Posts by Voland's right hand

Re: Revolving doors are dangerous...

A Eurocrat renouncing their "old French Civil Service" lifetime pension. You gotta be kidding me (you should look up some of the details - they came out in public around Brown bringing back the Dark Lord from Brussels).

IMHO this revolving door direction is all right. I do not see anything wrong in an ex-public servant working in the industry with some reasonable amount of non-compete restrictions.

The other revolving door is the dangerous one - where (especially in the UK), industry execs move into government and/or regulatory quangos without surrendering shares, pension, benefits and any of their vested interest. I can point to actual names here, but why bother - they are all very well known.

Re: Roaming - just don't care

O2 business contract

The exact reason why I am no longer with O2 (taking all 5 accounts in the family with me in the process). Vodafone bills all calls to other UK operators in-bundle.

Re: Hmm. If one is an aspiring terrorist......

What was used in Paris. Cheap ancient Symbian 40 Nokia and SMS in clear text. No encryption. No technical countermeasures. Nothing.

Re: 3-5 am wherever you are

Forecast is cloudy for the 6th here in sarf-west Lunnun

You are least likely to see anything because of light pollution. I have seen meteors in the south of England only when driving out on the M25 and/or one of the Ms to/form it. The moment you get anywhere inside the M25 you can no longer see them because of the glare from the lights all over the place.

Re: Why not bigger drives

We were there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot

The industry decided not to repeat the experiment.

China and Russian hypersonic gliders

China Successfully Tests Hypersonic Weapon System

Different cattle of fish. That and its Russian Bulava equivalent are the result of George Shrub pulling out USA out of the missile defense treaties as well as deploying anti-ICBM interceptors next to Russian (in Poland) and Chinese borders.

US expected both Russia and China to invest into maneuvering re-entry vehicles resulting in an arms race which USA was projected to win based on improvements to anti-ICBM missiles and control software.

Well, wrong - neither one took the bait. They both invested into hypersonic glider warheads instead which will enter the atmosphere outside the AEGIS and other anti-ICBM system defence perimeter and go for the kill on a glide trajectory.

This nullifies pretty much all investment USA has thrown into this area after Shrub reopened this arms race and in fact puts both of them ahead by 5-10 years.

Re: Asymmetry

We have yet to agree to change our (UK at least)

Indeed. UK wiring standard is quite far off from the Eu. In some areas it is safer. In others it is a right pain in the b*** to work with and a nightmare to augment or change wiring correctly. F.E. Most of the Eu mandates running both phase and neutral to the light switches nowdays which makes installing sensor control and/or smart switches a breeze. UK still mandates running only phase and having those retro 1960-es style ancient patchboards to which you supposedly screw a 1960-es style pendant on the ceiling (first thing to rip out in a new house).

In any case, I suspect this is not so much about wiring code, it is about appliance safety and power efficiency requirements. Eu regularly updates these (every 5 years or thereabouts) tightening up the code further and further. If TTIP was in effect it would have been "arbitrated" not to as that would have prevented a set of usual suspects from ripping off the consumer for more profits.

Re: Pearls to swine!

senior accountant where I have shown him how to use Newton-Raphson

Accountant? With knowledge of differential equations and/or optimal control?

Dude, you are smoking something cool which in itself is not a crime, but you are not sharing. That is criminal.

Re: Like the Apple watch...

Not your cup of tea, not my cup of tea either, but we are probably not into the M from BDSM. Though there are probably elements of B and S here too.

For day to day use - yes. Media - NO

DVDs and Photos rack up capacity at a rate where only spinning rust is financially affordable in consumer space. However, the overall tendency for that is P2P to decline and streaming services to grow. So even that is not a long term growth driver.

Re: Someone's not getting a bonus this year....

The telescope did the sepuku that 's for sure. Dunno about anyone else.

In any case, nowdays, the japs move your desk next to the window or the door instead of handing you a wakizashi and calling in the assistant with a katana.

Re: Best of British

I am not sure if it was OS or the StreeMap's reuse of their data, but there used to be deliberate occasional mistakes here and there to prove that "data has been copied".

So, what you are saying is correct. Unless the rock in question has been deemed to be the canary for data theft (if they still do it).

Re: Ireland, they know what they're doing

Nice summary.

What you missed however, is that a trade treaty negotiated by UK alone will also be done by close doors (same people essentially), it will be orders of magnitude worse than whatever Eu manages to negotiate and most importantly, there will be no higher court of law to deem the treaty illegal once it is waved through by the staff on Huge Co payroll who "work" (quotes intended) in the building on the bank of the Thames.

Doubly so if it crosses borders

The way this is formulated, it also sets in stone extraterritoriality of the warrant and gives a lowly magistrate court the authority to grant an order for the cops to hack computers located outside the USA territory with no consideration for any bilateral treaties on the subject. So much for Privacy Shield I guess.

Re: Can we stop this pyramid scheme nonsense

Dear El Reg, I don't think you're biting the hand that feed IT anymore.

Second that. If I want to enjoy observing how an IT publication is gagging on a marketeer *** I will go and peruse one of IDG group websites. Regardless of is it done in a devopsy sort of way or it is in some other double glazing context.

Re: Not something America could do

Russia did not do it "just because". There was a point when Kazahstan tried to play hardball.

Playing hardball with Russians is not an activity known for its long term beneficial outcomes. You can bargain with them as much as you like, they get it. Hardball - nope, they will ensure that you are never ever in a position to play hardball ever again out of principle, quite often regardless of the costs involved. They will not make a point out of it either (so do not expect any gloating and mentioning of why they did it). They will just do it. I have yet to see a USA or UK politician grok this very well known part of the Russian national mentality by the way.

The Russians negotiated the agreement for the Soyuz pad at the Guiana Space center, refurbished Plesetsk _AND_ kicked off the build at Vostochny when the Kazahs (the rumor is - upon western consluttants and stink tank "advice") tried to play hardball.

By the time Kazahstan back-pedalled on playing hardball at Baikonur they had to accept much worse conditions than what they would have got by negotiating. They are now in the unenviable position of a grandfathered Plan D (with corresponding investment and perspectives). They are not playing hardball any more either.

Re: Microsoft

How does this require OEM's to take a smaller margin?

By having no USP and operating in a price bracket where it is impossible to have an USP or a design differentiator.

When you race to the bottom, the last set of bottom dwellers right above the rotting ooze on the bottom of the pond all look the same.

Re: Carly is a natural for the job!

now she gets to work on a larger scale.

I hope she does not.

In any case, every single thing I have seen in the Republican camp so far triggers only one thought in my brain: "Could you actually find someone who is worse?"

Re: Anyone seen the rabbit hole?

Otherwise, the TCO for the F-35 is looking much worse than it already did.

OOOPS. It just hit me. You missed on which TCO to consider here.

Can someone enlightened on the subject explain to me how the f*** does a USA mil-only cloud based maintenance system work for an export fighter. Will it be necessary this POS to be integrated into every customer's flight control, spares and logistics? Will it be necessary to link during operations HMS "Lizzy 2" and whatever her sistership is to be called into what is effectively a USA system in order to do mission planning? Are they British flagged ships or I have missed what flag they are supposed to be carrying?

Whoever came up with that was smoking something phenomenally cool. Worst of all, he was not sharing - that is criminal.

Or Terry Pratchet's take on the subject

The scene where Death asks for the list of deadly animals followed by the "list" of harmless animals on the last continent is so spot on.

Re: don't forget the bubble in Cork

The real fun begins when they move out. That is the point where the rinse and repeat mechanism runs out of laundry detergent.

I wonder how it copes going up a slight incline ? 78 kg is pretty heavy so, it'll slow to a crawl, if it can make progress at all...

Perfect mall rent-a-cop then.

That's going to cost to install city-wide

I would not be so sure. LEDs are pretty easy to install and retrofit. It can be rolled out along with resurfacing and general improvements to sidewalks to minimize costs as well. In any case, the usefulness of this one is "to be determined".

If we copy a LED application, I'd rather have us copy the Eastern European approach. They recently started augmenting standard traffic lights for cars with matching LED strips on the gantries. Highly visible, cheap, reliable, easy to install and a big improvement on overall road safety.

Re: Not surprising...

Easily - it is a standard behavior for a politician. It is called "political integrity".

Re: I'm puzzled

The data is accumulated on non-PC devices nowdays and from there all usual suspects do everything in their power to move the data to "their" cloud and not to consumer's own storage.

Starting with small annoyances like Android removing mounted pass-through SD card support and finishing with outright sabotage.

Re: Still around?

Given the quality of webmail services

Some of us do not like to make all of our dirty underwear available to Google for detailed inspection so they can monetize better how to screw us. Ditto for other "services".