Posts by PhilipN

Connectors!

Cupboards-full and more all the time - all the way from serial, parallel, printer, scsi, FireWire 400 and 800, usb 1 through XX, Ethernet, and not forgetting vga, DVI-whatever, HDMI, power cables galore, audio cables with 1, 2, 3 or more jacks, optical, RCA, DIN, and now Thunderblah-blah 1, 2, 3 ....

But why is it -

1. The last critical connector cable is always two inches short.

2. That immensely valuable gender-changer at the bottom of the drawer turns out to be female-female instead of male-male.

Better stop here I’m getting angry

Too late : Ever tried counting the contacts on a scsi plug to see which frigging one it was? Sh**t!!

Wasp heaven

Cut the (bruised) top off an apple once and a fully-grown wasp staggered out from the core. He must have crawled in as a wee wasplet and couldn’t back out. Or was having a doze to sleep it off. Had no choice - after all wasps look and sound so ANGRY and the way they fly at you is so THREATENING - but to squash the b*****d.

Just imagine getting stuck inside a reasonably full barrel of cider and not even being able to drink your way out.

How to save humanity's self-respect

Brilliant idea - FB should freeze every single account - all of 'em - and require punters to re-register.

I'd be surprised if they have more than a few hundred million actual users. This whole chunk of the planet supposed to be on FB is bollocks.

"seized in as little as 24 to 48 hours"

Not clever.

Surely better to let them run and track what they are doing.

Hats off to Slackware

My Linux baptism was with Ygdrassil but blowed if I can remember whether I tried installing it from 5 inch floppies or those new-fangled 3 inch ones.

Dirty bomb

Newsworthy because of the chance to use the above epithet.

From which it follows all (hopefully) bombs in the world are "clean".

Phew! That's a relief. Had me worried there for a minute.

I got it!

To keep down the layoffs IBM put whole departments into suspended animation. They just woke up Notes.

Very clever.

Who’s next? The OS/2 team?

Some new directors have ties to Chinese elite, government

Urrrmmm .... ye-es...

This is China...so what else is new?

Key phrase

Oh I’m disappointed.

Given we are talking about calls to HMRC, I was hoping for an article praising us Brits’ creation of the world’s largest audio profanisaurus.

In other news :

Today's Financial Times :

"Facebook, Amazon and Netflix all closed at new highs"

Family unification has been a fundamental tenet of American policy and law since ..

Really? Could our brethren over there explain WTF about the above claim?

No, seriously I'd like to know.

Or has the writer been watching too many Disney movies?

As an aside, IAAFL and a cross-examining counsel would have a field day tearing a witness in the box apart over use of "fundamental", "tenet", "policy" and "law". Course the first question would be : "What was the tenet and policy before the Second World War?"

Now I understand

Straying this far from his brief of making the World a safer place (stop sniggering at the back!) I realise he thought conservation was something to do with the Conservative Party.

Walled Gardens

OK something to be said for keeping two systems functionally separate in principle but if you are the gatekeeper the openings in the fence could be selectively and more intuitively accessible from within each system. They must be there since this third-party app or that will help you to do things - such as sharing screens (e.g. Teamviewer), and seeing the output from a Home (TM) CCTV on a Mac (e.g. various) - which are not native to the system.

The Home potato patch surrounded by barbed wire in the walled garden - which I agree is a potentially very dangerous trouble spot for spreading potato blight - would have greater potential at least for me if I was not forced to handle it on a phone or iPad -

or a frigging Apple TV! Whose brilliant idea was that?

Pah! Away with your namby-pamby hobbyists

Look - first, young'uns, "chips" are not from potatoes. They* are Britain's finest. Grill a few extra to eat straight from the fridge, slightly shrivelled, the following day. Preferably with a slice of yesterday's toast which has absorbed all the butter. Best snack in the world.

Second, Walls's super size** - black on top and bottom. Sides optional. Wrapped in a slice of decent white bread with lashings of (melting) butter to compensate for the fat lost during the cooking process. Luxury!

* Sigh - kids today - "chipolatas".

** I hear you no longer have to pierce them with a fork?? What the hell is that??

History's first hacker

Ali Baba sneakily finding out that "Open Sesame" was the password.

And spawning a thousand atrocious pantomimes.

Bastard!

Room to let

Apply Ecuador Consulate.

He and Assange would have LOTS to talk about.

One breaks out data from unwitting subjects.

The other ... oh ... hang on a sec ....

Beowulf

Name's taken, sorry. Or at least it was when I were a wee lad.

It was the system for connecting and sharing two or more computers to apply multi-CPU brute force to a single program which needed it.

Time and a place for everything

I was an (cough! cough!) innocent schoolkid complete with blazer and schoolcap during the skinhead** era and I would have been more than happy for Plod to database all young, white, bovver-boot** and 'crombie** coat wearing, walnut-sized brain primates and to have 'em rounded up en masse and sent away for good.

**Explanation for millennials : "Skinhead" was... oh, forget it. Look it up. While you are at it look up "pogoing" too. The kind of "dance" which could be done when you have a brain the size of a walnut.

By the way - good article and EXCELLENT discussion in this forum.

36 Mb hard disk

Luxury!

When ah were a lad ......

Tech leadership

Not just strange to see a reference to Microsoft in the same sentence but downright dangerous. Granted there have been immeasurable benefits to most of our (meaning this readership, which does not include the Sudanese herdsman) lives in the past two to three decades but, no, the world is not becoming a computer. Nor even is it particularly intelligent.

Dangerous because this is a more subtle and misleading and therefore threatening presentation to developers than Ballmer's mantra, aimed at persuading them all to re-imagine themselves as Jeff Bridges speeding round the electronic circuitry as if it is real life. It isn't.

Time - roughly a century has elapsed, in fact - to re-visit the debate (dispute, if you like) between Bergson and Einstein concerning the primacy of an imaginative or a clockwork universe.

We got the joke already

Kindly stop the puerile rendering of Analytica as Anal. or I shall have to cancel my subscription.

P.S. You missed one.

One basic problem found - maybe

Cautiously confident that at least one of the issues is solved - up to a point.

Mac Pro 2013.

Seems High Sierra 13.4 does not know how to go to sleep. To whit:

Re-installed. Immediately began a Time Machine backup and nothing else. Next time I looked the bastard had crashed.

Happened a second time.

Changed Energy Saver settings to keep the display awake longer and NOT to allow disks to sleep when display sleeps.

So far so good. First backup completed. Bloody miracle!

This did NOT solve the ridiculous install/update issues which again one time ended with a floating frigging question mark on the screen but the OS seems somehow - eventually - to complete the boot/install/update.

Now on to latest developer preview no. 2 of 13.5. Can't be any worse ..... surely? I mean, this came out relatively quickly so maybe Apple actually reads all the crash reports.