Posts by x 7

Oxford Uni boffins get things rolling at new electric motor factory

YASA?

I forsee the battery manufacturer Yuasa getting upset by that

Julian Assange to UK court: Put an end to my unwarranted Ecuadorean couch-surf

why not sever diplomatic relationships with Ecuador and force closure of the embassy?

Its not as if it would affect any trade, we just buy a bit of coffee and vanilla from them, they buy fuck all from us, so sod 'em

We're cutting F-35 costs, honest, insists jet-builder Lockheed Martin

"Honeywell UK integrates some of the Onboard Oxygen Generation Systems components, though these, company reps told us, are actually manufactured in France"

So another damned American company takes over a British company (Normalair-Garrett in Yeovil, was part of the Westland Empire: they had a 51% holding, Garrett of the USA had the rest), strip out the technology and move manufacture outside the country.

This kind of technology export should be banned: its why we lose jobs and lose productivity.

Westland / Normalair were the world leaders in aircraft air supply. Now the business has been stolen

NASA is sniffing jet fuel over Germany

Biofuels = Deforestation

F-35 'incomparable' to Harrier jump jet, top test pilot tells El Reg

Re: Stealth Landings?

I ain't Spartacus

But any airframe, however stealthy, ceases to be stealthy when you hang a collection of bombs and missiles off the underside of it - which is how the F-35 is intended to work on day 2/3 of any war

The F-35 can either be stealthy OR carry a useful payload. Not both.

Re: VIFing?

"I guess the BBC used non-existent CGI to show that on the 6 o'clock News, then?"

You may have seen film of the VIFF technique, but not during the Falklands War

""And the US Marines invented it during a demo flight "just to see what happened if you tried it"

[citation needed]"

Here you go: http://www.airvectors.net/avav8_2.html#m3

"* The USMC's provision for Sidewinder missiles on the AV-8A led the service to devise an interesting new dogfighting tactic, named, somewhat stiffly, "vectoring in forward flight (VIFF)". Experiments performed by the USMC with VIFF demonstrated that it had some extraordinary qualities. The Marine pilot who performed the first evaluations on VIFF in 1970, Captain Harry Blot, fully reversed the nozzles while flying at high speed on his first test flight. He reported that he "decelerated rapidly" -- but he couldn't determine just how rapidly, since he was wrapped around the stick with his nose stuck on the gunsight."

Re: Stealth Landings?

"What I would like to know is whether autolanding is less stealth than a conventional one."

The point of the rolling landing is to allow the aircraft to return with stores attached.

ANY landing with external stores will not be stealthy.

But then any aircraft flying with external stores won't be stealthy either - to some extent it destroys the argument for stealthy aircraft. The F-35 can only be stealthy if carrying a much reduced payload i.e, internal stores only. The theory is stealth is only required on day 1 or 2 of a hot war: during that time you knock out the opposition air defences using stealth: if successful then on day 3 you don't need stealth. But to make that work you need a large superiority of aircraft to carry out the knockout punch, and you also need air superiority aircraft to deliver it. We have neither (and don't intend to have). The yank F-35 fleet will be protected by air superiority fleets, and will be available in sufficient numbers.

Re: VIFing?

If you read books about war flying by people who weren't there, and weren't pilots then the old maxim applies: rubbish in, rubbish out.

If you want to know what happened during the Falklands air campaign, read

Sea Harrier Over The Falklands by Sharkey Ward

Ward was the boss of 801 Squadron. Controversial, but accurate

Re: I think it was well known....

" I think they're were pretty much at the limits of what you could do with the Pegasus engine as well which would make improvements in thrust challenging"

But they were thinking on the lines of a grown-up Pegasus with either a Spey or Olympus core, which would have massively increased thrust. Would have required a new larger airframe, and the MOD weren't interested.

Re: "both of the UK's previous aircraft carriers"

And besides the Invincibles, Hermes also flew Sea Harriers

Re: F35 - Too Late and Over Budget

The engines will be repaired in Turkey, not Italy

Not much use in a hot war against Russia

Re: VIFing?

VIFFing was never used during the Falklands: the Argie aircraft were at too far a range to get involved in air-to-air combat. If a Harrier appeared they ran: if they had stopped to fight they would have run out of fuel. The Falklands really were at the maximum endurance range of their aircraft

PS - VIFF = Vectoring In Forward Flight

And the US Marines invented it during a demo flight "just to see what happened if you tried it"

Re: VAAC 35 knot relative speed ?

the video has no relationship to the landing technique being discussed, except that a lot of the avionics package for the F-35 is derived from the trials carried out on the VAAC Harrier. What the videos shows is an automatic vertical landing: nothing to do with the rolling vertical landing

NHS: Thanks for the free work, Linux nerds, now face our trademark cops

I presume the (first) four thumbs down on my last post are the four egotists involved in this project?

Totally pointless project

Virtually all the clinical systems run on Windows, and none of the suppliers have any intention to change.

Whats the point of a card ID system running on Linux when none of the applications run on Linux?

This just smacks of a handful of idealists who were trying to make the tail wag the dog. Good riddance.

Amount of pixels needed to make VR less crap may set your PC on fire

Re: Really, did no one think to ask...

Porn........the idea of a 3D popup in the browser is something to consider with trepidation (or hope depending on your orientation)

Re: Number! It's the flipping number!!!

And if you extrapolate from all those fairy take books, pixel dust are the spores of fly agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria). Eating those really helps expand visual reality remarkably. Even helps you see things that would be otherwise invisible.

Re: Glasses anyone?

On an Oculus Rift, the glasses fit under the headset without problems.

What did cause an issue was the enforced 3D perspective - I've got a lazy eye and have very little in the way of 3D vision. The Oculus Rift effectively rams 3D down your eyeballs and I found it bloody discoordinating - enough to make me feel decidedly queasy

Veeam buys AWS EC2 instance backup and recovery biz

"in January 20217"

Looking a long way into the future then.........

Russia claims it repelled home-grown drone swarm in Syria

Re: RE: "the missile to fly upside down it would immediately crash"

It wasn't wing-to-wing contact which caused the V1 to flip, but rather flying with the wings just close enough for the Allied aircraft to disturb the airflow over the V1's wing, resulting in loss of lift on one wing and an inevitable stall

If you're going to write about military issues, FFS get someone who knows what they're talking about.

Take this sentence: "They also bore a control package and presumably a fuel tank built into the body of the drone, but appear to have few metal parts and lack even landing wheels"

First, you'd expect a minimum of metal parts in a device which depends on evading radar to reach its target.

Second, WTF would it need wheels? Its on a one-way mission of destruction, it won't be landing anywhere - except maybe on someones head.

Brazil says it has bagged Royal Navy flagship HMS Ocean for £84m

Re: Basic arsemetrics

after 20 years of use, the hull plates will have worn thin.

choices?

replace the plates (expensive)

pump out the leaks (not good)

fill the double hull with concrete (affects ships weight and balance)

none of them are satisfactory - scrapping and new build is better

Well, if we sell to Brazil it'll piss the Argies off

Are they going to buy any helicopters to fly off it? A few Wildcats would be a nice extra

Windows Store nixed Google Chrome 'app' hours after it went live

I don't understand: what is this Windows Store and why are people using it?

If I want Google chrome I go to Google and download the chrome installer

The Register Lectures: Deception, Spitfires and the end of the road….

Salisbury

as no-one else has linked to it

https://www.secretspitfires.com/

considering the first "secret factory" was Salisbury, it would have been apt to show it there.

Or Yeovil or Castle Bromwich where the other factories were set up after Supermarine got bombed

Or even all three - there are still a few people around who actually built them, though my mum died two years ago

My mum built Spitfires during the war, she made the left hand inner wing box, her bridesmaid made the right hand inner wing box.

She went off ill for several weeks, when she got back there was a queue of airframes waiting for her to do her bit: there were no spare staff to fill in. It really was that tight in terms of labour

They got bombed once.....seems the girls all went outside to have a look at the German aircraft instead of heading for the shelters

"The venue for all these talks is the Yorkshire Grey on Theobalds Road, London, on January 30"

???????????????????????????????????????

Telly boffin Professor Heinz Wolff has died

Re: Young Scientist of the Year

All the judges I met on there were truly dedicated and enthusiastic. They believed in education and saw the programme as a way to interest kids in science and technology.

George Porter appears to have been the driving force: he gave us a personally guided tour of the Royal Institution and his drive to educate was impossible to resist.

As I said earlier, Porter, Wolff and the others.......these are the people who should have been in charge of the UK education system, driving toward meaningful teaching off STEM subjects

teddy bears

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/saturdaylive/2006/10/professor_heinz_wolff.html

"Despite being one the country's leading scientific experts, Professor Heinz Wolff reveals that his true passion lies in his collection of teddy bears. Yes it's true...........

"But Prof Wolff is also an expert in the facial expressions of toy bears, and believes that much can be revealed from the positioning of their glass eyes and embroidered noses."

I'd have loved to see that collection. I wonder what will happen to them?

Re: Young Scientists of the Year

A bit later - 1977

Never got the tie though...rules must have changed by then

Re: A British friend tells me he also helped judge "Young Scientists of the Year"

"So he'd been into the whole "STEM outreach" thing for decades."

I just refreshed my memory as to who the judges were the year I took part

Heinz Wolff

George Porter

Ian Fells

Fred Holliday

Colin Refrew

Tony Bradshaw

Jack Meadows

hard to think of a more illustrious bunch, all dedicated to teaching STEM subjects at school level.

They're the kind of people who should have been directing UK educational policy. How the hell as a country did we screw it up so badly?

He was one of the judges when I took part (as part of a team) in the BBC "Young Scientist of the Year" competition back in the 1970s. He and Sir George Porter (one of the other judges) are probably the two nicest people I've ever met.

Heinz claimed he had a cupboard full of teddy bears in his office at Brunel......he said he psychoanalysed them to see which had "friendly" faces and which were "evil". I guess he must have had a lot of fun waving teddies at babies to see which ones caused smiles and which ones caused tears. Ever since I've had a mental image of him with an office stuffed full of stuffed animals. I don't know how true to life that is, but it seems a nice way to remember him.

Cloud-building alien space rays altered Earth's climate – boffins

was all the computational work for this done in the cloud?

and should we be worried that this effect will damage cloud storage?

So if the sun turns into a supernova, the extra cloud cover will stop global warming?

European court: Let's not kid ourselves, Uber. You're a transport firm, not a 'digital service'

"The drivers generally hire the cars from specialist leasing companies that provide fully insured and maintained cars for the private hire trade"

In which case the cars are being leased and insured as private hire vehicles........

Re: Barcelona, Spain

There's only one Birmingham

the rest just stole the name and need qualification as to their location

It would be interesting to know how the cars are insured. I can't see any insurance company agreeing they're anything less than private hire cars.

Or do Uber provide the insurance?

Irony's lost on old Pope Francis: Pontiff decrees fake news a 'serious sin'

Well.......by saying that he'll have pissed off the bible bashers, but just imagine what the readers of the Koran are going to think

Kent woman to season festive dinner with her mother's ashes

But who ate Percy Fawcett?

Once again, UK doesn't rule out buying F-35A fighter jets

Re: Time to dust off the plans to

P1154 wasn't flyable / survivable

The plenum chamber burning would have meant it would have eaten itself on landing: the recycled exhaust gases would have melted the ground, and the airframe

The OPs comments about squadron numbers and staffing levels reflect the RAF way of doing things not the Navy way.............RAF squadrons have a much heavier management complement and much shorter deployment periods than the RN

The Harrier fleet was a case in point: the Sea Harrier fleet was three squadrons: 899 (Headquarters squadron), 801 and 809. Deployments were at full squadron level for months at a time. When the SHARs were replaced by RAF GR5/7 Harriers, RAF management took over and with the same manpower levels they decreed there weren't enough pilots or aircraft to do anything other than short-term secondments to the ships. Same manpower, same number of aircraft, about a tenth of the deployment team. In the end the RAF even gave up pretending to have squadrons and amalgamated the ex-RN flights into the "Naval Air Wing" which struggled to put eight aircraft in the air, and couldn't stay at sea for longer than a week.

Just another example of the RAF doing the RN over. And guess who will be providing the F-35 crews and management? Yes, the RAF! And they haven't a clue how to do it.

This push by the RAF is an attempt at a funding grasp: make the carriers unusable because there's no aircraft for them, and the budget will go to the airyfairy brylcream boys to buy new shiny toys.

Re: Why go totally F-35?

A Sea Hornet was an uprated Mosquito...........not quite the same as the F/A-18 Hornet / Super Hornet you lot keep wittering about

Report: Underwater net cables are prime targets for terrorists and Russia

How many days ago was it Russia announced they were looking at their own root DNS servers?

Now do you see why Russia need them?

Damian Green: Not only my workstation – mystery pr0n all over Parliamentary PCs

Re: All these accusations about him looking at pron...

be a damned stiff one to proove

Linux laptop-flinger says bye-bye to buggy Intel Management Engine

doesn't the ME require a driver?

what happens if you simply don't install it?

Russia threatens to set up its 'own internet' with China, India and pals – let's take a closer look

Re: The collapse of the USSR.....

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ножки_Буша

Surely, as ever Putin has the truths reversed......

this is all about maintaining access to the internet for Russia and her pals in the event that cyberattacks (or real attacks) on the west make access to the western root servers unreliable or impossble. And who is most likely to implement such attacks?

This is all about Russia siding with the third world and laying the infrastructure for the next world war. If the submarine cables to the west are cut, something else needs to be available to provide DNS routing for Russia and the rest.

This isn't about the west denying access to Russia. Its all about Russia isolating the west from the rest of the world

Rolls-Royce, Airbus, Siemens tease electric flight engine project

Electrically powered aircraft are a technical dead end

What is required is an more environmentally friendly jet fuel, like Boron hydride (Diborane)

We know it works - the SR-71 used it, and the Russians also experimented with it.

Make it via chemical synthesis, using renewable or nuclear to provide the power. OK it creates some interesting handling issues, but they are known and surmountable.

The only exhaust from the Boron hydride would be water and inert finely particulate boron oxides, which would settle to ground.

Microsoft to rebuild Redmond campus, including cricket pitch

It should be named Sinofsky's End

- after the prat who destroyed Windows with his Win8 nightmare

Its been downhill ever since