Posts by defiler

Re: So....

it should hardly ever come up, No?

Firstly, I am not a programmer. Secondly, it strikes me that you're correct in normal use.

However, somebody intent on causing trouble can pop this into a malicious program to cause havoc. It's like saying the bullet will be safe so long as it's kept in the box.

Can anyone offer a reason for using this segmented crap in any 32-bit system? If we're needing backwards compatibility for shitty old 16-bit applications, surely that can be isolated in an emulator or something these days?

Re: C'mon, Dr. S, this kind of trolling is beneath you.

Macs are tingley.

Same with the Surface Pro 3 I'm using just now. It's a figure-8 mains cable, so it doesn't have an earth.

A mate of mine had a Philips DVD player. Metal shell, but marked as "double-insulated". He kept getting shocks off that, and when tested it came out above 100V...

Re: Answer me this

And Blackjack! And hookers!

Re: Corporate tool?

but for example a Moto Z in a Daydream has significantly higher resolution

Then you're hammering against fill rates. I guess for a virtual desktop environment you don't care a whole lot about polygon counts, as the "screens" will effectively be two triangles with a high-res texture map applied. If the whole lot ends up looking like Job Simulator then so much the better - you can have people work without realising they should get paid for it. I'll not take my car to that workshop though... :)

You know, it's crazy but it might just work!

@AC

Even if I stay at work late ~ 11pm. And as I work at one of the top 10 universities in the UK, that should be a total f***ing embarrassment to the IT / network team.

Yeah. You'd think they'd be running backups and stuff offsite at that time of night. Bastards.

Also, we used to head into university to download Quake mods en mass, at 11pm. We'd hammer the Janet connection as hard as we could. Besides which, nowadays we put per-device caps on the line to stop people being stupid and greedy...

Re: TSB hires IBM amid online banking woes...

who else were they gonna call?

Ghostbusters? Not sure they'd do any worse by this point.

Re: Worrying...

Hahaha - flushed out the 4 Dundonians :D

Don't worry, chaps - I don't really have anything against Dundee. On the other hand, I did accidentally end up in East Kilbryde once at night. Had to think hard before stopping at red lights...

Re: Heavy handed indeed

What is "Win-10-nic"?

I'm going to reach here, but I think it's a play on Titanic (Ti-10-nic / Win-10-nic). Yeah. I'ts pretty rubbish. The sort of thing you expect from somebody who bought a nuclear bunker to live in and only comes out to buy canned goods, to vote and to foam at the mouth.

Hmm. Hi, Bob!

Re: My first laptop ran WIn98

I never had that many problems with ME. I'm sure other people did, but the hate it got and still gets seems to be a bit over the top.

I put Windows ME on my home PC. Between the Diamond Monster MX300 sound card an a Gainward Geforce2 video card I never got the thing to stay up for more than 15 minutes.

The next day I put 98SE back on it and got back to enjoying it. Fuck Windows ME and everything it ever stood for. I think I saw it on 3 machines ever, and those three caused more headaches for me than Vista.

(Also put 2000 Workstation on my PC later and it was great until I finally went with XP x64.)

Re: 2 billion in today's market

The Shuttle was an economical failure, but not a technical one

I'm going with this. It was a folly. A white elephant. I'll not argue against that, but what a tremendous achievement. NASA pushed the boundaries of what was actually possible, which was wonderful.

Did it work? Yes.

Did it work well? Yes.

Did it work as advertised? No - not really.

Did it achieve great things? Yes, look at the Hubble repair as the prime example.

Did it achieve its quick turnaround? Not a chance.

Did it achieve its reusability target? Not even close.

Was it the most insanely expensive way to put a payload in orbit? By far.

Was it flawed? In both design and execution.

Still, when I was a lad I made a model Space Shuttle. Didn't want an Atlas. And I would have had a Buran before a Soyuz. I wonder how many bright minds turned to aerospace just off the sight of something so ludicrously magnificent.

i've started buying all the originals right when everyone is going for the minis.

Snap. The lad like his retro games, so I just organised a SNES. Thought about the Mini, but it doesn't take carts so that's a bit of a waste. Looking forward to Play Expo now - he'll be coming along this year!

Re: When the a leader slags off a competitor...

First they ignore us

Then they laugh at us*

Then they fight us

Then we win.

*I reckon on that performance, we're about here.

Re: All is right with the world.

this is the ending that documentary needed!

Quick! Crowdfund the Director's Cut!

To Indiegogo!!

Re: Lobbing into orbit

Where there's muck there's brass. Did your mum not teach you that?

Re: What I want to watch...

I find I carry too much (post-consumption) cheese at the best of times. Don't really want to carry more.

Cracker, Gromit?

Re: Why???

Because it tends to be cheaper and easier than running your own resilient email system, if you're only managing a handful of users. Sure, it goes off from time to time, but that passes and in a few days it's forgotten about.

It's like when you drink tea that's too hot and it burns a bit on the way down, but a few seconds later you're fine and keep drinking the tea once it's cooled a little. People are funny like that.

Substitute coffee / hot chocolate / hot beer / hot absinthe or whatever you like to drink hot in lieu of the tea...

We run our email in-house, over multiple servers, in multiple sites.

Re: Films - meh

I thought the Dune film was OK when I saw it, given what it had to squeeze into a small amount of time (though I had the advantage of having previously read the books)

That's the thing, though. The movies acts as a great illustration to the book, but without having read the book it's very confusing. I remember it came on telly a day or two after I finished the book, and suddenly everything slotted into place. And you could see which bits had been shuffled around just to shift the narrative along quickly.

The SciFi Channel did a mini-series some time ago, but the cardboard they used for the sets was too wobbly even for Doctor Who. I seem to recall the acting was stiffer and more wooden than the sets.

Awaiting an Easter miracle

LOHAN was Lester's baby. Apparently there's a group trying to piece it back together, but it's been very much on the back burner since he died.

Official word

Re: A little breathing space

Can't we move Parliament somewhere further away? Bikini Atoll springs to mind.

Neptune. I mean it's not like Parliamentary TV needs to be real-time anyway.

Further, you can't presume the military in the USA would be 100% behind a tyrannical government, and if the majority of the people are against the government, the military would have reason to be party to a coup against the government in order "...to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness..." After all - the military needs money, and the citizens pay for it - and the military is essentially comprised of its citizens.

You buried it in the middle there, but this is the crux of my argument. You're not going to be as well-equipped as the military, and if it came down to some weirdly dystopian extermination of the civilian population then I have no doubt that the combined might of the US armed forces (both state and federal) could handle a 15:1 ratio with aplomb. Aside from everything else, you'd start with the low-hanging fruit and thin the numbers out before taking on the end-of-level boss.

But these military personnel are still people, and they still have families that they wouldn't take kindly to being asked to slaughter. They are the ones who would stop the lunacy. Armed forces of the people, for the people and by the people, if you will...

Re: 5 Hours to switch over to Disaster Recovery System

I'll confess I had to read it twice before I groaned. First time it flew right over my head... :-/

Re: "Mangers feature prominently in the Christmas story"

Strange. When did this turn into a UK vs. USA conversation?

Jake, you've been around here long enough to know that the answer is "every Friday" and "every Thursday before a holiday Friday".

Also, most Mondays and some Tuesdays. Wednesdays you're probably safe. Saturday/Sunday you've probably got something better to do. :)

Re: Outsourcing

If they are that much cheaper then someone somewhere is cutting corners.

Not necessarily. If the bar to entry is high enough, and the task small enough then outsourcing makes great sense. As described above - worldwide delivery. Not feasible to be done by every company individually.

A contentious example around these parts - cloud computing. If I need a small server to do my own stuff, and it needs to be permanently available on a fast internet line, it's generally better / cheaper for me to grab a VPS from (say) Rackspace than to buy a 1U Proliant (with hot-swap RAID, redundant PSUs etc) and colo it in an ISP datacentre. And even moreso over getting a RIPE allocation, multiple lines into my premises with BGP coming out of my ears, generator out back, and a second server handy in case the first one falls over...

For a telco, this system should be easy to set up. It should be well within their normal excess capacity, so it makes sense for a telco to handle it on behalf of the government rather than the government spending my tax money trying to *be* a telco. Why a telco then subbed it, though, is beyond me.

Re: Feeling Old...

> ...we attached a CD ROM to one of the (3?) interface options. Panasonic, Soundblaster and.....? Not IDE but can't recall the third one. Any one remember?

ATAPI, or SCSI?

ATAPI?? Pfft. Mitsumi, I believe is the word we're looking for. It was Panasonic / Sony / Mitsumi.