Posts by Death_Ninja 189 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
"I really shudder to think what the consequences would be of a prolonged power outage once we've moved to an all digital telephone system."
Well, we'll never know because you won't be able to communicate with us ;-)
If you are reallly that isolated, I recommend a sat phone - they aren't too expensive now.
Assuming of course that WW3 isn't the reason why the rest is offline, in which case you'll have nobody left to phone even if the satellite is still in the sky
If you unlock a feature in your in car shop (many others besides BMW have this sort of thing), when you sell the car the "feature" is tied to your login.
The hundreds/thousands you've spend on dynamic headlights or cruise control isn't available to the next purchaser, its tied to your account - and probably locked to the VIN of the car so you can't even buy another BMW 3 years later and automatically enable the feature on your new one....
Bit like with paid for digital downloads on your console - no resell possible.
"Convenient but unwise, the best will leave first, the dross will remain as they won't be able to find something else."
Ahhh but that would assume that in a giant corporation senior management don't think that any resource is the same as any other resource.
Except them of course, they are unqiue f***ing geniuses without whom the world would end.
I suspect the biggest cost saving could be made by either offshoring the C level or replacing them with this:
https://easydecisionmaker.com/
That's outsourcing in a nutshell, cheaper but worse.
Well, its cheaper if you stay within the terms of the agreed deliverables and then gets very expensive quickly when you ask for a variation...
But afer all these years, plenty of companies don't seem to understand this - I guess their "IT managers" also suffer from rapid turnover and muppetry.
From what I've seen demand for new cars is definitely there as always, but many people are put off once they are told that either the delivery date cannot be defined or they get spun some bs about it being 3 months only for it to keep slipping or in some cases being told its 40+ weeks.
And thats fairly universal across all marques too - and nothing exotic either!!
Off the back of that, a lot of people are not ordering or cancelling orders and keeping their current car a bit longer.
"Would work as a capital ship killer but there are already plenty of conventional missiles which do a better job by flying under the radar"
Yes but what if your target was 2000 miles away?
The point of this sort of weapon is unlimited range, unpredictable attack vectors and combined with impossible counter measures.
It makes the main weapon of US force projection (the carrier battle group) vulnerable anywhere in the world at any time, whereas today once at sea its largely invulnerable to even saturation attacks.
The time for a warhead from an ICBM to reach its target after seperation is less an a minute and thats at 2000mph - which is less than half the speed of a hypersonic. Most of the ~30 min flight time of an ICBM is mid course, the warhead reentry is the shortest of the 3 phases.
In space you won't be getting the plasma effect, meaning you can do all of your terminal guidance perfectly ok before the firey plunge.
How far can a ship move in say 15 seconds and is it predictable?
I'd say given the short amount of time and the slow speed of a ship, its entirely possible to hit it without needing to make adjustments during the atmosphere stage.
Lister: D'ya think Wilma's sexy?
Cat: Wilma Flintstone?
Lister: Maybe we've been alone in deep space too long, but every time I see that body, it drives me crazy. Is it me?
Cat: Well, I think in all probability, Wilma Flintstone is the most desirable woman that ever lived.
Lister: That's good. I thought I was going strange.
Cat: She's incredible!
Lister: What d'ya think of Betty?
Cat: Betty Rubble? Well, I would go with Betty... but I'd be thinking of Wilma.
"Researchers have found that people who would go with Betty were more likely to vote Leave than those who would hold out for Wilma"
Wall Street isn't about "long term" anything any more.
Its operating since 2008 on a post-growth model.
The idea that someone gives you $1m to make your company make more product and more profit that is shared back to the lender in dividends is such an outdated concept.
Its all about non-GAAP numbers and Wall Street concepts of casino gambling gaining money out of thin air.
Nothing in the world of big finance fits the concepts you have in your mind about how things work any more and its this complex web of dependencies that creates both massive wealth for the few and economic disaster for the many.
And there is no putting that genie back in the bottle as far as I can see.
I don't know about you but I am pretty fed up with adverts for jobs with utterly ridiculous skill requirements from major employers. (I understand that in a small company you might have a tiny handful of "technical people" trying to do everything but not from say a household name bank or insurance company)
"Must have CCIE" - ok its a network job
"have 5 years+ of Oracle" - you expect me to be able to deal with databases too....
"Javascript coding experience desirable" - a developer too?
"Prince2 methodology" - and a PM?
Just ffs tell me what it is the person is expected to actually be able to do on a day to day basis!
Notes was always a bit clunky, totally refusing to accept Microsoft look and feel in any way whatsoever.
Once you got over that user shock, it was pretty good.
We swapped it out for Exchange after about two decades and in many ways its not as robust and predictable as Notes was.
The other thing with Notes was it was eye wateringly expensive and needed specialists to look after it. I guess very much an IBM product.
I don't think anyone would be bold enough to start with Notes now, but I'm glad to see someone has kept it alive.
The difference between UK and USA and why these spendings are different is that one is totally post-empire, the other not quite yet - or at least hasn't recognised it.
Your priorities can be different when you aren't trying to control huge swathes of the world by force of arms to ensure free movement of your commerce activities.
If the British Empire hadn't fallen, I doubt we'd be talking about an NHS at all. We'd be talking about how the Royal Navy was the biggest recipient of money and clapping Grand Admirals at 8pm every night.
I wonder what the national Holy Cow is in India? No pun intended, well, maybe a little.
Yes, which is somewhat surprising. Who'd have thought the entire IT world could be disrupted by a bookshop.
Can you imagine what would happen if the reverse had occurred?
IBM: we're going to start selling stuff from a website
Shareholders: what sort of stuff? you already sell stuff.
IBM: We'll start with books but you know,anything really. We are going to sell anything and everything and we're going to use our ecommerce skills to do it.
Shareholders: *screams about core business* *mass panic* *dumps shares*
Unless you started out with working for today's big fish, the story of takeover after takeover and TUPE'd between employers is pretty much most of this industry.
Even if you work for the current big fish, it can still happen to you - look at this story - DXC getting bought out?
Prior to that EDS/HPES bought by CSC to make DXC.
IBM ITO is next
Eventually we will all work for Amazon/Apple/Tesla/The Lizard People Corp
...are going to get expensive with all of this.
Sure many of us have a spare bedroom that could be an office.... but what about when your partner also needs a home office.... or your grown up kids (which you can't get rid of due to house prices)
We don't need taxation on WFH, we actually need tax relief. We certainly aren't about to see employers go "that money we saved on your office, we've divided it up, here is your annual allowance of £10k each to pay for company rental of your house"
Although I suspect what will actually happen is that your local authority will decide you need to pay business rates for the "office" space.... not the case yet, but watch this space.
I have a K70 Mk2 (and there is a newish Mk2...I guess Mk2b) with Cherry Reds - you can get Red silent, Red, Brown or Blues.
Gotta say its very good, better than my K55 I have on another PC here.
The K70 is very solid, heavy so stable and really nice to type on all day - I am not gaming with it.
Apparently, I am hammering it less than I was the old Lenovo one I was using - so a definite plus for WFH.
Expensive, sure but feel like its one of my better purchases recently. Makes my endless days of keyboard bashing a bit better.
Transfer Pricing is how these companies syphon taxes out of countries and into a low tax location.
That Mega Corp logo on the packaging? $5 per use payable to the IP owner of The Logo - Mega Corp Cayman Islands Ltd. The carboard box? Patent owned by Mega Corp Cayman Islands Ltd and it costs you $10 per time you make one..... and so on. Just so happens that $15 is most of the profit on each sale, funny that. UK branch of Mega Corp sadly reports each year it made hardly any profit. Meanwhile in the Cayman Islands, Mega Corp have agreed to build a school or some money into the civil service retirement fund in return for paying $1000 of tax - afterall, they only have a mailbox address there at an office of a law firm.
It has fully legit purpose, of course, its just they like to play the game and abuse it. It remains totally legal however.
It is possible to counter it, assuming of course the normal process of democratic government isn't subverted by lobbying or being lent on by a government of the country where the giants come from...
https://www.taxjustice.net/topics/corporate-tax/transfer-pricing/
What most often fail to understand is that WW1 and WW2 are continuation wars.... and I don't mean from just 1 to 2....think of all of this as continuation wars from the break up of the Holy Roman Empire.
And then look at the technical advances...
When you see things massively shift though is in line with the arrival of the industrial revolution. It increases technology both civillian and military from the late 19th century. Even the technology of the 1870 Franco Prussian war is not the same as the Napoleonic war in many many ways.
The wealth of the Old Empires of Europe had already ended up in the USA by 1918.
WW2 just finished off what had already started, but it was certainly *by design*.
American superpower post WW2 industrial and military dominance wasn't by accident and those behind it saw it as a continuation of the founding of the USA, to have come full circle and finally crushed the "enemy" of a free America - the old Empires - without having to fight them!
Radar could determine the difference between a bomber and a fighter in 1940?
I didn't think it could actually.
Actual enemy aircraft type identification was done by the Observer Corps - once it had come into sight.
And both the Spit and the Hurricane were interceptors.... big type difference there - as they were to learn when Allied bombers needed fighter escorts later. Interceptors need to climb fast and be agile but be short ranged.
"Fighter" is a generic term and not everything labelled such is useful for multiple air to air warfare types.
Me110's were lousy air surpremacy fighters for example, but excellent night fighters. Same with the Mossie.... or even the Ju88!
True, but in summer 1940 the Common Wealth wasn't about to come under heavy air attack or stood waiting for a seaborne invasion.
At that critical moment, everything hinged on the island holding out and critically the very moment hung on what Downding described as "Our young men will have to shoot down their young men at the rate of five to one."
The power of the Empire would come to play later and ultimate wartime victory in Europe was only possible because of the weight, plus of course the industrial might of the USA and the sheer military muscle of the USSR.
Allied victory is what was achieved, not British, not British Empire, not USA, not Soviet.
Allied.
Yes, the Dowding System.
Churchill himself gave credit to this as the key to victory:
"All the ascendancy of the Hurricanes and Spitfires would have been fruitless but for this system which had been devised and built before the war. It had been shaped and refined in constant action, and all was now fused together into a most elaborate instrument of war, the like of which existed nowhere in the world"
I should have also mentioned Y's involvement in countering "Headache" - the Lorenz/Knickebein beam guidance for Luftwaffe night bombing.
And then later the X-Gerät and Y-Gerät systems which improved on Knickebein.
But its just another example of quite how high tech WW2 became vs WW1.
You talk about BP, but not about the RAF's Y Service who actually provided the raw intel - plus did a lot of analysis themselves.
In fact German speakers in Y were really crucial during the Battle of Britain. They listened to German chit chat and were able to provide a lot of useful tactical intelligence as raids built - given the way that the Luftwaffe spent ages assembling these massive formations of bombers before heading across the channel.
Y also were the ones to report that the Germans were packing up their kit in France, Sealion was abandoned and the Battle of Britain was actually over.
So lets hear it for the boys and girls of Y!
Better candidate.... I believe under your system it is possible to write the name of any US (born) ciitizen on the ballot paper and cast a vote for them.
That's real genuine democracy, why don't you use it? I don't think any other nation has anything like that level of genuine citizen power.
Jeez... I hope you got your free (made in China) hat when you wrote that.
And, sure my nom de guerre wouldn't look great on a ballot paper, but guess what... El Reg ain't a ballot paper.
I'll say again, i have no interest in which of your two party state govern. I just think that for a country with a load of intelligent people past and present, that you surely to Christ could find some better candidates.
Isn't all of this caused by the TikTok K-Pop mafia pulling that epic stunt on the Donald's rally the other week?
I'm really looking forward to when the world finally gets over the "petulant child leadership" phase - whenever that is, maybe the grown ups will be back in charge of the world.... by 2050 or something.
No, i assumed that, On the xbone it's neither possible to run windows (despite the underlying os is a *version* of windows) nor any flavour of Linux to date. It's not like people haven't tried either.
These days there is little point either, you can achieve similar results with other hardware for home entertainment centre use.
Almost certainly not - the XBONE went to great lengths to stop you from running anything - loads of things about the hardware are non-standard - from drives that read backwards to hardware with utterly unique parameters.
Its partly copy protection for the games, partly because of the (sub cost) hardware pricing strategy to hook you onto subscriptions and digital content. Lessons learnt by Microsoft from the original Xbox (which could be re-purposed)
Interesting.... a $200 bribe to have another go at killing off resale of pre-owned games.
It's got to be that and I suspect it might well achieve that.
We all know that the game companies hate the second hand market and MS tried this before with the XBONE, only backing down after howls of rage.
I guess offering both with and without is their next strategy.
Its very good but as you say the price tag exceeds the ROI value - its genuinely eye watering.
I'm fairly sure that some substantial repricing would mean better revenues overall - I've yet to find anyone who objected to it other than on the feeling they were being gouged.
I suspect MS Analytics is about to lay waste to Splunk too - its not as good, but the price is somewhat more acceptable.
The US's anti-satellite test mission is hardly secret - 13 September 1985.
Maj. Wilbert D. "Doug" Pearson is the only fighter pilot to date to have chalked up a kill in space so far.
I heard someone say the other day though that both the Russians and the Chinese are stepping up these space warfare projects because.... Trump created Space Force... announcing to the world that the USA is officially taking war into space.
And PS the 1967 Outer Space Treaty doesn't prohibit conventional weapons in space, only "weapons of mass destruction" and you can't turn the moon or any other celestial body into a battle station (are you listening Darth?)
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