Posts by I ain't Spartacus

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...

Re: Old regulations

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

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!

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Re: As Arthur said

To be fair to the couriers, I've worked for one - and a lot of the problem is the shippers want to pay for the cheapest couriering they can get away with - and then wonder why they have loads of problems. There's always cowboys at the bottom end, especially in the franchised bits of the industry, who make money by taking loads of parcels they have no hope of delivering, pocket the cash, then go bankrupt when the shit hits the fan and start up again under a new name. They of course steal the cash from the more legit people in the industry and keep their service worse than it would otherwise be too.

And some of the shit that I've seen people try to ship as well. A certain tile company, who kept sacking courier firms. They'd shrink-wrapped a quarter tonne of tiles onto a pallet. No plastic ties to hold them on, just someone walking round the pallet with a roll of shrink and a lot of hope. They forked it into the back of our van, and it didn't even survive the journey. I opened the back doors - avalanche!

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.

Re: The bigger question

There was a story on the BBC last week that Ryanair had been asked by Boeing to send more quality control inspectors to it's 737 MAX factory in order to assist with production. It was a very brief ariticle that asked a hell of a lot more questions than it answered. Why do they need more? Well I guess that bit is obvious. Because Boeing are clearly currently shit at making planes. But why would Ryanair want to pay for more? Why are Ryanair buying Boeing at all, if they feel so unsure about the safety of the product that they feel the need to send their own QA people? What the hell are Boeing playing at?

Re: When a company

Personally, if I wanted a truly non-opening door, I would just use about a thousand rivets. :)

The problem with that is when you want to put the exit back again.

The exit isn't needed if the plane is carrying fewer than 200 passengers. Which can easily be changed by moving some seats around. I believe it's because some carriers have quite big first/business class sections - and others don't. Therefore you may need to be able to re-instate the door for the next owner of the aircraft.

Plus if crappy cheap advertising is one of the causes of the problem, there's a good chance that Google are selling some of that advertising.

Another Google generated problem is that they've made being higher up the search results self-fullfilling. If lots of people click on the link, then the link goes higher up the list. So once a link's at the top - it tends to stay there.

We sell in the commercial building services industry. It's a niche within a niche, so I'd imagine search volumes are low. We used to sell an imported German product, but stopped about 5 years ago. We still get phone calls about it, from random web searches. I've just checked on Google, and the page from the French distributor comes first (I'm on google.co.uk) - they do have the only dot.com though. Our website is second. And the actual UK distributor's website is third. The company in Germany are only fourth, and then we're fifth for some reason. Sixth is the website of a company that went bust 7 years ago, and only sold marginally related products anyway.

I remember we used to get a lot of crap quote requests through, using the wrong technical info. Because design engineers were clearly basing their specifications off the French website, and all the product names were different. For some reason they didn't use the same model numbers as the Germans - which we just sensibly copied.

In the whole UK there are probably under 500 projects a year with these on them, each with a design engineer and between 3 and 10 contractors quoting for the job. But there's also the installed base needing repairs. So we're only talking at most 1,000 searches a month. So Google aren't terrible - in fact thinking about it, maybe it's the users to blame. As they've now got the French website labelled as such, which it didn't used to be - so I guess it's as much people blind clicking on the top results. But then I feel that's something Google also encourage, with the way that they now display ads almost indistinguishably from search results, rather than clearly separate as they used to be in the good old days.

But also once you've reached the top, it's hard to get demoted again.

Roland 6,

(one of the reasons why UK per capita GDP is poor is because we keep importing people and so dilute the productivity improvement…)

I don't believe that's the case. I think the problem in the UK is that we've not been investing enough in new production methods to increase productivity. At least partly I suspect this is because it's been too easy to just import more workers and so pay them to do the work instead of automating it. Hence GDP is too often being pushed up by having more economic activity because more people. And not being pushed up enough by the cycle of investment, increase in productivity, thus increase of GDP.

If we had both large productivity increases and large increases in population due to immigration, neither would hide the other - we'd just get extra growth. This is what's happening in the US - but we're not investing enough to get both effects.

Uh, no. Historically, increased productivity doesn't seem to correlate with working less.

Increased productivity does tent to correlate with increasing wages. Even if not perfectly. More wages does give the option to work less, in order to maintain the same standard of living. But also gives the option to work the same and have a higher standard of living.

Now it's true that if you're working a factory job, then the hours are determined by trying to wring the maximum profit out of the expensive machinery - so ideally you'd like to run it close to 24 hours a day, and that means getting the meatsacks to work as long hours as you can get away with. So harder for you to work less.

But there are a lot of people in their 50s doing 3 days a week nowadays, eithe ras part-timers or as contractors - who didn't really exist in the same way 50 years ago. Work has got, and is still getting, a lot more flexible. Which is partly because we've got better legal protection for workers, and partly becuase people are able to afford to work less, becuase they're better off, because wages are higher, because (again partly) of higher productivity.

if you use the increased productivity to start working less, then everyone else who is, instead, using it to increase economic power is going to inflate you into poverty.

This isn't how inflation works. Purely productivity-based wage rises are not inflationary. Inflation is an increasing amount of money trying to chase a fixed amount of resources - or the same amount of money trying to chase decreasing resources. The point about productivity is that you're making more products and services out of the same resources. Hence productivity increases without wage rises will actually cause deflation. So in a perfect model where all companies in an economy have increased productivity by 10% in a year - wages could go up by 10% as well, and there'd be no effect on inflation. Which means everyone could either take a month off work and the economy would stay the same size, or everyone could work the same hours and have 10% more stuff.

The only thing that truly allows people to work less is concerted, collective action (legislation, unionizing, whatever) to decide that the whole society needs to work less.

This is much more true for your un-skilled factory worker. Management can just see them as an interchangeable unit to be used to operate the machinery - and so for ease you'd like to make them work 1 shift, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. And I guess, two 12 hour shifts a day keeps all the machines running nicely. That might be the sort of industry where you'd have to legislate to reduce hours.

But the more of their own knowledge and expertise a worker is bringing to the job, the more they get to control things. And the hours they work become their choice. Particularly if you've the option to freelance. But employers are a hell of a lot more enlightened nowadays about using part-timers to fill one role - which is more expensive in management and payroll workload, but also gives the company more flexibility.

Finally, there's a bit of productivity you've missed. Work hours haven't dropped a huge amount recently. But hours spend on domesic chores fell massively since the 60s. Now we can all have hoovers, washing machines, dishwashers, freezers, microwaves etc. So hours spent on leisure have gone up - and with more productivity/economic growth/technological development, that has also increased our leisure options.