Posts by John Brown (no body) 25376 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
I do wonder sometimes why they feel the need to sit on code that is so old anyway. Much of it is dead, rotted, and probably no longer holds any "trade secrets" that aren't already known in other contexts nowadays (And yes, I DO know there is still code running out there that is even older and still proprietary)
Considering this is basically a American company, probably staffed almost entirely by Americans, this all sounds very typically self-effacingly British. Hey, we built this thing, it might work, it might not, but we'll give a jolly good try and if it doesn't work, well hey ho, we'll have another go. We've even got a spare rocket in the hanger just in case. (Although that last, spending real money on a plan B is a bit more American than the more typically British shoe-string, garden shed budget.)
Still, I wish them luck. The more the merrier.
"That was my first thought when I saw the new 'flat' Windows look: "Which fuckwit thought that making it look more like Windows 2 was a good idea?"
Maybe the designer hadn't been born when Win 2.0 was around? After all, here we are today 30 frikken years after 3.0 was "born". Shit, I feel old now :-( Even policemen look young these days!
I got curious after my other post, re Urdu speakers and looked up Apples penetration into the Indian market. They claim 75% of the premium market for smart phones. They have 2% of the overall smartphone market. But as per the El Reg report 5 days ago about the COVID-19 app for feature phones, there are at least 55,000 feature phones compatible with the app. But getting back to the 2% iPhone penetration, there are likely far fewer using Outlook for iOS, so it may actually be a very small market for MS, far smaller than raw numbers of language speakers or iPhone/iPad users.
I wonder what the iThingy penetration is in those areas where the affected languages are spoken? Urdu, for example, Apple have a very low penetration in India even though there is a massive number speakers. Likewise Irish Gaelic. There may well be quite a number of daily speakers as referenced above, but if MS data slurp shows that only 1000 people worldwide are running Outlook on iOS with Gaelic as the display language might just wonder why they are spending money on such a microscopic number of their total userbase.
"I'm just wondering how long an iPad Pro with fancy keyboard will last in a student house in the Boro. Probably not even as long as the parmo."
No idea how long they last, but many students at Teesside Uni are issued one as a "freeibee" when starting their course, for at least the last two years.
"Not many people are still using an 8 year old laptop."
FWIW, many people who buy their own kit are using it for longer than you might imagine. Corporate purchased stuff tends to not only get replaced on a regular rolling replacement schedule, currently about 5 years in most places, but the users tend to break them more frequently because they didn't pay for them and don't look after them
"I've got a 16 year old HP pavilion laptop that I dragged out of a cupboard and booted up a month ago and it... just worked."
Same happened with my Amiga A1200 last week when I "discovered" it during an archaeological expedition into the attic last week. Remarkabley, the HDD "just worked" after being powered down for many years.
IIRC they HAVE created a feature phone version of the app.
Ah yes, here it is:
India’s contact-tracing app unleashes KaiOS on feature phones
55 million users of $10 Bluetooth-enabled phones come into embrace of closed-source app
reported by El Reg 5 days ago.
Prove it. It's your own phone. Why would you not have the code to your own phone? Sadly, the law doesn't take this into account. They'd expect you to a) know the code or b) know how to get the code. Refusal of either is still the "crime". "Phone a friend" and get the code or go to jail.
Not really. You'd have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it affecting the economic well-being of the United Kingdom in some measurable and meaningful way and it's not just a microscopic rounding error, eg his actions cost the UK taxpayer an extra 2 hours of overtime for a Police Constable isn't affecting the economy ion any reasonable or meaningful way.
"Not compliance with the law, obedience. The choice of words seems quite telling how this person views the general public. and he's not a low-level clerk, either."
If I understand correctly, many places have laws whereby, under the right circumstances, refusal to obey a police officer or other law enforcement official is a crime in and of itself. The US in particular has this law in many places. The difference and nuances depend on the precise situation and precise instruction given and whether those may be superseded by the "victims" other rights.
Yeah, it'd be nice to get the details of the "settlement". Gnome ended up not having to pay anything so either the RPI had a sudden attack of altruism or they realised it was going to court and realised the was a good chance of losing not just the case but probably a number of the patents.
Although a good result for the Gnome Foundation, it leaves RPI to go after others with the same patents. I think the courts should have the power to reject out of court settlements and force the litigants to go ahead when there's a good chance of setting a precedent. (although IANAL and don't know if this would pass that test anyway)
I wonder if it matters who took the photo and when. eg might the grandmother have taken the photo when her son and grandson were living with her for 7 years? I don't think that was made clear, but it does seem as if the photo depicted her son and grandson. There's no mention of the daughter in law being in the photo herself, just that she brought the action.
On the other hand, although there's no statute of limitations, historical offences, if prosecuted today, have to work with the law as it was at the time of the offence. So you don't really have to worry if what you did then wasn't an offence at the time.
I suspect their "recipes" are why people where queuing up at their drive-throughs when they re-opened. No one making their own coffee at home would ever consider putting quite that much sugar in a mug of coffee so they can never duplicate the Starbucks taste, even if they manage to find all the other ingredients.
"When was the last time your neighbor in Blighty offered you a cup of home-fermented tea?"
I'm not a tea drinker, but I do know people who grow their own tea bushes. The UK climate is temperate enough but from what I've been told, you need the right type of soil or know how to make you soil into the right type. (Needs to be acidic I think, I'm sure any decent gardener could manage it.)
"I had a nice glass of local wine with my dinner, now I am enjoying a good cup of tea."
Whilst I don't disagree with the disgusting taste of many of the energy drinks, it's just taking some ingredients, processing them, then producing some form of drink that some people like. In many ways, it's not so dissimilar to the processes done to those pristine grapes to produce a wine, or those lovely green, succulent leaves plucked from bushes to make tea.
"I sometimes wonder what would happen if a couple kids tried this kind of thing today ... sadly, however, at that age they aren't taught enough of the basics to even contemplate the concept, much less attempt to implement it. Sad, that ... we've lost something as a society."
While I agree with you on the education (or lack thereof) bit, I do wonder just how much disruption that sort of fairly high powered spark gap transmitter might cause nowadays with so many people and devices relying on access to the airwaves. At the least, it might screw up everyone's home WiFi for a few blocks, maybe mobile phone signals, set off burglar alarms, screw up peoples satnavs, trigger WiFi enable heart pacemakers, OMG it's the apocalypse! Again!!
"But Baikonur is still an option... "
Maybe that's it. Maybe he authorised the booking of another seat from the Russians despite the planed SpaceX launch as a contingency and someone higher up the food chain, maybe right at the very top, is upset at that so he's jumped before being pushed. The apex predator has history of sacking people who upset him.
"It's my understanding that the re-usability of 1st stage rockets doesn't DIRECTLY apply to manned missions except that the manned mission booster can be re-used afterwards for an un-manned launch. But yeah THAT level of re-usability makes it cost less overall since the entire booster cost isn't eaten up by that one launch."
My understanding is that SpaceX are intending many launches of each first stage. Since the number of manned launches is going to be a small fraction of total launches, making sure a brand new virgin stage one is ready for a manned flight isn't likely to be a chore so the reality is that manned launches are directly cheaper thanks to the re-use in the same way that any first launch of a new stage one is. Unless there is some significant extra expense in building to man-launch ratings compared to unmanned launches, which I don't think there is on the first stage.
You're spot on with the "Unix-like" system though. We need bigger, better and more importantly, newer hardware in orbit. With the newer bigger launch vehicles coming online we should be looking at something with the legroom of Skylab, not the ISS. (I wonder if the ISS crews watch old film of the guys in Skylab flying around in all that space and get jealous?)
So, on previous space docking where there was video from both craft being seen in real time by the people/systems controlling the docking, did they throw a line across first and plug it in? Or are TV transmission via RF no longer classed as "wireless" despite not using, erm, wires. It's a bit like "on a mobile device". Hey, we are improving and adapting a system, lets tell everyone its a "first" because we tweaked the method a bit.
"Siri _cannot_ listen unless you say "Hey Siri" first."
...or something it *thinks* sounds like "hey siri". I'll give Apple the benefit of the doubt here and assume that the device itself is what listens for and detects the wake phrase and that it's not sending *everything* to Apple for speech recognition in the cloud.
"Also among the very worst features of Linux distros is the availability of FAR TOO MANY DIFFERENT PACKAGE MANAGERS."
Isn't that only an issue if you keep bouncing around from one distro to another? Is it an issue when you settle on and stay with a single distro? Why would you even want to be running multiple distro? Is there any benefit to running multiple distros?
"I live in a three storey house. It still has ground floor windows. Do criminals just give up with trying to get in through a ground floor window if the house isn't a bungalow?"
Of course not. I was making a point about ground floor bedrooms and therefore why someone might want a security camera in a bedroom. If you are in a flat or apartment solely on the ground floor of your three storey house, then yes, this may still apply to you. I didn't specify a bungalow, I just specified an entirely ground floor dwelling. For the argument I was making, it was irrelevant if anyone was living on a floor above the ground floor dwelling.
Yes, it's worth bearing in mind that we have people posting from both sides of the Atlantic. On the left side of the pond, "socialist" and "liberal" have very different meanings to those of use on the right-side of the pond. For a start, here on the right-side of the pond, we don't see calling someone a socialist or liberal as a mortal insult.
"Last year there were 27,820 people killed or seriously injured in road traffic accidents in the UK"
That's "only" 76 per day. It's not great, but it's a lot better than many 100's per day in just 2 months where you have far less control over whether you might be a victim or not.
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