Re: So much needs changing but the ones that can change it...won't.

J7, good points. One might also suggest that the importance of the pollie as media performer encourages the narcissist personality to take the job on. In Oz we are suffering thru the foulest fake election campaign anyone has seen. Relentlessly trivial, personal attacks on office holders or wannabes and no discussion of policies or anything that matters. What passes for media seems to be driving this, but for what reason escapes me.

Much as independents have earned much ire for supporting this minority government, voting for any of the major and not so major parties is not to be considered except in desperation. I await the next manufactured fear campaigns over some false irrelevant threat from both sides with loathing.

As for the lack of quality of pollies, I agree with fellow commentards about mine good, yours bad. Seems common that the local member may have high local loyalty while being a disaster for the country.

Re: Viva de la Revolucion

In Oz we do much better. On Cape York, (far north) there is a tree with big, soft , fuzzy leaves, just right for post relief cleanup. Except, it is a giant stinging nettle. Consequences are immediate, painful and blistery.

Re: Alternative theory

no, he was correctly pointing out that uncontrolled markets encourage cheating, like creating false protein levels in baby milk by adding toxic chemicals as reported in China for over two years because the companies are unregulated effectively. Management was the local Party. The point that all should have made is that politicians damage economies in at least two ways.

(a) crude interference with pricing mechanisms such as arbitary price controls

(b) allowing the companies and politicians to become interdependent or the same thing, as in the ruins of the USA, Australia and maybe Exgreat Britain.

<rant>Big corporations are most western governments effectively because they own the pollies via election funding.

Perhaps it is time for wannabe pollies to emulate the old monks and take vows of poverty. At least it maintained learning in Europe while the usually unlearned pollies crashed the Empire and fumbled their way into barbarian invasions. No political funding from anyone unless it is from party members private funds, with a limit. Might reduce the amount of $$ the media types get, but who cares. </rant>

Lastly, R-swipe, you nearly owed me a new keyboard

Re: Pay attention to SPARC folks..

Indeed sir. X86 is continuing to become commodity no matter what the hardware is sold as. Like all commodity industries, the specialists may remain in their niches and a few, very few, will remain. The auto industry, so far, has been an excellent guide to IT hardware industry change.

Next phase may be where the few surviving large scale generalists begin to absorb the perceived high status niche players. Rolls Royce, Cray anyone ? I wonder if eventually, with X86 vs ARM, SPARC (maybe) and virtualisation, Intel will buy Dell to have a complete supply chain to monitise the tail-end of the X86 PC era ?

HP, who were they ? Bought out ink sellers, weren't they ? IBM, who knows. So many pies, so many fingers, and even more sales weasels. Some of them very good.

Re: In-array compute ....

Matt, Chris,

in general I agree for the following reasons

(a) commoditisation of hardware does not seem to be slowing down. General purpose hardware performance is steadily improving to keep up with the more resource hungry tasks being thrown at it. Specialist kit is steadily shrinking outside of extreme high performance situations, once fads have passed.

(b) stored data management is important for regulatory reasons as well as business continuity. SANs make this easier as Matt explained.

(c ) finally, racks and servers are now so thin that there is no room to put much disk in.

A counter argument of merit is that there is not much evidence that IT buyers and consumers are rational about long term implications of any decision IMNSHO. This implies a significant spend on kit for a year or three before it is superceded by a rational hardware layout.

Re: Inconstant Moon

cant be, California survived. Unless the follow up story had the Big One strike as the steam cooled.

Re: "galactic coordinate" system

a bit longer, about 4 USA billion years for first pass, full merge complete by 10 billion years.

Re: Massive

as for warmup. Not really. The usual models for Solar Cycle 24 have not worked. It is weaker than predicted 5 years ago. The minimum ran two years longer than expected. Modified models indicated a late weak peak last year which did not show. A weak peak ITIRC happened earlier this year with a second peak predicted later this year. Uncommon, but not unknown. Seems the double peak model is correct. The magnetic gas conveyor belts 100,000 under chromosphere seem to have slowed. Consequences are uncertain, but some models suggest a period of prolonged minima, hence discussion of a new mini Ice Age.

Re: Massive

Trolling I assume ? OK, I am bored. Those flares were piddling. One early this century (2003?) was estimated at X48. it went off the scale of instruments.

We don't know how big the suns flares get. NASA estimates Carrington event was biggest for last 500 years. On what basis I do not know. What is known is that the Sun is unusually stable for a G star.

Sun can't blast big jets off the poles because it is not rotating at relativistic speeds and has no massive accretion disk and huge magnetic field.

And rejoice. If another Carrington event happens the greens will have their nirvahna. Mega-deaths from starvation and thirst, followed by compulsary enjoyment of the drudgery of a subsistence lifesyle for the survivors. No doubt some of them will break faith and eat meat in their stressed state.

Personally I think that death by diabetes or idiot 4 wheel drive owner is more likely for the majority of us.

Also plausible is a rerun of 1315-1325. Look it up. People died of famine big time when the last warm period ended, suddenly.

Re: Oh and...

it's called a Tobin tax. Might be worth investigating. But then, what will the surplus bean counters do ? Soylent green anyone ?

Re: Amurrica Strong!!

It does not follow. Germany and UK needed each other as markets in 1914. Did not help then either. You assume humans are driven by rational self interest. History is an empirical demonstration this is rarely so. Why do you assume the usa is likely to exist in its current form for more than a decade ? Economy ? Industry ? political stability ? All extremely debatable. A statistician predicts the USA will suffer disruptive civil violence by 2020 using his model based on UN violence outbreaks analysis. See New Scientist or better yet, do a google for sources. One should remember no expert predicted the USSR would fall as quickly as it did. Oddly, popular fiction had novels with exactly that scenario.

Re: Bleeding obvious

close. A few designs rely on pulsed fusion, the proposed Project Orion reborn using pulsed fusion rocket to get to Mars in 30 days is an example. Pulsed laser inertial confinement is another. Stable tokomacs are much harder than they seemed 40 years ago.

As for adiabatic engines, problem was lubricants. Isuzu had a diesel ceramic engine running AFAIRC in 1980s. heard nothing of it since. Probably produced enough nitrogen oxides to corrode following cars enroute.

One word, BBQ

because veges are not as good as snaggers or steak on a hot iron plate

Re: Chickens

{sigh} as usual, wrong, mostly. Highly intensive cattle lots can be a local disaster, but the well governed ones are not. Waste is recycled using something called processing and farming a substance called soil. Grows new cattle food I believe. Critical point is that food animals turn useless vegetation into useful food. Lose the animals and large areas of the worlds grasslands will need to be burned off far more or there will be destructive fires damaging soil. Ever seen soil after a major wild fire has sterilised it a meter deep because latte slurping green grunters in inner cities whined timid governments into stopping controlled burnoffs? Collapsing economies and ecologies due to an aversion to good management such as US of A are easily avoidable. What is this good farmland going to be used for if no animals ? And as a greenie, do you think mass extinction of domestic animals is good ? Aside from that, I like the aethetics of grazing animals in good condition. Lamb gambolling or cows quietly chewing are calming to the soul. When it becomes time for them to be lunch, processing is quick as stress is minimised. This because (a) I dont like anythings pain, (b) the meat is tougher. Happy animals produce good food, whereas you are demanding their extinction. Which one of us is cruel ?

The most ecological damage comes from poverty. Often maintained in that state by socialist governments in poor countries. Africa for instance. Once the locals are given ownership of local land again, forests get repaired and the land improved. Private family farmers tend to think long term. Channel country cattle stations are an excellent example in Oz.

Finally, existing trends are that by 2050 the planets population will diminish anyway. Improve education, health and local economies and population growth will slow even further. As usual, more panic merchants flogging nostrums for non-existent problems. One thinks that the planet has a cancer called rampant bureaucracy or expert groups.

Re: SAP - the sooner RIP the better

beat me to it. Yes indeed sir. A wit dubbed this type of management software "Corporate arterial sclerosis". ElReg article a week ago also pointed out how these things freeze the organisation at PIT, so change becomes very difficult. Secondly, in no workplace, big, small, public or private have I ever seen the coalface staff asked what they need to do their jobs better unless I pushed the entire project myself or my part of it. Each time the results were very cost effective. Doubled throughput and increased useful reporting. Even uncovered a serious bug in Oracle of the time. The untrained end users did something the developers never thought of. IMNSO, Yank firms are especially bad for making life harder for customer facing staff. PHBs seem to think asking the peasants is demeaning.

Re: Aerodynamics

definite stability issues with that much anhedral. Kudos to writer about probable lack of driver/pilot competence, Bad enough seeing poor airmanship from trained pilots, let alone Joe Clot, fresh from snorting white powders and a recent ego stroke. One thinks that in this vehicle, computers over-riding wetware pilots is a good thing.

Re: This article is lies, isn't it?

" Two different research teams found this as well. Ten times higher is a massive problem that cannot be denied " Uh, why not ?

Warmest in 600 years. You know the last warm period ended then and it cooled a lot ? March 1315 in northern Italy to be precise. So warming up in last 80 years or so might not be unusual? I love a good data selection. You can make any series seem abnormal. Sells papers, careers and feeds the need to be frightened now no-one believes in hell, or universal socialism or the free market. Select your damnation to taste.

Re: Cold winters, Wet summers

yep, as far back as Julius of the clan Julia. You know, the Roman geezer who made the remark, "Does it ever stop raining in this wretched place" or words to that effect in latin after invading the roman wild west, some hell hole called Britain.

You do know CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas compared to DiHydrogen Monoxide ?

Re: Calling all greenshirts to the barricades

greens already foam at air travel, except when it is taking them to another save the world quango meeting in an exotic tourist location. Some seem to like rail, claiming it is less CO2 emmitting, despite a study showing the exact opposite. By the time one factors in costs of building terminals, stations and connecting lines, air is less energy intensive, despite using the dreaded hydocarbon fuels. I am surpriseded greens dont foam at the amount of radiation emmitted by coal fired power stations. Double the loathing for the same price!

Re: So if the predictions are WRONG then what?

What about those unconnected to any industry who remain skeptical given the way the IPCC obtain their data for reports ? They don't dispute, mostly, it is getting warmer recently, to which the rational response is "So ?". The atmosphere is not showing the hot spots the models predict. It is still cooler than the Minoan and Roman warm periods even if it is some what warmer than the climate coming out of the Maunder Minimum.

NW Passage has been used on and off for 40 years. See previous ElReg articles.

Cynics can point out that, so far, in the last 30 years, extreme events have yet to match19th century for heavy rain and cyclones. Finally, cynics have also noted that when-ever the "we are doomed, doomed" leadership make an apocalyptic prediction, the opposite seems to happen. Never rain heavily again in Oz, and 2 years worth of floods follow. Never see snow, and we all know how that goes recently.

Re: The whole patent system is broken - and unfixable.

Tom, last para. There is a reason for this. The under-valuing of public servants, especially specialist skilled ones. I know of one tax dodger chasing specialist working for a government tax office who is targetted by tax minimisation specialist firms with huge $$ offers. But public servants, no matter how necessary their skills and public benefit, are routinely portrayed as a cost that must be cut, cut, cut. Meanwhile the senior PHBs, get bigger packages. In self interest, what is a rational person to do if their own employers demonstrate a hatred of the the staff who fund them ?

This may also explain patent offices being gamed by patent application requests. If any staff are not valued, why stay and suffer various forms of abuse, especially from PHBs, HR droids and loudmouth media ? The experienced staff leave, and quality of service drops. Number of cases in and out become PKIs, not whether a decision is sane or correct.

Re: Is there another side?

Well put sir, but regrettably, these events are in a country which like many other ex-democracies, has a ruling group consisting of lawyers and pressure group merchants, funded by large corporate mendicants. Asking lawyers to fix legal problems reminds me of foxes and hen houses.

Re: Politically motivated

Perhaps, but so is the current bigger business approach of dumbing down IT tasks into Taylorism derived monkey see, monkey do processes that are easily passed off overseas or to cheap low skilled staff. I suggest that destroying job interest and skill levels required in the name that trojan horse for PHB control, ITIL, is a matter of public policy and interest. Why would anyone study for a job that is dull, getting duller and may vanish at a foreign corporate droids whim ?

Much of the current myth making floating around Oz skills building seems to be focussed on creating a shortage to enable cheap labour to be imported or jobs exported so foreign corporations can avoid the cost of training staff. Think of it as another form of cost reduction, like tax minimisation. All legal, and legal loopholes are supplied by overly complex legislation and sovereignty destroying multinational agreements. I doubt the majority of pollies, no matter how well meaning, can get their heads around multi-ream obtuse legal prose.to understand exactly what they are voting for or against. Since corporates are allowed to make donations to the political parties, no wonder training, jobs and national interest do not get discussed in a non-partisan way.

I digress. Given our rising obesity rates, the idea of high numbers of personal trainers being created is so ironic. BTW, given his surprisingly coherent posts lately, I would love to hear amanfromars comment on this :-)

Re: Mixed lessons from history?

Ah, no. Pre-WW2, prime minister Menzies acquired a nickname Pig Iron Bob because he shipped lots of iron to Japan. As a colony of USA business, Oz has learned to ship anything to anyone if there is money in it. Mea while, Oz governments of any persuation give the USA access to bases locally to keep the local peasants believing the USA gives a stuff about Oz.

Re: Mixed lessons from history?

Perhaps. It is conceivable that the Norks are being used as a yapping dog irritant to enable the Chinese to do to USA what USA did to USSR. Spend it to exhaustion, fortuitously helped along by the USAs' own lack of currency policy. USA currency is currently inflating. Massive continuing overspending over decades means USA has strong incentive to be nice to China at all costs, whatever the rhetoric.

For China, the issue is controlling their terrier and walking a fine line on controlling an unstable leadership versus keeping serious pressure on USA. The end goal is ensuring all the other disputes which China has with the rest of SE Asia wont get other external powers involved. No conspiracy, just follow the money and ask who gains from the apparent mess. Or have I assumed that Chinas leaders are unlike the remains of the western democracies, capable of long term thiking ?