* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

"Can you point to 1,000 square miles of exclusion zone on the map due to coal? "

Yes. Spoil and slag heaps all over the world, full of toxins, adding up to far more than 1000 square miles. In many countries, fenced off as dangerous areas. Some have had a foor or two of top soil added to hide the bare, barren "moon-scape" like image they would naturally have. But many remain unstable and during very wet weather can come crashing down onto any nearby homes.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bang On - except the death stats

"You get Uranium and Plutonium out of the ground."

If you don't know the difference between the rocks that form the earth and "fossil fuel", then you really should give and go back to something you do understand.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bang On - except the death stats

"Are they shredding the panels so you can suck in the dust?"

No, but the mining or processing of the materials used to make them is causing pollution and deaths.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bang On - except the death stats

"Can you point to me something similar with regards to coal?"

Slag heaps collapsing and sliding down, burying villages and schools full of children. And it's still happening.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bang On - except the death stats

"* Nuclear: 0.03 (including Chernonbyl in 1986)

* Solar: 0.02"

And the response from the Greens/green press? OMG!!!!!! Nuclear kills 50% for people than solar!!!!!!

Samsung heir pardoned after doing time for bribery

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Lee became the head of Samsung after his father

On the other hand, if one of the "kings" dies unexpectedly, before the slow and tax free (or at least tax low) processes are started or completed, it can get expensive to inherit.

"After Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee passed away in 2021, South Korea’s inheritance tax made headlines as Lee’s family was saddled with a world-record breaking inheritance tax estimated at KRW 12 trillion (over USD 10 billion)."

It's not a straightforward "The king is dead, long live the king" process, even there.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Capitalism for the Win

"The bit I can't work out is how one individual can matter so much for the country's economic health."

The BBC gave a better report into the background of these huge cheabols.

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I hope whoever agreed to allowing catering to use the server room for cooling received their pink slip before the day was over."

It was described as a "server closet" and "at the turn of the century", so I'm guessing we aren't talking about "server central" and BOFH + PFY roaming around. More likely a rack or two and barely room to swing a cat.

"Dear lord that's a horrendours[sic] decision."

Despite the above, I still agree with this bit :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: fail - over?

"Pi is just a conspiracy by the global elites to dupe the sheeple into believing that circles"

I think your post got cropped.

Your AI-generated digital artwork may not be protected by US copyright

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"but who owns the training data?"

Most "AI's" seem to be trained on "open source" or "public" data, often by scraping the internet, so likely has no owner or possibly has thousands if not millions of "owners" :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: In my mind, this is a null line of questioning.

"Adding AI to Photoshop still doesn't make Adobe the author of the image"

Be careful what you say. You can't patent or copyright an "idea" and now you just put that "idea" out there in the public domain :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Pretty much that. According to gov.uk;

".2 Duration of the rights

A recording of a performance is ‘released’ when it is first published, played or shown to the public.

Rights in unreleased performances last for a 50 year period. The period begins from the year in which the performance occurred. If during this 50 year period a recording of the performance is released, then the following rules apply:

  • if the recording of the performance is not a sound recording, the term of protection extends to 50 years from the date of release; or
  • if the recording of the performance is a sound recording, the term of protection extends to 70 years from the date of release"

So yeah, Cliff "won" for "sound recordings", but didn't seem so bothered about other recordings. I guess he gets more income from his songs than for his films. Especially since much of his film income is from the songs he performed in them anyway and the songs were, obviously, all released as "sound recordings" too. He's more interested in Spotify than TV re-runs of the films.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"One could argue that Cliff did exactly that, it's just not the same pot you pay into. Where is it written that we must all piss into use the same pot?"

One could argue for the extension of patents to match that of copyright using that same logic of comparing it to a pension pot. Also, that "pension pot" starts paying out immediately, not just when you retire, so why should inventors not get the same benefits as artists and authors? It's worth bearing in mind that the only people arguing for extending copyright are the copyright holders. There doesn't seem to be the same drive to extend patents.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The winning sentence "wide-angle shot from below of a female astronaut with an athletic feminine body walking with swagger toward camera on Mars in an infinite universe, synthwave digital art,"

Does this AI produce exactly the same output when given the same input? Or does add more data of it's own randomly/algorithmically from some extra data? If so, how does it "decide" what to add to the users specifications?

In relation to copyright though, rather than treat AI "like a human", maybe it's time to look at copyright, what it is, what it means and who (and for how long) it benefits? Maybe it's time to treat copyright more like patents and give it a fixed life? Death of author plus seventy years is excessive IMO, especially for works created at the early stages of an authors career. That works against a successful author bothering too much later in life if they have a few "big hits" early on that keeps paying. Not to mention the general trend for people to live longer. Let's not even go near "corporate" copyrights and Disney!

People like Cliff Richard, who's pretty much done nothing for 20 years, says the royalties are his "pension". Well, why didn't he pay into a pension pot like everyone else and not have to worry about the royalties?

Ukraine's cyber chief comes to Black Hat in surprise visit

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "advanced feature sets is they require complex protocols, "

...and was it "mission complete" at some stage or are they still on retainer to keep security up to date?

Twitter unveils US midterm election integrity plans, upsets almost everyone

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Unless it's a politician stating it, in which case the odds are pretty good.

BOFH: Who us? Sysadmins? Spend time with other departments?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Internal relationship manager

Never heard of BDSM? It's enlightening (and sometime horrifying, as well as everything in between) to find out what gets some peoples rocks off ;-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bullshit jobs

"maybe these people are failed HR people?"

Is that even possible?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Management style fads! - Something Different

...or teach people the things they were supposed to learn as toddlers. Wash your hands properly, with soap, then dry them. This guy may have "washed" his hands, but I despair at the numbers of people who think "washing" their hands is a quick wipe under the running water then walk out shaking dirty water all over the place. Those drips may or may not have been contaminated water.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

Re: Management style fads! - Something Different

Our company does! Well, the free pizzas (or other food) every once in a while. Unfortunate;y, it also causes divisions between office based workers and those us out in the field who rarely if ever visit offices and don;t get any of the freebies.

Our software is perfect. If something has gone wrong, it must be YOUR fault

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: A mild infusion of yellow

Have you tried downgrading to a pen or pencil? Or, if you want the chance of being understood by the recipient, a crayon?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Dear God. Where to start?

Doing hardware support for multiple OEMs. One of them has a mandatory procedure to follow which means logging in to their systems and following the diagnosis procedure. You only get to touch their kit if you've already completed their mandatory training. The problem with the online fault diagnosis system is that it's clearly aimed at people who are untrained and have no clue what to do. I have yet to see it come up with a "solution" I could not come up with ten times faster. In theory, on is supposed to carry out each step, one at a time and the click on the result, which then takes you to the next logical step. It even starts with checking the power is on and power cycling. FFS, I KNOW THAT. I DO THAT. IT TAKES A FEW SECONDS. But following their mandatory and monitored online process takes at least 10 minutes just to get that far. The process goes downhill from there :-(

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

Easily solved. Kill one of your live badgers.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Testers

"You still have to pay to submit a bug report".

Really? And they are still in business?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Just be like me"

Sounds like the same attitude from game devs. Not got the latest whizzy shiny? Tough!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Hmm we only tested on IE"

We just upgraded one of our in-house apps. I say "we". I mean TPTB imposed it on us Some functions don't work in Edge, the "approved" browser, some don't work in Firefox and there's no complete overlap in the Venn diagram. We've been told it fully works in Internet Explorer and to use that instead. Unfortunately, the standard user build doesn't include the now EOLed IE and security policies forbid "unapproved" s/w installs by users, including IE

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

Re: Terminators and T-Pieces

Yeah, Paris was only temporary. Fugit about her!

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Given that the US didn't make 100K cars last week due to a lack of chips

I've noticed a trend, at least here in the uk, to leave the colour out of the paint job. Grey cars that look like only the undercoat and final gloss finish has been applied. I wonder if that's a cheaper option? I doubt it, since one I saw today was a Porche. They probably charge extra for that option ;-)

There can be only one... Microsoft Excel Champion

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Excel is why we can't have a simple "quick'n'dirty" database app in Windows

Type your comments here - advanced HTML and hotlinks allowed.

FCC decides against giving Starlink $1b in rural broadband subsidies

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Oh, that's right, the big ISPs spend a big chunk of that money bribing our lawmakers,"

It does make one wonder why LTD didn't get comms carrier status in 7 of the 15 states they applied for. I've never heard of them, so there may be good technical reasons why they didn't get that. But seeing how the incumbents operate, I'd not be surprised to learn the likes of AT&T et al spent money lobbying against them in some form or other.

You'll soon be able to ghost a WhatsApp group without making everyone hate you

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The BBC comment struck the right chord...

I forgot to add, Meta's new chatbot thinks Zuckerberg is stupid and Facebook exploits people.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

The BBC comment struck the right chord...

...they described as "leaving a party by sneaking out the back door" :-)

On the other hand, why are people so concerned about what others might think of them? I thought the default these days, especially amongst the younger crowd, is that it's doesn't matter what others think. I'm constantly seeing (and hearing!) other peoples phone conversations, about all sorts of sensitive stuff, because so many think it's right and proper to hold phone conversations in public on speaker phone. One woman, just yesterday, was complaining to some energy provider or other that the money had not gone on her card. Back in my day, you had conversations like that in private! Clearly these must not be the same people worried about the "fall out" of leaving a WhatsApp group.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Alternatively ...

"Which begs the question: does anyone know of a company that has supplied a phone to an employee they said "has" to be on Whasapp (etc) but who doesn't own a phone."

Yeah, me! I've never owned a personal mobile phone and still don't. I've been in jobs where a company mobile phone was provided since the "brick" phones where finally going away, replaced with little black Nokias. Current employer has WhatsApp groups for remote teams to keep in easy touch for general chat, work-related etc that's neither company sensitive nor of interest outside of the team. It's lighter, easier and less hassle than Teams (which we also use for "official" company business)

Google's bug bounty boss: Finding and patching vulns? 'Totally useless'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Without taking into account observed exploits, wasting huge amount of defensive resources

"One of the first to realize this in the commercial sphere was Kenna Security & Cyentia 2018 ROI of fixing vulnerabilities:"

I wonder if the ROI takes into account the losses caused by unfixed bugs and vulnerabilities when the customers systems go TITSUP or they get hacked? Maybe if the customers could sue the vendors for those "hey, it''s cheaper to ignore that bug" line items, the ROI might look a little different.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

So, ignoring all the bugs until a concatenation turns them into an exploit is ok by you? If the first bug had been fixed, the exploit would not have happened in the first place. Ignoring the bugs until some combination becomes exploitable is security by obscurity. The black hats might find the exploit first, and use it first.

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Genuine Question

"The work shouldn't be getting Linux to do a thing that Windows does by just configuring this, download this package, update this library, now modify this config, oh wait, missing another dependency, etc. It gets in the way of the actual goal of whatever the work is. It's gotten a LOT better over the years, but can still be a big pain."

I think mindset is a major part of the problem. "getting Linux to do a thing that Windows does" Is that really what is needed? Or is there another way to do it? I suspect that after 20+ years of standardising on Windows on the desktop, it's very difficult for most people to even conceive of doing something that is not "The Microsoft Way". And due to that very fact, it can be hard, if not impossible to do many things without using Windows because there's no userbase, so no development and therefore no support for s/w to do those things.

Back in the days when different companies used different computers and OS', they trained their people in their way of doing things. Nowadays, it's expected that new hires all know Windows and how to drive it, along with at least the standard "default" apps, no training required, other than maybe for one or two "business" tools, SAP stuff and the like.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: LibreOffice is not as good as MS Office

I never have issues saving my LO Calc files to Excel format and sending them to others. I frequently have issues with people using the many whizz-bang "features" of Excel, "Just Because They Can" which add nothing to either the data or the presentation, but make importing it into LO Calc a problem.

On the other hand, that's the same problem Word and Excel have had with previous versions of Word and Excel for many years. Not everyone can or will upgrade to the latest shiny as soon as it's released.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: preaching the gospel

I would say it mainly depends on whether there is software available to do what you need to do on your OS. Not so very long ago, it was normal to choose a computer based on exactly that criteria because there were so many different hardware architectures and OS to choose from. The Wintel monopoly has reduced choice in that respect but, to some extent, increased choice in what you applications you run on your OS so long as you choose Windows running on X86 hardware.

In my personal case, I can run everything *I* want or need to run at home on FreeBSD. That limits me from doing some stuff that might be nice to do, but I don't miss that stuff. Likewise, I can also all my work related stuff on FreeBSD because the few "custom" work apps are all web based and work nicely for me without issue, including vendor training courses I need to do.

In the past, there were some Atari ST based things I would have quite liked to use, but chose the Amiga, which to my ST owning friends did things their STs couldn't do. but we were all happy with our choice.

(Well, *I* was happy, they were stuck with crappy Ataris STs LOL)

Elon Musk sells Tesla shares worth $6.9b as Twitter lawsuit looms

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Musk's sofa

"but significantly cheaper than $44B."

Is it? For $11b to $20b, he makes the problem go away. For $44b he gets a twitter worth £33b now but likely to be worth more after he buys it. Nothing for a 1/4 to 1/2 price, something for paying 1/4 more than it's worth. It's hard to say which outcome is "cheaper".

Microsoft asks staff to think twice before submitting expenses

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Microsoft managers personally paid the bill to feed and water staff at a company picnic

"So... Microsoft managers paid the bill for a company expense from their *taxed earnings*, while for Microsoft that would have been simply another cost?"

That's the bit I don't understand on this entire issue. If expenses are incurred legitimately in the course of business, then they go in the before-tax column and in effect are "free" to the company because they that much less tax. Surely any company making a profit and paying taxes isn't losing out by paying employees out of pocket business expenses. IANAAccountant.

The sins of OneDrive as Microsoft's cloud storage service turns 15

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Costs?

"1TB if one signs up for a Microsoft 365 Personal subscription for $69.99 per year."

About the as buying a brand new 1TB HDD every year.

"(Apple's iCloud, for example, asks for just $9.99/month, or £6.99 in the UK, for 2TB.)"

Not much better really. A bit less than twice the price for only twice the storage.

Even if you want permanent access to the data, upgrading the laptop HDD will pay for itself in under two years for most people and no mobile/roaming data plans needed, let alone "free WiFi" of dubious quality in the local coffee shop to slow down access to larger files :-)

Russian anti-satellite test added to a 'pressing threat to security' in space

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

That was a short lived debris cloud in the almosphere, possibly some bits making it to a watery grave. Not a long lived orbital cloud of debris. Still not good, but not even in the same ball park.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Life imitating art

Bring back silver mini-skirts!!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Just speculation but ...

"a cloud of orbital hypervelocity buckshot "

Depends on the orbital difference. The velocity of the debris cloud is relative to the potential target, not absolute or relative to some "at rest" spot on Earth.

NetBSD 9.3: A 2022 OS that can run on late-1980s hardware

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Yes, well, but...

No, but it should be possible on a Sinclair PC200 :-)

(Obviously, it's post-Amstrad purchase of the Sinclair name. ISTR another one that was a PC but had a cartridge slot or a built in Spectrum emulator or something. Or I may be confusing memories of multiple systems that did two job in one box)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: ...and 32-bit SPARC boxes

...or AROS :-)

(I'd link Amiga OS 4.1, but you have to buy that, not open source)

US car industry leads the world in production cuts over chip shortages

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: are they lyeing?

Maybe, but demand is higher than production. If you want to buy a new car, the lead time is far longer than normal. I looked at our company employee salary sacrifice scheme to lease a car[*]. The website has a special search filter to show only cars available between "now" and 3 months. That eliminated quite a few models from the list because the lead time is 6 months+, some over a year.

* too expensive, even after the tax breaks, generic leasing worked out about the same, typical of government backed schemes.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Remember when

Would you even need all that for a town runabout in, say, Wales with a blanket 20mph speed limit? Maybe there's a market for "geofenced" little cheap eco runabouts there :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: to have electric windows and electrically moving seats without needing any chips.

Also, in the past, pre-chippery based controls, you had to press or pull the button constantly while it was moving. The sound of the child screaming would act as a signal to release the button and stop the window moving :-)

Modern electric windows generally keep moving on the chosen direction if you push or pull the button for more than a second or so and so need some kind of feedback mechanism so as not to cut off a childs arm or head.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Here's an idea -

"Linux car, only has a CLI."

Linux car. Comes with a range of controls and layouts that can be changed as the mood suits you for no additional cost. FTFY :-)

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