* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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UK government shakes magic money tree, finds $500m to buy a stake in struggling satellite firm OneWeb

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: LEO broadband with ubitous coverage

And by using sats, they can even charge if you head off to Europe or beyond with your car!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Just what we need

Sounds like my first ever car, a Vauxhall Shovette,

E-scooter fanboy so hyped for Teesside to host UK's first trial

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Here's an idea...

That's a TukTuk!!

(and quite possibly larger than the smallest Smart cars.)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: No consistency.

"of course the latter can go much faster if you pedal."

Which neatly explains why they are different. You can't can't "scoot" a scooter up to those speeds and so the motor is the primary means of propulsion, making it a "motor vehicle" in law, unlike an e-bike, where the motor is legally an "assistive technology", is NOT a "motor vehicle" in law.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"so you can plan ahead."

If your lucks in. You head to the nearest dock to where you want to be, but by the time you get there, three other people have already arrived, used up the two remaining spaces and left one wondering if a space will come free or bike off to the next nearest one. Like the apps which tell you where parking spaces are, you can't reserve it, you are still relying on luck.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

And only 100 of them across 5 towns. They will be hard to find even if they are all properly looked after and properly returned.

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users. It's meant to work like that, right?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The grocery loyalty card is no more

There's possibly bluetooth beacons in the store tracking which aisles you go up and down, how long you take, if you stop at a certain point, eg near a display, and how long for too.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Dear Advertisers,

Or maybe millions of people click on 1000's of ads per year?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Old fashioned?

Oddly enough, I was watching CNN the other day and weather forecast came on. Part way through, the map disappears and some tractor company logo fills it. The weatherman then proceeds to tell me this tractor company sponsors the weather and they also supply animal feed. The 1950's called and want their "now here's a word from our sponsors" tagline back. And for what it's worth, I'm watching in the UK so am unlikely to buy from them anyway. I guess CNN think it's mainly farmers watching their weather forecast and they can't find a way to use technology to put a more localised advert in.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: There is one enormous benefit of targeted ads

"They are an effective way to convince people that their advertising budget should be spent on targeted ads."

This is because marketing have been lead to believe the maxim that "half of all advertising is wasted, they just don't know which half" is true.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Shocking news!

Next big marketing hype. Blockchain powered AI to analyse pages and place ads based on context which will never go wrong, honest, no siree Bob! (Such ads for porn sites on sexual health pages)

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Green and Amber screens

"Restoring the brightness and contrast levels to a central position soon wiped the grin of the smug git's face"

Turning the brightness and contrast down to minimum used to be a fun jape. Usually it stopped after the first contract maintenance engineer (me!) arrived on site, explained that this was not a contractual fault and we'd be billing them for the call-out.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Simlar ...

"I turned the mouse the right way up - student was using it upside down as a trackball having never used such a device before."

But may well have used a trackball on games like Missile Command and/or Centipede, so not really all that odd when you think about it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It normally the Caps lock

Back in the days of MS-DOS, it was trivially easy to programmatically alter the keyboard CAPs, NUM and SCRLCK LEDs. I've no idea if it's still possible, but it was used in some games for extra status info or just for a cheap extra effect of flashing them in sequence.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Mouse mats with logos -avoid, avoid, avoid

"Am I the only person who doesn't use a mouse mat any more?"

Upgrading a lab with new kit and the new mice are optical, partly because they are the new "in thing" and partly because the lab has to be spotless and bio-secure at all times. Except the mice act as though they aren't plugged in. No pointer movement at all. Oddly, the buttons seem to work, eg right mouse button brings a context menu up. It turns out optical mice really don't like beautifully smooth white shiny lab benches which get cleaned and sterilised frequently. A sheet of A4 paper worked as a mouse mat which was cheap and could be replaced every time the bench got cleaned.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

Hollywood "cool" has a lot to answer for. From people ripping faxes or printout off (and causing jams) to modern times when people have learned from Hollywood to SLAM their laptops shut. Even when there a pen or other foreign object just waiting to smash the screen. At least the HDDs are solid state now and can survive the shocks.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Jimmying open a lock

"the excitement of doing something illicit seemed to be quite titivating, in fact."

I think that's the effect on the girl that A-nonCoward above was hoping for too,

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

He's a meercat?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Mondarin?

What makes you think an accountant has O level chemistry in their list of qualifications?

"Oh, look, shiny!"

UK space firms forced to adjust their models of how the universe works as they lose out on Copernicus contracts

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Interestingly...

In case some have forgotten, the UK is still paying full EU membership dues throughout the transition period and although not an actual EU members, is still supposed to be treated as one.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "are explained in language an adolescent could comprehend."

"No free trade? Even though we've signed 19 trade deals already, are in advanced negotiations on 17 more"

Most of which are for "drop in the ocean" amounts with tiny little countries, half of which, based on most recent 2018 figures, are for under half a billion. The lowest value is Kosovo (£8m of trade in 2018).

I'd like to think we will get some decent deals with the larger economies, but I'm not holding out much hope. The UK doesn't have a great deal of experience in negotiating anything any more.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Did you know the French took approx 80% of the total quota for cod, hake and haddock and we only got 6%, and then had to buy some of the rest back off them ?"

Every fishing boat has to buy a quota licence. Who was it who decided to sell so much to the French? Or was it just the the British boat owners decided they didn't want to pay as much as the French were prepared to pay? And if not, why not? Were the French boats subsidised or more efficient or something?

UN warns of global e-waste wave as amount of gadgets dumped jumps 21% in 5 years

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Fashion

I wonder if, because of who the readership are, we are looking at the wrong part of "e-waste"? It seems these days that most kids toys are cheap plastic electronic items these days. They are not built to last because kids grow out of them quickly and so go often go in the bin or for recycling within a year or so. They often can't be re-used or re-purposed by average families because they kids broke them at some point.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Blame...

"Apple is certainly to blame in part but so is every other manufacturer of E-goods, all of them want you to buy new replacements as often as possible, it's called capitalism, our current system relies on consumerism and obsolete goods in the shortest possible time that they can get away with."

I see the TV manufacturers are now pushing 8K TVs. I did buy a 42" full HD TV some years ago because the "HD Ready" TV was to be moved into the bedroom. But I can't see a valid reason to upgrade to to 4K TV let alone 8K because a) an HD TV is easily good enough, b) even now there's still a huge amount of SD content, c) there's really very little 4K content available and d) what 8K content?

Well bork me sideways: A railway ticket machine lies down for a little Windoze

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Chris Hadfield on Soyuz

"Not the ideal place to see a Blue Screen of Death. Soyuz is fairly old, but it has been upgraded in all that time, to some extent. I also wondered if they used a retail or OEM licensed version..."

You missed option c) A pirate copy.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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"There are amazing railway stations from the Victorian and Edwardian eras all over the world."

Not to mention some of the Moscow underground stations.

The Moon certainly ain't made of cheese but it may be made of more metal than previously thought, sensor shows

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Metal

I wonder what the Iron Chicken shits out?

I was screwed over by Cisco managers who enforced India's caste hierarchy on me in US HQ, claims engineer

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "HR" - there's your problem.

"Most any management type will tell you that all assets depreciate, usually on a fixed schedule."

Yeah, but the build quality has slowly gone up over the years and so they've had to recalibrate the depreciation rates from 65 to 70 :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: General concern

Reaction Engines? (Only guessing here.)

Mind you, one company I did some work for some years ago, made replacement hip joints and knees. The boss was a medical doctor.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: General concern

"Where did you study? "

I was once asked that. I said Durham, which seemed to be an ok answer. The questioner made an assumption because I didn't add the context that my primary school was in County Durham before our area was wrenched out to became part of Tyne and Wear. I suspect the level of education he was referring to would mean saying "Sunderland Poly" would not have been a "right" answer.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The great, the good, and the ugly

You may have missed the longer term plan there. Once UKIP got Brexit done, the UK needs to make trade deals. Any trade deals with India, such we likely need to have, will be dependant on Indian people having better access to the UK job market. That couldn't happen while we were in the EU.

Rental electric scooters to clutter UK street scenes after Department of Transport gives year-long trial the thumbs-up

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Rental sucks.

"But rental ones are NOT going to be useful for commuters/shoppers in general - they'll only be in the city centres (so wont help with the first bit of the supposed last-mile leg from house to tram/train station), and the end bit/city centre bit is usually not a problem for commuters/shoppers on foot."

Yes, arriving in the city centre is often not a problem for many people. Public transport is invariably designed around getting people to and around the city centre. The bit that is missing is the part where many people need to move around the outskirts, get to the local shops, local doctors/dentists etc, or even live on one edge of the city and work on a business/industrial park somewhere else on the edge of the city. Those sorts of trips often require a trip to the city centre, change bus/train, then out of city again, vastly increasing the numbers travelling into the city and so causing the planners to think the route is more popular than it is. Few traffic surveys do any more than measure people/vehicle going from A to B. They rarely check if B is the ultimate destination.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Rental sucks.

"Sorry, but the rental idea sucks for anyone but tourists. If they actually wanted to reduce traffic, then privately owned would be the way to go."

Absolutely! It could even be cost free to the Government. If suppliers want to sell "road legal" scooters, then they pay to have them approved by the DfT, just like other vehicle manufactures have to do. Maybe stamp serial numbers onto various parts of the chassis too. Yeah, that can be abused by some people, but then they already do that with cars etc now.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The Cycling Proficiency Test, which was well promoted and little short of compulsory, like school swimming lessons and water safety, are no longer pushed or funded as they once were. Hence the recent generations of kids drowning left, right and centre these days because they are poor or non-swimmers with zero risk awareness. Then there's the RNLI who provide paid and trained lifeguards to beaches, paid out of our taxes when we used to have volunteers, also trained and often competed in competitions to prove their abilities. Now you get "official" lifeguards who will make the effort to come over and shout at you if you have the temerity to swim in the sea outside their special flagged area.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Why do you need a driving license to rent an electric scooter but any one can go to Halfords and by a peddle bike and ride down the road (or often the pavement near me even though the council spent money painting cycle lanes on the roads) without even having to have demonstrated they have basic road sense?"

Because it would require a change in the law that defines a "motor vehicle". E-bikes skirt the law because the electric motor is "assistive" and not the primary means of propulsion.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Trials?

"So I expect we'll have their wretched scooters to deal with next."

Yes, and considering all the horror stories we are seeing posted here, from multiple countries, it does make one wonder just who the UK government are listening too when they talk about these sorts of schemes.

Like Facebook and Uber before them, the ideas seem to be coming out of US university/students, where the idea, on campus, seems like a good idea and quite possibly might even work quite well, But they really don't scale up to the real world where laws, licensing and real people are involved. Universitys on private land full of students paying a lot of money to be there are not a reliable analogue of the real world.

One does not simply repurpose an entire internet constellation for sat-nav, but UK might have a go anyway

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Obvious things often don't seem obvious to politicians and their support staff

"Why is many small sats in LEO not able to function as a positioning system?"

Dear downvoter. Can you please answer the question?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Who came up with the £5bn figure?

Don't Surrey Satellite have a lot to do with building the Galileo sats? That's a lot of skills, equipment and manufacturing tools already in place. Not mention that building sats is something that the UK is actually quite good at. Launching them is another matter, but there are multiple launching options either available or coming on stream that are then doable at much cheaper rates than lofting 1.5 tons into high orbit. (that's assuming the modern technology can reduce the required size and weight and that it's possible to run a position constellation in LEO)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Obvious things often don't seem obvious to politicians and their support staff

"it's obvious to anyone who understands the technology that a LEO satellite communications system depending on microsatellites cannot function as a positioning system."

I don't understand the technology. Why is many small sats in LEO not able to function as a positioning system?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "What's wrong with a brass sextant and clockwork chronometer? "

He'd certainly not stand for calling it a SEXtant!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: slapping the Union Jack on the side of OneWeb's birds

"p.s. Dominic told me we can also, real cheap he says, mount lasers on those satellites."

Dominic Dare?

The internet becomes trademarkable, sort of, with near-unanimous Supreme Court ruling on Booking.com

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"It also allows for trademarks to be removed if consumers have come to think of the term as generic"

As I mentioned in another post a few days ago, I'm hearing more and more people refer to pretty much any tablet computer as an iPad these days. I'm very confused as to what an iPad is now so clearly the name iPad should not be trademarked. Likewise, I've hear people refer to things being "on my iPhone" when clearly it's a Samsung Galaxy in their hand.

LibreOffice slips out another 7.0 beta: Spreadsheets close gap with Excel while macOS users treated to new icons

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Also an accountant able to use more than 3GB of memory in excel spreadsheet is just plain scary!"

Likewise, accountants given access to a spreadsheet capable of a "database" with millions of rows!!

Someone must be bricking it: UK govt website for first-time home buyers snapped up for £40,000 after left to expire

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How is this STILL a thing!?

...and no one noticed, no one complained or no complaints reached the relevant people. The action taken depends on which of the preceding happened.

Hopefully someone checked to see just how many site visits occur via the re-direct and how they got to the old .org.uk site in the first place, ie is it people still using the old address or is it links from other sites not yet updated?

Stinker, emailer, trawler, spy: How an engineer stole top US chip designs, smuggled them to China to set up a rival fab

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "aggressively investigating and prosecuting these crimes"

And if your government mandates backdoors, assume that other governments are in there too.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Trolled?

True, but from the context in the article it seems more like trawling than trolling.

Finally, a wafer-thin server... Only a tiny little thin one. Oh all right. Just the one...

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "cartoons depicting lazy American workers"

Apparently so, to the rabid PC brigade. Racism is any kind of stereotyped insult against anyone who is not "us", where "us" is the groups being offended on behalf of "them".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "cartoons depicting lazy American workers"

Well, to be fair, it's racism. Just not the sort of racism that makes it into US and western news feeds :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: PSU fun

"The PSU on this server's failed, can you send a replacement?"

The Dell rep did exactly the correct thing based on the information given, Hell desk people have to deal with the full gamut of callers from total numpties to people who actually know what they are talking about. S/he did the right thing in not assuming you were correct without garnering further information from you.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Been there, done that...

"UPS goes bang with smoke, fire and flame (mercifully brief but enough for it not to be as dark as it should have been)."

Oooh, a UPS with built in emergency lighting?

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