* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Does that mean there's will be a version with proper accent entry?

Holding down a letter to get an accents pop-up? Are you saying Macs don't have auto-repeat on key-press?

Uber reels from 'security incident' in which cloud systems seemingly hijacked

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Lack of adequate policies and training yet again

Good point! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Another junk company

"The cost of the medallions was pretty substantial, but market forces set the price."

That's actually a major part of the problem IMHO. Why should "market forces" determine the price? It's effectively a social service provided and managed by the city, hopefully to an optimum level. Surely it would be better to sell the medallions to applicants at a reasonable rate based on fitness for the job, aptitude and whatever other relevant qualifications are deemed necessary. Not the people with the deepest pockets. If the medallions weren't sold at extortionate rates, maybe the drivers could make a living while charging lower rates to passengers and truly be independents.

I do like your more correct description of a "disrupter" though. :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The disrupter disrupted?

Uber are incredibly lucky it wasn't someone with more evil intent. By the sounds of it, they could have pretty much wiped out Uber if they had cared enough to do so. A $$multi-billion business, everything online, cloudy stuff they can't properly protect. I wonder if they could have recovered from someone wiping all those systems where access was gained? Is *everything* backed up? Offline backups? Tested offline backups?

Our company does a "disaster recovery" exercise every year. The official start of the process is someone quite senior pulling the breaker switch on a Friday evening. The guys have until 8am Monday to be 100% back up and running on the original kit. It normally takes about 12 hours to recover fully while everything ticks over on the backup systems so hopefully no actual downtime.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Lack of adequate policies and training yet again

"If the policy says "don't share your password" it shouldn't make any difference who asks for it - you just don't share it."

We get "pen tested" every now and then by an outside company. It's usually, from a users point view, some "important" email with a link to follow where we need to log in. The link is long that's nigh on impossible to check where it's really going from the browser address bar. It's looks very much like the common sort of stupidly long links our system use. I usually follow the link, find a realistic looking login page, enter my username (my publically available email address", then enter "password" for the password. A page open telling me all about what just happened, why I shouldn't follow "unknown" links and auto-subscribes me to a 10 minute security "training" course, which I complete. After the 3rd or 4th occasion, I get a phone call from my manager, sounding a bit upset. So I tell him I was testing out the quality of the phishing attempt because it was abnormally good but wasn;t stupid enough to use my real password and if the pen testers were doing their job properly instead of using automated scripts, they'd have know that I'd not fallen for it.

He asked me not to do it again as it was raising red flags but copied me in on the email back to "security" explaining how poor the pen testing was and was it really worth the money :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Just a thought

If it had been the Norks doing it, that's probably what would have happened. They are probably kicking themselves now for not getting in first :-)

White House puts $50m into floating wind turbine projects

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Fiddling while Big Oil carries on as usual

According to Wikipedia

The world's first commercial floating offshore windfarm, Hywind Scotland, was commissioned in 2017.[40] It uses 5 Siemens turbines of 6 MW each, has a capacity of 30 MW and is sited 18 miles (29 km) off Peterhead. The project also incorporates a 1 MWh lithium-ion battery system (called Batwind).[6]

WindFloat Atlantic, sited 20 km off the coast of Viana do Castelo, Portugal, has a capacity of 25 MW and has operated since July 2020.[56]

The 48 MW Kincardine Offshore Wind Farm is the UK's second commercial floating offshore windfarm, and completed construction in August 2021.[42][57] "

All of the first 20 or so results from Google, searching on "the first floating wind farm in the world" (without the quotes), say Wikipedia is correct. There were a couple of single test installations earlier, one off the coast of the Netherlands and one off the coast of Norway (Also called Hywind) off the coast of Norway and lead directly the Scottish Hywind farm.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Fiddling while Big Oil carries on as usual

FWIW, the current thinking is to separate non-gas 'leccy generation from other forms of generation so that gas no longer sets the price. I'd like to think that will actually happen, but...Government ;-/

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Fiddling while Big Oil carries on as usual

"The North Sea is very shallow"

Mostly, which has been a bit of a boon for offshore wind, but not only is it not all shallow, there are other seas and coasts around the UK, some of which are busy shipping lanes and fishing grounds. The UK has floating wind turbines out there now.

"The world's first floating wind farm, the 30 MW Hywind Scotland pilot park, has been in operation since 2017, demonstrating the feasibility of floating wind farms that could be ten times larger."

So, R&D started some time ago and 5 years experience of running the system. More research, if shared, is always welcome though.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Quite literally a drop in the Ocean

"Probably a floating wind turbine requires better anchoring than a floating oil rig."

It does. Just look at the existing floating offshore wind turbines.

That prize money and the way it's being put over, it almost feels as though the US has come up with a new idea and suddenly wants to develop it and become a world leader.

Maybe it's just the articles author and the way he wrote it, but it doesn't even offer a nod to the existing technology.

Can reflections in eyeglasses actually leak info from Zoom calls? Here's a study into it

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Happy

Just a tie. Context is everything.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

It's the new official El Reg House Style. North American.

Some PHB at El Reg has decided that having authors from different parts of the world writing in their own local version of English is confusing for their poor dumb readers and have chosen to do everything in American English instead of English. Maybe most of their writers are from the USA these days. Or maybe their "analytics" show most of their readers are in the USA. Or maybe USA readers are less likely than others to have script blockers blocking the "analytics" and so skewing the results towards the USA.

But I agree, of so many "Americanisms", eyeglasses feels more jarring to this Brit than most others. Worse even than necktie :-)

Appeals court already under fire for upholding Texas no-content-moderation law

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So if I wanted to troll Texas...

In Texas, gravy is one of your five-a-day :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Here we go...

"One of the largest US cities, currently de-populating claims it doesn't have the support services or infrastructure to host a few hundred migrants, but a suburb apparently can."

Everywhere has plenty of space for tax payers. Welfare recipients, not so much.

"“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

It also seems to mean schoolkids can swear[1] in class, deny anything the teacher teaches they don't agree with and claim the Great Pumkin is The Lord Of All Things, freely and without hindrance 'cos "free speech", Texas style!

[1] Or cuss, if you prefer the new El Reg style guide.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Christian values? By what measure?

""Love thy neighbour" is seemingly hate speech in some devoutly Christian circles.

They probably have it confused with "Do not covet thy neighbours[1] wife" and think it means no more swingers parties.

[1} Note: UK spelling. Jesus is far more likely to be British[2} than a Texan :-)

[2] Clearly not as there was no place named Britain 2000-odd years ago just as there was no such place name as Texas. But he may have made a whistle stop tour of the Green and Pleasant land though certainly not the Lone Star State[3].

[3] Yes, I'm trolling Texas Reps :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So if I wanted to troll Texas...

"Politicians have more meat on them,"

Meat? Or fat from the pork barrels?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Here we go...

If that quote is accurate, I'm not surprised they wanted it gone as quickly as possible. A better analogy might have been thought of if the person writing it had stopped to think for a few seconds, but it sounds like a thoughtless "shoot from the hip" comment directly comparing asylum seekers with "trash". Not a good look.

Don't say Pentium or Celeron anymore, it's just Processor now, says Intel

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Given their namings….

"laptops...faster clocked CPUs...that fit the existing CPU socket"

Not something I see very often on the many business grade laptops I see everyday. In many cases, the base RAM is onboard too with a single SODIMM socket for expansion. Consumer grade often won't even have any socketed RAM, never mind a socketed CPU. At best, it'll be a socketed NVMe SSD, about the only upgradeable item in the system nowadays. Making things slimmer and lighter (and cheaper to make) has driven this. Leading to many more models on offer at many price points because you can no longe buy a cheap model and later upgrade it. So yet more landfill.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Given their namings….

They might be better off reducing the range of products. Most of of them are not especially special, just a little different. Maybe follow the fast food industry and have three CPUs, Medium (or Regular), Large and Extra Large. No Small, that won't sell according to Marketing). And when the cooling system fails, you can have fries with it too.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: trademarks

You can't trademark a common word. You CAN trademark a common word in specific style/colour/logo design though. On the other hand, successful trademarks can become diluted in common usage, eg Sellotape, Biro, Hoover, Sharpie etc such that they become almost useless in marketing. Intel may have just come up with the shortest ever useful life of a marketing name-brand.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

We ARE the B-Ark. It landed on Earth and displaced the original inhabitants. That's why Marketing hold such sway over out lives. They outmanoeuvred the telephone sanitisers and the hair dressers were too busy inventing spray-tan and discussing their next holiday.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Who talks like this?

Even the iNumbers are confusing for some customers. I remember my brother-in-law bragging to me how he'd got one of the new i5 processers and it was so much better than my AMD quad core 'cos his had FIVE cores :-)

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Happy

Re: There are more than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

whoosh! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Perhaps, but Shakespeare had other ideas …

"Please elucidate his other ideas."

He might have said something interesting about lawyers.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Other things can get clogged too

"The box was standing on what was obviously a new carpet, of a matching colour."

As a field engineer, I came across that same problem at many customer sites. They were told it would be fixed but future call-outs would likely be chargeable as "user induced damage" if they didn't lift the PCs off the floor by at least 6"/15cm. Most of the dust is disturbed by peoples feet moving under the desk, but not by much. 6" seemed to be enough to more or less eliminate the problem.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Possible fire hazard? Or sparks putting holes in that very, very thin film of plastic? Dunno, but there must have been a reason they didn't do it.

Former Reg vulture takes on Nominet – by running for board seat

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I wish him the best of luck

Well, hopefully there will be other like-minded board members, or some he can get on-side, otherwise he'll be a lone voice with a single vote at the table. An impossible task to do alone without allies on the board.

Heart now pledges 30-seat hybrid electric commercial flights by 2028

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It's not time to railroad

"I could likely get to the destination as or more quickly if I just hop in the car and go if it's only a couple of hundred miles."

Yes, for many people, short haul flights are often more of a status or habit thing. If you don't live near the departure airport and need to be somewhere well away from the destination airport, the extra travel at each end plus the security theatre at the airports can easily make it quicker to travel by car, train or coach/bus for many.

Actual real-life hoverbike makes US debut at Detroit Auto Show

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

It would need a significant optimisation to increase the carrying capacity and range to make it useful. On the other hand, the early[*] EV cars had a range of barely 40 miles, not a great deal further than this flying bike. On the other hand, what needs optimising is power generation/storage and electric motor efficiency and this bike is already using the very latest improvements that now give EV cars a 200+ mile range. No regenerative braking or other optimisation suitable for road vehicles.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What is “internal combustion with batteries “?

There's probably a learning curve. You don't let some over-excited motoring journalist loose on your brand new flying prototype. It's not in his/her skill-set :-)

Having said that, it is just a prototype and doesn't seem to have anything new or innovative in it.

Queen's shooting star was actually meteor, not SpaceX junk

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Islay

Do spacecraft use or need anchors?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Travelling North West

"Proclaiming your science-derived guesses as absolute, indisputable fact that may not be challenged changes it from science to religion."

Luckily, most science isn't like that and the published papers can be read, showing that. How the press spin the stories, or worse, how the PR from the company or Government sponsoring it might spin it is what leads to the "absolutist science" we keep seeing in the media.

EU puts smart device manufacturers on the hook for cyber security

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Offline

Not to mention that the full source could required to actually be useful may well include other 3rd party licenced IP, said licences which may have Ts&Cs which expire if the licence holder goes out of business and can't be transferred.

China can destroy US space assets, Space Force ops nominee warns

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"have you tried launching a battleship into orbit ?"

Orion?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Has anyone checked to see.....

It's his job. As with science, nothing is impossible, so he has to talk up the possible attack vectors so that he can show he looked at them, tried to get funding to protect against them and set plans in place for if or when that funding materialises.

Looking at it from the other side of the coin, maybe the Chinese are experimenting with ways to clean up orbital space junk. Somewhere in the middle, China has military leaders in the same position. They see the US satellite as a threat and must, as part of their jobs, identify and attempt to get funding to combat that threat if necessary. Space junk clean-up methods are also ideal for disabling "enemy" satellites. It's all very sad, but it's the way of the world.

Google fined $4b after Euro court snips 5% off earlier price

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Possibly. It's been rumbling on for years though, so maybe a small share will be doled out if the UK had some involvement in the gathering of useful evidence while sill in the EU. At best, it might be a tiny reduction in the ongoing monies still being paid to the EU for various schemes we were involved in, especially the pensions.

China's single aisle passenger jet – the C919 – likely to be certified next week

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Wow those are some big backlogs

"That would be a pretty big barrier to an airline starting up"

Start-ups and smaller airlines are more likely to lease, probably "used" aircraft. It's need to be a very well funded start-up to buy new aircraft outright.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: size

So, you're saying Jane Fonda's workout videos were secretly sponsored by Boeing?

HP pays $1.3m to settle dispute over printer security chip

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yes, funny how so often these things are settled out of court so the "accused" ends up "let off" for a small fee while denying any wrongdoing. Justice. The b est money can buy. Tough if you can't afford it. None for you.

Demand for software experts pushes tech salaries higher in UK

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Diversity should be a consequence, not a goal.

Interesting story in the press recently. It should be of interest no matter where on the spectrum of the diversity debate one stands.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-62826983

Now, there is probably more to that story than this one report shows. But it looks, from that report, that the primary arguments against this person being given the job is entirely because he's a man. There doesn't seem to be anyone questioning the line up of candidates or their qualifications. It'll be an interesting one to follow as local councils are usually sticklers for following all the rules in this sort of matter and in particular like to be shown as being fair and diverse.

One month after Black Hat disclosure, HP's enterprise kit still unpatched

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: ""Security is always a top priority for <company>"

Note that they said "a top priority". Not "our top priority" or "the top priority".

Clearly they have other "top priorities" too. Like profit margins, C-level bonuses, corporate buy-out at over-inflated prices etc.

Software fees to make up 10% of John Deere's revenues by 2030

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Well, all these $BigCorp have to put their huge profits somewhere. It earns nothing sitting in a bank, might even depreciate, while the bank makes profits lending it out. Can't give it away as bonuses or dividends, that attracts taxes. So why not just become their own bank instead? Win Win for $BigCorp. And they are all run by bean counters anyway. They always need more beans to count.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What Could be Useful for the Farmers ...

"the simplicity and reliability of the Volkswagen Beetle."

Have you seen the current incarnation of the VW Beetle? Few people buy cheap, basic, easily maintainable cars these days. They are more likely to lease something flashy. Cars as a Service has already arrived.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extract

"It's worked for fertilizer producers, seed vendors, grain intermediaries, shipping companies. And it looks like it's going to work for John Deere."

And not forgetting biotech with their GM crops that either don't reproduce or are licenced in a way that you MUST buy seed from them, no holding back some the crop for next years planting. And the sue balls fired at adjoining farmers because their crops now contain some identifiable propriety GM seed from wind-blow.

OVH opens less flammable datacenter at site of 2021 fire

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Neat cabling

Not usually in a newly commissioned build though. Cabling usually takes at least a few hours to self-entangle. :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"basically only discovered last year that automatic fire extinction is a good idea !"

Apart from the reputational damage, I wonder how much they saved across their entire data centre estate by not doing it properly, and how much this loss actually cost them, barring any insurance payouts?

Meta's next-gen Oculus headset kit left in a hotel room

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Photos of new VR headset kit leaked

"Both" fans? Does it run that hot? Battery life must be shit :-)

Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C8H10N4O2

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Laptops

Did somone think they deserved a gold plated laptop then? Sounds like something "high flying" salesman[1] would do.

[1[ not being sexists here, but almost always the blokie sales people who are the biggest arseholes.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: C8H10N4O2

No, it's #2 on the list, Caffeine. and above pizza.

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