Put ARM's in the supermarkets - computer distributors want too much money

I am typing this on a noisy Intel craptop. When I have real work to do, I ssh to an AMD desktop. I would like to upgrade to a silent ARM box that is too cheap to be worth nicking. If they really want my business: standardise laptop sizes so I can upgrade the main board or replace the keyboard or LCD panel with standard parts just like a desktop.

We will need more and better terrorists to get ID cards for all

According to: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/births1209.pdf 708711 babies were born in England and Wales in 2008.

If they triple Manchester's ID card rate and apply it to the whole country they still would not keep up with that birth rate. The obvious solution is to kill three out of every four babies. Policies with similar effects are already on the way. About once per year in winter the wind slows to a useless rate in Europe for about five days. If we switch to wind power, we should be able to freeze thousands of people to death every winter. Biofuel might be a better option as that should cause plenty of starvation. I am sure we can rely on our government to find imaginative ways to kill the required number of people. How about some UK based government funded terrorist training camps?

Nothing new here

Kill 5 people and you are a murderer. Kill 5 million and you are emperor.

Look out, here comes RDRAM 2

The whole idea of JEDEC was to create standards for connecting electronic components without risk of surprise lawsuits from patent trolls. Rambus have demonstrated that JEDEC's procedures can be profitably subverted. This will cause a stampede of lawyers each trying add their own tax to consumer electronics. There is a good reason why Rambus is a dirty word in the electronics industry.

Javascript again

Yet another exploit that depends on javascript. Adding javascript to PDF was an outstandingly stupid idea. Plenty of PDF readers do not implement javascript. Just pick one not made by Adobe. The only content you will miss is malware.

Put collection boxes in the airports

If there are enough donations to fund a scanner and someone to look at the images then fine. People are welcome to spend their own money on a false sense of security.

1% more market share needed

Apple's kit is not cheap, so there is no need for massive discounts to compete with them. If Linux has only 1% of the market share, why lose so much money to get it?

The Mule definately has a future

http://fireflyfunsite.kevinsullivansite.net/images/mule.jpg

http://www.brothers-brick.com/2006/06/07/the-omnibus-serenity-and-firefly-post/

大象爆炸式的拉肚子

Half a solution

A penalty for failure does by itself not teach people how to succeed.

Commentards demonstrate endless cheap energy without emissions

Clearly slagging off Lewis Page solves all our problems - although I have yet to see an explanation of how this works.

People who prefer checking the numbers to ad hominem attacks should read David MacKay's site (if they have not already): http://www.withouthotair.com/

Although David MacKay is a Professor in the department of physics at the university of Cambridge, understanding his site only requires knowledge of arithmetic. Unfortunately basic arithmetic is beyond the ability of many commentards and politicians.

Gordon Brown can honestly say that "The offshore wind industry ...could... support up to 70,000 jobs by 2020" but it would be nice if he added: almost all of those jobs will be for foreigners, and will be payed for by high electricity prices.

The reason we have ROC's at all is because wind turbines are not competitive with other sources of electricity.

Few a few days of most years, Europe has very little wind. A European electricity grid is not big enough to solve that. Energy storage is good for hours, and is used every day. Energy storage that lasts days and is used once a year is something only windfools should have to pay for.

Standardise on ddate

Today is Setting Orange, the 73rd day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3175.

Cars will compete with trains when I can read a book while driving

London to Endinburgh off peak return is about £186 first class and £107 standard. The journey time is a little under 5 hours. It might be possible to extract this information from the national rail enquiries web site. A very kind person has created a web site that works without hassle: http://traintimes.org.uk/

When your employer wants to own your dreams

http://cr.yp.to/patents/tarzian.html

Looking forward to recreational genetic engineering

A home made human sized angel would be inconvenient. If you make one with a human brain your new toy might be upset about having wings that are only for show.

Lady Cottington's pressed fairies are about the size of a human hand. If you have the skills to put insect wings on a miniature human body then your can use insect muscles (stronger than mammal muscle) and you might be able to make it fly. Also as the brain on a miniature fairy couldn't win a debate against a rabbit so there is less chance that your creation will get upset and stick needles in your eyes while you sleep.

For a really advanced project, try getting a lizard to burp methane (the stuff that powers your gas cooker and also comes out the back end of a cow). First person to make a fire breathing lizard wins a pair of singed eyebrows.

OLPC's XO

Netbooks did not come out of nowhere - they were a response to the problem of small cheap computers. Notebooks had become so expensive that they were too valuable to risk using in public. People had to buy an extra license to have the same software on their notbook as their desk top and they needed an expensive power hungry CPU to run it.

OLPC demonstrated that a useful computer could be sold for $200, and that people would buy them even if you made them jump through hoops to get them. They also demonstrated that the biggest profit centre for laptop distributors (proprietary software) could be entirely replaced with reliable free software.

Manufacturers were dragged kicking and screaming onto the small cheap computer bandwagon (each afraid that the others would get there first). Distributors refused to sell the Linux versions because they would not be able to shift profitable MS Office and crapware with Linux machines. Even so, small cheap computers sold because people would jump through hoops to get them and efficient distributors entered the computer market.

The term "small cheap computer" has been replaced with Netbook just like "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disk drives" changed to "Redundant Array of Independent Disk drives". Removing the word "cheap" allowed prices to rise to the point where people will not risk using a Netbook in public. Manufacturers and distributors hope this will stifle sales to the point where they can claim Netbooks were fad people experimented with during a recession.

Perhaps they are right, and they can go back to their traditional segmented market. The next bump on the road map is the work AMD has done for ARM and MIPS CPU's. Investigations into how Intel kept AMD out of the market are starting to reach conclusions. If the regulators prevent Intel's anticompetitive behaviour, AMD will not be the only company to benefit. ARM laptops will not mysteriously disappear after a quick demonstration at a trade show.

The time has come for a new marketing name. I propose "laptop" for a silent computer that will not catch fire if you use it on your lap, uses a non-x86 CPU to keep the cost low and battery life high and has a pixel qi screen so you can read in sunlight. (Pixel Qi was started by the people who made the low cost daylight-readable display for OLPC's XO.)

What about the other 10% ?

If we accept that impressive figure of 90%, and the little battery in the 15 mile range Prius reviewed yesterday, the wasted energy is enough to run a small toaster or two big graphics cards. Now scale that up to a car with a 150 mile range (still small enough to get derisive comments here). That other 10% is going to heat things. All the power of your central heating focussed into a patch under your car heating things you would prefer not to catch fire.

Please can the Register provide a video of a demonstration of this product in action a long way away from me.

Battery life and replacement cost please

Electricity is about half the price of petrol per mile, but batteries have a limited life (2 or 3 years is a sensible guess) and a huge replacement cost.

Assume charger is 80% efficient, battery retains 80% of the supplied charge, and electricity is £0.12/kWH: 15 miles on a 5.2kWH battery is £0.065/mile.

Assume petrol is £1.1/l, 4.5l/uk gallon: 40 miles per gallon is £0.125 per mile.

At a wild guess, a new battery is £2000, so the break even point is about 1000 miles per month.

Free advertising

Today police officers proposed adverting which sites have effective privacy technology with pop-ups.

Anything but BSA

I would rather not name a new British space agency after the Bloated Software Alliance. How about: British Organisation For Flying Into Nothing.

Plenty of solutions

1) Make the patent trolls pay to have patents translated into every language up front. Let the victims of patents choose what language they want to defend with. That will make nuisance litigation a tiny bit more expensive.

2) Don't bother translating patents as no-one reads them looking for new ideas anyway. Solve all patent disputes by tossing a coin: cheaper for everyone involved and just as fair as the current system.

3) Stop issuing patents. Simply deny all applications because they are obvious extensions of current inventions or not patentable subject matter.

Think of the anti-porn squad

They must have a reason to believe that looking at an action requires people to copy the action. Perhaps it is because that is what they would do themselves. The obvious solution is to recommend these people watch some films about people who do not imitate others all the time.

200 miles is too far

Drop the range to 20 miles and it is still double the distance I travel 95% of days. This drops the weight of the battery by a factor of 10, so it make a significant saving on the weight of the car. At a guess, a 20 mile battery is light enough for me (large and fit) to carry from the drive to the house and back every day. Charging such a small battery indoors is much simpler than charging a big battery outside. If they get the weight down to the point where granny can carry a battery indoors to charge then electric cars become much more practical.

Wind turbine tax is still much lower than petrol tax, so I would like a practical electric vehicle.

It is not technically difficult

The amount and the person to be paid must be displayed on the card or you do not know how much you are paying or who you are paying it to. The buttons needed to authenticate must be on the card or you do not know who is logging them. The software must be open source so it can be checked. The software must be stored in ROM that can be read by external devices so you can tell it matches the source code.

The hard part is collecting a bigger bribe for the banks than the people who want insecure banking.

A title is missing

Spectrum is green.

Comparing a truck load of apples to a dripping orange juice tap

"... the move will have saved sufficient energy by 2021 to power 864,000 single-family homes."

How long must an orange juice tap be left dripping until it leaks the same amount of juice as a truck load of apples? Exactly how many Joules of energy do they expect to save? How much power in Watts (=Joules/second) does a single family home use? For how many seconds will the energy saved by 2021 power 864000 homes?

Sounds like usual the piss and wind turbine figures used to justify subsidising wind farms. If everybody saves a little energy the result will be a small reduction in energy use. If you are going to do something meaningful about CO2 then everyone will have to do a lot. That means focusing on the biggest uses energy. For California that is probably transport, air conditioning and water. Watching half a television instead of one only sounds useful if you use a bogus energy / power comparison.

Lock-in / vendor survival is outwieghs everything else on the questionaire

Without source code and a license to modify, compile and distribute, any proprietary software is an invitation to lock-in or problems when the vendor ceases to support their product. I will pay for good software if I am certain it will be maintained - by myself and other users if necessary.

Battery powered laser sharks

A next generation super efficient 150kW laser needs about 200kW of electrical power. The first jet fighter I found has a 300kW generator and needs 400kW to power all its electrical systems simultaneously. Finding an extra few hundred kilowatts near a powerful jet engine on a fighter aircraft is achievable, but could be a bit of a challenge on a shark. A 50kg 10kW output power laser could be powered by a 50kg lithium ion battery for about 30 hours. (A smaller battery cannot power a bigger laser for less time because a smaller battery has a lower maximum discharge rate). Still, 10kW is not to be sneezed at.

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2007/08/24/216300/lockheed-tackles-jsf-power-deficit.html

Now lock up arms dealers for murder

... an offence to sell or distribute "any device, product or component which is primarily designed, produce, or adapted for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of effective technological measures".

IIRC, The people who originally hacked the X-box were doing it so they could run Linux on cheap hardware subsidised by Microsoft. Their first successful hack had a side effect of making it possible to run copied games. They did not release the hack at once. Instead they gave Microsoft the opportunity to sign a Linux boot loader. That way, people could run Linux without defeating the Digital Restrictions Management hardware. Microsoft chose not to work with the hackers, so the DRM breaking details were published.

Modding an X-box has honest (possibly legal) uses. As well as running Linux, you can keep your games in a safe place and only let your children play with (scratch) copies of games you have bought.

People can use a modified X-box for Linux and backups or for playing stolen games just like people can use a gun for hunting or murder. They can have my video recorder when they pry it from my cold dead ^H^H^H^H^H when a giant alien bug crashes his flying saucer into my truck.

@Bob Gateaux

You have the freedom to use, modify and distribute GPL code on the condition that you do not take that freedom away the people you distribute to. Microsoft is accused of taking that freedom away from you.

People create GPL software because they can benefit when others contribute improvements. People contribute improvements because they can benefit when others contribute improvements.

http://www.extremelinux.info/stonesoup/stonesoup.html

Been doing this for some time already

I am not worried about swap wearing out my SSD. My swap partition is on sda2, so the following incantation tells me how many sectors have been written to swap space:

awk '{print $7}' /sys/block/sda/sda2/stat

It has been 7 days since the last power cut, and 0 sectors have been written to swap. (Anyone know the equivalent command for windows?). If swap space ever gets used regularly I will buy more RAM. Even if I do not, modern SSD's are so big that there are plenty of sectors for the wear levelling algorithm to work with. It will be a very long time before most of the sectors approach their limit.

I upgraded my desktop to silent (PVR disk is a 2.5", so I do not have to worry about spin up / spin down cycles wearing it out). The temperature controlled fan has never spun fast. The laptop is more of a problem. When the fan spins fast it downs out passing aeroplanes. I am looking forward to a replacement with an ARM or MIPS CPU and a Pixel Qi LCD panel.

Pointing the beams into space ...

... would be costly.

There are two beams travelling in opposite directions, so you would need a pair of quarter rings to divert the beams upwards. If the beams could be curved into a tighter (cheaper) circle, then they would have been - so you are looking at quarter rings that curve 8km into the sky. That would be spectacular even without a beam dump. If these extra rings were ever used then they would emit synchrotron radiation (X-rays going out radially). Anyone standing underneath would not be pleased.

@Filippo

Filippo: "A small issue. Noone is going to bother writing a virus that targets Linux anyway."

After all, noone would want to root paypal and divert lots of money to themselves.

Try some other big names like google or yahoo with something like: http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.paypal.com

Who else likes the taste of self destruction?

The only reason most of my family know it is possible to download movies for free is because of the the skip resistant advert on most DVD's. Will they include the advert on this DVD?

Spengler cries wolf again

As root type "sysctl vm.mmap_min_addr". If the result is 4096, the problem has been dealt with. If it is 0, read the man page for "sysctl.conf".

WINE is for running Windows programs on a Linux box, but it has limitations. Last time I read about it, WINE was unable to install or run Windows malware correctly.

Closed source drivers can cause some hassle (none in this case). If some kit provides so much benefit for you that it is worth the hassle, ask the supplier to provide a minimal open source wrapper around a binary blob like nVidia have for years.

just the unintentional ones ...

If government agents insist on prying guns from Americans' cold dead hands then they will just have to watch out for people armed with hot tubs.

It's not a netbook

Anyone else remember "redundant array of inexpensive disks" morphing into "redundant array of independent disks"? "Netbook" is the marketing term used in the hope that people will forget that the XO was a small CHEAP computer.

It is good to see the SCC is on its way back from near extinction. The big question is does it come with a Pixel Qi daylight readable LCD or an X86 emulator and Vista SP2.

More crapware please

Like some of the other commentards here, I upgrade my PC's a few components at a time rather than buy complete new systems. I would love to add some crapware to my next purchase to reduce the costs. Anyone seen a distributor offering crapware as a separate component?

I support Microsoft's right to rent out third rate software at exorbitant prices. If you do not like Microsoft's license, don't use their software and get your money back from the distributor.

Selling point: copying between USB devices

Most chip sets have one USB2 interface, a few USB1 interfaces and lots of USB ports. When you plug a USB1 device into a port it is assigned a USB1 interface if there is one left (If not, it trashes the performance of the USB2 interface). All USB2 devices share the 480Mb/s of the only USB2 interface. A modern hard disk can use all the bandwidth in USB2.

If you plug a ten of USB2 hard disks into a USB3 hub, they get almost 480Mb/s each. This is not a feature I would use every month, but some people might like to use their hi-res webcam while backing up.

More snarky articles please

Half the point of reading the Register is that the articles are not all rehashed press releases carefully worded to avoid annoying the advertisers. Next week, the wailing Microsofties can enjoy the Register's sarcasm applied to the launch of Karmic Koala.

Is that 7ml to recharge a phone or 25ml?

If the latter, two spare batteries would be much cheaper. When was the last time you had no access to the mains for two weeks, but still had a signal on your phone?

Fuel cells were proposed as a way to power laptops. (Laptops were the precursor to notebooks and could be used on your lap without overheating.) Methanol boils of 65⁰ and has a flash point of 79⁰C. Fuel cells for notebooks could be spectacular.

@Kerberos

The rumour is they did have one backup:

Just before a planned upgrade, the techies started a new backup - on top of the only back because they did not have anywhere else to put it. After two days, the PHB got impatient and was not prepared to wait another four days for the backup to be completed (LOTS of data). She decided to halt the backup and proceed with the upgrade.

When your PHB won't shell out for a second set of backup media, you know your setup is being cost cut to shreds.

A different version of what went wrong

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/10/15/microsofts-pinkdanger-backup-problem-blamed-on-roz-ho/#more-3877

2000 ID cards or 2000 people?

If you need an ID card keep your job, why get only one?

Dont bank online until Lloyds gets a clue about security

http://www.securecomputing.net.au/News/157767,nsw-police-dont-use-windows-for-internet-banking.aspx

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/10/e-banking_on_a_locked_down_non.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter

What are you complaining about?

Didn't you know ID cards prevent swine flu? They also smooth sharp edges, stop heavy objects from falling and prevent global warming.

If you were a Labour politician, who would you be more frightened of: an angry man with a gun in Afghanistan or a taxpayer in the UK? Do ID cards make sense now?

How many pages ...

... came from a travesty generator?

Did amanfromMars contribute?