Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Waterfox Classic is from FF56, trouble with more websites

"Some even tell you that you need to upgrade immediately to Chrome or Edge."

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

"This website works best in Internet Explorer 6!{*}"

[*] And of course, the "works best in..." long pre-dates IE6, but that was the one that most went off on it's own propriety track and tried to take over the standards.

Re: Many companies are doing this

"We've spent almost all of 2021 hoping the carrot approach would work. Now it's time for the stick."

This. That is all.

"And that kind of exec order from Washington D.C. is NOT CONSTITUTIONAL anyway."

I don't recall you having the same level of antagonism towards the many, many executive orders from Donald J Trump, many of which were overturned as being "NOT CONSTITUTIONAL anyway"

Re: Get rid of the religious exemption.

"How many of the unvaxed already had and recovered from Covid19? This illness has now been with us for two years. I can’t believe that anyone still haven’t gotten in contact with the viruses."

Because of my job, I've had relatively frequent tests and never tested positive so far. I got my first jab relatively early on and have recently had the boost jab too and take all the sensible precautions, ie mask indoors, hand washing, cleaning my work area and equipment etc. I would imagine that there is probably quite a few more like me out there.

Re: Get rid of the religious exemption.

Yeahbutt!!!, what about all the unvaccinated not protesting, but simply going about their ordinary, unmasked, lives, passing through all the usual places such as stores, offices etc. and acting like it's all over?

Re: Get rid of the religious exemption.

I sympathise, with you but you are missing out on all the asymptomatic carriers and the vaccinated who may show no or very slight signs of COVID-19 symptoms. Looking at the current UK infection rates, thankfully starting to fall again, there's still something like 30,000+ daily reported new infections, from a recent high of over 50,000 on one day. Hospital cases are up, but not scarily so, as are deaths, but neither anywhere near last years numbers. Clearly a lot of people are catching it, but nowhere near as many are suffering from it.

Re: Get rid of the religious exemption.

I suspect that if you look into it, it's no longer made from natural extracts of tree bark, beans or any of the other natural sources of the key ingredient. Aspirin is a fully synthesised drug that has been through all the testing regimes you'd expect.

Re: Buy the jeans and get a free phone - there's a huge flaw

And, with only 450 pairs of these jeans being made, surely people will need more than one pair? Otherwise they may have to resort to putting their Galaxy phone into a non-approved pocket which may void the warranty.

Re: Ten billion images in its databases

"I would assume that any "image X is heavily associated with Profile Y" to allow further investigation rather than putting a name to a face ..."

For a company Calling itself Clearview AI, that's a pretty hefty and forgiving assumption. I suspect the only manual checking that might be going on is by their law enforcement customers when they get the AI generated results back. Manual checking of the AI results means paying humans to the job they claim the AI can do on it's own.

Re: Copyright violation?

No, but considering the countries that find ClearView is operating in breach of law and ClearViews answer is to simply pull out of that country and block their IP addresses and almost certainly are not deleting the relevant data, maybe it's time to find them in contempt or some such and either put out an international arrest warrant or, at least, make all the corporate officers "persons of interest" such that they will be arrested if they set foot in said countries. At the very least, that could screw up their travel plans.

Re: Just an opinion

"...build their r&d and product base, increase self reliance..."

This has been their long term goal for a couple of decades at least. The US sanctions have simply accelerated the plan. The Chinese have always worked with a long term view. They don't work to a short term, 4 year plan based on election cycles and popularity.

Re: And as El Reg helpfully pointed out in TFA ...

No, but I did now! Classic El Reg!

I'm at about 53 degrees North, and in the middle of summer, it never quite gets properly dark. On a clear night, there's still a faint glow in the sky to the North. That means dawn is really, really early. Far too early for me :-)

Time zones are a mathematical formula, but national boundaries, and hence the implementation of time zones and their regular changes is a political creation.

Re: I hate DST.

That would be because of geography, not to be contrary. The UK is more or less always an hour out of step with Europe. Portugal is on the same timezone as the UK, Spain probably should be, France could go either way. Some of the most eastern countries are on GMT+2 and other eastern EU countries really ought to be on GMT+2 but are on GMT+1 like the majority of the EU. The EU is spread over 3 time zones but only the most extreme edges have chosen not to "harmonise" with the rest of the EU (rightly so IMO, others should join them)

Re: At AndrueC, re: atomic clocks.

"I would love to get one, unfortunately it also needs to say the time aloud so I can know it at all. Being blind means I can't just glance over & determine the time, I need to physicly interact with the clock to trigger an audio version."

When my grans eyes got so bad she couldn't tell the time from the clock, my dad took the glass off the front so she could feel the pointers. This was the pre-digital age so the only other option would be to dial the speaking clock, except she didn't have a phone and that would have been a waste of money from her point of view.

Re: Meanwhile, in the real world

We are an IT company. Some of the marketing monkeys and sales savants seem to have no clue or appreciation of what IT's job is and are always whinging about IT policies or the occasional failures. I can only imagine how much worse and more widespread those attitudes must be in a non-IT businesses.

Re: Keep the scale of things in mind

"Most places will have literal tons of water in the air these devices are extracting liters and kilos from."

Yes, those of us in wetter climes generally can't even conceive of the "weight" of the fluffy clouds floating over our heads.

"They may look light and fluffy, but those big white things floating overhead are pretty hefty. A typical cloud has a volume of around 1km3 and a density of around 1.003kg per m3 – about 0.4 per cent lower than that of the surrounding air, which is why they float. So cranking through the maths, that means that a typical cloud weighs around a million tonnes."

Yeah, i've seen very clever people get confused about what 2m^2 is. Is it a square, 2m on a side or a square of 1.414m per side?

The article is talking about "safe drinking water". If you are living in an area with limited safe drinking water, you don't use that for anything other than drinking or cooking. You use the "not safe to drink" water for everything else. If you don't even have a source of "not safe to drink" water, then the problems are different.

If it wasn't for the HGV driver shortage, I would have suggested we send wagon loads of dehydrated water concentrate to the relevant locations. On arrival, just add...

Re: It was all a hoax

"However, the graveyards are full of humans lost due to the Covid pandemic. That'll be rather harder to debunk."

There are still Holocaust Deniers who don't believe the mass graves evidence.

Then there's the Moon Landing hoax proponents, Flat Earthers..and on and on and on.

Re: A bit OT but..

You're probably lucky you didn't get an invoice for their time speaking to you :-)

Re: Only free if your time is worth nothing

All the UK hotels I've stayed in have free WiFi, sometimes with a freely given password, sometimes completely open, sometimes there's a "charge" of having to register an email address through a portal page. The only times I've had issues have been in US owned chain hotels in the UK where either you only get WiFi if you pay, or they give a slight nod to "free" WiFi which provides little more than dial-up speeds as an alternative to the paid for one.

On the other hand, according to some hotel receptionists I've spoken too, the WiFi can get congested some evenings because of people rocking up with firesticks/chromesticks/whatever to plug into the telly of an evening. The last one I was in, just last week, said they had a 5Mb/s restriction per connection (they had a big fibre connection). She actually apologised for the restriction!! I know many people who still can't get that at home :-)

Re: My Fav

Depends on the domain. I've used micky@disney.com many times.

Re: "What the neighbours made of their sudden disconnection is . ."

"They might not have even noticed they were using the neighbour's connection. They switched on their gadget and the internet was available."

I actually had that happen. I was setting up a new WiFi system for a student house. Once the AP was set up, as a favour I offered set up their devices for them since WiFi was still fairly new and not many knew how to do that. Anyway, got about 8 devices all done, down to the last one and she says, "oh, mines already working. It's been working since I moved in." Erm, you didn't have WiFi till I plugged in the new WiFi router. Had a look, and her Apple device had automatically found anything within range and connected, ie in this case the next door student house which had a wide open network, no password.

You know the Flash isn't real, right? It's just Sheldon Cooper in a fake outfit.

I'm too meta for my shirt!

Signed: Fred. Right?

Only people in the IT industry know that Alphabet = Google. They rest of the world neither knows nor cares.

Even most tech journalist writing for the less technical or more general audience, will always state something like "Alphabet, the parent company of Google" because they know their readers won't know who Alphabet are. And by the time most readers have got the thought "Alpha-who?" across their brain, they then see the next bit of the sentence and their brain immediately replaces all future occurrences in the article of Alphabet with Google.