* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I have upvoted, but only with reluctance as this story of somebody attempting to cover their own mistakes by vociferously lying to put the blame on others, being proved wrong and still rewarded for it saddens me. The one bright note is being able (twice) to pull out unambiguous proof to the contrary and have it believed."

Sounds like she was demoted from front line teaching to a simple and basic admin role.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Which is why I always turn off email sigs...

Then they should go back to law school. The act of forwarding is "making a copy", something very different to using a vinyl record as a Frisbeetm

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Which is why I always turn off email sigs...

"Pfft. I got a Cycling Proficiency Certificate in the 1960s. "

Pfft! I took and passed the Advanced Cycling Proficiency Certificate too. Wimp!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Which is why I always turn off email sigs...

"How's the photocopier meant to copy that shade of blue? So inconsiderate of them."

You probably don't want an exact copy of certain shades of blue, especially if of the intelligent shade.

Voyager 1 cracks yet another barrier: Now 150 Astronomical Units from Sol

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

POWER RECEIVED -155.86 dBm (2.59 x 10-22 kW)

KW? Is that for standard comparison with other signals? Or should it be 2.59 x 10-19 W

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: repeating?

I doubt the CPU could manage that :-) At least not at any reasonable rate.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Light years

Don't be ridiculous. Anyone with babies, toddlers or, for that matter two or more kids still at home will be doing at least 2 or 3 washes per week. That means the average lifespan of a washing machine would be well under 12 months. That's not going to wash ion the EU where the minimum warranty period is 2 years and items must last "a reasonable time", which in the case of white goods will be 5 to 10 YEARS.

Or are you in the US and is the 90 day warranty still standard practice?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Light years

Like a certain red Tesla Roadster currently en route to the orbit of Mars. The paint may suffer some UV fading and maybe some pockmarks from space dust, but the otherwise should pretty much remain in the condition it was when launched.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Imagination and wishful thinking

"Therefore, there must be some line out there."

Yeah, a line of cones denoting where the hyperstatial by-pass is going.

AI assistants work perfectly in the UK – unless you're from Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham, Belfast...

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Another "smart speaker" issue

There's also the problem of people having multiple different devices, often from the same supplier in the room at the same time. Which one should respond? It's about time Google, Amazon et al allowed the users to set their own "wake" phrase like my 15 year old SatNav does.

"Hey Google, switch to BBC1". TV turns to BBCOne, smart speaker plays Radio One, phone asks if you want TV or radio, Alexa says "what's a google?"

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The usual then?

Yes.

The longer answer is that even people need to learn or tune their ear to a new accent they've not previously encountered. So called AI speech recognition doesn't learn as it goes and both the providers and the users expect it to work without training it to the users voice.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Speakers?

I prefer Marathon.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: People who do not speak RP English ...

I'm reasonably confident that The Rt Hon Jacob Rees-Mogg MP idea of new fangled shiny technology is the quill pen.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Belfast in Northern Ireland (64)

"a bunch of clicks."

Was it only me who parsed that as "a bunch of dicks"? No? Just me then. Bye.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Voice Calling on an Andriod Phone Anybody?

"Frankly, do not bother with voice access things ever. Nokia had it working back in about 2008, Android/Google still cannot recognise a thing that is said to it in 2020."

I think that's because Google are using a sledge hammer while Nokia used a little toffee hammer. Nokia recognised a few command words and compared a name you spoke with what it found in the phone directory and did all the processing onboard the phone. Google appear to be using their full on "natural speech" cloudy parsing system.

On the other hand, Nokia phones often had "interesting" ideas about the names you tried to voice dial. One colleague had a name with a "gh" in it pronounced as "r" so to get my Nokia to voice dial him I either had to mispronounce the name or spell it phonetically in the phone book. On the gripping hand, Google can't find that name when spelled and pronounced properly either.

Oh, yeah, you're other statement. Voice dialling is good for in the car. Hands free and all that, often legally mandated in some jurisdictions. Luckily, in my case, the bluetooth car interface does voice dialling way better than "Hey Google" :-)

And it's off! NASA launches nuke-powered, laser-shooting, tank Perseverance to Mars to search for signs of life

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I for one....

On the other hand, restaurants seem to be finally getting the message and telling "influencers" to fuck off when they ask for freebies in return for "exposure". I hope that attitude spreads to all other "influencer targets".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Roll on the test flight....

OO

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Two two laser armed, nuclear powered robots...

Sgt Bash could take both of them at once!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: RIMFAX

"you can order the DVDs. If DVDs are still a thing."

Yes, DVDs are still a thing. But. There's a always a "but". But, if it's not currently available on amazon.com, you might as well forget about it. Friends in the USA tell me ordering DVDs from amazon.co.uk is currently not viable. Some orders have taken months to arrive, others are now no longer available to order from the UK to USA and those which are still available have prohibitive shipping charges. If the US ever gets COVID-19 under control and flights resume between the UK and USA, orders may return to a semblance of normality but for the time being, assume that non-essentials are not going on cargo aircraft (a lot of cargo normally goes on passenger aircraft too, and they ain't flying)

Airbus to build plane that's even uglier than the A380

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The A380 is not ugly!

"is it a normal plane that is scarily close, or a very big plane that is still far away?"

Any time you're not sure, watch this.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The A380 is not ugly!

Depends on the liquid. They float quite nicely in a bath of mercury.

Boeing confirms it will finish building 747s in 2022, when last freighter flies off the production line

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Flying wings/bodies

"and the majority of passengers would be quite happy"

Maybe, but I think not. Even if you've not got a window seat, knowing the windows are there and that you can see a bit of blue through them almost certainly has a psychological effect. I suspect having no windows, or having to leave your seat to go to a special area that has a window would leave people feeling a bit more closed in. Possibly one of those psychological effects where you don't actually realise it's causing discomfort.

At historic Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google CEOs hearing, congressmen ramble, congresswomen home in on tech market abuse

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Only Jeff bothered to find an interesting room for the video-chat hearing ...

I wonder how things might be perceived if the media stopped mention which party a politician was from, just report the place/area/state the represent? I get the impression many people in the US automatically agree or disagree with a politician they've never heard of before purely based on that D or R in front of their name/state. Of course, it'll never happen because ALL of the media, mainstream or otherwise, is skewed towards D or R themselves.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Only Jeff bothered to find an interesting room for the video-chat hearing ...

"All Republican men asked stupid questions and all Democrat women asked sensible questions."

He only specified gender, not party affiliations. You chose to add that. Any particular reason why?

This investor blew nearly $300,000 on Intel shares the day before 7nm disaster reveal. Yup, she's suing

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

No, because stock analysts aren't just any old fools, they are M&S fools.

Short term, the stock market is incredibly volatile. Almost any major news tends to make the anal-ysts twitch one way or the other (and no one know which way they will twitch), but within hours or days, things settle to a more realistic position of a slight loss or gain rather than the wild loses or gains the anal-ysts caused. Stock anal-ysts are like sheep, following some intangible "leader", ie the one that jumps first, which tends to indicate that so-called anal-ysts are not what they claim, they are herd followers.

Virgin Galactic reveals giant mirror feature in cabin design for Beardy Branson's space bus

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Capitalism at its ugliest

"I cannot be the only one to notice that this experience is exclusively for the super-rich, and gives them a short anecdote to amuse their equally well-heeled friends at dinner parties."

On the other hand, that's more or less how the airline industry started too.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: It's been so long …

"When you wish upon a star … it might be your great grandpa!"

That sounds more like a "Hallmark Moment"

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Marketing circle-jerk

"at a time of economic uncertainty"

The people who can afford the tickets don't allow things like that to impinge on their reality distortion fields. It's icky and doesn't affect them.

'I think the police are here...' Feds reveal Skype, text chats of Canadian trio charged with $8m crypto-coin fraud

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Having said that, you've identified a big problem with English libel laws where if a Pakistani website calls a Pakistani politician a crook, the website can be sued in England if even just a single English resident read the defamatory article and in reality it has sod all to do with England."

On the other hand, it needs to be brought as a private prosecution and so brings income into the UK. The UK has a lot of highly specialised courts and legal expertise and many cases end up being tried here even if neither of the sides nor the dispute have more than a tenuous link to the UK. And, whatever your personal opinion of the UK legal system, it's still held in high regard for fairness and equality in other places around the world.

Face masks hamper the spread of coronavirus. Know what else they hamper? Facial-recognition systems (except China's)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: American (and now English) "patriots"

Day-am! And all these years I though chem-trails were about mind control!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What ?

Not to mention that so-called AI image recognition has been shown to get things wildly wrong simply by change a few strategic pixel, so pasting on a digital mask instead of a natural photo of the person with a real mask might well be introducing new artefacts.

Google extends homeworking until this time next year – as Microsoft finds WFH is terrific... for Microsoft

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yep, something I mentioned here back when lockdown was still in it's first weeks. There'll be a LOT more working from home and many people will suddenly realise they no longer need to live in the city or within easy commute of the city. People will start to move further away to the suburbs or countryside (so long as they can get decent broadband) or even other parts of the country. Maybe we'll start to see cities turning into those futuristic idealised places we see in the "nicer" SF like Star Trek where people live and work in less crowded, clean cities with little traffic as many office blocks become redundant and get repurposed as apartments with shops and gyms etc on the lower floors, maybe some hotdesking rooms where you can go to work.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

AIUI, physically working at Google is still an option, so the trailer trash can carry on as "normal".

Although speaking of weird lifestyles, I wonder if all those doomsday preppers are holed up in their bunkers for the duration and how many have realised they were not as prepared as they thought they were?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: WFH is also good

I wonder if that applies the "slackers" who keep popping out for smoke breaks too? Maybe they are actually the most productive people in the office and should be applauded rather then whinged about because they take "extra breaks". More productive and shorter lived. Win Win for humanity :-)

EDIT: Aaaaaand, I should scrolled just that little bit more before posting :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Anecdotally

"It's interesting to see that Silicon Valley workers seem to be having the opposite reaction, though."

I suspect it's more to do with the shitty employment rights in the US and people wanting and needing to be seen to be in before the boss, still be there when the boss leaves and seeming to be busy at all times. Actual productivity doesn't normally enter the equation.

USA seeks Moon and Mars nuke power plant designs ready to fly in 2027

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Height

They're asking that the design includes being able to operate on Mars without further modifications.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Credibility

"Given the specifications, and timescale, I suspect this is going to be aimed at the current military reactor products or technology."

Wasn't there some talk in the last year or three about civilian truck sized nuke power plants that could be parked at the edges of towns and cities? Did that ever amount to anything?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Why the 1Km cable?

Is 10KW enough to smelt aluminium? Is there any ore nearby?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Launch and landing

Shhhhhhh....you don't want the anti-nuke crowd hearing that!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Launch and landing

"I imagine the launch might be designed so that it travels over an ocean."

You still don't want it break open in the ocean. You might end up with mutant sharks!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Height

"solar panel arrays will need to be quite large to last ten years untouched"

And, as demonstrated by Spirit and Opportunity, on Mars, solar panels can get dusty and you really can't rely on a helpful passing mini-tornado to clean them for you.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What are they going to do with the heat?

You could probably just put a relatively lightweight sun shield up to protect the radiators. Something like those Mylar blankets they give to fun runners. Or drop the whole unit into a crater deep enough that it gets no sun light, which shouldn't need to be all that deep at the South Pole. The will also help with making the BlinkenLights appear more flashy and SciFi-like.

EU orders Airbus A350 operators to install anti-coffee spillage covers in airliner cockpits

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Amateur design and construction.

Interesting voting pattern on my comment. So, where is it legal?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Other liquids

"The cost of improvements is much less than the cost of one accident."

I believe Boeing have demonstrated that it takes at least two accidents before the costs start to mount up.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Amateur design and construction.

"As for the sippy cups, they work. I use one in my car. Solid plastic, have open the drinking hole to drink and then close and replace cup in cup holder. That would seem to be a good solution but then again, humans tend to bypass things when it's "inconvenient."

Yeah, but you really don't need to take those precautions when drinking a coffee or other beverage in the drivers seat because you're not actually driving at that point. Your're not actually drinking while driving, aren't you?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Flame

Re: Just how hot can coffee get?

Everyone knows that when things go wrong, sparks and flames appear all over the damn place, even in unrelated systems. It just depends on how much cash is in the SFX budget for pyros and squibs.

UKIP blackmail, data breach sueball allegations were groundless, rules High Court

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: And just to think...

OMG! First we have Dick Braine, now we have Mark Reckless!

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: We’ve had plenty of these Molly cover stories

Molly covers. Is Molly a shorthand version of a longer name or did a lady call Molly invent it?

Not-so-paltry towers to float: Vodafone reveals IPO plans for mega European masts biz

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Paris Hilton

margins of 85 per cent.

Excuse my lack of financial acumen, but does that mean they are making 85% profit on expenditure? If so, isn't that rather a lot?

Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control microchip implant' conspiracy theory

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

That's the case now, because employers assume that people can already use Windows, therefore they can use Windows programs, they learned how at school, college, uni etc., and anyway, the job application spec said they should be able to use it. My experience back in the DOS days (and CP/M prior to that), was that the few businesses and even local Councils that bought PCs, would usually train people to use those very, very expensive Capital Investments to get the maximum return on their investments. The training was often basic, limited to just enough to operate the computer and use the program(s) required, but it was usually there and done properly. As you say, nowadays, it's almost non-existent and what does exist is often poorly designed on-line "interactive" training of a "one size fits none" type.

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