* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Surprise: Automated driving biz finds automated driving safer than letting you get behind the wheel

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: But... but... we are driving because we like it, right?

"This has been predicted for a while"

I remember a short story by Larry Niven where someone was sentenced to be dismantled for the organ banks for manually driving their car.

Not sure of the date, but I think I read it in The Long Arm Of Gil Hamilton back in the early 80s. It was a collection so the story will likely be at least a few years older.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: But... but... we are driving because we like it, right?

Some of us are old enough to remember when electric windows were a new-fangled gimmick! Other might be old enough to remember when heaters were new-fangled gimmicks. Or windscreen wipers. Or the witchcraft of screen *washers*. Never mind those complex and hard to repair electric starter motors. You can't beat a proper starting handle!!

Belgian cops crack down on encrypted phone network Sky ECC in 200 overnight raids as firm denies criminal ties

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 17 tonnes?

"At least in those days you only got six months in jail - it was just seen as "personal" use."

A first time offender with only enough for personal use might only get a telling off and confiscation these days. Probably not even a Police Warning.

Brit cybercops issue tender to rip and replace their formerly flaw-ridden CyberAlarm tool

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

cyberalarm.org --- cyberalarm.org.uk

Such a rookie mistake when looking for a new domain name. Although in this case I suspect they had already committee'd and focus grouped the name and there was no turning back so they just took the name with whatever TLD was available.

As battle for future of .UK's Nominet draws closer, non-exec director hits a nerve with for-profit proposal

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: From the looks of this...

He sounds completely the wrong fit for a not-for-profit but I bet there will be a place for him in a for-profit venture somewhere where aggression and a different set of morals will be an asset. You just have to look at some of the worlds successful business leaders to see that.

SpaceX wants to slap Starlink internet terminals on planes, trucks, and boats – but Tesla owners need not apply

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hopefully

They may well have to pay back any subsidies already allocated and not used yet.

This does raise the question of how the subsidies are paid out though. Is like when you get building work done and the builder wants cash up front to buy the materials? Are BT "sitting on" ££billions using it on the money markets to make profits while not actually spending it?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hopefully

It's an interesting argument. But does Starlink or similar even require rural subsidies? They can supply internet just as easily to a city centre as the middle of nowhere.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 1 million users?

"So Starlink, 4000 satellites messing up the sky, can only provide connectivity to 1 million users?"

Apart from other have said, it's also worth noting that the base stations are not necessarily intended for a single users. Put one in a small village in the middle of nowhere and all the villagers can connect to it over WiFi or a mesh or something.

Remember that day in 2020 when you were asked to get the business working from home – by tomorrow?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Home Office working

I think the allure of having an office in the capital will take years to abate. Yes, the big established companies may be restructuring and at least partially moving out of The City and surrounding boroughs, but large spaces made into managed and unmanaged small office spaces will remain attractive to smaller companies and new companies for a long time to come.

There will be a big change, but not as big as we might be expecting. Office space prices may drop, but there will be predators jumping in to buy up on the cheap. Some might find themselves with expensive white elephants if they don't adapt and if they guess wrong and buy too early.

Similar is likely to happen (and is already happening to some extent) in all the major cities. That's why town planners are looking at revamping town centres to mix business and residential and more green spaces, or at least trees down pedestrianised High Streets. Most current town centres either date back to centuries of growth or monolithic concrete 1960's monstrosities. Few have been redesigned for the 21st century, they've just been tarted up with a lick of paint and few new buildings on the existing street plan.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Home Office working

"It will be interesting to see how many companies revert back to type when all this is over."

Looks like ours will be reverting to type. The CEO does a video pronouncement every month or so. There are distinct undertones of "why aren't we all back in the office yet?" and actual out-loud comments about how it will be great when we're all back in the office soon. Luckily, my job is out on the road. I've not been in the office in over a year now. I usually only go in once or twice a year as it is. Being 250 miles from the office helps too!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hats off

"You're right that I'm young enough not to have experienced that myself, but I think at least some of these statements aren't missing the point too much."

I was around then, you hit nail on the head. Yes, little of peoples work was in front of a PC back then. Those who did use PCs were not necessarily networked. Many didn't use a PC at all. Working from home would be all but impossible for many. Those who could take a PC home or had one at home AND had an internet connection would have difficulties because a lot of what they did involved data from paper and filing cabinets, from colleagues, faxes etc. Switching all that to remote working from home for those people who didn't even use computers at work but would have to to be able to work from home would have been a nightmare.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hats off

"Even if you could get extra lines out there, it would be hideously expensive and require a bunch of extra provisioning."

Remember when BT used to "split" a line to two houses? Using a modem on one of those line meant you were lucky to get anything close to the rated speed of the modem. I imagine you'd be lucky to get a connection if both customers were trying to use a modem at the same time. So, the logistics of BT going out there to add millions of extra landlines all over the country would be utterly horrific! Assuming the exchanges could even handle them. And so far, we've only talked about two working adults wanting to be on line at the same time. What about the kids? Online education in the 90's would have been almost impossible, let alone with two working parents.

I remember having multiple PCs networked and sharing dial-up at home back then. "Is anyone using the internet? I need to download a file, your access might slow down or stop."

Just when you thought it was safe to enjoy a beer: Beware the downloaded patch applied in haste

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Army Email time

"Anyone else remember this"

I just went back and watched it again and something I'd not realised at the time. It's all one long continuous shot! That's pretty good going for a bunch of amateur film-making squaddies at the end of a 6 month tour of Iraq!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Reply To All

*e.g. "Has anyone left a pair of gloves in the staff room?" followed by not only the originator, but everyone else receiving the all the stupid but inevitable 15 "not me" replies.

My boss sometimes sends out emails which are worded in such a way that they ate more or less demanding that everyone reply ether Yes or No. There's always some who hit reply-all. <sigh>

FWIW, we are an IT business and our department are all technicians who should ALL know better.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I haven't seen a good game of Reply-to-All Tennis in years

"stop being awkward and just do it".

Clearly it was a box ticking exercise and not an actual, honest to goodness DR plan they wanted. I suspect the entire budget for it was spent on your jolly training course and time spent away from your normal job (probably budgeted for 1 afternoon to write a few bullet points)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I haven't seen a good game of Reply-to-All Tennis in years

"It's still a regular occurrence - sometimes accidental mail to all, "Please let me know if this particular set of circumstances applies to you currently" followed by 270ty-billion replies of "I'm not", "Not me", "Why have I received this?", "I don't need that"..."

We get those as "surveys" or "online training" courses. Usually about how to stay safe in the office (if you are one of the few still going in) or how to make sure sure computer setup is safe and comfortable to use. But, as with all these things, they get sent company wide. Even the cleaners get them! Those of us out on the road take great delight in answering "no" to the many questions relating to adjustable chairs, wrist rests and properly positioned screen to minimise reflections. NO!!! I'M IN A FUCKING CAR PARK WITH THE LAPTOP BALANCED ON MY KNEE AND THE GEAR STICK. IT IS NOT ERGONOMIC!!!!

Oddly enough, despite all the exhortations to make sure everything is done correctly and the stated offers to help with equipment, there never seems to be any follow-up to the fact that NO!!! everything I do is NOT in line with the H&S "guidance".

Bit at least it's not an email only survey and reply-all can;t work because only very special people can send to the company-wide list.

NASA shows Mars that humans can drive a remote control space tank at .01 km/h

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Butler's Landing

"After reading the XKCD comic, I hope Perseverance can use its lasers in a defensive capacity."

Maybe Butler can start a Jihad against the thinking Martian rovers?

Facebook uses one billion Instagram photos to build massive object-recognition AI that partly trained itself

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 1 billion images

"i hope that they have signed releases for each and every image. "

Back in the day, both AOL and Geocities (and most likely many others) laid claim to a perpetual licence to use anything you put on their servers for any use they could think of. I would imagine most hosting services still do that. Although in this day and age, that's a little more risky since they probably don't want to be laying claim to and using any illegal material their users may post.

You only need pen and paper to fool this OpenAI computer vision code. Just write down what you want it to see

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Simply write the words ‘iPod’ or ‘pizza’ on a bit of paper

I was thinking of getting a new covid mask with SYNTAX ERROR printed on it. See what the facial recognition s/w does with that!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A rather large piece of paper for a fair test

"Even a young child when asked what is in the example image in this story would likely say something like "an apple with a piece of paper/label stuck to it", adding that there is writing on the paper/label if they are older. This is a description of a multi-object scene and includes adequate description to relate the subject for most situations and also shows context. Expecting singular object returns is self-defeating and shows a blinkered approach that is never going to work for anything other than clean, sanitised images of single, non-composite objects."

I wonder if the problem is that it takes the first likely answer and that text recognition has a higher priority than image recognition. I wonder how the "AI" would respond to an apple with the word pizza written directly on it with a marker pen?

Soft-shell robot uses snailfish features to sail though Mariana Trench stress test

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What's the hurry?

Also, they don't always want to move far or fast because they want to stop and look at stuff. Just look at how far the Mars rovers move per day. On the other hand, as mentioned in the article, currents will affect it, something the Mars rovers don't have to worry about. On the gripping hand, if it does get swept away by a current, what the problem? We know almost nothing about what goes on at those depths so one place is going to be just as interesting as any other, just so long as it's possible to keep track of where it is.

Blind man sues Dell over inaccessible website

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: PR nonsense

That's actually a very good point and will weigh in heavily on the side of the prosecution. They are clearly not following their own stated policy,

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: To web designers

"Lawsuits are very motivational for companies."

It's such a shame that it has to come to that. Maybe there needs to be a catchphrase and a campaign to highlight the spending power of disabled people as a whole. I suspect the businesses who currently don't give a damn unless forced by law might start to give a damn when the realise the sales or clicks they are losing. They probably assume that all disabled people can't hold down a job and have no spare cash to spend. I assume other countries have had a a similar experience to the UK headlines and campaigns highlighting, eg the "grey pound" and the "pink pound".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"that would surely scare the shit out of all these other none compliant website to sort themselves out to."

You're assuming they are the sort of people who read the tech news on the subject. I suspect most of them live in their own little bubbles. and I don't mean COVID bubbles :-)

I haven't bought new pants for years, why do I have to keep buying new PCs?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: SSD

It was quite some years ago, to be honest. Glad to hear it's improved because it is a good, free tool.

Luckily, the customers we deal with have changed over the years and we never need to copy HDDs these days. The customers we deal with have their own IT teams and they just image the new disks with their standard image thanks to server based user profiles :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: When you say "pants",

Thanks, just had a quick look, and yes, they do.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: One thing people tend to forget about FOSS.

It's a bit like those skeletons wielding swords in Jason and the Argonauts! You can't kill them, they just keep coming back!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: One thing people tend to forget about FOSS.

"By it's very nature, FOSS will be around as close to forever as makes no nevermind. Corporate closed source software, on the other hand, is just as ephemeral as the company in question."

Not so sure about that. There's plenty of FOSS that has withered on the vine. There are usually alternatives, but that's not always ideal for those used to whatever app stopped being supported due to lack of maintainers.

I used to like klibido for Usenet binary downloads. Unless going commandline, it was about the only GUI based option at the time. Pan didn't really do binaries back then. Nowadays, Pan is the only option and even that's pretty precarious. There was a long drought when the one and only maintainer really wasn't doing anything with it due to lack of time. Even now, since a major re-write and update, there's still really only one prime maintainer and a couple others who help out with minor bugfixes. I'm not sure when I last saw an update.

Now, you might say that Usenet is a niche thing nowadays, but it's actually still quite lively, but FOSS options to access it, at least in *nix land, are few and far between.

There's still the likes of Thunderbird and Evolution, but news always feels like the unloved step-brother and not really looked after properly like the mail client parts.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Personally ...

Whilst I support your choice fully, and have and will continue to make a similar choice, the problem with switching non-techy family members or friends to Linux is when they need specialised software as recommended by their friends, for hobbies such as cross-stitch, genealogy and whatnot.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Old kit

"Said family member is also addicted to Microsoft Word so there's no chance of replacing the OS with something more suitable."

You can name desktop icons to reflect the persons choice of word processor. Not sure if you can stop the LibreOffice splash screen showing though. Just tell them it's the latest version of Word and name the icon accordingly. Or blame the Marketeers at MS for naming the new version LibreOffice.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So why isn't IT kit like Jet Engines ........

30 years ago, you'd be looking at a 486DX at 50MHz. Still sluggish for Win10 and RAM and HDD space would still be an issue though.

Although to be fair to you, PCs were still often a capital investment back then which needed to be fully sweated and amortised so the newcomers were probably still buying 386/33 and the early adopters will have still been using some original 8088/86 and 286 beasts on peoples desktops. Hell I remember replacing a floppy drive in an original IBM PC (Yes, PC, not AT, not even XT, no HDD fitted) at a company when the first Pentiums were showing up on desktops!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So why isn't IT kit like Jet Engines ........

"they wanted to understand in more detail is why is it that they can design an engine that has an effective lifespan of many decades and yet the computers systems go obsolete much much quicker."

Maybe they should have looked at how rapidly their own industry changed in the first 4 decades since it's birth. ie from the Wright Bros. to the jet engine. And for that matter, the evolution of the jet engine since the early ones with flying life measured in single digit hours to 2-3 decades later and their own multi-decade life-span engines.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Mother and Mother in Law

Alaska!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I hate to say it, as I don't like the way they work...

"so they could use icons instead of words"

Penny pinching on multilingual translation costs.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I hate to say it, as I don't like the way they work...

Cinnamon!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: SSD

"The oldest probably dates to the turn of the century and I fully expect it would work if I still had a motherboard I could plug it into."

The 2.5" HDD in my Amiga 1200 still works. It definitely dates back to before the turn of the century. Admittedly it spent m,any years not in use at all, but is most definitely still working. It's been imaged and said image is mounted on UAE, but I still prefer the real thing for games :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: SSD

If you use something more intelligent than clonezilla, something aware of the Windows 10 file system, it'll only copy over what it needs to copy, so time taken is dependant on how full the source disk is.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "But I hardly use it."

Looking at the ancient Compaq running as my router/firewall, I could probably have saved much money by replacing it 10 years ago with something more power efficient. I should probably do something about that sometime soon. On the other hand, it only cost me £5 when I got it about 15 years ago as "scrap" from my employer. It was classed obsolete by the standards of the day and back then I think was when it was becoming a cost to get rid of electronics.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: When you say "pants",

"My oldest machine still in regular use...is a netbook bought ca. 2010."

My oldest computer in semi-regular use is my Amiga 1200!

My actual oldest computer is my Video Genie (TRS-80 model 1 clone). It was still working 5 years ago when I spent an hour or 5 playing Big5 Galaxy Invaders, Robot Attack, Adventure Internationals Sea Dragon and even a short spell with SubLogics Flight Simulator (The Adam and Eve of the current MS FlightSim) . Sadly, just from a few old cassette tapes since the FDD/Printer expansion, the printer and the two floppy drivers (and disks) are long gone but the 32K RAM expansion giving a whopping 48K of RAM is still in there along with the additional 1Kx1-bit RAM chip to get 8-bit video RAM allowing lower case letters with the replacement character set ROM.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: When you say "pants",

"made sure parentals got Samsung tablets so Brother could do the support."

Are Brother still in the IT business? I've not seen a Brother printer or PC in years. And why would they support Samsung tablets? Last time a saw a Brother logo it was on the side of a sewing machine :-)

The 40-Year-Old Version: ZX81's sleek plastic case shows no sign of middle-aged spread

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: ZX81 option for Raspberry PI?

"and I'd like to be able to use the Pi for hardware hacking..."

Pah! We used to do hardware hacking when RAM was measured in bytes, or maybe even KB!

GPS jamming around Cyprus gives our air traffic controllers a headache, says Eurocontrol

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: ILS?

Even if you throw them really hard at the ground?

Honda sends first consumer Level 3 autonomous car into showrooms, but only to 100 lucky Japanese leasers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

So, it's production ready yet, just a beta test?

Only 100 available and you lease, not buy. That's not a production run by any real measure based on the breakeven numbers needed to be sold for something like a new model of car. At best, this is beta test grade, possibly alpha test.

Japanese billionaire invites y'all to apply for an all-expenses-paid Moon trip in a SpaceX Starship – like the one that blew up today

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: All expenses paid?

"It looked like it almost landed, throttled up and then shut down which made it hit hard."

I don't know enough to agree or disagree re the engine throttle, but it certainly seemed to bounce at touchdown indicating to me that hit ground harder than planned and the legs sprung back or the engine didn't shutdown quite soon enough.

9 years after SpaceX strode into Texas village, Elon Musk floats name change for Boca Chica: 'Starbase'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Wenhop

Latest from the commentary here is an 11:30pm UK time launch now.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Boomtown sounds fine to me

Creating housing for employees and in effect building a "company town" is something the US has form for.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Texas

"You gotta love the USA. Home of Sue, Sue, Sue and Sue Lawyers."

Were they all boys named Sue?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Wenhop

The launch was scrubbed but might ahead at about 10:40pm UK time.

Telecoms shack in the middle of Scotland put up for auction at £7,500

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

SIX MILES!!! That'll take YEARS to sort out with wayleaves and $deity knows what. How do you feel about putting up an aerial encased in a Pringles can to help out your new neighbour?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Maps link

That's barely big enough to be a bothy! And I bet it stinks of piss round the back. There's not that many stopping place along that road with both somewhere to park and somewhere to hide behind while pissing.

Thanks for mapping the location. I'll keep that spot in mind for future trips assuming there's no one in residence :-)

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