Posts by Glen 1
78 posts • joined Wednesday 17th June 2009 21:09 GMT
Re: Google
The problems start when you are trying to do something that hasn't been done yet anywhere in the world.
That's when you post a question on stackoverflow... at the very least, you'll get pointed in the right direction.
Id be interested to see...
the pictures compared to each other at the same scale...
or scale at which the processes are the same size
Re: Down to the parents....
Folks, remember to add your voices to combat the whitewash of a consultation.
Although keep in mind the original questionnaire had such travesties as (paraphrased) "Do you think everyone's connection should be censored, or just those of the people who live with children? Tick the box of which one below."
NAT vs stateful ACLs
The thing about ACLs is(are?) that they are not likely to appear on any consumer grade kit (out of the box) any time soon.
Add to the mix wide open windows/SMB shares, and the usual disable-every-security-feature-to-get-it-to-work-itus, and im a bit worried. Many home networks security consists of "if you've got the wifi password, you can access everything. What do you mean its your address/surname?". Unless the belkin (et al) routers are going to be a drop-in replacement, with the ACL features there is going to be quite interesting times ahead.
Im not exactly comfortable with the idea that my potentially buggy code will be addressable from anywhere on the internet. If i was confident it was secure, i wouldn't call it a test server. While i might be able to cobble something together myself, its not something im going to be proficient at, because its something have never had to do before. (and my first hello world was decades ago :s)
Sorry to ramble, but there is a lot of FUD about IPv6, and that needs to be rectified before the article (however good) starts to hit a little too close to home...
Posted in BIG BOOBS banished from Linux kernel
Re: Are you kidding me?
NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN Batmaaaaan!
re: Funds
Imagine if we had the same attention/budget to spend on our office chairs?
Physio included?
Re: Bah!
It is *Adobe* that wont be supporting flash on mobile. If it's the user interface you're worried about, take a look at Adobe's HTML5 editor - Edge
Re: Open Source
that will mean flash takes longer to die.
Converging on one set of standard that can be supported directly the the browser makers is a Good Thing.
Open sourcing flash will mean those flash devs spend longer developing for a platform that will become increasingly non-default (users having download plugin, or it is flat out not supported) and see their marketable skills dwindle instead of biting the bullet and moving on. Indeed, perhaps the addition of former flash devs to the standards clamour will improve HTML/javascript/SVG. However, that would require feature requests/alterations to have a better reason than "because flash did it that way"
The real trick is the move from adobe flash professional to either EDGE or something like Aptana
Re: A Big Thank You...
does that mean the milky way has stayed the same size as well?
Re: recycle
the owner of said blue box might not be best pleased either...
Alien because the Doctor is one.
Re: give a stupid quote
Couldn't we just give that bit of the job to someone else?
If the yanks recon they can do it cheaper, let them. Its not like we will be spending *less* money with BAE either way.
do the google cars get the cunning stunt bonus?
Re: Where are the interfaces?
To elaborate:
The Gert board is/will be similar to the arduino shield system, bringing out the GPIO pins.
Videos of it in action:
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/raspberry-pis-gertboard-expansion-board-already-works-video-2012019/
Posted in Iran preps Internet cutoff
Re: RE: "that first paragraph was meant to be irony."
It's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron
Posted in Los Alamos fires BLOODY BIG MAGNET
Just goes to show...
Given that this is 'only' 3-4 times stronger than an MRI, it just goes to show the engineering that goes into MRIs... while joe blogs takes them for granted.
(assuming its not a log/quadratic scale)
Posted in Hardware hacker rigs up VR for Skyrim
i refer you to the gadget show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg8Bh5iI2WY
10:15 for 1st playtest
14:49 for Andy McNabb (sp?) giving it a whirl
Re: "...adding that a six-inch model of a bone can be printed in a few hours."
if they try to make a load more, they might be 65 million years in the making....
Posted in LOHAN's flying truss: One orb or two?
my two penneth worth
single balloon
tether to nearer the end of the truss
tether in a triangular fashion as above, but with the truss extended farther out one side of the triangle
Add counter weight to keep things balanced.
Card fins on the truss to keep things stable
(well, as stable as the wind... which should be marginally better than the payload pirouetting in said wind)
Paris, because I'm not a qualified engineer either.
Posted in Two UK airports scrap IRIS eye-scanners
Re: Border control has become a wasteful farce
i believe the phrase is "security theater"
A lot of hand waving and attempts to suspend the public's disbelief.
It hasn't gone well.
yes, many
If you see it in someones forum signature it counts
the spec of their gaming rig, to the hi-fi system, car's spec and/or history
thats just of the top of my head
'our' corporations....
whose?
These companies are sufficiently large that they can (and often do) up sticks to where the tax situation is most favorable.
I think you will find that many of 'our' corporations are Irish, or based in Luxemburg, or do business out of grand cayman etc...
Ultimately, any increase in tax will be passed on to the consumer.
@ jonathanb
i didn't know that.... It isn't an option on the Dyn dashboard.
I logged into nic.uk directly and sorted it from there.
Thanks. :)
my registrar didnt suck (well, only slightly)
nominet, ie the people in charge of the TLD *already* forbid proxy registrars. Which Dyn was trying to be.
Which is quite relevant.
I registered for dyn's secret registration service...
and had my co.uk domain 'expired' by nominet because the whois record didnt contain what they saw as valid info...
After too-ing and fro-ing with dyn, they refunded me, and said i can re-register, but not to select the secret registration option.
Strangely, last i checked, dyn still offers the secret registration service with .uk domains....
re: plugin
would this userscript be of use to you?
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/57679
its not the one i use, just did a quick google for the link...
i am aware of the irony.
Re: Timestamps
Epoc Fail :P
(sorry for double (triple?) post)
Re: shirtless bimbos
The eeePc girl hast college tuition to pay for.
this is going to sound realy random, but bare with me...
in the milenium edition of pcgamer (or was it pc zone, i forget), they did a futuretech speculation article set up as a mock news report. One of the articles was how a gadget such as this erased homeless people from the users vision, optionally replacing them with cartoon characters.
Those of you familiar with dennou coil can see it's awesome future just a little bit closer...
you hit the nail on the head.
the key issue is training.
Grads leave uni not knowing about much of the technology that they will be using later in their careers. Companies wanting to hire someone fresh out of uni who is an expert in X, only get their wish is they have influence on the syllabus.
A company that is prepared to invest in its staff will have a constantly improving workforce, none (less) of this 'do the minimum or you're sacked'. As long as they don't get over-skilled and search for pastures new... and that's the danger.
Companies don't want to spend money improving in house staff when they can hire for a specific skill. That way, they don't have to pay to have the staff member not doing productive work while they are being trained, only to have to give them a raise.
Then they whinge about a skills shortage, and want cheap imported labour to fill the 'skills gap' instead of plugging the 'wages gap' or the 'training gap'
re: babling incoherently
maybe he was saying things like "we need to find an alternative to fossil fuels"
re: fisher-price toy
people used to say that about xp...
i believe it was nicknamed the 'telly-tubby' interface
indeed.
even if an upgrade is deemed necessary, spending the money on a new graphics card and/or extra ram will probably have a bigger impact...
Posted in Valve says credit card data taken
indeed,
but to reveal the exact method used would *greatly* help the people who now have that data, and would be really stupid.
they can throw all the horsepower they like computing MD5 collisions, but that would be pointless if valve used SHA-2. Giving hints would be a *bad idea*
mdk2 reference:
atomic toaster + bread = atomic toast :)
@AC
economics is rarely concerned with sustainability (look at how we got into the credit crunch)
While I agree that a sustainable approach would be preferable, until any such approach can compete on cost, it will only succeed with subsidies (such as FiTs). Anywhere such subsidies aren't available will continue with the unsustainable model.
You ask about cost in terms of stealing from our children. To even guess, would require us to predict the next 30/60/100 odd years of the metals/energy markets. Other than 'probably more expensive' any attempt at quantifying this (as you ask), would simply be guessing, and not in the scope of the original article.
>Having to revert to a lower standard of living
Indeed, but that is a relative term. The 4x4 stealing resources across time that you mention, *is a part* of some peoples standard of living, which they will have to forego to achieve this utopian sustainable future, or pay an ever increasing premium (as they already do), or move to electricity. (which could come from whatever the energy source of the day is).
Yes, energy will be more expensive. To the point where if you buy an petrol tanker and park it somewhere safe, you will probably get a better return in a year than if you had left the money in the bank.
The point I'm trying to make is that energy is currently ridiculously cheap compared to what it will be in the near future. With the ever increasing demand for oil, it is a case of use it or lose it, because someone *will* use it. A similar thing will then happen with nuclear power. It wont be until oil and Uranium run out that it will be in big business' interest to *seriously* pursue more sustainable forms of power. (how expensive does energy have to be before mining Helium3 on the moon becomes cost effective?)
No amount of solar/wind/whatever will stop the oil from running out. The only defence is to not need oil/plastics any more...
Of course, the countries/companies that are doing such sustainable R&D *now* will have a competitive advantage, but this may not be evident for 30/60/100 years. That makes it a *much* harder sell to the taxpayers/shareholders (except maybe in things like data centres, where most of the operating cost is energy).
re: "outcome you prefer"
The preferred outcome is to be able to recycle everything at minimal cost, and maximum profit. If Tim could make a profit from recycling these marginal materials, he would.
As with any finite resource, as the supply dwindles, the price will go up. Materials that were not viably recyclable will become more viable. Unlike fossil fuels, these metals are rarely burnt off, they just get harder to get at as we move them around (with the exception of the stuff we fling into space).
Tim wants to recycle everything he *profitably* can, thus the emphasis on economics. You can be sure, even if Tim has let some of the marginal opportunities pass by, where there is a buck to be made, people will try to make it.
Given the volatility of the price of metals/energy, it would be pointless to quantify the numbers any further than a rough ratio. (for example, what will be the cost of moving XKg of Y metal Z distance in a months time? Ill bet it will be more than today)
As for "utterly vital" resources, you infer fossil fuels ("may already have peaked"), but this is simply the current cheapest way of doing things, *when* this is no longer the case, the *many* other options will be used, not because we will have run out, but because there will be cheaper alternatives.
note: I don't mean cheaper than *now*, I mean cheaper than the future sky high oil price at which solar/wind/whatever becomes competitive without subsidy. The price of energy will continue to go up while people are still having babies.
I think it is worth re-iterating that Tim (the author of the article) recycles as a business, and any assumptions he has made are either
a) not assumptions, but information that the origin of which could be commercially sensitive (such as his profit margin)
b) Discovered by hard won experience.
Posted in Windows 7 overtakes XP - finally
mobile os figures are interesting, especially given the anti-nokia stance many comentards have
indeed...
robbie williams on the other hand....
hmmmm...
i cant help but think that watson will end up being the doctor's equivalent of 1st line tech support...
The assumption is that the doc is competent, and not just blindly following what the computer says to do.
The flip side of that is if watson *isnt* followed because the doc thinks he knows better, and then turns out to be wrong...
You cant exactly send the engineer round to to a re-install and swap the mobo...
@Rob - Fair Enough, in your specific case.
Your media PC is better specced i/o wise than my main system, so in your specific case, with all those disks, an older CPU, you are correct. However, I doubt that many people have that sort of setup, most NAS devices tend to be set up as either mirrors, JBOD or RAID5.
If people design the system to fit a specific task (as you have done), they can target the bottlenecks, and not waste money on new/overspecced equipment that wont benefit the job in hand. However, in general, when buying a ready made PC it is always the I/O that shows its age first (namely hard drive thrashing with too little ram). This is arguably down to software bloat (I'm looking at you Firefox :-|). Outside of games, there simply aren't that many things that are compute bound. At least not for the home user, and everyone else knows enough to tailor their machine to its task.
Id be interested to see the CPU load on the Xeon test you ran...
Atom processors and arm devices have taken off because these chips do almost everything the home user wants to do, despite being *much* slower than what is mentioned in this story. The rise of virtualisation came about partially due to how underutilised the contemporary server hardware was. BOINC and it's ilk are unobtrusive because they use very little I/O (as far as Seti/folding go). I could go on...
@6hrs for dvd conversion
for my T5750 @2.0 Ghz, dvd encoding is i/o bound.
upgrading to a faster processor (and required mobo + ram) will do bugger all
(except for making faster busses available ;) )
For me, a faster HD will have a much bigger impact, at least until HD speed is fast enough for it to become CPU bound again.
Am currently leaning toward an APU with a nippy SSD...
could also sell them to JML
market the tiles as cookware
dont forget
the punters confusion between bits and bytes...
Posted in Ten... outdoor gadgets
from experience, it depends.
if you leave them in a draw over winter, the self discharged battery will take quite a while to charge and youve probably fubared it anyway, by letting it go so low.
However, leave it on a windowsill, and jobs a goodun.
As for recharge rates, it depends on your usage, size/type of panel, and the weather. Most (non toy) units can probably manage 1 smartphone never seeing mains power, but that assumes panels are in a position to charge most of the time. Not just for ten mins when you notice the phone is beeping low battery.
If your going to try and run 3 phones and a digital camera off one, you are going to come unstuck.
For any more detail than that, you'll have to look at the specific figures per device. Eg my phone takes 1 hour to fully charge of a 5w charger. These panels will be lucky if they can charge their internal batteries at a rate of 1w (assuming expensive monocrystalline panels) , so plan accordingly.
Posted in NASA's Juno roars off to Jupiter
it occurs to me...
that it might be a good idea to not ditch the probe into Jupiter. but leave it in orbit with some sort of line out, so future probes can use the solar panels....
Also, strictly speaking, a hard drive read/write head *is* a magnetometer :P
one logical reason...
id imagine their ip pool needs the equivalent of a defrag, but that would mean the ips are no longer static.
Arblus, look! It's Unicron!
Get to the ships, it's our only chaaaaaance!!
both truecrypt and dropbox split things up on the block level.
Dropbox only uploads the parts of the file that have changed, and if a file in a truecrypt container is edited, only the block containing the file is re-encrypted.
That said, if you have a large container, and edit its contents a lot, you have the overhead of dropbox constantly recalculating the hashes...
