Posts by John 110 418 posts • joined 10 Aug 2009
""I'm surprised we haven't already done the 'space force' thing, actually."
You have. It's called USAF Space Command."
Yeah, but they run the Stargate program and you can't use that to get to Earth orbit unless you gate to a planet with a goa'uld mothership (and that would be bad)
Like this?
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/27/16374118/eonebook-manga-digital-reader-progress-technologies-kickstarter
I'm looking at a stack of 3½" floppies now. It's next to the DC2120 tapes and those halogen MR16 bulbs I can't give away. The USB drive is over there under my Hudl...
Let's see it bring 4 pints from the bar without taking a sip from each... to prevent spillage obviously.
"Good grief. Is there anyone who ISN'T keeping nude pictures of themselves online these days?!"
Tentatively raises hand, unsure as to what the cool answer would be...
@Sabot
I've got one you can have if we ever get our lab system to print wide carriage worksheets on a laser...
As a scientist I resent that... wait no, as you were. I'll start again.
As a scientist I resemble that remark!
You fool!! Now everyone knows!!! I'll have to start putting a 2 on the end now!!!! (or some more exclamation marks!!!!!)
Where I live, it's a squabble of IT managers... Or sometimes a snigger of IT managers (when we gang up on somebody)
"...We have a left wing government..."
Wait!! What??
James Blish's Fallen Star perhaps?
"but if you have to sully it with water at least do it the honour of using spring water and not that chemically tainted tap excretion...."
Is that spring water that you collected yourself from an actual spring (NOT downhill from a sheepdip pit!) or Spring Water that some other bugger has bottled from HIS tap just for you (and your wallet)?
Just curious.
Personally I wouldn't put anything in whisky, but if I'm forced to drink water...
I find tap water much better when diluted with a malt whisky - There, fixed that for you.
....I watched too much of "the Goodies" in the 70's, but my first response to AIOps was "ecky thump"
I think your early game was "Pangolins" and it was in the ZX Spectrum programming manual (Y/n)
@Richard 81 "So, one day my habit of keeping the GPS of my phone off to save the battery will get me in hot water?"
I wouldn't worry about it - it only LOOKS like your GPS is off...
Public - "Not carry my phone! It's vital to my everyday life!! You can't expect me to do without it!!!"
Gov - "No we mandate that you MUST carry it at all times"
Public - "Sod that!!!!" (throws phone in drawer...)
They've got to land it to change the film cartridge (or SD card if you want to be needlessly "modern")
"...If you unplugged it at the server..."
Aah, the benefit of 20 years of hindsight. I wish I'd had that in my 20's...
It's good to know I'm not alone, although I put it down to carelessness on the part of someone giving their email address. These days I just delete the emails, but I have been known to report them to abuse@ whoever sent them, and once I went the extra mile to inform a doctor's practise in California that their patient was never going to turn up for surgery... (That was hard, due to a reluctance on the part of the practise to put any contact details on the website that didn't need logged in to, and I wasn't going to phone them)
@skippybing
Interesting thread you linked to. Thanks.
Having read the first couple of pages, the reaction to the prosecution seems mixed, but the consensus seems to be that it was the right thing to do.
[disclaimer] I was too lazy^h^h^h^hbusy to read the whole thread, so opinion may have shifted towards the end.
The same Martin Baker that knew about a technical flaw since 1990 and didn't bother to mention it?
"...horrors the Brits perpetrate when making/serving coffee. ;-)"
Coffee bag in a mug. Add boiling water. Risk blistered fingers by dunking it about a bit until it's cooled enough to drink. Drink slowly, leaving bag in mug to achieve a turkish level of strength by the time you get to the end.
What's wrong with that?
"Now England will pay a price for such self-serving petty politics"
I think you mean the United Kingdom. (The bit I live in voted Remain and will pay a price for England's self-serving petty politics)
Unfortunately out here somewhere, we sometimes find ourselves in the situation where the old license runs out before the replacement software is quite ready for primetime - but we have to go live anyway...
"Could you fit a nip in there?"
"Aye"
"Well top it up then, I asked for a Pint"
Tradition was to hand over the first pint while filling the rest, the punter would drink the first mouthful, then ask for a topup (used the honesty principle to ensure that the first mouthful wasn't pint-sized)
Ah the seventies - where did they go?
The Tory MSP for NE Scotland is complaining about £100,000 worth of uneaten food in Tayside hospitals, claiming it's " further evidence of the health board’s inefficiency"
Oh - and it's not privatised...
It kinda puts a bill for £6m for sorting out a cock-up into perspective, eh.
"... soon it will ban burps..."
And so they bloody should! Global warming!! Greenhouse gases!!!
"...instead of letting the free market solve it..."
Because the free market isn't solving it, perhaps?
If you go to vivaldi.net there's a wee link to webmail at the top. Once you've registered, you can use your client of choice with IMAP or POP to access the mail.
Or is that not what you mean? Are you looking for a (proper) Opera-like built in client?
@bob
"/me wonders where the IT angle is on this one..."
They had a light, and a plug! of course they were IT equipment!!
Not drives, but lab centrifuges. - We were taught to "balance" these by adding a tube opposite the one we were spinning containing a carefully measured (by eye) level of water. One day somebody (else) forgot... The centrifuge walked off the bench and was wandering across the floor when somebody had the presence of mind to turn it off at the wall.
And don't talk to me about ultra-centrifuges...
You've got windows!! Bastard!!!
....for something like Max Headroom :(
We need a Max Headroom icon!
"Maybe millions of housepersons watch porn whilst doing the ironing?"
I wouldn't, not near a hot iron...
They still talk as much, but the actual information content drops the longer they talk...
I think you'll find that "heid" is a perfectly good word north of the Tweed.
Usage : "awa an bile yir heid"
You're probably right about 'mangled malapropisms' unless the OP's family were trying to point out hilarious stuff that other people texted them with and inadvertently auto-corrected it to something legible...
I live a cashless life as well, but not in a good way...
@Ledswinger -- "And sweat, it needs to exude gallons of salty, dirty, malodorous juice."
I NEVER want to sit in your car...Never!!
We switched from a Citroen to a Ford. On the first long trip we made (over Cairn o' Mount) we hit dense fog on the way back down. I confidently reached down to the right to switch on the fog lights... and the dashboard lights went out... By the time I'd actually found the fogs, we had descended out of the cloud layer.
We have a new car (Motability) every three years, and when you have certain requirements (need room in the boot for a wheelchair and room in the back for kids) you tend to stick to the newer model of what you have. Except that the buggers keep changing the control layout! At one point Ford switched the controls on the steering wheel (volume up/down, trip computer etc) over. All that carefully trained muscle memory rendered useless!
"The vast majority of replies here made fun of the article."
I don't think most of the replies are actually making fun of the article.
This is the Register.
We read and comment on articles highlighting all sorts of horrendous catastrophes (and this one is terrible), it's only our sense of humour that keeps us going.
It's easy to laugh at mouse stories, but I remember the "Computing in Medical Laboratories" thing that we hosted in the 80's where guys who were at the cutting edge of Labsystem development (from Norfolk if I remember correctly) were harumphing about those new-fangled mouse things.
"I would turn them over and use them as a trackball" they said...
As an aside, our current labsystem is completely mouse-free once you've clicked on it's icon to fire it up...
When I was the technician in a medical teaching lab one of the (many) things I had to do was look after 90 microscopes. You don't want to know what atrocities students can perpetrate on microscopes. Amongst other things, we had to call in the Leitz engineer to lock the lenses in place (he actually tightened them up supertight with a pair of rubber-coated pliers) to stop the students nicking them. And these were medical students - supposedly the creme de la creme.
Ah the 70's I miss them sometimes.
ooh, you got a downvote, Teflon suit man must have read your post. Have a balancing upvote.
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