Posts by JeffyPooh 1244 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2007
In Canada, you can use your mobile phone to access the 'net. It cost 'only' $0.05 per kilo (NOT MEGA) byte. One MB will cost $50. Once month of browsing might cost $685,595,000,000,000 plus tax. If you plug your laptop into the phone, and then download your monthly Windows and Microsoft and security updates, it would cost you approximately ALL-THE-MONEY-IN-THE-UNIVERSE.
"at least two masked intruders entered the suite after cutting into the reinforced walls with a power saw... ...During the robbery, C I Host's night manager was repeatedly tazered and struck with a blunt instrument."
How long does it take to cut through a 'reinforced wall' with a power saw? Wouldn't that be noisy? Why didn't the soon-to-be-tazered-and-battered night manager wander over to the nearest telephone and call the police? 'Crikey, there's someone cutting through my reinforced wall with a power saw. Fourth time. Send the plods.' Was he asleep AND wearing a walkman with noise cancelling headphones?
Doesn't make sense.
Office environments often have a zillion PCs networked to one poor overworked server with a piddling sub-TB. Everyone complains that there's not enough storage, while those zillion PCs' often-250GB C: drives spin their lives away, 90% empty.
In this age of gigabit-Ethernet, someone should create a distributed application that will take that office full of near-empty 250GB hard drives and make a new type of multi-TB Torrent-like RAID.
One could arrange so much redundancy (something like 10:1) that failures wouldn't even be a significant concern. One could probably even change the back-up philosophy to take advantage of the huge levels of redundancy. There are a few downsides such as 'what happens during off-hours?', but the concept has potential.
On the off-chance that it hasn't already been invented (not likely), I hereby place the concept into the public domain. If so, then let's call it RAID-JeffyPooh (or RAID-JP). If it has already been invented, then please disregard (I didn't get the memo).
Saving 'daylight' during the evening to reduce artifical lighting and thereby saving the environment, the planet, the children, etc. Yeah yeah yeah.
On the other side of the ledger (never mentioned, never considered) is the added heating cost of having people get up an hour early during the spring and autumn. Heating systems turned on, people using remote car starters, etc.
If they'd dispense with DST and let people sleep in, then the sun would have an extra hour to warm up the houses and defrost the windscreens. In this modern age of efficient lighting, it is well past time to dispense with Daylight Savings Time. An extra hour of artifical heating in the morning wipes out any possible saving in artificial lighting.
DST is a bad idea to begin with; extending it further into the heating season was just plain stoopid.
The Skeptic wrote something like: "I may be wrong but don't ships run on diesel which has inherently low emissions? Don't planes run on really high octane full which has enormous emissions?"
You're wrong; and your spelling (corrected above) is atrocious.
Ships run on something called Bunker C (or similar). This is the garbage that's left when everything else has been refined off. It's actually cheaper than crude oil because it's more-or-less a waste product.
The noxious emissions (good old 1960s style "air pollution") from ships are incredible. Be advised that these emissions ALSO HAVE A SIGNIFICANT GREENHOUSE EFFECT. NOx is something like 200 times worse than CO2, and MUCH easier to clean up. My car's NOx emissions are basically ZERO (according to the smog test report).
Diesel engines are NOT inherently low emissions. Ask Mercedes Benz; they been busting their butt for decades trying to make their diesel cars as clean as gasoline cars. They're getting there - just now. Didn't you wonder why California banned diesel cars up to now? Because they pollute so much in spite of their better fuel economy.
Modern aircraft engines are quite clean and getting cleaner. They're high tech; whereas many ships are horrid old smoldering slag heaps of 50-year-old low tech.
Ships represent 'low hanging fruit'. VERY easy to fix with a huge beneficial impact.
If "They" don't address ships and dirty Bunker C, then They're not serious.
Why spend quadrillions of dollars fixing cars and airplanes (hint: ain't going to happen quickly), when for perhaps a measly few hundreds of billions we could fix the cement industry, livestock, Bunker C / shipping, methane from landfills, etc.
Doesn't it make sense to do something easy to start?
We need some pie charts please and thank you:
1) Source of all global warming gases (man-made vice natural sources), just for info
2) Man-made gases weighted by their global warming impact (not just CO2)
3) Broken down by sector (agriculture), and subsector (livestock)
4) Marginal cost to reduce per net beneficial global warming impact
Then address the cheapest subsector first. Don't even talk about anything not in the Top 10.
...For taking the time to prove what I thought was fairly obvious, and for providing sufficient detail for anyone interested to reproduce your results. Do those doubters (Law, Sean) wish to provide any follow-up sheepish responses?
So back to the main question:
Why did the 'experts' (sic) at Interplod take three years?
I brought home a moderately-expensive dual-tuner HD satellite PVR. I spent days installing the new dish and running about 400-feet of coax cable and aligning the dish. I plugged the new PVR into my old 1999 SD TV via component cable. When I powered it all up, it was displaying two columns of squiched video (a symptom of 480p video on a 480i TV). I searched through the menus (while squinting at half-width menus displayed twice), and the only options were 480p, 720p or 1080i. My big TV is only compatible with 480i. I thought I was SOL. I powered it off and had supper. After supper I powered it up and noticed that it had automatically downloaded new software and was now offering a 4th video output option: 480i. Perfect.
"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many from which to choose."
"...Linux..."
Wiki: "The rovers run a VxWorks embedded operating system on a radiation-hardened 20 MHz RAD6000 CPU with 128 MB of DRAM with error detection and correction and 3 MB of EEPROM. Each rover also has 256 MB of flash memory."
I wouldn't be too proud of the OS. They had some issue with lack of garbage file collection in the flash memory and the first rover went completely bonkers. They barely had time to figure it out just before the second rover arrived.
I'm not expert enough to know for sure if it was exactly an OS issue, or a rover design issue, but either way the OS could have been slightly more helpful.
Get a small magnet, one of those very powerful types. Grasp it tightly in your hand. Turn on your electric stove top burner element to max and (quickly, before it gets too hot) pass your hand over the element. Don't burn your hand. You'll feel a VERY strong vibration from the field. If you hold it just right (loose but secure), you might even be able to get it to flop about inside your hand. Turn off the stove.
Now, go stand beside your window and look at the scary frightening mysterious power lines. Hold the magnet towards the window. Feel anything?
Hi Matt,
We (the whole family) really like windmills. We often go for long Sunday drives and we will arrange things so that we can visit windmills along the way. I trust you see the irony (long drive, windmills). But that's my point. The irony is The Point. Because it isn't actually irony. It seems ironic only due to Lack of Info or Bad Info.
Let's say you have an Animal Problem in your house - your house looks like Noah's Ark. You need to get the animals out. There's a cow standing knee-deep in dung pretty close to the front door, and she looks bored from being cooped up inside for so long. All you'd have to do is open the door and she'd probably wander out without too much fuss. And that one cow outside would solve 5% of the total Animal Problem, and get you maybe 15% of the total animal reduction required.
But all the environmentals are running around pointing at the birds and chasing the bunny rabbits. There's hundred of birds and thousands of bunny rabbits, but their droppings are individually small (but do add up to about a cow in total). The big fat cow next to the door is being ignored, and just had another 48 kg dump on your floor.
Any sane person would take a minute to wander over to the door, and invite the cow to leave. Then make a quick check around the house for any further cows, hippos, rhinos, elephants, etc. And then get back to the birds and bunnies only after all the large beasts were shown the door.
Global Warming Cows:
Cows in fact, Livestock Industry is 18 % (recent UN-FAO report)
Dirty Bunker C in ships = no one knows (significant due to NOx etc. ?)
Concrete Industry = 5 % of man-made green house impact - who knew?
Methane from landfills and sewers = Methane is much worse than CO2
You're not going to get your 30% total reduction from the Transport Industry because ALL TRANSPORT COMBINED is only 17% (recent UN-FAO report, and that's even before the pie-chart is correct and or complete - actually less if you add concrete for example). Even if you shut down all planes, trains, and automobiles - maybe half the required reduction of 30%.
Why not show some cows the door? 30% is within reach if we focus our attention on the livestock industry, dirty Bunker C fuel in ships, concrete, and municipal infrastructure system.
Cars can continue to get more and more efficient. Tax the hell out of SUVs because they're stupid. Clean up all heavy diesel engines (now!) because NOx and other old-fashioned 'air pollution' are also very bad greenhouse gases.
Airplanes are already getting more and more efficient. Leave them alone and thank them for the Global Dimming. We'll get back to them later if we need to.
Compare this logic against the idiocy of running news items where they always show the stock footage of the tail-pipe of a car, or of an airplane taking off.
Let's slay a few cows FIRST.
Concrete. Dirty Bunker C. Livestock. Landfills. Sewage plants.
I just heard on BBC World Service that concrete (CONCRETE!!) is responsible for about 5% (one part in 20!!!!!) of man-made CO2 emissions. Geesh, was that little detail mentioned in Gore's .ppt file? Nine errors? Make it at least 10 now.
Okay - LISTEN UP GLOBAL WARMING BOFFINS OF THE WORLD !!!
You too Mr. Gore.
Go away, and get the pie-chart of man-made sources of global warming gases (ALL greenhouse gases, correctly weighted back to CO2 equivalent) corrected and completed. DO NOT come back nor talk to ANYONE here until the fricken pie-chart is done and correct. Don't forget concrete this time.
Geesh, airlines get all the news when they might be responsible for 2% (maybe). And that ignores the probable short-term benefit of Global Dimming (contrails). Meanwhile, the concrete industry is now reported as 5% and nobody even knew.
What about methane from landfills and sewers? Anyone? "Oops, ah 29% and we're sorry we forgot to mention it previously." (?) Note - Methane is many times worse a greenhouse gas than CO2.
We humans cannot fix this problem until we get the basic facts correct. Once we have the basic facts straight, then we can address the easy and cheap fixes first, and only then try to get everyone to ride to work on their recumbent bicycle while eating granola and singing Kumbaya. Trying to start with automobiles and airplanes is just plain stupid when there are easier fixes available that nobody even mentions. STUPID. And DANGEROUS.
PS: All transport (ALL transport*) is less than livestock (subset of agriculture).
*Except they haven't properly accounted for dirty combustion of garbage-grade Bunker C on a few hundred thousand stinky ships belching out all sorts of crap many times worse (greenhouse impact, let alone the smell) than CO2; NOx for example. They'll figure it out eventually...
"The company has proved reticent to talk about the exact nature of the technology, even though it has already filed for patents."
Sigh. US patent applications are all available on-line at www.uspto.gov. I can't be bothered to go look up these ones - RAID is far too boring a subject.
But if the wheels can turn like they do, then with a few more lines of code they could have turned the whole car on its vertical axis anyway just by turning the wheels into a circle. The rotating cab is nifty and neat, but almost totally unnecessary. I included the word 'almost' because a rotating square will be slightly larger than a non-rotating square. But hardly worth the extra trouble.
I had to start a blog to capture the many varied and stupid errors coded into Symantec's Norton Internet Security 2007.
Have a look at the screen captures - they're self-evident and quite funny.
http://symantec-sucks.blogspot.com/
I don't know if I should laugh, or cry, or just demand a full refund and some on-site help to uninstall the stupid thing.
Maybe I'll sue. Anyone up for a class-action lawsuit?
So I bought this nice Acer laptop that came with a 90-day free trial (by fire) of Norton Internet Security 2007. After a few Symantec updates it now displays the following characteristics:
Enabling the NIS 07 firewall is exactly the same thing as disconnecting from the Internet; might as well cut the wire. I've gone through every last menu and set IE to 'Allow All' and everything else. The only way to make the Internet work is to disable the NIS 07 firewall. Yeah, nice firewall...
When I run Live Update, it sometimes silently turns the NIS 07 firewall back on again. After some head scratching and swearing, I eventually find the problem and turn it back off again. That's just evil and/or stupid.
When I run Live Update it displays the famous LU1812 error. "Try again in two weeks" is their advice. Well it has been 2 months and I still get the same error message. The next layer of advice is to uninstall the whole thing and run away.
Just to be clear, all I did was turn on the brand new laptop and download the updates. I didn't go farting around in the menus except to turn it off when it broke. It's Symantec (and/or MS) that broke it. And either way, that's Symantec's problem.
I've just about had it with Norton and Symantec. To paraphrase Clarkson, I'd rather have bird flu.
Symantec & Norton - soon to be brand names with negative value.
The USA legal system has gone insane.
I once read about a guy that had a tower in his backyard with a burned-out red light at the top (a light that he had installed just for laughs). Burned out light = one MEELEEON dollar fine from the FAA. They hadn't even told him that they'd logged his light and it was on FAA charts.
Recently some clever dudes tried to transport empty beer cans from a $0.05 deposit state to a $0.10 deposit state. They got caught and charged with fraud (maximum sentence five years). Okay. But the prosecutor also bitch-slapped with some obscure racketering charge with a 20-year term. For moving beer cans around. 20-years.
Extreme punishment is a very bad sign of where your country is headed.
Next thing you know they'll be lopping off arms for shoplifting, and beheading teenage boys for winking at cute chicks. Or whacking ladies a quarter of a MEELEEON dollars for joining a P2P network.
Civilized countries do not allow this sort of crap.
Be afraid. Be VERY afraid.
Okay then. I will NEVER EVER purchase another CD or music DVD or any other format. NEVER EVER.
I haven't bought more than a couple in the past few years, but from now on - NONE. Nada.
It makes me sick to even look at a Music CD. All I think about is the RIAA and their scummy lawyers. Yuck. I need to take a shower even after just walking past the CD section at the big box store.
The boffins have handed the file over to the RIAA for enforcement.
"There's been enough music written and performed over the past decades that one of our clients will have a copyright on any possible burst of noise," the spokesman said. He continued, "In this case the noise is strikingly similar to the sound of a smashing guitar towards the end of an AC/DC performance in 1971."
The RIAA will be looking for $100 million from the ETs.
I like Vista... it'll be nice when they finish writing it.
My laptop happens to have 2GB of ram. When I turn it on (and wait several minutes for it finish calculating another thousand digits of Pi, or whatever the heck it's doing during boot-up), the memory meter gadget typically reports that it is using 48%. In other words, about a gig of ram just for Vista to get out of bed in the morning.
I tried the ReadyBoost feature with a nice 4GB USB stick. It really does make the system fly (after a ten-minute background copying session). But when the laptop goes to sleep with a ReadyBoost stick stuck in its ear, it wakes up stupid. That's seems to be one of the areas (ReadyBoost + Sleep mode) where the Vista code plus BIOS interface isn't quite done.
One thing I'm not doing is trying to load on all my old software. I just downloaded Open Office and started fresh. I suspect that makes a huge difference.
"...results came as something of a surprise, and demonstrated just how complex the environmental systems of our planet are."
No. Really? You have no idea. Even after I tell you, you'll still have no idea.
Someday, in the far and distant future, when they actually DO have a software-driven climate model that is reasonably accurate and fairly close to completion (including all known and unknown biological systems with possible global impact), I hope that someone will look back to late-2007 and realize that their Climate Model du jour was roughly ONE MILLIONTH as complicated and complete as it eventually needed to be to provide any useful output.
It's like PC speech recognition circa 1990s all over again a second time. Now that it almost sort-of works in 2007, has anyone gone back to lambast those that said it was practical more than a decade ago?
Or computer-based face recognition circa 2007. "Hey, it's a face!" works pretty good even in $200 cameras. But "...scanning the SuperBowl crowd for known terrorists..." is not working out quite as well as they claimed it would. Perhaps terrorists don't like American football.
How about the recently-proposed computer-based recognition of evil-intent micro-expressions on the subject's face to automatically determine terrorist intent. Presumably the system will be linked to automatic machine guns in airports - one false twitch of your left nostril and you'll be reduced to a pile of smoldering, and harmless, hamburger. I'm sure a False-Positive rate of 12% will be perfectly acceptable since It's For The Children (TM).
Sigh...
In Canada, it's 'only' $0.05 per kilobyte. Yeah, that's $50+ per megabyte. Simply loading this web page once via the Edge network would cost $64 thousand dollars. Ten minutes smurfing around YouTube would make the Iraq war look cheap. When your bill comes in after a month, they deliver it by one of those special, very long, Aussie 'Road Train' trucks - that's how long the number is after the dollar sign. One guy actually got a bill for "$1 divided by zero". Another one was $8,888,888,888 with all the digits blinking.
Compared to the Philippines where their 3G TV is ten Peso ($0.20) for 30 minutes unlimited. With some concentrated effort, you might actually be able to work up to a $25 monthly bill.
With the word 'if' (as in "If someone..."), we can all retreat to our caves and stomp out the fire. We've all seen elderly people drive as 'if' something might happen - they're going 42 mph on the expressway and periodically stomping the brake when anything new enters their field of view.
;-)
Ah, if it was mid-1908 to mid-2008 then you'd an exact even century.
They're just starting early (late-2007) so that everyone isn't surprised.
By the way - I assume that Guinness (dark beer and all that) realizes that they're rapidly approaching 250 years? I'd have expected to see some early signs of a party by now.
Due to geographical constraints, I access the Internet via 33kbps dial-up.
Because of this limitation, I have set everything to not access the Internet automatically because it is annoying to click on something and then have to wait 3 minutes because (for example) Norton decides that now would be a good time to automatically check for updates.
Honestly, it is almost a full time job to make sure that all these STUPID programs remain set to stay off my connection until I manually tell them to. Every time a Norton software update comes along, it tries to default back to being annoying.
Now those dim-witted twits at Microsoft have been outed. They're plugging up my Internet connection just when THEY think it is a good opportunity; instead of waiting for me to click the button just before I wander off to have supper. This in spite of the settings.
Listen here you stupid-programmers-of-the-world - not everyone has a high speed connection. Even some high speed connections are not very fast. You must keep your programs off my Internet connection NO MATTER WHAT unless I click on the damn button if I have set up your stupid program that way.
In fact, it would be nice if your stupid little software could distinguish the speed of the connection (hint: dial-up is not fast) and automatically configure itself to stay off dial-up connections unless explicitly clicked.
Privacy and all that is important, but a more practical issue is to stay the hell of my thin and slow dial-up Internet connection until *I* decide it is the right time.
Programmers that fail to take this into account are STUPID STUPID STUPID.
I'm talking about *YOU* Norton and Microsoft.
Not to mention MS-Vista software on my new laptop (like IE) crashing (!) because the Internet connection went open circuit somewhere along the line. STUPID.
...Far far away from those that don't like to have loud, drunken parties in the pool at three in the gol-darn morning. I'd say give them the entire back side of the Moon.
Reporting from Plantation Bay Resort, Cebu, Philippines*
Jeffy
(*Where the swiming lagoon just outside our Waterside room _is_ full of drunken Russians having a loud drunken party continuing all night and all morning. Curse them.)
Assuming that Global Warming is a major problem that needs to be addressed, let's get real and stop farting around with a watt here and a watt there. It is nothing but window dressing. It is the same as a kid with a $1k car with a six-inch diameter tail pipe - a 'False Finishing Touch'.
"Look at me. I've done everything that I possibly can and now there's nothing left for me to do except address the trivial-by-any-standard standby losses on my home theatre kit."
What's the footprint for manufacturing and shipping this useless crap?
Just earlier today we bought a Noka 1110i (not locked, no contract, choose any SIM) for 1750 Philippine pesos (about 18.90 pounds). There were cheaper options as low as PP1350 (about 14.58 pounds).
We bought it simply for one month local txt and calls to avoid roaming charges if we used our North American phones here.
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