Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: About bloody time too!

...and Branson just announced he's going up on July 11th, weather permitting.

Re: "Exciting educational experience"

I can't even begin to imagine what the educational experience, beyond possibly wearing one for a day might be. Designing, building, developing etc yes, but why would they then need to buy ready built, fully operational units?

Re: Thin skinned and CYA prone

"(AC as I still have friends there.)"

Considering the reported temperatures, isn't AC mandatory?

"Exactly what are the criminal charges for the DoubleVPN operators,"

Probably aiding and abetting for starters.

Para 4. of the article;

"Europol said the service was "heavily advertised on both Russian and English-speaking underground cybercrime forums," offering double, triple or even quadruple-layered VPN services to its customers."

...which indicates they were actively courting criminals as customers. It's a bit like the local pawn shop putting a sign in the window saying "we buy anything, no questions asked" and then posting flyers to all the local burglars.

Yeah. For one of our work webapps, printing only works in IE with Crystal Reports (yuk). Neither the app nor Crystal Reports are going to be updated (no idea if the suppliers have or not, but we won't be), so it's either use IE or, from other browsers, print to PDF then print that. And yes, printing is actually important and not optional in this case.

Re: impressively balanced

His entire reason for being is to manipulate information and people. He's a spin doctor. You think comments on his own site might not be fully and completely moderated, or even "edited" before appearing in public?

Like a comedy impressionist?

Re: Why so long?

" leaving the hardware in the previous configuration but this not causing issues."

I once came across a system whereby the audio had "failed". Cust had power cycled multiple times, reinstalled/updated the audio drivers and even re-imaged the PC before we got called in to do a hardware diag/fix. For no obvious reason, I just happened to wonder what would happen if I booted a live Linux distro. Sound worked. Re-booted into Windows and the sound worked. Clearly, none of the Windows steps did a proper hardware reset on the audio subsystem but the Linux drivers, most likely open source and written from reverse engineering or somesuch, was doing a proper hardware reset to make sure it was in a known state at start-up. I only ever saw this happen that once, but I still try booting Linux on recalcitrant hardware, not only because "just in case", but It's likely to show failures on some hardware during the boot rather than just crashing with a sad face on the display.

Re: Most content is worthless

Relatively few artists / musicians / what-have-you are able to make a living doing what they do."

A mate of mine was in a band. They supported some very big names back in the day, but never made it themselves. He owned all the gear, amps, speakers and whatnot. He went into the rental business and made more from that than performing.

The old adage about the guy selling shovels in a gold rush. Most miners will fail but the people selling the gear are guaranteed to do well, if not as well as the successful miners.

Re: Second view?

As per the article (and the subtitles on the video) "a wireless camera placed on the ground recorded Zhurong slowly truckin' away to explore Mars."

Re: Oh, right.

LOL, you REALLY should have used the <sarc> tags on that. It seems at least one person missed that :-)

Re: Windows XP's various peccadilloes

Yes, it's the last stop before Mornington Crescent, depending on which rules your are playing by.

"This particular rabbit hole appears to lead to a whole city, sounds like a good time to set an investigative reporter on to that one."

As per the article, there are already investigative reporters looking into it. I heard about the Philippines connection to 10's of 1000's of UK umbrella companies each doing small scale agency work for the likes of Serco on BBC Radio 4 show at least a month ago.

Re: Foot meet bullet

Well, I do use FreeBSD myself but, realistically, "the Year of FreeBSD on the Desktop" is never going to happen so it's much safer to suggest Year of Linux :-)

Re: Let's move away from remuneration shall we, and consider the wider society

"The "negotiations" bit will be interesting - person to person sometimes it can be done via lights, horn, small movements of the vehicle but often massively aided by a facial expression / hand gesture (not an option open to an AI unless start adding external animated screens so AI can do a "beckoning on hand gesture" or whatever."

I've seen many references to cars being able to "talk" to each other, mainly in relation to sending out notices of slow/congested traffic etc. But I don't recall any mention of standards so that cars from different manufactures can "talk" to each other. Fun days ahead!

Re: Anybody who knows anything about plumbing ...

"... knows you don't plumb two water sources together. Ever. For lots of reasons."

I'd guess that your average person would not know that the cooling system was pressurised and so it wasn't a "source" in that respect, even if they did know that you should not mix two or more sources in that way.

Re: Recycling is a bad sign...

"Generally speaking if companies are recycling plastic then it means that it is something they are doing on cost grounds, or availability grounds. Companies mostly aren't charities and don't do something unless it's in their interest."

Also, you need to take into account "green grants" and tax breaks for recyclers. And the premium on "green" goods that sections of the population are prepared to pay. Also the public relations aspect for some companies, as per the article.

Re: This is interesting

On the other hand, the big multi-nationals seem to have no problems setting up independent subsidiaries in local jurisdictions when it financially advantageous to them.

Governments can make it so a local subsidiary is financially advantageous by blocking access or levying fines against the parent if they choose not to follow local law. A local subsidiary would be able to follow local law without hindrance of the parent companies own local laws. Of course, the subsidiary would have to be properly independent so the US TLAs can't demand they send data back home from sovereign countries such as Ireland.