Posts by jake

Re: "all died within a week"

"before departing to a better place."

The smokehouse?

Re: Is this really necessary ?

Nah. For one thing, they die quickly, within days of birth ... if they are carried to full term in the first place. For another, they probably can't reproduce if they do make it into adulthood. These things are a genetic dead-end before they breath air for the first time.

Re: Finding loopholes in religious food rules

Depends. To these pigs have toes?

Re: I Can't Stop Myself

"I long ago concluded that any mention of Apple (other than a glowing testimonial) will get a downvote. Looks like we can now add any negativity toward Tesla/Musk as another route to a guaranteed downvote."

Basically, if you badmouth any religion, you'll get downvotes ... even especially if you are right and the downvoter knows it. The thumbs aren't logical, they are emotional. Ignore them.

Re: Shut him up!

Shirley you're trolling over in alt.politics.trump and/or free.impeach.trump, bob ... or do you just play that game here on ElReg?

Re: Trump, bent?

I don't know about that. The few folks I know who admit to having voted for the current idiot in chief say they refuse to vote for him again.

Re: Trump, bent?

The majority of voters did last time, for all the good THAT did ...

But ...

... if they don't want ads, why are they talking to Redmond?

Seriously.

I'd be far more worried about my yeast mutating than I would be about my grains having problems.

Re: Prelude to Mars

They aren't sending you to Mars with a specific brand of beer, they are sending you to Mars with the raw ingredients to make beer. Nobody says you have to make a Bud clone. And who would want to ... it's a lot harder than you might think. Simple Ales are a lot easier to make than American industrial lagers. If you don't believe me, try it.

Re: Prelude to Mars

Did you typoe "Pot still ..."?

Re: Prelude to Mars

The object isn't to export it, silly ... the object is to produce it for local consumption.

Re: About the same time that ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker,_or_The_Silver_Skates#Origin_of_the_story_of_the_boy_and_the_dike

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." —Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Re: This is one comman you never, ever type in - whoops.

"The smart thing is to type it into an editor, and when you both agree that it's perfect, cut-and-paste (without newline)."

Copy & paste can be fat-fingered, too. Turn it into a script. I have many one-line scripts, each named with a longish descriptive name that is often longer than the actual complex, dangerous command.

Re: From Experience (and In Hindsight)...

Or, if you prefer, molly-guard.

Re: DIKE

"It's a fairytale, made up by an American and not based on any facts, so who cares?"

You just pissed off a whole bunch of Star Trek and Star Wars fans ...

Re: About the same time that ...

And here I thought Venice was in Los Angeles ...

Re: About the same time that ...

My big Dic[0] also says it has been spelled variously "dic", "dik" and "diyke". Perhaps we can infer that the British can't actually spell at all. Doth the lady protest too much?

Ah, well. This kind of esoterica all Greek to most people. As long as the meaning is obvious, does it really matter in a forum like this one?

[0] OED, second dead tree edition.

Re: About the same time that ...

Offa died in the 6th Century. Dike was the common spelling (in English) starting some 800 years later. These days they no longer bother to teach spleling, near as I can tell. R U OK W dat?

Re: Paper White...

Oh, I dunno. I've seen a close approximation to 99FF33 ...

Re: DIKE

Sarah? Is that you?

Oddly enough ...

... you just did.

About the same time that ...

... schools stopped teaching kids how to spell "dike".

"Don't crush that person of short stature, hand me the side-cutters" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Re: Thermal Incident

"you will get a contact nicotine buzz"

No, I will not. I refuse to work on that kind of hazmat, and have done since I first started working on computers. The interior of a smoker's computer is the epitome of narsty ... Several people I know quit smoking when I pointed out that their lungs undoubtedly looked and smelled worse than the mess inside their computers.

Re: Ahhhh

The theory I've heard from clients investigating DevOps is that QA is overhead, so who needs it? To which I respond "So is Janitorial." ... They usually get the message.

Re: Thermal Incident

Corrosive air can elude the thought processes of the unwary ... In the mid-80s, I was working for a company that built gear to dynamically allocate bandwidth between voice and data.

Incredibly Big Monster of a company started getting weird bit errors on their global T1 (E1, T3 etc ... ) network. I was assigned to track down the problem after lower level techs couldn't figure it out.

Going thru' the data, I discovered that once the problem started occurring at any one site, it gradually became worse ... It was never bad enough to actually take down a connection, but network errors ramped up over time.

Further review showed that the same team of installers had installed the gear at all the sites with the problem.

I flew out to Boca and discovered that they had installed punch-down blocks in a janitor's closet ... directly over a mop bucket full of ammonia water. Seems it was the only wall space that was unused almost universally in such spaces.

Blocks relocated and corroded wire replaced, no more bit-errors ...

Re: Thermal Incident

Here, they smell of horse. Even the ones in the machineroom/museum/mausoleum/morgue that supposedly breathe properly filtered air.

Re: Some good rugged laptops from yesterjob.

"cant beat Panasonic for sheer strength - and bulk!!"

You got THAT right ... I used to carry a Panasonic Sr. Partner. 38 pounds of luggable (including case, modem, manuals & floppies). At least it had a built-in printer. I still have it. You get attached to the daftest things after a quarter million air-miles together.

Mine has an MFM controller in the expansion slot, a 20 meg hard drive in one of the floppy bays, and an aftermarket hack that upped the stock 256K of RAM to a more usable768K. I used an external modem. Yes, it still works. Came with Panasonic-labeled MS-DOS 2.2, but it currently boots MS-DOS 3.3 ... It might be hard for some of the younger readers to believe, but a LOT of RealWorld[tm] work was done with such primitive devices.

Re: If I have enough lego to need sorting

I see your three-pin plugs (literally, they are HUGE) and raise you an eight-pin DIP ... The venerable 555 has a habit of landing pins-up just exactly where my heel is going to come down. I've stepped on 6 of the damn things over the years ... all drew blood, two of them left bits behind in the bone, requiring removal by a surgeon. No other IC has ever assaulted me, just the 555. Is it paranoia when they really are out to get you?