Real Ale TWATS: In SPAAAACE, no one can churn your cream How can you get pissed, generously fed AND intellectually intrigued for a mere tenner in this day and age? Easy: sign up to attend one of The Register’s Christmas Lectures. Oh, except you can’t because the last one was held earlier this week in central London. Sorry if you missed it, heh. OK, a few pints won’t get the average …
'man who calls a spade a bloody shovel' this always strikes me as odd, spade!=shovel, the former is for digging, the latter for moving piles of stuff from one place to another. I wouldn't have yer man on my allotment, does he refer to satellites as reentry vehicles?
Mind you, I have a beard and drink real ale so perhaps I'm taking it all too seriously. ..
Possibly more than you want to know about Wombats:
Australian Wombat - Facts, Habits and Personality
and of course, The Famous Datatrieve Wombat
.. the reference to Windows Vista becoming an unintentional problem (OK, "unintentional" is an assumption) much later is not so far fetched as it appears. At some point, some [deleted] decided to migrate SCADA control systems to Windows NT (not without reason, though - *NIX license costs were pretty close to stupid in the days before Linux and *BSD) and we now pay the price for that.
It's a very valid point - will we remember CTRL-ALT-DEL a few decades into the future? Will XGA work with our retinal implants? Or the rectal ones? (I'm not sure what the latter implant would do, but given the present "up yours" attitude of companies vs staff I have no doubt that at some point such a thing will become a requirement to pass the HR employment gateway of doom, just because they can :).
Beer should never be creamy.
Dabsy is a **** for not inviting us to the party. Held in a pub even!
Many happy hours have been had watching a pompous PowerPoint prat fighting and losing a battle against a dial-up window that wants to update.
Sandra Bullock managed very well with a Russian keyboard in her underwear. (No, it wasn't in her underwear, she was).
Mr Dabbs wrote: "1987, the year I discovered that all beer south of the Midlands is piss"
Hmm.
Hast tha never supped Fuller's ESB, lad?
More seriously, he wrote:
"how frustrating is it to launch a heavy probe into space with its chunky IT hardware and clunky software in the certain knowledge that it’ll be seriously out of date before it even reaches Mars?"
Mr Dabbs probably knows why, when they launch deep space hardware, the electronics has specs which - superficially - look pretty crap compared to contemporary Earth-based gear. But for those who don't, this is because the space hardware has to be radiation hard (etc) and what with one thing and another, that means you have to put up with lower operational performance compared to kit that's not designed for such arduous conditions.
Both Voyagers are still working (just about) despite having spent 37 years in space. 1977 - hmm, how many TRS-80s or Apple ][s from that, the launch year for both the space craft and the microcomputers, are still able to boot, do you think?
I'd say it'd not be at all frustrating to realize that your apparently clunky hardware and software is still working after - sticking with the Voyagers - nearly four decades of hard vacuum, deep chill (also roasting depending on where the spacecraft is), and high radiation.
Some info:
http://www.robkalmeijer.nl/techniek/electronica/electronicabladen/ew_ww/1989/12/page1133/
Which was lovely by the way. The important fact about that pub was the homicidally huge piles of pork pie death they served. Either they, or The Register, were trying to kill us!
They were so delicious, and yet so unhealthy. I highly recommend pork and black pudding pie to you all. They even had a vegetarian option. Turkey pies...
Thank you El Reg.
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