* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

Page:

GhostBSD makes FreeBSD a little less frightening for the Linux loyal

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Devil

"If I could sort out games compatibility in BSD I would jump like a shot for the home PC."

There are guides out there to getting Steam running on FreeBSD, but they look like too much of a faff to me and I've not really been a gamer since Doom and Duke Nuke'em 3D days :-)

The Steam guides I've seen and the FreeBSD Forum posts on the topic rarely ever seem to be newbie friendly and make lots of assumptions about how much effort the user is prepared to put in and research just to be able to follow the guide.

I suspect that's because it's primarily developed as a server OS and the fact I can use it as my daily desktop is just happy happenstance :-)

There's enough working emulators to satisfy my occasional escapades in retro gaming like FS-UAE (Amiga), MAME, and of course ports of Doom and Duke :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

"Don't assume. When you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME."

Or, in this case, not "ME", ie "you", just "U", ie the poster :-)

I invariably find that aphorism to not work since the person doing the assuming is normally the only one actually shown to be an ass :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I haven't tried updating the Thinkpad BIOS because I've had bad luck with Lenovo's BIOS updater in the past, bricking one machine."

FYI, I've probably done that 1000's of times across a wide range of models and never had it brick a laptop. I think you were either really, really unlucky or there was some underlying fault neither the hardware or whatever OS you were running the updater on. Ditto with HPs and Dells.

In realty, as a field engineer of many years, it's always been company policy to flash the BIOS/firmware whenever a system board is being replaced under warranty, whether that be server[*], desktop, laptop, printer etc. (ditto for other firmware[**] on the system). I've had exactly one that has bricked in 20+ years and that was a building power outage during the update process.

[*] But always check, when it's a server. The users may have a requirement for a specific BIOS revision although that's pretty rare these days.

[**] eg, Intel ME and AMD equivalent, laptop webcams, NVMe SSDs, laptop batteries(!!) etc.

Woman jailed after RentaHitman.com assassin turned out to be – surprise – FBI

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A Rugar 308 handgun?

It does rather make one wonder why she wanted to hire a hitman she could only afford to pay for in bi-monthly instalments when she's already carrying a gun fully capable of doing the job. If she's carrying it for "protection", then she must feel she's prepared to kill. She's clearly smart enough to plan the "perfect murder" </sarc>

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I hate to say this, but it's sad that there are homo sapiens so f'in stupid

"Wow. it almost sounds like you actually believe that propaganda, despite voter fraud being exceedingly rare in the US. When they're pointing at something that's practically non-existent as a justification for quite notable changes, they clearly have another purpose in mind."

The UK Tory party clearly believe it too, hence the need for photo ID to cast your vote now and, likewise, very very little evidence of voter fraud and none of enough to swing a result. Although, so far, there seems to be little evidence of significant number of people being turned away and not returning with the required ID or a noticeable drop in turnout due to the new rules. Although time will tell, since turnout can be a fickle number to compare year on year.

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Dated Signage

Depends. Both on the type of lab it may be found in AND the sort of person who only ever rinses a mug before reusing it, the "absent minded professor" type. Either could be a cause for biohazards :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"That's why his arms got tired, combined with the {19") long wait weight."

FTFY since you missed a great opportunity for an added pun.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Plasma

I remember killing a multimeter, just one of the cheap no-name brand jobbies. Put it in voltage mode (500V) to test a live 240V IEC socket and the internal glass fuse blew so spectacularly that it deposited a fine metal "plating" over the orange plastic case inside :-)

Oddly, it was something I'd done many times before without issue, a quick'n'dirty, continuity, fuse and supply test before checking if the PSU was the faulty device on the dead PC <shrug>

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Notably the instructions in the test did _not _ include the helpful advice to set the multi-meter to voltage mode first."

Yes, instructions like that, for jobs like that, are usually written for people with experience to use as a crib sheet. Not a wet-behind-the-ears "work experience" student.

Although it was certainly an experience for you :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: That cat again...

To be fair, you're working from a broken premise anyway and your grant issuing authority ought not to be providing the funds for your research. The "not enough room to swing a cat" refers to the cat'o'nine tails used to lash recalcitrant sailors in the Royal Navy, not the soft furry variety.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The last time I heard a loud noise and things were restarting...

"The early Laserjets, right up until maybe ten years ago were built like tanks, and would run for years."

Then they bought Samsings printer division and stopped making "HP" printers.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: emacs for mail reading is wonderful!

"a package called 'vm'...in emacs"

vm in emacs? Sounds a bit too close to vim for many emacs users :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It just seems that way.

"Doctors and Lawyers I can understand, but when have Politicians ever been educated?"

These days, most of the politicians are ex-lawyers. Whiach raises some questions. The best lawyers can be very, very highly paid. So are these ex-lawyers realising that even politicians make more than lawyers or were they not good enough to be successful in law?

Musk's broadband satellite kingdom Starlink now cash flow positive – or so he claims

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Price not related to internal cost

"Buying a Falcon 9 launch costs about $70M because it would cost you more to buy from someone else - if they had a working rocket and would not just pinch your satellite. Popular guesses at the internal cost of a Falcon 9 launch are under $20M. Add in $5M ish for a fairing full of Starlinks and multiply by 60ish launches per year gets you to $1.5B - near enough Starlink revenue for a back-of-envelope calculation."

Thanks, I hadn't realised the launches were that cheap nowadays.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Are they foreggtin the technical debt?

Surely all those Falcon 9 launches must have cost a bit. I don't see how they could possibly be "cash positive" with all that historic debt still around the neck of Starlink. Or is this some "clever" financial trickery whereby the debt is loaded onto SpaceX instead of Starlike by providing "free" launch services?

Revamped Raspberry Pi OS boasts Wayland desktop and improved imager tool

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: They broke VNC

True, X is not a remote desktop. Once you get your head around what an X server and an X client is, you realise that you don't need a remote desktop at all, along with all it's overheads.

This is something the Wayland people don't seem to have managed. Previously, they said it would not be done as it was a pointless waste of effort and almost no one used remote GUI apps. Now, apparently, they seem to have spent some considerable amount of time and effort trying make something that looks a little like using SSH -X. I guess they finally got the message that this IS something people use and quite like. It's a shame it took them so long to listen to the real-world users.

Arm grabs a slice of Raspberry Pi to sweeten relationship with IoT devs

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Raspberry Pi Foundation has lost its way

"To consumers they are now reather expensive for what they are"

In effect, they are cheaper now due to inflation. They only appear more expensive if you want the latest model.

Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ £25

According to RaspberryPi, the 3B+ will remain in production until 2026, but which time the 4 and the new 5 will probably have dropped in price.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I remember when

"I'm not saying that you can't make a good educational tool out of a Raspberry Pi, but it's not there right from when you power it on."

You could provide them with a pre-imaged SD card that boot directly to an emulator, including a BBC emulator :-)

It's probably already been done.

Uber, Lyft to hand back $328M of stolen wages to NY drivers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

sick pay...of 56 hours per year.

"They will earn one hour of sick pay for every 30 hours on the job and can collect a maximum of 56 hours per year."

How...umm...very generous of them :-(

Lenovo’s phantom ThinkPad X1 foldable laptop finally materializes

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I have become a fan ...

Agreed. But it's still very early days in terms of folding screens. I'd say I'll wait 5-10 years, but I'll be retired by then, probably won't have the wherewithal to waste that amount of cash on a vanity laptop and have no use case for it any more :-)

After all, the early laptops were often barely even "laptops", requiring mains power to run (lets not go near the "luggables"), then crappy LCD screen emulating CGA or worse came along on some quite heavy, chunky laptops. Now we have wafer thin OLED screens that weigh next to nothing but don't like being folded at all. Early adopters will be all over these foldable screens, the rest of us will probably be able to afford them and find them useful and convenient eventually, as the tech moves on, production and reliability improves. Or maybe it'll be a dead end and we never get cheaply produced, reliable, flexible electronics.

Weird aside. Remember CRTs and the switch to flat screen LCD and the strange effect of flat screen appearing to bend inwards after spending time in front of the bulging CRT? I just had a weird throwback experience to that. I spent most of the day in front of a very wide curved display panel, then had to go into one of out mini conference rooms with a "traditional" flat screen and it looked like it was bowed in at the middle :-)

FAA is done with Starship's safety review, now it's over to the birds and turtles

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: No doubt in my mind

"but eventually it will work."

Oh yeah, I'm sure it will and, as you say, "explody episodes along the way", but has anyone noticed the numbers of the Starship and launcher? And the number already on the production line following the next to launch Ship 25 and booster 9? Ship 26 is already in engine test phase and others aren't far behind. That is some FAST development and pretty astounding compared to pretty much everyone else in the launch business.

Trademark fight: Brit biz Threads has a teeny tiny problem with Meta's Threads

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Remember Microsoft SkyDrive? They renamed to OneDrive after Sky Television/Sky Internet kicked up a fuss. Sky, as part of the Murdoch empire was big, but still nowhere near as big as MS. Not that either of them deserve any love, but someone had to win in that case.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Protection rackets

"Pay me $160 and your windows won't get broken. Pay me $160 and I won't install cameras and microphones in your bedroom. Pay me $160, and your personal & private data won't get collected and sold."

Possibly not the best examples, since it seems people are willing to pay Microsoft to buy broken Windows, pay Amazon, Google and others to buy spy cameras/microphones to willingly install in the bedroom and elsewhere and even sites you subscribe to still collect every bit of data they can "to improve the service". It's not that easy to think of some sort of criminal extortion racket that hasn't been "mainstreamed" by business to get user to willingly hand over cash and data for something they'd ordinarily run a mile from. Even ransomware has been mainstreamed. It's called "cloud lock in". Keep paying or lose you data. Blackmail might still be unique to the criminal world, but I bet someone reading here can point to an example of mainstream, legalised blackmail :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Shocked?

And, of course, don't forget to take into account all that other data they collect and link to individuals who don't actually subscribe to facebook but still get tracked all over the place and probably linked to real identities via actual Facebook members posting and tagging photos of friends and family, the so-called "shadow profiles", which they can also monetise by selling to ad brokers etc.

Russia hustles to fill impending void left by the ISS

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Ukraine's paying the price for seriously underestimating Russia's capabilities."

If it wasn't so sad and tragic, that would be funny. Putins "3 day special operation". Who underestimated who? Putins army spent more time in a traffic jam trying to find Kiev than their entire time estimate of the whole "special operation". That's some pretty serious under-estimation on the part of Putin and his military advisors. And all that happened before an aid started arriving for Ukraine.

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Anti-static precautions

"He put on his wristband and made sure all was connected properly. Then he placed the PC squarely onto the mat. On its rubber feet. That are not conductive."

To be fair, not only was he doing as he was told/taught, but by picking up the metal case, he'd discharged it via himself and the wrist strap and the mat is there to make sure any parts removed from the PC or new parts from packaging are at the same potential :-)

But yeah, I do see the funny side. Clearly the training (and I have done some Dell Servicer (and other OEM) training myself) only explained WHAT to do, not WHY to do.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"a catastrophic walletectomy."

**STOLEN** :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Most-Inappropriate Computer Repair Tool

And today, you place a 20+Kg weight on a surface pro for half an hour while the glue cures to hold in the new, replacement display panel. Sort of a very prolonged "hammer blow" :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Just a quick manicure.

"Besides, what's the point of screwing with someone if they don't know they're being screwed with? :)"

You could have removed the metal part of the jumper, leaving just the plastic bit. And then had a quiet giggle when they moved the jumper and claimed it was "so much faster" :-)

Sometimes it's even more fun to watch the placebo effect on "semi technical" people. Maybe tell them later, if you really must see the look on their faces :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ouch!

"until she got the terminology right."

I remember back in the day when Americans always seemed to refer to a soldering[*] "gun" when doing PCB work and the visuals in my mind were horrifying!

* Also usually pronounced with a homeopathic L sound in the middle, something you can't quite tell is actually there when spoken aloud :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: "To the best of [your] knowledge"

but I always try to touch a metal surface before touching sensitive areas like a motherboard or DIMM, just in case.

Yes, if it's not something you are doing every day, all day, AND you understand what you are doing, you can be perfectly safe without using the proper and approved precautions :-)

"Funny thing though - it seemed like static electricity was WAY more of a thing when I was a kid. I remember getting some BIG shocks sometimes growing up, but I honestly can't remember the last time"

Nylon was still the new "wonder" material in the time period you are speaking of, I also lived through it. It wasn't unusual for underwear, trousers and shirts to have a nylon content if not actually 100% nylon. It wasn't just women's clothes. And plastic "patent leather" shoes.

Likewise, nylon carpets in the home and workplace.

Some of that still hasn't left us, even if it's not always nylon. Other man made static generating materials are available :-)

Microsoft enlists iFixit to extend Surface spare parts program

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Repair a surface? Good luck!

"Do any surface models have a battery that can be replaced relatively easily?"

Surprisingly , yes. Although the official MS repair guides specify that if you remove the battery in most models for any reason, you must replace the battery and not reuse it. Most have very few replaceable parts, and some require you place a pad over the screen and something in the region of 20Kg/50lb weight on top for 30 mins to "fix" the glue when installing a new display panel.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What's the resale value of a Surface?

Depends. If you are fixing it yourself, the "labour charge" is your time, rewarded by the feeling of satisfaction that you fixed it yourself and will probably get at least another year or two out of it. So your dishwasher only cost £50 to repair unless you called someone in to fix it.

Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: That sounds about right...

Yes, you could buck the trend and guidelines but anyone doing so had to be doing something special or have some very good reason for doing so. I don't think WP had a good enough reason to do so considering that GUIs were clearly by then the next big thing and the growth in PC use was increasing rapidly. New users numbers were probably beginning to outstrip established users so training costs and time to become familiar with a program being cut was a selling point by now, and it was already a huge change in the way the interface worked, so a good time to change everything else to fit in with the new GUI paradigm. I also came from DOS background and had the same issues (I was a WordStar and later a SmartWare user, but I could the benefits of the CUA and working with it. (I was also teaching new IT users to convert from manual systems to PCs at the time, which probably helps give some perspective of why i thought that way. They already had a culture shock, but at least they could get the basics of any Windows program down pat and transfer that learned skill to any Windows program - I still had to teach them where the ON switch was, and the care and feeding of floppy disks, making copies/backups etc, but that didn't change with Windows :-))

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hate all this new software!

When I could finally afford a printer, I balanced cheapness against "quality"[1] and bought a Seikosh GP80 (which was also rebranded and sold by Commodore and Tandy[2]). It was cheap because it had no pins in the print head. It had a single hammer and the "platen", in

cross section, was a 5 pointed star and, in effect, replaced the pins. It was a "7-pin" printer so the hammer had to potentially strike 7 times for each column of dots times 5 columns to make up a character cell. It was slow and noisy! And I'm pretty sure that ad linked above is the same ad I used to buy mine too.

1. for some low value of quality LOL. Not the cheapest on the market, but a full 80 columns and not as crap as thermal or "spark" printers often sold for ZX-80/81/spectrums :-)

2. Both of them splurged on the slightly larger version that took standard 8.5" tractor paper, mine only used the smaller 8" paper although I did later get a 3rd party add-on that allowed friction feed to proper sized A4 paper could be used.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Hate all this new software!

"Give me PaperClip on my Commodore 64."

I'll see you PaperClip and raise you Electric Pencil on a 16K RAM, 1.77MHz Z80 based TRS-80. It was quite usable once you stumped up the Character generator EPROM that added lower case letters and added the extra 1kx1-bit RAM chip because the default video RAM was only 7-bit and didn't support lower case :-)

And just to pre-empt the local Yorkshiremen, yeas, printers were hard (and expensive!) to come by back then so yeah, we had to make our printouts by chiselling out the letters one by one onto slate. With our teeth!.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: That sounds about right...

Clip art was great if you, or someone in the office, had the skills to create the specific stuff you needed for your company or industry type. But, yeah, so many just used the free stuff that came with the package or cheaped out and bought collections of PD, which was invariably either shit or not relevant. And then went on to use it on EVERY document, along with a different and completely unsuitable font for every line and/or heading.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: That sounds about right...

"When I had to switch to Windows for work reasons, I naturally tried WP for Windows. Imagine my horror when I realized most function keys weren't working anymore, or they were different from the ones in the DOS version! I had to faff around with the menus or mice, which killed my productivity."

While I agree with you, back then it was still the rare, regular users who spent the time, sometimes months or more, learning all the ins and outs of one or two programmes and became incredibly knowledgable and proficient users. So when the change to Windows came and it often wasn't even possible to maintain backwards comparability, people such as you (and me, but different programmes) screamed loudly about it. At about the same time, many office staff were just starting to get their first ever computers (it wasn't normal for all office staff to have a PC for some years after Windows95 came out, let alone 3.0/3.1) and most could pick up in a day or at worst a week, the basics of using a word processor in WYSIWYG that simply could not be done in DOS. So I do have a little sympathy for the devs switching a DOS programme to Windows and trying to fit in with the semi-enforced CUA interface constraints where function and alt-function etc keys had a fixed, OS wide meaning so could no longer we used in the same way.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: That sounds about right...

"Microsoft's real advantage was that all its competitors had fewer fingers in fewer pies, so couldn't bundle software as effectively."

We went with Smart, later SmartWare (and I'm quite shocked how long it continued being developed after we moved on to other stuff!)

SmartWare is an office suite, originally developed for MS-DOS and Unix, and later Microsoft Windows, including a database, word processor, spreadsheet, and a (now obsolete) "communication" module for communication via a modem

I was very impressed with it at the time, it was the first truly integrated "office" package I'd used that worked the way I wanted it to. I think the closest rival was probably Lotus Symphony, which seemed clunk by comparison, long before Windows came on the scene.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: first time I saw MS Windows

My first "play" with OCR was when CP/M was still king and MS-DOS was starting to make inroads. It was a device called OmniRead or OmniReader or some such which doesn't show up on Google except as much more recent devices so either they survived, got bought out or someone picked over the bones and bought the name.

Imagine a document copy-holder with the flappy bar across it. Now lay it flat and there's a "puck" you slide along the retaining bar across the page, reading a single line of text from a limited number of "readable" typefaces and point size, plugged into a serial port and it constantly makes mistakes, even after lots of "training". And imagine how unforgiving it was to going to fast, to slow, or not moving accurately down to the next line. And yet, it seemed wonderful at the time, even if it was only kept as a curiosity :-) Even a non-typist could beat it, even on a bad day. We even experimented with attaching it to a flatbed plotter, but that wasn't much better as the scan head required the plastic bar for the calibration marks and the POC was bad enough we didn't bother to go any further, such as a creating a lighter, thinner calibration strip the pen plotter head could cope with.

It wasn't actually bad, as such, just too early in the technology for operating it and the CPU power needed to make it work, since IIRC that was all onboard the device itself and only plain text came into the host computer.

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

It's possible that some of them may well be thinking along those line now. They have a huge field tests currently running of what happens when you pull your ads from a massive internet service serving many millions of people. All those advertisers who pulled out of X/Twitter can now look at their previous ad spending on that platform and compare with any perceptible drop in sales since they stopped. They have real, hard data to work with. It'd be interesting to be on the inside of those discussion :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hardly seen more than 1 ad per year.

"There will always be clueless people, like the ones who run Chrome without any extensions and remain blissfully ignorant that they bear the full weight of all the ads plus all of Google's tracking."

Sadly, that seems to be the vast majority of people. Although of Google are going so far as to test blocking ad blockers, maybe the message is getting through to enough people that they've noticed? Or maybe someone wants a new paint job on their super yacht and every penny counts! Or share price. Gotta keep demonstrating growth to "the market" or the share price might drop.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I wouldn't mind the adverts...

Might have been an Ood!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I wouldn't mind the adverts...

"on TV where the show will be edited by the broadcaster to ensure that the advert doesn't play right in the middle of a sentence they regularly completely destroy the flow of whatever I'm trying to watch."

Some of the non-terrestrial channels do that. It's all automated and they've not even used a filter/detector to "look" for non-speech sections or other methods of finding a suitable insertion point. It's just set to play an ad break at a specified time and no one is controlling it. Or if there is, it's one person looking after multiple broadcast channels. It may be more noticeable on a UK channel broadcasting a US show because we have different, more restrictive rules on when and for how long ads can be shown. Those US TV shows clearly have spots where an ad break was intended, but we don't get one there. It does depend on both the channel and the show.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I've always been curious...

"Traditional TV ads are targeted that way, and they seem to make a lot more money."

Only partially, mainly at peak viewing hours. Other times of the day, the ads are targetted by expected demographics. Just look at all the ads aimed at retired people on daytime telly, ads for kids at teatime and ads for porn and gambling late at night.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Newpipe for your phone, Smarttube for your Android TV / Firestick and Minitube for your PC it is then. They are standalone apps so the recently added Google adblock detecting JS doesn't do anything to their ability to play back without ads (for now at least)"

Years ago, TuCows was THE place to go for PD/Shareware and blocking the ad server when it got more and more intrusive was easy enough. But then they directed all the download links via the ad server. I never went back again. "TuCows who?" you say? Exactly :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: For now...

"However there are already suggestions for alternatives elsewhere in this comments section, that I'll be investigating."

Like bookmarking the channels? All I do, if I find a channel I like, is go to the "Videos" tab, 2nd from left, which defaults to showing the videos in date order, latest first. No need to "subscribe" or sign in. If I want to support them, there are other methods than "likes" etc. and most seem to get very little from Youtube, making their money in other but related ways, eg Patreon, merchandise etc. It helps if you can maintain and manage you bookmarks in folders properly and stick to it of course :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: For now...

"your Google account."

What's that?

ULA's Vulcan Centaur hopes to rocket into Christmas

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Space burial?

It was described as "a non-separating payload" which seems to indicate that it will part of the vehicle taking the lander to Lunar orbit, not part of anything that will be coming back to Earth to burn up. I#m making the assumption that everything above the 2nd stage, apart from the fairings, will be going out as far as the Moon where the lander will then separate after achieving Lunar orbit. I don't see the lander having any more mass or fuel than absolutely required for the landing and will rely on the 3rd stage/orbital vehicle to actually put it in orbit first.

Page: