Posts by John Brown (no body)

Two sides of the digital coin: Ill-gotten gains in cryptocurrencies double, outpaced by legit use – report

Kosovo just banned crypto mining" after recent power outages.

IBM bosses wrongly sacked channel salesman after Tech Data joint venture failed, tribunal rules

Re: This was in the UK. In the US …

"Really? Maybe in UK. "

No, not in the UK. He was talking out of his arse. UK laws and regulations have barely changed since leaving the EU and the UK was one of the EU members leading and pushing for stronger employment protection (despite the comments in the press over the years that it was the EU forcing us to follow their rules)

Re: This was in the UK. In the US …

The 1 year thing predates New Labour and Tony Blair by quite some time. IIRC, up to a year and you were still classed as temporary labour. If you were on a temp contract and you worked past the one year anniversary with out starting a new one, your contract was, by default, a permanent contract with all the attendant rights. My father was at Reyrolles on a rolling contract like that.. They were effectively "sacked" every 364 days and then, in the main, re-hired the following day. Although IIRC, anyone reaching the end of the second year were taken on permanently anyway. One of my first jobs was dependant on the as then Manpower Service Commission funding, supposedly on an annually renewable employment contract, but 12 years later, long after the MSC had been reformed and renamed twice and I was made redundant, I still got full rights as a permie because no one at the local council had bothered to keep up with the contract details (Likewise, we were always treated as permies after year one and got the usual incremental pay rises on the scale as well as the negotiated ones and the additional long service extra days holiday each year)

Re: That JV sounds odd

Yeah, fairly standard in those sorts of JVs. The problem here is that IBM made it impossible by refusing to lower prices so the partner had no leeway to work with. Usually, the deal is "we'll sell to you at a preferential rate so long as you guarantee to sell X units per year so economies of scale kick in. There are usually conditions on both sides to make sure the deal works and only utter incompetence from one of the parters triggers the penalty clauses.

Re: This was in the UK. In the US …

In the UK (and the EU and some other countries), there is some pretty strong and decent employment legislation to protect employees from ravenous employers. It's taken many years to get to this stage. Something US employers operating in those jurisdictions seem to have great difficulty in understanding.

Few US States come even close to that level of employee protection, but as so many States have different employment laws, you'd think a company operating in multiple jurisdictions with different employment law "at home" would have the ability to think that just maybe, in a whole other country, the laws might also be different.

Re: Justice is slow

"I though one of the remedies for unfair dismissal was get your job back? The tribunal might award him a job, lost pay and compensation."

That was my understanding too. Although why the employer doesn't also get an actual fine for breaking the law eludes me. If the tribunal is won by the claimant, then by definition, the employer is in breach of the law and an actual court appearance ought to follow. Or employment tribunals need to be given more legal powers.

It takes more clicks to reject their cookies than accept them, so France fines Facebook and Google over €200m

Re: And why are some cookies so big?

Yeah? Not one I've come across before. I've no idea which site dropped that cookie on me. Sometime in the past few day I must have unblocked scripting/cookies for some site or other and got it from there.

And why are some cookies so big?

Just looking at existing cookies from the current session, and I see 4 cookies from weatherbug.com taking up 1.5MB of space. There are other offenders too. Most of the cookies are under 700 bytes. Why are weatherbub.com so special?

Re: Funny ...

"Oh, and if you go to customise the cookies (on either site, just tried it) all the additional non-essential crap is off by default."

That's also the case with the vast majority of the reputable UK sites I use too.

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

Re: GPS week rollover

"It also doesn't effect the original purpose which was letting the US military know where it is."

Other than the fact military equipment is harfd to change or update because it has strict specifications and so what used to be modern hi-tech equipment is often still in use 20 or more years later with the same specs. Mind you, I'm basing that on how the UK military works and just assuming the US military will work to similar standards. With their competing and duplicative branches, that may be entirely wrong of me.

Re: Ford C-Max

Clearly a fault that was present during manufacture, therefore covered by consumer protection law both now and then. Same applies to the Hondas in the article.

Age of the product does matter of course, but something like a car and it's built in device ought to be expected to last many more years than a cheap TV or HiFi,

Re: Always date and time

"Also, management does not appreciate the complexity of date/time and cannot fathom why it takes so long to program that damned clock, "

To make them aware of the complexity of time and date setting etc on technologically advanced hardware is easy. Just force them to use a 1980's VCR as their clock/calendar/reminder system for a week! The more up to date once were capable of setting daily and weekly recurring start/end times so great for regular meetings including durations.

A moment of tension as the James Webb Space Telescope stretches sunshield on way to L2 destination

Re: Where is it? Check this...

Ah, of course. Working from a vague memory of something I learned about when I was about 12, some 50 years ago isn't always a good idea. Of course, and obviously, there would be a transfer of heat to the cold side and of course that would bad. See icon for image of me ---->

Re: Where is it? Check this...

I since checked, and last night the coldest part of the sat was already reading below -200c. I'd imagine the temperature drop will slow down exponentially and those last 30c will take a lot longer.

EDIT. Maybe I was mis-remembering Fahrenheit temps from last night. It's currently at -198c

I also just had another thought. Is there any use being made of this temperature differential? I remember learning about and trying an experiment using copper an iron wire alternately joined at opposite ends and putting one end into the over and the other left out in the cold to generate a low voltage. I'm sure there have been large scale similar units using cold deep water and warmer surface temps too.

Re: Where is it? Check this...

Ah yes, of course, the passive cooling takes longer. That makes sense now as to why they want the sun shield deployed as early possible.

Re: Where is it? Check this...

"I don't think there is any risk since with 0 atmosphere, having burns in the folded or unfolded state is the same."

No, I think the survivable G force difference between folded and unfolded are probably very different. I doubt, even at 0 atmosphere, the shields and support booms could survive the same G forces they survived at launch time. Folded or unfolded is very different, but as I said, I'm sure they know what they are doing and understand very well the limits of what they can do.

Re: GoPro

" installed a few GoPro's on the thing to give us all a look at how things were going."

Do you realise how far away it is now? It was past the Moons orbit pretty sharpish. At time of this post, it's already more than twice the distance of the Moon at ~600,000 miles and still travelling at about 1/3rd mile per second. Yes, second, not hour. You need some pretty decent power on the transmitter, and accurate positioning for that and weight and power are things they really don't want to waste on stuff deemed non-essential. I'm sure they have images and lots of telemetry for the guys doing the work, but almost certainly not enough bandwidth to livestream it for us mere mortals. No doubt there will be timelapse video of a cleaned up feed eventually,

Re: Where is it? Check this...

Yeah, hopefully it'll be moving very slowly by the time it gets there. I was a little surprised to learn that the delicate sun shades where being deployed so early and there's still manoeuvring burns to be done. I'm assuming they will be quite delicate burns! I know they know what they are doing, but still, it feels risky to me :-)

Bitcoin 'inventor' will face forgery claims over his Satoshi Nakamoto proof, rules High Court

Yeah, many years ago, where I worked, we had a very basic network using RS232C and I wrote a "messaging system" very like what we now call email. At the time, there was little or no public internet so I can, with clear conscience, say I'd never heard of email before then and so can claim to have independently invented it :-)

Actually, on reflection, it was more like Instant Messaging. Client was a TSR in MS-DOS, server was a PC with 16 serial ports, one for each client, which collected the messages and pushed them out to the relevant person or person.

Ceefax replica goes TITSUP* as folk pine for simpler times

Re: Bring Back Telnet (or VT100/ansi via SSH)

Or even just simple web pages where the vast majority of the content is static and a whole page can load in the blink of an eye on a modern system.

Wikipedia are a good example of a website where pages load so quickly you barely notice. So many websites out there which provide information in text format could learn from that. We don't need animated buttons and flashy distracting graphics. Sales websites too could learn much from that. Getting the information we want or need quickly trumps flashy graphics and dynamically generated pages full of client-side JavaScript that is sourced from 15 different servers around the globe every time you visit the page. Not to mention the additional costs for all the unnecessary flashiness. But the web designers seem to have the business owners held in thrall with "ooh, shiny"

Re: Pedantic - slightly inaccurate

"All digital logic without a microprocessor in sight, and you can see from first principles how to decode the signal."

Also a starting point to building a Macravision[*]<??> copy protection defeat device.

* The one one that used to flash full white/full black across the top few lines of the frame where a Teletext signal would go, so as to screw up the picture/colour lock when copying VHS tapes.

Re: Ah yes

Yeah, the Red Button Service is so disjointed and appears limited, it's in no way a replacement for CEEFAX.

Northern Ireland aims to break free from BT's 27-year reign with £125m procurement of land registry systems

Re: how many millions?

Yeahbut, now it has to be all interconnected with the Social Security system, the Import/Export system, the Police National Computer and the local Council bin collections system. Oh,and it simply MUST be VR and AR ready and powered by AI from the cloud. Everything is "connected".

Fugitive mafioso evaded cops for two decades until he was spotted on Google Street View

Re: So he's lived on the run for 20 years

Just must be seen to be done. It might even be a deterrent to other potential murderers. The cost of imprisoning most convicted criminals is often more than the "cost" of their crimes, so using that logic, we might as well just settle for anarchy and hope we survive :-)

You better have patched those Log4j holes or we'll see what a judge has to say – FTC

Re: eBay vs Newman

Exactly. The "value" to shareholders may be that the company doesn't invest in any form of weapons or military systems, or that the company has a healthy charitable arm where a percentage of profits go or any of a number other ethical reasons.

NASA confirms International Space Station is to keep orbiting through 2030

Re: Should buy time for a new one to be planned and built

Woodchip powered?

Drax

Did you look up? New Year's Day boom over Pittsburgh was exploding meteor, says NASA

Re: Why do they alway seem to cross the sky?

Yeah, that makes sense.

Why do they alway seem to cross the sky?

All the video I've seen shows them flying across the sky. Surely there must be some that score a bullseye, straight down? Or is it something about orbital mechanics?

Hauliers report problems with post-Brexit customs system but HMRC insists it is 'online and working as planned'

Re: Hmm

"The LED bulbs in our Teasmades hail from a certain large Chinese tat bazaar where you can find them with just about any base in common use."

And with a CE mark of course, China Export, bearing a remarkable similarity, if not quite entirely unlike the EU CE standards mark :-)

Re: Hmm

The USA have enough of their own paramilitary orgs to deal with :-)

Re: Hmm

"Was interested to see a geniune UKCA mark on a Blueair Blue 411 air filter we bought recently. Quite surprised that a company had actually bothered with the duplication."

IIRC, manufactures have until 2023 to change from CE to UKCA marks. In most cases, it's just a case of changing the mark as the standards have not (yet) changed. It remains to be seen if the UK will track EU CE standards as and when they change, or go down a separate track. At that point, it will be up to the manufactures to decide whether to have multiple product versions for home and EU markets or go with whichever standard is higher, thus matching both, possibly at a cost disadvantage in the lower standard market.

Re: Hmm

"Again, the annexing of NI does not improve on that situation, makes it no better."

Ummm...yeah. You might want to read up on your history a bit. It might not be a great situation we find ourselves in today, but your interpretation of the history of the island of Ireland and the British involvement is rather at odds with reality.

Facebook files challenge to UK Giphy buyout ban by complaining CMA was 'unfair' and 'irrational'

Re: A raw number is worthless without a period.

Yeah, but are they unique users? This number probably came from a marketing dept

At 9 for every 100 workers, robots are rife in Singapore – so we decided to visit them

Re: What is a robot?

"The carts moving books and food around strike me more as replacements for conveyor belts, etc. than being in competition with human workers."

The article did more or less say as much, but that and your comment also lead onto another alternative. Why not just design an efficient kitchen in the first place, possibly with an actual conveyor belt.

Indian government tells Starlink to refund pre-orders placed before licences approved

Re: The problem with ... most American companies is they see the world as their "market"

"Personally I think Starlink will become THE de facto ISP from anywhere in the world,"

Not a hope in hell. Starlink can never have the capacity to remove ground based incumbents without many, many more sats than planned for, and probably much bigger birds at that. You can wire up a city with fibre far more cheaply.

Starlink is a niche market. Quite a large niche admittedly, but a niche nevertheless. And the only reason the niche is large is because from orbit you can cover much of the planet, sats "hopping" from one small niche market to another, unlike from Googles "Loons", which were even more niche.

AT&T, Verizon delay 5G C-band rollout over FAA fears of passenger plane radars jammed by signals

<groan> very good :-)

You wood not believe what a Japanese logging company and university want to use to build a small satellite

I'm curious about that. Were some of his sats over a 100KM too high or had the Chinese space station dropped over 100KM down to the Starlink orbit? Theoretically, Starlink Sats should never get anywhere near close enough to be a risk to them. (Other sats, potentially yes, but the space station "near misses" were in the news most recently, so I assume that's what you mean.)

Re: At last

The metal body of the sat also helps protect the electronics from the nasty stuff outside too. Not having the inherent shielding of the metal outer body will probably mean designing the inside differently to compensate.

Re: At last

"It takes a fair bit of heat to sublime the carbon, but that won't be a problem for a re-entering woodsat."

I'm pretty sure that while the US and NASA was spending a fortune developing and building ablative heat shields, the USSR used hardwood.

EDIT. Not sure if the USSR did, but China did.

Re: If anyone can...

"Then there will be the cheaper version, the IKEAsat launched as a flat pack it will self assemble if it can understand the instructions and will then release an allen key, a dowel and a surplus screw into the debris field."

Otherwise known as the James Webb Space Telescope?

Offering Patreon subs in sterling or euros means you can be sued under GDPR, says Court of Appeal

Re: GDPR is awfully expensive to implement

"Businesses are subject to the regulation of their home nation, NOT the EU."

You might want to mention that to the USA too. We've seen many, many cases of the USA claiming jurisdiction outside their borders in these pages. eg Patriot Act etc. The EU isn't doing anything different.

Chip manufacturing equipment vendor ASML reports fire at Berlin factory

The vagaries of the stock market

"The firm's stock price dipped 2 per cent on the news. That being said, the extent of the damage has not been confirmed "

With absolutely no clue as to whether this fire will affect production in any way, trader start selling anyway, just in case. I'd really hate to be in a position to have to bow to these people and in effect be under their control. The slightest hint of something going wrong, however transitory, can knock billions off the share price and potentially affect cash flow or borrowing significantly. One of the more serious downsides of our connected world IMHO

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of fraud: Blood-testing machines were vapourware after all

Re: Does not fit

"Sounds really strange. By the time she was 20 years old she had already raised several million dollars,by the time she was 30 the company had a valuation in the billions."

Considering she never even completed her degree, never mind did actual research or a PhD, I wonder how she managed to raise those early millions in the first place?

Her father was a VP at Enron, which went bust three years before she started raising her millions. No connection, no point being made, just chucking some facts out there to chew on :-)

"Did Google's founders lie? Did Facebook's? There are plenty of startups that were pretty honest about what they were doing - not just ones who succeeded wildly like those two but ones that succeeded moderately and those that failed."

Depends. It's part of the "fake it 'till you make it" ethos. The ones who succeed didn't "lie" because they did eventually "make it". Many, possibly most, don't. It's not necessarily lying if they don't make it either. It might just be having no business acumen in the company. Then there's the successes where the founders got kicked out by the people with business acumen and may or may not then go on to better things or crash'n'burn because they got rid of the pesky techy founders.

Re: But, she did do one good thing

I doubt they were actually the "working" board, just "names" to go on the headed note paper, non-executive directors with little to no power. Happens all the time in the UK too, primarily with ex-politicians being paid large amounts of money for a few hours "consultancy" per year and their name prominently on the letter-heads.

Re: But, she did do one good thing

As a company producing medical devices, wasn't there some agency required to look at and test this equipment before licencing it for use? Or can any old snake-oil salesman make any claims they want without retribution?

On the other hand, there does seem to be a culture of "fake it 'till you make it" in Silicon Valley. Lots of big claims being made to attract the VCs and frequent total failures to produce the goods.

Re: 20 or 80 Years?

"it could end up being the case that on the specific counts where she's been convicted the material loss is a lot lower than what the headline figure suggests."

Good point. It'd be interesting to see "the books" for those big investors and how much they put in and "lost" and compare that with their tax liabilities and how much of said "loss" was written off against tax.

Re: 20 or 80 Years?

"Most of the remaining exacerbating factors are things like whether or not she put anyone in significant financial difficulty (e.g. robbed your gran) or put a bank or other company at serious risk. Luckily for her those probably don't apply."

On the BBC today, they interviewed a woman who, on the advice of her boss describing Theranos as the "next Apple", invested a 6-figure sum in shares from her salary as a secretary, ie pretty much everything she had. I presume she lost all of that. There may well be others in the same situation, so based on what you described, there may be more points for that.

Re: 20 or 80 Years?

"applied consecutively rather than the more usual concurrence."

When I keep seeing reports of multi-decade and century-plus sentences in US media, I always assumed it was the other way around. Is it just media bias that tends to report 100+ year sentences because "big numbers"? Or is this more of a difference in sentencing at Federal level compared to State/County level?

Re: "what sort of person would think about having a child ... possibility of 20 years in jail

"with a gang of men"

Sexist much? How do you know the gender of the posters? There are a number here who may be women, at least some of whom have said so. I suppose they could just be a gang of men pretending. Some of those who haven't identified as women may well be, you can't really tell from their posting names.

I must admit I am tending towards the feeling that some of the comments are leaning towards the misogynistic side of the scale, but I'm not prepared to definitively claim those comments all come from men, or little blue furry aliens from Arcturus.