Posts by John Brown (no body)

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.

"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.

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.

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? :-)

"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.

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 :-)

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.

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.

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"? :-)

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!

"I haven't tried updating the Thinkpad BIOS because I've had bad luck with Lenovo's BIOS updater in the past, bricking one machine."

FYI, I've probably done that 1000's of times across a wide range of models and never had it brick a laptop. I think you were either really, really unlucky or there was some underlying fault neither the hardware or whatever OS you were running the updater on. Ditto with HPs and Dells.

In realty, as a field engineer of many years, it's always been company policy to flash the BIOS/firmware whenever a system board is being replaced under warranty, whether that be server[*], desktop, laptop, printer etc. (ditto for other firmware[**] on the system). I've had exactly one that has bricked in 20+ years and that was a building power outage during the update process.

[*] But always check, when it's a server. The users may have a requirement for a specific BIOS revision although that's pretty rare these days.

[**] eg, Intel ME and AMD equivalent, laptop webcams, NVMe SSDs, laptop batteries(!!) etc.

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?

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.

Re: I hate to say this, but it's sad that there are homo sapiens so f'in stupid

"Wow. it almost sounds like you actually believe that propaganda, despite voter fraud being exceedingly rare in the US. When they're pointing at something that's practically non-existent as a justification for quite notable changes, they clearly have another purpose in mind."

The UK Tory party clearly believe it too, hence the need for photo ID to cast your vote now and, likewise, very very little evidence of voter fraud and none of enough to swing a result. Although, so far, there seems to be little evidence of significant number of people being turned away and not returning with the required ID or a noticeable drop in turnout due to the new rules. Although time will tell, since turnout can be a fickle number to compare year on year.

"That's why his arms got tired, combined with the {19") long wait weight."

FTFY since you missed a great opportunity for an added pun.

Re: Plasma

I remember killing a multimeter, just one of the cheap no-name brand jobbies. Put it in voltage mode (500V) to test a live 240V IEC socket and the internal glass fuse blew so spectacularly that it deposited a fine metal "plating" over the orange plastic case inside :-)

Oddly, it was something I'd done many times before without issue, a quick'n'dirty, continuity, fuse and supply test before checking if the PSU was the faulty device on the dead PC <shrug>

"Notably the instructions in the test did _not _ include the helpful advice to set the multi-meter to voltage mode first."

Yes, instructions like that, for jobs like that, are usually written for people with experience to use as a crib sheet. Not a wet-behind-the-ears "work experience" student.

Although it was certainly an experience for you :-)

Re: That cat again...

To be fair, you're working from a broken premise anyway and your grant issuing authority ought not to be providing the funds for your research. The "not enough room to swing a cat" refers to the cat'o'nine tails used to lash recalcitrant sailors in the Royal Navy, not the soft furry variety.

Re: The last time I heard a loud noise and things were restarting...

"The early Laserjets, right up until maybe ten years ago were built like tanks, and would run for years."

Then they bought Samsings printer division and stopped making "HP" printers.

Re: It just seems that way.

"Doctors and Lawyers I can understand, but when have Politicians ever been educated?"

These days, most of the politicians are ex-lawyers. Whiach raises some questions. The best lawyers can be very, very highly paid. So are these ex-lawyers realising that even politicians make more than lawyers or were they not good enough to be successful in law?

Re: I remember when

"I'm not saying that you can't make a good educational tool out of a Raspberry Pi, but it's not there right from when you power it on."

You could provide them with a pre-imaged SD card that boot directly to an emulator, including a BBC emulator :-)

It's probably already been done.