Posts by Phil Endecott245 posts • joined Wednesday 29th November 2006 15:10 GMT
> What happened to the old BerkeleyDB btw?
Well of course it's still around, but I think that domain is increasingly moving the SQLite.
> I have literally never seen a PostgreSQL install outside of universities. Not one.
http://www.postgresql.org/about/users/
Just to pick a few from the long list on that page:
IMDB
Safeway
Skype
Apple
There is also a list of users of PostGIS, the geographic version of PostgreSQL, here:
http://postgis.refractions.net/documentation/casestudies/
Amazon's service works well for multi-terabytes, but I'd be interested in something that would work for smaller uploads, e.g. a single DVD. I could burn a DVD and walk to the postbox much more quickly than uploading the same data.
Fi Glover once called Patrick Moore an Astrologer.
She is an idiot who should simply be ignored.
I'm fascinated to know what orbits these satellites use that result in non-uniform coverage. Such orbits do exist, but they aren't used by American GPS, or Galileo.
> I get hounded by the tax man for a £5 under payment and these
> people just go an avoid it, and it is legal.
"Just" going and avoiding it has involved relocating to Singapore. How far would you be prepared to move in order to avoid that "hounding" that you're suffering? You are free to move too, if you think the benefit is worth it.
1. I don' think you mentioned the "PandaBoard", which is a newer T.I. OMAP board similar in most ways to the various BeagleBoards but significantly faster.
2. The Freescale i.MX53 "Quick Start" board is physically similar to the Panda and Beagle, based on a single-core Coretex A8; its main differentiating feature is that it has SATA.
3. The "OpenRD Ultimate" is based on a Marvell chip, similar to the various "plug" computers, but does have a VGA output.
> What do you use it for and how?
Backups of important stuff like source code, email, and similar; mostly via hourly or daily cron jobs.
> So just need to encrypt and store/ restore... And do incremental
> changes only mostly.
Encryption doesn't work well with anything incremental; I think that's a fairly fundamental problem.
> if only one of these cloud storage providers would provide a standard
> rsync based interface they would earn the undying gratitude of all Linux fans.
Tried rsync.net? Works for me.
> Might set these papers as study materials for our students.
Well if your students are in Kew that could work. Otherwise, wait until they get around to scanning them.
> at least they weren't all making the same mistake in a quadruple
> redundant aircraft control system!
Or a self-driving car!
> It makes your iPhone photos look like they've been flushed down the crapper
I heard Instagram being discussed on "You & Yours" on R4 today. "So, basically, it takes your photos and makes them look worse?" said an incredulous Peter White. Hilarious.
(For non-R4-listeners, Peter White is famously blind.)
Here's my theory: because of the fake calls, they would leave the phone off the hook. But the caller was recording, and picked up background chat.
> what would be a *cost effective* solution to switch the sub
> on when the amp is running?
So the connection from the amp is a "line level" audio signal, right? I'd be tempted to bodge a little circuit to detect when a signal is present, and turn on a relay. Your challenges are (a) not to interfere with the audio quality, and (b) power. Neither is insurmountable.
I'm more interested to know how many bytes of data they have, rather than a count of objects. Is there any hint of that anywhere?
> english speaking individuals you can actually understand
The last time I phoned $telcom_provider, after the 5 levels of menus needed to reach a human, the guy started by telling me that he was in Coventry. He also proved easy to understand and was certainly a native English speaker.
Unfortunately, EVERYTHING THAT HE TOLD ME WAS WRONG. Diametrically opposed to the correct answers.
So no, a UK call centre doesn't solve all the problems by a long way.
> Government and diplomatic sources from around the world give
> Stratfor advance knowledge of global politics and events in exchange
> for money.
Reminds me a bit of Levenson this week: "A network of corrupt officials" in the "police, military, health and government" who would pass on information in exchange for large amounts of money.
> what about looking for fossils in there
It's easier to do that where the rocks are exposed at the surface. I don't see why any pre-glacial fossils would be significantly different there.
If it was storing password hashes - as the article says it was - why are users being advised to change those passwords on other systems?
It's not just that they won't get their $6.1e8, but rather that it won't even stop the spam. I've just received exactly this spam this morning. I wonder if the spammers have just sent out a batch of this one to say "up yours" to Yahoo.
> what you're calling for is the mass imprisonment of everyone in the
> UK who's old enough to have voted before 1967.
I doubt that there was much difference in the policies between the parties on this; it wouldn't have been something that crossed the minds of many people in the polling booths. So I'd focus on those who actually did something active, like giving the injections.
All of this is just words. I have a more active suggestion: round up all those people responsible for this persecution and send them to prison for six months. Or inject them with hormones, or maybe just halve their pensions.
We're not talking about ancient history here - we're talking about pre-1967; there are still some cases of WWII criminals being found, and that's two decades earlier. Perhaps the judge (or jury) who convicted Turing are dead now, but plenty of more junior people from later cases will certainly still be alive.
Presumably after the first incident someone was given the job of improving compliance. They are the person who should now be sacked.
> "I am not suggesting putting them up against the wall like under Josef
> Vissarionovich (Stalin), but seriously punish either financially or, if the
> fault is obvious, it could be a disciplinary or even criminal punishment,"
If I were a Russian space scientist, I might now consider packing a suitcase and getting on the next plane to Pasadena. Do you think that quote would be enough to get you asylum on the grounds of well-founded fear of persecution?
Other places that might get disproportionately more mentions than their populations would suggest:
Crook
Stoke
Stone
Barry
Wells
Street
Wool
Battle
Sandwich
Reading
Sandy
and most importantly.....
BEER !!!
Please log on to re-enable: <link>
What annoys me more, though, is spam from real companies who have "forgotten" that I opted out.
"Police put the phone down on my complaint over Twitter racial abuse"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/20/nabila-ramdani-twitter-abuse?INTCMP=SRCH
The treatment you get from the police seems to depend on who you are.
Remember how in the Robin Hood Airport bomb threat case, it was described as a "strict liability offence"?
The bitterness of high pricing remains long after the sweetness of high quality is forgotten - me
I wonder how the properties compare to the dandelion seed head?
Apparently, if you have the original NSFW versions of certain songs in your library, iTunes Match will silently replace them with matching safe-for-US-radio versions....
If you're in to that sort of music, beware.
There are two kinds of people:
1. You're a poor to moderate candidate. In this case, you need to do everything in this article, and more, to make sure that you get considered. A side effect is that recruiters CUNTS will phone you up at inconvenient times and tell you about opportunities. And they'll email you vague information about those opportunities that is full of all the same problems of presentation that this article talks about. (Hint to companies using agencies: you should be putting as much care into the blurbs for your jobs as you expect applicants to put into their CVs.) You will soon tire of these phone calls and emails, but you have to put up with them and feign interest with "Hi, this is Zoe from Scumtwats, how are you?", else you will end up unemployed.
2. You're *really smart*. In this case, you probably hardly need to write a CV at all; the companies who are looking to hire you HATE recruiters too, and have probably heard of you, or you've heard of them (or your friend has). You'll get to find each other without an intermediary. You probably should write a really short CV with just facts that you can pass on to their HR people, if they ask for it.
> only effects those who use a 'smart cover'
The attacker can bring their own cover, or use a magnet.
What is there definition of a "victim"?
I would hope that the victims are nearly all banks. If there are really substantial numbers of members of the public who have genuinely lost out financially as a result of fraud, then I would like to know more about it.
I would expect that the majority of members of the public who have been victims are those who have not noticed the fraudulent transactions on their statements. These people would not know that they are victims.
Isn't this what xml:fo was supposed to do? A vocabulary for defining paged layouts. Except that fo always seemed a bit over-complex, and hasn't been implemented very widely. (I use it in a couple of places to convert web content to paginated PDF files.)
> As for the current state of the ozone layer; from what I read, that
> deosn't matter. The GRB just kills all of it; doesn't matter how much
> you started with, you end up with none.
Presumably the side of the earth that is facing away from the burst is OK initially.
The question is how long does it take for the atmospheric mixing to spread the ozone and/or nitrous oxide around.
(A bit like the plot of On The Beach, really.)
> If your checksum shows a *possible* duplicate block, you bit-by-bit
> compare the two data blocks to make sure they really are identical.
No, surely not. Large hashes are sufficient; look at how e.g. git works. It uses a 160-bit hash. Presumably you can make arguments about being more likely to be hit by a comet than to suffer a hash collision.
With a 160-bit hash and 4 kbyte blocks, for each GB of files you have 250 k blocks and each needs around 24 bytes to store the hash and its location, i.e. 6 MB of metadata per GB of data.
You could keep all that in RAM all the time - 6 GB of RAM for 1 TB of disk doesn't seem crazy to me - but if that RAM is too expensive you can keep it on disk and just cache it in RAM. You would probably need something like a Bloom filter in RAM in front of the main database in that case.
I still find the idea that de-dupe increases power to be unbelievable.
> Synchronous deduplication takes a lot of CPU power.
>
> It’s easy to imagine why. Try to compress 5GB of text files into
> a zip ball. Now, picture your hard drive as a half-petabyte zip ball
> that you are reading from and writing to at 10Gbit/s. Processing
> power is suddenly very important.
What on earth has compressing zips go to do with anything?
I would hope that de-duplication would actually save power.
Here's how it should work: for each block that you're going to write, compute a checksum. Yes this requires some CPU effort but it's not great - and you are probably already computing checksums for data integrity. Do a lookup in an in-memory database of that checksum. If you already have that data, you can stop - there is no need to actually write the block to the disk, saving you power. If you don't already have that data, save it as usual.
If people are doing de-dupe in a way that requires more power, they are doing it wrong.
The allegation in the Norris case is slightly different, but still an interesting abuse of statistics. It seems that someone spotted a correlation between when his shifts were and when some of the people died. They then got a list of his shifts and looked for other deaths that might be considered suspicious at those times. Then, they claimed that it could not be a coincidence that all the suspicious deaths had occurred when he was around. This is, of course, not valid unless they had looked equally thoroughly for suspicious deaths at other times and found none.
From http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-15127072 :
"The BBC has uncovered evidence of other similar cases of hypoglycaemia which occurred in the hospital where Norris worked but while he was off duty.
His lawyer, Jeremy Moore, believes there were serious flaws in the investigation and the convictions need to be quashed.
He said: "It seems that they trawled through hospital records looking for evidence of patients that might have died suspiciously but it seems they only cherry-picked those cases when Colin was on duty and ignored any others that might have occurred in the hospital."
The "system on chip" is an FPGA.
> "I enter all my expenses in this spreadsheet and file the receipts
> themselves in this envelope, and I enter all my income in this
> other sheet and hang on to my bank statements, and once a year
> I throw it all at my accountant."
Charlie, out of curiosity how well do you think that would have gone down with them if you had not done the "throw it all at my accountant" bit?
I have recently been asked to prove that I don't need to be VAT registered. Ironically, if I did VAT-register I would get a smallish net refund; my reasoning is that the agro involved in recording VAT outweighs the payback. On the other hand, if I'm going to be required to provide essentially the same level of information each year anyway in order to justify not being registered, then I might as well register and save myself some money...
Like football pitches and Wales. Tax on 15 years of gas production = 4 Kwekus.
> I don't know about the cracked turbine blade issue,
Then you should read Richard Feynman's book about Challenger.
They're charging £127 to cover their costs? Err, no, I don't think so. Their costs in this case are just adding an entry in a database, which should be practically free.
Yes, that's the right question - When Did It Stop? Seriously, some idiot somewhere must have woken up one morning and thought, "we shouldn't be teaching programming to GCSE students because $REASON". I want to know who that idiot was, and I want to know whether they have been fired for it yet.
Ditto for making French optional, which I suspect happened at about the same time.
Can someone explain what "cross channel" means in this context? On first reading I thought it was referring in some way to the English Channel (note mention of shops in Belgium and France) but then I realised it could be talking about the "channel" between manufacturers and consumers.
(Bloody buzzwords.)
> Bournemouth is currently 01202, just remove the last 2, prefix
> all numbers in Bournemouth with a 2 and suddenly you have an
> extra 8000000 or so numbers.
No, that doesn't work. You're proposing new numbers like "0120 3123456", right? Unfortunately that number already exists as "01203 123456", in Bolton or somewhere.
It would be necessary to use a new code, e.g. 02XY.
> I don't know of anyone who even dials numbers
Huh? So, say I want to call Example Ltd. I look at Example Ltd.'s web site, click on "contact us", and it shows a phone number. I pick up my phone and dial that number.
Tell me, how can I avoid doing that?
