Posts by RancidRodent

Monday: Intel touts 28-core desktop CPU. Tuesday: AMD turns Threadripper up to 32

Great, but time for windoze to catch up.

How about lifting the Windows 10 32 MCSS thread limit eh Microsoft? What use is all those cores to professional musicians if we can't use them?

UK's first transatlantic F-35 delivery flight delayed by weather

"What you mean the Rafale that France developed after it dropped out of the Future European Fighter Aircraft programme - remind me, who's the europhobe?"

Even worse, the French dictated the (rather small) size of the Eurofighter as they had carrier operations in mind - so the Germans and Brits ended up with a plane far too small for their requirements (a replacement for Tornado as a bomber) and a carrier variant was never developed because the French made their own.

"the cost of retrofitting was about the same as building another carrier!!"

The US offered to fund the fitting of EMALs/CATOBAR to our QE's in exchange for shared use of said resources, we stuck with the awful B variant of F35 to appease BAE who have a big slice of the F35B lift-fan development - the better solution would have been to join the proposed naval Gripen project - which BAE also have huge interest in. We'd could have bought at least five Gripens for the cost of one F35B. Better still, a carrier variant of Typhoon - which is too small for the RAF as a bomb truck because of original French requirements to build a carrier variant! You couldn't make it up! We could then share pilots and parts across the Navy and RAF.

Re: "The integration between Sea Harrier's Blue Vixen"...

"Yes, but you have to see it from an overall perspective - radar, armament, countermeasures, maneuverability, speed."

Indeed but with BVR combat you require a way of aiming your long-range missile before it's in range to actively home - you'll be surprised how many in-service fighters without this capability (in reality rather than on paper), Typhoon (waiting for METEOR) F-22 (just doesn't work) countermeasures are easy - just change direction after detecting the AMRAAAM launch! So in reality the two premier western fighters would have to get in AMRAAM homing/ASRAAM/Sidewinder range before firing, FA2 would have detected and shot you down before you got in range so the speed advantage is irrelevant. If the MOD had any sense they'd create a varient of METEOR using the ASRAAM IR Seeker and slave the tracking system to PIRATE.

"Speed and maneuverability can still dictate the engagement - and we've seen more than once that just relying on some system specifications didn't match reality when used in combat."

Blue Vixen/AMRAAM was one of those rare occurences where performance exceeded all expectations, there isn't another known (ie western) fighter in existance whose long range search and AMRAAM aiming systems worked so well, in NATO excecises, in "lone" fights, FA2 ruled. The US develop their fighter RADARs to be great allrounders as they never expect to fight without AWAC.

Modern warfare of course dictates that you don't do RADAR searches anymore anyway - you try to track passively (ISRT) or at extended range from other assets.

Re: Sorry, but the Sea Harrier was no better than the F-35

"Good for CAS when air superiority has been already achieved by other planes"

The integration between Sea Harrier's Blue Vixen (a superb air to air RADAR) and AMRAAM was generally acknowledged to be amongst the best in the world - in one-to-one air-to-air combat (without AWAC support) Sea Harrier FA2 was formidable - indeed the Typhoon with the Blue Vixen based RADAR but with NO INFLIGHT DATALINK to AMRAAM (due to penny pinching) would struggle against Sea Harrier - F22 is also stuck with old (block B?) AMRAAM due to data bus bandwidth limits so would be hopeless in unaided air to air combat. The Tornados Fns the RAF would hopelessly flying around for decades wouldn't stand an earthly against FA2.

UK's Royal Navy accepts missile-blasting missile as Gulf clouds gather

Re: What worries me....

"do we have any anti-missile-missile missiles?"

Actually this is something us Brits can do some flag-waving over - we achieved the world's first downing of a missile by a missile in actual combat when HMS Gloucester engaged an Iraqi Silkworm heading for USS Missouri, the US made Phalanx CIWS "goalkeeper" system aboard USS Jarret lost track of the lumbering sub-sonic missile and engaged her sister ship's chaff instead, luckily, sparing the US Navies blushes, an antique Brit Type 42 destroyer with trusty Sea Dart on board was part of the escort and the rest - as they say - really was history (in the making). Gloucester of course carried Phalanx as well - but the skipper probably understood how well it works and chose Sea Dart for the engagement.

Re: We're wasting money fighting a previous war - as usual.

"Ultimately as Voland pointed out earlier, it will come down to a numbers game."

But the west have given up on numbers in exchange for (assumed) technological superiority. Russia and China can and do shoot down satellites, what happens to the west's network centric warfare when all the military and communication satellites are dust?

Re: We're wasting money fighting a previous war - as usual.

"Down votes probably from people who realise your argument seems to be 'western weapons systems are all flaky bits of rubbish that won't work against the flawless wonder weapons of Russia and China'"

Not at all, western weapons are excellent - easily the best before we gave our microprocessor technology away in order to mass-manufacture cheap DVD players - we did this roughly 60 years after Stalin said "only a fool would give away their secrets" in shocked response to the Labour party giving him the jet engine - a formidable piece of kit the RAF had to face over the skies of Korea in their obsolete propeller planes. There is a point however, where weapons become too sophisticated - so much so it takes three years to build them and five years to teach someone to operate them. The wests' reliance on technology and the arrogance about its superiority is its downfall. The Russians and the Chinese go for big numbers - which in the heat of war, invariably wins. A good example of arrogance is the stealth programme - anyone with even basic understanding of the subject knew the game was up ten years ago, DSP technology (signal return oversampling) means that even the tiniest RADAR return can be tracked, so we spend billions developing planes with flawed aerodynamics to achieved stealth - stealth that is no longer, er, stealthy. What's going to more damage to your enemy? One F35 or Ten Gripens? I know what my money would be on - and given today's nambly-pamby rules of engagement, where you'd have to eyeball your enemy before fighting - if your "stealth" plane finds itself in the same airspace as something that's actually designed to be a plane first and foremost - boy you're in trouble! And that why Eurofighter - accidentally - turned out to be really rather good.

Re: We're wasting money fighting a previous war - as usual.

Given the projected cost of DF21D, even small uppity nations will be able to afford them!

Re: We're wasting money fighting a previous war - as usual.

The "thumbs downs" have started already - go and have a bath and think about the physics involved in trying to hit something coming at you at over 2 miles per second, you require sufficient reaction time to track the object, defeat gravity to get the interceptor in the air and then gain enough velocity to actually hit it - ie find itself in the same air space as the lump of pain doing 7,500+ miles per hour. If you think these problems are easily sumountable - then by all means thumbs-down away - or you could try, for once in your life, to face reality. Our carriers are white elephants.

Re: Anti-missile missile at home?

Don't worry - Rapier is still in service! Although to be fair, the missile system this article discusses is also land-based - the British army are currently under training to deploy the land-lubber variant - not that it has a chance in hell of hitting any modern hypersonic missile... Nor would Russia's current S-400 or future S-500 both of which are significantly better than CAMM(s) (Sea Ceptor and Land Ceptor.)

We're wasting money fighting a previous war - as usual.

Given the arrival into service of hypersonic anti ship missiles such as the Chinese DF-21D, aircraft carriers are nothing more than targets. There is nothing that will stop one of these missiles - nothing. Even if you manage to hit it (you won't) the speed of the incoming fragments will obliterate you anyway. I was warning about this well over ten years ago when we first started wasting money on the the Lizzie-class targets - er, aircraft carriers.

'Clive, help us,' say empty-handed ZX Spectrum reboot buyers

Microdrives.

The microdrives on my 34 year old (purchased new) QL still work perfectly well.

Sysadmin hailed as hero for deleting data from the wrong disk drive

Not owned by IBM?

"If only it hadn't been owned by IBM" Well who would have written it then? The postman? The anti-trust agreement against IBM probably had a lot to do with them abandoning it - the reason the Microshite/IBM partnership broke down was Microshite wanted a presentation (over content) layer to compete with Apple - whereas IBM wanted a robust, dependable operating system which took a lot longer to develop. Obviously, Microshite won in the end because they inherited all of IBM's hard work which became the windows NT kernel and everything half decent from Microshite since.

Brit IT contractor wins appeal against HMRC to pay £26k in back taxes

Cake time.

How is it HMRC can have its cake and eat it? If it won the case above - would HMRC have handed back all the VAT it collected under false pretences? The reality is contractors working under a personal services company raise more tax than they would have done as a permie doing the same job, so BOTH parties win - what's the problem? How much tax will the average £40K per year permie pay, in the same job as a contractor, the VAT raised alone will be more than permie pays in income tax, then on top of that there will be corporation tax, dividend tax as well the usual (admittedly limited) income tax and NI.

There will be blood: BT to axe 13,000 employees

It could be worse...

As bad as BT are - could you imagine the General Post Office being in charge as we went through the late nineties/early noughties internet era? "A phone in your hall sir? - I'll book you in for August... 2019 - if comrade Smith can be bothered to turn up."

Windrush immigration papers scandal is a big fat GDPR fail for UK.gov

Well, you could argue they became British after Labour passed their 1948 nationalities act - for which there was no mandate - nor was it mentioned in their winning manifesto - every single poll on the matter since has shown a healthy lead for the "no immigration" side which has been derided and scoffed at from day one. The British people didn't want and still don't want mass immigration, but then listening to the people would mean democracy - and we can't have that now can we? Still, it's another fine excuse for bourgeois career politicians to self flagellate and virtue signal to their Guardian-reading pals - democracy is over-rated anyhow.

If an English person was invited to and emigrated to the West Indies, they then didn't bother to do any of the required paperwork including applying for citizenship - when the authorities kick them out 30 years later - would there be any sympathy? We'd be asking the obvious question:- "why didn't you do what was required of you?" - the other way round we bow and apologise when the fault actually lays with the people who couldn't be "arksed" to fill out the paperwork and follow the rules.

RIP: Sinclair ZX Spectrum designer Rick Dickinson reaches STOP

Thank You Sir!

I owe my long and lucrative career in IT to you and your machines! Rest In Peace good man.

Who will fix our Internal Banking Mess? TSB hires IBM amid online banking woes

Re: IBM

'Cept they're not running on the old system nor any part of it, nor is there a migration path back to it. That said, IBM probably don't understand the old system anyway - the people who do would have been sacked by now - "replaced" by those who can do the needful - until the needful needs doing...

The reality is nobody ever got the sack for hiring IBM, but there is a first time for everything - IBM is an empty husk, Ginni Rometty has thrown the baby out with the bathwater - there's no in-depth knowledge left. She bet on cloud forgetting that z and the old men who smell of wee who understand it actually pay the bills. IBM is doomed, Ginni strangled the golden goose.

Re: Half and half?

"Looks like the back end is churning away doing all the right things, and the front end is totally fucked."

Yes, the decades old (ex mainframe) COBOL bit (that has been sunset and "containerised" under MicroFocus (yee gods)) is working - it's the new fancy-dan front end script kiddie stuff that's borked.

UK.gov demands urgent answers as TSB IT meltdown continues

Damn those legacy - er, um, new fangled systems!

The sound of silence is deafening over the fact that this is a modern state-of-the-art banking system, dragged off the boring, reliable, Lloyds mainframe and put on edgy x86 cloudy stuff - and - oh dear - it's all gone wrong. If this was a mainframe system, there would be finger-pointing at the platform from every commentator - as it is - nada - nothing to see here, move along...

Re: Ah the sweet smell of irony

"The Tory handbook"? Remember Tax Credits? £5bn stolen wasn't it? Notice the vast majority of IT outsourcing (including government IT contracts) to India occurred under 13 years of Labour - the same people who took the monitoring of UK bank liquidity off the Bank Of England and gave it to a toothless quango - the rest is history. Don't get me wrong - I can't stand the current shower in government but it was under Labour's watch the UK IT industry was decimated and the UK banking industry brought to its knees - the former by easy access given to our markets (visa rubber stamping), the latter partly caused by the one-eyed idiot's banking act(s).

Brit bank TSB TITSUP* after long-planned transfer of customer records from Lloyds

Bloody legacy - er, um, new fangled systems!

The sound of silence is deafening over the fact that this is a modern state-of-the-art banking system, dragged off the boring, reliable, legacy Lloyds mainframe and put on edgy x86 cloudy stuff - and - oh dear - it's all gone wrong. If this was a mainframe system, there would be finger-pointing at the platform from every commentator - as it is - nada - nothing to see here, move along...