* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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End of the road for biz living off free G Suite legacy edition

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So, advertising doesn't bring in enough money then ?

"Idk what I expected I thought that Google gave a shit about people"

They dropped the "Do no evil" mission statement a long, long time ago. Long after they crossed over to the dark side.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bait

I also wonder if the likes of Google introducing "free" stuff also affects how people think about using FOSS in business. If "free" stuff can be taken away at a whim or become a chargeable service, might that make people think twice about Open/LibreOffice etc.

Spain, Austria not convinced location data is personal information

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hm, I'd say..

Fair enough, that's a good reason. But if there was no reason, or even a law stating, that the location data could only be held for very limited time, eg to cope with billing disputes, say a month or two, would you care as much then? For that length of times, it would be *required* data. After then, it's not *required*, just something they feel it's "nice to have" and can sell on, supposedly anonymised, which I think is the real problem. I'm also not happy about EE or whoever knowing, possibly within a few metres, everywhere I've been over the last 5-10 years.

On the other hand, I don't feel a need to see that data. I already know they have it, and requesting a copy isn't going to help me in any way. On the gripping hand, if someone with the time and resources to challenge this data retention wants a full copy so they can then use it evidence to challenge the need for telcos to even have this data, then IMHO that's a good reason to request it, That's why I made the comment about an ulterior motive, for good or ill.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hm, I'd say..

I agree 100% with the first two, but I must admit I can't think of a valid reason WHY the phone owner would need to access that data other than "because it's mine". I can see the need for legally defining it properly and how it can be legally used, but why would anyone need it? This feels like one of those gray areas and someone wants to push the boundaries to see where the line actually is, or maybe someone else has an underlying agenda for good or ill.

Also, as others have said, why do they even NEED to collect and store location data for more than a short length of time, eg days, weeks or even a billing period?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: someone else could have used the phone

"they've said they would release it to duly authorised law enforcement,"

If there is a court decision on record stating that phone location data is not personal information because it may not relate to the phones registered owner, then it strengthens an interesting legal defence whereby the location data has a lower value in evidence.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hm, I'd say..

"The duty (if any) of unscrambling which location records pertain devolves on the data controller, and 'inconvenience' of doing so would not be a get-out."

On the other hand, isn't there a get-out clause where it would be too complex or too expensive to retrieve the relevant data? If so, then it would almost impossible to identify if a phone has been shared or loaned out and remove that data from the request. Now that we are aware of this data access request and the legal decisions reached so far, it's starting to sound a lot more complex than the "simple request" it seems to be on the face of it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Start to publish politicians, judges and other "VIP" location data...

Even so, courts can't provide rulings based on "it's probably true".

In a civil case, that's exactly how it works :-) It needs to be a criminal case before "Beyond reasonable doubt" comes into play. Of course, I'm not a lawyer nor am I familiar with the Spanish or Austrian legal systems.

Amazon fears it could run out of US warehouse workers by 2024

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

True, probably, mostly :-)

He was worth somewhere north of $4B when he set up Blue Origin, 6 years before AWS went live, but his fortune has increased massively more since AWS. On the other hand, his "gift shop" has also grown massively since then too.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Your first point is reasonable. As Amazon finds it harder to get employees, then they have to do some to either attract them or replace them sooner with robots.

Your second point is probably why you got the downvotes. Amazons margins are large enough to make Bezos one of the richest people on Earth and can afford to spunk it away on building his own space programme.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Interesting, being a former employee is a red flag."

Considering how Bezos operates, that should not come as a surprise. If people only last 8 months, then they were either fired or quit. They clearly don't have the correct "love of Amazon" attitude :-)

I wonder just how many Amazon staff have been fired or otherwise "let go" and still use Amazon services? Or is Amazon building a bigger and bigger pool of disgruntled ex-employees who want nothing whatsoever to do with the company ever again?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"2024? Oh, no! And after that, what will they have to do? Raise wages? Start treating them decently? Unthinkable!"

Well, if they can stave off pay rises for two more years, they'll still only need to bring them up to 1990 levels by then.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Disposable

"I wouldn't be shocked if Bezos starts campaigning to create a special class of immigrant visa for warehouse work, based on not being able to hire enough people. Amazon may be running out of citizens willing to work a physically demanding job for much less than competitors like Walmart offer, but there are millions of central Americans who would happily work for even less pay and endure even worse working conditions - because being exploited in the US is still far better than being murdered by drug gangs at home."

Whatever happened to that "caravan" of people heading for the US? Are they already working for Amazon? Is it time to organise another one?

RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Still baffled!

My bugbear when using Windows for work related stuff after using FreeBSD (same with Linux), is that when I use the mouse to highlight text, I can't just paste it somewhere else with a click of the mouse. That catches me out EVERY TIME :-) It would such a simple and efficient improvement to Windows.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: RISC OS needs to be rewritten in a high-level language

From what I see of Linux development outside of the core Linux Kernel team, it might be better to look how the FreeBSD guys operate than how any of the big Linux "distro" teams operate. Especially the philosophy of keeping the kernel and userland development models together and sync.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not the only one...

Yes, I was going to say the same. BSD as an OS dates back to 1977 or so and the likes of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are direct genetic descendants, not re-implementations.

(Currently running FreeBSD 12.3 RELEASE here, on two desktop, this laptop and on my file server - Thinking about upgrading to 13 now that 13.1 is out - I still don't like n.0 of anything :-))

Graphical desktop system X Window just turned 38

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What I like about X

"Wayland leaves it to the window manager to implement RDP or VNC instead of doing it as part of its own protocol."

Are you saying that Wayland has relented and implemented a system wher by I can run a graphical client program on a remote system which has no GUI installed and have it display its window on my local graphical server? Or do you mean I have to run a full remote desktop in a window? If the former, then that's quite a turnaround. If the latter, then why would I want a full on GUI installed on a fast, remote machine just to be able to run a graphical program remotely and display it's output on my slower, local machine?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What I like about X

"For technical reasons which are unlikely to ever go away, I want to be able to do GUI things without having any extra stuff in my process address space. The X protocol gives me that, and it sounds like Wayland has no intention of doing so. "

This has been my concern ever since Wayland first breached my awareness threshold a decade or so ago and has been worrying me on and off ever since. The Wayland team don't seem to have any interest whatsoever in network aware resources. The client/server model is deprecated as far as they are concerned. It's like the want to remove a prime USP from *nix and got eh Windows desktop route where the only access to remote system is a shared full fat desktop.

Yodel becomes the latest victim of a cyber 'incident'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: One of the better ones

"Our local Coop has both an Amazon locker stack at the back and takes parcel deliveries from some firms too. My next pair of shoes should turn up there."

That'll be handy for the walk home :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yes. The sellers are the consumers of Yodal services. The buyers rarely, if ever, get a choice in which delivery method is used. I have, in the past, cancelled my order at the online checkout when presented with Yodal as the only delivery option.

One one experience with them was ordering a TV. I paid extra for next day delivery. It turned up after 5 days, having sat on the other side of the country in a depot in Liverpool for 4 days. Their excuse? It takes two people to delivery something that heavy!. Well, duh! Don't accept next day consignments if you can't delivery them on time! My phone call to the supplier ended up as a three-way with the Yodal rep. Both apologised and I got the extra money back I'd paid for the next day delivery with a confirmed delivery data. I should have asked for more since 5 days was even outside the so-called "normal" delivery duration. On the plus side, the driver did knock at the and deliver it as agreed and didn't throw it over the fence, or put a card in the door and run away.

Mars Express orbiter to get code update after 19 years

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Astounding

Yeah, especially if it still had the 49.7 day run time limit due to the memory leak. It'd not even make it part way to Mars before turning up its toes :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It never ceases to amaze me ...

"In 100 years, I'm sure there will still be a number of antique petrol powered cars around,"

Considering how few were made, it's remarkable how many 100+ year old petrol powered are cars are still around and running now. Once, many years ago, I even had a short ride on a steam powered car! And yes, the driver was called an engineer and there was a fireman on the back to stoke the boiler. Not very suitable for a quick trip to shop though. It took over an hour from cold to being ready to run :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It never ceases to amaze me ...

"Not sure newer stuff is the same especially once the bean counters realise they’ve been duped into funding extended missions that where meant to last just a few days or years and are still funding them decades later."

On the other hand, these things cost millions if not billions to launch and get into their intended location with very high risk of failure. So if you can squeeze extra life out it until the pips squeak, that's got to be a good thing, even from an accountants perspective. Especially if the alternative to 100's of 1000' over an extra 10 years is millions or billions to launch a new, updated replacement :-)

Liftoff at last for South Korean space program

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Space Launch System

Yeahbut, the UK has three, count'em, THREE spaceports planned!!!

UK's Post Office shells out for SAP software it thought it had

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Nice business you've got there squire...

"You'd think they'd be more careful in how they operate, especially after the significant impact they had on employees with the Horizon failures."

Horizon was the my first thought on reading this story. Maybe SAP should have had them up in court for fraud? Sadly, unlike the PO, SAP don't have the ability to actually investigate and bring charges directly.

(Yeah, I'm being ironic/sarcastic)

Google, EFF back Cloudflare in row over pirate streams

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"PLUS the site owners can sue for violating their constitutional rights"

Was israel.tv owned by US citizens, resident in the US? Do they even have constitutional rights?

Voicemail phishing emails steal Microsoft credentials

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"What doesnt help in this situation is if you use Teams as a full telephony solution, a voicemail left for you by an incomig caller is sent via email"

Ah, that helps explain a bit how this scam works. I wasn't aware of that. On the other hand, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK????? Teams is basically a messaging service. Why the hell would Teams send you an email about a Teams voicemail when it's a fucking messaging service? Why not send you a fucking MESSAGE, internal to the teams app/client.

<goes off to think calming thoughts, humming whalesong after very nearly going full Bombastic>

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The answer is simple

And how many will get the info? Of those who get it, how many will do more than just go "meh!". Of those remaining, how many will care? Of those few who care, how many will remember for more than a day or so?

Talk Talk. Massive data breaches all over the mainstream news. Did the customer base reduce? Only microscopically for a short while. Did customer churn increase? A little, but not much, and by definition, "churn" means lost customers were replaced by new ones. A month or two after they dropped out of the news, customers were flocking back to them because they had heard of them, so must be good. They'd forgotten WHY they heard of them. Brand awareness is powerful and the majority of customer seem to have the memory span of a goldfish when it comes to details. If anything, those data breaches probably caused a delayed growth spurt at TalkTalk.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: But voicemail doesn't work like this

But how many people do this, know how do this or know this sort of thing exists? I suspect those who know about are those least likely to be taken in by it. The one who will be taken in by are going to be least technically literate[*] who may think it;s a new service offered by their or other mobile providers.

[*]I include the "young" in this group too. Many know how to use their devices, having grown up with them, but many have no clue how they work.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I'm getting too old for this shit...

I think that was the OPs point though. Do people actual send voicemail messages in such a way that some service or other will then email you an attachment with the voicemail embedded or linked? Also a greybeard here, and it's something I've not seen or done. I either get emails or I get voice messages left on an answerphone[*]. The only real oddity I've come across is my wifes dotty old Aunt who has a habit of sending SMS to the landline so we get a phonecall from BT that then uses a robot voice in attempt to read the text message out over the phone.

[*], Yes, I do live in the 21st century, I mean both traditional answerphone (built into the digital base station of the cordless phones) on the landline and "voicemail" on a mobile phone.

Workers win vote to form US Apple Store union

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I wonder

I find it strange that an individual store of a large chain is treated as an independent business unit and can independently unionise in this way. I noted a similar situation with the Amazon warehouse. Surely this should have been a national vote including ALL Apple retail store staff. Or is this just yet another way that $Big_Corp in the US operate? Every individual business unit is, at least on paper, a separate and notionally autonomous entity? Divide and conquer, except in this case, by dividing into smaller units, it actually makes it a bit easier to start a grass roots movement, but back on the other side of the coin, easier for $Big_Corp to stamp on it in one way or another (again, as shown by the Amazon warehouse vote)

DRAM prices to drop 3-8% due to Ukraine war, inflation

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Coz war?

"So why is the war in Ukraine having an impact on global demand for consumer electronics?"

Well, there's also embargoes in shipping stuff to Russia, so that's another consumer market that is sinking fast. Then the increase in fuel cost and general costs of everything as a result of said fuel costs, which tends to reduce consumer demand on "luxuries" like consumer electronics, all directly related to the invasion of Ukraine.

And, because of how oil is sold, ie by auction, even countries who are, or are nearly, self-sufficient in oil, such as the US, are seeing fuel costs rise because they sell to the highest bidders, even if that means exporting it and going short at home, hence the home price rises. The oil costs the same to produce, but the oil companies are coining it in at the cost of everything else in the world.

Former AMD chip architect says it was wrong to can Arm project

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Agreed. After all, by all accounts he's GOOD at what he does, but seems to have move around a lot. Is he driven to find new challenges? Seduced my better offers? A real shit to work with? Anyone have any insights?

Plot to defeat crypto meltdown: Solend votes to seize, liquidate whale account

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Grrr!

"In this case the whalers appear to have been taken as the whale seems to have used some not so spiffy securities as collateral for borrowing somewhat harder ones. Oops."

Excellent point. And who's to say this anonymous "whale" hasn't used that tied-to-the-US$ "harder" crypto and done the same but this time borrowed actual hard cash using that as the collateral?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Trollface

So, basically you are saying everyone gets a vote and afterwards everyone has to abide by the result of a majority decision? That sounds soooo....un-American :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "we've been unable to get the whale to reduce their risk, or even get in contact with them"

Not only that, but the proposed "solution" of "The OTC trade Solend would perform on behalf of the whale would involve selling to a specific buyer at an agreed upon price." seem to indicate simpley swapping one "whale" for another "whale", albeit one they "know" and can communicate with.

US lawsuit alleges tool used by hospitals shares patient data with Meta

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Greed

The accountants. because they refused the budget for a proper and safe portal and instead went with "free" because the only "cost" is the patient data.

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

You really shouldn't do that. It's not that unusual for a deleted email to suddenly regain some level of importance. At best, if disk space is an issue, auto-delete the deleted items more than <some calendar value> old, eg 6 months or a year.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: My tale of woe...

"I had considered such a move, but that would ultimately hurt the students more than the district head. I decided instead to leave the bill outstanding & just write it all off on my taxes. I listed a fair market value for each system, multiplied by the number of systems, tacked on an hourly rate for each system that would cover having the job "professionally done", and submitted that to the tax goons. They raised an eyebrow, called the school to verify that I wasn't yanking their chain, nodded & hung up with a "Well I'll be damned" before approving my credit."

While I applaud your ingenuity (and success!) in writing off the parts and labour as tax liability, it no longer sounds like volunteering in the usual meaning of the word.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

For me, the first identifiable OS (as in disk based), for me would be TRS-DOS/LDOS/MultiDOS. Earlier would be whatever ran on the local Town Hall mainframe where we sent our punched tapes from Computer Studies class, and possibly earlier than my TRS-DOS, experience, the timeshared teletype we got in 6th form linked to Newcastle Uni by a wooden box called an acoustic modem :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: DOS

So long as the drive isn't encrypted, yes, you can boot a Windows installed to an external HDD and read the internal hard disk. Likewise, booting a live Linux from CD/USB and then mount (if the OS doesn't do it for you by default), the internal hard disk.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"But then, this article is about academics and there's too many you can't teach them anything because they're smarter than everyone else."

In the case of some academics I've met, their brains are full to overflowing with their specialist subject. There's no room left for social niceties or storing information on how to tie shoe-laces, never mind other people specialities :-)

US must adopt USB-C charging standard like EU, senators urge

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Maybe not where you are, but plugs and mains power were standardise by government in the UK. The National Grid came into existence in 1926 by Act of Parliament, the old style round pin plugs in 1927 and then the current standardised main plugs in 1947. All were lead by Government with industry co-operation. Industry itself did not initiate national standards other than possibly individual companies with an intention of gaining a monopoly by growing large enough to take over or beat down the competition over a much longer timescale.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Standards to help the consumer don't imply monopolies. Or, to go with your dislike of standard plugs, should we allow manufactures a choice of how to connect to the mains supply too? Buying a new gadget? Oh sorry sir, you'll need an expensive adaptor or to have your house rewired. Yes sir, this washing machine needs 3 phase power and that TV runs off 120VDC. Should we go back to pre-1947 when there were multiple different round pin plugs? Or earlier when plugs were not even standardised and different towns and cities had different electrical systems?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I buy the tech in my home, and for years now I have not considered a phone unless it used USB-C"

And that's what Brussels said to the manufactures some years ago in attempt to at least halve the amount of charger e-waste. They didn't listen so instead of coming up with their own ideas to cut waste, something was forced on them. They had a choice.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: De-duplication?

"The only advantage I see would be when retiring an older device it might be possible to re-use the older charger with a newer device, assuming that they have the same power requirements."

That's part of the reasoning behind the EU directive. They told the manufacturers years ago to sort things out and if unable to do so, then legislation would be introduced. They didn't, and now the rules have been forced on them in a way that it's hoped will make phone chargers optional when buying a phone since most people will already have a good, working and compatible charger thus reducing the manufacturing costs, the wast and the numbers of "spare" chargers sitting around peoples home and offices.

Never fear, the White House is here to tackle web trolls

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Finger-Wagging

The saddest thing about your comment is that you feel you have the need to keep 3 loaded weapons, ready to fire, within easy reach inside your own home "for emergencies". That's a big part of what the other poster was referring to as the "America Problem".

UK Home Office signs order to extradite Julian Assange to US

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: While ya'll

2 additional years on remand because, for obvious reasons, he has been refused bail. Even the US takes "time served" in account if subsequently sentenced to jail. If the US sticks to the guarantees it's given the UK government, then at most he's going to get about 5 years, to be served in Australia, will get the two years on remand taken into account and then, depending the Aussie justice system and any agreements they may make (or have made) with the US, his time in jail may be as much as halved and released "on licence". He could, conceivably, spend as little as one year in an Australian jail. Then again, he will spend time in US jail on remand awaiting his court date and during the trial. If that takes a long time, it's even possible that by the time he reaches Australia, there may be little to no time in jail.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: My advice for Biden

"How many years has Assange been held in solitary now?"

He's never been in solitary confinement.

SpaceX reportedly fires staffers behind open letter criticising Elon Musk

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Careful what you ask for

"NHTSA: 'Self-driving' cars were linked to 392 crashes in 10 months

NHTSA report shows Tesla Autopilot led the pack in crashes, but the data has gaps (techcrunch)

NHTSA data shows Teslas using Autopilot crashed 273 times in less than a year

That same report also includes the caveats that Tesla has far more vehicles with "self-driving" on the roads than any other company and that not all other "self driving" cars actually report individual accidents where the "self driving" or "advanced driver assistance" is at fault.

I'm certainly not here to defend Tesla in way shape or form, but I did read the articles on that report properly and fully. Clearly you have some other motive in posting something which on the face of it supports your position but when read properly, say almost to the opposite.

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