* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Pornhub walls off Utah in age-verification law protest

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How does that work then?

Depends how well or badly the law is worded. To be checked, the PII has to be "stored" for some finite amount of time, even if only in RAM. If the wording is loose enough, someone will sue.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: There's some merit it this complaint...

"And if the majority are US-based, then clearly the editorial will be more focussed on US based content."

And yet, when it was slightly less US focussed, it attracted a great many US readers. So sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. It's how advertisers work. If a market is expanding, concentrate on that one, even if what you are doing alienates other markets and removes the uniqueness you had.

CERN celebrates 30 years since releasing the web to the public domain

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

Re: it changed software development

Back when |I was a kid, peoaple walking around talking to themselves were the local nutters[*]. Now everyone is at it (phone in pocket, in-ear wireless ear buds you can barely see)

* not PC nowadays, but I'm using it in it's historical context. Please don't cancel me!!!!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: it changed software development

"In the 1970's, there was an expectation of the "end of programming" -- that all the (green-screen) applications needed by business would be completed, and all the world would need would be a small coterie of operations and maintainence programmers."

And less than 30 years later, the Millenium Bug hit and there were no programmers left to fix it, bringing on the downfall of human civilisation :-)

How Sandia hopes to accelerate US hypersonic weapons development

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: Bullshit

And much, much less of spreading the project"in the right congressional district[s] for further funding".

Uncle Sam sounds like it may actually do something about rampant visa H-1B fraud

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Indian Immigration Visa

Being the two most populous countries in the world might have something to do with it. Both have some very good universities too, but by dint of their population, they also have a large number of less good universities. It's up the potential employers to sort out who is actually good.

Boffins claim to create the world's first wooden transistor

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Natural PC

..which has a regular clock cycle? Fibre is good for making you regular :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Flame

Re: ?

True, but very slow, AI? The sentient "world forest" of the future? Or maybe talking books (made from paper, natch)? Guided, intelligent growth of trees for making treehouses for our green cities of the future? Might need decent fire suppression in a warming world though.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Woodworm

And what;s the root password?

EU legislates disclosure of copyright data used to train AI

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

For that matter, what about that steep windy hill place in SF on a busy day, with Amazon type deliveries to the residents just to make it even more congested? Or the daily police chases down the hills past the trams, bouncing over the cross roads and leaving hub caps flying everywhere (Blame Hollywood for my view of SF!)

Ashlee Vance spills the beans on the secret exciting life of space startups

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Planet Labs, Rocket Lab, Astra, and Firefly Aerospace

I'm surprised there's no mention of Blue Origin. Are BO being secretive or is there just not much happening with them? I'd quite like an update on them.

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: You had me at

"You can try to float any Apple or Atari stuff. It will not float, but I have no problem with you trying, anyway. Makes great coral reef material. For the environment, of course."

Naaah. Plastics slowly degrading in the oceans isn't the best idea :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Nobody is touching...

Blocky! It's surprisingly sad how poor old games look on modern LCD/OLED screens. The imperfections and foibles of CRT displays where used to advantage by games programmers and they can look shite on a modern screen unless you use "shaders" to simulate scanlines etc to attempt to recreate the old look and feel. I recall some NTSC games that simply never looked as expected on PAL systems because of the different foibles of the two system. Probably vice versa too.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Embarrassed in to having a clear out...

"Oh, and 2 HP MicroServers, 1 of which is BNIB"

There's an ancient HP MicroServer in my loft too. It's got a 250GB boot drive in the CD-ROM bay and 4x4TB HDDs[*] in the main drive bay and has been running for quite some years now.

* upgraded a couple of times, running ZFS filesystem in RAIDZ, so 12TB of space, mostly filled and thinking about another upgrade :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Don't mention Soundblaster.

And/or a trawl around archive.com. Lots of games for almost any system you can think of saved on there for posterity. Some you can even play in your browser through their own emulators, other you can download and try setting up yourself.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: NMOC

Ooooh...me too. That's more than half-way to London for me :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Depreciation

She was a pretty shit FD then. Everyone knows that kit has a selling cost, ie there is a cost to be factored in to the process of actually selling the item(s). If the deprecation is allowed to fall below the selling cost, then it costs more to dispose of it than it's sale price value. You get shot of it before that happens, unless it's being scrapped, in which case you price up the scrapping costs too. And annual depreciation of 15%? Sounds like she had no idea of lifecycles and was depreciating based on heavy machinery with a much longer expected lifetime. Even our company cars are depreciated at 25% to 33% annually.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The Tandy 1000 had a 3 channel AY-3-8910 sound chip in it and some games supported that. That would sound more like "8-bit tunes" than anything from the PC speaker. Maybe DOSBox needs setting to emulate the Tandy 1000 Sound device. Try setting machine=tandy in the config file.

On the other hand, I remember speech coming out of the basic PC speaker. Poorly, but understandable :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Tractor beam on!

" iOmega ZIPdrive"

Was that the Apple version?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A phrase to remember

Yeah, and I have a "friend" wondering how much for the TRS-80 Model 100 :-)

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: True story

"(spec'd, provided and installed by IBM, gratis!)"

Well, the electrical and RFI specs for devices in most countries usually specify that the device not only should not produce too much RFI but should also continue to work in the presence of RFI. So either IBM or Otis would be on the hook to resolve that situation :-)

But yeah, spotting it in the first place can be interesting and fun. Most often it's when a fresh pair of eyes turn up knowing that the people who already looked at it are good and will have tried all the obvious things already. The right pair of eyes with the right type of brain behind them knows it time to think outside the box.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

...and very un-American, which is the opposite of what El Reg is trying to be. I submit Regonomizationizm as a suitable American-sounding replacement,

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Multi I/O Boards

Multi-I/O cards changed over time. Anything other than an original 8088/86 or 80286 based PC would likely have had the realtime clock on the motherboard, and the multi-I/O card would have been 16-bit and had FDD, HDD, parallel and one or two serial ports on them and most likely IDE-based by the time 486s came along.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not quite the same

It would probably have been cheaper just to fix the earthing problem in the vacuum cleaners!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Hairy jumper"

...and a vest is something else altogether :-)

ESA's Jupiter-bound Juice spacecraft has a sticky problem with its radar

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Pint

I often wonder...

...how many of the people involved in these long term probe missions have in the back of their minds the likelihood that Starship will, over the next few years, make it much, much cheaper to send probes on higher velocity orbits and send newer, better and bigger probes that will get there faster merely by being able to boost a cheaper more fuel-filled probe into orbit for much less money.

A pint or three of barley Juice for everyone involved, it's still great science and engineering :-)

The end of Microsoft-brand peripherals is only Surface deep

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ocean Plastic Mouse

Yeah, I noticed that too. It is, of course, recycled plastic, but showing that MS are not just being green by using recycled plastic, they are being "super green" by helping to clean the oceans too! I suppose the fact it's made from plastic recovered from the ocean makes the green-washing that bit easier since it's pre-washed plastic.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"For instance, I have a friend who swears by a trackball, whereas I have only ever sworn at it as it just doesn't work for me - each to their own."

Yeah, similar arguments can be had over trackpads and nipples :-)

Red Hat layoffs spark calls to unionize, CEO wades in

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

They are not all software engineers.

No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Truly, certainly not

Back to the FUTURE!!!! Where we're going, we don't need Windows! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Truly, certainly not

"Who knows, maybe with Windows 12 we'll finally get another version that looks pretty, consistent, finished and flexible. Not holding my breath."

Probably best not to, considering the time from Win 10 to Win11. Win12 is a few years away yet! I wonder if there'll be a Win13 eventually? Americans seem to be very wary of the number 13, at least in marketing terms, floor numbering etc.

Online Safety Bill age checks? We won't do 'em, says Wikipedia

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

It's most likely skewed by the large population of of the USA likely making the USA the largest contributor and almost certainly the largest consumer of articles.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What is deemed harmful to kids ?

Most kids probably only access Wikipedia for homework reasons. Likely the same reason most kids would ever knowingly visit a religious site.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The Lords said they felt that "anonymous age verification is possible."

Maybe, maybe not. Do you want Joe the binman[*] to be made a Lord to help redress the balance? Alan Sugar made it from London barrow boy (sort of!) to the Lords. Probably not the ideal example, but an example nonetheless.

* No offence to binmen. They do a vital job. But it's probably not ideal training to be one of the people sort of in charge of the country :-)

UK emergency services take DIY approach amid 12-year wait for comms upgrade

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Two systems cannot become one

"I'd also expect that having the existing radio strapped to the shoulder (as now), with a phone in a pocket for data duties is not as significant an issue as you might suspect."

If you watch any of those motorway cops type shows, they all seem to have two handsets, one strapped to each shoulder. I've always assumed it was radio + mobile phone, so carrying two devices seems to be SOP these days anyway.

Musk tried to wriggle out of Autopilot grilling by claiming past boasts may be deepfakes

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Musk is deposed

Is it just me that kept reading that phrase in a different context to that intended?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Tesla to actually do some advertising and point out the limitations of their software"

It'd be nice to see the court dish that out as part of the punishment, assuming Tesla lose. With the court having a veto on the adverts Tesla produce, ie there must be NO "spin" only the unvarnished "truth in advertising" :-)

NASA tweaks Voyager 2's power supply to avoid another sensor shutdown

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Amazing

"Expecting plenty of down votes by web site 'designers' and up votes from 'engineers'."

Don't worry, the coloured pencil and crayon department aren't technical enough to read El Reg. At time of posting, it's overwhelming clearly that it's mainly technical people reading here :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg!!!!!!. You mean Reliant Robins!!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Yes, as we know from all the best SF shows, the answer is always "re-route the power to the sensors" or, "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow"

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: "It [...] was detonated over Boca Chica, Texas, within minutes of launch"

See icon --------------->

You'll have to imagine the pint of beer icon since I can't use two at once :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What happened to the new Roadster? What do you think was in that nose cone?

"and think of the increase in the value of the only one in space currently. (clearly the most collectable car ever)."

Considering Muskolinis love of crypto, I'm surprised he's not auctioned it off as an NFT yet :-)

Elizabeth Holmes is not going to prison – for the moment

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

In the UK at least, sentence guidelines take into account all sorts of things from pleading guilty from the outset to whether remorse is shown etc. If there's a range available, I'd expect people who "play" the system and keep appealing and losing might get a longer sentence than someone who accepts the guilty verdict in the first place. But, as with so many court cases, it's always possible that the verdict is actually wrong for any of a number of reasons and so an appeals process is rightly part of the system. I think under UK law it is required that all known evidence is produced during the case and appeals are granted based on technical failures in the original case or if genuinely new evidence likely to affect the original verdict which can be shown to be not previously known to either party. From what I've seen of some US court cases, it seems like the defendants legal team only provide the minimum evidence they think they need to win the case. When they fail, they then appeal with the second string evidence they already knew about but didn't use. This seems to mean, as in this case, constant and seemingly never ending appeals over years.

Samsung to cough up third of a billion bucks for ripping off patent

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Gimp

We are pleased...

"We asked Samsung Electronics for a statement regarding the verdict in this case, but did not hear back from the company at the time if publication."

Samsung statement: We are pleased to receive the courts judgement and our lawyers are looking forward to discussing any and all possible grounds to appeal while sipping cocktails on their yachts in the Bahamas. (said with more of a grimace than a smile!)

Support chap put PC into 'drying mode' and users believed it was real

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Washing Machine Fix

Staying young? :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Washing Machine Fix

Yes, happy days when it was not seen as incredibly risky and instant dismissal to acquire some random bit of software and install it on corporate PCs. There were viruses around then, but thankfully relatively rare and usually a bit less vicious than nowadays, although even then, AV was part of the toolkit.

Florida folks dragged out of bed by false emergency texts

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

...or it means Cuadrilla are back in action :-)

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Wheels within Wheels

"I concluded he wanted that file to be found, to scare off some CS students, and I never did encounter a "flunk-out" CS course."

There may well have been an ulterior motive for a scheme which never actually materialised, but I don't think explanation adds up. After all, those who "discovered" said file would probably be those least likely to flunk out.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

...and I'm sure we've all noticed that no matter the enforced password complexity, if the user is told there is a specified minium length to the password, that is the number of characters used. 8-16 character passwords allowed? 99% of users will have an 8 character password because they are forced into making it "complex" and the natural reaction to that is to not make it any more complex than it needs to be :-)

Microsoft not a Teams player as admin center, 365 service suffer partial outage

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "repeated the same disable component, save, re-enabled component, save process"

By the time you've installed the updates it's back down again there are more available to start the update cycle all over again

FTFY

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