* Posts by Jim Bob

29 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010

Robot cop called in after MAD BONGER blown up in LIQUID MARIJUANA EXPLOSION

Jim Bob
FAIL

Re: Not so much stoners but thieves

Someone's been watching Reefer Madness and taken it seriously I see...

Why data storage technology is pretty much PERFECT

Jim Bob
Alien

Re: Make those bits work harder?

"While the states of polarity lend themselves to binary storage quite readily, I am thinking the intensity of that polarisation could be the next leap forward."

Polarity is a binary property, intensity is an analogue one.

So you are suggesting that one takes a digital system and discard the simple (cheap) reader/writers and easy error correction.

Big enough hole for you ;o)

Era of the Pharaohs: Climate was hotter than now, without CO2

Jim Bob

Re: A switch from the 1970's

In real science, hypothese are based on the best available data. If the data changes then so does the hypothesis. Reading your own text, those scientists claiming a new ice age were already aware of human induced forcing of temperature rise but, at that time, deduced that cooling was the dominant trend. A few decades later, these scientists now assert that their original hypothesis was based on incomplete data and, in fact, warming is the dominant trend. This is how science works - any scientist that never changes their mind based on new evidence is not really a scientist.

On a different note, I find it interesting thet the JG|U graph defines a mean cooling across the graph. If that is true, and there has been a mean cooling since the Little Ice Age, where the f*&ˆk is my wooly mammoth?

No increase in droughts since 1950, say boffins

Jim Bob
FAIL

Prediction vs Observation

" *More realistic calculations, based on the underlying physical principles that take into account changes in available energy, humidity and wind speed, SUGGESTS that there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.*

...

This flies directly counter to the most recent formal assessment by the UN

*More intense and longer droughts have been OBSERVED over wider areas since the 1970s* "

What is more real/accurate, prediction or observation?

McKinnon will not be extradited to the US, says Home Secretary

Jim Bob

Re: Hoorah!

"Logically, I don't think it is. Not having autism is, nevertheless, on the spectrum, even if it is only at one end of it."

What a load of crap! That is like saying that micro or radio waves are part of the visible spectrum - utter bollocks!

Taking the first line from the Wikipedia entry for "Autism Spectrum" (with the usual pinch of salt...)

"The autism spectrum or autistic spectrum describes a range of conditions classified as pervasive developmental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)."

So if you do not demostrate "pervasive developmental disorders" you are not on the spectrum.

As for the McKinnon case, sounds like the UK govenrment is finally starting to grow a pair regarding the apparent asymmetry of the US-UK extradition process.

Apple claims Aussie 3G is so good it's 4G

Jim Bob

Re: Ill buy that

I think you have it backwards...

It would appear that the ITU is the arbiter of what constitutes 4G, if they say a technology is 4G then it is 4G. If a telco provides a service that falls under the ITU definition of 4G but decides to market said service as 3G then that is the marketing decision of that telco.

4G has an international standard and if your product meets that standard then it can be marketed as a 4G product. If you disagree with a standard then blame that standard but don't accuse the product manufacturer of "BS" or fraud (as others have done).

Anonymous crashes Formula One site over Bahrain protests

Jim Bob

Bernie a subversive?

In an interview, during the Chinese GP weekend, Bernie claimed that having this GP would give the protests vast amounts of international media exposure.

Today, Al-Jazeera reported that protesters were claiming that F1 being in Bahrain had given them (protesters) access to vast amounts of international media exposure - something that wouldn't have happened without this event.

Bernie Eccleston - evil genius or unconventional champion of human rights?

Greenpeace releases 'Cool IT' rankings

Jim Bob
Thumb Down

Correction...

"DGSE1 Rainbow Warrior Nil"

DGSE 1 (Rainbow Warrior + Fernando Pereira) Nil

Yay! Murder is fine when it's state sponsored... guess you support the actions of the Met too?

New iPhone offered for sale via unauthorised outlets

Jim Bob
FAIL

???

Did this ever not sound like a scam? Twice the price for a non-existent product for delivery a day after Apple said they would ship it (if it existed)

Nothing funnier than watching people talk about how shit a piece of vapour-ware performs in the real world.

VMware backs down on vSphere 5 virtual memory tax

Jim Bob

Revisionism at its best...

vRAM isn't a new feature, previous licensing also had a RAM limit (256Gb per socket) though I'm unsure if this was fixed rather than upgradable, as under the new scheme.

But to be told that the new licensing is better for me because my RAM licensing just got bumped from 48Gb to 96Gb is somewhat rich (only reduces my previous allowance by 320Gb...) but is still workable in my current situation.

Also, what is the point of talking about 12-month average? Virtually all my production VMs (Win & Linux) use virtually all the available RAM virtually all the time, ie my 12-month average is my steady-state. And what happens if I bust my allowance?

As has been previously been pointed out in the wider discussion, it appears the VMware have noticed that RAM is the far more important than sockets for modern systems so has (rather cynically) adjusted its charging scheme to hit the new sweet spot - just as Windows goes 64-bit only and now requires 4Gb just to run...

@Davidoff

Couldn't give a flying F$%k about GPU virtualisation, seems more useful for desktop virt than servers but maybe I'm just running the wrong apps.

Also, 2Tb limit hasn't seemed to be an issue for me but maybe that is because i mainly use storage appliances (greater reliability) rather than fixed disk configurations. Of course, anyone finding disk IO an issue may have a different opinion but then I would wonder whether the application suits virtualisation.

Overall, I am disappointed by the route VMware appears to be taking but, for now, see their product as the best solution for my heterogeneous infrastructure requirements.

WikiLeaks sues Visa, Mastercard over 'financial blockade'

Jim Bob

Apples and oranges...

"Suppose you bought a house in a well known flood plain. You try to get flood insurance from various insurance companies. They all turn you away. Just because you can't get insurance doesn't mean that the insurance companies colluded against you."

To follow the analogy, in this case an insurance company HAS provided flood insurance and then decided that the risk was greater than they had calculated and is backing out of the deal. Immoral business.

Your analogy falls because CC companies are not good risk assessors, unlike insurers (for whom risk assessment is the basis of their business), and try to back out of deals they then find are not in their interest. This is an immoral business practice and should not be encouraged p whatever you view of Wikileaks or JA

Jim Bob

Law of tort?

"Have you ever read a bank's contract, or one of your credit card's contracts?

They can change the rules at any time."

Unfortunately, this is not true - in Europe anyway.

When you sign a contract, so long as there is contribution from both sides, a contract can only be changed by agreement from both sides. Any attempt for a unilateral change of terms leaves the contract null and void with any outstanding dues becoming instantly payable, within reasonable limits.

Jim Bob

No axe to grind, honest

"Not necessarily. If they feel their TOS have been breached there is an instant reason for breaking off. Another might be along the lines patriotism and national secrets. It's interesting to see how desperate Juleth has become. Hopefully he'll get a bloody nose, along with the one he ought to receive on the glorious twelfth, when he's told that a European arrest warrant cannot be stopped just to suit his vainglorious pleasure. Then we'll find out whether or not he is a rapist. As to the Denmark scam, they too are members of NATO."

Firstly, patriotism is a polite way way of saying nationalism. Given that Visa & MC promote themselves as international entities then they are, by definition, not able to demonstrate nationalistic tendancies and their TOS's are unable to define such eventualities.

Secondly, whatever happens with JA is irrelevent. These companies made agreements to collect monies on behalf of a 3rd party. They are not then allowed to collect the money but not pass it on, not collecting is allowed but that is not what has happened here. The CC companies have put themselves in a political position of penalising both a politically sensitive organisation and anyone who supports that organisation by taking monies from supporters then refusing to pass it on the intended beneficiary.

Irrespective of your view of that organisation, collecting but not passing when promoting themselves as a dis-interested 3rd party on is both immoral and illegal. If it is found that these companies have bowed to pressure that they claimed was not an issue then they should be forced to cease trading. Financial institutions require trust and this sounds, on the face of it, to be a fundamental betrayal of that trust.

Eco investors demand (even) more sweeteners for low carbon energy

Jim Bob

I wonder...

Having watched a couple of wind turbines, with one running continuously while the other stopped and started, I wonder how these generators are actually being used?

Maybe, low utlisation is caused not by a lack of wind but a preference to use wind turbines for load tracking. They have a pretty quick on/off response time compared to most generatig techs, particularly compared to the glacial response time of a nuclear reactor. There is also no fuel penalty for transient operation...

Jim Bob
FAIL

Seems you can make this shit up...

"Well, because after watching a group of reactors in Japan withstand two natural disasters of a degree they were never designed for, and that Germany will never face, they've declared that nuclear is unsafe.

You couldn't make this shit up."

If you choose to over-simplify the situation then of course it sounds like utter bullshit. However:-

1. The Japanese reactors were 'supposed' to be designed to withstand the seismic activity that was expected in that region and the actual seismic event was not beyond reasonable expectations. The fact that the final design parameters were found lacking (they failed to withstand the event) is caused by the fundamental issue that a commercial reactor owner must be financially as well as (in preference to?) safety motivated.

2. It is true that reactors built in Europe are very unlikely to experience anything similar to what happened in Japan. But directly because of this, European reactors are not hardened in the same way that Japanese reactors are. The question is how have these reactors been designed to cope with the risks that a European reactor could actually face or have they been similarly 'under-designed'?

3. Another reality is that LWRs require constant cooling, at all times, so can be (correctly imo) referred to as 'open-loop' unsafe. The accident at TMI was caused by a cooling failure that was the result of operating procedures that contradicted licensing requirements, Chernobyl was caused by not even having standard operating procedures. Neither was caused by a massive natural event. Also worth looking at is the incident at the Davis-Besse reactor, the most serious accident that never happened - just.

4. All nuclear accidents are caused by human error, either in the design or operating procedures. If you wish to perform the normalisation of deviance then it would appear that there is no problem - even though reactor designs are not meeting the safety performance that those licensing and building these things infer. Statistically, a major nuclear incident/accident is expected every 15-20 years but that is not the position the nuclear lobby portrays.

Returning to the heart of the article, just how much public money has been funnelled in to the nuclear industry? Through state R&D effectively given away, waste management costs deferred, liability insurance provided by governments, etc. Shouldn't these costs to the public purse be considered subsidies - on a mammoth scale?

And, of course, it is only fair to identify that fossil fuel users have been allowed to externalise their waste disposal costs by 'dumping' it directly in to the environment for centuries.

While renewables could not exist without subsidies, this is actually not particularly different to any other form of energy production. In all cases, public money is funding private gain.

Back to gaslight, coal and steam power - it's the future

Jim Bob
FAIL

You could always base your comment on 'real' data...

"Yes, but remember that 50% is comparable to 33% efficiency for current processes. So you're already getting 1.5x the energy out of the coal to start with."

Unfortunately, it appears that the article has confused the efficiencies of coal-fired and nuclear power stations.

Modern, "current", coal-fired plant can achieve 45+% conversion, chemical to electrical, with the limiting factor being the Carnot efficiency of the steam cycle.

Nuclear (current designs) is unable to create steam of the same quality so the Carnot efficiency is around 33% (look familiar).

Though to make a real "apples to apples" comparison, you should look at the potential of the fuel that is actually converted. For an LWR, the utilisation of fuel potential is 5% (6% if the MOX cycle is included) so you end up with an efficiency, fuel potential to electricity, of 1.667% efficient.

Of course, these figures only apply to the energy conversion process and exclude energy use in associated activities, eg mining/extraction, transport, processing/re-processing, sequestration, etc, that all affect the full life-cycle efficiency...

But, of course, that kind of analysis doesn't lead to tight, snappy headlines.

Hack attack kills thousands of Aussie websites

Jim Bob

Only a 11 days later...

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/260306,distributeit-hit-by-malicious-attack.aspx

Formula 1

Jim Bob
Facepalm

@GJC

Yeah, the iApp is a copy of the 'droid one. Let's just ignore that this is a v2.0 app, with the v1.0 being available on the iPhone for the 2010 season, eh?

Had "doing some research" not occured to you?

Is a Fusion-io bubble building up?

Jim Bob
Headmaster

Them's some weird apples...

"So if a 512 byte read needs to read 4K from the underlying storage can you explain exactly why comparing the number of 512 byte reads to the number of 4K reads is such a bad comparison? Sounds like they are very much apples to apples to me."

So I say that I can crack an egg and separate the yolk in 5 seconds then you say you can crack an egg in 1 second. Is this comparing apples & apples?

iPhones, MacBooks sicken Chinese women

Jim Bob
FAIL

...and Sony & HP (use Foxconn)?

and who else?

I would propose that virtually every electronic gadget contains at least one component that was manufactured "on the back of exploited and underpaid slaves". If it isn't 100% clean then it is 100% tainted.

It's always nice when you can attach this behaviour to a current media darling to highlight the plight of these unfortunates. But, any company that outsources production loses the ability (and often the desire) to audit just how many human abuses are contained in their products.

Researchers: Arctic cooled to pre-industrial levels from 1950-1990

Jim Bob
FAIL

Haven't read most of this so...

...This may have been said before.

Measuring temperature using an indirect method, such as tree rings, assumes that the science of that indirect method is competely understood. As has already been stated, science is a bunch of theories prone to being thrown out with a single piece of contrary work.

So, does this study mean that climate theory is wrong or that tree ring/growth theory is more complex than previously thought?

As any good scientist should know, "correlation != causation". Isn't that the main pillar of the skeptic argument?

HP's Palm bid beat Apple, Google, RIM, says report

Jim Bob
Big Brother

But what about...

... an abused bugle boy?

"...(no mention was made of a boogie-woogie bugle boy)..."

Airline passenger videos Atlanta maggot horror

Jim Bob
Troll

Hang on a minute...

"... But the BBC was kind enough to elaborate that the person who did bring it on, did not make the flight when it eventually did take off ..."

Does this mean a passenger got on the plane, put their bags in the overhead locker and then got off again? WTF?

I could understand checked luggage making on to a plane without the passenger but carry-on?...

"(im guessing they were answering some very interesting questions at airport security)"

And if the passenger was stuck at security, where would their bag be? ;o)

SoftBank punts free ADSL for femtocell folk

Jim Bob

Internet not so big in Japan

While local loop is fast, accessing the rest of the world is not so much. Some quick measurements from Tokyo (speedtest.net) give 90/60Mbps local loop but 2.7/0.4Mbps to London. Not an exhaustive test by any stretch but pretty indicative.

Does anyone really want to embed dedupe code?

Jim Bob

"Maybe I've missed something..."

Dedupe isn't designed for operation in a non-redundant environment. It relies heavily on there not being any bad blocks so is only of use on RAIDed storage arrays that perform scrubbing to ensure bad blocks are identified before checksums are compromised.

Power line tech could crash aircraft and shut down the Archers

Jim Bob

Like to see the figures...

Just how close are modern 400Hz transformers to 50/60Hz in terms of efficiency? A efficiency drop of 1% on a 1000MVA transformer is 10MVA. How many energy companies will accept throwing away 10,000kWh of revenue (per hour per transformer) just cos the cap ex was a little bit lower?

Jim Bob

400Hz

Interference is a minor reason for using 50/60Hz rather than 400Hz for large power distribution. 400Hz is limted to applications where size or weight limitations make the additional loses tolerable, eg aircraft.

Daily Mail breaks iPhone 4 recall scoop

Jim Bob

Churnalism rules!

For those of you who haven't read it, Flat Earth News is worth a punt. But it IS written by a journo so buyer beware ;o)

Prof: Carbon sequestration 'as bad as nuclear waste'

Jim Bob

Carbon Sequestration is snake oil

Oil & coal are examples of stable carbon sequestration so do the fossil fuel lobby really expects everyone to believe that they can use energy to extract the fossil fuels and return the carbon to a stable sequestered state and somehow not have a net energy deficit? That's Paul Daniels!

Either it is a lie or the fossil fuel lobby have no intention of storing the carbon in a permanently stable form (as the prof purports).