* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

Page:

Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Based on what I've read of its atomic structure

Bastard!

See icon --------------->

Boffins say they can turn typing sounds into text with 95% accuracy

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Old news

<clackity clack>

Might be time to ditch the IBM Model M keyboards too :-)

</don't look back>

Hide and seek in outer space highlights a battle here on Earth

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Unless you convince them there is an asteroid of massive gold waiting for them out there in the Oort cloud..."

If you mean Voga, there was a documentary about it;s discovery many years ago :-)

And it's only as far a Jupiter, so much easier to reach :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Science

Yeah, lots of "green", "carbon neutral" and so on in the grant request should do it :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Delta Vee is still a problem."

But not insurmountable. if there was the will and the finance, it should be possible to "launch" a fully fuelled rocket from LEO having refuelled in orbit, with a final stage ion engine for a much faster trip further out. Whether it would have a useful ability to gather planetary data on the way may not be an issue given the primary mission of catching up to the Voyagers and getting data from that part of space. But there's no way that sort of expenditure is going to happen anytime soon. (Possibly when/if Starship proves its mettle and SpaceX actually does go ahead with it's "space tanker" development)

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "some staff are resisting"

I could see small start-ups want to to rent space at Google HQ, especially if it include access to the "children's play areas" Google are famous for :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

grab a delicious breakfast or get a workout

"grab a delicious breakfast or get a workout in before work starts."

Are they mutually exclusive? Is that why it's "only" $99 per night?

And this IS a bunch of IT nerds, so is breakfast whatever cold pizza is left from the night before?

I think he'd prefer the breakfast over the workout ------->

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: "some staff are resisting"

Maybe they need to employ an Ad Agency to post some ads around the local area, what with them being a tech industry and advertising not being one of their core skills.

TV and film extras fear generative AI will copy their faces and bodies to take their jobs

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Does Apple get good value for its R&D?

"Are they building their own space station?"

Not as far as the public knows, but there's always rumours about what they might be working on. I suspect the majority of R&D never produces a "product", although some of the results might work their way into existing products. Remember all the rumours about an "Apple EV"? IIRC that turned out to be Apple working car-based software and systems, but not an actual car.

We'd pay good money to see... oh dear, Elon Musk 'needs an MRI scan'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

True. The "notorious Flakes" are the ones made in the Egyptian factory that are too crumbly to survive either the transport or the insertion into the ice cream cone :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"but for this occasion we could go with the inaccurate tradition."

Yeah, why not, you already broke about three other traditions before you reached that thumbs down bit :-)

Only Senators wore togas and the were so long and heavy it took one or two people to dress you and even then, you'd be hard pressed to lay down on your "chaise longue" and/or get back up. The reason you see statues or images of Senators in togas with the arm raised and bet 90deg is because that's holding the toga in place. Pretty much all you can do while wearing one is stroll around doing nothing except talking :-) It's a far far cry from the Animal House bed-sheet toga party :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Would you rather be in a fight with a single duck the size of a horse, or twelve horses the size of ducks?"

Hmmm, twelve tiny little horses with teeny tiny hooves to kick with or a huge duck with a honking great big beak at the front. Decisions, decisions.

Although, as others have pointed out, power/energy doesn't scale linearly with physical size. That horse sized duck would almost certainly be a tad slow off the mark and definitely not be able to fly.

Fujitsu pulls the plug on European client PC sales

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Really?

Same here. I remember seeing the odd Fujitsu PC on my travels around many different customer sites, but I don't recall seeing any since Windows became popular back about Windows 3.0/3.1 era. My brain associates Fujitsu with hard disks and rolls of camera film and that's about it. In a way, that's even more odd. I'm "brand aware" of Fujitsu as a name, but can't think of anything current that they produce or sell apart from the Post Office Horizon scandal, so "brand aware" in a negative sense.

Tesla hackers turn to voltage glitching to unlock paywalled features

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not persistent, so not a problem

"(though they appear to last getting on for 10 years anyway)."

I wonder what a new battery will cost for a 10 year old Tesla? Will they even still supply the right type and size of battery packs? There's lots of 20 year old ICE cars still on the road, and much older too, of course, so 10 years life followed by a huge battery replacement cost that will probably be more than a 10 year old car is worth is going to totally hammer the "green" credentials of EVs. The transition to EVs is going to be slow and painful for the customers and many are going to feel ripped off.

One weekend's TwitX chaos brings threats from Japan; indemnity promises for users; prominent account seizures

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: If you were unfairly treated by your employer, we will fund your legal bill. No limit.

"Of course the plan fails at point 6 when money doesn't arrive from Musk. It also could be considered fraud, but Musk's extravagant promise, made in public with no caveats leaves such shenanigans with a much higher chance of succeeding."

It could also fail at step 7 when the expensive lawyer successfully sues your mate's business, bankrupts him, he loses his house and everything, and you get nothing because the expensive lawyers cut exceeds the amount of your mates ability to pay. And being an expensive lawyer, do you really think s/he will split the fee if Musk does pay up? Who ya gonna call (to sue the lawyer)? :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "I imagine it'll either be nursery school hair pulling"

"I'm not tuning in to anything of the sort."

(not getting at you here, I just got triggered)

Tuning in is an odd phrase that ought to have died out even before "dialling" a phone number. Apart from some radios, no one tunes in a TV set these days[*], and probably hasn't in over 50 years. I can barely remember the old 405line VHF b/w TV when i was toddler, and even that had a knob to select either BBC or ITV. Tuning was something done inside the box once and then not touched again unless it needed "servicing" by dad, or the little man in the brown coat from the TV repair shop. It's all button pushing and digital nowadays :-)

"Film" at 11? Showing some "footage"? Icon of a floppy disk for "save"? It's all so quaint and kids today use the terms with no idea of the origins :-)

[*} Ok, some TV's etc still need to be "re-tuned" if/when the channels/multiplexes change, but even on the older ones where you need to initiate it manually, it's just pressing a button/choosing a menu option and leaving the digital electronic system to go do the "tuning" itself,

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "I imagine it'll either be nursery school hair pulling"

Yeah, "Fight of the Century", Pay-Per-View, Only $75 one off streaming fee! And it lasts 30 seconds, if that, after the 3 hour pre-match "special" and build up, barely time to break out the popcorn and it's over. :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Eric Frohnhoefer?

"Along the way I have fired many people. For consistent tardiness, drug use, ignoring safety procedures, embezzlement, creating ill-will with customers and co-workers, constantly lying, ignoring job responsibilities, outright sloth, and other things detrimental to the company as a whole. Are you suggesting that I should be forced by the government to keep these people on my staff? Shirley not!"

Of course not. All of those are valid reasons to fire someone, especially if repeated or persistent behaviour is ongoing. I bet even you never fired anyone for a first offence in most of those cases since it's common enough for people to make mistakes, have a bad day, or not know the correct way to go about things. "Gross misconduct" leading to on-the-spot dismissal is relevantly rare, it's usually an accumulation of problems in most cases. I think he's talking about the "at will" States where you pretty much can be fired "on a whim", in effect, just because the boss doesn't like your face.

UK employment law basically states that the employer should have documented disciplinary procedures in place and so long as you follow them, you're fine to fire people. It could get sticky of they go to a tribunal and it's demonstrated that your procedure is shit though :-) You'd likely lose an "unfair dismissal" case if your disciplinary process included terms like "staff not allowed to wear pink underwear, instant dismissal offence" since that would an be unreasonable or unfair contract.

I did some online training to be allowed to service some OEM equipment. The training said we had to wear chinos and be clean shaven. Well, thought I, fuck off, I'm keeping my beard and I don't work for you anyway LOL (and my boss agreed) since that breaks UK employment law. :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Eric Frohnhoefer?

XTwitter is transnational and comes under many different jurisdictions and judicial systems. I didn't notice anything in Musk Tweet? Xeet? stating there were Ts&Cs limiting the offer to the US oinly :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: This is the one time I'd root for Zuck

"It would require serious commitment though"

Yeah, the sort of commitment where you can hire a "sergeant major PT instructor" type as a personal trainer and promise, in legally binding terms, to pay them, no matter how rough they treat you, because it will take someone shouting very hard at you to get you going, giving "must be obeyed" orders etc., because the instructor is the expert, not the "victim". Can you imagine EGOn Musk doing that? :-)

Experiment arrives at the ISS to see if astronauts can keep things cool

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

I'm a little surprised...

...that it's taken this long and this many iterations of various crewed space stations and long(ish) term missions that they are only just getting around to thinking it might be a good idea to study the physics of heating and cooling the living environment.

Two US Navy sailors charged with giving Chinese spies secret military info

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

held a US security clearance

--------------> see icon

I would assume that ALL military employees have some level of security clearance. Without specifying the level, that's pretty meaningless.

Canada's Telus to shed 6K workers as profits plunge 61%

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Profits down 61%

So, let me get this straight. They are panicking and laying off people because profits are down? They aren't losing money, just not making as much as last year? And this is a full panic-mode disaster that requires extraordinary measures? Really? Can the CEO not afford that extra yacht this year or something?

Maybe instead of paying people off, they ought to be looking at consolidating the business and accrued expertise and looking for ways to improve thins rather than cutting back. It's the people who generate the income. If they really need to get rid of people, look first at the upper and middle management. Every large company almost always has far too much management as departments and admin grows during empire building and each department or division tries accrue "kudos".

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"But presumably the reason for rushing is to ensure that their possessions don't go walkabouts, in which case having a friend at the other end might be much safer."

I'm not sure of the benefit. If you push the button and race up 4 floors, whose to know if someone two floors up that you just raced past didn't press the call button there and so the lift stops on it's way up anyway where said stranger might help themselves to anything "interesting"?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I was doing some printer installs a while back. Just the set up and commissioning, fortunately. I arrived at one site and the delivery guys had just arrived. I took one look at the tiny narrow staircase with a 180 turn half way up the early/mid 1800's building, asked if they'd already delivered to the other site, turned around and left them to it!

It was a replacement printer, so clearly it was possible to get it up there and they did have an electric stair crawler, but a) no way was I getting involved and b) I very much doubt there was room for three people at the same time even if they felt they needed my help. To this day i don't know how they managed it, I'd estimate they barely had a an inch or two of leeway. Hats most definitely off to those delivery guys! They certainly knew their job.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: We had a similar incident

And back in the days of CRT screens, especially the earlier days of PCs, it wasn't completely unheard of for either or both the PC and screen to have fixed power leads at the device end, not a plug/socket arrangement, adding to the "boat anchor" effect rather than an IEC plug just flying loose.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The droid is lacking in foo

The H&S Dept probably send all the new guys down there. Any that come back get to join the team. And NEVER go back. Assuming they managed to learn to stop gibbering and dribbling after the "experience".

Astronaut-menacing sunstorm spotted rippling across inner solar system

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Alien

Coincidence? Did they invent the unit scale before or after the grays crashed at Roswell? :-)

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"For my entire IT career I've been hearing about how the thin client will change the way we work."

I remember being part of the instal team that set up Windows thin clients for multi-national. They weren't bad, as such, but the system was dog slow on a morning when everyone came in and switched on at the same time. Slow to the extent that from switch on to usable desktop was well over the time it took to go make a coffee (real, not instant!) for pretty m uch the entire org. And entire offices would be offline if there was a network issue, no local working at all.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Devil

Re: I find your lack of evidence…. disturbing

"And though it should probably go without saying, the number of users of macOS continues to dwarf the number of people who like to fiddle with Linux on the desktop. To each their own."

And while it's not Linux, MacOS is basically a pretty GUI on top of a Unix-like OS.

Maybe we should stop talking about "Linux on the desktop" and talk about "*nix on the desktop" instead :-)

FreeBSD (and occasional Linux Mint on a Netbook) user here :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Windows 2025

"Take a KDE-based Linux. Set application style to MS Windows 9x, window decorations to Reactionary and colours to Windows2000 and plasma style to Arc Oxygen or Arc Color. This gives a passable overall appearance to W2K except for the icon set*."

And thus produce a desktop that many users, especially younger users, have never seen before :-)

I was chatting with one of the helpdesk techs at a university the other day and he barely remembers WindowsXP from back when he was a kid. 9x is pre-historic for him :-)

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Actually...

At our place, where I never go anyway, I've noticed upgrades, deployments and other big changes are often booked in for Friday evenings, the logic apparently being that if it does go pear shaped it can be rolled back with the minimum of disruption to the work week, ie either it works or it's rolled back before Monday morning. I assume the relevant people doing the job are pre-booked into Saturday and maybe even Sunday on a provisional basis, ie they are there and expecting to work and the "bonus" is going home as soon as the job is done, hopefully without issues and still the weekend, or most of it, off.

Blue Origin tells staff to catch next rocket back to their desks

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

What about the remote new hires during COVID?

Are they going to force people to move home or sack them when they were taken on during COVID WfH and have never actually been to an office, never mind live within commuting distance of one? Or the people who moved home to somewhere nicer when WfH was stated as being permanent and suddenly now it's not? And if they do get to keep their jobs and continue WfH, why is that not ok for people who do live near an office?

There's no real extra cost to the company with WfH, so they can suck up the fixed cost of the building lease if they can't get out of it, costs they will be paying whether people come in or not, and use their badge entry system or desk booking system or whatever so see what the minimum, maximum and average office attendance is. Once they know, they can either sub-let some of that leased space or wait for the lease tu run down and either move somewhere smaller or let the building owner decide what to do with the now empty space the company is not going to pay for. But it might take a brave CEO to decide that an enormous prestigious building is no longer what they want. ISTR some "big names" have done this, not with HQ, but still large prestigious buildings.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: You can always tell when I come into the office

"Somebody in a different time zone with an accent so thick that they're hard to understand?"

I already have that issue in our onshore based company. We're pretty diverse and there's a quite a number of first gen immigrants. It can take time to get an "ear" for some of the accents, especially on Teams calls etc. which is how I deal with them, me being in a different part of the company and rarely if ever visit head office. Having said that, we have at least a couple of UK born and bred with thick local accents which, if you are not "tuned" to can make then difficult to understand too, especially on an audio only call when you don't get the visual cues.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Colleagues are distracting

"I had a screen saver I could invoke that looked like a spread sheet. Drag the mouse to the lower right corner and, poof, spread sheet instantly appears and the roving supervisor doesn't see that I was watching something on YouTube."

Remember back in the day when some PC games had a "boss" screen? :-)

Lacros rescues Chromebooks by extending their lifespans

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The real solution...

"when the kids will break it in under 1 year."

Especially the cheaply made ones, and I include mainstream laptops here, where the hinge screws for the screen are screwed into plastic mounted metal "nuts" that tend to come out of and/or break the plastic of the base cover they are mounted to. There's generally no fix for that other than a very expensive new plastic bottom cover, if you can find one other than from the expensive OEM who don't want to supply parts once the warranty has run out and every new model will use a different set of plastics that are not interchangeable.

Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yeah, that is true in so many case. BiL worked a short while for a national courier service. "All traffic laws etc must be obeyed, no excuses", but the local managers wanted a certain minimum number of "drops" per day, irregardless of the drivers routes. Routes covering even partially any rural areas were impossible to meet the targets that officially didn't exist. Hw quit and told them what he thought of the borderline illegal employment practices (he was being diplomatic!)

Middleweight champ MX Linux 23 delivers knockout punch

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: this shoggoth of a startup daemon

"The other, rather more significant problem is Poettering."

Considering he works for Microsoft, it does kinda make you wonder...

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: this shoggoth of a startup daemon

"I kinda like how the commands were similar to net used in Windows."

That's an interesting observation. From my perspective, as someone who used MSDOS from around version 2, and CP/M previously and stayed with Windows thriough to about 98, and while using WinXP and 7, am primarily a FreeBSD users since 4.3R, I've been quite impressed how Windows at the command line and boot process has moved much more in the direction of a Unix-like OS under the hood.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: this shoggoth of a startup daemon

"If it's so bad, why is (almost) everyone using it?"

By that logic, MS WIndows is clearly the best OS in the world and anyone not using must be some sort of masochist!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: this shoggoth of a startup daemon

"If it is so bad why don't you develop/code a better version?"

Why would any one want a "better" version of Systemd when the solution is to have an init system that is an init system and not a swiss army knife?

A "better version" of systemd is to strip it back to just being an init system or bin it and use one of the exiting init systems

Airbus to help with International Space Station replacement

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: In a space station, ALL of the bins will be overhead.

Yeah, but how do you know which day is bin collection day and which colour bins to put out when there are sunrises and sunsets every 90 minutes?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 2001

Trump would most likely just demand they add more floors to an earth-based tower until it reached space :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 2001

"for a 1g station."

Agreed re the nausea, but the real question is do we need to go all the way to 1G? We already know the issues with extended periods in microgravity, but haven't been able to study the effects of 1/6th or 1/3rd gravity, either of which may well be enough to eliminate the problems and something we really ought to find out before planning permanent "crewing" of Moon or Mars bases.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 2001

"and Starship isn't anything you want to pin any hopes on at this point."

I think I'd pin more hope on Starship than Artemis to get big stuff into space. And FWIW, the structures don't need to be all that big. They need to be modular. Atlas, Delta heavy, Ariane 5 (now defunct) & 6 (yet to be proven), Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy all have pretty much the same 4.6m diameter max. capacity. Lengths and total mass varies for each launch vehicle, none have quite as large a capacity as the Shuttle bay although again, it had the same 4.6m limit on payload diameter and we got the ISS built using that and other launchers so I don't see any reason why, if we chose to, we could not have something much bigger up there, possibly even a spinning wheel or something equivalent. Currently, the cheapest is probably using SpaceX launchers since we already know they work out much cheaper per launch and turnaround on that first stage is pretty fast these days.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 2001

"I believe it could've been done have a century ago if they'd put their minds to it,"

I'm not sure the "rocket ships" of 1923 were really up to the job of lofting up that amount of hardware, no matter how much time and effort they put into it. I mean, the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight had only happened 4 years previously, so that'd be one hell of a leap in technology!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: London eye in space

"Well I guess it technically is intercontinental?"

Isn't that one of Musks[1] stated aims for Starship? Very fast point to point long haul travel?

[1] and aim of Musk, not necessary an aim of SpaceX :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: London eye in space

" Ask again when Starship is taking a hundred people to orbit and back with a ticket price order of magnitude $100K."

Yeah, but only 4 of them can debark into StarLab, and that's assuming it's empty at the time of arrival or all the current occupants are planning on leaving together.

Seriously though, talk about lack of ambition! StarLab will be able to "host" 4 people. I really hope that's just the starting module and it will be extensible.

On the other hand, I could imagine SpaceX fitting out a Starship as a space station and just launching it as is. I'm sure there must be a way to have a docking port somewhere.

Tesla steering problems attract regulator eyes for second time this year

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: It did pass

If they don't stop beta testing on paying customers, it's be more like quality cheques[1] being paid out in compo.

Works better in English than American English since they spell both types of "check" the same, losing the pun if the context isn't quite right.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I've rebooted my 2021 Audi's electronic systems

Not to mention that a vehicle designed without power steering is easier to handle than one with failed power steering. Non-working power steering only adds to the resistance you need to overcome.

Page: