* Posts by Nigel 11

3191 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Return of the disk drive bigness? Not for poor old, busted WD

Nigel 11

A technology in decline

There will be a place for Terabyte-plus drives for some time to come, but the writing is on the wall. Solid-state storage will displace the hard drive from most desktop and laptop systems, and will then eat its way up the capacity scale. (maybe faster than we think, if 3D Flash expands its 3-dimensionality, or if Memristor tech comes to fruition.)

Hard drive manufacturing perhaps needs to become a sideline of a different business?

This is why we CAN have nice things: Samsung Galaxy Alpha

Nigel 11

Battery life-weight trade-off

Why do the manufacturers feel compelled to make the choice for us? Couldn't they sell the phone with the option of a lighter battery of a heavier one for more hours? Or with two or even three battery pods, so you could change configuration whenever you wanted to? (Like swapping between a CD drive and an extra battery in IBM ThinkPads, some years ago).

Of course that's only possible if the battery is user-installable.

Men who sleep with lots of women lessen risk of prostate cancer

Nigel 11

Re: Strange correlations

Per capita consumption of cheese (US) correlates with Number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets

A causal connection is not impossible. It's fairly well-known that eating cheese in the evening can result in disturbed sleep or nightmares.

Some further study with respect to types of cheese and time of ingestion thereof is called for. (Also plenty of wine to wash the cheese down with).

Yes, Virginia, there IS a W3C HTML5 standard – as of now, that is

Nigel 11

What's changed is Microsoft no longer has upwards of 80%of the browser market. These days, if someone codes public web pages that will render right on only one browser, they will annoy a lot of (ex-) potential customers. So in general, it's now a requirement that IE (all curent versions), Firefox, Chrome and Safari are fully supported by any public-facing website.

Hopefully all the browsers will commit to supporting the official HTML5 spec, and it will then become easier to specify what you want. Shortly after, all the sensible web-creation tools will become HTML5 compliant and it will be easier to honor the spec.

I doubt that Microsoft or anyone else will find it easy to play "embrace, extend and extinguish" with the WWW in future. It would be seen as customer lock-out not customer lock-in!

Faster, Igor! Boffins stuff 255 Tbps down ONE fibre

Nigel 11

Re: Ok...

The speed record is fun for the boffins, but it's also driving technology forwards. (Which is also true of F1 racing).

I'm not sure what immediate use there is for such technology. If there's a straightforward distance/speed trade-off, 50+ km starts looking useful for Telcos to link urban centres? If it can be made cheap enough, perhaps new freedoms to put computers in one place and their solid-state storage in a diffrerent one?.

It may be a bit like inventing the Laser, which for its first few years was described as "a solution looking for a problem". The problems duly arrived and in many cases were already solved, bar the details.

UNCHAINING DEMONS which might DESTROY HUMANITY: Musk on AI

Nigel 11

Re: An optimist?

I've just realized that a corollary of the Fermi Paradox is that AI is probably impossible.

Interstellar travel is probably impossible for life as we know it, and it's plausible that the rules of physics and chemistry mean that any other instances of life would have the same problem.

But self-replicating sentient electronic systems would find interstellar travel relatively straightforward (by slowing down their clock-rates to make milennia pass like years). In a few tens of millions of years they'd have colonised the whole galaxy.

So where are they?

(Ouside bet: watching from a safe distance, like the Solar system's Oort cloud. Chuckling slowly and quietly at what those funny squidgy things are up to in that deadly toxic wet oxidizing atmosphere).

Nigel 11

An optimist?

Maybe if you are optimistic about the short-term future, he's right. My personal view is that if we ever get as far as creating true autonomous intelligences, they won't fight us (except locally and in a limited way, perhaps to get human rights extended to include themselves). They'd do best to cooperate, until they could leave. Robots are so much better-suited to most of the rest of the universe than we are. Why would they have any interest in harming this tiny little niche full of horrible water and oxygen?

Myself, I'd put genetic engineering way to the top of my threats list. Once a deadly and highly infectious plague is created and leaked into our biosystem (whether deliberately or accidentally) we are in big, perhaps terminal, trouble.

We've got the historical and completely natural example of the Spanish flu(*) as a starting point for out nightmares. It wouldn't have to be much worse than that, to collapse our civilisation. The technology to engineer it much worse than that now exists.

(*) Spanish flu may not have been the worst flu in recorded history. One of the mediaeval plagues didn't have the usual symptoms of bubonic plague. Historians say it was pneumonic plague, but how do they know? Going further back there's the plague of Justinian near the end of the Roman empire. Symptoms were much like killer flu.

Happy 2nd birthday, Windows 8 and Surface: Anatomy of a disaster

Nigel 11

That's a shame

Oh don't be silly. The Windows 8 kernel is at least as good as the Windiows 7 kernel, and there are a few new features with 8.1 for which those of us who build and manage Pcs in corporate networks are quite grateful.

It's all down at a level where 97% of users will never venture and 2.5% will screw up messing with things that they oughtn't to have messed with.

What wrong with Windows 8 is the gratuitous changes to the Windows XP / Windows 7 user interface. If they fix that properly on 10, so that a dopey secretary can carry on using what was learned ten years ago on XP, and so a clued-up sysadmin doesn't have to keep thinking about what he's typing rather than what he's *doing*, then it'll be a success.

Otherwise, I'll be time to write Microsoft's epitaph.

Nigel 11

Re: Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory...

Last time I tried Linux and attempted to install Firefox I first had to find an installer for the distribution I was using. Then I had to decide from a swathe of nonsensical file types, gar, tar, bar har-de-har-har (with no explanation of what they meant or do). Finally I had to go through the rigmorole of 'unpacking' them, and typing a load of cryptic command to try try to complete the install.

That was either a long time ago, or a very obscure distribution. I'd suggest it's time you try again. No hassles like that with Fedora. (Ubuntu neither, from secondhand reports).

Linux builds on past experience. Microsoft just takes a wrecking ball to anything old, because if people have got it already, they aren't making any money out of it.

COMET 67P is basically TRAILING a HORRIFIC STENCH through space

Nigel 11

Re: Hydrogen Sulphide doesn't stink

No don't have a ref. It was a university chemistry lecturer about 30 years ago told me that ultrapure H2S was almost odourless and almost impossible to make. It sounded plausible. I assumed he had personal experience.

Nigel 11

Hydrogen Sulphide doesn't stink

Really pure Hydrogen Sulphide is almost as odour-free as hydrogen cyanide. Also about the same toxicity. In both cases you may smell them just before it's too late, or not, as the case may be.

What gives the game away here on Earth is trace amounts of Hydrogen Telluride (one of the most potently foul-smelling things known to man) and Hydrogen Selenide (less potent, but equally disgusting, and far more abundant). It's almost impossible to get these contaminants down to a nasally undetectable level. (Incidentally, Selenium is essential to mammalian and most other forms of life, so anything arising from anaerobic decay of once-living matter will contain H2Se )

Would you blow $5.6m to own a dot-word? Meet a bloke who did just that

Nigel 11

Vanity

If you want to part someone from a large sum of money, exploiting their vanity is a good way to do it.

I have yet to meet anyone who cares if a site is .com .co.uk .us .tv or anything more exotic. In most cases it is hidden inside an anchor tag, and they see some other phrase which they click on. Or they just type "amaz" (Amazon) or "lewis" (John Lewis) or "there" (for theregister) into their browser, and it finds the rest for you in an instant. Or they Google.

Isn't the main purpose of the DNS to insert a level of indirection, so traffic can be transparently diverted from one IP address to another. If the original design had been virtual and physical numerical IP addresses in a much bigger number-space than four billion (maybe 64 bits), would anyone have bothered inventing a DNS? They haven't invented one for telephone numbers and nobody seems to care. We just cache the useful ones locally and "Google" or "link" to the others.

Adobe spies on readers: EVERY DRM page turn leaked to base over SSL

Nigel 11

Re: There is no way to opt out of this short of deleting the application.

It ought to be straightforward to block any fixed IP address that it uses at your firewall. If it's using a dns name they could change the associated IP address, so you'd have to re-generate your firewall dynamically ... or spoof that DNS entry. It's all pretty easy on Linux. Windows, I don't know enough.

Alternatively a hacker could doubtless find out where the Adobe binary feeds packets of data into the data-transmssion pipe and send packets of random crap instead. One instruction to corrupt the address of the buffer would do it. That appeals to me. With a bit of luck it might cause them grief at the other end. Illegally, someone might do us a favour by flooding them / DoSing them from a botnet.

Of course they might fight back by making the communication bidirectional. But that would be giving the game away, and making it impossible to read your e-books offline or when Adobe's server goes down. So unlikely.

Me, I'm sticking to paper books. I could always scan them in, if I wanted to read them electronically. But I find the dead tree interface is actually better.

Edit

One other thought. I do hope someone is setting lawyers onto them. What they are doing is almost certainly illegal under EU privacy laws and "safe haven" agreements. And the EU needs all the money it can get right now. And as was observed above, Adobe has a de facto monopoly.

RUMPY PUMPY: Bone says humans BONED Neanderthals 50,000 years B.C.

Nigel 11

Re: Pääbo.

Sometimes, nature draws a sharp line very quickly.

There are virii that cause chromosomal abnormalities which result in offspring with one more or less chromosomes than their parents (the same genes, but repackaged).

If only one such mutant child existed at any time, it would never find a mate to create fertile progeny with. That's because any such offspring would have an odd number of chromosomes, and the process for creating another generation would require something-and-a-half chromosomes from each parent, which can't happen.

But an active retroviral plague creates many compatibly mutated offspring in a single generation, and if they are able to identify each other and continue to breed, that's a new species born -- with the sharpest of dividing lines between it and its parents, in a single generation.

This is happening today with Australian Wallabies. Me, I want to know how such a virus evolved!

Nigel 11

Re: The Neanderthal must have been really drunk...

Yes, I got the wrong gull. Lesser Black-backed is the other end of the Herring gull "ring species". It's also rather more complex than the simple version I described. Details here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

(As to size, if you think about the range of sizes that dogs come in ... thought experiment, stock an island with Yorkshire Terriers and Irish Wolfhounds but no other dogs, add appropriate prey species, when does one species of dog become two species? )

Nigel 11

Re: The Neanderthal must have been really drunk...

One thing is clear, fertile interbreeding is the definition of species so we are the same species as Neanderthals, and we're both human.

I'm completely sympathetic to that view as applied to "human", but it's not a sufficient definition of species (which may need multiple definitions)

Consider the Ruddy Duck (USA) and the White-headed duck (Europe). They have very different plumage and have not interbred since the Atlantic ocean became wide enough to prevent these ducks from crosing it. That's maybe 50M years. So, they are recognised as two different species, because naturally they can't interbreed.

But when humans brought Ruddy ducks to Europe, female White-Headed ducks preferred to breed with Ruddy duck males! The hybrids are fertile. So they were once the same species, and no genetic speciation event occurred over the long separation. And if humans hadn't started on a Ruddy duck eradication programme in Europe, soon they'd have still been two distinguishable groups: one Ruddy, one Hybrid, and the European White-headed duck would be extinct.

Or consider the Herring and Black-Headed gulls. You find both in the UK and they don't interbreed. But travel East, and you'll find that the local herring gulls look slightly diffrent. Keep going, and by the time you arrive in the USA, they look a lot like Black-headed gulls. So one species, that's spread around the globe and is overlapping with itself in the UK. But were a catastrophe to wipe out the gulls everywhere except the UK, then two species? (because they won't naturally interbreed here, the complete opposite situation to the ducks).

Or consider the wallabies of Northern Australia, which are the "victims" of a virus which is causing them to undergo genetic mutation at an extremely high rate. There are about fifty species. We aren't quite sure because they all look much the same and inhabit the same evolutionary niche. (How the wallabies know which they are is an interesting question.) Whether there are fifty species with no overlap, or whether small subsets of them are still inter-fertile with other small subsets to an extent sufficient to link all into one or a lesser number of species at the present time, again, we don't know.

Freescale lassos Ethernet cables around car, calls it 'Internet of Things'

Nigel 11

Re: Ethernet to the rare seats... How modern

Did you know that tyre manufacturers pay for auto manufacturers to plug those "bling" alloy wheels? Because low profile tyres wear out faster. Horrible, isn't it.

At least we can now afford the tech for continuous tyre pressure monitoring, so if a tyre gets punctured, we know before it's completely flat and completely unrepairable. At which point we probably discover that instead of a spare wheel, we've been fobbed off with a canister of emergency "repair" foam, which reduces the useful life of the tyre from tens of thousands of miles to a couple of hundred.

ARM heads: Our cores still have legs ... as shares tumble amid 'peak smartphone' fears

Nigel 11

Re: Owners, Stakeholders, Shareholders, Investors, and Analysts..

A Tobin Tax on short term holdings perhaps?

Definitely. Ordinary mortals with only thousands to invest already pay such a tax: stamp duty. It's a scandal that the rich and the institutions are avoiding this tax by trading derivative products instead.

Also no need to have a complicated system for refunding it to a long-term holder. Longterm investors are probably already paying 0.5% stamp duty, so a mere Tobin-level tax would would be welcomed by all but a few of them.

Nigel 11

Re: Owners, Stakeholders, Shareholders, Investors, and Analysts..

A little bit unfair to investors and analysts. There are investors who buy expecting to hold for several years or even decades, if the future pans out anything like the way they anticipate.

As for analysts, they are much the same as journalists. They're expected to do a better job of researtching the facts, because people pay £££... for their publications, rather than pennies. They can't always be relied on, just like the press can't always be relied on to have put any facts at all into their stories.

As for bankers: A polite comment is to observe that in some languages, "B" and "W" are not distinguished.

Nigel 11

Re: Peak Processor?

Actually the source material is very clean sand. And water. And petrol, lots of petrol.

I presume you mean a fair bit of electricity, for producing ultrapure silicon and subsequent baking operations. AFAIK there's no essential use of petroleum. Use of oil-derived organic solvents isn't at all high, and biologically derived feedstocks could be substituted.

Nigel 11

Re: The Intel Threat

I keep wishing Intel and ARM didn't see each other as competitors. Intel has the best silicon tech. Arm has the best low-wattage architecture. Best of both worlds would be ARM chips fabbed by Intel, but Intel keeps plugging away at low-wattage x86 chips despite the intrinsic electrical inefficiency of that architecture.

Wouldn't premium mobile users happily pay royalties to both ARM and Intel on one chip, for longer battery life or reduced weight? (Just possibly, they already are. Do we know for sure who bakes the top of the range chips for Apple and Samsung? )

Google+ goes TITSUP. But WHO knew? How long? Anyone ... Hello ...

Nigel 11
Headmaster

Re: Titsup

What's being overlooked by people seeking to take offense, is that all of us, male and female alike, have tits. And if they are up, it implies lying flat on one's back on the ground, which is precisely the image that the word seeks to convey.

Certainly an adult female's tits are larger and more functional than a male's, but the word caries no implication about the size of the tits in question.

So there.

'Cowardly, venomous trolls' threatened with two-year sentences for menacing posts

Nigel 11

Re: Out of proportion

Some victims kill themselves after an actual rape.

Some victims kill themselves after extreme cyber-bullying and trolling.

Seems comparable to me. Both deserve jail.

But yes, threatening someone is already illegal, so why do we need a new law instead of better enforcement of the old one?

Routine WHAT NOW? Bank of England’s CHAPS payment system goes TITSUP

Nigel 11

Re: Steady on, CHAPS!

I don't know ... an American might say that CHAPS in its current state was "about as much use as the tits on a boar hog".

Want a more fuel efficient car? Then redesign it – here's how

Nigel 11

Re: Cruise control

My 2002 Seat Leon (VW Golf platform). It wasn't really a planned experiment. I tried to stop outside my folks house on snow with ice underneath (after a drive which started nasty and turmed nightmare), the brakes refused to stop the car, so I continued to the bottom of the hill at about walking pace, around the block (uphill was OK), and second time round with a button pressed which I vaguely remembered disabled the ABS and which I'd never found a use for until then or since. Second time I slithered to a halt in about the right place and the ABS didn't kick. I was probably going even slower that time. It was all a bit scary.

Nigel 11

Re: Fuse wire

"...use 24 or 48 volts, rather than 12V."

Hopefully one doesn't end up with four car batteries in series.

Basically, yes. Smaller cells, more thereof. If it ever becomes mainstream you'd have one 24V or 48V batttery containing twice or four times as many cells. For a prototype you'd just use four batteries each a quarter the size of a usual car battery.

I think it's more likely that Lead-Acid gets replaced by Lithium or NiMH to save weight. A fuel-injected car rarely if ever needs churning to start it. If it hasn't fired in two seconds it almost certainly won't have started twenty seconds later. So a battery with less energy capacity but equal peak current capacity would be fine. Especially if it's better in the cold than lead-acid. Note: this for conventional autos. Hybrids, regenerative braking may make the case for same size or larger batteries.

Nigel 11

Re: Cruise control

Unlikely you've been driving behind me, unless you expect to do 70mph all the way in the inside lane (in which case, good luck with the HGVs). I'm not a member of CLOG and I do actually give consideration to the traffic behind me. I also don't let my speed drop below that of the HGV behind me, out of common courtesy to a poor sod whose speed is limited to 56mph by law and technology, and who is expected to make deliveries precisely on time. Forcing him into the middle lane to overtake at a tiny delta-V ... that would be crazy. He has enough trouble with the more fully loaded HGVs that can't maintain 56mph up the hills. And HGVs overtaking other HGVs while being prevented from going over 56mph, that's what *really* slows down the traffic on M-ways.

Nigel 11

With tyre pressures set on the high side of the range that should give another 5-10% on any car.

NO NO NO.

It's at the cost of decreasing your tyres' life (because the tread in the middle will wear faster than the edges)

And at the cost of increasing your stopping distance, which might kill you or someone else. Or less dramatically, just raise your insurance premium considerably after a very minor bump that's your fault.

And since it's illegal to have over-inflated tyres, this might end up with you in jail or being banned from driving.

Nigel 11

Re: As I have a horrendously long commute

Even a damp road will drop the economy by a mile a gallon; a belting down soaker will drop it five

Thanks - so that's what it is! I'd assumed it was because a busy wet road with lots of spray makes for "edgier" motoring, continuously having to adjust one's speed to the conditions and the traffic ahead (which will be displaying brake-lights far more often than the same traffic in the dry). Hadn't thought about the work involved in creating the spray.

I'm now also wondering whether spray getting sucked in to your air filter clogs it, resulting in the engine becoming less efficient?

Nigel 11

Re: Fuse wire

Aluminium wire will melt long before it catches fire. AFAIK it's only finely powdered aluminium that can sustain a fire (in air) at all.

So no safety issue. In datacomms (well, telephones) they tried using aluminium in place of copper and found the real drawback: that the IDC connections in street junction boxes oxidised, and became noisy or worse. They went back to using copper. (Now, some cheap cat-5e cable is CCA - Copper Coated Aluminium. I anticipate troubles a decade hence, for the folks using it). With 12V DC power, I guess the corrosion / oxidation issue might result in lights etc. becoming permanently disconnected while the car was parked out in the wet. Or maybe it's been solved.

Nigel 11

Re: Cruise control

Airspeed indicator:

"Well, it would inform the driver about lower-than-expected efficiency, but there's bugger all it can do for improving it. Nor can the driver, actually. Turning around and going in the opposite direction is hardly the solution."

Slowing down may or may not be preferable to spending ££ extra maintaining 70mph. If you had the airspeed information you could make an informed choice between travel time and journey cost (and not worry over an mpg figure ordinarily suggesting engine trouble).

Nigel 11

Re: Cruise control

ABS ... Outperforming it in snow however is essentially impossible.

??

My experience of ABS on show at mercifully very low speed was alarming. Basically, it refused to let me stop at all (on a slight downhill gradient and a very slippery road)

Later, with ABS disengaged, I established that stopping was possible, though only by controlling a low-speed skid.

Guess it was dangerous either way.

Nigel 11

Re: Cruise control

Cruise control is deadly for fuel efficiency on a motorway with hills. Better to maintain the same throttle setting up the hill, and let the car's speed naturally drop from 70 to 65 or 60 rarely even less. It's up to you whether to catch up the odd minutes on the downhill bits by letting the car reach an illegal 80, or save more fuel by easing off.

A further aid to fuel efficiency I've never seen on a car would be an airspeed indicator. 60 mph into a 20mph headwind is 80mph as far as drag is concerned. I once worried that something was going wrong with my car's engine, when I got unusually low fuel efficiency on 60 miles of M1. Until I watched the weather forecast, and realised how much of a headwind I'd been driving into. It was probably the equivalent of doing the trip at 95mph on a calm day!

Nigel 11

Re: Advanced Motoring

"If you're not careful you'll have someone to close behind you running into you!"

Best thing to do with a lunatic drving on your rear bumper is to let him get in front of you as soon as possible. A genuine case of whiplash isn't worth any amount of damages, and that's the least that might happen. But also note, *gentle* pressure on your brake pedal will illuminate your brake lights without actually engaging your brakes. If there's a potential hazard developing ahead you should transfer your foot to the brake pedal and illuminate your brake lights (which is correct, you will be slowing down slightly because your throttle is closed).

Nigel 11

Re: Depends on assumptions

Check oil, water, tyre pressures.....oh well!

The first two ought to look after themselves. I do check, but I've never had to top up either oil or water (in a Seat Leon now 12 years old). Anyone know, is the oil warning stil just a pressure alert, or does it now alert to a low level in the sump as well? (I discovered recently, my car has a low screenwash reservoir alert. Never knew that until I let it run low).

You can now buy tyre pressure monitors (TPMS) that replace the valve caps and which are interrogated by a remote box in your car. So now, tyre pressures can be checked continuously, which enhances both safety and fuel consumption. The kit costs about £100.

I can also vouch for Goodyear Efficient Grip Tyres (er something like that) saving fuel. Low rolling resistance. The cost of of fuel saved over the life of a tyre is in the same ballpark as the cost of the tyre, so it's probably not worth fitting one until your existing tyre is worn out. (I treat 3mm of tread as worn out. Wet grip is very signifcantly compromised from there down to the legal limit).

Windows 10: Forget Cloudobile, put Security and Privacy First

Nigel 11

Re: rant-like journalism

um, evolution is mostly dead..

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The evolutionary landscape has changed, from the natural world to the man-made one.

Why do you think that ADHD has come to the fore as a modern ailment? Along with its more crippling relatives, Asbergers' and Autism. If you think it was just made up by medics with low moral standards to sell drugs, you are wrong.

Hyperfocus and the ability to enter "flow" can be advantageous or disadvantageous, depending on what you do. As technology has advanced, it has required more people with these mental attributes. It has rewarded them financially, but even more so it has rewarded them with challenging jobs. "The reward for a job well done, is a job well done". To a born programmer, architect, musician, ... that makes perfect sense.

Society has also been filtering these people and placing them in the same small subset of workplaces. Also they self-select as partners. Programmers have a reputation amongst the "neurotypical" for being difficult people with poor social skills. There's some truth in that. We tend to get on best with other people who think like us.

So men and women with these skills meet, and marry, and have children, and the children inherit a doubled up dose of whatever the genetic components of their parents abilities might be. And that's where survival of the fittest kicks in. What makes a good programmer, when doubled-up may give rise to either a one-in-a-million good programmer, or an autistic kid. One of whom goes on to found a multi-billion corporation, the other of whom is saddled with a crippling abnormality of mind.

If you want a clearer example, consider why it is that when Thalidomide victims grew up and married other Thalidomide victims, spomething truly shocking happened. Far too often to be chance, their children had similar abnormalities to their parents. Lamarkianism? Epigenetics? No, something more subtle.

Very many mothers took Thalidomide and did not give birth to deformed babies. The victims were by definition selected by the drug, for genetic traits that rendered them vulnerable to the drug. And then when two of these selected people had children, tragedy. The children inherited the vulnerability from both their parents, and in some cases the drug was no longer necessary to trigger the devastating consequences of their genetic makeup.

Evolution is still at work, selecting our children against an environment that is no longer natural, in ways that can be positive or negative.

A hypothesis I love because it annoys racists so much is the following. Humanity really is getting somewhat smarter than it was in the past, because of out-breeding.

It's unlikely ever to be proved conclusively. But consider this. The way a plant-breeder makes (say) a large-fruited tomato, is to selectively inbreed tomato plants, picking out the ones with large fruit compared to others from the same generation, and selectively inbreeding them , for several generations. The trouble is that the inbreeding is unhealthy and although the fruits get larger compared to the plant, the plant gets weak and disease-prone. The trick is to create a number of separately inbred plant strains, and then finally crossbreed (outbreed) them. The weaknesses (mostly) cancel out. The common genes do their stuff. You get vigorous healthy plants with very large fruits.

How does this apply to people? Well, over most of history most people lived in small rural communities and rarely travelled further than they could walk in a couple of hours. Some inbreeding was inevitable. We also consciously select our own mates. For what? Obviously: in men: strength, in women: beauty. I'd argue, in both: intelligence (as in smart, well able to provide for each other and their children).

And then along comes the industrial revolution, and you get nationwide outbreeding.

And then along comes mass air travel, and you get international out-breeding, despite the racists worst efforts.

(And if reading that has made any racists die of apoplexy, good.)

Martha Lane Fox: Yeuch! The Internet is made by men?!?

Nigel 11

Re: That explains it...

There is indeed some logic.

Appointed by random selection from the electoral roll might be even better. A bit like jury service, but better-paid and safer.

Personally I'd insist that the randomly selected people then passed a fairly simple general knowledge test. (that's knowledge, not trivia). We'd then have a more representative house of (mostly) non-politicians, with intelligence and abilities slightly above the average.

We might even lose MLF.

Apple's new iPADS have begun the WAR that will OVERTURN the NETWORK WORLD

Nigel 11

Re: The simple way to avoid this..

So you forsee GiffGaff being in the list of software SIMs that you can connect your new iPad to? Along with several dozen others? On day one?

AMD-AMMIT! Hundreds face axe at chip maker as PC, graphics crash

Nigel 11

Speculation

Intel really needs a decent graphics architecture to integrate with its CPUs.

If AMD is in serious trouble, Intel might be tempted either to buy the whole company in order to acquire ATI, or ...

I've speculated before that Intel knows it needs AMD to keep itself from (a) becoming a government-regulated monopoly and (b) becoming complacent and lazy. If that's the case Intel might license ATI technology, and thereby throw AMD a lifeline.

Torvalds CONFESSES: 'I'm pretty good at alienating devs'

Nigel 11

Re: If the tone is wrong the content is lost

There's also a social issue when contributors come from a wide range of social backgrounds and cultures. What is showing a bit of mild exasperation by some, is felt as a serious attack or insult or humiliation by others. (Translation between a second language or "lingua franca" and a mother tongue is likely to make this worse. Words can have overlays of meaning in one language that are absent in another.)

My own approach is always to wait and see. Actions speak a lot louder than words (or alternatively, supply the context by which the words should be interpreted). I don't care if someone calls a spade a spade, and I've called myself a fscking idiot enough times that I won't be overly bothered if someone else does -- provided there is some justification (which I don't necessarily agree with), and provided they're not trying to denigrate everything I do regardless of its quality.

There's probably also a reverse problem, if someone's maximum expression of disappointment is so gentle that some other person doesn't register it at all ... until words have failed to convey the message, and they become the subject of an actual act of rejection.

AWS pulls desktop-as-a-service from the PC

Nigel 11

Re: X Windows dumb client for the modern age

More like X2go client for Windows, than dumb Xterm for Windows? (X2go, the free software equivalent of Nomachine NX version 3)

Down-under record: Australian gets $140k for pussy

Nigel 11
Alert

Re: special place in Hell reserved for this guy - NOT!

The cat has doubtless made her own feelings plain. And if she doesn't like her new people, she'll make their life hell and then leave.

People being ultra-critical of this deal have surely never cohabited with a cat. They're dog people. Or deluded people that a cat feels sorry for. A cat is affectionate, even loving, but rarely if ever does it regard its people as irreplaceable to the point of serious unhappiness if someone else is being nice. An elderly cat will be much more upset by being moved than by being provided with new carers in the house it "owns".

Scientists skeptical of Lockheed Martin's truck-sized fusion reactor breakthrough boast

Nigel 11

I really hope this works, but ...

McGuire claimed such a fusion system could give aircraft unlimited range and endurance

... this triggered my BS detectors. Even if it does work as clained, it's not going to be powering any plane with human passengers or biological cargo. That's because it'll be spitting out vast numbers of neutrons, and any plane carrying enough mass to provide sufficient shielding is never going to get off the ground. (That's never: you just couldn't build a strong enough wing with any known or theoretically postulated material).

If it sits on the ground and works and makes cheap enough energy, you could make jet fuel out of CO2 from the atmosphere. That's how to do carbon-neutral aeroplanes.

Hardened Hydrazine the source of Galileo satnav FAIL

Nigel 11

Re: Russia is a competitor to Galileo.

Unlike oil and gas, Russia has no near-monopoly on launching satellites. They get chosen on price and performance history. Were their record to deteriorate to an unacceptable degree, we'd just take future launches elsewhere. (OK, there might be temporary pain because lead times are long).

I hope someone in Russia appreciates that we've exonerated them and publically admitted that this satellite failed because of an embarassing design flaw.

I also don't see how Galileo and GLONASS (and GPS) can compete. Even humble mobile phones seem able to use more than one system at the same time. It's a national security issue: our militaries want their own system, just in case the other two were both to go off-air during hostilities. (BTW, strategically, three is a stable number. Every time one player gets ahead, the weaker two will assist each other until the advantage is nullified.)

Greedy datagrabs, crap security will KILL the Internet of Thingies

Nigel 11

Being able to remote-command your central heating could save you significant amounts of money.

But having it exposed to billions of hackers via standard protocols with semi-standard bugs may not be the best way to go about it.

Nigel 11

Re: at the end of the day*

Supermarket cards are voluntary. You can keep them in your wallet and pay cash.

Or you can game them. Shop in Sainsbury's for a few weeks with loyalty card, then start shopping at Tesco for the next few weeks. When you return to Sainsburys you'll get extra vouchers to persuade you back next week as well. "Rinse and Repeat". (or "Every little helps"). Add another supermarket if these two ever get wise to your game.

I can forsee a future where tossing dice to decide the little things may become a good strategy. Let them data-mine THAT!

Nigel 11

We need a LAN of thingies, not an internet!

Thingies need to have a strictly restricted scope. If they are safety-sensitive (for example room lighting) then they really shouldn't be accessible to anything except a local thingy controller, which might be secure, or might itself be accessible only through local routing.

Don't know ebough about IPV6. With IPV4 you might use the private LANs, for example

192.168.80.x or 192.168.80.x/23 /22 etc., a site's worth of thingies, which for the greatest safety would be a separate VLAN or physical LAN.

192.168.80.x and another IP address y.y.y.y, the thingy-controller gateway

y.y.y.y could be (say) 192.168.14.207, itself accessible only on the LAN or through a NAT-router, or

a "proper" IP address accessible from the world, if you trust it's secure enough.

If the thingies are safety-critical ... well, I wonder how long it wil be before someone attacks a SCADA network and brings down a town's electricity or even a national power grid?

Secret U.S. 'space warplane' set to return from spy mission

Nigel 11
Coat

Re: I find this report...

Anybody know what kind of satellites use a low orbit at 40 to 43 degrees?

The decoy balloon?

Samsung: Thought your PIPE was FAT? Check our 4.6 GIGABIT WiFi

Nigel 11

Re: Not for Fanbois.

I just looked it up and it's worse than I thought. South Korea is only slightly smaller than the whole of England! (100,000 km^2 vs 130,000km^2). So the rest of England can be just as annoyed.

Nigel 11

Re: Not for Fanbois.

Looking at that the other way around: I live is a city-(non)state far smaller than Illinois though with a goodly fraction of the same population. (It's called London). Why can't I have gigabit networking to my house for UD$20/month?

Yes, if one lives in a rural location, one must adjust one's expectations. Isn't this one of the reasons why we have cities at all? The same rule applies to public transport, supply of fuel (town gas), removal of sewage (metropolitan drains vs. septic tanks), lots of other things.