Posts by John Brown (no body)

Japan's aerospace agency hooks up with Boeing to make planes quieter when they land

Re: Owls

"Less joyously, this sort of nonsense comes round every ten years. Last time it was Cambridge with some big aerospace boondoggle to develop silent flight. I think results so far are nil."

I suspect the problem is no one is really building new planes. A new plane takes many years from concept to service-ready, so most new planes are adaptions and improvements on older models, thus seriously reducing the development and certification phases.

The research ideally needs to come up with simple adaptions that can be retrofitted to existing planes which then must be mandated in at least some jurisdictions, forcing the manufactures, owners and operators to take it seriously. They won't spend money they don't have to unless there are savings to be made in one opr more of fuel economy, lifting capacity or fine avoidance.

LibreOffice 7.2 brings improved but still imperfect Microsoft Office compatibility

Re: Knock-Off products

You mean Lotus Symphoy or SmareWare knock offs?

SmartWare in particular had an excellent cross-app scripting language and even included it's own comms client. We'd take spreadsheets from staff designed to minimise staff time while getting the data we needed, eg student number, course number, grade, and the system would uses the data in the spreadsheet to get the full wordy stuff from a database, put it into the word processor and print a useful, wordy report to give the student/their parents. The spreadsheet data also went to another database so we could get pretty formatted reports on almost anything and even graphs if required. The fact MSOffice doesn't have a database by default is why we couldn't do the above as easily with Office today without doing what so many do and use Excel as a tangled multi-sheet, multi-file spaghetti mess of a database or buying in a specialised bit of s/w and some likely extortionate price.

Re: In The End It Doesn't Even Matter

Alternatively, you export it in a format that other users can open, ie lowest common denominator. Back in the day I used to save Word documents in Word95 format so users of Office'95, '97, '2000 and 'XP as well as Open Office could all open it reliably.

Re: Standards?

"If you have 90%+ of the market share, you have the standard. No point arguing beyond that."

Hence the need and requirement for anti-monopoly laws.

Re: Does "compatibility" mean having the same issues?

According to the LO docs

Command line switches

--convert-to output_file_extension[:output_filter_name] [--outdir output_dir] files

Batch convert files. If --outdir is not specified, then current working directory is used as output_dir.

Eg. --convert-to pdf *.doc

--convert-to pdf:writer_pdf_Export --outdir /home/user *.doc

I've not tried this so YMMV.

More adventurous uses/devs might want to investigate running LO in "headless" mode and read the API docs for more complex task automation.

More Boots on Moon delays: NASA stops work on SpaceX human landing system as Blue Origin lawsuit rolls on

Wait...what? Are you implying we've already been to the Moon?

Cloud load balancer snafu leads to 3D printer user printing on a stranger's kit

Re: signing

So long the "anyone" installing "any binary" can only be a local user, and not some stranger elsewhere on the Internet at large.

Microsoft, flush with cash, raises cloud office suite prices for businesses

Re: In 2020 alone we released over 300 new capabilities including ... raise hand

"Are people really having video meetings and doing 3 finger keyboard salutes to "raise their hand", rather than perhaps actually hoisting that thing on the end of their arms in front of the camera? What's next? Yawn? Scratch Arse?"

It's aimed at the Emojii generation :-)

Re: My CD-ROM copy of Office 2013 still installs and works fine

"Incidentally, this test also showed that using Microsoft Office support for Open Document formats is challenging: in our test, importing the .odt version to Word made the diagrams disappear completely.

I must admit, I have had similar problem when opening up old archived Word documents from maybe 10-15 years ago in current incarnations of Word. Sometimes, weird things happen, especially in more complex documents. Luckily I don't need to do that too often.

Didn't need to. MS were offering office back in the day for £20 if you could prove[1] you were in or part of the education system. Everyone else had to pay £250-300 or whatever.

[1] IIRC, it was quite a low bar. Almost anything with the name of the school or institution would do such as headed notepaper.

Trust Facebook to find a way to make video conferencing more miserable and tedious

Re: Yay, second life is back

I thought he died years ago! Is he still around?

Re: Yay, second life is back

That video was brilliant! Although, as he points out in the end, only really useful if your are very unlikely to be addressed directly, otherwise you spend more time preparing for and monitoring the the meeting ready to trigger the relevant clips :-)

Now, if only we had real AI and proper, good quality, speech recognition. The no one would ever have to do another online meeting ever again! Just leave the automated AIs to have meetings for ever more.

I believe at least one civilisation came to an end because the AI meetings just got bigger and bigger 'till they took over the entire worlds comms bandwidth and ate up all the available power, resulting in traffic lights failing, aircraft falling from the skies and the local equivalent of MTV shutting down causing the people to return to the stone age.[*]

* One of the many quotes from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy never actually written by Douglas Adams and therefore never actually seen in print before.

Re: Who is the target market for this?

"But on the other hand, even though Second Live's fad was short lived back in the day, it got some traction. "

A comparison with Second Life was my first thought too. But on a much smaller scale. Just a meeting room instead of an entire world! Facebook seem to have lost their imagination when the best they can come up with is a small scale reinvention of a failed virtual world :-)

New on Netflix: A corporate drama in which staff are sued for abusing early access to financial data

Re: They are only catching the dumb ones

I'm sure it's been done as a movie a few times already. So, based on Hollywood's track record of not coming up with anything new, yes, it's probably about time for another one :-)

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Re: It was a lovely day for a coup

Hee, yes, A Very British Coup d'Twat :-)

Re: Sumption is wrong

"The only relevant bit is that it does promise Northumberland to Scotland. Maybe they can go reclaim it?"

On the other hand, the Scots stole Edinburgh from the Kingdom of Northumbria. Maybe we should take that back and Sturgeon can move to Glasgow?

Re: Sumption is wrong

"It's 'Magna Carta', not 'the Magna Carta'."

And doesn't that roughly translate as "Big Page"? So, the first broadsheet?

A new island has popped up off the coast of Japan thanks to an underwater volcano

There was a documentary about this some years ago.

Cassini data from last decade reveals insights into 'diffuse' nature of Saturn's core

Re: odd

TBH, that's exactly what I'd always assumed from the sciency/astronomical and SF I've read over the years. I just thought that was the accepted explanation and further science had/is confirming it. Maybe I was right, but for all the wrong reasons :-)

A Whopper of a bork for seekers of pre-flight nosh

Re: This is usually the situation

"Only McDonald's has its shit together to have the self-order kiosks functioning."

Interesting phrasing. ISTR an article on El Reg about just how much faecal matter can be found on those McDonald's touch screens. Yuck!

China starts testing tech to harvest solar energy from orbiting panels

Crackerjack!!!

"in the early 1970s Peter Glaser received a patent for a design to transmit power from satellites to Earth using microwaves."

Oops, sorry, Wrong Peter. Sometimes, ingrained and instinctive reactions are hard to overcome.

The consequences of missing the target are only catastrophic if the death ray hits anywhere other than one of your enemies.

I'm a little surprised El Reg did allude to China building death rays in the guise of "clean, green energy" somewhere in the sub-head.

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

Re: 62.8 trillion

As the poster just above you mention, because 62.8/2 is 31.4, or the first 3 digits of pi :-)

(OK, so it works better if you say 62.8/20)

It must be bloody good be at that price! I'd expect the whole pie for that, not just a slice :-)

Re: Oh dear, I need to update my passwords :-(

"Better yet: use the digits of some other fairly-well-known, but not as easily "guess-able" physical constant, such as the 'fine structure' constant..."

I'd not be surprise to learn that there "dictionaries" out there already with lists of those sorts of numbers used for hacking into university computers by black hat espionage types from places like China.

Re: Sorry to disappoint

And not forgetting that if you divide infinity by any number, you still get infinity. Some of those monkey will be pissed off. So that's an infinite number of monkey typing and an infinite number of monkey flinging shit around.

Blue Origin sues NASA for awarding SpaceX $3bn contract to land next American boots on the Moon

Re: ...a tourist shuttle which can only get half way to the ISS

Even the Nazis in WW2 got to 60 miles up and 3,300mph in the 1940's with the V2. They were a little less precise in their landing spots though, and not re-usable.

Remote code execution flaws lurk in countless routers, IoT gear, cameras using Realtek Wi-Fi module SDKs

Re: Yet again

"Short answer: No."

Which will fit on a stamp, thus saving the cost of the postcard :-)

Re: Iot the way forward...

Rule 1. No, that costs money.

Rule 2. No, that costs money.

Here's a few rules that you'll find most manufacturers adhere to.

Scalpel! Superglue! This mouse won't fix its own ball

Re: Nice

"so the next obvious step was to douse it in cooking oil."

Well, yes, obviously. It's science and engineering. Clearly the water had got to places where it was difficult to dry it out. Oil displaces water and is non-conductive. Simple logic :-)

Same here, but on a BBC micro. It came as part of a DTP package at the college.

I found that using a material harder than the rollers such as a metal blade would scratch the roller surfaces and they'd pick the crud even faster, leading to much more frequent cleaning being required. I always used a soft plastic "blade" to scrape the crud off once I learned from my mistakes.

Re: Ball crud

"The cloth absorbs dirt and grime before the sliders on the bottom of the mouse get cached in it. When at a temporary desk I get tired of cleaning them at least once a day to eliminate stiction or tracking issues as the mouse gets jacked up beyond its focal point."

Another solution is to clean your desk regularly and get in 18 months of more frequent than usual handwashing practice.

Re: Ball crud

"Yeah, until you are oh-so-bloody-stilish as a mate from university, who got imself a nice clean clear glass desk. Looked bloody great, but the optical mice don't work."

Ditto for the white high gloss finish lab benches in medical labs.

Re: Ball crud

"The funny thing is that every student we caught doing this appeared to think they were the first."

One of the many hazards of youth. They also think they invented sex :-)

Branson sews cash parachute for Virgin Atlantic with $300m Virgin Galactic share sale

Re: Three shells ...

That'd be RyanSpace. Windows and air, optional extras. And it may not go as close to the named destination as you expect. Taxis or buses may be involved.

China warns game devs not to mess with history

Re: "eventually misinterpreting the game's historical fiction as true"

"It's a game, not a history lesson."

True. On the other hand, look how many people get their understanding of history from Hollywood.

Re: Factual Games

They shave every day and always have done. Proof: When did you last see a hairy whale? Not even a hipster moustache to be seen.

Re: Factual Games

"The "challenge" is to encourage critical thinking,"

In China?

"it was just a peaceful protest with nothing to see....."

A BBC reporter recently did a bit on the "Tank Man" photo in China. Almost all the younger people shown it had never seen it before. Older people on the whole also claimed to have never seen it and a few denied seeing it but looked a bit uncomfortable at having said photo thrust into their face.

Re: History is the most fan-fiction-polluted science in the world...

Archaeologists do like their coprolites!

India makes a play to source rare earths – systematic scrapping of its old cars

Re: Cash for clunkers

"I only read the Gaurdian"

I saw what you did there!!

Re: They need to learn from "cash for clunkers" in the US

"Also, it turned out to be worse for the environment because these cars were simply shredded or smashed without draining the fluids, so all the oil, coolant, brake fluid, etc is now seeping down through all the landfills."

"There ain't no gummint gonna tell me how to run my business. My Granpappy always poured the used oil down the drain, so if it was good enough for him, then it's good enough for me."

Sometimes, it takes strong regulation to overcome greed. If that regulation means some business find they can't or won't adapt and go bust, then tough on them. It's their kids as well as everyone elses who suffer because of the shit that gets dumped in or next to watercourses or just buried in the ground.

Re: Good

There probably is, but is it economically possible to recover it? By economically, I mean both in terms of money and energy usage. R&D into this is a good thing, even if it's not feasible just yet. I'm not so sure about the rare earths bit though. There's lots of rare earths around. But no one wants the ecological costs of processing them into useful elements. It's hard to compete with an economy that takes far less care of the pollution than other countries.

US watchdog opens probe into Tesla's Autopilot driver assist system after spate of crashes

Re: A solution looking for a problem

"Do people hold it to a higher standard than a human? Yes, despite the fact that widespread deployment would already make roads safer - not to mention more accessible for more people."

Where there's blame, there's a claim. Now try blaming a multi billion dollar megacorp and see if you can find someone/thing to blame.

Dallas cops lost 8TB of criminal case data during bungled migration, says the DA... four months later

DPD = DPD?

Sounds like DPD in the US is about as competent as DPD in the UK.

Need a backup? Sorry, you weren't in when we called to deliver your backup. We left in your neighbours leaky shed in the next town over and have a photo of the soggy mess to prove it!

Re: "data migration of a network drive caused [...] dele

"A move to a different drive was actually a copy, with no delete of the old file."

No, a move to a different volume is copy then delete the original. If you catch it before the newly freed space gets overwritten, you might be able to undelete it, although that's a slightly more complex operation than the old FATx drives were. Left click and drag is copy only and you end up with two copies. Right click and drag, you get a context menu that lets you chose copy or move.

Before I agree to let your app track me everywhere, I want something 'special' in return (winks)…

Re: Location data is useless...

My experience with my SatNav is choosing Fastest, Shortest or Eco routes. I've never used the Eco route option, but the SatNav will choose one route over another based on the slightest apparent benefit, eg it's 20 seconds quicker (Fastest) or 20 yds shorter (Shortest) assuming perfect conditions. I assume the Eco route option will try to avoid too many junctions, roundabouts and traffic lights, ie minimise the times you need to stop and start.

I have known it, on occasions when set to "shortest route", try to send me down a back lane because it's one side of a triangle, the other two sides of the triangle being the main roads, saving me about 70 yds of distance. That was in the early days, maybe 10 years ago when I first bought it. It's had multiple firmware updates and many map updates since. (Which reminds me, it's time to check for the latest map update!)

Starliner takes off ... back to the factory and not space

Re: make way for other national priority missions.

Ah, thanks. So it's not so much giving up their slot as being "stuck in traffic" and stopping the people behind from getting away on time.

Please do not touch the exhibits – or this tabletop Windows Boot Manager

Windows is being optimistic

Considering the end of the screen states a boot device is inaccessible, the earlier instructions to insert you installation media to "repair" it seems overly optimistic :-)