* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25246 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Free Wednesday gift for you lucky lot: Extra mouse button!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Forgotten lore

Also works with the cursor keys from the cursor position, just hold down shift. Double click a work to highlight everything between two items of white-space/punctuation. Triple click to get a whole sentence/paragraph. Hold Shift down to manually extend the selection. Hold Control down to add a completely separate bit of text to the selection (although when pasting, it's all one big lump that you need to manually separate again. Once highlighted, you still get to chose whether to just middle-click/past or ctrl-c/copy. Same result when you paste.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Multiple buffers hurt my brain

ISTR seeing at least one clipboard manager that remembers multiple copy/cuts and you right (or was it left?) click the system tray icon to get a pop-up list of those clipping to choose from. But for real "old skool" (sort of) cut'n'paste at the command line, just type "history" and see every command you ever typed as far back as your custom extended buffer will go. And don't forget to man history to all the other clever stuff it can do :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I have to agree. This is a ZDNET article."

Article? Nah mate. It's a whole "special issue" for the Summer in W.H. Smiths. "100 things you didn't know your mouse could do!!!" (Windows only, of course)

(Or maybe a 3 hour YouTube video)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The big secret is this: your scroll wheel is also a button.

"No, people don't know."

You should have put a poll at the bottom of the story. It'd be interesting to see how much of the target audience didn't know about the wheel/middle button. I'd expect a high number of readers reading the story and asking themselves why the story was even written for this audience :-)

Personally, as a FreeBSD user and reading El Reg with Firefox, I'd find it very awkward without the middle button. My usual MO is to start at El Reg "Latest" stories, scroll down to last read/visited story/link then scroll back up to the most recent story, middle clicking anything that looks interesting on the way up, opening a number of stories into new tabs. Likewise when commenting, highlight/middle click to quote something and ctrl-c/v to copy the URI. Those of us "oldies" probably know about and use various short-cuts because a) we've used them for so long the habit is ingrained and b) once upon a time, GUI users were not 100% assumed to even have a mouse and there were keyboard short-cuts fore pretty much everything, just like the pre-GUI days and again, the most common ones which have survived are ingrained into our muscle memory :-)

I find it interesting that Windows and Windows programs in particular doesn't often show the keyboard shortcuts in the menus any more. Looking up at my Firefox menu running on FreeBSD, I note that the menu bar still shows the likes of <u>F</u>ile, <u>E</u>dit, <u>V</u>iew etc, , indicating that ALt-F will open the File menu and said menu also has an underlined letter for each choice so, eg ALT_FT is <u>F</u>ile, New <u>T</u>ab, and that also has next to it, CTRL-T informing the user that is the shortcut key. Many of these shortcuts still work in Windows, but with no actual manuals to read and little chance of seeing the hints in the menus, younger Windows users seem to use the mouse for everything, often slowing them down as they reach between mouse and keyboard. I'm sure we've all seen the users who, to log in, use the mouse to click in the username box, type in the username then reach for the mouse to click in the password box because no one, least of all the Windows OS itself, has told them about TAB/Alt-TAB to move forward and backwards through form fields.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: shift-insert for paste

"Perhaps you could look for a setting that completely disables the wheel?"

I've not used low level mouse config settings in a while, but isn't the wheel Button4 and Button5? Just remap those to null.

California man's business is frustrating telemarketing scammers with chatbots

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Yes, there was an "art" to hanging up so the other person heard the bang. Your mums version worked, but was more crude. When you slam it down you have to hit the frame of the rest before it hits the switches and do it all in one smooth motion :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Surely the scammers will catch on?

"since it wouldn't see me hang up right away like I do now."

True, but if the political robocaller is kept on the line spouting the spiel, and lots of people do it, it significantly cuts into the number of calls they can make if every call lasts the full length. Depending on how "clever" the software operating the robocaller is, they may well mark every "completed" call as being a likely voter since "you" listened to the whole spiel :-) So, reduced number of people harassed and poisoned database. Win, win.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I once got a call asking for me by name, "Hello, am I speaking to Mt John Brown?" No, says I, you have the wrong number, my name is Steven Brown, goodbye.

10 mins later, "Hello, am I speaking to me Steven Brown?" LOL. They do listen and take notes. I've had more calls from supposedly different companies asking for "Steven Brown" since then too. Same company, or selling on "corrected" or "confirmed" data?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

""While no one can put a price on slamming the phone down on a call center worker"

I can't remember when I last saw a phone capable of being slammed down in a way that the other party could hear it. Now all you can do is pretend by making a banging sound, possibly with the handset, and then pressing the button/tapping the screen to hang up afterwards. The person on the other end may have never seen that type of phone and not even know that the bang means you are annoyed and have hung up :-)

Europe's Euclid telescope launches to figure out dark energy, the universe, and everything

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

I'm happy, happy happy!

This was one of those rare launches that I got to see the live stream while it was actually live. I'd just gone onto the the BBC News website and saw the main headline lining to their live coverage, clicked on it and the countdown was at about T-00:01:40. And even after all this time, it's not only exciting watching the launch, the coverage SpaceX offer of their launch, especially on board is still about the best out there and I got to the absolutely most exciting bit, a successful landing of the first stage on a barge at sea! That landing still impresses me even if it does happen successfully pretty much every damn time! It still feels like science fiction :-)

I can't wait to see the piccies from Euclid (or it didn't happen :-))

Want to feel old? Ethernet just celebrated its 50th birthday

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Commodore Pet

"The first network I heard of was our high school computer lab had “MUPPET” (multiple pet) scheme for sharing the 4040 dual disk drive and the dot matrix, and I -never- figured out how that worked."

Same here but I remember it as MuPET :-)

Forget these apps and AI, where's my flying car? Ah, here's one with an FAA license

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Joby Aviation

Icon: Caution, low flying Jobys --------------------->

(For left pondians, the right-pondian word joby or jobbie means a shit, as in "taking a joby", or "is that a joby in the pool"?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

You keep saying that, and it's probably true. But laws change and the pilot need not be human :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Argh, what is it going to be??

"And note that today we can't even properly control vehicles in two dimensions, let alone three."

I suspect computer controlled flying cars in strictly geo-fenced "airways" will be a LOT easier than cars on the public roads where most cars are currently manually controlled. Those geo-fenced airways will ONLY have computer controlled flying cars in them and no other obstructions. Whether it will be economic to have that sort of restricted airspace and infrastructure is another matter. I doubt there will ever be the free-for-all the ICE cars have been given through most of their history. Safety is far higher up the agenda these days and flying cars are going to have to be SAFE from day 1. Which means take up will be slow along with long term design and real world experience and the required infrastructure.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ahhh yes, flying cars.

"And why is that happening? Because we waste all those resources on roads, parking lots and godamn car-centric infrastructure."

It seems to be all stick and no carrot. Clean Air/Congestion zones in some UK cities. Fines for the city Council if they don't introduce them and "clean" the air. When they do introduce them, they get hooked on the income it generates from "fining" people and business who don't/won't/can't switch to EV or hybrids and they "promise" the money from the fines will, eventually, some day, be used to "improve" public transport. The obvious solution to most people would be to invest in the public transport first, look on it as a loan that will be paid back from the "fines" that come later or, better yet, investing in and encouraging people on to public transport first results in the cleaner air they want.

That latter is how the publicity around the new fleet of trains for our local light rail system is being put over. The reality is that the 40 year old rolling stock, with an expected lifespan of 20 years, is desperately in need of replacement anyway. I mean, FFS, the *prototype* trains, two of them, used for training the drivers and were never even supposed to go into service, are still running the daily commute 40 years later! And the new modern trains are all sideways bench seats, so far fewer seats and lots more space to cram in standing passengers to make the journey even more fun. Admittedly, at peak times on the busiest parts, trains run about every 6 minutes, you can't really cram more trains into that route and the city centre stations are underground so you you can't easily build longer platforms either. The biggest issue is probably when the system was built, public transport was publicly owned and all meshed together with buses feeding the trains. With separate privately owned bus companies competing with each other and the light rail network, it's never going to be great.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Range of 150 miles

As per my other comment, early days. I doubt the first automobiles appearing on the roads would have been up to the scenario you describe either, but here we are today.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Range of 150 miles

True, but they are little further forward than the Wright Bros. were when they started flying, or the early car makers. The pioneers of private car ownership had to plan their journeys just as carefully to have a chance of re-fuelling for the return trip too. It'll be interesting to watch and see if the advancements in duration are equivalent, bearing in mind the battery chemistry and physics.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Are specially designed flying cars really necessary?

You may say that now. But over time, I see that changing. It takes time to learn to fly a conventional RC aircraft, but give a kid a drone/quadcopter and a smart phone and off they go, with little to no instruction.

Yeah, yeah, I know, even toy drones crash, but the point is they are very, very easy to fly. A flying car of equivalent, probably much better, self-handling such that the "pilot" only needs to point it in the right direction will probably need little more than a car driving licence to a reasonable standard, eg a "proper" test, not the sort of tests some countries and even some US States currently have where it's barely more than pointing to the steering wheel correctly for a pass :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I take it you don't drive? Road signs in miles and speed limits in mph?

Report reveals US Space Force unprepared to counter orbital threats

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Think Tanks found to leak; use New Never-Before-Seen Sealant for Instant Repair!

"the Space Force, a Trump initiative,"

Is it? I thought the subject had been kicked around for years, and creating a whole new branch of the military isn't something done lightly or quickly. Did Trump actually initiate it or just sign off on something that had been in the planning for years? Right place, right time, grab the credit?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Mushroom

Increased budget

Let's see. "Independent" thinktank produces a report by an ex-USAF, ex-USSF officer, one of their leading lights that says his mate back at the USSF need more people an money and if they don't get it, the USA might be wiped out by China and/or Russia. Yeah, ok. That sounds like an "independent" report to me.</sarc>

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: NumLock on a tiny laptop keyboard

Some laptops have a BIOS setting to switch the default action of the function keys between their F1 etc function and the "blue" functions like volume up/down, screen switch etc. So pressing F1/F2 etc at boot time doesn't go to BIOS setup, built-in diags, Boot selector etc. which can be confusing the first few times you come across it. You have to press Fn and F2 or whatever.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Gawd, that's happened to my users when the password is (eg) p@ssw#rd but the power-on keyboard layout doesn't match the actual keyboard layout until *after* logging in, so the BIOS thinks you're entering p"ssw£rd."

When replacing a laptop system board, with at least a couple of well know OEMs, most of the later models, (eg last few years) require localising the keyboard correctly along with putting the system model name and serial number in so the BIOS is properly synchronised with the physical keyboard layout.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: European languages, relatively 'easy' - but Korean....

Did you sell it on EBoyo?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Security 101.

My wifes laptop was a hand me down from her brother who bought it Thailand. The keyboard seems to be generic US layout with Thai characters added. But he had installed a UK version of Windows on it, so other than some "strange" characters on the corners of the most of thekeys, it handles and behaves exactly as a UK localised version of the laptop would. BIOS config is all in English too. Good for her (and her brother, the previous owner) obviously but I wonder how well it worked for a Thai native speaker, even with Thai Windows installed?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Keyboards...

"And if you needed to boot to dos, you now had a US layout, using the German physical layout."

If you booted to DOS, then config.sys should have had the correct country code localisation and autoexec should have had the correct keyb.com parameters passed to set the German layout. (keybde.com in older DOS versions)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Faux AZERTY

"Helps that I can touch type."

Yes, that's the important step that most people never seem to master properly. If you can touch type, what's on the key caps doesn't matter so long as you know what layout your are using. Luckily it's usually only the letters that get worn off so you can still find the more esoteric and unused keys when you need them by looking for them.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Paris...

My one and only time through CDG was aged 14 or 15 in the mid to late 70's when the place was new and I'd never flown before. It was exciting and the escalators/travelators through the plastic tubes was all SciFi to me :-) On the other hand, brutalist concrete architecture doesn't age well unless you shot blast it clean every now and then to make it look all clean and new.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: travel savings - NOT!

"3 meals air-side and the wasted day came out of my departments budgets!"

Of course! That's how accountants and expenses departments work. The money in your departmental budget is already "spent" and it's not their problem how and when you spend it. But making a saving from their budget, however small, is worthwhile and adds to their end of year bonus :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Pint

Re: Paris...

"we watched the funeral out of the hotel window.

Happy days."

Ah yes, there's nothing quite as uplifting and fun as a funeral :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: AltGr

"my personal favourite from that era, SysRq."

"That era"??? I'm typing this on my Toshy laptop that has SysRq on the PtrSc key. Ok, it's about 8-10 years old, but certainly not the late 1980's and I don't think I've ever used that key function :-)

Next to that key is one labelled "Pause" as the main function and "Break" as the secondary function. Again, something almost never used these days. Pause used to be handy for pausing long screen listing scrolling up the screen, but most systems scroll too fast for that to be usable these days :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Hmmm....now known as "gestures" :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

"Or, you could accept that your company operates internationally, with different languages and therefore different end user needs..."

I get the impression that many US multi-nationals have an ingrained cultural problem with seeing geographic regions as far, far more diverse than the conglomeration that is The United States of America. But often it's those same multi-nationals that have, for their own convenience, lumped those disparate sovereign countries into geographical regions such as "Europe", "EMEA" etc.

One company we contracted for many years ago was an international hotel chain headquartered in Paris, where their IT support was also based and where they shipped spare parts from. I quickly got used to replacing motherboards and setting them up with the BIOS config in German, French, Spanish etc as they just sent out the correct board, whatever the localisation of the firmware :-) Interestingly, they had standardised on IBM PS/2 desktops so finding non-English BIOS screens from a US corporation was interesting and unexpected at the time. Even today, it's not uncommon to find HP printers still defaulting to US letter, in an international market where only the US uses US letter, when doing a factory reset :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

To be fair, having two different keyboards connected at the same is probably a fairly niche use case, more niche even than having two identical keyboards connected other than in specialised situations where there may be a special custom keyboard for specific use which will most commonly be operated by either it's own driver or the program/app that requires it, eg a PC being used as a cash register or information kiosk.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

...unless you don't speak English :-)

eg List of local translation for "June"

It's fairly clear to most(not all) that it's the 30th day of "something" in 2023, but which "something"? We can eliminate Feb, but that still leave 11 months to pick from :-)

Virgin Galactic finally gets its first paying customers to edge of space

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: For Beetling around in Space

Kármán, kármán, kármán, kármán, ármán chameleon

You come and go, you come and go

Chinese balloon that US shot down was 'crammed' with American hardware

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A couple of points.

"Ban US kit from being sold to China and this opportunity vanishes."

Much of that "US kit is made in China.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: If you think we've calmed down since then......

Yee hah! That varmint be a stranger! Whare's ma shootin' irons?

Thanks for confirming the stereotype.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Yeah, um ... you really don't want to pull that thread."

Wasn't it reported at the time that there had been previous Chinese spy balloons during Trumps term in power and *nothing* was done at that time?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Notice how....

Ah, but it was a "stealth" spy balloon running under "radio silence" while over enemy territory, storing the data for when it moves off-shore and then barfs the data up to a CCCP satellite.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Notice how....

Yes, and that Airstrip One company is Japanese owned too!

It's time to mark six decades of computer networking

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Wonder....

If they do, they may "dig" a hole to "drop" you in. And they might get away with it too if not "fingered" by those pesky kids and "Fido"!

Cisco buys SamKnows to give ThousandEyes a look at millions of endpoints

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Will this be the end of the Sam Knows "white box"?

"and next time I am tinkering in the server rack it will be unplugged & trashed."

You should email them first and tell them you no longer wish to participate. They may want the box back. Depends when they last sent you a new one, but best to cover yourself. In my case, a good few years ago, they offered to send me a pre-paid Jiffy-bag to return or I could keep/dispose of it myself. I chose the latter and flashed the firmware to give it a new lease of life.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Will this be the end of the Sam Knows "white box"?

"The TP-link device's 100 Mbps FE interface became obsolete when my internet connection increased. I applied for a newer box and never got a response. I'd do it again if I had the chance."

Similar here. They didn't want the box back. So I got a USB to RS232 adaptor which attached to the RS232 header on the router board[*} and flashed it with DDWRT and it's been my wireless access point ever since on a separate VLAN.

[*] SamKnows monitoring routers arrive pre-flashed with their custom firmware and you can't get into it through the web interface, telnet, ssh etc., they are very well locked down.

One year after Roe v Wade overturned and 'uterus surveillance' looks grim

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How is it an "extreme" position

"If necessary set up a programme to get free and discreet pregnancy tests for anyone who asks."

Like paying cash at any pharmacy? That's that bit sorted anyway :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

"Want to take a wager that IBM's HR dept hasn't run the numbers on it?"

And yet, they continue to get rid of the older workers, those unlikely to be getting pregnant? If maternity pay was a concern, they'd be hiring more older women and more men and avoid hiring women of "child bearing age". Clearly this a much more complicated subject than we thought and IBM HR and accounts people are still studying it? It all sounds more complicates than Disaster Areas accounts.

Supreme Court says Genius' song lyric copying claim against Google wasn't smart

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "the results were often character-for-character copies of song texts it hosts"

Mamas and the Papas, California Dreaming.

'Ello Lisa Brown...

(All the leaves are brown)

My excuse is a knew someone called Lisa Brown :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I wouldn't then be able to claim copyright to it."

Not to the transcript, no, but you do own the copyright to that specific representation of the transcript. Others can make their own transcripts, but can't just take and publish your transcript without permission. But the content of transcript itself is probably already a copyright breach anyway once published :-) I can take a photo of red London double decker bus and own the copyright in that work. But I don't own the copyright to the design of the bus or any other objects in the photo and at least in that case, the owner of the design copyright can't claim I'm stealing their works unlike the copyright owner of the movie script you just copied.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

In that specific instance, if Genius had obtained the rights to use the lyrics, they would own the copyright on their specific rendering of the lyrics so I think the would have a case. The problem is they don't appear to have the rights to use those lyrics and are themselves IMHO breaching copyright by publishing them in the first place. I'm thinking here in particular of audiobooks. The author holds the rights to the story, the audiobook company purchases the rights to make the audiobook and in turn own the copyright on that performance recording. Others can also buy/lease other rights from the author, even to make their own audiobook so long as the first company wasn't sold exclusive rights, but no one has the right to just make a copy of an existing audiobook and publish it as their own.

But, as I started out with, this is predicated on buy the rights or otherwise obtaining permission. If what you publish is someone else's copyrighted work, no matter how you obtained it, you can't publish without permission so I suspect the courts turned this case down because they REALLY didn't want to open that can of worms. User generated content in particular is a potential bubble that if looked at too closely could burst and affect enormous chunks of the internet if IP rights are fully and properly enforced.

I can sit down and type out the lyrics of a song for my own use legally. But submitting that file to be published on a website specialising in publishing users transcriptions of copyright works is on very shaky legal ground for the publisher and, theoretically, for those submitting the works.

'Joan Is Awful' Black Mirror episode rebounds on Netflix

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: No such thing as bad PR

Exactly. There may have been a 1500+% increase in searches for the T&Cs[1] but what's that an increase from? Normally it's 2 or 3 and now it's a few 1000? And how many understood the T&Cs and decided to cancel? Answer to that latter is likely zero or close enough not to be measurable :-)

[1] Why? Surely it's linked from the bottom of every page, who can't find the Netflix site, especially if you are already a subscriber.

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