Posts by An0n C0w4rd 359 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Oct 2011
One thing a lot of reviews miss out, and given the increasing ubiquity of the drives is somewhat worrying, is whether the drive contains a supercap or small battery or something so that it can drain the RAM cache to flash when the power fails. Else any writes that were in flight at the time may be lost, which could do a nasty job of scrambling your filesystem (depending on the FS, of course)
"Several airlines already have apps available that provide passengers with electronic board passes. All they need to do is change those apps to use the NFC chip and that's that."
The "Secure Element" in NFC is generally the SIM card. You can bet your bottom dollar that the telco's will try to force companies who want to use the secure element to pay for the right. They're losing their lucrative revenue streams as people start using iMessage instead of SMS, etc. They're looking for new revenue streams and NFC is in their sights.
@AC 1 and 2
Hydraulics in older planes were driven from pumps driven from the engines. Some planes have A and B hydraulic systems, bigger wide body planes tended to have 3 separate hydraulic systems for redundancy.
Unfortunately, a number of accidents have proven the hydraulic systems have a massive single point of failure - in order to be useful, they have to back each other up. This tends to mean that for controlling the tail surfaces (horizontal and vertical stabilisers), all 3 systems congregate at that point. The JAL 747 crash and another crash in the USA, I think of a DC-10 if I remember right, where damage to the tail from an uncontained engine fan failure rendered all 3 hydraulic systems inoperative as the fluid leaked out
Preventative measures (including automatic cut off valves to stop the fluid leaking out when pressure is lost) have been introduced since, but the risk is still there.
The benefit of the electrically operated controls is that if you have damage in the tail, you MAY lose the tail controls but the ailerons, flaps, etc still work so you have a better chance to control the aircraft
@Xamol , the APU is used on the ground to run lighting, heating/cooling, etc when ground power is unavailable. Most main airports have ground power available on articulated arms that swing out under the plane and a large plug is put into a socket on the plane just next to the front landing strut.
In flight the 2 main engines drive the generators for aircraft ops, and if the main engine generators are unavailable then the APU can step in to ensure the plane is still flyable.
However the BIG change from traditional electronics on the 787 is that the main engine generators are NOT fixed voltage. The APU starter battery was one of the components that had a fault, but I believe there have also been other batteries, likely used to try and help smooth out the voltage fluctuations from the main engine units, that have had problems on the 787
Boeing claimed that by not having a constant velocity drive for the main engine generators it would save weight, and thus fuel, but it has also added complexity to a system that MUST WORK. The A&B DC power buses on jets pretty much power every critical system on the plane (avionics, radio, nav systems, etc). Boeing took a big risk in messing with a decades old proven design. Interestingly, while Airbus is launching the A350 to compete (sort of) against the 787, they're not messing with the flight controls or power systems.
Not sure I get this. Under most BGP routing arrangements, it's "hot potato". You hand off to a peer/transit connection as soon as you can. If TWC have a nationwide backbone, then TWC will carry the content to their customer from the peering point where they got the traffic. I fail to see why arranging an interconnect with NetFlix changes that, unless TWC are playing games with their BGP announcements to shot cut hot potato routing and force the sender to carry the traffic to a point closer to the end customer.
And to my mind, direct peering and not needing such hefty transit links, is a good thing. For both NetFlix and TWC.
The only scam I can see is TWC potentially trying to get NetFlix to pay for access to the TWC eyeballs. Good luck with that.
"Air pollution is actually GOOD in that sense, reflects more sunlight"
Not all pollution reflects sunlight. Soot emissions from burning wood and diesel engines is alleged to be nearly as bad as carbon dioxide for global warming, or so sayeth the BBC.
IPv4 and IPv6 can co-exist. There was never any plan for an overnight switch from v4 to v6. IPv6 was designed to run in a dual stack environment where both v4 and v6 addresses were in use. If you were connecting to a system that also had a v4 and a v6 address, then local configuration will determine if you make the connection over v4 or v6, with the default to be to use v6.
Of course this isn't perfect. People can have a v6 iP that isn't able to connect to your v6 IP, and people don't want to wait 90 seconds for the v6 connection to time out before retrying on v4. This lead companies to develop a standard called "Happy Eyeballs" which try and learn whether to use v4 or v6. Yahoo! also sponsored an extension to BIND to try and help mitigate the split network scenario.
The real reasons nothing happened until it was too late was lethargy and inertia. Vendors didn't want to spend the (considerable) effort in making their products IPv6 compliant as it wasn't affecting purchasing decisions in the vast majority of cases. Customers weren't asking for V6 because either the people making the decisions didn't understand or because they didn't want to pay more to get v6. End user devices (DSL modelms, etc) didn't support v6 as ISPs didn't offer it, and ISPs didn't offer it because no devices could use it. A set of classic chicken and egg scenarios.
Yes, IPv6 was largely driven by academia, and that can be witnessed by the original specs for IPv6 autoconfiguration where the end client figured out what the subnet it was on was and then used its Ethernet MAC address as the last 48 bits of the submit and hey presto, you got a unique routable IPv6 IP. Its why IPv6 subnets tend to be /48s - the 48 bits in the MAC. It wasn't until years later that someone pointed out that MACs are globally unique (or are meant to be) so it didn't matter what network you were on, your computer could be uniquely identified through the IP it chose. A new autoconfiguration mechanism was released in the past 2-3 years to address that.
Even though Cisco has supported IPv6 natively in IOS for years, initial implementations were not carrier grade. IPv4 was handled through very efficient DCEF, which IPv6 packets were process switched, a very expensive process. Only recently has Cisco moved IPv6 into DCEF (or whatever they call it today).
As for CGN (Carrier Grade NAT, the industry term for what Plusnet is trying), there are a lot of implications and not all of them are well thought out. The issues raised in the article are relevant, and search engines and other such web sites are already concerned about the rise of CGN as it impacts their operations to not only monetise their search results and make them more relevant by using geolocation, it makes defending the sites against attack a lot more difficult as you can't just block the IP and affect a single user any more. The search engines have been in talks with ISPs for years about IPv4 to IPv6 transitions, and the need for CGN as an interim phase. Search engines would much rather we all move to v6, but thats not going to happen any time soon.
CGN also has implications for non HTTP traffic such as VOIP, as SIP really REALLY doesn't like NAT. That is one issue that I don't think is easily solved in CGN deployments without sniffing and rewriting the SIP control packets, which would be a non-trivial exercise with high traffic deployments.
"As far as I know Google was the first to revolutionise that and automatically create it's index"
Uh, not AFAIK. AltaVista operated an automated crawler at least 3 years before Google came along, as did Inktomi (now part of Yahoo!). Yahoo! even had used Inktomi search results before they bought them, but their main sell (at the time) was their manually maintained content index.
Google's innovation was its PageRank algorithm which made its results more relevant to the search query.
"And that only makes sense if those sites have an entitlement to web traffic. "
No, it makes sense if Google is acting in an anti-competitive manner and leveraging its dominance in the search market to push its other services in preference to organic search results from its crawler. It keeps claiming to only display organic results, and yet its own results are always first. There is also no justification for its use of reviews from 3rd party sites in its own product review section. Sure, if people submitted the reviews to Google, fine, but scraping them from other review sites and showing them as part of Google's product review section is wrong, especially as I don't remember links back to the review site (unlike search results)
Microsoft got smacked for making it easier to use IE (and in fact making it impossible to remove) than it was to go get another browser, and Netscape went bust - it is open to debate if it was a direct result of the MS action or natural evolution, although a strong case can be made that the MS action was a significant contributing factor in the demise of Netscape.
I see no reason why what Google is doing is any different to what MS did - abuse dominance.
Unless I missed something, it has nothing to do with locality of the search results, it has to do with Google giving priority to it's own properties over competing services. e.g. put in a street address and get a link to Google maps before the "organic" search results for the address. Or put in a stock ticker and get a stock price quoted without going to Reuters, etc.
OK, it can be argued they are improving the service for customers, but they're also denying 3rd party sites the ability to get traffic to keep those sites alive and well.
Unfortunately, raw storage isn't the only limitation. You also need to be able to effectively seek and read/write the tracks. Increasing the diameter of the medium increases tracks, but also decreases IOPS per TB as you have N heads accessing significantly more physical space. You can pull tricks like putting multiple heads per platter, but they run into limitations also.
I'm also not convinced current technology could support a 5.25" platter at 7200 or 10k RPM - the centrifugal forces at the edges will be significantly larger than at 3.5". The Quantum BigFoot drives didn't spin anywhere close to 7200RPM AFAIK.
Would this be the competitive UK market where the vast majority of people are served via BT copper with no opportunity for a 2nd supplier to come in and compete?
At least in the US, the 1996 telco act let people like RCN and WOW (and others) go in and build fibre/cable networks and compete head-to-head with the incumbent telco *and* cable co.
Here I have BT copper competing with BT copper (not even FTTC copper - they missed my cabinet) And a low capped wireless service for people in the boonies.
NetApp was interesting a while ago. But these days I suspect large deployments use LUNs over FC or iSCSI and not CIFS or NFS. And there NetApp has a problem. Their LUNs are basically huge files that live ON TOP of their WAFL file system. If you do the maths when sizing a NetApp deployment, even if you do NOTHING other than LUNs, you lose a chunk of disk to WAFL overhead.
I also think NetApp isn't nimble enough to compete with new(er) players like 3PAR in the large SAN market, and there is a significant tax for NetApp products due to their age. Yes, its a proven product, but it's becoming clear that ONTAP is long in the tooth and I think is causing issues when they try and introduce new features or functionality.
Citizens arrests are legal in most states in the USA. As is carrying of guns, although most jurisdictions require a special license to carry concealed weapons. However, a gun on a holster on a guys hip is not concealed and they are therefore OK to be carried.
I don't know the laws about Tasers, especially as it applies to the jurisdiction in question.
And lets be honest here, who would you rather have for security? A mall cop who has only basic training, is probably still armed, and doesn't know the relevant laws, or a real cop?
"What we're seeing is the beginning of a Google drive to reduce interoperability. "
Perhaps if MS didn't require a monthly license to use ActiveSync per user then Google would continue to support it. But as a provider who can supply EAS to mobile devices, the costs are non trivial.
Or in other words, why should Google pay MS to use EAS when there are open standards that largely do the same that are (probably) license free?
"not focusing on manufacturing" = "not paying us to put/keep our plant in your country/region"
Except even if they do get incentive packages, what guarantee is there they won't play the double -Irish sandwich (or whatever its called) and shift 90% of their tax liability out of the country, or pay "franchise" or "Intellectual Property" fees to some tax haven and get out of paying whatever tax we DON'T waive for them?
Jobs and manufacturing is one thing, but if we still don't see any revenue (except for the workers), do we really benefit for all the incentives we give?
I love the text on the update page, clearly cut'n'paste from a laptop update
"Your computer's power cord must be connected and plugged into a working power source."
because clearly software updates on a DESKTOP without an internal battery work REALLY WELL
How long until people start justifying the alleged move to ARM for desktop products on the Intel HD4000 failure?
Don't get me wrong, I love ARM products and have done ever since my A410/1. But AFAIK they've got way to go until they can release a desktop product that is as fast as the current crop of Intel Core processors.
Mines the coat with an ARM (or 2) in it
Just because tests have yet to prove that consumer electronics doesn't interfere with airplane systems is actually rather irrelevant. The regulations state you have to prove it DOESN'T interfere, which is a different kettle of fish and why it has never been done. Aircraft electrical equipment is revised infrequently and tested thoroughly. The same cannot be said of consumer electronics who are likely to include a different chip or a later revision of a chip at the drop of a hat, with no external indication of the change.
And its not just systems on the plane you are on that could be affected. Potentially a badly designed/malfunctioning device on a plane in front of yours could interfere with the ILS (Instrument Landing System) signals or other navigation aids and then you're really in trouble. I strongly suspect that is why the plane has to leave the active runway before American Airlines goes on the PA to let people turn on their fondlephones.
Personally I would like to see the ban lifted, however I retain the right to change my mind if cheap crap designed without proper RF shielding is proven to be an issue.
Oh, and I fully consider this to be the best license ever:
/*
* ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
* "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
* <phk@FreeBSD.ORG> wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you
* can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think
* this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return Poul-Henning Kamp
* ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
*/
How many people download a package with a GPL license and check it wasn't altered? Not many.
If you don't compare to a reference copy, how do you know that it is the proper GPL license and not one that has a "now we own your first born" clause?
Answer: you don't. You just fell into the same trap as people clicking through on commercial licenses.
The only benefit to the GPL or BSD or Apache licenses is that they are (mostly) standard. I'd honestly say the BSD license is better than the GPL in this regard as it is relatively short - the 2 clause version is 29 lines of 80 column text long, with the differences being in whom claims the copyright. GPL v2 is 339 lines according to one local copy. GPL v3 is 674 lines long, again in some local copy from some package or other. To me thats just as bad as an Apple license.
wasn't there an issue on some early versions of Windows where the code that dimmed the "Next" button on installers until you checked the "I agree to your ludicrous terms" box was by-passable and you could run a small program to un-dim the next button without agreeing to the license?
I would suspect that there was some effort to address that, but I suspect its still possible to get past that check box if you're determined enough. And you're right - they have no way of proving if you did read and agree or not.
When I rented my last accommodation I pointed out several spelling and/or grammar errors in their contract. I strongly suspect I was the first person ever to read it and not just blindly sign it.
I got some fairly expensive 5W GU10 LED bulbs in April this year and they have worked flawlessly, and give of significantly more light than the 50W halogens they replaced. I've since replaced most of the GU10s in my house with the LEDs.
Will the energy savings ever justify the cost of the bulb? Impossible to say as that will depend on the lifetime of the bulb. However, given the extra light I'm getting, if you factor in the cost of the extra wiring and light fittings it more than adds up.
IMHO there needs to be encouragement to use the more energy efficient bulbs, probably by creating a sliding tax scale based on number of lumens per watt, the more light per watt the lower the tax. That to me is more justifiable than banning entire categories of product, and we've seen that manufacturers find a way around them anyway. I think all that the EU incandescent bulb ban has done is force people to replace their lights with halogen style lights (such as the aforementioned GU10). I was not particularly impressed with the halogen GU10s, especially with how much electricity they used and how much heat they put out, but its what my house came with so unless I want to re-plaster the ceilings I'm stuck.
I think that'd be too slow to respond to market changes and too easy to game. Plus I don't expect standards bodies to be independent, since most of them are stuff full of the companies with the most patents in the first place.
No, there needs to be some supply/demand dynamics here. The more popular a patent is, the less it pays, a bit like mass market products - as volumes go up, costs per unit come down (in general, unless there is under supply). Ericsson expecting the same royalty for (e.g.) 3G tech these days is stupid - it cost them $x to "invent" the patented technology, and if the licensees are selling 100x today than when the patent first launched then the costs should naturally come down. Which also creates an incentive for new inventions as they can't just invent a widget, patent it and retire.
However, I absolutely agree that the FRAND agreements need to be public. I'd almost want to say that they can be private until they are used in a lawsuit and then the patent holder has to prove that all the other licensees are paying $x so company Y should also pay $x. If they're being fair there is nothing to be scared of. if they are being greedy with some companies and they call their bluff, they lose.
DPD already do something like. A recent parcel delivered by DPD sent me an e-mail at 10:36am stating the package would be delivered between 10:57am and 11:57am.
The technology isn't that difficult IMHO, especially with most of those electronic pads that they make you sign these days having cellular connectivity.
So now app authors that get negative reviews can attack the people who left the reviews? How in any way is this a good idea? There have been numerous occasions where organisations that have had negative reviews go after the reviewers. This just encourages the practice, and will decrease the quality of the reviews as people are going to be less likely to be critical.
The problem is corporation tax, which (AFAIK) is levied on profits. You can't apply VAT here as many of these transactions are inter-company so are VAT exempt.
You can't just replace corporation tax with something based on revenue as then any struggling company will be instantly killed. Letting companies offset loss against the new tax will let Google out of paying tax again as they just pay a hefty royalty to their overseas subsidiaries and hey presto, we're back where we are today
I don't know much about corporate tax law, especially as it applies to inter-jurisdictional transactions, but the solution does not appear to be obvious.
While you suggest that the reason GNU/Linux got more buy in is due to the license, the reality is rather more complex and a lot of people who were involved at the time believe it is more to do with the AT&T/USL lawsuit (mentioned in passing in the article) which accused UCB and the CSRG of copying proprietary files from SYS V into BSD. The end effect was several years where people looked elsewhere for their open source needs until the lawsuits were settled, and even then the free BSDs had considerable work to remove the allegedly offending code from their trees and move from BSD 4.3 Net-2 based code to the 4.4-Lite code. e.g. FreeBSD didn't get 2.0 (4.4-Lite based) out until 1994, and it wasn't really stable for a while.
All the time Linux was quietly spreading without all these issues.
A lot of people believe that the balance between the open source OS's would be different today if it had not been for the AT&T/USL suit.
One problem with Time Machine over iSCSI is the iSCSI initiator is not native to OSX. If you have to reinstall your Mac and reload from your TM backup, you are offered the option of doing the restore from the install media, but it won't work if you have your TM volume available over iSCSI. Only direct attach or AFS works AFAIK. Not sure about CIFS
I have a sneaky feeling that surfcast waited until MS released all their software so that they could press for as much infringement revenue as possible. Why sue for WP7 when it hardly moved any units, and reveal your hand before WP8, Win8, etc, ship. Wait and get more revenue.
The fact the patent sucks, and they're not suing in the patent friendly East Texas venue, means they're probably losing anyway.
Watch the Air Crash Investigation report on fake spare parts for airplanes (Partnair Flight 394). The accident in question was fatal - 55 people died. A FAA investigation subsequently found fake parts on the B747s that make up the Air Force One fleet.
Think about the number of critical components in most modern goods - engine management systems in your car, avionics and metal parts in planes you fly on, etc, you should realise just how serious the issue is.
The higher the bit rate available (and going from 20Mb down to 60Mb down probably meant a change in QAM symbol rates too) the more sensitive it is to environmental factors like changing capacitance/resistance in the plant, noise, etc.
At my last job (for a different cable company) they could tell the ambient temperature in the area by the performance characteristics of the plant changing as copper cables expanded/shrank. That all affects the quality of the signal you get, and therefore the reliability of the service.
"Though didn't Apple lead the way on this by not including AC adapters with iThings?"
AFAIK all iPads and iPhones have chargers in the box. I suspect iPods as well but I don't know.
If they stopped shipping chargers there would be an outcry over Apple forcing you to buy separately what people expect in the box.
Used flash or had flash run in their browser without them actually wanting the content?
Remember two points with that 99% statistic:
- flash is default bundled with chrome
- not all requests for flash are desired by the user. some secondary content on pages (e.g. ads) still use flash.
I would also suspect that people with Chrome are more likely to visit Googly sites like youtube which probably still prefer flash on chrome to HTML5 playback.
Incidentally the reason I won't touch Chrome is because they bundled Flash. I don't trust it as it can basically run as an independent agent in my browser while ignoring all my browser security/proxy settings. The fact they release a security fix version of flash frequently doesn't particularly add to my confidence of the product.
The real reason behind the problems with RAID and larger disk sizes isn't IOPS or anything else, but the uncorrected read error rate. To rebuild a RAID 5 array after a failure you have to read all the data from all the surviving members of the array. The larger the disk, the more likely you are to hit an uncorrected read error which will silently corrupt the reconstructed data.
This is why ZFS does block based checksums, specifically to catch this kind of problem
NetApp gets around it by using non-standard hard drives. NetApp drives have a 520 byte sector, and several (or all, I forget) of those extra bytes are for a checksum.
Not entirely. ZFS and its copy-on-write mechanism is strikingly similar to WAFL on NetApp, which predates ZFS by decades. NetApp owns quite a few patents in this space, hence the Sun/NetApp patent spat a few years ago.
I don't know if the Oracle/NetApp settlement means ZFS users get the patents under the CDDL license or not.
ZFS dedup, the "official" Sun one anyway, is intensely memory heavy. According to http://blogs.oracle.com/roch/entry/dedup_performance_considerations1 you need over 2GB of RAM per TB of disk for ZFS dedup to work. Some empirical testing on ZFS on FreeBSD ( see http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide#Deduplication ) shows it closer to 5GB of RAM per TB of disk (less if you shove some of it onto L2ARC with an associated performance hit).
I don't see ZFS dedup as being particularly applicable to laptops/mobile iDevices.
ZFS compression is more interesting, but you don't need ZFS to gain advantages by compressing certain types of documents
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