Posts by John Brown (no body)

Well, to be fair, even if the image is in 3D space rather than 2D space, it's still a Picture Element, ie a single point or "pixel" :-)

I was working with a guy just the other day. He's showing me a procedure on his laptop, He's bashing away at the touchpad for clicks and complaining about how poor it is. So after a demo, he lets me have a go. Moving the mouse and a quick tap on the touch pad for click worked perfectly for me every time. Also, as is common on many modern touchpads, it's actually what some call a clickpad in that the bottom left/right corners sit on switches. I still have no clue how he managed to make such a simple device fail to work reliably. I suspect he's frequently logging fault calls when the clickpad buttons fail. Some people are just ham-fisted by nature I guess.

Re: Starship?

Boing STARliner[*]? Virgin Galactic[**]? They're all it, driving by marketing departments and the coloured pencil brigade.

* It's a souped up Apollo capsule, no more, no less, barely passed the stage of the Wright Flyer, not an air or ocean liner by any stretch of the imagination.

** Give me a break! They don't even go to orbit!! (VG is the space tourism bit, not to be confused with Virgin Orbit which can actually, you know, get to orbit. Sometimes)

Re: Orbit

If your 65 mile daily commute was straight up instead along the ground, the press might take more note of it. Let us know when that happens :-)

Your later comment in the same post make you sound like a flat-earther.

Re: An account that posts images and videos each time a cat returns home. Is that "good content"?

At least the decisions might have a firmer consistency.

Re: Meanwhile...

"some outfits think they can have a QA or coder or administrative staff person "do IT" in their spare time. I've even had to help clean up a situation where the hands-on IT person was more of a facilities caretaker than anything else -- not even the proverbial "electronic janitor"."

Aaaaand we come full circle. That pretty much describes many of the SMEs I used to visit back when MSDOS was still king of the desktop and Novel was the King of servers. Si9nce it was often the accounts dept/office which got the first PCs, the Finance Director, Accountant or finance office manager was often also the "IT manager".

Re: OSS

Yes, because "secure the open-source software" is actually the easiest part. It's much harder to secure the commercial code that you can't inspect, relying only on the supplier to do it for you, or inspecting the inputs and output of the "black box". If securing any FOSS you use is your responsibility, then securing the commercial software you use is the suppliers responsibility. Making the commercial supplier legally responsible if it's not secure might be a good start, starting with MS. At the very least, legally invalidating the common licence clause which basically absolves the company making the software to take no responsibility for it even working at all, let alone working properly.

Re: Why not shoot it down ?

Yeah, if Trump was in charge, he'd create a new anti ANTI-JINESE DEFENCE FARCE of Lawn Chair Larrys to go up there and shoot them down. (and with snazzy new uniforms with lots of gold braid too!)

Re: Why not shoot it down ?

Frankly, I'm amazed the yanks are showing restraint. "It's coming right for us...!"

Agreed :-)

"If you're not on your lawn getting noisy shots of every speck in the sky, you're missing out."

And with comments like that, there's probably a certain demographic taking potshots at any little speck in the sky in the belief they can see a fairly small "Chinese balloon" flying higher than most aircraft can go and their little pop guns have the range to hit it :-)

Re: One time

"The number of times I've seen such a light when walking by"

Yeah, I once got called out to a Compaq server with a 3 disk RAID array that had failed. I got there and there were two red lights showing two failed drives. I asked the on-site person (non-techy type), in conversation, when the two lights had come on. "Oh the second one came on yesterday, the other one has been on since I started here". Oops! Clearly their head office were not monitoring or checking to make sure someone on site was aware of how to at least keep a basic eye on things. No blame for the on-site non-techy person though. She had little knowledge about MS-DOS and none at all about Novel servers, that wasn't her job. She knew how to drive the PC to do her job.

On a similar note, an "emergency" HDD replacement on a similar vintage server, out of hours, so no one on site to query other than security, Only one failed drive in this case so I go to pull the hot-plug drive and note that there is a lit "failed" LED and the "faulty" drive has been removed already. Called over the security guy to confirm what I was looking at (Always have a witness, just in case). Phoned their IT guy and asked about the state of the drives when he left for the day. He says he pulled the faulty drive ready for me arriving. I could almost hear the "gulp" when I told him he'd pulled one of the two remaining good drives and the array was now toast.

Re: Strange way to respect user privacy

"my business and none of theirs."

But, but, but, how else is poor struggling MS going to work out who to target with upsell adverts on the Windows 11 start menu?

Re: We have some of the old projectors still hanging there..

Not everyone is a builder! :-p

They must've been bloody high quality fridge magnets. Most are barely strong enough to hold more than on sheet of paper to a fridge. I'd be quite shocked to find one strong enough to affect a computers operation.

As someone mentioned the other day, established and more wealthy economies can afford to "go green" while emerging economies such as much of Africa, large parts of Asia and South America can't, so are still investing heavily in the "cheaper" fossil fuels. Obviously there's still a level of hypocrisy in the 1st world governments, but not as much as you imply.

Re: EV Smugmobiles

"I'd stick with the diesel for now thanks."

Good for you! I'd bet most EV owners, other than maybe the most ardent greenies, would agree with you. I single long haul flight probably outweighs your annual emissions :-)

Just Googled it. A fully occupied 747 emits less pollution , but in the comparison that was a diesel car with a single occupant. So for your holiday trip will all the family, probably much less pollution than flying the same distance. I can't be arsed to work the numbers, but a flight is generally far, far further than a 200-300 mile caravan trip. And not all flights are filled. many are empty or near empty return flights at night just to get the plane at the right airport for start of day.

Re: Hyper Truck

Yeah, saw that reported on the Beeb the other. It surprised me that it even existed and I was a bit disappointed. Then I considered where SpaceX is now with Falcon9, Heavy and soon-to-be Starship compared with where they started with Grasshopper. The economics and demand are very different though. We shall see.