Posts by Pete 2

There IS a case for web censorship

Personally I would thoroughly support any initiative that helped protect children and other impressionable members of society from exposure to the Daily Mail.

I like!

That 2GB of flash sounds handy - instantaneous bootage (well, close) and having all the ports along one edge is definitely a good move.

This is exactly the sort of competitive reaction that benefits consumers and users. Anyone want to buy my Pi?

And on the first launch attempt

... a shudder went through the Trekkie fan base as it aborted and they all heard a voice in their heads:

"Cap'n the engines canna take it!"

Pulled a rabbit out of the hat

> [Apples] ... magical and revolutionary products

Dang, you mean Apple have patented magic?

It's who you know

So the best thing a crim can do is to make sure his/her speed-dial list contains the numbers of the Top Cop, a few Members of P, some high profile journalists (ex-NotW, 'natch) and some extra-litigious lawyers. Just call them all up from time to time to establish credibility and then go about your business. Maybe for extra points, some photoshopped happy-snaps of said crim and high-profile copper's head in compromising positions.

If you do get your phone's collar felt (or downloaded) it's a good bet that once those "VIP" numbers and piccies start to appear, the data they took will get conveniently lost.

Kiss of death

> without any significant government help. ... Some people think that ought to change

Possibly the worst thing that could happen to the UK space industry (and by that I don't mean satellite TV) is government involvement. If they want to help, they can promote space science in education, make permits, planning and finance easier to obtain but otherwise STAY OUT OF THE WAY.

The UK has an unhappy history with space exploration - which was all government sponsored and fell prey to the whims of bean-counters far from the action. If there's to be any continued success or growth of the UK industry, it should learn from the lessons of the 60's and keep government interference at arms length.

Just like WotW

Even NASA's three-legged "fighting machines" are as described in the book - though they're smaller than I imagined

The cost of things that don't happen

We reckon that the cost of a production server taking an unexpected dive averages about £5,600. It might be a made-up figure, but it's one that drives a fair number of budgetary decisions around here.

Yesterday there were no server crashes ... kerrr-ching! Look at that, we've "saved" the company over £300 grand (52 prod. servers) in a single day. Surely for that massive saving, the IT department deserves a rise? In fact, there haven't been any unscheduled outages for a couple of weeks now, which puts the IT "savings" at something greater than our departmental budget.

Given how many (ahem) crashes I personally didn't cause last year I can boast a saving to the company of several million. Surely that means HR should employ more IT staff - none of whom cause any crashes, thus saving even more? Strangely, they're not buying it.

However, I'm sure that with their accounting methods the BSA has IT staff coming out of their ears. Even if they count the cost of an outage at much, much less than we do, they will still be in the money by employing more and more people who don't kill their computers.

What goes up

... must come down.

Sooner or later someone's going to ask the embarrassing question: what's their intrinsic value? That can only be quantified by the amount of living, typing product they have available - the number of actual people who use the site regularly. Unlike Google, which doesn't have "users" in the conventional sense: people who have created an account and visit the site frequently, FB is dependent on the number of people who actively partake of the site and receive their advertisements. It doesn't take much (ref: every other social website that's floated) to realise that users are a fickle bunch. Just because a site is popular, now, with todays generation of teenage web users, that doesn't mean that todays 8 year-olds will necessarily want to use such an "old" technology in 5 or 6 years time. If that does come to pass, then the shelf-life of FB and its stock value could be about as perishable as a piece of fish.

Let me guess

leaves on the server?

20,000 cars?

Sorry, but unless the volume is expressed in olympic swimming pools I have no idea how much (or little) that is.

How long before they start rebroadcasting Youtube?

If they need a source of cheap programme content (and they will, 'cos they won't be in a position to make any themselves - not on their budgets) there's already a thick vein of unspeakable dross ready and waiting. I can see that in the few minutes per hour that is NOT advertising, the lone employee will be tasked with doing searches for "Oxford" or "Southampton" on YT and then plugging whatever comes out into the TV transmitter.

Can't wait.

Adapting adaptive optics

> OpTIIX is exciting because if the "adaptive optics" experiment is successful, it'll pave the way for much larger, free-flying telescopes in the future

Uhhh, don't almost all ground-based professional telescope already use AO? Haven't they developed it for many years in order to reduce the effect of atmospheric turbulence on their cameras. Why would you need to put this as an "experiment" on a space-based telescope that was above the atmosphere, if you only want to look at stars through it?

However, if you wanted a space-based telescope that was looking downwards through the atmosphere, to spy on people then I can see the benefit - and where the funding would come from.

Now, I appreciate that vibration from all the machinery inside the ISS makes it a no-no for anything that needs precision pointing, but the simple solution to that is (as has been done since the beginning of the space era) is to NOT put your telescopes on a platform that wobbles it's way around the planet. Hubble, JWT and all the other observation satellites managed this decades ago, so it's mystifying why we suddenly need a telescope on what is probably the least suitable orbital location.

I can see that some of the other attributes of this experiment: kit telescopes, are useful. But AO on an extra-atmospheric 'scope? What's it really meant for?

Stag or Moose?

People want the shares simply because there's a demand. The plan being to buy what you can then sell quick (stagging) for a profit. Since FB is such a massive company, those traders who need a "balanced portfolio" will be forced to hold some FB stock, just to maintain the balance - irrespective of how many veiled profit warnings FB announced this morning.

Now, the problem is that if there are more announcements (FB said they don't make as much from mobile users - and their proportion is growing) or if the markets decide that FB isn't the golden child they thought it was a year or two back, then all the fizz goes out of the proposition and those left holding shares at the IPO price would have to take a loss if they sold them.

Personally, I don't give a rat's arse either way. They say that the only way to make a million quid on the stock market is to start with 2 million. And given the way it's going these days, it's no longer the sure thing it was in the 80s (when you literally couldn't get hold of a broker on floatation day ... grrrrr).

As it is, the history of internet stocks shows that they all go through an initial boom, followed by a decline into nothingness. The only question is was FB's boom last year, before they floated?.

The british version

> Venus in rare Sun crossing next month

Clouds in common Sun crossing next month, next week, tomorrow and most of the rest of the "summer"

Though if you do fancy a shot, £20 for an A4 sheet of Baader film for your telescope is fine. Comz1 is correct - just make sure you buy the ND5 film, not the "weaker" one meant for astrophotograhy.

Doesn't come in "pork" flavour

> previous "stealth wallpapers" developed for the defence sector cost roughly £500 per square metre, the researchers reckon rolls of this new decor will be reasonably priced,

It's probably exactly the same stuff, made in the same way by the same people. The only difference is this is closer to the true price, without the added "overheads" of dealing with a government department that has an infinite supply of money at its disposal that it's determined to (over)spend.

Development costs

> "It’s not entirely clear to me why the Beagleboard is so expensive ... "

We are told the Pi took 6 years to develop. I'm guessing that during the time the developers had proper jobs and regarded the Pi as a sort of altruistic hobby. It definitely wasn't going to be a source of income during those years.

Consequently all the time and resources used for the development process are a sunk cost and don't have to be recouped from the unit-price of the eventual product. That's what makes the Pi different from commercial offerings. In these cases the years (or more likely: months, for time is money) of developer time has to be paid for - in salaries, equipment and facilities.

We also know that given a large enough production run (say for a mobile phone) these costs don't add a great deal to each board when you're producing a million of them. Even less if all you have to do is add new features/power to an existing design. However for a low-sales, niche market that only produces one-hundreth the number of units, those same costs will contribute 100 times as much to the price of each board made.

Maybe the longest lasting legacy of the Pi won't be introducing children to little motherboards, but will be the creation of a low-cost, open sourced basis for future embedded hardware.

Cause or coincidence?

> a definite 200-year-long cool period which corresponds with the onset of the "Homeric Minimum"

Maybe we'd better all stop writing ancient greek prose, just in case.

Standard bureaucratic response

> "The government agreed with our assessment that the central system for assuring major projects was not optimal," the NAO says, and the government has since set up the Major Projects Authority (MPA)

Add more committees and paperwork. It's a poor substitute for talented project leaders, but it's the only substitute we have.

A tale of 2 chemistries

Question 5: In comparison with steel, what is pure iron like?

Harder

Magnetic

Softer

-----------------------------------------------------------

Q1, part (c) Describe the action of heat on:

(i) Sodium hydrogen carbonate

(ii) lead(II) nitrate

For further marks, determine which question came from (a) the AQA Extracting metals and making alloys section on the BBC website and (b) the 1973 O&C Chemistry O Level paper

s/social/computer/

Was it Yes Minister or Dilbert who suggested the idea of countering a disastrous project failure with a meaningless reorganisation?

It does seem to me that a random swapping of job titles won't excuse pouring £17Bn down the drain - though given the amount of talent in government, a quick reshuffle is probably the best they can manage.

However, if our overlords and rulers are so worried about IT "waste", why not change the certainly useless Chief Social Scientist role into something useful - like a Chief Computer Scientist job? In fact, given government's history with IT projects, they probably don't need an actual person to fulfill the role. A framed notice will do - it would read "It'll cost more than you can imagine, it'll be delivered late or not at all and it'll never work properly".

That'll go nicely ...

... with the three channels of snooker on at the moment.

(For those who want to check: BBC2, BBC HD and channel 301)

Let's apply the same standard more widely

ISTM the accusation of "wilful blindness" is fitting to almost any situation where a person in power should reasonably have known what was going on. Whether that person is running a company or a government - maybe the time has come to start investigating more people, including our (ex) leaders and holding them to the same standard.

Though really this is just the start. The big question is: what happens now? Presumably all the NI/NoTW underlings who are still the subject of police charges will be duly processed, but the guy at the top will just walk away?

Biscuits or Pi?

There are lots of embedded PC formats. Apart from the fairly popular Mini (and Micro)-ATX there is also a 3½ inch "biscuit" format and a 4 inch PC104 size, which seems to be about the same as this new offering.

These are intended for embedded use - as is the Pi, though given the power and heatsinking requirements of Intel's latest attempt, I'm not convinced that's the market they're aiming for.

It's definitely not a Pi-worrier.

How inappropriate!

An idle thought: surely no town's tourist board would sink so low as to make up a story like this, just to attract visitors. Would it?

Sadly, Wirth's Law will keep on going

"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster"

Luckily for us, the annual increments in processing power have masked the continual degradation in software performance. If Moore's law does hit the buffers, someone somewhere is going to have a 50 year project on their hands to fix all the inefficiencies, crocks, bad design and unoptimised code.

Maybe once there is an actual incentive to write fast, efficient code instead of the traditional "do whatever it takes, just deliver it by Monday" approach to software development, we'll have a renaissance in programming. If we're lucky, we may even find that once people start writing well-designed, reliable and efficient software that programmers start to win back some professional esteem and respect, too.

Moisture sensors

I am told that Mac have internal moisture sensors that "go off" when dampened and are used by their service people to deny warranty claims. It may be that a kid with a good aim didn't actually destroy the Macs, just dampened them enough to void their warranties. Although to describe them therefore as being "destroyed beyond repair" may just be a ploy to get the insurance (or the child's parents) to pay out.

... miss Olympics 2012 deadline

Never mind. There'll be another olympic deadline along in another 4 years. I'm sure that with enough effort and hard work, they'll be able to miss that one, as well.

Buy what you're told to

> You're not, after all, going to buy a crap TV just because it can connect to the internet.

But a lot of people do buy a crap TV because the nice person in the shop tells them how wonderful it is.

A lot of people have their TV adjusted completely wrongly. Colours (set to the garish "demo" mode), sound may or may not be stereo, treble/bass heavy and until recently may even be watching analog channels (Hi, Mum!), no matter how often their diligent and loving sons explain the "benefits" of digital, HD and even calibrate the set with test images. They know what they like and no amount of telling will convince them otherwise.

Less useful than it appears

> support extended from three to five years by Canonical.

The "support" only covers the O/S - not the applications. So while you can get bug fixes and security patches (and maybe some O/S enhancements, too), your applications will remain frozen in time.

During the three or five years that this release will be supported, almost every piece of accompanying application software will get updated (or die off). However, there's no guarantee, or even hint that it will be possible to install those upgraded apps onto 12.04 due to library incompatibilities, pre-requisites or the like. To get all that stuff to work, you'll still need to move to a newer Ubuntu - one that does supply the libgodknowswhat.so.3.99 when all that's downloadable for Ubuntu 12.04 is v3.98, even though there's ostensibly still support for the release. Operating systems are only useful if they can run apps. When the apps move ahead of an O/S, it becomes obsolete, no matter how much or little support it's provider gives it.

Those aren't banned words

That whiteboard is the source of every tabloid headline (and probably article, too) over the past 10 years.

Since it's got "boffins" on it, maybe it includes all El Reg headlines, too?

We know this is excellent advice ...

> "Technology diplomat" Ben Hammersley – who has worked as a journalist ... Hammersley said that companies shouldn't do community give-back as some kind of add-on after they'd made lot of money, but that the business should be "focused" on the community from the get-go.

... As this guy has been so successful at running design companies and startups in the past. Oh, hang on - no he hasn't. He's never done anything entrepreneurial himself, all he's done is sit on the sidelines and write about other people's companies.

So while his flowery prose and inspirational word-smithing sounds all very fine, he has no practical experience to back it all up (and worse: no personal investment in what he's advocating). So really he's just pontificating about how he thinks things should work. Beware the pundit - inventing new words ("podcast") doesn't mean he knows how to run a tech. business.

Puppets on a string

The thing to remember about all TV presenters, reporters, interviewers and correspondents is that first and foremost they are de-facto EMPLOYEES of one or other public body. As such their only allegiance is to keeping the pay cheques flowing. If that means toeing the company line, tugging the forelock to the arts graduates and capricious "Head of ..." who can sideline you on a whim ("he/she just doesn't have the right image, darlink"), then so be it.

These on screen people are not there because of their qualifications, nor for their ability to explain / educate or even entertain - though it's almost all entertainment, these days. No, they're there simply because they have an insubstantial, undefinable quality that makes them "right" for a piece to camera (or because they contribute to a quota). Consequently, if the planning meeting decides that they should spend a day learning to put angle brackets around words and call it "programming", then that's what they do - and are grateful for the opportunity.

For all it's cuddly "auntie" facade, I doubt if there are any other publicly funded organisations in the country that are quite so institutionally totalitarian - or as unaccountable in their dealings with "talent", as the BBC. So you can't really blame the presenters for the crass, simplistic or simply inaccurate content of their reports. They're all just standing in front of cameras, having their strings pulled by unqualified, dull-eyed production-types back on the mothership.

Plan for world domination

The difference between shipping "precious" (only until availability increases and prices drop) metals to Earth from asteroids and bombing the planet from orbit is not much more than where the delivery comes down - and how fast.

Success is not being at the top of the food chain, it's being at the top of the gravity well.

One more

Poor change testing

Going in to a change with no certainty (or even a reasonable prospect) that it will work. Whether that's because of lack of time to work out how to do the change and then carry it out, live - or a lack of preparation due to test/mirror systems that don't actually reflect the production environment - changes being assigned to staff who have no real clue what they're doing (but it was their turn) - or even just systems that are intrinsically untestable and have to be changed "hot". One place I was involved with made over 12,000 production changes a year. Of those 60% were to undo earlier changes, correct improperly applied changes or to add diagnostics so the support teams could work out what was going on - oh yes: then another change to fix the problem and another change after that to take the diagnostics off again.

The cost of impetuousness

> the US military would like to be able to deliver a warhead to any spot around the planet in less than an hour.

Whereas most other global purveyors of firey death would be happy to wait an extra day or two and send it by a more traditional means: DHL, anonymous shipping container, back of a Transit, etc.

Still, I suppose when you simply have to make the 6 o'clock news, extreme measures are necessary

Goo Nuk

I think I see the problem

> the new movement ... <name of website>

It's kinda difficult to get people to become "netizens" by promoting a website to them. If they can get to the URL they're already converted.

Maybe next, she'll start promoting letterboxes with a mass-mailing campaign.

Where e-books go to die

> I can understand why people never like it when I ask what will happen if they go out of business, but it annoys me that they haven't considered the possibility.

We all already know the answer to this: they'll just disappear, along with the company (and your only recourse for complaint). it's not that they haven't considered the possibility, it's just that they have nothing to gain from telling you that all your investment in virtual goods and chattels are just that: virtual. They don't really exist, except in the benevolence of the supplier. And when that goes away, so does all the stuff you've paid them for.