* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25254 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Good point. Pay peanuts, get monkeys. On the other hand, paying a dev in a country where the exchange rate means the $ goes much further and the wage is good for the that job in that country, then everyone wins. The problem seems to be that the outsourcers are NOT paying what is considered a good wage for the job in the outsourced country,

Trees may help power your next electric car

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

I once had a wooden car...

...it had wooden wheels, wooden doors, wooden batteries and wooden motors. Sadly, it wooden go.

I upgraded to a Rolls Canardly. It Rolls down hill but Canardly get up the other side.

(With thanks to The Beano joke writer, c1966)

Yeah, yeah, I've got my coat,, I won't be here all week.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Just remember to buy the correct acetates for a laser printer. Yup, I've seen the mess a "normal" one can create..."

Me too. Visited a customer site to repair a "broken" laser printer only to find a non-suitable acetate sheet melted and wrapped around the fuser and no way to remove it and save the fuser roller. Charged them for the "user damage" and a new fuser, so full call-out fee, not covered by contract. They did it again a month later :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bank of England notes.

"All banknotes destined for destruction went through a punch press before they left the premises, so even if someone trousered them at the incinerator, they were already useless"

Someone has got to get the notes to the punch press. Someone operates or supervises the punch press. It's just moving the "problem" elsewhere in the process. Possibly to a point in the process where security is or can be much better, but never totally infallible.

I suppose the best option is that all the notes go through a sorting machine that splits good, going back into circulation and bad, going down the chute into a stacker/baler for destruction (or direct to a shredder/furnace), no humans involved.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I learned about scanning half-toned images and the likely consequent moire patterns from reading the Aldus PageMaker manual all those years ago :-)

I also used a similar effect using fine horizontal lines at different angles on two layers of OHP transparency to create rudimentary animation of data flows when teaching. (only became possible to do accurately when laser printers came along)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Years ago....

"the GPS mapping of *every* address to within 3 ft or something like that"

If that was the case, every address would have a unique post code. Barring flats/multiple occupancy buildings, that's clearly not the case. Many houses in a street will share their post code, hence the need to have the door number too. Theoretically, the door number (and maybe flat number) and post code should be all you need to address a letter. At least, when the post code system went national, that was the claim. I suppose people must've tried it. On the other hand, it can get interesting in more rural areas.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Years ago....

"I am talking back in the late 80s/early 90s - the copier vendor known by the mis-spelled medieval device of ordnance had firmware in their colour machines (the crap logo copier 0.5x10^3) which wrote "Specimen" across anything it recognised as currency of certain denominations."

That was probably one of the early digital copiers. The copiers in most offices around then were almost entirely optical in their process and had little if any smarts fitted, maybe a "digital" zoom which operated a server to adjust the lenses if you had a slightly more flash one. They certainly had no way of recognising what was being copied.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Don't know if it's just that my coffee hasn't kicked in yet...

"(see also: micelles, and how the "beauty" industry has suddenly discovered how surfactants work a century after the word was coined)."

Not to mention their most common "secret" ingredient, Aqua :-)

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: About a billion web pages have been authored to help

"I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't also an element of the fact that the contacts on SD cards are small and presumably made against tiny spring-like contacts in the phone, which sound very much like something that would be prone to intermittent failure through dust sand, grease, vibration, and so on."

Possibly, but I suspect unlikely. When did you last have a SIM card fail?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The Bit-Theory

If a 1 penetrates a 0 do you get a bum-crack emojii (I)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Maybe its Huawei

"There's a kill bit that makes the MicroSD card read-only so you can retrieve the existing files, but nothing I found can change it back to read-write."

That seems to be a "feature" on SSDs too. It seems to be a failure mode where some (or too much) of the device has errors, possibly from too many write cycles, so the whole drive goes read-only to limit any further damage or data loss. It's a relatively common cause of boot time BSODs on Windows laptops because Windows, like any OS, needs to write stuff during the boot process. SSDs/Sata/m-sata.nvme.whatever terminology, seem to be improving though. I'm not seeing so many failed SSDs this last year or two. Maybe the silicon is better now. Or maybe the TRIM/wear-levelling has improved, or Windows is no longer forcing certain writes to the same places for "special" files. Who knows? Who cares? Whatever the cause, they seem more reliable and longer lasting.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I used to have a clip from The Goodie singing Black Pudding Bertha as my ring tone until the Ecky-Thump branded SD card mysteriously wiped itself while on a trip darn' sarf'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"As regards the problem in the smartphone, my suspicion would lie fair and square with Android I'm afraid. "

Agreed. As per both your and Dabbsie use cases, other than in phones, SD card either Just Work, or fail with r/w errors after lots of use. I don't think I've ever had one spontaneously re-format or refuse to work in it's "home" device only to work in something else or to be "fixed" by a re-format. There is the possibility that it's environmental in that it can get quite hot in a phone along with all the physical movement and jogging around it gets which would be the exception rather than the rule with most other devices, but it does seem more like and Android thing.

China seems to have figured out how to make 7nm chips despite US sanctions

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Chess.

Competing with China is hard to do in terms of technology. Do you sell them everything they want or refuse and force them to develop their own? Either way, they will end up out competing you one way or the other.

Hospital IT melts in heatwave, leaving doctors without patient records

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: New software solves this ?

Yeah, that struck me too where the article said "The outage came after the trust board was warned months ago of the risk of running legacy systems." and I thought, how does legacy software relate to the cooling systems not being able to handle the conditions? Running legacy software doen;t mean they are still running on hot-running P75 servers. They may be, but nothing in the article indicates what hardware is running in the data centres.

Microsoft sunsets Windows built-in data leak prevention

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Funny, I thought...

You must be young. Supplies of sarcasm, like cynicism grows with age, a never ending supply, more than any one person could ever need :-)

UK blocks China from licensing Manchester Uni's robot vision tech

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Holmes

Manchester University reportedly said it would abide by the government's decision,

See icon. Since the ruling is based on an Act of Parliament, not abiding by the decision would mean breaking the law. And since said law involves "national security" breaking that law could arguably be treason. They have no choice but to abide by the decision, although they could, at best, try to challenge it in court.

Amazon buys US healthcare chain One Medical for $3.9bn

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Playing Devils Advocate

Or even, and I feel dirty for saying this, even Bill Gates, with his new found evangelical philanthropism and having again stated he wants to give all his wealth away and could easily do similar.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "What's next?"

There have been many SF stories warning/predicting of possible corporate rule taking over from governments since at least the 1950's. I'm sure we all have our own favourite examples, so I won't bother listing them

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: "waiting weeks or even months to be seen"

No more doctors being "off task" for pee breaks. I think they already have the right kind of bottles in the surgery.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Doctors Wearing Performance Trackers and Peeing into Bottles

""Excuse me, Mr. Johnson, is that urine yours or mine?""

Amazon doesn't care, they will take the piss anyway.

National data privacy law for the US clears first hurdle

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: The most nothing as possible!

Maybe it's time for "a well armed and regulated militia"?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Weak

"The ADPPA seems weak now. It will get weaker on the House floor, and then the Senate committee, and then the Senate, and then the Conference committee (if it even gets that far without being McConneled)."

And after all that, it will be interpreted and enforced by the FTC, headed by political appointees. So expect the "interpretation" to change every time a different party President gets elected.

Tesla jettisons 75% of Bitcoin holdings, boosting cash balance by $936m

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

But as we have seen many times, what Musk says today isn't necessarily what he dres tomorrow. I wonder if those "free" licences are time limited and renewable under different terms in a year of three? On the other hand, if he does try to play shenanigans with those patents, the people licencing them are big boys in the car making business and probably best able to the throw money at ways to work around most or all of them.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Up and down ... and up again.

"there are tailwinds ahead:"

FYI, tailwinds are usually beneficial. Did you mean headwinds, which are usually a hindrance?

NASA stalls water-seeking VIPER lunar rover to 2024

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

My pet goldfish begs to disagree. What was the question again?

Judge approves Twitter's request to hurry along Musk trial to October

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Cutting Elon story short

Ba-dum tish diddle dum diddle dum tiddle aye!

After 40 years in tech, I see every innovation contains its dark opposite

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Even other humans have trouble with Scots accents!

Yeah, but the west coast accent, Weegies especially, is a whole other language!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: a planetary-scale "ignorance amplifier"

Excellent! I don't remember that sketch. But that was back in the days before streaming or even the ubiquitous video recorder. If you weren't home to watch it, odds are you'd never see it :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Depends on the reason and urgency. Maybe they have retired or are about to retire and just want to move somewhere "nice". Moving first, then looking for a house sounds much more like it's career/job related, in which case yes, that's probably a good reason to move to a short term rental first and look when you get there.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The definition of "quiet" being little road traffic, not the general audio landscape it's located in of course.

Never trust an Estate Agent/Realtor :-)

They'd probably sell better and quicker, with far less of their own time wasted if they were honest and up front in the first place. I wonder how many "person hours" are wasted by estate agents taking people to house they would never even bother to look at if the description and location was clearly given? You might occasionally get a nice surprise and a sale from this practise, but I bet that's far outweighed by the time wasted :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Tie me down

"Wearing a tie...insults my religious beliefs"

Not a Mormon then?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I doubt...(title too long)

"having VR headsets strapped to their faces"

The latest ones seem to be much, much smaller nowadays, more like wearing a pair of slightly larger sunglasses and from the one I saw demoed on The Gadget Show the other week, quite impressive. But for gaming while at home, probably sitting down. On the other hand, it's rare to see anything on The Gadget Show that they are critical of other than in the comparison tests. They get all excited by IoT stuff and never mention the downsides.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I could see the point of 3D tours, but more in the gaming fashion on the computer screen rather than at the sales agents office with goggles on and them trying to push the sale. It could be a good way to winnow the wheat from the chaff and only spend time physically looking at the properties you are most interested in. After al, the static photos can and often are, used to hide the things that might put you off. I'd think the sales agents would be all for only showing around those people most likely to buy and not those who turn up, see the tiny back garden and walk away.

I see this "photo hiding reality" thing all the time when looking for holiday cottage lets. Anything that only shows the outside in a tight shot is hiding the fact it's in somones back garden or the middle of a housing estate, which is NOT what I'm looking for :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Once again, convenience

And yet, physical supermarkets seem to have it just about right. Occasional relocations of stock items, maybe one every year or two, prime sellers at eye level, and "special offers" sometimes in unusual places to trigger impulse buys. Some are looking at Bluetooth tracking to try to see what individuals are doing, which products they pick and put back, how long they stand in certain parts of the shop etc, but I bet they are not finding much use for the data on individuals and are only ever using the aggregated data to re-arrange store layouts and product placement. IME, it's a better shopping experience than online shopping because I don't get bombarded with "other people also bought" and other push advertising.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: a planetary-scale "ignorance amplifier"

"so the enjoyment of browsing the shelves for Iain Banks and finding an interesting-looking book by a different author"

I'm in two minds over the sorting of the books on the shelves. Our local library, for as long as I can remember, used the general alphabetical sorting for most books, but also had some specific genre sections such as crime, SF&F etc. The problem with SF&F, despite the SF and the F being different genres, is there is also a lot of cross-over between the two and neither are especially large genres so get lumped together. Same happens with general Crime novels and the more distinct Murder/Mystery sub-genre.

As for the quote above, "finding an interesting-looking book" is marketing in reality. What attracted you to it? The colours? Authors name? Book title? There's really not much to see on the spine to make a book seem attractive unless there's something obvious related to an existing interest. I suspect if all books were mandated to be green of red "leather" bound and use the same typeface for gold leaf printed authors name and title, you'd rarely spot an "interesting-looking book". :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Speech recognition...

I looked on with admiration as speech recognition was coming along. I even played with it a little, on a simplistic level, on 8-bit Z80 based systems. Then the likes of Google came along and moved all the processing into "the cloud" where no one knows who has access to everything you say. That spoiled it for me. I'd much rather have a simpler interface that works locally, and the power of even a mobile phone should allow that to some extent. I think the problem is, as you say, lazy users. No one wants to learn the limited vocabulary of a locally based system and train it to their voice and peculiarities. They just want it to work with any voice, any language, any accent, right out of the box.

Amazon sues 10,000 Facebook Group admins for offering fake reviews

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Reviews Business

No, that was general comments and feedback on the survey results.

If it wasn't truly anonymous, there'd be fewer people in my department now :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Our teams stop millions of suspicious reviews before they're ever seen by customers"

See subject line. Clearly either they are still not doing enough to solve the problem or their entire system is totally broken and it's time to go back to the drawing boards!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Reviews Business

I never give a maximum score on any of these sorts of scales because perfection or "above and beyond service" is incredibly rare and the only time anyone deserves full marks. As far as I'm concerned, a middle ranking is "doing your job as expected". Systems which have scales of only 3 or 5 stars means most vendors should be averaging 2 or 3 stars.

On the other hand, I've seen plenty of manipulative scales ranging from "good" to "excellent" with no options for anything less than "good". Rankings only offering 3 scale points are probably the most insidious since the only real options of "poor", "average", "excellent" and they complain if you give anything other than "excellent".

I did one recently which had a scale of 1-9. I gave 5-7 for most of the items and then was informed later that anything below 7 was considered "poor" despite my being honest in my belief that I was giving quite good scores to the questions asked. This was supposed to be an "open, transparent and anonymous" corporate-wide survey, yet they did not make clear how the scoring worked befoirehand.

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Quick charging

"There will be a few travelling salespeople who do silly miles each and every day,"

I'm not sales, but I do "silly miles" for work most days of the week. I could manage with a 200 miles range. Less would be doable, but adds risks of extra time constraints to the journey. EVs are just about at the stage I could make the switch, but the cost is still a barrier. Unfortunately, the up front costs are still too high at the moment for a decent sized car and leasing, when you get to my annual mileage levels starts to reach silly levels. I don't get paid enough, even with the car allowance and the various schemes on offer. Fuel cost isn't an issue as it's 99% business miles which the company pays for, which means the threshold for economically switching top an EV is quite different for me compared to a high salary earner pootling around 8-10 thousand miles per year. It's quite sad really. All the best deals are aimed at low mileage drivers while those of us who must drive many more miles and contribute much more to pollution, can't afford to switch.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Quick charging

"Quite a few of the tesla charge stations are now open to all users."

Thanks. I didn't know that. I don't rectal seeing anything other than Teslas at those charge points and the motorway services I use seem to segregate the Tesla charge points from the other ones so maybe many users don't know that either. I'll keep an eye out for it though.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Quick charging

"And even if you take the 45 minute HGV break, in a layby at the side of the road, or in the corner of an industrial estate or business park - how and where do you charge up? Drive 20 miles off-route to find a charger and hope that it is not already in use?"

Not to mention the 40-50 or more HGVs commonly seen in motorway services all at the same time which, if EV, will be wanting to use the chargers for at least 30 minutes each during their 45 minute stop-over. There's not even the infrastructure to support all the EV cars at those services, never mind entire fleets of HGVs. That will take many years and much more power generation. I'd like to see it happen, but I don't expect to.

Just a couple of years ago, it was common to see empty spaces at motorway services charging points. Today, it's not unusual to see people queuing up to use them and that's going to get worse before it gets better. I will grant that it's more unusual to see all the Tesla charge points in use at the same time, but AFAIK, ONLY Tesla drivers can use those charge points.

UK government refuses public review before launch of NHS data platform

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Trust is non-existent

"Any trust has been eroded:"

Your list of reason for not trusting the government seem to be related directly to, and only to, the current government. Are you young? Have a short attention span? Simply forgotten all the reasons previous governments of all colours have given us to erode trust over the years?

I still upvoted you for the sentiment though :-)

Microsoft lures SMBs to Cloudy PCs by connecting them to Xbox accounts

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: XBollox

Yeah, they are constantly pushing XBox and/or XBoxLive accounts in these sort of situations for some weird and only logical to them marketing reasons. Considering the installed base of Windows users, I would think Xbox owners/account users are a tiny minority in the overall scheme of things. Likewise, why is something as niche as XBox getting apps/shortcuts and actual running services installed in a default Windows install?

British boffins make touchless computing tech on the cheap

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I just installed it

"Though the aesthetics of a Pi bolted to camera module aren't to everyone's tastes."

I'm sure there are a plethora of different cases available[*] to suit every need and decor :-)

[*] either physically available to buy or as 3d printing files.

Apple to pay $50m settlement for rotten butterfly keyboards

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Talk about pattern and practice..

And something almost every company who supplies "product" to "users" goes through if a user reports a problem. The speed they go through the stages seems to relate to how highly regulated their industry is in any particular jurisdiction.

Demand for smartphones is drying up

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Consumerism is down, good.

The continual growth model is forced on them by the way the stock market works. Grow or die. And don't just grow. Grow based on stock market expectations. Grow slowly, or worse, level off while remaining a profitable and successful business, and you will die on the stock market. Borrowing cost will skyrocket and the fair-weather shareholders will sell up in droves.

We frequently see reports here on El Reg of tech company share prices falling because they didn't achieve the n% growth predicted by the "anal-ysts" and instead grew by some slightly smaller amount.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The ride is over

Apart from foldable phones, which have their own issues (I'd quite like one actually), I'm not sure what is even in the pipeline in terms of revolutionary new technology. There's often signs of Things To Come in the tech press, but nothing I'm seeing so far that would do much, if anything for the mobile phone.

I can imagine plenty of SF-like changes/options/upgrade that might be considered revolutionary, but nothing actually feasible of possible yet :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"my service provider had been bombarding me with offers to renew for nearly a year"

Are you on a leasing contract? Or is just that you've paid off the "loan" and instead of going SIM only, they wanted to tag you for an "upgrade" to a new "loan"?

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