Posts by PhilBuk
88 posts • joined Wednesday 7th November 2012 19:49 GMT
Re: A few theories
@AC 08:17
Autoland uses RADAR altimeters and is therefore unaffected by ordinary radio signals.
Phil.
Re: Stupid
This is the same city that tried to stop disk drive manufacturers fromm using the terms 'Master and Slave' in their product information and documentation.
Phil.
Re: Over a barrel
And a stupid name.
Phil.
Re: Follow this simple yes-no rule
That list was funny the first few times - about 4 years ago.
Phil.
Re: telemetry - just stats and stats are what you lie with
Absolutely right. I've always turned their telemetry off on my own and any other machine on which I've installed Windows (quite a few).
Phil.
Re: Fuck Off Microsoft
@Elron Cupboard
Learn some fucking history before you start mouthing off. Both C/PM, QDOS and laater MSDOS were all command line "rip-offs" of various DEC minicomputer operating systems. The C/PM command line was a copy of DEC's RT-11 OS and the MSDOS command line (and later versions of C/PM) was a copy of DEC's DCL front end for RSX-11 and RSTS/E (and later RT-11).
Guess what? Nobody really cared. The only people who seem to care are modern anti-MS bores who think that all this was significant!
Phil.
Re: Horses for courses
It's Ordnance - no 'i'. The OS was originally tasked with making it easier to deliver Ordnance.
Phil.
Re: Probably an Idiot
Polonium yes, but dioxin? Were you thinking of clubbing someone to death with burnt toast? I think you mean ricin.
Phil.
Re: Ouroboros
Is this a private forum for IBM personnel? The only people who like Lotus Notes are the people that administer it. The users can go and screw themselves. Notes was very good at that.
Phil.
Patronising Twats
Love the patronising bit in the reply, "This comes with clear instructions of how to protect their data."
It's not them that that should be protecting the data - it's your job!
Phil.
Re: It's all old news
Nah, it was Ethan Hunt.
Phil.
Re: The key to education in VietNam is ATTITUDE
Your use of the word 'hunger' is interesting. My wife is a senior lecturer (biological sciences) at a major UK University and describes her asian and middle-eastern students of having 'hungry faces'. They go to university to learn and have the 'hunger' that JaitcH talks about.
Phil.
Re: What about the review?
IIRC the Go*ro came out better than the Sony it was reviewed against.
Phil.
Re: How about some bread...
Exactly, Ross. Just like the old sayiing. "Life is like a shit sandwich - the more bread you have, the less you taste the shit."
Phil.
Re: Not nearly enough
@David Neil
Reminds me of a German p0rn film I saw once (Yuk!).
Phil.
Re: Hmmmmm...
Two downvotes in some cases. Looks like they just doubled their efforts.
Phil.
Posted in New nuke could POWER WORLD UNTIL 2083
Re: Not going to happen
It's not the Daily Mail readers that you have to worry about - just Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Lib-Dems and any other political group that derives power from frightening the public.
Phil.
It Was Me
Just found that the bastards have converted one of my accounts to Mickey-Mouse+ interface. Seems very reluctant to allow you to log off.
Phil.
Posted in Outages plague Hotmail and Outlook users
Re: "a vision for modern email."
Great link - it tells you that you can't switch back.
Time to move to Google just to escape the shit-faced MS GUI disaster.
Phil.
Re: Teco
One of the few text editors that had a command to read the front-panel switches (Control/F according to my TECO pocket guide).
Phil.
Re: 2001 still does it for me
I'll give you an upvote for hating Steven Spielberg as much as I do!
Phil
Re: Primer, of course...
For the really obscure - "Welcome To Blood City". It's even got Keir Dullea in it.
Phil.
Re: Strange Days
Gets my vote. Nice bit of Juliette Lewis on show too!
Phil.
Re: Soo...
@M Gale & AC
Both wrong. IBM did not run Unix and yes Microsoft were the heroes in the 70s and 80s.
Phil.
Posted in First C compiler pops up on Github
Re: Engraving
@AC 13:12
There was a BLISS-11 but it was only really used a lot inside DEC.
Phil.
Posted in First C compiler pops up on Github
Re: PDP-8 any good?
Much, much too hard. Main problem was no stack on the PDP-8 hardware. Memory addressing was very limited at 128 words in the local page and the zero page. The PDP-11 was like a breath of fresh air with a nice flat address space and excellent addressing modes in the instruction set.
That said, I'd love a PDP-8/e with 32K of core, and a disc drive. The only one I used had an ASR33 for paper tape and interactive I/O (plus full A/D and D/A stuff).
Phil.
I thought it meant "Mind the Gap".
Phil.
Posted in SpaceX Dragon eventually snared by ISS
Re: It's not rocket science!
I thought Russians repeatedly hit things with very large adjustable spanners whilst ranting on about Taiwanese components?
Phil.
Re: The difference between Steve Mann's glasses and Googles version is ...
@m a d r a
Seems to be wearing lip-gloss too! Doesn't suit him.
Phil.
Re: Parliament?
You mean the same bars where smoking is still allowed?
Phil.
Re: It's enough to drive you drink
Please, stay away from society and don't get a job which involves other people relying on your good judgement.
Phil.
@John Smith 19
Yeah - just like smoking. First a few restrictions then a concerted social engineering effort to make social drinking unacceptable, then have the BBC news publishing anti-drinking stories or theories involving drink consumption in accidents, etc., etc. When drinking is finally banned or severly restricted, start work on the obese and then on fishing and anything else that distracts from the gloom of this miserable country. Some people just like inflicting misery on others. Now the church isn't so effective, they use the health service.
Sip, sip - ahh - that's better.
Phil.
Re: I have XP here so no use
@Geoffrey W
How about search within files for text - yes, 3rd party apps can replace this functionality - but it shouldn't work like that.
Phil.
Posted in Linus Torvalds in NSFW Red Hat rant
Re: @Jamie Jones - UEFI
People who put sighs in posts should definately be downvoted.
Phil.
Posted in Linus Torvalds in NSFW Red Hat rant
Re: @ShelLuser
It's 'per se' not 'perse'. You are at risk of confusing a few people.
Phil.
Re: From somewhere behind the sofa
I remember watching the first ever episode, even the theme music sent me off behind the sofa. Bit of a squeeze as it was against the wall!
Phil.
@AC 09:!8 GMT
Big iron Unix in the datacentre - sorry sonny, it was VM/CMS, OS/370, TOPS-10, RSTS-E, VMS, RSX-11XM, etc, etc.
Not many big data centres ran Unix. It was mainly reserved for Universities and research centres.
Phil.
@kb
@kb
Ah - someon as grey as me. It's refreshing to hear the true story for a change rather than the wishful thinking from youngsters who were nestling cosily in their mother's fallopian tubes when all this happened. Agree on the subject of Netscape - never did like it anyway - Mosaic was better.
Phil.
Re: You still have landlines in England???
At last a man who knows his history. Yep, Strowgers were the first and a lot of them outlived Crossbar exchanges. The latter were pushed by a Labour politician of the 60s and 70s - dear old The Right Honourable Anthony Wedgewood Benn (a.k.a. "Tony Benn") when he was Minister for Technology(?).
Phil.
Re: I love it!
@Joll3295
Now write something without quoting wholesale from your MBA course notes.
Phil.
Galactic Imposter
You could put that picture on the NASA site and claim that it was IR image of some deep space phenomenon. Wonder how long it take people to latch onto that?
Phil.
Re: Cue enviro-tards...
@Jim59
More like "whooshing across the heavens". The ISS moves at a hell of a lick.
Phil.
Re: lets build a death star
If BAe built a Death Star to the usual design, it would come out looking like a Borg cube with lots of trenches and ventilation vents.
Phil.
Re: To sum the article...
AD - you're getting a good catch this afternoon. Best thing is - they don't realise it!
Phil.
Posted in Who ate all the Pis?
Re: vi...
My usual strategy with vi was to hit the 'esc' key if I couldn't remember what state I had left an edit in or if I had hit a number of keys before noticing that I wasn't in insert mode. The best vi error came about when I set up up linux box at work to provide a DNS server for our team to access some customer IPs that had changed.
After a weeks holiday, I came back to find it not working. A collegue had 'just edited the hosts file with some new entries' and the system hung when booting. After booting with a CD and mounting the system disk, it turned out that the host file was about 2M in size. It contained several hundred copies of the original. When inetd tried to load, it read the hosts file and fell over with lack of memory (it was quite an old version of Mandrake). Rather than use the usual ':wq' to exit, my collegue had used some fancy set of control keys which, although they wrote the file out and quit, also managed to replicate the entire buffer several hundred times.
vi became a lot easier to use with the easy cut and paste in PuTTY. I admit to the crime of copying the buffer, pasting it into Windows Notepad, editing and pasting the result back.
Phil.
Re: James Bond
Alice! Stop that now. Go back to being the Borg queen.
Phil.
Re: Brilliant
The bridge of the Enterprise was an ergonomic nightmare. In the first couple of minutes of the reboot we had lights shining directly at the crew. Bright, white, blue purple colours and reflections of those colours from transparent or reflective surfaces - massive sensory overload. That's before we have Abrams with his lens flare and cameramen with severe muscular spasms. Best watched with a pair of sunglasses!
Phil.
Re: So Star Trek is fact now
Like Starship Troopers where asteroids get launched from the far side of the galaxy and arrive just in time for dinner? I don't think they were fitted with the Shooting Star Drive! But then Paul Verhoeven was only interested in the morality play - not in the technical details.
Phil.
Re: Hmmm?
Good link - horrifying but interesting. To summarise, Boeing expect a certain proportion of the LiON batteries to catch fire and got approval from the FAA for a system that lets the fire burn itself out and vents the smoke out of the aircraft. They hope that the heat will not damage adjacent subsystems. Most pilots think this is insane - I agree.
Phil.
