Posts by Anton Ivanov 1034 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2007
Quote: Decide you want to reorganise the whole mess, after months or years of unplanned operations?
Did you just notice the two chaps in suits from IBM Global Services trying to express a database problem in IBMerese at the door? I thought you did not...
Me coat... The one with "Though shalt not misquote Dijkstra in vain" on the back
The E65 has just about enough RAM to run the bundled SIP client and browse the web. The moment you try to use th IMAP client you are facing the choice of "either SIP or IMAP". So the question is - did they improve the RAM or t is the same crap as before. If it is the same crap as before (64M) it is better to shell out the few extra quid for a proper N-series gadget.
Another question is - did they fix the Bluetooth bugs. With an E65 if you walk out of handsfree coverage you quite often have to reboot (especially if you use the SIP client as well). Quite annoying actually. You almost fell like you are running Winhoze...
Me coat, the one with "Enough E-series, I am going for an N78" on it.
You are biting the wrong bait.
The comments on this thread are full of FUD of monumental proportions. While Britain does not have the natural resources to have high proportion of hydro proper 90% of the grid stability problems which many people consider to be the ultimate bane of renewables can be solved by using hydro-accumulation.
I own a house overlooking the lower portion of one of the biggest hydro-accumulation cascades in Europe (not in UK). It is a weird sight to see how a reservoir the size of Granham water is empty at lunchtime and fills up nearly to the rim by the end of the evening just to be empty again next morning. It is a solution which works and which can be built in many places which lack the natural hydro resource.
In fact, Britain has all the infrastructure necessary to have this in place already. It is called "The Lake District". The Victorians built it to supply the industrial north of England with water and it is an idiocy not to use it.
Ok, heritage dolts will scream because the sacred Coniston water level will vary by a meter or so a day. So what? The investment is a minute fraction of the investment into nuclear and it will allow to eliminate most of the expensive gas-burning capacity outright. Unfortunately it is a very "politically incorrect" proposition which we are not likely to see it any time soon.
Have these guys ever tried taking the fingerprints of a builder using an automated reader? It is close to impossible and for tiling and bathroom people outright impossible. Their fingerprints cannot be read. Same for car mechanics and many other professions who have their precious "ID" metric damaged on a daily basis. Add to that children, add to that over 75 and end of the day the only people who can be fingerprinted are the Whitehall mandarin themselves.
So why don't they call it "biometric government employee card" and get over with it. It will be useless for everyone else.
At present the land in the new EU arrivals is utilised at under 30%. The agriculture there is virtually bankrupt. You can drive for miles and miles through abandoned orchards and empty fields.
Bringing it out of disrepair and running it at full throttle should be more than enough to deliver food for the whole EU with a lot to spare. The only reason it is not doing it is that EU at present is an organisation whose primary aim is to provide French farmers with a nice and easy life at a high living standard. This however is temporary as there is no food shortage just yet.
As long as EU exists and Britain is part of the EU there is no such thing as a food security problem. There of course is a "French Farmer thinks that rest of EU is obligied to feed them" problem, but it will end up being solved in a jiffie if we no longer have enough food to eat.
As far as Africa they will be able to feed themselves with ease as well if they stop using the aid (direct or indirect in the form of St Bob Geldof loan waivers) on murdering each other and building palaces for whoever happens to be filling in for the king job spec on that day.
While I agree with you that the whole car has been a metrosexual PR stunt from the beginning, a rooftop solar is something that will benefit any car. Every car loses some of its battery charge when parked (up to 5-8% a day for some combinations of car+ alarm) and it is recovered during the most inefficient engine operating mode (while cold). A solar on the roof will go a long way towards improving that. In addition to that a solar on the roof coupled with an electric driven aircon can go a long way towards keeping the car environment nice and usable on those +30C days in the middle of a hot parking lot (this used to be an option on the S-class Merc by the way). Once again - savings from having to run the aircon fullblast when the engine is cold. And so on. In fact - it is something that is worth having on any car and not just the Prius.
It is not grownd breaking. The non-rubber-sheated bend and push (OK, innuendo ahoy) version of the same known as Pelamis has been produced by Scots for a while now. An experimental installation off the coast of Portugal was supposed to be operational by now (I have not followed it).
However as everyone who has had more than one holiday on the Atlantic coast can testify this will not be a salvation to EU needs. Americans with their ever-rumbling Pacific are more lucky. EU has to contend with days and sometimes weeks of having no waves at all. Still, any power is better than no power at all.
Though personally, my bet is that we do not have the tech to produce rubber that is capable of such abuse for a long period of time so we should probably stick with bendy systems like the Pelamis for now.
One piece which all media is missing that these designs are catapult-less. This makes them considerably less efficient in terms of policying the Gulf, Dar-es-Salam or other current "hot" spots.
It however enables them to operate where no UK or US carrier can operate at present - in the far north or the far south where steam from the catapults freezes straight away and they jam all the time (that is the reason why Russians have decided not to use them on Kuznetcov class).
So, how long till an antarctic or arctic war?
Hmm... That is a bit too early to say. As far as wiping the floor with a couple of F15-s that is something that a Su-35 has been able to do for a very long time. And it is much much cheaper as well.
This is even without the vector thrust upgrade. With the vector thrust upgrade... This is one test that will be worthy to see. I suspect that the Typhoon will lose fair and square.
White Star is a jolly good vehicle in its class, but I would rather wait for the "Drala Fi" (Black Star), thank you. Something with more "poke" that can carry more stuff around.
Nothing personal, just business. Regardless of how consumer-middle-class-MPV driverish it may sound, I actually like to have a car where I can fit a few bags with some food from the supermarket, the "management" (AKA wife) and the unruly 6 year old. In an Elise you have to make a choice which one you are going to tie to the front bumper and neither one of them seem to like it.
By the way, Babylon 5 jokes aside, I have actually put in a 10mm^2 ring to the car port when refurbishing the house. Let's see when it will finally get to be used. Knowing the chancellor the 90% disparity between electric and petrol will not stay forever. He will find a way to exercise his daylight robbery rights.
Me coat. The one with the White Star printed on the back.
Microsoft, PHP, Perl have all had built-in functionality to avoid SQL injection for 10+ years now. Every single "corporate" developer I have met does not use it (except some of the perl-heads). Interestingly enough the non-corporate ones do.
Every time I work with a new team I have to teach them. And every time I leave a team which has started working properly using the so called prepared SQL statements and SQL variable substitution I find them to revert to the old injection-prone practices a few weeks later.
The truth is - developers do not care.
Me coat. The one which says "SQL injection is a self-inflicted problem".
1. The 5000 are a joke. Current end-to-end prices for smuggling an illegal immigrant into the UK are 10000+ depending on the country of origin. So unless each case results in "assisting illegal immigration" prosecution this will actually be a perfect loophole for importing more as it is a smaller price than the snakeheads ask for at the moment. The price tag will have to go into the 25K-50K or so to have any effect.
2. Most people who invite relatives are of foreign origin. The CRB is a total failure as far as foreigners and naturalised persons are concerned. Due to the UK government not being a signatory to Shengen or any other criminal data sharing arrangements there is no proper data on most of the foreigners. As a result the CRB will return a "clean" record on anybody except the very few people who have managed to get a pan-EU arrest order or an Interpol wanted list. In fact it will probably return clean even on that.
As usually - a typical labour half-arsed underbaked halfmeasure that fails to deliver any tanglible benefit and serves only to provide appropriate tabloid headlines.
Paris - as someone who would have come with a better set of measures as she probably has more brain than whoever wrote this proposal.
Well... Via long had that problem solved. They have encountered the problem of the norhbridge+IGP consuming as much as the CPU (or even more) long ago and most Via Motherboards the heatsink is SHARED by the CPU and the chipset. While this results in a big, unsightly and heavy aluminium blob it also allows low rev fans or no fans at all for the lower freq designs.
Overall - Intel is where Via was 5 years ago with this one in terms of thermals, noise and features. The only interesting part is price as this is the cheapest system money can buy that thinks of itself as two CPUs (OK, it is SMT not SMP but 2 CPUs for the OS none the less).
With all due respect the review is utterly useless.
Can we have this baby compared to a 1.5MHz Via or 1.5Mhz Geode so we can compare apples and apples instead of comparing apples and watermelons. It looks like Intel has delivered something which is fairly close to them performancewise so it is quite interesting to understand how close it is.
As far as features it is not anywhere near a modern Via motherboard, but it is also much cheaper so there is some level of cost/benefit tradeoff there for people who do not need the crazy choice of IO present on a Via mini-ITX motherboard (firewire, 6 USBs, 2-4 SATA, 1-2PATA, all varieties of audio, LCD panel, and so on...).
In addition to that it looks like the design suffers from all the failings of the early M-series Via motherboards. It has an audio connector that is too tall for many cases and it looks like the heatsink is even taller which will preclude this motherboard from fitting into anything but a MicroATX case. Most proper mini-ITX cases like cubid, travla or venus are off the menu. Same for mini-ITX 1U cases.
They counted a couple of infants in the tally. That is cheating...
During the mad boozing week that followed the high school proms the year when I graduated we got stopped for gross overloading with 15 people in the car at 3am. The cop could not believe his eyes so he had us lined up on the road side to count us up. That was 15 teenagers in an old Volga estate. The cop let us off after finding out with dismay that the driver was absolutely sober (this was in the wild East, I would not expect to get off so lightly in Health-n-Safety paranoiac UK).
This is a standard practice in legitimisation of dirty money (aka money laundry). The money is laundered through buying unnamed checks, winning lottery tickets, etc.
By the way, this is a fairly low markup for this type of service. The usual markup is >20%.
Also, I would not be surprised if the seller is Inland (Internal) Revenue.
Me coat.
OK, so what is the distinct improvement as summarised in the last page if you still enable the crippling TLB workaround as described in page 1?
That should have been fixed in B3 so if you have it on you are actually strangling the CPU.
Can we actually have some results with the workaround disabled and some results on an OS that can make good use of 3 cores and not just 2 of them (hint - it is not Winhoze).
It does not need to be a virus targeting the person specifically.
Sounds like a P2P darknet using internet temporary file areas for in-transit storage. This also fits well with him getting a Verizon bill big enough to warrant an internal investigation (this is where all this started after all).
There is a LOT of that going on. The more interesting bit is how did it get onto there in the first place and whose head should be served on a plate in court.
Sorry Arnold, you are missing to see the wood behind the few trees in front.
There is an underlying reason for all this and it is that over the years the British School system has evolved towards a state where the teachers do not have any control of the class and do not aim for a control of the class. It has however retained its "abuse the child" Roger Waters lirics stlye design from days past.
In any other country in Europe if a teacher cannot control the class (or a pupil) there is only two choices - the pupil is expelled straight away or the teacher leaves (or is made to leave). The teacher has the sole and full responsibility of controlling the class.
In the UK there is a third choice - the pupil is shovelled off to the assistant (the one normally with the class or a dedicated one). As a result any kid who is bored, sleepy or otherwise unwilling to concentrate at this particular moment goes and plays teacher vs assistant straight away to get off. Kids learn it from their first day in school and this is exactly how the proto-ASBOs and the later lack of discipline is generated. It is inherent in the system.
In addition to that, the entire system both private and public is geared towards creating psychotic/neurotic kids. I would suggest that you actually take a holiday once in a while, but not to where British go. Go to a place where German, French or Italian go like south end of Fuerteventura (Costa Calma) or Gran Canaria and observe. After that go to the part where the Brits go like Costa del Fuste and observe again. There is a staggering difference between the two. On one side you have kids that are composed, self-sufficient (you hardly ever see a parent chasing their offspring) and how to put it - complete. On the other side you have screaming neurotic wrecks that rip out car window mirrors for the fun of it and have to beat up someone or something just to vent their frustration at least once an hour.
This once again is not surprising. UK is one of the only two countries in the EU that deliberately forces children into school before they have completed their initial social development. No other EU country does it. From there on the children are stressed and further lack of discipline is even less surprising. You cannot expect a person stressed to the bone to have discipline. Sorry, humans do not work this way. And if you doubt what I am saying check children obesity data. There is a well proven and well established link between obesity and stress. The only other country in EU to have the UK children obesity levels is the only other country to put children in school at 4. From there on you have decreasing obesity to the point where it is nearly 0 in the countries which do it at 7 like Germany.
Me coat now. The one with the "Subject the Education department to Decimation" sticker on the back (by the way, I have moved my own kid from public to private to discover that they are no different. It is all Roger Waters lyrics all over again).
To be most exact Samsung has a license for nearly every CPU/SoC under the sun. Besides Arm and PPC it is also an Alpha and MIPS licensee. So whichever way Apple turns it may still end up fabbing them with Samsung. It can do it for everything but Intel./x86 based designs.
Next time listen to the language in the background. It is from the part of the world where a monitor still costs much more than a decent suit (though it could have been guessed anyway by the average obesity level especially in the female part of the office).
I does not look staged. It looks like something a pissed of Russian working for an American company that has cubicled all of their staff would do. And it probably is.
Per cm2 most likely. A typical hotplate is more than 100cm2.
Anyway, the ex-chemist in me keeps wondering:
What kind of water are they using and how often does it needs changed?
My gut feeling is that this setup requires at least double-distilled and deionised water. Tap water is definitely out of the question here. If we ignore the lymescale bit in this setup water is actually in contact with the semiconductor itself and if it starts conducting things are bound to get really funny. The only way to make water non-conducting is to deionise and double-distill which is not cheap. On top of it the ghastly thing does not want to stay in that shape. It will scrape ions off the walls of the pipework and literally suck them out of thin air. By the time you turn around its dielectric constant shows that it is a conductor again and full of "pleasant" ions that will do their best to solidify in the most inappropriate place.
Frankly, something less capricious and temperamental than H2O is probably a much better idea for this one.
The unadjusted USA graph actually fits better the current global northern hemisphere models than the adjusted graphs.
IIRC, during the last several million years when Earth was warmer than now (not that there was a lot of that) Texas and the Eastern seaboard were much colder and wetter. The mathematical models show the same (as well as very cold Northern Sea and North-West Europe).
So the first map which has a very hot California, as well as parts of the midwest, etc and a colder than average Texas makes much more sense than the adjusted one.
I will second that.
I was looking for hot water and heating source for a summer house abroad (in an Eastern European ex-5th world country) and came across a number of companies that did the whole ground heat source business from A to Z. The prices were excellent and the only reason I did not do it was that with 1-2 months a year it would have never payed back.
However, inspired by the ease with which it can be done on the continent, I decided to see if this can be done in the UK. Oh my, oh my... Apparently the UK is the only country in the EU where any form of drilling is still a state controlled affair. Essentially, HMG has never ever heard of any drilling for anything but water and minerals. As far as they are concerned heat source drilling does not exist as an option. You have to apply for a drilling permit, deal with the British geological survey and fight a bureacracy specifically designed to make the lives of people like Shell or Thames Water miserable. A mere mortal not backed up by several hundred billions of capitalisation will of course loose.
So the heat source option while most practical is closed for the UK until the govt gets a grip on reality and relaxes the drilling permit regime.
Quote: "In the absence of changes to the fundamental energy economics,"
Oil at 250$ per barrel, gas linked to oil anyone? If dat is not change dunno what is... IIRC, based on calculations on a back of a napkin I did a year go the price of electricity would need to go up only to where it would be at 150-170$ and stay there for a solar installation in south england on a south facing roof to become a feasible investment with around 7 years of payback time (assuming current mortgage rates for crediting). The only condition is that the national grid b*** actually buy it back at standard wholesale rate. No need to even do a German style subsidised rate, at the price of energy derived from 150$ per barrel it will pay for itself.
Unfortunately at the moment this is not an option as anyone who has tried to call one of the "antihelplines" of powergen, british gas, etc can testify. They are published, but there is _NOONE_ actually manning the phone. Noone answers the email either. PR gimmick of the worst degree.
As anyone who has had to play with a recent Geode can testify AMD does not need to "develop" such a chip. It already has one.
Geode now has nearly all MMX and FPU "checklist items of importance" grafted from Athlons and can deliver comparable performance to Intel and Via best offerings. All of this within 2-5W thermal envelope. It is already used in thin clients and some custom small PC designs instead of Via. I have a recent HP thin client using it and its performance is way higher than the Asus EE (pre-Atom) or the Via subnotebook platform.
What AMD is lacking however is the in-house support for the rest of the platform. Geode systems are being shipped with SiS instead of AMD/Ati. IIRC some of the ATI offerings should be compatible with it so getting a small cheap computer (TM) platform together for AMD is a question of an engineer sitting down with a CAD system and a spreadsheet for an afternoon. Worst case scenario an agreement with SiS can do the trick.
Now, why it does not want to do it is a different matter.
And at the same time I have boarded a plane more than once wearing the "Practical Unix Terrorism" O'Realy t-shirt in Spain.
http://www.bofhcam.org/co-larters/images/practical-unix-terrorism-pub.tif
The security guy had a look at me a couple of times and after that smiled and let me go. It downed on me what I was wearing only half an hour later.
I guess it comes with the territory... My T-shirt, the one with the clockwork and the dinamite on it...
Section 58 of the Stalin's era USSR penal code was the infamous section under which people were sent to Gulag to rot and die. Treason, subversion and crime against the state.
Similarly, there were books on the so called prohibited list during Brezhnev's time which would have gotten you out of the university onto the all-time job blacklist and sometimes even into forced resettlement. At the same time these books were on the reading lists for some of the ideology and history majors. However, lending them to someone else would have resulted (and has resulted on many occasions) in the same story as in this case.
History indeed repeats itself. Up to the exact number
Welcome to the Union of British Soviet Republics and its most prominent educational institution, the Stalin's Nottingham University.
Me coat. The one with "My great granddad was shot by Stalin, I do not want to be shot by his brown incarnation" slogan on the back.
More waste of money yet again. Sigh...
It has been known for a long time amidst the people keen on bionics that imitating birds is a waste of time. A bird's (and to lesser extent bat's) wing is a very complex structure and the bird can vary its geometry, pitch, etc at will over a very wide range of values.
Any hope we have to achieve controlled flapping flight lays in imitating insects. They use fixed semi-rigid wing structures which we can imitate. They do not change their geometry either. It is all controlled by the way the wing is moved so it is much easier to imitate. And most importantly - they can hover and even fly backwards.
Me coat... The one with the big dragonfly print on the back...
To put it bluntly, as my CS professor 20+ years ago used to say: Miss, you cannot be a little bit pregnant.
It is either, or:
If it is a sale, it can be resold and customers can in most countries claim tax credits on it as capital expenditure. Similarly, Autodesk can collect revenues in the state/country which is most convenient tax-wise the way it does now.
If it is a licensing contract, it cannot be resold and the cusstomer cannot claim tax credits on it as it is no longer a CapEx. Similarly, lease is subject to different taxation on the Autodesk side. Things like selling it cross-border and registering revenue only in a state/country where it fits you most no longer work. In most countries in the world leasing is subject to local taxation and there is no way to wiggle out of it by registering an office in Ireland (or Texas for that matter).
Frankly, it is about time HMRC and the like payed attention to this. Compared to this VAT carousel fraud is a child's game of conkers.
I would love to see this in court. It is about time idiocies in the system are sorted out.
The system is on the land belonging to the petrol station You are entitled not to drive over it. If you do it, you do it on your own volition. It has been clearly marked with all relevant warning signs. So if you drive over it, it should be your problem. If you do not like it there is always the option of calling the police and complaining that the petrol station assistant is illegally restraining you. Let's see how will this one work right after you have shoplifted.
Enough is enough, time to stop the madness where innocent people get charged because someone gets hurt breaking into their property and slips on the stairs.
Well... It is clear it has not so there is a simple tried and tested solution for that - outsource it.
I will really like to see someone wanting to go to prison for "the badge of honour" if this means chopping your own firewood in middle of the Russian taiga.
By the way, the Germans are already doing this instead of Asbos and it is rumoured to work well. I bet that we can improve on the financial arrangements they negotiated with the Russians. After all the UK can probably negotiate bulk rates. It will be cheaper than maintaining the various forms of HMP and it will never suffer from lack of space.
On a second thought it may be just easier to do this in Canada. In either case it will cost half the current cost of keeping a low grade criminal in an HMP.
Wheels have motors already. They are spun up before landing to the landing speed to minimise the strain on the undercarriage. So the weight is already the actual weight difference is between the current motors which are designed to spin up wheels to the equivalent revs for 200km/h+ and a motor that can move the plane on the ground. This in fact may end up requiring the same weight and the only difference is that the motor will have two different switching arrangements for low and high revs. In fact you can also use this for breaking as well which will eat some weight from the breaking system so overall this may end up weighting less than the current undercarriage assembly.
You have never seen a GreenPeace protest I guess...
As far as MSFT running extremely dubious tax policies, that is a given and it is not just them, it is the whole software industry. The MSFT EULA specifies something that is along the lines of rent, not sale. In fact it is written in it that you "do not own" the product. As a result it should not be treated according to the tax regime for selling and buying, but for renting assets and this is subject to completely different tax relief arrangements especially in cross-border cases (usually much less).
Unfortunately the only country to pick on this fine distinction and tax them correctly so far has been India. If everybody else gets their backdated taxes from them they will go bankrupt in a jiffie. 40 billion is a severe underestimation.
The only reason why it is not being done is that the rest of the software industry will quickly follow suit.
By the way, this IMO is a clear example of illegal state subsidies as far as I am concerned. All of us making a living in-country and working outside the software industry "proper" do not get any such handouts. Why should the software industry have them?
The video has MPEG2 and MPEG4 hardware accel so in fact it may be able to play HD subject to the software being able to take advantage of the feature. It is all quite irrelevant at present. You can rip 99% of all DVDs when using the right drive with right firmware (thanks LiteOn). You cannot do that with HD media.
So as far as "real" HD any PC is presently more or less out of the question. There is no point in using a PC if you cannot use the storage. If you are going to keep on plugging the damn BDs into it you might as well buy a proper BD drive.
As far as upscaling to HD res all Vias starting from the first C7 at 1MHz and the first post-S3 videos have enough resource to do that. I have a diskless client using the first Via "media" mb from 4+ years back at 1GHz. It is based around VLC and can flawlessly run "Planet Earth" in 1366x768.
Not for a mini-ITX solution. You tend to pay 20%+ premium for the "size matters" option. By the mini-ITX world standard this is an extremely keen price.
What I do not like is the speed. at 2GHz it is bound to have a fan which defeats its use as a media center system (with the media elsewhere on a server where it belongs).
The operators have optimised their network to the Ofcom testing methods. As a result roads are covered better than railways and abissmal indoor coverage is a norm. I am not surprised that he hit a few dead spots into London. I travel on one of the main commuter lines on a casual basis and there are several clearly defined holes in the coverage (different for different ops, but none covers the whole journey).
AFAIK they carry pistols after Leonov and his mate made a mistake not to carry some on that disastrous landing which put them in the middle of the Perm woods. More that 1000 km off target. Still, something has to be said for a capsule that can survive reentry while not complete separated from its service module (that is not Soyuz, but its predecessor).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
