* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25247 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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$900bn coronavirus stimulus bill includes $600 for most Americans, $50 in monthly internet subsidies, $1.9bn to help rid the US of Huawei kit

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Pardon me / Pardon you

And El Reg doesn't care about an easy to get Presidential pardon. They are more likely to shoot for the impossible and aim for an Apple pardon.

UK firm NOW: Pensions tells some customers a 'service partner' leaked their data all over 'public software forum'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"worth £6.99 per month"

Subs will be cheaper in bulk, and they'll get trade "mates rates" too. It's probably costing them more like 2 or 3 quid a month.

Elon Musk says he tried to sell Tesla to Apple, which didn’t bite and wouldn't even meet

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Both SX and Tesla have come a very long way in 2 years

Ooooooh....The penny just dropped...4 days later. Well played :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

My LightCycle should be safe then! Oh, and my mate Automan should be ok in his car too.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Both SX and Tesla have come a very long way in 2 years

"they already have the basic shape with their rockets."

FWIW, Blue Origin have them well and truly beaten in the design stakes. Sadly, they can't get it up as high or for as long as SpaceX although both seem to be doing well at going down after going up.

BOFH: Time for the MMOCC. You know, the Massively Moronic Online Christmas Call

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Pint

Re: "Everyone needs a cattle prod at Christmastime."

Bloody contrary Southerners! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Pint

Re: "Everyone needs a cattle prod at Christmastime."

"Happy winter solstice to all at and reading El Reg."

A bit late mate, that was four days ago. Merry Christmas! :-)

Hong Kong's Hutchison Group, which runs mobile carrier ‘3’, protests as USA puts it on new China ban list

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Dear World. I'm sorry.

"Signed, a bunch of disgruntled Yanks."

Well, that's your Presidential Pardon out the window now. How you gonna feel when everyone else has one?

After 11 years, Australia declares its national broadband network is ‘built and fully operational’

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I don't get it.

"“New premises are being built all the time,” the minister said. “This means that there will always be a number of premises around Australia that are not yet ‘ready to connect’. ""

Why? Surely whatever their equivalent of Building Regulations are have already been amended such that providing the ductwork for quick connection to the network as part of the finishing out process is in place. No new build should be sold without the infrastructure already in place. After all, connecting new builds ought to be easiest and cheapest since they can do it while the other utilities are going in rather than having to dig roads, paths, gardens etc and reinstating.

Earth observation chief Dr Josef Aschbacher takes reins at European Space Agency

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So th Johnson has brought Blighty it's own (unnecessary) satellite constellation.

IIRC, the UK is a secondary partner, not the biggest, primary partner.

'Following the science' rhetoric led to delay to UK COVID-19 lockdown, face mask rules

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How a string of failures by the British government helped Covid-19 to mutate

"The government’s poor control of Covid-19 has increased the force of the infection and allowed more mutations to happen."

So, how many COVID-19 mutations are there running rampant across the USA where infection rates have never really gone down at all? Looking at their graphs, re-opening the economy in many States far too early caused not just a second wave before most other countries, but now a third wave.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Long-term view

"The whole tier system in the UK and rules is just bewildering."

At the start, I thought the rules were pretty clear. On the whole, the rules now are pretty clear if people bother to notice them. The problem is people choosing to NOT follow the rules for their area. There are two stories on the Beeb news today, party of 60 in Leicester and a party of 200 in Manchester. Probably many more around the country. Huge numbers of people travelling to lower tier areas just for a fucking pint in a pub. 160 find and many more warned in York. One twat drove over 200 miles to go to a pub in Cornwall. Every single one of those people are selfish unthinking bastards in my book, risking catching the damn virus and passing it on to their own families.

Young, fit, healthy people are less likely to get a bad case, but they can. It can still kill them. The odds are better then winning the lottery jackpot, but I bet a lot of those people play the lottery!. They may have underlying conditions they are not aware of. If it doesn't kill them, there's evidence that some people, apparently other fit and healthy, suffering various long term post-COVID symptoms, some quite debilitating.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: you can't just conjure medical professionals from thin air.

"No, but you can give your mates millions of pounds to convert a warehouse into a "nightingale hospital" that never gets used."

Yeah, and think of all that house insurance you paid over the years and then never used. It's called contingency planning. Imagine what would have happened if we'd really needed the Nightingale hospitals and the Gov had decided NOT to implement them in advance. Remember, the idea was that they would take all the COVID patients that needed hospitalisation and maybe oxygen feed but NOT patients needing ventilators, freeing up the general wards for "normal" patients, ie keeping COVID out of hospitals as much as possible since they populated by the vulnerable.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Long-term view

"Left to it's own devices, a virus will spread, some or those infected getting ill, some experiencing little or nothing and some dying. All the time some form of immunity begins to develop."

Sweden were pretty much the only country to try that. They regret it now.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: playing with the politics of pandemics

"I'd still like to see evidence of this magical NATIONAL 1970s *pandemic* plan where the army, wearing hazmat suits apparently, but not spreading any infection, would feed and test the entire nation for the N months whatever pandemic orgamism would take to clear from the population. I'd imagine in that picture the infected would be left to die (or army style open wards?)."

Not only that, but the army is a bit smaller these days. The army had a strength of about 373,000 in 1970 to 315,000 in 1979 so hard to say what the plan might have been since the army was reducing all through the decade. Currently, the army has 79,620 regulars; 29,980 Army Reserve, less than a 1/3rd the available in the early 1970s, and that's assuming all reservists are called up and all overseas troops are brought home. Any plan from the 70s would need a very significant revamp to be even barely workable 50 years later.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Here we go

"Where originally the plan was herd immunity. Then that was considered stupid. Now a vaccine to help form herd immunity."

The side effects and potential deaths caused by a vaccine are miniscule compared to the side effects and deaths caused by the virus. Which version of herd immunity are you advocating?

Search history can calculate better credit ratings than pay slips, says International Monetary Fund

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Proof?

Unless you've been building a fake search history for years, then it'd be quite difficult to fake. I suppose it depends where they source the data from and whether you can hack the source.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Oh God, no

"So I ended up getting my own credit card, buying a few random items and a year later I have "good credit" rating."

Yes, it's weird but true. If you don't use credit, then your credit rating is zilch. They want proof you can pay off debt before they allow you to accrue debt. It's a bit of a catch 22. I've had no debt for over 20 years now so my credit rating, like yours, will be at the bottom of the scale if I ever try to get credit.

On the other hand, utilities are paid in arrears and so they are credit (or debt) and should be easy enough to account for by the credit reference agencies. Gas, electric, water and telecoms/broadband are all essentially the same as paying off a monthly credit card balance.

Just let this sink in: Capita wins 12-year £1bn contract to provide training services to the Royal Navy and Marines

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Nostalgia

Possibly, since the river Fleet still runs underneath :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The staff bonding paintball session could go wrong. Do you want more suggestions?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Maybe it will work

"perform poorly, never deliver anything promised and fail to make a profit,"

On the other hand, maybe it a surreptitious plan for world peace. After all, one of the states aims to sell the course on to other nations military. If they all become equally incompetent, Cramita get rich and we get world peace. Win Win!! (oe Lose Win, since tr's Crapita getting rich)

Google AMP gets a shock to its system as advisor quits, lawsuit claims foul play

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Fuck javascript.

"more responsive sites with faster UIs"

The vast majority of sites neither have nor need a "UI", unless you class the page itself as a UI. Most sites don't need JS just to deliver and display the basic data. That's what HTML and CSS is for. I can't think of a single reason why a site should render as a blank page if the user has JS disabled.

Unsecured Azure blob exposed 500,000+ highly confidential docs from UK firm's CRM customers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Think about how this was created

"then run without any QC checks."

Sadly for them, they are about to find out the power of QC. They just pissed off the Trades Union of the Queens Council!!

Dodgy procedures doomed Arianespace's Vega before it even left the launchpad

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "not picked up in testing"

"I really can't imagine any scenario where plugging something in the wrong way around won't create merry mayhem with the electrical signals."

USB-C? Or any two pin mains connector. Or any of many others I could think of but will leave as an exercise for the reader.

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: IBM Ashtray

"The thing was completely smothered in several cm of grey dust which I assumed was years of accumulated fag ash and congealed smoke."

With 30 people in the office, a fair chunk of that dust would be human skin too. The condensed nicotine and tar from the smoke just helps glue it all into place and adds some extra aroma.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: No cats but...

Try a paper mill. Apart from the explosion risk, that dust not only gets everywhere, it also completely fills every available enclosed cavity. I once got called out a factory floor wide carriage dot matrix printer. It looked quite unusual in that it seemed to have some sort of polystyrene block inside, cut specifically to allow the printhead to move side to side, even to the extent that it had printhead shaped edges at each side of the head path. But no, it was just an almost solid lump of paper dust filling the entire printer apart from where the moving parts move to and fro.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Benefit

Well, I for one welcome our feline overlords!

(someone had to say it)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Benefit

"I'm a former cat owner (died at 16)"

Bloody millennials. Even posting online from the afterlife!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Pugs, golden retrievers and IT equipment do not mix

You get ones which link to their RFID chips now too.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Heat detector

"You can always tell when there's a bit of warm (or overheating) kit around here, as you'll usually find the cat sitting on it."

The obvious and immediate solution is to make sure there is bigger source of heat, to which any cat will naturally gravitate. Ours will lay down in front of the fire, stretching at least one paw out as close as is bearable. Even to the extant that his tongue is out and he's panting to indicate he's reached the optimum temperature.

In summer, he'll sleep on the sunny patch where the sun shines through the window. He does get quite grumpy that the patch moves with the Sun and tends to blame me for not stopping the rotation of the Earth such that the sunny patch will stay still.

US nuke agency hacked by suspected Russian SolarWinds spies, Microsoft also installed backdoor

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Mushroom

America's nuclear weapons agency

That sounds much more scary than The Department for Energy :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: "full rebuild"

Agreed, but I think he meant to say "Cannot be overstated", which is the same meaning as your correction, just more correct IMHO :-)

Google rejects Australia’s revised pay-for-news plan, proposes its own plan instead

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Rules

Various SF stories dating at least back to the 1950's have been warning us of dystopian futures where the world is ruled by a few $BigCorp. Wanna a Moke Coke?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Especially when said argument is coming from a "disrupter" company who was born out of doing something new that had never been done before. They don't like it when it's done back to them. The biter bit, or "They don't like it up 'em!"

About $15m in advertising booked to appear on millions of smart TVs was never seen by anyone, says Oracle

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So much for the "science" of marketing

"And the article claims 10% of the entire market is fraudulent."

50% or advertising budget is wasted money, but no one knows which 50%. So, only 10% of it being fraud only accounts for 1/5th of the waste. They still don't know which 40% is the rest of the waste :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Something smells fishy

Sounds like something Google or Facebook should be able to track and check on easily and with much greater accuracy. Unless, of course, they don't WANT to look into that area.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So, from where does that money ultimately come?

"Perhaps supermarkets will inflict some terrible adverts for branded products on us so they can put up the price of Store's Own Brand. Judging by a couple of adverts I saw recently, this is already happening.""

That's the entire premise of the Aldi and Lidl TV ads :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Naughty step

"This is a problem that could trivially be solved algorithmically "

Could be? It was solved years ago. There are many s/w applications capable of detecting silences in audio, with adjustable levels. The early ones I saw were primarily used for digitising vinyl albums to split the tracks. Newer ones can differentiate between speech and other sounds. One I've used recently is mp3splt which has a 17 year pedigree.

I will add that this is not just a problem with streaming services though. Many cable channels are run on a shoestring budget and are mainly automated. Ads are placed at certain times, irrespective of the content being show at the time. Even CNN do the same. The "ads" come at specific times, not "breaking" the shows, but often flash ads intended for some other region before cutting the intended ones.

Ethical power supplier People's Energy hacked, 250,000 customers' personal info accessed

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

There are probably plenty of people with that birthdate. How is it a check of the quality of their IT systems?

Atlantic City auctions off chance to hit Big Red Button and make grotesque Trump Plaza casino go boom

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: The possibilities are ...

4MORYRS!

Icon most like Trump ---------->

US Government Accountability Office dumps sack of coal on NASA's desk over Moon mission naughtiness

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Infinite loop

Well, it is beginning to look as if NASA will end up buying seats on a SpaceX Starship to the Moon. Probably long before Artemis is ready.

Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away: Certification renewals to be free ... but annual

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"... for now."

I was thinking the same thing. Certification as a Service.

China's Chang'e 5 probe lands Moon rocks in Inner Mongolia

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Great success

The samples are also from a totally different part of the Moon. It should be interesting to see how they compare with the existing samples.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Space Race Propaganda

"Here Chinese scientists have a big advantage in that a budget and building site for a new project can be determined before many other nations manage to figure out the first part. The years that it took for ITER's building site to be determined was an embarrassment, in my humble opinion."

It certainly helps when you have an authoritarian government that, if on board with the project, can just say "Yes. Build it there. Here's the money" as opposed to many other countries where not only does the location have to be agreed between international partners, but it has to be somewhere which doesn't affect the locals, or the locals need to be properly compensated and given time to move. Then there's the many court cases brought by the various protesters (you can't just shoot them in most countries!) Living in a democracy with restrictions on Government is allowed to do by dictat has its downside too.

PS, I upvoted you for the general thrust of your post, I agree with you :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Space Race Propaganda

"Despite being shut off from the ISS, they are still designing their space station modules to be compatible with ISS docking."

That might be pragmatism. If there's any future co-operation or even an emergency, there are a number of craft capable of using that docking system from a number of sources. Not to mention that they were probably given the relevant plans, details, methods etc, by NASA because a universal docking system makes way more sense than propriety ones. And it's cheaper and faster then inventing your own.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: But It's China. It Must Be Wrong!

"...and well done El Reg for actually covering this story! (and in a positive way)."

Not only was it well covered in other media, but El Reg did have a righteous dig at China at the end of the article. Maybe you didn't get that far?

Dutch officials say Donald Trump really did protect his Twitter account with MAGA2020! password

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Not just Trump out

"Yes Pence is happy to protect unwanted children. At least up until they're born - then they can die because healthcare, shelter, food and water cost money."

Well, Jesus did say "Suffer the children". What? There was more to the sentence?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: less than a month before no one has to care what appears on Trump’s Twitter feed ever again

"c) blame all issues as somehow being inherited from the Trump presidency"

That's a given in politics. All leaders blame everything on their predecessors! Here in the UK, Labour were blaming all their woes on the Tories, right up to the day they left office after being in power for 13 years.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: less than a month before no one has to care what appears on Trump’s Twitter feed ever again

"The idea that 70+ million bigots will suddenly go "We were wrong, he's an arsehole" is pretty unlikely."

Yes, because that would create too big a disturbance in The Farce.

Raspberry Pi to anoint ‘Design Partners’ it will recommend for industrial applications

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How about making a RasPi phone?

Not much of a market though if it's only sold in "olde London Town"

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