* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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People still seem to think their fancy cars are fully self-driving

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

AIUI, the Tesla computer tries to get the drivers attention with bings and bongs etc and if that fails, pulls over and slows to stop. But I don't think it's clever enough to be sure that where it stops is a safe place, but at least it doesn't just disengage while in motion. The article implies that the computer assist can be disabled and in effect ban the driver from using it. It doesn't say if that's automatic, e.g. if it has to slow and stop three times it stops operating completely or if that's a decision made at the Tesla mother-ship by a human alerted by telemetry,

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Quelle surprise

From the article:

"the early adopters of these systems still have a poor understanding of the technology's limits"

...which implies, no, they didn't. You'd think "early adopters" would have had them long enough to have learned the limits by now, but it seems many have not. Personally, I'd say they are exactly the sort of people who should not be driving these cars, possible not even allowed to drive at all.

The new GPU world order is beginning to take shape

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Heh. I endured it on a A2000 with 1MB of Ram and a stock 68000 CPU. Impulse Imagine on a coverdisk of Amiga Format."

Same here, but the GUI based stuff never really attracted me. Like the heinous, vulgar and misguided ST user (spit!) below, I used PoV from the command line originally on an A1200, eventually upgrading it with an 030 accelerator +FPU which helped a lot. With some scripting, I was able to render animations and even got asked to make the title anims for a couple of PD CD collections. By then, I was after every bit of speed I could get, so used PARNET to network to an A500+ with the A1200 and used a lock file to tell each Amiga which frame was being rendered so when one finished a frame it would start on the one after the other Amiga was rendering. It still took at least a week to render the 50 or so frames at the final required quality though. IIRC, the A500 did about 1 frame for every 8 or so the A1200 did, but like I said, any speed increase was worth it back then :-)

Even nowadays, I still do computational intensive stuff at the command line on FreeBSD so there's no "wasted" CPU cycles on a GUI. Do my video editing in a GUI where necessary, outputting an edit list, then do the final spilt/join/re-encode at the command line. PoVRay is still around. That's next weekend already spoken for now and since my Amiga HDD has been imaged for FS-UAE, I should still have files on it somewhere. I wonder how long at anim will take to render on a modern fast PC :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: hurrah

Just wait and see what MS do with Windows 12 to slow things down. Again.

Reds on the beds: Putin's war sparks Chinese chip boom, starting with electric blankets

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Mind you, Mrs AC sometimes comments that I seem to lavish more attention on the cat and dog than I do on her :-("

The cat is understandable, they can be so much more demanding than a wife. The dog, not so much.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: If only whinging could turn generators...

"Putin couldn't have inflicted any pain on Europe if they had used fully non fossil fuel sources (wind, solar, nuclear) unless he blocked the sun."

There's a documentary about that.

Oz Apple Store staff vote to strike for better pay, settled rosters, clean shirts

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The union demands seem quite reasonable

I also think that "and pay rises at either five percent annually or 2.5 percent more than the rate of inflation, whichever is higher." is a tad unreasonable since that sounds like an "in perpetuity" demand to me. Or are they currently so poorly paid they desperately need annual above inflation pay rises just to get a decent wage?

Some of the demands strike me as being disposable, ie it's the start of negotiations and you always ask for more than you expect so you can negotiate down to what you really want and both sides can say they "won".

600k+ Celsius customer crypto-coin records revealed

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So much for privacy

Really? That's like saying everyone arrested should be subject to a full body cavity search just in case someone may be hiding drugs up their jacksie. "We" don't need to know anything about them, whether they be customers or creditors, until after the procedure and then only if any of them are subject to more legal scrutiny, not all of them. It's certainly not "vital" that all those innocent peoples details should be made public just because there might be some wrong'uns amongst them that interested amateur detectives want to investigate.

Toyota dev left key to customer info on public GitHub page for five years

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

They made the Githib repo private immediately, then it took a couple of days to go through said repo to find out what was actually in it. They found the key..

PayPal decides fining people $2,500 for 'misinformation' wasn't a great idea

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: re: a main stream banking/financial organisation

"That really depends on what they'd actually try to enforce. I'm pretty sure the meaning they intended - no conmen, scammers, or purveyors of woo - is just fine. If it were used for other purposes it wouldn't fly."

Even conmen, scammers and purveyors of woo have rights. Such as the right to a fair trial. If PayPal have evidence of illegal activities, the most they can do is report it to the authorities and allow the judicial system to take it's course, PayPal are not a court of justice and can't impose "fines". They can close any accounts the suspects may have, but they cannot withhold access to their funds without a court order or under instructions from the Police who may already be or want to investigate without letting the suspects know.

Pro-Putin goons claim responsibility for blowing US airport websites offline

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It’s annoying…

Considering "the west" have been banging on about already being "at [cyber] war" for quite some time, we don't seem to here very often about "unattributed" attacks on Russian, Chinese, Iranian or North Korean sites. Are "the west" simply "playing by the rules" and carefully exfiltrating data rather than doing like for like DDoSs against their public facing systems? Or is just that it's not news here when their sites get knocked offline?

Rivian recalls nearly every vehicle it has sold

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

A loose nut behind the steering wheel?

The sub-head, article and comment quality has degraded since El Reg went American :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ford (Found On Roadside Dead)

"Rental agencies demand bottom of the barrel specs - because only cost matters"

Here in the UK, whenever I've had hire cars, they are invariable at lest mid-range and almost invariably a grade or two higher than the requested grade for the same price. Getting a hire at relatively short notice (a week or two), even when only wanted for a day or two usually means you get a free upgrade because most hire companies in the UK seem to run with barely enough stock. On the other hand, returns didn't seem to be a high priority. I well remember one hire company phoning me a week or so after the off-hire asking me where the car was. I told them I had emailed and phoned them at the drop-off time informing therm it was at the dealers where I'd picked it up from as per the hire agreement. It had been "lost" for at least a week.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Would it not be great ...

"Leasors"

Minor niggle. It's lessors. Or, if you are from a certain demographic, losers :-)

US executive order a long way from settling EU privacy cases

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

They need a consultant on board.

They need a consultant on board before they announce these "new" tweaks. Max Schrems might be good choice. It could be cheaper in the long run and avoid any future investigations, court cases and heartache. Worst case is they never reach an agreement and the data flow stops or at least becomes much more restricted since it's clear the US and EU will never see eye to eye on data privacy, so why waste time on sticking plasters that keep getting ripped off?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Leader of the free world"

Based on the size of the population being "lead", that would Ursula not Biden :-)

iPhone 14 car crash detection triggered by roller coasters

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Here we go again

It does show the power of marketing though. Apples crash detection was all over the news media as the new iPhone was launched, even before the latest news of the false positives on roller coasters etc. And yet I have no memories of crash detection being a big selling point in the media when it was introduced on the Pixel (or any other phone that may have it).

Apple release new device - hugely newsworthy (do the media all use Apple gear?)

Samsung release new device - moderately newsworthy (The media have heard of Samsung, but don't use their kit much)

Google release new device - <tumbleweeds>, media response, Google make phones? Who new?

No, no, hear us out, say boffins: Foot fungus to measure your walk

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Does anyone really need to know how I walk?

"Some people with joint issues are affected by an unusual gait. Analyzing the pressure patterns of the feet would make it easier."

True, and there may even be a small amount of medical grant money put towards this. But the REAL money will come from the likes of Nike looking to develop the perfect running shoe and a new range of outrageously expensive trainers.

Business can't make staff submit to video surveillance, says court

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Jurisdiction?

"Has the company paid up yet? I'm guessing that the contract of employment stated the legal jurisdiction was a state within the USA, and that to get them to pay he'd have to sue them in their home state, not his home state."

It seems that office was their only point of presence in the EU (UK no longer counts of course), so if they choose to ignore the ruling, there's not a lot the EU can do about. I suppose they could put an arrest warrant out on the entire C-level in case they ever visit or transit through the EU. They may have to go the long way across the Pacific when visiting their Indian offices and be careful to not transit an EU hub such as Schipol or Frankfurt when visiting their UK office.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Chetu dissolved and deregistered its Dutch branch within days of firing the employee

I thought that at first, but that seems an awfully quick response to a possible "oh shit, what did we just do" moment. Maybe the local management are the ones who did the firing and then, out of the blue and coincidently, head office shut the whole operation down and fired all of them anyway. That, on the other hand, is on the US parent and seems, as far the details in the article are concerned, means there was no 90 day consultation period so maybe all the other staff will also be taking their ex-employer to court now if they didn't get paid in lieu of that period.

Biden's Privacy Shield 2.0 order may not satisfy Europe

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Privacy Shield 2.0?

Just so long as they don't produce a "personal" version just for...Me :-)

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Spoiler

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Privacy Shield Me

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John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Privacy Shield 2.0?

More like 1.1 It's been tweaked, not re-written. I doubt there's enough changes to warrant a major version number increase ;-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Restricting?

Why do you think most embassy have many and varied aerials on their rooves? They;re all at it!

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ugh small cables are small...

"Made the mistake of using my fingers to hold it tightly in place - but the scorched skin eventually healed ok."

Anyone who has never made that mistake has never held a soldering iron :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: printer has started speaking French

"[0] Should this now be the King's English"

Yes. The BBC said so. :-)

Likewise, Kings Counsel, On His Majesty's Service, Detained At His Majesty's Pleasure etc :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Mandatory tech support

I'm surprised he bothered to even try "fixing" it anyway. No one classes a single dead pixel as a reason to change a screen. Even the OEM warranties normally allow for at least one dead pixel, often up to 3 or 4 before they will consider a warranty replacement.

Of course, if he was dumb enough to think it was dirt on the screen and running it under the tap might be a fix, then it's unlikely he understood the T&Cs of the warranty or service agreement anyway.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Customer pushback

Something for the amateur Orbital Mechanics to chew on. Launch a Falcon 9/Crew Dragon to orbit where it meets the SpaceX fuel station (A group of 3 or 4 Starship tankers docked to a 6-way hub along with the "Mars Transit" Starship and then set off for Mars on a fully fuelled maximum burn orbit, ie half the fuel burned, coast/flip/coast burn to slow down. For extra credit, we may need to land/ascend in the ship we flew in, or there may be another fuelling station at the Mars end with a ready fuelled lander/ascent vehicle or maybe our Mars Transit Starship just re-fuels for that part. We assume His Muskiness sends Starship "tankers" to Mars orbit by slow, fuel efficient orbit to fill the refuelling station or is making fuel on Mars by then or whatever other futuristic hand-wavy stuff we need such as assuming perfect alignment of Earth/Mars :-)))

Any takers on a best possible Earth to Mars time?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Told this one before too...

...but a friend of a family member wanted some help working out why they could no longer get online. Based on the PC still working normally, I said ok, £20 and I'll come around. He agreed. After a few diagnositics it was clear the PC was seeing and talking to the router, a VM cable modem/router box which I was familer with, including it's web interface. Not locking on to the cable signal. I spot he also has a Virgin media cable TV box. Is that working? I say. yes, no problems with that, gets all of the channels. So I then check the cable from the router to the wall where there's a short lead and two way splitter. Looks ok. Remove the splitter and plug the router cable direct tot the wall point. Splitter faulty? Put splitter back in circuit, router can't connect again, TV OK. Swap them over, TV still OK, router can't connect. Ok, last chance, take the cable from the TV box and plug into router. Can't connect. Weird. TV always works, router only works if TV box disconnected. Must be the TV box or some weird loading issue on the router, tell him to get VM to come out, check both devices and replace the faulty one. Can't do that, he says. Why not? I says. I bought the cable box from a bloke down the pub for £200 quid to get all channels for "free". Sorry I says, not my problem, that'll be £30 thanks. He paid up.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Other way round

"I once had the task of sorting out a machine in German. The language I learned at school didn't include ANY computing terms, even from mainframes."

On a slightly similar note, I was tasked with replacing a system board in an IBM PC for an international hotel chain. Their IT support was based in Paris. The part came from their German supplier. I had to set the BIOS config properly. It did NOT support different languages, only German. Of course, I knew my way around the BIOS settings, just not the IBM version. Luckily, enough of the words and terms were the same and the ones that weren't, being technical German words had just enough similarity to get me through it and guess what the remaining ones must be by a process of elimination. Like you, I never learned German at school, only French. Technical French is harder because they refuse to use "American" computer terms and use the nearest French equivalent. (Not so much these days due to common usage, but in the early days, the Académie Française made all the decisions!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Fortunately I have an electrical/electronics engineer in the family so whilst I'm capable of bodging up simple circuits, mainly I2C interface chips to a RasPi, I can pass anything else on.

Post incoming from some guy whinging about a family member who keeps coming to him for free electronics repairs/builds and even designs in 3...2...1...

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"You get whatever the makers of those devices provide, which is variable, quality wise, and only covers the device itself, not any of the others."

I've not bought a new motherboard for a good few years now, but they used to come with quite decent manuals detailing all of the jumpers (back when they had them!), IDC header details and what to plug into them, info on what type of RAM to use, how to installed, if it needed to be paired, which around to fit the CPU and how to install expansion cards and in at least one case, how to fit the MB into a case with spacers. I'd think anyone with a decent level of general technical/mechanical knowledge and the ability to learn would have a good chance of building a working PC from those manuals :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: family support

"But after a full day of faffing and head scratching, I ended up slapping in a new hard drive, doing a clean install and copying all of his /home data over to the new drive."

And, of course, made sure /home was a separate partition this time so if you need to re-install again you don't need to use a new drive and copy /home over again :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Customer pushback

"It's cheaper and easier to buy a new one"

No, it isn't. You don't cost money. Mums have a way of making you feel guilty even when you are right!

Make your neighbor think their house is haunted by blinking their Ikea smart bulbs

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Epilepsy?

"While the blinking and lost connection with the gateway device are "a nuisance," by themselves they "don't pose any serious risks such as safety concerns or loss of sensitive information," Knudsen admitted, in an email to The Register."

Is really "safe"? Could it be set to flash at a rate that triggers an epileptic fit?

That might be a out out there, may not even be possible, but was it considered when they claimed "safe"?

French court slashes Apple's €1.1b fine to pocket change

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Units?

"By my current calculation, that's £327 million. What's happened to El Reg?"

Yes, it's all well and good going with a North American style, but with the € and $ almost at parity, about 3% different, why even bother with a conversion? The £ was nearly at parity with both for a short while last week but is currently about 10% different so would be more useful to show.

People are coming out of retirement due to cost-of-living crisis

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Not great news for youngsters

...and, of course, British cheese. I KNOOOOOOW!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Wow, the call has come for a couple of old-timers!

I got a WFH job. All I have to do is send money to a never ending stream of Nigerian Princes and they'll send me even more money back for each transaction!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Sort-of inevitable

"competing with companies looking for drivers, which is less stressful."

That probably depends a lot on what the driving job is and where. I'm not sure I'd want to be doing deliveries in and around a a busy city centre!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not great news for youngsters

And with the cost of gas and 'leccy shooting up, hospitality are seeing massive increase in costs too. Not to mention the number of people no longer wanting to go into that industry after being laid off for so long, coupled with the difficulty of getting in foreign workers. Quadrupole whammy in that industry.

It might be somewhere for "unretirement" if looking for part-time, choose your own hours work :-)))

If not, there's always fruit picking :-)

He's only gone and done it. Ex-Register vulture elected to board of .uk registry

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Black Helicopters

It could also be argued that getting him on the inside, possibly with little to no power as stated above and much less ability to do investigative reporting, could neuter him. Keeps your friends close and your enemies closer.

On the other hand, with his work experience, and words being his stock in trade, he might well be a good persuader (Tony Curtis or Roger Moore? :-)

Obviously I hope I'm entirely off-base with that first paragraph, but you know, conspiracies are everywhere!!!!

Juno what? Jovian moon Europa is looking rugged

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A Pareidoliac's Paradise

Looked like some chav was doing doughnuts in a Fiesta Hatchback too.

Amazon halts work on ‘Scout’ delivery-bot that delivered parcels no faster than humans

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not surprising

Especially considering the speed they travel at. Which begs the question, why are they so slow? Is the navigation and sensor interpretation s/w not capable of coping with higher speeds? Is the battery capacity limiting the speed in favour of range? Or is it really "safety", ie Amazon being risk averse or local authorities placing a limit?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: " we worked to create a unique delivery experience"

"I seriously wonder where the idea that everything has to be an "experience" came from."

Marketing, obviously! More specifically, US marketing teams.

And, as usual, it's now being so overused, the marketers who originally thought it was a clever new gimmick will be working hard to come up with something "news, fresh, dynamic, emotional, green".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Scalability

FWIW I only ever seem to see electric Amazon delivery vans these days around my area. The size of large Transit vans. No idea of the range, but I suspect it's decent.

Ah, here's an atricle about them buying 1800 Mercedes vans. It only seems to have a range of about 90 miles, although MB claim the average van driver only does 62 miles per day. I'd imagine Amazon have charging points at the loading docks so they can top up between delivery rounds,

They're also trialling electric HGVs. I suspect they will be a short range only option for the foreseeable future though, where vans are not enough. It has a claimed maximum range of 155 miles between charges but doesn't specify if that's empty, "average load" for a 37t full load and as far as I can tell, can only be charged at it's Tilbury and Milton Keynes depots for now.

Charge a future EV in less than five minutes – using literally cool NASA tech

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

That's probably what he meant based on the stated MPG, but he said "car" and I'd not normally associate a pick-up with "car". On the other hand, the MPG might be about right for a big SUV, which I assume Toyota include in their range of car models. :-)

Linux kernel 5.19.12 'may harm' Intel laptop screens

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How?

"I have seen Linux people struggling for hours to print a document. Printing from Linux is not always easy or straightforward. And don't blame the lack of drivers. That is just part of the problem."

And your point is?

I have seen Windows people struggling for hours to print a document. Printing from Windows is not always easy or straightforward. And don't blame the lack of drivers. That is just part of the problem.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How?

Well, for a start, printing doesn't get borked as often by monthly patches.

Papa John's sued for 'wiretap' spying on website mouse clicks, keystrokes

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: so what?

It's about how much data is collected and the purposes it's collected for. Apart from the article, I've not read any deeper on this case, so can't really comment on the merits of this case or the likelihood of success. Maybe if it gets to court we'll find out a bit more about what is being collected, whether or how much is personally identifiable, and maybe have a more informed opinion on whether it's too much, a temporary analytics to drive a site redesign or if it's just "nice to have" by Papa Johns.

It'd be interesting to know if they do this in jurisdictions with strong data and privacy protection laws. That would help inform whether what they are doing is actually necessary or just because they can

Block this: Using satellites to plaster ads over our skies could work, say boffins

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: OK now this is something

I suspect Russia isn't on good terms with the UN just now.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Somone will invent a suitable ad-blocker

I live in the UK. We already have a cloud-based ad-blocker suitable for this.

The rain coat --------->

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