* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25251 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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

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.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Favourite CPU socket?

I've not upgraded in a long times, and this last decade or so, upgrades have been so far apart I've needed the faster CPU but also a new motherboard and new RAM. Back in the day, faster CPUs commonly went in the same socket on the same board and you just changed some jumpers to match the new required clockspeed, often for two or three sequential upgrades, before needing a new motherboard, let alone new RAM.

I get the sense that AMD outlasted Intel in terms of how many times you could upgrade a CPU before needing a new and different motherboard with a new and different socket, as well as new RAM. Maybe because the AMD model didn't rely on selling motherboards as an income stream. Intel, of course, have sold motherboards for a long time, so having every new iteration require a new socket helped that bottom line more than it did AMD. Am I being cynical?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Unicycle test

SCUBA diver or cliff diver?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Brilliant...

"Done for security as the ground floor door was a fire door that lead onto a public road."

That sounds a bit over the top. Fire doors such as this are usually emergency exits and should only open from the inside. They normally have a door open sensor linked back to security too so unauthorised use to let someone in, assuming you jave some "naughty" staff, can be detected.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Logs

Most probably because the amount of "damaged" stock wasn't in the main reports and not looked at very often because it's normally quite low and after all, who would steal the damaged stock? The waste skips would have been the most obvious indicator of an increase in damaged stock, and obviously that wasn't changing in a noticeable way. It was quite a clever fraud really and may not even have been discovered if the thief had kept the "damages" lower. But, of course, greed. It works, so let's take even more!! The downfall of many thieves and fraudsters.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Heh. A classic.

On our email system, the default retention period is 7 years. Other stuff, in special categories has longer or "never" retention periods depending on the legal rules surround the data. 7 years for "everyday" non-sensitive emails seems more than long enough and is most likely a legal minimum.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Assisted in a TLA investigation once.

How do you know s/he didn't use random length redactions? :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Apparently the local suppliers liked to drop gifts off with the purchasing manager when chasing contracts"

LOL, that must've been a good few years ago! These days, that would be bribery and even the attempt must be disclosed if the intended recipient doesn't want to land in hot water :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Email backups

The "dodgy" was most likely the MD shagging the secretary and trying to keep it private :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Email backups

Apart from anything else, despite the metaphor of an "envelope" around an email, we all know it's more like a post-card and anyone with access, legitimate or otherwise, at rest or in transit, could read that email if there's no encryption. Most users have no clue how email works and are happy to send all sorts of confidential, sensitive or otherwise private details via email.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: re: deleting data from backups

Possibly, but if "instructing a builder", then normally you go choose the kitchen and either buy it and have it delivered or "instruct the builder" to go buy what you have chosen, and he'll want the cash up front, ie is only acting as an agent.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: re: deleting data from backups

"but left in offline backup tapes, and only deleted from those were they to be used for a restore of data at some, unspecified, future date."

Assuming that the original removal is part of an accessible and usable transaction file ready to be run against a backup might be a bit optimistic :-)

It may well be a required function, but I'd be willing to bet a lot of recovery strategies, disaster or otherwise, neglect that. There will most likely be an inherent assumption that there will be missing data, not additional data when restoring a backup.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

Yes, it seems weird using a new name now.

  • PROM. Can't be erased
  • EPROM, erasable (by UV light)
  • EEPROM, electrically erasable

There's no need, ever, for the term UVEPROM :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

It was the high bit of the first byte of the filename. You just had to flip it back to 0 to get the original filename back. There were/are plenty of undelete tools around to make it even easier.

The character set was quite limited, upper-case only (lower-case letters you type in are auto-translated to upper-case on accessing the directory), some limited range of non-alphanumeric characters and DEFINITELY NO characters above ASCII 126 so the high bit of any character in a filename will never be set other than the special case of setting it for the first character marking that file as deleted.

Big Tech silent on data privacy in post-Roe America

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The right to tell you what to do

Probably because the US, while putting on a public front of being a country is, in reality, more like the EU than they care to admit. A conglomeration of countries with some shared ambitions and an overriding sort of government that can impose some laws on all of them in specific areas. At least they mostly all speak the same language though :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The right to tell you what to do

I still find it funny every time a left-pondian uses "liberal" as an insult. In most of the rest of the world, "liberal" is what most left-pondians should be aspiring to. Many seem to have a completely arse-about-face use of the term to mean authoritarian or fascist.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Swiss-Cheese Reassurances by Clue Co-CEOs

I had similar thoughts on reading that same quoted part of the article. Are there any other "crimes" in the use with a standardised bounty ready for the taking by anyone reporting it to the Police? Any at all?

Then there's the commercial aspects of banning abortion. There are occasions when it's possible to effectively sell a baby. Will we see companies setting up, with expensive lawyers, clamouring to help these poor, unfortunate women to "give up" their babies for adoption? At least one "pro-lifer" as said there is a demand for babies to be adopted. Looks like supply might be about to increase too. Will this lower the costs or create a whole new industry? Ads on TV? An online service, EBaybies,com? Look at our range! Choose the specs! Click and Collect!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Theocracy

Depends what you mean by "someone" really. If you believe it's "someone" from the moment of conception, that's your perogative, but not everyone thinks that way. There are various legal definitions around the world for when those cells become "someone" and clearly, even in the US, it's defined as at least 6 weeks, much to the chagrin of some "pro-lifers".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Theocracy

Yeah, but when that was written, people thought men planted the seed in the woman. She was just a vessel to carry the mans seed which grew into a baby. Other may say that the Bible is The Word Of God, of course. Some may say it was written by men. Others will respond that those mens writings were guided and inspired by God. I say that either they weren't listening properly or even God didn't know how babies were made back then. So, how many other "mistakes" are there in the Bible?

It's interesting to see a Bible "literalist" tie themselves in knots :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Canada

"Oops, the rubber broke"

Is the morning after pill acceptable to you? Or is that also an abortion?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Canada

It's ok, there will be a Revolt in 2100 to overcome the theocracy. I read a history of it once.

The real time to worry is when you meet some bloke called Nehmiah Scudder.

NASA circles August in its diary to put Artemis I capsule in Moon orbit

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What are the betting odds?

And at the launch cost, it's hardly going to be economic to use it on a monthly, or thereabouts, schedule to crew a Moonbase. SpaceX's Starship may not have flown yet (although it has reached higher than SLS to date), but it's looking like the only viable option currently in development to act as a regular Moonbase shuttle.

Maybe Falcom Heavy, but that also means building a working transfer shuttle/lander/ascent vehicle.

It's a crime to use Google Analytics, watchdog tells Italian website

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "a country without an adequate level of data protection,"

So, basically what you saying is that the Supreme Court isn't "what it says on the tin", but "merely" a "Constitutional Court"?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It's OK with the EU?

"California won't cut it, no matter what they do, because even if they implement the same protections as GDPR, the federal government could still grab the data."

And thanks to the US Patriot Act, US owned companies with a presence/server/data in the EU has to hand it over if ordered to. Which, as MS discovered in Ireland, puts them in a very difficult position since they have to abide by both the Patriot Act inspired data request and the GDPR provision to not export the data.

NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Sixth Time Is ...

NASA's last work on this began in 2006 (and concluded in 2028)

So, still waiting then... :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Yeah, but those solar winds contain lots of "sticky" particles that will attach to the blades and decrease efficiency.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Are you stupid????

"At this point, you're probably wondering how is it possible that stuff still gets successfully sent into space on a regular basis, given that space is hard and everyone is stupid."

Please Sir, Please Sir, Me, Me, Me! It's because everyone at NASA is fewer stupid than the rest of us!!!

SpaceX: 5G expansion could kill US Starlink broadband

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 56k

"I remember using an acoustic modem doing 300 baud over a Transatlantic phone line."

Did have to call the International Operator to book the call in advance? :-)

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"If you wnat to see what an e-bus can do in a suburban Paris street -https://youtu.be/5r-yN8SugWM"

Oh wow! That's awesome, in the proper meaning of the word. Terrifying is another word I'd use.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Thermal runaway

There's been a noticeable uptick in large recycling centre fires in the news over the last few years.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yes, the same sort of people who rip up fibre-optic cables to sell as "scrap metal"

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Am I the only one

There's also been comments in UK news recently about some big tree planting initiatives that have either not looked at diversity (all the same species planted) or have planted the wrong kind of trees for the local area and watched them die off after a year or three. There's more to planting a tree than just "planting a tree".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Am I the only one

I'd go as as to suggest that most people commuting don't carry a laptop either. After the big WFH adventure (still going on for many either full time or hybrid), there's probably more than pre-pandemic, but not everyone who commutes is an office worker and not every office worker takes a laptop home, So, sandwiches it is then :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Trains are less usefull buses

"This of course fully occupied during rush hour, but rail companies tend to run smaller sets outside those hours, and it's rare to see trains less than half full."

Rush hour is the killer for public transport though. If you have enough trains or buses to cope with peak demand, then you have a lot of very expensive equipment lying idle or running at a loss. And you really don't want bus and train drivers working "gig economy" style for a couple hours morning and evening.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Am I the only one

It'll go straight up. What's the problem?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So when one of these things is junked ...

IIRC, Audi take in a lot of "used" batteries and re-use them in the factories for forklift trucks and pallet shifters etc. The reduced capacity is more than enough for those jobs and have a lot less overhead than heavy lead/acid batteries traditional used.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So when one of these things is junked ...

True. But then you'd "only" have a battery fire instead of an entire car on fire along with all the plastics and foam etc.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Deja vu again

"This is only going to become a bigger problem as more battery packs arrive at the scrap yard. Having the space to remove and isolate battery packs from each other lest we see cascading fires is potentially going to be a big problem. :("

Yep. I note there was no comment about how the wrecked Tesla was stored or if the scrap yard had any special consideration for how they treat and store scrapped Evs. If they just "rack'em and stack'em" like they do with conventional ICE cars, then that's asking for trouble. A well managed and good scrapper with drain the wrecks of the various fluids for environmental reasons and remove the batteries for safety reason (and sell any that are "good". They will probably have new processes in place for hybrids and EVs, like removing all the batteries. After all, those batteries are valuable parts if in good condition as well recyclable.

DMCA can't be used to sidestep First Amendment, court rules

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"So, you can see why the judge asked this “How did Bayside come to acquire these copyrights, and from whom?” I would say there is a question as to whether Bayside has the copyright."

Absolutely that. Based on the sudden appearance of this company, the onus is very much on them to prove they own the copyright and from what date. You can't just rock up to court claiming you own something without the evidence that you actually own it.

Halfords suffers a puncture in the customer details department

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: A spokesperson told us: "Halfords takes the security of our customer data very seriously."

They do use the pen to tick the box though. So we know the pen, at least, works.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Wassat, then?

Back in the days when Halfords was a chain of much smaller shops on the high street, you could pretty much guarantee that all the people working there had a good idea about cars and engines and at least one would be a proper petrol-head. Nowadays, they are primarily "shop assistants" IME, with little practical knowledge.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Wassat, then?

"In order to complete the order (sorry!) you put in the registration of the vehicle."

Which, of course, begs the obvious question. WHY?

Halfords most likely answer? Because!

Clearly they have no concept of multi-vehicle ownership or doing a favour for a friend.

Samsung fined $14 million for misleading smartphone water resistance claims

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It worked good enough...

I have to ask. WHY did you take your phone into the pool regularly? Is their an app for measuring your swimming distance and speed or were those Facebook updates really so unmissable? :-)

The fact you then made sure you had and used de-mineralised water to wash it afterwards does seem to imply a good enough reason to go that extra effort. I just can't think what it might be.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Common sense...

"lose a lot in the total disconnect between what they are doing and what the machine is actually doing."

True. Then again, even many of us grey-beards aren't aware that an "X86" CPU is a RISC chip emulating X86 instructions in microcode. The disconnect is getting deeper.

Amazon shows off robot warehouse workers that won't complain, quit, unionize...

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Flame

Re: Actual cost?

Because Jeff still wants a bigger rocket.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Re: This has been in the works for years

"The only physical job that couldn't be automated was hairdressing."

What about telephone sanitising?

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