Posts by Nigel 11

BTRFS?

The obvious competition for ZFS is BTRFS. If Apple are happy with GPL and adopt BTRFS, that's great news for both Mac and Linux users (and for that matter just about everyone apart from Microsoft).

Rockets are hopeless.

It's about time to do space properly. Use some vision.

A couple of decades ago, BAe had an outline design called HOTOL for a hypersonic air-breathing spaceplane (it looked somewhere between a space shuttle and Concorde, and was around the same size as a 747. If space is worth doing at all, it's worth doing properly.

For those who've never done the maths, rockets are hopeless, because most of the fuel goes into accellerating the rest of the fuel and a bloody great structure to hold it. Most of a rocket is burned up long before it even breaks the sound barrier. A spaceplane only has to carry a fraction of the mass of fuel, the rest is air which it collects as it goes, up to the point where it' s going as fast as possible within the atmosphere. This greatly increases the payload it can carry, and means that the entire vehicle would be re-usable.

Work with the physics, not against it. Engineering elegance, not brute force.

Next step after this should be a space elevator a.k.a. a beanstalk, but we don't yet know how to make strong enough rope. But do research it. Even if a beanstalk turns out to be impossible, discovering how to make really strong but light rope would be useful for earthbound purposes.

Just say no

I hope that these civil servants send back their application forms with comments such as "I wouldn't apply for one of these things even if you paid me £30"

Hopefully the Tories will win the next election and scrap the whole sorry scheme. Labour please note, I regard scrapping the ID database as so important for my future liberty, that there is no other issue that will convince me to give you my vote.

Morph or Virtualize the image?

Rather than making an actual image (albeit just a silhouette) of a subject's nude body, wouldn't it be possible to morph that image onto an appropriately-sized silhouette of someone who volunteered to be a template? A library of a hundred or so templates should suffice. Then those who object to a silhouette of their particular body being viewed should be placated. This also has the advantage that the operators could not be distracted by an every-one-different image of the persons being scanned, and would perforce have to concentrate on the important differences (the concealed objects that the scanner is there to detect).

Of course, this still needs some images of the body of a child ... if such a template silhouette falls foul of the child porn laws, then that law is an ass. I think they were told that, but they passed it anyway.

What do they do in the medical books that paediatricians study? Are they also all breaking this law?

Recycle the heat

It never ceases to amaze me that heat generated by computers is just thrown away. Now, blowing it outside is being trumpeted as a step up from pumping it outside!

In the UK, an office building needs heating at least half the year, during which time the server chiller plant should be capable of pumping the "waste" heat into the office central heating system, as a first step towards reducing energy waste. Yes, this would be a less efficient heat pump than conventional chillers, but since all the energy used in pumping also ends up in the heating system, that shoud not be an issue - the saving on the fuel not burned in the building's boilers will be greater.

As for the other six months, it ought to be possible to pump the heat into the ground, and then retrieve it in winter. This is already the basis of the least CO2-emissive form of office air-con: ground source storage, pump unwanted heat down into the ground in summer, pump it back into the building in winter. In the UK, the amount of heat needed in winter exceeds the amount pumped out in summer, so adding "waste" heat from computer systems would work rather well.

What's wrong with menus?

I *like* menus. Why slavishly follow Microsoft (or fashion)?

Anyway, at least with Firefox, there will either be an easy way to get them back, or someone will soon write a menu plug-in!

Problems, problems. Why DAB will fail.

The biggest problem - cars don't come with DAB, and DAB doesn't cope at all well with the inevitable interference in a moving vehicle travelling through dead spots and surrounded by moving interference sources. Since at least half radio listening is in a car (I guess), they'd better not switch off FM.

DAB could, in fact, have been an improvement for car radio. What they should have done, is transmitted the DAB signal with associated lower-bitrate versions of the same thing delayed, say, five and ten seconds. Car radios would buffer the high-quality data and when interference kills packets, splice in the low-fidelity version received 5 seconds later (by which time the car will have moved). The short degradation of quality would sound much like interference on FM does.

The second problem - DAB isn't green. DAB radios eat batteries at a frightening rate. They really shouldn't have made them to run on standard batteries at all, they should sell them with built-in Li-ion rechargeables like mobile phones or iPods. There are now a lot of people who think that you can't afford to run a DAB radio. Yes, I do know you can buy AA 2700mAh NiMH rechargeables and AA to C or AA to D adapters, but there are a lot of less clueful types out there, and it's still a pain to have to fiddle around moving batteries between radio and charger on a weekly basis. My old FM radio ran for about three months on one set of AAs. (Shame it ended up drowned in my bath - which incidentally, is why mains-powered is never an appropriate solution).

The third problem - DAB fidelity is terrible compared to FM. Maybe MP3-loving pop listeners don't notice, but DAB turns classical music from a sublime pleasure into a pain. The encoding generates non-harmonic distortion - tones that have no musical relationship to the actual notes. FM doesn't do this. Harmonic distortion - especially low-harmonic distortion - is far more tolerable.

The only reason I own a DAB radio at all is that I can listen to BBC World service in my bathroom without the cacaphonic noises one gets on Medium Wave. But my next household portable will be an internet +FM radio, I don't really care if DAB is part of the mix or not.

The final problem no-one seems to be thinking about, is emergency public service broadcasting. An FM transmitter is low-tech stuff, and not at all power-hungry. You could run an emergency service for days off a car battery. I doubt you can do that with DAB, and in any case, the DAB radios out there would have flat batteries within hours, even if they weren't mains-only.

I remember the 1987 "Hurricane". There could have been panic afterwards, with electricity and telephones both knocked out in parts of the country. But the BBC could still transmit FM, and people had battery radios to listen with, and so everyone knew what happened and that civilisation would soon get back on its feet. (Soon = 4 days, in some rural parts!)

Anyone know what this means?

"its rotational and linear vibration characteristics make it unsuitable for enterprise use" ???

Does this have meaning in engineering terms, that someone could explain? Or is it marketing bafflegab, intended to persuade "enterprise" customers to pay twice as much for a different model with extra gortleflab? Have had good luck so far with Barracuda 7200.n drives in "small" servers (more accurately, large capacity ones where speed was a lesser consideration than Terabyte count).

@AC with failing drives - I wonder if any of the other drive manufacturers would have been any better? I doubt it. IBM (pre-Hitachi) definitely not, from experience with the "click of death" in their "Deathstar" range. A batch of bad components can happen to any of them, and you'd need Google-scale usage of drives to accumulate meaningful statstics on who is better. And even then, past performance may not be a good guide to future performance.

C3

I thought that the Citroen C3 was the reincarnated 2CV - and a rather nice design, which isn't obviously retro like the new mini, but definitely brings the 2CV to mind.

This one just brings its own name to mind. Yuk.

Running cost not high?

"Using the high-yield figures gives costs per page of 2.51p for a black page and 10.5p for a colour one. Neither of these page costs is particularly high, when compared with other machines aimed at the same market. "

OUCH! Run a mile!

Seriously, if that's for industry-standard 5% coverage, it is considerably higher than for an HP Officejet 8500 MFC, which will also give you much superior colour reproduction for half the starting price. Which just leaves speed as its advantage.

I think Colour Laser printing may be a dead technology, except for high volume printers costing a good four figures. Mono headed the same way, though it can still save on ink/toner if you really never want colour.

The only question worth answering

Microsoft - what does Windows 7 do for my business, that Windows XP doesn't already do?

Not a feature list, please. A zillion new features that I never asked for and which contribute nothing to my business is a non-answer. In fact, it's probable that they'll confuse my users after the upgrade, leading to a drop in productivity and a flood of calls to the support desk. That's a negative, not a positive. I'd rater pay (yes, PAY) for continued XP support with user-transparent incremental upgrades. than for a flag-day upgrade to Windows 7.

So exactly what are the killer features that make the cost and the pain of an upgrade worthwhile?

As of this time, I am not aware of any such. Over to you, MS and your fans.

By the way, about cost. Very few of the analyses seem to include the old printers and suchlike, which still work perfectly well but which would have to be replaced for lack of Windows 7 drivers. Or the old software which we purchased for ££££ which won't run on 7 without spending ££££ more on an upgrade. Or the legacy software, whose vendor went out of business and for which no upgrade is available.

What will happen now?

I expect that a large number of voluntary organisations will shut their doors to non-adults (under 18) because of the financial cost and cost to their member's privacy of complying with the new rules.

I expect that a number of people will refuse to be vetted (or at least will refuse to complete a form that intrudes on their privacy), and will therefore cease to be able to support voluntary activities involving children. It's very likely that these organisations will then end up closing their doors, as they'll no longer have sufficient manpower to continue.

The end result will be children loitering on street corners for lack of anything else to do, falling into the clutches of criminal gangs and sexual perverts. This will cost uncounted children their innocensce or their very lives. But this may not be the worst of it.

Several branches of my extended family are today extinct, because the information voluntarily provided in the years 1890-1920 made it so very easy for the Nazis to organise their genocide in 1940. That genocide included the children. A worse form of child abuse is impossible to imagine.

You have been warned. Those who fail to learn the lessons of history, are doomed to re-live them. I just hope, not in my lifetime, but I fear for future generations. Once the data is collected, it will never be un-collected.

Incompatible

My guess is that it's just standard operating procedure at Southampton, to protect their interests where they have interests to protect, without anyone having to work out for each instance whether that is the case or not.

However, I do think that they should be obliged to supply a response to a simple request like this on a sheet of paper, should the requestor be unable to open the response in the encoded and DRM'ed form provided. It would, for example, be unreasonable to require him to purchase a software license from a multiply-convected monopolist corporation resident in the USA. Can this sort of PDF be read using free software?

Mileometer @AC

It's trivial to sabotage the mileometer. Just unplug or jam its sensor. (I don't know if the feed is still a mechanical rotating cable in a sleeve, or whetther it's gone electrical, but either way - no input, no recorded mileage).

Beyond that, same argument as before. Will disabling the mileometer be deemed to be an illegal act, or something that one is free to do to one's own property? And why?

The big question

Will I be able to read my books for ever, on the hardware of my choice? Or will they be forever tied to a Sony product that'll break down in a few years time? Also do I trust Sony's answer, given their previous form for DRM-malware distribution?

In any case, squashed tree is a better random-access device for use by humans, then anything with a screen. E-books are for people who never learned how to do non-linear reading.

Doh!

They would say that wouldn't they. It's like considering anything the Pope has to say about protestantism as reliable and unbiassed.

As for "few" printers, HP ought to consider legal action. (but of course they won't, because they also sell PCs and need Microsoft). hplip (open-source supported by HP) supports virtually their entire product range.

http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/supported_devices/index.html

"We recommend filtering access to port TCP 445 with a firewall."

Fat lot of use that'll be, once someone crafts a virus that goes around "pinging" port 445 on the inside of your firewall. Or does so using a trojanned system. And if 445 isn't open at all, how do you share files?

I almost hope that they do write such a virus... I'd love to see all the flag-wavers for Vista and Windows BSODded to a stand-still, while those of use who stuck with good (well OK) old XP get on with our work.

Malware.

You buy a PC with a one-year warranty. One year and a few weeks later, you get a massive lightning-induced mains spike that fries your PSU and your Motherboard. So you nip down to your local hardware shop and buy functionally equivalent replacements, and a couple of hours later your PC boots again ...

except it doesn't. According to MS it is no longer the same PC, and they expect you to pay for another copy of Windows in order to be allowed to continue using it. That's more than you spent on the repairs. No amount of arguing with the man in India (on a premium-rate phone line, to add insult to injury) accomplishes anything. To be fair, this happened to me some years back, so just maybe they behave better today? Anyone replaced their motherboard recently?

In my book malware is something that is installed under false pretences, which cannot be cleanly removed in a simple and well-documented manner. On this basis WGA is indeed malware. Also, I'd argue it's illegal under UK law. You were led to believe that it was a security update, which it was not. You therefore had a reasonable expectation that it could be rolled back like any other security update, which it cannot. And later, it deprives you of the use of your system until you pay Microsoft again for something you have already purchased, which at best is an unfair contract term. At worst, this is fraud followed by extortion, in the criminal sense.

Read once, in a secondhand book shop ...

... on a very rainy day. Stories about life in the Navy in centuries past. The book opened on this one.

An officer overheard one of the men say that he'd left a candle burning below decks, "in a barrel of black sand". Black sand? ...?? ...???? Gunpowder!!

The officer immediately went below and found the candle flame burning level with the gunpowder held back by a ring of wax. Very carefully, he pinched the flame out with his fingers.

Microsoftf?

I think I'd sooner trust a free and open-source hypervisor, than a closed one by Microsoft, however much or little money I paid to Microsoft for it.

First, there's the thought of closed Microsoft-quality software sitting where only the absolute highest quality code will do.

And then there's the thought that a multiply-convicted monopolist might decide to do something to give itself an edge. Maybe, find ways to slow virtualized linux systems down a bit compared to Windows servers? Maybe, to tickle bugs in the LInux system, so that (latent) coding flaws in Linux cause crashes a bit more often than they do when running on real hardware?

How efficient are these OLEDs?

If the efficiency of OLEDs (electricity to light conversion) is over 10% and they can be manufactured by spray-painting, forget display panels. Just create a panel that emits white light, and say goodbye to those nasty greenish CFLs that have been forced on us in place of light bulbs.

Light-emitting wallpaper (or ceiling paper), anyone?

This always happens, why??

Announce a great offer, get flooded with customers, fail to cope with all of them. Get bad press and pissed-off new customers telling their friends not to bother. Sometimes, fail to invest in the network so that the teething problems become a permanently bad service.

Better, surely, to announce a less inexpensive offer and catch only those who are REALLY unhappy with the competition. Use the extra profit to buy more kit to enhance the service. Only then, advertise a price cut (and future plans to keep on cutting). Get some more customers, but still don't get flooded. Advertise another price cut. Keep going until you conquer the world.

I'll wait a year or so to see if the Virgin service settles down as better than BT, cheaper than BT, both or neither.

VMware ESXi4 is free (beer)

Contrary to what the article implies, ESXi4 is a zero-cost download, just as ESXi3 was. They make the money selling the add-ons.

No VGA port ?!

Am I right to interpret the review as meaning that it has no VGA output? (Obviously a standard 15-pin VGA connector wouldn't fit, but a small connector and a cable with a VGA connector on the other end would not be hard to add).

By omitting this, they've made it useless to a large market segment. That is, anyone who wants a maximally portable device which they'd plug into a projector, and use to give presentations. Pity: there are clear advantages to a true hand-held PC that you can hold while facing your audience, and see on its screen either exactly what they are seeing on the screen behind you. It's just about possible with a netbook, but after 20 minutes or so the weight and size of the thing becomes a pain. (True physical pain, that is! )

Steam on wheels record

Perhaps worth mentioning, they've also claimed the record for steam powered motion on wheels. That was previously held by the "Mallard", a steam railway locomotive, which got to 126mph in 1938.

@Carl: the physics of a steam engine is intrinsically inefficient compared to an internal combustion engine. It's simply not possible to make a 40%-efficient steam engine. (well, not without using steam at implausibly high pressures and temperatures, which couldn't be engineered safely. Possibly not at all, because steam at high enough pressures and temperatures becomes an almost universal solvent that would eat the boiler).

Solar power is renewable and sufficient

""Most analysis suggests that even the most extreme renewables plans would struggle to deliver as much energy as civilisation uses now. "

No.

The sun delivers about a kilowatt per square metre. Tried and tested production-ready technology can capture this with 5% efficiency. Technology working in the lab can reach 20%.

Either way, if you do the maths, you find that covering a small fraction of the world's deserts with solar power systems can meet our energy needs. (The area needed is actually not very different to the area that the human race has already covered with roof or tarmac).

The problem is economic. Unless artificial penalties can be placed on the burning of fossil fuel, it's likely to remain cheaper to generate power by burning stuff until all the fossil fuel is gone. And given how much coal there is, that will be far too late for the environment.

A counter-example? Which we are living with.

Does AIDS plus this proof mean that the human race is doomed?

AIDS is, after all, a killer plague that leaves its victims free to wander around for a number of years, in many cases not knowing that they are infected and infectious. The saving grace is that it's not very infectious. It requires blood or sexual contact to be passed on, which limits its spread. Hepatitis-C is similar.

Leprosy and TB were similar slow killers, before the advent of antibiotics. THe human race survived them. TB can be spread merely by close proximity to an infected person. TB is becoming drug-resistant and within decades, it may again become an untreatable killer with low infectivity and a long incubation period.

And then there was the SARS outbreak, which was a lucky break for humanity. It wasn't slow, but it was sufficiently low in infectivity that small changes in human behaviour (face masks, not shaking hands, etc.) drove it to extinction.

So isn't the actual Z-plague story that we could not co-exist with *sufficiently infectious* zombies? But that's then so bleeding obvious, why bother saying it? And they've made the movie (the one where the human race loses) several times over.

But ...

I still don't know what Windows 7 will do for us that XP couldn't. Or, why didn't Microsoft throw Vista in the garbage can, and ship (say) "XP reloaded"? By all means, replace its kernel, if they can do a better job starting afresh. But keep the user interfaces we are familiar with, so there isn't a massive hidden cost while everyone gets used to the gratuitous rearrangement of all that we had got used to.

As for that bug that was latent in the Linux kernel for eight years: almost as soon as it was spotted, a fix was available. Most major Linux suppliers patched their currently-supported distros within weeks if not days. Any that don't(?), you have several alternatives to choose from. Contrast this with that bug in Windows that Microsoft recently fixed after about two years of ignoring it, and only because the black hats had started exploiting it. Ask yourself, how sure are you that there aren't any eight-year-old latent bugs as yet undiscovered in XP? And more importantly, if or when they are discovered, are you confident that they will be fixed within days? And even more importantly, what are your alternatives?

And most importantly, ask yourself who has most to gain from the discovery of such bugs after XP is no longer a supported operating system?

Electric heater - another missed trick?

You don't say whether the electric heater can be programmed to come on at a particular time in the morning, while the car is still plugged in. Or even just manually turned on, while the car is still off (or charge-filled or on standby or whatever this state is called for an e-car)

It ought to be programmable. Then, at the time you start your daily commute, your e-car is already nice and warm, and its battery is still fully charged. Otherwise, you'd start your journey in a cold car (like fossil-fuelled motorists) and lose a good fraction of the car's range making it into a warm car.

An old-timer's joke

"Never under-estimate the bandwidth of a 747-load of CD-ROMs"

Still ringing true.

Open?

"The format is LTO - Linear Tape Open - but if there is only one media manufacturer then the openness of the media vanishes"

Surely it's multiple manufacturers of the drives, and tape that could be manufactured by other media companies if it were profitable for them to do so, that defines Open?

Closed would be a patented tape format which could be manufactured only with the permission of the patent's owner. (Not including an "open" patent where the owner has agreed in perpetuity that anyone will be given permission to manufacture subject to paying the same pre-agreed royalty as anyone else - CDs used to, and for all I know still do, require a royalty payment to Philips).

Windows/Microsoft update

Microsoft Update uses Active X

For everyday browsing I'd much prefer to use a web-browser that does not implement this incredibly dangerous protocol (basically, someone sends you code, and your PC executes it!).

Windows Update is basically an item on the start menu that you click, which downloads and installs your updates. It uses IE as part of its engine, but I really don't see this as a kind of user-initiated web-browsing. Any computer I use, it's just about the only thing IE ever gets used for. It's hard to see how it creates any sort of monopolistic lock-in. You use Windows, you use a Windows tool to access a remote Windows service to download updates that are no use for anything except Windows. When I use Linux, I get my updates with a different tool (yum or apt-get) and the fact that FF won't play with Microsoft Update on a Linux platform is a total irrelevance.

What's the real point of contention? That Microsoft is trying to use this as an excuse for shipping every system with Internet Explorer, so it remains the default browser for newbies? Provided Microsoft's new browser-choice screen strips IE from the start menu and desktop and file associations if the user says he doesn't want IE, I can't object to the binary remaining on the system as a component of other tools such as Windows Update. The issue then becomes whether any such tool represents unfair leveraging of a monopoly.

Methinks the Opera folks are being a bit, er, operatic.

Contract law

A contract requires that a something of value be delivered in return for "a consideration". It's well known that "a consideration" need not be monetary - "a peppercorn" is sometimes used by lawyers, when both parties wish to create a contract, and it's not necessary for the peppercorn to be delivered if it's not demanded.

In this case Microsoft has obtained your sign-up details and (possibly) permission to use them in the course of its business and to sell them on to third parties. That could surely be held to be a consideration, in which case a contract might exist. Although given the army of lawyers that MS supports, I expect that there's some other sort of get-out for MIcrosoft.

Also, what is the applicable law? In the UK, there is legislation outlawing unfair contract terms. Saying "in perpetuity" up front and defining that to mean "until we change our mind" in the small print legalese is almost certainly unfair and therefore unenforcible.

If I ever have something I really need to hide ...

I'll use the right encryption software. Create several co-mingled encryption volumes. Stuff one with a load of mildly embarassing but legal sub-porn plus bank statements etc. Hand over the de-crypt key after protesting as much as possible.

It's all but mathematically impossible to prove whether the other encrypted + steganographied volumes contain anything other than random bits - in fact, you can't say whether they exist at all. The software is known to create a good few of them, with random contents and decrypt keys, never known to the user!

Also, how long before an enterprising company outside the UK sets up a network data repository and web proxy service that one can access (only) via an encrypted VPN? It soulds like the sort of thing that a Swiss should do. No use whatsoever for terrorists or people doing other things prohibited by Swiss law, but the country still believes in privacy and certainly wouldn't help any foreign government with its drive to catch "thought-criminals" or to put all our e-mails in its database. Which sadly, seems to include UK govt. these days.

Criminals, of course, would use the service in Paraguay. (No, I don't know if it yet exists).

Safest way.

Don't have anything to do with on-line assessment. Send them your return on paper.

True, they'll probably leave it on a bus, or lose a skipload at once.

But it's a read-only format. Any changes made tbetween my signed paper and the data in their computers are unquestionably their fault, either for screwing it up themselves or for failing on the computer security front.