Re: hmmm....sony doing something good ?

Well, AC there pretty much answers what I was wondering. If Sony are being lauded for not being asses about DRM and connectivity, and people are swearing off the XBone, what does this mean for gamers who vowed never to buy anything from Sony again after their treatment of George Hotz? After all, it'll be a while before CoD is out on the Wii...

It's almost like good cop / bad cop only nobody can remember who's who...

As someone running a Linux home office here...

I have an Xubuntu desktop and a Centos 6.3 server (also running a couple of VMs under KVM). For the server stuff, Linux just runs and runs and runs. For the desktop stuff, I still have niggles.

Honestly, is there a decent RDP client for Linux, because I'm running Remmina, and whilst it's close, I still have lots of issues with it. Also locking up whilst playing music (or it might be Flash - nothing is logged),and YP is a bit of a pain in the arse. I'm going to get around to an LDAP setup, but it's a faff.

For all it's faults, Windows tends to just work straight away. At the same time, I'm glad to have a little space from it. Oh the dichotomy!

But as was mentioned on The Reg...

Just the other day it was reported that the weak point of the fibre is the fibre itself. Get rid of that and use a hollow tube, and you're looking at upping signal speeds by 40% or something...

However, I suspect they really meant turning them on and off faster. Nice to know that either could be done though. And more colours. And more cables in parallel.

The only remaining question is will it blend / play Crysis / carry all the porn blah blah that everyone always asks...

Re: Fond memories

John Menzies on Princes Street was brilliant as a kid poking the various computers. Good times!

Re: But...

So nobody else remember the "Shotgun" modems that Diamond used to do? Channel-bonding over PSTN - 100kb/sec.

(Although that said, he did say he had ISDN. If it was (almost certainly) ISDN2e, it would be 2x64kb, and channel-bonding was easy. Technically it wouldn't have been a modem though.)

Re: Sems to be an optical impedance matching layer ffor optical devices

Hopefully it can be used for solar cells (they could really use a boost), but just being able to improve lighting efficiency alone is brilliant (bad pun). I have 5W LEDs in the kitchen that replaced 50W halogens. If they could be 3.5W instead, there's a saving. It's not big, but it looks like the cost implication will be minimal, and saving energy is saving energy.

And what about other devices? Can this be used to lower the power consumption of LCD monitors by increasing the efficiency of the backlight? Can it be used to make plasma screens more efficient? Perhaps there's some peculiarity that restricts it to LEDs, but it's worth considering.

Very interesting - I like this.

Re: This Musk guy

For one, as an American he's more inclined than us British to blow his own trumpet, so to speak. Americans typically shout out louder regarding their achievements, whilst that's regarded as comparatively vulgar over here. Not saying that that's good or bad, or that all Americans do it - it's just a lot more common "over there". Secondly, he's a salesman. He wouldn't be doing his job if he didn't push his own solution over a competitor's. Especially when he owns the company.

Besides that, SpaceX is a young, brash company. Give them a decade or so, and they'll also be able to quietly sit back with a spectacular track record and say "why, yes we have!" (hopefully). Good luck to them.

Re: Failure by the NHS

Well, you have my sympathies, but I can't fault the NHS at all. In my experience if I want a regular appointment with my GP it takes nearly 2 weeks, but for an emergency I can generally be seen same-day. When I crashed my motorbike they couldn't have been more helpful (though the fracture clinic at the ERI is a zoo, and it's my one complaint I can level at them). When my kids were born 10.5 weeks early, though, I saw the NHS working fantastically. I saw parents dragged through hell in that place by bad luck, but throughout the whole experience the staff were as helpful, professional, friendly, courteous, patient and honest as they could be. If we had a USA-style medical industry, my children would probably be dead now. So would the wee lad Harris, who was born 12 weeks early. So would the cute little triplet girls with the Thai parents who almost filled one of the ICU rooms. And a dozen or so others that I can remember from my stint in there. There's something about watching a baby in an uncubator being rushed out of the ward by a helicopter crew whilst the parents are chasing it with their luggage that makes you pause and think (a) that could have been me, and (b) they're really doing everything they can.

Does the NHS have problems? Yes, it most certainly does. But most of these problems (from where I've seen it, and from the people I've spoken to) have been due to management incompetence at some level or another. The people in the trenches trying to save lives and cure sick people work fucking hard and deserve a lot of respect.

I'd rather have a safety net for everyone that faily the unlucky few (and I do know people who've been failed too), than the patchwork that the USA has.

Service unavailable

I put it down to submitting "wrong" answers...

Re: AMD meets most people's needs and is a good value

Whilst the sentiment is laudable, don't delude yourself about being able to avoid Intel. You might not buy their products directly, but you'll find their chips in all kinds of hardware.

I don't think they're as pervasive as they used to be, but they're still everywhere.

Oh, and my desktop is AMD/ATI, and SI is my home server, so not trying to sell you on Intel.

Re: Some comments from the Project Manager.....

MS-DOS? My A420/1 came with DR-DOS. Bloody cheapskates...

Still ended up with 4MB and 25MHz. Still wanted an IDE or SCSI podule...

Re: Wow

That is why I was so thrilled when the Glide patch came out for the original. Voodoo a-go-go. I don't think it ever slowed down (but then it's been a while so I may have my rosy specs on).

Re: Acorn for schools

Don't forget that Aleph1 offered a podule with a Cyrix 486SLC to fit into the 300/400/500 series. Not as tidy or capable as the RiscPC option (which would take a Pentium Overdrive chip (remember them?), but bloody clever, and a big step up from the 80186 offered by the software emulator.

Re: Great article

The A3000 wasn't out until about 1989/1990 - the 1987 models were the A310, A410 and A440 if I recall correctly. I had the A420/1 which came out in 1989, and the A3000 came out soon after. A great piece of miniaturisation, but hamstrung slightly by the lack of a hard drive. 2.5" drives appeared that could fit inside later.

As for the Mandelbrot drawing, I converted a BASIC program to ARM assembly and then hand-optimised it. The innerloop was 13 instructions long, and the rest of it was just dumping a value to the framebuffer. It could do 320x256 fractals at 5fps (although, to be fair, it mirrored one half, so 2.5fps). Such was the power of hand-optimised ARM code. You could bash out a program like that in half an hour, and then spend a week teasing out every extra clock cycle. And figuring out that ot only was inline conditional execution faster than branching, but LT is faster than GE (by one cycle).

Still that was ARM2/2.5/3, so I guess things have changed since. Now please excuse me - I've been typing this whilst being assaulted by a 3-year-old...

Re: WD, Seagate, and ... anybody else? Anyone?

"The lack of competition and higher prices probably aren't important to enterprise buyers - it is just a marginal inconvenience, but a very small bump in the costs of a datacentre"

If you can get the drives. Maybe it's different for big enterprise, but for SME it's virtually impossible to get your hands on SAS drives.

Some great 8-bit games post-1984...

Revs, Stryker's Run (and its sequel, Codename Droid), Zalaga, Repton (and especially Repton2), and, of course, Exile. Exile was truly epic.

You can tell I had a BBC Micro...

Re: Err, limiting factor.

It all depends on where you are. 1000W/m^2 is regarded as Standard Test Conditions, and is what the specified output of the solar cells will be reached under, but there have been a few occasions this month where my own installation has exceeded STC output, and that's in Scotland... Certainly if you were to use the same panels on the Isle of Wight, they'd produce significantly more given the same cloud coverage.

I've been trying to find a solar insolation map to tag onto this, but they all deal with average kWh/year, which I suppose makes sense. Ho-hum.

Re: The elephant in the room which everyone appears to be avoiding commenting on .....?

Good point. Without the bankers, accountants, lawyers and myriad other hangers-on he's probably actually got a bargain!

Re: Apple are successful and that isn't going to change soon

Yep - for a company that doesn't issue a dividend, and has too much cash in it to be subject to a takeover, I can't for the life of me see why the stock is valued so highly. Sure, it's a stable, profitable company, but if shareholders can't realise a return from investing then what's the point?

In a nutshell, the price can't keep rising at this rate. Not forever. That's when the bubble will burst. Hell, it might not even burst, but just settle and stop - then a lot of people are going to be sitting with very expensive pieces of paper...

Re: Guess what

@the hot stick melts the shiny stuff - I may be drunk but that sounds awfully like my own soldering. Made me chuckle regardless - I'll give you a thumbs-up for that, but that alone.

Re: This just reinforces

@Aaron Em

The world is full of mediocre people trying to cruise by on as little effort as possible. A small percentage of people actually stretch themselves to try to achieve their goals. And a small percentage of them charge in grasping a particularly unpleasant nettle and promise the world in return.

Of that last group, most will fail. There's no getting around that simple fact. But the few that succeed will be glorious, and their legacy will be touched by a spark of the divine. (But not in the ethernet jack, because that'll ruin it, obviously.)

I say good luck to them, and if I get my arse in gear I'll probably end up with a half-dozen of them at least...

Saved me a job

I was going to have to write something similar, but you beat me to it. I don't shoot or own a gun, but in the past I have been taught good gun discipline, and it's amazing how hard it is for some people to pick it up.

At the end of the day, the lamp is only a toy, but I don't think that justifies all the downvotes for a guy who uses real guns as a hobby in a country where it's permitted (and appears to be doing so very responsibly).

You'd want dedupe.

But at the same time I wouldn't choose to bet against you. :-/

Ditched their plasmas?

My plasma is 10 years old this year, and going like a trooper. Great colours, great blacks, so ghosts. It's only SD and has no HDMI which is a bugger, and I paid through the nose so you guys can get cheap-as-chips screens today, but I don't grudge it anything by now.

Happy Birthday, TH37PW4B! They grow up so fast...

@Peter - Sort of but not entirely.

Go back 15 months or so, and the FiT was 41.3p/kWh. A 4kWp system was about £16000-£18000. That gave a payback in 15-18 years which was nice, because anything after that was your bonus for being an early adopter and helping to kick-start the govertment's chosen renewables industries.

Now you can put 4kWp on your roof for £8000-£9000. So the FiT has dropped to 21p - that's actually a good number for it to be at. It keeps the payback at a similar rate to what it was before, and you still get a (smaller) bonus at the end for being a not-so-early adopter.

I've spoken to installers who've said that the 21p is not a terrible rate (though generally 25p is regarded as more sensible), but it's the suddenness with which this bomb was dropped that's the problem. If the rate had dropped in April 2011 by 5p (instead of going up by 2p), then again by 5p in October 2011, and then again in April 2012 by 5p it would have been down to 26.3p/kWh, would have saved a big pile of billpayers' cash, would still have given an excellent ROI, and would have not been a kick in the balls for the honest businessmen who're trying to make this their career. (No, I don't include double-glazing salesmen; I had a price from SafeSeal for an installation, and I felt they were taking the piss charging double what I could find from a specialist installer.)

The legal argument is that the rate was changed before the consultation period was over. That's where the government has caused itself problems. If they'd had the rate change scheduled for a week later they'd have kicked the installers just as hard, but because the consultation was over there's nothing that could have been done. (Or very little, at least.)

Nope, I'm not in the PV industry, I've just chatted to a few people who are. And most of them are honest people just trying to provide the best service they can.

That was pretty funny

I'll probably have a proper listen later when I have headphones and no 2-year-olds climbing on me...

RTFM

Literally...

@AC 09:52 - issues with my plan

Well, it-slayer covered most of the cost aspect. As a retro-fit it's a pain in the ass, but it's easy whilst building.

Where to put sockets? When the houses are designed, they have people design the room layouts and plan on where to put power sockets and aerial sockets. It'd be figured out then.

Not saying you wouldn't need wireless, but that you would want wired for many appliances.

I remember thin-ethernet, Cat3 etc. But any cable I've been involved with installing in the past 10 years has been Cat5e / Cat6. They're all good for 10Mb/sec to 1000Mb/sec and beyond. That's the cable spec that the IEEE work to.

Many people won't care, but you're suggesting that only 25 homes in the UK would use it? Exaggeration, I suspect. As more devices become connected, it'll become far more convenient and reliable to just plug them in rather than rely on wireless. Especially for devices that may be so cheap that they can't warrant a wireless card, or those that need a lot of bandwidth or low latency.

Cost? Peanuts in a new-build.

As for Charles, I did specifically mention rented accommodation. That's a bugger. And I know that most housing stock in the UK is not new-builds. But unless the cabling goes into the new-builds it won't be there when the houses are re-sold. As I said, wireless is a good fallback, when you can't sling a cable in or when it'd be inconvenient. But it seems to be being adopted as the default position. I've yet to need/want more than 802.11g at home because the high-speed stuff is wired.

I'm not picking on the new spec (other than that it'll take bloody ages to get released). It's very clever, and progress is generally a good thing. I'm taking a shot at the housebuilders who have the opportunity to get us all hooked up from the start, but won't take it. That said, looking at the new-builds near me they can't even build the bloody roofs properly, so maybe that would be a better priority...