Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Just perhaps

"Universities don't just teach theory, they also teach employable skills and if you want to work in creative industries in particular you need to have knowledge of using Adobe tools."

So, use cheaper alternatives for years one and two and use Adobe for year three. The students come out multi-skilled with the most recent being what the main employers want them to know. Everybody wins and the graduates are ready for change or to work for companies who do use alternatives. Remember, a degree isn't supposed to be a vocational work experience course. It's supposed to teach you the subject as well as how to research and learn on your own or in a team. I wonder how many here have degrees they never used as intended? Or where their degree simply made them more skilled for the unrelated job they ended up in. ISTR someone once posted they did a chemistry degree but ended up in software design, primarily but not exclusively in the pharmaceutical industry.

"The problem is finding tutorials and support as a beginner or intermediate user."

That shouldn't be a problem for students though, what with them being in a place of learning and all :-)

Re: Well the FSB ain't what it used to be

But will all your friends, neighbours, employer etc think that too? Can you be absolutely certain?

Re: Reductionist science, thus fatally flawed speculative tech.

"prosthetic limbs using muscle nerve signals probably require plenty of user training to learn to use"

We already have prosthetics that work by sensing muscle twitches and nerve impulses and yes, they do take time for each individual to learn to control. I can only imagine using a brain implant sensor is likely to be at the same level of required training if not more so.

Re: However, he also got a reputation...

"That worked very well up until my particular section of IT ended up under Marketing,"

Have you considered a career change? Maybe as a nursery school worker where the level of intellectual conversation might be a bit higher than currently?

Re: Paint it orange and yellow . . .

". . . then it will look like one of those plastic toddlers' toy cars with a bunch of drones strapped to the top. The only conceivable use of such a thing is to convey Chair Force brass around a military base in, um, style, we'll go with style."

The Segway of the skies!!!! Sounds like a cool idea but anyone using one ends up looking like a dick.

Considering the level of battery and motor technology, I think range anxiety is something you'll get even stepping into a fully charged unit.

Re: I heard that everything in Australia will kill you.

"But I always thought that only applied to the plants and animals!"

Yep, they got the full set now. Animal, vegetable and mineral.

Re: High tide only

I thought you ate them with tatties and haggis.

Re: They could

I think I saw a documentary where people travelled in a big cylinder from one side of the world to the other. They overcame the "upside down" issue by swivelling the chairs around as they passed the halfway mark. Or maybe that's just a fake implanted memory.

Re: They could

"You are thinking small. If you dredge deep enough then eventually there will not be enough water to fill the gap and job done !"

You might be on to something there. When the ferries were ordered, sea level was lower, but due to climate change, the sea levels have risen and now the ferries are "too tall". If we dredge all the rivers and harbours around the world enough, that should drop the sea levels back to whatever we all agree is "normal". After all, it's been reported that the "pause" in sea level rise during the 70s and 80s was due to large numbers of massive damns being built, so there is precedent :-)

Re: Trustworthy?

Chrome is the modern IE6.

"Best viewed using Chrome - because we use "features" of Chrome that no other browser has and are used right at the start of the page render so royally fucking up page display in any other browser."

Re: "Like WebUSB, WebMIDI and WebBluetooth, …"

"Yep. If I wanted a browser-OS, I'd use ChromeOS. You can't simply shoehorn a browser into doing everything!"

It does look as if the endgame here for The Goog is an appliance with the absolute bare minimum of OS under the browser, just enough to run it, and everything else is a webapp.

Re: I choose the clients...

...at least not until said client is the only option because all the browser makers have followed suit. Although hopefully some decent blocking add-ons might available by then.

Re: Embarrassing?

"TURN THE BRIGHTNESS UP!"

Had a call for a dim screen, full brightness, barely visible display. I get sent out to take a look and maybe adjust the HT voltage up as an interim fix. It's on the factory floor. Clean the glass, turn the brightness down to normal levels, users all happy. Sometimes, it's not a technical fault :-)

Re: took his hammer and smashed it to very tiny pieces

"Hammering the proverbial square peg into a round hole is just asking for the joint to fail at an inopportune time."

I remember woodwork lessons at school 50+ years ago and we had square drill bits :-)

It was essentially a square box/tube with a drill bit down the inside and the four sides of the business end sharpened to chisel through as the inner round bit drilled. It's probably got a proper name, but i've not seen or used one since school/

Re: With great power comes great incompatibility

"For future reference, they make locking outlet covers that fit over an inserted plug or plugs, preventing the removal of same."

Just bear ion mind, and plan for, those moments when an emergency power removal must be performed at great speed. eg make sure the cover doesn't prevent access to the switch or that the end going into the device is easily removable.

"while pulling 9G."

That's the deal breaker when it comes to a meatbag pilot against AI assisted remote pilot. Suddenly the flight envelope is only limited by the strength of the airframe and power of the engines. And you no longer need the weight of the pilot plus gear/life support and the heavy ejector seat.

Re: Unlikely story

"There's nothing wrong with a good truck in much of America. Plenty of things to haul, unpaved roads to explore and alligators to shoot and bring home to eat."

While true in some case, the vast majority of the population live in cities where a truck, big or otherwise is personal choice or a status symbol. We call them "Chelsea Tractors" over here. The clue being that no one would EVER need a tractor in Chelsea! (Well, maybe a tractor pulling a grass cutter in a local park, but I'm sure you get the point.

Re: As far as eBay and PayPal are concerned

I would tend to agree with you on the whole. There's no way to prove the person logged in is the person making the transaction in the same way that someone can take and use someone elses credit/debit card and use it in a shop. If they have the card and PIN, there's no way for the shop assistant to know that the person is not the valid cardholder. In effect, the child "stole" his fathers identity.

Sounds like a corrupted backup process anywhere from it's never done a successful backup to just far enough back that it's trickled through to the least used backup. If the former, then it was never a backup if a restore was never verified, but it sounds more like the latter.

Correct. Especially if the device is not provided by the education establishment in question. Although in the case in question, it sounds like it was a university which would probably only require that the account is logged in on the device to get access. But maybe she didn't have auto-login switched on either.

Re: Class action suit in 3... 2... 1...

"I've worked at companies where whole servers have gone down, power surge due to a lightning strike, fire, flood etc. They didn't wail about how unfair life is, they got replacement hardware in and recovered their data."

Do you think said company would just "suck it up" if their vendor supplied updates wiped the server? There's going to be downtime, even if it's just a few hours/days/weeks while they rebuild from backups, Or do you think the company might be suing the people who caused the damage?

Re: Class action suit in 3... 2... 1...

"Whatever liabilities a software creator may have the ongoing existence of data stored on a device they are not responsible for is not one of them."

There's a pretty strong argument that they ARE responsible for deleting data on a general purpose device though. If it had been a specific single function device like a camera, cable/sat decoder box etc that an update may do a factory reset, then yeah, there might be an argument for deleting user data. I'm fairly confident that most courts in most jurisdictions are unlikely to look favourably on a company provided update to a single app deleting data that might not actually relate to the app itself.

People losing data by not having backups because they got malware or dropped and smashed their device is upsetting but they will accept it's mainly their own fault. Having your data deleted by a company error who you have paid to supply an app, backup or no backup, is very much mostly the fault of the supplier not the user.

Re: Class action suit in 3... 2... 1...

"No doubt the EULA requires accepting arbitration rather than a lawsuit, and limits potential damages"

Have these one-sided, onerous EULAs ever actually been properly tested in court yet? From what I remember reading of various cases over the years, despite the EULA pretty much absolving the vendor of most/all liability, they almost always end up settling out of court for much more than the EULA would imply. It's almost as if the corporations are frightened of setting a legal precedent proving the EULAs are not worth the paper and ink or digital bits they are written on.

"Time to send an astronaut outside with a spray bottle of soapy water. Look for the bubbles."

Great idea. Remind me, what happens to water in the vacuum of space?

Re: Call a plumber

The return trip is the cheap part. It's downhill all the way.