Posts by Nigel 11

Re: Hold This (while I press the big red button)

Actually it's conceptually easy to trigger a supervolcano erruption. Drill down as far as you can, maybe 500m above the magma, then put a "Tsar Bomba" hundred-megatonne nuke at the bottom and similar nukes every 500m or so all the way to the top, and blow them all at once. Fortunately, I don't think even the leadership of North Korea is quite that crazy. (Scarily, ISTR that there is a supervolcano reservoir inside North Korea's borders).

Re: and I live on top of one of those 20

Definitely no joke. I'd be planning to relocate as soon as reasonably possible. Vesuvius errupts far more often than supervolcanoes. If you leave relocation until there's smoke coming out of the volcano, it may be too late to get yourself (and the entire population of Naples) safely out of town.

Statistics

No consistency problems. Erruptions of different supervolcanoes are not correlated. Erruption times of a single supervolcano are vaguely cyclical, but not anything like clockwork. So the earth has had two go pop in the last 100K years, and may have none go pop in the next 100K years, averaging out as one every 100K years.

In reality (a) you'd have to average over a few Myears to get meaningful statistics, and (b) the Yellowstone supervolcano is likely to go pop in the geological near future. (Say in the next 100k years with probability 0.7 or higher).

Re: Test your bl**dy software Red Hat

Which RHEL are you talking about? 5, 6 or 7?

They are all current. If you want the most stable production platform, and provided you don't *need* the newer features, 5 might still be the best choice. (Though 6 seems pretty darned stable to me).

Also you need to evaluate the anatomy of whatever bugs are hurting you. If it's a bug in, say, Samba, the chances are high that you'll find the same bug with Samba running atop SuSe or Ubuntu. I.e., it's not Red Hat's code or package-building at fault.

At least the bugs do get fixed. As opposed to being swept under the carpet until a black hat starts exploiting them, or being documented as features, or being told to migrate to an incompatible and expensive version N+1 or lose all support. Techniques frequently adopted by closed-source alternatives.

Re: Harvesting spare static electricity

I was thinking how completely irritating and disabling it is, if there's anything on your eyeball that doesn't move exactly the same way as the eyeball. Think of a grain of sand in your eye, or conjunctivitis.

If the implant does react exactly the same as the eyeball with no added mechanical resistance, there's no way to harvest mechanical energy.

Solar power sums: the usual figure is 100 watts per square meter harvested from bright sunlight. That's 100 microwatts per square millimeter (10 microwatts on a dull day, maybe 1 microwatt indoors with office grade lighting).

Re: Harvesting spare static electricity

I'd have thought a better solution would be those power cells that metabolise glucose.

Good idea for implants in blood-perfused tissue, but the surface of an eye is not well-supplied with blood or glucose.

The best way for an eyeball implant would probably be photovoltaic ("solar power"). Eyeballs are well supplied with light, at least while you are awake. Transparent solar cells can be made (indeed, large ones are being installed as windows on "green" skyscrapers).

Another way would be wireless power (I'm assuming only microwatts are needed). You'd need to wear a power transmitter elsewhere on your person if continuous power was needed. You might be able to scavenge power from a 21st century environment if continuous power was not vital. (ie, parasitise off WLANs and mobile phones).

Yet another way would be piezo-kinetic power scavenging (as in the Seiko Kinetic watches). Again I can see that working much better for implants in other parts of the body.

Re: Nothing new here

What is it that you need in the server farm, that you can do with hardware integrated on the same slice if Silicon as the CPU, that you can't do with a separate piece of silicon attached to an Intel CPU's external bus?

I appreciate that at the consumer device end, there are serious economies to be reaped by integration of a system on one chip. (Serious economies means maybe a few tens of dollars per system). In the server room, I don't think a $50 cost advantage will win any arguments. It needs to be a technological advantage, or a price advantage at least one order greater.

Ultimately, I do expect Intel will be fabbing the world's ARM CPUs with their world-leading process technology, but in the first instance for mobiles, not for servers. ARM will conquer the server room last, if ever.

Re: Excellent

We don't want them being used as fetish objects or clubs by the cave-dwelling man apes that will wander the post-apocalyptic wastelands.

Or maybe we do, provided they're suitably resilient. Something that's periodically rediscovered and regarded as treasure from the great ones of yesteryear may stand a better chance of finally being decoded, than something lost in a hole in the ground getting buried deeper and deeper with every passing milennium. Tableware made of a high-tech ceramic much tougher than mere porcelain might be a good choice. If some barbarian manages to smash it and dumps it in a midden, the information loss probably isn't very great.

Anyway you'd run both strategies in parallel, with very many identical plates for redundancy.

Re: I think that ...

The Earth will become uninhabitable a lot sooner than 5 Gigayears hence. We're actually rather close to the inwards edge of the habitable zone around the Sun, and the Sun is getting hotter as it ages. Unless "we" initiate major planetary protection operations within the next Gigayear (orbital sunshades, or orbit expansion), life will be over by then. Some estimate as soon as 300My, before Earth suffers thermal runaway the same as Venus. (OMG multicellular life is having its midlife crisis! )

If we want to leave a *really* long-term record, Earth isn't really the right place. Too much corrosive oxygen and water and those awkward plate tectonics, and a boiling sulphuric acid nightmare after the end of life on Earth.The Moon is better (dig in deep to protect against all but huge meteor strikes, and position-mark with long-life radioactives near the surface). An outer moon of Saturn would be better still, might even survive Sol going red giant and nova. (Ring any bells? ....)

Re: Equivalence Principle

Good question.

The gravitational interaction of two human-sized objects has been observed, and Newton's law of gravitation (inverse-squares) confirmed for masses of the order of kilogrammes at distances of the order of a meter. The experiments are very hard, and the accuracy isn't great. Some alternative theories have proposed that gravitation breaks down on milli- or micro-meter scales, and of course at much smaller scales still we get into quantum effects. These aren't yet testable.

Other theories posit that inverse-squares gravitation breaks down on the scale of a galaxy and above, and attempt to explain away dark matter and dark energy in terms of a different law of gravitation on very large scales. So far, such attempts have not been very successful in doing away with the need for dark matter and energy to explain the observations.

The equivalence principle is much better-tested for terrestrial masses, than Newton's law itself. But all the masses tested were made of conventional atoms. Perhaps fortunately, we don't have neutronium or large masses of antimatter to play with.

AFAIK the orbits of the Voyager spacecraft are still observed to be not quite as expected. Tantalizing, but they weren't ever designed as gravity probes, and their deviation from predicted orbit is just within the likely errors of observations.

Re: how?

I haven't worked out the details (which will be very complex, probably involving serious supercomputer resources to model) but there will be gravitational perturbations of each orbit by the other bodies. Here in the solar system, the existence and position of Pluto was deduced and calculated by very careful observation of the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Once they knew where to look, they pointed a powerful telescope at that patch of sky, and there was Pluto.

For this system we can test GR rather than simple Newtonian gravity, because the bodies are very dense and close. It tests the equivalence princible, because a Neutron star is made of Neutrons and a White Dwarf is made of ordinary atomic nuclei (ie with protons, and electrons between the nuclei). Short of a black hole, that's about as much different as two astronomical masses can be. (*)

I'll have to file this system along with Zircons dating of the age of the Earth. $DEITY is being extremely kind to us, providing us with the means to scientifically investigate questions we might have thought were forever beyond our grasp.

(*) I've always wondered whether bosons (commonly neutrons and protons) and fermions (commonly electrons) are gravitationally equivalent. Is there any way to probe this, even conceptually, given that the electromagnetic interactions of electrical charges are about 10^40 times greater than any gravitational effects?

Here on Earth, if you put the feather on top of the hammer and drop in still air, the feather will fall with the hammer. The hammer pushes the air out of the way, and gravity does the rest.

I'd be very surprised if Galileo hadn't tried this, thought he was probably smart enough to realise that the limitations of this particular experiment would be siezed upon by his enemies.

Re: Haven't you seen Fringe ?

Puncture? Almost certainly yes, if taped to the skin of the airframe itself. On the inner plastic skin, I doubt it. Further away, no chance. It's also unlikely that a small hole could bring down an airliner.

Re: Shame - Win8 needs a good virtual memory stress testing tool

Ghostery and NoScript...

Adblock-plus, Flashblock, and Tabkit (tabs down the LHS in collapsible trees, not along the top)

Privacy concerns about what is being sent to Microsoft (IE) or Google (Chrome) without my knowledge or consent.

Re: My advice to Mozilla

Mozilla doesn't have to hope anything. Firefox works just fine on Linux and anything else that might replace XP and Windows 7 on business desktops (including the Windows 8 desktop).

The day Microsoft announces EOL for Windows 7 without having an upgrade path that doesn't involve massive costs (including retraining all a business's low-skill keyboard-pokers), is the day Microsoft will have signed its own death warrant.

If I hadn't been around while Digital self-destructed, I'd think it couldn't happen.

There's actually a decent successor to Windows 7 in Windows 8, if only it could be made to boot to desktop with a 7-compatible login /switch user screen and start menu, and TIKFAM made so it can be defaulted hidden and configured completely unavailable using AD policies. Doesn't actually look too hard, if Microsoft would only stop pushing TIKFAM at business users who know they absolutely don't want it in any shape or form.

Re: What *other* apps are not available on Windows 8?

Personally I wish they'd decide that there never will be an official version of Firefox that works anywhere on Windows 8 except for the Windows 7-compatible desktop, until someone stumps up the entire cost of porting it.

If Microsoft think the non-availability hurts their chances of persuading people that TIKFAM is any more seaworthy than the post-iceberg Titanic, let them pay the Mozilla foundation to do the port. If Microsoft doesn't care to do that, tell the world that's why there's no TIKFAM-Firefox.

Re: Passive cooling - FOUND!

For the record, if anyone finds this post with Google, I have at last found my passively cooled ITX board with a faster CPU than an Atom. It's a Gigabyte GA-C1037UN-EU. The -EU is important because there is another variant with a fan and (I presume) a wimpier heatsink and/or a different BIOS that will moan if the fan isn't present.

The CPU is a Celeron 1037U, 17W TDP, which CPU benchmarks about 2.5x my Atom. It also takes up to 16Gb of DDR3 which should save on disk IO. The board (incl CPU) is inexpensive (£72 incl VAT and shipping) and even boasts 3 x SATA (one of which SATA-3, great for an SSD), USB3, and one E-SATA.

Fingers crossed. Intel shouldn't be marketing these chips as Celerons. They should market them as low-wattage low-end Ivy Bridge i3 (which they are), or even as faster Atoms. There's a Haswell version coming "soon", but I decided not to wait for it.

Re: Brogrammers

There's satire, and then there's just being a bunch of dicks

Indeed, and this isn't even a patch on Intercal

" It is a well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person whose work is incomprehensible is held in high esteem. For example, if one were to state that the simplest way to store a value of 65536 in a 32-bit INTERCAL variable is:

Re: Heisenbug?

Gnome 3.10 ... hopefully yum install cinnamon still deals with that. (Or you could have picked KDE in the first place).

Re: China?

Except, one hopes that the NSA or someone is reverse-engineering the BIOSes being shipped, to keep the other side honest. Booby-trapping all BIOSes shipped is the sort of dirty trick that you could get away with only once (and pay a huge economic price afterwards). Unless you posit a multi-national conspiracy, if it had been happening we'd have heard about it by now.

Unless absolutely nobody is checking.

Re: BIOS malware eh?

It's been around ever since some bean-counter demanded removal of the write-protect switch from a system's flash logic circuitry.

How it ought to be, is that to do a BIOS upgrade you'd start by taking the lid off the system and moving a jumper or switch to write-enable. Then update. Then set it back to write-protect. (Note: nothing to stop manufacturers shipping it write-enabled, if they know that their average customer is a moron. Intelligent customers would protect it on delivery -- or buy from a different manufacturer).

How much did removing one jumper save? One cent? Probably less. Bullet, meet foot.