* Posts by jjk

63 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2012

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The delights of on-site working – sun, sea and... WordPad wrangling?

jjk

Re: HP GPIB is far from dead.

It's also still used in tons of measurement and test equipment (which after all was the original purpose). Your computer might not have a built-in GPIB interface nowadays, but hook it up to a LAN- or USB-to-GPIB adapter and you're good to go.

One of our customers told us that they preferred GPIB over LAN because when an operator trips over a LAN cable, it will rip the cable out of the socket and stop production. With a GPIB cable, the operator might fall and get a bloody nose, but production will be unaffected.

More on that monster Cerebras AI chip, Xilinx touts 'world's largest' FPGA, and more

jjk

I'm getting flashbacks

Sir Clive Sinclair already tried to do wafer scale stuff in the 1980s.

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8199/Anamartic-Limited/

AI beats astroboffins at sniffing out fast radio bursts amid the universe's clutter

jjk
Alien

This is surely completely safe

Let your AI listen to alien transmissions. Yes. Nothing could ever go wrong. BTW, don't read the story at the back of last month's CACM, it isn't that good.

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3232923

BOFH: Buttock And Departmental Defence ... As A Service

jjk

Team player

The PA would naturally be on the BOFH's side, as she probably also has to deal with unreasonable requests from people who should know better.

Danger! High voltage: German customs bods burn half-tonne of weed in power station

jjk

Re: "Kraut" ? really ? in the 21st century ? after 70 years ?

I'm German and I would rather be called a Kraut than a Hun, a name lovingly bestowed on us by our very own Emperor Wilhelm II (may he roast on the sultry side of hell for all eternity).

US watchdog alert: Don't fall victim to crapto crypto-coin cons, people

jjk

A company for carrying out an undertaking...

...of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.

Cancel your summer trip to nearby Proxima b. No chance of life, room service, say boffins

jjk

"Radiation rays"?

Really?

Good luck building a VR PC: Ethereum miners are buying all the GPUs

jjk

Re: Not to worry

"slightly used" = "ran overclocked 24/7 in a hot room for several months"

EyePhones packing Iris-scanning authentication to go mainstream

jjk
Facepalm

Demolition Man

Anybody that advocates iris or retina scanning should be forced to watch it.

Cops break up German sausage fight between pair of Neubrandenburgers

jjk

Ecky Thump

Be careful when you look that up. This caused one of the rare documented cases where somebody died of laughing.

Boffins blow up water with LASERS, to watch explosions in slow-mo

jjk
Mushroom

Re: later in life, after college

Was your roommate Dutch? Because they love that sort of thing (Google "carbide shooting").

Idiot millennials are saving credit card PINs on their mobile phones

jjk
Facepalm

Not as stupid

...as tweeting a picture of your shiny new credit/debit card (soon to be canceled for fraud).

Autonomy ex-boss Lynch tells of poisonous life within HP in High Court showdown

jjk

Re: Despairing....

"As a result, HP business units were incentivized to market and sell competing third-party products rather than Autonomy software."

Even when Bill and Dave were still alive, that was a problem. When I worked there in the early nineties, my division (producing CAD software) had the exact same issue - the workstation salesmen were pushing our main competitor's products.

Mono Magic: Photography, Breaking Bad style

jjk

Re: Dust to (bloody) dust.

Film grain, too. Film actually has surprisingly low resolution.

Curiosity rover's broken arm heals, exploration-as-normal resumes

jjk

Disappointed

..at the Reg, for missing the obvious Sweeney Todd reference.

Sir Terry remembered: Dickens' fire, Tolkien's imagination, and the wit of Wodehouse

jjk

ZX-81

"In 1980, he moved into PR and became the press officer for three nuclear power plants run by the UK's Central Electricity Generating Board."

"A computer enthusiast since the early days (his first machine was a Sinclair ZX81), [...]"

Well, of course.

jjk

Re: Both my favourite authors gone now ...

And Harry Harrison. And Patrick O'Brian. And Jack Vance. All within the last few years.

Cutlasses rattle in Brussels as Black Spot copyright report argument heats up

jjk
Pirate

Re: So...

Nar, just a page torn from a bible. Bad luck, that.

Dark Fibre: Reg man plunges into London's sewers to see how pipe is laid

jjk

Re: I feel the need

...or reread _Rattus Rex_.

MARSQUAKES shook up range of hills in ancient lake bed

jjk
Headmaster

Xenogeologists?

Areologists, certainly?

Bloke, 26, accused of running drug souk Silk Road 2.0 cuffed by Feds

jjk
Facepalm

Re: Another one bites the dust (@ Jack of shadows)

Yeah, public executions. And how many thieves did that deter in the UK, at the time when theft of goods worth more than twelve pence was a capital crime?

Even a broken watch is right twice a day: Not an un-charged Apple Watch

jjk
Holmes

Re: Odd

Apple missed a chance there by not making it an actual pocket watch. They would have been able to fit a bigger battery, and the Fedora wearing crowd would have gone nuts for it. Bring back waistcoats, watch pockets, watch chains and the little trinkets you can hang on them, say I.

LOHAN crash lands on CNN

jjk
Facepalm

Die Welt called you a "burly baldie".

They also said LOHAN would be sent up using a hot-air balloon. Just what I'd expect from an Axel Springer rag.

Let XKCD's Randall Munroe satisfy your curiosity in this excerpt from his book, What If

jjk

Re: Huh?

...aaaand I see it in Firefox (17.0.1) on Linux (RHEL 5.8).

Twitter: La la la, we haven't heard of NUDE JLaw, Upton SELFIES

jjk

Re: What's a jlaw?

"Have to say that makes more sense than actor Jude Law which was all I could come up with flicking through the crappy mags, or 17th century economist John Law."

Well, possibly John *Phillip* Law.

That stirring LOHAN motto: Anyone know a native Latin speaker?

jjk

Ab hoc possum videre domum tuum

(Another one stolen from Sir Pterry.)

Picture special: LOHAN makes fire in the sky at 15,000m

jjk
Mushroom

Re: Addition for the Truss

Unfortunately the Kerbal figurines reportedly are very fragile. I doubt they'd survive the launch.

(Of course they don't often do that in KSP either, at least when I'm playing it.)

Microsoft bug hunters kicked 0day own goal

jjk
Coat

Ydgterday

I know the Reg uses their own units of measurement, but so far I was unaware that they also have special names for weekdays, and probably a calendar too.

Super-heavy element 117 DOES exist – albeit briefly. Got any berkelium handy?

jjk
Headmaster

Re: Obvious wheeze

ITYM "Schnapsium".

As a former student at TU Darmstadt, I'll hold out for Datterichium or Niebergallium.

Apple patent pokes at holographic iPhone screen

jjk

I've seen that before...

While this has nothing to do with holography, the drawing looks suspiciously like an existing toy (which creates the illusion of an object floating in mid-air.

http://www.amazon.com/Mirage-3-D-Instant-Hologram-Maker/dp/B0002W3J7M

Apple poking at idea of bayonet phone fittings

jjk

Re: Third-party vendors

"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." - RFC 1925 (One day late, sigh.)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/01/thatll_turn_things_around_blackberry_wins_block_on_typo/

Communist party boss blames Kunming knife attack on VPNs

jjk
Black Helicopters

"... with no fear of monitoring ..."

Except from the NSA, GCHQ, etc.

VMware hyper-converge means we don't need no STEENKIN' OS...

jjk
Boffin

Yes.

"Will it be possible – indeed, is it possible – to compile apps to run inside hypervisor-controlled VMs that have no need for a traditional operating system inside them at all?"

These boffins are already working on it: http://www.openmirage.org/

Loki, LC3 and Pandora: The great Sinclair might-have-beens

jjk

Virtual image

So... the Pandora's screen would have operated on the same principle as the blow-up computer screens in "Brazil"?

Sinclair's ZX Spectrum to LIVE AGAIN!

jjk

Re: What the...

The ZX81 keyboard was still better than the ZX80 one with the ZX81 overlay on top.

Tunguska object came from Mars say Russian boffins

jjk

Mars?

I don't believe it for a moment. Readers of Stanislaw Lem know that it came from Venus.

German frau reports for liver transplant clutching bottle of vodka

jjk

To me that sounds like a woman tasked with holding the bottle during the transplantation, to give it back to the owner afterwards.

SCRUBBED: Technical oopsies halt SpaceX's bid for the Money Ring

jjk
Mushroom

Re: Kerbal Space Program

I can only caution against trying out KSP if you're not addicted yet. Before you know it you too will talk in incomprehensible jargon about "burning prograde at apoapsis" and "delta-V required for taking off from Eve", and you'll waste countless hours watching Scott Manley be better at it than you on YouTube.

You Have Been Warned.

(Icon should be self explanatory for KSP fans.)

Tolkien 'almost became WWII code-breaker alongside Alan Turing'

jjk

Re: Pass me another elf.

And it's Pass me another elf, sergeant.

Sail HO! Look out Bay Area - it's the Google Galleon

jjk

Re: By and Large

@I ain't Spartacus: The original explanation was the correct one, as any reader of Patrick O'Brian can confirm. (Dr. Maturin gets hoist by his own petard when he - pitiful lubber that he is - tries to use the term to impress a colleague.)

Microsoft advertises Surface, Excel with maths mistake

jjk

Re: El Reg not a travel expert

I think that actually was a dig at the people who scoff at Apple buyers because Android HW is cheaper...

China funds devs to write smog-clearing vidcam code

jjk

Re: how about...

They'll just order the people to breathe the smog and like it. Communist Man will evolve to tolerate it. Coughing will be punishable by forced labor (or worse).

Stanislaw Lem already covered this in one of his Ijon Tichy stories (except with water instead of smog).

Ding-dong, Cthulu calling: Infogrames’ 1992 Alone in the Dark

jjk
Headmaster

Crawling Chaos?

That would be Nyarlathotep, not Cthulhu. (Although it's probably not that important if you get eaten anyway).

Science fiction titan Frederik Pohl dies, aged 93

jjk
Unhappy

This year is getting worse all the time.

Oi! You guys up there! Stop offing my favourite authors, start targeting those who really deserve it.

Apple's Siri 'hurls insults' at Google Glass

jjk
Big Brother

Re: Are you talking to me??

What about German engineers then?

In fact, ve do have a sense of humour. And ve haff ways to make you... appreciate it.

Open source 'Cubesat' set to soar

jjk
Holmes

Re: Clever launch technique

Launched using the robotic arm... hm. Overhand, underhand or sidearm throw?

Germans brew up a right Sh*tstorm

jjk
Mushroom

If the Guardian really printed that, its a Scheissblatt. (Call any German a Scheisskerl and see how he likes it...)

BOFH: Go on, beancounter, type DROP TABLE asset;

jjk
Devil

Re: Off-site backups?

"Those would be the tapes that are in the cardboard box sat on top of the floor standing server,..."

... overhanging just enough so that they fall on the passing beancounter's head... distracting him for long enough to let him step on the missing floor tile... making him stumble and hit his head on a strategically placed chair... and fall on a piece of old carpet that just *happened* to lie around...

The Tomorrow People jaunt back to the airwaves

jjk
Pint

Re: Waiting for a reboot of...

Fsck the Wombles, I want to see the Borribles filmed.

The bunker at the end of the world - in Essex

jjk
Mushroom

Re: yes

When I did my stint in the (German) army 30 years ago, I was part of a unit whose task would have been to put up mobile antenna towers after the fixed ones had been blown away. These were painted green, so presumably the Sov^W^W Redland forces would not be able to find them :-)

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