* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Elon Musk won't join Twitter's board after all

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

"Looks like it’s time to move on from Twitter. It’s been an enjoyable platform but between bots, trolls and now this, I think I’ll be winding down my use of it."

What's Twitter?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Dodging a bullet

Well, when my plan to introduce the leaf as a global currency come to fruition, we'll all be rich!!!

(Thanks for the idea Doug!)

US Army to build largest 3D-printed structures in the Americas

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I wonder if it would be simpler

Wouldn't dehydrated water be...erm...oxygen?

I suppose you could go the other way and ship tanks of hydrogen and burn it to produce water. That ought to save weight :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: They will need to be able to print around rebar at some point.

Very likely. I recognise the title :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: They will need to be able to print around rebar at some point.

ISTR an SF short story where some clever architect built a new house designed to be a 3D representation of a 4D cube. There was an earthquake and the house folded in on itself and disappeared into another dimension :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I wonder if it would be simpler

Most or your points would just as easily apply to a robot using bricks and mortar. The *proprietary* "sludge" is just as heavy as the bricks and mortar in terms of transport and still needs people to there to feed it to the robot. Likewise, the robot can work 24/7 with just a small barely trained crew to feed the bricks and mortar into the hoppers and the robot can build to plan and repeat easily. It's a robot :-)

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, just wondering out loud if anyone has actually tried robot building the way I suggest. I'm guessing not, since "designing and building a robot to replace human brickies" is not going to get the investment that "WOW! WE CAN 3D PRINT A BUILDING!!!"

On the other hand, looking at local tradition building projects, once planning has been approved, it seems to take forever to prepare the land, utilities and foundations, then the brickies come in and the houses go up so quickly it's almost undeliverable. Then it seem to take ages for the fit out and finishing, plastering, wiring, windows and doors, roofs etc before the residents move in.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Labour saving?

On the other hand, most of military life is either sitting around doing nothing or training. Having skills useful in civvy life when they leave, even the "cannon fodder", would be useful. The majority of any military force are "grunts" who's training makes them good at security and...erm...maybe other stuff like "private armies" labelled as security.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

between 2,000 and 3,500 PSI

" between 2,000 and 3,500 PSI"

Is that a range of values they can build to depending on the concrete mix or is the material that variable?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I wonder if it would be simpler

Yeah, but a 46' wide, 15' tall printing robot sounds big and expensive.

I wonder how much it would take to build a robot to place and mortar in bricks and/or breeze blocks (Cinder blocks) with pipes for the mortar, conveyors for the blocks? Is 3D printing actually better? Or has no one actually tried an alternative robot working with existing "traditional" building materials?

3D printing as a solution is starting to seem a little like blockchain. It's a solution for some problems, but not a silver bullet.

IBM deliberately misclassified mainframe sales to enrich execs, lawsuit claims

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"but it seems the upper echelons said one thiing, and did another."

What? You think those people do the courses too? HR mandate the course because either they have to by law or because it looks good to the outside world. I very much doubt anyone from salaried senior managers and up do any of the courses.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Happy

Re: Pleasant change

Is that Base26? Or just the Q key being right under the 1 key?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It's human nature, though, isn't it?

Clearly they need a couple of new metrics showing both number of tickets and actually resolved tickets. A resolved ticket should need sign off by the person raising the ticket, not the call handler.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Wasn't "maximize shareholder value" idea thought to hinder this?

"The real outcome is that bad executives will always find a way to game the system."

I wonder what happened to the incentive bonuses of the people in charge of the areas the money was transferred from? Surely they'd be fighting tooth and claw to NOT transfer the money over?

Union rejects latest BT pay offer, calls for ballot on industrial action

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Inflation

I have only one word to add: WAGONWHEEL!!

European Right to Repair resolution headed for vote

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: (Yet) another regulation the UK will need to abide by

s/Chinese/USA works too!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: (Yet) another regulation the UK will need to abide by

"So fairly or unfairly that also applied to the referendum* meaning expats not being registered could not vote."

But it didn't have to work that way, a referendum is not an election. That was a choice made by the Government. eg the last Scottish "Should I stay or should I go" referendum, just as important as the Brexit vote, allowed for 16 & 17 year olds to vote despite not being eligible to vote in elections.

I suspect if the Brexit vote used the same voting eligibility criteria as the Scotxit, the result might have been different.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: (Yet) another regulation the UK will need to abide by

According to The Indy, one single cheese manufacture lost about £180,000 worth of exports in the aftermath of Brexit. The total across the industry was a 64% drop. I suspect there's not a lot of wine exports to the EU, but they were a major consumer of UK dairy products and that industry has been devastated by Brexit.

Ironically, prior to Brexit, almost every farmer interviewed about Brexit was in favour of it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: (Yet) another regulation the UK will need to abide by

This is where the "reasonable expected lifetime" of a product comes into play in the UK at the least, may not in the EU, not sure about that. If a product fails during its lifetime, but outside of warranty, you may be entitled to a repair or replacement pro-rata based on age, parts likely free but probably charged for labour. It can be a bit of a grey area, but I think there's a gov.uk website listing various types of products and what is the "reasonable expected lifetime".

SpaceX launches first totally private mission to the International Space Station

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"This "totally private mission" is, I note, completely dependent on the $150bn spent by various governments on the ISS itself."

Axioms longer term goal is to add modules to the ISS and eventually "spin off" (not literally), their own space station when the ISS reaches EOL.

Fish mentality: If The Rock told you to eat flies, would you buy my NFT?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Lab-on-a-fish

"(Not going to comment on 10 years of articles - just last week's)"

Yeah, but the battery and memory hungry Retina screened iPad3. It'll never catch on!!

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: Engineer vs. Business mentality

"Engineers are smart in many ways, but not when it comes to knowing what to charge".

Businessman: My laptop stopped working, fix it.

Engineer: It's not broken. You forgot to charge it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

"Others will squeeze the penny so hard the Queen cries."

Hey, don't knock it!! That's how copper wire was invented :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Television repair

"If he followed Sony's documented testing & repair procedure it would have taken two hours."

Same for brand name latops, and by extension, most/all brand name kit where you are supposed to carefully follow the official procedures. eg, one particular manufacture of laptops I deal with, the official way to replace a broken LCD panel is to strip half the laptop down, separate the screen from the base before removing the bezel to get the screen out. Anyone with a bit of experience soon finds they can do the job in 5-10 mins rather than nearly an hour once you figure out the "trick" to removing and putting the bezel back on properly while the screen is still attached to the base. There are hard to reach plastic tabs at the bottom in the gap between the base and screen which needs pressure applying "just right" to click them in with a nice bit of rigid plastic as a lever.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

On the other hand, giving out financial advice might have legal and professional implications involving regulators.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It wasn't dropped honest

Over the last couple of years of WFH? Every day! And worse! "No, I'm pretty sure nothing was spilled on it, look how shiny and clean the outside is" etc etc etc.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Lost dog pictures

The hole doesn't open the inside to the outside quite like that. You don't want debris getting into the mechanism. Usually there will be at the very least a filter inside, more likely, especially on modern drives a rubber/latex membrane. It's primarily to allow for ambient pressure changes, not ventilation.

Direct lithium extraction technique for greener batteries gains traction

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Well, someone has to grow and harvest the cactus to make the mezcal and tequila :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Water is Recyclable

Can the water actually get more radioactive than the Granite itself? People live with the slightly higher background radiation in that area all their lives for countless generations, some even living in houses made of granite.

Raspberry Pi OS update beefs up security

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Is root the same as Administrator?

root is UID 0

User account names start at 1000 and increment as new ones are added. System accounts start from 1 and increment from there.

If you are logged in, depending on the "hardness" of the OS install, you can just

cat /etc/passwd

to see the list. (FreeBSD here. Linux, esp. SystemD based ones, might be different)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: TITSUP

Which is odd. The problem is not the username. It's having a default password that is a (now solved) problem. Usernames are commonly easy to guess so having a default username of pi is no less secure than me using "john" as a username.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Linux and security

I agree that the pi/pi default credentials should have been dealt with a long time ago but on the other hand, the Pi was designed as a cheap educational toy. It's growed and growed since that early concept in what back then were undreamed of production levels and use case.

First Light says it's hit nuclear fusion breakthrough with no fancy lasers, magnets

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Why it's always 30 years.

The "2030's" are not 30 years away unless you are posting from Y2K.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Where can I get me one...

Does it come with a bump stock or do you have to buy that during a separate purchase at a different register, cos these purchases are in no way related, no siree!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Tokamak, or not tokamak, that is the question...

The low and flat South of England. The ideal place for onshore wind farms :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Tokamak, or not tokamak, that is the question...

"rubriks cube"

ICBA to argue your post, except to say if you can't even get the guys name right, what hope is there for the rest of your "facts"?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: It sounds to me ....

"Also, where does the gas go? "

Dissolves into the liquid? Mr Fusion meets Soda Stream?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Or El Reg goodies for sale. ISTR the El Reg shop, Cash'n'Carrion, used to sell Tritium based light thingies. And here's the Health & Safety article they produced relating to the sale of Radioactive Tritium-based goodies.

Russia (still) trying to weaponize Facebook for spying, Ukraine-war disinfo

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Imagine for a moment

"How would we fare in understanding eachother? (taking into consideration our inability to communicate generally with eachother)"

Luckily for us, various governments will create a committee of experts to deal with the issue and it won't be some random collection of Facebookerati :-)

Happy birthday Windows 3.1, aka 'the one that Visual Basic kept crashing on'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Petzold!

Same here. I dabbled in programming in the DOS days. The Windows SDK killed my enthusiasm.

South Yorkshire to test fiber broadband through water pipes

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: OMG

Because they have the best Tea. And you know how much Tea is consumed at the sharp end of British infrastructure jobs, especially if it involves digging trenches. And in this specific project, there'll be no shortage of water for the kettle while the job is ongoing. I suspect we can expect this job to to take quite some time!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Microwaves..

Weather, trees, cooked pheasants :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: fiber installed inside water pipes can be used to help water companies detect leaks

From the article; "it would be left up to broadband operators to actually tap into the fiber in the pipes and provide the last few metres of connection to subscribers’ homes."

That sound like they are going to run it down the pipes in the street, not just the mains to the town.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Childcatcher

The potential for pollution of the drinking water also crossed my mind. There's an awful lot of porn on that internet thingy (or so I've been told). If a fibre breaks inside a water pipe, how are all those children going to be protected from porn leaking out of the taps?

Bank had no firewall license, intrusion or phishing protection – guess the rest

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Licence costs

Likewise Microsoft with both Windows and Office.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Maybe they should have outsourced their IT...

It's an interesting thought. If you run a business in India, with the local market rates, how do you beat the completion on price? Where do you off-shore your outsourcing? Malaya? Philippines? Tuvalu?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: the Andra Pradesh Mahesh Co-Operative Urban Bank

Maybe, maybe not. Anyone know the laws and regulations on Banking in India? Specifically in relation to a co-operative? The account holders may well be shareholders which might affect any payouts.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Root Causes

But you always need a Plan 9 for user-space! That's not planning for failure, it's a plan of last resort. The cold, dead dregs of the company need something for the lawyers to hang onto. Just ask SCO :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: IT is a cost center isn't it?

Probably because if it's free, then it must be shite. Or the business has to take full responsibility and can't blame the vendor (and pay for people to set it up and maintain it). At least that's the logic I expect is used at board level.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

No. Licenced stupidity is regulated to fixed levels. This was pure unlicensed stupidly which has no bounds.

French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not quite...

Guess where Arthur is :-)

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