Posts by John Smith 19

Drayson locks Forces chiefs out of Defence budget carve-up

Should that not read

"Informed" critics of the spending review will be excluded.

Remeber thought that Dryson, like the Dark Lord, can lurk in the House of Lords until his time comes again.

Surplus astronaut right-sizing imminent at NASA?

or "The most pampered b"£$%^&s I know"

As a certain science fiction writer described them.

Johnson has spent *decades* finding reasons to employ them and hence keep *itself *in business while insisting that *no* vehicle *other* than ones designed under NASA sanction could *possibly* carry one of their staff without exploding on the pad.

Johnson has at least 4 options if they want to stay in business.

Re-configure their facilities to train for Soyuz flight.

Accelerated the COTS programme to include level 5 (human) transport on the Dragon and Cygnus capsule

Re-consider their decision that neither of the EELV's (Atlas V and Delta IV) are safe enough and robust enough to man rate for a capsule (still need to to get a capsule designed. it would depend how far along the Constellation design is).

Hire out their training faciliites to other countries like ESA, India , Virgin Galactic or (dare I even *suggest* it) members of the *general* public. IIRC they did have ESA astonauts in their neutral buoancy tank when spacelab flew (was it just me or did Wubbo Ockels have the whole 70's porn star look down).

Johnson, along with Marshall have proved *very* adept at finding reasons to continue existing. Perhaps this will re-focus them on what *exactly* they do that is critical to how a modern crewed launch programme should be run. The Von Braun view that "We will give you a space programme. You will be very proud of it, but space is *far* too dangerous for ordinary people to go to" is *very* slowly changing.

Space is a place 67km straight up. People go to the top of Mount Everest or Antartica more routinely.

Mine will be the one with a copy of Battle Royale in it. Perhaps the perfect will to select the survivors.

New airlock mini-sub for US Navy SEAL 'operations'

They are pretty discrete

Not like the usual merkijn website at all.

So the 64$ is will the Navy build a bigger shelter to accomdate this or can it achieve the feat of locking to a subamrine escape hatch *without* being ripped from it when the submarine is running at cruise speed.

Looks quite comfy.

MEPs to US: Hands off our bank accounts

Not needed when the IRA were blowing stuff up in the UK

But blow some stuff up in the *US* and watch the collective US under garments fill up.

The first act of the European Parliment having some control over foreign policy seems like quite a good one to me. Let's hope its future ones are as good.

Tories will force BT to open up ducts to rivals

Is this not what the French do?

I think it's fairly close to that except France Telecom is still state owned, I've no idea who the other 2 suppliers are, but the average speed is meant to be about 20Mb. I'm sure some non domiciled Reg readers are in France and could enlighten us.

I think a level playing field would demand reciprocity. If Virgin or Sky *really* are as good a deal (as they claim) they have nothing to fear. If they're not BT will be laying their cable into Virgin or Sky ducts.

That's called competition in a free market.

ISA chairman assures nation: Your data is safe

@RW

"This raises the question, what is the ISA going to do about inaccurate, out of date, irrelevant data? How are errors to be corrected? How is stale and irrelevant data to be purged? When the DB is compromised, as it assuredly will be, who is going to be taken to the Tower for decapitation as an irresponsible idiot?"

Good questions. But as this DB includes "Soft" data the simple bureaucrats approach is to move the inaccurate data into the "soft" catagory.

More to the point as AFAIK the report is confidential and sent to the employer how would you *know* if you had an entry in the soft section (you'd know if you'd been convicted). Of course if they have the wrong details (I've never been to prison, but I bet some other John Smith has) how would you know that?

Mine will be the one with a copy of the "The Trial" in the pocket.

They also claim they've knocked down the numbers affected by 2million

Time will tell if this is any more accurate.

The episode is here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qs991/Panorama_Are_You_a_Danger_to_Kids/

I'll note 3 things.

The nationwide database of *all* UK school children has been running for 8 years and is only *now* setting a data retention policy. With enough staff data loss is not only likely, it's inevitable.

Staff at the ISA are the "1st generation" employyees. The agency is in starup mode and is likely to be thinking about data security issues. Wheather or not the future hirees are as well trained (or it'll be a case of "Read that data securtiy manual in the bottom of that cupboard when you get a minute") will depend on how will this becomes ingrained in the corporate culture.

This being the British Civil Service I'll not get my hopes up.

And of course they haven't started collecting really large amounts of information yet, so not that much to loose.

BTW do look at the episode. 1 of the best things was when Panorama talked to the "Childline" charity on how many calls were (from children) were about abuse and how many of them involved people who weren't family or friends (the people this system is meant to check). The numbers were 56000 calls talking about family or friends of the family, and 13 for others.

If these are the *only* people that the ISA catches that would make them £18769230 per suspect.

Money well spent?

NASA's Sun-gazing sat grounded

SOHO was getting a bit long in the tooth

If it's still running.

This is a superb mission. Hard science which will have definite and immedate applications on Earth. It will give early warning of upcoming large solar storms (although what happens will depend on what precautions have been planned for. Finding a way to partition the power grid into sub sections seems to be pretty important) and with this much detail it *might* improve the modelling of magnetic confinement fusion reactors. The Sun is the *only* working fusion reactor we know about that we have *any* kind of access to.

The fact that a very complex object is being obbserved in much greater temporal and spatial resolution alone should generate substantial discoveries.

I hope tha NASA puts in place arrangements (possibly as part of an international consortium) to maintain some kind of permanent satellite watch on the sun.

Microsoft erases Windows 8 optimism

"We listened to our customers"

Intel said make it *need* a 2GHz quad core processor as a *minimum*.

The drive makers said have it take up at *least* 10GB.

The RAM suppliers said it needs a footprint of at least 2GB.

NHS appraisal toolkit yanked offline

9 years old. OMG does it need IE6?

OTOH I've never heard of the supplier, so maybe they are one of those niche specialst companies that concentrate on what they are good at.

It is possible that this is only the *current* security audit that has rung alarm bells and they run these anually. However if that be the case running them at the high usage time of year is a bit stupid.

Intel finds cure for CPU old age

this will make Intel a load more money.

Border line chips can be sold at relatively low prices. Of course as the error rate climbs the clock slows down untill it ramps up again (can you say limite cycle oscillation)

But most importantly it retains the ability to charge customers for faster chips. Dumping the clock and going asynchrounous would be such *bad* marketing.

Presumably 1/2 ofthe transistors will continue to be for clock distribution as they are now.

Does anyone else think this sounds a bit desperate? Clever but definitely running full tilt into a brick wall.

Women face 'glass cliff' after breaking glass ceiling

"Crotch fruiting"

Grossly insensitive but a quality line nonetheless.

My college course was unusual in offering make up course if people did not have maths. This may have accounted for the above average level of women on what was basically a mechanical engineering course.

During my time in software development all of my jobs had women staff or supervisors. Howeever this was in the COBOL/RPG type environment.

It's on: Micron is buying Numonyx

IIRC Micron was owned by Amstrad at one time.

At least in part.

Hard to believe now.

I for one welcome our new technically advanced memory sourcing overlords.

Microsoft drops open-source birthday gift with FAST

SQL Server anyone?

The #3 horse in the Unix database market .

Bought up and rendered down at the Redmond knackers yard. serverd up as Microsoft SQL Server for Windows.

Was it up to V7 before it could do record level locking? That's quite an important ability for people who run large databases (especially if some of those files have small records, when a cluster lock blocks reading a *large* number of them).

Navision was also more cross platform and had a wide user base in Euope (good internationalsiation faciliites as IIRC it was Danish). Wonder if any of that's left.

IPS's double IT has risks, says commissioner

How much does he *know* about IT security?

Or indeed IT in general.

IOW does he have to take whatever the IPS say at face value, as he does not *know* any better?

Just curious. I noted they appointed this "Identity Commisioner" a *long* time after the actual project got rolling IE after he would have *any* ability to influence its design.

I'd like to know if the Conservatives will scrap the requirment (much loved of the IPS) to make the passport a notifiable document, like an ID card but not.

Thumbs up. So they are not rolling out 1 system, it's 1 "small" system and 1 "large" system. How much risk has it increased. Who knows. Lots.

Battlefield skyhook robocopter 'passes US Marines' test'

@alyn

Um, intermeshing contra-rotating rotors are kind of Kamen's specialty. The contra-rotation eliminates the need for a tail rotor (and has done since the 1950's IIRC).

Their rotors also tend to have a flap on the trainling edge of their blades, which is quite unusual (AFAIK). I'd hear d of this basic design some time ago when they were touting it as a helicopter for logging operations, with no cabin, just a pilots cockpit and rotors and bearings designed for no replacement during the life of the vehicle.

Bishop Hill: Gonzo science and the Hockey Stick

Myth of global cooling int he 1970s

I refer to the BAMS (American Meterolgical Society Sept 08) which de bunks this urban ledged pretty well.

I *suspect* human behaviour is interferring with the global climate in quite severe ways. That is a personal POV, not one I would try to convice anyone else of.

However the more detailed description I have seen of the *behaviour* of the investigators into this the worse their behaviour looks.

Raw data sets they won't publish. Data cherry picked. Undisclosed data filtering/processing methods. Statistical measures that have *not* been investigated in detail by statisticians.

This does not corrospond to any definition of the "scientific method" that I am familiar with.

I think Einstein said "Nature cannot read." Let's have *all* the facts (including the ones that don't match *any* theory) on the table, along with the methodology used to reduce the data.

I *hope* climate "science" will go down in history like viriolgy, not eugenics (or perhaps fusion).

BAE broke bribery pledge, faked US arms-export applications

Lockheed. Whoever won the contest

They ended up building the vehicle. Suntan, F104, and the whole "Slush fund" business in the 1970s, when the King of the Netherlands ended up in the dock.

BTW saw a documentary on the F35. Lockheed had "lost" c$60m in an accounts situation. Normally grounds for being dumped off a US Gov contract. Then it looked like they might not make the fly off. Except Boeing got hit by a strike and the Pentagon extended the deadline for both.

What a truly *amazing* bit of luck that was.

BAe *always* play the patriotism card in the UK. I recall a study that reckoned defense indsutry jobs are the highest cost, lowest number of people employed use of government cash anywhere.

If their products are *so* British, why do they keep *needing* US government sales approval?

Microsoft tests show no Win 7 battery flaw

@Monteeth

Thanks for the pointer. It's good to see someone offering some constructive help. Your comments suggest that Windows 7 is a *monster* battery hog and the battery app is just reporting the fact.

The help file is rubbish.

Microsoft kills FAST's Linux and Unix search biz

@Kristian B

"When they launch their "Microsoft Certified Hardware" scheme and only permit Windows to be used with Microsoft-labelled or Microsoft certified hardware (inc. peripherals). Naturally they would only certify the hardware of vendors who promise to never provide drivers or support for Linux or Unix platforms. "

Consider it done. I think you need to look up "Paladium" or "Trusted computing." this is DRM territory. However actually putting out major hardware with the MS logo on is unlikely. Microsoft's *only* friends are hardware suppliers. MS gives them the 50% (and Office) OS bloat needed to justify scrapping PC's every 18-21 months.

Gov tempts young London onto ID database with booze, 'games'

@chris thomas alpha

Quite right. It is the NIR, not the card itself. This is something which *every* idiot who witters on about "I live in xxx and we have these and our government is not a police state" *fails* totally to get.

The current backup plan is that they will make the passport a "Reportable document," IE that any changes in address details or family circumstances will have to be reported to IPS, making it an ID card in all but name (although rather more useful if you do decide to travel abroad).

It has gone from being absouletely essential to win the war on terror, to ensuring you are old enough to drink.

thumbs up for your comment. Thumbs down for it being a s"%t system.

Does not want to drive but does want to travel

Tight fisted and stupid with it.

122 days maximum (87 days likely) before regime change.

US gov's emptying of vast Texan helium-tank dome 'wrong'

@Julian 1

Hydrogen should be quite a bit cheaper than Helium. However I could see safety being a real issue on this. Helium can leak out of fairly small gaps but Hydrogen can diffuse through metal walls. It would probably take a buildup in a confined, unvented space over time to get enough to actually explode.

Not a happy prospect on an oil rig.

@hayseed

In principle liquid nitrogen (BP at 1 atm 77k)would work out pretty well for *most* bulk rocket related activiites. Inerting tanks and plumbing before liftoff, chill down etc. However the US (read NASA) is wedded to hydrogen, and cooling down the hardware with *anything* but helium will result in frozen cryogen clogging stuff up. There is also the mass argument. A space shuttle large He tank weighs 270Lb but carries 30 lbs of He. Holding the same number of moles of Nitrogen that would be about 210lbs of N2. Most other launch vehicles (modern US ICBMs use solid fuels) use Helium as well.

Besides if its a cost+ contract you gain *no* points for loosing payload carrying ability and lowering costs.

Argon is probably the cheapest inert gas as it's sold in volume for welding. No go for Hydrogen apps and even heavier than Nitrogen.

Cloud firm wafts out white label ERP for small biz

Not a bad idea in theory

But it will stand or fall on how much stuff has to be loaded on users desktops and how reliable their connection has to be for it to work without glitching all the time.

Pupil database claimed to be breach-free

Retention policy "Being developed"

After it's been running for 8 *years*.

Let me guess. We'll archive the data when they leave.

To the NIR.

Microscope-wielding boffins crack cordless phone crypto

security by obscurity

Let's be honest that while his methods are not exactly a mainstream black hats approach they could have been used by just about any government or major organised crime operation in the last 20 years.

Fail for the companies who *continue* to believe this approach works.

Lotus Symphony 3 beta goes OOo

Improv sounded interesting.

AFAIK it added applied the notion of templates (as in a pre-defined layout with placeholders for text insertion in a word processor) to spreadsheets. IE structure (of spreadsheet model) is divorced from actual data.

My further *impression* is that it might have been better if they had looked at Lotus Agenda's ability to construct an implied object hieracrchy and re-structure it on the fly.

Given it was hosted on a *nix box it should have been possible to re-host to Linux, but I guess that would have gone against the IBM view on IP.

Mine's the one with UI development for dummies in the pocket.

Dell ordered back to court in laptop dustup

Good

How much does "arbitration" on a $1200 laptop?

Four UK politicians charged for dodgy expenses

As David Kosoff observed

In the HoC members refer to each other as "My RIght Honourable Friend," when they believe them to be neither right, nor honourable, and certainly no friend.

BAE cops to arms-deal violation, pays $400m US fine

£30m to HMG is unlikely to cover their expenses

Or rather the expenses the UK taxpayers spent through the SFO (and their case management system) to run this case.

Not to mentione the substantial support you can bet Blair and his predecessor bunged them "Safeguard British jobs."

Brits take iTablet moniker for 12in iPad rival

@Tony Martin

"There is a chinese tablet maker that will sue those guys. It even runs Windows XP, like the chinese one. I bet it also has 1.5 hours battery life. LOL"

Where do you think they will be getting it from?

Do Google's search warrant police run IE6?

Let's ask an obvious question

You are a *very* large internet services company.

Your core apps are built on Linux

You have some test machines running Windows/IE6 for QA purposes.

Why do you connect *them* to the internet? Not a mini nets, not a simulator, the real thing.

BTW Remember that "Patriotism is the last bastion of scoundrels." I'd check the small print on that act *very* carefully. I believe the average merkin will be quite surprised at what they have signed away.

Climategate witchhunt fingers scientist

I think they are trying to populate the NIR.

No police officer with more than 10 working brain cells can beleive this kangaroo court style invasion of privacy is goint to catch anyone.

The most they can hope is someone gives a different view on their questionaire than their publically know stance.

I smell Fail.

Iran launches rat, two turtles, some worms into space

@James Hughes 1

"As for the tech required - I would have thought if you have got a payload in to orbit, you have ALL the (difficult) tech needed to delivery a payload to anywhere."

Not quite (although you're right about the it being a better prgramme than the British one).

The Iranians still have 3 major hurdles to overcome before they can be a full on make_uncle_Sam_cack_their_pants country.

1) Develop re-entry technolgoy to enable a package to protect its contents well enough until it gets to the ground. This flight was a non-return package.

2) Make the payload size big enough to carry something really scary. Yes some staggeringly lethal gas/bacteria/virus *could* be effective at the current payload size, but this is reality, not a Tom Clancy novel.

3) Bring it down on a target. Since they haven't even tried to get this package to re-enter *anywhere* they are a pretty long way from this goal. OTOH quite a lot can be firmed up with computer simulations but this is still an area where the *only* true test is a live firing. The classic one being the laminar to turbulent flow transisition. This can increase heating 10x. Predicting its location on the vehicle, height and speed of occurence are still fairly open questions without a live launch.

Mind you they could become the worlds cheapest launch provider.

Iran has possiblity of global space first

First mullah in LEO.

I wonder if they can manage this NASA has a non shuttle crew carrying vehicle in service?

Defra tenders for sheep tracking database

did''nt theybuidl one of these to track cattle for the f&M crisis?

Maybe there are a *lot* more sheep than cattle in the UK but so what?

Make the ID strings a bit longer in the *design* phase. This was on the cards a *long* time ago. £6m additional when most of the hooks should have been in the V1.0 system.

After all cattle are tracked from cradle to grave in the UK.

And soon so will humans. Why should sheep have it easy?

Adobe to Jobs: 'What the Flash do you know?'

@TJ1

"The key aspect here is the blending step.

For 'just' video streams therefore the player has to be prepared to do blending but it isn't used, but prevents any optimisations for 'movies'.

A further issue for the Linux player currently is his belief that H.264 video can't be hardware-decoded using VAAPI/VDPAU since those APIs can't decode to a memory buffer. Others have pointed out that belief is incorrect, so it is possible if that information is followed up the Linux player may see some useful speed increases for H.264 decoding."

If accurate this is very interesting. It also suggests the *obvious* improvement. strategy.

Disable blending for all segments of the video stream that have *no* additional items, bypassing the additional steps.

A vector based graphics langauge should have a *lot* lower bandwidth in terms of processing items (the 2 major reasons for vector appraoches are scalability and storage space) so it *should* be possible to walk through the list of objects to be created (and hence blended) into the video stream a *lot* faster than they need to be displayed.

Caution. On a white board everything is simple.

Air Marshal: RAF may not have to be disbanded

Interesting that this is even *on* the table.

The presumption would be that amalgamation is a no brainer, as *everyone* has seperate army/navy/air forces.

So that merger is no longer an impossible idea?

Note that inter service rivalry and the playing of politics has caused a *lot* of trouble in the past. I'm thinkg of Earl Moutbattens *highly* partisan campagn for the Buccanner against the TSR2.

Perhaps a more politically viable way to save money would be the merging of the seperate operations commands as Lewis suggests.

Perhaps it could be called something like "Combined Operations," or CombOps for short.

Just a thought.

Quantum superclock will be accurate past end of life on Earth

Not to mention GPS

Rubidium atomic clocks on board the satellites provide the time reference for the GPS system. obviously an upgrade to these for the next generation (or Gallileo) would tighten up the whole systems accuracy.

However this one's likely to be pretty bulky. An experimental JPL unit uses a few mercury atoms and is IIRC 1000x more accurate than the GPS clocks while only taking up 2litres of volume (and of course standing a full space launch). Handy if you want launch a satellite constellation into relatively high (800-1000Km) low earth orbit.

Note that atomic clocks are not normally viewed as portable. More 20 ft container sized than desktop. Making most of the vacuum system in 1 piece out of materials that can take a 450c bakeout (gas molecules desorbing off the walls contaminate the signal) seem to have been key elements.

HP ordered to pay £200m in interim damages ruling

Opps, 1 bad apple defense not quite enough.

I wonder if he pitched any government contracts as well.

Consultants only ever change if they take a large financial hit. This *might* be big enough to do so.

Google's Android code deleted from Linux kernel

A note on BSD Vs GPL

From dim memory BSD gives you the source and you report any bug fixes *but* any additions or non bug fixes are *yours* to keep. MS *like* the BSD license a lot.

GPL *requires* a 2 way street. They hand you the bug fixes (found by a worldwide developer community if you did not) and you hand back any extensions you developed. It seems Goggle have been handing back bits with references to non kernel components (whose code they have *not* supplied) and other parts that view core data structures in non standard ways.

This code is *useless* to the Linux kernel.

People have been trying remind users that Android is just a form of Linux. Clearly Google no longer want to be a part of this process. They want to be a *proprietary* OS, with a locked in developer community. IOW just *like* Windows.

Google mystery server rooted in Apache

"Blasts Tomcat out of the water"

Sounds like a rural sport in Alabama.

Call animal welfare.

Won't *someone* think of the kitties

Aussie ISP beats Hollywood on 'copyright' rap

OMG. Aussie judge issues sane view of copyright infringement

And accepts ISP's are carriers, not content generators.

MoD turns to bloggers for advice on UK defence policy

"Kings of War"

Is that Playstation, PSP or XBox?

Researchers penetrate last bastion of Windows security

Adobe *enables* these exploits

But does not *cause* them.

"Buffer overflow" MS say.

Why?

Carbon trade phish scam disrupts exchanges

Carosel fraud is *not* committed by rogue states

Why should this be? It represents another form of cash, albeit a pretty esoteric form (at present).

if people in the EU are smart enough to devise carosel VAT fraunds (and they have been around since at *least* the 1970s) why would'nt some of the more cutting edge fraudsters think about this.

"Corporate ID theft." That must hurt. I bet they won't take that lying down. Unlike the rest of us.

Think Aussie election rules are draconian? Look at the UK's

AC@16:48

"Fair is the word you mean. It's part of a process which stops people like Rupert Murdoch doing what he did in the US. A prolonged, biased and wildly innacurate campaign by Fox to smear Obama and the Democratic party.

I know which system I think is most democratic"

Er.no. "The Representation of the People's Act" in the UK is what requires TV stations in the UK to offer "balence" reporting with *roughly* equal levels of coverage to all major parties.

This does *not* include newspapers, giving the UK newspaper coverage (mostly Murdoch owned) over the last half century (The Sun

Spiderman Beetleman wall-crawl glove/boot tech invented

The tech has some other uses as well

Personally, I've always wanted a wall that would be controlably "sticky." Handy for putting up diagrams, printouts, pictures etc.

This tech also appears to function as a large area, controlled volume fluid pump for dispensing very small fluid volumes. This is *exactly* what is needed to supply some of the active heat shield ideas for reentry vehicles.

Of course the $64 is what happens to the surface tension forces if the flow is contaminated (IE soap) or airborne particles get into the layer.

US plans crewless automated ghost-frigates

This is the Somali pirates calling

How much will you pay for your new robot frigate?