Posts by Ken 16

Want to learn about lithium-ion batteries? An AI has written a tedious book on the subject

Re: IBM did this thirty years ago

This comment intentionally left blank

Google Pay tells Euro users it has ditched UK for Ireland ahead of Brexit

Mainstream EU country?

Ireland seems like a pretty mainstream EU country from here (Dublin).

Would you care to list your criteria, or give a list of who's mainstream and who's alternative for EU?

Re: What I hope for...

Yes, low taxes will attract companies selling services to...who?

If you base in the UK you're limited to the UK market, which is big, but not as big as the EU.

Basing in Ireland may result in higher taxes (France has lower corporate tax rates than Ireland AFTER taking advantage of all the available tax breaks and refunds but you need a team of expensive French lawyers and accountants to keep on top of those whereas Irish corporate tax rates are simple and transparent and haven't changed for decades) but means you can trade freely and recruit from the entire continent.

Edinburgh-based rocket botherer seeks UK or overseas launch location for fun times, maybe more

Re: Ascension

So is Prestwick

Re: Practicalities....

It's the basis for an independent nuclear first strike capability once the RN go south

Two Arkansas dipsticks nicked after allegedly taking turns to shoot each other while wearing bulletproof vests

Re: real men test bullet proof vests

Allow bullet-PROOF vest but ban bullet-RETARDANT vests.

The US Constitution guarantees "the Right to Keep and Bear Arms" and doesn't say anything about "while sober". Yee Har!

Re: Testing in the real world

Beer costs money, stupidity comes for free.

Just the small matter of the bill for scrapping Blighty's old nuclear submarines: It's £7.5bn

Re: Alternatively

Albanians, Algerians - someone must want a generation old nuclear submarine right?

What bugs me the most? World+dog just accepts crap software resilience

Re: Who bears the cost ?

Which is why safety critical systems cost more, people are more willing to accept occasional outages on a restaurant ordering app than on a nuclear plant control system.

P30 pic pyrotechnics in Paris: That's one Huawei to set the smartphone world alight

Is there a non-camera option for business and government use?

Nokia and Blackberry used to have such...

Oracle swings axe on cloud infrastructure corps amid possible bloodbath at Big Red

Re: Oracle cloud was terrible

Not perfect, as you'd expect. It's one of those things where it depends how much you've done with Oracle. It's pretty good with Oracle specific functions. I would hate to move something with heavy PL/SQL stored procedures (but then I hate their existence in the first place). You do get to keep the good bits of PostgreSQL, the EnterpriseDB is mostly marketing plus some add ons and the cloudy hosting.

VP Mike Pence: I want Americans back on the Moon by 2024 (or before the Chinese get there)

Re: Way ahead of you Mikey

Is there a Mexican space programme?

America's forgotten space station and a mission tinged with urine, we salute you

Re: "Could have been used to feed hungry people"

It already does, through better global weather forecasts and may do more through weather modification satellites.

Darby Kennedy, my first flying instructor.

He began his career flying Hannibal biplanes and Sunderland flying boats across Africa for Imperial Airways.

There are two options for testing that, the mildly drunk one of putting it in your shirt pocket and dropping it in the bowl/urinal as you sway forward and the very drunk one of putting it in your front trouser pocket and wetting yourself.

Azure thing at last: Windows Virtual Desktop takes to the cloudy stage

I like it, as a business continuity option

AD and Exchange replication, DaaS, probably Office365 and you can let people work from home and tell your customers what went wrong at your DC.

I wouldn't run it as a main solution for more than maybe 25% of employees but it could be useful if you've got high turnover.

Brit Parliament online orifice overwhelmed by Brexit bashers

This is not the non-functional you need to worry about

How many signature sessions it can support simultaneously is irrelevant compared to end to end response time: how long will it take for any petition exceeding the target to result in a vote. I somehow suspect that's going to be more than 8 (and a bit) days.

Croydon school rolling in toilet roll after Brexit gift deemed unfit for the Queen's Anus Horribilis

Re: Grow your own

How long are you willing to wait between your after-pub chip shop curry and the development of a new paper industry in the UK? I'm going with a RTO of 4 hours.

Re: schools

null points from the Belfast jury

Re: re: I wonder why they would pretend to think....

This is one area where I'm commited to soft

I'd certainly be shitting myself, if I was British.

Holy sh*tsnacks! Danger zone! Edinburgh Uni's Archer 2 super 'puter will cost a cool £79m

Who's this 'We'?

Re: *sploosh*

Bloody Mary, full of vodka, blessed are you among cocktails. Pray for me now at the hour of my death, which I hope is soon. Amen.

Re: Perfect timing

sliced haggis is only good on burgers - you want a deep fried one

Re: *sploosh*

Hold on, I had something for this!

College student with 'visions of writing super-cool scripts' almost wipes out faculty's entire system

Re: Don't Shout "Fuck" in The Data Centre

It's a mystery that f-uck isn't a valid Unix command

That sounds Agile to me!

Fail fast, fail often, leave not one stone standing upon another, burn the crops, salt the Earth etc. I forget exactly how it goes, but by their works shall ye know them.

NASA admin: What if we switched one delayed SLS for two commercial launchers?

I regard the balanced thumbs up and thumbs down to mean no-one is sure whether I'm serious or taking the piss - just like Brexit.

May insisted we need to stick to our commitment. If the UK says it's going to leave the EU in March 2019 then it jolly well will.

China still doesn't want iPhones despite Apple slashing prices, say market watchers

If you want to have an Apple shiny because you've already bought all the previous Apple shinies then fair enough. I know several, technically literate, people who do that and have all Apple stuff in their home and they know it all interfaces (until Apple change their interface) and what its depreciation value is and that they can get all the accessories they want for them. It's not status for them, just brand loyalty. I felt the same way for a very short time about the Blackberry 10 range. :(

It's probably just a harder sell to people who haven't had Apple before and are comparing with, as a perfect Chinese example, Xiaomi for 1/10th the cost but with probably 85% of the features + better battery life.

2 weeks till Brexit and Defra, at the very least, looks set to be caught with its IT pants down

Re: @codejunky

Also, Croatia already has blue EU passports. Back when the format of the EU passport was standardised, the committee working on it produced a demo version in burgundy and said something along the lines of "of course you can have any colour you want" to which the overwhelming response was a lack of fucks given and to avoid having to set up a committee to decide what colour to have or put it to public vote (with an overwhelming preference for polka dots) pretty much every country said, just leave it, no-one will ever care.

Re: No Cheese for you...

I must admit I thought the UK would go back to EFTA when it voted to leave the EU.

Paris puzzled too.

I will refrain from asking why you know this and how you found out.

Re: @tip pc

I see you're using Brexit as a noun "kick all the Brexits" or presumably, "stop acting the Brexit" whereas I've always used it as a verb "bend him over and give him a right Brexiting".

Can El Reg provide a style guide?

Re: minimal bureaucracy involved

The form is online if you have the right kind of phone, it's not available until after Brexit so no-one can guess what information they'll need and it probably won't cope with the traffic. Poisson d'Avril!

Re: You beat me to it ...

Yeah, but that was going to be the easiest deal in history, you can't blame the EU for expecting it would have been sealed by now and the EU are doing nothing to stop the UK Government from defining what kind of future relationship they want to have; close coupled, loosely coupled, actively hostile etc.

Airlines in Asia, Africa ground Boeing 737 Max 8s after second death crash in four-ish months

Probably coincidence and in fact, since those are the newest, shiniest, most expensive planes in their fleet, chances are they got 1st place for service and the most qualified aircrew assigned.

Racist self-driving car scare debunked, inside AI black boxes, Google helps folks go with the TensorFlow...

Giant Killer Robots

I think any company advertising that it's building killer robots will get 10 applicants for every employee put off by the prospect.

That's what got people interested in the tech in the first place and while I'm old enough to question the morality, I'm not sure I'd have hesitated coming out of engineering school.

Hurrah for Apollo 9: It has been 50 years since 'nauts first took a Lunar Module out for a spin

Re: 'c) socialism'

and if the socialists hadn't developed Soyuz, how exactly would anyone have gotten to the ISS for the past 8 years?

Silent Merc, holy e-car... Mflllwhmmmp! What is that terrible sound?

There has to be an on/off switch

I want the option of driving in complete silence at night.

I will add aftermarket air horns to alert anyone who hasn't noticed me approaching.

ReactOS 0.4.11 makes great strides towards running Windows apps without the Windows

Re: Too little, too late

No, but Version 1.0 is traditionally the point that a development team think their offering is ready for use by customers, just as Version 3.1 is traditionally when it actually is.

Three-quarters of crucial border IT systems at risk of failure? Bah, it's not like Brexit is *looks at watch* err... next month

Re: Cheer up, what's the worst that could happen?

Agreed, I mean that's over 150km with 24 crossing points, that'd be much harder to put a border on than the 500km and 310 crossing points between Ireland and Northern Ireland, wouldn't it?

Re: Simple system

Not a bloody European one, obviously

Coming over here, eating our birdseed.

Re: What possible delay?

and £33Million on ferry contracts

We import a lot of food from across the planet now because we can afford to pay for it

And those who can afford to pay for it can continue to do that.

Supply and demand does suggest that when the supply drops, the price will rise. Oxfam estimate that 2 million people in the UK are malnourished now and half a million reliant on food banks. Those are the people for whom life will get harder, not Tim Martin, James Dyson, BoJo or Rees-Mogg.

Re: Cheer up, what's the worst that could happen?

There's no f-ing reason why not.

Not sure about your argument on the act of union, how does that line up with the DUP asking for NI to change its corporation tax to match Ireland or the Scottish government taking an extra 1% income tax?

Re: Cheer up, what's the worst that could happen?

No return to the hard spiky borders of the past

Re: Cheer up, what's the worst that could happen?

I was referencing Braveheart not history :-)

Geordies are generally welcome in Scotland though, it's only when you get down to Leeds and Manchester that you bump into real southerners.

Vodafone exec dons tartan tam-o'-shanter, clutches bottle of Irn-Bru, in snap shared with firm... just before Glasgow staff told of redundo dates

maybe it's Brexit dependent