* Posts by Nigel 11

3191 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Apple to support reps: Don't confirm Mac infections

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

UAC Unix-like?

Unix-like is surely a requirement to log in as or su root in order to install the download. Mere users don't know how to do that or haven't been authorized to do that.

On Linux there are some desktops where package installation has been "made easier". This, in my opinion, is a big mistake. Drinking potential poison should not be made easier, it should be made harder. Being able to do so by clicking "yup" is a big mistake, on any system where it's possible.

Planet with British weather found 20 light years away

Nigel 11

Not quite that simple

If the planet had rather more water than the Earth, it would be ocean over most of it (maybe with islands, or not). Anyway, ocean circulation might be able to maintain a habitable temperature, and not just in the twilight zone. Sure, some of the surface might be at 100C and some of the other side frozen, but the ocean depths might well be at 4C just as on Earth, because water is denser at 4C than at hotter or colder temperatures.

That's stil quite Earthlike. It's also possible to imagine a planet with many tens or hundreds of kilometers of water depth. I don't think we know enough to speculate what might or might not be possible in such ocean depths, any more than whether life can exist deep in a gas-giant's atmosphere. For all we know, there may be life within Jupiter, and a hot Jupiter might be an even better place to look.

Maybe the answer to the Fermi paradox is that all the aliens "know" that there's no point looking for life on low-gravity slightly damp balls of rock?

Heavy coffee drinking wards off deadly cancer in men

Nigel 11

Indeed...

The obvious things:

Stimulant -> raised blood pressure -> increased heart attacks, strokes?

Dark roast -> carcinogenic organic chemicals created -> digestive system cancer risk?

These are guesses. A long-term study of heavy coffee drinkers against a control group is needed, before coffee can be recommended for warding off prostate cancer!

Pint-sized 3D printer produced

Nigel 11
Thumb Up

Jewellery revolution

This might revolutionize the jewellery business, if they can print in wax or a acceptable plastic alternative for "lost wax" casting in gold or silver. (You need something that can be burned without toxic fumes or any solid residues).

3D graphic designing is a lot easier than sculpting tiny details in wax, and some geometries would be possible that are all but impossible to sculpt from a solid lump.

Intel: Windows on ARM won't run 'legacy apps'

Nigel 11
Boffin

Emulator?

It's not beyond the realms of possibility to run x86 code in an emulator / interpreter on an ARM system. Sure, performance would be seriously lower than natively, but for some classes of apps that may just be a matter of 10ms per user-interaction rather than 1ms. Provided Windows was done right, all system calls would be in native mode, and it ought to be possible to call some shared-library code in native mode as well.

Third mighty WD 'data tub' launched

Nigel 11
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What??

"Now these really would be big fat data tubs as EMC calls them, but best used for desktop systems rather than in RAIDed storage arrays, where the RAID rebuild time would be diabolically long."

That's utter BS!

You use RAID if you want to be sure that when a drive fails, you still have your data both safe and on-line. If you have 20Tb of such data, then a 5- or 6-drive RAID of 5Tb drives would be ideal. The only alternative is a larger number of smaller drives, also RAIDed.

Personally I'd call for RAID-6 not RAID-5, because the rebuild time will indeed be long, and the chance of another drive error during that rebuild time is therefore higher - perhaps 10x what it would be for 500Gb drives.

Apart from that, just let the system get on with it. Using Linux software RAID, access by users to the data on the array is prioritized over rebuilding, so performance isn't noticeably poor during a rebuild, and if the rebuild takes several days, so be it. (That's a RAID-6 rebuild so you can survive losing another drive during that window ... I might have trouble sleeping if it were RAID-5, imagining that the first drive failure might signal a comon-mode fault with the others).

With the alternative, using (say) 50 or 60 500Gb drives, you'll be replacing them maybe 10x more frequently, so the total time per annum in rebuild may well be much the same, and the human time spent drive-swapping 10x greater. True, with more spindles you may get more performance ... but in the applications I look after, performance isn't an issue. Our researchers just need many Tb of data on-line and safer than relying on single drives not to fail.

CATS to be saved by BLASPHEMERS after the RAPTURE

Nigel 11
Go

Sin to extract cash ...?

I don't think so, as long as you take the money in good faith and genuinely care about pets. You're offering someone peace of mind, which is a much better product offering than, say, Windows Vista and a pre-installed crapware bundle on a PC with 0.5Gb RAM. In the unlikely event of the Rapture during the pet's lifetime (or yours if shorter), with both yourself and the insured pets being left behind on a survivable earth, you'd use best efforts to look after the pet(s).

It's a perfectly ethical insurance policy. Unless you get a lawyer to write it, and he puts in the usual disclaimers about force majeure and acts of God. Hmmm, must find out, where and what did Dante envisage for lawyers?

Nigel 11
Pint

World's end

The reason there are many pubs, and even places, called the World's End. All the unrepentant sinners gathered there on the promised last day, to enjoy their last opportunity at enjoyment for, er, all eternity thereafter. When the day passed uneventally, they re-named the pub.

Nigel 11

The original typo

GOD ... DOG ... ?!

Russian rumor: Microsoft to buy Nokia for $30bn

Nigel 11
Black Helicopters

Echoes of Digital?

Seems like the Digital (DEC) story all over again. Market-leading high-tech company loses its way, suffers infighting verging on civil war, gets infiltrated by the worst sort of top-level managers, is sold out to loser(s) / competitor(s) that chiefly want a customer base, and to kill off all the great technology that wasn't invented by them.

With Digital there was the added spice of Kenneth Lay (later of Enron infamy) on the board. I've always wondered whether there was an active conspiracy within the company's board, to destroy the company. We'll probably never know.

And now Nokia treads the same path to oblivion. What a shame.

I'll be hanging on to my fairly ancient Nokia candy-bar phone that I kept as a spare. Like certain DEC microcomputers, I expect it to last for a decent approximation of forever. It was all downhill from there.

BOFH: Every silver lining has a cloud

Nigel 11

TRue BoFH territory

"the inch of water from the burst water main that had already claimed their floor-mounted UPS units..."

I wonder, did the on-call bod have enough of a clue to make absolutely sure that the *uninterruptible* power supply had indeed managed to interrupt itself in this circumstance?

Splish. Splash. Kzeeert, as the ripples reach the UPS "on" button height and convince the thing to make one last heroic effort at uninterruptibility.

Nigel 11

Yes, never.

It's a bad idea for your systems to be anywhere that might get submerged in what might euphemistically be called water under the influence of nothing more than gravity.

There's a BOfH to be written in which a competitor's subterranean datacentre gets cross-connected with a six-foot main sewer, at the same time that all of the blast-proof security doors mysteriously slam shut. Or something like that.

Italian bus driver goes completely hands-free

Nigel 11

Spain

Strange, I was in Spain recently and the driving didn't seem any worse than the UK.

Official: phones sting bees

Nigel 11

Obvious explanations for city bee success

Less insecticide exposure, a more natural habitat.

Urban parks are not heavily sprayed with insecticides, unlike crop fields. I suspect that many gardens and parks are "green", not sprayed at all.

More natural? Yes, many parks have large areas of natural meadow and wooodland, and even the carefully managed flower borders are more natural than the multiple square-mile monocultures that farmers create. Cities are also full of man-made nooks and crannies that bees can nest in, though that's perhaps more relevant to bumble-bees than honeybees.

Also, honeybees have been bred by beekeepers for many millennia. I wonder how inbred and weakened the species might be by now? Do wild honeybees still exist? (apart from the African ones ... crossbreeding domesticated bees with those was not a great success for humans, though the bees might think differently).

Nigel 11
Boffin

Inverse-squares law

The strength of EM radiation falls of as the square of the distance from the source. Therefore a mobile at 10cm is 100 times stronger than a mobile at 1m and 100 million times stronger than a mobile at 1km.

Cell towers operate continuously and at somewhat higher power than a single mobile, but for human phone users, even humans living adjacent to a cell-tower, it's the phone next to their head that's creating the greatest level of exposure. As for bees, the obvious study is of hives next to a mobile base-station tower, 50m distant, and 500m distant. I'd guess that the bees will be OK adjacent, but even if every cell-tower has a small radius of bee-confusion around it, that's unlikely to threaten the species.

The basis for my guess. If mobile EM radiation upset bees that much, there would be no bees at all in big city centres where cell density is close to saturation point. A visit to any park shows that's not the case.

Reg ed rattles the Red-Headed League

Nigel 11
Boffin

Completely non-racist technical comment

The gene for red hair is more common amongst Celts than other peoples. It's recessive, masked if one also has the genes for black hair. It might have been unique to Celts, many millennia ago, but since then it's been spread around quite a bit.

Flame bait for racists: outbreeding is better for one's children than inbreeding.

Crucial M4 256GB Sata 3 SSD

Nigel 11
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Wrong!

"Short of a major CPU upgrade, an SSD is the best performance addition you can really go for"

That's comparing chalk and cheese. There are many workloads (those involving intensive access to many smallish files) where a faster CPU will buy you very little, and an SSD will result in a spectacular gain. Booting an operating system tends to be one of these.

Use of Weapons declared best sci-fi film never made

Nigel 11

Odd...

Odd, that no-one is keen on "Look to Windward" or "Against a Dark Background".

"Look to Windward" has a relatively straightforward plot to film, and a Mind that mere humans can easily empathize with. Perhaps a bit gloomy, but some great movies are. I thought this might be the last Culture novel when I first read it - had the feel of an author closing the door on his creation.

"Against a Dark Background" isn't part of the Culture series, so carries less baggage. Again, could make a great film.

Microsoft poised to make biggest ever buy – Skype

Nigel 11
Flame

I really hate Skype

Skype is the ultimate security-by-obscurity product.

I don't know what it does inside, and I can't pin any blame on it except by correlation, but statistically in my experience, it's the PCs whose users have installed Skype that go down with malware infestations, and the ones that haven't that don't.

Microsoft resuscitates 'I'm a PC' ads to fight Apple

Nigel 11

One good thing MS are going to do ...

... is support ARM for Windows 8. Which will create a market for PC-format ARM boards with all the canonical PC interfaces. Which will mean that at last, low-power always-on LInux boxes won't be tied to obscure overpriced hardware, or graphics-deprived hardware like Pogo/Guru plugs.

As for tablets - no keyboard, fundamental flaw. I'd rather have a notebook-format device. At present there isn't even any cost saving for not having a keyboard.

MobileMe drove Steve Jobs to foul-mouthed fury

Nigel 11

USB current limit and extra power

I can confirm that USB ports shut down and generate a software warning if something tries to take too much current. On my PC, anyway.

If you need more than the USB current limit but less than twice as much, you can do what the vendors of some USB disk drives do. Supply a special USB cable with two host connectors, one for power + data and the second for extra power.

In the case of something containing a battery it should always be possible to charge off USB when the device is off, even if it would overload the USB with the device on. If you were really smart you'd have two batteries, with the device running off one while the other charges, with a controller switching the batteries around every few minutes. That way even if the power going out was in excess of the power going in, at least USB wouldn't overload, and you'd extend the runtime, though not to infinity.

Intel's Tri-Gate gamble: It's now or never

Nigel 11

Unlikely?

"Or, for that matter, Intel could license the ARM architecture and start buiding its own ARM variants in its own fabs, using its 22nm Tri-Gate process"

I'd have thought, more like a dead cert, than unlikely.

If Intel has the best process technology for low-power devices, ARM without question has a better CPU architecture for low-power devices like Smartphones. Put them together and what do you get? The best possible Smartphone CPU, that can either double battery runtime, or allow for a large cut in the weight of the phone without any loss of runtime.

If Intel suffers from the "not invented here" syndrome, Smartphone manufacturers will have to choose between i86 architecture running on the best Silicon, or ARM running on less good silicon. It won't be so long before TSMC or some other chip foundry catches up with Intel enough to put ARM back at the front of the pack. Best for Intel if it's Intel that makes the best mobile device chips.

What treasures will the US really find on bin Laden's hard disk?

Nigel 11

Kiddie-porn. MALE kiddie-porn.

Whether true or not, the more folks believe it, the better.

Nigel 11

It's a mistranslation

A more learned punchline would be Allah telling bin Laden that "houris" was a mis-translation between Syriac and Arabic, and then giving him his 72 sultanas (sweet dried grapes)

Oddly, sultana / sultanah is almost the same mistake in English!

Tales from the storage frontier: What's next for flash, disk and tape

Nigel 11
Alert

An error

"Tape's cost/GB stored blows disk away". Oh no it doesn't!

Prices just Googled: LTO5 cartridges about £50 (1.6Tb). 1Tb SATA disks about £33. Cost/Tbyte about the same. And then there's the cost of a very expensive tape drive to factor in. Disk just needs a hot-swap enclosure and a few caddies, or a raw-drive docking station.

Of course it's comparing different sorts of fruit. Tape wins for offline off-site storage, because a tape cassette is mechanically rather more robust than a SATA disk. On the other hand, Rsync or similar algorithms across a network to a remote disk mirror is far more accessible for things like recovering accidentally deleted or corrupted files, or doing post-mortems after TS hits TF.

Reg reader lost for words over blank HP keyboard

Nigel 11
Pint

I know someone who'd have wanted to buy one of those

Ever tried to buy a Ukrainian keyboard in the UK?

He carefully painted the tops of all the letter keys black. Then he equally carefully relabelled them in Ukrainian.

Someone should sell a blank keyboard with stick-on labelling for every known keyboard variant in the world. Also Klingon and Elvish.

New York attorney general escalates Sony attack probe

Nigel 11
Coat

Not an IT company?

More a disinformation technology company?

Seagate's terabyte platters make it the densest of the lot

Nigel 11
Boffin

Vibration

I've heard it said that one head actuator seeking inside an HDA would create so much vibration as to prevent any other heads from being stable enough to read or write. If you couldn't do seek and read/write concurrently, there wouldn't be very much point in multiple heads.

Reportedly, this can even be a problem between disk drives in a badly-designed multi-drive cage: if all drives are engaged in seek-intensive activity, the vibration mechanically coupled between them can degrade each other's performance. Or so the manufacturers of heavy-guage server towers with rubber drive suspension bushes claim. OTOH it might work on the same basis that wearing a paper bag over your head in the UK keeps the elephants away.

Nigel 11
Boffin

Seek time worse?

That depends on your usage pattern. If you are reading huge sequential files stored without significant fragmentation, then the 3-platter drive may have to do a one-cylinder seek 5/3 times as often as the five-platter one. A one-cylinder (minimum) seek is much faster than a random seek. It could also be optimised, if the start of each cylinder is rotated with respect to the previous one by an amount of rotation with a latency just slightly bigger than the one-cylinder seek time.

If your typical file is smaller than one three-platter cylinder, both drives will be pretty much identical.

While thinking about performance, isn't this technology crying out for use in a small-platter drive spinning at 15000 rpm or faster? With twice the competition's areal density, they could make an ultra-fast drive twice as capacious. The last gasp of the sub-Terabyte hard disk, before SSDs take over?

Pakistani IT admin leaks bin Laden raid on Twitter

Nigel 11

@Graham Wilson

You do have quite a few namesakes out there. Care to post your address as well? I'll guess not.

I do post under a unique registered name, which any computer-savvy person might hack through to my true name. I don't volunteer my surname directly because I have few if any namesakes out in the real world.

Nigel 11

Proof?

Proof is hard to come by, but there are a lot of former colonies to study.

I can't help comparing Vietnam with Zimbabwe. Vietnam was first colonised, then carpet-bombed by a super-power. Despite this (and a subsequent detour into communism) it's become a halfway decent country to live in. At least by comparison with Zimbabwe, which escaped the carpet-bombing. Then there's South Africa, which shares a very similar history with Zimbabwe, up until its first democratic election. Or Liberia, which never was a colony, and turned itself into hell anyway (or rather, a few of its people did so, with the rest powerless).

Looks to me like the influence of the former colonial power fades pretty quickly, compared to the influence of the politicians or megalomaniacs running the show afterwards.

Vote now for the best sci-fi film never made

Nigel 11

Anime?

I'm sure most of them could be filmed, even filmed well, if one counts Anime as film.

Also judging by Smeagol in the film of LoTR, special effects these days is quite capable of realising any sort of alien life-form. It's our extreme familiarity with human beings that makes computer-generated people look slightly wrong. Give it another decade or two ....

Nigel 11

A Fire upon the deep

True, far too much to make into one movie. Would work as a series (but how to afford the special effects in something made for TV?) Anime?

Sad, because it has something I haven't found elsewhere in literature (except possibly, Lord of the Rings). A sense of what it's like to be caught up in vast events ot only utterly beyond one's control but beyone one's comprehension, armed with little more than hope that one might be able to do something rather than nothing.

(Also the really cool idea that interstellar FTL bandwidth might be measured in mere bits per second, making the galactic net look a lot like the internet of the early 90s! )

Nigel 11

Filming Canticle

"A Canticle for Liebowicz" could make a great movie, but would almost certainly be made into a truly dreadful travesty of the book. It's chances would be somewhat better if it were made into a 2-hour drama or 3-episode series by an independent TV company or by the BBC (please? ). Unlike most, it could manage with a very small special effects budget. Spend the money on good actors instead.

Why probable travesty? Because most directors would not put their prejudices aside and let the characters speak for themselves. In a book the author can let you know where he stands without warping his characters. In a film, that can't be done.

BTW, it could also make an excellent stage play, unlike just about any of the others. Even better chance of getting it right in that format?

Lasers set to replace spark plugs in car engines

Nigel 11

Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons are mostly bad

True, a benzene ring with a substitution isn't carcinogenic in the same way as benzene. However, most of the polycyclics are evil carcinogens, with the notable exception of Naphthalene (C10H8, two rings), otherwise known as mothballs.

Nigel 11
Flame

Stupid taxation rules

It's stupid (utterly, completely pig-headedly stupid) to tax a fuel by volume, or to compare distance-per-volume. Diesel is a denser fuel. One liter contains more carbon (hence more CO2 when burned) and more energy (hence better mpg for cars of similar weight and power).

Fuel should be taxed as energy, so the tax per volume on diesel *should* be considerably higher than on petrol per unit volume. Not equal, definitely not less! This would allow motorists to select the best vehicle for their needs, on a taxation system that doesn't discriminate.

Diesels have a small thermodynamic efficiency advantage because of the higher compression ratio. This is more significant for big engines (HGVs) than for small ones (cars). Therefore for the best use of our crude oil imports, the majority of cars should use petrol. We can't do all-diesel: an oil refinery creates both petrol and diesel and has limited ability to adjust the proportions.

BTW I drive a diesel. The distorted tax system made that make sense. In a sane world I'd have chosen petrol (quieter engine, less pollution, with sane tax a lower running cost, after the expensive fully-synth oil and shorter service intervals that a diesel needs is allowed for).

Also BTW - there's a trade in refined petroleum products across the Atlantic, driven by this same tax anomaly. USA car drivers hate diesels (low winter temperatures may have something to do with it). So we ship surplus petrol to the USA, and they ship their surplus diesel back.

ARM's Intel challenger set for 2012 release

Nigel 11
Go

Hurdle depends on the physics

It won't be nearly such a big hurdle if energy costs keep rising, and the amount of processing you can do on an ARM system per watt-hour remains many times the same for an i86_64 system.

Of course, adoption of ARM has to be made reasonably practical. ARM boards have to become available as commodity products at a comparable price to an Intel one (say £60 for ARM CPU + motherboard competitive with Atom CPU + board of similar performance). They have to have standard interfaces (SATA, USB, ATX PSU connector, etc). And they have to run mainstream O/Ses. Windows 8 is going there. Linux already is there, but we'll need RHEL for ARM and a more standardised ARM board ecosystem before it takes off.

RIPA to be changed to demand full consent to monitoring

Nigel 11
Thumb Up

They will have to in future

If the law is changed so that explicit consent by both sender and recipient is required, that removes Phorm from a grey zone and puts it well and truly on the illegal side of the line.

Note also that either sender or recipient (depending on where you view it from) is not necessarily a customer of the ISP doing the interception. Note further that it may very well be a big company with deep pockets, and very unhappy that its customers communications are being made available to its competitors, even if only in the form of targeted advertisements.

(I'm aware that many readers including myself regarded Phorm's past activities as already on the wrong side of that line, but they're moving the line much further in our direction! )

Goodbye Phorm, at least from the UK. And good riddance.

The best sci-fi film never made: Also-rans take a bow

Nigel 11

Blood Music

Can't believe that Greg Bear's "Blood Music" wasn't on the list.

The one line synopsis: "A movie in which the world gets destroyed. Twice. With a happy ending."

The special effects would have to be very special. It might be even better as Anime.

Nigel 11

No Charles Stross

Can't believe there's nothing by Charles Stross on the list either. The "Laundry" series is the stuff of cult movies. Start with "The Atrocity Archives".

SCHEITERN: Scientologists want to friend schoolkids on Facebook

Nigel 11

Cult versus religion

A religion tells you what it believes. If it's a proselytising religion it'll do this ad nauseam even if you don't really want to listen.

A cult doesn't. It elther refuses to tell you its real agenda until it has hooked you with "lesser truths" and brainwashed you, or it maintains an inner circle of "true believers" with a secret agenda, and lies both to its outer circle and to the world, using the outer circle variously as camouflage, "useful idiots", and a source of recruits to the inner circle.

The Germans have recent experience of a cult within a popular movement. It was called national socialism, and the inner cult later became the SS. Come to think of it, East German communism was quite similar, albeit less genocidal. It was Stalin who coined the phrase "useful idiots".

Anyhow, I'm not surprised that the German state is now allergic to cults.

Tim Berners-Lee: Coalition mustn't be 'lazy' on open data

Nigel 11
Coat

Open-source analogy

open-source code tens to be reliable, because with lots of eyeballs, there's nowhere for the bugs to hide.

Open-data government ought to be less corrupt and less inefficient, because with lots of eyeballs, there's nowhere for the buggers to hide.

Blighty's Skylon spaceplane faces key tech test in June

Nigel 11

In practice takes practice

I'm sure that they must have said the same about cars once. Would (did!) need significant overhaul in a well-equipped garage between road trips.

But if it works at all, then one can work on making it more reliable.

XXX domain names go live

Nigel 11
Thumb Up

sex.xxx

Who got it and how much did they pay?

An errect extremity, for obvious reasons.

Seagate to buy Samsung's disk drive biz?

Nigel 11
Pint

All drives are prototypes!

Every drive you buy today is a prototype, in that it has not been tested for as long as you hope it will last. They do accelerated ageing tests (run them hot, or alternately too hot and too cold, shake them, power them up and down every ten minutes ...), but that cannot fully substitute for the passage of several real years. By the time you and the manufacturer know it's reliable, it's also obsolete.

I had a batch of PCs with same-batch Samsung Spinpoint drives. After three of those drives turned into bricks at power-up, with no prior warning signs from SMART, I replaced the other four pre-emptively. I don't hold this against Samsung, because I have experienced or heard of bad-batch problems with every other make of hard drives. However, it was my first brush with sudden-brick failure. All my previous failures in the SMART era either gave advance warning through SMART, or were recoverable using ddrescue.

Nigel 11
Boffin

That's the end of RAID-5 then

No, seriously.

RAID-5 data security assumes that if one drive fails it has no implications for the others. But if you construct a RAID-5 array out of identical drives (usually from the same production batch!) the fact that one drive has died makes is far more likely that the other N-1 are about to, because you may be looking at the first of a batch of common-mode failures.

And you have a RAID reconstruct operation ahead, which may put a rather greater load on the survivors.

If you bought four drives from four different manufacturers, common-mode failures were rendered far less likely. But now there will be only two manufacturers.

So time to drop RAID-5? Use RAID-1 / RAID-10 (mirroring) with 2-drive sets, one WD and one Seagate, or RAID-6 with all extremities crossed.

Libyan network hijacked for rebel cause

Nigel 11
Thumb Up

You *can* do that!

The lesson for everyone, everywhere, is just what can be accomplished and how fast it can be done, once the army of people who say "no" are ignored, sidelined, sacked, or shot.

NASA hands out second-hand shuttles

Nigel 11
Unhappy

Sad, not happy.

Unfortunately, no successor to the shuttle exists, and the USA is not working on one.

The purpose of (say) old railway engines or cars in museums is to record how we got to the current technologically superior state of the art. (Network rail notwithstanding!)

The only way to view a shuttle is as an unsurpassed past achievement now reduced to a tourist attraction. The mark of a country, or a civilisation, in decline?

Air cooled data centres are hot!

Nigel 11

Heat pumps

It should not be difficult to design an air-conditioning system so that the "waste" heat is pumped to somewhere useful. For example, into the building's central heating/ hot water system, so that in winter the boiler has to burn less fuel, and in summer the hot water is "free". (You might still have to dump some unwanted heat on the outside). Better still, in summer, run a ground-source renewable heating system backwards - heat up a chunk of earth or rock with the "waste" heat, and then pump that stored heat back inside when winter arrives.

Of course this is easier still if you design the server centre together with an appropriate quantity of nearby residential accomodation as your "heatsink", rather than as a standalone unit in the middle of a commercial centre.

It's called joined-up thinking, and there's far too little of it going on.

GNOME 3: Shocking changes for Linux lovers

Nigel 11
Flame

I hate it already and haven't used it yet.

What is it with GUI designers, that they can't do non-intrusive incremental improvements, and instead get this urge to rip up everything that we've learned to use, and start again?

I hated Windows 7 GUI, not because there was anything particularly bad with it, but because it got in the way of working in the way that had become second nature with Windows XP.

Now Gnome is going to do the same thing to me on Linux.

If these people designed cars, they'd have got rid of the pedals and steering wheel, and given us a joystick. If the car didn't already exist, that wouldn't be such a bad idea. But it does, and changing the user interface would be a very bad idea. It would kill people, which is why it'll never happen.

A GUI change is unlikely to kill anyone, but it's just as gratuitously annoying. A couple of hours of my life down the pan while I learn to use it, and probably another couple of hours and lots of silly mistakes made because I'm thinking about the bloody new GUI instead of the actual work. Multiply by however many million users you have and divide by a human lifetime. That's how much human life potential you have flushed down the toilet, in order to have your ego trip.

Yes, I hate all GUI designers.