Posts by DarkwavePunk

"Being an adult is lame". I'm 50, reading El Reg, drinking a G&T at 10AM, and wearing fluffy bunny slippers. Chin up old chap!

Re: Fades the curtains

Queenslander by any chance?

Unfortunately that doesn't preclude them from having a point in this particular case. I'm going to join the above commentards in a beer shower...

Re: After checking the article’s date …

That had me mildly confused as well. Oh well, interesting to see what ARM are up to. Worked at the Cambridge office some 15 years ago. Strange and exciting times

Re: Microsoft "Active Desktop"

Argh! I worked for a small ISP back when that horrible web push content became all the rage. Given the Internet industry pricing for peering in Australia at the time the bills went wild for a bit. We pinned down the problem and stomped on it fairly quickly. Ashen-faced bean-counters was mildly amusing though.

Re: System 7 - the horror, the horror.

I had high hopes for CDE as a platform back in the day. It may look "ugly" to some but it does the job. Hell, even OLVWM is functional...

Re: Not really novel

Too true. I remember back in the early/mid-nineties a shark taking out pretty much the only direct (commercial) Internet cable to the US from Australia. Routing had to be done through SE Asia in a very convoluted manner. Watching BGP go batshit was mildly amusing at the ISP I worked for at the time.

Re: "standard pc?"

I have no idea what that <Ctrl>-<Left Cursor> etc thing means either. In most KSH derivatives beginning of line and end of line are <ctrl>-a or <ctrl>-e, or word at a time forward/backward <esc>-f or <esc-b>.

*edit (before I've even posted* - looks like the latter. Never knew. Then again I'm the type that uses <ctrl>-p instinctively instead of the up arrow.

Re: "free speech"

I'd generally be careful there. "You're a right fucking knob and talking steaming piles of bollocks you utter pillock" seems like a perfectly reasonable response to many things. I understand where you're coming from. I'm not targeting you personally in this response. If only "Social Media" was as civilised as USENET was... (AFK Mind Bleach).

Re: no VLANs ????

You'd be surprised. Early 2000s I had a short contract job at a financial institution that had 700+ NT4 desktops on a flat network alongside the servers. With stacked hubs no less. After pointing this out as a "bad idea" many times I was basically told "We know, shut up!". Not exactly sure what they wanted me to do and why I was hired.

"C - it always compiles." - I get your point although not entirely true. There is as always the question of "Should it do what you tell it to do, or what it thinks you want it to do?". I'm mostly in the former camp despite having trashed many many things in my life.

Re: Gardening leave

Ah the Cambridge IT Mafia. Back in the day I swear nearly every IT company had at least a few people who had worked with each other at a previous company at some stage.

Re: Fuck that

I get your thinking and would normally just do the voodoo and leave. In this situation however it sound like a week of paid holiday for very little effort and free booze. Can't complain there.

Re: Bloody hell...

I'd completely forgotten about the whole SoC style of it with the shared memory etc. I stand corrected.

Re: Interesting

Having worked with very "digital marketing" heavy companies in the past, I've seen horrors no one should have to. Implemented so many atrocities that I'm practically implicit in crimes against the Internet. This kind of shit runs deep in the industry and mutates fast.

Re: Site Acceptance Test

I agree entirely. Business park outside of Amsterdam, business park somewhere in Copenhagen, where the fuck is Luxembourg?, that sort of thing. Rack up the bar tab and get them to invoice it as "dining", watch the "interesting" things on European TV, and hope you're still drunk for the journey home.

Re: Moar visibility

Yes, lots of terminals, each with different colour schemes so as to get a visual cue as to which system I'm on. I do still use GNU Screen a lot though (mainly because I can't be arsed learning tmux after all these years).

Re: Serial to VGA? All you need is an adapter!

Argh! I got hold of an old SGI Indy once. It had SCSI-2 but the only SCSI CD drive I could find in the IT pile of crap at work was a Centronics style with a converter. Installing IRIX from a 1x CD-ROM drive was rather painful.

Re: "I prefer not to think about it too much."

Yeah, at some point you've just got to throw your hands in the the air and go "Sod it. Done as much as we can.". Still, must be nice for the boffins to have almost real time comms with the kit briefly. May Eris, Goddess of Chaos smile upon the journey.

Re: Helicopter catching

I'd guess that there are good helicopter pilots and dead ones with a small overlap on the Venn diagram. I heard a tale from someone who saw a pilot put a teabag in in a mug from a helicopter in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Probably just bollocks, but a nice story.

Remember that the Electron is rather small, will have lost all its fuel and be descending via parachute. Still don't think I'd want to be on that particular ride when they actually try it.