Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Interesting idea...

"Even more so, when it's an intermittent jet engine!"

Back in the days of Pentium 4 and earlier, when most PC cooling fans had no speed control, few people complained about the constant noise. Once speed controlled fans became popular and some even turn off completely when not required, the complaints from users started as soon as a fan got anywhere near full speed and especially when the loading on the CPU was at the threshold of the speed up such that, as per the one in the article, it kept speeding up and slowing down. The human brain is very good at shutting out and ignoring a constant sound, but very poor at ignoring randomly changing sounds.

Re: death trap

"Do you then want a nice gentle gas release in one corner risking a dense cloud of suppressant in one area of the room, which would slowly (very slowly) be pushed around with air currents and to start taking effect within a few minutes and maybe start damping down the fire within 5-10 minutes?"

While I take you point, I think he's suggesting something less violent, but still relatively violent, something akin to power of gas or powder fire extinguishers, ie the gas gets there pretty quickly, but not violent enough to itself cause damage and injury.

Re: Err

Many of the Carry On team, actors and writers, had WWII military experience, or at least ENSA experience so quite possibly/probably picked up common military phrase for use later in their careers :-)

I'm not so sure about a mandated sprinkler system in private residences, especially single family dwellings. That could be a very, very expensive false alarm.

Re: There's some merit it this complaint...

"And if the majority are US-based, then clearly the editorial will be more focussed on US based content."

And yet, when it was slightly less US focussed, it attracted a great many US readers. So sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. It's how advertisers work. If a market is expanding, concentrate on that one, even if what you are doing alienates other markets and removes the uniqueness you had.

Re: Woodworm

And what;s the root password?

Re: Nobody is touching...

Blocky! It's surprisingly sad how poor old games look on modern LCD/OLED screens. The imperfections and foibles of CRT displays where used to advantage by games programmers and they can look shite on a modern screen unless you use "shaders" to simulate scanlines etc to attempt to recreate the old look and feel. I recall some NTSC games that simply never looked as expected on PAL systems because of the different foibles of the two system. Probably vice versa too.

Re: Embarrassed in to having a clear out...

"Oh, and 2 HP MicroServers, 1 of which is BNIB"

There's an ancient HP MicroServer in my loft too. It's got a 250GB boot drive in the CD-ROM bay and 4x4TB HDDs[*] in the main drive bay and has been running for quite some years now.

* upgraded a couple of times, running ZFS filesystem in RAIDZ, so 12TB of space, mostly filled and thinking about another upgrade :-)

Re: Don't mention Soundblaster.

And/or a trawl around archive.com. Lots of games for almost any system you can think of saved on there for posterity. Some you can even play in your browser through their own emulators, other you can download and try setting up yourself.

Re: NMOC

Ooooh...me too. That's more than half-way to London for me :-)

Re: Depreciation

She was a pretty shit FD then. Everyone knows that kit has a selling cost, ie there is a cost to be factored in to the process of actually selling the item(s). If the deprecation is allowed to fall below the selling cost, then it costs more to dispose of it than it's sale price value. You get shot of it before that happens, unless it's being scrapped, in which case you price up the scrapping costs too. And annual depreciation of 15%? Sounds like she had no idea of lifecycles and was depreciating based on heavy machinery with a much longer expected lifetime. Even our company cars are depreciated at 25% to 33% annually.

The Tandy 1000 had a 3 channel AY-3-8910 sound chip in it and some games supported that. That would sound more like "8-bit tunes" than anything from the PC speaker. Maybe DOSBox needs setting to emulate the Tandy 1000 Sound device. Try setting machine=tandy in the config file.

On the other hand, I remember speech coming out of the basic PC speaker. Poorly, but understandable :-)

Re: A phrase to remember

Yeah, and I have a "friend" wondering how much for the TRS-80 Model 100 :-)

...and very un-American, which is the opposite of what El Reg is trying to be. I submit Regonomizationizm as a suitable American-sounding replacement,

Re: Multi I/O Boards

Multi-I/O cards changed over time. Anything other than an original 8088/86 or 80286 based PC would likely have had the realtime clock on the motherboard, and the multi-I/O card would have been 16-bit and had FDD, HDD, parallel and one or two serial ports on them and most likely IDE-based by the time 486s came along.

Re: Not quite the same

It would probably have been cheaper just to fix the earthing problem in the vacuum cleaners!

Re: "Hairy jumper"

...and a vest is something else altogether :-)

"For instance, I have a friend who swears by a trackball, whereas I have only ever sworn at it as it just doesn't work for me - each to their own."

Yeah, similar arguments can be had over trackpads and nipples :-)

Re: Truly, certainly not

"Who knows, maybe with Windows 12 we'll finally get another version that looks pretty, consistent, finished and flexible. Not holding my breath."

Probably best not to, considering the time from Win 10 to Win11. Win12 is a few years away yet! I wonder if there'll be a Win13 eventually? Americans seem to be very wary of the number 13, at least in marketing terms, floor numbering etc.

Re: What is deemed harmful to kids ?

Most kids probably only access Wikipedia for homework reasons. Likely the same reason most kids would ever knowingly visit a religious site.

Re: The Lords said they felt that "anonymous age verification is possible."

Maybe, maybe not. Do you want Joe the binman[*] to be made a Lord to help redress the balance? Alan Sugar made it from London barrow boy (sort of!) to the Lords. Probably not the ideal example, but an example nonetheless.

* No offence to binmen. They do a vital job. But it's probably not ideal training to be one of the people sort of in charge of the country :-)

"Tesla to actually do some advertising and point out the limitations of their software"

It'd be nice to see the court dish that out as part of the punishment, assuming Tesla lose. With the court having a veto on the adverts Tesla produce, ie there must be NO "spin" only the unvarnished "truth in advertising" :-)