Posts by richardcox13
38 posts • joined Saturday 19th May 2012 08:16 GMT
Re: If you liked this....
Certainly worth a visit. They have a collection of cold war military equipment including a WE.177 case (well I hope it's empty).
Lots of signs to it in the area... really must get a photo of a few on a visit to family in the area at some point.
Re: PCI-DSS
In the early days of Azure there was a lot of talk about lots of security verifications being done (usual alpha-numeric soup of standard identifiers).
So it is possible PCI-DSS is covered.
But likely you'll need to ask Microsoft directly if a hunt for "Azure security compliance" fails to show anything.
Re: Super Proton Synchrotron
> Radiation damaged cables? How?
Read up on synchrotron radiation: when you use an electro-magnetic field to change the direction of charge particles (eg. protons) EM radiation is emitted. At the energy levels of CERN this is hard X-Rays.
Re: That's why codecs are usually compared with lots of different footage
> BBC has to constantly transmit every local station as a full stream
If I recall correctly this has already changed[1] or is due to sometime soon if not done already.
The problem was combining the variable bandwidth stations in the MUX with the regional BBC1 feeds and sending to the regional transmitters: the technology to make BBC1 variable width in each region and merge didn't exist when Freeview started.
With newer kit, HD and analogue switch off the situation has (or will soon) change.
[1] I seem to recall it was linked to the completion of analogue switch off and HD roll out.
Re: 9mm?
"NATO Standard Rounds" makes for simpler logistics, and in the end conventional wars are more about logistics than anything else.
Re: "The temperature scale simply does not end at infinity,"
> Or do they have other research going on that gets to negative values of temperature by heating something to infinity and beyond?
That's exactly it.
The Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature has been cited as containing a good introduction.
It is an effect in a quantum system so you need to forget your intuition.
Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister
Given garbage in is the norm this is inevitable.
Posted in Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support
Re: 486?
> Isn't 486 a 386+maths coprocessor?
Not necessarily: remember the 486SX?
Plus it made some significant changes to the instruction set that made multi-threading significantly easier. For example the atomic interlocked increment and decrement operations return the new value rather than just a zero or not-zero indication. Hence (from the article:
> which complexity has plagued us with extra work whenever we wanted to change SMP primitives
(And also why the InterlockedIncrement and InterlockedDecrement Win32APIs where different on WinNT vs. Win9x.)
Posted in Flash memory made immortal by fiery heat
I Think Wear Leveling Will Still be Needed
> look like making wear levelling irrelevant.
I don't think so.
Image a block being written once a second (quite possibly pessimistic for something like control information in a database file on a busy server), that's ~31.6 writes a year.
So 100 million is reached in a little over three years.
So unless the ">" in "to > 100M Cycles" is really order of magnitude greater than, wear levelling is still going to be needed for server (ie. enterprise grade) SSDs.
Posted in Reg boffins blow lid on sheepsecs
Re: I'm no physicist, but ...
Vacuum is not empty.
All that quantum fluctuation (where the closer you look the more noisy it becomes) for a start.
Plus the odd bit of dust or gas.
(The vacuum used in The LHC contains considerably less matter than in inter-planetary space.)
Posted in Reg boffins blow lid on sheepsecs
Re: But
> A Dyson should be able to suck up a real one. Or a lamb. Or at least kittens.
Which leads to the question: what is the speed of a kitten in a Dyson?
Should be a little more of an everyday speed that a sheep in a vacuum? (The outer space kind rather than cleaner kind of course.)
Re: The good old days...
> 0.066666 FLOPS
To put this in perspective, the Harwell Dekatron described was built in 1949, so assuming it was running continuously ever since it has 63 years of runtime at that 1/15 flop/s.
And then compare with the 27PFlop/s Titan at Oak Ridge (top of the latest Top 500 list).
A few calculations...
Titan would take about 500nS to perform the same number of operations at the Dekatron in 63 years.
Five hundred NANOseconds.
Even a nVidia Tesla card, running at about 1TFlop/s would only need around 130μS.
Even a computer as slow (by today's standards) as a megaflop would only need a couple of minutes.
Re: A Patent Wars icon is needed
A crying toddler. or rather having a strop would cover many a report of legal posturing.
Re: We need
Unicode already has its 'PILE OF POO' (U+1F4A9), so this isn't much of a stretch.
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm
Re: I just spat out my instant noodle
Remote code includes documents received from other parties.
For lots of "near" misses...
follow https://twitter.com/lowflyingrocks
I would suggest a more careful read of the article, in particular this sentence:
> Ormandy reported the vulnerabilities to Sophos on 10 September.
That's rather more than 5 days,
I would expect Peer1 (who run the DC) will be looking at that in the future.
The fuel tank may well be stuck in the basement by local planning (zoning) regulations, but maybe putting the pumps in the ground or first floor (1st or 2nd for USAians), maybe with a submergeable booster next to the tank (to get things moving).
Re: Use the cloud
Some web sites have done that.
StackExchange.com (including StackOverflow.com) are running out of their backup DC in Oregon, some of Fog Creek's applications are now in AWS.
Of course this isn't something you can just magically do, throw some servers into another DC and it will work, you need both application changes and administrative processes (and monitoring) that will allow the fail over. (Eg. StackExchange recently – in a rather timely manner – tested their fail over, found some issues and fixed them.) Whether for a given web site it is worth the costs for the level of risks is a business choice.
Re: Anyone actually expect the hardware is the same?
> You'd hope performance would be equivalent regardless of the hardware.
Not really, I would expect performance to be no worse (and often better) than the minimum specified for the type of VM.
Ie. you get at least what you pay for, but you might get lucky.
Of course those faster, more modern, host machines could be getting a higher density of VMs loaded on to them. So a faster CPU might just mean more users sharing it so – on average – you end up getting the same availability of CPU instructions executed per unit time per VM.
Re: Americans...
Arguably for much of physics even the SI units are a RPITA. So many things would be easier with "natural" units. For example in particle physics using Planck Units, however these are not exactly practical outside their specialisms (time in units of approximately 5.4e-44s and distance of 1.6e-35m).
Posted in Reviewers say ‘yes’ to Higgs boson data
I suggest a view of
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Uh5mTxRQcg&feature=share&list=ECED25F943F8D6081C
(followed by parts 2 and 3), which briefly covers how a particle is a field and visa versa.
Posted in Reviewers say ‘yes’ to Higgs boson data
Re: whoa!
> And the articles are not behind a paywall for a change.. *shock*
Indeed, and it gets better, from the "Open Access" section of each article:
> his article is published Open Access atsciencedirect.com.It is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0,
"Dominion's vast southern neighbour"
The dominion in question has a somewhat larger area than the southern neighbour.
Too much sub-editing without fact checking?
Re: Mostly agree
Do the admins having to deploy that "scalable, stable, ultra low-latency and high throughput algo trading system" agree?
Re: Problem for 3-D Secure?
Certainly Verified by Visa does *not* use Java (remember the only link between JavaScript and Java is in their names).
This is not a security hole: if you can access this you already have complete access
To access this information you need to either capable of taking ownership of that part of the registry or running as SYSTEM.
In either case you all ready have complete and total control of the machine.
(The linked article acknowledges this., Hint: check out the ACL on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SAM\SAM.)
Another case of if you are already inside the safe, the you have access to the contents of the safe.
Re: Express: Are they fealing the 'heat' or... ?
> Very surprising if you ask me since former statements seemed to indicate that desktop development wouldn't be freely available at all, only in the full versions of VS 2012
That was changed several months ago due to the outcry the limitation it generated. Announced on one of MS DevDiv's blogs a few months ago.
Re: Actual server figures
Based on http://www.zdnet.com/boston-viridis-192-core-server-consumes-only-300-watts-of-datacenter-power-7000001654/ it appears that 300W does /not/ include the HDDs.
Clearly using SSDs will add the least power (but the most cost), while high performance spinning rust will use more. Looking at the spec of Seagate's Savvio 15k 2.5" disks: operating power is almost 8W.
So with 24 of them that's almost another 200W.
Still low compared to x86, but getting a long way from the 300W headline.
Be very careful when looking at manufacturer's specifications in the area they are claiming leadership: their information is spinning more than the HDDs they're not including.
Re: Trundling?
No it isn't. I seem to recall NASA saying it will be several weeks.
Re: The Frankie Boyle angle
"earlier" (not easier).
Re: The Frankie Boyle angle
Frankie Boyle demonstrates his ability to jump on an incorrect bandwagon.
The factory in question has a lower suicide rate than other factories (a lot lower). Listen to (the excellent) More or Less from easier this year where the "high suicide rate" was covered.
Posted in Jackson’s Hobbit becomes a trilogy
Re: Inventive
It's the one Gandalf goes off to fight with the White Council: remember when he disappears off from Bilbo and the Dwarfs in Mirkwood?
Listed in Appendix B of LoTR.
Posted in How do you measure up at the Olympics?
Just Seen Proper Use of El Reg Units by BBC
This sort of thing is good to see, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/archery/16277420:
> Archers in the Olympics have to hit a target the size of a beermat from a distance of seven bus lengths
Posted in Readers fret over LOHAN's chilly bits
Re: I apologise for butting in
The term you are looking for is "Hypergolic propellant".
But they are all really nasty corrosive liquids. Not really something that will work for LOHAN.
Re: Sod this for a lark
Unleash The Luggage of course.
Posted in What is SpaceX Dragon's secret cargo?
Re: or more simply
Surely THE playmonaut.
Launch currently on Nasa TV: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
