* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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India's – and Infosys's – favorite son-in-law Rishi Sunak is next UK PM

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Talking points

"especially if you look back to the last ice-age, when the most of the land mass here was covered in ice-sheet, so fairly slim pickings..."

And even more especially when you consider that what we now call the English Channel and most of the North Sea (that wasn't under ice) was dry land so what is now an island was just a sticky out bit of the European mainland. Migration was a simple matter of walking to wherever the best hunting was :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Talking points

OMG/ It's true. Even a stopped clock can be right twice a day :-)

Throw enough mud and eventually some sticks.

Starlink decoded for use as GPS alternative – without Elon Musk's help

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: muskiness

"Taxing him 75% of any take-home over the first billion in any year would have almost no effect in 9 out of ten years!"

Yeahbut, the OP was talking about taxing 75% of gross, not net. And he wanted that tax on the billionaires and the multinationals. That would bring in enormous amounts of tax the first year and then nothing in subsequent years since they'd close up shop.

I may be wrong of course because the OP failed to mention what he meant by "gross". Gross turnover? Gross income? Gross profit? 144? Just being horrible and icky?

Data loss prevention emergency tactic: keep your finger on the power button for the foreseeable future

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The National Health Service

"I work in research for one of the big pharma and the aim is generally to cure."

That almost certainly is the case in R, maybe even in D. But I think he's suggesting that the beancounters at the top may not share those lofty ideals. Whether that would be possible without whistleblowers is another matter, something you may be able to shed some light on. (bear in mind you may have to respond to conspiracy theorists claiming cartels with government links and even the Illuminati before you do answer) :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Figures.

It couldn't work on a modern system anyway. Hit the power button accidentally and you are toast. Single press, it goes into the shutdown sequence. Panicking and holding the button down is worse. Much worse. Hard shutdown! There is no second chance, no matter how quick your reactions.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The "half click" and related moves

"Laptops might be considered somewhat differently, as they often have a plastic shell, but this is almost always screwed onto a metal chassis that holds the internal components in place.They don't even really have a case, to speak of."

Plastic laptops are not that uncommon, especially consumer and low to middle range enterprise. The "palm rest" bit of the case is, in effect, the chassis. The only substantial metal in them are brackets shaped to fit over the PCD mounted sockets, USB ports etc and the screen hinges. Some, but not all, may have metal stiffeners up either side of the LCD panel.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The "half click" and related moves

"I built a pc with new case recently and it was metal, in fact I have never seen a pc without a metal case ,"

There were many PC brands using plastic cases with some form of inner metal shielding such a vapour deposition of copper or a stuck on tinfoil like coating. Amstrad[*] in particular were always plastic cases. Actually more expensive for small runs, the moulds cost big money, but much cheaper if you are going mass market and IIRC, Amstrad started out as a plastics moulding company before they got into electronics and computers.

Plenty other brands used plastic cases too, but often that was just the outer panelling, the inner chassis skeleton being metal.

[*] and yes, I mean PCs, not their earlier 8 bit stuff. PC1512 up to at least their x386 based kit.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Another sign of the migration of El Reg Westwards?

"I don't think Paris followed him."

I was going to suggest the Mme Dabbsie would have strong words to say about that if she had followed him. Then I realised two things. 1) We've never actually seen Mme Dabbsie. 2) Dabbsie and Paris disappeared at about the same time. Ergo, Mme Dabbsie is Paris :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: pedant says...

"I like to point out the american tendency to use pre-revolutinary units does not match well with their image of themselves"

Especially when you consider the inventors of the Metric system, the French, significantly bankrolled the uprising in the colonies :-)

NASA picks its UFO-hunting – sorry – unidentified aerial phenomena-hunting team

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Still all oddballs staring at the moon but...

Agreed. If you watch those shows through the eyes of a sceptic, there are some interesting photos and videos from otherwise credible witnesses. Some seem fairly obvious, but the talking heads and narrator will big up the UFO angle as much as possible. Some are less obvious, and while still not agreeing with the show that it's aliens, there is something strange or odd. In the case of video evidence, I find many of those shows only show the bit of the film that supports their claim. They will probably tell you, if challenged, that they only have so long per episode so can't show everything in it's entirety. But they do have the time to show the shortened clip multiple time while cutting to and from talking heads. I remember one in particular where they claimed "alien orbs" and I thought "insects really close to the camera". They cut the video short right at the point where we would be able to see if the "alien orb" passed in front of or behind the bush that was about 2-3 metres away.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I have always found it an interesting phenomenon, that since the advent of pretty much everyone now carrying mobile phone cameras with high resolution, the number of reports of alien visitations, has dropped off a cliff."

If anything, there are many more "sightings". The problem is that the people holding the cameras have no fucking idea how to take photos or video! Back in the days of film cameras, I'd suggest that they were more expensive to buy and very much more expensive to use, so people tended to at least learn the basics of how to use them. Wasted shots cost money! Modern people with modern "point and click" phones expect the phone to do all the work for them. Hell, most of them have no idea you can rotate the phone 90o to take in a wider shot! And most of them swing the phone around wildly like they're dancing the Pogo on steroids. Billions more cameras out there and far fewer useful images.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

Yeahbut, everything you just described are identified, not unidentified.

How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"What I take away from that is that I am mid-Atlantic and I strongly suspect we all will be eventually."

Or speaking Mandarin ;-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: But some of us prefer the Encheferizer.........

Yes, dragging the keeper through the piss she'd previously deposited on the floor, making the dragging action that much easier with a lubricant. It's almost as if she planned it :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Why not do server-side substitution when rendering the page - default to UK/US spelling based on IP2geo or user preference?"

It'd a far more fun to have a client-side plug-in to switch between US/UK locale but have it render server-side :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Advertisers are funny. They all want to differentiate their products and push their own USP. But when it comes to placing adverts, they all want "safe", "same" and shy away from "unique" places, locations or websites.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: ∞↔ ∘ ∘

That was so bad, you ought to have posted as anonymous poltrron!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: The word "Math" is ...

Whatever you want it to be.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: The word "Math" is ...

Clearly Jake COULD care less :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

* I am not a linguist"

But you are cunning!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not wounded pride.

"The problem is that it sometimes makes it much less intelligible - you can figure out what you think it means, but understanding isn't always instant, as it would be with the version and phraseology that you are used to."

Should we table that motion?[1]

[1] Was I writing in American or English? Are you reading it in American or English? If you make the wrong choice you will take the exact opposite in meaning that that which was intended. Especially confusing if it's a meeting involving people from both sides of the Atlantic.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not wounded pride.

"I dunno about that ... virtually everyone I know in the UK will claim to be CofE if asked"

Many people seem to be averse to answering "none of the above" to the question of religion. And many who never visit a church for a service in the lives will still get married in a church, have their children baptized and have a religious ceremony for their funeral. Primarily because "it's the done thing", although since the relaxation on the rules over where you can be married have been relaxed, churches have lost a fair chunk of the wedding business. When the choice was the council registry office or a church, most chose the church because they wanted some sort big ceremony because of the "fairy tale princess effect". Now they go off to fancy country hotels and the like which gives even more opportunity to "splash the cash" and prove they too can spend the first 10 years of married bliss paying off the bills for the bash!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not wounded pride.

"first, the effort to translate it all to American, and now the effort to offer some sort of sticking plaster for doing so."

Which interesting in itself. There's been way more blow-back over going all out American than there ever was over each author using whatever version of English they felt most comfortable with. Lots' effort and lots of complaints, versus the status quo of no effort and only a few complaints.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Stand down

"No surprises there - BoJo has pulled out"

Now there's a first! How many kids has he got again?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"I won't lie, that rankles slightly with me, but it's not a deal-breaker, so long as the style of humour stays the same!"

Agreed. Although as a general observation, here in the UK we get a lot of US TV and films and are expected to be clever enough to understand the difference in accents and culture. The reverse seems to be less true. Having said that, even in the US, TV seems to think people are not clever enough to understand American English if it's spoken with a local accent. I've seen US documentaries aimed at a US audience and some people speaking English in their local accent get sub-titled[1]. Even I, as a Brit who has never been to the US can understand what is being said, so just who are those sub-titles aimed at? Is it part of the dumbing down of US education? Is El Reg part of it? Are you confused yet? You will be after this weeks episode of Soap![2]

[1] In case any left-pondians need a translation, I believe sub-titles are called closed-captions (or close-?) over there :-)

[2] Yeah, we've been getting imports for a loooong time now.

Biden wants SpaceX to beam internet to Iran amid uprising

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

"Thank <deity> astronomers are generally non-violent, eh?"

Big Banger Vs Steady State --- FIGHT!!!!!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Irony

You barely mention the UK in that but the US only got involved because the UK asked for help due to the Iranian government nationalising the oil industry after failing to negotiate a handover from the British owned British-Iranian Oil Company who pretty much had a strangler hold on the entirely of the Iranian oil wealth.

On the other hand, unlike with Suez where the US did NOT get involved (no oil), in the case of Iran, they DID get involved (lots of oil). There may be a pattern there.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Pirate radio?

You may be confusing the French with Parisiennes. An easy mistake to make :-) The French are lovely people.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Pirate radio?

"I think you meant It's just like people saying UK when they mean England."

So people saying USA when they mean one of the constituent States?

England is one of the "states" that comprise the UK, so anyone from any of the constituent "states" that make up the UK is correct if they say they are from the UK.

Boffins shatter data transmission speed record

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: the transmission managed to hit 1.84Pbps over 7.9km (4.9 miles) of fiber line

"Only thing missing is details on the type of fibre line being used and its connectors."

...and what hardware is at the receiving and whether it can cope with routing the data at that speed :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: cool, so price drop

Don't be silly! The price is what you have to pay and bears no relationship whatsoever to the cost of supply.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Are boffins sort of like puffins who can solve tech things?

Honestly, just find it odd for a tech site to use headlines that belong in a British tabloid. It’s one stop short of calling engineers “a bunch of geeks.”

Seriously? You signed up as a commentard back in June 2010, and possibly were reading the site for a some while before then, and you STILL don't get the "house style"? And you managed to miss the many articles using the word "boffin" where someone else made the comments and had to have it explained to them?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

Re: More like a modem...

They may need a magnifying glass with a graduated scale. And a year or so of training on how to use it :-)

OpenBSD 7.2: The other other FOSS xNix released, runs on Apple M2 Macs

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Early days

I was disappointed for years that all the wonderfully amazing functionality of LDOS on an 8-bit Z80 TRS-80 never seemed to catch on. System libraries loaded/unloaded on demand, system overlays when addition features or functions are needed then unloaded, device independent drivers so you route print jobs a file instead, a print spooler, device "filters" to change a devices behaviour, a proper Job Control Language and too many other clever features to mention normally only seen on mainframes and minis!

Anyone not old enough to have used LDOS or maybe are but never came across it (and the later TRS-DOS 6 which is LDOS re-branded by Tandy to replace their in-house TRS-DOS, really ought to at least take a look at the contents page in the link above to see what it was it about.

Why are PC webcams crap? Lenovo says it knows the reason

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

So, to summarise the article...

...someone tells top Lenovo gut that laptop webcams and microphones are shite. Top Lenovo guy agrees.

Did I miss something?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: on that note...

"Yet we still often wind up with fuzzycam when chatting to each other. Seems weird."

Well, it's going via TLA servers and they have tens of thousands of streams to handle, so they compress them down in transit :-)

New measurement alert: Liz Truss inspires new Register standard

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Horse feed

It's also used as a support when you have a hernia.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: But is this unit not superfluous?

"(Yes, yes, I know it's not quite 1024 either)"

Close enough for Government work!! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "September 6 - October 20"

"She was appointed PM early afternoon on 6th September, and resigned at lunch time 20th October."

So she's actually PM when appointed by the monarch? In that case, despite announcing her intent to resign as PM, she's still the PM until her boss accepts it, which will be sometime in the morning of Tuesday, 25th.

It's relatively rare for a resignation to be immediate. It almost always comes with a "notice period", during which work carries on to some extent.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Decimal?

No, that's <a href="https://autosaveisforwimps.substack.com/>Autosave is for wimps</a> :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Delighted ...

I suspect it became clear that Boris would struggle to get the 100 nominations and despite his public clowning around, not getting the 100 nominations would be too much for his ego. I was more concerned that Penny held on the bitter end despite it appearing she had even less chance of getting the 100 nominations. It looked like the Boris supporters switched to Rishi and Penny was hoping they'd swing her way. She claimed, on bowing out at the last minute, that is was for the good of party unity. If that was the case, why didn't she concede early Monday morning?

Then there slimy Rees-Mogg, Minister for Workhouses. Strongly supporting Boris then immediately switching his full support to Rishi. That comes across very much as supporting whoever wins, even if it's not his first choice. He doesn't come across as someone who will support "the leader" whoever it is for the good of the party and the country. He demonstrated that during both this and the previous leadership campaigns with his public statements. He's not the only one, but he's the most obvious and notable one.

I just hope Rishi Sunak has the balls to put people into jobs because of what they can do, not who they supported. Truss was notable for sacking pretty much every Sunak supporter and putting in place nobodies who she probably promised top jobs to for their support.

IBM withholds healthcare subsidies from some retirees

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

unseen contract terms?

If I'm reading this correctly, IBM are insisting people take out new contracts or agree to contact terms changes, sight unseen.

Surely even in the USA, where contracts are king, this is illegal? I must have missed something because this just sounds completely wrong and not even IBM could think they might get away with that.

Team Interpol: Metaverse Police

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Coincidence?

Is it a coincidence that this story comes out with the launch of the new TV series The Peripheral based on William Gibsons book?

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Manual is optional,

To be fair, "any key" rarely actually means that literally. Most "any key" routines will not work if the user presses Shift, Alt, Ctrl, Fn Pause/Break and/or some other keys.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Manual is optional,

Bugger! Oh well, just proving the rule. Any post correcting a spelling mistake must include a new spilling mistake ;-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Bad design

Skoda. Same company though.

The light icon on the stalk is the high beam switch :-)

Oops, web trackers may have leaked 3 million patients' info

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Why in the fsck...

"Why in the fucking name of fuck would any organization, much less a health care organization, send any personally identifying or healthcare data to Fuckerberg?!?"

Probably because they get the analytics for free, the data being grabbed is the value that FB want.

Amazon hit with $1bn claim that secretive Buy Box algorithm screws shoppers

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Without merit?

First off, is "without merit" some sort of legal term or just something every $big_Corp happens to say whenever they are accused of something because all their PR departments have come to the exact same decision to use that particular phrase?

"An Amazon spokesperson told The Register the complaint to the tribunal is "without merit."

According to the spokesperson, Amazon is "confident that will become clear through the legal process,"

So, if they are so "confident" the case has "no merit", surely that will come out in the pre-trial evidence collection and assessment and the case will be thrown out. If it does go to court, then clearly the judicial system system thinks it DOES have some merit and Amazon are clearly wrong in their opinion ;-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Raise a lawsuit or open your eyes and mind a little

"The other thing is if you go to a retail park with 2 supermarkets should each one have next to each product (that it applies to) that it is cheaper at the other supermarket? Should there be a person there to point this out to you, or flashing red lights to warn you away from the product?"

If the retail park owners are acting as agents for all the shops on site and listing all their goods in one convenient place so you can more easily choose, then yes, they should. They should not be pushing products based on how much the shop owner is paying them and "hiding" the fact other shops also sell the same products at a different price. Amazon is not only the retail park owner, they also have the biggest supermarket of their own on the retail park. If you provide an aggregation service and are also a supplier, them there is a clear conflict of interest, especially if you are also a major supplier. That's why we have regulations, regulations and laws. The US discovered this back in the 1800 with oil, steel, railroads etc. They called them "robber barons" because they used their power as suppliers to control the markets and remove the competition.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How is this different to promotional product placement on supermarket shelves?

The primary difference is that in a supermarket, the cheaper options are not hidden away in another room via a security door. Similar items and brands are on the same shelves in the same aisle. The most they can do to push you towards specific products is put them on the eyeline shelf and the other brands above or below eyeline. There are other small, psychological tricks they can try, but few are proven to actually work. If someone wants the cheapest option, it's simple for them to find it. Only the frit and veg is more difficult since they often sell bagged items by item count and loose by weight. The loose is almost always cheaper, but sometime it's worth putting a bagged item on the provided customer scales and checking :-) And the supermarket may well earn more if you buy their preferred option, but they don't actually care that much so long as you do buy something rather than go somewhere else. Personally, I use a number of shops based on price, quality and convenience and the mood I'm in at the time. I never get a full "shop" in one supermarket because they don't all sell the same stuff and based on my personal choices, not theirs.

Supermarket buyers tactics and their stranglehold over much of the supply chain is another matter.

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