Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Or the other way around ...

Because lots of cars are left unattended and unlocked and/or windows open?

(I still upvoted you for the obvious thought that will pass through the minds of many drunk students thinking it's a funny and original idea and they are the first to think of it though :-))

Re: Not again...

"'Merkins and personal responsibility rarely occupy the same space."

That's part of it. The rest is "Gummint ain't telling ME what to do...muh FREEDOM, damn commie Feds!!"

Re: If only battery production was green...

"Trains could work with alternative technologies such as redux flow or sodium ion as the energy density issue is less of a problem."

Yes, just make the seats a bit narrower and reduce the leg room a bit to make space for the batteries :-)

Re: State of rolling stock

So those new trains on the East Coast line were bought in 2nd hand then? They told us they were new!

Re: My gripe

"Their support staff is well aware of the issue, have been for years, and they seem about equally invested in fixing it as Mozilla."

As back in the day when stuff worked or didn't work with FF or IE, devs mark all those kind of problems as "will not fix" because the metrics say they are self-repairing. User get so sick of waiting for a fix, they just install the browser that works with that site, possibly only for the few incompatible sites they encounter. What the devs see is that "everyone" is using the browser that "works" and almost no one is using the "incompatible" browser, therefore it's not worth spending time and resources fixing a problem only a very few "whiney" people have.

Re: Testing Win 11 right now

"if people spent some time to learn to use the search function instead of trying to sort everything, a lot of complaints about “they moved Feature X to a new location” would stop pretty quickly."

Yeahbut, Search only works if you know what you are looking for. And if you know what you are looking for, a user adjustable hierarchical menu is quicker because if if stuff is where you put it, then it's where you expect it, not hidden away in some ever changing location depending on if there is a "Y" in the name of the current day.

Re: The company now has an estimated half a million disks in stock

"18090 MB / 1.44 = 12562.5 disks per installation"

IIRC, the last time Windows came on floppies, they used a special 1.6MB format.

I forget the exact details now, but running a program called FDREAD would patch DOS (or intercept the floppy interrupt handler) and allow reading of differently formatted disks created with FDFORMAT. Handy for turning 40 track 360K DD disks into 80 track 720K disks on a 1.2MB floppy drive. (cheaper disks!) More if you were brave and added an extra sector per track and maybe an extra few tracks if the drive could handle it. Likewise, using the more expensive 1.2MB HD disks, you could safely get 1.44MB. On the later 3.5" HD disks, 1.7MB was doable.

Re: Extinct?

Yes. Apparently, one of them did a double back flip in a fit of exuberance and this was interpreted by a passing alien space ship as "Help, save us from our giant lizard overloads", who lobbed a big rock over in aid and sympathy. The Coelacanths promptly did a runner and stayed hidden till the heat was off.

Re: NASA

NASA run some very old hardware to support long term missions, Voyager probably being the most high profile. Some old stuff can be emulated, but much of it is original kit. Or at least original design. Some of it may be a bit "Triggers broom" :-)

Re: Older media still has its place

"When was the last time you updated your anti-lock brake software?"

Probably when the car last had a dealer service. They do firmware updates, often without telling you. Whether it actually was the ABS s/w is another matter.

Re: I'm surprised

Likewise, there are IDE- PC-Card[*] devices which present as a hard disk too.

Experience in the community indicates that SD cards are too "fragile" long term for emulating a hard disk with many r/w cycles.

Re: Bummer

According to GpTek, yes, they do. On the front page they even make a model specifically for weaving, embroidery, knitting, CNC, and music applications. That version is an adaptor to make a USB stick appear to be a physical floppy disk to the hardware,

They are certainly popular in the vintage computing community. From comments I've seen there, you put multiple floppy images on an SD card or USB pendrive and can then select which image is presented to the host computer from a thumb-wheel switch/LED display. I've seen them used on Amigas and Atari ST so they do support various formats. You might need to buy the correct version or model though. Although looking at the linked site, they are wholesale only and make no mention of Amiga or Atari. Maybe others buy them and flash the firmware to cover those computers.

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 ;-/

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.

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.

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 :-)

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."

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.

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 :-)

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

"Politicians have more meat on them,"

Meat? Or fat from the pork barrels?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :-)

Re: Perhaps, but Shakespeare had other ideas …

"Please elucidate his other ideas."

He might have said something interesting about lawyers.

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.

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.

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.

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.