Posts by John Smith 19

I don't like to engage in childish behaviour but..

ROTFLMAO

That is all.

UK Govt IT. Safe in their hands?

IIRC EDS big thing *was* their mainframe skills. Chomping through a whole nations social security files with 5 9s reliability.

So with that gone, aside from a *very* large "entertainment" budget for smoozing civil servants and the occasional minister what do they do that's "special"?

@BorkedAgain

"Can't see too many realistic peaceful uses for this; all that "cheaper access to space" stuff sounds too much like a sop..."

You're right to be suspicious.

Hypersonic flight is a bit like fusion power. Good for generating a nearly inexhaustible supply of PhDs with *limited* use outside their (highly) specialized areas.

As an *idea* its advocates break down into 2 groups. Those who would like to field a hypersonic (M5+) vehicle to *prove* you don't need rockets to go this fast, *ideally* leading to a hypersonic passenger carrier (say 3x the speed of Concorde). the 2nd group reckon the way to lower launch costs is to get more "aircraft" like operations. In this mindset this is a stage in ramping up the aircraft speed until *ultimately* it gets to launch velocity.

Note that the missions are *qualitatively* different. Cruise in a missile or passenger is fine. It can run rough at startup and getting up to speed because that will be transient. A launcher wants to be *continually* accelerating. If it's not its crashing. This implies a launcher engine is *continually* altering geometry to compensate for its acceleration. And if (big if) it *can* get to M8, that still leaves getting to orbital velocity at M23. It's now above 95-99% of the atmosphere (so any wings are pretty useless).

There is a *reason* NASA chose to pursue RBCC (Rocket Based Combined Cycle). A launcher will need rocket drive. Treating it as a *systems* integration problem and designing it in up front helps spread the weight. IN a cruise vehicle (passenger carrying or not) it would eliminate the dropping of booster rockets at the expense of a smallish oxidizer tank.

What *really* lowers weight is junking the wings, landing gear and huge high temperature (huge x high pressure x high temp capable = V. heavy ) air handling ducts running end to end and replacing them with a well designed rocket engine.

Honestly figuring the weights of these things at the concept design stage is tricky enough that *any* group of supporters can concoct a set of assumptions that will *prove* their preferred development plan will solve the problem. You might note that the USAF (whose top brass *love* the idea of crewed *very* fast aircraft and would bend over backwards to justify one) have still *never* managed to find a mission it can do better *enough* (than a crewed aircraft pushing at most M2) to justify the huge development costs.

Human beings have built at least a *dozen* orbit capable rocket systems in the last 54 years. No one has flown a *single* hypersonic system (1 or more stage) to orbit.

Air is *bulky*. Liquid oxygen is not (by about 700:1) and pretty cheap. Storage tank design is well understood and can be surprisingly compact as long as you avoid a propellant that is colder than LOX (other heat leaks accumulate pools of LOX. Add spark for "interesting" effects) or insanely dangerous to handle (OF2 for example. It can burn through concrete).

Mine will still have a copy of "Surviving the Heat Barrier" in it.

Too fat.

So what? that's at least a couple of mm above what *can* be done already.

I have a business notebook. 10mm thick. No moving parts. Infinite battery life and infinite range of color display.

Replacements available at all leading stationers.

Bring me some real news.

NO2ID likely to be in business for a while

As has been pointed out (and to mix metaphors) the folk on various gravy trains have *no* plans to desert this particular trough.

They're digging. They will do (say and write) *whatever* is necessary to keep their jobs. Some because it's a cushy little number and others because they *believe* in their sacred duty (and *right*) for the civil service (never of course themselves) to collect *whatever* information it wants, whenever it wants of whoever it wants.

No need to ask. No need to know.

"Runaway" or "Spies in the Sky"

Looks remarkably like the device used by Gene Simmons to evade capture in the old Michale Crichton/Tom Selleck movie.

The other reference is a JWR Taylor book of the early 70s. Tethered surveillance platform with fuel hose/tether for virtually unlimited endurance. Developed IIRC by Dornier and called something like "Peewit".

I'm sure they've seen the Italian Job in Germany

But I doubt the "suspects" (remember they have not had a trial yet) had the sense of irony to appreciate it.

55Kg, a 20 (?) flight

Reckon Sophie Anderton could make that disappear.

My coat's the one with a News of the Screws sting operation story in the pocket.

How the hell do these contracts *need* to be *this* big?

How many "eligible" people visit the UK each year that get involved in this system?

Is it >>66million?, =66million?, <66million?

As suspected, this is *not* being put "beyond use," it's more like being put into hibernation.

For when?

This should have saved *100s* of millions of pounds, not 18.

Very f^&*ing angry indeed.

Australia, the next theocracy after Iran?

I've never thought of Autstralians as growing the sort of right wing religious zealots that Merkinland has in such abundance but it looks like I'm going to have to revise my opinions.

I'd always figured the folks of Aus had better detectors for this sort of BS than their UK counterparts.

Still looking to get a clean feed into the NIR

I seem to recall this database was meant to be *only* for children that were on various (including the police) agencies and departments radar.

Then *someone* decided *all* children should be on it

And by "child" they meant IIRC up to 25. A nice overlap when it comes to feeding the National Identity Register.

Much better than the 10 year census the Nazis (assisted by IBM Deutschland) had to work with when it decided to start performing "surgery on society."

Like most of the madder of Labor's database plans it *might* have a *very* small justification.

But nothing like that needed to justify the scale they *wanted* it used on.

Black helos for obvious reasons.

Now that *is* impressive

Roll up while showing live video.

Organic, transistors less than 80 microns thick. A 4mm bend radius is a bit large but this is a *prototype* not even a product.

The 2 *biggest* problems with portable PCs are (and always have been) the screen and the batteries. Imagine 3 D cells with an end cap of electronics and this to roll out.

BTW I've *never* bought into the "LCD is low power" rubbish. With a substantial light source to generate the light and then throwing away roughly 60% because no normal light source produces polarised light. The power needed by an OLED Vs LCD system *might* surprise people.

"Derived from commercial ISR routers"

Oh good. Plenty of hardware for people to practice on.

Power companies. You have been in charge of your distribution networks.

Not for long.

Mine will be the one with "Good security is *never* bolted on afterward" on the back.

OFT has had it's moments

But the look like they were a *long* way in the day.

There performance on IT related matters seems *very* poor.

Let me suggest a view that El Reg readers might agree with.

You go on a site it tracks what pages on *that* site you visit and what links you use.

*NO* off-site tracking. Should there be some kind of joining process opt *in* to advertising is mandatory. Readers *ask* to have advertising (remember this allows the site to show it has genuine members to its advertisers. Adblock as and when necessary).

Awkward to make a profit? Probably? Tough to retain subscribers? Quite probably.

But HTF did they conclude "Opt out" was reasonable without a payoff?

House!

Another clean sweep on my BS bingo card.

good questions on lasers

A very short pulse would be *very* difficult to detect but would need *lots* of processing to pull all the factors off of such a pulse.

Note that repeated pulses could trip a fairly low tech detector that had hysteresis.

Tricky. but pretty clever.

Anyone with a grand to spare?

Shorting Crapita could be an amusing pastime watching senior fat cats stock options turn to rubbish overnight.

-4% by the end of the week?

@Graham Bartlett

"And really don't get me started on traceability, since I took over an automotive on-board diagnostics team a few years ago. The previous bloke had just set people doing things which seemed like a good idea at the time, in spite of the fact that a lot of legislative requirements (which you can't sell your cars if you don't meet them) tell you exactly what to do. It took me the better part of a month to work out how deep the shit was, never mind starting shovelling it out to fix the damn thing. Most of the team didn't even know there were requirements, never mind where to find the documents, and the customers were majorly unhappy."

Staggering. I would presume various assorted safety and emissions standards/laws would effectively write at *least* half of *any* spec.

It might be H&S gone mad, dead hand of nanny state etc, but it does give you a pretty good steer as to what direction your team should start moving in.

I guess the take away from all of these faster chopper projects is

*no* solution is actually as simple as they look.

*all* have non obvious factors ready to bite you in the rear if you don't conduct a *very* careful test programme (and in the case of the V22 even if you do. Direction of jet engine exhaust pipes on takeoff/landing anyone?)

Good luck but I wonder given *repeated* efforts to kill V22 failed if it can survive.

I hope it does.

Oh the tragedy

In the back streets of Manchester, where *dozens* of bold "entrepreneurs" had staked their financial future on reverse engineering/copying the card, now facing *ruin*.

Won't *someone* think of the forgers?

BTW IIRC most of the actual *data* is held on the virtual database that *was* the NIR (let's make sure *that* is dismantled along with the more loonier parts of the IPS) stitched together from the data from 3 existing databases.

Shorting RM

(who are still *very* much in business).

Sounds like a plan.

Candidate for an (ig)nobel prize?

While there *might* be multiple explanations for this and this *might* be one of them Occam's razor suggests the it's got 1 cause and that's something to do with plasma physics.

It's *not* the eyewitness accounts (the *whole* point of their work is that *all* you posters who described seeing things were seeing an illusion). It's the film and video recordings and the reports of damage *after* contact.

IMHO V. poor use of scientist time.

AC@22:08

""hats right, just let them email/fax/write down your name address condition dob etc, plus the other 30 sods that day x 500,000 staff, who cares about confidentiality, just "Tell Sid" and sell the data to a viagra seller. Get real. "

Well an inter-site secure email system was a *major* part of the back infrastructure IIRC. I would like to think that *would* have included encryption as an *option* at least. The sub system that distributes imaging data *seems* to work well, is liked by staff and has had no security issues.

"The whole point of the NPFIT is bring the NHS IT it the 21st Century, and protect us from the GMA Boys network who don't give a flying f*ck about patient confidentiality only who's turn is it at 19th Hole and who has the biggest budget to waste on gadget of the month. "

So not talking to *any* frontline staff about what they *need* until roll out would stop any protest. Are you perhaps a graduate of the Huto Militia school of Project Management?

The NHS needs central management, ITIL and effective cost management. It needs the Consultants to be just staff and take a salary and not self styled management guru's, with personal slush funds to waste on what not.

We must "Collectivise" the data to improve its efficiency. The kullacks (sorry medical staff) will attempt to sabotage this, but we will use our "revolutionary sense of justice" to deal with them appropriately.

*If* you believe should put *every* record of *every* hospital, GP and nursing home on *one* database you might be right. You'd naturally conclude that a mainframe (or *very* large server farm) offered the lowest transaction cost and want to build the system to be as unique as possible from everything already installed to force its adoption.

This is complete nonsense. It totally *ignores* how fast people move around (*fairly* slowly by broadband data speeds) and *all* the existing (but apparently un-inventoried) systems installed at *most* large hospitals already. On that basis the *real* issues were more to do with assembling a *virtual* record IE compatible inter system querying, data transfer and security.

If you think my language and historical references make it seem that I think of this as rather *less* about improving services and rather *more* about a Stalinist style desire to impose *total* control on this (*highly* sensitive) data you'd be right. AFAIK the *only* major effect of this idea of *one* management system driving one *central* database is the monoculture of IE6, with attendant data loss and infection stories likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

WTF is this network *for*

Because I'm b^&&$%^d If I can work out its use.

BTW they were looking at spending about £70m to implement mains signaling controlled light dimming. £40m is really small beer for the 5000km of road they manage.

@IR

"so they must play the same songs every single day with almost no variation at all other than the order."

So you've seen their play list then?

My Jobs

Is an *angry* Jobs

That is all.

An intriguing justification

The US Army's IP infrastructure has fallen into enemy hands but is has not been shut down, presumably because the enemy is using it also.

Hmmm....

Note icon.

Scramjets

Propulsion system of the future.

Always has been, always will be.

As for air breathing SSTO.

Dream on.

Suicide genes?

Perhaps they should talk to Monsanto (or whatever they are calling themselves these days) about how well that worked on keeping their herbicide resistance genes locked into their (proprietary) corn strains.

Just a thought.

BTW re-writing the human genome. A substantial part of the human genome matches matches that from various viruses and bacteria. In one case the genes for coding part of the human placenta matches those used to construct the cell wall of a bacteria, presumably humans acquiring and passing this gene on produced healthier babies than those that did not. it would seem reasonable that we acquired incorporated these genes from them and *not* vice versa.

Humans are *already* chimeric.

NN. Too simple for the WIPM generation.

Just a useful reliable system to help people communicate.

But remember there are a *lot* of news servers left.

*only* offical IMP figures released were £12Bn

As the Reg reported, it would be the *biggest* UK IT project from day 1 (The NHS NPfIT took *years* to balloon to £17.7Bn)

Not spending that money sounds like a *big* dent in the £110Bn deficit they need to reduce.

Just a thought.

On a smaller scale. WTF to ANPR cameras records get retained for 5 years?

Working the problem backwards.

Instead of choosing some random flying insect, working out how it flies (which turns out to be *very* strangely by human standards) and then building a hardware mimic these guys found the simplest flying motion insect *first* then worked out how to model it.

Now that's engineering.