Posts by Nigel 11

Fishy?

It may not be fishy. Maybe just a bit like a hybrid car (which charges the battery while the engine doesn't have anything better to do).

Provided the PSU can supply enough power to run the CPU at peak usage and a small trickle to the battery, all is well (provided you don't expect a rapid recharge while playing games!) The halt-and-catch-fire bug presumably is trying to take too much battery charge current from the PSU while the CPU is maximally loading it.

I do wonder about engineering it like this, to save the small amount of money? or weight? that a PSU with an extra ten? Watts would cost.

Dim doesn't begin to cover it

Anyone who wants to blow himself up so that he can spend eternity with seventy-two perpetual virgins ... and thinks that he won't get bored, thinks that he'll still think he's in heaven after the first million years .... or billion ... or googleplex ....

Personally I hope that these people get what they are expecting. In the fullness of eternity, they will come to realise that they are in HELL.

Body clock synchs on daylight

Most people's body clocks free-run at a longer period than 24 hours, a few free-run shorter. (I seem to recall 26 hours is average, anything from 22 to 30 is normal). This is established by experiments where volunteers live indoors for weeks or months, deprived of any clues as to what time of day it might be outside.

Daylight causes our clocks to fall into 24-hour synch. To a lesser extent, so do man-made clocks and scheduling activity around them. A few unfortunates have medical problems that appear to reflect a built-in clock that won't synchronize to 24 hours.

I've always suspected that those infuriating individuals who expect everyone to be up, bright and shiny at dawn, are those with the 22-hour internal clocks!

WRONG!!

> All that heat from light bulbs is wasted energy.

WRONG. Or only in summer, or only in a warmer country than the UK.

In the UK, our houses need some degree of heating for at least 8 months of the year. Also, the hours of darkness are much longer during the part of the year when heating is required.

A filament light bulb burning near the ceiling is not the most efficient way of generating that heat, but it does convect around the room, and if we're talking flats, downstairs' lighting inefficiency becomes upstairs' heating.

A back-of-envelope calculation suggests that in the UK, something like 3/4 of the energy no longer emitted by filament light-bulbs, will be emitted by heaters and central heating instead.

Energy-saving light-bulbs are at their best in tropical places where not only is waste heat from light bulbs wasted all year round, but causes air-conditioners to waste yet more energy pumping the waste heat to the outside.

Infringing code

Code can infringe a patent whether it's closed or open.

The unfair advantage of closed-source code is that it may hide patent infringement well enough that the patent owner never notices. It's far harder to take a collection of binary blobs and decompile them to see what algorithms are being used, than to read commented open source code in a high-level language.

And yes, the way to fix this is to scrap software patents. The right protection for software is copyright (and/or copyleft). Literary authors have known for a long time that although plagiarism may be grounds for a lawsuit, mere imitation is just the sincerest form of flattery. It should be the same for software.

Spot on

Spot on.. Netbooks are cheap and come with Keyboards, Ipads aren't and don't. I'd take a lot of convincing that they were competing in the same market.

Windows 7 might be the culprit. Maybe until Intel has faster Atoms, the MS-philes have gone off netbooks because they're too slow running Win7? (That they come with 1Gb RAM rather than 2Gb doesn't help)

What I want, is an ARM-powered netwook with a small SSD running Linux and weighing under a kilo. Shouldn't be hard, with ~17 Watts less CPU and no moving parts. Is there really *no* market?

Lucky

Lucky for you they started failing during the warranty!

Dell - the company that used to use PSUs that were physically and plug compatible with ATX, but wired differently. Replace one of those with a generic (non)-equivalent, and ... kaboom!

Manifesto for a small revolution

Some of this I agree with. Certainly the chilling effect of the WEEE mafia on charity and giving things away.

I completely disagree about support. If the primary requirement is to give families access to the internet, you don't even need a hard disk in the PC. A usable Linux system can boot and run off a DVD, and apart from videos and and high-def photographs, you can save everything you need to store on a USB stick. Including extra apps, for those who get computer-savvy enough to download them.

A linux DVD will boot on virtually anything with an X86 CPU. Especially anything that's been around for a few years - it's mostly the bleeding-edge hardware that lacks Linux drivers. If you don't believe this, download a Knoppix or similar DVD and try it for yourself. It won't touch your hard disk if you don't tell it to.

So customise such a DVD to contain all the software that a kid in a particular school year will need. Give one to every kid. Kids not below the poverty line can run it on their home PC. Families below the poverty line will qualify for a repurposed UK.government PC. The letter with the DVD will tell them about that. At the other end, all unwanted government PCs go off to the repurposing agency, which handles data destruction and disposal of the few machines that can't boot the schoolware DVD, or which are too slow or too damaged to inflict on anyone else.

Where's the problem? Support: eject your USB stick if you still can, then hit the reset button or turn off. The PC contains no state. This will always reset it back to the known-good state contained entirely on the DVD. A reset-user-defaults script on the DVD would deal with times that the user's own context on his USB is knackered. Hit F-something during boot to access it.

Remember the BBC micro? Same concept, brought up to date.

In fact, if UK government was doing this, perhaps they shouldn't repurpose old PCs after all. Perhaps they should commission a tiny box with a 3-watt ARM CPU, a DVD and plenty of USB ports. Should cost under £100 in large-scale one-per-kid production. Why? ~100 less Watts per child, that's why. Less strain on poverty-line electricity bills. And less strain on the UK's creaking electricity supplies.

An even better idea if they start using the same box for all civil servant desktops ... a box that can't run MS stuff, except as a thin client stop-gap until the country goes open-source. I'm digressing.

Ku ... you ask why small businesses aren't using Linux. Well, I know a few that are. But mostly, before they talk to anyone who knows anything about IT, they have trapped themselves into PCs using MS-proprietary file formats talking to MS servers via MS-secret protocols. They've trained their staff to use proprietary software that isn't available to run on Linux. Try finding an HMRC-approved small-business accounts package that runs on Linux. Good luck. "There's no demand" and there never will be as long as Microsoft is allowed to keep pulling the strings.

UK Government is in the same trap, but it is big enough to call the shots. Unfortunately it is also dumb enough to make the same mistakes over and over again. They're smarter in Brazil.

RAM wiped at power-off?

Not as well as you might think. Someone might well be able to capture useful data by pulling the RAM from a recently switched-off or live machine and immediately re-powering it in another. You could do the swap in ten seconds, less with practice.

Sculpture for sale

> if I make a sculpture, I get money from and when it's sold, it's sold. No further money for me.

Not necessarily so. It depends on whether you also sell the unrestricted rights to reproduce it. I don't know the legal defaults for sculpture. I's probably rather complex. For example, I know that when a sculptor makes multiples of a sculpture cast in metal and numbered say 1/25 up to 25/25, it's thereafter illegal even for him to make more from the same original, let alone for anyone else to make copies (=fakes). On the other hand he can sell 1/25 up to 5/25, keep the master, and sell up to 20 more at any later date. If the number of copies is not specified, he can sell any number of copies later. This situation is pretty much the same as a musician selling recordings.

Personally I think the dividing line is whether one is using another person's work for personal gain. If it's a typical amateur YouTube video distributed for fun, I don't think that a musician whose work is used in the soundtrack should be allowed to complain. Call it free publicity. Perhaps there should be a requirement that the music is in some way incomplete or talked over, so the soundtrack can't be taken by others as a substitute for buying an authorised copy of the music. On the other hand if the video is an advertisement, or otherwise linked to something being sold for profit, then the musician has every right to claim a share of the profit (and also the moral right to refuse to allow his music to be associated with a commercial product that he objects to).

There are always grey zones. How much has to be the same, before one is plagiarising music rather than creating an original composition? In classical music, a fairly common form of the art is variations on someone else's theme, or a re-arrangement thereof. Thank heaven C21 copyright law was not around when Ravel orchestrated Moussorgsky's "pictures at an exhibition" ....

And reading between those lines...

... this is a feature which was insisted on by a marketing person, so that he could have icons which flashed purple and pink and jumped up and down while making Whee! noises.

An engineer pointed out that this was really bad system design with unlimited potential for security breaches.

The marketing drone pointed out that this was really cool artistic design with unlimited potential for supporting the Wubbly(TM) marketing campaign, and future highly profitable developments.

The engineer was over-ruled.

Wubbly(TM) was canned a few months later when someone higher up pointed out that it might cannibalise the sales of Microsoft Office. Which is why we have never heard of it and have been spared a proliferation of purple-and-pink-flashing active icons.

Unfortunately, not a proliferation of malware, because the engineer was right. (Engineers are *always* right, but no-one ever listens until after the design is changed without their approval, and the inevitable consequences follow).

All this is complete fiction based on no facts whatsoever. Have you got a better explanation?

Diatribe link

A short version: http://lwn.net/Articles/387610/

"We do not trust BIOS tables, because BIOS writers are invariably totally incompetent crack-addicted monkeys. If they weren't, they wouldn't be BIOS writers. QED. And in fact the Apple problem is an _example_ of this BIOS writer incompetence, not some shining example of them doing something right." (Linus)

I'm sure I saw him expressing similar sentiments at greater length somewhere else but I can't find the link.

Points

You obviously have made up your mind, but you don't help your case with non-sequiteurs like

"Sv with capital letter" -- as far as I know Google is case-insensitive.

"What time of year and which geographical location" - makes very little difference. Cosmic rays arrive at a pretty much constant rate from all directions. The radiation dose would be a bit higher near the Earth's magnetic poles, where there is a "hole" in our magnetic screen against the solar wind.

"Operating staff are well-protected". I know this. However, as I made clear, is it possible for security staff operating a body-scanner to step away from the person being scanned to behind a lead-glass slab? Security - get it? Also, airline flight crews are not and cannot be protected against high-altitude radiation for all hours they work in the air.

As for the figures, I doubt that they can be wrong by two orders of magnitude. If they are out by less than a factor of a hundred, it makes no difference in my concluding that the risk is negligible. If you are radiation-phobic, you should not fly, whether or not they have scanners at the airport. (You shouldn't visit Aberdeen, either).

ME? You cannot be serious!

ME? Stable?? Most of us thought naming ME after a seriously debilitating ailment was quite deliberate.

The last stable release of Windows was NT4 SP6, or arguably NT3.51, although current XP SP3 isn't bad. The last stable Windows 9x was Windows 98 SE.