* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Beer gut-ted: As many as '70 million pints' spoiled during coronavirus pandemic must be destroyed in Britain

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Milk consumption?

"I'd really like to know how exactly the UK consumers have changed their habits."

Packaging. Factories/bottling plants are built to produce goods for their customers. Some of that is retail for the likes of you and me, some of it is for "trade" and comes in much larger packaged quantities. Most milk for the trade is in a plastic bag with a spout inside a large box, rather like those boxed wines you see in some supermarkets. Likewise, flour and the current "shortage". People are buying more retail items of both but the retail packaging plants can't keep up with demand. So, at the point of production we have oversupply because trade sale of dropped through the floor but in the retail market we have increased demand above the level of supply. Retail milk no longer seems to be a problem and the flour "shortage" seems to be easing a bit now. Packaging plants are adapting.

Morrisons supermarket are manually re-packaging bread flour from their bakery 16KG sacks into 1.5KG portions using bags from the pie and pasty counter to help meet demand. If you ask nicely they may sell you a 16KG sack or there may even be some on the shelves. The bakery counter will also sell you fresh yeast for 20p. Fortunately, the milk is no longer an issue. I don't feel like going back 60 years and going out with a jug to get some milk!

If American tech is used to design or make that chip, you better not ship it to Huawei, warns Uncle Sam

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: China will become self sufficient in tech

"What is frightening is that the Trump administration is quite incapable of thinking these sort of strategic issues through."

Few countries can see past their next election. The USA just seems to be better at that than most. MAGA!! WE'RE No. 1!!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

Re: Narcissist

He's turned into that dirty old uncle who turns up at all the family functions, gets drunk and embarrasses himself.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Also Microsoft

"Whether trying to make such restrictions on tools that have been sold and installed and that are the property of the overseas fab is left as an exercise for the lawyers..."

What if the s/w running the machine has to phone home to keep the licence valid and the s/w working? A bit like Win10 and all the Software as a Service we see nowadays. I'm sure no one would dare break the Ts&Cs to override that. Lawyers!!!

Tales from the crypt-oh: Nvidia accused of concealing $1bn in coin-mining GPU sales as gaming revenue

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: South Sea Buble?

Is that Michael Bubles sister? Or has he had a daughter and gone for a "celebrity" name for her?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: More long term than any other?

"the value of your investments may go down as well as up"

There does seem to be a strange sense that some investors think the stock market is like a bank which pays interest instead of what it actually is, a casino.

Cyber attack against UK power grid middleman Elexon sparks in-house IT recovery efforts

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hubris

Or, more recently, "There are no America aircraft over Baghdad"

(Or words to that effect as said by the Iraqi military spokesman with the clear sound of explosions in the background)

You can't have it both ways: Anti-coronavirus masks may thwart our creepy face-recog cameras, London cops admit

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A solution occurs to me

"[Truth-knowers, don't trust the person who put this footnote in my comment.]"

Don't worry about it. You wrote enough to get their blood boiling and steam straight past their attention span so they'll not see your disclaimer. Remember, these are the same people who read the Daily Mail Headlines and maybe the first paragraph where all the misleading click-bait is and never reach the end of the article where the real facts have been buried so as to keep the lawyers at bay.

Openreach boss denies BT selling stake in UK's national broadband plumber

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Cash in before the collapse

"I do everything using the WiFi. "

How do you think your home WiFi router reaches the internet? Magic?

Even if you are on VM or some other non-BT "wires", it WILL go through the BT national infrastructure at one or more points on it's journey.

You overstepped and infringed British sovereignty, Court of Appeal tells US in software companies' copyright battle

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: @phogan

But not forgetting that in the US, you can protect (patent? copyright?) "business methods". So, by protecting a way of doing something, you can effectively try to protect a specific software application and stop anyone else from doing something similar. This may not actually work in practice, but if you have deep enough pockets and aggressive lawyers, you can certainly intimidate others to stop them trying, or outspend them into bankruptcy if they do try.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: US Law applies worldwide

"Meanwhile I find the US judges getting whiny about UK judges interfering with their final order amusing, because the US judges got the case precisely because SAS didn't like the final Uk/EU order..."

Upvoted for that (I don't enough about the legal shenanigans to agree or disagree with the rest of your post)

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Mouse fixing.

...now you're in marketing? :-p

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Remove before use"

Cue a trip back down to the department and some inquiries about who normally replaced the toners... Goodness knows how long they'd been doing it! (To be fair, the pull-tab didn't actually say, "Remove before use.")"

As a field engineer, I once got sent to a customer in the middle of nowhere about 140 miles away to pull the tab on a toner cart. Sadly, it wasn't my job to tech support on the phone. I just got a basic fault description and told to go fix it. Still, it was a beautiful sunny day and I got to visit the North Yorkshire seaside instead of some busy industrial city.

Swedish data centre offers rack-scale dielectric immersion cooling

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Boffin

Re: In days of yore

Caution, for best performance use only approved oil and filters, change every 30,000 Mips.

NHS contact tracing app isn't really anonymous, is riddled with bugs, and is open to abuse. Good thing we're not in the middle of a pandemic, eh?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I feel they are rushing it get the economy back up and running at the risk of a second wave of infections."

It'll be interesting to watch what happens as places like France, Germany, Spain, Italy etc gradually open up in small step and compare with the US, which in some states at least, seems to be going hell for leather to "old normal". Wisconsin in particular.

Coronavirus didn't hurt UK broadband speeds in March. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, on the other hand...

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: beliving the operators...

I can't see how to select a server other than Dublin, IE, which may or may not be a typical route. Upload speed maxed out consistently but the download speed results over half a dozen test varied wildly from 90+Mb/s down to 20(ish)Mb/s. Other speed tests I've used tend to be a bit more consistent than that. But I've added it to my list for when I feel the need to check speeds again.

Danger zone! Brit research supercomputer ARCHER's login nodes exploited in cyber-attack, admins reset passwords and SSH keys

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"whoever gets the patents out first will be s happy bunny."

You'd think the situation might result in whoever finds a useful vaccine might gift it to the world, but I suspect it will be "protected" in some way that someone will get very rich from it.

Sky Broadband is not the UK's cheapest, growls ad watchdog

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Is it man made?

Yes, made by cowboys. Yee Haaah!

The Rise of The (Coffee) Machines: I need assistance. I think I'm running Windows. Send help

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: A taste of its own medicine?

(I wonder if anyone has switched it off and back on?)

No, because it takes twice as long as a colour printer to become "ready" after a power cycle. It's quicker to call the service guy out.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Not quite Windows

Ah, yes, that's what TRS-80 Level 1 BASIC was based on, hence my other post up-thread replying to someone else. Looks like I should have waited till I'd read further on before posting.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not quite Windows

Level 1 BASIC on the cheaper end of the TRS-80 range had only three error messages. What? How? and Sorry.

Driveway karaoke singer who wanted to lift lockdown spirits cops council noise complaint

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Dear Mr Currie,

You sad bastard. I agreed with everything you say :-)

Breaking virus lockdown rules, suing officials, threatening staff, raging on Twitter. Just Elon Musk things

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Elon Musk Is An Ass

Is that the nice soft velvet one? The one with the iron fist inside?

Users of Will.i.am's Wink IoT hub ask 'Where is the love?' as they're asked to pay for a new subscription service

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Let's start a new fad

Brilliant! Why didn't I think of that!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Tossed mine today

Google? The company where almost every service or app is in perpetual beta and subject to being shutdown at a whim? That Google? The same one who bricked the Revolv kit?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Let's start a new fad

But for the vast majority of people, the convenience factor is being able to instantly adjust the lighting or heating as you walk in or out of a room far more conveniently than checking where your mobile phone is, waking it up (swipe/face/finger swipe/print recognition/PIN code), activating the app, logging in, finding the function you need.

You could use a dedicated phone or tablet just for this one job, no screen locking since it never leaves the house, so long as the entire household has the self-discipline to not allow feature-creep and install other apps, and to always, ALWAYS put it back in its "proper" place so it can always be found.

For anyone with a mobility disability, I can quite see how this stuff is a godsend, but does it really have to rely on a server in silly-con valley and/or a subscription?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Let's start a new fad

Ah, yes, "cluster" switches @-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Cue the lawsuits in 3, 2, 1...

...and if they do fold, the users are in exactly the same position as if the chose not to subscribe, ie everything stops working/

Mad dash for webcams with surge in videoconferencing has turned out rather nicely for Logitech

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: People don't know how to use webcams

Ya know, I didn't even consider the laptops with the webcams in the keyboard area. :-)

That will probably be even worse! I was more specifically talking about all the people we see being interviewed on TV currently. They are almost exclusively not typing and as I pointed out, many are used top being on screen and seeing monitors showing their own image while doing so. Clearly most of these talking heads have no clue about what the camera operator does to make them look "good".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

People don't know how to use webcams

I assume everyone here has noticed that almost no one knows how to use a webcam. People constantly looking at the "wrong" place, placing the camera in the wrong position so we get to see up their noses etc. Worse, this applies to journalist too, even those whose job it is to appear on camera! You'd almost think they can't see their own PIP image in the corner of the screen or notice that everyone else is also doing it wrong.

It's not like it's hard to pile a few books underneath the laptop, especially for those on-camera TV interviews.

Total Eclipse to depart: Open-source software foundation is hopping the pond to Europe

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A logical conclusion...

"Hopefully software companies will also realise that En-US shouldn't be the default English language version.

I recently downloaded and built the Win 10 USB installer tool. It built the image on an En-UK system. On running the installer, it defaulted to a UK keyboard since it had obviously worked that out from the host system, but I still had to switch the installer language choice from En_US to En_UK.

Of course, the other default needing to be changed is paper size. The vast majority of the world default to DIN A4, not US Letter so more people have to change that setting than not.

Microsoft doc formats are the bane of office suites on Linux, SoftMaker's Office 2021 beta may have a solution

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"These experiments show that getting perfect reproduction of Office document formats on Linux is still not easy."

And, of course, the opposite is true.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Seems like a losing battle, and there's an elephant in the room

"And the prices that Softmaker charge are around the same as a personal MS Office subscription,"

Personally, that's what I see as the biggest problem. Why can't I just outright buy a version and keep it? Why should I have to rent it? Yes, it's not a lot per month. But everything is heading to "....as a Service" these days and all those "small" monthly rental charges add up quickly and I still don't own anything at the end of it. Like all the new streaming services. You just know that in a few years, some will fall by the wayside or be bought up and we'll end up with a couple of big players who will charge what they like and lock you in with a choice of take it or leave it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Nail, meet head.

And from the article, there is no such thing as a complex, tightly formatted test document you can use to compare word processors. All it tests is the design of one specific release of one specific word processor and then demonstrates how that one is different to every other one. I'm sure I could create a "perfect" document in LibreWriter and then "demonstrate" how MSWord is incapable of displaying it "correctly. And that's not even taking into account of the fact that no one had the exact same selection of fonts to choose from unless they running a bog standard plain vanilla OS/Office app combo. Not only to people add extra fonts because they like them, but companies often mandate specific fonts for outgoing correspondence which others may not have at their end.

Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket's tanks just disintegrated in Earth's orbit

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Is LEO US property?

CEO of AI surveillance upstart Banjo walks the plank after white supremacist past sinks contracts

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The irony in this case is immense

"That said, how long until you can be considered to be a... better..(?) person than what you had been? Maybe never, though never is a very long time indeed. Sure, this will absolutely depend on what you did. Still, I do find this a really difficult question.""

CEO of internet scraping surveillance company has his past outed by...erm...internet data scraping. The could hardly be better example of "you reap what you sow".

Post-pandemic hard-sell under way: Resellers leaned on to convert free trial users into fully paid-up customers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I'd like to say I'm surprised

I'm certain that, behind closed doors, some organisations and governments are talking about and making decisions that the public would find nasty, selfish and unpalatable, all in the pursuit of more money or power. And it won't just be "the usual suspects".

Penny smart and dollar stupid: IT jobs slashed in US, UK, Europe to cut costs – just when we need staff the most

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

..and exactly which IT staff have been furloughed or let go? Juniors, apprentices and some hell-desk staff most likely will be the majority of the number.

There's a world out there with a hexagon vortex over its pole packed with hydrocarbon ice crystals. That planet is Saturn

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Regime change followed by shipping in vast amounts of dollar bills, then leave them in the shit when the next election comes around.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Consistency pays.

That would equally apply to Adobe too.

It is unclear why something designed to pump fuel into a car needs an ad-spewing computer strapped to it, but here we are

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "engineers should never, ever get involved in User Interface design"

"Oh lord Wordpress with 20 css files and 14 different js files with modified plugins that when updated overwrite their customisations!"

And that's just for the "Hello World" demo.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"In the US add in “display adverts to customer”."

Shell in the UK are doing this now. At at least one filling station the noise is blaring and they all seem to play the same advert at the same time but a bit out of sync with each other. I complained to the staff but they just shrugged, so I assume either they have no control over the sound volume or someone higher up is in charge of that setting. Either way, I don't care. I just never go there any more.

For reference, it's the new Shell "services" at Leeming on the A1, Nth Yorks on the southbound side, not the long established Leeming Services on the northbound side (You can get to either from north or southbound direction.) I can only use Shell as the company fuel card is a Shell card, but there are many other Shell filling stations I can use.

DBA locked in police-guarded COVID-19-quarantine hotel for the last week shares his story with The Register

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: And this is why the Aussies are on top of it

"Instead, everyone will Eurostar it to Brussels or Amsterdam and fly from there."

The quarantine is for people coming TO the UK. I've not seen anything about quarantining people leaving FROM the UK.

Having said that, we won't, yet, be quarantining people from Ireland or France. So I suppose people coming to UK could fly into either of those places and then use Eurostar to get here. I suppose that depends on whether Ireland or France are going to be quarantining incomers, however they arrive and whether the UK will be at least checking who arrives from France/Ireland by ferry, tunnel or plane and how/when they got to France/Ireland

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How far away is home?

"When we went back to the UK a few years ago, we stayed in the Lake District. We then drove down to London to visit a relative. I lost count of the number of people who were very surprised at this asking how we travelled so far in a day. This was very puzzling to me."

To a Londoner, anything outside the M25 is "long way" :-)

Having said that, I know people locally here in the Grim North of England who would get lost if more than 15 miles from home but can tell you where all the best pubs are in there regualarTurkish or Spanish holiday resorts!

Singapore releases the robot hounds to enforce social distancing in parks

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Holmes

Re: The important questions...

Having watched the video, it does seem to be taking a dump on at least one occasion but no actual shit.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Just wear the mask

"They have lots of cheap labor and use that, not the robots."

Yes, this. There's almost if not actually no situations where a fully mobile robot is cheaper or safer than just using a meat-sack. Those specialised situations where a "robot" is useful, it's rarely ever actually a robot. It's a remote controlled device with little to no autonomy.

In the instance in the article, the cost of that one remote controlled toy could probably employ a small army of real people with PPE.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Spacecraft with graphene sails powered by starlight and lasers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Thoughts

"Can you use lasers to decelerate enough with current scientific knowledge and unlimited funds?"

Use Dark Light? Well, hey, we already have dark matter and dark energy :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Calling Isaac Newton...

ISTR that E E "Doc" Smith came up with something similar far earlier. Build "stuff" from the asteroids to effectively make a solar system sized CRT with the sun as the emitter.

Fancy some post-weekend reading? How's this for a potboiler: The source code for UK, Australia's coronavirus contact-tracing apps

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Apple-Google API

You've clearly not bothered to read any of the articles about this. Whether it's of any use in another matter, but there's no reason the majority of Android device won't have access to it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Schneier posted a thorough takedown of contact tracing apps

"So why bother at all?"

You are forgetting "if it saves just one life"

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