* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Joint European Torus more than doubles fusion record with 59 megajoules

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Sadly, current technology seems to be indicating that if you want it running long term, ie more than 5 seconds, it needs to be much, much bigger. Mr Fusion looks unpossible with what we know now.

Unless there's multiple breakthroughs, I don't think we'll see super-cooled magnets creating containment fields for 100 million C plasma in a portable unit very soon.

Critical 'remote escalation' flaw in Android 12 fixed in Feb security patch batch

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: obsolescence

I remember when so-called "pocket" TVs were all the rage. I never had one with a tiny CRT, but did get my hands on a 2nd-hand LCD one at one stage, 35-40 years ago when I was younger and my eyes were less aged than they are now. The screen was 4:3, naturally, but as big or bigger than an average phone of today. It was barely useable for anything other than "talking heads" type TV. Anything else such as films or drama, it was simply too small and pretty much useless.

Kids today think watching video on a tiny, barely legible screen while "on the move" is something new and ground breaking :-) On the other hand, it's a real use case for folding phones with larger screens, or better yet, roll out screens.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "then there's four high-severity vulns in Media Framework"

"its their bloody analytics code/tag manager causing it!"

Have you considered following Googles advice and removing Google Analytics and Tags?

Geomagnetic storm takes out 40 of 49 brand new Starlink satellites

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Insured?

"The thing they'll have insurance on is their factories, and maybe their launch facilities (though that's probably stupidly expensive too)."

3rd Party, Fire and Theft? "Wait...what? You take big towers of explosive and set light to them?"

Labour reminds UK.gov that it's supposed to be reforming the Computer Misuse Act

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ha

"Starmer might figure that out, but I'm not sure his more rabid associates like Rayner, Long-Bailey & Abbott are capable of that sort of deep thinking."

I quite liked the look of Starmer when he first made leader. On the other hand, he was following Corbyn and pretty much anyone would have looked good after him! But Starmer has sorely disillusioned me that Labour have any hope of being a real party any again anytime soon. He seems to spend all his time using his lawerly wiles to snipe at details with no real broad policies.

To our total surprise, Apple makes adding alternative payment systems to apps 'painful, expensive, clunky'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Why would Apple offer less than 27%?

I suspect the result, in the longer term, will be far more strict rulings against Apple in those jurisdictions starting or considering similar actions. The various national legal systems will be watching with great interest how Apple pull every trick in the book to be as awkward and unco-operative as possible. Courts generally take a very dim view of that sort of contempt.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Ban all new Apple sales (including the Appstore sales) in the EU until such time as they come back begging to be allowed back in, and promising to do as they are told. And then we will see how quickly they (and Google as well), will start obeying the European court orders..."

While I thoroughly agree with the sentiment, beware of unintended consequences. Lots of educational establishments rely on Apple, specifically iPads issued to all students.

Chip supply problems might mean Wi-Fi 6E is skipped over for Wi-Fi 7, says analyst

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: coming along with 2.5G NICs, but as usual I have to ask "why?"

"I'm not going to scrap my 1Gb/s LAN even if I can get a 2.5+ FTTH connection, but others look willingly to do."

I remember doing the same with 10 10Mb/s co-ax network. Switches still being expensive, I got a hub with a BNC connector so those devices capable would get RJ-45 cables and the rest, such as the laser printer, would stay on the co-ax network. It took a few years before that last bit of co-ax got retired in favour of 10Mb/s Ethernet. More years again to migrate to 100Mb/s Ethernet. I have a Gb switch now, but I think most devices on my network are "only" 100Mb/s capable, just the cable modem, it's cable to the firewall, and the upgraded NICs in the firewall.. One day, I'll start replacing cables to the rest of the network, but I'm not seeing a compelling reason yet.

Play Store class action has £15m budget for defeating Google in London court

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: But it's a bit like short-sellers in finance.

So, it's sorts like privatised, for-profit regulation then? Can I buy shares in OFCOM? (Hmmm...maybe not a good idea)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The answer is more lawyers

Are you saying it's lawyers all the way down (to hell)?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Guess what the legal bill will amount to?

Break even? You must be kidding! These are lawyers taking a gamble and the entry fee is £15.4m. I'm sure they will be expecting 2x that back as a bare minimum, more likely 3x. Have you seen the inflation rate for yachts? (No, it's not an inflatable rubber dinghy!)

Apple, Broadcom allowed to press Ctrl-Z on billion-dollar Wi-Fi patent payout to Caltech

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Apple trying to have other peoples patents invalidated LOL

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Apple sucks balls.

"we have a reputation to maintain."

Not a phrase one expects to hear as being attributed to lawyers :-)

Polly wants a snapper? Parrot swipes GoPro for sweet views of New Zealand's Fiordland

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I, Robot?

No, I'Kea :-)

Facebook fined peanuts after Giphy staff quit and firm didn't tell UK competition regulators

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"including reimbursing all the personal fines levied personally on their officers etc."

I'd expect that to be something included in general salary or annual bonuses. I suspect even in Australia, it not the done thing to put a court fine down on your monthly business expenses claim form :-)

I'm fairly sure that would be illegal in the UK.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

When I get a speeding ticket, I generally go "this is less than 0.5% of my monthly income, embarrassing and I'll try to avoid it, but not worth agonizing about".

Which, of course, is exactly the point. If you don't see the punishment as a punishment, then you don't learn the lesson and will likely do it again and again. As mentioned further up, at least in the UK, incur that "embarrassing" fine 4 times in a 3 year period, and you suddenly find you get banned[*] from driving for 12 months. This is why another poster above mentioned accumulation of fines and "scofflaw"

* It's actually much worse than it sounds. You have your driving licence rescinded. You then have to do without a car for 12 months and than have to re-apply for a learners licence and take the driving test again before you can have a full licence. Not to mention the increased insurance premiums.

This is going well: Meta adds anti-grope buffer zone around metaverse VR avatars

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

My first though...

...on reading the bit about a woman feeling intimidated by a group of men, and the "solution" being a "personal boundary" through which others can't pass was that it'll be a variation on the concept of people playing chicken with autonomous vehicles. eg a group of people with a software enforced "bubble" around them can trap others by surrounding them. That could be way more intimidating than simply moving away from people you don't want to be near.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It's as if Second Life never happened

"Isn't there a user manual somewhere that says 'there's nothing new under the sun'?"

I read that one.

It's only 16 pages.

Title page

Contents Page

Page 1 'there's nothing new under the sun'

Pages 2-13 "This page intentionally left blank"

Index

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yeah, but a "full disk" will likely still let you add a few lines to a logfile unless it happens to already be exactly on a cluster boundary and need the file extending.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: What error message?

"Then once you stop them ignoring the error message, they say "Oh that. It's being doing that for months, I just click on it and it disappears." Like that fixes it."

I once got called out to a PC many years ago on the first properly warm day of Spring. On arriving, the PC was hot, hot, hot! The CPU fan was completely seized. Asked the user if it had been making any unusual noises before it overheated and failed. "Oh, it was making an annoying grinding noise all winter, but then it stopped yesterday so I thought someone had fixed it" ---> See icon.

Oh, yes, this was a PC used by first level support in an IT department :-(

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Simples...

Excellent choice of volume name :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Simples...

"Which is always anyone but the martyr "on call""

Yes, or it would be a Who, Me? instead (although there does seem to be a bit of a grey area where some On Calls should more properly be Who, Me? articles and Vicky Verka :-)

Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Buy an exercise bike or treadmill from Peloton, and you find that its brakes are locked on unless your account is in credit."

If true, is that even legal?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Occasionally, you get a straight answer

"Mr. Dabb's difficulty of the week"

Sounds like a better title for the series rather then SFTW :-)

On the other hand, the trials and tribulations he's gone through over the last few years, I'm a little surprised it's not submitting his articles from Bedlam!

12-year-old revives Unity desktop, develops software repo client, builds gaming environment for Ubuntu...

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: my 12 year old...

When I was 12, the BBC micro wasn't even a twinkle in the futures devs eyes :-)

I had to wait a while before I became aware of microprocessors that might one day be within my budget. I think it was 1979 before I saved up enough to buy a Z80 based computer that cost as much as a cheap 2nd hand car :-)

Automakers continue to see chip-supply carnage as vendors talk of sales pain

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

a 48 per cent increase in operating profit on flat sales

That's interesting. Sounds like the gas industry. Demand is up so prices hike while costs remain the same and the owners/shareholders make out liker bandits.

Privacy Shield: EU citizens might get right to challenge US access to their data

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Enhanced privacy shield

Three strikes and you're out would be more understandable to the US negotiators. And bring a result sooner. Are we currently on #2 or #3 at the moment?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Having taken back control we in the UK, of course, have nothing to worry about."

I was also wondering where the UK stands on this. As we are still using an unchanged GDPR, is the UK also at this negotiating table or are we shafted more than EU?

Out of beta and ready for data: 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS is here

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The OS Formerly Known As Raspbian

"Not really one of their better thought-through decisions, sadly."

On the other hand, their prime target audience is newbies, so having a 32 and 64-bit OS with the same name could cause issues there. Albeit not quite as bad Windows not making the differences clear between ARM-based Windows Surface tablets and x86-based Windows Surface tablets :-)

Nothing to scoff at: Crisps and nuts biz KP Snacks smacked in ransomware hack attack

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Windoze security as service

"Finally, there is the User. Users need to be told how to spot scams, and need to know not to just click random links in emails, or open attachments from those they don't know."

Unfortunately, badly thought out "security" just trains uses to click "OK" to everything. We recently were forced onto O365. My laptop, now on the corporate domain, won't allow me to install my preferred LibreOffice. (preferred, because of my limited use of spreadsheets and documents so the cleaner interface is far better IMO). This means every time I open a local spreadsheet, I'm warned that "documents from the internet could be harmful" and have to click it into edit more from read-only mode. Every time. And can't change it. Ditto, when I'm finished with a particular spreadsheet and move it to the archive folder, I get warned again, and have to click OK to say, yes, I really want to copy this "dangerous file" from one local directory to another. Interestingly, if I get a spreadsheet by email and open it from outlook in edit mode from Onedrive, I don't see those warnings. If I was more cynical, I might suspect that MS are trying to discourage users from creating and storing local documents in favour of storing them where they can take a peek.

Grab some tissues: Meta's share price tanks after Facebook emits latest figures

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Considering their growth has been going on for so long, you could look at it as a much more significant drop because they are not going from flat to down, they are going from rising to falling. So, instead of rising by 3 million, they fell by 1 million. A salesman would call that a drop of 4 million :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I am waiting

Yes. It's said that we should have no real expectation of privacy when out in public. The reality is, of course, that even out in public you are fairly anonymous, even with the rise of CCTV. But when there are many people out there with Facebook glasses on, constantly doing facial recog. on everyone they look at, it turns into something far, far more creepy. Even those of us with no Facebook account and have never had one, are probably tagged in photos by friends and relatives so Facebook will be matching those images too.

It'll be interesting to see if their facial recog. tries to take into account not only the confidence level of the potential recognition, but matches that with others and takes into account the 80% match it just hit in London might not be the same person it just matched at 75% in New York 10 minutes earlier.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: MetaFail

Living in a cocoon like The Matrix?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Metaverse

On the other hand, unless they are committing tax fraud, that money is going into the economy in wages, buildings and equipment costs etc. and the people that money goes to are probably paying taxes. The problem is that it's not necessarily going to the correct tax jurisdictions.

PS, no, I'm not defending facebook/meta/whatever :-)

European watchdog: All data collected about users via ad-consent popup system must be deleted

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Just a thought...

Would you like a Moke Coke?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Just a thought...

"Can we take all the sales & marketing folks, gather them into a ball, & fling them into space on an intercept course for the Sun?"

It's already been tried. They were put on the 'B' Ark. We are the result, not the solution :-(

50 lines of Bash to bring a Wordle fan out of their shell

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

reforming copyright

"reforming copyright more generally to make it more fit for the age of the metaverse and the iPhone rather than Telex and Teletext."

Considering the lifespan of the vast majority of computer games, or software in general, maybe the copyright could be reduced to 10 years, or even 5. If it's still viable as a program after that, or has spawned a series/franchise/whatever, then the copyright holder gets first dibs at a 5-10 year renewal for a fee. After all, if it's still generating revenue, then a renewal fee every 5-10 years ought to be no hardship for the copyright holder. For that matter, why not apply that across the board? If the IP has value for life of author + 70 years, then it's valuable enough to incur a renewal fee. If not, then let it lapse into the public domain. Possibly retain the the rights for use in other media, eg old books, no longer in print thus generating no income, but later being used as the basis for a TV show or film.

Cyberattacker hits German service station petrol terminal provider

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: If it was news over here

The BBC were reporting this before El Reg.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It's been said here before, but . . .

That's what I was thinking too. Declaring "force majeure", when they don't yet know if it could have been defended against if only they'd paid more than lip service to security. It may well turn out that they did do all reasonably possible, but I find that in almost every case of security intrusion reported, they missed some "best practice" solutions.

Trio of Rust Core Team members take their leave

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Fashions

Could it be related to size, complexity and completeness of relevant libraries?

Why is the little guy getting rinsed for hardware? Because top OEMs had to spend 25% more on chips in 2021

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: At least Sony didn't

"Has anyone seen a pay increase?"

My own employer has been keeping our moral up be telling us how massively turnover and profits have grown over the last couple of years, beating all previous records. Pay rises? Yeah, sort of. Below inflation level, ie a real terms pay cut. Of course, the fuel costs for the boss' helicopter have risen a bit, so that's all good then!

He ain't heavy, he's my brother: Bloke gives away SpaceX ticket because he was over weight limit

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Lose weight without diet or exercise ..... simples !!!

"To follow David Lettermans advice that leaves something like Dysentery !!!"

Or decent bout of 'flu. Or anything else that lays you up in bed for a week with little appetite.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I have the answer!

You'd be better off having a decent breakfast and the light lunch, skipping dinner. Or skip the lunch and have the dinner. Depends on how later dinner is.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 149.6kg?

Do you own a wheel barrow and have your own section in Viz?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: At Gene Cash, re: excersize.

The fact you didn't mention that no animals were harmed in the creation of your post is rather telling...you murdering bastard!! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Let me fix that.

Not to mention "carrier pilot Hippchen"

At his weight, is the flying military craft from aircraft carriers or is flying civilian cargo planes for FedEx or someone?

Shazam! Two world-record lightning events recognised

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 17 seconds ?

"What boggles my mind is the amount of energy it took, in both cases!"

Nature has a habit of doing things we barely believe are possible and can't reproduce, and dissipate incredible amounts of energy. Being able to monitor from space has taught us that we know even less than we thought, as we slowly discover that "once in a lifetime" events are actually relative common. So-called "rogue waves", for instance, are far more common than we could have imagined just a few years ago. In fact, not many years ago, they were only myth and legend!

Nature is awesome! (And I use "awesome" in it's proper sense, not just as a synonym for "good")

BlackBerry offloads its 'legacy' patents – some of the stuff that made its phones hum

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: BlackBerry only 1999 - present

"my pips disappeared"

Did they squeak?

New York Times outlays seven-figure sum for 1,900 lines of JavaScript – yes, we mean Wordle

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

Re: What have they actually bought?

"Do you go up to people reading Agatha Christie on the tube and tell them who did it?"

Why yes, yes I do. Why do you ask?

PS, it was the butler.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Fair play to him

Absolutely, good on 'im!

But I did wonder why maintaining this game was taking up so much of his time. Surely all it takes a few minutes to automate picking a random word once every 24 hours and then forget about it :-)

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