Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Insight?

Sorry. From your username, I assumed you were a bloke who is challenged in the snake department. On reflection, I suppose few blokes would admit to that publicly, let alone announce it in their user name, so clearly I was wrong on a number of levels :-)

Re: Insight?

He's right, but a bit harsh. Go easy on him, he's still a newbie :-)

Re: Insight?

"NASA seems to have given up on the 'try it and see' approach,"

In a video the other day, His Muskiness said it currently costs about $1B per ton to land on Mars. I'm not sure "try it and see" on the primary power source would be a good idea. On the other hand, NASA do still do "try it and see" with helicopters :-)

Re: Insight?

"cost a couple of quid down at the pound shop."

errrr...wot? :-)

Re: Yablochka redux?

"Given that Russia's access to latest software from big vendors seems quite as restricted as its access to hardware, they may need to revert to older versions which are not as easily subjected to sanctions. Or licencing checks, for that matter."

In the early days of the home computer revolutions, what was available behind the Iron Curtain was knock-off Spectrums and C64 at best, often with low RAM specs. Some very efficient and innovative coding came out of eastern Europe, especially when The Wall came down and access to the latest Western kit became possible.

I can easily imagine a similar situation developing in Russia now, possibly a major shift to Linux if not just outright hacks of Windows so there's no registration or phoning home. It's not like anyone can successfully sue them now.

Re: Yablochka redux?

"I used a Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop PC for a day when my regular desktop was broken. It was adequate for everything except full screen video, and I suspect the latter was due to the GPU limitations."

Depends what you mean by full screen video. My RasPi4 running Kodi plays 1080p full screen with very low CPU usage. That's X265 video in the main. It depends what codec the video needs and if there is any hardware acceleration in the GPU to support it and software to make use of it.

Re: 41 hours of latency sounds bad...

At school, it was over a week. Someone went to the local Town Hall once per week to deliver the coding sheets and 5-hole paper tape and collected the printouts from the previous week. Due to scheduling, it could be two weeks before you found the typo!

I'm not sure we learned about latency in the terms we think of today. Most likely it only got covered when we learned about mercury delay lines as storage :-)

Re: Choice of technology.....

Stop screeching about it!

Re: Choice of technology.....

"(He was also the one who bought himself an analogue mobile phone just when digital ones were becoming available.)"

Depending on where he was and where he was likely to be, that may have been a shrewd move. Analogue mobiles phones would have dropped significantly in price, have better coverage in general, still worked ok'ish in a poor signal area while the new digital ones would still have been at "early adopter" prices and pretty poor coverage outside of cities and large towns :-)

Re: "Voyager 1 is now 45 years old"

Oh $deity, that brings back awful memories! I had to slow down my typing or charcters would go missing! Luckily, I was rarely typing "live" on a remote system at 1200/75.

"I'd like to think of David Attenborough being the human equivalent.. He's over twice the age of the probe, and has probably travelled as much as Voyager-1"

Better yet, the mission was conceived in (IIRC), 1965 with the launch date in mind as the "once in a life time" launch window.. That makes the actual mission only a tad short of 60 years old now. It really was serendipitous that just as the maths and technology was developed to work out it was possible, matched up with the emerging technology (and will) to do it at almost the exact right time to actually launch such a mission. I think the next opportunity for something similar is in about 2150 or thereabouts. Hopefully, we'll not need to repeat such an energy saving route by then.

"power an ARM3 from the wasted heat of a Pentimum 100."

Yeahbut, all those Pentium 100s saved us a fortune in heating bills!!

Re: More reason to relocate server farms

And it'll be easy to spot a dead battery. Brown instead of green. And actually dead, not just a misuse of dead meaning expended :-)

Re: Always-on Security Hole

"a steal box."

I saw what you did there! :-)

Re: WTF is going on in that picture??

"I'd assume that surveillance cameras will be used,"

When everyone in the building will have Google phones and all devices will be on the internal Google network, why would they need to install any form of surveillance cameras?

Re: Such a chatastrophy

"And now I am getting upset with my toilet seat."

Taps. Or faucets, if you prefer. Nothing could be simpler, eh? Unless, of course, it's touch operated, or proximity operated, or you lift/lower the handle to operate and swing left/right to adjust temperature. Or is it left/right to operate and up/down for temperature? Is up hot, or right cold? Is the sensor in the wall, the basin or the tap? Then there's the plug. Is it on a chain or have a lever hidden somewhere? Do you push or pull the lever to put the plug in? :-) Better yet, combined tap and hand drier, and no, not the ones with push buttons or timers. The new ones switch between water and air depending on where your hands are and seem to be either too sensitive or not sensitive enough!

Re: You seem to be doing XXX - here's a framework to make it easier.

"but the argument for something significantly different would need to be highly compelling for someone to switch."

To some extent, that's an advantage that MS and to a lesser extent Apples have. The users are more or less tied to their OS and will just have to like or lump whatever is served to them. When Win8 came out with such a huge change in the way the desktop looked and worked, the vast majority of Windows users either loved it or made the best of it. There was no mass migration to a different OS. A very small number may have switched to Apple or Linux. Another small number may have hunted around for ways to switch off the new stuff, either in one or more of the Control Panels or by installing some iteration or equivalent of Classic Shell. But all those people would almost certainly have been a tiny minority.

The "compelling argument" for most Windows users is to stay with what they know, even when what they know changes.

Re: So what should a a 21st century UI look like?

Surprisingly few people choose (or even have) the option to rotate their screens, if they are even allowed to have more than one screen. The current fad seems to be for extremely wide curved screens, removing even the possibility of rotating them.

Personally, I like one vertical and one horizontal :-)

Re: So what should a a 21st century UI look like?

Voice recognition has it's niche, eg consumption devices or for accessibility needs, but on the whole, yes, it's much slower. In the same way when I want help with something, reading it on a web page is much, much quicker and easier to understand, flick through and flick back than watching and listening to a YouTube video. Video instruction also has it's uses too of course, when done well, without lots of spurious Umms and Ahhhs and tangential comments.

Re: Why are they all the same?

"Unnecessary changes to the UI cause delays while the user tries to figure out where the function they want is now hidden."

Imagine of MS were in charge of a power tools company!! Your ancient chainsaw finally breaks and the new one requires completely re-learning how it works and how to use it.

Re: The curse of overchoice

"Partly I wanted to make the point that many users wouldn't even know what questions to ask,"

To be fair, that's exactly the dilemma most home users would be in even taking Linux out of the equation and just having the choice between Mac and Windows. What to do? Unless there's some compelling reason they are already aware of, they will most likely choose either what they know or what a good friend/family member recommends.

Re: The curse of overchoice

"I can tweak and choose a different one when I am comfortable."

But, depending on what you chose to start with, might be more difficult if you don't plan ahead. eg, set up your /home directory as a separate partition so a re-install doesn't wipe out your home directory. Not the end of the world if you have backups, of course, but one of those "gotchas" (or benefits) you need to be aware of and which many/most distros don't do by default. (having said that, you can do the same with Windows, but few if any people ever do.)

Re: The curse of overchoice

Part of my job is "refurbing" laptops. One of our bigger customers sends all their kit to us from leavers (or which are broken in some way). We check them over, clean the outside and install a default Win10 image from a standard Win10 Install USB pendrive. Since this install won't be used and is just for checking everything works, we click "NO" to everything related to tracking, advertising, accounts etc and just use a default local Lan/WiFi account. Install time is not over an hour, let alone a full day.

I'm speaking as a FreeBSD user, not a Windows users, so I have no axe to grind. All I can say is a default Win10 install is pretty quick and painless. On the other hand, we don't bother with Windows Updates since the laptop will be re-imaged when it gets back to the customer anyway, we just need to make sure it's fully operational and looks relatively clean. Maybe if you don't use the latest Win imaging tool, then there may be be multiple major updates that get applied in the right order, so that might well take longer. Windows Update, even on a good internet connection, doesn't seem to be especially quick!

Re: This is why I still think

Self driving motorhome sounds more like your bag of fish :-) Travel with the seasons, or your general whims.

Re: Tricky technology

That's why they score the big points. People and animals, of course, score even higher!

Re: Ahh, Team building/break the ice exercises....

"But the teams were made up from different departments."

Which then begs the question, what type of team are we trying to build with people from different departments who don't actually work together and, for work purposes at least, never actually meet? Is there a point to team building with people you are unlikely to ever meet again?