Posts by AndrewG
102 posts • joined Tuesday 24th March 2009 00:31 GMT
Few Major Changes
I should have thought that was a selling point, no new ribbons, no addition of fringe rubbish just because the company wants to sell a new version every year,
I didn't realise there was a difference
Affter years of watching British defence procurement and how defense budget cuts were apportioned between MOD and the actual services, I just assumed that the MOD was BAE's marketing department
What US Space Program?
After 40 years of push offs and political grandstanding is it any wonder.
And the report is basically more of the same
What they need is a clear goal that needs to be accomplished within the existing presidential term so you can't have successive presidents pushing grandiose rhetoric, content in the knowledge that they won't have to find money for it in their budget.
Also NASA needs to stop being a feeding trough for the Aerospace industry and actually require functional hardware or improvements instead of launching million dollar studies into dubious concepts.
For longer term, they should be defining the steps needed to develop a working space infrastructure (like how do you feed someone for 5 years, better interplanetary engines, pressure suit development because the ISS era ones barely capable) and make attaining one of those the 4 year goal
NASA shouldn't be working on orbital launchers unless its to fund development of something in the heavy lift range because private enterprise seems to be growing into that field
Mars Research is OK, but it should be looking at improvements to automation and development of better experiments (which can also be done on the moon)
The moneys probably in the markets that don't exist yet.
I tend to agree that the numbers don't add up the way Planetary Resources would like
Where I think the money is, is having all those shiny resources at the top of the gravity well, particularly volatiles like Hydrogen or water-ice. No-one in their right mind wants to spend US$2000 per pound hauling fuel up to Low Earth Orbit and Planetary could probably deliver it for a tenth of that just based on Delta-V costs. Likewise mineral resources already in orbit could be delivered far cheaper than boosting them up into Orbit on top of an Ariadne or Dragon.
Given current circumstances what is probably going to happen is they will potentially use any volatiles to defray costs of later missions and de-orbit the minerals (and I'm going to love to see the greenpeace protest over that one) and try to sell them for funding. Probably not a sustainable model
What should be happening is development of an orbital infrastructure to use those resources either by other private operators or governments to make a big step towards self sufficiency. Bad news is something like Planetary should by rights come along after theres some infrastructure there, which would require a larger space commitment or usage like moonbases, orbital hotels and refueling stations etc.
Instead we've got government funded organisations (NASA) d**king around with unworkable pork for the aerospace industry and occasionally tossing a probe out somewhere interesting for scientific information.
Re: Nice thought but unlikely
Politics has already gotten in the way.
The original concept for L2 was an unmanned fuel dump which could have resources gently boosted out to it and used for all sorts of things (deep space probes & serious lunar work mostly).
But lo and behold...all of a sudden its a manned base so we've suddenly got a reason to throw a few more billion towards the unworkable SLS and capsule system that will make big aerospace happy.
I would have preferred the fuel dup and more Earth Orbit development, particularly though private industry, but NASA has got to have a reason to exist and a way to feed pork to the Space Consortium companies
Posted in NetApp offers middleweight refreshments
getting more ready for cluster mode
Back when the 3270's came out cluster mode was for NFS bulk storage
Now with Ontap 8.1 cluster modes becoming their main development platform so large storage arrays aren't so important because thier preferred setup lets you can now split a volume over several nodes.
I wouldn't be surprised if all these new versions had 10GigE interfaces on the chassis - that'd prove these puppies were designed to run in cluster mode.
Re: Errrrr....
Actually I think WB owns the trademark for the mask and anyone buying one pays them a royalty
Posted in Global chocolate crisis looms
2 birds one stone
First we tell all those climate change botherers to push off because we've got a more important crisis to solve
Then we use the money being sunk onto pointless carbon reduction schemes (I'm looking at you windmills and electric cars) and put it towards cocoa irrigation and improvement.
Surely we can use some of that space they cleared for biofuels?
In any case...tell the WWF and Greenpeace that this is our cause!
Posted in ONTAP 8.1 delayed a month
Haven't seen a date for 8.1 because I'm really not interested until it gets to 8.1.2 (I've been burned before) - which of course means no 2240's for me :(
What I'd really like is to see 8.0.3 because I'm getting jacked off having to use 8.0.2P6 and explain to my management why I'm using a P release in prime time (and reading the bug fix list between that and vanilla 8.0.2)
I do notice that NetApps seems to be pushing 8.1 pretty hard.
Re: Sort yourselves out
Yeah, and that goes back to where RIM actually has both an opportunity and a risk.
They can just about create a category between feature phones and smartphones, sucking some of the smartphones growth market with themselves as the only mature player. They've missed the boat for full smartphones but if they can provide 75% of the functionality plus their own advantages it would be interesting to see how big a dent they could make.
Posted in Football rules punt Oz IPTV into touch
Conroy...
Conroy is to IT as an ocean is to a sack of kittens
So naturally the idiots made him minister for broadband & digital economy.
Hopefully this will go as well as his last brainwave..the great aussie firewall, or at least the other side will find someone to lead the party who isn't obviously overcompensating.
Re: Would be nice...
The most likely thing to put a major dent in our food production at the moment has already started happening. Farmers are finding that they get more money growing seed for biofuels then they ever did growing food for humans.
Re: 290 Light Years Distant?
290 MILLION Light years would be more like it
290 Light Years Distant?
I don't think so
more pork for Aerospace
Possibly one of the stupidest ideas NASA's ever floated, except of course that lets them sling another few million at the United Launch Alliance for a feasibility study rather than give it to private industry to actually develop technology.
High enough to need deep space level radiation shielding.
In a circular orbit so the Delta V requirement to actually get to it immense
In the unstable L-2 location so it's going to need lots of fuel runs
I'll bet you at some point they say its going to be manned so they can justify another expensive boondoggle like the Space shuttle.
I'm just trying...
To imagine the Tux logo for this one
Posted in Star Wars: The Old Republic
What about Australia?
No official release date yet, website won't even take our money despite the fact that everyone in OZ is used to playing MMO's with crappy ping times from US or EU servers.
Thank God for the grey market!
What does integrated applications actually mean?
I thought the beauty of the iPad was it is what you make of it. This sounds like a rumour started by a windows integrator who installs gig after gig of crapware on new PC's.
Posted in The next Steve Jobs is: Kanye West
When did Apple start making things people wanted?
Apples business plan has always been to design something cool, TELL people they wanted it, and then try to stuff all the money people gave them into their pockets.
If these guys are talking about doing product the customers ask for..they aren't Apple, they may be Dell or HP, or if they then go and see what Apples got thats selling and try to do a better version they might be Samsung.
Oh Well...
In one way she never lived up to the promise of the police uniform in her first episode...
I thought there'd be that girl from the forest that was in the half season finale that would be a contender for upgrade.
Or maybe River Song?
Or maybe Moffats just giving us something to cry about because this christmas special is even more crappy than the last one (Hint, when they include a flying shark, thats a very good clue that they are about to jump the shark)
Already fixed
Noticed it about 4 hours ago in Australia when iTunes decided I didn't exist.
Noticed it was fixed 2 hours ago...so not a huge outage time wise, but the problem with a single appleID for iTunes, App Store, Support and iCloud pretty much hosed everything apple in the big wide world.
Meh, at least I could check that it was a server issue and see if it was fixed by failing to log on to the apple support communities, would have been nice to see a message somewhere saying there was a general problem.
Posted in Apple stores getting close to overload
I walked into one this morning
it had about 30 staff and 100 customers, and the staff were attentive and helpful. Definitely going back after Christmas for a longer look when there aren't so many crowds.
"I don't know, but I suspect that 4 jet turbofans at full throttle probably produces so much thrust that the benefit of going nose down is marginal"
Errr you'd be wrong in your suspicion I'm afraid. The biggest problems with any jet engine is they have to spool up, gravity's instantly responsive. Also the aim of a stall recovery is to get the air flowing over the wings the right way, a stall means your descending so pointing the wings in the direction your travelling makes the recovery one hell of a lot quicker.
And according to the transcript, it looks like the people driving sort of forgot to pump the throttles for a while and then when they did they tried to go for a nose up max climb attitude amore appropriate to sea level.
Theres so many basic mistakes and areas for improvement in that reconstruction its scary. Add that to the later QANTAS A380 engine debacle where the crew had to spend 30 mins clearing alerts to understand what was wrong and you've got to wonder if there are some seriously wrong UI decisions in Airbus
Who said this didn't have an IT angle?
Posted in NASA busts booster booster
There are sooo many things to be upset about in this article
First off.... NASA's not wanting booster tech to get out into the world.... NASA doesn't actually build things..Lockheed builds things, NASA's just acting as a government schill for their corporate owners and justifying their continued existence as the primary agency responsible for stopping anyone else from having a space capability and nobbling private companies with withdrawn contracts when they can't stop them legally.
Secondly. 1960's technology, No doubt theres been updates but if a 1960's engine still has secret bits they haven't really been busting a gut trying to improve the things have they? And as has been said, unless someone happens to have 300 cubic feet of liquid oxygen and hydrogen handy, they won't be getting far with launching it.
NASA and big Aerospace just seem more and more like a for-profit conglomerate trying to keep a monopoly by doing as little as they possibly can while going slow on solutions.
Form follows function
Who's got time to prettify on that level?
Assuming you don't have some form of reentry force field and your ship needs to re-enter, your stuck with the simple geometrics Disk, Ball, Cylinder, Boomerang, or Dart.
What you use for propulsion also has a big influence, is it a big 1950's antigravity ring? (in which case your using a saucer or a ball) some big rocket nozzles? some sleek reaction less propulsion device (which under current physics you can't have anyway, but thats another story).
How radioactive is it? - does it need to be at the ned of a long spar to keep the crew from spitting out their teeth after a few weeks
Whats the ISP? - An engine that can do a brachistone trajectory is going to look seriously different to something that only fires off once every 6 months
Warships? Using lasers? in which case you want at least two of the dimensions minimised for dodging.
Using Missiles? Then it should be studded with counter missile kinetic weapons
At the end you can't just look at a spaceship and say "this looks real" or "this looks fake", you have to look at the spaceship in the context of the technology that built it. The USS Enterprise exists in a universe of cheap artificial gravity, field drives, energy reinforced structural components - so it makes sense in that context. However if the rest of the universe is babylon 5 (for example), then the USS enterprise is just wrong.
My favourite from the Australian list was someone driving around with a plate of 6UL-DV8 although I allways wanted TA12D1S
Paul McGann
Minus the atrocious wig this time of course. Or failing that..Hugh Laurie because he should all be housed out by that time
What about last years Christmas Special?
Awfulllest writing for the Doctor ever. Basically it had the premise that if he meets someone he disagrees with, he'll just go back in time and make sure their personalities changed to whatever suits him.
How long does a civilisation radiate EM signals
Possibly a long time, but taking the one example we know (us) our omnidirectional EM output is actually dropping overall as we move to cable transmission, fibre optics, podcasts instead of radio and low strength wi-fi.
Don't forget a Star is a pretty big EM emitter naturally and any source has got to be resolvable with that in the background.
Poor Baby
So he finds a flaw - commendable
Then he puts that flaw into an app and lets it be sold for 2 months.
And then he wonders why Apple, a company not known for taking a joke, canned his developer access?
He either needs to be saying he was trying to expose Apples weak app store application process (if that was the reason) and take the hit or admit that he really messed up.
Its not quite that bad
Actually we can't only "see" them when they are between us and the sun. The usual method for detecting exoplanetary systems is Doppler Specroscopy (the minute change in the frequency of the light given off by the sun that we see as the planet orbits it). We can detect a change of about 3 m/s last time I looked which means of course its way easier to find a superjovian than an earth like world. However the limits are currently that we can detect a heavy world as long as its orbital plane is within about 20 degrees of our line of site.
That brings us to problem 1, geometry is not our friends in this case so theres about a 60% chance we will just have the wrong viewing angle to see nightside or even be able to detect an exoplanet.
Problem 2 is as pointed out...the small earth like worlds have to be on a really close orbital plane to viewing angle and that means theres a ruddy sun in the way half the time
Problem 3 is that your detecting exoplanets by essentially looking at how the mass distribution changes over time so you've got no way of working out when the intelligent aliens will be pointing their nightside to us
Problem 4 is I think lighting will be like radio, we'll always have it, but waste light going up not the sky will be a passing fad.
What kind of dunderhead wouldn't expect to get pinged for this?
Gotta agree with Steven on this one...the fact that they even tried it means their marketeers either don't know the law for advertising standards or just don't care...In either case, the ad should have been pulled.
And if I saw a flicker that made me spend 15 minutes slow scrolling a bunch of ads just to find some swarmy false-freindly piss-in-your-pocket adhype I'd be pretty annoyed.
Posted in NetApp's STEALTH launch of ONTAP 8.1
8.0.1 wasn't one of their best
8.0.1 brought in support for a couple of things that were also later added into their 7..3.5 release, 8.0.1 imo wasn't that great for enterprise (mainly because downgrade was awful and it had a bit of a buglist) but originally they had to ship hardware with it pre-installed.
Stay away from 8.1 its still a RC for 7 mode (I'm I'm appalled Netapp are shipping systems with RC level software) even though it looks good. 8.0.2P2 so far has been running sweetly and fixes most of 8.0.1's concerns.
From my perspective 8.0.2 lets me use 64 bit aggregates (finally large volumes!) and 8.1 when we start using it will offer the ability to turn existing 32 bit aggregates to 64.
Don't think so
L1,2 and 3 are dynamically unstable (which means stuff doesn't stay there) L4 and L5 are a pretty fair whack from the moon (60 degrees) and aren't that strong gravitationally...I mean you could create a burn to drop you into L4 or L5 with a small enough relative velocity to be captured..but you'd have to be aiming to do it.
I Feel your pain
Having spent two years watching my companies Executive happily pushing for iPhones connected to the company exchange environment (because apparently Blackberries aren't cool at CEO gabfests) and watching so many reports go up to the board about why exactly its a bad idea, I just feel like I'm on the treadmill to security hell.
Use it or Loose it
Non-renewable helium? You mean the stuff that the US Government no longer offers storage for because they can't afford it? The stuff that now gets thrown away from most natural gas refineries if they can't shift it to balloonists and welders and such? Oh and some estimates of Helium depletion are 2015 - I agree thats a travesty, but not using out for balloons is not going to make it last any longer.
Hydrogen, despite the pundits, wants to kill you, Helium, use it or not..is going to get away and head off into space.
All part of growing up
....and getting around that kinda thing is one of the signs that she's wanting to take a little bit more responsibility as long as she knows what she's getting into.
Don't forget...were talking CHILDREN...if they were ready for full responsibility for their actions then they'd be ADULTS, whatever age they are.
I can't see a problem with getting her email cc'd as long as the parents also take the time to educate her on why they are doing it, when she eventually opens her gmail account that'll be her first tenative steps into giving her a chance to make her own mistakes....in some places they call this growing up.
I remember that one
Bell kinda forgot to mention that the stolen document could be purchased legally for $25 from their tech support store.
Still stuck on power and graphics :(
What amazes me is these numbnuts are still stuck on the power and graphics mantra after the way-behind-the-power-curve Wii and the Nintendo DS basically owned the 360 and PS3.
Yeah mobile gaming is probably going to do to consoles what consoles did to the PC game market, but not because mobile platform reaches a console spec, its becasue it finally got up to a minimum spec to be useful and is a damm sight more convienent and the limitations of the platform mean they'll have to focus on a little thing called gameplay rather than how they can overdrive the gpu.
PORTMAN
Pre Orbital Rocket Test of Manouvered Aerial Navigation
Pull this off and you've got to go for an orbital next :)
Imagine...the only only Web News arm with an orbital capability..never has a vulture flown so high
Humanoid robots confirming to the astronauts movements?
Considering the astronaut is in zero g and the robot isn't....I'd pay to see that on u-tube for about the 5 seconds it lasts.
Investigation of wearbale drone control systems and LEO->Surface comms maybe, Examination of semi-autonomous drones conducting external repairs and operations to save an astronaut suiting up most deinfately.
But managing a humanoid robot from orbit by conformal motion has got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Best Reason ever....
..to ban Google or anything connected with Google from an Enterprise network.
I wonder how their revenue stream will fare while their busy forcing people onto Bing?
As usual, they miss the point..If Enterprises are still using XP/IE8- thats probably becasue they've got so many internal web apps they can't test them all, which is an environment that would make them very leary about a browser functionality install that can bypass policy settings.
Posted in E3 2011: the showstoppers
So, nothing much new then
More same-as-before sequels than a hollywood cinema season with everybody in the xbox stream trying to leverage Kinect (no matter if it makes sense or not) while Nintendo goes ahead and rips out whatever made the wii so special.
Oh and Sony is pushing for people to buy HD TV's...never would have guessed.
Ho Hum
About the only thing that actually shows some potential is Star Wars: Old replublic and thats probably only becasue Sony botched it the first time round.
One more step to the car as an applianhce (shudder)
And I thought Pugot was leading the feild in turning cars into tampon shaped handbags!
at this rate its only a matter of time until Steve comes up with the iCar
(available in white or black - orders for black will take an extra 6 months)
Posted in Why is ILM such a failure?
Disk is Cheap, and ILM isn't
The only real use for ILM is in companies that have regulatory requirments to ensure data deletion. I went through an analysis last year using a non-HP ILM product and the bottom line always was it never actually paid for itself against just whacking in a bunch of SATA and SAS disk every 6 months.
Information management and things like dashboards sound good to middle management types, but keeping below their budget sounds a lot better to them.
A proper ILM solution requires quotas, rigid attention to file type control and maybe data fingerprinting. All of this can take a little bit out of the Non-IT employees day (you know..the guys that actually are their to make money for the organistation) so however much the IT managers hat propeller spins at the thought..he's never going to get it past anyone on the money making side with an ounce of sense without a fairly draconian business case or playing the "we don't have a choice" card.
All I can say is....
I never used to download DVD's until I got tired of wading through 10 minutes of rubbish about the perils of piracy that I couldn't skip past.
I think your confusing religion and morality
Then again, its possible your religion is your morality and you just don't know any better
Isn't that how the crusades got started?
Meh
Sounds good at first blush but theres reasons water/steam became the heat transfer agent of choice. Both the US and USSR have tried other liquids with better figures in their nuclear programs (The Sodium reactors on submarines comes to mind) and they always turned out to have the simple drawback of being utter abominations if you considered any situation apart from normal operation. (using the sodium example..if the reactor went cold and you didn't have external heating from another reactor...you were then trying to chip several tons of radioactive metal out from around a nuclear pile..imagine the fun)
Supercritical CO2 sounds cool (just for he sake of annoying global warming people) but what are its characteristics at STP?
Posted in Locking antlers with a network Nazi
Sounds like our office where the security guys keep making the domain unadministratable
I've even been told off by the security guys becasue my poor servers refused to accept connections from their security probe servers - aparrently they didn't like my argument that if my corner of the company wasn't accepting connections from their systems because they didn't tell me they were probing, surley I'd passed their test.
Then again, another time when they were able to monitor, they logged 6 months of remote connections to administer workstations all as one afternoons work. Next thing I know my boss is asking me why I'm appearing on the suspicious user report.
Posted in TiVo hits pause button in Australia
Tivo Good..Aus VOD crap
Tivo with a digital antannea is brilliant for FTA stuff and a TV with a USB input allows me to watch the stuff that hasn't hit FTA - Although I've been pleasently surprised this year by how quickly US/UK first run stuff is turning up on some FTA channels.
What always amazed me was the crap that Tivo expected you to pay for in the VOD market, In the entire VOD list and over a years looking, I think I've only ever seen about 4 things worth downloading from it.
