Posts by werdsmith

US military F-35 readiness problems highlighted in aptly timed report

Re: Too many cooks spoil the broth

Pub talk debates about military hardware capabilities are hilarious.

Re: Optional Extras Not Included.......

US operates a global hegemony, it requires the rest of the planet to act in the interests on the US at all times and needs a very large stick to ensure this happens.

The iPhone 15 has a Goldilocks issue: Too big or too small. Maybe a case will make it just right

Re: Phones are lovely but they'd be much better without cameras

Do the Japanese HW people not just suggest using Cascable or any of the other various solutions to this problem that already exist?

Re: Phones are lovely but they'd be much better without cameras

The compact camera itself is a compromised camera. Not much better than a good phone camera, nowhere near as good as a full frame or ever a 2/3.

DSLRs are going extinct very quickly now. The full frame mirrorless shows there is no need for flappy mirrors.

Re: Phones are lovely but they'd be much better without cameras

I have a nice mirrorless camera thing but I'm not inclined to take it everywhere. It's an encumbrance most of the time, won't go in a pocket, swings about on a strap.

For all the time readiness the phone has been a godsend.

Re: Recovering fanboy here.

I will wait about 4 years and then consider a used one. I have an iPhone XS and I expect it to be still be my main phone in 2027.

Unless 4G is switched off.

That's gas: CO2 found on Europa surface may hint at some possible sign of life

Next year JUICE and then CLIPPER will hopefully launch on schedule and so at the end of the decade the real exciting stuff will start to happen.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: Moving House

The thing about CDs is, you pay for them once on their storage media. You don't keep paying for them forever.

I own on CD probably about 98% of the music I'll ever want to listen to. I paid for it already, I don't want to have to pay for it again. Much of it came on very cheap used CDs.

It's all ripped and available wherever I need it.

I realise my way is not making more money for the artist and even more money for the music corporates.

BMW always offered the heated seats as a choice of a £350 one time forever payment rather than monthly, so this would have been exactly the same as choosing it from the options list. I guess very few took the monthly choice. Three years would have been a one time payment of £250, so £7 added to the monthly PCP payment which was probably at least £600 per month. Taking the £350 option would add about a tenner. I'm not sure if people are concerned about the odd £100 or £3 per month when speccing up a new BMW for £40k or more.

I guess it's just the idea of the never never. I actively avoid subscription, ongoing monthly wherever I can because I don't like the idea of my money being spent before I earn it. But it will be seen as normal for youngsters.

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

Re: "leaving airlines to decide if they want to cram passengers in"

NYC is an excellent place if you like big cities with a buzz about them. I used to go for weekends, loved it.

Re: in a 3-3 economy class configuration.

It's almost as if no-one's noticed the average size of a human these days

Oh the people configuring cabin layouts know exactly how to keep people just uncomfortable enough to persuade them that paying for business class becomes more acceptable.

Re: in a 3-3 economy class configuration.

I did this frequently on some NorthWest Airlines flights back from Boston to London years ago. DC-10 in those days. Loads of people do it.

Re: in a 3-3 economy class configuration.

I think Ryanair brought back assigned seating because it makes it easier to split people 50/50 between the two sets of stairs.

Ryanair brought back assigned seating so they could separate families and people who were travelling together, they could then charge them money to choose seats.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Because they believe that the hundreds of thousands of dollars they cost in aggregated time is worth it.

Connect to the meeting, put it in the background, get on with some real work.

Lightning struck: Apple switches to USB-C for iPhone 15 lineup

Re: More discarded cables

The most common problem with lightning is lint-in-the-hole. I don't know if USB-C has that problem.

I will be very interested in buying an iPhone 15 for myself.......in about 4 to 5 years time.

Those people upgrading to 13/14/15 now would probably be interested in 5G.

Microsoft's Surface Duo phone hangs up, drops out of support

Re: A Pity

Palm Pre / WebOS was also quite useful.

And the Meego stuff that developed into Sailfish - which is still holding its own in its small niche is very good.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Re: The electric cult

The powers that be run nice big old Aga ranges in their various kitchens.

Re: Cost of refining oil

IT has Lithium battery too.

Re: If have the extra power to refine more petrol...

They have a special deal with the power generators.

Re: If have the extra power to refine more petrol...

We're British. It will be a queuing system.

They do queuing very nicely in Disneyworld. Or you can buy a Fast Pass. Fast pass EV charging - don't give them ideas.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

I've been told hybrids are better for some colder regions of the US (one of which, I live in).

Batteries don't like the cold

In Europe the nation where EVs have been adopted more than any other is Norway.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

Off road parking has meant lower premiums for decades.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

No, they aren't, not any more. These days most public chargers are around 50-55p/kWh for slow chargers, and up to 75p for fast.

Tesco chargers are 50p for fast and 23p / 40p for slow. Lidl about the same.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

No, not illegal. But needs building control to be notified and a qualified sparky to certify it safe.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

70p/kwh is 23p/mile at 3mile/kwh.

£1.50/litre is 17p/mile at 40mpg. So even less in a Prius.

Thats the price at our local supermarket charge points.

Tesco charges 23p / kWh on 7kW chargers 40p on the 22kW chargers and 50p / kWh on their 50kW chargers.

Lidl Podpoint chargers are similar (bo 7kW tariff).

What supermarket is charging 70p?

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

Long wave really works effectively only in hours of darkness.

They use sat radio in US to deal with long range.

My rental car had Sirius XM or something like that.

My phone stays out of reach and out of sight.

It auto connects to the car by Bluetooth and is available by voice control but I rarely use it.

Phone holders should be banned.

In Europe, nobody. I think that asking people to carry someone in a chair mounted on parallel poles is a bit demeaning.

Almost all of them can be voice controlled so there’s no need shit your bed about it.

But I do prefer rotary physical controls.

Electric handbrakes?

Thanks for reminding me that cars have parking brakes, I had virtually forgotten. They do their thing automatically,’no need for a human to get involved or worry about where it is.

Do you lament fuel injection and loss of manual choke mixture control?

Re: connected services as a strategic imperative and a driver of future revenue

You are talking about EVs?

Cabin heating on ICE cars is done by waste heat from the engine (there’s a lot of it available). The exception to this is pre-heating before you move away.

NASA rockets draining its pockets as officials whisper: 'We can't afford this'

Re: Still cheaper than HS2...

I use it to get to France.

My kids use trains to get to and from Uni every few weeks.

Commuting from Birmingham to London or vice versa might become a thing for a few people who will probably have their desk on the train for part of the days. And the media will be making a big deal about them, and the thickos will be triggered. But most HS2 traffic won't be morning and evening commutes 5 days a week.

They will be the kind of same folk who are using the fast Kings Cross to Leeds/York trains right now on hte ECML.

Re: Still cheaper than HS2...

I used to commute because everyone did it, and I thought it was just the way things were.

Then it dawn on me what a complete and total waste of time it was and became determined to minimise it as much as possible.

With covid my commute is completely eliminated and it seems moronic to me that I ever did it.

Re: Still cheaper than HS2...

thought HS2 went from almost London to almost Brum, didn't actually quite get there at each end.

It's going to Birmingham Curzon Street where the original Robert Stephenson London and Birmingham railway terminated in 1838 until New Street opened.

At the London end it's supposed to go to Euston (where the Robert Stephenson L&B also terminated) but the last stretch across London has been put on hold. So it will terminate out in the West London suburbs until an unknown time.

When the L&B was opened in 1838, steam locomotives were not allowed to go deep into London, so the trains got as far as Camden, and were then cable hauled the remaining couple of miles.

There are two big old tunnel bores that are now over three quarters of the way through 10 miles of Chiltern Hills. Imagine abandoning that to sunk cost fallacy.

Re: Please, ell me another one, that one was hilarious

I ride the Eurostar over the HS1 route from London, through a very long tunnel and then through northern France to Paris. Right into Paris. It's been excellent for almost three decades? You'd have thought that it would have been closed down by now with all the mass deaths that keep happening.

Toyota servers ran out of storage, crashed production at 14 plants in Japan

Re: Out of space

Tape backup. How long ago did you retire?

Re: Out of space

Yes, in fact transaction logs grow large and the process to truncate them and keep them in trim is the backup. The backup writes the data off to another location. But the larger than usual transaction logs use up more of the space in the backup target volume which eventually fails. So the transaction log backups don't have enough space to write to, so they start failing. So now nothing is truncating the transaction logs so they grow and use up their volume (or file size quota). When the transaction logs can't grow anymore the DBMS stops doing stuff.

Or the transaction logs are set to a fixed max size and they hit that before the next periodic log backup.

You need to alert not only on remaining available space, but also on the rate that space is being consumed.

Re: Lost in Translation?

How does one "organize" data which has been "deleted" from a database? (I'm presuming "organized" in this case means, "re-organized".)

Some of the data was deleted.

Some of the data was organised (possibly moving datafiles or logs to different volumes).

Two separate actions allows sense to be made of the sentence.

Musk's mighty missile is ready for launch once FAA says OK

Re: Cost

It would be great if launchers could be from somewhere that had much lower gravity and minimal atmospheric density.

Then perhaps somebody could land and launch a spacecraft like it was 1969.

UK rejoins the EU's €100B Horizon sci-tech funding program

Love Brexit related comments on Reg.

Watching the futility of the dwindling numbers of pro Brexit diehards flailing around trying to defend Brexit is very entertaining.

Re: Turing...

Nobody who is alive or usefully active today has done any harm to Mr Turing. Laws that affected him were rescinded 55 years ago. I don’t hold people responsible for the crimes of their grandparents. That would be scummy.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Need

Because Larry needs a faster sailing boat and all those future audit threats to keep it crewed.

Re: Great job!

We don’t have a competent government. Neither the incumbent or the party waiting to step in to have a go.

Never at any time I’m my life have I witnessed a decent term of government in the UK.

So when I hear these discussions where the two ideologies are pointing the finger at each other

I just think “shut the fuck up you bunch of gullible wankers”. Neither side has a leg to stand on.

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

Re: Question

@Throatwarbler Mangrove: nobody of any capability, competence or class would ever enter politics and therefore the only people who can achieve office of any kind are these narcissists and sociopaths.

It's a choice of vote for a moron or don't vote. As I understand it, this is not an unknown situation either here or on your side of the pond.

The world seems so loopy. But at least someone's written a memory-safe sudo in Rust

Re: Mandate

Rust uses a runtime for somethings, like async functions.

Re: Mandate

I am really enjoying getting into rust, now but the one thing that annoys me is the need to be online, the method to have all crates that you might need (all of them) available offline is ropey.

Concorde? Pffft. NASA wants a Mach 4 passenger jet

Re: Civilian spend on, uh...

Turns out it has uses beyond aero propulsion.

Re: The internal expansion joints were quite wide

Somebody ripped that capped out of its eternal resting place (leaving some of the material still in the gap), a thief in Seattle.

The torn piece was returned anonymously but couldn't be put back in place very easily.