* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: FSD ≠ Autonomous

As I am in the market for a new(er) car in the next 12 months, I've very greatful for this and similar comments on what to watch out for what to ask about and what to check for on any vehicle that I may be interested in. To date, my only gripe with "automation" I've experienced has been fucking stupid automatic headlights that come on far too early, never ever automate sidelights which would more appropriate and always default back to auto when you start the engine. I wasn't aware of auto-braking and lane-keeping being things that might default to on.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Capable of driving a car as well as a human?

"a minimum 23 metre gap"

A strange number. Until you convert to imperial and realise that 23 metres is an approximation of 75 feet, a relatively "round" number :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hmmmmmmm

"its a co-operative activity and still relies on the behaviours of humans "

In particular at some junctions where eye contact, politeness and sometimes self-preservation are what decides who goes first. We've probably all seen the various videos showing self-driving cars get completely stumped by some junctions, the locations and movement of other vehicles and, of course, unexpected roadworks. Self-driving cars, as they are now, could really only work if all the other cars are also self-driving AND they ALL communicate with each other, whatever the brand, with standard and open protocols, not all using proprietary and patented systems and protocols. On that note, do Teslas within range of each other talk to each other and cooperate or are they all acting independently? Tesla like to talk up how one cars experience and "learning" is passed on to all other Teslas. I wonder how true that is and how/when that "knowledge" is aggregated and passed on?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Hmmmmmmm

Well John, I suggest that you try braking hard in a tunnel for no reason, and see if the beak lets you off the dangerous driving charge because "the cars following me shouldn't have hit me"

At this stage, you are assuming the Tesla braked "for no reason". Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. If it was for no real reason, then the Tesla drive bears some responsibility of course, but the following drivers who then hit him and each other are ALSO due charges for dangerous driving because, as stated many times above, they were driving too close to stop in time. Maybe the Tesla braked hard because something fell off of a vehicle in front, tyre tread tearing off a truck, badly loaded items, wear and tear causing something to fall off, some twat throwing rubbish out the window. We don't know yet, but you are assuming the Tesla or the Tesla driver did something wrong.

And yes, some of us DO drive with a safe stopping distance in front of us. Those of us driving 1000+ miles per week are fully aware of written stopping distances and actual stopping distances, ie it's very, very rare for the vehicle(s) in front to come to a sudden and abrupt stop so take that and conditions into account. IME, most drivers are sensible and careful, but there are so many out there that it only takes a small percentage to make it seem worse than it is. And we always remember the idiots who do stupid things because they are the exceptions. We rarely take note of or remember the 1000's of other drivers we saw that day who caused no issues.

FCC calls for mega $300 million fine for massive US robocall campaign

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: In prison - with a phone

"Maybe also put the phone numbers on 4Chan..."

That would probably breach the UN Human Rights declaration. Did the US ever ratify that? No? Good-oh!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: And the operators that allowed the spoofing?

"so the phone company not only knows who actually made the call"

A lot of the calls came from out of country. CallerID may be "genuine" (or missing) by the time it reaches US jurisdiction and the only thing the US carrier knows is the originating foreign telco and the destination. Sometimes, it's not even intentional.

I remember an occasion many years ago when Telewest/Blueyonder (now Virgin Media) were routing "local" UK calls via the Netherlands for some reasons (cost? trunk failure?) so UK/UK calls on the same network looked like they were international calls (but not charged as such) and even caused some issues with their own dial-up internet since only their own network customers got the "free" calls to the PoPs.

And nowadays, with most of the phone network being digital, at least on the trunk side of the exchange, how a call is routed is probably very different, routing based on economy rather than any other metric. I bet even in the US it's not unusual for calls to be routed via Canadian or Mexican networks where it's cheaper for the carrier.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: We need to go beyond fines

"Aiding and abetting" is already a crime, so that part shouldn't be too difficult.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"5 billion calls? -> then the fine is $1.00 for every call call made, with the money going to the called parties."

Well, for most victims, that will only be a $ or 2. The admin cost would be silly. Better to make the guilty party personally call at each victims home address and personally hand over the compensation and apologise. They can wait at each door until the get an answer too. Once they complete that task, only THEN do they start the prison sentence.

(With thanks to Douglas Adams for creating the character whose mission was to personally insult every living being in the universe for inspiring the above idea)

Perseverance rover drops off first sample tube on surface of Mars

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

And then run PEEK to check if it succeeded?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Spliff

Is that the same team of engineers who came up with the idea of, "yeah, it'll scream through the atmosphere at interplanetary speed, slow down enough for parachutes to be deployed (Yeah guys, I know how thin the atmosphere is, bear with me), then, a few hundred feet before it crashes into the ground, we drop it!! But, wait for it guys, the bit we drop has ROCKETS on it and it'll hover about 30 feet from the ground and lower the rover on a rope to the ground!"

Rest of team: whoaaaa, shit man, can we have some of what you're smoking?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Covered by dust storms

If this was a film or TV show, or even a documentary with a CGI simulation, those sample tubes would have a strobe flash and beeping sound with no indication of how they are going to be powered for a decade or more, not to mention the problems of transmitting the beeps through the near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere :-)

SEC: Startup had 'no functional streaming service', raised $1.3m anyway

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Centrix

I think he;s talking about, eg the "History" channel and all their non-history programming, the SyFy channel with lots of fantasy and horror, and the Horror channel with lots of SciFi etc. In particular, since it's in the tech news this week, TLC or The Learning Channel which is not all about learning any more, although I'm sure after their recent travails, "lessons will be learned" :-)

License to launch: UK space regulator gives Virgin Orbit satellites the go-ahead

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Second Life

"(Ok, the example takes it to extremes. It's not that bad. But you get the idea)."

I don't agree. That's not an extreme example at all. It's spot on. Compare replacing a pedal, spoke or chain on a bike with a set of blades that are past their Best Before date in a jet engine. There's a good chance you can't even get the specs never mind someone able to make them and get them certified for flight.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: liicences, nor licenses

After all, the BBC don't use "Prime Minister" when talking about the leader of the Irish Parliament. They use the Irish words for Prime Minister and Parliamnet and put the English translation in brackets. Likewise, the Register article about the Indian Manned space programme also use the Indian word for Parliament and then tell us native English speakers that it mean Parliament. So if they can localise for other nationalities, why not for all nationalities?

I assume at some stage we'll all have to call the Indian astronauts by the local Indian designation the same way space articles always differentiate between "western"[*] Astronauts, Russian Cosmonauts and Chines Taikonauts.

* I say "western" because English language media never tells us what the local language words are for the various other nationalities who have been to space are.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I'm confused by all this... @xyz

That brought a tear to my eye, especially as I'm reading it on a Friday evening with a pint of beer in my LOHAN glass tankard :-/

It's time to retire 'edge' from our IT vocabulary

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: What exactly is the edge?

I came here expecting an article about the browser used to download Firefox on a clean Windows install :-)

Fraudulent ‘popunder’ Google Ad campaign generated millions of dollars

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Five finger shuffle?

Lawyer mom barred from Rockettes show by facial recognition tech

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Copyright & data protection

"Dies that answet thevwuestion?"

Replying on a smartphone I presume? :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"So if she isnt working on the case are they trawling the companies websites for profiles, or is there some StalkBook / Linked in mining & matching going on here??"

I wonder if this would be a GDPR issue in the UK or EU? Mis-use of personal data collected without consent?

US sanctions drain Huawei of homegrown advanced chips

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Dark times ahead for ....

"I for one think we are long overdue for another world war"

Two data points don't make a trend. What are you smoking?

UK's Guardian newspaper breaks news of ransomware attack on itself

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Snide, or am I missing something?

Yeah, musty admit I didn't get that either. The only time I've come across quinoa is the dried packets in Lidl or Aldi. So either it's something "posh" I've not come across until it trickled down the food chain or something for "poor" people. It's clearly a swipe at them, but i can't figure out which type of swipe. Maybe tears in the Tofu would have worked better, especially with the alliteration :-)

Don’t expect a Raspberry Pi 5 in 2023, says Raspboss Eben Upton

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Pi5 in 2023, a Pi4 would be nice!

Pimoroni and Rapid are both showing as having RPi3+ in stock at time of this posting.

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: a bit late to this party but

It was rather remiss of you not to notice that something was amiss with your sentence.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How could you

"The parallels between Liz and Musk in their management styles, consensus building, and short-sighted policies has been astounding this year."

Musk seems to be keeping his distance from Amber Heard these days. Might there be an open for Liz in Musks boudoir?

(Try not imagine any offspring they may produce!)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Clean Up In Aisle 3!

"When I saw the first suggestion my dentures were across the room before I could help myself!"

Same here :-|

(Not, not a proper "smiley" since it looks awful with no teeth in)

I am also rather flabbergasted by the poll results so far. El Reg claims that it's readership is primarily North American these days, hence their change in house style. The poll results seem to indicate that either not be true or BoJo has cracked the US market in his search for fame.

Parental control apps prove easy to beat by kids and crims

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Smarter that who?

And yet, we are already at the stage where the parents of school age kids ALSO grew up with computers and technology. Maybe most of them are in the same boat as their kids. They don't really care how it works, just so long is it does, sorta, more or less, does what it's expected to do.

Why would a keyboard pack a GPU and run Unreal Engine? To show animations beneath the clear keys, natch

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Practical tech or art?

Many people have commented on the practical aspects, or lack thereof, of this keyboard. But people are different. I think it looks cool, but I'd not spend that kind on money on a keyboard myself. I'd be happy to see it under my Christmas tree though. Yes, it's bling, and people with more money than sense will probably buy it. But then some people like artwork or china ornaments, neither of which have any practical value to many people. What's the real difference between a cheap Casio digital watch and a Rolex or other high end watch? They both tell the time, but one "looks" nicer than the other :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Numeric Keypads

I wonder just how many people do enough numeric data entry that a separate numeric keypad area is actually required? Certainly back in the pre-Windows days, a LOT of PC (and early computer) use was just getting the data into the damned machine in the first place because so much of it arrived in printed form. I'm not an office based person, so don't really know what most people do in office based situations these days.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: No, I don't think so.

Yeah, they do. But will a USB A to USB C adaptor provide enough power to run the CPU/GPU/display combo? Or would you need an adaptor cable with an additional PSU? And anyway, who in their right mind, being frugal enough to not own any USB C sporting devices would spend $349 on a keyboard? :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Cat hair and crumbs

"I guess you could offset the graphic for where your head normally is in relation to the keys, but if you shift around in your chair they'll be misaligned again."

First paid-for upgrade. Webcam head/eye tracking to adjust the effects for the optimum "experience" (Which will always be just ever so slightly off and laggy, causing nausea for the users) :-)

SystemRescue 9.06 is here with the shiny new Xfce 4.18

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: dd

"Ever since then, when I send a machine for repair, I back up everything important, remove the firmware password,"

Ah yes, the firmware password. The bane of every repairshop. People send their kit in and then some even say they can't tell us the password "for security reasons". I mean, it does depend on exactly what the fault is, but if we need to change the BIOS config, or worse, it's f/w boot password, how the hell are we supposed to properly diagnose and fix the bloody thing? :-)

We have, on occasion, just pulled the relevant parts and tested/fixed/replaced using a test box, but part of our procedure is a full hardware diagnostic in case there are other problems that might need dealing with. Sometimes it gets sent back with "reported fault fixed, no other diagnostics possible due to password protections". Laptops, especially, because we like to make sure more esoteric things like mic, speakers, cameras, BlueTooth, Wifi etc are all ok, which may not be possible if we can't boot to bloody device from external drives.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: dd

I think what they really mean is "it's too hard to run all my favourite Windows programmes on Linux". Which is true in many cases :-)

Brit MPs pour cold water on hydrogen as mass replacement for fossil fuels

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"the Great Reset."

What exactly is your definition of "the Great Reset"?

I'd like to add it to the other four, mainly conflicting ones I've already collected. I'd really like to see just how many varying and conflicting versions there are.

Microsoft patent eyes ads in streaming online games

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Big Brother

Do YOU want a Mokie-Koke!

Of course you do.. Drink Mokie-Koke! Then cleanse the palate with a nice long cool drag on a carcinogenic free Mokie-Smoke before tucking into a Mokie-Kandy Bar. You know you WANT to. Right NOW!!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: YOU WILL BUY.....

EVERYTHING is advertised on the internet. You might not be buying as a result of seeing it advertised on the internet, but pretty much everything you do buy is advertised there. And even you think you are not buying as a result of seeing it advertised, they are still building brand awareness which might lead you yo a later purchase that you only think you independently chose.

Advertising is a tangled web and we're all stuck in it, ad and script blockers not withstanding.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I wonder whatever happened to...

To be fair (spit), the IRS or HMRC are not stand-alone "corporate enterprise" but the revenue generation subsidiaries. The "product" is things like the judiciary system , defence, road building, education system etc., (might vary in some countries that don't have a national education system etc) so not really a great comparison since taxes do pay for stuff we use. Whether you agree with all or even none of the uses of taxes, you do use and benefit from stuff paid for from them. Even the 100% committed anarchist living totally off grid and off the land is still benefiting from the rule of law that says a bigger boy can't just come along and take away your toys :-)

Patch Tuesday update is causing some Windows 10 systems to blue screen

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: On a positive note ...

...DECADES!!!

US Air Force signs $344m deal for hypersonic Mayhem aircraft

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: SABRE?

I have no doubt the US already have all the relevant specs. If they hadn't already acquired them, taking the kit to the US for testing was as good as giving them the tech for free.

In praise of MIDI, tech's hidden gift to humanity

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

That reminds me, not being musical at all, MIDI didn't really come into my awareness other than that some games supported MPU-401 MIDI output and at some stage I acquired a Commodore branded PC sound card that was Soundblaster 16 compatible with an onboard MIDI synth that played much better sounding game music from games which had the MPU-401 option. That sound card lasted through a number of upgrades until there were no longer ISA slots on the new motherboards and anyway, the news Soundblaster cards like AWE32 etc were just as good to my untrained ear.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Foresight is a wonderful thing

"Lot of old keyboards out there companies are too cheap to upgrade."

When the BOFH needs to LART the PFY, he doesn't use a lightweight modern flexi-keyboard with parentage from the realms of laptops. There are good reasons to keep old keyboards, mass being one of them :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: TWAIN being the other thing that leaps to mind from that era...

And if you try to do orchestral manoeuvres, you need a conductor too, who also have a union. You can open Windows, but not the doors, that's the conductors job :-)

Elon Musk starts poll with one question: Should I step down as head of Twitter?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Confused.com

If I vote "Remain"

If I vote "Leave",

I'm a swing voter. I settled for Romaine Leaves with my salad :-)

When we asked how you crashed the system we wanted an explanation not a demonstration

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Timing

"Reported to the boss at 8:15am that all was fixed and he never sent me home."

I'd not have expected my boss to send me home. I'd simply have gone. If he later wondered where I was, I'd tell him. On Tuesday morning when I showed up after a very long sleep :-)

Email hijackers scam food out of businesses, not just money

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I’ve just been sick."

I think that's retching out :-)

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: All too human.

The biggest problem with people who won't own up to their mistakes is that they are also the ones least likely to learn from them and repeat them again and again.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Memories

"AT power connectors had keying. They also came in pairs that also were keyed to each other. I'm not saying you couldn't connect them wrong, just that it would take some effort."

As a field engineer during that time, I can say with absolute confidence that they were NOT all keyed. It did eventually become a sort of standard, but it most certainly wasn't originally. I had case where a new PSU was to be fitted and the connectors on the leads had the key tags on them but the connectors on the system board did not or the key tags were in the wrong place A quick couple of snips with side cutters to remove the key tags and we were back in business, being careful to make sure P8 and P9 were the correct way around :-) (and yes, double and triple checking that it wasn't a special OEM PSU with the same connectors but different wiring before starting the replacement!)

Apple 'created decoy labor group' to derail unionization

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Local union affiliates?

Why aren't these Apple workers organising for State or national unions? It seems really odd hearing about trying to unionise individual stores, one at a time. Why do they need to even organise in the first place? Can't they just join an already existing national or State "retail workers" union or something? They don't even have to tell Apple that they joined until they reach critical mass. Sometimes, individualism works against you.

Plaice in spaaace: NASA boosts astronauts' cognition with piscine diet

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

So, a balanced diet...

...is good for you. No shit Sherlock.

More and varied real food is better than the current diet which they state "meets most dietary requirements", ie not all.

BBC is still struggling with the digital switch, says watchdog

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: BBC 4

"who remembers the excellent "Connections" with James Burke from approx 1980?"

I watched both series just recently. Still very watchable and mostly still relevant today.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Slow moving

"Indeed BBC4 (BBC channel we watch most) is Python parrot like as a free to air service (will soon be online only)"

They already tried that with BBC3, failed, and brought it back as a broadcast channel. Being aimed at "the yoof", that makes me wonder if they simply got it wrong with the format or if "the yoof" actually quite like broadcast TV for some use cases.

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