* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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All of the norths are about to align over Britain

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.

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 :-)

InSight Mars lander has only 'few weeks' of power left

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I vaguely remember an SF story about a Mars mission. The budget was stripped back such that it would only be given if they went with a cheaper unmanned robotic mission. It failed on landing, something simple. So budget was granted to send another probe to "fix" the first one. Pulling a stuck folding panel or something IIRC. That failed, so budget was added for a 3rd one. That failed and the only remaining option was to send a fourth one, but since the budget was for unmanned missions only, the bloke inside it was not, under any circumstances to step out of the vehicle onto the Martian surface. He was only to reach out and flip the panel, then leave. Total cost was at least double the cost of the original planned manned mission :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Borrow some f1 tech?

It's also not travelling at 200+MPH and hitting flying insects etc either, but I still agree with your point :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

And that helicopter is also solar powered and the solar cells are ABOVE the rotors, so it has exactly the same issue with dust! Maybe not quite as bad as some dust will be removed when flying through the air.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Use inclined solar panels

Blowers all the way down?

Imagine the Paris icon -------------------->

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Use inclined solar panels

"Complicated, heavy, can damage the panels and probably not nearly as effective as you'd think (try brushing dust off of a statically charged balloon, you'll probably just end up adding more)."

I would have suggested earthing it, but then I thought about the long earthing wire that would be needed. It'd have to be quite stretchy too to cope with the changing orbital positions.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Use inclined solar panels

"What's needed is for a Martian to pop out with a bucket and sponge, give it a quick rub down and demand 5 Martian dollars."

It'd need to be stopped at traffic lights for that to happen. Have we seen traffic lights in any of the photos sent back yet? Click all squares which contain traffic signals[1].

If you see some traffic lights, then we have proof of life and can stop sending probes anyway.

[1] El Reg Americaizatio and that's what Google calls them too when they ask me[2]

[2] FFS, You'd think Google would know what they looked like by now, what with indexing most of the WWW!!!

Ritz cracker giant settles bust-up with insurer over $100m+ NotPetya cleanup

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Prove it!

"Short of an official government declared statement of "War", I find it incredibly difficult to prove a cyber attack was caused by a nation state."

I do wonder if there was any US Govt pressure brought to bear on the parties to settle out of court. It could be a tad interesting if a US judge found in favour of the insurers and declared the "cyber attack" an act of war.

iPhone factory workers bussed home to avoid COVID, Foxconn urges them to stay

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Apple has in the past lamented high air freight costs

That just shows how big Apples mark-up is on iThings if they can ship at least some of the goods by air.

Air freight is usually reserved for perishables and "really urgent". iThings are neither (unless you're an Apple Fanboi, I suppose)

Or is it that Apple are short of cash and so can't afford to have capital tied up for weeks on the open seas in shipping containers? :-)

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket launches after three-year hiatus with secret US sats

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: My thought for the morning...

I'm sure we've all got a fair number of pre-entangled cables we could donate :-)

Is it any surprise that 'permacrisis' is the word of the year?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Unprecedented

Removing a word? That would be...unprecedented!

Elon Musk shows what being Chief Twit is all about across weird weekend

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints

Zuckerberg and Musk?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints

"That said, such people do exist and I believe such a council can be created. In fact, I'd say that setting these things up usually isn't that hard...it's keeping them going that is difficult, as the members and their priorities change."

The problem with creating a council of sensible and fair minded people is that ir may produce results you don't like.

Facebook tried it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: chief moron

And many more before him too. So many money grubbers who did questionable things to get their money in the first place and then "finding God" or whatever and spreading the kindness to buy their way into "heaven" or wherever. Carnegie comes to mind.

The ones who got rich without being utter bastards and tried to do good while getting rich are often less well publicised.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Seeing Musk acting directly makes me wonder ....

"A lot of it was, but the second in ownership stake is the Saudi investment fund. It wouldn't be all that good for Elon if he managed to burn the place to the ground and make them rather angry at him. At the very least, they wouldn't be as interested in going in with him on a project that might actually make money."

If it does burn, he'd be well advised not to accept any invitations to a Saudi embassy ;-)

Signs of sediment-rich ocean lend direction to Mars life search

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Life on Mars

But, but, but microbes are are last line of defence against Martian invaders! UUUUuuuuuLAAaaaaa!!

Google kills forthcoming JPEG XL image format in Chromium

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Heck - even h264 is good enough for 1080p."

That pushing the analogy a bit. X265 IME compresses the file size at least 50% more compared to x264. When you are talking movie length 1080p, that's significant.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Are google planning on pushing AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) instead ?

"Technically the patent system is fine; it's the court system that's broken. Anyone attempting to enforce a patent that is non-novel should lose to a summary judgment"

Shirley your second statement belies the truth of the first? If the system is "fine", then non-novel patents should not need to be challenged as they should mostly be refused at the application process. The problem is the US Patent Office has outsourced the process of checking patent applications to the legal system at much, much higher cost to the economy than doing it themselves. I'd guess an MBA/Beancounter thought up that "budget saving" wheeze.

Spooky Pillars of Creation snap reveals a dark side

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: JWST is amazing

"I take it you are homophobic, racist and bigoted and far too cowardly to post even as 'Anonymous Coward'."

That's a hell of a leap top take!!!

Maybe people downvoted simply because it's not relevant to the science.

It's the past which is often very different to the present regarding social mores and most people are product of the past they were brought up in. In this specific instances, it's not even about Webb. The only link is the telescope is named after him and his science achievements. If we cancel everyone from the past who doesn't match up to current mores and morels, a lot of science and art will disappear too.

FWIW, I didn't vote at all on your post.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Boffin

Re: How fast is the dust/gas moving?

Only The man With Absolute Motion knows :-)

NASA uses space station dust sensor to map 50 methane 'super-emitters' on Earth

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 10 years?

Considering the current prices of gas, you'd think it would most definitely be economic but from what I've been reading, it's not the current economics stopping them using it, it's the investment in processing and storage at the point of extraction. Flaring is generally relatively small amounts of gas so they never invested in the plant to process it. Or the local storage is full.

Maybe the drilling companies should be investing much more of their windfall profits in processing and storage instead of bonuses for the C-suite.

Waste processing/landfill is a bit more difficult since that's really low density, ie emissions spread over large areas and only really becomes even slightly economically viable when sections of landfill are covered over so the rotting materials emissions can be guides to extraction pipes.

Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

And I agree, it's a very good point. If it's truly unfaffable :-) But most ROM based OS (or BIOS and similar) have "hooks" so external programs can "patch in" to change how things work and setpatch on AmigaDOS/Intuition is a prime example of that.

I would imagine that it's primarily embedded system or areas of very very high security that would be running kit with immutable, un-patchable, hook free ROM based OS :-)

Elon Musk jettisons Twitter leadership, says takeover was 'to try to help humanity'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Why can't you just say he was right?

While I agree in principle, it's not actually workable in practice because none of the "social media" sites have cracked monitoring and moderation yet. They simply can't or won't put enough people in place to either do the monitoring or respond properly to complaints.

For a current example on the BBC site for the latest Panorama programme:

Travis Frain was trolled by online conspiracists after he was filmed just after being hit by a car during the 2017 Westminster Bridge terror attack. Mobile phone footage of him standing on the bridge after breaking his leg - adrenaline delaying the pain - inspired a wave of online abuse.

He received the first message about the attack in hospital the next day.

"We know the attack was staged. I hope they hang you," it read.

In the months after the attack, Mr Frain flagged videos and posts to social media sites using their reporting tools, but he said nothing happened until his lawyer wrote to them.

YouTube did then take down various videos which promoted the theory that he was a "crisis actor", but he said he has had only varying degrees of success with other major social media sites.

We are constantly reminded by the "MSM" that complaining to "social media" has little effect unless it's about something especially egregious and/or the media or lawyers get involved which may give rise to bad publicity for the likes of Zuckerberg.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Famed cave rescue expert Elon Musk

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John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: so when I go to SpaceX/Tesla/Tweetter/Boring HQ

Apart from Tesla, which of those companies have publicly available shares to buy?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

No, he agreed with you in that he missed that it was commentary, not news, but he does raise an important point in that it's actually quite hard to find actual unbiased news in amongst the flood of commentary these days. Just look at Fox News for one of the best examples. It even has "News" in it's name it's but almost entirely commentary and opinion. It's the downside of 24 hour rolling "news". There simply isn't enough news to fill that space so instead of repeating actual news every hour or so and highlighting what might have changed or is new, they spend the vast majority of that 24 hour cycle discussing it and giving opinions.

Russia says Starlink satellites could become military targets

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Seems reasonable and fair

Yes, I agree. I was just pointing out, perhaps a bit too subtly and or obtusely, that attacking an American company/property not in America is not necessarily an attack on America. And as you rightly point out, my examples were poorly chosen as they are very likely to be locally owned franchises.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Seems reasonable and fair

"Starlink is a US company, therefore a military attack on Starlink property would be an act of war against the USA."

I wonder how many Starbucks or MacDonalds have been destroyed in Ukraine by Russian military attacks?

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Ah, the wonders of "localised" English language. Move 2 miles down the road and people have a whole different way of speaking :-)

Gan canny man!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: skip the front page

"Go straight to https://www.theregister.com/Week instead, you will be thankful."

Thank you! I didn't know the "old style" front page still existed. That's better. :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: IBM Engineer

You bastard! I ended up down the rabbit hole for a couple of hours!

I missed out on that stuff. By the time I got into computers at school, the 8-bit micros were just coming in. Learned on 5-hole punch tape, but by 6th form and A levels, we had a single Commodore PET to play with. I ended up down that track rather than the mainframe track.

As a field engineer, I miss the days when we used to fix stuff, not just replace entire modules. I can't remember when I last needed a soldering iron at work.

Watching the one about compiling and running the Fortran test program, I was already aware of the basics of mainframe stuff, but seeing them wandering around from device to device, just to run a "simple" program and actually doing it for real put me in mind of starting a vintage car, set the fuel, set the ignition timing, crank the handle etc all just to do what we do nowadays by turning a key or pushing a button :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "not trained on the kit"

and most engineers simply fail at because they have the view that "surely they know this".

I spent some years teaching general "IT" before and during the rise of the "IBM PC". I know how to write instructions. I despair at some of the "project notes/guidance" we usually have to deal with. Even though *I* know what I'm doing, trying to interpret what the project manager actually wants us to do is an exercise in frustration. It's not simply a lack of basic instructions. It's a lack of anything useful. They seem to think what I would call the "Aims" section is enough. No "Objectives" at all and certainly no "Conclusion" stating what we should have working at the end of it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: IBM Engineer

"I could see this idea working into a vacuum..."

AIUI, the tapes are the big reel to reel jobs. The tape "DJ" was a person, not a mechanical arm thingy. But some did use suction to feed to tape past the heads, capstans and other bits of feed mechanism ready to be attached to the take up spool, so yes, it was sort of working "into a vacuum" :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: IBM Engineer

Me: "Apparently. Let's not try it again though."

Wise word to live by :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yes, I think that's the main reason that "Happy Holidays" as a greeting sounds so weird in the UK. As you say "the holidays" means the annual summer holiday when people go away for a week or two, often to sunnier climes and many, is embedded in to annual six week long Summer school holiday. It's really nothing to do with how many religious or other holidays happen across whatever period "Happy Holidays" might be referring to and most especially not "renaming" Christmas to some generic "holiday" as just one of many. It's simply that in the UK "holidays" plural already has a long established meaning and having Coca Cola TV adverts telling us "holidays" is now in the dark cold of winter instead of the bright and sunny (hah!) Summer is utterly and contemptibly wrong :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Angel

"Last I checked, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Ōmisoka all happen in December.

Plus, Thanksgiving, Halloween, the Winter Equinox, etc...""

Happy Winterval!!! as one of the UKs local councils once tried to brand it before rapidly backtracking after suffering ever growing amounts of ridicule :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It goes far beyond that ...

"Santa on his slay with his elves looks suspiciously like a Disneyfied Wild Hunt."

Yeah, well, the vicious bastard slaying everything in his path may well be on a Wild Hunt.

Most of us look forward to a visit from the happy, jolly one riding a sleigh :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Gimp

Re: "Christmas is called Christmas"...

"which then makes me raise him an XXmas, and you can see where it goes from there."

My wife and I tend have our XXXMas very late on new Years Eve. She like the orgasm to last across two years :-)

The timing isn't always perfect but it's still fun.

(yes, it IS a party of two, we don't really do crowded parties and getting blind drunk)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"El Reg commentards, however, continue to be highly entertaining, and well worth the visits to the site."

I generally scroll down the front page then start scrolling back to the top, middle clicking any vaguely interesting headlines into new tabs, mostly skipping anything in a "special" section. Then I start reading articles, oldest to newest, bit more and more find myself giving up after the first couple of paragraphs, skim reading the remainder of the article to get the gist of it, and probably spending way more time enjoying the comments than the actual article.

Interestingly, I often miss seeing the BOFH, On Call and Who, Me? in the main articles. They only ever seem to appear at the very top row in "!popular" or whatever it's named now. Rather than having stories posted in order of publication, they seem to be interspersed with stories being "pushed" at the audience. I find that distracting and it makes me even less likely to read them,

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Afters!

Glad I could educate you :-)

BOFH: I know of a small biz that could deliver nothing for a fraction of the cost

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: BOFH, that old softie...

...until Word manages to squish them significantly in either the vertical OR horizontal making it unrecognisable. :-)

RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Birth Location

Shit happens. I was born in County Durham, and before I was old enough to move out from the parental home and without moving house at all, we ended up not only in a different county, but a whole new county that had never previously existed! ;-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Good long life and a lasting legacy

"I cut my teeth writing assembly"....with CESIL at school in A level Computer Studies :-)

"Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language", a very simple and very restricted pseudo assembler which, at the time, I felt almost like a waste of time. But it gave me the basics for when I got my first computer and started playing with real Z80 assembly language :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I’ve been writing in 68k assembler recently"

Out of curiosity, embedded stuff or retro computing?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: All Purpose Electronic X-Ray Computer

Absolutely! Upvoted!

It sounds like something from a 1950's SciFi "B" movie where we all point and laugh and go WTF is an X-Ray Computer!! Except it's a real and brilliant sounding name :-)

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