* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Half Life 3

Ooo-eerrrr. Better watch that one alone, definitely not with friends and/or family!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Flight Simulator has never been the same since they moved from the TRS-80 and sold it to MS! The original took proper imagination to work out where you were, none of that fancy "photo realism" stuff.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Unity

"I would actually be intrigued by Windows as a desktop environment atop Linux. So - alas - it has zero chance of happening."

Been done. $search for Lindows.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Profit on rockets

Yeah, no grass for the goats to eat :-)

Data-destroying defect found after OpenZFS 2.2.0 release

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: ZFS in FreeBSD

Correct, but I was speaking to Linux people, so put it words they would understand :-)

(That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: ZFS here we go again

"I'll prefer to partake on the in-tree FSes"

Using FreeBSD, ZFS is "in-tree", ie it's part of the kernel. Linux doesn't have it there due to licencing, but I think that may be changing in some now.

X/Twitter booted out of Australia's disinformation-fighting club

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: False premise

Clearly not. He'd have fallen out of a high level window by now if he was!

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Take responsibility

"And yet software companies keep pushing this cloud nonsense."

What they are pushing is the notion that data in "the cloud" is safe because it's distributed and duplicated so you will never lose anything, even if a data centre burns down. What they don't make a headline "selling point" is that free accounts definitely don't get that safety net and paying customers need to pay a LOT more for that resilience and that it might not actually work anyway.

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Likewise for us techies, working on a bunch of identical laptops. Never be tempted to place the one you are working on on top of another closed one!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Unimportant Important People

Yeah, true. That's probably because the it's not a catastrophe even if it does happen, if you are properly prepared. Worst case, it's a disaster, best case, a minor inconvenience, but not a catastrophe :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: every other

"Many other" might be correct, I suppose, but given the extraordinary variety of editors and other programs out there it might be hard to be sure. It seems that in your usage, one thing is dominant, but on mine the other is."

In my (early) world, CTRL-W is scroll up one line. Likewise, other cursor control keys were up^/E, down/^X left/^S and right/^D because not all computer or terminal keyboards had arrow keys on them. This layout was pretty common across a lot of programs back in the day, especially in CP/M world. Many of the more common WordStar and SuperCalc keyboard commands are still ingrained in my "cold storage" memory :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Can't stand IT

"Well if you just delete them, why are you complaining they're not there ?"

In defense, I also delete "most" emails I get on one particular business account. It's not unusual to be scrolling through and deleting the crap that I then sometimes have an "oh shit" moment and have to go into the deleted emails folder and restore that last one back to the inbox. Her problem is how she was deleting them, not that she was deleting them unread, or possibly the email system didn't work like most modern email systems and all deletes were "hard" deletes.

USB Cart of Death: The wheeled scourge that drove Windows devs to despair

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Atari 800

Not to mention that USB is, sort of, a backward step in that you can't daisy chain devices. You need enough sockets to plug all your devices in or have to add hubs making a star configuration instead of a serial chain :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Atari 800

"The USB standard emerged in 1996 as a way of powering and connecting devices on a single bus."

A bit like the Atari 800 did all those years ago. Serial connector on the back and everything daisy chained along the serial bus.

And, IIRC, the guy who designed that went on to be on the USB standards committee or helped design it or something (not sure now, I read that quite some years ago)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Finally!

I've not noticed that being an issue on FreeBSD. What i DO find disturbing is that Windows seems to have to not only re-enumarte a device but re-load the drivers if you unplug a USB device and then plug it back in to another USB port and it takes a noticeable amount of time to do that. If I switch my mouse or keyboard into another port on FreeBSD, it just works, instantly.

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: The New and Improved "Bovine Adjustment Implement"

Ah Mr BofH, you know more than is good for you!

Bolfeld-like villain -------------------->

Europe's Ariane 6 rocket rated 'ready to rumble' after passing hot fire test

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Was my "pun" really that bad or did the downvoters not know how to pronounce "8" in French? :-)

Maybe if we get Huit more downvotes, they'll be Dix?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

And Ariane 8 will be toast? Or maybe eaten for breakfast by SpaceX?

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

There have been odd times when my keyboard ended up inverted in some sort of shift-lock mode, acting as if the shift key was always pressed and pressing it acted like you'd stopped pressing it. Very weird and disconcerting. It's happened only a few times over the years, far enough apart to be different keyboards on different computers and almost certainly different OS's or at least OS version. Usually because I hit the keyboard in frustration, pressing many keys at once. I can only assume it's either something in, or at least used to be in, the keyboards internal controller chip, or the keyboard simply taking revenge on me for mashing the keys!

Because it was rare and "accidental", I never did find out what made it do that and hence never found out how to reverse it other than to unplug the keyboard and plug it back in, hence my reasoning it was a function of the keyboard controller that was never documented, or at least not widely known about.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I have also witnessed plenty who can't seem to work out how to push a BIG green button to exit the building"

In some cases, it may be because they've not seen them before. Or worked recently in a company/building that used something other than Big Green Button releases. Was in one this week that had a brushed stainless steel plate the size of a standard light switch with a small, approx 10mm diameter brushed stainless steel button in the middle. Probably difficult to see the button for anyone with vision problems. I've seen others that look like light switches but are rocker switch and is a momentary contact that springs back...next to actual light switches as well as those light switch type next to other non-standard switches that most would assume to be door access rather than the one looking like a light switch.

Big Green Button exit switches may be fairly common, but are far from standard, ubiquitous or even recognisable by people who don't work in buildings that use any kind of press-to-exit systems.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Click, click, click, nothing happens

"I've done that to myself on my phone also : take a screenshot inadvertently, then try to use the phone which doesn't do anything."

Out of curiosity, which phone/OS/App was that? Whenever I need to take a phone screen shot, I press the relevant buttons and the image is saved to Photos (or wherever, it shows as an Album in Gallery for me). It's never been automatically displayed with no hint it's an image, such as not having a translucent menu along the bottom included icons for share, delete etc.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I hear they made a thanksgiving dinner that can't be beat."

If you need to beat your Thanksgiving dinner, the turkey is a tad undercooked :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Been there, Done That. will do that again...

"The Linux thing of moving focus with the mouse pointer is even worse, but at least you can turn it off."

As a *BSD user, I love that it works like that and get frustrated using Windows and having to remember to actually CLICK on a window to give it focus. At which point I suddenly realise that click DOES SOMETHING and isn't just sucked up by the system as an "activate this window" click, but fully passed to the underlying window so I have to sometimes be very, very careful where I click to activate so as not to trigger some unwanted action.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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...and when you pause to actually think about it, computers have been more than powerful enough to do that for years now and it's a pretty obvious feature to add. So obvious it probably took a genius to actually think of it, while the rest us slapped or foreheads, said "Do'h, that is SO obvious, why didn't I think that!"

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Similar here. The first mouse I used was the AMX mouse on a BBC micro. The cable came out the side near the front end. I was working in a teaching environment at the time and pretty much saw all possible "wrong" attempts to use a mouse since no one had ever seen or used one before. Although I don;t recall anyone "doing a Scotty" and picking the mouse up and using it a microphone, since speech recognition was also pretty much unheard of by then :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

ISTR the early laptops had the logo the "right" way up, but once product placement deals were happening, the logos all got turned upside down so the TV/film audience could see the logo the right way up. At least that's how I heard it. I've also heard that Apple were the first to do because they wanted people using their laptops in public places, coffee shops etc and the logo being the "right" way up on an opened laptop advertised the brands to all and sundry passers-by :-)

Whatever the original reason for the switch, clearly it's now used as brand advertising to everyone who is not the actual user. After all, the user already bought the brand, no need to advertise to them :-)

India's space gatekeepers pick Eutelsat OneWeb to provide satellite broadband

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Trollface

Wait...What?

I thought OneWeb was the Great Post-Brexit Hope for a British GPS?

Bezos might beat Musk to Mars as NASA recruits Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: Back to square 1. Do not pass Go. Do not collect ...

I'd have said Triggers Broom, but clearly you are more edjumated than what I am :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Back to square 1. Do not pass Go. Do not collect ...

Depends how you calculate it :-)

The core stage and tankage etc is all still there, but possibly modified for the new engines, so yeah, a bit like an old car or plane restoration that only has maybe 10-15% original, everything else is new :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Nothing much to be missed if lost.

The article mentions test flights before that launch, which seem to imply that the Mars sat launch won't be it's first launch, just its first active delivery mission.

Long-term space missions may make liftoff harder for male astronauts

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

So....

...basically getting up in a ricket might stop you getting up again?

Maybe we should be recruiting more older Astronauts then :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Have humans ever journeyed into and beyond the Van Allen belt ?"

Seriously? You think that? You need to get out more! FFS!

How to give Windows Hello the finger and login as someone on their stolen laptop

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

a facepalm moment?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hardware or software

Exactly. As many have said, biometrics are a username, NOT a password.

Half a kilo of cosmic nuclear fuel reignites NASA's deep space dreams

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: significantly lower power degradation over time

"Hopefully in the last 47 years, we've made some progress in power conversion efficiency that can be applied to future devices."

We do, but the temptation with better power sources is to use more of it. See the improvement in laptop batteries and power management, the end result being not a laptop that run for two or three days, but smaller, thinner laptops with the same battery life :-)

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Forcing people to turn off ad blocking won't have the effect that Google wants

"In the end, everyone will end up losing, including Google themselves."

Sadly, in realty, what will happen is the vast majority will accept the situation and the few of us who actually care will have to either switch off and tune out or join the crowd and put up with it :-(

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: That Melania moment

"interrupting videos every 3-5 minutes."

That seems to be "The American Way". I was watching a YT video of Adam Savage the other day talking about his time on Mythbusters and was shocked to hear him describe it as a "6 act show", ie 5 ad breaks in what is supposedly an hour long show. I'd only ever seen it on UK TV, with 3 ad breaks in the show. It's no wonder streaming services took off so rapidly and meteorically in the US is they are forced to watch ads on broadcast TV every 5-7 minutes during a show. YT are just copying that modal and making it even worse. Surely the people at YT who are doing this must remember growing up watching TV with far too many ad breaks and being frustrated by them! And yet they are inflicting the same on their audience, on steroids!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I wonder how many advertisers and their families use ad-blockers? Or do they enjoy watching adverts inserted into a stream, often mid-sentence and accept it as normal?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Firefox and YouTube shenanigans

Maybe someone could offer to "drain the swamp"?

X's legal eagles swoop on Media Matters over antisemitic content row

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Venue Change

Either way, it still doesn't make sense to me.

"file its lawsuit in Texas's 5th District court, as opposed to the 9th District where X is headquartered,"

Shirley they should be filing this where either they or Media Matters are headquartered, not "shopping around" for the most sympathetic jurisdiction.

FAA stays grounded in reality as SpaceX preps for takeoff

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A little slanted?

"When you think how many Falcons they blew up in their early days, they actually seem to be on a pretty good trajectory with this latest toy."

And, of course, not forgetting the number of early Starship "hops" that ended in RUDs too, but to be fair, this is effectively two separate rockets, each with the own foibles and problems doing things that have either not been done before or not been done on this huge size of vehicle and then combining them and their "unknowns" into one big launch stack :-)

I wasn't surprised the first launch ended in explody bits, but was surprised at the amount of damage to the launch pad and tower. I wasn't *too* surprised at the second lauch booster explosion and was really getting hopeful for Starhip as it just seemed to keep going up and was sadly dissapointed but hugely surprised that it too didn't fully succeed.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. SpaceX seem to operated a little like Kickstarter projects. There's a goad you want and need to reach, and then there's "stretch goals" that would be nice to reach. On the whole, SpaceX do generally seem to meet their main goals and sometimes reach some of the stretch goals. If nothing else, it's a lot more existing than spending 10 years, going massively over budget and massively of target date for a "first time success" :-) And as someone else suggested, a first time success could mean it's over engineered and over weight as well as over budget!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Let's wait until the wildlife and fisheries people have checked out the results of the water deluge and any possible debris scatter! It may be minimal effects, but how long will it take them to confirm that and raise the thumb? :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

LOL, I should have read on a bit further before posting my reply. I said almost the same thing :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

On a similar note, the booster engines shut down in stages, probably to reduce the levels of deceleration "pushing" the fuel upwards, potentially either cause pressure issues or hydraulic shock, and so was a mitigation. But I wonder if the thrust from the Starship engines doing a hot staging "pushed" back on the booster, causing an increase in deceleration rate and resulting in fuel pushing "upwards" and/or hydraulic shock" to levels more than expected? Whatever caused the problem, it does seem to have been an issue with fuel feeds to the engines as they seemed to go out in a cascade very quickly after re-light.

CompSci teachers panic as Replit pulls the plug on educational IDE

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

From the article, it's only been available since Jan 2022, so most teachers have been using it for 12-18 months, the early adopters being the few at the 18 month end of the curve and after education had been pretty much back to "normal" for a while. So for most teachers, only one school year. It should not be hard to go back to how the worked in the previous school year. In the case of UK schools, I doubt they switched to this before the start of a new school year, so most likely used it from Sept'22 to July'23. That means they are into their 2nd year of using it now, so the short notice cut-off is a bit of a bastard, and the current years course is based on it, but it really should not be THAT hard to go back to their older lesson plans. Likewise, anything that is free is going to be limited in some way, never depend on "free forever" because it never, ever is.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ah we want it for free

Sometimes it can be hard to tell with the Americanisation of El Reg, as in the US, "school" can be almost any form of learning environment from compulsory age schooling through to college and university. Back in the dark ages, when I was young and there was much less US TV and films available in the UK, hearing a US university student talk about being "in school" or "going to school" was very confusing until I started to understand that US English was similar to but not entirely unlike English :-)

Boffins claim invention of rechargable, biodegradable, supercapacitor drug pump

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Waiting to see this in my next cell phone....

I suspect that may be an Impossible Mission.

MOVEit victim count latest: 2.6K+ orgs hit, 77M+ people's data stolen

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What is this MOVEit?

An excellent question. It's not a service I can get my head around. What is the business case for companies transferring data around, especially between parts of their own spread out organisation, that a middle-man can do it better or cheaper? A middle-man for the actual fibres and wires inbetween, but why would anyone need a middle-man to actually send the data for them?

I'm sure there are people here who will have good reasons for why MoveIt exists and people use their services, so please, do share that info because I'm stumped!

Microsoft dials back Bing after users manage to recreate Disney logo in fake AI-generated images

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"There's no way that thing generated that image statistically without that original image being in the training set, and hitting a lot of statistics for keywords like Afghan and girl together."

Yeah, that's what I said, but you put it a bit more succinctly :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Exactly. Average and averaged are not the same thing :-)

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