Posts by PatC

New plastic telescope ammo machine gun is light as a rifle

Found another article quoting an ARDEC engineer:

Re heat / cook-offs:

The rotating-chamber design provides better heat management. Combined with the insulating properties of the plastic ammo cases the LSAT LMG has potential to decrease the possibility of a cook-off or eliminate them altogether

Re accuracy / lethality:

The cased telescoped ammo still provides the same muzzle velocity, range and accuracy as the brass-cased ammo. We’re not sacrificing lethality for weight. The plastic case does the same job.

Another significant feature is the long-stroke, soft-recoil design, which provides a noticeable reduction in felt recoil over the current SAW. This significantly increases control, thus providing the shooter the ability to put more rounds on target and making the weapon much easier to fire from the standing position as a result of decreased muzzle rise.

Also, according to never-knowingly-accurate Wikipedia:

- the caseless version of the gun has been in test since 2008

- the caseless weapon is 1% heavier than the cased as it requires additional seals in the breach

- pricing is expected to be equivalent to the current SAW

- they're also considering other 'more lethal' (read: larger) calibres (makes sense)

So all good. Unfortunately, no-one's expecting either of these to be adopted any time soon ..

Geek girls lauded on Ada Lovelace Day

A Lovelace with other talents ..

.. who knew?

(Paris as a latter day Linda Lovelace)

Post-pub nosh deathmatch: Kapsalon v quesadillas

Wot ?

No guacamole?

No salsa?

No sour cream?

You put that quesadilla in a pink tutu and gave it pillows for gloves - lacy pillows!

Call that a fair fight?

We demand a rematch!

What's not in the iPhone 4S ... and why

Why Steve Went When He Did ..

.. he wanted to let the new boy make an a*** of himself telling the fanbois they've waited 18 months for the same frickin phone!

Apple really are betting the company on the power of the cult on this one .. I can't imagine how even the most ardent fanbou can get excited by this - but then, I never really got religion ..

Nokia reaps the Dilbert years

Dodgy Phone OS Killing Sales? Switch to a Non-Phone Company's Dodgy OS!

Really, what was Elop thinking?

When your OS is causing you to fail, why tie yourself to another OS that's failing? OK, so you want to make sure there's a 2nd non-Apple OS out there, but at least allow yourself the option of making phones with an OS people buy.

Nokia's hardware has generally been pretty good. In many ways, the much-derided N97 was a country mile ahead of the original iPhone - 3G, GPS, great camera etc etc - but it was let down by the screen and the dire OS.

If they'd put a better screen and Android on it, most of us probably wouldn't have heard of HTC.

Ofcom posts broadband, mobile punter satisfaction scores

Hogwash!

No way so few people complained about Virgin.

B*stards hiked my bill from £25 to £39 without bothering to tell me.

OK, I should have kept a closer eye on my bank account, but to me, a 56% price hike counts as a "significant change" to my package: apparently to Virgin, it's completely normal.

Blow to the head makes people feel good about religion

Do Your Good Deed for the Day - Hit a Religious Nutter Upside the Head

So to be a Happy Clappy Religious Nut, the 'Clappy' needs to be applied to the head.

Hard.

I'm always happy to help ..

Plods roll out new Police National Database

Still Regionalised ..

The forces remain owners of their data, the PND simply facilitates data sharing.

Access to data is very tightly controlled: only a few (in smaller forces, less than 10), named people have access to the PND and all access and access requests are logged and audited.

For sensitive data, access is further restricted to 'headline' information - officers from other forces who require more detail have to apply to the owning force and justify their request.

If regionalisation is your worry, you should be far more concerned with the cost control driven merging of back office operations that is happening across multiple forces. With budgets dropping 20%, for the last year or more Chief Constables have spent half their time playing outsourcing salesman, trying to persuade other forces to outsourcing of back office operations to them ("we're really good at looking after radios - let us look after yours and we'll save you x% on your current budget").

Some smaller forces, facing drastic funding cuts are going to end up virtually merged.

Apple 'spaceship' awaits landing clearance in Cupertino

No Surprise ..

.. it's supposed to look like a flying saucer: the Apple-ites already refer to the offices in Cupertino as "the Mother Ship" (least, the ones I know do)

Save the planet: Stop the Greens

Wouldn't "No to Subsidies" ..

.. include "No" to the billions the petrochemical - and coal and gas and every other energy-related - industry gets in direct grants and tax breaks ..?

To say nothing of the trillions in defense budgets required to secure access to the oil, gas, uranium etc.

The idea that it's only tree hugging green projects that get inexplicable amounts of government money is standard right-wing BS: decide what you want prove, deny reality and invent "facts" to back up your assertions. The bigger the lie etc.

Coal, oil, gas, nuclear all have government skewing the market in their favour: why not a little skewing in favour of things that aren't going to totally trash the planet?

Going back to the middle ages is definitely not the answer, but then it's not what anyone is actually proposing, except in the right wing imagination.

Quit b*tching about emerging technologies getting a tiny fraction of the assistance established technologies have been getting for decades: sure, it may affect your share price in the years to come, but you can always just buy into green technologies.

Vote now for the best sci-fi film never made

Where's ..

.. "RIGHT WING SEES SENSE AND UNDERSTAND REALITY"?

.. "REG Finally Gets Global Warming"

.. or should they go under Fantasy ..?

Google sets Android on pirates

Minimal problem on iPhones?!

.. apart from my missus (who works for apple) everyone I know with an i-cant-phone has it jail broken and rammed full of "trial" (read: stolen) apps ..

Of course, this could just say something about the sort of people I know (financial fools maybe, but at least minimally tech savvy) ..

Apple's iPhone 4 denial: insulting or ignorant?

Wot? Nothing about ..

"We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see" (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/07/02appleletter.html)

Losing signal bars? Apple's answer: make the bars bigger.

The Job-ees* really will eat any bovine excreta ..

Paris coz the whole press release was clearly drafted by similarly gifted intellectuals

* My preferred collective noun for fanbois, given it's Scottish dropping overtones

Android tops iPhone in US (no thanks to the Nexus One)

80s Redux? Control Freak Failure .. Again?

The real news here is Android overtaking the iPhone and the real questions: whether Steve Jobs is about to repeat the single biggest mistake in computing history (not licensing his O/S and thus handing a 25 year near monopoly to Bill Gates) and gift the phone market to Google?

Jobs wants to dominate the phone market the way he dominates the iPod/Music market. He's a control freak and having tasted that degree of dominance - along with the excitement that's beyond any woman's (or Filipino pool boy's - I never really worked out his sexuality) gift - he wants more.

His strategy is promote the iPhone via cool, 3rd party apps which he then locks into appearing on his platform alone by making it as expensive and inconvenient as possible to port them to other platforms.

Then, even when non-fanbois come to replace their iPhones, they buy another one because it's the only thing that runs their favourite fart app.

It's not a bad strategy - I had Nokias for years because I'd paid for a copy of Route 66 that only ran on Nokias - but it only really works while the iPhone platform offers the greatest number of potential customers for the developers of the most interesting apps.

Once the iPhone no longer offers the most potential punters - and it looks like it won't in the next 12 to 18 months - it obviously makes more sense to develop for the platforms that do. That they happen to be more open and easier to port code between just helps make that transition all the easier.

Result, everybody starts developing for Android/RIM and eventually the iPhone goes the way of the Mac: a pretty irrelevance worshipped by media types who's computing needs really only run to a word processor and a printer.

And that Fart app, of course.

You'd think Stevie boy would maybe have learned his lesson after a quarter century of eating Gate's dust, but maybe control freakery always trumps common sense ..