Posts by Herby

Kibo!!

Go to http://www.kibo.com (all things Kibo). Who knows he may even respond to this!

Is YouTube just...

...Wayne's World continuously??

No I don't think I'd trust those two with ANYTHING! Of course, they should have been better at reading cue cards. Maybe take acting classes.

About time!

...enough said!

How did she eat?

With the event taking over two years to come to an end (insert joke here), one wonders how the poor woman sustained herself. Someone had to supply her with food and water (the waste was taken care of). If one assumes that a sink was within arms reach (it was a bathroom) then the water could be supplied, but crikey, where did she get the cheeseburgers?

While anything could be true, this stretches the limit. File this one in the urban legends category until further notice.

Just another 'name'

All this talk (book titles, etc.) is just to apply the name-of-the-year to a practice that has been ongoing for eons. Sounds like hype in another set of clothes.

Who knows next year it will be "magic interaction" for all I know (you heard it here first!).

There are precidents...

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC_logos#_note-1

Kinda "ooops", we forgot to do our research. I guess it happens all the time. With worldwide companies these days, there is bound to be a conflict. Oh well.

Needs to be close by.

Having done some work for one of these companies (it was a few years ago!) my understanding is that the "controller" (actually a laptop PC) needs to be in close proximity to the "subject". They usually use "induction", not radio frequency to couple to the device implanted (at least that is what I saw).

Yes, security is not something the device vendors, or the FDA thinks about. Lots of medical devices have "unpatched" windows environments because the vendors haven't gone thru the process of verification with the latest of windows patches. Most of the time these computers are not connected to a network (they usually don't need to be!), but sometimes they do get connected, and then the malware arrives with evil intentions.

On the ICD I did some work on they used a 65C02 processor, which they needed to get certified outside the normal supply chain (look at any datasheet for ICs and it usually says "not for life critical..."). Then they need to get ALL the software to pass FDA rules (lots of time and $$$). By the time everything is done, the development cost is HUGE. Then they deploy the stuff, and the added cost of a laptop per inplantable device is "small potatoes", so they just build it into the kit.

In my book the big problem is the controlling box (laptop) used to program the implant to do its thing (parameters per subject). As usual, security isn't a big consideration since most of the development is in an isolated environment.

It was interesting how the company "solved" problems in the test environment. It ended up being 4 (yes four) Windows boxes (it was W95) and a logic analyzer to test the ICD which had a 65C02 processor (same as Apple 2). Need something, add more hardware! In order to get the timing for the network between the 4 cpu's right, they even incorporated a relay to cutoff the network from outside the 4 cpu's. Oh, well. It was windows, they didn't even try anything else.

Vulture zoom-tech desk

I like it! Everyone should have one!

For the price...

He could have gotten one of those EEEpc's WITH the nice model (probably only an hour, but...)

Of course if the spuds were nice imported Idaho russets from here in the USA, it would have been a little less painful.

My question, why potatoes? Aren't bricks a bit cheaper (easier to find "surplus")?

Drugs, Pollution?

Wine, breathing?

No more of that sacramental wine for you!!

Oh, and breathing generates carbondioxide, can't do that either.

We're all doomed anyway!

But I wanted...

...a Bud Lite!

It has already been transported, this is probably just a drill, or some such. Get out the Geiger counters and see if anything "glows".

If you want examples of C++

Just go to Bjarne's fine text. Then look for all the examples that include:

// ...

And fill in your own.

Wonderful moving target that language. If you don't like it, wait a while and go back. Nice to have all those versions (up to 10, eh?).

Maybe there IS a reason the Linux Kernel is written in C. If you change one file, you don't need to recompile the WHOLE kernel. "Minor tweaks", yeah, right!!

Power Corrupts...

Absolute power (the inner circle) corrupts absolutely!

Can't say it much better than that!

Then there is the danger of DHMO.

Go see: http://www.dhmo.org/

I have WAY too much time on my hands...

Making an interesting comparison

China == Microsoft (competitors need to go through it to deliver data)

Dow Jones, Reuters == Netscape, Firefox, Opera (better product that can't compete with "linked" operating system/government).

Just musing.

Microsoft will fix a bug??

I'm shocked. Has the temperature of Steve and Bill's final resting place cooled down a bit so that snow will accumulate??

Than again, it has taken them a few years to realize they HAD a bug, trying to blame it on someone else!

Idle power 33% less

If Vista's idle power is 33% less I suppose that is good, the problem is that Vista has no idle time, so it probably makes little difference. One needs to compare TOTAL power requirements to really make a difference. Then again doesn't everyone know that?

I am reminded of a computer company that optimized the idle loop because it used quite a few of the available cycles. The computer did nothing very efficiently!

Probable reason...

When you address something to "mildenhall", the mailer just adds the ".com" by default. The lazy id10ts in the US Air Force just thought that they should send to "mildenhall" and did so. Oh, we need to add something like ".af.mil" on the end has no meaning to them.

So much for passing the "internet" test. Maybe the military should get browsers/mailers that DON'T put in defaults (or at least have an option to do so). Add criticism of your mailer of choice here.

What it comes down to...

Is that the cell phone companies DON'T want to provide coverage maps to anyone. The excuse of not wanting to locate towers makes it possible to say "security" when they refuse.

It is the same here in the USA. The only coverage maps a consumer might get are general ones. They consist of a red dot over a whole city (like San Francisco), which hardly takes into account the terrain (yes, San Francisco has LOTS of hills!).

"Can you hear me now?"

"Like Cockroaches"

In my opinion, comparing cockroaches to spammers is degenerating to cockroaches. Something lower on the food chain which we all detest would be more suitable (pond scum??). Oh, the never ending battle (*SIGH*).

What if they did this to your phone connection?

Draw the parallel. You call up someone, and instead of "hello" from the other side, you get bunches of ads that you may not desire (to say the least). Sounds awful to me. Luckly at the moment, here in the US we don't have such scumbags (I suspect some are close, but that is another comment). If this is so wonderful, why not extend it to the mail, or some such. Instead of getting a nice sealed letter, you get pounds of verbiage in the form of advertisements. To me it looks like they would lose their "common carrier" status and be liable for all sorts of nasty things.

Yes, there is no privacy.

This sounds like another activity...

Midget bowling

'The second perp ran straight through a plate-glass door and jumped from a balcony.'

I suspect that he was picked up using his collar and belt and they just wanted to see how far you can throw an idiot.

"Wow, two points, you made the basket!! Oh, sorry, no net..."

Price of Vista...

In my opinion, the price ought to be NEGATIVE (i.e. they pay ME). Here at work, I'm stuck with XP since it is the only thing that runs Internet Exploder, and I need that to fill in my timesheet. I'd be just as happy running Linux (which I do at home) to get the work done. Also it runs on cheaper hardware!

Now things would be REAL complete if Lotus Notes ran under Linux as well.

(*SIGH*)

Oh, if it were so easy to do...

The quote in Total Recall:

"Consider that a divorce.". I had just gone through one and wanted to duplicate the whole scene. Tempting, very tempting!!

The kid in all of wants:

"Where's the Kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom!"

(need to duplicate in a nasal [Mel Blanc] voice).

Hours, minutes, seconds, and days, Oh My!

I worked with two people who were born on leap day (different years!), and they tell me that their birthday is "the day after February 28th". This seems very logical to me.

Of course, time should be reckoned by proper Register Units: Microfortnights!

Now look at your watch, and see if the "day of month" thing is proper. I was told of a digital watch that (because it didn't keep the year, so it is excusable), made March 1 after Feb 28. Then I was told that it was pretty smart, in that if you turned it back on March 1, it went to Feb 29. Now that was cool.

I suspect that Lotus 1-2-3 just used year%4 to determine leap year. Microsoft didn't understand, so it copied the bug. Now it wants the bug^H^H^Hfeature documented (and standardized!). Why does this sound like them.

The Asus gal is for me...

I just like the beach scenery, and the white EEEpc. Oh, the girl isn't bad either. Must be the dark glasses or something...

Maybe Comcast should do its own Torrent

If Comcast did its own torrent (seeding files) on the other side of the narrow pipe (the upload stream on cable), it wouldn't have problems. All it might take is a simple server with a few gig's of disk space or some such. Then the users can grab the downloads and Comcast's server can do the throttling all by itself.

Oh, and funny how DSL people don't have this problem.

Its obvious...

Said in the earlier movies:

"I'll be back" (you really need to have the Arnie accent to get this right)

Al Gore

Convenient Lies (carbon credits). Enough said!

Stock quote

$28.19 -$0.19 (-0.67%) at 10:47 PST Feb 27

Basically no change. I guess crime DOES pay!

*SIGH*

Look, 5.0 or less is not much here in California (NZ be damned). Nothing to get up and tell anyone about.

Once (in the 70's as I recall), I awoke to a shaker around 3am or so. My only reaction was to look at the clock so I could correlate with the news media. Not much else to do.

Nothing to see here, please move along.

FCC has already raked in close to $20bn

Now if they would only put it to good use! The digital TV mess that is coming in 12 months is a train wreck waiting to happen.

One must remember that it is OUR (the US taxpayers) money first and foremost!

Of course, the high bidder will get "unlimited" use of the airwaves, but will charge us peons by the minute for its use!

And so it goes.....

You know why this happened...

It was because the local bank official was stuck using a Curta Calculator, not some modern Windoze thing. He got frustrated in the accuracy of the older calculation methods, and didn't have the ability to "fudge" the numbers.

Now if I can find the one I bought back 38 years ago that is somewhere in my sisters house. It is probably worth a fortune (*SIGH*).

Better cause:

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

Probably leaked by some stupid clerk. The malice of hacking a computer seems WAY off base. It is a convenient way of applying spin.

What's in a name...

It may be that Intel just changed freeways in its naming pattern. The problem with that is that the name 'dunnington' doesn't correspond to much. Then again in my travels, I've come across something similar:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=38.852,-121.169&spn=0.3,0.3&q=38.852,-121.169

Ah, for the days of US99W (it was the 60's, and true to form I've forgotten all about it).

It is for those of us that DO eat cookies!

Look, lots of people DO spill crumbs on the mouse pad. For those who are just too lazy to shake the mouse pad in the wastebasket, this could be quite ideal.

Of course, its performance with wet objects (spilled soda) might be troublesome. Especially since it can get quite "sticky".

Oh, well. As was said in a previous life: "Nothing sucks like a VAX".

Re: Mr. Fussion

Well, doesn't everyone have one??

Should arrive on the market sometime around 2015 or so. It will solve all those silly global warming things, and make everything nice and cozy.

There are warning signs everywhere

"Shown with optional equipment"

"Your mileage may vary"

"See store for details"

"One at this price"

and finally: "Microsoft Operating System Included at No Charge".

If any (all should) of these causes a further investigation, you will be well served.

This "Prohibition" idea...

I believe it was tried back in the last century in a North American country. Funny, it lasted on a couple of years (1920-1933) but thankfully was overtaken by common sense.

In the "energy crisis" there was also a 55 mph speed limit. That lasted about 20 years too.

Some people never learn!

Strange things DO happen in California...

Here in the Bay Area, where Redwoods are cut down to make solar panels work, we also have a bunch of tree-huggers that want to preserve the recently (about 75 years ago) planted Oak trees in Berkeley (next to the Memorial Stadium there). You see they (the university) wants to expand the athletic facilities to have better teams (more money in TV rights for the university too). The tree sitters (who are now fenced in (two layers) and have people sending food to them with launchers or some such. There is a solution:

Install Solar Panels.

Then they can legally insist on the trees being cut down as they are blocking the panels.

There is a problem, they need to sell a square foot to some enterprising person who will claim the "right" to have solar energy. Perhaps it could be an emergency call box (they have solar panels) so you get a double whammy!

Oh, well, back to the drawing board. File this one in the "unintended consequences" category.

Authors notes...

I like it!!

Yes, everyone has had the experience.

Then again, I can say (with photographic proof mind you) that I've further south on earth than anyone (except an astronaut, but that's not earth!). Yes it was a while ago (over 30 years), and I was doing IT (we called it computers then) stuff as well.

A modest proposal...

Has been mentioned before. Maybe we should look into it.

p.s. Water is not running out, it is all recycled. It has been postulated that in every glass you drink is a molecule of what was once Julius Caesar's Urine. Probably very true.

Life goes on. Always will, always has. (*SIGH*)

Uncle Fester

Aka Steve Ballmer. Best joke I've heard all month.

Reference: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057729/

What would be the charge for...

...an M1A1 Abrams Tank? It would be quite nice in central London, as it would have EXTREME right of way. Kinda a true BOFH type vehicle. Just a small pipsqueak horn which anyone who ignores does so at their own peril.

Who needs a 4X4 when you have artillery you can point at the offender.

Congestion, NO PROBLEM!

Of course, my Porsche preference is for older 356 models (Specifically a 356SC) like the one in my dad's garage!