* Posts by Sceptic Tank

967 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2008

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Uber Australia to pay $178M to settle cabbies' class action

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Go

Making own drinkig water unclean.

If you are a driver for Über and you decide to sue them, don't you risk seeing your monetising opportunities being decimated? As in: you see a potential client standing in the street 100m away from you but another Uber from 5 km away arrives to pick him up because you did not get a notification for inadequately explained reasons.

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

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Devil

Baaa baa baaa

Barbara Ann

(The customers were fleeced)

'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city

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Pirate

Hello Kitty

Stupid animal. You need platinum to make a good cataclysmic converter.

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

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Windows

Not for distribution

If I remember correctly, the devil had arranged it so that the Outlook versions that were around in the early 2000's used Ctrl+S hotkeys for sending emails. One friday afternoon a mid-level manager was messing about on one of his subordinate's PC and typed up a harshly worded email to the global distribution list, telling everybody in rather rude language how stupid they are. Then Ctrl+S to save ... followed by a futile attempt to recall the message. The disciplinary hearing was held two weeks later and the farewell drinks organised for the following friday. Turns out that the head of IT was on the hunt for a reason to get rid of the guy already, and then this fell out of the sky. Subordinate survived with a warning on his employment record.

IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

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Alien

The Painframe

Once I was a mainframe programmer. That must the worst computing environment ever devised in ca. 300,000 years of human history.

Belgian ale legend Duvel's brewery borked as ransomware halts production

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Devil

Als de Duvel.... ====>

A diabolic deed!

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

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Pint

Re: And for just a short period of space time

Thanks for the demonstration.

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Windows

Missing Fingers Fan Club

Your friends wouldn't happen to go by names like The Tramp, and such?

Microsoft drags Windows Subsystem for Android into the trash

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Big Brother

You! Product ....

M$ and Google probably got into an argument about who gets to sell all the data they harvest when Android runs on Win 11.

NASA and Japan's X-ray satellite space 'scope sends first snaps of distant galaxies

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Terminator

Don't you have enough of these things already?

More space junk in orbit.

Say, are those and dark crossing lines and white square around SN 1006 signs of possible extraterrestrial intelligence in that galaxy?

FOSS replacement for Partition Magic, Gparted 1.6 is here to save your data

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Pint

OnTrack Disk Manager. Always though that's the coolest name ever.

Nikola founder faces ranch forfeiture following fraud conviction

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Re: Nine bucks a year.

Oh dear!

Husqvarna ports Doom to a robot lawnmower – not, thankfully, its chainsaws

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Black Helicopters

So on 9/10, expect a few garden gnomes mowed down when the lawnmower controls suddenly started doing strange normal things.

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

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Devil

Sounds like Google (Meta / Microsoft / Amazon / ...), alright

Some of them want to use use

Some of them want to abuse you

I'm not sure who would trust Google for anything after the altered reality that Gemini has been coughing out.

Anyway, DuckDuckGo: sounds like the cure is as bad as the disease.

Google co-founder Brin named a defendant in wrongful death complaint

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Devil

Wipe that Brin

Yup, not nice people. We're forced to use their stuff because they ran everybody else out of business. But they're not nice people.

Web archive user's $14k BigQuery bill shock after running queries on 'free' dataset

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Thumb Up

42

What was the answer in the end?

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

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FAIL

The road to hell

Google maps is finicky. If you hold your phone wrong it decides to map out a different route that takes you to strange places. I had that recently where I needed to drive 5 km east. The first attempt got it right and then suddenly it first wanted to take me 4 km north, then back to my starting point, and then on to my destination. I could not get it to recalculate the route correctly so I packed away the phone and drove to the place. Luckily I had a fairly good idea where it was, but if that happened in a rough neighbourhood where I'm not familiar with the area I would have been out of luck.

Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 surfaces on eBay

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Devil

Re: Worth noting the discovery that made OS/2 1 redundant

"... of a marketing release of work in progress than a completed chip"

Nah! I do believe this was a real – albeit flawed – attempt to create the next generation of CPUs. Someone an Intel apparently truly believed that the majority of DOS software would either just run in 80286 protected mode unaltered or could easily be fixed. Digital Research even wrote an operating system for the 286 that was supposed to replace MS-DOS. But it looks like the Intel engineers never took a good look at real-world 8086 software to see what it was really doing and missed the part where everybody was accessing segments wherever they pleased. There was no way to create a protected mode operating system that could deal with that real mode mess. It looks like Intel also believed that programmers really liked dealing with this segmentation scheme and that flat memory models would never catch on. They even extended segmentation to 32-bit on the 386.

Square Kilometre Array precursor looks to filter out satellite interference

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Devil

Re: 41k loc in bash scripts

After the first line of Python, drink Strychnine to reduce suffering.

Chunks of deorbiting ESA satellite are expected to reach the ground

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Mushroom

Re: A bit more precision required

We also need to understand if the Kremlin counts as an ocean.

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

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FAIL

Castrophic failure

Don't Fidel with those servers.

NASA extinguishes experiment about setting things on fire in space

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Flame

Re: Maybe

Fire the lot of them!

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

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Holmes

After booting for the second time

Your PC is now stoned. Legalise Marijuana

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

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Boffin

The Cylons

Immersive 3D realty can be had for free by anyone with two good eyes. You could always wear scuba gear if you truly want to look like a dork.

Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap

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Devil

Re: Small?

And I suppose your CP/M had a GUI on top of a multitasking OS kernel, access control, plug & play peripherals, and a network stack? I watch these 8-bit restoration channels on YT and all I can tell myself is how eternally grateful I am that the days of struggling with those clunkers are over.

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

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Childcatcher

Re: POPCNT

Oh no! Is Hungarian notation making a comeback in W11?

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Angel

October 14, 2025 - Bring it on!!!

REASON:=POPCNT

Y'all say what you want but this smells like a perfect excuse to go out and buy some shiny new kit before the day comes. What I have works excessively well, but it's 7+ years old and needs to replaced because $(REASON)

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

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WTF?

Re: Copium

Better not park near Midnight Oil then because "diesel & dust is what we breathe", etc. Your precious Cybertruck will look like a Holden wreck in no time.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

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Show me the micro money

It will cost you $0.001 to view the page. (This page automaticaly refreshes every 0.001 seconds)

'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand

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Mushroom

No need to abort. The countdown starts.

Good thing that the ordnance team wasn't testing their rocketry that day.

Forcing AI on developers is a bad idea that is going to happen

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Flame

JetBrAIns drinking from the fAIre hAIdrant

This is just an incarnation of the phenomenon in dev shops where some jet brain wanted to learn some weird or wonderful technology and then implemented a solution that looks like they're whacking a mosquito with the help of a large demolition crew.

Angry mob trashes and sets fire to Waymo self-driving car

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Terminator

A shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a thing that doesn't know it exists.

Even before I was old enough to learn to drive, my father taught me that a very important aspect of driving is the ability to predict what drivers around you might do and to sometimes think for other people. This is especially true in this place where I live where the road traffic act is mostly regarded as a set of guidelines. Now, how much awareness of the driving conditions might one reasonably expect from a robot that doesn't know or care whether it's driving a car or peeling a potato?

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Happy

Re: Can't be all bad, these cars ==========>

It takes a special level of arrogance to be a good cyclist.

Think tank funded by Big Tech argues AI’s climate impact is nothing to worry about

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Childcatcher

And they are right because there is no climate change. The real issue is the destruction of the environment, but there is lots of money to be made by replacing existing energy infrastructure with new stuff – that doesn't work particularly well. But there is no money to be made by stopping all mining activities – and implied environmental destruction – to produce the metals needed to make all these shiny new things.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

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Childcatcher

Digging deep in Switserland

So why now bring "climate change" into this? The people raiding the earth to dig up minerals to build EVs, wind turbines, solar panels, etc., can just sell all the rare earths, copper, aluminium, and what have you to CERN. They'll still make their money. But I suppose this scaremongering over "climate change" will sell more. This whole "climate change" thing is just to switch from an oil based economy to a lithium based one so that somebody else sitting on some kind of mineral can start raking in the money.

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Re: Power

Solar

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war

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WTF?

Re: Unsurprising....

Mandela was a pacifist? He of Pretoria Church Street bomb? In "The Long Walk to Freedom" he himself actually admitted involvement.

An established AI player is in nasty trouble – in this market? What? Why?

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Terminator

Ask Dr Theopolis

Couldn't their models predict this? Or come up with a working business model?

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

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Black Helicopters

Air-o-space

Are these the same people who drilled that hole in the ISS where all the oxygen escaped?

(Ok ... rumour has it that the culprit was a homesick female astronaut who also destroyed the toilet)

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Mushroom

Re: Side hustle

The aircraft are also designed to fly only once.

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WTF?

Re: MBA Influences on Quality

Haha! What? Engineers letting someone tell what to do?

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

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Devil

Check your instruments...

If you wanted to build a simulator for the A320 at the Paris Air Show, how would you get the pine trees to move?

Scientists don thinking caps in wearable tech breakthrough

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Pint

Interesting thread

Your MCSE is useless with these new WinSock and multi-boot systems.

Windows 10 users report app gremlins after Microsoft update

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Windows

Re: A calculator...

Also not sure what kind of calculator needs SSE 4.2

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

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Big Brother

Sh!t4Brains

I drive a manual shift vehicle – I enjoy having that sort of control. I'm unlikely to use tools that come and plonk somebody else's prewritten rubbish code* into my project. Soon I'll be coding in Notepad++ (or worse) if they're going to force this AI rubbish on us.

* Possibly their code is actually better than mine. Who knows?

Things are going to get weird as the nanometer era draws to a close

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Angel

Re: Can the foundaries cope?

I'm sure a solution will be found. No need for any angst.

Microsoft confirms Windows Server 2025 is on the way

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Windows

Re: "tops out at 6TB of physical memory"

Firefox users will have to wait.

Add bacteria to the list of things that can run Doom

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Devil

Please no surface disinfectant on the screen

600 years feels like the network latency if someone decided to play a multiplayer Doom match on a LAN back then.

Anyway, would it not be better to hook your PC up to a chameleon? At least you'll have colour.

Techie resurrects teletext on a vintage BBC Master

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WTF?

In news just in: accident at a nuclear powerplant in the Ukraine.

So let me guess: when he opened the news section there was an story about Margaret Thatcher?

This guy must be seriously bored. At least I've advanced to reading the Intel 80286 Programmer's Reference Manual. (It finally dawned on me what Intel were hoping for when they designed that thing).

The literal Rolls-Royce of EVs is recalled over fire risk

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Childcatcher

Re: I'm very disappointed!

Who cares? If you have to ask you cannot afford it.

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