Strange criteria...
Anybody buying, or reviewing a Monty Python film on the basis of the quality of its audio and video technical quality has, frankly, rather missed the point...
Posts by Steven Jones
1091 posts • joined Monday 21st May 2007 21:57 GMT
Not many Einsteins to go round, but...
"problem is that patent offices are not exactly stuffed with einsteins"
Whilst not exactly stuffed with Einsteins, the Swiss patent office at the start of the 20th century could, at least, claim the only one anybody has ever heard of.
Re: hmm
@some beggar
By "removing" I mean removing the effect of. Manufacturers are perfectly capable of delivering sensors without the bayer matrix - just use a neutral (ie transparent) filter material. The colour density of the bayer filters is something the manufacturers tweak for individual customers.
And who said the tweaking of the firmware was just removing menu items? However, it also isn't going to be a massive job either.
Pricing
The pricing will be based on what Leica think the market will bear. If you can afford a B&W only Leica, probably to supplement an M9, they'll be fairly wealthy so adding another £1K to the price tag probably won't suppress sales.
Of course removing the Bayer filter won't have cost much (although a bit of extra tweaking on the firmware will be required for a small run), but otherwise the costs of manufacturing aren't going to be significantly different to the M9.
Root canal surgery & pain...
Root Canal surgery in my experience is painless. It's what caused you to need it in the first place that is the painful bit...
Also, what is it with meaningless comparisons like this one? Also, the article, and presumably the study it was based on is so full of vested interests and bland generalisation as to be just PR puff.
As anybody can tell you with complex applications, porting, whether to cloud or a completely new platform of your own is almost always an expensive and painful exercise.
Acorn's demise in perspective...
The reason the Acorn project fell to pieces was partly because so many journalists, politicians and other influential parties were vociferous in opposing the use of a "non-standard" (that is non-Wintel) architecture machines in education especially. That, and the domination of business by MS Office and the need to exchange documents essentially lead Acorn into an ever declining market. There were some great applications written for the Acorn RISC machines (like Sibelius), but it was inevitable that it could not be sustained on that architecture. It's simply impossible to maintain a thriving development community of applications in such a narrow market based largely in one country.
Don't forget there were many other non-Wintel casualties in the US and a whole raft of alternative processors. Apple only just survived as manufacturer of an alternative architecture because of its dominance in some important niche areas, such as the "creative" sectors along with a somewhat grudging support from MS via a porting of Office (grudging, because it was something of a sop to US competition authorities). Acorn were never able to do what Apple did with the non-computing products, like IPod. With all its troubles, Apple was much better financed with a much more supportive investment sector and a larger market.
As it is, it was ineviable that Acorn would end up, as its name indicated, the seed for a number of small/medium enterprises specialising in niche areas. Competing with Wintel was always going to be near impossible. That ARM emerged from it is something of a miracle, but to keep things in perspective, the vast majority of the income from products using this architecture acrues outside the company. Essentially ARM does not compete just on the excellence of its low-power processor designs and associated eco-systems, but because it is very, very cheap. ARM is not Intel who can command income per processor perhaps 100x that of the royalties the former achieves.
Re: Plagurism - maybe, maths no ...
It depends what the rated hours of service are. If it is 24 x 7 x 365, then you are right. However, if it only has service for normal working hours for measurement purposes then they are right.
Many services are available 24 x 7, but only supported for office hours. Depends on the service level agreement.
UK hobby computing started in earnest in 1977...
Those who started home computing in the 1980s were Johnny-come-latelies. The first true UK designed hobby computer was surely the Nascom 1 release in December 1977. With a proper keyboard, screen output and supplied as a kit with full circuit diagrams and monitor listing, this was a proper hard-core hobby computer. Many were those who cut their programming teeth on this and the Nascom II released 2 years later. I still have mine, and a few years ago, at least, it was still working.
My first serious project was a porting of Dan and Kathleen Spracklen's Sargon chess playing program to my Nascom II, a slow and laborious process when I had no floppy disk drive.
The Nascom 1 featured on the first ever issue of Personal Computer World.
http://www.digitalretro.co.uk/Personal_Computer_World_magazine/PCW_obituary.htm
Re: Outstanding
@irish donkey
be careful what you wish for. If retrospective taxation becomes the norm, then you might just find the tax authorities come after ordinary people for more people when they decide keeping to the law is just a tiresome chore. Retrospective law changes are a menace to ordinary people as what is a legal act now, might turn out later to be something you get in trouble for.
It should be noted that some of the "anti avoidance" measures on the statue book are not quite the same as they already set out areas of uncertainty which need clearance before new schemes are exercised. Not ideal, but certainly not changing the rules retrospectively.
Another thing to note is that retrospective legislation is a sure way of scaring away inward investment. The Indian government may yet find they pay a penalty if they pursue this route. Also, if they abrogate treaties they've made with other countries, they could finds that's not cost free too.
Re: Better reception?
@fuzz
not quite true - the BBC HD channels are on a second mux (along with c4 & ITV HD).
Legislative clarification anybody?
It is surely time that there was some government involvement in clarifying the purpose of IPRs rather than leaving it to courts to interpret. It should be remembered that the granting of monopolies in the form of copyright, patents, trademarks and the like was (or at least should) be done where it is in the greater interests of society and some recognition of natural justice. However, where this is just being used as a tool for extending scope of market control and reduction of competition, this is questionable. Undoubtedly the increase in the use of IPRs on the part of (mostly) larger US corporations is towards the control of markets and the generation of local monopolies through lock-outs.
It's about time a proper commission was put together to clarify these positions with the purpose of protecting the interests of the great majority and not those of major corporations seeking to generate areas immune from real competition.
Of course this introduces huge international issues, but there's a good case for some economic blocs to take a more liberal view of IPR extent than and increasingly litigious US corporate sector. There are, of course, very different interpretations of the scope of patents in the EU for instance.
Re: Wispa's superficial analogy
Indeed - and other services are cross-subsidised as well. Witness the delivery of letter to rural areas by postmen in vans. How much is it costing to deliver each item as against those in a suburban area?
That's not to say I'm against all cross-subsidisation, but it's nonsense economics to claim that those who happen, by choice or luck, to be on longer lines to claim that they are somehow being overcharged when the real costs are very much the reverse. If it was left just to be market, many of these places would get no service at all.
Wispa's superficial analogy
The problem with this is that most of the real costs of ADSL are fixed and independent of line speed. That's simply because that, apart from back-haul, the inescapable costs are largely those of the maintenance, return on capital, business rates and so on for things such as the local loop, power, DSLAM and accommodation. Indeed, as ADSL speeds are essentially inversely related to the length of the copper line, the real costs of supporting long lines (and inherent slower speeds) are higher than those for short lines, as the former requires more maintenance and capital (more copper, more telegraph poles, ducts and so on). Indeed rural lines are already cross-subsidised by those from suburban and city areas.
Of course the rational thing here is to have a separate fixed line charge and then variable rates based on the amount of data shifted and guaranteed back-haul bandwidth. That way those on longer lines will pay less for the capacity side and more for delivery. People might complain about this, but it's hardly unusual. If you live remote from a town you inevitably pay more for transport or local shopping due to higher costs. Indeed there are some infrastructure services, like main drainage, gas distribution or cable TV which are deemed not to be cost effective in some locations.
Comparison with Kg of sugar are just a nonsense. The costs of sugar are largely proportionate to weight whilst the costs of providing ADSL are far more complex.
It may be that it's social desirable to provide high speed comms to those remote from telecommunications infrastructure and for the rest to cross-subsidise it. However, outfits like wispa should not be misrepresenting this - as it stands, those who by luck, or choice, are on shorter copper loops effectively cross-subsidise long lines already.
Re: Remember Network Rail...
"The government should bring Openreach back into public ownership (they should never have privatised that bit) "
So that's another few billion pounds to be added to the national debt then - well, assuming you
Of course at the time of privatisation there was not separate "local loop" organisation and, in any case, the government raised as much in cash terms via the three tranches of share sales as BT's entire market capitalisation, so you might think the government did fairly well out of that deal when the accumulated inflation is taken into account.
It's also worth noting that, at the time of privatisation, competition was to be provided by the local cable franchises (who had cable TV delivery monopolies) and, to a considerable extent, that arrived with about 50% of households covered.
Not the weight of the Broooklyn Bridge divided by Body Surface Area...
"I think the implication is weight of the BB spread over surface area of you."
Well the Brooklyn Bridge is reported as weighting about 14,680 tons, or about 32.9 million pounds. As they report this as being equivalent to 1.5 Brooklyn Bridges, then that becomes about 49.3 million pounds. At 400 pounds per square inch, that comes out at 123,312 square inches. An average man has a BSA (body surface area) of about 1.9 sq metres, or 2,945 square inches. So that would be out by a factor of over forty to one.
Of course constrictors don't work over the entire body surface anyway.
In all, the BBC's numbers are bonkers and it's unclear how they were derived.
"the equivalent of lying under the weight of one-and-a-half times the Brooklyn Bridge".
This makes no sense at all. The units don't match. The weight of the Brooklyn Bridge is surely a unit measured in force whilst pressure is force per unit area. Of course it might be that the BBC is talking about the pressure at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge's suspension towers, but as it stands it is complete nonsense.
Re: Power
@Lee Dowling
"We're talking hundreds of GW of power to deliver some TV signals."
What utter nonsense. The total installed generating capacity in the UK is only about 100GW, so how on Earth you think it takes "hundreds of GW to deliver some TV signals" I've no idea. Even if we do take your rather naive interpretation of what the transmitter power ratings mean (as the figures are ERP and include the net effect of antenna gain - that is allowing for most power being transmitted at a relatively narrow angle towards the horizon), then the nominal total is only 1MW for all the digital TV signals from the Crystal Palace transmitter after switchover. That's to serve a population approaching 10 million people (as the coverage area goes way beyond the Greater London area). Admittedly analogue TV uses more power, but as it's digital TV that is being discussed, it's hardly relevant.
To get your 100s of GW, then you'd have to multiply the nominal power rating of all the channels (analogue & digital) by many tens of thousands of similar transmitters.
Posted in UK government says no to turbo e-bike
Re: 28 what
Unless you are Chris Hoy, Mark Cavendish or the like, that's with gravity assisted meat power as 45mph on the flat requires about 1.8Kw on road bike. Electric bikes can do those speeds downhill too - just not with any power assist.
Incidentally, fat boys on steep downhills for faster than thin ones as the weight goes up faster than cross-section.
Re: The right wing dodged a bullet
@Jason Bloomberg
I suppose it was predictable there would be at least one person using the situation to promote their own particular preconceptions whatever the actual circumstances.
Proof furry mammals existed alongside dinosaurs.
How else to explain how this was produced?
http://idiotflashback.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/110949.jpg
Posted in SanDisk Extreme 120GB SSD
Re: Capacities
Any extra cells used for wear levelling are invisible to the operating system as it's purely internal to the device.
The real reason for the difference is two fold. Firstly the definition of a GB is not 2^30, but 10^9. The difference is significant (about 7.4%). Technically speaking,2^30 would be 1 GiB, not 1 GB. File systems tend to report KB, MB & GB using a bizarre mixture of units. Very fften the base is a KiB (1024 bytes) - a legacy of the physical sector size being 512 bytes. Sometimes a MB is reported as 1,000 x KiB and a GB as 1,000,000 x KiB, sometimes a a MB is reported as 1,024 x KiB (ie a MiB) and a GB as 1,024 x 1,024 x KiB (i.e. a GiB). These sort of hybrid units are a real pain if you are working on SAN allocations, logical volumes and so on as it's easy to be tripped up.
Then the other reason is that when formatting a file system a considerable portion is used for things like directory structures and other areas not available for actual data. File systems tend to report what is left after that. The same loss of apparent capacity happens with HDDs.
Re: BT scum
@AC
BT were not "given" the infrastructure you idiot. It was sold to the shareholders for an amount rather higher than BT's current capitalisation. Ofcom consistently undervalue the fixed line assets in order to produce their wholesale charges.
Note that the amount raised by the government in the three tranches of BT share sales is higher than current market capitalisation in cash terms - feed inflation into the equation and it's less than half the capitalisation now.
You've also compounded your idiocy by conflating retail charges (for which their are manifest alternatives) with wholesale.
Costly arms race.
The thing that is going to alarm the ISPs is simply the immense cost of maintaining and developing anti-piracy measures and technologies in what will simply become a technological arms race. Indeed an arms race that's impossible to win unless the Internet is to become a rigidly controlled "walled garden" where what can, and cannot be done is micro-managed. It's the sort of dream of the Internet that despotic regimes (and maybe Apple) would like. It's simply nothing like the Internet as we know it.
Also, it's not "customer's money" being used to fight these cases unless, somehow, we have departed from the normal capitalist way. It's shareholders money.
Re: Surely Twitter is not an editor/publisher
@Wize
Unless you take the word literally, that's what is viewed as "fair comment" and not a libel. People seem to have trouble understanding the difference between an insult and a libel.
Re: Oh dear
You cannot be (successfully) sued for defamation in the UK for expressing and opinion about somebody. You have to make a claim of fact which is incorrect. So you can call somebody anything insulting you like, but if you claim (for instance), they are corrupt and can't prove it then you are in trouble. There is no defense of making such allegations as an innocent mistake (as their in the US where you have to prove malevolence as well as making an unproven allegation).
There is a proviso to this - whilst you can't be successfuly sued for defamation, recent legislation on various forms of equality legislation can mean that racist, homophobic or similar insults can get you in trouble with the criminal law if they are considered to be liable to generate hate etc.
Re: Re: ISO Test Images
No - you are basically right. When all is said an done, for equivalent levels of technology, the basic technical properties of image quality (SNR, dynamic range etc.) are functions of how many photons are detected. High ISO just means the gain has been turned up (either analogue, digitally or some combination) to get the required image density. However, where a sensor has low read noise, the analogue amplification doesn't really gain anything over doing it in post-processing as, fundamentally, your are deriving an image from the same number of detected photons. Larger sensors simply intercept more photons for a given field of view, aperture and shutter speed.
Indeed there is something called "isoless shooting" which just involves using a camera's "base ISO" setting - that is the setting which has optimal dynamic range - and dialling in whatever level of under-exposure is required to get the shutter speed and aperture that you want to freeze the image and get the required depth of field.
Tests on sensors using modern Sony manufactured 16MP sensor in cameras such as the Pentax K5, Nikon D7000 and, indeed, thise Nex-5n show that using base ISO with underexposure at base ISO of down to -6 EV compensating in post-processing produces almost identical results to increasing ISO by the equivalent amount with the same exposure. Note this is not true of sensors with higher read noise.
So it's the photons that count, or rather the number of photons that are counted...
For technical measures of image quality, DXOmark is an excellent site.
Posted in Ten... sub-£100 mono laser printers
Re: Re: Re: Electricity Consumption - a Real Cost
True, but for printers with a sub 1W deep sleep mode the environmental and monetary saving is small - about £1 per year. It's probably better to have a low deep-sleep power usage and decent energy management than relying on people remembering to turn things off promptly.
A more complete explanation
There is a rather better explanation of the issues here, which are by no means limited to using channel 60 with signal boosters. It appears that if you have a signal booster near a 4G transmitter it could kill the entire Freeview service or, if you are really unlucky, even without a booster. That's due to overload of signal levels into either the booster or the receiver.
The adjacent channel 60 interference issue also applies, but it's far from the only issue.
http://www.ukfree.tv/fullstory.php?storyid=1107051834
One thing that does occur to me as that this is based on modelling the 9,000 or so 4G base station. However, what about the mobile devices themselves? No doubt they are much lower powered than the base station, but many will be a heck of a lot closer to the TV aerials, and the inverse square law applies.
What really matters.
"we won't be running out any time soon" is a euphemism for "in my lifetime"...
Re: Re: Problem is not due to signal boosters.
Well that makes more sense that the article, although my experience of masthead amps is they have a great deal of tolerance. I've seen a masthead amp deal with a combination of very strong and very weak TV signals. Of course if the 4G transmitter is close enough, and strong enough what you suggest could happen. Fitting a filter is a bit of a pain with a masthead amp as if it's to sort out clipping or AGC as you suggest, it will have to be up the mast too. It would also have to have a very steep roll-off, which implies it might have to be active.
Perhaps it would be better to introduce masthead amps & boosters that cut off the frequency response at channel 60.
An alternative
What's the Spanish for "my ex husband is a self regarding prick"?
Re: Rural France
That's a pretty idiotic comment. The laws of physics are the same in France as they are in the UK, as is the technology. Getting 2Mbps over 4km of copper twisted pair is not exceptional. In fact it's rather poor. I get about 4.5Mbps on a line of similar length back in the UK.
Problem is not due to signal boosters.
"The only people who are really going to have problems are those receiving television on channel 60 or above (see this helpful map from UK Free TV) who are also using powered signal boosters. These take in the signal and amplify it, but they also amplify the interfering signal and can make the two indistinguishable, so it's those users Ofcom (and the Ministry) will be targeting."
What a nonsensical way of describing the problem. Powered signal boosters do not make the two signals indistinguishable. What causes the problem is that the Freeview signal is very weak in the first place (hence the need to boost it) and that the addition of extra interference from an adjacent 4G channel will reduce the SNR below what is required to decode the Freeview channel. So it's nothing to do with the use of signal boosters as such - it's simply because such boosters are used where the Freeview signal is already marginal.
A better approach would be to use "grouped" antenna to provide for more signal selection. Unfortunately, the early Freeview roll-outs involve a lot of "out of group" channels and wide-band antenna proliferated. I don't know if this pattern is repeated on the "final" Freeview frequency allocations, but if so it will not help the situation as wide-band antenna will be more vulnerable to such interference.
Posted in Ten... sub-£100 mono laser printers
Re: Electricity Consumption - a Real Cost
I'm a bit dubious about those quoted costs. As an example, the Brother HL-2130 is estimated at 215kWh per year. Averaged out, that's over 24watts 365 days per year, 24 hours per day. It's equivalent to the printer being in full ready mode (i.e. hot and ready to go) for 7 hours every day and printing for 1 hour. That's well over 1,000 pages per day, vastly more than the usage this sort of printer is designed for, an wholly atypical of a home office or domestic situation. Also, the printer defaults to entering deep sleep mode (0.8W) after 5 minutes. In a domestic situation this is how it can be expected to remain for the vast majority of the time (or switched off).
In fact Brother's estimate is 0.913kWh per week or 47kWh per year which is about £5 and an average of about 5W. I think that's much more realistic for typical home use - indeed it would be at the high end in my view.
I suspect that's typical of most modern printers. Until somebody puts an energy usage monitor on one of these for a few months in a typical environment, we won't know for sure, but for now I think the estimates are simply wrong for any environment where this class of printer will be used.
Posted in Intel 520 240GB SSD
I rather think you're mistaken. The original idiom was "all told", although the "all tolled" version is used, if much less frequently.
http://www.word-detective.com/2008/04/11/all-told/
Storage is a multi-dimensional issue
I'm extremely dubious about the merits of allowing applications to write to persistent storage in servers without going through properly mediated O/S interfaces. There are extremely good reasons to have very well defined API storage interfaces (security, data sharing, validation, integrity etc.) implemented by operating systems and databases. Throw this away and chaos threatens.
It's certainly true that latency can be optimised by placing storage very close to system buses, but realistically the vast majority of real-world applications will gain very little benefit once I/O latency drops below the 100 micro-second mark (well within the limits of what storage technology can do). That's a 50-fold improvement on what 15K spinning disks can achieve. Of course older arrays don't have the processing speed to support such low latencies at high I/O levels (although they can just about get there from cache). That's an argument for improving storage appliances, not throwing away decades of well-founded application and storage architectures.
Once you throw away the idea of a separate networked storage pool (whether a physical or virtual pool), then it plays havoc with application and data centre architectures, data sharing, resilience, legacy applications, manageability and much else.
No, much better to retain established I/O API interfaces (block, file & database) and their attendant network protocols. For each of these there are centralised storage appliances available (SAN arrays, NAS arrays & DB farms/clusters/appliances) where the detail of flash implementation can be hidden.
It may also be that VM farms might have their own integrated storage solutions, but the majority of storage in major data centre applications will continue to be shared and that will require appropriate storage networks.
This is an article which has all the hallmarks of theory based on just one dimension of a problem.
FTTC copper pair hybrid solutions still use DSL.
It is technically incorrect to describe FTTC hybrid solutions which utilise copper pairs for the last few hundred metres as "abandoning DSL". Generally the copper part uses some form of VDSL which has the potential for 100Mbps or so. El Reg ought to know that DSL is a family of technologies (albeit based on some common principles), and ADSL is just one of them.
I think not...
Care to put money on that claim? That's approaching 8 orders of magnitude above current capacities, or about 23 doublings. Depending on whether you take the doubling period of Moore's law at 18 months or two years, that's still somewhere in the 35-50 year range.
Of course if you want to be ambitious, 10 Exabytes is 10^16. If we manage to store 1 bit per silicon atom, that's around 10^17 atoms (before we consider any form of access circuitry). 10^17 silicon atoms has a mass of a bit under 2 milligrams, so some might argue it isn't completely impossible, but that's about the only grounds I could give for it.
Bizarre conclusion...
@crisp
In what sense is any of that your money? Or for that matter, in what sense was it stolen? This was a matter of a disputed tax bill, and as the supreme court of a country has decided that no such liability was due, then it's rather difficult to make such a case, let alone that money was stolen. But then maybe you don't care too much for the rule of law.
How about two time standards...
Could they not just establish some form of time standard which is decoupled from "Earth Time" and then maintain an appropriate offset. For those applications where an "absolute" time standard matters, then use that in conjunction, where required, with "Earth Time". For everyday apps where "Earth Time" matters, it's relatively straightforward to "stretch" time a little to provide for the odd "leap second" without creating big jumps.
It's not as if computer systems don't have to deal with multiple time standards anyway. Many systems have to cope with different time zones and so-called "daylight saving".
Posted in Ten... mini hi-fi systems
Groan...
Uncontrolled audio quality comparison tests which are not performed using "blind testing" techniques are next to worthless. The whole area of audiophilia is riven with mumbo-jumbo, meaningless and undefined terms and snake oil salesman.
Posted in Kodak heading to Chapter 11
The way of the world
It's a huge deal to radically change the basic technology of any major entrenched company in note much more than a decade. It's especially difficult when you run straight into the established strengths of the type of consumer-based electronics specialists based in Asia. If people want to see how difficult such transitions are, I invite them to examine how many of the top 100 US companies (by capitalisation) at the start of the 20th century are still there a little over a century later. There are very few.
Inicidentally, it's not quite true that Kodak were never a camera company. Whilst there cameras were always aimed at promoting their film business, it has to be noted that the Box Brownie was absolutely at the forefront of popularising photography.
Slurp
There is surely no more word that suits the El-Reg headline style than "slurp". It's got that wonderful heady mix of being disrespectful, unsavoury, uncouth,monosyllabic, confrontational and making everybody feel ever so slightly queasy and unclean.
Penetration?
So just how will the gas get into the vehicle or building without penetrating it? Drill a hole? Use a tiny, shaped charge? This doesn't sound easy to me given the range of materials and thicknesses it might have to deal with. Also, in a car, it seems to me that opening the windows might rather limit the effectiveness.
There's also the little question of what these gases are meant to do. Forget any ideas of fast-acting "knock out" gases. That's the realm of Batman cartoons. Thinks like tear gas might temporarily disable those in a vehicle or cause them to evacuate it, but they have to bedelivered in reasonably large concentrations.
re errr..
The density of CO2 at atmospheric pressure is 1.98 gm/litre, so 6 litres (at atmospheric pressure) from a 12gm CO2 cartridge would be accurate, however much it was originally compressed.
Posted in PCIe flashers bash storage networks
Not addressing virtualisation
@Ammaross Danan
I wasn't addressing the value of virtualisation in my post, but of the role of I/O bottlenecks. However, since you raise it, the point you makes about virtualisation disrupting I/O patterns applies equally to any form of multi-application access to shared storage unless you maintain a system of rigid segmentation (which is usually undesirable from a storage utilisation point of view). Indeed even multiple apps under the same OS exhibit this phenomenon of disrupted I/O patterns, and this has got worse as disks have increased in capacity and fewer spindles are available. However, none of this is incompatible with the observation that I/O bottlenecks are increasingly the limiting factor on modern applications - indeed it reinforces it.
I'm well aware that virtualisation saves system boxes, power, software licensing (under some circumstances) and so on (although savings ). Indeed I go back far enough to have worked on virtualised systems in the very early 1980s. Also, virtualisation does make some other demands on fast I/O. There is a phenemomenon called I/O elongation (or it was at the time) whereby I/O latency time had the appearance of being extended (as far as the guest OS was concerned) as the I/O terminated whilst the guest machine was not scheduled to run. This means that guest OSs on I/O bound apps in contended environments tend to perform notably worse than when run native. Improvements to VM software guest scheduling has helped this, but owing to the common x64 OSs not being written with virtualisation in mind, there are limits to how effective this can be.
Virtualisation is fine, but it should be remembered there is one resource that can't be virtualised, and that is time. Any time an OS has to deal with the real world, the timing issue raises its head. If the guest OS is unaware of running under a hyperviser then there are many complex issues which can lead to unhelpful behaviour on contested platforms.
Ever heard of the Hawthorne Effect?
I hope the people evaluating this are aware of the Hawthorne Effect where it was determined that increases in productivity were not down to changes in the environment (which included lighting changes), but the special attention the subjects were getting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
Of course people are now well aware that the original experiment (and the conclusions drawn) we somewhat flawed. However, the basic Hawthorne Effect is very well accepted.
This does not mean that environmental issues don't make a difference, but it's a good reason to be suspicious of press releases and *research* from interested parties.
Rubberneckers...
The talk about "rubberneckers" on the other carriageway completely fails to understand what amounts to the fluid dynamics involved in a busy motorway. When such a road is running close to capacity it's very susceptible to even the most minor perturbations in flow. Everybody will have come across situations on busy motorways when traffic flows freely for a while interspersed with queues of stationary traffic only to be followed by another repeat of the same. That's simply caused by a minor disturbance (or even random fluctuations in flow) leading to turbulent flow. Simply as traffic behind starts to close up on a slowing vehicle eventually, as gaps close down, eventually somebody has to brake and this gets worse until, eventually, somebody has to stop. Then you are into stop-start territory. In the case of an accident on the other carriageway, with blue flashing lights and the like, it's only natural (and safe) to ease off the throttle a little and this minor effect is enough, on a busy motorway, to trigger turbulent flow.
Of course the article has nothing whatsoever to do with "rubberneckers" - it's about the length of time that the police take when closing down motorways for investigations.
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