Posts by Steven Jones

@Mark65

I understand the point, but it's not quite true that some current bond holders won't suffer a loss. That is part of the new deal, albeit nothing like as bad as it could have been (and might yet be). That France is notably keener on assisting Greece than is Germany might be something to do with the former's banks being particularly exposed to Greek sovereign debt (albeit German banks are the second largest creditors).

In any case, the notion that all state-issued bonds in the Eurozone are equally sound has now been disproved, the importance of that being that it should be possible to contain risks in the future. However, we are where we are, so there's an awful lot of reckless lending to be unwound. For instance, the UK banking sector is particularly exposed to Irish sovereign debt.

Mixing up your energies

@atippey

The formula you give (half mass times the square of the velocity) is that for kinetic energy. The formula for potential energy in this case is m x g x h where m is the mass, g the acceleration due to gravity and h the height above the reference level you are measuring the potential energy (ie where this blessed phone would land).

Nightmare?

I've been using a 256GB Crucial drive since September 2009 and, compared to the hard drive setup I had before, it is an absolute dream; far and away the best upgrade I've ever performed.

As for write cycle limitations, then it's not going to be an issue that affects typical PC users. In any case, hard drives are prone to sudden and unpredictable failures (as I've found to my cost).

I should add that I use the SSD for system and other areas with high random I/O demands. For bulk data I use HDDs.

So one thing I can say for sure, my experience of an SSD is anything but a nightmare. It has transformed the usability of my PC.

In a word no...

The minimum size of a photosensor element in a CCD is effectively dictated by the optics and the nature of visible light and not the ability to fabricate smaller elements. Indeed a 40nm element would be something like an order of magnitude smaller than the what any visible light optical instrument could theoretically resolve. Indeed for many types of optical instrument, the practical resolving power is significantly worse than that. Whilst there is some value in the sensor "out-resolving" the optics, there is a law of diminishing returns and there are other issues. One of these is the ability of the photosensors to be hold enough excited electrons to provide for a decent dynamic range. That ability is directly related to the photosensor size. Then there is a requirement to be able to read all these elements. A single billion-cell CCD would take a long time, and due to the "bucket-brigade" nature of a CCD it would be likely to introduce more errors and noise. A CCD also has to allow for space round the photocells for insulation and for circuitry. That reduces the surface area for actually sensing light, which is very bad news.

For this sort of work, the optimal photosensor size is probably of the order of a several microns, or a good two orders of magnitude larger than that used for producing processor chips.

Slightly misleading...

If you compare the sequential throughput of a modern 1TB drive with that of a 10MB one, then that has only gone up about a 300 fold, or rather less than Ethernet throughput has in the same period. The reason for this is quite simple - disk capacity goes up as to a square of linear bit density (so capacity has gone up 100,000-fold) whilst sequential throughput goes up linearly. In fact it's misleading to claim that Ethernet is only 1,000 fold faster - that 10Mb used to be delivered in a single collision domain (and if there were many hosts it was impossible to get anything near 10Mb). A modern LAN implemented with non-blocking switches containing many hundreds or thousands of switches. Indeed there are enterprise switches rated at several terabits - just not all down the same wire at the same time. So (total) network capacity has gone up at a much higher rate than the data rate of a single Ethernet interface.

Not exactly illegal

It was never "illegal" to make a charge for credit card payments. However, the credit card companies used to have a clause in their contracts with retailers which forbade them to raise such surcharges. It was these contact clauses which were, in time, deemed to be illegal in the formal sense of the word (quite possibly because of EU or domestic competition rules). This has been the position for many years.

I can see some justification for not making debit card payers (fixed 20p charge from the card operator) and cash payers subsidise credit card sales (usually about 2% of the value), but it should not exceed the actual costs.

Note that credit card users do gain some benefits - their payments are essentially insured against the failure of the supplier, not to mention a 1-2 month credit period.

O2 (or rather Cellnet) did not exist in 1984

The O2 (or Cellnet) as it was network did not exist at the time BT was privatised and the first tranche of shares was sold. It was created as a partnership in 1985 with Securicor owning 40% (although the latter was essentially a sleeping partner). So there isn't really any sense in which the O2 network was built by the state and bought by shareholders. The state had no role in the funding of the Cellnet network.

Of course there's an argument that the bandwidth was "gifted" to Cellnet, but that also applied to Vodafone too.

Of course the other things that has to be taken account of in the capitalisation is the rights issue in 2001 when almost £6bn was raised from shareholders (probably the equivalent of £8bn or more now).

Growth Stocks

I two words Capital Growth. Investors buy shares in companies such as Apple on the basis that they are growth stocks. The principle is that the money freed up by not paying dividends can be invested to grow faster. It was an approach taken by many US technology stocks. Of course how this fits with a company sitting on a huge cash pile is another question. Should Apple be unable to maintain the momentum of its growth and it can't find anything useful to do with the money, then the stock price will stall, fall and there will be a clamour to return these funds.

It's storing up a problem for the future - it's difficult to see how Apple can continue to grow at the same rate and many investors will count on getting out before any share price fall. However, there are always more losers than gainers.

Common infrastructure

I don't think there's an issue as such about opening up the infrastructure - it's just that it has to be done at a level which is a realistic representation of it's value. The assets belong to shareholders, and they've paid for them - however it was originally put in place. As you point out, if this is done at the wrong level all it does is disincentives infrastructure investment.

I wouldn't support monopoly, especially state monopoly provision. The old Post Office telecommunication organisation was monumentally inefficient and, at the time of privatisation, the vast majority of local telephone exchanges were Strowger based. Government ownership does not equal lost of investment - the exchequer have a habit of siphoning off funds.

As it is, the government does quite well out of telecoms taxation - the (for the mobile industry) disastrous 3G auctions raise about £24bn (from memory).

Not oil....

"the power they use is still probably coming from oil or gas in the first place". The electricity will only come from oil if you live in Saudi or the like. Far, far too expensive - London got a nice big venue for modern arts at the old Bankside generating station largely because generating electricity from oil became increasingly uneconomic during the late 1970s.

The primary fossil fuels used for electricity generation are gas and coal. Gas isn't too bad (from a CO2 an pollution perspective), but coal is fairly dreadful - not just CO2, but other pollutants not to mention putting quite a lot of radiation into the atmosphere.

Anyway, the general point holds true that if electric cars had to pay the same duty/VAT for their power as do IC vehicles (at least in the UK) it would put the per-mile costs up from about 2p to about 6p (assuming optimal range and off-peak electricity).

CMT

There is no way that a CMT chip can compete with the single thread speed of x64, Power, Itanium or SPARC64. CMT chips are all about maximising the throughput of processor cores by presenting virtual CPUs and using up otherwise "dead time" spent waiting for main memory access. They simply are not optimised for single thread processing as to do so means allocating lots or silicon real estate to superscalar techniques such as out-of-order execution, concurrent execution and the like. To do so with the T series would be impractical - the entire processor design is based around on a completely different philosophy. Unfortunately there are many workloads out there where single thread speed matters. For example, to optimise response times or for large, high-throughput, Oracle databases. Indeed it is telling that the Oracle Exadata is built round Intel x64 architecture processors, not the T series.

Now that AMD and Intel are pushing adding many high speed cores into single chips (with two threads per core in the case of Intel), the only real advantage of Oracle's T series processor is on binary compatibility with SPARC code (important for a lot of legacy apps). In almost all other criteria the advantage will be with x64 architecture servers, and on price/performance there is just no comparison.

Hydrogen economy myth

The idea that hydrogen makes any sense as an energy storage system is a persistent myth. When you take into account the full life cycle only about 25% of the original energy content used to produce it will be available for use in a fuel cell. On top of that, it's bulky - even under very high pressures or even liquefaction. The very compression (or liquefaction) of hydrogen uses a very high proportion of the energy content. Because hydrogen atoms are so so small it is notoriously difficult to keep under very high pressure - it tends to percolate through liners and does bad things to the tank material over time. Diving tanks are simply unsuited to this purpose - they have to be built to a much higher level.

Only for a few uses does hydrogen make much sense - whilst it's bulky, liquid hydrogen is at least light, so it makes sense in space rockets where the energy lost in liquefying it is not the most important issue.

Pretty well nothing (at least chemically) beats the energy density of liquid hydrocarbons. It would make more sense to find an artificial way of generating those (perhaps using genetically engineered organisms and sunlight) rather than taking the high thermodynamic losses in spitting water by electrolysis and compressing or liquefying it then somehow finding a way of flying a 'plane using the stuff.

Small nuclear reactors also don't make much sense - for those to operate you need copious supplies of cooling water. That's fine in a submarine, or a ship which are, literally, surrounded by oceans of the stuff, but it's hardly going to work in a desert where even drinking water might have to be shipped in.

Here's one simple link to the basic overheads.

http://www.physorg.com/news85074285.html

Yes, and for those who know about these things, there is talk of using electrolysis under high-pressure to avoid much of the compression energy costs, but it's all rather speculative.

Microwaves?

Microwave frequencies are generally defined as starting at 110GHz. Given that the system bus speeds are generally in the few hundreds of MHz there's not much danger of significant amounts of microwaves being emitted. Once they start powering buses from cavity magnetron, that's maybe the time to worry.

However, I'm sure they will have had to pay attention to RFI issues in the motherboard designs. Otherwise it's not conducive to reliable operation.

@AC

I'm not quite sure how the designers of the plant having got their design criteria wrong makes me an idiot, but if it makes you happy.

Incidentally, it's not unusual for coastal areas to slump after a rupture of this type in a subduction zone. There's an interesting bit in Aubrey Manning's superb "Earth Story" series. It showed how, following the Great Alaska "megathrust" earthquake of 1964 (magnitude 9.2), that some parts of the coastal region rose, and some slumped. Some parts dropped by 2.4 metres. That earthquake also caused a tsunami which was measured at 9.1m at one village it destroyed over 200 miles from the epicentre. Given how sparsely populated the Alaskan coast is, then it might well have been higher elsewhere.

So the possibility of coastal zones slumping following a mega thrust quake was known quite a long time before Fukishama was built. The circumstances of the two earthquakes are fairly similar, although there will always be local variations of course.

EU Power

The EU has plenty of power to investigate market abuse and raise fines if necessary. Even Microsoft were hit by this. Given that there is at least one very large European company (SAP) which has a lot to lose if Oracle abused their market power, then the EU could well take a lot of interest in this.

As anybody who runs a large IT shop can tell you, the costs of migrating from one database to another are enormous. The market is therefore quite "sticky" in terms of changing vendors.

Mental ability

For the great majority mental ability and the ability to concentrate and the energy levels have deteriorated notably by the age of 65 (there are exceptions of course). It's at its most extreme with scientists and mathemeticians where productivity is demonstrably lower past the age of about 40 (again, with exceptions). The accumulation of knowledge and experience can still be beneficial in some areas up to the age of 60 (according to a number of studies), but basic cognitive skills start dropping from 27.

If anybody is able to operate as a top-notch IT technician by the age of 80, then hats off to them, but they will be very much the exception.

@dic.usa

Nothing new to me there. The point wasn't what you can run Z-Linux, it's what concepts were pioneered on mainframes. TCP/IP simply was not pioneered on mainframes - an early port hardly counts, and in any case, many of the concepts didn't fit MVS very well and the whole centralisation concept of that OS.

I'm also fully aware the the I/O channel architecture was developed to offload processing to specialist I/O controllers so you could do things is search for index blocks without the CPU being involved, but it was an architectural dead end. Yes, there was a need for efficiency, and I know why it was done, but the point is that proper file systems were pioneered away from

Also, I knew 360/370 architecture inside out as I used to write operating system code right down to the issuing I/O commands in kernel code and dealing with interrupts, condition codes (think that was the term) and do on. My company had a high performance OLTP system using a proper pre-emptive multi-tasking system, software disk mirroring, atomic transactions, dual logging and atomic transactions on this architecture back in 1971 (and there is one system still running in production albeit is should have been re-written years ago). I can still read (most) of 360/370 programmes from the binaries, and I can certainly at least align all the instructions by eye as it's a nice predictable architecture.

Yes, and I know about TCBs and all that stuff - it's just that TSO and the like were hardly the last word in sophistication.

So go back to the original challenge - somebody claimed that there were no major computing concepts pioneered on mid-range servers. I just gave some examples of ones that were and where some mainframe concepts became outmoded and replaced by others (like the IBM mainframe channel architecture, or the arcane mainframe access methods).

Superdome II

The Superdome 2 (which is based on a modified form of the C7000 blade chassis used on Proliant) currently scales to 128 cores (256 threads) and 4TB. It has 32 sockets each capable of carrying a 4 core CPU.

However, I'd certainly agree it isn't going to be in the same price/performance area as a BL980 G7, but the issue for many users of big iron equipment like this is stability and ease of migration. Moving a 10-20TB Oracle DB from HP-UX to OEL is no minor thing, especially if the migration has to be done with only a few hours of downtime and be reversible if it goes wrong.

Speaking from a company that has a huge amount of Integrity, Proliant and Solaris hardware, then the RAS characteristics of the former have undoubtedly been better than the x86/x64 architecture machines, although the latter is improving through the generations. One issue about very large configurations is that RAS characteristics have to improve as, with many times the components, there are proportionately more things to go wrong. Even things like Oracle RAC won't resolve all those issues as node failures can still leave to brown-outs with stale cache and so on.

Of course big iron will turn into more and more of a niche, but for some companies the cost of the hardware is sometimes only a modest part of the entire system cost. Stability is often what matters most.

Lewis was addressing only the nuclear issues

Lewis is referring to the nuclear element of the disaster, not the whole thing. Just how much the nuclear clean-up cost, I don't know. But if we take the costs of cleaning up Three Mile Island (about $1.7bn in today's money), allowing for there being three reactors at least as badly damaged and a fourth where the building is badly damaged and allowing for the fact several of the building were wrecked and this has affected the storage pools (not something that happened at Three Mile Island) then I can imagine the bill approaching $10bn to clean up this mess. To that you can add the costs of replacing the lost generating capacity (or at least the proportion of the life lost - some of these facilities had, or were likely to have, their operating lives extended by another decade) plus the economic impact of supply disruption then we might be looking at maybe $15-$20bn. Not, by any means, in the same league as the whole clear-up costs, but also not insignificant.

So it's simply not a minor event. It's just not a catastrophic one.

Interestingly the European Pressurised Reactor would have survived this as it has several backup diesel generators dispersed in several locations all of which are in watertight concrete enclosures. The French have been complaining for some time that they've lost out business against the Americans as the latter have taken short-cuts with their safety standards. This would appear to be some evidence to support that with the proviso that no French reactors have had to survive a tsunami.

There is, interestingly, a litany of Japanese nuclear accidents (some leading to deaths) and the local nuclear regulator has been accused of being far too cosy with the operators.