Re: 8th Time
Jessie Anderson? Mundane and/or inane?
A million nerds just cried out in unison...... NEVER!
Posts by Jonathon Desmond
97 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Oct 2006
SpaceX powers through bad case of wind to nail Falcon 9's eighth droneship landing
Happy silver jubilee to JavaScript, king of the web at 25 and still hanging on to its crown, for now
America's largest radio telescope close to collapse as engineers race to fix fraying cables
Did Arthur C. Clarke call it right? Water spotted in Moon's sunlit Clavius crater by NASA telescope
Come on, Amazon: If you're going to copy open-source code for a new product, at least credit the creator
Is today's AI yesterday's software routines with better PR? We argued over it, you voted on it. And the winner is...
Facebook rejects Australia's pay-for-news plan, proposes its own idea: How about no more articles at all, sunshine?
AWS unleashes a new homegrown Linux that's good enough to bottle
SpaceX to return NASA 'nauts to Earth with a splash
Turns out Elon can't control the weather – what a scrub: Rain, clouds delay historic manned SpaceX-NASA launch
The point of containers is they aren't VMs, yet Microsoft licenses SQL Server in containers as if they were VMs
Star's rosette orbit around our supermassive black hole proves Einstein's Theory of General Relativity correct
NASA to launch 247 petabytes of data into AWS – but forgot about eye-watering cloudy egress costs before lift-off
Star wreck: There's a 1 in 20 chance a NASA telescope and US military satellite will smash into each other today
Are you getting it? Yes, armageddon it: Mass hysteria takes hold as the Windows 7 axe falls
Official: Microsoft will take an axe to Skype for Business Online. Teams is your new normal
Experts: No need to worry about Europe's navigation sats going dark for days. Also: What the hell is going on with those satellites?!
Cheapskate Brits appear to love their Poundland MVNOs as UK's big four snubbed in survey again
Florida man's deadliest catch forces police to evacuate Taco Bell
A few reasons why cops didn't immediately shoot down London Gatwick airport drone menace
It's official. Microsoft pushes Google over the Edge, shifts browser to Chromium engine
Micro Focus belches as it struggles to digest HPE Software
Creep travels half the world to harass online teen gamer… and gets shot by her mom – cops
In huge privacy win, US Supreme Court rules warrant needed to slurp folks' location data
Saturday 23rd June 2018 13:53 GMT
Re: Hypocrisy of dissent
Re: "Original wording"
On this, you may be misremembering the phrasing of the 2nd.
The exact text is:
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Whilst it does mention 'Well regulated militia', it is more in the sense of a preamble. The money shot is the phrase "... , the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed".
If the framers had intended that "the people" should only be those who were members of a militia force (essentially a state army) they would have said so, something like:
"The right of the states to keep, arm and maintain well regulated militia forces shall not be impinged'.
But they didn't - they granted the right to "The People", without qualification.
To those of us on the outside looking in, it appears mad - but that's what it says and it isn't likely to change.
Meet the Frenchman masterminding a Google-free Android
SpaceX to pick up the space pace with yet another Falcon 9 launch
Thursday 31st May 2018 10:30 GMT
Although three Block 4 boosters appear to have been recovered twice, the main restriction is that it is apparently not economically feasible to reuse them for a third launch (i.e.: It is cheaper to build a new one than refurb)
Although some people accuse Musk of 'littering', the fact is everyone else is littering with every single booster they launch. Should SpaceX really be punished for doing it better than everyone else? By getting two launches out of one booster they have already cut their litter by 50%.
Don't read this, Oracle... It's the rise of the open-source data strategies
Thursday 31st May 2018 08:04 GMT
Re: 'Nuff Said
Already fixed, but thanks for pointing it out.
Matt (Asay) has articles on the Reg going back to at least 2012; in that time it looks like he has had about a million jobs (Sorry, Matt!) and was, for a short time, employed by Mongo/10Gen to run their community. He is now working for Adobe and there are stints for Alfresco, Canonical and others mixed in there somehow.
I think he highlights a good point regarding the revenue share of OSS DBs having a magnifier effect on the loss of revenue of Oracle. The NHS switched from Oracle on the Spine, for example, saving a whole bunch of money. Shame they went to Riak, but it’s easy to judge with 20/20 hindsight.
Beardy Branson: Wacky hyperloop tube maglev cheaper than railways
nbn™ isn’t fixing HFC, it’s ‘optimising’ it
Well that went well: Polycom sold for the same figure it fetched two years ago
Thursday 29th March 2018 07:33 GMT
Not so bad...
Clever shenanigans notwithstanding (as outlined by the posters above), I’ve often pointed out to people that any business transaction *that does not actually make a loss* is better than the alternative.
In this case, the investors turn their stock into equity in a company with a larger portfolio and a better strategic fit.
Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, off you go: Snout of UK space forcibly removed from EU satellite trough
Uber breaks self-driving car record: First robo-ride to kill a pedestrian
Let's Encrypt updates certificate automation, adds splats
Are you Falcon sure, Elon? Musk vows Big Rocket will go up 2019
Monday 12th March 2018 14:30 GMT
Re: Musk really does see himself as the Saviour of Mankind
"If any country had established a moon base and based on today, there'd be a Chinese one,..."
You're probably right, and things could rapidly get confusing.
To keep the nomenclature simple, the UN could maybe agree on numbering them. The Americans could have Moonbase 1, the Russians Moonbase 2....
Mueller bombshell: 13 Russian 'troll factory' staffers charged with allegedly meddling in US presidential election
Friday 23rd February 2018 07:34 GMT
Re: Is lies! Lies! All lies!
That is a myth. Even Wikipedia states that on that very same link:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_referendum,_1967_(Aboriginals)
“It is also sometimes mistakenly stated that the 1967 referendum overturned a "Flora and Fauna Act", which supposedly mandated that indigenous Australians were governed and managed under the same portfolio as Australian wildlife – New South Wales state MP Linda Burney made mention of such an act in her maiden speech in 2003,[26] as did Mark Colvin in a 2007 ABC article.[27] A 2014 SBS article described the notion that "Indigenous people were classed as fauna" as a "myth", listing it as one of "four key misunderstandings persist[ing] about modern Indigenous history and the referendum"
SpaceX's internet satellites to beam down 'Hello world' from orbit
Friday 23rd February 2018 06:48 GMT
Re: One wonders ...
But it’s not a random network. Satellites move in fixed and predictable ways and clients generally won’t be moving fast enough that tracking them would be too challenging.
At any given point in time, any given satellite will know Its own location, that of all the other sats in the constellation, and where the fixed ground stations (exit nodes) are. That would seem to me to make client to internet routing straightforward.
I imagine that clients would be assigned some kind of identifier or address that indicates their physical location, or that information would be wrapped in the protocol somewhere, so that responses can be directed to the nearest satellite for the downlink. Slight variations and outages would be handled because, as with GPS, the client nodes would likely be listening to multiple overhead sats at once, so would receive the data intended for them regardless of precisely which nearby bird down linked it.
Long haul flights on a one-aisle plane? Airbus thinks you’re up for it
Monday 5th February 2018 12:39 GMT
Re: Money
I remember reading in an article on them a while ago that most BA flights are priced for and target one of two goals:
1) To completely fill first class
or
2) To completely fill business class
- either of these, by themselves, pay for the flight and costs. Everything else (i.e.: The cattle fares and the other 'up front' cabin) is cream.
BoJo, don't misuse stats then blurt disclaimers when you get rumbled
Tuesday 19th September 2017 13:42 GMT
Re: The closest thing to a . . .
I voted in both Mayoral elections that BoJo won and both times it was pencil on paper old fashioned style voting. Not electronic.
I understand that scanning was used to tally the counts, but that's hardly electronic voting.
Besides the competition was Red Ken - so, no competition to speak of.
Private sub captain changes story, now says reporter died, was 'buried at sea' – torso found
Tuesday 22nd August 2017 16:20 GMT
Re: FFS!
My brain itch comes from people using 'crafts' as the plural of 'craft' in this context.
The plural of craft (as in a transportation device such as a sailing vessel or aeroplane) is also craft - there is no 's'
e.g.: 'On a Sunday, the busy waters of the Solent are packed with many craft such as pleasure vessels and sightseeing boats'
Conversely, the plural of craft (when referring to handicraft or ability) *is* crafts.
e.g.: 'He is skilled in the crafts of knitting and embroidery'
Volterman 'super wallet': The worst crowdsource video pitch of all time?
Microsoft founder Paul Allen reveals world's biggest-ever plane
Sons of IoT: Bikers hack Jeeps in auto theft spree
Wednesday 31st May 2017 22:47 GMT
Re: Alarms
But the mechanical duplicate key won't have a transponder code recognised by the cars immobiliser, so the alarm will continue to sound and the car won't start, even though the key will mechanically unlock the steering.
That's why these guys had to pfaff around with the reprogramming I guess. A mechanical duplicate isn't enough to steal any remotely modern car.
Two-thirds of TV Licensing prosecutions at one London court targeted women
Sunday 5th March 2017 11:17 GMT
Re: Big opportunity missed
At least I had the courtesy to quote some sources in my comment rather than 'I used to own...'
It's not twaddle. The point was that by building and deploying a system that did not use smart cards or encryption (and that was the main difference between Freeview and ITVDigital) there is an incredible amount of consumer inertia now built up making it almost impossible to switch to a BBC subscription model over DTV anytime soon. All those TVs with built in tuners that would suddenly become useless.....
Which was the whole idea. Greg Dyke admits it in his book. Go and read it if you don't believe me, but I did try to save you!
Thursday 2nd March 2017 22:04 GMT
Re: Big opportunity missed
The opportunity wasn't missed at all. It was avoided by a country mile.... Greg Dyke saw to that on purpose.
Freeview was deliberately designed so as to not support smartcards, making it easier for the BBC to resist any potential push to a subscription model.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/sep/17/broadcasting.digitaltv
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/why-sky-is-not-the-limit-112213.html
http://www.tvlicenceresistance.info/forum/index.php?topic=2.5
.... And, of course, you could read his book. I wouldn't recommend it though.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
