* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Amazon hit with $1bn claim that secretive Buy Box algorithm screws shoppers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: And this is news to just about nobody?

Yep. Most brand name online retailers, when you search for something defaults to "Most relevant", which generaly means it puts the stuff they most want to shift at the top of the list. But they offer a clear sort option allowing you to choose, by price or popularity to, usually price sorting by lowest->highest or highest->lowest.

Sometimes, sorting lowest->highest brings up pages of cheap accessories first, but at least they have the option and sometimes you can overcome that with better search terms, or in some cases, the site is clever enough to not list all the spares and parts when you type in Acme Spile-Trosher. Amazon, with all their online shopping expertise, all their web design savvy, all their massive processing power, can't seem to figure out how to do what some non-tech based sellers can manage.

Texas sues Google over alleged nonconsensual harvesting of biometric data

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Mr. Meseeks

Yeah, that's my problem with this too. It;s right to go after Google for this. But Texas!

It's like two lawyers fighting it out. Who do you want to win? I suppose it's more a case of who do most want to lose :-)

California wildfires hit CTRL+Z on 18 years of CO2e removal

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Mismanagement

"Much simpler to do nothing,"

But, but, but, nothing is something! All those fallen trees create ecosystems for insects, small animals and that increases the general food supply for the larger animals. it's all good, green and eco friendly!! It also encourages varieties of fungi. California surely is good with more and varied fungi man!

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Confession

...or the physical WiFi slide switch inconveniently placed to be accidentality slid to the off position either when picking up up the laptop or when putting it into a case/cover/bag.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Bear in mind that the lecturer had a PhD and all the students in the room were studying to be science teachers."

Biologists maybe? Or worse, Geologists[*] :-)

[*] not a real science according to Sheldon L. Cooper.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: press any key

Similar with the message "Press the Enter key". Sometimes it says "Return", not "Enter" on the key. Or has the left arrow with the vertical bar on. Some people can't learn multiple meanings for the same thing. The information simply doesn't "stick". Even asking them to press the Space Bar can be confusing.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: office save dialog

"Now in ,say ,Excel you find "save as" on that stupid f**king ribbon thing and guess what happens - Some totally unfamiliar screen pops up with a incomprehensible array of guesses about what you MIGHT be trying to do!!"

maybe it's a version thing, but on my works laptop, the only place I use MS Office apps, ALT-F S still saves the file. ALT-F A brings op the Save As dialogue page (note, not a box, and entire page!) with so many options it's confusing, but at least the file name box is easy to find, followed by Enter.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: CRT Monitors

Often it was a "joke" played by a co-worker that ended up going too far once the support engineer has been called so no one would admit to it. I used to point out in a nice clear and loudish tone that this was user error, not covered by the service contract and for them to expect a £120 invoice for the call-out, while surreptitious glancing around the open plan office and often noting at least one head suddenly bobbing down in embarrassment. Depending on the customer and if it was a repeat incident, we may or may not have actually charged them, but we always made sure the site contact was made aware of it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What button?

"I didn't hear from the person again."

IME, negative feedback is never appreciated and almost never responded to. If it is responded to, it's to tell you that your are wrong in your assessment of their baby.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bad design

"Dear God yes, and save me from software designed by some silicon valley boy genius who has never actually done anything out in the real world."

Ah, like one of our work apps that used to have a back button that took you back to the menu. The left facing arrow, commonly identified in most software as "back" has been replaced by three horizontal lines in a stylised "menu" or list (and for some odd reason called a "hamburger menu"[1]). Now, technically, it IS taking me to a menu, ie the front page of the app which is a menu of icons to select from, but that particular icon is pretty much standardised these days such that clicking on it one expects a drop-down menu of options.

[1] I'm not sure I've ever seen or eaten a hamburger. AFAIK they are made with beef[2] :-)

[2] I've had things called chickenburgers, turkeyburgers and even fishburgers, but I'm not sure they are really burgers as they are invariable coated in breadcrumbs or batter.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bad design

Except when it's a laptop and the BIOS config has set the function keys to act as multimedia keys instead and you have the press the Fn key plus a function key to get the function of the function key you expect instead of turning the WiFi off or volume up/down or switch the display to a non-existent external screen :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bad design

"swipe left 3 times, find the little gear wheel, 3rd option down, go down to the third page of settings, choose XYZ button, then choose the correct option from the drop-down - it's obvious!"

Obvious...until the next version of the OS comes along and it's all changed for no obvious or useful reason...because.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bad design

Even Google can't answer that :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bad design

"And my kid #2 just learned to drive. Started out on a recent car with the keyless fob and they did great. Get back into my old car (2001) to learn manual transmission and I handed her the key. We sat there for a while while she figured out what to do with it. That made me feel pretty old."

On a similar note, young lady driving up a major trunk road at night with no headlights on. Eventually managed to get her to pull over and it turned out she'd only ever driven cars with automatic headlights. While her one was in the garage, she'd been given a car which needed some sort of old fashioned switch thingy to turn them on and couldn't find it, although she did say she'd tried everything on the steering wheels stalks. That particular make of car had a rotary knob at the bottom right of the dash, just above knee height.

I did have a similar experience myself ones. A hire car which had "hidden" the light switch somewhere I#d never seen before. But at least I had the sense to pull over as soon as it was becoming dusk and spend 5 minutes looking for it rather than driving down a 70mph road with no lights on!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bad design

"Trust me, if your driving experience predates about the year 2000 there's a lot that's not obvious."

Or, something as simple as a tap (or faucet in new El Reg style). Motorway services and "executive" toilets seem to be a hotbed for "innovative" design of the humble tap such that it's very much not intuitive how to get water to come out of them. And despite the budget for the new fancy taps, when they fail, they get replaced with bog standard "push to operate" ones because the maintenance budget can't stretch to the unique and expensive parts to repair or the even more expensive like-for-like replacement.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bad design

Or, for that matter, a truly vintage car before controls were standardised. Need to advance or retard the spark as it warms up? There's a nice brass control on the steering wheel for that! Or it it a foot pedal? Or something like a handbrake? I bet few people could even start the engine on a car of that sort of vintage. I'd be one of them too!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bad design

It's not even new!!! I remember comping across a Tulip laptop many years ago. Not sure of the CPU, possibly an 8086. It had a monochrome LCD "CGA" 640x200 display which should help date it. The "power button" was the space bar. with tiny, tiny, almost microscopic yellow power symbol on the front chamfered edge.

The funniest one was, as a field engineer, I looked after pretty much anything PC or peripheral related and dealt with many makes and models of dot matrix printers, the vast majority of which had a small mains power rocker switch along the bottom casing, either left or right side. Until one day I came across an IBM ProPrinter. So I spend a good 5 minutes feeling all around the edges looking for the power button without success. It was cunning hidden on the top casing of the printer in full view. The "standard" Big Red Switch IBM were famous for back in the day :-) Clearly my brain was not properly engaged that day and was running on auto-pilot, blanking out anything unexpected and concentrating only on the usual, expected situation. A genuine "blind spot" :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bad design

"Also the paint rubs off the keys now in a few months, so eventually you will never know which key is which!"

Dunno about Dell, but Lenovo class that as an authorised warranty repair. The key cap legends should not wear off during the 4 year warranty period.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: If I have to look in the manual (absolute last resort of course) it's a really bad design!

"Not progress but regress."

...cost cutting. Those extra buttons cost money!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Press the button

"and this was supposed to be a work experience day"

There's yer problem!"

"He was given less difficult tasks to do under heavy supervision for the rest of the day"

Lesson learned, I hope. Never allow any "work experience day" kids access to anything unsupervised.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Press the button

"Then insisted that the installers come back to fix their work."

Too late once it's been signed off, accepted and handed over. The person signing off is supposed to be competent to do so. If not, that's the customers fault :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Manual is optional,

"the location of the illusive ANY button."

It's next to the ellusive ANY button. But, that's harder to find :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

Re: Manual is optional,

Obviously! There's no budget for sending the peons on jollies!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Manual is optional,

Yes, that! Likes and Subscribes don't translate in the quality or even future production of "more great content". Neither metric tells you anything about other videos they produce(d). Even the advertisers are more interested in accumulated views. They don't care if people "like" or "subscribe".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Manual is optional,

"rather spend 15 minutes reading the material as opposed to 1+ hours watching a video."

The YouTube generation? Millions of long winded "instructional" YouTube videos that for most people can be distilled down a few minutes of reading text and looking at diagrams on a simple static webpage which can easily be referred to at a glance rather than spending some minutes trying to find the spot in the video that has the bit of info you need to refresh :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Manual is optional,

"I'd always rather have the option of learning something from a few different perspectives and then maybe one of them will make it stick."

Impossible to test for. More likely is that using multiple learning methods is that subsequent ones are simply reinforcing what you already learned. Since you can't unlearn something, there's no way to tell which method works best.

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Please help me here

Ah, so that's why she never goes out when it's raining :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Free speech, duh

"Last I checked, North Korea's GDP was smaller than that of Somerset."

It seems to be about double that of Somerset.

Nth Korea $28.5 billion (nominal, 2016) $40 billion (PPP, 2015 est.)

Somerset In 2019, Somerset's economy was worth almost £12.1bn in Gross Value Added (GVA) terms...The Somerset economy has grown for the last seven consecutive years.

Clearly Somerset is catching up but has a ways to go yet :-)

Having said that, I'm not sure GDP is a useful measure when it comes to talking about a pariah state that has few trading partners and of whose internal markets we know so little.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Free speech, duh

"Me - I'm the end result of the melting pot that is the Forest of Dean. It's amazing that I don't have six toes on each foot.."

Maybe you do. Have you considered obtaining a second opinion from someone who can count?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: ... the constituents can remove their MP. if that MP happens to be the PM...well :-)

You can be a party leader without being an MP, but in general, you can't be a PM if you are not an MP, ie the leader of the Parliamentary party, the one in power. But, under certain circumstances, the Monarch can invite someone, anyone, to try to form a government if there are issues such as a hung Parliament and little prospect of a coalition.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Bald leaders

His baldness was FAKE!!!!!

Baldy icon --------------->

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Based on recent UK political history, Hague will probably be remembered as "The best Prime Minister we never had" :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

"Dwight D. Eisenhower here. Perhaps the secret is to select a bald leader."

William Hague?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Face like thunder

She has two claims to fame.

First UK PM to serve under two monarchs

Shortest term UK PM EVAR!!

That last, along with so many other negative firsts will be what she's remembered for. If she's remembered at all. A modern day Lady Jane Grey? Who?... asks nearly everyone?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: seeing how things work (or don't) over there...

"The problem is, the little people don't get to remove the leaders early."

Under some circumstances, the constituents can remove their MP. if that MP happens to be the PM...well :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Free speech, duh

Kim Jong-un is also the leader of a nuclear power. Not a G7 nation, but their economy might be in better shape than ours right now, Now THAT is depressing.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

So, more like "Not win. Stole vote. Vote wrong!!"

DisplayPort standards bods school USB standards bods with latest revision

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I may be wrong

It's almost as bad as SCSI :-)

Musk grumbles about 'overpaying' for Twitter but says he's excited

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"How could Twitter possibly be turned profitable?"

The vast majority of people using it these days uses either the web site or mobile app. Both can easily be made to show paid ads. And IIRC correctly, Twitter is already trialling paid for "premium" accounts.

Founder of zero-emissions truck venture Nikola found guilty of $1b fraud

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Alleged?

"guilty of deceiving investors with exaggerated claims about how close his company was to producing working prototypes of zero-emission 18-wheelers.

The indictment notes that "Nikola's stock peaked in the wake of announcements by Milton about the Badger, the market value of Milton's stock was at least approximately $8.5 billion," meaning the alleged lies"

Why "alleged" if he's been found guilty? Unless he wins a subsequent appeal and gets the entire verdict overturned, then he's a convicted liar. Even if the verdict is overturned, he's a convicted liar unless and until it is overturned. No alleged required!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: energy storage ... pulling a train of concrete blocks ...

Just had a look. It comes across as an entirely theoretical school science experiment.

Clicking on the technical section, I expected see at least some details on operation, how it works, test rigs etc. Nothing.

The idea is interesting but it's light on the practical engineering and despite working on the concept since 2014, seem to be still trying to attract any funding. I suspect there may be some major challenges in building this to scale, otherwise we'd at least see some sort of scale model prototype they'd be showing off to attract the funding.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: enthusiastic salesperson who never intended to defraud anyone

Well, they never said the truck was moving under it's motive power. They merely said it was in motion and left the rest up to the audience to be hoodwinked. Typical lying "salesman".

Millennials, Gen Z actually suck at workplace security

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: "something only 15 percent of boomers and 31 percent of Gen X admitted to"

True. All the words are spelled correctly. It's just not always the words they intended to use :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: EY did not define ranges for the four generations included in the report.

"It would be too quaint and uncool to call them by the actual years. Giving them fancy and slightly obscure names turns them into very distinct tribes, and thus reinforces the "us vs.them" feeling of each generation."

It seems to be primarily a US thing IME. Nothing must be known by it's proper name, everything must have a "cool sounding" new name. Now don't get wrong, the Yanks are great at coming up with new words and especially acronyms for projects and such, But PLEASE stop doing it to things that already have names. it just confuses everyone. But those "nicknames" do seem to catch on very very quickly across the US. It's like some sort of forced hothouse evolution of language. A recent one I've come across is the pronunciation of cache, as in a cache of treasure. Suddenly it's being pronounced "cachet" on all the US TV programmes (that use the word, ie not all of them, obviously). Seems to have started a year or two back, but pretty much every treasure hunting documentary seems to have switched now. Possibly, they are trying to sound sophisticated and have learned that cache is a French word so are trying to be too clever and think it's pronounced caché :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: "something only 15 percent of boomers and 31 percent of Gen X admitted to"

"type in longer phrases that are more easily remembered, then the ...1,2,3 stuff wouldn't even happen."

Until the number of users being locked out rises due to typos. Have you seen the state of some peoples spelling these days? They can't survive without auto-correct and predictive text :-)

SpaceX's in-flight Wi-Fi, Starlink Aviation, takes to the skies

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

guest experience

"guest experience"

WTF? It's a bit of transportation. Mostly not comfortable. Mostly people just want to get where they are going. And they are PASSENGERS. It's not a fucking hotel or a theme park "experience".

Lenovo reveals rollable laptop and smartphone screens

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I'm more tempted by the ones the size of a standard smarthone but opens out, book like, to give double the screen area. But then I use mine mainly for work and double sized screen would mean I could do more of my work stuff on the phone more easily then getting the laptop out. But that's just my particular work methods and use case. I rarely spend hours in front of the screen. I'm more likely just updating the days field visits and ordering parts after each site visit. Current smartphone screens are just a bit too small for those tasks. Or the web-app/web page designers don't really target phone users as well as they might.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Who buys these things?

Absolutely. Who wouldn't want a laptop that "grows" into a tall portrait-style display then shrinks back to landscape shape for closing and carrying? You still get the width that you normally get with any laptop, but now can see much more of a document or web page without scrolling. As screens get wider, so web pages add more unscrollable shit to the top and bottom of sites meaning we view the page through a narrow letterbox, especially on average laptops.

The prototypes and early production foldables show some promise and are giving the designers and engineers some real world experience of the problems. They will probably overcome them eventually.

Bob Newhart had a few points to make about marketing early inventions and prototypes.

Jim McDivitt, NASA Apollo mission astronaut, dies at 93

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A pioneer of space

I wonder if, in the the future, we'll be hearing stories of the people who actually designed, built and succeeded in the first reusable SpaceX rockets, and possibly Starship, when Musk is gone and no longer grabbing all the glory for himself? I'm sure there must be brilliant and dedicated people there doing great things but we never hear about.

Intel sued over historic DEC chip site's future

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Why Not Try a Classic "What If"?

"It wasn't an insult, it was advice. Seek help. You're having a psychotic episode."

If you are going to give medical advice, can you please show us your qualifications to do so?

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