* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

Page:

Add bacteria to the list of things that can run Doom

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

No, the bacteria can't run it, only display it. The bacteria are being used as a biological e-ink, or LCD panel, they don't run the code.

But other than that minor niggle, good call :-)

The literal Rolls-Royce of EVs is recalled over fire risk

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I'm very disappointed!

Only in Ireland! I think O'Rafferty's Motor Car was worth a couple of pints of Guinness. Or used it as fuel, I forget which :-)

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"If you ask me, it would be kind of pointless to upgrade the OS on some embedded system on a 30 year old train with 20 more years of expected service life"

Yes, they may well go through one or more major refurbishments during their lifetime, but generally that's just the upholstery or maybe the actual seating. The mechanical bits are repaired/refurbed as needed, possibly with a "one off" fleet refurb, but generally the on board control systems are left pretty much as-in, not just for QA approval and safety regulatory reasons, but also the expensive retraining/re-qualification for the drivers if there are substantive changes. Luckily, Boeing don't make trains.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Some fine words...

Speaking of less complex OS', I just watched a Youtube video the other day of a guy running Pimega, the Amiga emulator on a Raspberry Pi. Just for the giggles, he then ran ShapeShifter[*] on the emulated Amiga and had MacOS running faster than it ever did on a real Mac :-) I wonder how many nested emulations it's possible to go with? He could have tried MacOS NES or C64 emulation.

* If you want to try this, apparently ShapeShifter borks on a 68060 emulation so you need to downgrade to a 68040, and turn everything else to the max. Many years ago, on a real Amiga 1200 + '030 accelerator, I installed Windows 3.1 in MSDOS emulation mode. It was painfully slow. So slow, that I discovered the Win 3.1 splash screen is drawn from the bottom up :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Which language? English, Turkish, German or Russian?

Actual disk are only of interest to serious collectors, and they probably have multiple releases/versions already :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

My first paid programming job was to write a system for CNC programmers to use that could select and upload a programme over serial direct to the machines, write the programme to the correct format of floppy disk (both 5.25" and 3.5") for other machines, and write the programme to the paper tape punch for yet more machines. I ended up writing it in the SALT(??) scripting language provided with the Telix[*] comms package for core functionality because it had a "good enough" text editor, so a few file management functions and some external programmes called to handle other stuff. Customer was happy, and I got well paid :-)

* I also looked at Procomm, but the scripting language was less useful. I also considered writing it from scratch, but the lovely comms in Telix + Salt meant a lot less work for me!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yes, they were quite popular in that sort of situation because of Mode7/Teletext mode. Clear and readable text with colour and simple graphics, and the people you were giving information to were already familiar with the "look and feel" so could garner the info they need from the display in a quick glance. An early success in usability :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: RESPONSE IN CAPS

"You could have rendered quoted text in italics, you know."

Is that allowed for Badge-less posters? Or is it just live links they can't do?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Improvement?

"Good luck finding spares and repairs for 3.5" or 5.25" floppy disk drives,"

Gotek drives, beloved of retro computing enthusiasts, were originally developed for industrial uses, such as sewing machines and CNC machines as plug in replacements for physical floppy drivers. Just put the image on a pendrive or SDcard, select the correct image file from the front panel and suddenly the device thinks you just inserted a floppy disk.

There are similar devices using PCCards or SDcards to emulate older hard drives too. USB to Centronics and USB to serial can be a bit hit and miss. Some work well in certain situations while others may not and vice versa. And some printer ports were "bit banged" to make more esoteric devices work, which can also be an issue.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Disappointed

You sure it's not a bus replacement service?

UK lawmakers say live facial recognition lacks a legal basis

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Live Facial Recognition Ethics

"Live Facial Recognition is based on a list of criminals who have already been caught, not on identifying new ones, which, in my opinion, contradicts efforts to rehabilitate these individuals. Should these ex-criminals always be marked as criminals for the rest of their lives? Will their images be on live facial recognition databases until the age of 100, similar to the lifespan of a criminal record in the United Kingdom?"

Good point, and why we need some sort of legal basis, oversight regulator and proper, standardised training. At the very least, faces of "known criminals" should be expunged from the database after all convictions are "spent", ie they have stayed on the straight and narrow (or at least not been caught since!)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Or They Could Just Pull Another Rwanda

...might as well go the whole hog and make Pi = 3 to make those calculations easier when building the new Whitehall revolving doors.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Don't worry, there is no chance of LFR wrongly identifying a person who ends up in prison for half there lives and then is refused a pardon or compensation."

...and being charged for "board and lodgings"

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ignored not just by police forces

And schools. Don't forget schools. I first saw this in action a good few years ago. The CCTV system was live tracking and drawing green and red boxes over detected faces. I didn't ask, but my assumption was that green boxes were faces either properly identified as faces, or possibly had identified the specific person, red for those it either wasn't sure was a face or it had not identified, not sure how advanced it was, but I couldn't think of an obvious reason for it to be boxing in faces in both red and green unless it was identifying specific people, looking for people not in the database.

It took Taylor Swift deepfake nudes to focus Uncle Sam, Microsoft on AI safety

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Why now?

Yes. But also because past generations meant the creator had to have some actual skill as an artist to be able to pull it off. Or skills with physical cut'n'paste photo editing. Or the ability with Photoshop or similar to blend lighting effects to get the realism required. Now, it's possible for kid in living in mommys basement just typing into a computer to tell it what he wants, and refining the text a few times and using the produced images as source for said refinements. Very little skill required, just time and maybe some patience.

Oh, and it's an election year so "Something Must Be Done" about the public outrage du jour. (and if there isn't one, create one!)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Only non-cosensual?

Whose consent would not be required? Remember, "deep fakes", by definition, are intended to portray real people. If it's a non-recognisable person, specifically generated to not resemble anyone specific, then it's "art", not "deep fake".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Misdirection....Of Course!

LOL, "Photoshop automation". My wife would like a copy of that version, once she's stopped laughing at the excuse :-)

I wonder if it can "automate" away my beer gut?

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink tests its tech on a human

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I notice he's not put it in his own brain.

Or, maybe he has, quite some years ago. It might explain a lot :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Future

"It is a wide notion that men think of sex too often. A new study busts that myth. The research in college-age participants suggests that while men do think about sex more often than women, the subject crosses their mind an average of only about 19 times per day, compared to 10 times per day for women."

Hmmm, that's still pretty often to have the barriers slammed down on your thoughts ;-)

Things are going to get weird as the nanometer era draws to a close

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Going to get weird.

I've already reached the point of non-understanding of the techniques and technologies involved and have decided that it's just "magic" now as per the Arthur C. Clarke quote.

Japanese government finally bids sayonara to the 3.5" floppy disk

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

click...click...click...click...click.... :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Don't think it's analogue, but I can imagine that it definitely *is* 1-bit

"This sounds like it shouldn't work- and since it's being done on the cheap I assume that'd be why it *doesn't* work very well!- but it's essentially a very, *very* grungy and low-end version of the same principle underlying the "1-bit" audio encoding used in some very high-end audio systems. (**)"

It's also how we got bleeps and bloops, and even (barely intelligible) speech out of TRS-80s and Commodore PETs with minor mods back in the day by simply playing with frequency and duration of the square wave pulses from the cassette port on TRS-80 and user port on PET.. Years later, the IBM PC built that same function into the system board :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 3.5" floppy discs are not analogue.

"Digital Transformation" (a phrase which the people using it can rarely define clearly, but seems to mean 'sticking all your data on someone else's computers'

being a greybeard, I concur. Although it's not always that people can define it clearly as it has come to mean different things at different times, sometimes overlapping. The first time I heard it was at a company who had no computers at all and were buying in their first one. That was a "Digital Transformation" and billed as such to the peons. Other times it meant getting on-line for the first time, often meaning they had email accounts and maybe some web browser access. More recently, as you say, it's transforming to "cloud", other peoples computers :-)

Amazon calls off $1.7 billion iRobot buy, blames regulators

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

"In this case, and many others, the cheap knockoffs offer better value for money."

Yeah, my wife informed me last year that she'd ordered a robot vacuum cleaner. She normally doesn't do techy like orders without checking with me first so I was a bit surprised. Then she said it was only about 40 quid from China. My heart sunk. I was expecting some crappy bit of tat that wanted all sorts of personal data before allowing it to operate and then would fail do do a decent job.

Imagine my surprise when it turned up, didn't have an app, didn't connect to the Internet, just has a simple remote control. And it actually works quite well. I can't compare with other, more expensive IoT devices, it seems pretty random in the way it maps out it's path, but it does, eventually, go everywhere it's supposed to and is easy to clean and empty. The time it takes isn't all that relevant anyway, since it's left alone in a room we aren't using, and it finds it's way back its charger when it's done. Not sure who she bought it through, Amazon, AliExpress, Temu, whateverrrrrr :-)

GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Net Zero

"- If they want to see some landmarks or stay at the beach, redirect them to Argos to buy a fan, heater, lamp and beach coconut room scent and grab bottle of Rum at Sainsbury's. Throw in discount at local tanning shop. For landmarks send a link to some YouTuber reviewing the landmark."

I was thinking along similar lines, but hadn't got to the Youtuber idea. My idea was for personalised local tour guides with VR cameras live streaming to your shiney new VR headset :-)

Advancing towards net zero and giving the holiday spot locals alternative employment to serving drinks or waiting tables.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: All the more reason

S'ok, they'll just install ChatGPT on board.

The real significance of Apple's Macintosh

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Trollface

20, 30, 35, 40th anniversaries

"When it turned 20, we looked at how it was a mold-breaking computer. When it was 30, we devoted two separate installments to key points in the machine's history; and at 35"

You'd thing a techie/IT rag would be celebrating nice round binary or hexadecimal number anniversaries rather than boring divisible by 5 or 10 decimal ones!

Admittedly, the downside is that they become ever further apart and many of us might be dead before the next "round" number anniversary :-)

Cruise being investigated over car crash that dragged victim along the road

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Texas Uni AI

I wonder if academia actually believes the hype on AI and if they, in private, actually call it AI? The university management, on the other hand, probably don't care what it's called so long as it or what it does generates new patents as it "speed advances in health care, drug development, materials and other industries"

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "The system, nicknamed Vista"

It'd be safer to just go and get The Internet Box and destroy it :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: +1 for Carlin

"We, as fleshbags, are not allowed to, or at least ethically, should not copy/plagiarise other peoples' work and I don't see why it should be any different for AI systems and their manipulators"

Yes, it's step beyond "tribute bands".

That runaway datacenter power grab is the best news for net zero this century

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Trollface

"To which I was pointing out that politics is not at all an easy or minor problem, and I feel pessimistic about that."

And, so far, no one has even mentioned "TERRORISTS!!!!" yet :-)

Lot's of nuclear material scattered in small units all over the country/world. Much harder to keep secure than a few large, well fenced off sites. There will be "DIRTY BOMBS" going of all over the place, mark my word!!!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "well away from risk factors like other industrial installations that could go messily wrong"

I'd imagine the shock wave from that explosion might well have killed spinning disk even further afield too.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Iceland

"There's a lot to be said for building data centers in deserts. Lots of unoccupied open land, efficient cooling with evaporation,"

Pretty much the prime definition of a desert is no or minimal water so you may need to get truck or pipe water in and than try to come up with a closed loop, or near closed loop evaporative cooling system that doesn't corrode away too quickly.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Zero

"the only viable ones would be those that generate genuine value, or that someone is prepared to run on a non-profit basis.

I came here to ask what you would define as "genuine value", then the rest of the sentence sunk in and it appears you mean those that at least make enough money to pay for running the service. I'm pretty sure generating cash flow is not the only definition of "genuine value".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: 1954...

Even if the standard was agreed today and the first production units were being delivered tomorrow, it would take at least 10-15 years to get one installed in the UK. Planning permission and anti-nuclear protestors objecting at all stages and going to court to challenges every time they find an uncrossed "t" or undotted "i", appealing to the next court up when they fail, camping out in trees, digging tunnels and doing everything else in their power to slow down the transition to any form of green energy, which is, sadly and entirely unironically in their eyes, completely contradictory to their stated aims.

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: If you share you password with me...

"I keep "upsetting" our IT support by refusing to share my password with them when "they need to make changes". Isn't that what admin accounts are for?"

Where I work, just asking for someone's password starts a disciplinary process if the person being asked is a bastard or suspects it's a "security check" and reports it

Hubble telescope spots tiniest water-rich world in orbit

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "located in the constellation Pisces"

Orion does! I've seen the documentary :-)

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

Guess the company: Takes your DNA, blames you when criminals steal it, can’t spot a cyberattack for 5 months

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

$6,000,000 per "print"?

Anyone not getting that reference is too young :-)

JAXA releases photo of SLIM lander in lunar faceplant

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Thrusters

"One wonders why the JAXA probe/lander did not have a much larger footprint so that when it landed, it would not tip over ?"

Probably for the same reason they tried this novel way of landing without using landing legs. Mass savings for more science packages.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Thrusters

...and the first Swedish one to arrive as a self-assembly flat pack?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Thrusters

"Any attempts are likely to be given to engineers with spare time on their hands to work out how future rovers might include self-righting equipment."

Maybe they could have a chat with some of the Robot Wars/BattleBots teams?

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

Re: It goes right here

"I still chuckle every time I cross the Sydney Harbour bridge as I wonder how many millions it costs to sleep where my desk used to be)."

The delicious irony, of course, being that you got paid to sleep there?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A Classic Case ...

"Of course everyone knows the words printed against tick boxes have no meaning, they're just to decorate the page before you add the ticks"

Yeah, I remember the discussion with the manager of the local dealer that serviced my car when I queried how well I could trust the service checklist which claimed the technician had "cleaned/greased sunroof rails" and "topped off automatic transmission fluid", neither of which my car had. He'd just ticked every box on the sheet. I wasn't oo bothered since it was a company car and I wasn't paying. The second time, I was more vocal in my complaint. The 3rd time, our fleet manager escalated it to the manufacturer and it never happened again. It even looked like the ticks had been done at different times during the process as they no longer looked identical all the down the page and there were dirty fingerprints on it :-)

Virgin Media comes top of the flops for customer complaints

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The cost cutting started when Liberty Global bought VM. Gotta make back that sunk cust ASAP, any way, any how.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Yes, but

Careful what you say when referring to Apple :-)

From your link "It was originally created by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston of Software Arts and first released in 1979 for the Apple II....It was one of the first commercial packages available when the IBM PC shipped in 1981.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Yes, but

"They had a lower capacity than a 1.44Mb 3.5" disk (IIRC, 180K per side), "

The Amstrad PCW came out in 1985, two years before the 1.44MB 3.5" floppy. It was, however, contemporaneous with the 720KB 3.5" floppy disks. By 1987, when the 1.44MB 3.5" disks arrived, Amstrad had updated to double density, 360KB per side or 720KB per disk. A few years later, they switched to 3.5" disks on the PCW, probably because they had now became cheaper than the now obsolete 3" drives. Bearing in mind it was built to a price, I wonder if an 8-bit Z80 CPU could manage with an HD 3.5" 1.44MB floppy or if they simply didn't see the point in changing again. After all, the target market wasn't power users :-)

Sometimes people just don't remember (or weren't there to know) just how fast computers were evolving back then and the various routes hardware makers went down only to find they chose the wrong route. There was no real reason those 3" drives could not have been double sided, they just got beat out by the Matsushita 3.5" format. It could have been one of the other competing formats that were also aiming to out compete and out perform the 5.25" floppies that had reigned supreme. At least we never standardised on the IBM 4" floppy!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Yes, but

Did VisiCalc make it to DOS? It was the first spreadsheet I used, on a TRS-80 no less! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: the Ribbon is a terrible UI

"For me it was a revelation in WIMP interfaces that all the things you could do were discoverable somewhere in the menus."

Today, I had to actually print out an email from Outlook. I don't often use Windows, let alone Outlook. I must have spent 10 minutes looking for a way to print that bloody email before I finally noticed an extra (pale gray) search box in the top of the menu ribbon. So I typed "print" into it and it immediately gave me the print options I was looking for. I still have no idea if there is a print option you can actually find and click on in the menu.

In retrospect, I should have tried hitting Ctrl-P, maybe that would have worked, but it was end of day, I was in a hurry and I was a bit overwhelmed by the 6 million menu options in the menu bar that I've never used or needed before ;-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

"When I queried this I was flamed and told use the keyboard and mouse to drag and resize a window."

I had the same issues until I change the theme. On a slightly more positive note though the "standard" (CUA compliant??) keyboard shortcuts do work, eg alt-space for the window menu :-)

Boeing goes boing: 757 loses a wheel while taxiing down the runway

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: click bait

Well, to be fair, a car or truck with 4 wheels and three tyres is more easily drivable than a car or truck with 3 wheels. Not quickly, or safely, but drivable nonetheless :-)

Page: