Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
And have the audacity to say it proves they are better?
Are you f**king kidding me?
Cockup theory says amateur hour benchmarking. Not too good for future credibility.
Conspiracy says someone (who I won't speculate on) was told "Make Intel look good."
They did.
Not too good for future credibility either.
"Once you hear the word 'restructuring' it's time to sell your shares..."
On the upside (just playing devils advocate here you understand)....
They have not commissioned a brand spanking new corporate HQ.
Or (AFAIK) bought any more corporate jets.
Of course there's always the January sales....
"Beginning? I'd say it's at least the middle of the end. Or even the final reel. I'd expect one more punch line, then the credits."
No, sorry I've heard that one far too many times to believe it.
It ignores a)MS's effective monopoly of the desktop market b)Their rat-like instinct for self preservation c)Their new best buds at No Such Agency and d)Their ongoing Bonnie & Clyde relationship with Intel.
MS is like Boris in the film "Snatch." It takes a lot of killing.
I could live with it being dismembered into OS and apps companiesbut they are not that stupid.
Personally I hope Ballmer will remain CEO for decades to come.
Disclosure. I don't own MS stock, I don't want MS stock and I don't plan to buy any MS stock anytime soon.
I know, when it's put that way it's obvious except when it's not and admins (or perhaps their PHB's) think they can get away with using something like backup.
Excellent article (and some excellent comments) the part about "utilities" would explain a lot.
Thumbs up for a useful reminder of some things some people may have forgotten.
Will rise again. IIRC only David Davis had the IT background to know this was BS. The next sock puppet Right Honorable Home Secretary will regurgitate what the senior spookocrats and data fetishests tell them about "maintaining capability" and "diverse threats"
Note that even if a study by some outfit they trusted proved that searching for more terrorists by studying the comms pattern of known terrorists did not work this would still not stop the desire.
Remember catching terrorists is not the goal of this legislation.
Social control is.
"What is it with you COINTELPRO guys and your roman names?"
No. Titus has been around since at least the end of the UK National ID Card scheme (scrapping of which was part of why the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats were voted in).
I smell govt con-tractor loosing a fat piece of work and wanting to get back on the "security" gravy train.
You don't need a conspiracy when you've got greed and self interest.
Endgame. Spy on everyone all the time forever.
Whatever way you look at it it's wrong.
Treats everyone as a criminal. IE No presumption of innocence.
Hugely expensive. AFAIK this has never been subjected to any kind of cost/benefit analysis. The UK govt wants to spend >£500m/yr to maybe prevent another 7/7 event which killed fewer people than are killed on British farmyard accidents. Does "Terrorism" sound more like an excuse than a reason?
In the US you are looking at secret warrants issued by a secret court whose and if (as a company) you argue with them you are not even allowed to say that you are arguing with them.
There's a reason people call that Kafkesque.
All countries have telecomms monitoring methods that can monitor specific calls/websites/computers and laws that allow them to be used provided there is some evidence. Any society that does not want to be a police state had better use them.
Once you have data collection without warrant for everyone why not have have detention without trial for everyone.
Let's strip the "terrorist," and the other classic "paedophile" and "organised crime" BS from this.
The civil servants behind this want to do it because they ca and it will give them considerable power. and they can trade their stuff with their opposite numbers. You spy on my nationals, I spy on yours. We're only spying on foreigners.
It is grossly disproportionate to the crime it allegedly counters. It is a fetish without reason. A compulsion.
"More relevant is that it doesn't matter what the password is, or how complex, if is the same on every box!."
And that's the real b**ger of this issue.
It's a universal hole in everyone's hardware.
But you have to ask how many other mfgs do it?
The trouble is properpassword management is a PITA.
Store them on a secure website? Congratulations all your passwords belong to the USG.
" It seems fiefdoms do not want any internal threat to itanic yet. "
I saw what you did there.
It's funny how monopoly suppliers decide to launch something that does not support their monopoly product (the x86 architecture) at their monopoly priced product level they always look surprised that no one wants to touch it even with the aid of a long stick.
They always confuse tolerance with love of product.
Unisys OTOH seem to have done a bang up job of gradual migration from their CMOS engines to a commodity product. The irony that they have no special access to the intel architecture (unlike the Itanium developers) but have made a go of it is especially impressive.
European Silicon Structures ES2 2.0 anyone?
30 years later the issue is still getting enough wafers through the system except the wafers are now 300mm, not 100mm and the # of masks is about 3x higher (although in principle ebeam is also maskless).
Back in the early 80s one of the UK silicon vendors (when there still were UK silicon vendors), possibly Plessey, came up with an ebeam system using (IIRC) a UV source to trigger electron emission from multiple micro-electrodes using either a metal grid or field emission electron array to generate 100s of copies at the same time at unheard of line widths (100s of nm when the SoA was 1micrometre+).
Obviously a more sensitive ebeam resist would help quite a lot here.
The problem comes down to this. Electrons are the obvious way to go. There is a lot of tech that has been developed to generate and steer electrons and their natural size is sub nanometre by default. But everyone wants throughput and that's always been the achilles heel.
The foundries reckon throughput --> 1 shot whole wafer exposure --> Xray (let's can this "EUV" BS).
But there are other options. Despite my jibe at the start I like the fact they are still running with this so thumbs up to them.
It's a huge quadcopter powered by one guy.
I did not know this prize even existed. What's even more amazing is that it was established decades after the kramer prize and shortly before the KP was won. TBH I'd thought thought the helicopter might be easier as the "wings" that give lift also give thrust and you can have as many as you like.
Keep in mind that engines to replace humans can be much smaller and lighter, leaving room for an actual payload. And yes Aeroresearch did do tests with the Gossamer Albatross to test this.
Not quite sure what use it is but thumbs up for another challenge met.
A big application of GPS is the ns accuracy time pulses.
A lot of infrastructure uses these and things would get difficult if the DoD felt the need to pull the plug.
A chip version (and some people are working on such an idea) would make this a backup system at best.
IIRC with an accurate enough clock you can eliminate exterior signal systems altogether, although I'm not quite sure how this helps you cancel the gyroscope drift effects.
However generally thumbs up for moving forward the "Frontiers of Measurement."
Personally I figured cloud would grow by leaps and bounds until something went sideways and suddenly people start asking questions about jurisdiction and liability
For you Comp. Sci OO types it's a case of where the method is instantiated, not where it's defined that matters.
No real judge was going to fall for the old marketing line "It's in cyberspace so it's not anywhere" BS.
"Mark my words. The NSA has the private keys to all signed SSL certificates, they can decrypt anything at will. Any "real" cert signed by any cert authority Comodo, Verisign, etc, NSA already have all the keys to decrypt it, provided to the NSA by the cert authority itself."
True. If the certificate is a company subject to US law.
Non US certificate authorities?
"And since when do Al Quieda communicate via Skype video chats?"
Only newbies actually believe this is about terrorism.
THE PATRIOT act is about 360 pages of legal jargon and came out 6 weeks after 9/11.
That's a big law in a very short time span unless you've already got something in the works and you just need a justification to bring it in.
"Not saying it's a likely scenario. But then none of this was considered likely six months ago, let alone 10+ years ago when the existence of NSAkey slipped out accidentally and was played down by the MS ecosystem."
Then you'd better start reading, hadn't you Mr AC.
Funny how these notions always seem to come from a) People posting AC and b) It's always someone else who needs to do it.
"It's not quite so simple. A minor excess of alcohol for a first offense will be punished by a suspension of licence, and the driver can still drive a "voiturette". A driver who is further over the limit, or caught a second time, won't just lose his licence, he will be banned from driving, and that applies to all types of vehicle."
IIRC the french "over the limit" is 2x the British "over the limit."
So "quite hammered" by UK standards.
"We measured the speed of sound in a copper resonator about 62 mm in radius - but we determined the average radius with an uncertainty of 2 nm - or about 12 copper atomic layers. We certainly have other ideas about how to exploit this capability.
Anyway: Thanks for your positivity :-)"
I'd read Jones "Instruments and Experiences" and have some idea of the work on Gravity Probe B, so I knew the simple number hides a lot of detail.
Didn't stop the downvote though. Apparently someone holds a grudge against improving the accuracy of physical constants.
I'd love to know why
Roughly from global climate models to LED designs.
When you have very big numbers flying around (like say the number of atoms in the atmosphere) those last digits can make quite a change.
This subject may seem dull but the methods used are SoA. Making the reading is tough. Proving the accuracy (IE identifying, scoping and removal all sources of error) is tougher still. Thumbs up for this and I'll hope anyone who needs that level of accuracy (or should be using that level) updates their systems accordingly.
Hmm. It's wild, it's stupidly expensive and it's form factor would be completely bonkers and yet maybe...
Yes folks I'm talking a circular mobile phone. with circular UI to go with it. Say about 31/2" in diameter.
I have seen the future and it's round!*
*One of an infinity of possible futures that might possibly arrive. No promises are made or implied. Standard T&Cs apply.
"So either they're going to have full management structure in place as well as sending a survey team and a law enforcement officer up there or they're going to screw up national legislation for all the other parks."
Ah, it all starts to make sense.
They have finally found another mission for the SLS, one needing regular launches.
ET because (obviously) you can't have any of those illegal aliens (well they are trespassing) coming on the site.
"The USA is signatory to the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (1967), which among other things places all celestial bodies and their orbits under international law, and prohibits any state from laying claim to any celestial body or part thereof. So technically the United States is in violation of this treaty by assigning parts of the moon as 'National' Park space."
True. This is a real cold war relic.
At some point property rights will need to be worked out for bodies off Earth.
An interesting case would be if someone finds a really valuable asteroid. Salvage? No, because no one can own anything of "outer space."
ElReg readers are on whole pretty good at understanding the difference between the world as we would like it to be and how it is.
"Why did no one catch the error? Did the test plan check for the error? Did the design allow for testing for the error? Why did the design not prevent the error with, say, an asymmetrical connector?
This is management error, but let's not even say error. This was the result of management's decision to gamble."
According to the JPL "lessons Learned" database power supply problems (including wrong voltage, wrong current, wrong polarity, wrong power up sequence) are the #1 cause of orbital payloads being either degraded or destroyed.
And this is in an environment where everyone is aware of the consequences of failure (into the $Bn) and many of them can't be fixed.
"ps Is there actually a market for GSO communications satellites anymore? I thought their capacity was so laughably behind fiber there was no point for phone calls and everybody was now watching ESPN and FOX over cable?"
Want to make an phone call from the middle of the ocean (any ocean) or a ship or plane and you're not a member of the US govt?
You're a news reporter who wants to send a report from a s**thole anywhere int he world to pretty much anywhere else?
There is also film distribution and (hard to believe) horse race and betting data broadcasting.
"I seriously doubt the "geo-return" (industrial handout in proportion to pay-in) percentages are fully in the hand of CNES."
Quite true. AFAIK it's set by who puts what in the ESA cash bag.
EADS Astrium then has the job of ensuring roughly the same portion of work is handed back to the partners.
Part of the reason why Europe is quite good at large systems of structured documentation. The sort needed to support large space projects like ISS, is it's SOP for each Ariane iteration.
The VAB is French for the ring of hardware at the top of the stack holding the Inertial Navigation System, computers and other stuff. The parts in A5 are little bigger than a pack of cigarettes (and only a little bit more expensive, given the price of a pack of 20 these days) while those on the the Saturn 5 weighted about 100lb and spun up not electrically but with a 200lb Nitrogen gas tank. I may however be wrong in call them Fibre Optic based, but they are certainly laser based).
Just on size alone it should less than 1/2 that weight and with a maximum payload on A5 of 1/8 that of Saturn V it should be lighter still. As it sits at the top of the stack any weight saving would go directly to useable payload mass.
Given the 20+ years between them I was not very impressed by it's performance.
But there are 2 things about this that really p**s me off about this plan.
1) There are already systems in place delivering these benefits. True they might be s**t but you can study them. What they do, how they do it, how staff handle the times it craps out etc.
2) Change in government systems is guaranteed Rates, allowances, structures all can be expected to change. Any architecture that does not embrace change (parameters in data files, table driven procedure calls, decision tables for logic capture and verification etc) is going to be a goldmine for conslutants forever.
Despite the regular bitchslapping HMG insists on giving the taxpayers HMG never seems to learn.
"I know it's yet another bad government IT story but 'too small scale', and 'start with the easy stuff'. Isn't that how you are supposed to do Agile? Get the easy stuff working, then tackle the corner cases and expand the scope. "
Err, isn't the idea of agile that you proceed quickly between levels that have shallow steps between them? Rather than
Weeks 1-25 Single people. Single parents with 1 child. Disabled with 1 condition.
Week 26 Cohabiting couples with 5 children between them by different spouses (with another on the way), Quadraplegic diabetics with liver cancer etc.
"
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