Posts by John Brown (no body)

Starliner snafu could've been worse: Software errors plague Boeing's Calamity Capsule

Re: "re-verifying flight software code"

No, but there may a lot of date conversion and timer management code snippets just waiting to be pulled and other number of routine that could be useful :-)

Re: Hmmm...

Subsidies? But that would be illegal! Just ask Airbus.

Re: "stll walk away with 100% of the available dosh "

If NASA were forced to choose just one supplier, they'd choose a massively large incumbent over a new incomer every time. If SpaceX has a major disaster, it could kill them dead. Boeing, as we have seen, can ride out a big disaster and, hopefully, recover from it. It's no real surprise that when NASA spread the costs and risk, they spread it more thinly over the newcomers. This could change over the coming decade if SpaceX continue to prove themselves and keep costs down and show they have the reserves and/or enough other business to survive a disaster.

A new entry in the franchise: Microsoft Windows and the Goblet of Meh

Re: "the build snapped before it was ready" "included in an upcoming flight"

Well, I wasn't going to go with a Brexit comment, but I came here to comment on exact same phrases!

"the build snapped before it was ready."

They broke it already?

"included in an upcoming flight."

Best I can manage on this one is "WTF?"

Built to last: Time to dispose of the disposable, unrepairable brick

"Sadly, mobile phones are still built to self-destruct after a couple of years, but maybe there's hope."

Nah. Depends how you look after them. My Samsung Note 2 just got retired[*] but only because the version of android couldn't run a couple of apps I need for work.

[*} passed on, scrapped.

Re: This has always been my expectation

You must be quite young. Back in the early days of PCs, 10 years of life might of been doable in some cases, but system speed increases and RAM requirements were rolling in much faster than they have been since about 2000. Speed increases were often in to 20-30% range (or more) on an almost annual basis.

Re: Used cars vs. new ones

"We bought pre-registered cars, low mileage (my wife's had 40KM on the clock, mine was under 800KM) from the dealer."

Trying to work out whether KM means kilometers or Killo-Miles. Neither seem to make sense in the context. Either your wifes "new" car barely had delivery mileage on it or yours had been absolutely hammered!

"but we expect M$ to keep producing security updates for free, indefinitely."

If it was secure in the first place, we'd not need security updates :-)

Re: It's not just Laptops and Smartphones

And these days, it's very very fine work on surface mount boards. That's a whole other skill level than just getting out the "soldering gun" (anyone who calls it a gun is doing it wrong!). It's not really cost effective or practical to do board level repairs on-site.

Re: The same arithmetic when choosing an automobile

In 15 years, a new car might only be available as electric. They just brought forward the ban on ICE car sales to 2035 and have included hybrids in the ban. Your only option by then will be all electric or a second hand car. I suspect by then that many more petrol stations will have closed as the demand will start falling before then and only get worse.

Re: The same arithmetic when choosing an automobile

"That would be fine for most local mileage (probably 80% of what I do), leaving the old ICE Skoda for long trips."

And there's the problem. You still need something capable of doing many miles with a fast "charge" time measured in minutes for that other 20%. Many people would tell you just to hire a suitablel car for those trips, but considering most people will want hire cars around the same time, ie for the summer holidays, we have to wonder if a) there will be one available and b) just how much will it cost during a high demand period. And peak pricing will only get worse if it comes to that sort of hire availability pattern.

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

Re: "an" SCSI cable?

"You'd use "an" if the word starts with a vowel sound, but "an" for a consonant sound"

You have one too many n's there.

Re: IDE not SCSI but the hack worked

"Spark up said cig, heat needle and melt the offending offending plastic away. Hey presto, one working cable."

My solution was to poke through the plastic blank with my smallest jewelers screwdriver. I didn't especially think of it as a clever hack, just getting the job done by hook or by crook. But then I worked for a cheapskate company and bodgjing stuff was just the way we had to work due to lack of proper kit and parts. It wasn't unusual to leave site with a PC sporting two multi-I/O cards because eg the IDE controller had failed on the original and I had a "spare" with a failed serial port. A quick play with jumpers to enable/disable the relevant parts and the customer had a working machine. Since I didn't like bodging and I knew the order for a fully working replacement would never complete, I would usually enable the "new" card such that the customer got an extra printer port and/or serial ports, which helped salve my conscience somewhat and often pleased the user.

Re: Bless..

Yeah, especially for a US product. A soddered BUTT connector. Surely someone in marketing must've spotted that faux pas and silently sniggered to themselves.

As for the product itself, I could see a small market for those people who might need to join wires once or twice in their lives, but it strikes me as a dumbing down for the masses who want instant gratification without the learning curve,

Beware, Tesla might take away your car's autopilot if you buy its vehicles from third party dealerships – plus more news

Re: The worst thing about Tesla is the example it sets

"I've had to bin 3 kettles in the last 6 months alone, and my coffee machine has stopped heating the water and that's only 2 months old (keeps it warm after brewed though, so I just put hot water in it now.)"

Surely they should all be replaced under the guarantee. Why would you put up with broken goods?

Re: What's next?

"After January 14, 2021, Telsa will no longer provide software updates or Autopilot for cars with windows."

You should have used the joke icon to alert the hard of humour :-)

Re: bits of your car not working...

"what sense could this possibly make?"

Depends who you ask. The bean-counters think it's a wonderfully sensible idea.

Re: bits of your car not working...

"There should perhaps be a law about this to dissuade manufacturers pulling stunts like this "because software"... that is the option or feature should be available for the lifetime of the vehicle once it's been paid for with a one-off payment."

I hope they try pulling this stunt in the EU where resale of "used" software licenses is legal. Just ask Adobe about it.

Google Chrome to block file downloads – from .exe to .txt – over HTTP by default this year. And we're OK with this

Re: Not as disruptive as it sounds

And I mentioned because here in the UK there are quite a few schools giving out Chromebooks or iPads to pupils. Glasgow are currently roiling out about 50,000 iPads. Another part of Scotland did similar with Chromebooks a couple of years ago. I've seen a few areas of England do the same, certainly a couple of academy trusts. I'm not sure how common it is, but it happens and I'm sure they get good educational discounts.

Re: Not as disruptive as it sounds

"If this continues such that it affects *EMBEDDED* systems [which might be serving up http content to a chrome browser running in 'kiosk' mode and NOT be using https] then it's "game over" for using chromium in such systems."

I predict that school IT support and admins becoming very, very busy dealing with reports for both actual educational sites as well as many other sites used by the students for research and homework being block by Chrome. Many schools distribute Chromebooks to all students and have based their whole educational "experience" around it.

Social media notifications of the future: Ranger tagged you in a photo with Tessadora, Wrenlow, Faelina and Graylen

Re: Oh, dear

There was a King John. Although he didn't like the name Robin.

Re: It's even worse if it's political

That's marginally better than naming her "Boss".

Re: Due diligence

"With girls it's even harder, because her surname could change to almost anything after she marries."

And if it turns into something embarrassing or hilarious, she has only herself to blame for marrying someone with the "wrong" name, not her parents :-)

Re: Robert'); DROP TABLE students;--

Shirly you meant this link!

https://www.xkcd.com/327/

I was thinking of calling my son Alfredo.

Signed

Mr Garcia

Hear, hear: The first to invent idiot-cancelling headphones gets my cash

Re: Not a lot of people know this ..

No, when they say that on travel announcements, they are talking about the rubberneckers on the opposite carriageway causing a new tailback despite there being no accidents, breakdowns or obstructions on their side. Yet. Their slowing down and causing a tailback will quite possible result in secondary accidents on their side.

Re: Had a recent train trip myself

"Everybody seems to have to fumble around for a couple of minutes to pull up a screen with the code if not longer."

That would be the same people who manage to bury their paper/cardboard ticket in the bottom of a bag or forget which the many, many pockets they put in and wait until asked before they start looking.

It's not hard to be prepared to show your ticket when asked and actually be ready. Unless you happen to be right at the end of the carriage the inspector is starting from.

Re: idiot cancelling headphones? That'd be nice

Have you checked out Joo Jantas catalogue? If they can make Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, Idiot Cancelling Headphones should be a doddle.

BOFH: Darn Windows 7. It's totally why we need a £1k graphics card for a business computer

"the only downsides are that it can sound like a machine gun and there are no windows keys for various shortcuts."

I can't try this as I don't have a Windows PC handy right now, but CTRL-ESC works to bring up the Windows start menu. Maybe CTRL-ESC-R will work as, for example, WIN-R. Anyone care to try and confirm?

Re: Keyboards

"All the modern ones have too much damping on the movement so you can't just flick the ball to move the cursor to the other side of the screen."

Can't you play with speed and acceleration settings in the driver screen?

Tech can endure the most inhospitable environments: Space, underwater, down t'pit... even hairdressers

Re: Crammed with unmentionables?

I was expecting that on a PC I went out to fix. The black dust just needed cleaning out, or so I thought. Stuck a hoover nozzle in on the blow function and a lot of the dust flew away (outside I hasten to add). I tipped the system on its side and half the RAM chips fell out. Thermal "creep" had caused all the chips to rise so far out of the DIL sockets that many of them were just resting on the top. Now, thermal "creep" was an expected issue back then, but not so much that the chip was actually out of it's socket. The theory we came up with was that the black dust was acting as a conductor and kept it working when most other PCs suffering thermal "creep" would have failed. Did I mention this was a metal processing plant? That dust must have had a decent amount of iron content.

Re: In 1998...

I seem to have a vague memory of those MCA based PS/2s being awkward buggers when it came to hardware upgrades. IIRC, you needed a floppy disk with a special file just to tell the bastard that you'd installed extra RAM. Despite that having been a simple, non-complex "done deal" since almost the invention of the microcomputer, ie just plug it in and it works.

Re: Teaching Moment

And this, ladies and gentleman, is why "show and tell" is a good thing. Assume your students/trainees know NOTHING about the subject. Even now, I meet people fresh out of school/college/university who have little knowledge about hoe to drive a computer other then the very bare basics, despite having used them their whole lives.

Re: Industrial environments

Somewhere you would expect paper dust, but maybe surprising to a first timer opening up a PC, is in a paper mill. The fan kept enough paper dust away from the CPU that by the time it did eventually fail, the entire inside of of the PC was an almost solid white block with a "channel" above the CPU cooler to the outside world.

Re: The devils foam

Carbolic soap?

Re: Surprisingly ...

Anyone under 30 is guaranteed to have used PCs pretty much every day of their time at school, at least between the ages of 10 and 16.

Re: Surprisingly ...

I wonder if it's because that's how the shift key works on soft/virtual keyboards on phones. For many people, even now, their only regular use of computers is at school. After that, they only ever use their phones or maybe a tablet.

Whoa, France. Take it easy. Wow. You're out of control. Fining Apple 55 minutes of revenue for secretly slowing down iPhones? Maniaques!

"mostly for breaking environmental regulations."

You still have them? I thought Trump was repealing them?

Day 4 of outage: UK's Manchester police deploy exciting new carbon-based method to record crime

Re: Impact

"Customer facing impact: Minimal (although this is PR speak so to be taken with a lot of salt)"

"Some users were affected" :-)

Come to Five Guys, where the software is as fresh as the burgers... or maybe not

Re: I'm sure they can afford support

You forgot to mention Westlers boiled burgers from a street cart!

Oh, sorry, have you spent long trying to forget their existence?

Politico-speak? Advert-speak? Lawyer-langauge?

Android owners – you'll want to get these latest security patches, especially for this nasty Bluetooth hijack flaw

Re: Bluetooth impeached

Maybe he's set it to update over WiFi only.

Re: Project Treble paying off

My Samsung J3 last got an update in Nov'19. There's nothing new for it yet.

Hey GitLab, the 1970s called and want their sexism back: Saleswomen told to wear short skirts, heels and 'step it up'

"As an aside, a magazine some years ago asked a large sample of female readers about their attitudes towards various chat up lines etc by men, 6 to 10% said "fancy a fuck" got to the point quickly, cut out all the chit chat and if the guy in question was vaguely attractive then why not?"

That still leave you with a 90-94% chance of getting kicked in the balls if you try it. Personally I don't fancy those odds!

I thought the same - "It's going to be Cold and maybe Icy! So please wear your short skirts and impractical shoes! Entertainment for all!"

I didn't realise the event was in Newcastle-upon-Tyne!

Uncle Sam tells F-35B allies they'll have to fly the things a lot more if they want to help out around South China Sea

Re: !!!

"The target (That it cant meet) is the equivalent to ~10 sorties please tell me this is not normal for a combat jet!"

Wasn't the ME 262 also limited to about 12 hours flying time before critical failure, ie it needed new engines. We've come so far since then.

Fed-up air safety bods ban A350 pilots from enjoying cockpit coffees

Re: Trolly dolly?

Thanks. I've not flown in a while!

I see at least 7 people missed the point, ie the assumption that cabin crew are all female though :-)

Re: Only obvious now?

Apparently that's only for the US market as it was deemed the tiny neck diameter was sufficient for normal usage. Meanwhile, the rest of the world still gets the wide necked bottles...

Re: Only obvious now?

"Only problem, the first lessons are in a single engine small plane. Not much chance of getting a coffee there... ;)"

You saying that small cheap planes don't have cup holders for when passing a drive through Starbucks where they discourage drivers (pilots) from drinking and driving or throwing used cups from their vehicles?

Re: Gobsmacked!

One crew bring two cups of coffee as opposed to bot pilot and co-pilot leaving individually to each get a coffe means twice as many door operations. I assume you don't expect both pilots to leave together!

Having said that, I suspect the incidence og hijacks/cockpit invasions is unlikely to increase based on that.