* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25181 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Uber Australia to pay $178M to settle cabbies' class action

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Coat

AU$272 million ($178 million)

Thanks for telling us the fine is $272m in Oz dollars, but what countries $ is the 178m in? Is it the Canadian or Fujian dollar?

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"tell us to take out custom elsewhere."

The problem is that they are ALL doing it. If you complain, odds are you'll get no response, but if they do deign to responds, they'll waffle on about how it only take s a few seconds of your time and will help "improve" the service. They never, never will understand that few seconds, minutes, whatever, mounts up when they are all doing it and it pisses off every customer. Almost every interaction with a business these days results in a "feedback survey" by email or phone. And the survey NEVER has a free form reply where you can complain about the waste of time the survey is!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Likewise, Outlook for Android (it's a "managed" work phone, I don't have a choice) asks me EVERY DAY if I want to make O365 the default app to open PDFs. EVERY DAY I click no and the next day it ASKS AGAIN. How many time do I have to tell it no? For all eternity, it seems. All it does is make me hate MS even more. Unfortunately, as far as my job is concerned, I can avoid them.

Microsoft license shuffle means Power Apps users could break the bank

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Can someone tell me [REXX]

Thanks, I'll have a closer look at that, but on first glance, it doesn't seem to do the "killer app" thing that AREXX does in that AREXX, as part of the AmigoOS utils suite, was supported by quite a few Amiga apps which were built to work with AREXX. From what I read at the REXX link, it seems, more or less, like any other scripting language, albeit with what appear to be some very useful custom extension. It certainly looks useful though, and fairly familiar from my Amiga days, which should make picking it up a breeze :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

With Oracle dounbling their costs...

...it seems as though the vendor lock-in has reached the stage where the suppliers really don't care if a few customers leave so long as they can pull the old bait and switch and gouge the majority of remaining customers who can't or don't know how to leave.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Can someone tell me

PowerApps sounds a bit like AREXX I used to use on the Amiga. Scripting that could control other programs which had AREXX ports, sending them commands do things and responding to status or data coming back from them. It was an incredibly powerful system under the hood that in my recollection, few people understood or used.

I never used the original REXX on IBM(??) mainframes, but I assume it was the same thing. So once again we have a reinvention of something from the past branded as new and innovative by the "cool kids" because they wrapped a GUI around it :-)

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I bet in spite of the usability angle, there is little to no fingerprint support

"It’s the red line that’s stopping me going for Linux"

(Ignoring the biometrics/passowrd argument, other have already made that point)

While I can't speak for any/all Linux distros or any other OEMs, the diags tool I use on a daily basis for Lenovo laptop repairs is based on some Linux version or other and includes drivers for the fingerprint reader test, so it's doable. And if it's doable, I'd assume at least some Linux distros support it.

I'm currently running FreeBSD 13.2 on an ancient i5 based Toshiba Tecra and according to dmesg:

ugen0.3: <vendor 0x08ff Fingerprint Sensor> at usbus0

I've never felt the need to see how the driver works or interacts with the OS though, but the fact it identifies at a Fingerprint Sensor bodes well. Normally, device that need special drivers or are not supported generally show us an unknown device. Having said that, I just googled "freebsd fingerprint reader support" and the very first link is a blog post from 2014 explaining how to set it up and referencing it being based on earlier Linux support.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Coincidence...

It's also worth noting that it's that usual when adminning Windows or supporting Windows users to end up in a command shell running commands tor powershell scripts to fix stuff :-)

Most Windows users will run screaming from that and leave it to their support people to deal with (or don't have access privileges to do it anyway.) Using Linux in a corporate environment would almost certainly be locked down in a similar manner and most normal users would rarely, probably never, see a command line.

On the other hand, Windows Troubleshooters, while not always that great, do seem to manage to fix quite a lot of the basic stuff that normal everyday users come across, they just don't seem to know they are there. I know our 1st line support report a fair number of users "issues" are solved using them and try to educate the users on how to use them for future reference.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Coincidence...

"Linux applications can typically be installed with click or two via whatever "software store" is used."

I have sometimes wondered if the "store" app in most Linux distros could be improved by hiding, in a "general user" mode, anything that is not directly a runnable app, possibly even limiting to GUI apps only, for those less technically minded users who are simply browsing the repos looking for interesting stuff to play with. Most of the solutions I've seen tend to be "show everything, including the 300 libraries that are only ever installed by other apps" and/or "group stuff by relatively wide definitions, but still include all the libraries etc" causing the useful stuff to be lost in a sea of things most users don't understand or need to know about.

Most users neither care nor want to know about libavcodec, they just want to install and use VLC or HandBrake :-) The sort of person who needs to or wants to install specific libraries are probably using whatever the distro command line installer is anyway, and obviously the GUI installer will have an "advanced" mode too.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

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Re: Interesting

"Why didn't Ferrari guy get a server version of the Mac and/or just tweak the OS to be a real server? All the OS updates would have been unnecessary. And there ain't anything that says you must issue updates immediately; just wait until the weekend and update everything at your leisure. Patch Tuesday and Apple Update Day for me are usually Saturdays. All of that running around was absolutely unnecessary."

Yeah, I'm not an Apple user, but shirley even Apple can't be so incompetent that an update to one device would cause it to not be able to talk to another device on the same network until that device was at the same patch level. At worst, I could see a possible patch to SMB to enforcing a new version and defaulting to not supporting pervious versions for security reasons, but that has to be a pretty rare occurrence.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Maybe a typical Oz thing?

"Holden Commodore 5.3 litre V8"[bit]

Did it play Bubble Bobble or Turrican?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Walk away

If it was Capita, IBM or their ilk, with on army of lawyers on call to make sure the contract is airtight and fully details precisely their responsibilities and all the get-out clauses, yes, but most smaller operations will not have that level of legalese in their contracts so can often be trapped in unprofitable support roles by cheap and nasty clients.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Aaron?

That was almost a good joke but a bit of a stretch!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Pint

Friday comes but once a week

"Thirsty folk will tell you it's always twelve o'clock somewhere, but Friday comes but once a week"

On the plus side, it's Friday for about 48 hours someone in the world :-)

UK minister tells telcos to share telegraph poles if they can't lay cable underground

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Carbon savings

"The ongoing maintenance has to be more than underground lines."

Different budget. Maintenance isn't capital spend. And anyway, that's next years budget and someone else's problem 'cos management will have moved on by then and took their bonuses with them! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Interesting Choice

To be fair, it's not the poles or pylons that generally have a problem with the wind. It's the trees that blow onto them. At one time, if it looked like a tree was going to be a problem, it would be cut down. Nowadays, all trees seem to be sacrosanct, no matter the risk to infrastructure, and any hint that a tree may need to be cut down to prevent storm damage results in letters to the editor and Swampy's pals building tree houses in them! Heritage steam railways have a similar issue, except in their case it's a fire risk that used to be dealt with and now involves months of planning requests and environmental surveys,

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: They do.

"That sounds much better than around here, where CityFibre have recently been along my street adding a new pole 5ft away from each BT pole. Most of the BT poles only appear to have a handful of cables on them."

Odds are that BT would require a rental fee to use the poles, ongoing, forever, which will have paid for itself after a year or two. Profit! So CityFibre looked at what BT wanted and decided to put their own poles in, paid off in "saved" BT pole rental in two years and so "savings!!" In the end, BT lost potential income and CityFibre spent more than they need to.

The obvious and fair solution, with wins all around, is for BT to charge half the new pole installation cost as a one off fee for using their poles. If a 3rd supplier comes along and wants in on the act, they pay 1/3rd of the new pol installation cost, again as a one off fee, but that payment is split two ways between BT and CityFibre. Cost of maintaining the poles is split between the poles users with the initial pole owner deciding what to do and when unless other pole users can demonstrate issues with the poles affecting their services. Same system can apply to underground ducts too. Someone pays once to put the duct in, any future users can pay their "share", as a one off for access.

Of course, the pole and duct owners can't then gouge the other suppliers, so of course it won't happen without regulation and/or laws and it goes against the grain of capitalism.

Oh look, cracking down on Big Tech works. Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi surge on iOS

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Google should not be able to decide what is the standard by simply unulaterally including it into their browser."

"This website works best with MSIE6. Actually, it ONLY works with MSIE6. And the special Active-X plug you can download ONLY from this site is mandatory. We recommand you use MSIE6 + the special Active-X plug-in to download the special Active-X plug-in"

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"It wasn't until there was some competition that all of a sudden they decided it was worth putting some work into it."

Which, funnily enough, proves the benefits of competition, even it it does mean a smidgen more costs for the players.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Brexit Bonus?

I think the fact they excluded Iceland et al who "all but EU members" means it's extremely likely they will exclude NI too,

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"It just didn't work as well as Edge and the design was clunky and slow,"

Or, maybe, Edge is much more tightly integrated into the OS that by definition it's going to work better in some circumstances. There are parts of Windows where no matter your default browser choice, MS STILL uses Edge, despite your choice. ie exactly the behaviour that forced the EU browser choice on MS back in 2010. Their spots haven't changed, they just temporarily covered them over and now the camouflage is degrading while they hope that enough people in the EU have forgotten and it might take yet another 5-10 years to take action.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "make their websites dependant on Google's proprietary features"

"I'm looking at you Microsoft."

And game devs! It's been an issue ever since the IBM AT came out, faster and more expensive than an XT :-)

CPU power, RAM volume and GFX capabilities for new games always seem to be that much faster/higher/better than most users have.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ah! Memories!

In my job, the kit we service has excellent online, free[*], searchable service manuals for all of the (well known) OEMs we deal with. Compared with 10-20 years ago, I find them much improved not only in terms of availability but in terms of being current, with links to fault finding and all sorts of resources I'd previously have to hunt down or even pay significant money for, if they even existed. This may not apply across the industry, or in other industries, or to consumer grade kit, but my experience can only be described as positive :-)

* not always freely available to all, I admit. Most offer at least the service manuals to all, some restrict some information only to authorised "partners" and "service techs", but it is all there but generally, it's not hard to find the teardown info, f/w, drivers and all the stuff you need for 95% of the work, even if not an "authorised" technician. Few offer the circuit diagrams mind, but 99% of the time, you don't want or need that level of detail unless you are working to a tight budget and the kit is out of warranty, which doesn't happen in my job :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ah! Memories!

"many videos are surprisingly content-free!"

That's how most of our ongoing training is delivered. The best way to deal with it IME is to blast through as quickly as possible and do the test while it's still fresh in the mind. The real training happens when you are on site in front of the broken kit and have the service manual open :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Alien

Re: V'Ger

Well, the article does state "Engineers are hopeful that the veteran spacecraft Voyager 1 might have turned a corner", so it's either found a new fuel source and figured out how to top up the tanks, it slingshotted around a previously unknown gravity well, or aliens! :-)

Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Capabilities.

"And me! Was just watching Scott Manley's review here-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8htMpR7mnaM"

He also pointed out something I'd not noticed in the live stream. There was still some pressure in the cargo hold as seen by the wisps of vapour, which then proceeded to rush towards the hatch when it opened. I wonder if that could be an issue, eg causing a "thrust" and possible rotation? I suppose it depends on how much remaining pressure there was. Although it was interesting to see a real life demonstration of a pressure loss in space. It didn't look as violent as Hollywood shows us :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Basically

Considering that SpaceX is the only company using mainly re-usable spacecraft and the Starship prototypes are intended to be fully re-usable, that's an interestingly wrong observation from you. If you want to attack Musk over something credible, I'll probably join in with you, but picking on the one thing SpaceX is doing right that no other launcher is yet doing is so far off the target, the proverbial barn door must be on a different planet to you!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"The payload doors looked like they had some movement, but it's not clear how successful that was yet."

It looked a bit thin and "cheap" to me. It seemed to be flexing when trying to close it. Looks like it needs some strengthening.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

While I sort of agree with you, I would dispute that "enormous amounts of land that has to be cleared for them". Here in the UK, where most land is at a premium, there are many on farmland and the farmer simply ploughs around them and their access roads/tracks. The "wasted" land is minimal. Others are up on moorland which isn't used for much other than maybe some sheep grazing, and the sheep really don't seem to care about for the slight disruption and minimal loss of grazing.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I heard it said that they are using the "waste" fuel that needs venting to keep the pressure at safe levels as the thrusters and that exhaust may freeze on the nozzles, especially on the shaded side and bits of ice breaking off might have been the "debris" we were seeing. I'm no rocket engineer or physicist, but it sounds plausible to me. Happy to be corrected :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

I nearly missed this!

I had a brain fart and thought it was happening 1am local time! But since I'm not at work today, I was browsing a bit of Youtube just after lunch and the Live stream appeared in the suggestions. Boy am I glad I was wasting time on Youtube today :-)

I'm not 100% sure, but I think they did actually succeed in all of their primary goals too. And from what I gather, they have the kit and the plans for a number more test flights this year too. Looking forward to seeing both bits make successful "soft" landings and I REALLY hope we get to see an actual catch attempt this year!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Capabilities.

"The video of the reentry plasma around the fin was one of the most amazing things I've seen."

Same here, that was stunning! They very kindly explained why we were able to see it too. Basically 'cos Starship is frikken big!

Exchange Online blocked from sending email to AOL and Yahoo

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: AOL

"AOL??? That still exists???"

I thought that until a couple of days ago when I noticed two different signed vans, different business, parked next to each other, both with AOL email addresses on the side. :-)

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

That post was bat sheep crazy!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Suppose they succeed and the wholly mammoth and modern day elephants breed. Is that not the same endangerment of the species?"

The Wooley Mammoth is a native animal :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"It's simple, you lambush one then bleat it to death with some kind of martial arts style chop."

Wow! That's a mint idea!

Pentagon said to have pulled $2.5B Intel defense chips grant

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Comrade Трамп

I suspect you are conflating two separate issues here.

Stanford University failed to detect ransomware intruders for 4 months

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: "We take safeguarding your information seriously,"

...and it only took us a year to let you know. Meanwhile, we hope your data wasn't used to scam you or take out loans in your name. Have a Nice Day(tm)

Japan's first private satellite launch imitates SpaceX's giant explosions

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Mushroom

KA-BOOOM!

Commentator <dead-pan> A launch anomaly.

LOL

Trump 'tried to sell Truth Social to Musk' as SPAC deal stalled

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "the use of a Chinese firm"

...and impregnated with lead, as evidenced by the declining mental acuity of frequent wearers :-)

NASA's FY2025 budget request means tough times ahead for Chandra and Hubble

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Amazing views! Great selling point!

UK council yanks IT systems and phone lines offline following cyber ambush

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Cyberattacks happen a lot, they happen to councils a lot,"

To be fair, it's a bit difficult NOT to publish the information on elected officials and the relevant staff on something like a Council website. It's all information that has to be public. I would assume the canteen staff and cleaners names are not on that website, or even the general non-customer facing staff, but department heads etc would be easily findable anyway from many other sources.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Cyberattacks happen a lot, they happen to councils a lot,"

"the recognised poverty of most UK councils"

"Poverty" is relative. Some may have effectively gone bankrupt and others may be close to it, but the annual budget is still a Very Large Number in most cases.

Birmingham, as a current example, may be effectively bust and in special measure, but the annual budget is still over £3B. To a ransomeware crim, that's still a juicy target.

Likewise, Leicester City Council has an annual budget in the region of £500m, so to ransomware scum, also a juicy target for a $million or so, even though local councils, especially now, are at best breaking even and have no spare cash.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: simple.

He's probably referring to sentencing guidelines. By make a new, specific offence it allows for different sentencing. See, for example, assaut against and emergency worker compared to assault against "normal" people. On the other hand, a variation ion a law or sentencing guidance is probably easier and quicker than a whole new law. But a whole new law gets media attention and in some cases, change the threshold between a finable offence and an appearance in court

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Root cause

"the accessibility of the ducts (and indeed ancillary equipment)."

I've reported open street cabs to the relevant owners, both OpenReach and VM, and neither bothered to secure them for months. If they won't react to information provided, why should Government be expected to help secure the kit for them?

GPT-4 won't run Doom but will play the game poorly

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Also, GPT-4 can't reason very well."

Exactly. The only ethics involved here are those in the mind of the person "programming" it. There are no inherent "3 laws of robotics" in the LLM. After all, anyone can attach a movement sensor and a gun to a robot arm and get it to kill intruders. The robot arm has no ethics or morals, can't think or reason and has no intelligence. I doubt any LLM has been taught to not harm humans or even been taught what "harm" might mean, as evidenced by the shit they frequently output.

Justice Dept reportedly starts criminal probe into Boeing door bolt incident

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Sentences you have to read twice...

As other have mentioned above, if you call it a door, then it's not a documented procedure. Otherwise there could be...issues...every time the plane lands at an airport when embarking or disembarking passengers self-[un]loading cargo. :-)

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

And if they are into parties, there's an even bigger one under the sea!

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"So UK rivers - still room for improvement, but water quality is much better than it was, and is generally well protected."

Although, unless you are at a "source", eg an underground spring making it's first exit into the open world, always remember that no matter how inviting and clear that stream water looks, there may be a dead sheep or something in it upstream, out of of sight! :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Wouldn't put me off

"TBH I'd be surprised if this process is any more efficient than letting it evaporate and collecting rainwater."

Unfortunately, in hotter climates, letting it evaporate and turn into rainwater is essentially exporting their water. The rain isn't happening often enough there. Which is pretty much the point of the article :-)

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