Posts by MrT

Re: Unless...

... the AI reaches Transcendence. And looks like Johnny Depp.

Re: Sounds like a complete prick

"This will destroy my life, I am the director of a company and everyone would lose their jobs. We have 1,000 clients, we have staff all around the country, and it would die." Robert Croucher, MD

Sir, you are certainly a shining wit...

"Mark Hung, a Gartner research veep..."

Ah, the importance of punctuation. At first glance it looked like Garner's HR department had instigated a new way of letting staff go. Either that, or the revolution had arrived and marketing was next in line...

The Gillette moment...

If they can develop a system that simplifies the more fiddly job of wiring up the sockets (wall mount, patch panels, etc.), once that's been learnt, the simpler job of wiring the plugs might as well follow the same method. I'm not sure it would win the other way round.

Overall, it looks a neat solution. However, it's another set of connectors in each end of the cable. Something else to check if there's a signal dropout...

"New Armstrong"...

... that's stretching things...

...

After all, he first flew as an astronaut around 4 years after John Glenn.

Bezos may save that moniker for his first off-planet landing and return though. Or if he can get a flying bedstead into orbit.

Re: As a Muppet fan...

"Where de checkin'...?"

Re: Let's do a generator test..

"I would assume backup generators should be fueled and ready to go at any time."

Have you never seen The Dish... ;-)

Tesla limits the power draw of the P90D because the motors are capable of pulling more than the battery can provide. If the battery can provide 10KWh more then they can can set a new higher upper limit on the effective combined front/rear motor power with the P100D upgrade. I've linked a source from Tesla in a comment further up here.

Re: Cool

Sooooo... it's a chip that's capable of creating an emotional and physical response in a user. Looking to see if there wasn't a Dr Noonian Soong involved in its development - one small patch of skin on my arm has goosebumps in anticipation.

Floppy disk orchestra...

... I read recently about a 64-disk setup playing the Star Wars Imperial March, but this 8-disk version is pretty good...

Re: Do you even lift?

Buying a fitness tracker and expecting dramatic changes just because it's there did remind me of this story from The Daily Mash back in springtime this year...

Red Flag...

... Nellis AFB commander reportedly had a photo of a large curved trench in the desert floor, taken after one of the contests in which the RAF took part. When asked, he said it was left by the wingtip of a Vulcan as it manoeuvred at extreme low level. Another Vulcan landed with cable fouling the tail, snagged as the plane flew under power or telegraph lines - at the time it the snagging, the plane was going up. A further example of the RAF pilots' flying skills was when one Vulcan flew in as a cover for two Buccaneers (Operation Skyshield IIRC, simulated attacks against the US eastern seaboard) - one radar blip became three as the two smaller planes broke cover from under the Vulcan's shadow. The way the RAF flew their 4-engined plane when it first attended the contest was such that one US pilot commented that he liked the new fighter jet, but he thought it a bit big, not realising that it could haul 21,000 lbs of bombs.

Re: Daewoo

It'll start a trend for anonymous submissions, or even submitting in someone else's name... A shiny, hardly used Matiz sitting there whilst a bunch of bug-hunters all point at each other saying "No, really, it was him/her".

Ha! More Filth, Dirt Cheap - thenceforth any mention of Rhode Island Reds is like hitting rewind and play in my head on a n'th-generation tape copy that's so bad it's gone mono...

And to think, they let him loose every week on That's Life under a different pseudo :-D

Re: Hear this a LOT

I had to give up my licence for a year after a seizure. Once medically cleared for my full Till-70 licence again, it took them a handful of attempts to get it back to me with the correct entitlements. One of the versions finally had the right categories on, but for car, minibus and light goods vehicles only the "with trailer" codes were listed. When I rang DVLA to check if I should be concerned, not having specced a tow bar on the car I'd just ordered, they admitted that this was an impossible combination and that there were several departments that were able to authorise a reissue. The advisor also said she could see no record of the issue number of the licence I had in front of me, and that I definitely should not have the other (also wrong) version I had next to it as they never issued a licence until the previous one was returned to them.

That was just under 10 years ago - I'm getting ready for the same shenanigans when renewing the photo card in the next month...

Go on, then...

"Usually seated to the side of the iDrive control, directly behind the steering wheel??"

</stereotype>

Re: BBC off then

Depends on the browser . In the desktop version of Firefox I use "User-Agent Switcher" by Linder rather than editing the about: config settings. Whenever Auntie kicks off about media not playing, tell it you're using an iPad, refresh the page and carry on watching. It's pretty much the only website that I use regularly which needs this workaround.

Re: Beware

In the month leading up to launch, two of the three laptops here gave the incompatible hardware error for graphics. Though I pushed one to use the old Vista drivers after an upgrade to W10 (and the old December 2008 files worked fine) it wasn't a brilliant experience and I rolled it back to W7pro.

Until I set a registry key to block OS upgrades on the pair I initially kept deleting the hidden W10 download folder, which of course kept refilling. I reckon each did so around 6-8 times, even on the one that had rolled back, with the folder reaching 4-4.5GB (W7HP and W7pro fetched different amounts). I was a bit annoyed that the roll-back option didn't set a "never bother me again" flag. I'd put the estimate of total downloaded at about the 35-40GB mark, although that was down to me trying to never let the download complete by deleting it as it went.

I later used GWX Control Panel, which does a much better job than my hack effort.

I upgraded the third laptop without much fuss, but since the last major update for all the non-admin user accounts it's gradually binned all the built-in apps and now won't open the start menu. It's taking more looking after than both the others together, though YMMV and I know folk who haven't had problems like that.

Re: This mess of an article still doesn't explain WTF is going on?

Exactly my thoughts - no link to source material either. At one point the message is "don't trust extension writers", then it's "some are okay", but in parts it looks more like malware is riding in under the cloak of the extension, as if it's nicking a session ID, or that it's replacing the regular extension in the library with a fake version.

If the conclusion is to trust AdBlock more than NoScript... ... oh dear. I'd rather trust NoScript than the ad-slingers and analytics trackers. It's almost as if the research was funded by those behind DoubleClick or AdBlock - wouldn't surprise me if uBlock Origin was also found wanting...

FUD.

Re: My Satellite

Same here - the kids have a 3yr-old C850-1G2. Since swapping out the HDD to an SSD, it still gets 4-5hrs of real use on a charge though.

The manual check tool shows other parameters for G71C******* parts - model range is broken down further (mine's PSCBWE, and not listed), and even then the serial number has to also match. Ah well, no free battery!

Re: Bugger

Yeah, that. A friend of mine, Chris Done, has only just gone out to Japan to continue 5yrs of work so far preparing for the data that this satellite was going to bring. She was due to spend the next year in Tokyo on the project.

Re: The three body problem

I think the cultural aspect made it more interesting to me - grounding in the Cultural Revolution, the 'thought police' aspect and so on. I initially read the role of the VR side to be more of an escape, so the way it is described (or not) sort of fitted. I've not read on into the next book, though from the summary it looks like there's more to it than that. It might be that some nuances were lost in translation though.

"But to me the best of science fiction tries to uncover the truth about ourselves." Definitely agree there.

Re: So in a hundred years time...

' In Scotland we have mixed feelings about global warming because we will get to sit on the mountains and watch the English drown. “More pineapple Huey?” "Well, I've got a coconut here, I'm fine." '

Frankie Boyle

"Here's Johnny...!"

Amazon is a classic case in point - I bought a couple of Fiskar axes and for weeks "My Amazon" was full of things like log 'grenades', chainsaws, checked shirts, sturdy steel-capped boots, high heels and a book about hanging around in bars...

Netflix is the same, though. A few months back, fifth along under the category "Because you watched Captain America: The First Avenger..." was Peppa Pig. I'm still waiting to see what crops up after watching 'Space Station 76' last week, but that's either been forgotten about or is so odd it's broken the algorithm...

Re: Nothing to worry about...

Just some old stock they had lying around.

A bit like a reverse of Small Soldiers, y'know, where someone puts military-grade chips into a range of toys...