* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Walmart accused of turning blind eye to transfer fraud totaling millions of dollars

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Maybe the FTC should concentrate on

But when the choice is delayed payments or don't use a bank at all, that's not really a choice. Clearly people in the US are demanding a better banking service. Why is the world capital of Capitalism not cashing in on that demand and offering the service people want?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Maybe the FTC should concentrate on

"So that's why PayPal was invented, and why BitCoin and the rest of the funny-money schemes took off."

There are lots of services that originate in the US and spread around the world, often due to "coolness" factors amongst the young, which actually, the rest of the world doesn't have so much of a need for, but it's because the "traditional" versions of the US services are entrenched in the past and the past while in the rest of the world, things have already moved on. This is probably why there are so many "disruptors" which originate there. For such a forward thinking and advanced country, the US can be remarkably staid in some areas.

I suspect some of it is regulation/de-regulation and politics. Politicians of both sides will almost always scream about job losses if the party in power wants to make changes, even if, when they are in power, they want to make the same changes, with a minor tweak to make it "ours" not "theirs".

Is computer vision the cure for school shootings? Likely not

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"What kind of dumb-ass question is THAT?"

A tongue-in-cheek one as indicated by the icon :-p

On the other hand, never having been there, my world-view of the US is strongly coloured by US TV shows and films, PBS, CNN, MSNBC etc. and some interactions on t'internet with US people over the years. (To be fair, I have a few US friends I've known online for many years, and most of them are quite normal.)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: AI gives responders better intel

"A complete AI Gun Detection solution would provide policed with the exact location of the incident, a photograph and a video snippet."

How? In the example given, it was a chair-leg, wrapped in paper, so physically looked like it might be a rifle or similar in poor light. There were no bang sounds, no muzzle flashes, no waving it around and pointing it at people or things. What is an AI going to "detect" until it's too late?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

"The guns are not the problem, the problem is the culture, and/or serious mental health problems, due to a multitude of reasons. Start by tackling the culture, and start addressing the mental problems then we might start to see a difference."

From what I've seen on US tv, everyone seems to have their own personal therapist on speed-dial. Have I been mis-lead by Hollywood?

Soviet-era tech could change the geothermal industry

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A Different Tack

Need energy? Sap the seas via electro-wave generators.

Need energy? Sap the earth by drilling holes to allow its heat to escape.

Need energy? Sap the winds by erecting huge fans to capture it.

Your 1st and 3rd options are "solar" power. Wave and wind energy is created by heat from the sun. You re never, ever going to "sap" that energy such that the wind stops blowing or the seas all end up a mirror flat calm. As for the Earths internal heat, there is no way Humanity could "sap" enough heat to be noticeable for the foreseeable future without some sort of massive SciFi project that today we can't even imagine. You seem to have no concept of the mind boggling huge numbers involved in the sheer size of the planet and the tiny pin pricks even 20km deep holes would be.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Blowback

I just had a look at how current geothermal plants work, and based on that, much of what you describe are possible issues. I would assume those issues are known and accounted for in some though. On the other hand, the depths being talked about are for "simply" drilling down to where it's hot enough to create thermal differences to generate steam rather than drilling into specific hot water reservoirs. In this latter case, I would assume (and may well be wrong) that the plan is to create a system that I mistakenly thought was what actually happens now, ie pipes down the hole, injecting cold water down, it heats as it goes down, reaching peak temperature at the bottom loop and comes back up the return pipe as pressurised steam to run the turbines and creating a closed loop. Of course, a sealed 20km pipe might be an issue to create (and the 20km back up!)

On the other hand, I think sub-surface temperature increase 1c every 30 metres or so, so does the hole really need to be all that much more than 3km deep rather than 20km? This is definitely not my area of expertise, so I'm throwing out assumptions and questions in the hope better informed people may be able to provide answers or discussion on that I'm not really finding on t'interwebs :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How deep?

"As a bonus they can claim it's all green energy."

Well, once you've offset the initial bootstrap drilling/construction, it is green energy :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Blowback

"If it takes the output of a power station to drill a borehole, and takes months to do so, are the costs ever going to add up?"

It might. Once you've got the hole, barring earthquakes, you've got the hole forever. Making use of the hole, ie generating electricity from the hole is where the on-going costs will occur.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Blowback

It makes dark and heavy, ominous clouds and then rains hailstones as it condenses. Where's my AR15 steel umbrella?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How deep?

"Really? The deepest oil wells max out around 40,000 ft (12,000 m), a hundred times deeper. Seems to me there is something more to it than this."

Apart from what other have said, it might also be a cost/benefit thing too. Once you've drilled a hole for oil, at great expense, you get $millions as a return pretty quickly. Drilling a much larger hole, building a power station on top of it and then selling KW/hours at a much lower rate than extracting the equivalent in oil might mean it's a much longer payback. Any experts here care to comment on that?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Is 500°C (932°F) hot enough?

"The goal is to consume a temperature of 500/c created by the earths core to generate electricity"

But, if we suck all the heat out of the Earths core, what happens to the magnetic field? Those tinfoil hats may need to be re-purposed as radiation shields!!!

(You just KNOW there will be protests by conspiracy theory nuts and the more extreme greens over this)

Arm jumps on ray tracing bandwagon with beefy GPU design

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ray-tracing on mobile phones

PoVRay is still current and still works in exactly the same way, script driven and is still FOSS with source code. There are GUI front-ends for it too. It evolved out of DKBTrace.

It's nice to see things which have not bloated beyond comprehension. Even when GUI based raytracers came along, I still liked PoVRay because it gave total control over exactly what I wanted to do, although having a GUI to make more complex 3D models was a great improvement and could be used in PoVRay.

I'll have to download the latest version and have a play now, dig out some of my old scripts. That's this weekend sorted!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: Ray-tracing on mobile phones

I remember playing with the first available version of PoVRay, might have still been called by it's full Sunday name of Persistence of Vision (or did it have an earlier name?). Text only interface to describe everything in the "world" and then waiting *DAYS* sometimes for the final result. Quite nice on an Amiga 1200 + FPU and accelerator with decent graphics. I even managed some short animations, each frame talking hours or more to render.

Now it's possible to do it in real-time on a piggin' phone FFS!!!

Returning to the Moon on the European Service Module

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Sometime very soon, only USA will be non-metric. …

"US customary units."

I still find it annoying when doing a factory reset on an HP printer that it still defaults to US letter paper size though. :-)

IIRC, it was suggested that the newly formed US should depart from the Imperial system (I never heard it called US customary units before today), but Thomas Jefferson objected quite strongly and so it was decided to use a subset of Imperial measurements, choosing "standardised" things like gallon and pint etc., whereas the British Empire as was still used multiple different gallons, pints etc for different products as they'd not standardised on specific standardised measurements across the board yet.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Bugger! Well spotted :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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"<and yes, we mix the spelling types up as well, just to confuse everyone else>"

...and neither us will even mention what the Quebecois get up to :-)

FWIW, I'm in the UK and will be 60 years old this year. That means we started going metric and decimalised our currency[*] while I was in junior school, ages 7-11, so find it difficult to estimate sizes or weights in either system but can use both :-) A persons height, however, means nothing to me in metric. :-)

[*] The "new" decimalised money, however, is not an issue. Aged about 8 when we changed, money didn't have a great deal of meaning to me back then, so really I've only ever used New Pence :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: erm

Hee :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

For whatever reason, I had cause to do a Google search to which countries are not using Metric units as standard/default, especially in everyday life. Apparently, it's only three countries in the entire world. Myanmar, Liberia and, of course, the USA. Both Liberia and Mynamar are currently in the process of converting.

There's a still one or two outliers who have mainly metricated but for various reasons still use some non-metric units, eg the UK still using pints for beer and miles and miles per hour on the roads.

Sometime very soon, only USA will be non-metric. Big enough not to care? Maybe, but I bet it's already an issue with some imports. I suspect they will be forced into metrication by the back door. It took the UK a long time (and in some case still is) in that some products, while measured in millimeters, are just conversion from the inches size. Most food products seem to have transitioned away from Oz and pints to grammes and Litres now, no more 454ml of milk etc.

I'd expect something like NASA is actually metric and they only convert to Imperial for press releases aimed at the local population.

California's attempt to protect kids online could end adults' internet anonymity

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The Real Web 3.0

"The idea that the internet is evil & that freedom to say or read or interact with others is dangerous seems to have taken root amongst ruling elites."

Back in the day, every village had it's own idiot. Now that the world is one big village, all the idiots have joined forces and formed their own army.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I can see this working

"Right upto the point where the PFY misconfigures the database holding all our details and the hackers make off with a copy of all of it... new credit cards all round plus time+expense of canceling etc etc."

Alternatively, make the law state that age must be verified then a token marked against the username and then any/all verification must be deleted on pain of £enormous_fine. Verification could even be outsourced to a service such as Verified by Visa, who already know who you are, so the site doesn't even have to know who you are, just that a "trusted source" confirms you are over 18. I'm sure it could be arranged so that "Verified by Visa" don't actually know who the site is requesting the verification, thus keeping it all anonymous. This does, of course, require a level of trust and a proper level of security, but only the verifier will ever know the details of the person being verified, and their business is based entirely on trust and security.

(Oh, and for anyone asking, the sky is pink on the planet I live on and all is good with the world)

NASA's mini-spacecraft CAPSTONE just launched on its journey to the Moon

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Electron rocket, Proton engines...

...it all kinda makes me think they are doing something really cleaver and revolutionary with their engines, like ion propulsion or something. But it's just marketing names.

Good luck to them anyway, but sack the marketing team :-)

You need to RTFM, but feel free to use your brain too

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The top to the right? That's confusing.

I learned many years ago that turn the screwdriver widdershins to loosen a screw and deosil to tighten a screw. Unless it's a left-hand thread. Then someone confused us all by inventing the clock!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Never assume anything

"I then went back to my office and added "and then press 'enter'." to the procedure in question."

There's no key on my keyboard labelled "Enter". What do I do now?

Before answering, bear in mind that the key may be marked "Return". I may have as well as or instead of the relevant word, just a left arrow with a vertical bar and they key may not the be shape you think it is.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Doncha hate it...

"... when the instructions are just '1. do X, 2. do Y, 3. do Z', with no explanations. You often find that once you understand the process you can often improve an old process to make it better/safer/quicker. (I'm thinking of a bunch of old local documentation where, as a newbie, after a few mins research 3 or 4 individual commands were replaced with a single safer all-in-one command)"

One particular brand of kit we maintain, you are not allowed to work on until you complete the manufacturers service training. Then you take a test to prove you have taken it in and understand it. Then you get set loose on the kit to fix it and the instructions are written for dummies that almost anyone who knows which end of a screwdriver is the business end could follow. The procedure involves an almost compete strip down of the kit to replace the part over about 90 mins, including re-assembly and testing. Anyone who has completed the course, by definition, understands the kit and the prcess and can replace the part without a full strip down in about 10 mins with 5 mins for testing. Who's right? Depends on if it works afterward :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

5a) NO! STOP! An army boot is not a substitute for a size 2 Philips Screwdriver. Neither is whatever random screwdriver Pte Philips loans you, size 2 or otherwise.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Some even start with "remove equipment from box"

Ah, yes, where the "BREAK" key was most definitely not the ANY key to press to continue

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Check you can complete before you start

"Complete step 2 of the instructions and hand in your paper. Do not answer any other questions or write on any other part of the paper."

Now THAT'S more like it! In Flocke Kroes example, it was a bit ambiguous.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Zero Knowledge

"We still have to rework 30% of the products coming off the line."

Clearly the quality control is working and consistent. What? You thought QA was there to make changes? That's engineering's job.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Based upon personal experience....

"PLEASE READ ALL THE WORDS IN THE INSTRUCTIONS "

Sorry, I stopped reading there and looked at the pretty picture, then forgot what the words said. I was brought up on IKEA-style instructions.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Some even start with "remove equipment from box"

Up until someone breaks it by opening the box in some unorthodox way, at which point you need to explain how to open the box properly and safely :-)

Running DOS on 64-bit Windows and Linux: Just because you can

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Protext? Yay!

Another good place to look is archive.org

Not much of this actually from 'China anymore,' says Northern Light Motors boss

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Question

Stability seems to be better with two wheels at the front. I have no idea if it is, but it looks like it might be.

Having said that, I'd not want one as shown in the article photos. I'd not feel comfortable anywhere other than maybe quiet suburbs ona trip to the local shops. Certainly not on a rural country road or a busy city centre.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Sourcing everything from the UK

I did wonder that too. How many of the components on the control boards are made in the UK? How much of the motor is made in the UK? Magnets? Copper wire? And at the end of the supply chain, how much is still coming from China?

Marking something as Made In Britain (or any other country, for that matter) hasn't really ever been 100% true for most countries for 1000's of years, before countries, as we know them today, even existed. Everyone imports something, even it's raw ore. After all, Cornwall has been exporting tin to Europe and the Med since about 2000BC and obviously importing a variety of stuff in exchange.

IBM settles age discrimination case that sought top execs' emails

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: As good as admitting guilt

Agreed. The likely settlement is probably something close to what the litigants expected to get, otherwise they probably wouldn't have accepted. This smells very, very strongly of IBM simply paying to keep the damning evidence under wraps for another few years. I suspect any future cases will be settled in the same way until IBM can legitimately say they deleted those emails as being past the legal age whereby they must be retained.

Behold this drone-dropping rifle with two-mile range

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "lean" innovation

"Ukraine still needs lots of financial and military (anti-aircraft defences would be good) aid but have from the start demonstrated that they have remembered the lessons of WWII that produced the AK47."

Not forgetting the previous invasion of Crimea and the years fighting the Russian backed and supplied separatists. They have a lot of recent experience fighting against Russian equipment and tactics.

Misguided call for a 7-Zip boycott brings attention to FOSS archiving tools

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: A couple of points

"I can't remember which film it was. Cultural appropriation?"

Don't think so. I just checked IMDB and they don't have "Cultural appropriation" in their database. Sure it wasn't Blazing saddles?

NASA's Psyche mission: 2022 launch is off after software arrives late

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A question of logistics, I think

Well, they did say "NASA takes the cost and schedule commitments of its projects and programs very seriously." but that has echos of "We take the security of a customer data very seriously" :-)

Contractor loses entire Japanese city's personal data in USB fail

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: remote start

Watching the last episode of the Gadget Show, one of the Air Fryers on tests was controlled by an app, FFS!! And I mean *all* of the settings, as far as I could see, no manual controls other than an on/off switch ie a "sleep button". This is a device you really should not be controlling remotely. They didn't specify how the phone talked to the Air Fryer, so I suppose it could be BlueTooth, but I suspect it's a cloud connected server a few 1000 miles away where they can record exactly when and how you use it.

Tropical island paradise ponders tax-free 'Digital Nomad Visa'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Tax free status doesn't matter to Americans

"Perhaps using part of the taxes we pay to give us the private health care referred to in the story?"

That would apply to the UK.

"Quality health care for free will bring in Americans,"

Ah....wait....what?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Recipe for resentment?

"Would the dog walkers/gardeners/housekeepers be unemployed burdens on society or would they learn to code or become an architect, or start the next google or amazon?"

Some may succeed but most of them will probably be renting and be priced out of the area. Those better paying but still low paid service jobs suddenly become uneconomic because they can't afford to travel from their "new" poor area to the now gentrified area to be gardeners, dog-walkers, whatever. See for examples, teachers and nurses who work but can't affords to live in London and see their wages eaten up by commuting costs.

Big Tech silent on data privacy in post-Roe America

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Theocracy

Not that long ago, it made perfect sense. "Spilling your seed" is sin in the Bible because that's exactly the source of a baby in the minds of the authors. There was no concept of women having eggs needing to be fertilised by men. It was "planting seeds".

First steps into the world of thought leadership: What could go wrong?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Now hang on ... Linkedin is useful for something!

Unfortunately, many employers now actively look for LI or other social media presence when culling the pile of applications, so those of us with no presence don't even get passed the "bin and move on" stage. Likewise, many employers are concerned about applicants who don't change jobs often enough, seeing it as a lack of ambition or drive or something instead of the potential asset of a loyal employee with years of experience..

Whether you want to work for a company like that is another matter of course.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It's a trap!

You sure it's an ink problem? It's saying "Load Letter". Ah, I see what you mean. It's not printing because it's run out of letter ink. It should be ok for printing pictures though.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: 500 words about breaking her favorite coffee mug

Yeah, but who gets the red pill and who the blue? Is it a choice you can make or is it made for you?

The long black trenchcoat with the cool shades in the pocket -------------->

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 500 words about breaking her favorite coffee mug

My everyday mug broke the other day. My wife bought it for me about 10 years ago. It got used every morning at breakfast and sometimes through the day too. I don't care that it broke. I have others. Yes, I said my wife bought it for me. Sentimental value? Not really. It was her who dropped it in the sink and broke it. It was her fault, not mine :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "tediously lengthy and needlessly double-spaced humblebrags"

"Thanks. It all makes sense now. Except the IT angle, as I'm not even remotely in IT, other than reading the reg in the morning to see what new security breach I need to look out for."

You just answered your own question. You read The Reg therefore you know waaaaay more than the average person about IT. You're nearly an expert!

BOFH: HR's gold mine gambit – they get the gold and we get the shaft

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Don't most places like to have contact details for next-of-kin in case you meet an unfortunate accident at work? Like riding a unicycle down the stairwell, or falling from a 5th story window that was accidentally left open?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Out of all these...

On the other hand, he may rise to the occasion and prove his worth, unless he;s a crusty old geezer in which he can baguette off. Oh crumbs, I've done it now! Yeast, that's my white coat, thanks.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Favourite CPU socket?

And "thermal creep". Probably one of the most common fixes on a failed PC back then was pushing all the socketed chips firmly back in their sockets. And there might well be 36 DIL chips in sockets if the motherboard was fully loaded with an ENTIRE ONE MEGABYTE or RAM!!! Possibly many more on an ISA card if there was an EMS or EMM RAM expansion card in it. Or RAM on a SCSI card.

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