...and made sure it was really hot

I'm off to find a teacake, and some perspective.

Good.

Sounds like a way for early adopters of the iPhone who have resisted the urge to upgrade to recover some of the value by making a market for their second-hand devices.

I expect an upsurge of these early iPhones appearing on eBay.

@AC. My bad.

Intel only announced that Atom was running Android last week (apparently, I appear to have missed it. Must have been because I had a busy week doing some real work).

But as to Atom and Windows, may I point you in the direction of what is happening in the NAS space, where Atom is already pushing ARM out. Almost all of the recent devices run Windows Media Server on Atom, possibly because this is of use to people with Windows PC's but also because Atom is sufficiently low power that the ARM advantages are being eroded.

If Apple were to buy ARM and restrict advances in the architecture, do you really not think that the real winner would be Intel?

Not an immediate collapse

ARM do not produce processors. They license the technology, and guide it's onward development.

The current generations of ARM processor made by people like Qualcomm and Marvel would still be produced under an existing license that Apple could do little to change (unless the Qualcomm, Marvel etc. lawyers were sleeping at the wheel).

What they could do would be to stifle innovation for new developments and licenses, keeping the best for themselves and allowing the rest of the world to struggle on with what they have already.

But I would hold up what happened to Mips and Alpha (and to an extent PA-Risc) as examples of what happens when a company not in the primary business of designing processors have control of a processor architecture. And SPARC may be going the same way (do you really think that Oracle are really interested in investing significant sums to progress SPARC beyond what we have already).

I rue the day when we have just Intel and AMD (lumped together because they produce code-compatible processors), and possibly IBM if they decide to continue developing Power, are the only game in town.

Answer to your first question

On paper. The paper system still exists, and will continue to do so for those exceptions (like not having an Internet feed) that will continue to exist in the future.

Just because Internet filing is the preferred route does not mean that it will be the only one.

WOL...

...cannot be used for this type of wake-up remotely, unless the system generating the WOL packet is either on the same physical (wired) network, or there is some form of MAC level routing set up.

By definition, WOL packets have to be at the MAC level (if the laptop is off, DHCP cannot allocate IP addresses), and these do not route through standard IP routers.

And this also means that the laptop cannot be on a wireless network, as WOL does not work over an 802.11abgn network.

My suspicion is that when the laptop in on, there is a VPN set up to allow the laptop to access and be accessed by the school systems, regardless of the network, routers and firewalls between the school and the laptop. This will be a software VPN, which relies on the OS, which means that the system has to be on.

Unless someone has produced a LAN card that is integrated in these laptops that does IP and VPN actually in the NIC when in standby mode. If they have, I suggest that these would be laptops to avoid, as who knows who would be able to snoop.

How long ago

...was your last Linux install.

I've put Hardy and Jaunty on lots of systems, and generally it just works.

Almost every wireless card I've used (and I've got many rattling around in drawers at home) is recognized without need of a vendor supplied installation disk.

The last problem I had was the hacked Atheros chipset in my EeePC 701 with Hardy (fixed by a specific module from the community), but by the time Jaunty came along, it worked without problems.

What impressed me recently was when I took my mule system, and replaced the motherboard, which resulted in different processor, support chipsets, graphics adapter, memory, network - well pretty much everything besides the wireless card (it's a deskside system some distance from the core of the home network) and the media peripherals.

The existing Hardy install (yes Ubuntu 8.04 - two years old, but kept up to date) barely batted an eyelid. It recognized the onboard Nvidia graphics (it previously had an ATI AGP card), asked to install the correct driver for it, and came up as if nothing had changed. It just coped with the fact that the support chips changed from a VIA set to an Nvidia nForce set, or that the processor changed from an AMD Athlon XP to a Pentium Dual Core.

The last time I did this with Windows XP, I had so many problems, mainly because the Windows 'you've changed your machine, are you still entitled to run Windows' checks caused me to have to call Microsoft to re-authorize the retail version of XP (which is allowed to be moved between systems as much as you want). And the specific IDE drivers for the original motherboard refused to let me access the optical drive to enable me to load the correct ones from the driver CD packaged with the new motherboard to fix the problem.

I've not used Vista, but have built a Windows 7 system last Christmas. I was genuinely impressed by how easy it was to install, and it is clearly a step change from XP, The install I did was on pretty much generic hardware, so I would hope that it would be quite easy.

But comparing the installs of Linux and Windows is largely bogus, because almost nobody outside of the technical community actually installs Windows on any system. They buy it pre-installed, and just use it until it becomes so cluttered and slow that they discard the whole system. To somebody who has never installed a system, it will always be a traumatic operation to partition their disk and install a completely foreign OS with no experience of building systems. This probably explains many of the 'tried it, found it so difficult that I just switched back to Windows' type of comments.

Many of these people would find a second or third install so trivial compared to the first that they would change their view.

CPU cycles

If you have a modern GPU with OpenGL support, this is almost exclusively handled there (fading, bouncing, wobbling etc.)

Unless you've harnessed your GPU to do calculations, you've probably got ample spare cycles there.

I leave Compiz on on my laptop, jut to try to get people to notice it to increase user awareness of Linux. It doesn't really chew up a lot of CPU cycles on my lowly 2GHz Pentium 4 Thinkpad T30 unless you are using rapidly changing pixmaps (like video), and I don't normally do this when I am working.

The ATI MobileRadion in this Thinkpad is not up to water or flame backgrounds, but it runs a mean desktop cube.

@Matt

WTF are you talking about!

Any AIX code that is compiled with the compiler defaults will work. It just does, and has done for years.

There is a good chance (greater than 80%) that if you pulled a binary compiled for RS64 or Power2, or even the original RIOS chipsets from a system running AIX 4.3.2 or later, and placed it *WITHOUT CHANGE* on an AIX 6.1 system running Power7, it would run.

*IF* you are talking about extracting every ounce of performance for some code, then I agree that if you have optimized the code for cach size and processor affinity or the particular properties of the floating point pipeline (as is being done where I work currently) or any number of other factors, you will need to re-compile it with the relevant options to get the best performance, but even then the Power6 optimized code will probably run on Power7. This is not new nor specific to IBM processors, and hasn't been ever since I was working on PDP/11's and VAXes.

It is acknowledged that there will be a different execution profiles for Power7 from Power6. The design requirements for the processor were different, and I talk to some worried people talking about how scalable their model is at the moment. We currently have some code that tops out at about 768 processors, and gets worse if you increase the number above this. If the overall clock speed is dropped without a corresponding increase in the number of instructions per clock cycle, then this code may well be slower on Power7 than Power6.

But it's not certain. The speed of the level 3 cache, together with the less deep pipeline required for slower clock speeds may just offset the drop in overall clock speed (pipeline stalls become less of a problem). And as the bottleneck with the code is in inter-thread communication, the high bandwidth between cores on the same die, and on the same QCM may also offer realistic hope of performance gain. And the interconnect between the nodes in an IH supernode should also perform better than what is currently used. And I believe that the number of possible in-flight speculative execution threads possible with more available execution units may reduce pipeline stalls even more.

Remember the Pentium 4 vs. Pentium 3 debacle, where a Pentium 3 at the same clock speed out performed the Pentium 4 when it was first launched, and the follow up Pentium M and D processors dropped the clock speed and again outperformed a Pentium 4.

The talk of in-order vs. out-of-order is bogus. The results for the same stream of instructions should be the same regardless of whether it is in-order or out-of-order. If it's not, the processor is broken. The difference is that out-of-order may allow the hardware instruction scheduler to better utilize the available execution units, leading to more-instructions per clock.

And anyway, the only applications that really are affected by the clock speed are speed-daemon floating point hungry single threaded research types of workloads. From my 30+ years of experience, this is a very small (but admittedly valuable) part of the AIX customer base.

For your commercial workload customer, the difference between Power5, Power6 and Power7 architecture and instruction sets will be largely ignorable. What will be more important is the number of cores, the number of simultaneous threads that can be executed and the memory constraints of the hardware. For these customers, the application providers may not even have optimized versions of their code for the different processors, but a one-size-fits-all distribution. Power7 is probably a big step forward for them. I know application providers who still compile on Power4 hardware with a generic set of compiler switches to allow the code to run on the entire processor set.

In fact, AIX is like this. The version of AIX 5.3 that runs on the Power6 575's (the current speed freak machine) is EXACTLY THE SAME as that which runs on an RS64 44P 170 (same install disks, I know, because I have done it!). There is no distinction on FixCentral for patches. It is just all the same.

Your comments about AIX5.3 are interesting. Yes, there are some features that will not be available to AIX5.3. Things like Turbo mode. But AIX 5.3 is still supported (not sure if there is an end-of-life date yet, would expect it if and when AIX 6.2 or AIX 7.1 is available), and there is likely to be a new Technology Level (TL12?) for Power7 that will add some of the new features. IBM have always kept the latest 2 releases of AIX under active support, and normally publish withdrawal from marketing for an OS about 2 years prior to that date. This means that there is at least 2 years of AIX 5.3 support, not that I would recommend anybody installing Power7 to use AIX 5.3 at this time.

The instruction features are more likely to be conditioned by the compilers (which, incidentally, are currently OS version agnostic, the Fortran and C compilers are the same packages for AIX 5.3 and AIX 6.1). What's even more impressive is that you can compile Power6 code on, say, a Power5 system, drop it onto a Power6 box, and expect it to run as well as if it had been compiled on a Power6 system.

All of this does not sound like the scenario you paint. Maybe you ought to work in a big AIX shop sometime, and see what binary compatibility is really like.

BTW. I cannot say where I am working, but we have more than one cluster in the first 100 of the November 2009 Top 500 Supercomputer list.

sudo lockdown

It's perfectly possible to lockdown sudo so that you cannot run any shell, and there are many books around that will also show how to prevent user-escapes from allowed commands (like shell escapes from vi, for example).

This is another advantage of UNIX and UNIX-like OS's. There's lots of documentation and experience 'out there'. When your only avenue to reliable knowledge is a vendors training program, you become their technical and economic hostage. This is one reason some vendors like changing their product frequently, so they have the opportunity to sell their training over-and-over again.

Another view.

I'm sure I don't agree. Yes, UNIX is nearly 40. Yes, there are uglies in the way that you administer it, and also in the crude security model, but what are you holding up as a shining example of something better? I've seen administration tools that looked prettier, but they generally end up being so locked down as to be largely useless, or so complex to set up (I'm thinking CDE with it's cross-system authentication here) that you have to be a real propeller-head in order to get it working.

UNIX has seen off so many alternatives, and still lives on, while everyone else learns the hard way over-and-over again that hidden complexity leads to difficult-to-manage systems. The more layers of 'gloss' you add to 'simplify' administration, the more problems you build in when it goes wrong. (I'm coining Gathercole's Law as being "Apparent simplicity causes hidden complexity" )

If you need something better for users, then Gnome and KDE will provide you something just as pretty as other OS's (and a product from the 1980's called Looking Glass, which predates usable Windows systems also springs to mind), so the so called unfriendly* command line is not necessary for those who don't need it. Sometimes you ought to look and see what it is possible to do with the simplicity of the shell command line as practiced by real power users. It may not LOOK pretty, but it is elegant and functional.

I have frequently stunned managers and younger colleges by piping together several small tools with simple stream processors (think awk or sed) to achieve in a matter of minutes things that they were prepared to commit days of work to do. This is especially true in clusters or networks of near homogeneous systems, which is where UNIX excels.

It is a testament to the original design criteria of the shell and the base UNIX command set that most of the commands I use on a daily basis came out of Bell Labs. Version 7 UNIX, dated 1976. This has been augmented over the years, but you would still recognize that system as UNIX today. This may mark me out as a dinosaur, but hey! I'm still working, and I appear to have the respect of my peers who keep asking me to do things they cannot work out an easy way to do.

In my view, what is wrong with the example quoted WAS a UNIX design flaw, that of allowing spaces in filenames (space should have been made a banned character), but the very flexibility of the shell and filesystem interface allowing almost any character in filenames has allowed multi-byte character set languages to be integrated into UNIX with comparatively little effort.

(*) Often, the reason why it was seen as unfriendly is that most users were too lazy to learn the dozen or so commands that were the core set needed to do their job. They got frightened because two-and-three letter abbreviations were not close enough to english (e.g. cat - catinate is and English word, but one many people are not familiar with). This was a matter of perception and training. Possibly the only OS that got it right on the command line was VAX/VMS with DCL, which allowed you to use full command names, or any unique abbreviation. But this made the command processor one of the largest tasks in the system and was still not English!

P.S. I'm really not looking forward to a time when role-based security (which is already present in the few genetic UNICES left and also Linux since the 2.6 Kernel) becomes the norm. I predict that we will see stories of administrators who don't fully understand the importance of local privileged accounts locking themselves out of their systems when the LDAP or ActiveX directory servers cannot be contacted to authenticate them to fix the problem.

I'm honoured..

.. by having amanfromMars respond directly!!

I've often wondered whether he was speaking in code rather than translated Martian. I think that this post clarifies the matter, don't you?

Type 12 (improved)

This was Leander. It was built on the basic hull form and machinery of the Type 12 Whitby and Rothsay frigates, which were specialist AS and AA frigates.

Interestingly, the last batch Leanders ('broad-beam') were actually completed with different specialist configurations (Ikara AS, or Sea Wolf AA, and I believe that some had Exocet) in place of the Twin 4.5" turret, and many older vessels were converted during their lifetime.

So we went from specialist to general, then back to specialist.

After this, the Navy wobbled a bit. The Type 21 (Amazon) which was a commercial design, which was regarded as a poor as a result of not having sufficient upgrade potential built in, but then the Type 22 Weapon or Broadsword, which was a Navy design, and the later 'stretched' versions were so successful that some remain in service today. As I understood it, the extra space was not for additional weapons, but for Command and Control capabilities to allow these vessels additional radar and tactical control facilities to allow a conflict to be run from on-board.

Looking back, it seems strange now to consider that the Leander class ran to 26 ships. Nowadays, the entire major surface fleet is not much larger.

And the other thing to note is that today's destroyers are the size of 2nd WW cruisers, the frigates are the size of flotilla leader destroyers. There are effectively no vessels in the small frigate/corvette category, as these do not have full ocean-going capabilities without sacrificing either speed or weapons for endurance.

In reply to everybody saying that the modern warships are armored, that is not really the case. Whilst they do have survivability design features, a single missile or largish bomb will actually take a frigate out, and they would suffer quite badly from shrapnel damage from a near miss. What they do have is the ability to operate in nuclear or bacterial contaminated fields of war (so called ABC, Atomic, Bacterial or Chemical), and the Type 45 destroyer is intended to be a 'stealth' ship, with surfaces and water sprays designed to scatter radar, to make it look smaller on radar than it actually is. Imagine how large a container ship, with large flat sides must look.

These features are most comically illustrated by the so-called Kryten turret (Mk. 8 improved), which looks, naturally, like Kryten's (from Red Dwarf) head.

In addition, a warship must be able to move at least as fast as the rest of the group it is with (and with allied Navies), and to be able to react rapidly (which is why they switched from oil fuel steam turbines that had a startup time measured in hours, to Gas Turbine and/or Diesel, to allow a ship to be underway in a matter of minutes). Keeping j-fuel safe in combat is MUCH more difficult than keeping heavy oil fuel, which requires more design work.

And Lewis's ill-informed musing about carriers being able to protect themselves does not take into account amphibious warefare vessels like HMS Ocean, which do not have all the trappings of a full carrier.

Putting it bluntly, frigate sized ships are much more cost effective and useful in any number of different, and possibly un-expected environments than helicopter-carrying RFA's.

So Lewis. 3/10, could do better.

And the NHS...

...is just sooooo god at identifying people allowed treatment that they can be trusted to confirm identity!

I've seen my GP once in 10 years. I'm sure that he would recognize me again. Oh yes.

DMV equivalent

That would either be the DVLA Local Offices (all 39 of them, all in big cities, see http://www.dft.gov.uk/dvla/contactus/localoffices/findnear.aspx), or the Post Office. Just looking at the US, California on it's own has more DMV offices that the UK has DVLA Local Offices.

We do most of our driving license work by post, the Internet or in the Post Office. And unlike you, our license lasts from when we pass our test to 70. Identity is confirmed by having an influential person (doctor, MP, business owner) vouching for the identity only once when the provisional license is first issued. I believe that there is a requirement to apply for a new photo card every 10 years, but that is done just by sending a new photograph by post.

Even the old-style passport (the non-biometric ones) were done the same way. This is why it is such an outrage (to us) that the new passport or ID card requires visiting such a centre.

Having mentioned California, it's obvious why I've used the Terminator icon!

... forfeit their membership?

Why do they need to , bearing in mind how much the rest of the world now relies on them as the worlds manufacturer.

If China withdrew from the WTO, who exactly would boycott trade with them? It's a fine idea as long as you don't want computers, TV's, other electronic devices, plasticware, knives and forks, kids toys, tee shirts and jeans... and even a place to send all your plastic waste to be re-used rather than dumped in landfill.

I could go on.

Next time you buy something non-food, pretty much anything, have a look at where it was made. Just think how you would like to wait a year to get non-Chinese production scaled up, and how you would embrace paying three times as much for it. And that's not to mention the billions of dollars that China has invested from it's sovereign wealth fund propping up UK and US companies.

No, China is not afraid of the WTO. We should be afraid of them leveraging their dominant manufacturing position on us. Still, we only have ourselves to blame for letting our manufacturing sector to become so niche.

I don't like the human rights issues either, but if you examine the United Nations Charter, you will find that not even this allows any country to interfere with another sovereign nation (Article 2, Paragraph 7 apparently). Mind you, this appears to be something that the US and UK governments have forgotten over the years.

The other concern I have is why so many people think that the western democratic system is the only one worth merit? It should be quite obvious from Afghanistan and Iraq that it does not fit the whole world's moral and ethical systems. We (in the west) are just being moral snobs. I don't think that the Chinese system is currently fair, but that does not mean that we immediately have to schedule a western style election for China. The Chinese representational system, if it were implemented correctly could work, as long as the people at the top loose their desire to stay in power (hmmmm, probably not going to happen).

Anyway, enough of this Friday Afternoon politics, I need a pint!

You're forgetting...

... the nitrogen dioxide that will also be a product if the atmosphere is used as the source of the oxygen. Of course, this is produced in petrol engines as well, but most people forget it when considering hydrogen as fuel in a conventional piston engine.

Collaborative Distributed Proxy

I have long thought that an Open Source, Collaborative Distributed Proxy (my term, and I don't think it has been used elsewhere), whereby any packet can be sent via any member of the collective, in a pseudo-random scatter basis, with encryption, is needed to defeat the country filters imposed by a number of countries.

I've not worked out all of the details, but the basis is that you run a client that acts as a html proxy on your on system, which joins the collective, and does not route any two packets the same way, using UDP stateless connections on randomized ports via other members of the collective. You would need to be able to re-assemble the packet stream, and enforce packet re-transmission (like TCP), and you would need a fixed endpoint for each TCP session.

I know that TOR does something similar, but is mainly for anonymity, I believe that my solution differs because the set of system participating would be constantly shifting, making it difficult to block at the country level.

There are problems with local firewalls on each of the member machines which I have not yet worked out (I suspect that at some point, you would need a broker), and initially joining the collective would be a potential point of weakness which could be trapped, but I think that these are all addressable.

Broadband over power cables?

There have been trials of data-over-power grid (please note this is *NOT* the same as Homeplug). Scottish Power actually had a commercial service at one time, I believe.

It's not RF interference that killed the trials of this, it was the cost of bridging the signal from high to medium to low tension safely, the problem of combining upstream signals, and the problem of suppressing power switching noise which would cause damage of the datastream ( I was told that even medium tension switching uses sealed oil-quenched switches that arc through the oil, causing it to boil and be very dangerous - exploding substations anybody?). Not conducive to data.

My local electricity distribution company has fibre carried on its HT pylons, providing long-haul data services for trunks across the Atlantic, and has been selling bandwidth on this for over 10 years. But this is not suitable for broadband to the home, unfortunately.

No win situation

There is no way the BBC can escape criticism in this argument, and this is not because of what they do, but because of their wide audience of people with different viewing needs and opinions.

The fact that there is such a spirited set of arguments just proves that the BBC is being inclusive, and is probably doing it well. There is no way that everybody can agree on a single set of programming, and even if they did, it would then be criticized for being non-imaginative middle-of-the-road crap. It is the ONLY broad-spectrum media organization in the UK, and is probably the best in the world.

I do not particularly like period costume drama, but I accept that there are people who do. I do not like sport either, but I am not calling for either of these to be taken off. Same with Soaps. I do like much of the BBC 3 output, it allows programs that would not be carried anywhere else to be made, but it does get a bit repetitive (that's why it is actually so cheap). BBC 4 is useful for its arts and historical documentaries, and especially for its Proms coverage.

If there is anything on air that needs reviewing, it is the output from the biggest critic of the BBC, that being BSkyB. Just try to spot what they actually commission, rather than buying in.

Brainiacs, sport coverage, a handful of popularist book dramatizations, some elimination entertainment shows (following the herd) and a whole raft of police or customs reality shows and out-take shows. Are they really a good yardstick to compare the BBC to?

Everything else is American big-budget shows (some of which I quite like) and Matt Groening cartoons, but nothing they have actually MADE. Even though Sky carry a huge number of channels, they actually produce almost nothing of value themselves (Hogfather and The Colour of Magic excepted - but these were very rare).

If you need to free bandwidth up on Freeview, dump Sky 3 (just a placeholder really) and half of the shopping channels (Bid, Pricedrop, Ideal, Create and Craft, QVC - do we need them all), and some of the +1 channels. (I would also vote to return YeSTERDAY back to the UKTV History format). And definitly get rid of the Bingo and Roulette pap and Babestation exploitative junk. These last two catagories do not need replacing, just removing (really, there is much better free real-porn online if you want it).

@solarian

I hope that was a joke. Have you seen the reported size of the Chinese military!

And they have a capacity to launch space vehicles, so they could probably do ICBM's just as easily.

And they have a modern airforce, and are building a potent navy.

Nothing to do with democracy

We have a representational democracy in the UK. If Parliament vote to accept indefinite retention, there is nothing undemocratic about this.

Unethical, immoral, non-productive, stupid and possibly illegal according to European law maybe, but undemocratic - never.

This is even the case if the policy does not match the feeling of the majority of voters. The fact that you voted your MP into office (or didn't if you either did not vote, or supported one of the loosing candidates) means that you delegated to them the authority to vote on your behalf. Only problem is that they rarely do...

If this really upsets you, lobby your MP, or vote for a party that is more sensible (if there is one!), or even if you feel strongly enough, stand for Parliament yourself!

Democracy is basically agreeing to be governed by the majority. The problem is that without a referendum on every subject, you have to trust, rightly or wrongly, someone to act on your behalf.

BTW. I hate the policy as well. If you are cleared, then my view is that the data should be deleted immediately. Maybe we ought to have a 'not proven' verdict like Scotland, which would allow DNA to be kept for a fixed period, but deleted for cleared suspects.