Posts by PhilipN

Usenet anecdote

Tangential but worth recording for posterity.

A well known guitarist with an avid fan base passed on.

The next day a whole bunch of new newsgroups had been set up. Purpose? When looking at the list of groups by name in alphabetical order the new ones formed, graphically, the words "Jerry Garcia".

Doesn’t Work

“I never said a word.”

“Yes, he did, Your Honour. He admitted .....”

“Where is the bodycam record, Officer?”

“He snatched it, Your Honour, threw it on the ground and stamped on it. Hence the additional charge of criminal damage.”

Maybe I’m biased from (professional) experience with our wonderful London policemen some time ago but, put it this way, a Defendant with front teeth broken would have been charged with trying to bite the cop’s kneecap.

Rent-a-parent; There's an App for that; student dating network

Got to be an actual IT angle here so it does not have to be a bootnote.

Rent-a-parent including a robotic one leads to the AI debate but there again I am old enough to pre-date the mini-skirt era. When I saw some of the Mum's (and their thighs) delivering the little kids to school I would have gladly swapped mine. (Sorry, Mum - kidding; and Freud can f*** off).

Food

What are the blighters feeding on? And - side issue - who fed the first inhabitants, thereby engendering a whole colony (unless the household rubbish is not properly disposed of)?

Eliminating the food supply gets rid of a lot of animals, teenagers included.

OMD

Ta, Dabbsy. Good choice, since we can look on in amazement that McCluskey and Co actually looked like that in the same way we can look back aghast at having the monstrosity which was Notes foisted upon us.

But Andy Stewart?? No, no, that was way below the belt. Now I shall be humming A Scottish Soldier all night. So - misery loves company :

https://youtu.be/SCSB_BiNSZo

Appalling, El Reg

How can you unashamedly publish such an article. "Very, very NSFW" is atrocious grammar!!

OS/2!

‘Cos nobody’s mentioned it.

{waves ‘bye going out the door and no-one looks up}

Old Tech Solution >

The Senior Partner in a law firm I was with in a previous lifetime once said only half joking he wanted a neon-lit sign on his door saying "Fuck off".

Somehow I think he would have reported his email system broken and useless, perhaps on a daily basis.

Now that would be a "MeToo" movement for the rest of us.

Weren’t accessible from the main roads

And a miserable to non-existent mobile signal?

Way-hay! Show me where! That is exactly where I want to be at weekends.

Well, weekdays too but .... needs must.

Close to the sea?

You mean - that is where the pipe is aiming and where its (usual) contents will go?

Point 1 - Urggh.

Point 2 - Can we have more fatbergs please.

Blade Runner

If anyone has already commented approvingly on the pic at the top I have not spotted it, so : good choice, AD.

Smart move of the film makers to choose a look-alike sound-alike young version* of Harrison Ford to do the interrogation.

*Clone? Replicant? Now, now - do NOT hijack this forum with a BR digression.

Crossing the Line

That was when FB, a simple social facility, following the decision of its bankers drooling over fees, agreed to list at US$100B+.

Then (1) the upper executive echelon inside FB were carried away in a total state of hubris and (2) they had to adopt one desperate measure after another to generate income to justify the hype, and the price. Item (2) was made easier because high-flying IT graduates* with the same dollar signs instead of irises flocked to FB and its incentive schemes expecting to get wealthy within 3 years or, hopefully, sooner.

*with apologies to the vast majority of IT graduates who maintain their prInciples.

Fuel pumped by a Jaguar V8 engine

My Jag has what I suppose is the same engine. Since I already have the base module I just need to bolt on the jet engine. There's a fixer-upper on eBay :

https://www.ebay.com/itm/ROLLS-ROYCE-G2-BUSINESS-JET-ENGINE-NON-OPERATIONAL-/273336101881?redirect=mobile

Anyone got a garden shed so I can get started?

Explanation for across-the-ponders : example of self-deprecating British irony.

Graphics

Ugh. Do not know whether it was actually the graphics on a VGA monitor or (or as well as) splattering organs but I succumbed to something like motion sickness in less than 2 minutes. Is it any better on modern systems? Cannot try since just thinking about it makes me queasy. Ok so it was the blood and guts.

Alternative business model please

Today's internet was built on the back of advertisers' dollars, yes? Was there another way? I am genuinely interested.

We all or most of us pay a monthly stipend for the bandwidth, not that much different in principle from the days of ftp, gopher, etc but would we have had all the graphical and multimedia content?

Reminds me the thinking is that porn was behind the growth of VHS.

Any advance on ads, porn ..... ?

Surprised nobody has yet said it

but memories fade, even about "embrace, extend, extinguish".

And the Browser Wars

And the DoJ case against Microsoft (q.v.)

At least MS have learnt : last time around they went with the NCSA Mosaic donkey. Now they are riding the competitor's thoroughbred.

P.S. I would not have wanted an Andreessen-controlled planet either.

"hit quarterly targets so as to pocket fat performance-linked bonuses"

Uhhh yeah? Thought that's how all US executives operate?*

So if sales are flat find another company to buy to hit the target by consolidating sales.

Even better make it an overseas company so the executives can go off for a jolly occasionally.

and again and again

*On the other hand I was a pimply-faced newbie in the City of London when I first heard the expression "window-dressing" to (cough! cough!) "improve" the balance sheet ahead of results time.

It's a what?

Must confess I look askance at people, and the animal, when they say "It's a XYZ/ABC cross". Some things are not intended by Nature.

(for US readers)

Many of them have been there. Suffolk too.

Went to school there. Flew for the USAF there ...

Look up Feltwell, Lakenheath and Mildenhall

Not surprised

Good article. FWIW since it is tangential I took delivery of the Mate 20 Pro phone a week ago and I am mightily impressed, not just with the phone but in the sense that Huawei are making some very smart, coherent and thoughtful decisions to push themselves up the sales charts in both phones and PC’s.

Bound to be in fact already is political pushback against Huawei but if this gives the PC industry a much-needed boot up the arse it is a Good Thing.

P.S. 32.5 cm tall? You mean y.... Oh the bag is 32.5 cm. Phew!

Efford

Love it! Phonetically almost identical to “F-Word”.

Think I’ll use that name as part of all my login credentials from now on.

Did you see it?

The main statement : “ double-check whether anything had crossed my desk”. Smart move - making sure first there is no paper trail so she can say whatever the hell she likes. How could she not know?

She ain’t presidential material though: they are past masters at “plausible deniability” without so clumsily demonstrating how they achieve it.

No no you have it all wrong

Not broken. NOT withdrawn. Just paused.

It was pining for the fjords.

“..based on your feedback...”

Is what MS always say when they’re harpooning another user favourite.

Be happy : “The theoretical argument against democracy is, of course, that man being prone to evil, something external to him and indifferent to his passions must be put up to govern him; the people will corrupt themselves, but a despot or an oligarchy, when it has satisfied its corrupt desires, still has a wide margin over which it may rule well because it is indifferent.”

I was stifling a chuckle nay a guffaw while writing that. Must be ‘cos I take comfort from MS’ protection against you corrupt bastards.

Buzz words - the more times you say it ......

“Innovation” dates back to Ballmer - and he even remembers to say it again.

“Digital transformation” is a new one on me : count how many times MS execs use it in the next 6-12 months.

I wonder how much they pay the PR people to come up with these Orwellisms?

Senior European Politician

Who's that, then?

Thought it was an article about Clegg.

Will die - no

Judging by the number of punters at the Surface counter at the local digi-shop compared with those at other counters, it is already dead*

*Save for corporations finagled into buying them in bulk