Posts by Pen-y-gors

Bottom line

is that any half-competent 12 year old knows all about VPNs.

Testing is good, but...

We all agree that testing is a Good Thing.

But it seems a bit odd to build a complete test launch facility somewhere that it can't be used later as a live facility? Why not build the test rigs at the real spaceport and then certify them for use when the tests are complete?

Or are they planning some big, messy 'failures' to see what an exploding booster and fuel tank look like?

Won't someone think of the planet?

This does not bode well - China using all those terawatts of coal-powered electricity to run their crypto-cracking servers. Why wasn't this mentioned at COP26? Surely our governments can use this as yet another justification for attempting to ban encryption?

Theoretically...

It does make sense. A fraction of 1% change in speed/direction a few million km out can have a big effect by the time Earth orbit is reached - the difference between taking out the ISS and taking out New York.

But it will need preparation.

Presumably if DART proves the principle, it will be wise to shift some large masses into orbit on stand-by to be shoved in the right direction when needed?

Yeah but yes, but no, but...

Utter insanity, yes. But probably fewer 'orbital fragments' from the explosion than will be launched in the next few years by Musk, Bezos and co. The sky will be so bright we can turn off the street-lights, and have fun watching the celestial pin-ball as the Starlink satellites bounce off all the other networks.

Bring back the rudder!

Interesting, one of the terms in Cymraeg for steering (as in English I suppose) comes from the word for 'rudder'.

Why doesn't someone re-introduce the rudder as a way of controlling motor vehicles? Far more relaxed having a long rudder running up the middle of the car, with your appropriate elbow gently resting on it and giving it a twiddle from time to time. I believe some very early automobiles did actually use a tiller mechanism rather than a wheel. Have to be rear-wheel drive of course.

Frequent Flyers?

Surely, in the light of COP etc, the rules of any 'Frequent Flyer' club should be amended so that their flying experience gets worse the further people fly?

Higher fares (obvs) - some sort of exponential sliding scale. 1st flight LHR-LAX say £2500, 10th flight £25,000

Poorer food. By 10th flight down to a tin of cold baked beans and a tin-opener. (Although I do rather like cold baked beans...)

Smaller seats

Worse seating position (next to the fat guy eating baked beans for a 12-hour flight)

"Executive Lounge" becomes a plastic chair on the tarmac, without a roof. Free food and drinks becomes a Rich Tea and a cup of something almost, but not quite entirely, unlike etc. Bring your own cup.

'The Last One'?

Anyone remember "The Last One" - software from 1981 that would make coding obsolete?

But then , this is a another Gartner fantasy.

And the beauty of all these 'let the user do it' is that the one thing the users never do is actually test anything (spreadsheets?)

Misleading headline!

I had this wonderful vision of the ISS deploying some of its space-to-space rockets to destroy the evil Chinese junk. (Or should that be 'rubbish'? I'm fairly sure the Chinese haven't launched any junks into space)

Bandwidth?

Is that 400 Mbps total bandwidth on the satellite or 400Mbps for every one of the 10 million people using each satellite?

What's that Skippy? They can't support that many users? So the night sky will be destroyed for a handful of people in the US outback?

Do I want Win 11?

Doesn't matter, as M$ has decided I can't have it. Seems that my 5-year-old quad-core Intel i5 @ 2.3GHz with 16GB RAM isn't up to it. Something to do with a missing feature of the processor? Secure Boot?

CIA conspirarcies?

One might suggest that the idea that CIA might harm, or threaten to harm, his kids is a tad on the paranoid side.

But you have to ask yourself, not whether it's true, but whether it's a reasonable belief. And given the CIA track record, it's more than reasonable.

The US legal system is a pile of crud. No-one should be extradited to the US for any reason whatsoever. If the crime is serious enough, charge them in the courts of the country where they're being held.

Multiple accounts?

Why the concern about multiple accounts? Doesn't everyone on social media have multiple accounts? How else do you keep the different aspects of your life apart? And I assume that most sensible people (like me) have their main account under a pseudonym?

Lift shafts?

I suspect there are still a load of punched cards at the bottom of the lift shaft at the old Pearl Assurance offices in 252 High Holborn.

Nice Picture

Nice piccie on the home page about this article about more dodgy Govt 'consultancy' deals - wads of £50 notes.

Well known fact - the only people who use £50 notes are drug dealers and forgers. That's why most shops won't accept them.

Terms and Conditions

1. Only apply if your company was incorporated less than 7 days before your application date

2. Only apply if your company has paid-up capital of £100 or less

3. Only apply if one or more of the directors have donated at least £50,000 to the Tories in the last 5 years

4. Do NOT apply if your directors have any experience in 'digital' or 'in cyber'. Kebabs and/or hedge-funds will be ideal.

Pretty obvious.

And we can be sure that many billions will end up with Honest Roderick's Kebab, Pizza and cloud services of Chelmsford

Great value

Actually, if the at £20mn + the earlier payments covered the IT requirements of T&T for 50 million people it's pretty damn good value.

Unlike the other £36,980 million which disappeared into someone's offshore account - 'cos it certainly wasn't spent on a functioning T & T system.

Are you sure?

presence of Windows Defender in every copy of Windows, at no extra cost, as it obviates the need for dedicated security software

Hardly.

I'll keep running Malwarebytes as well.

Alternative headline

"Apple will hold the unencrypted database of photos (really the training data for the neural matching function)

Apple now owner of world's largest stash of kiddie-porn! It's for research - honest! says senior exec.

Cool idea, but...

It's overly complicated.

Option A) Roll out lots of low cost panels in deserts around the world. Dirt cheap to install. Easy to reach for maintenance. Cost of the panels approx $200/kW

Option B) put some expensive panels in orbit. SpaceX are currently charging about $1 million to launch 200kg. More for higher orbits. That's 200 sq m of panels, max power (solar constant x efficiency) a generous 400W/sq m, admittedly 24/7. Panel costs? They're going to be several times the cost of ground-based ones.

So cost for 1MW on ground about $200,000

Cost for 1MW in orbit - $12,500,000 in launch costs plus panel costs (another $1mn?). Yes, costs will fall, but a hundred-fold?

Generating 24/7 compared to maybe 10/7 doesn't offset that massive launch costs and extra infrastructure costs.

MMGRP

"MMGRP Limited is the registered name of MMG, "a global leader in Secure Enterprise A2P SMS Messaging,"

If they've got a contract from the Tories, I'm guessing they're also a global leader in pizza and non-functional PPE in North Essex? And provision of ferries between Brighton and London.

Updates?

"Pixels are also among the first in line to get Android security updates from Google"

Which will probably stop being released as soon as the Pixel 7 comes out!

I wish suppliers would guarantee security updates for at least 5-6 years from product launch date. We don't all have an urge to blow £500 every year on a new phone, just to get a slightly faster chip and an extra few pixels on the camera. I have a fully-functioning laptop, running Win 10, that is 10 years old now. Why can't I get a phone that lasts at least 5 years and can run the latest Android version?

So, what if...

A Russian billionaire oligarch ups and says

"I was bought up in Soviet Russia. I was taught to hate the vile Yankee capitalist scum and everything they stood for. I would have happily worked as a KGB agent to infiltrate their degenerate society and help bring about its downfall. But now that I have had the opportunity to visit America and become very very rich I've changed my mind"

Would that be treated in the same way?

System requirements?

The IT titan already sparked a backlash by stating that 7th-generation Intel Core processors will not be sufficient to run the new Windows

That would be bad. One of the more impressive things about Win 10 was that it actually reduced the system requirements compared to 7 & 8. I upgraded a seriously sluggish 10-y-o laptop (some sort of i5? 430M) to Win 10 and an SSD and now it bounces around like the lambs in the field outside. Won't be impressed if upgrade is unavailable on newer machines, like my 3-y-o i5-6300HQ which is 6th gen and zips along with Win 10.

WAAAAH!

WANT! NOW!

When will Openreach upgrade my village? 900Mbps is so passé.

(Just noticed that after 14 years as an El Reg commentard I am now a scant 29 upvotes short of a total of 32768 ! And only 4000 down votes.

Go on, help me over that line...)

England != UK

just as "Freedom Day" in the UK hits the half-day mark

Free Doom Day only applies in England. That's the bit of the UK at right bottom. (very apt really)

The governments of Cymru, Scotland and (amazingly) even NI seem to have a natural aversion to killing their citizens.

Roll on our independence days. Won't be long now.

Small screen sport

"You lose some of the grandeur of a major sporting occasion when part of the chilli tortilla chip you're munching falls onto the screen and obscures half the playing field."

It's tricky. Every night at the moment I'm watching the daily highlights from the July Basho of Grand Sumo, on NHK World. It's nice to relax in bed before lights-out but it does lose something on the small screen, particularly when a cat settles down and blocks the view. So much more satisfying watching two muscular 30-stone giants thumping into each other on a 37" screen.

Odd

Does 'ordering 10,000 custom printed T-shirts' really count as ""bankrupt and surplus stock, as well as end of line clearances to individuals and companies of all sizes""?

It would make more sense if a printer had accidentally printed the pro-Bretagne T-shirts before realising the cock-up and then offered them cheap to this guy.

Horses for courses

I've worked from home for the last 20 years, so my technology has evolved. Problem is that while WifI has problems with internal walls, when the internal walls are in a cottage in Cymru and are usually 18" of stone, then 'problem' is a serious understatement. So I've built up a mix of cables strung around walls, skirting boards and through holes in the wooden floors (untidy, but I can't channel those stone walls), and in a pipe between the house and the office, which then conect to a little switch or a WiFi box in the different areas. Some things then use a wired connection from the switch, others (phones, printer) use the WiFi. Garden is covered by putting router on windowsill!

I also volunteer in a community shop and caffi, and we have interesting issues. It's a nice new wooden-framed building, so we happily run two wifi networks off our Fibre router, one for public, one for staff and business. All works fine. But...doesn't reach outside the building. (And 4G doesn't reach inside the building). In our desire to build a really environmentally sound building, we slightly overdid it. The roof is lovely black-enamelled corrugated iron, the walls are massively insulated, and include a foil layer on each panel, and the windows are triple-glazed, again with a metal film on the outside. Result, one giant Faraday cage, so we had to run a cable out to the shed in the garden to get a connection there.

Nice idea

Take a tank full of fish, drop them from the air into a lake where they aren't native, in a way that will be so shocking the 5% will die, just so 'anglers' can trek up into the hills to catch them. Doesn't sound really ethical?

Perhaps just keep them in a tank and invite fishermen to come and hit them with clubs?

<music on>Who wants to live forever?

Not me. I'll settle for a few millennia.

Thank you Brian May