* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Foxconn shows off pair of EVs, boasts of bulk orders for last year's model

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Good point. Whatever people may think of Musk, Tesla shook up the EV market and arguably brought ot forward by some years. The incumbents really were dragging their heels until Tesla came along, stole their lunch and drove off into the distance while they were still wondering if EVs might be practical. Another shake up may well be due in the way cars are designed and built. "Unbranded white box" cars that other companies can "brand", similar to laptops and tablets coming out of the far east now.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The most useless metric ever: from 0 to 100 in xx seconds

"but it being 0.1 sec faster than another car is not going to make me buy it."

No, but other factors might. That acceleration factor is just one factor and it's aimed at the people who like that sort of thing. The boy racers and EV equivalent of petrol-heads :-)

Same applies to the top speed. You want something in reserve so you're not maxing it out at 7mph on the motorway.

Having said that, I'm not sure if the extra oomf matters so much with EVs as it does with ICE cars.

Collapsed Arecibo telescope to be replaced by school

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The Arecibo Center for STEM Education and Research (ACSER)

Wow, nested acronyms! Acronyms all the way down :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The big and unique thing about Arecibo seems to be the powerful radar facility. That might be a bit more difficult to run on a remote space based jobbie. I've no idea how much power Arecibo can put out, but if they are using to to look at the surface of Venus and Mercury, I'd imagine it's quite a lot. I suspect solar cells won't cut it for sustained operation.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I just watched #4 on Netflix a week or so back. The Silent Sea, a dubbed Korean SF drama.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

"shift virus research to an isolated facility on the moon?...and do it someplace with a really impressive air-gap?""

Is it an "air gap"?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

That's not just a public sector disease. See also any new building put up in the last 100 years or so. Most are already gone and any new ones will likely not "live" past 30 or 40 years at best before being replaced. Things are not built to last because they know there won't be a maintenance budget. Maintenance, repairs and upgrades attract VAT on materiels. New builds don't so it's often more attractive financially to pull an "old" building down and quickly put up a new one on the cheap.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Part of the reason for a whole new line instead of an upgrade to an existing line is the network in the relevant areas is almost or already at capacity, which is a major part of the problems elsewhere on the network. A major network repair programme across the entire UK would also be a good thing but would not increase capacity by much, just make what is already there more reliable.

Too bad, contractors: UK government reverses decision to axe IR35 tax reform

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: huge news really

Wow, you really like to hold that grudge don't you. Is it like a comfort blanket[*] or pacifier[*] to you.

[*] new El Reg North American style, I'm turning all Yankee Doodle Dandy. YEE HAH!!! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Starting with a lie

While I agree with the sentiment, I don't think it was Hunt who gave it away "a few weeks ago" when he was a mere backbencher.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: This should make people happy

"she backed down"

Because the real policy makers are the "markets". Because the "markets" disagreed with her unconventional choices, government bonds and the £ devalued. This morning, even before Hunt made his announcements, both had recovered because the "market" expected more conventional policies to be applied. Note. Expected. The markets demonstrated that if thew government follows the market approved policies, then the £ and bond values will be safer.

Nice economy you got there mate. Be a shame if something happened to it.

Loathsome eighties ladder-climber levelled by a custom DOS prompt

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Logging which executables are run!

How? It's an MS-DOS PC with 640K RAM, almost certainly no networking and you by-pass any security that might be done in the OS on the HDD by booting a floppy and playing games from that. Few games were multi-disk so copying (not installing!) the game to the HDD had a single benefit. Initial loading time. The whole game would fit in and run in RAM. Depending on the BIOS, there may have been no way to disable the floppy drive. There were ways to secure a PC back then but almost no one could or did because security was simply limiting who had physical access and trust in the user.

And anyway, from experience in a past life, who's to say that wordstar.com isn't Alley Cat, Ford Driving Simulator or Space Invaders in a different directory.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Like so: C:\>.

"Normally, if you recall, the DOS prompt would default to telling the user what directory they're in and inviting them to input a command. Like so: C:\>."

At the time of 640K and 10MB HDDs, the default prompt was C>_ If you wanted a more fancy prompt to include the path, you had to first enter, or place in AUTOEX.BAT, the command:

prompt $p$g

for [p]ath and [g]reater than. If you were clever enough, you'd also put the ANSI.SYS driver in your CONFIG.SYS and be able to do more clever stuff like save the cursor location, move to the bottom row, display a pretty coloured status line with path, date, time etc and then restore the cursor back to where it was using ESC codes and the $ prompt commands.

A default prompt showing that path didn't arrive until at least MSDOS 4.0, might have been 5 or even 6. It's so far back, and once I learned about a customised prompt in the very early days, I never used anything other than a custom one I can't recall when the default changed. Probably about MS-DOS 5.0

Oil company Castrol slips and slides into immersion cooling

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

OVHcloud

"OVHcloud detailed how it has developed its own cooling technology using a mix of water and immersion systems."

Yeah, well, OVH might not want to use oil in datacentres which catch fire. :-)

Starlink, shot by both sides in Ukrainian fracas, lives to fight on

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

We supply and support a bit of IT kit to the military. It has an expected life of at least 10 years and can't be replaced with similar models due to the custom built transport cases need to shipping it around the world such that there's very high chance it will still be in operable condition when it arrives at the remote base or war zone. That means we have spares and replacement units in a warehouse waiting for a fast turnaround as needed. That costs a lot. We aren't in the order of 100x cost but we are certainly in the region of 10x cost for the original supply cost compared to retail kit with maybe a 5 year working life. It's part of the support system for £multi-million offensive capability so everything has to work, work well, work the same so the people operating it don't have to learn new kit in battle conditions

Our profits off the contract probably aren't all that much more than off a normal business/enterprise contract in percentage terms because the cost to us in operating the contract are so much higher. There are probably a lot of suppliers like us in that situation, but what makes headlines are the cost plus overruns on things like aircraft carriers and F-35 Lightnings :-)

Weird robot breaks down in middle of House of Lords hearing on AI art

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Gallery director Aiden Meller created Ai-Da

"I've been trying to knock-up a robot in my garden shed for some time now. It's not as easy as one might think."

Confirmed by Howard in The Big Bang Theory. It can be awkward when things don't go as planned.

Just $10 to create an AI chatbot of a dead loved one

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Horrifying

I don't think fiction counts as prior art since ideas can't be patented....yet.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Sniveling miserable cowards would love this ...

And when enough people have handed over enormous amounts of personal details to this scheme, he'll cash out when Facebook comes calling and no matter what the original Ts&Cs said, it's all be hoovered by the Borg Zuck.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Horrifying

I was thinking along similar line. The sort of situation where people around the world sigh and say "Only in America". There seems to be, IMO, an unhealthy attitude to dragging out the grieving process, an emphasis on "closure", primarily lead by so-called therapists who, as far as I know are completely unregulated and don't need any qualifications and pushed by "celebrities" who have a pathological need for attention.

Having said that, different people handle grief in different ways and may take longer to be able to move on with their lives. A few may even need help to do so and come to terms with it. But I would suggest that is the exception rather than the rule that seems to be pushing foisted on us. I suspect this chatbot, for most who try it, will not only be sorely disappointing, but will extend their grieving process even more.,

How to watch NASA Jupiter probe's flyby of Earth

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

No comments...

...about diamonds in the sky?

I shall be cancelling my subscription forthwith!!!11!!!ONE!11!!!

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Fixing toilets.

"if you have IT training you must also be a qualified electrician and plumber..."

Plumbing digital/binary, isn't it? It's all just 1's and 2's. It's only an off-by-one error.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Is it just me

Maybe more people need to send in their stories instead of putting them in the comments to On Call? :-))

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not just in IT

"You needed to check the oil anyway didn't you?"

I suspect only people of a certain age will understand that. The days when you pretty much always checked the oil levels whenever filling up with fuel because not only were things like oil pressure sensors "high end tech", you might might be lucky to have an indicator lamp, let alone an actual pressure gauge dial or other warning and oil tended to disappear almost as fast the the fuel in the tank!

There was a documentary on Ch4 the other night about the building out of the UK motorway network. Many, many cars blew their big ends on the new motorways due to a lack of oil and temp indicators and cars suddenly doing many, many miles flat out, something they were not designed for and previously were not able to do because it was rarely possible to find that long and clear a road to do it on.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not just in IT

"Daddy, did we just drive 60 miles to put that mans car in Drive?"

For me, it was printer with the IEC (kettle!) mains plug not pushed in all the way and 140 mile round trip. This was a maintenance contract call out, not the long expired warranty coverage. Turns out the plug "has always been a bit loose", so they used brown parcel tape to hold it in place. No one had ever figured out that all they needed to do was push the plug firmly in passed the friction grips. Why they thought they could get a "free" fix on a service contract but not on the original warranty is beyond me. We charged them the full call-out fee as "no fault found, user error".

Oh, and they used an identical plug on the kettle which they frequently plugged/unplugged when filling it at the sink.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Just maybe ...

" I can't think of any occasion when it wasn't made clear that the staple issue related to a particular photocopier..."

I can. User will be users.

Open ticket: Stapler not working.

Close ticket: See office supplies team

Open ticket: Stapler not working.

Close ticket: See office supplies team

Open ticket: Stapler not working.

Close ticket: See office supplies team

Open ticket: Stapler on printer not working

Update ticket: Fault noted, ask user to replace staple cartridge following animations displayed on printer control panel and escalate to site visit if problem not solved. Close ticket if no further responses within 24hrs.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Local Manager - Former Architect (Log cabins).

"number two loved doing everything in Access...the other team in Edmonton were working from the master spreadsheet in Excel""

It does rather sound like a job for a database rather than a spreadsheet. Though maybe not Access :-)

<mutters about people abusing Excel as a database>

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Shredder

I remember going around installing Cisco VPN package on users home PCs[1] years ago when WFH was for the very few. As well as setting up the VPN and an encrypted virtual disk in a big file on the HDD where work stuff must go, it also added a "shredder" on the desktop for securely deleting documents.

[1] Yes, the users provided their own PCs[2]. It was a government department and these particular people were classed as self-employed contractors. The majority only did work for that department and eventually became employees thanks to the earliest incarnation of IR35 when the tax man came calling.

[2] It was a ball ache installing the software BECAUSE it was the users home PCs. We had to take a full image of the HDD before starting so if anything went pear-shaped we could at least put them back how we found them. This meant having multiple methods of imaging the HDD because there were many different PC configurations and even Windows versions out there so one size most definitely did not fit all.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: But I DO want to know!

Some printers have an over-ride option for A4/Letter/. It's worth checking if that's available. In most cases, with normal sized margins, there's a high probability that an A4 document will fit on Letter and vice versa.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: But I DO want to know!

"Usually there will be some big obvious "paper tray empty" message flashing on a screen or a LED blinking with "Paper" written below it, but somehow the user will miss that until you ask them about the paper explicitly."

You mean the ever so helpful "PC LOAD LETTER" and user thinks it means something is wrong with the PC and it's run out or letters to send to the printer?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: But I DO want to know!

I agree with that comments!

On the other hand, we were paying extra for the convenience. Not having to drive a few miles off-route into a nearby town or village, hope there was something open, pray we could get parked nearby hope it wasn't too busy, then get back on-route.

On the other hand, I used to travel a lot and stay overnight, rarely knowing more than 24 hours in advance where I'd be each night so stayed in a lot of Travelodges (company budgets!!) so went completely through the Little Chef menu a few times. When booking, I tried to find a Travelodge near where I wanted to be that had a Harvester pub attached rather than a Little Chef!!

BOFH: The Boss has a new watch – move readiness to DEFCON 2

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I wonder if

She's not a proper PFY if there's not another script redirecting his salary to an untraceable account too. So we'll just take that as a given, shall we?

Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"The PC was originally a niche product aimed at the space between enterprise (green screen) and home (playstation etc)."

Er...what? Playstation? That was over a decade after the PC came out. And even small businesses were using computers before the PC and long before Windows, which is what I think you may have meant when you said "PC".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: You still need to be far more tech savvy

"After that, it's learning what the alternate programs are called on Linux and clicking on the right icon or menu pick."

Until the inevitable Windows re-install, at which point, at best, it will re-write the boot loader and hide Linux from you, at worst, it will spitefully wipe the Linux partition and use the whole disk for Windows, either way, requiring the user to know how to restore the boot loader or re-install Linux :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: @Missing Semicolon - cloud pc

"Works best with XBOX For Business"

You may need the XBOX For Business Pro if doing CAD, Video Editing or other high CPU intensive tasks - Only 5 times the price

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: cloud pc

And at least 16 years ago, I was installing Wyse WinTerms for a client in NE UK which ran on VMs at their London HQ. Have also done this for at least two other very large nationally operating clients in more recent years. The only difference of course is they were running their own servers on-prem. Mind you, in every instance, the external bandwidth was calculated by the client for "normal" usage. In every instance, the users were complaining about how long it took to start up and get logged in on a morning as everyone switched on at about the same time causing quite high bandwidth demands. I wonder how many companies will take that into account if they go with this MS idea of "everything in the cloud, including the OS"? And just how much will (not) get done when the connection goes down.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: #@$Drivers

"even cheap garbage from China seems to have Linux support,"

Isn't China in another drive to switch from Windows to a home-grown Linux distro at the moment? They;ve tried a few times with varying levels of success so I can imagine Chinese hardware havine Linux support as standard either because someone has strongly recommended that from high up in the party, or because it's an actual requirement. Anyone know how that's currently going over there these days?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: #@$Drivers

"But if your workflow depends on some older piece of gear, you may be stuck with some older version of Windows pretty much forever."

FTFY.

neither MS nor the hardware suppliers are interested in updating drivers for anything other than popular hardware for the latests version of windows. There's a steady stream for printers and scanners (to name but two hardware families) heading for landfill because there's no Win10 drivers for them. Or Win8 drivers. Or Win7 drivers. It happens every time a new version of Windows comes along. Industrial and instrument control are other areas where people are running old hardware and an old OS because the £million kit is no longer supported with updated drivers for newer iteration of Windows because they can't afford to replace that kit and send it to landfill.

My own 2400dppi scanner is one such "rescue from landfill" a friend was going to bin because there are now drivers beyond Win7. It worked immediately with Sane on Freebsd 9. And still does on FreeBSD 12. Now, don't get me wrong. I know there are many printers and scanners out there that have never worked on any version of *nix and never will. But support for those drivers that do exist does seem to just keep chugging along, usually because the entire subsystem never changes, so just a few tweaks to an existing driver to bring it up to date.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Nope. Ain't gonna happen.

"coof"

What? I'm guessing, from context, you mean Covid. But coof? Where does that come from?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: MS Office

"It's bullshaite. And, no, it is NOT MS's responsibility to create a .DOCX format that allows others a guarantee of compatibility. They don't have to - it's their format, their software, to call the shots on."

Didn't MS force it's formats through as "open standards" or something? Don't they have a responsibility to that? Or can we just say it's yet another example of MS setting and then moving the goal posts for their own benefit?

Scottish space upstart's rocket crashes into the drink

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

It crashed in the sea. There's ;ots of wildlife there. And it's probably even more wild now someone just crashed a rocket into the bailiwick!! Especially if some of said wildlife was impacted by the falling wreckage and died as a result.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: No such thing as failure

Right. So you are incapable of searching the web? I have no idea why El Reg didn't link to the actual launch where it's clear within a few metres that it's going wildly off course, but it's easy enough to find. Try the BBC,

'Baby Al Capone' to pay $22m to SIM-swap crypto-heist victim

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

On the other hand...

...How much would the original owner have now? Would he have cashed in or transferred his TRIG coins before they crashed? Would he be worth more by being astute and moving the value around through various cryptos over the years? Or broke?

Junk cellphones on Earth would stack higher than the International Space Station

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hmm

It's already being done. But AFAIK, it's rarely profitable in many jurisdiction because of the nasty chemical processes and resultant toxic waste used to extract the valuable metals. And the labour intensive part of separating the cases and batteries from the boards etc.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: We used to have deposits on bottles...

Do you trust your average phone shop employee to wipe or destroy the phone without have a rummage around the data first? Most people don't seem to know how to wipe their old phones and that, I suspect, is another major reason why people hang onto their old phones.

Boffins grow human brain cells to play Pong

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

No, it's a character IN Doom :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: And yet,....

There's many more to choose from nowadays. Apparently, there have been more Chancellors of the Exchequer in the last 5 months than were in government for the 20 years preceding the last election! Strong and Stable indeed!!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Why?

Did it look like a Dalek?

(No, not their mobile "tanks", the actual creature inside that operates it)

Japan space agency blows up eight satellites aboard Epsilon rocket

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Why does non-foaming toothpaste mean no need to rinse?

Is it ok to swallow, along with all the rotting debris you just dislodged? And isn't toothpaste only foamey because they add a foaming agent anyway?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

Re: Sensitive image

Agoraphobics and/or Acrophobics?

Mormon Church IT ransacked, data stolen by 'state-sponsored' cyber-thieves

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

breach happened in late March 2022

This is why US "data protection" laws will never be compatible with EU data protection laws, Privacy Shield 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 whatever point zero, without major changes in the US. How the fuck is a data breach of this magnitude and scope allowed to be kept from those affected for so long without some sort of legal punishment? It's entirely possible that data has been used maliciously in identity theft already with those affected completely in the dark as to how they lost their money.

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