Posts by John Brown (no body) 25434 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
So, as a former trainee glider pilot, did that sound like a glider landing to you? :-)
Maybe it was just the speed of the landing and the air flow over non-streamlined bits, ie the undercarriage making all that noise and not that it was under power.
According to Wikipedia, "LauncherOne made six flights total beginning in 2020, resulting in four successes and two failures. Following the failure of the company's sixth launch and an inability to secure additional financing,[5] the company laid off nearly all staff and suspended operations on March 30, 2023"
So no, VO weren't built on this single UK launch, the rest having been in the USA. But they do seem to have been living from launch to launch and didn't have the funds to cope with too many fails, or 2 out of 6 in this case.
Possibly some people are confused by El Reg referring to the launch as "the UK’s big hope for space launches", which could imply VO is a British company. Obviously some of those jobs will have been at the Cornish spaceport, ie "British jobs", but I suspect many were never going to be long term since I don't think it likely the UK can support enough launches to make the place viable yet, if ever. I suspect most of the "jobs" in Cornwall were imported US staff, engineers, controllers etc., flown in for the UK launch and now flown back home.
Depends on which side of the Atlantics version of "laid off" is being used by the now US -centric ElReg in a UK based story.
AFAIK, "laid off" in the USA means sacked or fired. In the UK, "laid off" is more likely used as a short term thing where the company can't afford to pay the wages and is attempting to re-finance/re-structure and hopefully take the staff back on in a few weeks or a month.
The risk is that it all fails and the people laid off end up redundant or the company starts up again but some people have found other jobs. The longer the shutdown, the less likely the good staff will still be ready, willing and able to come back. If too many of the essential staff don't come back, the company may fold anyway.
They're chasing the younger market because they appear to have money. One of the reasons the younger market has money to burn is because they can't afford to get on the housing ladder and are living with the parents for many more years than young people previously did. So they want the "hip and trendy digital bank image", not some fuddy duddy old Victorian bank image of old in the hope that when those youngsters do finally scrape together enough for a house deposit, they will take out a mortgage with Clydsedale Virgin Money.
Most of these "hip and trendy" online banks are not new businesses. They are just re-brands of the old established order. The Co-Op Bank did the same with Smile. There no hint on Smile website that it's owned and operated by Co-Operative Bank.
So stick a damn big popup on the login page. "We process any data you give us in order to respond to it. Log in or bog off"
Yes, exactly that. Warn the user first so they can make an informed choice. The problem is they are not currently doing that and that's illegal where GDPR holds sway. It gives people the freedom to choose from a position of knowledge instead of ignorance, it doesn't take away or restrict freedom (other than the "freedom" of companies to take any and all personal information and use it any way they see fit)
"ChatGPT, Replika and tools like it are so new that it's easy to forget widespread use has only been happening "for a matter of weeks," said Edward Machin, a London-based privacy lawyer at international law firm Ropes & Gray."
So what? GDPR has been around for a while now and companies have no excuse not to be aware of it. Just because the company or technology is new does NOT give them carte blanche to ride roughshod over the law until someone stops them. Collecting personal data without consent is already illegal. ChatGPT being new doesn't change that.
As per the article, with Crapita out of action, they can't provide the contracted services to their customers, so many other company's and organisations are also unable to provide their normal levels of service. On the other hand, customer satisfaction levels are up and THAT is news :-)
"and lending unlimited copies."
Not true. It's been made clear in every article I've read on this subject, at least two here on El Reg including the parent article of this comment section, that IA are digitising books they own and then lending out one single digitised copy per book owned,
With MS, would we even notice the extra patches? It's nearly Patch Tuesday again!
With Google, it seems to be down to device manufactures, so not holding my breath (although my Samsung A12 just got another update last week!)
With Apple, I have no clue. I've not properly used an Apple computer since I played with an Apple ][ many years ago :-)
"If I was in incharge of Gov issued phones/tablets, they would be MDM'ed to the nth degree... no app store and the minimum needed for them to do their jobs."
Our company did that. It took weeks if not months to get the approvals through to add back all the apps we actually need to do our jobs properly. Like OEM diags tools which are absolutely required on a day to day basis. AFAIK there was no consultation or notice period. Someone high up simply decided it should happen and suddenly the "app store" had something like 5 or 6 apps in it.
Isn't Candy Crush a default menu item in Windoiws10/11 these days? Surely it's not "recreational", it's part of the default install :-)
And doesn't every office have a least one X-Box for all the users to connect to over the LAN? Why else would the shortcuts in the start menu be there by default?
Then "IT" manglement aren't doing their jobs properly. It's up to them to prove the business case by itemising the cost of secured access to employees own $random phones. Even just the time spent adding users to an exiting InTune or similar management tool and then keeping it up to date as people join and leave the org is a significant ongoing cost. Of course, there will different budgets involved, so the bean counters need to be convinced that no matter the budget it comes from, it's still hitting the bottom line!
That reminds me of as book I read many years ago.
It tells the story of a boy growing to manhood in the land of Shant, a society composed of many different, and wildly individual cantons, some of which are run by cults. Each adult wears an explosive torc which can be detonated by remote command, bringing about instant death by decapitation."
"So how much are they planning to charge for the ARM chips used in Maseratis Lamborghinis and BMWs."
Excellent point. I foresee lots of court cases attempting to not only define exactly what the "end user device" is but is the "value" what the end user pays or what the OEM builds it for? Retail prices vary from country to country as well as over time. If a phone is discounted does Arm get a proportionally lower royalty?
Buy Samsung phones and tablets. Comes with a FREE Arm processor!![*]
Note, the CPU is not part of the device and if you insist we do have models available with no pre-fitted CPU at EXACTLY the same price, just to prove that the CPU really is FREE!
"An equally interesting question is what's the maximum distance a hypothetical alien race of a roughly similar technological level could detect us from. Not just by radio but spectral analysis of the atmosphere and any other viable form of remote sensing."
Good point. We'll know when we find one :-
Yes, after all, what evidence might there be of our civilisation in 65 million years if we got a "dinosaur killer" tomorrow? Even the plastic particles will have degraded by then. Maybe there'll be evidence of the degraded chemicals left from plastics in the equivalent of a future KT boundary layer?
"though 'not that often' is a different question for a five-user app vs a five million user one!"
Like the infamous "some users were affected" when it's a cloudy system used by millions and "some" is a significantly large number when stated on it's own, even if it's "only" 1 or 2% of the total users.
"Hint: it isn't about metrics."
Exactly that. If OFSTED are so clever at defining what good education is, why is every child not leaving school with a single rating across their entire educational performance with a certificate marked Outstanding, Good, Needs Improvement or Inadequate? Why so many grades for so many subjects when clearly a single word from a list of four is the optimum level of assessing the students academic abilities, just like with the even larger complexities of a school? Not to mention that they have a limited number of metrics to assemble into this one word rating that doesn't take into account the many other things a school does to make it a good place.
"Brown declined to go into further detail, but according to a leaked term sheet seen by Reuters, that funding amounts to $200 million, which, by virtue of the fact of the leak and the subsequent share price rise, is just $20 million shy of Virgin Orbit's current market capitalization. If the deal goes through, the VC wouldn't just get controlling interest, but become the de facto owner."
If Brown "injects" $200m, and becomes the de facto owner, then either he bought the company by paying that £200m to the current owner(s) and there's still no money to run the company with or he's basically lending the money to them, in which case he's not buying shares in the company, but obviously will have a level of say. Does anyone know how this actually works? Is Branson or whoever actually owns the company selling it for like $1 maybe?
Do "activist investors" ever do any good? When I ever I see them mentioned, it seems like one or more rich people and/or orgs buying in and forcing a company to do something it doesn't want to do, then cashing out with a profit and no concerns at all about what happens to the company afterwards.
...I do wish these people stop touting their "super excitement" at fail to launch because "some key targets" were met and data was collected. Inside, I'm sure they are gutted. I have no doubt that the bits that did work were a success and that's a good thing, but the launch as whole was a failure. Just tell it like it is. The investors know, it didn't reach space. A major part of the launch failed. They will look into what happened and the investors will make their decisions appropriately. Just tell us it fucked up and they will study what went wrong and fix it. Be honest.
I can see why it's not finalised during the editing stage, I can also sort of see why it may not be finalised just because you save it since you may not actually be finished editing it, so maybe it needs to be made clearer to the users when and how to use the "compress image" tools. Maybe Yet Another Pop-Up(tm) reminding the user every time they same?
Ta for the info :-)
Does the Google API give all the cookies to any extension asking for them?
Surely an extension only needs to read it's own cookies and, if it's say, an ad blocker, know the names of the cookies. Maybe the API should NOT be giving total access to all of the cookies to any extension that asks for them except under very strict and very carefully curated circumstances.
"It was never meant to benefit the consumer in Amazon's eyes. DPReview is loaded with Amazon links for everything discussed that Amazon sells. That alone would make me very suspicious."
As a relatively frequent IMDB user, I've seen exactly the same happen there too. They also seem to be moving parts of the info to the paid-for "pro" section too. Just waiting for them to buy up TMDB and/or TVDB.
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