* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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MIT boffins build battery alternative out of cement, carbon black, water

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: hmmmm - sand battery

"As space heating costs in the UK are more than electric for the typical household,"

For now. Replacement gas combi boilers are being banned from 2035 or something like that. Everyone is going to have to go all electric eventually and certainly any new house built from about 5 years before the ban on sales of gas boilers, at least. At some stage, even people "hanging on" with gas boilers will either reach a stage of it being non-repairable and having to replace with electric, of eventually switch to local tanked/bottled gas as the gas network is under utilised to be uneconomic and turned off.

GNOME project considers adding window tiling by default

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"On Linux the large window will immediately pop to the front, obscuring the drop target."

Using FreeBSD here with both KDE (desktop) and XFCE (laptop) here, and that definitely does not happen here. The windows under the mouse gets focus, but it doesn't "leap to the front" at the same time. That sounds like a WM setting that you may want to investigate and hopefully change. Or maybe it's an inherent property of the DE/WM you are using. It's definitely not the default setting in KDE or XFCE so if your Linux distro is using either of those DE/WMs, then the distro maintainer changed the default.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Like Windows 10 I have to use at work. It seems entirely random where a new window opens up. Picture it. Two windows tiled on the big super-wide screen and one full screen on the laptop below. Outlook is on half of the big screen, Click "New Mail". Where does the new mail compose window appear? Anywhere. Literally anywhere, although most commonly and most perplexingly, on the laptop screen, a different physical screen to the one where the main Outlook window and therefore my eyes are. And Windows "knows" that screen 1, the laptop is physically below screen 2, the big monitor. Weird!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Killer app

"The real killer feature would be the ability to set one workspace as a tiling setup and leave another as a standard window setup...or even allocate it by monitor."

As I was reading your post, I was formulating a reply in my head to add exactly that, then, of course, I reached that bit of your comment and end felt both elated that you thought of it first and deflated because you thought of it first.

It would be great to have virtual desktops that could be configured entirely differently in that way. So much more choice.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The edge snapping tiling was Vista's killer app for me

"I dispute that there *is* a "stock look*."

I use it on FreeBSD and you could argue that the base install of XFCE on FreeBSD is the default "stock" look since it's not been fiddled with by "distro" devs. Having said that, I can't remember exactly what the default install looks like now. The first thing I did was to change stuff around to make it look fairly close to my preferred KDE look, which I also prefer looking pretty sparse. So I change the task bar to a "low profile" and put stuff like virtual screen applet and other stuff where I like them, menu button etc then stick warlockbar in a vertical config on the left. I grew up with 4:3 screens so anything wider often feels like it has "wasted" width, which is also why I like the look of that browser you wrote about the other day whose name escapes me right now, but isn't available on FreeBSD anyway and has the fancy sidebar although i can't quite cope with the way Firefox does vertical tabs. It's icky and half-hearted. :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Killer app

"I don't see the delight in windows snapping. I move a window in just the wrong way, and BAM it's taking half the screen."

Doesn't that just happen once you release the mouse button though? I don't know. I use KDE on my main desktop and XFCE on the laptop at home with four virtual screens so don't want or need snapping since I sometimes want to drag a window to the next virtual screen left or right. I use Windows at work on a very wide curved screen and find the snap a bit of a pain when it's not what I want but since I see the "preview" of what will happen if I let go the mouse button, then I don't let go and drag it back a bit. Although with my work flow I usually end up preferring the browser and Outlook snapped side by side on the big screen and teams on the laptop screen. Even with the very wide screen, I'm not sure it's wide enough fro three apps vertically tiled without reducing the global zoom setting and my old eyes probably won't like that :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Once you try this, it is rather wonderful

"Imagine if EVERY option was on by default. What a cluster fuck that would be."

Assuming we are still talking about Gnome here, isn't that going to be the choice of the distro maker as far as default OOTB goes? So whichever Gnome based distro you use, it's either defaulting to on or off and you get to either pick a distro based on that decision or stick to you distro of choice and if you don't agree with their default setting, just switch it on or off to suit you. Or just choose a desktop that isn't Gnome at all. Ain't choice wonderful?

Panasonic liquidates its liquid crystal display business

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Been saying that for years. The actual, needful replacement cycle is at least twice as long as the OEM marketing departments would have us believe :-) More so now that so much office type work is done "in the cloud" in browser based apps.

Not for everyone, of course, but many, many users only need a new computer because age means things are more likely to fail. If you have a large fleet all bought at more or less the same time, 5 years down the line, the replacement rate starts going up and users lose time waiting for the fix or replace. The failure rate is what determines the replacement cycle for most corporate or other large users.

Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

"pure entropy"

That sounds too much like an oxymoron to me :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Cleaning products

"a passing fancy for the Shake n' Vac lady in the 1980s."

Mmmm...a certain relatively small demographic of early to mid-teens becoming aware of girls at the time.

Full disclose: I'm also in the demographic :-)

Twitter's giant throbbing X erected 'without a permit'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Another..

"Why didn't he choose I instead of X for the new name?"

Maybe even he thinks the chances of lawsuits from Apple might might be a bite too much even for him?

I doubt he was fearful of The i since they and their parent group combined aren't even close to being in the billionaires club :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Or checking they had a permit to close off a public thoroughfare.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Don't give him any more crazy ideas!! He has enough already.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What recourse

"I'd guess that one reason is that this being the US the police aren't empowered to be the private enforcement arm of whatever bully boy fancies having a go at them."

Enforcing the city laws on behalf of a city representative on city business is hardly what one might call "private enforcement...of whatever bully boy fancies having a go at them."

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I tried it..

"So, I had to wait until _hoi polloi_ got their chance..."

Did you also have to register an account to use it? That wold be a deal breaker for me. Collecting telemetry, even linked to an IP address, is one thing, but linking that data to an email address is something else, even if it is a throwaway one.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

Re: Off topic

Are they grouped in packs of 20? That's still a lot of tabs :-)

He's probably a smoker --------->

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Off topic

"I used to write macros to save days of work a month."

Yes, sometimes it's a balance between dev time and time saved. If it's a macro that take days to write but saves 100's of employees 10 minutes per day for the next three years, it's also well worth it.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Off topic

"When I mailed the person who created this we ended up in a long and fruitless email exchange because they didn't know what a Powerpoint Template was."

LOL at that. So typical, especially in some large US companies :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Toxic negativity is a bad thing. I am trying to write about something new and bold and innovative and cool, and it's really sad to just see people taking cheap shots at it."

Well, I for one quite like it. Not sure it'll work well on my laptop screen (and it might take a while to reach FreeBSD!!) but I think that format will work well on the immensely wide, curved screens we now have at work instead a pair of "wide screens". Going full screen when you only have one screen doesn't often work well for most apps or browsers, so I had to learn a "new" technique of grab title bar and drag to left edge to auto-size to half screen. Not a huge issue, but I can see having a single internal tiled browser taking the whole screen being simpler and nicer, especially with the multi-function side bar. My only issue at the moment is that I like and address bar, but since I don't have a Mac, can't check if that's an option yet. I often need to paste URIs into documents or emails so a cut'n'paste from the address bar is a vital function. Unless there's another method provided that isn't obvious from the screen shots. Can I, for example, just drag a tab from the side bar into an email and get the link that way? or is that something to suggest to the browser creators?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yes. It adds much to the discussion, usually, and helps form opinion on the authors too :-)

I like authors who defend their position and agree/admit[1] when commentards with an opposing or just different point of view changes the narrative of some or even all of the article.

[1] Or disagree with a commentard and put them right, as above :-)

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What's 2 degrees away from Earth?

...in three dimension.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What's 2 degrees away from Earth?

...and shit on the parcel DPD left "near by" for you because your were "out".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Auto-correcting antenna aiming! Amazing!

Oh, I don't know. Maybe some "Howard" was trying to impress a girl, late one evening :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Variation

You had a can? All we had were sea shells. Bloody whooshing interference on the listening end too!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Off topic

"Our polytechnic had a ceefax adaptor on one of the beebs in one of the labs. 1k per page refresh (every minute or so) for the freebie of the week."

I had access to one too. And the software to download as many pages as you wanted to a local disk, just set it going and come back after a coffee or three and get "instant" access to all the downloaded pages :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Off topic

"Yup.....tedious! In 1983, my trusty Osborne 01 had a 300 baud modem, used to communicate with Prestel."

First time I used Preset, it was a 1200/75 modem. I never knew it worked with 300/300 too.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Talk it up

"Let BT marketers get at that information and it will be described as Stunningly-Fast Broadband at the Speed of Light..."

...and the poster child for why providers never talk about latency :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Voyager 1 & 2

"No management consoles if you accidentally turn off networking on the remote system"

But, as per the article, they allowed for that by giving it a program to auto-recalibrate and reconnect if comms are lost :-)

Would you need a management console to restore networking if the remote server, by default, waited for the comms for a length of time and if nothing is received, auto-roll back to the previous config?, eg you changed and fat fingered the IP address and lost contact, or downed the wrong Ethernet port?

Florida man accused of hoarding America's secrets faces fresh charges

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: In jail with DJT

I'm hearing 10cc's Rubber Bullets in my head now!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: … flooded "a room where computer servers were kept."

Is it actually an air hole or a vent to a membrane such that membrane expands and contracts inside the drive to allow the air pressure to equalise? I thought they were supposed to be dust proof. Or is it a hole with a filter? I must admit I never looked that closely, it just looks like a stick on bit of latex or similar from the inside.

EDIT: Never mind, as you were. It's a filter, not a membrane or diaphragm. DDG to the rescue :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
FAIL

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

Me: "You forgot Reagan and Trump. Or do those examples not fit your narrative?"

You: Reagans dead, something about Trump and then a lot of "But what about...."

Thanks mate, typical answer LOL

BTW, what is the Dbc? Did you mean BBC (as opposed to the also incorrect Bbc)?

This last question is entirely optional and not meant to detract from my original question, but I will just add that both Biden and Starmer come in for a kicking on UK news on a regular basis, including from Left leaning sources. ALL leaders are up for ridicule and criticism across the news spectrum. It helps if you use multiple sources rather than just those pandering to a single point of view though,

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
FAIL

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

"1 thumb down"

Well, come on then Mr/Ms downvoter, don't be lazy, provide the links.

Oh, right, because you can't! Hilarious!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Holmes

That's why they are secret!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: … flooded "a room where computer servers were kept."

"I would presume the pool was fresh water"

Chlorinated "fresh" water. Along with any other "pollutants" introduced by the pool users and, assuming it;s an outdoor pool, any other debris blown in, dead insects etc. So, yeah "fresh" as opposed to "salt" or "sea" water, but not pure fresh ;-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: In jail with DJT

Actual and genuine question. What is it with orange jumpsuits? Is that something specific to federal prisons or something? I've seen plenty of US tv both fictional and documentary that shows prisoners dressed in all sorts of different ways, depending on what prisons they are in. The apparently ubiquitous "orange jumpsuit" actually seems to be quite rare in reality. Has this just become a trope due to some TV show that happened to be popular for a while?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

"The El Reg office has decided that only left wingers get a positive review, regarsless of how bad they are doing their job.."

Would you care to point to all the positive articles published by El Reg about Kim, Xi and Putin please? I seem to be missing them.

Meanwhile, here in the real world...

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
FAIL

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

"Biden, Feinstein, McConnell etc etc have their senior moments live on TV. These are the leaders of the free world."

You forgot Reagan and Trump. Or do those examples not fit your narrative?

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's pop artifact stash now heads to a museum

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Relics

The heavy breathing?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Kirk's Chair

Yeah, it's a pretty impressive item to have, but up close and out of context looks like a bit of poorly made, cheap stage dressing, Sad really.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Thanks for that. Can I have some Paracetamol now?

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Or a Pringles "cantenna" at each end if it's not quite that far! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What is a parking garage?

Same in the UK, to be fair. Many towns have a "parkway" leading to them and many people park their cars in the drive, The A174 on the south side of Middlesborough is called The Parkway, and there's the Sheffield Parkway from the M1 to the city centre.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What is a parking garage?

I think that now faulty logic has already been demonstrated at least once with an EV car fire spreading to other cars and the building.

No idea if this one was EV related or not, but it was pretty devastating for an above ground multi-story car park fire.

EDIT. Apparently it was a 16 year old car (so not EV) that had been modified to be "differently fuelled", so possibly a home/back street retrofit to cooking oil or LPG.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"(all rights to password privacy have gone by the time it gets to this stage. They can change it after if they're bothered , as long as they arnt straight back on the phone)"

If I did that at our place, I'd have to report myself to infosec for asking the user to do that. Then report them for doing it :-)

I'm only allowed to trigger a password reset for them and leave them to deal with it, or at best, show the poor dears where to click.

Infineon to offer recyclable circuit boards that dissolve in water

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I was going to say this is ridiculous but...

I have visions of the early unleaded solder concoctions and unexpected long-term whicker growth, which over time seems to have been mainly solved now. As others have said, try it out where the use cases match which brings experience, development and bulk production pricing.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: High humidity environments?

"This does not bode well for the technology being discussed."

At a temps approaching 70C and high humidity, you're probably already outside the recommend operating parameters for many electronic circuit boards and/or devices and into "special environment" areas. So these boards would probably not be suitable for your application, same as they will not be suitable in some other applications, eg rigid, not flexible (although they didn't define what they mean by rigid. I remember circuit boards being pretty damned brittle and any flexion could be enough to break tracks where as, for example, modern PC/laptop system boards allow for a few degrees of flex, indeed is often required to fit some laptop boards into the case.

Tesla's Autopilot boasts, safety probed by California AG

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: EV range

It isn't hard to note the current charge level and the rate of drop in real time, averaged over some period to produce a more dynamic range estimate than waiting for a drop to 50% charge and suddenly wildly dropping the range estimate.

Maybe they didn't actually write the algorithm and just ripped off and adapted the MS Windows file transfer time algo?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: TSLA crashes

"I wonder what Musk will have to do to thoroughly crash TSLA."

Enable FSD?

"and I really do not understand the recovery."

Skittish markets. It's something we see all the time. the slightest hint at a problem with a listed company and the price crashes as the markets "panic". Almost invariably it turns out that most sensible people didn't really see the blip as a serious problem and clever ones start buying when they see the price falling and make a quick profit as the price recovers both because of the initial "panic"being overblown and the buying spree of now-cheap stocks in what is a perfectly viable business. Just look at stock falls when a company doesn't quite make it's predicted $billions, even though they are still beating last years profits.

It's generally the "get rich quick" short termers causing this. people in it for the long run are looking years down the line, not just next week.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: re: How in the world has Tesla

"Tesla does not advertise."

Yes. At least, they don't *pay* to advertise. They (and Musk, especially Musk) just release wild PR and the media does it for them :-)

And, of course, designing a product with a specific shape and corporate logo on it is also advertising, emblazoning the Tesla logo on the "superchargers" is advertising etc etc etc :-)

Not making TV, print or online adverts doesn't mean they don't advertise.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Litigation moves at the speed of a sedated sloth

"Seriously? If this is true, reselling the car would make it drop tens of K's in value."

The same applies to software controlled enhancements you pay BMW for. You pay for "lifetime" heated seats, but when you sell it, the heated seats no longer work unless the new owner also pays again for those same heated seats. Or you pay-per-month on a subscription model, the preferred way as far as BMW are concerned as they want the regular income after the one off sale of the vehicle. They are all at it or heading that way. Even the sale of the car is falling out of favour as lease companies are targetting private individuals these days rather than corporate fleets.

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