* Posts by I ain't Spartacus

10123 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009

A Space Shuttle goes vertical for one last time

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Coat

Re: Skyhooks

We'll need pulleys to fix the skyhooks. Go to the stores and ask for a long weight.

While you're there, you could pick up some tartan paint as well, to cover the extenal fuel tank.

Oh, and this is special NASA gear. We'll need a left handed screwdrive.

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

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Re: Zen continuing the downward spiral

Sadly I don't know when the change was made. I was assured it was now the law when we were talking to a telecoms consultant a couple of months ago when we moved office.

And a number that we were told was impossible to port by BT "for technical reasons" in 2019 - and had to be tied to a landline can now be ported to a RingCentral setup.

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Re: Zen continuing the downward spiral

Martin an gof,

I'm told it's now a legal requirement to allow you to port your number. And the old excuses of "not technically possible on this network or with this type of number" are no longer acceptable.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

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Re: Had a similar thing happen

Good advice. Some notes are dead useful. Let me add one from my list:

Office 365: Don't bother writing anything down. The UI (and possibly the entire set of options) will have changed before you can look at these notes again.

My written procedures for setting up new users being an example. We hire a new person every 2-4 years - so I will have forgotten almost everything by the next time it happens. So when we switched to O365 I made some notes the first time we I did it. Literally the next month we partnered with another small sales company - a they needed an email address. Back to Microsoft, notes in hand, ooh this'll be easy. Oh well. Start again.

I still quite like it - but I've looked up MS own documentation on two occasions, and followed the instructions to get a dialog saying this is now the new settings page for this - please click on "classic mode" to keep using the old way. I presume their UI team are all ADHD sufferers with speed in the office coffee machines instead of sugar.

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Re: Had a similar thing happen

I'm not professional at this computer malarkey. However I work for a small business, so while my official job is technical sales - I also fix the computers / phones / network (and buy the teabags).

So when I come across a problem that I both know what it is, and remember how to fix it - then happy days! It's better if I can remember what the problem is, but have to Google the fix - harder to work out what's going wrong and diagnose because, as I said, not professional at this. Which both means I have a lot less experience to fall back on and do things less often so forget stuff.

But my golden rule is always to remember to bloody reboot it first. From the time I proudly found a fault I knew, did the fix I remembered (go me!), which didn't work. Then of course I tried doing some diagnosing, which also didn't work - and only then decided to reboot it while i went and made a cuppa. Problem solved, except I'd wasted 90 minutes in order to save myself the minute it would have taken to reboot the thing.

It isn't just the annoying thing techies tell you to do, in order to make you go away.

It's amazing how hard it is to get people to reboot their mobile to fix weird issues - even though that usually fixes them.

Adobe has 'no plans' to invest in XD despite failed Figma buy

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In the US companies being taken over (in a non-hostile takeover anyway) are expected to open up their books and give an awful lot of other information to the company making the offer. So you need to have a disincentive to stop people making a big offer and getting to see everything, then just walk away whistiling a happy tune, and saying, "ta very much laddie." Also takeovers generate uncertainty, so you risk losing long-term sales / deals that might otherwise have gone ahead.

This may have been one of the problems with HP buying Autonomy. The UK tradition is that you only give very limited information to your potential buyer, even if the takever is welcome and the board are happy to accept. HP were expecting a lot mor info, that they didn't immediately get. Of course there's a bargaining that can take place, i.e. if you don't tell me your exact breakdown of low-value hardware sales compared to high value software sales then I ain't buying - but HP had convinced themselves that doing that might bring Oracle in, so they didn't even wait for their due diligence report to be finished - and just bought them anyway. Which ended about as well as you'd expect.

Musk bought Twitter because he'd have had to pay them $2 billlion to back out of the deal. Which would have been the better decision for him, both in terms of finance, and his reputation. Oopsie! Although it's not clear that the contract allowed him to back out - of if he'd done them so much damage by spouting off about how rubbish they were during the purchase that they'd have been able to force him to buy it anyway. Or pay even more compensation. Which still would have been cheaper for him...

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Happy

Re: Who and who?

Overpriced and overpowered art programs are just money grabs at this point

I solve this problem by having all the artistic talent of a cluster of colourblind hedgehogs. In a bag.

Web devs fear Apple's iOS shakeup for Europe will be a nightmare for support

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It should be hard to go to a site with an outdated certificate. Or a self-signed one. That's a sign of a failure or that something might be wrong (or at least in testing).

But normal sites that just display some text and the odd picture didn't used to need https. And I'm not convinced that making that change has helped very much - except if you sell certificates of course...

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tiggity,

To be fair to many sites, they didn't go to https in order to look secure. But because Google made them. Firstly by de-prioritising them on search, and then by simply blocking access to them in Chrome. There wasn't even an easy way to click and get to see the site - whereas at least Firefox (still annoyingly) gave you a warning, but let you click through anyway. I don't use Chrome enough to know if there's a way round it.

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Re: I'm sure Apple will be fully compliant

Although seemingly not their iDivices. Just their iPhones. Apple aren't allowing browser choice on iPad.

It's true, LLMs are better than people – at creating convincing misinformation

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Re: More human than human?

But how can an LLM pick up a piece of paper?

Brit watchdog thinks Google's tweaked Privacy Sandbox still isn't cricket

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Re: Loophole

The CMA aren't "appeasing". They're raising their concerns in a pretty pro-active way for a regulator. Rather than waiting until the deed is done, then studying it, then saying "oops we shouldn't have allowed that".

They might be preparing to appease in future, but we can't know that. Plus they should get the credit for at least publicly doing the work now.

Also, the CMA aren't a privacy regulator. They're a competition regulator. So they're much more interested in Google abusing its market dominance, having a browser, search and mobile phone OS monopoly.

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

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Re: It's everywhere

Doctor Syntax,

Profit doesn't always have to increase. Or even stay stupidly high. This is just where people mistake news about the tech sector for how economics works in the rest of the economy. Which doesn't have vast untapped resources of venture capital money - or come to that vast untapped numbers of hubristic "thought-leaders" eager to relieve those VCs of some of that cash and launch massive start-ups. Some of which even have a rough idea how they might just make a profit in twenty years time.

Most small and medium sized companies, in mature industries, just bimble along doing what they've always done. With plans to maybe grow a bit, or launch a new product (maybe even start a new division) - but not expecting the market to change a huge amount over the next decade. They tend to take on a few new projects and new staff, and get a bit fatter, up until a recession comes, then if that's not working out, might cut costs a bit, but in general aren't trying to re-invent the wheel.

What's unusual about, say Google, is that they started off small, but with huge ambition, and access to loads of money. A quick (ahem!) Google suggests that they started off with $100k of initial funding and within a year had had two more rounds and got first $1m and then $25m. Try raising that kind of money to start a building services engineering firm or a small chain of restaurants? Of course it wouldn't make sense to invest that money, because even if they were successful, the returns wouldn't be big enough to justify it. Whereas initial investors in Google did pretty well for themselves.

But those other kinds of businesses (and whole industries) carry on nicely on making their steady profits. The problem for Google is that the people at the top probably don't know how to settle for what they've got. Just accept that you've build a huge search monopoly, keep taking the profits, take a healthy cut and give the rest to your shareholders as dividends. Partly they were quite right to invest in smartphones. There could have been a competitor, with all that smartphone data, access to the advertisers and the possibility of doing things like local search and so competing successfully with Google and damaging their search monopoly.

But how much cash have they poured into self-driving cars? Or starting a social network. Or building a basic, but not very profitable, office suite. They still make 90% of their profits from placing adverts next to search results.

I guess here we might praise Apple? At one point they had a $150 billion cash pile. But managed to resist temptation to blow it on a buying-spree of other companies. And although there are often rumours that they're looking at launching into new markets, they've mostly stuck to their knitting, making computers, plus tablets and phones. Admittedly the correct response to having that huge a pile of cash is to only do it if you have a reason to use it, or return it to your shareholders. So at least they might do something useful with it. But at leas they didn't blow it on buying Facebook or trying to re-invent the car or something.

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Re: Deliberation

Yahoo!'s front page ended up looking like a Geocities page. Except without use of the blink tag.

Please El Reg, can we have the blink tag in the forums? Pretty please! We promise not to abuse it. And you can trust us, your loyal commentards.

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Re: Deliberation

Google are also vastly richer than AltaVista ever were. So they can buy competition or tangle them up in expensive patent lawsuits in order to hamper competition.

Not that money will save you forever. But it can be used to obscure/ignore problems for quite a long time before it often comes to a sudden stop.

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Re: Would you not expect things to go wrong as well as right?

Pascal Monnet,

what exactly has gone right ?

This is the point where I feel the political discourse needs a serious sense of perspective reset.

Google can be bloody annoying sometimes as a company. And I don't particularly like Android, in comparison with my old Windows Mobile 8 phone. But comparing these tools to what we had even 15 years ago suggests that an awful lot has gone right. I'd say Google search reached a peak about 10 years ago, and has been getting more polluted with computer-generated data and ads since. But it's still mostly very usable, and I'm starting to look at some of the alternatives to see if they're any better.

But we've got loads of tools, a lot of them very cheap (or even free) that were science fiction 30 years ago.

One other thing I agree with Doctorow on is that free is often a bad thing. Because a company with a pre-exisiting revenue stream can offer something for free - often backed by shitty advertising. Which makes it a lot harder for someone else to come along and offer a better paid product, and thus fund their innovation.

Which also inevitably leads to enshittification - if the funding comes from VCs willing to give great service away at first, in hopes of finding a viable business model once they've got the customers. That's given us some expensive tech, but also quite a lot f expensive dead-ends like Uber and Groupon.

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Re: Does old Cory know what he's talking about?

In the case of Microsoft, it was a level playing field. Both they and Google had the resources to do whatever they wanted. So no problem.

But RIM didn't have another monopoly to abuse in order to generate profits to give their phones away for cheaper. So they were forced out of the market by competition that was cheaper than they could reasonably compete with. As is also true for Palm with their rather nice Pre phones.

This destroyed competition and innovation, which now leaves us with just Apple and Google.

Now RIM had taken their eye off the ball, as had Microsoft, so maybe they deserved to lose their mobile markets. Maybe they'd have been driven out of business by fair competition - but they faced unfair competition subsidised by Google's monopoly profits. Which, by the way, is illegal. But I certainly think that the market is poorer without Blackberry being available, they made some incredibly good hardware and software - which I personally dislike, but there's many people that would be better served if you could still get Blackberries. It would make Andrew Orlowski, formerly of this parish, a happy bunny anyway...

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Does old Cory know what he's talking about?

He's very good at making these wide, sweeping statements, as if they're somehow some kind of philosophical or ecomic laws. But what's he got to back them up? What research has he done on similar stages in other massive growth industries?

For example, he laments how the tech industry wasn't united but the evil record industry was, hence the death of Napster. But what's the rest of the tech industry got to do with it? Napster died because their business model was to steal other peoples' stuff and... Profit. I don't see how say Oracle or Facebook had skin in that game, they weren't interested in the music industry. Other than that Oracle would like to defend intellectual property, because they sell software, and Facebook generally like to steal a litte of it, given they need content to put adverts next to, and don't generate any themselves.

Partly we're looking at the results and chaos of another industrial revolution. Massive economic and social changes brought on by huge technological change have disrupted whole sectors of the economy and society. Would you not expect things to go wrong as well as right?

I do agree with him that regulators and politicians have failed to use exisiting laws to rein in the big tech firms though. Google's use of its search and advertising monopoly to fund a move into the mobile market (in order to defend those monopolies from competition), by giving away Android for free destroyed Blackberry and Microsoft - who were unwilling to invest their own monopoly profits into doing the same thing. That was obvious in advance, and might have been stopped. It's not like the old railway booms of the mid 19th Century - the legal structures exist now.

Fairberry project brings a hardware keyboard to the Fairphone

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Re: The Blackberry Passport...

Liam Proven,

Its unified inbox was so wonderfully elegant that it makes the best iOS and Android have to offer look like total amateurish junk.

Windows Phone got close to what Blackberry could do in terms of the people hub, where you could have all your communications with a contact in one place. It was also very good at allowing you to separate out personal contacts and work ones. From what I've read it wasn't as good as Blackberry, but then I didn't like the rest of the Blackberry OS - or the keyboards.

Didn't the Palm Pre also do similar things?

But sadly they all died, and left us with Apple - who've added more bells and whistles to iOS but barely changed it in a decade. Plus Android, which keeps changing its menus and look, but also doesn't seem to have innovated much in terms of displaying all the information available.

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Re: Sniff

I had an experiment with an old Q10 last year. Step-father has badly arthritic hands and really struggles with touch screens. His fingertips no longer point in the same direction as his fingers. Plus when you're in your mid 80s the skin is much less conductive anyway - which really doesn't help with capacitive screens.

So he bought a new old-stock Q10 from a Chinese vendor on Amazon. Which won't work if your network has already turned off 3G - and anyway is a decade old now. But before I'd realised that and got him to send it back, I got to play with it. And the keyboard is truly amazing. I still hate them, due to my fat fingers, but that thing was a beautiful piece of engineering.

But I did find him the Unihertz Titan slim linky to their site - which is surprisingly nice. Not exactly the most up-to-date version of Android - and the keyboard is rather decent, but nothing close the excellence of the old Blackberries. On the other hand, it's a £250 mid-market Droid, not a £500 premium phone - as the Blackberries were at the time. Keys are a bit bigger, though not as ergonomically sculpted - and they have even bigger models, with bigger buttons.

The important thing is he's happy. Me, I dislike onscreen keyboards slightly less than I do these tiny physical ones, so I put up with an Android. Swype makes onscreen keyboards a bit more bearable.

I used to have the Sony Ericsson P800. Where the keyboard was a number pad with actual pins in the back, so when it was folded over the screen it literally pressed the touch screen to operate the keys. Proerly primitive. The onscreen keyboard was so small you needed to use the stylus anyway, so you might as well use the handwriting recognition. So the P910i was positively advanced when it came out. But I didn't get one. I got a Motorola Razr instead, on the grounds that these modern smartphones were overrated. And I didn't reconsider until after the iPhone had come out and HTC had begun making nice Androids.

Happy weird early century phone memories. There were some strange old designs out there.

GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry

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Re: Is it naive to suggest ...

Drones aren't great for electronic warfare yet. Listening to signals isn't all that power intensive. But jamming requires power, both to over-power the source and to travel long distances. And drones tend to have small engines.

This is the problem the Royal Navy are looking at. There are persistent drones we could use for radar surveillance, but none with the electrical power required to operate a massive air search radar with a range of a couple of hundred miles. Hence we run our carrier-based radars off a big, fat 3-engined helicopter.

Japanese government finally bids sayonara to the 3.5" floppy disk

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Sorry, we've run out of floppies. Can I print it out for you instead?

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Devil

Re: God I feel old....

Back in the 90s Virgin Mates (Branson's condom brand) did a bit marketing push. They sent cards to journos and politicians extolling the virtues of protected sex - each with a condom stapled into it.

Or perhaps it was more subtle a campaign than I thought at the time? By encouraging those kinds of people to breed, perhaps they were trying to put the rest of us off?

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Re: Old regulations

I want that report done, and emailed in triplicate, by Friday!

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

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Re: Knowing how to make tea properly …

You don't need to trust to pot luck. I find that if you cosy up to someone who has the secret, they'll help you learn with no strainer.

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Happy

Re: A Pitch...

I didn't think the Royal Shakespeare Company did research?

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Flame

heyrick,

That, with garibaldi, a little moment of bliss.

Oh for fuck's sake! Now you've gone and bloody done it! You've invited the biscuit-taleban into the conversation! And with the tea-nazis still on the warpath too! As one of the aforementioned - use a bloody teapot!

And you've done it in praise of dead fly biscuits as well. Not even something decent.

Burn the heretic!

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Re: "if you don't like how tea tastes, no one's forcing you to drink it"

As a totally neutral observer to this whole kerfuffle I have to say I'm enjoying every minute of it. The wailing! The gnashing of teeth! The clutching of pearls! An American ignoring convention and the English being elitist about the whole thing are both very much on-brand.

But someone is wrong on the internet! Dash-it-all! This cannot be allowed to stand!

And there's worse! A method of brewing tea that includes neither teapots nor tea cosies! I mean, what is the world coming to?

These things are important.

Oh, and get off my lawn!

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Heyrick,

You appear to have found a new major divide in society. We have the tree eaters, and the brain eaters.

Personally I like to eat both. Though it took my Mum consistent effort to get me to eat broccoli. I don't remember even not liking cauliflower. So I've been trained / bullied into being a tree-eater.

However I will say that cauliflower cheese is one of the foods of the Gods. It goes even better with added potatoes and sweetcorn. Better still with bacon. But as soon as you add broccoli to the mix - it becomes weirdly unpleasant. So I wonder if I'm mostly missing the bitterness of the trees, until I add the cheese - which causes them to release their true evil nature?

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Re: Barbarians …

Surprisingly Sainsbury's Red Label was the tea I grew up with. Loose leaf, so made in a pot, my parents aren't animals.

But since I grew up and changed to drinking it black - Sainsbury's Red Label is still my tea of choice. I spent a couple of years experiementing. I do very much like a nice Darjeeling - but not for everyday. I'm also a fan of an Early Gray every so often. I like green tea and jasmine tea, but not had a white tea that I liked yet.

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I know it works with popcorn. A small amount of salt added makes sugared popcorn taste sweeter, so you can use less sugar.

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Re: Pointless if potless

I used to sell water softeners. The NHS won't allow them on drinking water. Because of making up baby milk formula (which already contains salt), and people on low-sodium diets due to heart conditions.

Quick back of fag packet maths:

Chiltern hills water hardness about 450ppm - mostly calcium and magnesium chlorides - there's a few places worse in the UK, but not many.

Soften that (ion-exchange) gives roughly half - so 220ppm sodium.

So that's 0.22g of sodium per litre of water.

Your RDA of salt is 6g a day. Of which c.40% is sodium - so sodium RDA is 2.4g.

So 1L of water is almost 10% of your RDA

A quick Google suggests the recommended sodium intake after heart failure is 1.5g - so you can see how the amount in your water becomes significant at that point.

Personally I'd drink it with no worries. And have in the past. Though I don't like the taste of it much, becuase I grew up on hard water. But you don't notice that when you mix it with any kind of flavouring. Plus it's great in the kettle, because you don't get limescale bits (or scum) in your tea, your cup stays clean even if you drink it black - and your kettle uses less power when not scaled up.

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Re: Tea

Terry 6,

I'm the only tea drinker in my flat. Except when there are guests. But a teapot allows you to have two cups. The second is usually the nicest. A tea cosy keeps it warm. Although I also have the one cup strainers, for when I'm using unusual teas that I don't want to use my normal teapot for. Black teas with bits of dried fruit in can be really nice for a change, but I'm assuming they'd flavour the teapot.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

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Happy

Re: I use....

But they won't be speaking Welsh in the new Democratic People's Republic of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch! They'll be speaking Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochian. And who knows how many letters they'll choose to have in their alphabet?

They'll also have the biggest delegations at international conferences. Because they'll need to have three people sat next to the ambassador, just in order to fill the table space covered by the name plaque. Or I suppose they could just get some really fat ambassadors?

Their fans chants for their national sports teams will be interesting too. Give me an L! Give me another L! Give me a...

Software troubles delay F-35 fighter jet deliveries ... again

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Re: Are you out of your frickin' mind, Dave?

No problem. Updates are loaded from floppies.

Insert disc 369 of 1,064 and press any key.

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Re: Once Upon A Time At Hawker-Siddley...............

In 2024 the F35 is costing the best part of a billion pounds a pop.

No it isn't. F-35As are down to somewhere below $80m each nowadays. That's less than a Typhoon and similar money (or less than) a SAAB Gripen.

Now the F-35 has massively higher maintenance costs, and is still a new system - so if you buy one this year, you'll need to fork out to upgrade the computers and the software to Block 4. And if you bought one before last year, you also need to fork out for upgrades to the electrical generators in the engines and various other bits.

But they're also stealthy and have massive advantages in "sensor fusion" and communications and intelligence gathering. Which is why they're probably best used in a mix with other aircraft.

Everything's secret. So it's impossible to know how good they really are. However F-35 has won all the recent competitions against F/A-18 Super-Hornet, Typhoon, Rafale and Gripen. That ought to say quite a lot. The only countries who could afford it that haven't bought it, either weren't allowed to or were making rival products. Even there, Germany, Italy and the UK have bought a mix of Eurofighter and F-35.

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Trollface

Re: "continually upgradable"

Don't forget the pop-up to download Google Chrome along with your fresh install of Java...

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Re: Magnificent men in flying machine

It's impossible to know. They're not telling, because they have no democratic oversight.

I've seen suggestions that their engines are incredibly under-powered - but again, it's hard to know because the people in the West who might know aren't telling. And that's assuming they do know.

However it idiotic to assume that if they want to create systems this complicated they won't also have these kinds of problems. So if they're not having software problems, it's probably because their software is pretty basic and not capable of all the shiny things F-35 can do when it's working properly.

Clearly the F-35 software is a mares nest though. It clearly needs to be more modular, so it can be upgraded in little bits, rather than massive upgrades of everything all at once. Hopefully a lesson that can be slowly retro-fitted to F-35 and kept in mind with new programs like GCAP.

If you look at the "spiral development" model in missiles that the European defence industry has got going now, it's deeply impressive. With continuous, incremental upgrades to systems that are also cheaper becausue they often have common parts. It's also often true of Navies. We need some of this in our aircraft industry. The days of an aircraft being scrapped after 15 years are long gone, and types seem to hang around for decades now. There are B-52s built in the early 70s (when I was also built) that are planned to still be flying in the 2070s - after I've been scrapped... Rolls Royce are building them new engines at the moment. They'll probably be on their umpteenth set of avionics and electronics already.

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Re: The F-35 engine

I thought they'd already released the engine upgrades, last year. Although it's actually an upgrade to the engines electrical generators.

There's also a plan to upgrade the engines in future, but that's a different thing. To both give more whoosh and more electrical power.

Modern Western planners seem to be wanting to add huge amounts of power generation to both their ships and aircraft. Partly in hopes of future laser weapons. But also because modern radars can also be used for offensive electronic warfare. Which is horribly power-hungry. Plus if electronic warfare is more prevalent, you need more power to your radars to burn through it.

The problem is that the older the aircraft, the more of these upgrades you're going to have to retrofit to get up to Block 4, hence the more expensive.

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What air force? The non-existent air force that we refuse to help replenish despite blood promises to do so that they're using to wipe the floor with Russia anyway?

By the end of the first year of the war, Ukraine's air force as considerably bigger than what they started the war with. Mostly with lots of spare parts, and quite a few spare jets, from Eastern Europe. That allowed Ukraine to re-activate some of their own old jets, as well as keep others going - and then there were a decent number of, I think, Polish and Slovak ones as well.

What we didn't do, was plan for a long war. That Ukraine would have to transition away from any complex kit that needs spares or ammo provided by Russia. It's easy enough to make Russian calibre 152mm artillery shells - but not so easy to get reloads for S300 surface-to-air missile systems or air-to-air missiles compatible with old Soviet fighters.

There's been a lot "MacGyver-ing" going on though. Storm Shadow cruise missiles and HARM anti-radar missiles onto the SU24. But only the older stuff, without the modern ability to transmit mid-course guidance and target changes.

Given some of Ukraine's recent successes - I do wonder if we've bodged some decent long-range air-to-air solution? Or have they just sneaked Patriot batteries right up to the front lines, for a brief few long-range kills, before moving them back to safety again?

There's also a Franken-SAM project, to get Western missiles onto the old Soviet launchers Ukraine has. Because NATO is mostly pretty poorly provided with SAMs - relying on getting air superiority instead. So the US have managed to get Sea Sparrow onto Ukrainian Buk mobile short range SAM launchers. The UK have built a mobile launcher from scratch to fire ASRAAM - and US are doing something similar with Sidewinder - so a radar launcher truck firing an air-launched infra-red missile.

F-16 is on the way now. Too late, like everything else. But I don't think the politicians were really wanting to believe in a years long war. Bit like the start really, where most people refused to believe Russia would do something so stupid, and so disbelieved US and UK warnings - despite the massive (and un-precendented) mobilisation of Russian forces. Similarly I just don't think politicians could believe that Russia would do something as stupid as to keep the war going for two years, when it was clear from week 4 that they'd already lost.

Logitech warns of logistical impact of Houthi attacks in Red Sea

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gandalfcn,

The downside of convoys is that you'd then have to have huge piles of ships waiting at the end of the Suez canal (big target) - or loads of small convoys, requiring huge numbers of escorts. As ships can only go through at a limited rate.

Boeing goes boing: 757 loses a wheel while taxiing down the runway

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Yes I do! If my plane hits the ground, I want it to boing harmlessly back into the sky - rather than crashing into an exploding heap.

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Re: click bait

The article quotes a wheel falling off. Then also quotes an airline spokesdroid saying it was a tyre that came off. Therefore any contradiction is between the FAA and the airline marketing department. El Reg went with the FAA. Which seems reasonable.

Think tank warns North Korea uses AI for battle planning, maybe using cloudy resources

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Re: Hallucinations

Or AI proves to be as reliable as it's proving elsewhere and decides the losses of marching NK troops through a mine field are perfectly acceptable.

Unfortunately human wave minefield clearance is a long, and dishonourable, tradition.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

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Trollface

Re: This far down in the comments

Microsoft Excel 97 was the only Wordprocessor anyone ever needed - and has not been improved upon since!

Asda's delayed SAP migration forces extension to Walmart's backend support contract

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Re: Portent-ial

Just kill me now.

DPD chatbot blasts courier company, swears, and dabbles in awful poetry

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Re: As Arthur said

The driver couldn’t know. He couldn't easily see through the layers of shrink-wrap. It was absolute madness. Bloody dangerous too! Not to mention expensive.

Travel app Kayak offers Boeing 737 Max 9 filter after that door plug drama

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Re: When a company

Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese,

I'm pretty sure he's talking about the same incident you remember. Which was a British Airways flight, about 20 years ago. It's a completely different thing to what happened to the Boeing over Alaska.

In the case of Boeing it looks like shortcuts in manufacturing process. They've not been fixing these door plugs properly in place, and therefore also not doing the full QA that should be part of the manufacturing process of any airline. Not that they were using the wrong bolts, but that they weren't doing the bolts up at all - or if they were only hand tightening them or something.

I'm also pretty sure the OP slightly mis-remembered the case of the BA accident. From my memory it was a middle-of-the-night windscreen change / repair. At 3am the maintainer went to the parts store - and was correctly told by the guy in charge which bolts he would need. Whereas he was trying to measure his existing ones by eye - rather than going to the manual and looking it up (having already binned the old bolts - which would have been correct procedure).

However that parts store didn't have enough bolts anyway. So he went on an early morning parts raid. To several hangars round the airfield, raiding stores for bolts. And again, measuring by eye.

From memory there were something like 20-30 bolts securing that window. And they found some of the old ones in the bin, and realised that the plane had already been flying with some that were too small. It's just that sufficient were of the correct size that they'd held the window in. Which means he was probably comparing one of the wrong type. I think he'd also forgotten his reading glasses that day - possibly another reason not to look it up in the big book of bits. So he put the smaller size on, bye-bye window.

The accident report blamed management. For making the process to get parts difficult, and not giving enough to time to get the work done. They couldn't claim that this was just one bloke doing a bad job, from the fact that the previous engineer had also used some of the wrong bolts.

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Re: The bigger question

I'm sure that's true. It would cost a lot, and take a long time, for Ryanair to switch away from Boeing. And I'm sure it's lovely and cheap to only maintain one fleet. Although I've read that Boeing had to offer some pretty deep discounts in order to save sales of the 737 MAX - and I suspect that's when Ryanair insisted on a bit of QA - to try and stop Boeing cutting corners.

There must be a point, when switiching starts to look really attractive. But then Ryanair have a very modern fleet, and I don't think Airbus can make A320 Neo's fast enough for their existing customers. Let alone cope with refugees from Boeing.

OpenAI bans long-shot presidential candidate bot for breaking T&Cs

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Jusus H Christ

All of these people need to be beaten with the clue stick!

Excuse me, while I just hammer these nails into the clue bat, and snip off the ends...