* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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New GNOME Human Interface Guidelines now official – and obviously some people hate it

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Bug: "deactivate laser" and "destroy planet" buttons adjacent | WONTFIX

"now if you want to do *anything* in the app, your cursor is going dangerously near the close button every time!"

...and to help minimise the number of clicks users must perform in order to reduce the risk of RSI, confirmation dialogue boxes have been removed.

Woman sues McDonald's for $14 after cheeseburger ad did exactly what it's designed to

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I see

"It's more like you may have two separate football (American or otherwise) teams with separate traditions. They're hugely important to their teams, but they're not actually a part of the rules of the game."

Hence the origins of Rugby Football. And the Holy Schism that is League and Union. (I'm not even going to get into the heretical "American" Football.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I thought Toby passed away years ago. Is he still around?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: If you find a McD cheeseburger irresistible

And yet...millions of people around the world do find McD irresistible. I guess that says more about humanity than McDs. Remember the queues when they reopened after lockdown? Clearly very few people tried making their own burgers or were so crap at it, they went straight back to McDs at the first opportunity. (Or maybe they bought cheap, even shittier burgers from the local freezer shop.)

Wireless powersats promise clean, permanent, abundant energy. Sound familiar?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: Tesla scams.

Did you explain to him that, in effect, EVs DO have alternators in the wheels? ie regenerative braking. It's a shame they can't physically be made to be better than 100% efficient. Ye canna break the laws of physics!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Lets do the maths

You mean like wind and rain? (Rain for hydro, shame most of the UK isn't suitable for much hydro (unless we do some major blasting and digging in National Parks.)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Lets do the maths

"Can you launch and install a payload like that with $3500? No, it wouldn't even pay for a tiny part of the fuel used to launch it."

While I fully agree with your point, it's worth noting that the latest solar panels going into space are roll out ones on telescopic arms. There's also "paint on" solar panels although I'm not sure if they are viable at scale yet nor whether they have any hope of working in space. Also, I've no idea of the power to weight ratio of these other technologies. Either way, I doubt they are going to be economical for beam transmission any time soon.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Is there a need for beam transmission in those circumstance though? Probably easier to just have the panels where you need them.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

You are me and ICM£5

(Except it was the school librarian)

I found a few as ebooks on Usenet, but not the whole set. I've seen the odd dog eared one on ebay/Amazon over the years, but silly money.

Flushing roulette: Southern Water installing digital sewer monitors to prevent blockages

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: overflowing manholes

Does that mean Ms Panman is an oxymoron?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: overflowing manholes

OMG!!!1!1!ONE!!1

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It's 1984 - but with toilets

Yeah, well, we were both right. And don't forget the Dishwashers too!

I wonder who downvoted and why?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: poor residents of Hampshire

Possibly the reasons they don't get the extra help is because they have so many wealthy residents paying larger amount of council tax and maybe it's the local authorities spending money where the wealthy "squeaky wheels" with expensive legal advisors or "forcing" them to spend.

I've personally seen examples locally of people complaining to the Council about services or maintenance and nothing being done, while in neighbouring more wealthy areas, people who more closely understand "the system", have "contacts" or have the correct legal knowledge, can make complaints and get much more immediate action from the Council. You can see the evidence from the minutes of Council meetings if you care enough to access them. People should not have to go out and learn and use specific legal phrases or play golf with the right people just to get the services they are legally entitled to. I should be able to phone the council to complain about multiple pot holes in the street and get them fixed just as or more easily than SIr Ponsonby-Smythe can get his single, tiny little pot-hole fixed next day by quoting the relevant Statutes and By-Laws.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

And I love the way these companies talk about "historic" offences as if it was so long ago that the people who did it have moved on or died. No Mr Southern Water spokesman. "Historic" is not the word to use for fines just levied for offences that took place only 10 or fewer years ago. The only reason you are being fined NOW for those "historic" offences is because it not only took a long while to collect and analyse the data for such a huge dump, but I have no doubt whatsoever that YOU, Southern Water, did everything in your legal power to delay the case as much as possible. Now we just have to wait another few years to see what fines you get for "less historic" dumping offences you possible did since 2015 because I doubt you changed your ways until you were actually convicted because we all know you will have denied everything up to and possibly since being convicted and changing your before before then might be seen as an admission of that now proven guilt.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It's 1984 - but with toilets

I think it was the flow limiters in showers that Trump was whinging about.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It's 1984 - but with toilets

"Actually very difficult unless they put a monitor on every single drain and sewer length. All the monitors will show is a possible issue in an area based on predicted flow rates and measured flow rates, taking into account other factors such as weather conditions."

You need to take into account feature creep and data fetishists. As water meters are introduced to more and more properties, how much more or less expensive will it be to also place a monitor on the household waste outlet too? Once the proposed network of monitors is in place, the management team in charge will be vastly reduced to a maintenance team. And we all know middle and senior managers are very protective of their fiefdoms. Expansion of the monitoring network is pretty much a given once the powerpoint presentations have been created to demonstrate the business case for ever more micromanagement and the ability to introduce "Pay per Poo" to the customers.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: overflowing manholes

It could be a musical skill. Some arseholes can play tunes :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: overflowing manholes

Agreed, a good definition of which I also was unaware of. But can we rely on the PC brigade and their campaigners being edumacated enough to either know that or admit they are wrong when it's explained to them?

SpaceX Starship struts its stack to show it has the right stuff

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

So, is the above scandal or the extension of his rocket the true definition of ElonGate?

(Thanks to BBC Radio 4's ISIHAC, recently)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "100 people at once or 100 tons of cargo"

Would more struts not help?

Q: Post-lockdown, where would I like to go? A: As far away from my own head as possible

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I know where I want to go...

Maybe you need some Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Mushroom

NFT cakes?

If only I could my wife to limit herself to NFT cakes, there'd be a lot less whining about diets :-)

(no, she doesn't read El Reg, I'm safe!)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Lockdown Wellbeing

And pretty much the rest of the world! Anti-vaxxer nut-jobbiness is not limited to the "Western world"

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Cordon Bennet ...

"but not many can paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel."

Easy peasy. Would you like white or magnolia?

The white one with paint splashes ------------------>

Foxconn buys chip factory off Macronix in bid to break into the electric vehicle market

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Cheap as chips

Depends on the fab process and what it builds. Here on El Reg we tend to see all the latest and greatest as CPUs and GPUs increase in density and processing power. Probably the vast majority of the silicon chip market is not based on either of those parameters and "old" fab plants based on older tech can still produce the ancillary chips for everything else. The article refers to the EV market and I'd guess that most of the chips in an EV don't need very low nanometre processes.

Your Computer Is On Fire, but it will take much more than this book to put it out

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: THE continuing "Big Lie"

"keep the great unwashed (us) off-balance, and, of course, digging deeper into our wallets"

You seem to be implying (or maybe you aren't) that it's some sort of organised conspiracy by "big industry". The reality IMHO is simply MBA-types and Marketroids trying to come up with the "next big thing" to demonstrate how their identical product is "better" than the competitors identical product.

The canonical example being soap powder that "washes whiter then white", or "blue white", or "whitest ever" while the product itself barely changes.

Apple is about to start scanning iPhone users' devices for banned content, professor warns

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Or hope that those at Apple responsible for this get beaten with the Cluestick."

I wonder if Apple Legal are aware that Apple have the ability to scan data on a users phone? I'm sure various law enforcement agencies who spent large sums of money having suspects phones "cracked" because Apple said it was not possible for them to do it, will all be mighty pleased to hear the news.

Full Stream ahead: Microsoft will end 'classic' method of recording Teams meetings despite transcription concerns

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 273 years ... That's a strangely specific number.

Remember when we first learned programming? You were usually taught to end you list of DATA statements with an "out of range" number, something that would never be in the actual data. 9's were almost always used, so maybe they used 99999 to mark the end of the meta-data. Or they are planning for five nines uptime.

Paperless office? 2.8 trillion pages printed in 2020, down by 14% or 450 billion sheets

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"The paper went, people thought it worked better, now people don't give it a second thought. We could have done that at any time.

Same as working from home."

Inertia is a powerful force. It can take a powerful $something to overcome it. The real test of what has changed will be how much change has still stuck next year or maybe the year after and how much returns to the same old, same old.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Paper per se isn't so much of a problem(...)"

"For as short as a time as I needed to be within the blast radius and still get my job done."

I know a fine dust/air mixture and be very explosive, paper mills, grain silos, custard powder factories etc, but of the 100,000s of those places around the world, how often do they actually explode? And what's the odds of it happening while you are there? We used to have a paper mill on our customer list, went there many times, well aware of the explosion risk (H&S induction on first visit and signs everywhere), but then never really thought about it after the initial lecture, other than following the rules regarding flammable items and anything that can generate sparks in certain limited areas. Ditto for nuclear plants and chemical factories. Been to many of those. Well, only one actual nuclear power plant. On the other hand, I've been to Hartlepool many times and they have a nuclear power station a short distance from the town centre.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A3 devices

I rescued my old Epson the other week by wadding up wet tissues thick enough to slide under the head to dissolve and wick out the dried up ink. Since I only had the one to experiment with and didn't want to damage it, I repeated this about 10 times over a couple of days. It now works almost as good as new with a cheap set of refilled tanks. Now I need to consider if I have enough use for it to buy some bottles of ink to re-fit and refill the CIF tanks.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Need to print

"Our main use of office printer seems to be expense claims."

Is this a solicitors/lawyers office? I've been emailing mine in, with photos/scans of receipts for at least the last 15 years, probably more like 20 years.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Need to print

For clarity, a lot of office printers are pay per page including toner, staples where applicable and repairs. The customer only provides the paper and pays the monthly fees, which, IIRC, is a minimum rental fee ie they always pay for the first 50000 pages then it goes up per page from there. The ones we lease email us if there's a problem and auto-order consumables a couple of days before they will be needed which are shipped direct to the printer location, not just the company/org goods inwards

(I'm not directly involved in that side of our business, tany figures quoted are for illustrative and entertainment purposes only :-))

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Tape

I've still got SF books I bought at as a young teen which I still read. Even the ones I bought new are nearly 50 years old. Many were 10, 20 or more years older when I bought them and I still re-read them now and then. Most were paperback, so not exactly high quality paper and they've lived in bookcases, not humidity controlled environments. A very small number are "delicate" in that the spine binding glue has given out, but the paper, despite some yellowing, is fine, even after being in my school blazer pocket sometimes for days at a time. Many are a bit ratty looking and worn, but they were second hand and looked like that when I bought them :-)

8 years ago another billionaire ploughed millions into space to harvest solar power and beam it back down to Earth

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

...muttering something about cleaning up and fumigating after another of Mister Listers breakfast curry specials, eh?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hmm

On the other hand, many houses are empty during the day when solar energy collection is at it's highest. Unless you have your own local storage, it's being "wasted" if you don't or can't feed it into the grid either for use elsewhere or storage for later.

Ch-ch-ch-Chia! HDD sales soar to record levels as latest crypto craze sweeps Europe

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Chia

So, how does this "proof of space" actually work anyway? Are the "miners" offering up their space for other to use or something? Or is it simply that the more free space you have on your disks the more you can earn just by it simply existing? Is this the monetising of "nothingness?" I know people with large amounts of space between their ears. Is that worth anything?

84-year-old fined €250,000 for keeping Nazi war machines – including tank – in basement

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: If he had just kept the tank

"Being an expert in WW2 German military hardware - i.e. I once saw an episode of Combat Dealers - I'd have thought a working Panther tank would be worth a fortune."

Well, the article does say he spent DM500,000[1] restoring it and ""He was chugging around in that thing during the snow catastrophe in 1978" , so I'd expect it to be worth something in that region as a starting point

[1] rough guess, about £125,000 back then. ISTR 1DM being about 26p when I was in Germany around about that time.

Tesla battery fire finally flamed out after four-day conflagration

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Red Adair might or might not agree with you

What you use to create the explosion isn't relevant so long as you get the desired result :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: Red Adair

"hasn't been agreeing or disagreeing with anyone for well over a decade."

Is your Ouija board broken?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Liquid nitrogen

"Not an expert in any way on the matter, but it seems to me that dropping a super-cooled liquid on a raging fire is an absolute guarantee of explosive results that might not correspond to the definition of "putting out the fire".

Red Adair might or might not agree with you/ :-)

Amazon sets the date for televised return to Middle Earth: September 2022

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Production subsidies ?!?

It's still peanuts in a government budget though.

According to the Grauniad, back in 2006, "a mile of new motorway has risen to £29.9m. Adding an extra lane to a motorway costs £10m a mile, and a mile of dual carriageway costs £16.2m."

Of course, all income from outside is good income, but we mere mortals don't generally deal with the sort of rarefied numbers that Government budgets and projects deal with. You need to study Neomathematics and require a practical understanding of the General and Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not more bloody battle scenes

Yeah, I'm kinda hoping it will have the "based on..." disclaimer. Use the world, and tell new stories, or at least add significantly to the existing stories. After all, it's an episodic TV series not a feature length film. They have the time to develop the characters slowly and properly.

On the other hand, it's a huge budget and they want massive ratings, so I'm expecting more explosions, car crashes and laser blasts than ever before!!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"There's going to be vampires in it, right?"

And zombies! Don't forget the zombies!

US govt calmly but firmly tells Blue Origin it already has a ride to the Moon's surface with SpaceX, thanks

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Fly me to Venus

I wonder if Google Alphabet are kicking themselves for not getting into the space race. Then again, if they had, they'd probably have made it to orbit then cancelled the beta test programme.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Fly me to the moon

Yeah, no heat, just go do it Jeff!

(Stay on the dark side if you don't want the heat; not forgetting to leave before it rotates into the sunny side.)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Go Fever

"I wonder if the mad rush to the first Starship orbital launch is for a "in your face" directed at Bezos' for his argument against SpaceX selection being that Starship is an unproven platform."

I doubt SpaceX were concerned over that barb. It's not as if New Glenn is a proven platform yet either.

I'm not sure I have much faith in Blue Origin anyway after getting this message from their home page "We're sorry but Blue Origin doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue."

Would you flying in anything "powered by JavaScript"?

Undebug my heart: Using Cisco's IOS to take down capitalism – accidentally

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Dead. Also the name of Deaths human apprentice in Mort, a Discworld novel by Terry Pratchette.

Tech spec experts seek allies to tear down ISO standards paywall

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

So, how much do YOU pay for your subscription ro El Reg?

I assume you never use an ad blocker either.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"People are just fool enough to buy into the scheme."

By "people", you mean governments too I hope, baring in mind that some ISO standards are legally mandated in many jurisdictions, so the businesses are forced to spend that money to access the standards.

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