Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: eh?

"I understand that you can go 150 km in England and find a very different different dialect from your starting point. "

Hah! Get into the mining areas and you can go a mile down the road to the next pit village and struggle to understand the dialect.

(not so much now, thanks to TV, pit closures and all the older miners dying off though!)

Re: @AC ... eh?

"Don't be so sure. Sea boundaries are drawn perpendicular to the coast, and if you take the current England/Scotland border a surprising amount of the N. Sea oil/gas fields are in English waters."

FWIW, there's no specific, accepted, way of drawing the border out to see. Your way is one. Another is to take the general direction of the border between the two countries and extend that out to sea. Which, coincidently, gives England an even bigger share of North Sea oil :-)

Re: @John Brown ... Vogon

"May pushed it forward and people voted for the parties of leave not remain."

Apart from UKIP, most political parties were split over leave/remain, certainly the Tories and Labour, so which were the "leave" parties?

Re: @John Brown ... Vogon

"No, we didn't have an election. we have a referendum which is basically an opinion poll."

Actually, I didn't say that, you are mis-quoting.

"We did have an election, which despite the most monumentally stupid manifesto plans Theresa May still managed (just) to win. In fact, the pro-Brext parties gained vote share, and the pro-Leave ones lost it."

Theresa May didn't "win" the election, it was almost a hung Parliament, at best taking a risk with a minority government, but she found the mythical money tree she said didn't exist and bought off the DUP to retain a majority.

Re: eh?

"JIT never worked when there was any sort of distance between factories / suppliers and customers."

JIT isn't about distance, it's about time, hence the expansion of JIT into Just In Time. It's doesn't matter where the stuff comes from so long as it gets from source to destination "Just In Time". The major selling point of JIT is that goods are not stockpiled, costing money instead of earning money, sitting in a warehouse.

Back when Ferrybridge power station was still burning coal, they switched a load of coal deliveries back to the canal. They didn't care that the coal took a day instead of an hour or two to get from Immingham docks, it still got there when it was needed. (yes, not a great example, since they also had a mountain of stock-piled coal too.)

Re: eh?

"Post-no deal-Brexit if it happens ALL UK trade - yes that is both EU and non-EU trade will be subject to WTO rules - something being missed by many, including I suspect the leading Brexiteers in the Conservative party..."

FTFY - The whole point of the negotiations is to avoid a "no deal" Brexit.

Re: eh?

"We should assume that anything relying on JIT manufactiring is going to pack up and leave - and it will take any local suppliers with it, or find new ones on the mainland."

JIT manufacturing doesn't need to leave the UK just because the time scales may change. They just factor in the time it takes to get stuff from one place to another. To some extent, it may increase costs since in effect, capital will be tied up for longer as goods in transit. But so long as the goods get to the destination "Just In Time", why does matter if said goods took 2 hours or 2 days to get there?

There may be impacts on fresh goods and some others, probably on many JIT systems initially, but that's what forward planning is about. And all of the this is assuming a worst case, hard "no deal" Brexit, something neither the UK nor the EU wants. The UK may be prepared to walk away from the table, but that doesn't mean they will have to if a good enough deal is reached.

Re: Won't somebody think of the UK?

"Nobody cares about the United Kingdom."

Yes, least of all the politicians. No matter the internal or external disagreements, that should be happening behind closed doors and a united front put on for the negotiations. All this public political squabbling is doing serious harm to the UK's negotiating position. Having said that, the EU stance seems to have mollified a bit over the last weeks compared to their initial position at the start of this palaver. They are finally coming to terms with the downsides to the EU of a hard "cliff edge" Brexit. Maybe the UK negotiators are not blinking and the EU have just noticed? I suspect, and it's my hope, that there will be a last minute flurry of agreements and we'll all come out of this with some sort of agreement that doesn't cause as much harm as a hard Brexit.

Re: The comment has been taken out of context

"He is not the only one. I had to do some unrelated trawling through the company registries in Bulgaria and Romania a few months back and I came across a lot of prominent BrExiteers and their investment vehicles investing like crazy into office real estate there."

Although I have no doubt you are correct, I'd be prepared to bet that was already happening anyway. They are the new "cheap" places in the EU. But Brexiteers taking advantage of the likely increased rush for properties there is a bit beyond the Pale.

Re: Vogon

"Politicians like to be re-elected and hate admitting they were wrong."

Hence the confusion at the highest levels WRT to Brexit. How do you take the UK out of the EU on the basis of a slim majority and not alienate the almost half of the voters who didn't want to leave? Especially when both leave and remain voters are from all parts of the political spectrum.

"At one point British Telecom called # "gate" much to the bafflement of every single one of their customers."

I once heard someone refer to an exclamation mark as pling, which confused me somewhat!

"Won't take much would it, buy an urn digitise and insert; how much is a Grecian urn?"

No one knows, they rarely declare it to the tax man.

Re: IoT foolishness

"I can't think of a good reason why your vacuum cleaner needs access to the internet at all. This is just more IoT madness."

...and why does it need an SD card, which the article implies is removable?

"A set of stairs should mitigate the risk to privacy"

Until they independently invent anti-grav!

Re: Am I missing something?

"Using a CLI requires a certain amount of knowledge and cleverness that most users don't seem to have."

Must be a dumbing down of users. Not so many years ago, a CLI is all they had and many users were happy with booting up a PC and loading WordStar/WordPerfect, SuperCalc or whatever, copying files around and all sorts of "clever" stuff.

Re: Am I missing something?

"I really do expect the progress bar to reflect what's going on in the background. It's kind of the point of having it in the first place - if it's wrong, why have it at all?"

Because it soothes the users into thinking something useful and important is happening when the reality is the bloody thing is just cleaning up some old files or waiting for a server connection or something equally as boring. And it's a lot less confusing for them than having console messages scrolling by.

I wonder if Simon will be remembered, many, many years from now, in the way today we celebrate the life of Steve Ditko, on his death last month, aged 90, the creator of Spiderman and Dr Strange. Funny how people we never get to meet and often don't even know the names of, can have such an affect on our lives.

Re: Big red ball?

"Never red? Nope, the description will eventually be correct, just wait a little while.

OK, you'll have to wait quite a long* time,"

Nah, you only have to wait a few hours for almost sunset then goes a lovely red if the weather is right.

"By making a man in a fancy hat ultimately responsible you solve the problem"

A humorous way of putting it, but the "driver" is ultimately responsible for the vehicle while in motion. The same applies to ships and road vehicles to. I'm specifically aware of lorries/HGV in that no matter who does the loading, the driver is the one who gets fined if the load is unsafe, out of balance etc. and possibly on charges of manslaughter if the mis-loading is the root cause or attributable cause to a death in an RTA.

"There's an ICAO standard weight for a passenger which you can use if you're carrying more than a certain number of passengers. Unsurprisingly a few years ago it was revised upwards, I think to 83kg."

Which is probably why, on a school exchange visit to France many years ago, 40 kids, aged between 12 and 16 were manually rearranged into suitable seats on the first leg of the journey flying a Trident down to Heathrow. A small enough aircraft that the unusually large number of little people meant taking their approximate weights into consideration in the seating plan. There was none of that kerfuffle flying the much larger Tristar across to Charles De Gaulle.

"There nothing in these calculations that a straightforward IOS app (Android if you prefer) can't handle. Jiust make sure you have the passenger numbers to start with. Its known as plan b."

That thought crossed my mind too, in a slightly dissimilar way. What is so complex about this software that it has to run "in the cloud"? Why is this not something an airline can by in and run on it's own systems? You really don't want to be at the mercy of a 3rd party for business critical systems. I wonder if the savings of doing it this way will be more or less than the losses just from this one outage?

Re: EU Highwaymen....

"I cant help but think this is nothing to do with antitrust but about topping up the EU pot of money."

Even what looks like an enormous fine to you is still only a tiny amount in terms of the EU annual budget. Its barely a blip on the radar.

"The only part I think is totally wrong is that manufacturers cannot use a fork on another handset and be able to have play on another. That is wrong. They stopped car manufacturers limiting sales at dealers to their cars which amounts to the same thing."

And this is exactly what the fine is about. Google have been told this strong-arming was illegal for years but took no notice. The large fine is based on not just the action, but the duration of the action, after being told they were being naughty boys and girls.

Re: At least it's not BING

"If I were Google I would threaten to pull out of the EU... There would be riots of angry denizens facing a future of shitty Bing search."

Except everyone would just point and laugh at an obvious empty threat because Google are not going to pull out of a market much bigger then the USA.

Re: @Ledswinger

"Good luck with your European Operating System. Whilst it may not slurp your data to advertisers, it will slurp your data to your political masters, the EU."

They may rail and argue and fight through the courts, but no US multinational already trading in the EU is going to pack up and go home, leaving what is pretty much their biggest single market (bigger than the USA) to the competition who WILL accept the laws and regulations and fill the void. MS broke the law, got fined big time, eventually realised they would have to suck it up and got right back to business. Why would Google or others be different?

Re: Pointless?

"Note that having a build ready in a few hours without human intervention is still way ahead of the old days."

I think the point is that in a large organisation, particularly admin type departments, which are often he majority, they all have the same build. We do hardware support for a number of large orgs, and that's what we see every day. Having pre-imaged hard disks for desktops (or a whole PC) and pre-imaged laptops means a swap out is an almost instantaneous fix from the users point of view leaving the actual fix to happen without a user breathing down your neck.

Re: Tee hee. Trump is to Putin as --

"It's almost like Germany is following rules laid down to ensure it never becomes a military empire. Craziness."

I wonder who it was who had such a big hand in laying down those rules and when? Might it have been the USA? Same applies to why there is such a large US military presence in Japan (which Trump also railed against the cost of until someone told him the Japanese pay the USA for said military presence.)

Re: "I don't think Trump is controlled by anybody..."

"I think this overestimates Trump. Because he looks like a person and makes noises like a person we assume that, well, he's a person, even if he's a bit disorganised in his thinking. "

I do sometimes wonder if there a zip hidden under his wig and maybe he farts a lot more than expected.

Re: Tee hee. Trump is to Putin as --

"The EU ensures that this is perpetuated by locking US firms out of the EU market on regulatory grounds."

There's nothing stopping US food producers and exporters dealing with the EU other than their own reluctance to meet the regulatory standards. There are certain EU foodstuffs banned in the US or manufactured here to US standards so they can be safely exported.

Pretty much all of the rest of your post is highlighting illegal practices under EU laws and regulations for which the perpetrators were found out and punished.

The NATO bit is a bit of a red herring too. The US was a prime mover behind the creation of NATO because the US needed a European buffer zone to contain the USSR. NATO, to the US of the day, was all about protecting the US and minimising the spread of communism. Trump was especially creative with the figures when he claimed the US was paying 90% of the NATO bill, but was right to some extent that some EU countries are not putting in the full whack. Trump just exaggerated for effect as he is wont to do on many, many occasions, to the extent that he's had to back pedal many, many times.