* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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BBC is still struggling with the digital switch, says watchdog

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Slow moving

"For me, one of the main attractions of BBC (mostly consumed via iPlayer) is the lack of advertising - I can just dive in and watch a show uninterrupted."

This is why streaming took off in the US. The ad breaks are so infuriatingly long and frequent that switching to streaming was a backlash from the viewers and "no brainer" leading to the phrase "cord cutters". Once it took off there, it was inevitable it would spread even to markets where the advert "problem" was nowhere near as bad, to the detriment of the often reasonably good incumbents.

Here in the UK, we often looked enviously cross the Atlantic at the many TV channels they could choose from. What we didn't see was the ad breaks they suffered and problems having so many channels to fill when there's a finite amount of good content. The rot set in to the BBC and ITV when satellite and cable came to the UK but took a long time to really set in. Yeah, only having two channels, eventually five, to pick from doesn't seem like much, but is there really that much good content on the 300+ channels we have now? Even the higher end documentary channels like Discovery and NatGeo have very little new content, they are 90%+ repeats. Once you've seen all the stuff you want to see, suddenly you find there's not a lot to watch.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Slow moving

Oh FFS, that was shit! Did he not do ANY practice? That looked like he'd never been on the ice before in his life!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Slow moving

"They're in it for the long game, as the BBC used to be, before those working for the Beeb, just began exploiting it for their own gain by making cheap, crap TV, to fill the schedules, ignoring the long term consequences of doing that. Allowing a top-heavy management structure to develop."

For good or ill, mostly ill in the long run it seems, the BBC was forcibly "broken up", spinning off much of it's production into private, commercial operations. That's why so many "BBC" productions don't appear on iPlayer for very long after initial broadcast, because they have to pay for those rights. The BBC has an enormous back catalogue going back decades, but not so much from the last decade. Rather than put that back catalogue on iPlayer, free to those who paid for its creation, some of it is on Britbox so we have to pay again to watch it.

For those talking about the "obsolete" iPlayer and BBC Sounds, I find them no more difficult to navigate than Netflix and infinitely better to navigate than Amazon with it's many interleaved "channels" in the guide that are paid for extras.

Amazon is the worst for browsing, iPlayer more or less on a par with Netflix,although none are actually good for browsing. Most streaming service front ends are only really good if you already know what you are specifically looking for by name. Even genre searches are poor IMO. You'd think all these streaming services with the $millions of development funds would be able to compete with the many interfaces and customisation options the free Kodi media player can manage. I have Kodi running exactly the way that suits me with a skin of my choice and the options that work my way, ie many text based titles I can read per screen with a description in a sidebar, not silly "thumbnails" I sometimes struggle to identify with maybe 6 or 8 per screen and much scrolling.

TL;DR Streaming services: Great content, shit interfaces

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Too many "heads in the sand" technophobes run the BBC

"I worked for a commercial broadcaster who didn't like the license fee. However they also didn't want the BBC taking advertising or sponsorship. Neither did the idea of encryption/subscription go down any better. People apparently might find the idea of two monthly charges unwelcoming and ditch the commercial one."

So, in summary, the commercial broadcaster didn't like the idea of a big competitor, no matter how it's funded. Sounds like every other commercial business in the world :-)

Corporate execs: Get back, get back, to the office where you once belonged

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: C-suite interfacing with the rest of the company

"What I found is that the C-suite has little or no connection with what workers do. They don't get any feedback, because middle management in larger companies in general only report back success stories."

We did a company wide anonymous survey because some of the actual feelings of the staff was breaching the management firewall between the workers and the C-Suite. Primarily staff turnover rates. The staff treated the anonymous survey as truly anonymous. Things have changed for the better. No one got fired, at least not in relation to the survey[*]. :-)

* Yeah, I know a few people who said things in the survey that could have potentially lead to repercussions, and nothing happened to them which I take as a great positive improvement in the company.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: complete mystery.

He's "only" a backbencher these days. But sadly he still has influence.

On the other hand, the number of government departments still buying in large numbers of laptops and tablets, I suspect those departments at least are not panning a mass return to the office any time soon. Local councils too. Many are selling off or mothballing office space as fast as they can, and not just for budgetary and running costs reasons.

Some Local Councils were already implementing partial WFH and closing offices before covid because it was cheaper and better for them. At least one I know of commissioned a study back in 2018 and a tried a pilot scheme in 2019 which showed increased productivity and fewer sick days, putting them in the perfect position to go fully WFH when the pandemic hit. They had to scramble a bit to beef up the servers for full remote working and get PCs and laptops into peoples homes quickly, but did it far quicker than most others managed.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Why (please explain)?

"IME the "notebook refresh cycle" is strictly a function of whether parts and support are still available from the notebook vendor. 3 years seems to be typical, though the notebooks themselves will last much longer."

IME, the number of laptops failing during warranty has risen. Not all are in warranty in terms of the repairs, ie "user damage". Broken screens seems to be on the decline now after a sharp peak during and immediately post-lockdown. Damaged charging ports, whether barrel or USB are steady at the new plateau reached with WFH. Spillages on keyboards and into the gubbins have dropped too from an early WFH peak. The hazards and working environment is very different at home than in the office and many of those people suddenly dropped into WFH had never done so before and may not have even used a laptop before then so didn't understand how to take care of it properly. Most people never plug anything into an office based PC. A home based laptop probably gets the PSU plugged in/out at least daily and was something people had to learn to do properly and carefully.

Now, none of that that indicates a shorter refresh cycle. It just indicates that some of the laptop estate will need replacing a little more often than than the lengthening desktop PC refresh rate, which is currently about 5 years for most of our customers, not accounting for the lack of use during covid. Although it seems most customers are buying with 3 year on-site warranty and just scrapping anything that comes back "broken" outside of the warranty period.

I'd say if any business has been hit hard by WFH, it's the office printer business. I see a number of customers with entire sections or even floors of their offices effectively abandoned but with big heavy duty office printers on lease agreements that may not have even been switched on in 2+ plus years and likely never will be right up until the lessor comes to take them away.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: We all traipse into the office for that critical meeting that HAS to be face-to-face..

On the other hand, there can be a social side to some team meetings that doesn't/can't happen online when only one person at a time can speak. People who don't "do" social", which I know are some of the people reading/posting here, clearly don't miss that. But most people do have a social element to them and may well have actual friends they work with and may have worked with for years, so a face to face meeting can be a lot more than just a business meeting for them.

Because of the remote nature of my work, there are people I've "worked with" for many years, but have only ever very rarely, or even never, met in person. I'm ok with that, but on those rare occasions we do meet face to face in two's or three's, we usually end up chatting about anything and everything other than the job :-)

Bill Gates' nuclear power plant stalled by Russian fuel holdup

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 40 metric tons

It seems to be a common "amercanism" when exclaiming loudly about something heavy or meaning a lot, like "a shit-ton", "a fuck-ton" and, when there are many of them, "x METRIC TONS!!!!!"

It seems to be a way of making an exclamation be longer and more drawn out, like instead of just saying "Jeezus!", it's more likely to be "Jeezus H. Christ" and similar involving crutches or bikes :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Two words. Commercial interests.

Why would an American company try to make reactor fuel when no one will buy it if they can get it cheaper from elsewhere. Doesn't matter where, so long as it's cheaper. That's capitalism. Legislating for use of a US production facility is "too much regulation", at least until you find that you can no longer buy the cheaper fuel and there is no other suitable source and it becomes a "national security" issue with a minimum 10 year lead time.

IT recruiter settles claims it snubbed American workers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "It's a Jersey thing"

Yeah, I was expecting some sort of link to The Channel Islands, maybe tax haven/tax avoidance related.

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Don't know.

Apparently you need to install the "BBC Sounds Skill" and then log in with your BBC account.

More here.

So you can't just tell it to play BBC Radio 4. You have to tell it to play BBC Sounds and then from their choose the radio station or from the library etc. which sounds a bit of a faff to me. I have no experience with smart speakers. Maybe once you have the correct "skill" set up you can teach it bookmarks or shortcuts? Surely they thought of that when designing the interface, didn't they?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Yeah, smart appliances are DUMB.

LOL, yes. oops :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Voice control

"It could only recognise a couple of other commands beyond 'call' and a name to match against whatever was in the address book "

Yes, my old Nokia could do that. Then again, even further back in time, I built a circuit from a book that was basically a few filters that clipped at 3 or 4 frequencies and output a digital signal to my TRS-80. The software could then store a pattern based on the sound and duration it "heard" and, with fairly limited parameters, recognise "words" and perform actions. One word at a time and you had to pronounce the word pretty close to the trained word to get a match to the stored pattern. It helped to make sure all the trained "action" words were not too closely similar. That was an 8-bit Z80 CPU running at 1MHz and, at the time I only had 16K RAM to work with. What the phone did was harder, because it has to match a spoke name with a string of letters, so it needs some smarts to analyse how that string of letters should sound. With my old Nokia, I had a to pronounce a Welsh colleagues name using the "rules of English" to get it to call him despite his name sounding utterly different to the "English" spelling :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The same applies to tv series and games

"Instead, their "dialogue" consists of chapter-long political or military analyses."

Heinlein went through that phase too. Some of his books are little more than a series of short political or social comment essays with some "plot characters" added to make it seem like a novel. :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Yeah, smart appliances are DUMB.

In this case, the generic "we" as in society. Some of this tech is becoming impossible to avoid simply by attrition. A device breaks, the only replacements available are "connected" or "smart" and, as documented in some cases, will only work when they are connected to the internet. Plain and simple "dumb" devices are getting harder and harder to find on sale anywhere. Most of us here know how to hold out, repair the older kit, avoid so-called "smart" kit from phoning home etc, but it's becoming a losing battle because the majority either love all this shit or simply don't care. Even on your ranch, there will eventually come a day when the only tractor you can get will be "smart" tractor. Although in that instance, it's probably a lot further away in time than for small electricals. (On the other hand, what if the use of ICE engines is banned in say 30 years time? Could be sooner than you think :-))

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Don't know.

"Unused, unloved and a complete waste of money."

Clearly, she doesn't listen to the exhortation of the BBC. They have always done "station idents" telling you the frequency to tune to. It used to be medium and long wave. Then it was medium wave, FM and, for Radio 4, also long wave. Then it was usually only FM and DAB. Nowadays, they ALWAYS start be telling us to "ask your smart speaker to play...", followed by DAB and maybe FM as a sort of afterthought. BBC radio is making an assumption that everyone has a smart speaker and implying "if not, why not?"

Two Four Seven Radiooooo Oneeeeeee! (Just showing my age!)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

My car and phone does local voice dialling without connecting to anything. The car gets a copy of the phone book and call history. When I press the steering wheel button and say "call $name", the car speaks back to me with "Do you want to call $name?". I say yes, (assuming it got the correct name) and it the car send the Bluetooth commands to dial it for me, no Google or even Samsung speech assistants required . Neither the phone nor the car are high end models. Mid-range at best.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

That's what Bluetooth is for. I've had a number android phones over the years and a number of different company cars. I've never had an issue with using the steering wheel controls to operate the Bluetooth connected Android phone.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

"Alexa, add tomatoes to the shopping list" would be useful for me - as long as I could later review and change the list before placing an order.

Even more than a mic switch issue, the above is the defining action of all "assistive" technology. Despite the massive computing power, they NEVER work the way the user wants them to. You ALWAYS have to change what you do to suit "the computer". There are fewer and fewer customisable options from the OS to the programs and apps. Our way or the highway is the mantra from $corp.

Musk bans private-plane-tracking @Elonjet on Twitter, threatens legal action

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: stalker

"in fact, the only thing you can definitively say is that there must be someone (the pilot) aboard."

Surely Musk has a Tesla autopilot!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I'm appalled

"Just more toys / pram behaviour."

And just to prove it, he's now banned live links to Mastodon on Twitter as "potential malware", apparently very shorty after links were posted showing where the @elonsplane has found a new home, which I'm sure is not related any way nosir! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I'm appalled

"In case it's not clear from the above: no, this is not about being pro someone or against someone. This is about fundamental ethics and a sense of moral responsibility. I would write the same whether we'd be talking of mother Theresa, Stalin, or the guy who stole my bike. Criticism, yes. Hate, no (and that goes for those who foment it as well)."

On the other hand, Twitter et al are already doing exactly the same with all of their users data, profiling them, probably selling on the results etc etc. Because that data has "value", they don't make it public, but is it really any different morally? There are people prepared to pay to get far more sensitive data about Twitter users than the location of a flight they may be taking. What Twitter et al actually sell may be aggregated, but the people collecting the data have it right down to the last detail.

The data on Musks planes flights is publicly accessible, just as Twitter users data is accessible to Twitter. We get told if we don't what to be tracked by Twitter, don't use Twitter. If Musk doesn't want his plane tracked, then go by train or car. He has the same choice we do.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: stalker

out of curiosity: WHY would anyone want to do that ?

Apart from what Jake and others have said, there are many people out there who's lives revolve around "following" their current celebutard and having a live feed of where they are and what they're doing is exactly the sort of thing many of them are doing every day.

After all, isn't this one of the premier USPs of Twitter in the first place? Fans "follow" their "heroes" so they can vicariously "live a better life" and bask in the reflected glory by re-tweeting the missives of their "heroes" and increase their own follower count.

European telco body looks into terahertz for future 6G comms

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

TerrorHurts

You can see the tinfoil hat conspiracy theories already starting to form.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Business as usual, then

"I suspect that one motive might be to grab the bandwidth licenses and go into business selling terahertz WiFi access points into the SOHO market. But with the obligatory monthly cellular bill instead of being consumer owned and free."

If that were to be something that might be considered, the incumbents would object to the need for licencing at all. Short range signals barely able to escape the room they are broadcast in is pretty much the definition of unlicensed spectrum. There would be a LOT of "stakeholder" reaction to attempts to licence that type spectrum.

TikTok could be banned from America, thanks to proposed bipartisan bill

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Easy self test

I would suggest that the fuzzy line demarking "social media" lies more or less with the sites which are primarily people chatting/pontificatin/ranting on random subjects on one side and on the other, "not-social media" being the likes of comment section such this, which I suspect you are alluding to, where the conversation is generated and guided by the posted articles.

America's nuclear fusion 'breakthrough' is super-hot ... yet far from practical

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Laser ignition fusion

You can use HE3 too. Apparently there's lots on the Moon. The US and others are making noises about moon-bases with permanent crews. Do these all mean something when taken together?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Just place a whole lot of them in a circle

As a "remoaner" I found that funny. A shame someone had to click a knee-jerk downvite :-)

Airbnb hosts less likely to accept bookings from Black people than Whites

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Interesting...

...but is this a USA only thing? Latino is not a word commonly used outside of the US, which also means people the report describes as "asian" might well be very different to who in the UK would be called asian. AirBNB operate across Europe and many other parts of the world too. Are those countries included in the survey and if so, the wildly different "markets" would easily skew the results. What about the results in predominantly black countries?

Boffins hear Martian dust devils' rumbles for first time

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Devil

The sound of the Martian (dust) devil.

Apparently, if you play it backwards, it says "WE ARE COMING FOR YOU"

Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

Back when I was driving a company car, only a couple of years ago, our company insurance policy was any authorised driver in any authorised (and notified) vehicle. Car hire costs for when ours were off the road for a service or repair were similarly low at something in the order of £20 per day for a week, maybe £30 per day for one or two days and we similarly were frequently "upgraded" to whatever was available if the requested grade wasn't in stock. Hiring the same car as a private individual, using my own insurance cover, is way, way more expensive than corporate hire.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

Same applies to local councils. They are their own insurers in most cases for most things. They might have employee and public liability cover and maybe some other special or edge cases, but on the whole, it's cheaper to do it themselves than to pay exorbitant policy prices.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

"Done. An hour or two DIY plus £15 for the switch, tops."

While I mainly agree with you, the OP did point out he was not especially "handy" at things like this. I know many people like that.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Renovations

Topically, each layer add more insulation to the building :-)

As one mission returns to Earth, three more make for the Moon

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: >attached a cable called a winch line

"everyone knew that its bark was worse than its bight."L

Excellent, just a shame you missed Barque :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"And all on autopilot, touchdown within 5 miles of the target!"

All things considered, ie speed, parachutes, weather etc, it's pretty amazing. On the other hand, we are getting accustomed to SpaceX coming down within 5" of their target spot :-)

UK arrests five for selling 'dodgy' point of sale software

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: designed and sold electronic sales suppression systems internationally

"I guess it shows how deeply ingrained it has become among some to look for a Brexit angle in almost anything."

It was mentioned in the article. It's hardly a surprise that it also gets mentioned in the comments.

Microsoft: Whoops, Patch Tuesday might screw your database connections

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: re: move to the Back Page

"googling, adolescent and Linda Lusardi!"

FTFY :-)

BOFH: Come back to the office. Your hotdesk is nice and warm

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: My eyes have been

I've never worked for a company that does bonuses. I suspect it's more of a "normal" thing in the US and much less so in the UK. Or maybe it only ever happens above my pay grade. I always have the feeling that bonuses are more likely to create division and sense of unfairness than any real motivation. After all, how do you decide the bonus level of the cleaners or anyone else at the bottom of the corporate ladder? I bet it's rife with favouritism, which I have certainly seen, even if not bonus related.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: My eyes have been

IIRC, our employment contracts forbid discussing salaries. Of course, no one ever reads their entire contract/Ts&Cs and either don't know about that or don't care :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Office

"And remember shared desk-phones? I'll stop, now – writing this post is re-traumatising me."

Maybe all those redundant telephone sanitisers could be retrained as mouse/keyboard sanitisers?

NASA's Orion Moon capsule to splash down this Sunday

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Which makes an bigger mess when El Reg then convert a round 300 mph into KM/s to the nearest 10th. God knows what the actual speed is since the first is a rough rounding at best.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: NASA coverage is a joke

The Weekend? Is that important? Didn't James Webb Space telescope launch on Christmas day?

San Francisco investigates Hotel Twitter, Musk might pack up and leave

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Deep in the heart of Texas

Depends. Is the whole of Texas the same? People keep warning us not to confuse SF, Silly Valley and California because CA is big and diverse.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

On a similar note, think about how useful building code inspectors and admin staff would be at halting the "child fentanyl" problem.

Raspberry Pi hires former spy gadget-maker who baked devices into surveillance ops

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: No supply for us geeks...

Or, more likely than companies going bust, they would rather supply those companies who might choose a different solution and never come back as a paying customer. Those companies pay the bills so the rest of us, in the good times, can have our nice new shiny at decent prices. Lose too many big customers such that demand falls too far and the economies of scale start to fail.

First-ever orbital satellite launch from British soil will be delayed

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Translator Service

Except, of course, as per the article, the purveyors of Red Tape have said "Uh, wot? Naa mate, the licences are all sorted, no problems at our end."

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