Posts by Mark Boothroyd

Data Protection Act in the UK

Does the contact between yourself and Facebook, that you have to agree to in order to join up, include a clause to allow Facebook to provide data to 3rd parties?

If yes, then there really is no grounds to complain, (not legally anyway), as you've already agreed to allow Facebook to provide your data to 3rd parties.

If no, then as far as I'm aware Facebook would be open to prosecution under the Data Protection Act, because data gathered for one purpose, such as populating a profile on a web site, cannot be used for any other purpose without your explicit consent.

Sun engulfing the Earth

Quote: 'While the Sun should have some time to run before becoming a red giant - and so engulfing the Earth and much of the solar system'.

If I remember correctly, the Earths orbit, like all the planets, is slowing down, therefore slowly drifting away from the Sun. By the time our Sun becomes a red giant, we'd be far enough away not to be engulfed by the Sun. (Although the planet would still be dead by then anyway, so still not exactly good news!).

Plus our Sun won't turn into a Red Giant for about another 5.4 billion years or so, so the clock could actually be out by over a second by then ;-)

redirect their domain

There aught to be some process in place to shut sites down.

i.e. Find a virus etc. So tell the site. Site has x number of days to clean up. If the site still isn't clean a couple of days before x runs out, send a final warning. If site is still not clean on day x, redirect their domain to a holding page stating that the site contains malicious software, with an option to continue to the site if you accept the risks.

Already here!

HTC Hero is still on Android 1.5 and has multi-touch.

It's used in the default browser, image viewer and in the email app.

Results

It will be interesting to see the results of this after a while, see if this does actually make a difference to infection and fatality rates in the hospital, as compared with before they implemented the new process.

Co%t etc

@ 'Windows O/S are so slow because they forever thrash the HDD to death with the swap file...'

That just looks like you don't have enough RAM for the OS or what your doing on the system. Windows should only need to use the swap file if there isn't enough system RAM available.

Granted Windows isn't very good at managing swap memory when it needs to use it, but as long as you've got enough memory in your system, it shouldn't need to use swap memory.

The swap space is only there as a backup for exceptional circumstances, to stop your system from falling over because you've run too many apps at the same time or some app has decided it needs more memory than you actually have installed.

If your system is using swap all the time, then you need to get the system sorted out first.

I'm at work now using an XP Laptop, Got Word, Excel, Lotus Notes, IE, Firefox, half a dozen explorer windows, UltaEdit and two other bespoke apps all running at the same time (I rarely close an app once I've opened it) and the swap file hasn't been touched since I booted up this morning. 840MB of 2GB still fee.

@Ken Hagan: Fully agree about your comments around memory being more important than processor speed. It amazes me how many people buy PC's that are essentially crippled from new because the supplier wanted to shave 10 quid of the selling price (or increase their margins) and only supply the system with 512MB rather than 1GB of memory.

The amount of people who've brought Laptops to me to look at, because they are running really slow, to find out they've only got 20MB of memory or less free after just booting up, either because the system didn't have enough to start with, or they've got too much crap loading on boot, or both. £20 spent 2GB of memory and a bit of a clean up of the system and they think they've got a brand new machine, because it's finally running as the speed it should have been running at in the first place!

For me, if you using XP, 1GB should be your minimum for light work, 2GB min for heavier work. Vista or newer 2GB min, and when you consider that 2GB of memory is typically less that £20, even for Laptop memory, there really is no excuse for crippling your own machine by skimping on it. Even if your a gamer, 2GB of decent branded SLI memory is still only around £40-£50.

Even Linux appreciates the extra memory (I dual boot my PC's) :-)

@White Elephant

Plus the combination of power stations and an electric engine is far more efficient than the measly amount of energy a petrol or diesel engine can get from it's fuel.

@Wireless Signal

Quote: 'The shell in the XM-25's breech gets its electronic time fuse precisely set by a wireless transmission from the smartgun computer at the instant it is fired.'

I assume this would mean the shell would ignore any commands until it's actually fired, possibly even being completely dormant until loaded in the barrel. Only activating themselves once loaded in the barrel, and possibly not even arming the explosive system until after the shell has been fired (like a torpedo or missile, they arm on route, not in the launcher).

I would also expect the shells have a built in minimum range, to make sure they are a safe distance from the person firing the weapon before going off.

So worse case, even if the shells were compromised somehow, they'd go off mid air on the way to the target. So just make sure your not in between the two :-)

@A-level Physics seems so long ago

L1 is easier to visualise than L2, as L2 needs to be spinning in obit, although the laws are the same.

The rotation is not round an actual physical object, but round two physical forces that interact with each other. i.e. The gravitational pulls of the Sun and the Earth.

For L1, imagine something like a tennis ball with two lengths of elastic a few meters in length tied to the opposite ends of the ball.

You then have two people, A & B, pulling on the elastic in opposite directions, putting enough tension on the elastics to lift the ball up off the ground.

Something like this: A-------*-------B

So the ball '*' represents our satellite in L1, person A is the Sun, person B is the Earth.

The ball is basically sat in the middle point of tension caused by the elastic bands. So is basically the L1 point.

Now imagine a third person walking up to the ball pulling it away from the centre and trying to throw it towards the ground. The elastic would cause the ball to start swinging around the middle point. Picture a skipping rope going round, only with a weight in the middle causing the object to continue going round and round, rather than energy being put into it by the people holding the ropes/elastics.

Obviously here on earth with friction etc. the object would slow down and the orbit/amount of swing would decrease, until finaly is was sat back in the middle stationary again. But in the vacuum of space, with no friction to slow the ball down, it just keeps swinging around and around the centre point.

So although it's not actually orbiting something physical like a planet, it is in essence orbiting the gravitations pull of both the Sun and the Earth.

L2 is the point behind the Earth, so in the example above we'd have:

A-------------B====*

So the '=' is two elastic bands, the one from the Sun 'A' and the one from the Earth 'B'.

The rules are basically the same as above for L1, but person B has to run around peson A in a big circle fast enough to cause the ball to lift off the ground due to the certifigal forces.

Again the ball would try to find the centre point and just sit there, the L2 point, but if made to orbit around this centre point like in the L1 example above, it would simple keep going round and round that point (if in the vacuum of space).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point for the math :-)

@General processor on graphics chip?

GPU's are too specialist, essentially just uber maths co-processes geared around GFX.

But for general tasks, even ignoring the lack of x86 commands, GPU's simply don't have the grunt or capabilities that a standard CPU has. An OS running on a GPU would run like Vista on a 200MHz 486!

Although other math intensive tasks can be done by GPU's, such as protein analysis (folding at home via CUDA on nVidia as one example), and now more recently hardware physics acceleration via PhysX on recent nVidia cards (8, 9, and 200 series cards)(I believe ATI/AMD are also working on something similar for their cards now as well).