* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Windows 10 paid downloads end but buyers need not fear ISO-lation

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Only 2 years?

There's a lot of home users out there with no clue how to upgrade to Win11 due to it's hardware/security requirements and will end up either buying a new computer or running with no new security updates. There's still a lot of perfectly serviceable TPM1.2 based computers out there and the upgrade cycle seems to be getting longer and longer and incremental improvements appear smaller and smaller.

Having said ,that I note that even MS give details on how to bypass the TPM limitation, but the process they describe is not "non-techy" friendly.

Hundreds of Spotify staff stream out the door in latest layoffs

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Needs Work

Probably because, as with so many "internet" companies, it's their way or the highway. Maybe, as someone else mentioned, it's related to royalty payments.

Just look at something like Kodi[*]. It's free, open source, made by unpaid volunteers and you can choose from many different "look and feel" interfaces and a working playlist randomiser. I don't know of any streaming services, paid or free, that let you choose how the media is presented. They all seem to be designed to make you listen to or watch their choices on a screen designed for touch scrolling. It's bloody hard work identifying some albums or TVshows/films from thumbnails because the title style, font and colour changes on each one. No one provides a simple text/list option. The thumbnail display works if you know what you are looking for but is shit for quickly browsing for something that looks interesting.

* I'm just a happy user, no other connection to the project.

Twitter stiffed us on $2m bill, claim consultants in lawsuit

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: In the circumstances...

Knowing Musk, that's true. But in the real world, a company is responsible for its debts even of the ownership changes, unless they go insolvent. If Musk were to win in these cases, it would have a huge knock-on effect across the entirety of the business world. Want to renege on your debts? Just sell the company to your wife/husband/partner/child/whatever. Musk and Trump would love that, of course :-)

Rentokil uses AI rat recognition to plot extermination in real time

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

Brown rats?

I wonder if this AI has problems distinguishing between brown rats. Or lady rats?

US authorities release asylum seekers after leaking their data online

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

no customer information was exposed.

Well, no, of course not. Staff aren't customers. Nor are the 1.5million people not allowed to fly because they either upset the FBI or have been mistaken for someone who upset the FBI.

On the other hand, did they change the AWS bucket log in details in time? Have they had time to fully check everything and confirm no other systems have been accessed?

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: No to cups or spoons

Just like in the UK then, except the 1/2lb block was marked in ounces and now the 250g block is marked in grammes[*]

Interestingly, ATK did a segment on butter and concluded the European/UK[**] style of tending to uses paper backed foil was the superior packaging method as the butter was far less likely to take on the smells of other products in the fridge. I think they picked Lurpack as the best option :-)

*Usually, but it's not always the case and because of the foil backer wrapper, you fold it and use it more as a ruler rather than cutting through it.

** some of the cheapest butter uses waxed paper but most is paper backed foil)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Metric for precision. Imperial for sharing

"Try that when dividing a cake between a small number of people...5 really is the only outlier"

The "2.4 children" implies that nuclear families of 5 is relatively common :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Gammon's

*IF* the EU ever turns into a single federal state, that would make it as much an "empire" as the USA, Canada or Australia or is. No one is being forced or pressured into joining the EU. Countries ask to be allowed to join and are then given a range of conditions to satisfy before being allowed to join (and yes I accept there are controversies over the conditions). Maybe you meant Moscow, not Strasbourg?

And, of course, a country can leave the EU too if it choose to :-p

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Gammon's

"These are the same fuckwits who think Britain has an empire and is a country that matters."

There are very, very few people alive who experienced "empire"[*] these days. I doubt it's enough to swing an election.

* depending on who you ask. Personally I'd say 1947[**], not the hand over of Hong Kong. If we use Hong Kong as a measure, then Britain still has an "empire" with the likes of Gibraltar and other dependencies.

** Yes, 1947 is "only" 76 years ago, but anyone under 5 or 6 isn't going to have much if any memory of it so we're really only looking at people over about 82 who might have some active memories of Empire. The rest are just jingoistic wannabees.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I just use SI most of the time

Motorway coutdown signs are in a weird length which is 0.9m roughly.

100 yds per sign, 300 yds total, so about 91 meters between signs. or 0.17(ish) miles in total. Not sure where you confusion is with 0.9m since it doesn't seem to match either miles or metres in this case :-) At motorway speeds, just treat the signs as 100 metres each, it's close enough.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The French also tried metric time

6 deka-seconds :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Metric for precision. Imperial for sharing

"The great value of 12 is that it readily splits by 2,3,4,6."

Why? 30cm splits nicely into 300mm, so you can spit things many more times without bothering with messy fractions and 30cm has 2, 3, 5, 6, 10 as factors. 12 doesn't have 5 as a factor and I come from a family of 5 so food portioning works better in metric :-p

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "forced to glide the aircraft, containing 69 souls"

Yeah, that actually sound s a bit weird. "Souls" instead of people is usually reserved for those "lost", usually at sea, but has carried on to the air passenger industry. It might even be offensive to some who may not believe in "souls" :-)

And anyway, the Christian God at least is supposed to omniscient and omnipresent, so no "soul" can ever be "lost" since They[*] will know exactly where and when they died and arrange "collection" :-)

[*] Surely, by definition "God" is gender neutral and so must use the they/them pronouns, none of this He or She stuff :-))))

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Age

I'm only 60 and can work with both. We changed over while I was about 7 or 8 but I still use feet/inches for mu height and St/lbs for weight because I can easily visualise both. I know my weight in kg and can work with that in a relative fashion, but still find it difficult to visualise what, eg 180cm tall is or 82Kg in weight is. Likewise distances, miles because that's what I do everyday on the roads, but can easily do metres for shorter distance from my competitive swimming days so visualising 25meters or 50meters is easy from pool lengths. Likewise, the pool I first learned in was 100' so can visualise that sort of distance in feet/yds easily too. My head is a weird mish mash of metric and imperial measurements and conversions making some things more difficult simply because I learned first imperial and later metric.

On the other hand, my SatNav British voice says things like turn left in 200 yds normally, but in December when my wife likes to switch to the America Elfred santas elf American voice, it says things like turn left in one quarter mile, which I find harder to visualise :-) (Yeah, I know it;s about 440yds, but still...)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Brine

So freezing brine at 0F also requires you define "brine", ie the salt content and possibly any other impurities in the water?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"You could go down to 1/256 of an inch without needing any more decimal places."

Yeah, 'cos working mental arithmetic with fractions is so much easier :-)

True, with practice, you "learn" certain fractions and calculations that are common and can just "know" the answer, but the moment you come across a less used fraction and have to add or subtract another less used fractional size, it gets more difficult. My mother was a comptometer operator when she first left school and for the rest of her life remember all the LSD-decimal conversion she had to memorise because even back in the 50's, big electric office calculators where working in decimal, not a bastardised mix of bases 12 and 20. Converting mixed 12ths and 20ths to decimal was second nature to her. But she only had to learn and do that because the mechanical calculators couldn't (or were more more complex and expensive)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Consistency is what matters....

Fun fact, building and plumbing supplies are still sold in Imperial sizes

...because there are still an enormous number of "legacy" properties out there with 100+ year old plumbing.

as is jam & milk........

Not sure about jam, but milk still sometimes comes in 1 or 2 pint quantities, but not always. Mostly I buy it in 1 or 2 litre bottles. I just checked in the fridge where I keep a "1 pint" bottle to re-fill for my "coffee on the road". It's actually 500ml. So I can't say I've actually seen milk in imperial measures for some years now.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I'm pro SI

"At least Americans just give the weight in pounds."

And have a love of *BIG* number based on docudrama/reality shows I've seen. Things are many, many 1000's of pounds. And yet they have at least two sizes of Ton to play with :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I'm pro SI

"One of the tangible, retrograde, outcomes of Brexit, does seem to be that people feel free to use Imperial measurements - I hear it increasingly, everywhere."

That;s a little surprising to me. Just some strongly Brexit people being contrary maybe? Anyone 60ish or younger was taught metric from early school days, like me, I was there when it all changed so learned both. By secondary school, pretty much all teaching was done in metric units.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: No to cups or spoons

Ever watched Americas Test Kitchen? They bang on about "perfection" and then use these imprecise measurements like cups! They even did a section on *how* to fill a cup depending on the recipe/ingredient and then never really talk about it again, leaving you to guess. A little variation may not matter with large quantities, but could make a huge difference in smaller quantities such as 1 cup or 1/2 cup. Dip and scrape level? Pour in? Shake or not? Cup of chopped nuts? How small are the nuts chopped? Weird!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: No to cups or spoons

The teaspoon and tablespoon are also official mandated size in the UK for cooking measures too. And as you say, actual tableware are not calibrated measures and come in variable sizes :-)

There are conversions between US and UK cups and spoon measure though because, as you would expect, they are different on each side of the pond. A bloody nightmare when buying some cooking equipment that comes with recipes from the US and they didn't bother to (or even understand!) that the measurements are different. I only really use cups for rice cooking and tea/table spoon for bread making.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"More factors."

I've heard that as an argument for retaining feet and inches from Americans before. "What if you need a 1/4 ft or 1/3rd of an inch? My ruler has those marking". Well duh! You can divide a ruler into any weird fractions you want to. Or you can just use decimal in the first place :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

From the telly, I was under the impression that in US bars, beer comes in a "glass" or a "pitcher" :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Still the same in UK DIY stores :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I couldn't agree more. The longer a change is left, invariably the harder it is to implement. I wonder how "easy" it would be to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right nowadays compared with when Sweden did so in 1967 when cars were a lot more scarce on the roads?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Wile more or less true, depending on the circumstances, they were given years of notice to prepare.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"And also ignoring the fact even when we were in the EU it was legal to sell in pounds and ounces that as long as they also gave the weight in Kilos / grams."

And even now, you still come across some products in weird numbers of grammes or millilitres because they are approximations of imperial measurements.

Twitter tweaks third-party app rules to ban third-party apps

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 1,400 non-working employees

"cost centre" staff in bean-counter terms, ie admin types who don't actually produce income but are still vital to the operation of the company and so seen as unwelcome "costs" :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Leeching off a leech

Does Twitter charge for access to the APIs? If so, then charging for their app and not wanting to give refunds after being cut off with no notice makes a bit of sense. But if the Twitter API access is free or very low cost, then how much money were these companies making? That might affect how some people feel about them.

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Seeking out competition

Ans once they're ready, they can "update" Windows Defender to auto-delete anything they don't like. The shortcuts debacle was a only a test run which failed.

Icon only half in jest ------------>

New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"People not being like this is exactly why wealth is floating to the top and causing the economy to stagnate, whilst the richest get appreciably richer off the back of reaping the profits of other people working for free."

Like, for example, some of the richest companies in the world laying off 1000's of staff because there's a downturn in revenue. Note especially that they are NOT booking losses, just a reduction in profits. In some cases, they were extra hires during the COVID up-tick that many in IT saw, bit not all of them. They could probably afford to "coast" for at least 12 months but the stock market wouldn't like that and depress the share value.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

"Equal pay" relates to hourly rates. Of COURSE someone doing overtime will get paid more per week/month when overtime is worked than someone not doing it, but they still get the same basic hourly rate. "Equal pay" has never meant everyone goes home with the same wage packet no matter the hours worked.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"It also, of course means that your employer won't go the extra mile for you."

That's the point that so many are trying to make to you. Few employers will go the extra mile for you, no matter how often you do so for them. You've either been very lucky with your employers or aren't old enough to have grown cynical yet :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

They usually also get paid a "flat rate" salary (+ perqu's of course, like shares) so the more hours they can show they claim to do, the better it looks for them. The problem is, even if they worked their way up through the ranks, they forget (or never knew) what it's like to be paid hourly under contract and expect everyone to be just like them. Of course, their flat rate salary is way way higher than us peons get so while it may not matter to the bosses, it matters a lot to us.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

This was covered on Radio 4 on Thursday.

The presenter took a mic out into some of the other program offices to see what went on there. Most places seem to have "cake" table or desk where they get put fr others to snack from. One Journo claimed it was a conspiracy encouraged by upper management to get staff more hyper on a sugar rush and make them more productive. I nearly spat my cake out when I heard that!! They should place safety warnings on lines like that so I can pull into the hard shoulder and not get half-eaten cake all over the windscreen!!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: what you get advertised is chocolate and not cauliflower

I seem to recall a fad for chocolate covered sprouts at some point in the past.

I like chocolate. I like sprouts. But not on the same plate, never mind as a "fusion" :-(

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Free healthcare

"I'd be happy to pay more tax if the government would fund it properly - it needs paying for somehow."

I believe someone once implied that the NHS would get £350m a week extra. I'm sure that must have been true. It was on the side of a bus :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Oh for the love of kittens

Or the "pasty babies", ie young, not very well off mothers feeding Greggs[*] pasties[**] to their toddlers.

* other brands may be available and the Greggs ones are probably "slices" or "bakes" since Cornwall decided to be assertive over the name of its "national dish" :-)

** Ginster abominations don't count, even if they are assembled in Cornwall.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Some people...

Thank you. It's always nice when someone shoehorns in a quote from Mr Adams :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Some people...

Would be great for morale (sorry, "mental health").

It was, for a short time, Well Being, but I believe the current fad term is "mindfullness" :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What a load of cobblers

"there is no such thing as passive eating!"

You've not met my wife!!!

Warehouse safety citations could cost Amazon seconds in revenue

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

intends to appeal

"intends to appeal"

That say all you need to know about Amazon. Safety issue pointed out and instead of just dealing with them, they choose to spend time and money arguing the toss over it. Being Federal regulation s, they'll eventually cave anyway, so why not just make the process changes and get some kudos for doing so, apologising for the oversight? Or is this a case of admitting to fault opens the floodgates for compensation claims by the affected staff?

Punch-drunk Apple Watch called 15 cops to a boxing workout when it heard 'shots'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

""AN"? You mean the 112 number that is litterally THE emergency phone number for most of the world?"

Many parts of the world had standardised emergency phone numbers before 112 was "invented" and popularised, so some other countries adopted it as an alternative to their existing system so tourists and people brought up on foreign TV and films can also get the service.

I just checked on Wikipedia and they seem to have a quite comprehensive explanation of it, it's origins and where it works

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: confused

"The watch tried to understand what was said and apparently the only part it could understand was "1-1-2" and so it assumed it was a number to be called. So it did."

That's actually quite an assumption, but not something I'm surprised by given the current state of so-called "helper features" in general software today. If it was me, I'd not assume a "heard" number was a phone number since few people ever actually use phone numbers these days. I'd expect a call to the emergence services to be something like "Call 112" or "Call Police" etc. Specifically the the word "Call" to specify what the number/name/word following means in context.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hey, Siri

"They don't realise that we all have different ideas about what's interesting. With this sort of attitude so prevalent, it's only going to get worse."

If he also has an Apple watch, tell him the motion sensors can report all sorts of stuff back to Apple HQ, such as how often he wanks, how long for and how "enthusiastic" his performance was and, thanks to various web tracking, not only which porn site he was on at the time but even what video clip he was watching.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The bill

"Why? It was most likely human officers who heard the audio from the gym and made the decision to send what they saw as an appropriate response, given the information before them."

From the article, it is implied that Siri "heard" the words one one two, multiple utterances of "shot" and some "bangs" from gloves hitting the trainers pads and took it upon itself to call the emergency services. The article doesn't mention if it just dialled 1-1-2 and connected the audio to whoever picked up or if it just reported in it's own voice what it "thought" was happening.

I'm not sure how that could work in the UK, with either method. Calls to 999 are picked up by the emergency service operation centre and the first thing they do is as "Which service do you require" at which point you are expected to state Police, Fire Ambulance or Coast Guard. They do have procedures for "silent" calls and/or special code words. I'm not sure what they might do if Apples Siri calls them.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hey, Siri

"Not sure how it works, whether it's the car or the phone that is doing the work."

It's the car doing the work. If you check the manual, you should find you can also change the audio source, radio band and stations too. Also a Kia owner. I only use the voice recognition for the phone too. The radio stations and audio source is easier to do by pressing the buttons since I know where they are by feel and that's quicker for me.

(Did you know the radio also has 2GB of storage for MP3 files? Handy for keeping your favourite stuff and just use the USB for the ever changing stuff. In my case, music in the storage, audio books on USB stick)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hey, Siri

So why is it even listening without the "wake" command? Or does Siri commonly mistake "sorry" for its wake command? Something I'd not be very surprised at and commented on when Siri was first announced to the world.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hey, Siri

"My Echo has a mic off button with a red LED confirming it."

Doesn't defeat the primary reason for having a voice controlled assistant

Ransomware severs 1,000 ships from on-shore servers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
FAIL

Numbers?

"ransomware attacks against the shipping and transportation sector had doubled from the second to the third quarter of 2022."

So, there was one in Q2 and two in Q3? Yeah, I followed the link and it was entirely percentages. Not an actual real number in sight. Lots of high percentage increases but with no baseline real numbers, utterly meaningless.

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