Posts by Nigel 11

Re: Far more than "IT" person of the year

I wouldn't even say that the NSA and suchlike are evil. They're just government agencies and they probably think they are doing good. At present one might credit the governments of the USA and the UK with some degree of good intent, or at least benign intent. But do we all know what is proverbially paved with good intentions?

The road to hell.

There's also the advice about "Power corrupts ...." and I think it's becoming clear that they are stealthily acquiring more power and becoming more corrupt. Yes, for sure we're on the road to hell. How can we get off it?

Re: Not sure...

Carry on using 6.x then. Until 2020

Or even 5.x (EOL in 2017, with three years extended support available after that) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Version_history

Re: Better Idea

>>Put an end to this stupid millisecond nonsense<<

How? Maybe insist that all trades are input by a human being. Computers alllowed as advisors, but not permitted to enter directly.

Would destroy anything based on high-speed decision-taking and ultra-high leverage. The first, because a human can't input a trade in less than a few seconds. The latter, because the risk from fat-fingering it would be too great.

Just because something can be done does not mean that it should be done. Trading faster than a human being possibly could is one of those things. Doing so with ultra-high leverage puts the stability of our entire financial system at risk.

Re: solar power will be the limiting factor on what humans can do in the long run

Todays nuclear reactors have outputs that reach the MW range on a surface that would take a solar farm half a continent to replicate.

Bollocks! A small fraction of the Sahara desert alone could generate more electricity than the human race currently uses.

The Solar radiation flux onto Earth's surface is about a kilowatt per square meter. Allowing 10% for harvesting efficiency and a factor of two for dark night-times. you need 20 m^2 per kW power-station output. A large power station is a Gigawatt: a million kilowatts, or 20 square kilometers of desert covered in solar panels.

Controlled nuclear fusion would be great if we could get it working (economically). So far, we can't (at all). Certainly worth continuing to try, but ... in the meantime, solar panels really do work, and offer an alternative should fossil fuels become uneconomic or accepted as too damaging to use. Solar panels are already cost-competitive with fossil fuels where there are deserts in close proximity to cities (for example, in Arizona).

Re: I don't understand

Maybe something to do with the fucking great piece of lead that it's stored in.

And probably even then, the driver wants a good bit of inverse-squares law on his side. Like most of a truck's length?

Now you know another reason why slip-streaming or staying in a truck-driver's blind spot for a long time might be bad for you!

Re: I never saw the point of this concept.

Meaningless strings of words, I agree. But can't you see that the "Pheasant plucker" is a minor masterpeice of something like wit? The moment you notice where you might go wrong, some perverse subsystem in your brain wants to go wrong. And there are so many ways to choose from!

Re: Why a hexagon?

Why can't it be because of a years-stable period-3 wave in the planet's equivalent of Earth's jet-stream. Watch long enough, we may see the vertices move, assuming there's anything more stable to define their location relative to (which on a gas giant, I doubt! )

Short of closing down the internet how *can* the authoritoes close Bitcoin down?

Anyway, it's not new. Since the earliest days of the Chinese Empire (and probably earlier, but the records have perished) there have been trustworthy(*) alternative criminal(**) organisations which would move your money across borders and around accountancy barriers for a fee. Typically you hand over some money and receive a token, such as a roughly torn sheet of paper. You later present it to a representative of the same organisation at another location, and they match the other torn piece and then hand over the agreed amount of cash.(***)

(*) for certain values of trustworthy

(**) according to the authorities, who ask more in taxes than the alternative asks in fees.

(***) this practice may even be the origin of paper money instead of gold, brought back from the underworld by the authorities, who could then back several banknotes with the same piece of gold and get away with it for centuries. Behaviour which any self-respecting criminal gang would be ashamed of.

Re: Title is too long.

£10 + £1 is still £11 whatever way you cut it.

ROFL. Whatever legal way!

One of the oldest "victimless" frauds was dropping all fractional pennies into a personal account, instead of rounding or dropping them into the bank's own account.

Re: Calm down...

It's to stop the "flip it over" problem that USB connectors seem to magic upon themselves - Cable won't go in - Flip it over - won't go in - flip it over - goes in.

A USB connector is a Fermion not a Boson. You have to rotate it 720 degrees before it's back in the state it started in.

(A corollary of his is that no two USB memory sticks can ever have the same internal state :-)

Re: Resistance is futile

@Wzrd1 - a fundamental misunderstanding of CMOS. In a pre-CMOS computer, a bit was represented as a flow of current. It's consuming power even if it's just maintaining an unchanging logic level for minutes on end.

in CMOS a bit of state is a package of charge - maybe as little as 100 electrons. No current flows except when a bit of state is chaged, when the electrons have to be removed from a high voltage (probably representing a 1) to a low voltage (0). CMOS can work on micro- or nano-watts. Witness the hand calculator powered by a couple of square cm of low-grade PV panel, illuminated by an energy-saving dim light bulb (and operated by a dimmer one - sorry). Easy when you want single-digit IPS not MIPS.

Moore's law is based on a scaling law. If you shrink the devices by a given factor, reduce the voltage (between 1 and 0) by the same factor, you have constant power per unit area of chip and that factor squared more devices to play with in the same area. The limiting factor is that atoms are discrete, and today we are at the point where the gates of the FETs can no longer be made much (if any) thinner. So the scaling law can't be followed any further, and the first sign of trouble is that the chip runs too hot because it's suffering resistive heating from various sources.

Outsourced / offshored?

Unless, of course, it's outsourced and offshored, so that if someone is "fired" he just gets swapped with someone making a mess of some other organisation's IT. If the entire outfit to which it is outsourced is "fired" the same principle will apply: you'll end up with someone else's rejects, either directly or indirectly (though mass hiring, firing, and forming new companies to tender for the work)

Outsource the catering and the cleaning. If it's mission-critical it must be done in-house. If it's mission-critical and it fails because of under-investment, the CIO (and possibly CEO, rest of board) should be taken out and shot.

Re: Law seems clear

"forbidden to have a screen mounted where the driver can see it. Turned on, or off. I don't see how this defense can fly.

The Google glasses weren't mounted, your honour. They were being carried. Carried, I hasten to add, in a way which in no way impaired the ability of the accused to drive safely.

It is a conspiracy, in that there are public plans to deny us choice by discontinuing FM broadcasting at an unspecified future date. Until an announcement is made that FM is here to stay, be very afraid for your music broadcasting.

Once that announcement is made, expect DAB to die out. The only reason it got any market penetration at all, was a lot of people bought a DAB set to try it out on the back of a load of media hype. (This customer hasn't binned his DAB set because it does represent a slight improvement over BBC World Service reception on AM. The other preset buttons remain unset).

Re: Quote "XP is like 13 years old. Get with the 21st Century."

If a stalker knows enough about me to impersonate me to obtain my vehicle's location, they likely know where I live already as it'd be one of the security questions so why would they go through the hassle and risk of exposing themselves further?

That might be the point. Someone you want to avoid, doesn't know your location but has access (legally or otherwise) to various large collections of data.

The other reason is that an automobile "accident" is much easier to arrange and much less likely to lead to a full murder enquiry, than any other sort of "accident". And the more they knew about your habitual routes, the easier it would be.

All hypothetical. Some people care about their privacy more than others.

Re: More on win8 please.

any new laptop purchased now is going to come with win8, I'd like to know exactly what evilness MS has in store for those of us who want to dual-boot linux.

Some pointers

Make those restore DVDs as soon as you've unpacked it. Then make another set just in case. Assume that your first attempt at converting it to dual boot will brick it at the software level, and then you can only be pleasantly surprised. (Unless you manage to brick the hardware - far too easy on certain Samsungs, supposedly now fixed in the BIOS. They blamed Linux until someone demonstrated you could also brick one trying to dual-boot two versions of Windows).

Use Google. Read about the generics, and as much about the specifics of your model as possible.

It's probably running in secure boot mode as shipped. This can be turned off, from within Windows 8. I'd recommend that you do. After that you just have to master re-partitioning a UEFI disk, installing Linux into UEFI partitions, and installing Grub2 or other boot manager. Alternatively you can have "fun" trying to install a secure-bootable version of Linux.

The quick and easy way for casual Linux usage is to download free-beer VMware player for Windows and run your Linux inside Windows. (Yes, I know, leaves you feeling unclean just thinking about it. But easy) The other way around requires paying Microsoft more dosh for a retail Windows distribution (or playing fast and loose with your employer's volume license ... which might just cost you your job so don't.)

Re: massive blackmail database being compiled...

The scary thing is that "big data" techniques mean that the database does not actually have to be compiled. They can just do a search for dirt on anyone who is deemed to be a legitimate target, through just about everything that's ever been recorded about everyone. The NSA is filling a data centre mot much smaller than Wembley Stadium with 4Tb disk drives. We're all in there. If you've had an extramarital affair in the last decade, I'm fairly sure they can work out when and with whom, just as soon as they get the order to look for dirt on you. If you have one this next decade, it will be a dead certainty they'll be able find out.

I didn't really get "Rule 34" when it came out. When I first read it I thought it was for laughs. Now, it's starting to feel as chill as the bad stuff in the Laundry, and a lot closer to real life. Skynet is unlikely. ATHENA, on the other hand ....

Re: good, but ...

MRAM or RRAM (HP's memristor tech).

But chip stacking as a technology might be valuable in conjunction with either of the above, to deliver truly awesome bandwidth. Or, stack RAM on the CPU, to reduce interconnect speed-of-light latency. Stacking is almost certainly worth researching.

Re: Just don't get me started on

Caesium for an even more explosive reaction. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSZ-3wScePM (Open University broadcast. I have to wonder how many out-takes before they got the Caesium just right :-)

at least this one is under cover.

Actually I'm sure that's what I'd hate most about it. It' s possible that an Amazon warehouse has a transparent roof, or even just skylights, but somehow I doubt it. A day spent with nothing but industrial high-efficiency lighting would really suck. I once threatened to resign if I wasn't relocated to a location with a window. (They moved me rather than calling my bluff. I meant it).

I could walk eleven miles in a day and enjoy it (if sunny and outdoors) until I reached my 40s. I probably still could after a week or two toughening myself up. Ask someone in the army what they're expected to be capable of. And that's before hostiles start shooting at you. And they say they enjoy it!!

Re: Comp Sci degrees were sold to many kids looking for a well paid job....

You don't want a CS graduate. You want a Physics graduate who enjoys programming.

Re: 13 billion light years old or 13 billion light years away?

Back to relativity and that difficult concept "now". The light we observe has been travelling for an estimated thirteen billion years. The space it has been travelling through has been expanding. It was a lot less than thirteen billion light years distant when that light set out. By extrapolating, we can work out that light emitted by that object at this time (insert relativistic caveats) won't get here in thirteen billion years. Forty billion might be a better guess. Or not. It's a long time to wait.

If the expansion of the universe really is accelerating, maybe that object will move right outside the boundary of our observable universe at a future date. (In that case it will become more and more red-shifted, until the redshift becomes infinite and it disappears).

Re: Not as safe as people believe

To say nothing of PCs and other electronics with exploding power supplies. I once watched a switch turn itself into a small flamethrower. It's a good thing I was there to yank its power cable. Another time a PC PSU went BANG and took out the power to about forty rooms.

And don't talk to me about water heaters.

Time to re-christen the local pub?

There are lots of pubs called the World's end, because back when Jeremiahs were proclaiming the end of the world on an annual basis, the local reprobates would gather at the pub for one last drink before their eternal damnation. When that didn't happen, they had a few more drinks and renamed the pub.

Anyway, after that ramble, I'd suggest that this estate's local be re-named the Cock and balls. With a perfectly clean pub sign, of course. And a Google maps reference.

Re: Wintel irrelevance == x86 irrelevance

If it doesn't need Windows, it doesn't need Intel.

Hmmm. How else can I buy a really fast server for crunching numbers or big data using Linux? Say 4 CPUs, 32 Cores, and half a Terabyte(*) of RAM? Sun's gone. HP IA64 systems don't make financial sense unless you want to run VMS. Much the same for IBM Power-based systems. AMD have sadly fallen behind again, their Opteron glory days are behind them. GPGPU computing has its place, but so far, it's a fairly restricted subset of scientific programming for which a GPGPU is the answer. Don't think I've missed anyone.

(*) There's such a machine crunching away a hundred yards or so from where I'm sitting. It's attacking large sparse matrix problems. If you know what that means you'll know why it needs that much RAM.