* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25249 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Run a demo on live data? Sure! What could possibly go wrong? Hang on. Are you sure that's not working?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: chain ferry

Nah, they upgraded to an unbreakable block chain.

Catching a falling rocket with a helicopter more complex than it sounds, says Rocket Lab

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: On what scale?

The overall "mission" succeeded, they recovered the 1st stage. But the Plan A recovery method failed so they used Plan B, which did succeed :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Thunderbirds had magnets strong enough to carry entire aircraft!! And that was back in the 1960;s :-)

Sizewell C nuclear plant up for review as UK faces financial black hole

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Its ok

It will take legislation to reduce "green" electricity. Currently (pun intended), all energy is sold at the price of the highest priced source. This means the solar and wind generators whose operating costs have gone up only with the cost of living (in simplified terms), are making out like bandits because they are selling product at the vastly inflated price of gas generation.

The legislation is required to unlink the "strike price" of gas from non-gas sourced generation. Despite all the hot air coming out of Westminster, I'm not seeing any suggestion that the Government is even considering this, let alone acting on it yet.

Elon Musk reportedly outlines horrible Twitter layoff process

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The blue bird rises like a Phoenix

"Voting rights are not being unduly restricted in the US. There is simply a fundamentally broken electoral system that favours VAST bureaucracy and complexity in order to employ a vast number of people."

I didn't say they were unduly restricted in the US. I was disputing the claim that they are more restricted in Europe than the US. On the other hand, your statement above seems to confirm that voting is more restricted in the US than it ought to be even if only by incompetent bureaucracy rather than ill intent.

AIUI, in the US, the onus is on the person to register as a voter. In the UK, at least, every residential address is regularly sent a form (annually, more or less) listing those who live there that are registered to vote, which can be ignored if there are no changes, or any new eligible voters can be added to the form and sent back to the returning officer to update the Electoral Register. It's generally very simple although in some cases new residents at the address may need to go in and show ID to prove who they are and there eligibility to vote

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Ah, but hat was the SEC and The Law telling him what not to do, and he's rich. This is sacrosanct Employment Contracts he's talking about. Far more powerful and easier to enforce, not matter what silly clauses may be in them, especially if you can't afford a decent lawyer.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Meh

I would suggest they take up Ballet, since the ballet dancers all went of to re-train as coders :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Don't the other investors get a look in?

The second biggest investor in Twitter is the Saudi wealth fund run by a member of the Saudi royal family. You don't piss them off. You might be invited to a Saudi embassy and not come out again. At least not all in one piece.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I've never used it but...

"Still it's always good to remind people average does not equal median..."

Yes, although I don't remember the examples given, I do very much remember a maths teacher at school demonstrating the difference between mean, mode and median and how vastly different the results can be using each method :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I assume that at a minimu that gves people 60 days more salary, but we'll have to see how this goes."

I've seen reports Twitter will pay salary to Feb'24. That may satisfy US law, or at least ameliorate the fall-out, but I don't think it will fly as well in EU countries or the UK. I've no idea if or how it might affect things elsewhere in the world though.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Twitter on Azure certifications

"2) It breaches the terms and conditions of those sites to give them my credentials"

Maybe, just maybe, however unlikely, that was a test :-)

(Yes, I know, far to many reports, especially of US employers, asking exactly for those credentials in all seriousness.)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The blue bird rises like a Phoenix

Good point. On the other hand, being accused of bias by both sides doesn't mean you are not biased. It just means you are not biased *enough* to either the left or the right since the people accusing of bias are invariably the extreme left or right :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The blue bird rises like a Phoenix

"The restriction of voting rights is a fever dream by the left. Even the lefts favourite socialist (but not really) European countries have restrictions on voting that are tougher than the US."

Evidence?

FWIW, most European nations have very few restriction on who can vote. At town/city level, proof of residence is about all you need, not even citizenship. Likewise when voting for MEPs at EU level. Most require citizenship to vote for national government representatives and that right is NOT removed just because some voters may be in prison, unlike most/all of the USA.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The blue bird rises like a Phoenix

"I think the issue with very, very wealthy people is that they tend to accrue hangers on who simply say what they think the boss wants to hear, rather than what they really NEED to hear. So if someone close had said 'Elon, you are coming across as a fucking idiot, just stop now, you twat', it would all have worked out much better!"

Generally, they don't "accrue" people like that. It's more Darwinian. If you tell the boss things s/he doesn't want to hear, you don't last long in their employ. At least not when the boss is a sociopath type.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

From the reports I've seen, at least in some jurisdictions if not all, Twitter will be paying full salaries till Feb'24. That might get him off the hook for some of the redundancies in some countries. They *may* be classed as still employed by Twitter until then, or at least "paid in lieu of notice". Skipping the legal notifications is a different kettle of fish though. Being notified of your redundancy by discovering you can no longer log into your work accounts is an especially shitty way of doing it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Strange

Interestingly, on the BBC R4 news yesterday, someone now ex-Twitter pointed out the "one" person responsible for dealing with celebrity accounts abuse has been "let go". With the Football World Cup about to start in Qatar very soon. So, who's going to deal with that now? Will the "slebs" now have the same issues as the "plebs" when it comes to complaints about abusive tweets? That's not going to encourage them to pay for a blue tick.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Tomorrow?

" Fri 4 Nov 2022 // 03:44 UTC

...reportedly informed company staff that layoffs begin tomorrow."

If you are going to post an article that close to midnight US time/UTC time, regardless of the local time zone of the author or publishing mechanism, it's probably best to use a day and/or date than something as nebulous as "tomorrow". At the time of publishing, for most of the world, the word to use was "today" in this case. Even if the majority audience is in the US, many would not have seen it that late on Thursday night on the East coast. Maybe El Reg isn't so much US centric these days as US West Coast centric :-)

Having listened to the BBC R4 news report and interviews on the subject driving home on Friday night after a day on the road, it was a bit weird seeing the Reg article referring to "tomorrow".

Twitter employees sue over lack of 60-day layoff notice

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Idiot dot com'ers..someone not in the Bay Area I'd guess..

That's a pretty shitty attitude to have for the people who do most of the actual work in most companies. Not everyone can be the queen bee like you because the queen bees like you NEED the drones to survive.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

...except, in some jurisdictions, such as the UK and EU at the least, they are NOT fired. They are on notice of redundancy and therefore still employees on the payroll depending on how long they have been employed for. The notice period is normally 1 week for every full year employed after the first year. And that notice period starts AFTER the legally mandated consultancy period of a minimum of 30 days (I assume the EU is the same since UK laws haven't changed much if at all since Brexit)

If their UK contracts include stock options, then illegally "firing" people without proper consultation and notice period will quite likely mean that in law they are still employed for the relevant period and therefore also entitled to any benefits they would have got if not illegally laid off.

IANAL but have some experience of being made redundant..

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

"They didn't invest in AI for the moderation (which is the only scalable solution)"

Sorry, can't reply because I'm laughing too much!!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

7,500 favoured friends? That's stretching "jobs for the boys" a bit! Or maybe they are all Facebook "friends"? ;-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Idiot dot com'ers..someone not in the Bay Area I'd guess..

"As long as there is a reasonable severance package people should not complain."

The problem with that is that it's only the 1%ers who get those sort of severance packages. The other 99% get offered a basic contract, take it or leave it. If you leave it, there's queue out the door waiting to take it. Almost everyone in a position to negotiate their employment contract is a 1%er.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"When the cost of the office space an employee occupies exceeds their salary, you have a problem."

Just make them work from home, simples. Oh, wait. This is Musk. He *hates* WFH :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: handling layoffs

I suppose it depends a lot on the law, how it's worded and how their employment contract is worded.

The last time I was made redundant, I was on 12 weeks notice and working it, not sitting around at home. On top of that, I was entitled to 12 weeks redundancy pay, due at the end of the 12 weeks notice period. I applied for and was offered a new job within 2 weeks of the formal notice period starting, with a start date at the beginning of week 4. Once notice has been given, my current/old employer has no say over when I actually leave other than they don't have to pay wages for any remaining notice period but still have to pay the full 12 weeks redundancy pay I'm entitled to, and cash for any unused holidays.

If they had chosen to not have me work my notice period, I'd still be entitled to those 12 weeks pay for as long as I don't find new employment, but that doesn't affect the redundancy pay but will affect the unused accrued holiday pay. In my case I left with 8 weeks notice still to go so "lost" those extra days annual leave I would have accrued. Which doesn't matter of course, because I'm now being paid by the new employers, accruing annual leave in the new job, earning more than the old job and have 12 weeks worth of wages/redundancy pay in the bank, and no unpaid time off work :-)

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Is the pandemic over yet?

"agreed not to extend Palantir's contract beyond the pandemic without consulting the public."

Who decides/has decided the pandemic is over? I'm sure the pandemic is over/not over depending on who you ask, when you ask them and whether there is profit or political capital to made from answering yes or no.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hidden backlog

And 50% of the appointments will be people wanting to talk about stuff that years ago we dealt with ourselves with a quick trip to the Chemist. The other 50% will be people who went in for something seemingly minor and were told to take a couple or paracetamols and call back in a week or two if it hadn't cleared up, by a busy and overworked GP mostly trying to do their best with few resources.

Google cut contractors off from online 'Share My Salary' spreadsheet, union claims

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yes, MS would have no reason to block access, but Google might be adding a very specific URI to their firewalls :-)

Maybe people working for/at MS should do the same, but store their data on Google while the Googlers move theirs to MS?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Google knows everything

Soylent Google is MADE FROM CONTRACTORS!!!!

Dell hit with Oz court case for misleading prices on monitors

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: If it was a genuine mistake

Interesting that they had to be told about this "error" that seems to have been raking in extra profits for well over two whole years too (at least!).

Did it really take that long before anyone noticed? Or does "justice" take that long to wind it's way from the consumer complaints to the "system" officially informing the vendor?

Assuming Dell were told of this quite early on by consumers and they did nothing about it implies that either the complaint was never passed up to someone who could take action or Dell figures the fine will be less than the extra profits they made. Either way they are guilty of something. But leaving it for so long will strongly imply to a judge that it was deliberate price gouging and Dell will most definitely be able to identify every single customer by purchase order who is affected. This ought to mean refunds of the difference, possibly plus compo and bigger fines for the offence.

Lets hope it goes to court and not end up with some wishy-washy out of court settlement where the lawyers take most of the settlement and the punters get a $5 voucher they can spend back at Dell (ie it's worth £1 in actual cost to Dell)

BT re-enters pay talks to prevent further strikes, says union

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

It's not how you read it, it's the actual words.

"making a different" should be "making a difference".

"We have called a meeting of your local branch official" possibly should be "at your local branch office" or maybe "with your your local branch official" and in the same sentence, "next steps ifs our talks fail to meet an acceptable way", "if" instead of "ifs" and fail to meet an acceptable way" sounds very wrong to me :-)

The problem with poor grammar and spelling and saying "I read it as..." leaves it open to interpretation by others in a different way. It's why we have so many issues with project managers :-)

Hot, sweaty builders hosed a server – literally – leaving support with an all-night RAID repair job

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Movers

Not had that, but at least two occasions where the delivery would need stair crawlers and four people, we paid for that, ie "delivery to room". The delivery company had subbed the final leg of the delivery out to a company and only paid them for "delivery to kerb". The two of us there to commission the kit Were Not Happy, to say the least.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Botched Aircon

"Apparently the master switch had to be located there rather than internally. It is now protected with a lock to prevent unauthorised switching, and better temperature monitoring..."

Sounds like the emergency isolation switch for use by the emergency services, especially fire crews. Putting a lock on it may not have gone down well at the next inspection, assuming they remembered they were supposed to check that.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Botched Aircon

"a proper aircon unit that was somewhat overspecced for the job."

There was this one customer I used to visit every now and then who had a freezing cold "server room". It was quite a large room, maybe 50 feet by 30 feet. It contained 7 servers, a couple of switches and the usual ancillary gubbins. One of the servers was in the rack with the switches and patch panels. The others were floor standing beasts from before it was standard to but kit that fitted in racks. And it was bloody FREEZING in that very large, almost empty room! Even at the height of an exceptionally hot (for the UK) summer, I always took a coat with me :-)

NASA wheels SLS rocket out to the launchpad for another attempt to get off the ground

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Beyond caring

"How nice! Wake me up when something moves vertically."

If you are anywhere with 30 miles of the launch site or early part of the flight path, I suspect it moving vertically will be all the alarm clock you need :-)

BT CEO ups cost-cutting plan amid rising inflation and soaring energy costs

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: dragging the country down

"What negotiation? They downed tools to harm their employer that they wish to gain more money from. Ransom."

Well, clearly there were negotiations before strike action was started. There are laws around that specify that. So-called "wildcat strikes" are not legal in the UK and haven't been for a long time.

Version 252 of systemd, as expected, locks down the Linux boot process

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"If the TPM fails, it's fucked."

Agreed. As a field engineer, I've come across a number of laptops where it's the TPM that has failed. It means a new system board, every time. Luckily, it's not that common and the clients I deal with just re-image anyway when the system board is replaced. I'm guessing someone decided the few pennies they save by TPM not being a plug-in module is more than the cost of a few warranty replacements when the now integrated TPM module fails.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: For a second....

Many people get the French confused with Parisiennes! Even the French hate them :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: For a second....

"haters like to hate"

And that is one of the most stupid and ridiculous generalisations ever invented, almost exclusively used by people who have run out of argument to describe anyone who doesn't agree with their point of view.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: For a second....

"we've been exposed to US writing for long enough"

I often wonder whether it's about cost savings or assumed intelligences levels of the audience or simple familiarity, but it does seem that English speaking nations are expected to understand "American" English, but more rarely the other way around. Exports to the US seem to be more frequently translated into "American" English or, in the case of some TV shows, completely remade for a US audience. Even show or book titles might be changed to suit the perceived US demographic.

I note that even Americans posting here are often dismayed by the apparent dumbing down of the education system.

NASA's CAPSTONE satellite is out of safe mode and on track for Moon orbit this month

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yes, considering science and space is primarily being done in metric units, I think maybe El Reg is going to far in it's "North American Style Guide" by converting from metric to "American" as the prime system. And this conversion is glaringly obvious that either El Reg or the press release it was based on did a conversion of a Very Large Number down the last significant integer place, make it look very, very silly. It might have looked a bit more clever if rounded to the nearest 100 or even nearest 10.

All of the norths are about to align over Britain

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Northist discrimination

Ah, well, it was well past midnight, it seem my RasPi has just died on me and I was in the middle of installing/rebuilding Kodi and my databases on a spare laptop. So MY icon applies to me :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: And as the norths merge at Stonehenge.....

You think he's the true king just because watery tart game him a sword?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Northist discrimination

Never heard of electromagnetism?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Northist discrimination

"Antipodeans". People who don''t like feet?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: for the "first time in history,"

I think the levelling up thing is a natural geologic phenomenon since the ice retreated after the last ice age. The South is sinking and the North is rising, which can mean so many things :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Or you could...

Oh, dear $deity!!! I hadn't thought of that!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Or you could...

"Even with a digital watch you can imagine where the hands would be."

You might be surprised at how many people can't tell the time if you show them a watch or clock with pointers on it instead of a digital numeric display.

China reminds world shock and ore can hurt tech supply chains

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Your logic is bizarre"

Taking into account some of Putins more bizarre decisions, especially where his plans have failed and he resorts to "revenge" actions, it's really not hard to understand what likely happened,

Microsoft mulls cheap PCs supported by ads, subs

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: PiHole

That was when I stopped using TuCows. A while after that I saw the light and just stopped using Windows :-)

UK comms regulator rings death knell for fax machines

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hasta la vista, Faxy

"So imagine my delight when email came along, and I was able to set up a ‘mail-merge’ from Word to Outlook, and the job was reduced to about 10 minutes of blissful pointing and clicking, from the comfort of my desk."

You were luck if all your recipients also had or got email at the same time as you did,

I was dealing with a client in the shipping business some years ago who not only were dealing with clients by email in the main, some still using faxes but even one somewhere in Africa that still had only Telex. There was an ancients PC (an IBM PC-XT IIRC) with a Telex card in it just for dealing with that customer. Luckily, because it was never switched off, it just ran and ran for years. I think I replaced the PSU once. Not sure how far back that was, but it was in the very early 2000's :-)

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