Thanks for the memory

I remember going to see a colleague who was the first in our office to have Windows 3 installed.

To this day I remember the gasps of amazement as he booted his machine and it counted through 5 (yes! 5!!!) whole megabytes of RAM before loading Windows.

Excellent news

Good luck with the preaparations

it's Gif I tell you

When I select File->Open in my copy of PaintShop Pro, it offers me a variety of file formats, including...

CompuServe Graphics Interchane (.gif)

JPEG - JFIF Compliant (*.jpg, *.jif, *.jpeg)

...so I'd take that as meaning JIF is a different type of file format to a GIF.

Also Graphics (that being what the G stands for" is pronounced as a hard G, and not as a j)

good to be able to look on this so light-heartedly

As a child of the 70s/80s I remember when the idea of nuclear obliteration was more of an "when" than an "if". Good to have come out of the other side and be able to look at things like this and have a few light-hearted comments.

How do they describe the taste experience?

If they use the phrase "it's got a lot of body to it", I want out

am I reading that right?

"only 22 per cent is converted by the food industry into feed"

So that means that 22% of animals are fed back to their fellow species?

face off

At least we know what the watch face *won't" look like... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/12/apple_payout_swiss_railways/

"bit windy today"

A relentless diet of greens and life in a space-suit don't sound like a happy combination.

good luck to them

Having spent the last week trying to get a problem with my parents' Sky broadband fixed, I hope any new recruits are better than the absolute shower of s**t I've had to deal with thus far.

Even if they man the phones while off their faces on Newkie Broon, they can't do a worse job than the muppets who have been taking me round in frustrating circles over the last few days.

I fail to understand

In what way is a video of someone being beheaded with a chainsaw not "depicting harm to someone"?

Good luck with this

Not without warning

The article says this happened without warning, but it's certainly something I was aware of. My folks are Sky BB customers and when I went round to visit in late February, my Mum showed me a copy of an email from Sky about this, followed by the "you're the IT expert...what are we supposed to do about this then?"

My answer was, of course, follow the instructions in the email, then sit back and expect a complete fiasco like the one you experienced when they ported email services over to Google a few years ago.

Leccy? No!!

Nothing personal against Tesla Motors themselves, but personally I'd like to see the electric car concept flounder - even fail - to a sufficient degree for people to realise that that electric vehicles aren't the super green bundles of tree-huggery that they're made out to be.

While electric vehicles can claim to be zero emissions at point of use, they still require the electricity which fuels them to come from meaning that there is more-than-likely emission and use of non-renewable fuel at some stage in the chain.

Then people might start to look at other, cleaner platforms, such as fuel cell technology, which doesn't seem to be getting the focus it deserves

Excellent

Great idea - I really hope this gets somewhere and doesn't get throttled by the nuke nay-sayers.

..and that salt plug/valve is genius in its simplicity

water-rounded stones

The article mentions stones which appear to have been rounded by water flowing over/around them. How can we be sure that they were rounded by water? I would have thought that there are many liquids which contain hydrogen and oxygen (and/or the other elements that Curiosity found evidence of) which would have a similar eroding effect.

EDLIN

Years ago I worked with someone who eschewed the code editor built into our database development platform (a perfectly reasonable, for the time, full file text editor) in favour of EDLIN (on DOS 5 - yes I really am that old).

We all thought they were a bit odd....ended up a a project manager, as it happens.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

same old same old

Large scale government IT project descends into train wreck....not exactly news is it? Can anyone recall a large scale government IT project that wasn't a complete shambles for all, or at least some, of it's lifespan?

mmmm.....venison

Bovine Mammary Fluid

Brewing in the drinking vessel - add milk after brewing (otherwise the brewing process is compromised)

Brewing in a pot - add milk to drinking vessel before pouring tea in (no stirring required)

"£10,000 per household ensuring they get some sort of free-to-view TV service"

how much!?! per household?!?!?!

"all but dismissed malware as a Windows-only problem."

Pride comes before a fall

code of connection

I'm sure that Vodafone (indeed all mobile networks) have a code of connection - device manufacturers have to test their devices for conformance against the the network to guard against SNAFU's like this.

If that's the case, then potentially some of the blame lies at VF's door for not picking up on the problem in testing at their labs.

Although it may sound like I'm trying to defend Apple there, I'd still like to stress that I detest the very ground they walk on.

options

I'm very much a mash-a-bag-in-a-cup-to-get-it-fairly-strong-and-add-a-splash-of-milk kind of guy, and would never contemplate sugar in a normal cuppa, but there cases where I'll allow sugar near my beverage...

Arabic style tea with a fair bit of sugar - it's a different drink altogether to the British cuppa

The faitigue-defying nectar that is cofftea (mug of boiling water + 2 teabags, stew to oblivion and add 2 or 3 spoonfuls of good instant coffee...add milk or, ideally, powdered creamer like CoffeeMate). 2 or 3 spoonfuls of sugar are essential for a brew like this.

nomenclature

Naming it after an Egyptian god of death hardly seems like a good move if you want to avoid causing panic among the populace.

Are we going to stop giving hurricanes names like Sandy and start calling them things like "Mighty Wind of Doom"?

Scene from the Hitatchi factory canteen

Employee #1: So what have you been up to this morning?

Employee #2: [comedy, high squeaky voice] Assembling those new hard disks

Here's a sobering thought...

Out of curiosity, I viewed the image info for that graph...it's over 190KB....way bigger than the RAM on any of the machines referenced in the graph itself.

Possibly a commentary on how complicated the graph is, but sadly I suspect it says more about how profligate we've become in our attitude towards memory and resources.