Posts by Nigel 11

I know, no photo on my driving license either, but

Have you *never* been photographed by officialdom? Never held a passport? Never worked for an employer requiring photo-ID? Have you passed up your opportunity for a free bus pass (or intend to do so if you're not that old a fart yet?) And are you never going to move house (which will render your old driving license illegal, and require you to get one with a photo).

If so, congratulations! (though I'm not sure for what).

By the way, that driving license will expire when you reach 70.

Reliable backup, cheap media

You can today. It's to another hard disk. An external drive the same size as your internal drive (or somewhat bigger if you maintain some degree of archive of deleted data ).

Yes, disks are slightly fragile. You'll therefore invest in two or more of them. One to be making the backup to, while the other(s) is(are) in its padded box in your offsite storage location's data safe, or whatever lesser degree of security you deem acceptable for a home machine.

Don't forget to do a disk integrity test as part of your backup-update operation to catch if longtime-stored data is suffering bit-rot. Copying the entire disk to the null device to check readability is one option. If the disk suddenly bricks itself, that's why you have more backup disks.

Too much work? Maybe. But don't blame hardware for laziness.

Wrong to you, ya boo sucks etc.

Whenever I have to go forward to Win 7 on someone else's machine "it takes twice as long to do anything (even when I remember the exact convoluted way to do it)." Proving what? ... that whatever we're most used to is easier. Meh.

And my own opinion is that 7 is crap compared to XP for productivity. But apart from sysadmins, who produces anything with an OS? Users run applications and produce with their apps. Office 2003 or 2007 or 2010 looks much the same on XP or on 7 or on a Mac (yes, I know, it's 2011 on a Mac).

The main reason for not upgrading is the cost of forced replacements. It's not just elderly PCs that are still OK for XP. It's also a host of printers, scanners and other useful gadgets that don't have Windows 7 drivers. Some places have "legacy" software that won't run under "7" and which will cost a fortune to migrate upwards or away from. Or even worse, software that has no migration path at all (vendor defunct, source code buried).

The other reason is the retraining cost. Even if you and your staff are capable of retraining themselves, their productivity will drop while they are un-learning the old way of doing things and finding out what the new way might be. And if that's going to happen all over again with Windows 8, delay makes more sense than burning bridges.

Table? On a train in the UK?

You don't know what luxury you enjoy. The only table you get on the lines I use is your lap. That's on a good day. Otherwise it's standing room only. On a bad day, cross out "room" and insert "sardines". On a really bad day add "next to a flatulent garlic-eater, at a stand-still for three hours and counting, at 110F and rising"

Physics

Silicon CPUs won't go much above 4Ghz for good physical reasons. Assuming otherwise was the big mistake Intel made with the P4 design, which let AMD get ahead for a while.

Parallel processing of one sort or another is the only way we're ever going to get chips 10x or 100x the power of a current Intel or AMD CPU.

Maintenance issues

A brain is highly fault-tolerant, at least with respect to well-distributed failures. Neurons die as we age. One of the things we need to do is work out how to make networks of millions of CPUs similarly faut-tolerant.

Why bother? Curiosity, and an assumption that at some point in the future the electricity bills will be reduceable. The Met office always has a next-generation weather-forecasting program to hand, which they can prove is better than the program currently used in all respects except one. That one respect is that on the currently available hardware, it forecasts tomorrow's weather several days after tomorrow!

Hydrogen really not a problem, outdoors

In the open air you can't get an explosive hydrogen/air accumulation. Hydrogen on its own has no explosive properties. If someone gets really careless and manages to ignite the balloon, it'll burn strongly upwards (away from them).

It's not well-known that the majority of the passengers in the Hindenburg disaster survived. Of those who didn't, many died of wounds caused by jumping from too great a height, or by heavy metal components of the airship falling onto them. And that was one helluva large balloon.

The fatal flaw of the Hindenburg, was using an inflammable material for its outer skin. You wouldn't do anything that silly, would you?

Penalize attempted rule breaches!

This might help just a little.

Applying for a TLD should involve signing something like the following. "I have read the <rulebook>. I declare that this application is not in breach of the mandatory security requirements <reference>. I agree that my application fee will be forfeit, if this declaration is untrue".

Nice little earner for the registrar, pocketing $18K or whatever, whenever another phisherman with big ideas (and big pockets) comes along.

Not sure what one can do about insane use of arbitrary TLDs but applications for .localhost .lan etc. should be in breach of the security requirements (rule 1, list of illegal TLD names). They're also clearly in breach of the spirit of TLDs, which require the applicant to have a good claim to that TLD. localhost etc., are in the public domain courtesy of many years of widespread (ab)use.

Personally I'll be surprised if many companies actually bother. It might annoy or antagonise more customers than it could possibly attract. Doesn't everyone and his dog use the Google (or Bing) search bar if they want to find, say, "Nike"?

Sputnik-1 redux

Picking up a radio emitter is not a problem provided you know where to look. Think of radio-telescopes picking up emissions from other galaxies close to the edge of the observable universe. Compared to that, something emitting 100mW pulses from low orbit would be trivial.

Tracking the micro-sat from launch would be the tricky bit. Guiding it into any particular orbit harder still.

Another idea that might work is a lightweight corner-cube relector and an earth-based laser illuminator. After all, they measure the distance to the moon by laser-illuminating a corner-cube that the manned moon missions left behind! One for low earth orbit could be much smaller and lighter.

Sixty seconds at 4680 Amps??

A car battery that can recharge in seconds?

If 6 hours at 240V 13 amps is the right amount of charge, then that would be 6 minutes at 13 x 60 amps, or 60 seconds at 13 x 60 x 6 = 4680 Amps. About 1100 kilowatts, or 400 kettles.

Think about what a 4680 Amp plug might look like. Think about a tiny fraction of that current going into resistive heating somewhere it shouldn't. File under cloud cuckoo.

Oh, raise the voltage, I hear? 46 Amps at 25 kilovolts. Yes, that might be manageable on the connector front, but could it ever be made available to Joe Public? File this one under carbonized squirrel.