Posts by Nick

Two options: Virtual Machine, Reinstall on reboot

I can think of two options:

Virtualization.

Forced reboot when time runs out which does a network (PXE) reformat and reinstall between sessions (wired directly from a separate hardware timer to motherboard reset switch).

Both of these would cut the chances of picking up something nasty and allow for a much less locked down user experience.

Re: Why carcinogenic

AC wrote:

"Is all carbon, and by extension, all things made from carbon carcinogenic then?"

Bare Carbon nanotubes are more reactive than most other forms of carbon. They are also of a similar size to asbestos fibres and can be absorbed deep in the lungs.

This has lead to concern from some scientists about whether there could toxicity issues.

Tests are ongoing to determine if they're toxic and whether coating the nanotubes has any effect.

HR

I think a lot of HR people would advise against it because you could open yourself up for discrimination lawsuits.

But then they're probably more interested in the process rather than the end result.

@Robin

Robin wrote:

"Now, I'm not a math teacher, but I think I am smarter than a fifth grader"

Unfortunately your joke may have gone over the heads of the UK readers where the show is called "Are you smarter than a ten year old?"

hmmm, that's a good log

For the method I'm going with the taking the log, dividing by thirteen and then raising back to the solution.

How he got the logarithm is another matter. Did he memorize log tables, iterate in his head or do something else?

Thanks El Reg for getting me to brush off my arbitrary precision coding. Raising 2407899893032210 to the 13th power gives:

91474397281474512894803677416201430283564210503432385339561327276933454229609304646471925094518114771016258896592907441426349897556504145570960203925503679105245199142338806082494254050610000000000000

Translation

AMD:

"we're only shipping Barcelona for specific customer commitments, like larger volume deployments."

Translation:

"We busted a gut to try and get 16,000 chips together so that the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computer Centre could deploy in time for the November Top500. Now we've missed that deadline everyone can wait until we get it sorted out properly."

The megahertz war is over

In the nineties Intel and AMD competed in the megahertz war to see who could overclock their chips to get the fastest headline grabbing chip frequencies.

The end result was that you couldn't get anywhere near the peak performance numbers and the thermal envelope went to the wrong side of 100W per chip.

When the single core chips were in danger of melting they jumped to multi-core.

We're now living with the fallout where the chip designers are retrofitting power saving features onto a power hungry design.

It's not their fault. The old mainframe technology was too expensive so people jumped away to cheap x86 hardware.

Now the pendulum is swinging the other way and lots of old technology (liquid cooling, thin clients (again), virtualization, etc) is being brushed off and given a new coat of paint.

@Joe Ryan

In some respects 7.10 is a beta release.

Ubuntu specifies certain release which have Long Term Support (LTS). Currently it's 6.06 and 8.04 will be out next year. They're the ones which you can expect to be the most stable.

Naturally everyone hears the hype about the latest tweaks and jumps on the newest release which in most cases is stable enough but sometimes has a few niggles.

QuickPath

Until Intel gets QuickPath up and running and there's a common Xeon/Itanium motherboard then they're just treading water.

Whether it will help or just remove some excuses for the price/performance gap is another matter.

@AC

"He should have used Truecrypt: http://www.truecrypt.org."

It's now an offence in the UK not to hand over your encryption keys to the police so that won't help much.

@evilbobthebob

Errr, the first page are all domain registrars and the second page says the rest are duplicates so there are no real sites yet.

I think they're just registering at the moment and won't go live until next year.

@AC

"surely for Linux people to copy MS code they would have to reverse engineer the code or something, where are all MS would need to do is download Linux Source files and Copy and paste"

He's talking about patents rather than copyright. You can infringe a patent without copying the code.