Posts by Peter2

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

Re: Wait

At the end of the day does Microsoft actually need consumer users?

From one particular point of view retail is probably utterly irrelevant to Microsoft's bottom line.

From another; having been somewhat involuntarily forced to Linux Mint from Windows (as a 8 core/16 threat processor with 32GB of RAM is no supported by Windows) the greater familiarity I am gaining with Linux on an ongoing basis is making it steadily more likely that i'm going to end up deploying it at work as a server at some point. That prospect ought to keep people at Microsoft up late at night if they can think a few steps ahead.

Re: There's no slowing down this fecal train

I've ended up switching to Linux Mint because Microsoft wants me to replace my not horribly old gaming PC (AMD Ryzen with 8 cores (16 with hyperthreading) and 32GB of RAM and with a tolerably decent graphics card just because Windows won't support fairly modern hardware, and I found that replacing the OS was less hassle.

I haven't had the slightest problem with gaming on it. The Steam launcher runs just as on Windows and Windows games run on it with no hassle. Interestingly, i'd say with less hassle than on Windows for older games. The performance is comparable, if not better. Really old DOS games certainly work much better on Linux than under Windows, and without needing to put the slightest bit of effort into the configuration. It's also got a Steam like launcher called Heroic Games Launcher for GOG, Epic Games and Amazon prime games which functions basically the same way as Steam.

I'd suggest downloading Linux Mint and sticking it on a USB drive and then you can boot from that USB drive and try it, without actually installing it per se.

~25 years ago when I did this with Suse 7 I ended up switching back to Windows to run various things so often that I eventually ended up remaining with Windows.

I haven't loaded Windows since installing Mint, other than to test that the boot loader option for Windows functioned correctly.

Aviation watchdog says organized drone attacks will shut UK airports ‘sooner or later’

Re: What goes up will come down

The solution is ultimately going to be melting them with a laser and then only closing particular runways if their is a FOD hazard.

Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support

Popular operating system much more sticky than Windows 7 was during its EOL

You could upgrade Win7 to Win8.1 after Win7 went EOL.

In many cases, you cannot upgrade Windows 10 to Windows 11 because only a 8 core/16 thread PC with 32GB of RAM not on the supported list is no longer enough to run a Windows OS.

All of this perfectly task adequate equipment therefore either needs to stay on Win10 unsupported, have somebody jump through an awful lot of hoops to make the installer install despite not meeting the nominal requirements, or switch to another OS.

Microsoft suggests temporary registry hack for stricken smart card users

Pure incompetence.

Microsofts Win11 installer recently informed me that my ~8 year old AMD Ryzen box (8 core/16 thread processor with 32GB of RAM) is good enough to run Win11 and wants me to go and buy a new PC.

I suppose I could play around and fool Windows into allowing me to install it on the perfectly adequate PC, but i've no particular intention of doing that. Instead, I considered that it's been about twenty years since I last dabbled with duel booting Linux and am now running Linux as my main desktop.

Microsoft puts Office Online Server on the chopping block

Re: It's gonna crash sometime

I don't think it's so much about "What if Microsoft goes out of business".

Trump sanctioned a judge in the International Court of Justice because he didn't like their rulings and suddenly their emails and documents (like court case files) vanished out of the cloud. If he's willing to target a judge in the International Court of Justice then he's going to think about it rather less when going for somebody else.

That personally makes me look at the cloud and increasingly unstable political situation in America very pensively. It's now entirely plausible that Trump may wake up one morning not having taken his meds and decide that industry X in country Y is now sanctioned resulting in our IT vanishing, and the company collapsing when the cloud backups don't work either. He's done basically that with tarrifs already, even to countries that were previously American friends and allies.

Migrating to an American cloud without considering this sort of issue would now be somewhat negligent.

Grounded jet engines take off again as datacenter generators

Re: my thoughts too

Yeah; that's an open cycle gas turbine in a nutshell.

Combined cycle gas turbines also have a triple expansion steam plant tacked on to the end to basically get every last bit of power out of that heat, however the steam plant is expensive to manufacture and has long lead times.

Fake home invasion vid lands woman in real trouble

Re: 8 police cars?

You'd get an immediate and major police response for phoning 999 and saying that you'd got an intruder in your house or trying to kick in the door. If you reported that people were doing it with an axe or were trying to shoot holes in it then you'd get a helicopter, armed response units and dog teams and a good old fashioned manhunt.

If you made a police report saying that you'd left your laptop on a chair in the front garden, gone inside to answer the phone and had come back and found it missing then you'd probably just get given a crime number or be invited to come in and give a statement.

And that's simply because it's fundamentally pointless waste of time for somebody to investigate; because even if they sent a forensics team to come and look at your chair then it's not likely to have any fingerprints on it from the person who nicked it. And ok, you could pull every bit of video evidence from every camera within a mile and spend 2 man years looking at it which the police will do in murder cases, but the police don't have the time or manpower required to do that for every single bit of petty theft. Hence, they just say "don't leave valuable stuff sitting where thieves can see it!"

Tribunal wonders if Microsoft has found a legal hero after pivot to copyright gambit

Re: Red herring?

I'm pretty certain both that your right.

Also, isn't there existing case law for this? I'm fairly certain that you're allowed to resell (access to) copyrighted works like music and books as well in most (if not all) european countries, assuming you do not make copies or sell it multiple times.

Your allowed to resell physical media such as books, CD's etc sure. If anything, this might actually hurt Microsofts case.

I've bought VLK's via Value Licensing way back, and they simply provided access to the original Microsoft media via the Microsoft Volume License Servicing Centre; so I very much doubt that Microsoft has an argument on copyright grounds.

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

Re: Fairly Minor but...

A winding up petition here in the UK is a commercial nuclear missile - ignore it at your peril!

It's supposed to be. It's a way of ensuring that suppliers get paid, as with a nuclear missile the threat of it being used tends to have the effect desired without having to resort to the use of the weapon of last resort.

To obtain such a court order you've got to write to the target and warn them that following your previous letters, your going to seek a winding up order if they don't pay up within 14 days. Therefore, the simplest method of defending yourself is to pay the supplier before it goes to court.

Although if it did go to court, paying the money before the hearing date would be a bar to any order being made by the judge as your defence would be "we've already paid them" and so the case would have to be dismissed.

Exchange Online will start archiving your oldest emails before your inbox bursts

Local device storage on 1 HDD is cheap.

Network storage on 2+ HDD's for failure tolerance plus online and offline backups which can be recovered in a short timeframe is not so cheap, especially when multiplied by a large number of users.

At a certain point, "just delete unused shit" is the cheapest method of dealing with this, especially if the organisation is archiving everything going through the mail server for 6+ years centrally anyway.

UK chancellor Putin the blame on Russia for cyber chaos, but evidence says otherwise

Re: Evidence

You are right their illegal activities could have been handled under existing laws and none of their actions come close to any accepted legal definition of terrorism.

Nope, not what I said. Their illegal activities could have been prosecuted under other laws (High Treason being one, money laundering for receiving foreign funding from unknown foreign sources being another) but they were meeting the legal definition of terrorism and that's beyond dispute given that they ended up being banned under said act. People might not like that, but I don't much like our military equipment being sabotaged by saboteurs acting under the direction of a foreign government.

But they were not actually the target of their own proscription. The actual target were protesters protesting perfectly legally

Um. I take it that your not aware of how the law works in the UK.

Protesting against anything is perfectly legal. Sticking up a sign saying that you were pro Palestine was and still is fine. Putting up a sign saying that you thought that banning the morons under the terrorism act was stupid would have been fine. Putting up a sign saying "I support <banned terrorist organisation>" gets you in trouble, and organisations were handing out signs to protesters to get them in trouble. One hopes that the protesters were aware that they were being deliberately set up.

Re: Evidence

This is how the UK govt can claim they do not aid Israel with refueling despite it being done with RAF liveried aircraft and serving RAF personnel.

Which still ignores the really obvious point that the Voyagers are incapable of refuelling Israeli aircraft. Even Wikipedia gets this right:-

Because the RAF's Voyagers are only capable of probe-and-drogue refuelling, they are unable to refuel current or future RAF aircraft that are fitted solely for flying boom refuelling, including the Boeing RC-135, Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, Boeing 737 AEW&C and Boeing P-8 Poseidon. In April 2016, the RAF stated its interest in fitting a boom to some Voyagers, bringing its fleet into line with other MRTT operators. Fitting a boom would add flexibility to the RAF Voyagers, allowing refuelling of RAF aircraft not fitted for probe and drogue, and also by other air forces that operate boom-refuelled aircraft

We still haven't fitted booms to our tankers and Israel uses the US boom system, rather than the probe system. Therefore our tanker aircraft cannot supply fuel to Israeli aircraft.

Re: Evidence

The labour government has form on this. E.g. Palestine Action are terrorists. Trust us, we have secret evidence that proves it. But we aren't going to publish it cos it's er, secret

We don't really need much evidence to prove that Palestine Action were sabotaging British military equipment since they released a press release bragging about it, and then said to a Telegraph reporter (!) that their next targets were the aircraft used by the air cadets (aka RAF sponsored version of Scouts) and for the basic flight training of the Ukrainian pilots in the UK which have zero relation to Palestine. Not that damaging refuelling tankers did, mind you given that they couldn't be used to refuel Israeli aircraft given that they use a different refuelling system to us.

Their actions meet the requirements of the terrorism act to be described as terrorism, as well as banning the group. They are rather lucky that merely the group is being banned; the lot of them could have been tossed in jail as members of a proscribed terrorist organisation, or for High Treason as they have "adhered to the king's enemies in his realm, giving them aid and comfort in his realm or elsewhere" or "levied war against the king in his realm".

The fact that far left protest groups actions are indistinguishable from terrorism or high treason is perhaps something that the far left might wish to consider soberly. The far left is just as much of a fucking menace as the far right.

Johnson, Cummings met Thiel months before Palantir won NHS pandemic role

Re: Britain is run by corrupt people

Ah, cognitive dissonance strikes again. So two pretty much mutually inconsistent statements.

Only if your a Russian. Anybody else will see "Putin increases military spending, threatens to invade neighbour" leads to "neighbour increases size of defending army to make war too expensive to contemplate even for a war mongering imbecile" as being obvious cause and effect.

The same as "Senior Russian leader threatens to nuke %nation%" leads directly to "%nation% considers acquiring nuclear weapons".

Cause and effect.

Re: Britain is run by corrupt people

The honest ones get hounded out, with the conniving of the media and the establishment.

I'm pretty inclined to agree with this.

Jeremy Corbin: the prime minister we were denied because he was too honest and decent.

No, people didn't vote for him because it's very obvious that the maximum extent of his level of competence is running a protest group, not a country.

Friendly reminder; he still wants to quit NATO and wants the UK to decommission our nuclear weapons without requiring that either the Russians or Chinese do the same.

NATO is all that's stopping the Russians from reconquering the territory of the late Soviet Union up until the middle of Germany, and the reason Putin decided to invade Ukraine before it joined NATO is that if it did join, he'd have to fight a war with the whole of Europe, which based on the performance of the Russian army in Ukraine he cannot possibly win.

The rest of Europe is currently considering acquiring their own nuclear weapons to deter Russia with since they find being on the receiving end of threats to be nuked without being able to say "if you do we'll nuke you back" a bit unnerving.

Home Office delays £816M English test contract despite market engagement

Re: £800M?

I'd have thought that a multiple choice questionnaire that records answers should be a job that could be able to give to almost any developer, SME IT Manager and probably a significant majority of power users for completion within a week.

I suppose adding recording through video and storage of that and a playback system would push the time and money requirement up, but it does seem a trifle expensive.

Get paid like a prime minister to tame Home Office IT chaos

Re: Delusional

I'm not sure it's possible to resolve, honestly.

The procurement requirements basically say that you've got to use the usual suspects, who are the problem. Resolving the problem would require not using the usual suspects and doing something else.

Therefore as you don't have the power to alter the procurement laws without an act of parliament then doing anything useful that would address the root cause of the problem would result in breaking a law, which would result in the usual suspects suing the government to force them to waste expend money upon their services without requiring delivery of a finished and usable product.

US Army straps on another mixed-reality gamble with Anduril, Rivet

The US Army's troubled attempt at outfitting soldiers with mixed-reality headsets is getting a $354 million boost and a new pair of lead contractors as part of a second attempt to make the kit stick without making troops sick.

Having used very many generations of VR kit for computers since before some people currently playing with this stuff have been born, I really think that there is a fundamental problem which is being quietly ignored; in that it can't actually be done without causing the operator to get sick.

We can provide visual inputs via projecting on glasses or whatever and fool the eye into considering that as being a distant object for depth perception; It's been done for like 30 years or so now with varying degrees of success. However, at best this causes very rapid eye refocusing between distance and close up which causes eyestrain, which causes headaches for which there is no solution. I can't see any way that this can be resolved in external hardware.

In addition, fooling the eye but not other senses in certain ways will predictably trip hardware safeties in the human vestibular system, which effectively does checksums against various inputs and when it detects movement in the eye which is not matched by the body's movements then it treats that as you having eaten hallucinogenic/poisoned stuff which if you trip an alert state by failing repeated checksums causes the body's safeties to resort to vomiting to remove the poisonous berries that it assumes that you've eaten.

The only way I can see to deal with that would be a hardware tap into the optical nerve to input data, and modifying the hardware in the human vestibular system to override it's safeties. Until that's done, VR stuff will predictably continue to make people sick if you do particular things with it. This issue (as a non tech one) appears to being studiously ignored by the tech world.

Norway's £10B UK frigate deal could delay Royal Navy ships

Re: Wrong type of ships

Not to mention that Norway's largest ships are frigates; meaning that they don't have anything like a carrier to actually escort which is basically the sole purpose of a destroyer these days.

Re: To be fair

... we can go back as far as records allow (quite a few hundred years) to see that 'defense procurement' - with occasional exceptions - has always been a venal, corrupt, arse-facing-forwards shambles.

This is actually a fair comment. HMS Victory was a product of this; she was a very old ship and after the battle of St Vincent in 1797 her CO at the time Admiral Jervis suggested that she be retired to a life as a storeship or hospital ship. Somebody then wrecked another ship, and the dockyards reckoned that they could refit Victory for much less than the cost of building a new ship.

She ended up being delivered back to the fleet late and over budget, costing more than building a bigger and more powerful ship. I suspect however that the French and Spanish would be inclined to agree that being late and over budget didn't affect her performance at Trafalgar much though.

Re: Quality?

Type45: six destroyers with defective cooling systems. Maybe back in service by 2032.

A faulty generator design, actually. The two diesel generators are being replaced with three more powerful units.

Dauntless and Daring have had this modification, Dragon is undergoing trials, Defender and Diamond are in the dock for modification and Duncan is currently on operations but is going to get the refit in it's next yard period. 50% are done already and Duncan is going to be the last ship complete in 2028.

Aircraft Carriers: Out of service because propeller fell off.

Um? Alternately routine pre sailing maintenance checks identified an issue with a coupling on QE's propeller shaft and so she went into a yard to get it fixed. At no point has a propeller ever "fallen off" a British carrier; were you thinking of the Russian ship which had it's propellers stolen a couple of years ago?

All the Russian ship has to do is increase speed and it would leave the OPV in it's wake.

Which would risk the Russian ship breaking down and then needing to be towed back to base. While the RN has a few problem the Russian navy is in a much, much worse state than they are willing to advertise.

Re: No scheduling problem.

Reality shows that modern naval vessels, in isolation, are incredibly vulnerable—effectively tinfoil—bits of equipment. Witness the Ukrainian success in bottling up the 'mighty' Russian navy.

The Slava class "Moskva" was laid down in 1976 and many of Russia's other warships are of similar vintage. It was by no means modern in anything but Russian propaganda, which unfortunately many of us accidentally ended up believing to some degree simply because nobody believed that anybody would operate an unmodernised deathtrap as a fleet flagship and pose with it if it didn't work. You therefore need to be a bit cautious about learning too much from the Russian experiences.

Single European warships operating in the Red Sea have shot down ballistic missiles fired at them without being sunk, and have kept the Red Sea open for trade. The Chinese can actually produce working equipment and probably don't have untrained crews who operate the ships while drunk.

Re: No ship yards?

At the point when your building submarines which are considered to be capital ships and which are the size of WW1 Dreadnaughts saying "well they are only boats" looks a bit stupid.

Re: "Need to go get the book..."

The book is a detailed examination of military training on the psyche, along with the effects that being in combat has on the psyche.

The film is not.

Re: Bullshit

No currently serving politician has put his life on the line for his country in either the US or the UK. Not one.

Lord Dannet served in the British army, and earned the Military Cross during the fighting in Ireland, when Russian funded IRA forces were blowing people up and shooting at people in Northern Ireland.

Lord West of Spithead had his ship sunk under him in the Falklands war, and was the last man to leave his burning ship, receiving the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions.

That's two, and i'm pretty sure that there are other examples.

I'm no fan of Churchill but he did venture on to the roofs of Whitehall, not a bunker in Scotland.

He actually pretty much stayed in number 10, and only narrowly escaped being killed at one point when a large bomb blew in the rear windows and blew shrapnel and glass shards across the kitchen when they were sitting down to dinner.

The King, being rather appalled at the prospect of losing Churchill appears to have developed a persistent habit of sending Royal Invitations to him and his wife (a sort of invitation that one cannot decently refuse) to come for dinner in the basement of Buckingham Palace unless Churchill was working in the Cabinet Office War Rooms bunker or similar.

I know that your Russian and so projecting based upon the situation in Russia, but in the UK in WW2 the Anderson shelter was deployed by the million in urban areas which were being bombed and they held a family in.

The countryside largely didn't bother on the basis that they didn't get targeted.

Reg readers have spoken: 93% back move away from Microsoft in UK public sector

"Rather than a panacea," Creese added, "open source can create unforeseen risks of lock-in and incompatibilities across increasingly integrated systems. As the links between different public service organisations become more crucial, incompatibility creates all manner of problems."

Then standardise on a data interchange standard rather than "standardising" on the latest version of Microsoft %whatever%.

The biggest issue with *nix systems is that high level specialists aren't easy or cheap to come by, however since Canonical who makes Ubuntu is a British company it doesn't seem unreasonable to standardise on their software and pay them to maintain additional high level experts to provide emergency support.

UK.gov's nuclear strategy is 'slow, inefficient, and costly'

Re: Nuclear Concorde

Absolutely. And it's notable that groups like Just Stop [western] Oil started attempting to blockade western refineries at the same time that Russia stopped providing gas and fuel with the fairly obvious intent of shoving prices yet higher by further depressing supply.

The same as the green groups are frantically protesting against running power lines from the offshore wind turbines to the rest of the country so that all of the wind turbines can be connected to something which can actually use the power and so displace gas generation.

The next major thing with nuclear is going to be producing the Rolls Royce SMR's (which at 580MW really stretch the definition of "small") on a factory line.

When RR starts knocking them out at a rate of a few a year then they need the planning permission process sorted to deploy them, or else the production in the factory is worthless.

Hence sorting out the planning system now so that they can deploy them with some relation to the time taken to roll them off of the factory lines.

Pay attention, class: Today you’ll learn the wrong way to turn things off

The other godsend is [on windows servers] removing shut down and restart from the start menu via group policy.

As you then tend to go for the next easiest option of shutting servers down via "shutdown -i" then it forces specifying which server you want to shut down and thus utterly eliminates the problem of "oops, wrong server".

Foxconn says EV sales are so slow it's converting a factory to build AI servers instead

Re: “Retaining Elon is more important than ever before”

Yes, but Tesla always have to say that they are working on The New Big Thing, because if they admitted that they produce EV's that are truthfully a bit inferior to what everybody else makes then somebody is going to compare the number of cars that Ford makes to the number of cars that Tesla makes, and Tesla's share price will decline to the level of Ford's.

There is a massive bubble in certain corporate share prices in America which are wildly disconnected from objective reality and when the bubble pops and the share price declines to a more natural valuation then it's going to carry off most of America's wealth with it.

Gadget geeks aghast at guru's geriatric GPU

Re: Surely...

Core 2 machines will still "work", but they are sluggish, enough to notice. Especially with multiple apps / browser windows open.

Many years ago, we bought a bunch of C2D desktops (the HP DC7800 & 7900) as refurbs to do an upgrade from WinXP to something supported enmasse. At a later point I started buying new Win10 boxes to replace them with.

The new Win10 boxes i'd specced came with duel screens, which led to lamentations and demands for parity from the workforce, along with a desire for a quick fix, which was that the DC7900's got an upgrade package of a second hand Quadro card, 8GB of RAM and an SSD.

These PC's remained perfectly task adequate up until they were all retired just before the Win7 EOL in Jan 2020.

In March 2020, we had a sudden unexpected requirement for a large amount of home working, along with a pile of PC's that were task adequate with a quick reimage. These PC's were then gifted to staff. Many of them are still in use in a personal capacity, but certainly do well enough for office work web browsing and watching youtube etc.

NHS disability equipment provider on brink of collapse a year after cyberattack

Re: Oh sure

Okay, so either your initial planning was shit, or the results you got are shit, but you cannot tell me that a 6-month project was properly done in 3 weeks.

It's entirely possible to do a long project quickly.

If the 6 month project was based on training one user at a time and then moving them over to a new system, evaluating any issues and then moving the next user to avoid disruption then you could accelerate that simply by booking a single mass training course and accepting the downtime that they were suffering anyway with the 3 weeks being waiting that long for the training course slots to be available.

I've got a digitalisation project running at the moment which won't be finished until well into the next decade due to the approach taken being a budget conscious one of ensuring that we don't send any new paper documents to archives, and then destroy the old stuff as it reaches the destruction date. If we wanted to accelerate that radically then it's entirely possible given a large injection of cash; just pay for all of the old paper to be scanned.

Trump pushes EU into trade 'deal' that several EU leaders aren't happy about

Re: Wait a minute

What would you expect from a people who imagined the tax on tea could be reduced by first dumping the tea into Boston harbour ?

The American Mafia was protesting a tax cut from ~100% down to like 10% because they couldn't smuggle in untaxed goods for less than the cost of taxed goods. Their response was to destroy the taxed products to leave the people with no alternative but to buy from them.

War Games: MoD asks soldiers with 1337 skillz to compete in esports

Re: Anyone else.....

Ukrainians point out that playing certain computer games is militarily useful.

MOD supports [existing] soldiers playing certain computer games competitively.

How we got from the first line to the second appears to be rather intuitively obvious.

In Enders game (in at least what I recall from the book) children were taken away from their families at like 5, raised and conditioned to vicious in the pursuit of military victory without regard to losses or consequences and then put in charge of a series of battles which Ender promptly uses as extermination missions as he's been conditioned to do. They then tell him, "yeah by the way that was real, not a sim"?

It's less obvious how you get from the second line to that.

UK Post Office names public inquiry as risk to £410 million Horizon replacement project

Re: The Post Office is a broken company

To be fair, the Royal Mail is irredeemably fucked and it's the IT worlds fault, not the governments.

Royal Mail exists to send letters. People now send emails, not snail mails. The last holdout reason for snailmail was needing signatures on things, and then electronic signatures come along and boom.

Royal Mails situation is therefore reduced to being another parcel delivery company with a bunch of legacy requirements as to mandatory delivery timescales and a requirement to deal with unprofitable areas that nobody else can be bothered to deal with which drives up their costs above the competition.

Splitting the Post Offices off of Royal Mail is setting things up so that when the Royal Mail goes splat the Post Offices can survive independently.

Re: Off the shelf

Sure. But as far as an Electronic Point of Sale system cares, it's taking a payment for performing that function.

That the staff member is taking a photo with a camera and uploading that photo to the relevant government agency via a web portal is not something the EPOS system cares about.

Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore

Re: "I explicitly told it eleven times in ALL CAPS not to do this."

It's a good thump, or a good kick.

Although I stopped doing that years ago after learning that a non technical colleague had spent an hour or so systematically hammering the crap out of a bit of equipment trying to duplicate the exact strength and location of my purely theatrical thump.

Re: Tortoise vs the Really, Really Hairy

In the UK as a management rule of thumb then you usually add an extra 50% of the wage cost as being the cost of desk, office overheads (rent, electricity, heating etc)

The US is probably higher since an employer usually provides healthcare etc, although in the new Work From North Korea age then they might not assume the same overheads for offices etc.

Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state

Relationships between manager and subordinate tend to be frowned upon for obvious reasons.

Being senior in the organisation but not being her direct manager would be fine these days in most organisations.

Britain's billion-pound F-35s not quite ready for, well, anything

Re: Alternatives

Getting high quality wood is the harder problem.

Yes, it was in WW1 as well. That's why the Forestry Commission was created; after they arbitrarily chopped down most of the forests for timber during the war it was decided that a more comfortable reserve in the future might be nice.

Re: Alternatives

It does hide that maybe most of those aircraft were not going to last even if not shot down.

They were made out of wood and cotton with glue over the top to make the covering stiff in an era where there was a 25% improvement in performance every 6 months. The Sopwith Camel was ordered in May 1917 and deliveries started in June 1917. The Sopwith Dophin entered service in Febuary 1918 with the Sopwith Snipe entering service in September 1918.

I'm fairly confident that nobody really expected them to last indefinitely, or to be particularly repairable after being shot full of holes by a machine gun or nearby explosion from an AA shell etc.

Re: Alternatives

Fun bit of historical trivia; after they were basically bankrupted by government policy the senior staff from Sopwith bought the assets of Sopwith and opened a new company under the name of Harry Hawker, Sopwith's head test pilot.

Hawker Aviation produced the Hawker Hurricane for WW2, very deliberately using the same techniques (such as doped fabric over the airframe) that the WW1 aircraft used so that all of the people trained and experienced in repairing those sort of aircraft (ie; everybody who'd served in the RNAS, RFC or RAF from the dawn of flight) could easily maintain them thus maintaining much higher readiness rates than the Spitfires, which used modern stressed metal techniques which about two people in the country knew how to repair and thus meant that damaged Spitfires had to go to central depot maintenance for relatively minor repairs and thus harming their sortie rates relative to the Hurricane.

The Hurricane is therefore a direct successor to the Sopwith Camel.

Hawker then continued on postwar producing the Hawker Hunter, the Hawker Harrier, and the Hawker Hawk trainer before being nationalised in the 1970's.

Re: 5 years to get an existing missile operational?

A real cycnic would suggest Lockheed-Martin have a vested interest in not integrating foregin weapons systems on the F-35 when the US has its own equivalents to sell...

But the issue is that the Meteor is a competitor to the Aim260 which the Americans haven't started building yet, not a competitor to AMRAAM which has about half the range of Meteor.

Re: Alternatives

What production prowess?

Put it into perspective. In May 1917 an order was placed for 250 aircraft. By the end of 1917 they'd delivered 1325 aircraft. In 1918 up until November when the war was won and orders cancelled they delivered 4655 aircraft for a total of 5980 aircraft in ~18 months.

Does anybody seriously believe that we'd do better producing them these days? We'd be more "efficient" which is to say that we'd eventually produce them (in about 5 years time after we'd produced an automated factory to do the job) with much fewer man hours and therefore cost per unit, but in the 21st century we'd still be having meetings about completing the paperwork and buying in machinery in the timeframe it took to build the lot originally.

Just look at shell production for the Ukraine war. In WW1 the UK alone produced one hundred and seventy million shells in 4 years starting from a not radically dissimilar point to where we were in 2022, France produced just shy of double what the UK did IIRC (something like three hundred million shells during WW1 and Germany produced much less than we did in WW1 as a result of us blockading any supplies via sea.

Raw output doesn't lie. The allies fired like half a billion shells during WW1. With our modern technology and "production prowess" we are struggling to collectively produce 2 million shells a year across the entire of Europe after 3 years after an existential threat to the EU started on it's borders. The difference is simply one of attitude. A hundred years ago they aggressively bulldozed every obstacle. Not enough material to produce explosives? Get chemists to invent a new explosive composition that available industry can build and mass manufacture. If it's too difficult to do then it's a failure. You can't build that fuse in quantity? Design one that you can. etc, etc etc.

At our current rate of production then the half billion shells produced in 4 years during WW1 will take us a century or so to produce with modern technology and our modern "production prowess".

Re: Maybe it's time we in Britain admit we're a bit crap at things nowadays

The only reason the US would be interested in joining GCAP would be to demand lots of changes, driving the price up and causing delays and then quitting the project in favour of the F47.

Georgia court throws out earlier ruling that relied on fake cases made up by AI

[Citation needed]

Judges write court orders in the UK. The judge is supposed to take the arguments of the prosecution and defence into account in their judgement, but asking the prosecution to write the judges judgement is unheard of as so far as I am aware.

If you are aware of any such instance then kindly provide a citation, along with when you reported it to the Judical Conduct Investigations Office.