Posts by Andy Bell

"But make no mistake. Living in a capitalistic structure is a fabulous place to live." Said the wife of a billionaire.

"thanks for the fascinating insight into how Capitalism is fabulous for the top 0.001%" Said everyone else.

You'll have to go back a fair few years to find a better example of national self sabotage than the monmental self inflcited wound that is Brexit.

The Spitfire entered service with guns that didn't fire at common combat altitudes and an engine that didn't work if the aeroplane was upside down.

Seemed to work out OK in the end.

A memorable day

I was on the 7 o clock from York to KX that morning..due into the station just before 9 if memory serves. We stopped just short of the platform and stayed there for an hour or more. It was the time before you had a internet connection in your hand, so the only news came via the PA system and i guess people calling on mobiles. Everyone speaks of the mobiles not working, but i don't remember that bit. Certainly mine worked when i sent a text saying "i'm not dead" to the now ex wife. Probably have been a bit more sensitive.

Eventually the train set off in the other direction back to York, we never actually set foot in London. York station was full of armed coppers. The sense of getting off the train in a very different country, only a few meters away from where i got on it will always remain with me.

Library ?

Thats such 20th century speak. Round our way they were renamed Learning Resource Centres years ago.

30 years since a war was won with MBT's ?

So they are now irrelevant and we don't need them.

26 years since the Falklands, so in 4 years we can scrap those expensive ships then Lewis ?

Whats that Lewis ? They are useful in other ways ? If we scrap them we may find we need them at short notice due to some unforseen event ?

Well i never.

As for manufacturing capacity, the Sherman was the "best" due to numbers alone being a inferior design to British designs such as the Cromwell or Comet. This is an argument for having more capacity to design and make the things, not less.

Muppet

He's saying that we need to go back to the AOL, Compuserve and (pre internet) MSN days where you saw that they gave you and were lucky to get hobbled access to everything else.

Because that worked out just fine for all those folks didn't it ?

Muppet.

We need a muppet picture.

Is this ever going to be realistic ?

They are going to need as many as 10 to be airborne to cover the whole 360 degree space around the US. 10 airborne, all the time.

They are going to need four times that many at least in total to maintain the 10 in the air, due to maintainance demands etc etc.

Then they will need the specialist ground equipment at a number of US bases to support them.

I wonder what the total cost will be in the end ?

@ Stuart Van Onselen

No thats Iraq. Afghanistan via its then Taliban government assisted in the direct attack on a NATO member, who invoked article 5 of the NATO charter.

Afghanistan is a NATO and UN sanctioned action, so take up your "illegal" tripe with them.

And at Typhoon detractors. Exactly what major defense program is on time and on budget these days ? Even the F22 and JSF programs are being eyed jealously by US lawmakers looking to reduce costs and government pork. Neither is 100% safe.

Where would we be if the JSF gets canned ? Well, not so badly off, because we have an alternative.

Not we shouldn't have just bought the Rafale anyway, doing a good enough job for a much cheaper price. That way we could have avoided this Eurofighter and JSF boondoggle, and the French may well have bought a third carrier of the design we are using to operate them from potentially saving money there too.

Don't know why Lewis didn't mention that, its not like he's a US shill or anything.

re naval sonar: wrong enemy, wrong century

You couldn't be more wrong. Iran and North Korea have some very capable submarines supplied by our good friends the Russians, its not entirely impossible that they may use these to threaten nearby shipping lanes. It may be worthwhile to have some means of countering that threat to our / friendly nations shipping. Doesn't mean anyone is going to sink anyone, but its useful to know that they can't even mount a credible threat thanks to the RN's capability in this area.

Unless you think it worthwhile to trust that other nations will pick up the tab for us, which would leave us in something of a pickle if they decide not to.....

Colour me sceptical

Lets see some pics of said SMS messages on the phone in question, and someone from the mobile company confirming no SMS messages sent to that phone at that time.

Until then its just some jolly japer sending prank texts to this poor chap.

Don't be confused by the terms hot and cold

I don't think they are referring to thermal radiation. Like a radioactive emitter might be described as "hot" even if its not actually hot in the thermal sense.

Can we get a "story dumbed down" picture ?

I agree

I deal with a few small organisations with less than 50 members. They typically don't even want to pay a full time IT person, never mind want to buy a blade server. Some don't have racks, much less care about server density.

Unless this is the less than 1,000 employees small business beloved of totally out of touch corporate types.

@ John Macintyre

Well to be fair John the Army probably didn't want to have its transporation outsourced to the civilian private sector. I would imagine it was more or less forced into this by ever tighter budgets.

Funny thing the UK. When it suits we are happy to slag off the military, even if the corner cutting we are slagging off was not the militaries first preferance. When it comes to allocating tax money, we are just as happy to give them an ever decreasing amount as a percentage of GDP.

Omlette, eggs, cake, eating etc etc.

And before someone comes back with the tired old "well we shouldn't be spending it in Iraq" note that the military doesn't get to choose where to go. The politicians WE selected get that dubious honour.

Bet Billg wanted to drag a Raike over hot coals

I'll be here all night.

I agree, not all MS hardware is rubbish

I bought a Intellimouse wireless explorer mouse 6 years ago and it still works (no internal moving parts you see)

Also the MS Sidewinder force feedback 2 joystick was so well built it aquired legendary status amongst Flightsim players to such an extent i was able to sell my working 5 year old model for almost as much as a paid for it. The prices on ebay actually went up when they stopped making them new.

Logitech joysticks on the other hand are pretty terrible flimsy items, only good for occasional use.

iSCSI is growing up, that doesn't mean it stays bargin basement

The iSCSI solution mentioned in the first post by mvrx is not itself able to challenge the reliabilty of a tranditional FC SAN.

A traditional FC SAN solution aimed at the low/mid range such as the Hitachi AMS200 is capable of five nines reliabilty in one box. It has dual everything, even controllers.

A commondity iSCSI solution based on standard PC server hardware would need to provide 99.999% reliability with two such boxes and have replication between the two, by which time the cost difference has narrowed somewhat.

I've deployed a few systems of each type and can see where iSCSI will encroach on the traditional FC SAN, but people need to get out of the cheap-as-chips mindset lest iSCSI never be seen as rock solid as a mission critical SAN needs to be.

A10 cancelled ?

To the chap who said the A10 was cancelled, not sure about that. Last i heard it was not only still in service, but being upgraded to the A10C, for onward service into the next decade. The first A10C rolled out this year.

Never has so much been got wrong by one person

Without a doubt the most inaccurate, slanted, biased, and downright wrong article i've ever read on El Reg.

I hope the editor doesn't let you near a defense story again.

In addition to the merciless debunking already handed out, Sea Dart / Wolf performed well enough in the Falklands scoring many kills, and forcing the surviving Argentine aircraft to fly so low that often their bombs did not have time to arm. Do you think they were skimming the waves to look good on camera ? Or because if they went over ~200 feet within range of a T42 they were dead ?