* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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SpaceX's Starship on the roster for Texas takeoff

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

A guy called Elon sent a rocket into space...

Boom boom!

Yeah, poor attempt at a joke/punchline, I know, but the launch itself was exciting and so close to actually getting to "nearly orbit" and certainly met the prime objectives. I can't wait to see the aftermath on the launchpad and whether it properly survived this time :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Re-use

"the "experienced" scientists and engineers who were successful are mostly dead now."

You almost make it sound as though NASA stopped all activities after Apollo and so no new rocket engineers and scientists ever bother to learn from and stand on the shoulders of the giants before them. I guess Space Shuttle and all the other lesser known rockets never happened in your universe? After all, those "experienced" computer scientists and engineers who built the first successful computers are mostly[*] dead now too, so who the hell built all this newfangled shit we are using to interact on this very website?

Can one actually be "mostly dead"? Shirley dead or alive is pretty much a binary thing (ignoring life support on a brain dead "patient", which is effectively dead but I suppose could be classified as "mostly dead", depending on how you define mostly since the brain only small portion of the body but, I suppose, is "mostly" what operates the body.)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Clearing stage zero is again the primary aim...

"it will uck this dust into its rockets"

Rockets don't (s)uck[sic], they blow. The only input is the fuels and oxidisers pumped into them from the onboard tanks. To be able to suck in dust from the lunar surface would require the rocket engine to be redesigned as a jet engine of some some form and for the Moon to have an atmosphere.

Amazon's Project Kuiper satellites nail online orders from orbit

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Mmmmmm....

"** pretty much guaranteed as part of the Amazon in space T&Cs."

Good point! With Amazon as your ISP, tey will have total control over your Internet "experience", not least the ability to inject their own ads. Anyone remember the early days of free 0800 dial-up in the UK? At least some provided their own hacked browser which enforced banner ads along the bottom or top of the screen inside the browser window but outside of the "web" windows. I never looked but I assume they were delivering webpages into some sort of frame/iframe to keep their own ads outside of the users control so unblockable. And those "free" PCs that were available, possibly only in the US, which required a net connection and enforced the watching of adverts every so often.

Neither lasted long or were especially successful, but with that previous knowledge and Amazons current abilities and knowledge (and users acceptance of shit like this being at a much higher tolerance level nowadays), I could easily see Amazon doing advertising/hijacking on their own end to end service.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Excitement

That would be many of the same reasons that WiFi speeds lag wired, such as penetration through obstacles. From orbit, the atmosphere is an obstacle, not to mention clouds and other weather phenomena such as snow and rain.

If you want 10Gb/s or more from orbit, you can have it. But it will cost exponentially more to get the much larger sats up there and each will have to serve fewer users thus each user bearing more of the launch and running costs.

Todays nearly successful Starship launch may address these issues in a year or three, but don't hold your breath. The consumer ground stations will have to be more powerful and therefore more expensive to transmit back to the sats too.

Watchdog bites back against blockage of $9M fine on US selfie-scraper Clearview AI

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: WTF!

"I interpreted the tribunal decision as suggesting that a company performing *any contract* for a foreign government/judiciary etc would be exempt."

If that was the case, spying on behalf of a foreign government as a private contractor would also be legal :-)

The dark trench coat one -------->

Copilot coming to Windows 10 to help navigate the OS's twilight years

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Plan to slow Windows 10 - try the other side, its less hassle (mainly)

Its been such a long time I can no longer recall how I installed player"

"I migrated to Mint about 5 years ago and its been subject to multiple OS updates (all seamless so far)"

"but it seems reliable and stable."

That is probably about the best, possibly unintentional, reviews one could make :-)

Install and forget is how it should be. No one should have to become an expert on installing software, whether that be VMWare Player or the underlying Linux Mint OS, most especially not because you upgraded one or the other :-)

Windows users can soon ditch Bing, Edge, other bundleware – but only in the EU

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What is the brexit bonus ?

If you read the article carefully, the "Brexit Bonus", clearly meant ironically, is that the EEA is not getting access to Copilot yet while the UK, not in the EEA, is. Nothing whatsoever to do with the other part of the story about removing certain apps from the system.

Samsung UK discloses year-long breach, leaked customer data

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Maybe...

...companies who, while reporting a data breach within the specified time frame from point of discovery, should also have a sliding scale of fines applied for NOT discovering it sooner.

Were the miscreants really so clever they stayed under the radar for a whole year or was Samsungs logging, security and monitoring so poor that it was easy to stay under the radar?

Tesla Cybertruck no-resale clause vanishes faster than a Model S in Ludicrous Mode

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"people with short, muscular necks and sloping foreheads."

Isn't there a word for that? People who look like their pets? Your description of likely Cybertruck owners does seem remarkably similar to the shape of a Cybertruck :-)

Amazon to staff: Come into the office – it'd be a shame if something happened to your promotion

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 3rd rate managers?

Likewise, ""If your role is expected to work from the office 3+ days a week and you are not in compliance, your manager will be made aware" implies that managers can't even keep track of their own staff and need some computer to do it for them and trigger an alarm under some conditions. Shirley the bare minimum of a managers job is to know what their staff are doing and where they are working? Those "promotion gaining conversations" clearly aren't happening if the manager doesn't even know from personal knowledge who is in the office!

Vote now on who should take the lead in Musk: The Movie

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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I agree because I have a cat![*] :-)

* No, not a white fluffy one.

Tool bag lost in space now tracked by garbage watchers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: Why

They use quantum string, but that's neither here nor there.

Want a Cybertruck? You're stuck with it for a year, says Tesla

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif

"Or an awful lot of patience to trickle charge an EV battery from a couple of solar panels. And that's assuming you don't have insolation problems from any nuclear winter."

In a post-apocalyptic world, there'll probably be a lot less need to travel too, unless you are running/hiding from other survivor envious of what you have :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Despite the fact that Musk was praising European sales of his vehicles the other day, he's cut the entire market out of this product purely because he wants his toddler-sketch pedestrian slicer."

And if he tried to, it would almost certainly fail the "unfair contract" test. IANAL, but I don;t think you can put those sort re-sale restriction on products on the right-side of the pond.

On the other hand, I can sort of see his point. He doesn't want "scalpers" selling them on at inflated prices and "stealing his profits" LOL

Amazon's retail wing tops list of take-down demands from Europe under new DSA law

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: Not a fan, but

...and there was me thinking you "Arfur Daley" :-)

Apple might have to pay that €13B EU tax bill after all

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The mistake the EU made..

"Given that the Irish Government is already foregoing money it should have, I'm not sure how this would work."

The Irish Government wasn't foregoing money it should have. It was "buying" high paid tech jobs to boost the economy. Except they may or may not have broken EU laws in the process.

Impatient LockBit says it's leaked 50GB of stolen Boeing files after ransom fails to land

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Scan the data for corruption

"MSM" is known throughout the world (yes, even outside of the anglosphere) as the acronym for "mainstream media;"

That may well be the case, but the definition of "mainstream media" seems to be one of those Humpty Dumpty phrases that means "whatever I want it to mean, no more and no less", depending on who is speaking and what their own personal agenda may be". In other words, a nonsense phrase.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Scan the data for corruption

"not something you heard from MSM."

Is that Metro Selwyn Mayer, the not so well know Welsh film production company?

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Looks like we're going to be well under our budget this year!"

"Looks like we're going to be well under our budget this year!"

Is this a fatal error in the making? Coming in under budget is a recipe for a smaller budget next year!

I do hope the BofH and PFY have their eyes on some new high end GPUs (to render the mission control status screen better, natch) or something equally suitable for Crysis management :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Excellent!

Unless the postal vans were the largest customers of said filling stations by far, then yes, I'd agree it's an apocryphal story :-)

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Fun with tie-wearers

"Only that long ago? I can remember SuperCalc!"

I remember the launch of Visicalc for the Apple ][. Pah! Kids today. Git of ma lawn!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Fun with tie-wearers

"Which he’d ignored, and used a calculator anyway…"

That's just proper paranoia. Who can tell if that spreadsheets formulae are actually producing the correct result and not shaving off some in favour of the company :-)

US Air Force wants to see some atomic motors for future spacecraft

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Quantum slipstream

"using dark matter flux at altitude"

What's that? Dark matter and dark energy are still only hypothetical so any design relying on something we can't actually prove even exists yet, let alone understand it's properties is a bit pie in the sky. I'm sure the cosmologists and astrophysicists and/or the people at CERN would love to listen to your analyses of "dark matter flux".

Microsoft hits Alt+F4 on internal ChatGPT access over security jitters, irony ensues

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"It guarantees better data privacy compared to the publicly available one."

a) That's not saying much, so...meh!

b) If it can't learn it's not AI. If it can learn, then it's using YOUR data to help it work with OTHER PEOPLES data and may well include personal or private things you entered in other peoples answers/suggestion, so....meh!

c) if it's working with YOUR email, or your entire companies email, then by definition it's pulling in other peoples data from email chains, inline quotes etc.

In summery, if it can't learn, it's NOT AI, at best it's a static expert system and if it CAN learn, it can't be private.

NASA's Lucy probe scores a threefer as it flies by first target in 12-year mission

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Based on current speech mannerisms, I'm surprised they weren't "SUPER SHOCKED!!!"

Space Force turns to Falcon Heavy for spaceplane's seventh mission

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

including plant seeds?

"investigating the effects of radiation on materials, including plant seeds."

Why? Surely that's the purview of civilian missions, or are they planning manned orbital military missile platforms? Or military staffed Moon or Mars base?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Space Force?

I was under the impression that Space Force was already happening and had been "under construction" for some time, when Trump came along and he simply took the credit vecause the official formation of the new branch just happened to fall while he was El Presidente.

It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

No one is suggesting you type an SMS reply while driving. That would be illegal in many jurisdictions anyway. But some cars can read out an SMS and if you choose to, can send a reply SMS using voice recognition. I've never done that and have no idea how reliable it may be, but is possible to do so legally. Although I'm with you on the attitude to replying to SMS on the move. They can wait. No communication is so important that I will take it or reply to it while on the move unless I personally choose to do so, without any sense of obligation. At most, I may take a call on hands-free while driving if I judge the risk to be low enough and it's a known person calling me.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Storing the data in the car is probably ok. At least short term. How else can it read an incoming text to you, or show you the list of most recent people you called. That data has to be stored by the infotainment system, even if that's temporarily. So in that regard, it's a necessity of function."

I'm not sure if my car stores the phone contact information long term. I can't access it if my phone is not connected. And everytime the car "sees" the phone at ignition on, it takes just as long to read all the contact info as if it's a new device. It's entirely possible all the data is there, and the new sync still has to read everything off the phone again anyway to see what have changed while disconnected. It's a 2016 mid-range model, so it's not all that "clever" anyway, it doesn't display or read SMS, it's just a hands-free calling convenience and as far as I know only reads the contact and call history lists.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Old car, for the win!

Holding on to an old car might well become a financial burden and/or economically unviable as "low emission zones" proliferate. Currently, in England, many LEZes don't apply to private cars. The expanded London ULEZ does, as does the now enforced one in Glasgow, Scotland. Over time, there will be more of them, they will eventually include all types and status of vehicles and the stringency of the rules will increase. Unless you live in rural areas and never visit a large town or city, you WILL eventually have to have a newer car or pay through the nose to use it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Optional

"Guess what happens when you touch

POWER OFF."

Well, most people would take that literally. Whether it's actually the case or not is another matter. Holywood and the TV industry would have us believe one needs to take the battery out to be SURE it's off. Who is right? Can the TLAs really remotely switch-on a powered off phone or is that also just Holywood myth? :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"That is quite different to stating that it is actually OK."

True. On the other hand, the "injury caused" is unconsenting privacy breach, which as we all know, the US legal and executive systems are very poor at defining and implementing protection laws in virtually all jurisdictions.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Why not use a satnav app?

While I agree in principle (I drive a lot and also swear by a proper SatNav), it's very much a case of horses for courses. Many people are quite happy with multi-function devices and will put up with the currently used function being interrupted by other functions or not being as good or useful as a dedicated device. Just look at most people kitchens and compare with a professional kitchen :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: You own the car, and it retaining your information is no different...

"With a pc or phone you can wipe the hard drive/memory. How is this achieved with a car?"

Same way? Hit it with hammer (or car crusher)? It might affect the resale value.

Fedora 39 waves goodbye to modularity, but has enough spins to make your head spin

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: banish?

Yeah, if you really, really want to avoid systemd, I'd be wary of any Linux distro, no matter their current stance. There's always a chance that someone, somewhere will get sick of having to work around systemd and give up, and if that happens to be the Linux distro you jumped to, you're shit on all over again.

Cruise patches robo-taxi software to not drag humans across the road anymore

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Missing a vital component

"if you do add any kind of external emergency stop to the vehicle then people are going to press it if they have a chance, "just because"."

Public transport buses all have them, usually on the back, where it might be hard for the driver to see someone sneak up nehind and press it at a junction or bus stop. Been there for as long as I can remember, so at least 5+ decades. I don't recall ever seeing a news report of people pressing the emergency stop buttons "just because". But, I have no doubt it HAS been done, but not in any significant numbers that it made news. On the other hand, if the Big Red Stop Button was mandated on AV cars, their very existence would probably make the news and the TicTok/YouTube crowds would be all over it and suddenly there's be gridlock all over the "test areas" as the kids discovered a new game that has, in reality, been possible for decades but they didn't know about it :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not happening in your lifetime

"Presumably, that means when it's lower than human driver hit rates."

I can just imagine some big US operation declaring "problem solved" because their cars are 0.00001% "better" than human drivers. And then wondering why the UK and/or EU tell them there is NO FUCKING WAY their death-trap AVs will be allowed on their roads until they meet their much higher standards. The death rates on US roads are not a target to be aiming at only just beating.

GhostBSD makes FreeBSD a little less frightening for the Linux loyal

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Ooooh, that's GOOD! I've never seen or noticed that before. I'll keep that one tucked away in a corner of my mind for a rainy day :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Freebsd also has "meta packages". pkg install kde4 or xfce4, for example, do a pretty neat job. Been around for yonks and can be kept up to date with the usual pkg upgrade command. I can't remember off the top of my head if that pulls in the xorg meta port or just the relevant dependencies. It's ages since I did a clean install :-)

pkg install xorg

pkg install lxde|xfce4|kde4|gnome|whatever

...should work for most people, maybe some furtling with graphics/sound drivers :-)

I just spotted a pkg that may be of interest to anyone experimenting

sysutils/mkdesktop-5.0 Set up any desktop under FreeBSD with ease

...or, in ports

cat /usr/ports/sysutils/mkdesktop/pkg-descr

Easily set up a desktop under FreeBSD using ncurses.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yes, and others Liam didn't mention or maybe doesn't know about. ISTR one I used for a short while that was media oriented, mainly for music and video playback. Sort of a *very* early KODI :-) I think it even could create/burn bootable video CDs/DVDs. Freesbie comes to mind, but that's not it, same era though. And then there OPNSense, which I use as my firewall/router, but I'd categorise that as an appliance, not a distro, which comes back to what someone else mentioned upthread. What exactly is a "distro"? :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

"Put yourself in the position of learners and don't give me any of this supercilious "read it on the man page" shite."

Does Linux still have man pages? I thought they migrated to various and incompatible versions of hypertext Info pages :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: No it isn’t

"Probably as a result of “what you learn first is what you tend to like","

While is no doubt true, I think the main difference is that if you go from one BSD to another, there's likely to be the same directory structure and same basic tools there. Linux has a number of different, diverging pedigrees so only really seems familiar if you stick to derivations of the same pedigree. Jump across the evolutionary branches instead of up or down, and it can feel like a different world!

Microsoft, Meta detail plans to fight election disinformation in 2024

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Definition of Disinformation

"Disinformation are facts"

Bunk! By definition, disinformation is/are not facts.

European Space Agency grits teeth, preps contracts for SpaceX Galileo launch

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Stupid idea

"The lost opportunity was not that, it was HOTOL."

Makes you wonder where Reactions Engines would be with Shotwell leadership and Musk-level financial backing, but not Musk, of course!

(Or maybe it's just the engineering that's hard and slow and not related to money at all)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Stupid idea

BELUGA! BELUGA!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: American Security Threat

Considering how fast SpaceX seem to be able to set up a launch site, it makes one wonder how much it might cost to have them build a launch site in Kourou and ship a few rockets over there :-)

Of course, then there's the US red tape on what can and cannot be exported.

I wonder if that option has been considered?

US actors are still on strike – and yup, it's about those looming AI clones

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Give it time! It's early days yet and laws can change, especially when the lobbyists have an effectively unlimited bank balance to draw on!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Not to mention there are dead actors who've been dead longer than book copyrights last, so has anyone put forward how long an "estate" can profit from their famous dead ancestor image?

Here's a few thousand from 1950 - 1953. Some of thoise famous faces will have plenty of surviving film an "AI" could model from.

4,000 days of Curiosity: Rover still 'strong' despite worn joints, vision issues

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Obligatory XKCD Mars rover

Considering how often that link has been posted whenever one of the many, many great milestones has been reached by a Mars rover, I think posting the link is redundant these days and just what you put in the subject line is sufficient for most El Reg readers to immediately visualise that XKCD without further prompting :-)

But it's nice that you took the time to be considerate to newbies and edge cases :-)

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