Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"My previous boss has just called me and offered my old post back, but with a 70% pay increase for a 37 hour week amongst other benefits. Rest assured I won't be continuing after my '3 month probationary period'."
Which sound great.
*if* he keeps his word.
Better check the small print on the new contract *very* carefully.
"Apparently the guy had slept through his alarm and turned up at 8:55 "
It would be interesting to speculate wheather he'd be as forgiving if it was *you* who'd slept through your alarm.
But I'd suggest you do keep a note of his name just in case.
"In my experience, you can tell a lot about a potential employer by checking the state of the loos. Make sure you check the ones that the staff use, not those reserved for "guests" or "visitors" (unless comparing the two). If there are such reserved loos, that is also a big signal."
I tried this.
They'd sealed one off for me to do the drug testing in.
"On plutonium, the LAST thing you'd do, if you were after bomb grade Pu was got for a design with a long refuelling cycle/high fuel burn-up. That's when you get a build-up of Pu240 and higher actinides, which are a very bad thing when you're fabricating a bomb. So, if anything, CANDU types (no enrichment, on-line refuellable) are a much better option for bomb making than LWRs of any sort."
That I did not know. I've always had the impression that CANDU *should* have been more successful abroad *because* of its no enrichment fuel requirement. BTW The Wikipedia AGR article *suggests* that CANDU was on the list of reactor types the UK was considering for (what at the time) was going to be its "next generation" UK reactor design. It was very much my impression that the AGR concept was *very* much the in-house design of the CEGB, which ran *all* UK generating (and distribution) capacity at the time which meant *all* other designs would get a mark down as NIH.
And the rest is history.
But remember all that is past is prologue.
" Positive void coefficient means the reactor will increase in power in the event coolant starts to boil at the wrong places or coolant channels become clogged, causing (partial) meltdowns and similar issues."
I don't think that was what caused Chernobyl. But it certainly would not have helped.
"I think the point here is that we are mad, as a high energy consuming country, to have abandoned nuclear energy design, a new field teeming with possibilities, simply because gas looked cheap. "
I think you need to look at the history of the programme. Descriptions of AGR's "Building a Swiss watch in the middle of a field." Or a construction programme *decades* behind schedule. Or the belief that "The market will provide" religion of Margaret Thatcher's government.
IMHO *any* nuclear programme must be able to handle the burn up of nuclear waste. MSR is supposed to do this but Hitachi claim ABWR do as well. I'd *love* to see the MSR in the UK but no one is offering that.
"The AGRs were horribly over-budget and had a pretty terrible reputation for reliability when they first came onstream, "
That was sort of my point.
"It's a real shame as some of the ideas were good ones, such as producing steam at the same temperature and pressure as a coal-fired plant allowed commonality of equipment between stations."
One of those simple high level design decisions with *huge* implications (and hopefully cost savings).
"I'm still trying to work out why the Canadians have never tried to sell CANDU in the UK."
I think it's still a bit difficult to get the level of bomb grade Plutonium that HMG was keen on getting out of its reactors. And possibly they surcumbed to the Canadian disease that "American is better".
One little point people don't seem to want to talk about is the PWR's were developed out of the US ICBM sub programme. It's *key* requirement was high energy density. So if something *does* go wrong it can very bad very fast. Rather ironically the Chernobyl designs were rather *low* energy density (with some unfortunate design flaws) which should have coped *much* better in an accident. Unless run (as I believe the official report put it) "Murderously incompetent sons of w**res."*
*That may not be an entirely correct description of the accident report.
That'll be a first for the *British* nuclear industry. I think the AGR's managed to be about a *decade* behind schedule on average.
Got to love that cost plus contracting and many firms did.
Of course with Hitachi on the case the new ABWR's will likely be smaller and cheaper.
"government need to grow up a bit more like China and just imprison anyone who protests at national building projects"
Yeah that democracy thing's a PITA.
IIRC there was a bit of trouble when an Austrian proposed something similar a few decades ago.
Now WTF does that come from *exactly*?
A little thought experiment for you gentle readers.
Consider *all* the communications channels (phones, landlines, email addresses, URLs) and who they link to.
Imagine this is star pattern of coloured lines radiating from you.
Now imagine that pattern overlaid with the patterns of *everyone* in the UK.
Now overlay that with the pattern of (say) each of the 7/7/05 perpetrators to find the "hidden" terrorists.
This is the ultimate *claim* of this technology. Pre-crime without the need for pre cognative ability.
Of course there might not be *any* terrorists to find IE exhaustive search, but hey that's £xxxBn (£180m is the *starting* figure for a govt IT project and that is the *public* part) well spent, right?
Sounds like BS to me and there's an NSF report that agreed.
"Instead of a happy trawl through all of our dirty laundry "because we can", how about a bit of oversight before any data is collected? A judicial process similar to warrants, but stricter in which a request is presented to a judge with a list of requirements and justifications as to why collecting the information is necessary and proportionate. Not too bloody hard really. If the legislation is what they claim it is, they will already be doing most of the legwork for this to justify the resources to collate the data etc internally, so putting it on paper and justifying it to someone other than the boss shouldn't be too hard"
It's called the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)
It already *exists*
*but*
It's not real time and (as you've noted) have to specify *who* you want to watch.
It's seems they don't have the staff to actually prepare a *request* but they do have the staff to watch *everyone*
Curious.
"IMP is going to cost a fortune, yield little to no net benefit and give lots of room for scope creep "
Not so. It will make people *afraid* of what is known and who knows it.
Which I suspect some civil servants are quite happy with.
"(because having to go back and ask for more is so wrong?)"
To a (senior) civil servant *any* questioning is clearly an annoying waste of their time much better spent building up their files.
How "thoughtful" of them.
I'm not *quite* sure what a perfect storm in computer security would look like but how about something like.
Oligopoly of suppliers who own 90% of the market looking to cut costs/raise profits.
Geographically dispersed companies with multiple *large* assets that need remote management who want to cuts costs/raise profits.
Clueless developers raised on an ethos of "all users have *full* privileges all the time and so should their software."
The first tends to create a "monoculture" within specific companies. work out how to infect one, you've got them all.
The 2nd means you *have* to talk to the outside world and do it *cheaply*. But how often? If your local node cannot run on its own for even a *minute* does it even *deserve* to be a PC? Some things do change on a sub second basis but seriously how many really need that *level* of SCADA?
The 3rd will ensure (regardless of what's needed) that the lowest spec'd bit of hardware will allow an intruder to form a bridgehead into the system.
Proper systems administration (not someone whose *sole* qualification is the passing of the Windows 8 admin certificate) *may* act as a 2nd line of defense (all ports closed by default, which includes FTP, email and damm near everything else IMHO) but that only delays the inevitable as some clueless dev, under pressure from some equally clueless PHB implements what Marketing *swear* is the SCADA worlds next "must have" feature.
As to *why* someone would do this the poliss generally work on a)money (IE ransom) b)sex (not quite sure how that works but there are some strange humans about) c)revenge. But we should not forget the great IT motivator "because I can."
"Second - "proprietary battery technology" is all nice but it requires similarly "proprietary" recycling facilities."
Funny you should say that. AFAIK the UK has *no* battery recycling facilities. They are shipped to France.
I agree if it ships in the EU it should pass EU regs. After all aren't we all world suppliers now?
Both Amiga and Commodore boxes had *substantial* ASICs to off load tasks for like video, memory management and sound (as did the Archimdes). Anyone remember what *standard* sound support in a PC was in the late 80s? Not much in the way of "off loading" going on there. Even the Mac had a fair bit of ASIC support, *despite* the way Apple liked to talk about it as "A processor and a bitmap".
I don't think Motorola *ever* supplied an MMU to support the baseline M68000.
ARM designers were able to check out most of the high end processors of the day by hanging boards off the "Tube" interface in the BBC (2nd processor bus). There conclusions ( the money being charged just did not give you the kind of performance boost they *expected* for the clock rate and the 16 bit 6502 they wanted was *years* late). They'd some experience of VLSI's design tools and reckoned they were up to the challenge.
The CISC/RISC example in the article is *very* poor. Historically RISC has been *strong* on *internal* data movement between registers, limiting I/O to a few *specific* instructions.
CISC normally used the idea of "microcoding" where a "short" instruction is actually the start *address* of a short program (in on chip memory)in a simpler processor whose instruction set width is *much* wider. The Alto workstation main memory (which has a nice report available about it) was 16bits but its *microcode* was 32 and partly writeable (if you were, err "bold" enough to do so). The Transputer *deliberately* split instructions into bytes so (in principle) a 32 bit transputer got a 4 instruction look ahead buffer for free.
The Z80 was also a microcoded design.
A RISC goal was *direct* interpretation. Instruction set bits *directly* routing hardware within the CPU. This was difficult (BTW the 6502 did this and it was laid out by *hand*. The delay to the 16 bit version in the Apple IIGS demonstrated what a monumental PITA this is without software tools). IIRC most went with some direct routing and other functions being controlled by signals derived from the bits in the instruction set being fed into a Programmable Logic Array.. VLSI logic supplied tools to help take logic equations and do the layout automatically.
Another goal was architecture that compiler *writers* could get the best out. So developers would want to migrate *onto* the architecture and could do so easily. IIRC *all* the core MSDOS programs that were successes were assembler coded, things like Lotus 123 (remember that?). They thought developer costs were going to rise so better to write clean code in HLL and have the compiler do the heavy lifting, the mad fools.
*All* processor architectures *evolve* over time. Original RISC's have sprouted FPU support, special data type support etc. Intel has *internally* been re-architectured to run *common* instructions *much* faster, making optimisation rules of thumb obsolete on new versions (yes, in some cases your code runs *slower*). At it's core is still the random logic replacement device developed for traffic light control.
The hits you taking reading and writing to/from the outside world are the reasons *all* RISC's have big register sets (SPARC anyone?).
RISC CPU's stressed "orthogonality" where *all* instructions handle *all* data types (typically 8,16 and 32 bits. Possibly 4 if BCD is accepted as well). No tricky op codes to benefit just 1 type that *might* be used sometime (Decimal Adjust anyone?). Likewise *one* instruction format IE *all* 1 word long, not a mix of 8,16,24 or 32 (or more) at random.
Mfg bang on about how many more transistors they can stuff on a chip but if you've doubled the the transistor count without *halving* the power level (or *better*) your power consumption is only going one way.
IIRC Dick Pountain's article on the ARM 1 (can't be a**sed to dig it out) said it was something like 2 micrometres and 25k transistors and about the size of the die for a 6502 (as reported up the thread).
Short version.
Acorn had a captive deal with the BBC and wanted to retain that niche status.
IOW they wanted to be Apple.
They were not. Had they accepted their cash flow was *temporary* and leveraged it to move into the mass market they *could* have been a contender.
Where can I locate a Bill Gates shaped punching bag? There *has* to be a market for that.
"QEmu runs on ARM and can emulate x86 and x86_64 amongst others. Won't this be available as a package for Windows RT in pretty short order once the devices start to appear?"
You can bet Redmond factored that into their OS design.
Making sure that it will be either a) Impossible. or b) *just* unreliable enough to discourage people (which when someone starts digging will turn out to be down to some API calls having been "mysteriously" tweaked for no apparent reason.
"On the other hand, redmond didn't quite manage anything close to that. winnt on alpha, anyone? Instead their offerings seemed designed to require upgrades, driving sales for intel,"
When you realise that MS "friends" are *hardware* suppliers who make money whey you buy more/higher spec'd bits of kit.
Consider what a Win98 PC *did* back then in *user* terms.
What does it do *now* from the *user* PoV?
You've got to be pretty "creative" to waste that big a speed up and capacity increase in the OS.
"I suppose it would be handy in situations where you want to kill a crowd's mobile communications without taking out the network."
This will fry *any* electronic equipment in range.
That *includes* the cell tower electronics, including the RF receiver side. The transmitter side, being used to higher powers *might* survive.
I think in the US law enforcement just request the telcos to suspend service or use a jammer.
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