* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Make assistive driving safe: Eliminate pedestrians

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yes, hand signals are still part of the Highway Code.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Here is an interesting to make traffic better in general:

"the concrete wasteland our cities have become"

Tree roots. That's the excuse many councils give for removing trees from down the side of streets. The roots lift the surrounding ground, people trip, then sue the council. Oh, and not forgetting that it costs money to assess trees regularly and lop off suspect branches in case they fall on people. And leaf cleaning in Autumn. Again, people might slip on them and sue the council who put the tree there in the first place!

Likewise, councils have money left at the end of the budget year, or get grants for "beautification" projects, but they never have the money to maintain them (different budget!!) so they end up looking very tired and messy after a while.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The Joy of Motoring

Especially when lane 1 is actually empty.

But, apparently there is a thing going around where people refer to lane 1 as the "lorry lane". They probably think cars aren't allowed in that lane.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Also, I advise indicating well before you start the manoeuvre. This should show other drivers that you are not making a straightforward lane change since, indeed, you are not doing it yet."

Er, you should *always* indicate before you start your manoeuvre. That's why they are called indicators. They indicate your intention or wishes.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Changes to the Highway Code

"Similarly cyclists should cycle at least 0.5m (1.5 feet) from the kerb"

Many of them do that. It puts them tight in the middle of pavement causing maximum hazard to pedestrians :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"It is not true that cyclists hate pedestrians, and, of course, they do not try to kill pedestrians."

The important point is that some do, most don't. As with any large group, the majority are relatively normal, law-abiding citizens, the minority are self-important twats. Of course, we forget about all the people who don't cause issue and never forget the twats who jump out into the road, cycle through red lights, or turn left, cutting up cyclists.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "I could be driving out of Cairo towards the Great Pyramids of Giza"

"the Pyramids now border Cairo city"

Yes, that's why we always see almost the exact same photo or video clip, no matter who takes it. There's only that one angle where the slums don't encroach on the image.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Do your feet not reach the ground?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Maybe the current chip shortage could put a stop to that. I mean, FFS, they even use chips to control the indicators so they "flash" like a rope light extending in the direction of travel. I wonder how much a failed "bulb" costs to replace just because some designer thought it looked pretty and convinced some safety board that a "travelling light" would help to indicate the turn direction more effectively than a "simple" flashing light?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: pedestrianism

Well, if he sets off now, and walks through the Channel Tunnel, by the time he reaches the west side of the Bearing Straight, there might be the oft proposed bridge there :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: pedestrianism

"In the mid 60s, my mother knew a posh middle-aged lady who would travel in her chauffer-driven Daimler between her big house and the parish church a similar distance away."

That sound very much more like a status thing beloved of certain classes and wealth levels rather than laziness.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: On foot, on crutches, in wheelchairs

True, as far as on the road is concerned. Pavements etc, not so much. At junior school, the rule was keep left when moving about the school corridors. At secondary school, not only was the rule "keep right", but it was signed as such all over the place. As for out in the real world, I find the vast majority of people walk "where the hell they like" but through a system of learned behaviour, unwritten rules and fleeting eye contact, most people manage perfectly well. But, of course, there are always twats. There always will be.

On really busy pavements, somehow the crowd seems to work out that everyone going in the same direction should be on the same side of the pavement, which mostly works. Except there are "junctions" frequently along the route as people need to go look in a shop window or go into/out of a shop, which can be a little awkward at times if your direction of travel is on the outside and someone is speed-walking with a large parcel! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: On foot, on crutches, in wheelchairs

The sidewalk has up and down lanes?

Use Zoom on a Mac? You might want to check your microphone usage

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Watching the watchers watch the watchers watch

I watched what you did there :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Watching the watchers watch the watchers watch

Yes, you are correct and are describing the situation we are in now. My point was that we[*] should have been objecting tp this years ago so as not to have reached this point.

* By "we", I mean everyone, not just those us in the industry who have been watching this slow, step-by-steo sleep-walk into the surveillance society.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Watching the watchers watch the watchers watch

"Maybe you should not install any of those (potentially) dangerous programs?"

All programs are potentially dangerous. Users have to judge whether there is actual danger and balance that with their needs, wants and convenience. For most users, obviously convenience is weighted very heavily and all other concerns are weighted very low if not actually into negative weightings otherwise we'd not be in the situation of even the OS snooping on you these days, never mind all the 3rd party stuff. If people were really concerned, or informed enough that they have the choice to be concerned, snoopy programs would not have the success they currently enjoy.

France says Google Analytics breaches GDPR when it sends data to US

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Where is the UK in all of this ?

"if your country deems *all analytics* to be illegal according to GDPR?"

Did you read the ruling? GDPR is about PI data being sent to jurisdictions where it won't have the required levels of protection. If Google and other analytic operators choose to do the processing inside the areas covered by GDPR and only export the aggregated, anonymised data, then they will be fully compliant.

"Ummm. No. I will simply geo-block IP addresses from there"

That's fine by me. If you don't trade in the EU or UK, have no presence in the EU or UK, then no one will miss you.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Where is the UK in all of this ?

"gov.uk which has GA turned on, and on many pages is listed as necessary,"

All those sites claiming GA is "necessary" are lying IMHO. I have the GA domain blocked in NoScript and as far as I can remember, it's one of the blocked domains I've never had to temporarily unblock to get a site to work.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Confusing GA with advertising?

How much does GA actually provide though? Is there more than could be gleaned from the website access logs? Are there offline analytics that could provide all of the above without running GA scripts and cookies? It's many years since I was interested in that stuff. I was using Apache back then and, IIRC, Webalyser(??) which did quite a bit of analytics, but not at the depth you describe. But then I wasn't running a business and it was simply "nice to look at" and see where in the world site visitors were coming from. I'm sure Webalyser or equivalents must be vastly more powerful nowadays, although I can imagine advertisers insisting on GA data in the same way printshops used to insist on only Postscript submissions years ago, because they can't or won't consider anything other than the market leader.

Real-time software? How about real-time patching?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: one day trips

I should add that anyone who was stuck in a "quarantine" hotel has my utmost sympathy!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Guns at the ready

You can't fix the stuff while it's being used! Shirley the best time to install or fix stuff in an observatory is during the day :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: one day trips

"It's the one thing I'm glad for the pandemic - no more flights for pointless in person meetings!"

At the height of the second UK lockdown, I was tasked with a weeks work a long way from home, but still in the UK. One of the few hotels still open was booked for me, 4 stars above the door. It was probably the most soul destroying week of my life, working in a windowless cubby hole all day, having got up before sunrise (mid January!) and left site post sunset (still mid January!) I barely saw daylight all week and the evening meal at the hotel, running under COVID restrictions, was a choice of three types of toasted ciabattas or 4 flavours of pizza as there were no kitchen staff, delivered to your room. Breakfast was in a bag (at least it came with a hot bacon or sausage buttie!). That "delivered to your room" was quite important too as the COVID rules meant the hotel public areas were closed and there was no where to go since everything else outside was also closed! I barely saw daylight for the entire week. I really hope that never happens again. On a brighter note, the job was completed by lunchtime on the Friday and I made it home in time for tea and most of the drive home was in daylight :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Site Acceptance Test

Similar here. Most of my field jobs, all over the place, take time to get there and when the job's done, it's time to leave and get back on the road. There are so many places I'd like to see, but simply don't have the time. Even if I do get finished relatively early, the thought of getting home at 6pm instead 9-10PM is more enticing :-)

Fibre broadband uptake in UK lags behind OECD countries

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: HS2 or FTTP?

"a strategic deterrent we don’t plan to use,"

Without going into the ins and outs of whether the UK ought to have nuclear weapons or our obligations to NATO etc, the clue is the name. Strategic deterrent.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: HS2 or FTTP?

"I keep thinking that if the government used the HS2 money on fibre to every house"

BT/Openreach would still find a way to introduce huge delays, over-runs on costs and whinge that they need more money to reach the remote villages, like Brentford, Chiswick etc.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"In general, the early adopters will be the laggards for subsequent enhancements."

Yep. Been saying that almost since the US first got touch-tone phones while we in the UK still had dials. There's been an almost leap-frogging effect for many years. Same happened when the US started with cable broadband. Cable was pretty much ubiquitous over there while here it took far longer to catch-up, but when we did, we used the latest tech while they were still sweating the "early adopter" assets. Also, of course, why we see some countries going from almost no hard-wired comms networks to full on, high availability, high speed fibre, massively "beating" many so-called advanced countries. After all, why would they even bother to install an outdated copper network?

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The survivor of the lift incident

Yeah, the current PFY really should be moving on by now. He mush be the PFMA (pimply faced middle ager) by now.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Electronics shop

Yeah, there's one just a few minutes down the road from me. They are a "chain" now. They have three other branches in adjoining towns.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Superb episode once more

I was picturing Colin from The Brittas Empire :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Dibert has the answer

Looks like Bezos :-)

Microsoft tempts G Suite customers with 60% discount

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Google Family

Yeah, nice data you have there. It'd be shame if something happened to it.

'Boombox' function sparks Tesla recall

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: "Recall" is NTHSA terminology

Wait...what? Win10 is running my life support mach...BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I've seen Teslas on the motorway, me passing them while I'm doing 70mph. On the other hand, I've seen Teslas passing me on the motorway while I'm doing 70mph and seem to be standing still by comparison. I guess they are the ones where the "fun" hasn't worn off yet :-)

Actually, I saw one today while on my way home along the M62. I was doing 70mph. He was stopped on the hard shoulder. There was another car parked just behind him. That one had pretty blue flashing lights :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Recall" is NTHSA terminology

Would it be beyond the wit of the devs/designers to put a message up on the screen informing the driver a mandatory up must be performed but it can only happen if the driver responds to the message at a convenient time for the update to happen and the system identifies that the car is parked up? With the self driving/SatNam "awareness", they should even be able to tell if you are home on the driveway.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Could be good uses for this.....

Oh, well played :-)

Users sound off as new Google Workspace for Education storage limits near

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Does that include all those huge "startups" like Uber who have either yet to make a profit or have only just started to make a profit after burning through huge amounts of VC and other investors cash?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hmmm

Maybe they are paying huge chunks of cash to their parent, Alphabet and are seeing their coffers beginning to drain? Google like, for example Starbucks UK, might be paying enormous sums to "licence" the Google name, trademarks and other IP from Alphabet and so make little to no profit, therefore pay no taxes. Alphabet may have just upped the licencing fees so Google needs more cash flow.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Think of all the potentially insanely critical research data that is just entrusted to Google, with no idea of what their backup plans / recovery procedures are."

I was thinking of what Google will be going with all that space used that is above the new 100TB limit if the researchers haven't moved it by the deadline. Will they allow read-only access for a time so it can be moved, or just cut them off at the knees?

Car radios crashed by station broadcasting images with no file extension

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: HD radio

Apart from most people in the USA being the same race as me, you might care to note that I was insulting the US media, not the people of the USA. In particular, note that even if I was insulting the people of the USA, being in a different country doesn't necessarily mean people are a different race. Of course, by some definition, I may be mixed race since I have English, German and French ancestry (at least!). My wife is part English, French, Canadian First Nations, Italian and (still to be confirmed) Semitic. And that's just the couple of hundred years of the family history she's managed to trace so far.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: HD radio

From what I understand, only the best of the best (in general) is what we get to see. And even then, those of us watching get to choose whether to watch or not :-)

We're all different and have different reasons for watching, or not, as the case may be. Personally, I prefer SF. I've seen some good stuff and some clearly comic-book stuff. Not just US either. Korean, Japanese, Brazilian, French and Norwegian are other foreign SF I've watched recently, some surprisingly good and thoughtful, others, just "eye candy" to kill time or as a distraction while doing other stuff, although the sub-titled stuff does take a bit more concentration since I can barely scrape through in French or German, no chance in other languages :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Mazda's Infotainment is a pile of garbage

My first true use of any form of DOS was TRS-DOS and the others like MultiDOS, LDOS etc, then CP/M, then MS-DOS. Moving to Amiga, back to MS-DOS and Windows and now primarily FreeBSD, I've always used the file extensions, not just because many OS require them, but because it's a nice human readable way of identifying what a file is quickly from a directory listing.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Mazda's Infotainment is a pile of garbage

"Not mentioned in this article is that the cost of a replacement 'head' for the infotainment system is $1500. We all know that car electronics is wildly inflated in price but this isn't the first time I've seen or been offered custom options at many times the cost of generic. A decent Bluetooth radio is less than $100; you can spend more if you want, but why bother?"

Why bother? Primarily because few people have the skills to be able to fit a DIN standard radio unit into a modern car which uses customised mounts and wiring, not to mention probably DRM in the cars systems. The price reflects the fairly small volumes manufactured for the custom moulded plastics to fit your specific model of car, because last years model and next years model use a different mount and shape.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: HD radio

No. It's totally and completely different. It was invented and patented in the USA. None of that old fashioned Yooropeen stuff! It just looks exactly the same in operation.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: HD radio

"Hell, I'm American and I had no clue that's what it was..."

Don't worry about it. Based on what the rest of the world sees on US TV shows and movies, the media don't expect you to be intelligent anyway so you fit right in :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: GIGO for the goddesses sake!

""Garbage In Garbage Out" should be branded on the forehead of each one."

Back in about 1976 or so when I did my O level Computer Studies course, one of the first in the UK, GIGO was one of the very first things we were taught. Checking data was valid was important, but with less emphasis than today since it wasn't just any Tom, Dick or Harriet inputing data back then.

5G masts will be strapped to lampposts and traffic lights – once £4m project figures out who owns them

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: That's all very well

I did look for the upgraded version to see if it's ready to play Crysis, but no luck so far.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Modernising the way local authorities and operators work together"

"2) They were looking at the plans on their system the wrong way round."

Having dealt with the local planning dept. option 2 sounds the most plausible!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 5G is no more harmful than 4G LTE

They finally moved on from leeches in Yorkshire?

KDE Community releases Plasma 5.24: It's eccentric, just like many old-timers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The difference is that the menu button was called the menu button first and only later became, to some people, a "hamburger" (actually, a hamburger in a bun, because a hamburger would just be - )The mouse became a mouse almost from conception in 1964 and long before it was released as a product.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "hamburger menus"

My wife likes watching some of the US reality-type shows, the documentory-like ones, not the shouty fighty houswives ones. Of the few I've seen, they seem to be constantly peppered with "cool sounding" names for so many items, anything but their proper name. The truck rescue show she watches sounds especially dangerous when using slang terms while working with other crews because they are assuming everyone understands the slang term when in fact they may not. But you can be sure that everyone knows the proper name. The new guy might not know that "hamburger" means flat. He might ask or he might guess. Lets hope it's not a heavy, dangerous or highly valuable load he guessing at :-)

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