* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25253 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Brit data watchdog fines sleazy sales ops £250K for 'bombarding' folk with calls

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Pathetic

IIRC, either that is now the case or is wending it's way through Parliament.

Reddit cuts five percent of workers while API pricing shift sours developers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Exactly how many API calls are they making?

I wonder what the difference is between using a 3rd party app calling the APIs and using the officially provided app calling the APIs? Do you get charged the same if you use the official app instead of a 3rd party one? If no, why not?

Robot can rip the data out of RAM chips with chilling technology

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"That said, there *are* people (especially those working for the various intelligence agencies) who are *very* good at getting hardware or software (on physical media) into a server room without being noticed."

While true, I suspect even a special custom built robot, reader and the cryo gear might be a tad more difficult, even for "them" :-)

They probably already have easier ways.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What about "chip stacks"?

...or if the chip is glued to the PCB so just de-soldering it stops being an option?

Microsoft injects ChatGPT into 'secure' US government Azure cloud

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ok, what is the point ?

"Who and in what government agency is going to have a use for a babbling "generative content" toy that can't actually bring itself to define anything specifically ?"

Political speech writers? Expect an improvement in the babble coming from politicians :-)

File Explorer gets facelift in latest Windows 11 build

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Here we go again

Worse, they keep taking away more and more of the options to customise the look and feel of the desktop such that these days about all you can change is the wallpaper now. And personally, that's the one bit of the UI I rarely want to change anyway. I prefer a nice non-distracting plain background, or maybe a nice soft gradient, top to bottom. I got bored with patterns, photos and "photo carousels" as a desktop about 5 minutes after discovered the option in Windows 95 :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Teaching an old dog new bugs

"It's also be nice if it would differentiate between jpeg, png etc files without having to turn file extension visibility for all files:"

What? You don't switch on global file extension visibility as a matter of course as soon as the install has finished? I also like to know what format a document file is in before I open it so I don't "accidentally" save it out in MS's preferred Office format. if it was .odf or .rtf, I'd like it to stay that way. Not just see two apparently identically named files in the directory, one of which might be the original version :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: simple requirement

"It would also be nice if the tree in the left-hand pane and the files in the right-hand pane always agreed on which directory is selected."

Or even either two pane files window or just simply an easy option of opening two or more instances of Explorer. Yeah, we can do a "workaround" of clicking it open once and then running explorer.exe from a command line/chooser, but that still to this day feels like a dirty hack that might go away at any moment.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Cheese is Christ!

"Mind you, many native Linux software applications also struggle to talk to Linux sound hardware, even without wine or anything else in the way."

You could probably better direct your ire at PulseAudio. or the multiple different "sound things" that Linux has that often need to be installed at the same time because different programmes use different sound sub-systems and sometimes they conflict with each other.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

OMG, it's worse than I thought! I was expecting something like a toolbar along the top. Not the whole fucking workspace to be smothered. If I open a file manager, odds are I want to, you know, "manage" files. And mostly I want it to open in the directory I was last in when I closed it since, oddly, that's likely the directory I use the most anyway. I really don't care if someone commented on some file I once looked at last week, or shared during a meeting. If it was important or useful, I grabbed a copy, if not, well it can go bitrot for all I care. Ans as per my previous post, I really don't want to be reminded about a file I recently opened. I did want that file, that would be the reason I open Explorer in the first place and I'd already know where it is. I'm getting a sense that MS Explorer is heading down the route of Android "you really don't need a file manager", the apps will show all relevant files they can open" type of system. In my use case, the ONLY app I use to find files is Galleray for photos. For everything else, I use a proper file manager to find the file I want, properly curated by me into an understandable directory structures, then click/tap on the file and the relevant app then opens it. Simples.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: xyplorer

I didn't even know it was available for the PC. I use it on Amiga and WinUAE. But only up to version 4. Version 5 lost the plot with floating windows and docks and stuff :-)

On the other hand, both of the Windows laptop I'm forced to use for work are locked down via InTune and the odds of convincing "security" that some program they've never heard of should be whitelisted are about the same as Bill Gates phoning me up to ask if I could assist him in spending some of his $billions.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The Recommended File feature

NO!!!! Just NO!!!!!

I get that shit already whenever I open an email attachment on Outlook for Android (No choice, a work phone and account). EVERY time I close the attachment, no it DOES NOT go back to Outlook. The trip back to Outlook, which should be a single click of the back button, is hijacked by MS to show that stupid "recommend" or "you recently opened..." page. I have NEVER found an actual use for that page. Al it does it make have to click the back button an extra time just to get back to where I started. It's fucking annoying and seemingly has no way to turn it off. The last thing I need are "adverts" for other files I don't need right now appearing in file explorer.

What do we make of the $3,500 Apple Vision Pro? It doesn't take a magic leap to guess

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Gimp

"so I don't see if gaining mask market appeal"

I saw what you did there!

Waymo robo-car slays dog in San Francisco

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: In the UK, this would be criminal

It's also a hangover from when to own a dog you had to buy a license, so there was an actual defined owner, assuming the tag had a collar tag or more recently, an RFID tag.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

You misunderstand, or maybe you are new here. Mind you, El Reg missed missed the obvious sub-head. Dog Killed By A Mobile Device!!! with the obvious allusion to silly patents granted because "on a mobile device" :-)

Whistleblower claims Uncle Sam is sitting on hoard of alien vehicles and tech

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: They're just teasers

You'll need an electronic thumb. And a towel. And beer'n'peanuts help buffer the pick-up shock.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

What's the current US methods? Shirley something other than accidentality falling from an 11th floor window of a hospital. Putin has the current patent on that.

Scientists think they may have cracked life support for Martian occupation

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Mars?

One thumb and three fingers? I have axe. Anyone got a hand they can spare?

Florida man (not that one) sold $100M-plus in counterfeit network gear

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The lowest bidder strikes again

Is that actually the case? In many cases, it's actually "best value for money" but in finest Cover Your Own Arse mode, that's almost always switched to "lowest price/bidder" for any number of reasons not limited to "I don't understand the product so will buy the cheapest" and "The more I save, the bigger my bonus".

The bonkers water-cooled shoe PC, hexagonal pink workstations, and IKEA-style cases of Computex 2023

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Weird looking computers

By an odd coincidence, last night I came across some videos on Youtube shown "weird" computer designs over the decades.

Microsoft Windows latest: Cortana app out, adverts in

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Why

"(when did programs turn into apps anyway?)"

At least as far back as the days of shareware and PD libraries when categorising the various programs in their lists :-) More so when entire libraries were sold on MS-DOS compatible CDs with limited 8+3 directory and file naming restrictions. On the other hand, "app" seems to to refer to all programs nowadays whereas back then "apps" where "applications, usually full on things like a word processor, spreadsheet, database etc.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: a chat-based interface for controlling the OS and applications.

I've recently had to start using Windows in a fairly serious way for my job. In some ways, it's like going back to MS-DOS, or pre-GUI *nix days. Find stuff in the "start menu" is a nightmare and often things you want aren't even in it at all. So I need to learn what programmes are called and type the name into the search bar instead and hope I picked something close enough to what I want that it shows in the results, if I'm lucky. It really does feel like a significant step backwards! Trying to do that through voice commands is only going to take even longer. I get the feeling the YouTube generation have taken over Windows interface design. You know, those people who think a 15-20 minute video to give you information you could get in 10-15 seconds by reading a web page :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Microsoft Still Up to the Usual Antics

"All TV is pre-recorded, commercials get fast-forwarded through."

US and Canadian broadcasters have taken to putting banner ads across the bottom of the screen AFTER the ad break has finished. The make space by squashing the shows image vertically making everyone look short and fat for the duration. Worse, they are often animated so even more distracting.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"If they show you 50 ads for cars per day, thats nearly 20000 ads for cars in a year ? Who buys a car every year ? How is that "smart" advertising paying all that money for at most 1 sell every 5 years ?"

I visited a forum I like to read the other week from a PC/Browser that a) wasn't mine and b) had no script or ad-blockers. Fuck me! Every page had the same banner ad for an Estate Agents (Realtor for left pondians). Worse, the banner was repeated between every users post. I have no idea what they were trying to achieve with that swamping of an entire site with a single ad. After seeing it so many times, I almost instantly became "blind" to it and can honestly say I have no idea what the name of the company was. The highly tarnished silver lining? At least it wasn't animated!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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"pushing me more and more to making my current Win10 desktop my last Windows-based primary desktop O/S"

You sound like a smoker promising to give up every time the price of packet goes up :-)

Good luck, you won't regret it :-D

This typo sparked a Microsoft Azure outage

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: "Sprints"

...especially if the Azure devs are trying to chew gum at the same time :-)

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Over the years ...

"and across San Francisco Bay a handful of times."

A place famous for frequent and dense foggy conditions? Well, done if it worked :-)

This ain't Boeing very well: Starliner's first crewed flight canceled yet again

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "NASA desperately needs a second provider for crew transportation"

In terms of NASA buying from SpaceX, SpaceX is becoming "too big to fail", at least until others catch up. If US Gov thinks Musk is becoming a liability by sticking his oar too far into SpaceX day to day operations instead of leaving Shotwell to carry on running it well, they have "National Security" options they can pull to keep him out of it. Although I doubt it would get that far, I'm sure there will be "Red teams" looking at possible scenarios of what cold happen and what the solutions could be. This outsourcing national pride, not just the book keeping for some Government department.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: .. Paying attention to History

While I agree with you, Blue Origin seem to be playing their cards very close to their chest. We rarely hear much about them. So far as I'm aware, they produced a sub-orbital tourist ride and launched a couple of test rockets that didn't go anywhere near space but did land successfully.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Pissup/brewery

"THe entire starship to land on the moon or Mars thats incompetancy."

You know that huge Starship that blew up? You might have missed it, but that was a two stage vehicle. Hard to believe, I know, vut clearly you missed all the early test launches of the upper stage Starship and are clearly under the impression that the big launch you saw was a single big rocket. It seems like an obvious mistake to make since clearly all those previous lunar Apollo missions never used separate stages either. The entire Saturn V went all the way to the Moon. I have no idea why there's no film of that landing on the Moon back then instead of those grainy black & white images of a spidery little lander thingy.

Meta tells staff to return to office three days a week

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: forward to the future

"I haven't yet quite figured out the logistics of virtual reality laser toner but when I do I will clean up the market."

If you want to clean up, make sure the virtual container is spill-proof :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: This is a good way to conduct stealth layoffs

"By those who wfh quitting they are automatically self-selecting for the ones who are most confident they can get a job somewhere else. Since you don't want the sort of employees that other people would hire - you are automatically ahead"

Your second sentence seems to be saying the opposite of the first. Surely those most confident[*] of getting hired elsewhere are the better staff you don't want to leave?

[^], yes, there will be percentage of those overconfident types too, especially sales and marketing types who you'll be glad to see the back of at no cost in redundancy payments :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Handshake on the golf course

On the other hand, based on the comments in the article and the various "outs" suggested, Facebook at least, don't seem to be going with a hard and fast "everybody at their desks Mon-Weds, or else!" and have left wiggle room for those who are clearly better or as good when WFH based on experience, length of service etc. And they do specifically pull out those who joined remotely and may have not ever met their colleagues face to face. If, and it's a huuuuge, "if", Facebook stick to what the article describes and managers have authority, leeway and the ability to be fair, I could see it working quite well. On the gripping hand, it's Facebook and their toxic culture, so I don't hold out much hope for it not turning into a tick-box exercise with no leeway at all.

I say this as a remote field based guy of 20+ years who rarely ever meets other employees of the same company other than on Teams once in a while and am fully in favour of being left alone to just get on with the job with no hassle from manglement :-)

Laid-off 60-year-old Kyndryl exec says he was told IT giant wanted 'new blood'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Does anyone know exactly what Kyndral is? Did IBM sell off an entire division and if so, to who? How much debt has it been lumbered with? Or did they just cut a division loose, give it a new name, but it's still owned by IBM and part of the "IBM Group" with the IBM board still ultimately in control but with debt "outsourced"?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Curiously

Yeah, boasting about the wide range and depth of skills in a mainframe business (or any business, for that matter) and then stating the average age of employees is so young doesn't really jibe well to most potential clients. Decades of corporate experience means nothing if the clients get fobbed off with kids with little experience :-)

Software rollout failure led to Devon & Cornwall cops recording zero crime for 3 months

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: Home Office statement

and ensure that the whole country is completely crime-free by the end of this year."

Of course, this will involve a one off charge of a few billion in redundancy payments next year, but that will, over the following years result in a large budget surplice allowing for many more work-place "events" with free wine and birthday cakes in Westminster.

Bookings open for first all-electric flights around Scandinavia … in 2028

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Dunno why they don't just erect a couple of large phone masts, one at each end of the flightpath. And a run a zipline from each to the destination landing site, Two problems solved :-)

Amazon finds something else AI can supposedly do well: Spotting damaged goods

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Damaged goods truly rare occurrences, or no time to actually check...?

Or time pressures PLUS low wages mean they don't care.

California rolls closer to requiring drivers in driverless trucks

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
WTF?

Meanwhile, here in the UK...

...we have a car hire firm just started up after a claimed year of testing, which will be using remotely driven vehicle to deliver and collect hire cars to/from customers. Not self driven, not autonomous, but fully driven by a remote operator. And for at least the next 18 months, with a "safety driver" on board too. When questioned about the onboard safety driver in a radio interview, the company spokesdroid said they were still developing the safety system. WTF? They WHY THE FUCK are you launching the service if the SAFETY SYSTEMS are not ready yet? STAY OF THE FUCKING ROADS until it IS ready!!!

Remote driver car rental service launches in Milton Keynes

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Life saving?

"vagaries of road conditions and load security."

Don't know about the US, but here in the UK and across the EU, the driver is 100% responsible for their load, ie that it is properly loaded and secured. And as any driver will tell you, it's not unusual to get a few miles down the road and have to pull over and check/tighten straps etc because no matter how well you secure the load while stationary, once you start moving, vibration and cornering will cause it to shift slightly, just enough to need all those straps checking and tightening again. Any issues such as an unbalanced or shifted load leading to it being dangerous or worse, causing an accident is entirely down to the human driver. Who is going to be legally responsible for the initial loading and subsequent en route checking if there's no one on board to carry that task out?

Kremlin claims Apple helped NSA spy on diplomats via iPhone backdoor

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

WRT Apple and El Reg...

...it was fun reading those old stories linked in the article, especially Kierens email exchanges. I do note the the legally required "apology" by Apple on their website is long gone though. Not even a holding page. Just The page you’re looking for can’t be found.. I bet there was a time period specified by the judge on how long it had to be there and it was gone, to the second, as soon as they could legally delete it :-)

As a side note, if everyone reading this comment could please click the link above, it might be fun to mess with Apple and have some Apple analytics person too new to understand why suddenly see a spike for that now empty page and have to go around asking people why the page exists only as a "Not Found" message :-)

Meta threatens to pull all news from California rather than pay El Reg a penny

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
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Re: It's All About the Priorities

"Refuse to pay El Reg? Redrum!"

oooooh, that takes me back! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Facebook would probably be ok if they just showed the headline and a very short précis, all clickable to the source. From experience, quite a few people would still treat Facebook as the entire news source because the have such a short attention span they can barely get past even that much text before moving on to the next item, buy it would generate a lot more links to original article. On the other hand, I know people with very warped views of the world of new because they rarely, if ever, read beyond the first paragraph and as we all know, headlines + first paragraph is 99% clickbait that often implies the opposite of what you find when you read the full article. That plus Facebooks algorithms only showing what it thinks or wants you to see is still a recipe for a distorted world view.

Watchdog calls for automatic braking to be standard in cars

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: sometimes triggered whilst stationary

LOL! Clearly it worked out where you were from the GPS and decided the queue was moving far too fast for a bank :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Yet another waste of time and money

"Roll on having only self-driving cars on our roads, not that it'll happen in my lifetime."

I was with you right up to that last bit. I still gave you an upvote, since I agreed with you far more than I disagreed with :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

That sounds like a really poor implementation since it's not only pretty useless at such low speeds, it really should not even be active in those conditions. Are you prepared to name and shame at least the manufacturer if not the specific model?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yeah, those numbers looked strange to me too as I read the article, so I also converted them to kp/h to check, and yeah, absolutely they are metric to imperial conversion. I bet that sticks in their craw :-)

What's weird is that it's all software, so it would be a doddle to set the limits to 35mph and 65mph without going for "odd" limits.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Cars kill about the same number as guns

"If you're shot with a legal gun it is likely you were in the process of committing a crime."

Maybe, but I'll just leave this here;

https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2018/12/21/child-death

"For the study, researchers sorted through CDC and World Health Organization data on 20,360 deaths of children and adolescents in the United States in 2016.

The researchers found that motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of child deaths in the United States, comprising about 20% of all deaths among children in 2016. The chief reason for the crashes was cell phone use by drivers and pedestrians, the researchers found.

Firearms were the second leading cause of deaths among children and adolescents in 2016"

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Cars kill about the same number as guns

Curiously, Harry and Meghan have completely disappeared from the news in the last week. Clearly it's because they were NEVER important to start with because now we have Philip Schofield dominating the headlines with another non-story. Schofield will not be important next week/month when the next story du jour appears.

Anyway, summer is hear, governments will be going on holiday soon so it's time for "dead donkey" stories to appear.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: RTFM!

Glad it saved you, but seriously? A major "feature" like that and you didn't know about it until it kicked in for the first time? Maybe it's just me that reads manuals BEFORE I get surprised by a new feature :-) I'd expect there to be some sort of indicator on the dash showing it as enabled or disabled, probably using an icon/symbol I've not seen before, which would immediately trigger my curiosity to find out what it means.

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