Posts by Millwright

Nextcloud boss: You gotta fight … for your right … to 'plug into Windows and offer the exact same service'

Re: There's no consumer service

Nextcloud have partners, sure. Makes sense to me to have a wide choice of providers who can specialise in service provision using the underlying tech, and there's also the option to self-host instead/as well.

Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids

Boskone.

As in "Zuckerberg, speaking for Boskone"

Electric car makers ready to jump into battery recycling amid stuttering supply chains

Aluminium air

Aluminium air are primary batteries - not rechargeable. So they /have/ to be recycled after the equivalent of a few charges for a lithium or other secondary battery.

They may have significant use cases, but there are enough issues with the infrastructure needed for swap-out that they're not a universal replacement.

Pentagon scraps $10bn JEDI winner-takes-all cloud contract

Re: Biden seems to be downsizing

You missed (doubtless among others but I have reasons for remembering this one):

Grenada 1983

Dedicated (Local) Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service to grow almost 1000 per cent in five years

Maths, dear chaps. 138M to 14B is a touch over 100x, which is 10,000%

Lenovo ThinkPad P1: Sumptuous pro PC that gets a tad warm

Re: Terrible customer service

I have a T480 whose screen went iffy a month ago. Support was brilliant - some quick diagnostic questions then a free 3-day pickup, fix and return sorted pronto.

Intriguingly the support was provided by....IBM Canada. I'm in the UK.

Berkeley bio-boffins' butt-blasting belly-bothering batt-teria generates electricity

Do the math(s)

500 milliAmps. The team estimate that each bacteria cell can give off about 100,000 electrons per second.

[...] In the electrochemical chamber there are approximately 100 billion bacterial cells,

10^5 x 10^11 = 10^16 electrons per second

1A =~ 6 x 10^18 electrons per second -> 0.5A =~ 3 x 10^18 electrons per second

Two orders of magnitude error. Tsk

Morrisons launches bizarre Yorkshire Pudding pizza thing

Obviously it needs a snug fitting pizza on top of the cheese and tomato filling and basic toppings. Back of the fag packet suggests 5 3/4" would do nicely.

Sci-Fi titan Jerry Pournelle passes,
aged 84

Am I the only one here who thought his story writing dreadful, ill-constructed, predictable drivel only saved from utter uselessness by the Niven collaboration? And the only one who found Chaos Manor a sink of ill-informed, name-dropping posturing?

Seems like it. I will grant that he managed to give me a few unintentional laughs by the sheer buffoonery of some of his CM hardware tales.

Confirmation of who constitutes average whisky consumer helps resolve dispute

As any fule kno, Scotch comes in several levels of desirability. So does non-Scotch whisk(e)y but that's another discussion.

Sub-basement: Nasty blends of industrial grain alcohol with a meagre admixture of the cheapest, roughest malts. [Covers nearly everything that isn't labelled 'Malt'.]

Basement: Somewhat malt-heavier blends, often heavily marketed and usually at a price premium exceeding their value. Major example: Chivas Regal.

Ground floor: Vatted or blended malts. No nasty grain spirit. Vary from nigh-undrinkable to very good indeed. An example of the good stuff: the regional blends from Douglas Laing, like Big Peat.

Upper storey: Single malts. Vary from fairly bland but non-poisonous to distinctly characterful, complex and delightful. Region and style according to taste of course, barring the next level.

Penthouse: Islay.

British firm to build world's first offshore automated ship

Another thing about oil rigs

My nephew is a trainee engineer on the North Sea rig supply boats. They have /lots/ of accommodation space as they are rescue craft as well as delivery ships: and I don't see that function being automated.

Pluck-filled platter-stuff: Bold disk drive makers fatten up

Geometry

Yes, you have to take case/bearing thickness into account when you double the z height - but unless that scales up linearly or worse you'll have relatively more, not less, room inside the higher units.

It's still only breeding faster carthorses to compete with lorries though.

Flying Spaghetti Monster is not God, rules mortal judge

No, he didn't. He broke with Rome and created the Church of England but he was doctrinally Catholic. Protestantism - which started mainly in mainland Europe and whose followers in England, like the Lollards, had been given a hard time for centuries - came later under Edward VI and Elizabeth 1.

Seagate offers California Uni genome data storage K-drives

So 1PB = 250,000 x 4TB ?

German football hero battles Nazi doppelgänger

They're not too good with names. The Russian under Uncle Joe reads ' Iosif Vissarionovitch Stalin' as is correct, but the English is a mashup of his early and late surnames. He was Iosif Vissarionovitch Dzhugashvili (Russian form) in his Georgia days.

Sony Xperia M4 Aqua 4G: The Android smartie that can take its drink

"If the Moto G were available for £150, the natural order would be restored."

It is, unlocked PAYG from 3. I've got one.

Testing Motorola's Moto G third-gen mobe: Is it still king of the hill?

Bought one a few days ago for £140 (+ £1 SIM and £10 top-up) unlocked from 3. Nice phone at that price, good replacement for the original G I just broke.