* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"And Britain's extremely bland palette has been widening massively since the 1970s "

I blame Vesta boil in the bag curries for the start of the rot to internationalisation!!!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Pronoun police

It appears Greggs went public back in 1984. That probably ties in with my recollections of the start of their massive and rapid growth and slow but sure reduction in quality from being a major local bakery.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I'm thinking that the till does more than the money. Perhaps stock control and logistics depend on knowing what has been sold that day?"

It's quite likely that that is true. it's not exactly a new idea. In fact it was the entire reason for development of the first ever commercial computer used for business, LEO, to support the Lyons Corner Houses empire :-)

Ok, they phoned the data in verbally at the end of the day, so could still trade, so long as the next days orders could be processed. I have no doubt they had a manual back up system in place though, such as simply repeating the previous days orders if the system went TITSUP (Total Inability To Supply cUPcakes)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Same happened to a small local "hipster" shop near me. They ran the entire business off a mobile phone app. Then the app failed.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Pint

Re: A Suggestion Or Two......................

"We are blindly walking into a potential major disaster."

While a can't disagree with you, I wonder how the conversations went when people started buying stuff with funny little new fangled tokens instead of chickens and sheep?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: McDonalds

"a McShit with lies."

Do want to Go Large(tm)?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

When I was a kid, 50 or so years ago, and Greggs Of Gosforth was a small but becoming ubiquitous bakery chain in the Tyneside area, spreading as far afield as Sunderland on Wearside, they were pretty good. In more recent years, starting 20+ years ago, they've been expanding, initially by buying up other local chains further afield, often retaining the local names but branding in Greggs colours and retaining the local "specialities" (still do to some extent, stotties in the NE, barm cakes in the NW etc). The quality eventually started to go downhill, but then they decided being a bakery wasn't enough and they had to be a "destination" for snacks. What they sell isn't bad per se, but it's a smaller, yet at the same time wider range of goods aimed at the quick sell populist market. I don't think they even sell loaves of bread any more. They used to have a range of loaves from cheap and cheerful everyday to some really quite nice stuff. Their current range of sandwiches are the usual triangular offerings with "exotic" fillings and the currently popular, unfullfilling "wraps". Gone are the days of the "half stottie" with the filling spilling out. You can't even get the traditional NE ham and peas pudding half stottie there these days unless you beat the lunchtime rush, something they used to be famous for :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

So did McD's. Also inexplicable!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ok adding my not so consipracy take...

Was it that leftpad script everyone was pulling and using on demand instead of writing their own?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I hasbeans! But I'm hoping to make a comeback!

Brits blissfully unbothered by snail-paced mobile network speeds

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Facebook isn't used as much by the younger genertation(s)

"I'd say that no more than 10% of my friends and family have ever listened to a podcast"

Same here. I'm not sure what a "podcast" is other than marketing jumping on the iPod bandwagon years ago and the term stuck. The best I can work out is it's a radio programme that was never broadcast. The BBC advertise their "podcasts" on BBC Sounds, the same place they put all the radio shows that you can download after, sometimes even before, over the air broadcasts. So basically, it seems a podcast is just a name for an audio file you can download and listen too "offline".

And yeah, technically I'm a "boomer", whatever that is. But as an Astrologer might say "on the cusp" between "boomer" and whatever the label is for the following generation 8-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Makes sense

I would assume that devices that are "fixed" but using "mobile" connectivity have better aerials than most mobile phones too and so likely to get a much better signal. And probably less likely to be in high footfall areas where lots of people are trying to use their phones :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Interesting list

"I see Safari high in my list, but also top individual sites visited in Safari are separately listed."

That seems eminently sensible to me. Looking at the stats in the article, Chrome is shown as #2, but is a jack of all trades and people are using it for many and varied reasons, possibly even to access the site used by the apps also listed in the top 10. All the rest of the top 10 are what I would call "one trick ponies" and so are not comparable at all with a browser.

Australian techie jailed for accessing museum's accounting system and buying himself stuff

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Circular reasoning

"National rules differ. In the UK, current security clearance can be transferred between contracts."

Yes, there are even some clearances which can auto-renew with a "subscription", others with minimal fuss just by filling out the form again, or replying "no changes" to circumstances. Most likely they accept that and just do a quick request to the Police National Computer system or whatever to make sure there's nothing new appeared since last time.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Circular reasoning

"and whether or not they have been to the big house?"

Even that doesn't always preclude a security clearance. Depends on the crime, sentence and age of conviction. Some will preclude you for life from most or all clearances, others, not so much.

Judge demands social media sites prove they didn't help radicalize mass shooter

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

It's not hard to test it out for yourself rather than just dismiss it out of hand.

I just did and, also anecdotally, got fairly similar results. A sample of two isn't proof of anything, of course, but interesting nonetheless.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It’s the algorithms on trial [Hold Up Here, Chief]

"He told me to do it." is neither a legal nor a moral defense.

True. Which is why the the person is serving a life sentence with a further trial due to decide if he gets the death penalty. So there's no mitigating circumstances to help ease his sentence. But there is serious concern about his motivations, what caused them, how did they grow to such a level that he acted on them, etc. He didn't get this way in a vacuum.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: IANAL

"OK, then the postal service is not a common carrier, despite legal code and case law. They filter content (mail) by content (address) and deliver it to the address indicated. So, if any terrorist receives "go" orders by postal mail, obviously the postal service is defective in that argument."

Don't be silly. The postal service doesn't open and check your mail and decided to send you more, similar mail that isn't even addressed to you, or push more mail at you that they want you to see and delay or hide your actual mail at the bottom of the pile.

(Ok, to an extent, they do send you "unwanted" mail, but that's not them sending it, it's the spammers and mailing companies sending it, even if addressed to "The Occupier". The Posat service simply delivers what it's been paid to deliver, in the order it's collected or sorted. They don't even decide if it's priority or not. Priority mail may be delivered faster, but not because they decided it might be "more interesting" to you based on past deliveries. Priority mail gets priority only because the sender paid for the extra level of service.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: No clean hands

"It would be like trying to old Ford responsible because a driver of a Ford truck decided to drive over a crowd at a bus stop. When the "defect" is the user utilizing a device or service, the product isn't defective, the user is."

That argument falls at the first hurdle because Ford are not pushing content at you showing badly behaved Ford drivers, even if you ask Ford for information about badly behaved drivers, they aren't going to give you any, let alone encourage it by giving you more than you asked for. But go to YouTube and search for Ford Crashes and it will not only provide multiple examples, it will keep pushing more and more similar items at you and the more of them you click on, the more it will keep serving up.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: IANAL

"promoting content"

Came here to say pretty much the same thing. If you have to search a "message board", then it's probably safe. If the "message board" is recommending things based on it's algorithms and what else you've looked at, then it much more likely there will be case to answer since one is the user searching stuff out, the latter is the service pushing you into stuff and giuding you down the rabbit hole, pretty much the definition of radicalisation.

Garlic chicken without garlic? Critics think Amazon recipe book was cooked up by AI

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Pirate

Dangerous and poisonous recipies?

I saw it mentioned somewhere, possibly this very august publication, that some tests with an AI creating recipes came up with food using outright dangerous and poisonous ingredients.

It'll be interesting to see the lawsuits if/when someone cooks up something that kills them or makes them ill and just who the defendants are.

When life gives you Lemon, sack him

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"There's a big difference between allowing free speech on your platform and paying a salary and stock options for it."

If you are claiming to be a defender of free speech, or a proponent of free speech, that could be true. But when you are a self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist", then there are no gotchas, gimmes, or ways out. It's the very definition of the word "absolute". Absolute is absolute.

UK tech titan Mike Lynch's US fraud trial begins today

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Meanwhile on the 16th hole at an exclusive golf club…

The 16th hole? FOOOOOUUUUUURRRRRR!!!!!!!!!

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I can avoid them."

Oops, typo alert! Should read "can't" avoid them at work :-/

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"tell us to take out custom elsewhere."

The problem is that they are ALL doing it. If you complain, odds are you'll get no response, but if they do deign to responds, they'll waffle on about how it only take s a few seconds of your time and will help "improve" the service. They never, never will understand that few seconds, minutes, whatever, mounts up when they are all doing it and it pisses off every customer. Almost every interaction with a business these days results in a "feedback survey" by email or phone. And the survey NEVER has a free form reply where you can complain about the waste of time the survey is!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Likewise, Outlook for Android (it's a "managed" work phone, I don't have a choice) asks me EVERY DAY if I want to make O365 the default app to open PDFs. EVERY DAY I click no and the next day it ASKS AGAIN. How many time do I have to tell it no? For all eternity, it seems. All it does is make me hate MS even more. Unfortunately, as far as my job is concerned, I can avoid them.

Uber Australia to pay $178M to settle cabbies' class action

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

AU$272 million ($178 million)

Thanks for telling us the fine is $272m in Oz dollars, but what countries $ is the 178m in? Is it the Canadian or Fujian dollar?

Microsoft license shuffle means Power Apps users could break the bank

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Can someone tell me [REXX]

Thanks, I'll have a closer look at that, but on first glance, it doesn't seem to do the "killer app" thing that AREXX does in that AREXX, as part of the AmigoOS utils suite, was supported by quite a few Amiga apps which were built to work with AREXX. From what I read at the REXX link, it seems, more or less, like any other scripting language, albeit with what appear to be some very useful custom extension. It certainly looks useful though, and fairly familiar from my Amiga days, which should make picking it up a breeze :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

With Oracle dounbling their costs...

...it seems as though the vendor lock-in has reached the stage where the suppliers really don't care if a few customers leave so long as they can pull the old bait and switch and gouge the majority of remaining customers who can't or don't know how to leave.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Can someone tell me

PowerApps sounds a bit like AREXX I used to use on the Amiga. Scripting that could control other programs which had AREXX ports, sending them commands do things and responding to status or data coming back from them. It was an incredibly powerful system under the hood that in my recollection, few people understood or used.

I never used the original REXX on IBM(??) mainframes, but I assume it was the same thing. So once again we have a reinvention of something from the past branded as new and innovative by the "cool kids" because they wrapped a GUI around it :-)

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I bet in spite of the usability angle, there is little to no fingerprint support

"It’s the red line that’s stopping me going for Linux"

(Ignoring the biometrics/passowrd argument, other have already made that point)

While I can't speak for any/all Linux distros or any other OEMs, the diags tool I use on a daily basis for Lenovo laptop repairs is based on some Linux version or other and includes drivers for the fingerprint reader test, so it's doable. And if it's doable, I'd assume at least some Linux distros support it.

I'm currently running FreeBSD 13.2 on an ancient i5 based Toshiba Tecra and according to dmesg:

ugen0.3: <vendor 0x08ff Fingerprint Sensor> at usbus0

I've never felt the need to see how the driver works or interacts with the OS though, but the fact it identifies at a Fingerprint Sensor bodes well. Normally, device that need special drivers or are not supported generally show us an unknown device. Having said that, I just googled "freebsd fingerprint reader support" and the very first link is a blog post from 2014 explaining how to set it up and referencing it being based on earlier Linux support.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Coincidence...

It's also worth noting that it's that usual when adminning Windows or supporting Windows users to end up in a command shell running commands tor powershell scripts to fix stuff :-)

Most Windows users will run screaming from that and leave it to their support people to deal with (or don't have access privileges to do it anyway.) Using Linux in a corporate environment would almost certainly be locked down in a similar manner and most normal users would rarely, probably never, see a command line.

On the other hand, Windows Troubleshooters, while not always that great, do seem to manage to fix quite a lot of the basic stuff that normal everyday users come across, they just don't seem to know they are there. I know our 1st line support report a fair number of users "issues" are solved using them and try to educate the users on how to use them for future reference.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Coincidence...

"Linux applications can typically be installed with click or two via whatever "software store" is used."

I have sometimes wondered if the "store" app in most Linux distros could be improved by hiding, in a "general user" mode, anything that is not directly a runnable app, possibly even limiting to GUI apps only, for those less technically minded users who are simply browsing the repos looking for interesting stuff to play with. Most of the solutions I've seen tend to be "show everything, including the 300 libraries that are only ever installed by other apps" and/or "group stuff by relatively wide definitions, but still include all the libraries etc" causing the useful stuff to be lost in a sea of things most users don't understand or need to know about.

Most users neither care nor want to know about libavcodec, they just want to install and use VLC or HandBrake :-) The sort of person who needs to or wants to install specific libraries are probably using whatever the distro command line installer is anyway, and obviously the GUI installer will have an "advanced" mode too.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Interesting

"Why didn't Ferrari guy get a server version of the Mac and/or just tweak the OS to be a real server? All the OS updates would have been unnecessary. And there ain't anything that says you must issue updates immediately; just wait until the weekend and update everything at your leisure. Patch Tuesday and Apple Update Day for me are usually Saturdays. All of that running around was absolutely unnecessary."

Yeah, I'm not an Apple user, but shirley even Apple can't be so incompetent that an update to one device would cause it to not be able to talk to another device on the same network until that device was at the same patch level. At worst, I could see a possible patch to SMB to enforcing a new version and defaulting to not supporting pervious versions for security reasons, but that has to be a pretty rare occurrence.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Maybe a typical Oz thing?

"Holden Commodore 5.3 litre V8"[bit]

Did it play Bubble Bobble or Turrican?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Walk away

If it was Capita, IBM or their ilk, with on army of lawyers on call to make sure the contract is airtight and fully details precisely their responsibilities and all the get-out clauses, yes, but most smaller operations will not have that level of legalese in their contracts so can often be trapped in unprofitable support roles by cheap and nasty clients.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Aaron?

That was almost a good joke but a bit of a stretch!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Pint

Friday comes but once a week

"Thirsty folk will tell you it's always twelve o'clock somewhere, but Friday comes but once a week"

On the plus side, it's Friday for about 48 hours someone in the world :-)

UK minister tells telcos to share telegraph poles if they can't lay cable underground

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Carbon savings

"The ongoing maintenance has to be more than underground lines."

Different budget. Maintenance isn't capital spend. And anyway, that's next years budget and someone else's problem 'cos management will have moved on by then and took their bonuses with them! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Interesting Choice

To be fair, it's not the poles or pylons that generally have a problem with the wind. It's the trees that blow onto them. At one time, if it looked like a tree was going to be a problem, it would be cut down. Nowadays, all trees seem to be sacrosanct, no matter the risk to infrastructure, and any hint that a tree may need to be cut down to prevent storm damage results in letters to the editor and Swampy's pals building tree houses in them! Heritage steam railways have a similar issue, except in their case it's a fire risk that used to be dealt with and now involves months of planning requests and environmental surveys,

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: They do.

"That sounds much better than around here, where CityFibre have recently been along my street adding a new pole 5ft away from each BT pole. Most of the BT poles only appear to have a handful of cables on them."

Odds are that BT would require a rental fee to use the poles, ongoing, forever, which will have paid for itself after a year or two. Profit! So CityFibre looked at what BT wanted and decided to put their own poles in, paid off in "saved" BT pole rental in two years and so "savings!!" In the end, BT lost potential income and CityFibre spent more than they need to.

The obvious and fair solution, with wins all around, is for BT to charge half the new pole installation cost as a one off fee for using their poles. If a 3rd supplier comes along and wants in on the act, they pay 1/3rd of the new pol installation cost, again as a one off fee, but that payment is split two ways between BT and CityFibre. Cost of maintaining the poles is split between the poles users with the initial pole owner deciding what to do and when unless other pole users can demonstrate issues with the poles affecting their services. Same system can apply to underground ducts too. Someone pays once to put the duct in, any future users can pay their "share", as a one off for access.

Of course, the pole and duct owners can't then gouge the other suppliers, so of course it won't happen without regulation and/or laws and it goes against the grain of capitalism.

Oh look, cracking down on Big Tech works. Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi surge on iOS

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Google should not be able to decide what is the standard by simply unulaterally including it into their browser."

"This website works best with MSIE6. Actually, it ONLY works with MSIE6. And the special Active-X plug you can download ONLY from this site is mandatory. We recommand you use MSIE6 + the special Active-X plug-in to download the special Active-X plug-in"

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ah! Memories!

In my job, the kit we service has excellent online, free[*], searchable service manuals for all of the (well known) OEMs we deal with. Compared with 10-20 years ago, I find them much improved not only in terms of availability but in terms of being current, with links to fault finding and all sorts of resources I'd previously have to hunt down or even pay significant money for, if they even existed. This may not apply across the industry, or in other industries, or to consumer grade kit, but my experience can only be described as positive :-)

* not always freely available to all, I admit. Most offer at least the service manuals to all, some restrict some information only to authorised "partners" and "service techs", but it is all there but generally, it's not hard to find the teardown info, f/w, drivers and all the stuff you need for 95% of the work, even if not an "authorised" technician. Few offer the circuit diagrams mind, but 99% of the time, you don't want or need that level of detail unless you are working to a tight budget and the kit is out of warranty, which doesn't happen in my job :-)

Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Capabilities.

"And me! Was just watching Scott Manley's review here-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8htMpR7mnaM"

He also pointed out something I'd not noticed in the live stream. There was still some pressure in the cargo hold as seen by the wisps of vapour, which then proceeded to rush towards the hatch when it opened. I wonder if that could be an issue, eg causing a "thrust" and possible rotation? I suppose it depends on how much remaining pressure there was. Although it was interesting to see a real life demonstration of a pressure loss in space. It didn't look as violent as Hollywood shows us :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Basically

Considering that SpaceX is the only company using mainly re-usable spacecraft and the Starship prototypes are intended to be fully re-usable, that's an interestingly wrong observation from you. If you want to attack Musk over something credible, I'll probably join in with you, but picking on the one thing SpaceX is doing right that no other launcher is yet doing is so far off the target, the proverbial barn door must be on a different planet to you!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"The payload doors looked like they had some movement, but it's not clear how successful that was yet."

It looked a bit thin and "cheap" to me. It seemed to be flexing when trying to close it. Looks like it needs some strengthening.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

While I sort of agree with you, I would dispute that "enormous amounts of land that has to be cleared for them". Here in the UK, where most land is at a premium, there are many on farmland and the farmer simply ploughs around them and their access roads/tracks. The "wasted" land is minimal. Others are up on moorland which isn't used for much other than maybe some sheep grazing, and the sheep really don't seem to care about for the slight disruption and minimal loss of grazing.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I heard it said that they are using the "waste" fuel that needs venting to keep the pressure at safe levels as the thrusters and that exhaust may freeze on the nozzles, especially on the shaded side and bits of ice breaking off might have been the "debris" we were seeing. I'm no rocket engineer or physicist, but it sounds plausible to me. Happy to be corrected :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I nearly missed this!

I had a brain fart and thought it was happening 1am local time! But since I'm not at work today, I was browsing a bit of Youtube just after lunch and the Live stream appeared in the suggestions. Boy am I glad I was wasting time on Youtube today :-)

I'm not 100% sure, but I think they did actually succeed in all of their primary goals too. And from what I gather, they have the kit and the plans for a number more test flights this year too. Looking forward to seeing both bits make successful "soft" landings and I REALLY hope we get to see an actual catch attempt this year!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Capabilities.

"The video of the reentry plasma around the fin was one of the most amazing things I've seen."

Same here, that was stunning! They very kindly explained why we were able to see it too. Basically 'cos Starship is frikken big!

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