Posts by John Smith 19

"that Dara Ó Briain (O'Brain?)"

The fellow with the Physics and Maths degree.

Probably a better choice.

Youu might add that Rowan Atkinson's degree is Electronic Engineering.

So probably quite a good choice for GPS or computers.

Re: Build Nuclear

" I don't understand why we would be doomed if we need to burn more gas (or even coal) occasionally. "

Because it will not be occasionally. As many have pointed out on this and other threads the target for onshore wind is 26% and offshore is 30% That's a little over 6 hrs in every 24 or 8 hrs in every 24 running. The expected situation is that A.N. Other power source will pick up the slack the other 16-16.8 hrs a day. Which sounds like a lousy use of that money.

The reason you're so impressed by the figures for the last few days is they are so damm rare. BTW at least one onshore UK site racked up 6% run time last year.

You seem to have a problem remembering those figures, despite them being mentioned frequently when this debate comes up and you seem interested in this subject.

"compare it to Google, Amazon (haha) and Microsoft -"

Wot, no Facebook?

"India are already researching "flexible riser" tech that will work at 6km. they have remote controlled mining machines on the seabed that slurp the material and send it skyward to a platform."

I did not know this.

I had thought this sort of deep vacuum cleaner tech was pretty esoteric with no one really looking at it due to the lack of demand.

Sounds like I was wrong.

Excellent news.

Re: What is this article supposed to be?

"Tables for layout are the devil's own work."

Thank $deity I thought I was going crazy and it was just me.

Re: It's an impressive feat.

Actually neither is correct.

Re-checking Computers in spaceflight, the NASA experience indicates the main cycle was 28 microseconds, or 35.714kHz. It's about 9% better than the Apollo AGC, which weighed about 90lbs (Voyagers was about 20lbs but only doubly redundant). Using COTS parts (albeit the rad hard SOS versions of 4000b parts) also probably made it a lot cheaper.

The 4kHz signal is something I read in an E&WW article and was described as the "heartbeat" but the NSA book describes it as being about 0.5-1 Hz.

TTFN

Re: Why sell a cure for baldness when I can sell you a pill that stops your hair falling out as long

"By the way the current worries about antibiotic resistance are partly the result of the cost research combined with the limited returns due to the short treatment courses. "

So it would give a better return on investment if the course was longer. IOW the drug was not quite so effective. If the drug company had a choice that's what they'd go for. Sadly for them it seems the discovery and development process is not quite so fine tuned to their profit predictions.

I think you've demonstrated my point.

Re: "This is a wake-up call for operators of these infrastructures"

"Ha ha! No."

I wrote should not "will" for a reason.

"I suspect it'll take aggressive and concerted government intervention with hefty penalties to wake up any of the folk responsible for these systems."

Perhaps loss of rights to any bonuses might focus their minds as well.

"Natanz was a USB stickjob IIRC, so no Internet involved, at least directly."

I think that's sort of his point.

If SCADA systems are vulnerable even when not connected to the internet PHBs can say "well it got infected anyway so why give up on linking them to the net and using that fixed (and expensive) leased line tech instead.

Re: I thought

"the whole FacebooK IPO was a Ponzi scheme."

No. In a Ponzi (I quite like the term "rollover") you use money from initial investors to pay later suckersinvestors.

In Facebook you run a campaign to convince people the "value" of the company is way more than it's total asset worth and its revenue (IIRC the P/E ratio for Facebook was in the 100s. IE if Facebook distributed all their profits back to their stockholders it would take them centuries to get back what they paid for them unless the price rose above what they paid for them).

That's more like a "pump and dump" scheme. Which appears to have been plaid with fake press releases for some firms and can happen amazingly quickly.

Re: ISP's, Telco's and mobiles say "We're *special*"

"I'm not so sure what moiles are when they're at home"

They are a mis-spelling of mobiles for which I apologize.

"but if you actually look at the details, many of these "critical controls" are only relevant to enterprise networks "

Given most of a countries information travels over internet, landline or mobile phone networks I'd call them all ""enterprise."

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding here.

Unlike gas, electricity and water networks there are two groups of users of the corporations computers.

Internal staff IE staff, who have some kind of job on the network.

Customers who do not but use them (but work through them) to talk to each other, web servers, other servers on the internet etc.

I would suggest that most of these rules apply to the the servers and PCs used by internal staff.

I'd suggest the computers they use and manage and the way they use them can be controlled.

As for the users, well how about ISPs opening an account with a minimal set of open sockets and notifying the customer by email when their machine wants to open non default sockets? Or how about an email on how many emails you sent this month.

I don't believe ISP's, telco's and mobile companies are that special and I do beleive they can do more to stop botnets generating the tidal wave of crap they do without DPI.

"Not sure I'm going to be very happy with that. Strikes me as an ideal idea for terrorist or rogue governments to point the nice beams elsewhere.."

It made a great plot device for a Ben Bova novel.

IRL it's b****it

JPL have been lead researchers on this and you can look up why the terrorist hijack idea is rubbish yourself.

Re: Something missing from this picture

"Thanks, but I think there's more to this than meets the eye so far."

What I've downplayed is the bill the foundry will charge you for the work.

I'd guess both ARM & and foundry will set one off charges and royalties based on projected volumes and the volume for such systems is just not that large.

That would include proving the chip design has the necessary radiation resistance, which AFAIK is not cheap either.

"although in at least one company I know of, they're now suggesting source-level testing is sufficient and that something like a change from 68K to PPC would therefore not need sw to be re-tested using the appropriate toolchain and binaries! Nothing could ever go wrong in the toolchain, could it)"

On the surface this looks reasonable because the software will run on the same hardware and only the code generators and debuggers are going to need to be different,right?

But IRL both of those are pretty big chunks of software in their own right and I doubt they will be alone.

The fail is strong with this idea.....

"I currently struggle to see why any clean sheet or new-generation design would want to be on anything other than ARM, w"

Agreed. The question is how often people have that opportunity.

Re: outage planning

"Ironically in some ways it can be quite rigid. Their infrastructure management is their SPoF."

A very good point.