Posts by John Brown (no body)

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.

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 :-)

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.

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". :-)

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.

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.

Re: I just installed it

"I may try it on one of my big computers and actually read the documentation."

That;s actually, possibly intentionally, quite an endorsement. You installed it and successfully played with it in a non-optimal situation with no instruction and it mostly worked. I look forward to your comments when you've read the user guide and have a more optimal PC or laptop to try it on :-)

Re: Fitness for programmers

So, basically, you are saying all the devs and programmers can be fired and the PHBs, marketing and sales, ie those best at handwavey stuff, will be the new devs?

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 :-)

"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"?

Re: Meanwhile at Apple... in a different universe perhaps

Exactly. Being a big fish in a big but shrinking pond means their relative growth, ie bigger share of the pond, doesn't mean to say their absolute growth is the same in percentage terms.

Re: Innovation

Many of them may be mitigations against various side channels attacks we've learned about from El Reg over recent years. Most of the mitigations seem to be actions which slow systems down, eg affecting predictive branching etc.

Re: ...and the pope is catholic

Yeah, I was thinking that it must be pretty natural the world over the realise the babies make higher frequency sounds than adults, so making similar sounds back at them is more likely what they will understand. Likewise, speaking or singing to them, the adults realise that a baby is not going to understand complex sounds and so simplify them. It's almost, but maybe not quite, a No Shit Sherlock moment. Like a lot of "common knowledge" sometimes it takes someone to go, "Hey, is this really true? Should be look into it and test for it?"

Re: Tap, tap

One of ours got renamed teletubby after she started "saying "eh oh" when we got home or she came back in after an expedition :-)

(on reflection, I suppose eh oh is pretty close to hello)

Re: Yes, it is

As of November last year, the UK owns 24 F35Bs, 3 of which are stationed in the US for training. That was the first link I found. On the other hand, facetious or not, yeah, there were none when the first carrier was launched, which was pretty embarrassing both for the UK and the US.

I don't know how standard this is but when the "full fleet" of 74 is reached, it's expected that 20% will be in maintenance at any one time. That sounds like a lot to me.

Re: Yes, it is

Old and outdated "news".

Sep '21

"Until now, the ships have embarked the fifth-generation jets but never have the two 65,000-tonne behemoths launched the fighters from their flight decks at the same time.

That’s now changed with HMS Prince of Wales exercising with the RAF’s 207 Squadron in waters close to the UK, while, on the other side of the world, HMS Queen Elizabeth carries out flying operations over the Pacific with her jets from 617 Squadron and VMFA-211 of the US Marine Corps."

Re: And the answer to the question is

He's quite rightly pointing out how much more value for money it could have been had it been on time and on budget. He's also saying it's most likely *still* value for money even 15 years late and 20x over budget and suggesting that the next one, if on time and on budget, might be so much better both technically and value for money. While thinking on this and a likely successor, remember that JWST was in the first discussion phases before Hubble was even launched. That means the JWST successor is probably being discussed right now.

Re: It's still going on

One of those outages that "only" affected "some" of their users?

Re: It's still going on

ERROR: An Error has occurred.

Re: It's still going on

Yeahbut, if File Manager is opened to a directory on the memstick, technically the memstick is in use. I get that behaviour in KDE on FreeBSD too.

Re: Exchange

"I'm afraid MrsAC deals with this simply by having 80,000 emails in her in box, although to be fair, the search function in the latest Outlook is actually getting quite good!"

It is better than it used to be, but why does it list the "Top 3 Results" then below that, list all the results, including the same Top 3 Results in the top 3 positions? And it never has my result in the Top 3 Results even though every search term I entered is definitely in the one I'm looking for? It seems the "Top 3 Results" are just the most recent emails which happen to match the criteria.

Re: Exchange

Especially when Windows "helpfully" show only part of the path with elipses, the amount it shows varying by which application of file manager you are using to dig down with because the address bar isn't allowed to scale with the content in case it messes up the pretty layout of tool icons.

Re: Exchange

"They should be enabled to store and find the documents they need effectively."

Solved by teaching then the company "standard" way of doing things instead of reinventing the wheel for every new hire.

" switched to Office 345 on the web"

Typo or years of experience?

Re: Buffer overflow DoS attack.

Yeah, funny how they almost never publish the upper limits in the advertising especially, but often not even in the documentation, because, of course, 640KB is enough for anyone :-)

Re: The title is optional

"Still not all of the mail stopped, and even when we learned of his demise a few years ago and started labeling the return mail with "ADDRESSEE DECEASED" in big bold letters two or three trade magazines just kept going."

Probably because a 3rd party mail distribution company is sending the stuff out and the returns just go straight in the bin. They don't care at all whether the items even get delivered. They only get paid for sending them. If they acted on even the genuine "not at this address" or "addressee deceased", that would affect their bottom line.

Re: transfer the phone into Mum's name

I think read somewhere, fairly sure in a comment in these very forums, the power of attorney expires on death.

Just checked and "The lasting power of attorney (LPA) ends when the donor dies. You must report the death of a donor to the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG).

Re: Remember Dabbs - He'll be missed

AH, does this explain why there was no SFTW last week then?

Re: Which processors?

"Oddly the cpu was a NEC V20 or V30 which supposedly could run 8080 code (and CP/M-80?) natively."

It did. I can confirm. I upgraded a Tandy 1000A by replacing the 8088 with a V20 because it was 10% more efficient at the same clock speed and came with the extra benefit of running CP/M stuff.