Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Time to Generate Data!

...or just drive down a UK road infested with pot holes. Apparently that's quite a few of them once you get off the trunk roads :-)

Re: Collecting sexual activity - Top Gear S16 Ep4

"That said, if you're looking for biological issues closer to home, have a look at house mites."

Is that the best you can come up with? Your eyelashes are *crawling* with little beasties!!

Re: A long time ago...

"and as for a Tesla well ...."

"Just buy with Doge. Guaranteed anonymous, untraceable and you get a huge discount!"

Signed,

Elon M.

Re: It just keeps getting better

"do people REALLY want to give up personal privacy JUST TO GO TO WORK EVERY DAY?"

You and I may not want to, but the generations growing up today with smartphones, bluetooth and WiFi always on, apps tracking their every move, smart watches, fitness bands measuring all their vital statistics to send back to base, sharing their running/jogging/cycling habits to the world, running browsers with only the default inbuilt protections, no ad/script blocking etc. Why? Because the DON'T CARE enough to even think about it. If you bother to try to explain it to them, they go all glassy eyed. And as others have already mentioned, in 20-30 years time, where are you gonna get fuel for all those lovingly maintained ICE cars? A very few might be able to produce their own, but good luck with that if you live in a city.

It doesn't even matter whether EVs are the future or not. Having your car "connected" is all you will be able to buy, the choice will only be who you choose to buy from, choose the least worst option. If not for you, your kids and grand kids.

Re: Umm. Mainframe?

"salvaged from the local landfill."

Landfill? Luxury! No one could afford to throw stuff away around here! At least those few who rich enough to even have "stuff"

I just use KDEConnect as well as Total Commander with the Network plugin. :-)

Re: Barebones loveliness

That's why I feel it's odd to remove it. Almost no maintenance, ie just enough so it still works as the OS environment changes and it's *tiny* compared to the rest of the OS install. So a tiny amount of resource required to stop the bitrot and effectively no extra space saved by removing it

Re: "WordPad is no longer being updated"

"Since wordpad only reads the newer docx formats I would have thought a plugin architecture to convert whatever to wordpad's internal format (rtf?) would leave the wordpad executable itself alone?"

I agree with your "it's done" statement, but not the above. It IS "done". All it needs is whatever minor tweaking/updates to keep it running on whatever version of Windows is current. It doesn't need access to other file formats, or any other [breaking] updating :-)

Re: slow transformation

"using misleading wording on the setup screen."

Say it ain't so! I'm shocked! MS using "dark patterns" in the set-up process to make sure you sign up to as much telemetry and account sharing they can possibly get away with?

Re: So LibreOffice it is then.

"No, it is not as lean as WordPad (which can do the most basic things only). Loading time is quite a bit longer, especially on not-that-new hardware, and it times it can feel a bit sluggish"

Agreed. And despite the authors comment of "That feature set saw it occupy a strange zone", I'd say that WordPad occupied the "perfect zone" of being good enough for many tasks where some basic formatting is required, it's on every Windows box, unlike Office/Word and fits all those cases where NotePad is just too bare bone. I don't use Windows at home any more, but find WordPad very useful when using Windows at work or on a clients site. It's certainly very handy for print out those quick and simple, Very Large Font notices like "Do NOT Touch", "Out Of Use", etc. :-) Likewise, those one or two page documents that might need simple bullet lists or some paragraph headings. Loading up Word or signing into an online word processor feels like massive overkill for those situations. I suppose MSPaint might fill sign-making the gap, but again, that feels like overkill. And most places don't let you install random WordPad replacements from random websites.

Re: Single point of failure

W£W isn't regulated like medical equipment suppliers are. If you use their kit in the way intended and it fails, no amount of "legal disclaimers" such as "do not use in life threatening situations" will get them off the hook the way W3W do.

"Having said that, I'm a Brit so perhaps adding some American drawl would make them sound more similar?"

Or just travelling a mile or two down the road, in the UK. Accents are blending more these days due to easy communications and national/international tv and radio etc, but not so very long ago, accents varied wildly from village to village and even different parts of town. As for the US, there a areas where they seem to go out of their way to never pronounce the letter H in many words and and other cases where they strongly emphasise the letter H. eg 'erbs and Ve-hicle. Then there's the UK divide over whether it's properly "an 'otel", "an hotel" or "a hotel". Lets not even go near the Scon/Scoane debate :-)

Re: Mountain rescue

Yes, likewise a Devon based RAC patrol being assigned a job in Orkney, 750 miles and at least one ferry trip away :-)

The story doesn't explicitly state how this happened, but implies it was a Post Code error either in understanding a spoken character string or entering it into the system.

Re: Existing to make money

"The notion it exists to solve a problem is nonsense because it does not actually solve the problem, but creates yet another flawed approach."

I considered the notion that US doesn't have an existing system other than Lat/Long, as I note that is sometimes the case when US "tech bros" come up with new standards or systems they plan to sell to the world when the rest of the world already has system in place. But, no, even that is no excuse as the US does have the United States National Grid. Mind you, that only became a standard in 2001, so maybe W3W wasn't aware of it?

Exactly. Anyone with the forethought to install W3W as a location app could just as easily install anything capable of showing GPS based Lat/Long, or OS grid ref, or any local maping co-ordinate system in whatever country they happen to live or be in.

The ONLY thing W3W has going for it IMHO is the marketing and awareness raised in people who might not otherwise be aware of other, pre-existing solutions.

On the downside, it's a profit making "disrupter" that, as per most so-called "disrupters", isn't actually solving a problem, uses proprietary tech and doesn't appear to be amenable to criticism and the consequent fixes as evidenced by their "robust" defence when likely flaws are pointed out to them. If they were really all about doing good and not just making money, they would take constructive criticism on board and evaluate it, not just dismiss it as "unlikely" with no corroborating evidence. That's the typical response of a commercial business.

Re: ECO DECT

"Don't even get me started on the "plant-based is better" bs. You know how many plants out there can kill you?!?!"

There's a few examples here

Re: Outlook...

Most them aren't grate courses. It's all a bit patchwork-y

There's always the alleged Baghdad Battery to throw in and liven up the discussion :-)

And depending on who/what you believe, the alleged power generation capabilities of the Ark of the Covenant :-)

Re: Meanwhile, in Japan...

Unless the Russians chose their timings correctly in terms of wind direction, Germany mostly gets winds from the west so I expect the fallout from Russian nuclear test bombs to mostly have gone east, not west. There's probably records of wind directions and dates of bomb tests if anyone wants to spend the time checking.

Re: Care?

I wonder if in the future it will be a "K-T Boundary" event rather than an "age". After all, they define an "age" as being thousands to millions of years, so defining a new age based on plastics deposition is being incredibly more accurate and precise than any other Age, at least for the start, hopefully for the end, and ideally, a very short time period.

Re: Care?

"Geology is not a real science"

Sheldon Lee Cooper, Ph. D., Sc. D. Nobel Prize Winner.

Or, more fully:

Penny : What's wrong with geology?

Sheldon Cooper : Let me put this in a way you'll understand Penny. You remember how you explained to me that the Kardashians aren't real celebrities? Well, geology is the Kardashians of science.

when I asked them to justify, they said "well they have to reset the computer..."

And that is the heart of the matter. Having a computer stop something working because a part failed or wore out of spec is one thing, but having an OEM only process to reset it back to normal operation once the affected part is replaced is the real problem. Often it's because the computer doesn't actually know or check if a part has failed or worn out of spec. It's just assuming that happened based on time and/or usage so "for your safety", they won't allow the user to hit the reset button themselves.

Re: "reduce task switching across windows and tabs to help stay focused"

"That does not help to stay in focus. Words against acts, once again, and your acts betray you. Not to mention that this forcing Edge anyway you can is very much like the whiny ex that can't stop phoning you. Pathetic."

"Focus" is the new marketing buzzword. I remember when I was forced to switch to Outlook for work, a year or so ago. After a month or so I realised I was missing a lot of email because MS Outlook defaults to something it calls "Focused Inbox", which meant it was only showing me some emails in the inbox, not all of them. Typical of MS. I never have found out how it "decides" what I need to be "focussed" on and what I am supposed to either ignore or go hunting for, disrupting my "focus" on what my job actually entails. Luckily, at least for now, we can still switch off the "focussed inbox" and make it behave in a rational way.

Re: Is there anywhere giving free access to the alt.binary newsgroups

No, and they don't, at least not without using an NZB web based search. Many if not most of the binaries these days are posted using encrypted or obfuscated titles, sometimes scatter gunned across multiple groups such that you need to get an NZB file to automate finding and re-assembling them. Some free NZB search engines will decode and name the posts properly, but mainly you need a paid for one or an invite from someone on an "invite only" search engine. Or so a friend tells me :-)

Re: H'mm - federated messaging - now where have I heard that before?

Searching Usenet? Simple. Subscribe to group, download ALL messages, possibly going back decades then use your client or command line favourite search technique. :-)

(Or just use Google. I think they still have groups.google.com kept up to date)

Re: sudo apt install slrn

(Agent is one of a smallish number of apps I still run in a VM as I've simply found nothing I like as much that'll run under Linux (or perhaps because I am too lazy to convert all the killfile rules)

I used to like Agent for similar reasons, but then they changed the interface too much. Almost as bad as the Gnome2/3 debacle! So I switched to Pan and haven't looked back since. But yeah, the rules. Pan has a good and if required, complex rules system to mark/move/kill posts, but it's a bit less intuitive than Agent used to be, for example, and in advanced mode, works almost identically to slrn rules.

Re: IRC

My wife suggested using MTV for some background music/noise a while back, so out of curiosity, I switched to MTV. WTF? Where's all the music? It seems like so many specialised cable channels, they start off with a descriptive name and over time re-brand to an initialism and eventually change the actual name to the initialism, dumping not just the original descriptive name, but the entire programme line-up. The M in MTV is just M, not shorthand for Music. Even The SciFi channel became SyFy and now it's more fantasy and horror than SF. Although the converse seems to be true of the Horror channel, which seem to carry a lot of SF :-)

Anyway, getting back on topic, Pan for the win (best free Usenet client out there IMO!)

Re: IRC

"I think what crippled Usenet was that the gravity of Internet-based interaction gradually shifted to the Web. For most novice Internet users, the Web became a media-rich one-stop shop for interaction and content consumption, and my guess is that most people these days have never even heard of Usenet."

That and a preponderance for newer Usenet clients to work "on line", and even if they had an offline mode, the offline mode would not be the default, so to a lot of newer users, it was just another online "forum". If posts were deleted from the server, the server went TITSUP or they changed the numbering system for any reason, the users "lost" all the old posts. And then there were the people that used MS Outlook for Usenet, the biggest offender of them all for doing things in it's own "special" way by trying to make Usenet look like email, doing quoting "wrong", not being able to strip sigs etc.