Posts by jake

Re: Hire a few hundred thousand biplanes.

No need for such an expensive undertaking. I suspect the Russians will listen to Aunty Beeb, VoA and Radio Free Europe on the radio, just as they always have.

Re: re: countries that haven't ventured an opinion on the invasion and shelling of civilians

PDNFTT

Re: Yay!

Lamppost? Isn't accidentally falling out a window de rigueur over there?

One wonders if that gymnast tart he's been boinking knows that the fastest way to a man's heart is between the fourth and fifth ribs ... with his level of paranoia I doubt anyone else could get close enough.

I'm fairly certain you can substitute the name of any other country in the so-called "developed world" for the US in that paragraph. Security agencies as a whole work that way. It's in their remit, whether written in officially or not.

Re: RH kernels

"Red Hat kernels apparently bear little relation to their headline version number. They backport and tweak an insane amount of stuff, so that kernel is probably no more 4.18 than my hamster's brain firmware is."

Now ask why nobody with a clue uses RedHat kernels.

Re: Linux Bias?

"the only thing that motivated Microsoft to get up off their lazy, unconcerned, condescending 'sofa' to fix their shortcomings."

Microsoft has fixed it's shortcomings WRT bugs? Really? Post proof or retract.

Re: Linux Bias?

I think you'll find that it's not the type or quantity of bugs that people here rail against, rather it's the attitude that Microsoft exhibits towards the concept of bugs in general that people don' approve of.

Re: Linux Bias?

All hardware sucks, all software sucks, all languages suck, all text editors suck[0], and all OSes suck. And of course let's not forget the fanbois/fangrrls, who suck in all kinds of spectacular ways.

[0] Except vi, of course ... the One True Editor.

Re: Linux Bias?

"Sigh, why this angry?"

Have you honestly never run across sabroni, Chris? It's always angry ... usually to the point of dropping all pretense of logic. Which is a shame, because in rare bouts of lucidity it is apparently a fairly knowledgeable coder, and technically more than competent.

Re: One word: DUH!

"I don't suppose you bothered to read their article, did you?"

Of course I did. It's a subject I'm quite interested in.

"Not sure what papers from the 1960s you have in mind, but they do cite literature back to 1982."

Check out what Minsk's AI group at MIT and the fine folks at Stanford's SAIL were doing ... both contributed heavily to the subject, starting in the early 1960s. Their papers from the era are pretty much canon, even today.

Re: The current poster boy for this being our favourite Russian dictator.

From personal experience, I'd say half are drunks, half are stoned, half are brainwashed, half are ignorant oiks and half voted for him "because Daddy always voted a straight Republican ticket".

Obviously, there is some overlap.

Re: I worked in companies where HR actually run the business.

"What do you do when it's HR doing <illegal thing>?"

You get your ducks in a row, retain a lawyer, make sure your paper trail is clean, and then call them on it, starting with reporting to your direct Boss, and working your way up the management chain. When they fire you, place it in the hands of the landshark. They will probably offer to settle out of court, possibly in the high 6 figures or low 7 ... At that point it's a matter of asking yourself how much your ideals/scruples are worth.

Have fun! :-)

Re: He who shouts loudest is often wrong

I believe the cavalry officer was saying the gentleman in question wasn't marriage material for his daughter(s).

Different times, different memes.

Re: Similar tale in a hospital

"He'd read all the management books"

Have you read any of them? Basically, they teach you how to increase your latent psychopathic/sociopathic tendencies.

Re: The current poster boy for this being our favourite Russian dictator.

That depends. Are his lips moving?

Re: Business as usual

"Under no circumstances should I try to set up or run my own company or become a 'self-employed consultant' as I am just not that sort of person."

That's what so-called "aptitude testing" told me when I was in high school. I've been self employed since 1988.

Re: I want to believe, but...

"I've rarely seen any justice, let alone biblical."

Same here. But I have seen it occasionally ... Extrapolating across the entirety of ElReg's commentardariat, the proverbial Thinking Man would have to conclude we haven't yet heard the bulk of the stories out there.

Re: I want to believe, but...

" It just doesn't seem plausible. "

About a billion years ago in Internet time, call it roughly 1985, my Boss and I were in my office talking to the company owner on the speaker phone. The guy in charge of Advanced Manufacturing slammed into the office, making all kinds of demands, threatening us with firing and worse of we didn't drop everything to do his bidding. Until the owner's voice came out of the telephone, saying three magic words: "Dave, you're fired." ,,, My Boss was given the newly vacated AdvMan seat the following morning, and I took over his position. The owner cautioned both of us separately "Play fair with everybody, I don't like assholes". Needless to say we took him at his word.

Re: The current poster boy for this being our favourite Russian dictator.

The accent fooled you ... the actual chant was "FOUR MORE BEERS!"

Seriously, though, how drunk would you have to be to vote for Trump?

Re: The current poster boy for this being our favourite Russian dictator.

For values of "vacation" that include "trying to stay out of jail".

Re: The current poster boy for this being our favourite Russian dictator.

Last time I checked, the OED wasn't prone to listing Bavarian surnames.

One never knows what the Yank sitting in the UK Prime Minister's seat might insist on, though.

Re: Multi-Mate WP on an Olivetti 386 in the 80s

A riff on that thought ... In early-mid 1981[1] I was working for Bigger Blue when the PC-DOS 0.98 beta & original IBM PC came out in pilot build ... everyone in the Glass House looked at each other and said "WTF is IBM thinking? Thank gawd/ess it can't do networking!" ... The rest, of course, is history.

[1] I can't remember the exact month, but it was raining. Naturally.

Re: Evil Books!

HP lost their corporate archives in the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa.

https://www.theregister.com/2017/10/29/hewlett_packard_history_lost_to_santa_rosa_fires/

Re: My girlfriend of the time was already mad enough about the KZ900 being rebuilt...

What, you've never rebuilt a bike in your living room?

7.5 inch? 8 inch, Shirley.

It did what it did OK. What it did was emulate Wang's system.

Re: Evil Books!

"I defy you to find ANY digital; media that old!"

Your simple paper recording device is subject to rot, fungus, water and insect damage, fire, sun bleaching, acid damage and physical damage from handling, and other catastrophe ... unless stored under optimal conditions and never actually used as intended.

Cuneiform tablets date to the early bronze age. Tally marks on bone go back over 30,000 years.

Just as an aside, when my daughter was learning to count (age 4ish), I taught her to count to 15 on four fingers. She added the thumb, and then the other hand, on her own. (Well, you were talking about digital media, right?)

Re: Dogs don't do that but

My girlfriend of the time was already mad enough about the KZ900 being rebuilt in the living room. A couple cylinder heads on the table would have ended it ... another useful thing the neoprene brought was a level of sound dampening.

Re: Dogs don't do that but

I bought a used one like that once. It came with a skid-proof neoprene pad to place under it.

Subjective. It always is.

Except vi is the one true editor, all others are mere pretenders.

"I also have a bird box camera"

No, no, no ... That's Le Phoebus, not Le Phoenix.

_{Well, how many box cameras can you think of named after a bird?}

Re: The modern (ha!) wee-wah/whoop-whoop noises aren't so discernible.

Back in the day when I had a CB in just about all the vehicles (through roughly the mid '70s), I usually had a PA speaker hooked up. Flip the switch, key the mic and provide whatever commentary necessary ... It was technically illegal to do when the vehicle was moving, but I only used to to keep other people from hurting themselves. The one cop who called me on it let me go with a warning.

Except 5PM in the UK is 9AM here in California.

1AM in California would be 9AM in the UK ... perhaps your estate agency was really on the ball and sending you the info first thing in the morning on the day it was available?

Re: Mia Culpa

Around here, if you're on a limited access highway that sound starts if you slow down below 100kph (62mph) ... but it's not a bong from under the dash, it's honking from the irritated folks behind you who you are slowing down.

Re: Gravity and mass...

"Once the Earth and Moon reach equal mass though, either they crash into each other or they begin to orbit a common point between them"

The Earth and Moon already orbit a common point, called the barycentre. That point is located about 2900 miles from the center of the Earth.

Re: As the mass of the Moon is approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg

"why not use suitable SI prefixes?"

Suitable is subjective. The OP was apparently going for effect.

It would seem it worked.

Re: Gravity and mass...

PDNFTT

"Although personally, I'd far rather we pollute the lifeless moon than the planet we live on."

I'm absolutely certain your great grandchildren will thank vilify you for holding that opinion.

What about deliberate littering just to litter, no science?

Like Musk's car in space. Talk about a big "Fuck you!" to all his greenaholic supporters.