Posts by jabuzz
60 posts • joined Thursday 13th August 2009 11:40 GMT
Power sneaked in via earth wire
Do some Googling but it would appear that the method for the "anomolous" heat generation has been twigged. As it is all a black box you wire up a simple electrical thermal element and then use the earth wire from a normal plug that has been "specially" wired along with the socket in the wall to draw power. You then happily separate the wires out in the flex but a clamp meter over the live and measure the current/voltage and get a power draw that is less than the heat output. Meanwhile the power for the "anomolous" heat generation is being drawn down the earth wire and shares the common neutral.
Rossi has been challenged to do a test where the power levels in all three wires supplying the apparatus are measured and he has refused. I have quickly skimbled the paper and the power measurement section makes no mention of measuring the power levels in all the cores connected up.
Given Rossi's history of fraud (Google it but there is a failed thermoelectric generator using waste heat and a failed oil from waste firm) one has to take him with a very large pinch of salt.
Posted in Review: HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook
14" ideal for older eyes
The problem with the 11" displays is that for aged parents the small screen size is an issue. Simply displaying the same resolution at a larger size makes it much easier for those suffering from the effects of old age on their eye sight to read the screen. As such the 14" HP Chromebook is ideal for those aged parents that just want to browse the web, send a few emails and write the occasional letter. For these users a Windows laptop is just something to go wrong that produces endless support problems.
Only two usb sockets
Title says it all, only has two USB3.0 sockets, and there is nothing internal. Why is that important you might ask, well I have /boot on a small USB flash drive so that when I do my Linux software RAID I can put /boot on the flash drive and just do it whole disk and not mess about with partitions. The closest thing to a perfect home server board otherwise, well more SATA ports would be nice.
GSM/GPRS reliance?
What I don't understand about these smart meters is why they have been made reliant on GSM/GPRS aka 2G mobile signals. What happens in a few years time when the mobile phone operators decide to ditch their 2G networks because they are not profitable to operate? Also what happens in a house like mine where there literately is no mobile signal indoors (bricks it is constructed from seem to have a high content of magnetic material for some reason) unless you are next to a window?
Surely the sensible thing would have been to do supply side powerline networking. You only need a low bit rate for a smart meter so distance can be improved and it is not reliant on a service being provided by a third part that they can stop any time they want. Given a electricity meters usually last decades this was a dumb move.
Re: Fingers crossed...
20,000 short range rockets pre targeted at all 20,000 artillery pieces? That said I would expect that most of the artillery pieces are arrange in groups so you would need a lot less than 20,000 rockets. The idea that the North Koreans can unhindered keep pounding Seoul with an artillery bombardment and reduce it to rubble is complete fantasy.
I think you will find that Gerald Buller works at Heriot Watt University which while located on the outskirts of Edinburgh is distinctly not Edinburgh University which is another completely separate institution all together.
Chromebox is cheaper
Really get a Samsung chromebox for £250 which includes 16GB od SSD storage and 4GB of RAM. In addition the PSU is built into the box no some separate add on.
LTO1 tape drives are still available on the used/surplus market. If you are using a decent software package to handle your archives and are sensibly keeping all your tapes in the library, and having multiple libraries in separate locations, then the backup/archiving software will take care of migration from one tape technology to the other, with the tape robot in the library doing the shuffling of all the tapes between the drives and the slots with no human interaction once you set it away. Might take some time a.k.a. a couple of months, to complete but if there is no human interaction required in the process that is not a problem.
Lies from SGI
That machine will have 2.5 times the capacity per spindle compared to Oracle, IBM, and Fujitsu arrays in the same class.
Given that IBM sell exactly the same hardware as the DS3512, DS524 and DCS3700, I am keen to know how SGI believe that they will be offering anything better than IBM?
It's about longevity
While I am sure the Quantum tape library is more dense that the competing options, will it still be around in 5 years or even 10 years. A TS3500 purchased 10 years ago (as a 3584 as it was back then) could have gone through several tape drive technology changes, would still be fully warranted from IBM for a maintenance contract and could still be upgrade and have more frames different drives etc. added to it all in incremental stages as the budget allowed.
If you read the specification for the thing on the HP website you will see that it comes with a 16GB SSD. To my mind this is perfect for parent, grandparent where deteriating eyesight due to old age makes the existing Chromebooks screens are too small. Yes it has no more pixels, the fact that they are bigger makes it easier to see for someone wearing reading glasses.
Re: Glass platter
A 10krpm drive with a SAS interface is not aimed at laptops. Besides which IBM/HGST have been shipping glass platters for years.
It's all Rupert Murdoch's fault
Getting on for 20 years ago BT offered to put in fibre to every premiss in the UK. The only thing they asked for was to be let out of the bar on them offering TV over the fibre a few years early. Mr. Murdoch saw this as a threat to his Sky business and lobbied hard to get the government to turn the offer down.
It was biggest mistake of any government in probably my lifetime. Had we taken BT's offer up we would right now be enjoying the best internet connection in the world bar none.
Re: Outsourcing is wonderful
You can go along way to solve the pollution problem in China by introducing pollution duty on imported goods. So goods imported into the EU say that originate in a country that pollutes more than the E.U. are taxed appropriately. This has two positive effects, it limits the race to the bottom as companies outsource manufacturing to places that don't look after the environment as well as we do in the E.U. because the cost advantage is largely eroded by the pollution tax. Secondly it encourages the countries with lax controls to tighten them up to qualify for better pollution duty rates and make exporting manufactured goods to the E.U. easier.
Amazon S3 is expensive at scale
You don't need to scale to a PB, even if you only need a 100TB, it is much cheaper to DIY than buy from Amazon when you spread the cost out over a number of years for most people.
No surprise there
Hardly surprising really, there is no way that you can offer storage at this price using anything else. I suspect however that there is a chunk of disk based storage between the customer and the tape libraries.
Hands free
The problem with just pulling the phone records is that it does not tell you whether I was holding the phone to my ear or on hands free which is integrated into my car stereo.
I have been rear ended by someone too busy talking to a passenger to pay attention to the fact there was stopped traffic ahead, so the mere fact that you are talking and whether they are in the car means nothing.
Bit error rate
So the $60,000 question is what is the bit error rate on these drives. This is frankly of far more importance than the MTBF these days.
Also 60 drives in 10U, that is rubbish density as all the major players are offering 60 drives in 4U, e.g. IBM DCS3700 for example
Re: Not surprised
Shop around then. I can buy Fuij LTO4 tapes with barcode labels preapplied for less than £20 each including VAT and delivery.
Re: AMERICA, F*CK YEAH!
The blueprints and other Saturn V plans are available on microfilm at the Marshall Space Flight Center, they are emphatically not lost. What is gone I believe is the tooling, and I imagine that some of the electronics might be rather difficult to source in 2012, for example I don't believe they make core memory anymore.
Vacination program
Or the Peruvian government could start a pre-exposure immunization program in the effected communities, thereby reducing the risk to humans.
Re: Vote with your Pounds
Apple are actually on the wrong side of the FRAND. Samsung offered the same FRAND terms as they do to everyone else and Apple turned them down. The reason being that Samsung's FRAND terms include a mobile patent cross license. Apple wanted to keep all it's mobile patents to itself so refused the deal as they just wanted to pay cash for the FRAND patents. Then used the patents without paying any license fee. Read the court submission from Samsung, Apple will eventually loose and loose badly on this one...
Samsung would actually have been in breach of it's FRAND obligations if it had given Apple a different deal, because the deal must be NONE DISCRIMINATORY, and not requiring Apple to cross license all it's mobile patents would have been discriminatory.
On the other hand one can use money to hire coders to produce code that can then be used to buy open-source love.
FRAND and cross licensing
Interesting to read in the document regarding the FRAND patents that Samsung explicitly relate that their Fair Reasonable And Non Discriminatory licensing terms require cross licensing of mobile patents, that Samsung offered such a deal to Apple and they refused it, where as everyone else has signed up.
The desgin patent stuff being claimed by Apple also comes under a hammering of supreme court precedents, that invalidate their claims.
In the end Apple are going to loose big time and end up paying Samsung a large amount of cash.
While flash might be getting cheaper, enterprise flash is still eye watering expensive. As such fast spinning rust offers a very cost effective storage where the out and out random IOPS of flash is not required but capacity with better IOPS than 7200rpm disk is required. I have hundreds of disks at work doing just that.
Need to go back further
I would say that by 2000, A level physics had around a quarter of the syllabus cut from a decade earlier when I took it; easier to know less to a higher standard if you ask me. In addition the multiple choice had gone from A-E to A-D; an immediate improvement for anything you need to guess at. Finally the written paper rather than have a scenario and a number of things you needed to calculate had become a fill in booklet with all the intermediate steps layed out for you; makes life much easier. I cannot speak for other exams by A level physics as definitely much easier by 2000.
Exams have got easier and rather than it being disingenuous to hard working students to day to belittle their work, it is disingenuous to students in the past to suggest they where lazy and not that the exams are easier.
Re: So which is it?
In general they are melting, that a small number of glaciers which are technically not in the Himalayas anyway are getting thicker is almost certainly down in increased precipitation on them; though we don't know for certain.
Remember it is global warming, which does not mean that all areas will get warmer. In addition global warming will lead to shifting weather patterns leading to some areas getting increased precipitation. If this falls as snow then glaciers can very easily get thicker/longer.
Trust Lewis to put the usual everything is a scam spin on it.
Solar derived is the only option.
Quick lesson in thermodynamics, the only long term viable energy generation has to come from short term solar derived sources (aka burning fossil fuel does not count through it is solar derived). Anything else will simply heat up the planet as all the generated energy becomes heat.
Renewable the only long term option
There is very limited capacity for generation of energy that does not harvest it from sun derived sources. Too much of anything else will due to the inescapable laws of thermodynamics heat the earth up. The guesstimate is 5000TWhrs of none sun derived energy generation for the entire earth per year.
Tape is insainly cheap
I just purchased 200 LTO4 tape at work for 17GBP with labels to my specification applied. Tell me where I can buy a 800GB hard disk for that price please. LTO5 tapes are less than twice the price as well with a 1600GB capacity. Where are those 1.5TB drives for under 30GBP?
Then you have the power and cooling requirements, well those extra 200 tapes consume zero extra power and require zero extra cooling. In fact the whole library requires zero cooling., and less power than a kettle. I run out of tape slots in my library then after paying necessary money to IBM they will come and stick an extra frame on my TS3500 library for another 440 slots. Or I could go for a high capacity frame and have an extra 1300 slots. Extra power and cooling for this, effectively zero.
It does require a couple hundred tapes to cover the cost of the library and become cheaper than disk, but once you have you it just keeps getting cheaper. If you don't understand this then your don't deserve to be doing cloud level storage.
Cross licensing
It may well be (it is as I understand it) that Samsung's "fair and reasonable non discriminatory" license terms include a mandatory cross licensing of all mobile patents. That's how the patent MAD game is supposed to work, and everyone else would have had no problems with that. Consequently it is "fair", "reasonable" and "non discriminatory".
Apple comes to the game and feels it has a load of innovative touchscreen and smartphone related patents that it does not want to cross license with anyone. They are finding out that is not how the game is played and look like they are about to get screwed over massively for being greedy.
Posted in Toshiba Qosmio DX730 PC TV combo
Not the first desktop
Toshiba have in the past done a range of desktops, some of which where sold in the U.K. One can start off with the Equium 7000 series based on the NLX chassis released in the late 1990's. A quick Google and you can still find web pages on the Toshiba Europe website about them.
It is a Fibre Channel switch, and instead of being NPIV only it is full fabric which costs $$$ to get a license key to unlock. For the record it is a 1U piece of kit, being an entry level FC switch from Brocade. The only hot plug bit about are the SFP's unlike their older switches that had redundant hot plugable PSU's and fans.
Princess DIana
Was tried after Princess Diana died and it failed. Apple and the estate of Steve Jobs are onto a loosing wicket.
Posted in Dell cooks up new HPC strategy
Not on enterprise machines
My experience over the last seven years is that when you buy the Dell equipment that is targeted at the enterprise they don't randomly change the BOM as the article suggests. Sure if you buy the consumer line of products that does happen, but that is presumably why they are cheaper than the enterprise line.
Sure if Intel stop making the parts you can't buy a server with the same CPU several years down the line, but all vendors have the same problem.
RAM is the way in the enterprise
Basically enterprise flash drives are done all wrong. It would be far better to just have a bunch of RAM, and relatively cheap flash or 1.8" drive and battery or supercap. In the rare event that power is lost the contents of the RAM are just dumped to the flash. You would get much better IOS than flash and not have to worry about the wear rates. Given the price that enterprise flash drives are charged at the cost of the RAM is easily covered. The list price for a 400GB SSD for an IBM DS3500 is 10,000USD, well 400GB of ECC RAM and a 1.8" 400GB drive cost a lot less than that retail.
Posted in BMW, Fiat join Connected Car Consortium
Why a new standard?
There are already Bluetooth profiles that do all that, why do we need a new standard?
Admittedly many in car stereo's and hand's free things suck when it comes to integrating Bluetooth properly. However the BTX-2600 which is quite ancient now in my car has never had problems. Hooks up for hand free on the phone, and you can stream music all using Bluetooth. Any incoming call pauses and/or mutes any playback continuing when the call is over.
Now the built in stuff in my sisters Focus does none of that, which is just rubbish, but there is no need for a new standard.
Relativity and speed of light
I am getting sick of all this stuff that relativity says nothing can go faster than light. IT SAYS NO SUCH THING. What it does say is that nothing with a none zero rest mass can be accelerated through the speed of light, which is something entirely different. So photons which have zero rest mass always zip around at the speed of light, things with real mass can never get to the speed of light, and if we can ever find anything with imaginary mass they can never slow down below the speed of light.
Finally anything that can warp space time could take a short cut and appear to be moving faster than light to an observer while never actually doing so.
Cross licensing
You can bet your bottom dollar that the Samsung FRAND terms require a cross licensing of all Apple's mobile patents. Apple is no doubt refusing to do this hence the problem. It will ultimately require a court to decide if this is "fair reasonable and none discriminatory", but on the surface provided they do the same with other manufactures, it would appear to meet the definition of FRAND.
If the courts rule in Samsung's favour on this, and there is a good chance they will Apple are in deep trouble.
I would note that this was a problem with Nokia back when the iPhone first came out. Nokia demanded cross licensing, Apple refused saying they did not need a cross licensing agreement they should just be able to pay cash to used the Nokia patents. The negotiations broke down and Nokia sued and as I understand Apple caved in and came to a settlement. That indicates that cross licensing is seen as the norm in the industry (unless you are Apple that is).
FRAND
As it has to go into the GSM standard, the patent would have to be covered by a "fair,reasonable and none discriminatory" license so as much as Apple might want to keep it to itself it cannot, otherwise it would get locked out of making mobile phones rather quickly as all the FRAND covered patent licenses it needs would be revoked.
What is fair and reasonable
I am quite sure that in Samsung's eyes fair and reasonable means a full cross licensing of all mobile patents. So yes they have to license them under fair and reasonable terms, it is just Apple is not willing to accept the fair and reasonable terms that Samsung is offering because it just wants to pay money and do a one way license deal while keeping it's patents all to it's self. Which way the courts go I don't know but to my mind Samsung's position seems pretty reasonable to me and until Apple pressed the nuclear button what everyone in the mobile business was doing which makes it a pretty strong precedent for what fair and reasonable means in this context.
And exactly how are the University going to know what is in my personal none work email account to disclose it. They are not, and neither am I ever going to give them access to the contents of my personal and private account for them to find out if it contains information that should be released.
The right to privacy of the Human Rights Act would be a useful shield against this sort of total nonsense. The ICO needs to take some legal advice and consider the practicalities of his ruling if you ask me
Posted in Lossless music goes High Street
Been available for years
Ok so it is only classical recordings, but Deutsche Grammophon has pretty much it's entire catalog available for download as FLAC, as well as MP3 with not a drop of DRM in sight, and it's been that way for a couple of years at least.
No Freesat - fail
With no Freesat and FreesatHD it is another failure, if for no other reason there are more HD channels on Freesat than there is on Freeview.
Sex Descrimination Act 1975
It has been illegal to discriminate on the grounds of gender in the UK for over thirty years now. Basically they have been getting away with it.
Eh.
> Too close to the exchange (direct line to the exchange, no cabinet).
Why should this be a problem? Surely they can just install VDSL2 equipement in the exchange and be done with it. There are a lot of smaller rural exchanges serving small towns where virtually everyone is less than 1km from the exchange often much less. These are surely cheaper to upgrade to an FTTC like solution where the cabinet is the exchange than actually having to run fibre to cabinets or am I missing something? Sure you won't cover everyone on such an exchange running with the VDSL2 equipment in the exchange but it would be better than the current system. That said I would be happy if my exchange was upgraded to take ADSL2, because I need more upload speed than download.
Toshiba clearly don't count then
The MK1059GSM is another 1TB three platter drive, and Seagate have their ST91000641NS drive aka Constellation.2 which is a 7200rpm job. Contary to the article span are listing it with a price and three day availability along with a link to specification sheet on the Seagate website. I would point out that the Constellation line is depreciated for the Constellation.2 line which is probably why you could only get 160GB and 500GB drives.
Admittedly both are 12.5mm height drives but, poor background research/knowledge for this article I am afraid.
Posted in ACS:Law fined for data breach
Legal firms are partnerships
Legal firms cannot be limited companies they are all partnerships. The Law Society requires that partners in law firms are personally responsible for all liabilities. That is unless they have changed the rules recently.
Andriod UI on Symbian
What Nokia should do is paste the Android user interface on top of the Symbian kernel. That way you get a quality hard realtime kernel rather than Linux which is really not up to the job and I say that as a hard core Linux user of 18 years, with the popular Android user interface and hence access to the applications.
I reckon if Nokia did such a move it would not be long before most other vendors ditched the Linux kernel in favour of Symbian.
Posted in Google sees printing in the cloud
All you need is imagination
Well lets face it if you include a PostScript and PCL drivers that covers a large percentage of business class printers, and quite a few others beside.
For a large chunk of the rest there is workaround. Include PictBridge support. Now while this was designed for printing pictures from cameras, what it means is that the printer is presented with a JPEG which it then prints. Nothing to stop you rendering a document to a JPEG and printing page at a time. I have tried it myself, rendered a page of a PDF to a JPEG using GhostScript loaded it onto my camera, and then promptly printed it on a suitable inkjet printer. In theory it should work with a TIFF as well but I did not bother to try that.
