Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Keep the scale of things in mind

"Most places will have literal tons of water in the air these devices are extracting liters and kilos from."

Yes, those of us in wetter climes generally can't even conceive of the "weight" of the fluffy clouds floating over our heads.

"They may look light and fluffy, but those big white things floating overhead are pretty hefty. A typical cloud has a volume of around 1km3 and a density of around 1.003kg per m3 – about 0.4 per cent lower than that of the surrounding air, which is why they float. So cranking through the maths, that means that a typical cloud weighs around a million tonnes."

Yeah, i've seen very clever people get confused about what 2m^2 is. Is it a square, 2m on a side or a square of 1.414m per side?

The article is talking about "safe drinking water". If you are living in an area with limited safe drinking water, you don't use that for anything other than drinking or cooking. You use the "not safe to drink" water for everything else. If you don't even have a source of "not safe to drink" water, then the problems are different.

If it wasn't for the HGV driver shortage, I would have suggested we send wagon loads of dehydrated water concentrate to the relevant locations. On arrival, just add...

Re: It was all a hoax

"However, the graveyards are full of humans lost due to the Covid pandemic. That'll be rather harder to debunk."

There are still Holocaust Deniers who don't believe the mass graves evidence.

Then there's the Moon Landing hoax proponents, Flat Earthers..and on and on and on.

Re: A bit OT but..

You're probably lucky you didn't get an invoice for their time speaking to you :-)

Re: Only free if your time is worth nothing

All the UK hotels I've stayed in have free WiFi, sometimes with a freely given password, sometimes completely open, sometimes there's a "charge" of having to register an email address through a portal page. The only times I've had issues have been in US owned chain hotels in the UK where either you only get WiFi if you pay, or they give a slight nod to "free" WiFi which provides little more than dial-up speeds as an alternative to the paid for one.

On the other hand, according to some hotel receptionists I've spoken too, the WiFi can get congested some evenings because of people rocking up with firesticks/chromesticks/whatever to plug into the telly of an evening. The last one I was in, just last week, said they had a 5Mb/s restriction per connection (they had a big fibre connection). She actually apologised for the restriction!! I know many people who still can't get that at home :-)

Re: My Fav

Depends on the domain. I've used [email protected] many times.

Re: "What the neighbours made of their sudden disconnection is . ."

"They might not have even noticed they were using the neighbour's connection. They switched on their gadget and the internet was available."

I actually had that happen. I was setting up a new WiFi system for a student house. Once the AP was set up, as a favour I offered set up their devices for them since WiFi was still fairly new and not many knew how to do that. Anyway, got about 8 devices all done, down to the last one and she says, "oh, mines already working. It's been working since I moved in." Erm, you didn't have WiFi till I plugged in the new WiFi router. Had a look, and her Apple device had automatically found anything within range and connected, ie in this case the next door student house which had a wide open network, no password.

You know the Flash isn't real, right? It's just Sheldon Cooper in a fake outfit.

I'm too meta for my shirt!

Signed: Fred. Right?

Only people in the IT industry know that Alphabet = Google. They rest of the world neither knows nor cares.

Even most tech journalist writing for the less technical or more general audience, will always state something like "Alphabet, the parent company of Google" because they know their readers won't know who Alphabet are. And by the time most readers have got the thought "Alpha-who?" across their brain, they then see the next bit of the sentence and their brain immediately replaces all future occurrences in the article of Alphabet with Google.

Re: Facebook is just a mirror

"Those who don't like what they see should perhaps start doing something more useful than picturing the one who installed it, being mr. Zuckerberg, as the devil."

That's a little like saying the oil companies aren't to blame for pollution. It's the people buying the products that cause it. Oil^[1] companies are nice, friendly, green and cuddly, but those customers force them to produce all that dirty oil. (But let's not mention the $billions spent on advertising, pushing the people to buy all that oil derived product)

[1] Pick the industry of your choice here.

"Because following the logic, if MZ calls the holding company Meta then the subsidiary developing the metaverse can't also be called Meta."

That caught my attention too. Surely, following his own logic, Meta should be a new spin-off company under the parent, which means they need to go back and find a name for the new parent company. Again.

Unless the "logic" is that "Meta" is the parent and Facebook, instagram etc. are all planned to be part of it, despite his bleating on about inter-operability and open standards, the long term plan is a closed, walled garden.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg has gone off the deep end

"That list, and one of Amazon and Alphabet are a result of acquisitions being tax deductible. Corporate USA is out of control"

And the US Govt. has a massive debt problem. Maybe they could consider placing a 15% Sales Tax on corporate acquisitions? Kill two birds with one stone :-)

Re: second life vibes

"They're also great at selling adverts. Targetting them, not so much. But selling them they do fine."

They do target them. But they have a sawn off shotgun while telling everyone it's really a high end sniper rifle.

Re: Bond Baddie

Yeah, it's looking more like The Matrix and less like Multivac (which also had issues of course)

Re: A massive lack of ingenuity

"Is there no ingenuity out there? Is ths really as good as it gets?"

No, it could be "Better Than Live^TM

Re: I can help but think...

The landed/crashed spaceships reminded my of this artists book cover style.

Re: Waiting for virtual reality

"Facebook is buggy as hell, slow, clumsy, and completely incapable of taking on next-generation functionality."

Yes, now imaging being a fully immersive VR world of that quality. Motion sickness just won't be enough to describe it. Although come to think of it, maybe now is the time to invest in companies making motion sickness medications?

Re: Just goes to show

...and also my introduction to The Blue Danube as a fried breakfast slid around the non-stick frying pan, long before I tried flying a Viper into a docking station.

(At least I think it was a gas advert, I could be wrong - can;t find it on the intertubes)

Re: Just goes to show

"Except the plonkers in charge at the time took the same sort of decision the government did in 1971 .."

Meanwhile, over in Germany, a number of the nuclear power stations were off line for repairs but when Fukishima happened, they decided to start shutting down their entire fleet and import power from Poland who were generating electricity from very dirty "brown" coal instead. I'm not sure of the likelihood of earthquakes or tidal waves in Germany, but clearly it's a risk too high to take. It's cheaper and gets more votes to get rid of nuclear and outsource your pollution.

Re: Black Arrows forth dimension

"It might be reasonable to think that the UK was broke by the 1960s but you'll hear the same kvetching from politicians about unnecessary expenditure in the 1930s and even earlier."

Such as, currently in the news "Palmerstones Follies". Touted as a waste of money at the time because they were never used. Of course, you could also argue that they were never used because their mere existence was a deterrent.

Re: Previously on The Register:

Google search

road sign leicester space centre

select images, 1st result. :-)

Alternatively, Google Streetview and have a look at the motorway near any of the junctions off the M1 or other major trunk roads around Leicester, eg heading south on the M1 or the A46

Re: Paging Mr Cynical Dabbs

"asks the bloke in the seat in front on the tram"

The driver?

Re: "You've got mail!"

TBH, I was expecting to find that Dabbsies flies were open and his new found friend was simply stating "You've Got Male" in a not so subtle way of informing of said situation while trying to minimise the embarrassment that otherwise might be caused by yelling "Oi! Mate! Yer todger's hanging out!"

"And my company is on a 3 year replacement cycle, meaning that old Windows machines are always looking for new homes."

Wow! They must have money to burn or some very demanding needs. I've not dealt with a customer in many years still on a 3 year replacement cycle. They all went to 4 and then 5 years quite some while ago. They'd probably go longer now, except the failure rates start rising past 5 years.

(On the other hand, with COVID and WFH, the failure rate has shot up anyway, what with pets, kids, drinks and food near expensive computers!)

Re: It can happen

Was that one of those orange plasma screen "laptop" beasts that didn't even have a battery because it would only last about 10 minutes on a good day?

Uneducated users can be fixed. The stupid ones, well, we have Etch-a-Sketches for them.

FWIW, most of the "education" issues I find with users is a lack of training in the first place. Employers often assume users know how to use their PCs and software. They assume they were taught at school or at previous employments. The users often think they know too because they don't know how much they don't know. And often it's the basics that they don't know. Something as simple as keyboard shortcuts, or even just using TAB/ALT-TAB to go up and down the fields on a form comes as huge revelation to many. They log in every day but always reach for the mouse to select the password field!!

Re: Analogue radio receivers were low cost

Only because the DAB patents have expired. You won't see DAB+ at those prices.