Posts by Nexox Enigma

I bet...

I bet that if/when it starts working it'll produce a beverage that's not exactly, but almost entirely unlike tea.

This again?

Firewire has, yet does not need hubs, since you can chain devices together like with SCSI. Most devices have 2 ports, and you can just keep plugging them into eachother, up to 127 or something. And it's rather decent about sharing bandwidth and keeping latency low.

I don't know who in their right mind would do a 4 disk external raid. If you have data important enough for redundancy, then spend a couple extra bucks and get a case with extra internal drive bays. Or get a hotswap deal to stick into your 5.25" bays.

With reasonable software raid (Those $50 raid cards do software raid too, don't be fooled,) you can raid anything you want. I'm referring to md in Linux and whatever OSX uses. I've not used OSX's version much, but software raid in Linux has most of the features of a high end hardware raid card (online capacity expansion, background rebuilding / consistancy checking, shared hot spare, etc) and it's faster than a couple of the low end hardware raid cards that I've tried. And you could make a raid out of a network disk (AoE), a sata disk, a usb disk, and a firewire disk, and a disk image file. It'd probably be slow as balls since that USB disk would probably run slower than a network disk using 100mbit ethernet, and it'd introduce all kinds of rampant latency, but you get the idea. I've also heard of someone using OSX to raid together 8 usb floppy drives. It's not a good idea, but it illustrates the flexability of the system.

Yes, USB sucks, especially the Intel and VIA controllers, since they do even less of the work than a regular controller, leaving more up to the cpu to deal with.

As to the math, not every single bit in the GBit rating is actually used for data, they typically do some sort of 8 in 10 encoding to get some error checking and data resilliency, so you actually just divide the rated speed by 10 to get the actual speed in bytes.

Don't get me wrong, I've used external USB drives, but I typically do it when I'm not even kind of in a hurry, mostly when backing up users' machines before I reformat or whatever. Then again it was hard to tell whether the shitty computer, shitty drive, shitty enclosure, or USB that slowed things down.

I mostly hope that there's always some alternative to USB that isn't too expensive, since I may need an external drive in the future, and I don't really want it plugged into my mouse port.

@Simon Ball

Finally someone with some sense comments on one of these things. As soon as I started reading I knew someone would be bound to pop up with something like Jordan's comment.

In the end you absolutely need to develop and deploy a higher bandwidth interface before you make drives that run over it. If you do it the other way around then you end up with disks which have a bottleneck at the interface, instead of at the r/w heads, which makes it pointless to develop faster drives. And it does take a couple years for a new interface to become wide-spread, which is what a storage maker would be looking for before investing too much in drives which require the speed.

And people assume that working on faster interfaces some how means people aren't working on faster drives. Which is wrong for many, many reasons. I don't think I'll ever understand why people complain about progress.

Riiiiight, dangerous...

I tend to work with 'dangerous' levels of radiation most days. It takes a fair amount of radiation to get a Geiger counter to start ticking above background levels - say like 10 feet from a 1.6 Curie CS 137 source in a ~33kg depleted uranium shield. And you really have to be paying attention to see that low level.

For someone treated with such extremely low levels of radiation, with such a short halflife, you'd probably be able to stick the Geiger-Muller tube probe down their throat and not see anything out of the orginary. You would likely need a Scintillation Detector, which is not quite as cheap or easy to make as a geiger counter. And you'd have to be pretty close too. The nice thing is that if you did it right, it could do a spectroscopic breakdown and tell you just what radioisotopes it found. And that would probably come out on the indecent side of $100k.

Hmmm

And I was just getting ready to deploy a transparent proxy on my home network. If I do that now, I won't update Squid for a couple years, which means I'll be vulnerable... Nothing like a good excuse to procrastinate.

replies...

@ JimC:

Proxies are just the beginning of ways to get around blocks. Any ISP which requires you to use their proxy these days is hardly an ISP at all, since so many protocols just don't work like that. You'd be blocking all online gaming for one thing. And unless an ISP / government started whitelisting hosts / domains as being OK to access, it'd still be relatively easy (not free) to get yourself a VPN to a nicer country. And then you've got all sorts of clandestine tunneling and protocol obfuscation to look at.

@ the spectacularly refined chap

File sharers actually pay for their internet access most of the time. Unless you've let one of them steal your wifi, then you're paying for your internet connection and they're paying for theirs. It's the ISP's buisness how to charge for it, and you can bet they'd charge you just the same whether theri network was at 3% utilization or 90%. You're the kind of person that'd probably be in favor of pay-per-use tiered access, but even those plans would end up costing more for you, even to get the lowest tier. You're getting cheated by your ISP, and file sharers have nothing to do with that.

You have to wonder whether this ISP will be like the rest and just drop blocked sites from their DNS. We all know how easy that sort of thing is to foil.

One of these days I'll get around to deploying a nice little dark net and all these silly little ISP / Government problems will go away.

Finesse?

So downloading a tar file and runing make is considered to be a procedure which requires finesse? So what do they call the mysterious voodoo required to make CPAN work properly?

And it isn't so much that you can't trust software from your OS vendor, but you just don't want updates to affect code which you depend on. And you /can/ trust an OS vendor to update things from time to time, whether you want them to or not.

Screen permitting, indeed

So this chipset is designed for mobile internet devices, which seem typically to have a max screen resolution of 800x480 or so. The smallest screen that I've heard of that can do 720p is 8.9 inches. That doesn't excactly seem mobile. What are they indending to do with this chipset?

Or is the HD playback cabability just so they can stick some extra letters on the end of all the products?

@ Rob Dobs

"""Sure you can rip out the HBA/NIC but there is not a External connector for PCIe for them to plug a cheap cable into each motherboard"""

Actually the PCIe spec does include both external plugs and cables. You wouldn't need anything like a network card, just a board with wires straight through from the PCIe slot to the rear bracket. It may need a bit of filtering gear, but nothing at all like a high speed processor or anything.

I've actually seen some PCIe 4x cables (that's 10gbit, I believe) and they're not all that bulky, though I'm not sure what the max length is in the spec, I hope it'd be able to reach from top to bottom of a 42U.

The real nice part is that loads of hardware already has and will have for a while PCIe busses, which are already designed to operate over some distance. Contrast that with HyperTransport, which is limited to AMD, and not really feasable over any distance longer than a couple inches (maybe 1.5 linguinnis.)

Looks like Apple wants more profits

I wonder if many future Mac Mini purchasers will ever know that you can get a mini itx mobo with the atom 330 (no nVidia chipset, regretably) for under $100 US retail. Those Core2 Duo chips cost about that much by themselves, if purchased in volume. So obviously Apple is going to be upping their profit margin on the Minis, unless they lower the price (doubtful.)

Whatever Anon said that two seperate CPUs on the same package would be better than the Core2 Duo's shared die setup is quite wrong. Sure with the atom they just share the FSB, but it's also the only way for each of the cores to communicate with eachother. In any Core2 that is actually dual core, instead of dual die, they can commincate directly on the silicon at a far higher rate, plus most of them have shared cache and other neat things to help out. The dual die approach is more or less provably the Wrong Way to get 2 cores on a chip.

And to all of you that say the GPU offloading will make up for the slow CPU... it might, for certain applications. Out of the Mac Mini's intended uses, though, the only real advantage will be for watching videos, which has been mostly offloaded even to cheap Intel GPUs for quite some time. I really hope that most people don't buy a Mini to do video editing or anything like that, because they'll find out very fast that even with the GPU helping out, they'll hit storage and memory bandwidth bottlenecks.

I'm personally going to reccomend not buying any more Minis in our department until we've had a chance to see if they will actually work. We already had a huge problem with the first generation Intel versions, since they had trouble running a web browser and an email client at the same time. We really don't need any more of that crap.

Close, but I won't be buying...

I like the screen, and I'd probably be able to live with that irritating keyboard nubbin mouse, but there are some other issues.

Lack of an Ethernet port is no good really. Sony should have called this thing the Vaio Air. The fact is that I probably won't have an 802.11N network for a while, and even when I do, it won't be nearly as fast as the gigabit port on my HP2133 (or probably even as fast as the piddly Via cpu bottleneck will allow an nfs copy to go.) They'll probably supply ethernet via a docking station that goes in that proprietary port.

Mostly, though, I just seriously doubt that Linux will work on this device at all. Sony has historically done things in as proprietary and bizzare a way as possible, so you more or less have to run Windows and use all the Sony software. Who knows if you'd even be able to run XP.

So I guess I'll just wait for that HP2140, since it's so cheap I can justify replacing my 2133 after a year... especially if I can get the damned video drivers to work properly.

Replies

The nice bit abotu the HP2133 was the screen, which, at 1280x768, is somewhat useable. For some reason no other netbooks seem to want to go above 1024x600, which is somewhat unuseable.

I suspect that manufacturers realize that if they sell netbooks with a useful screen, then they will cut into their real laptop sales. Plus it seems to have become a standard, so they've got a psuedo excuse for not making decent screens available.

I'm also not attached to the x86 arch, which I think is mostly popular because of politics instead of actual merit. As long as the Freescale chip has an FPU, which some ARM chips (looking at whatever is in the Nokia N8xx line here) seem to neglect. I imagine that it will be on there, since it seems like you'd put an FPU on there before two GPUs.

I'd really be more interested in a PPC netbook, which will never happen since I believe the market for such a device would be about 8 people, but Freescale could help out if it did happen.

Screen Space Efficiency?

Seems that Apple doesn't especially value their users' screen space. That menu bar and the dock already consume far more space than they need to, and hiding the dock just makes it bounce up and get in the way inconveniently.

This new 'technology' is just going to throw more of your pixels to various un-usable edges and corners, which is the sort of thing that slowly grinds away my soul when I encounter it.

As you may have guessed, I am the sort of person that has spent measureable amounts of time trying to save 4 pixels of vertical resolution by re-arranging my gui and things. I'm just glad that Fluxbox allows me to customize /everything/ on the screen to my preference, which is one of things that really turns me off about the OSX gui.

And I think that Pierre may have been confusing a couple topics:

- Non-graphical tools may be faster and easier than their GUI counterparts, and there are a large amount of people who are violently against believing this. I argue on occasion, but most of the time I just let them get on with their slow, mouse-driven lives. I know for certain that LaTeX is faster for me than Word, even if I do occasionaly have to whip out TFM and R it. At least I can use VIM, where I can navigate a document at ungodly speeds compared with scrolling and clicking.

And,

-Many OSX users don't really do much. That isn't really a fair generalization, and I know plenty of people that manage to produce work on OSX. I wouldn't say they're faster or slower than people on other operating systems, because there are more factors involved than choice of interface. But I think that we can all agree that we know a few OSX zealots that spend their time on facebook and making Photobooth images with their foreheads all expanded out and not even pretending to do work. It seems that there are a fair amount of OSX apps that actively encourage this sort of time-expendature (Christmas is coming up, so I get to look forward to a couple hours of videos that my Uncle made in Garageband, mostly featuring my 7 year old cousin distinctly not singing very well) and so it isn't so hard to understand why some individuals might think OSX is dominated by useless individuals.

But yes, you can write a paper just as well on OSX as Windows, largely because you can install just about the same software on each.

In summary, can't we all just get along and use whatever works best for us? I can't stand to use OSX for extended periods, I can tolerate Windows, and I like my highly tuned Linux desktops, but I don't think that anyone in their right mind should agree with me. And rants like this are why I normally avoid commenting on these fanboy topics.

@Eddie Edwards

"""Not sure how to operate my scanner over SSH if I'm honest."""

Not only is SANE relatively easy to use over SSH, but I've got a network-enabled SANE front end on my Nokia N810, which is trivial to use over my VPN. It's nice for when I leave some paperwork at home and I can just have my girlfriend place it in the scanner for me. And rest assured that the network enabled scan server is mostly used for scanning on multiple nearby computers than the occasional remote document aquisition.

And yeah, the screen on the iPhone is just too low resolution for this to possibly be useful. The N810 has almost twice the res, and it's barely passable for RDP on Windows. It does kick some ass with SSH, however. Keyboards with real buttons and all tend to help. Hell, I'd rather use a 4 year old Blackberry for SSH than an iPhone.

Again?

Does it seem like every new laptop that Apple releases has an eventual firmware fix a couple months later? Either the fan doesn't run enough and the thing over heats, the battery life is deteriorated, or something along those lines. For such nice hardware, it seems like Apple just doesn't test these things enough before they're released to the general population. I mean it should be pretty easy to notice that 30% of your products overheat during normal use, and fix the firmware before they hit the streets.

Then again, maybe there is some reason for it that I can't grasp, because it sure seems to be a trend for nearly all of their laptops since they switched to Intel. Ah for the good old days of a 12 inch iBook G4... The only issues it had was that tendency to turn urine-yellow after a year or so.

@David

"""Without a compiler this seems like vapourware."""

The lack of a compiler at this stage doesn't mean a whole lot, since usually it's good to have an agreed-upon spec before you go and start writing code that depends on the spec. Seems like there are a good set of corporations behind this thing, so I imagine that it'll go ahead.

And it has a better chance of catching on than CUDA since it'll be cross-platform and hardware independant, so obviously there'll be more incentive to code apps for it.

I'm not terribly eager for this sort of thing to show up on OSX, but I will eagerly await support and applications on Linux... maybe with some nice Python modules to back it up. Might be a good reason to spend more than $25 on a video card for my servers...

Comments

First off, has anyone stopped to consider that Jobs might just be trying to get his friends at Symantec, etc a little larger holiday bonus? It wasn't made quite public enough for that to be probable, but it is still possible.

Second, to whomever thinks that they shouldn't find and erase Windows viruses from their Macs... consider that sharing viruses is considered quite impolite, and could be construed as illegal, though if you didn't know it was there you'd probably be alright. Still, it isn't cool to put others at risk because you are lazy.

As others have mentioned, ClamAV isn't exactly optimal for desktop use. It was / is designed mainly for servers, where it gets called to scan files / volumes on demand, like checking an email attachment before allowing the message through, or daily scans on user shares. It does have real time scanning support in Linux, but it doesn't seem terribly mature from what I've seen. It definitely isn't a replacement for realtime scanning, which is what you need, if you need a virus scanner at all.

Unless Norton has improved a lot since version 10.0, it's crap. And uninstalling it is nearly impossible. That app caused me so many problems with my previous job at a helpdesk that it still makes me fume to consider how poorly designed it is. And it does tend to slaughter your performance.

Some people seem to make a big deal about *nix security and what not. A computer is secure as you make it, and not all *nix systems are equally secure. For instance, as far as I know there is no SELinux analog for OSX. Then again, it's easy to give every account root privledges and no passwords on Linux.

The main problem with realtime scanners is that they use kernel hooks that get called frequently. With 2 or more realtime scanners, you interrupt the kernel more frequently, and run the risk of having the (generally sketchy) kernel hooks interfere with eachother.

I personally don't like AV on Windows, because #1) I can remove viruses better by hand, #2) I keep an eye on processes and whatnot and I generally notice a virus quickly, and #3) I definitely notice the performance impact on heavy file IO.

Interesting looks...

Looks like one of the better designs to come out of Honda in a while, especially from the rear 3/4 angle. But I don't particularly like the view from full astern. Not really sure where they were going with that one.

And to the Anon going on about the tanks... No halfway-serious pressure equipment since the dawn of time has been made from Aluminium. The only property of Al that suits pressure equipment is the light weight, but weight is only rarely a concern with 5kpsi hardware, plus that weight comes from low density, which means a higher rate of Hydrogen diffusion through the metal, which means H2 loss into potentially closed environments, to say nothing of the lost fuel energy.

The fuel tanks is probably the most difficult part of a Hydrogen car (or that H2 economy people keep talking about) since the molecules are so small that they can generally move through solid metal with relative ease. In addition to that, interstitial H atoms in a metal crystal latice cause massive embrittlement, which means increased likelyhood to shatter into pieces when impacted.

I've got no idea what Honda have come up with to contain their fuel, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was some combination of Carbon Fibre, High Tougness (maybe steel) alloy, and extremely high density plastic. Thats just off the top of my head, and people have been working for many years to come up with something that is safe, cost effective, and functional. So no inch thick Aluminium.

Not so good for Maemo...

I enjoy Maemo, which runs on Arm, and it does a pretty good job (On my Nokia N810.)

If Ubuntu moves in, it'll bring fanboys and funding and could just obliterate Maemo if it snags all the market share.

How many Debian-derived MID Arm distros do we really need?

Oh well, so far as I've seen the whole MID idea isn't really all that great, according to my trying for ~4 months to find a decent use for my N810.

Screen...

You wouldn't even need a 12 inch screen for 1280x800, as 10.6 inch screens have run this resolution (and have been quite useable) for years.

As far as I can tell netbooks lack real screens either because Atom can't drive them, or because notebook manufacturers don't want to cut into their higher end laptop sales. I'm inclined to believe the latter possibility, which is worse, because that is a problem that time will not solve.

Notorious, eh?

"Notoriously wobbly" may be the best way that anyone has ever described ActiveX. Or anything at all.

Writing like that is what keeps me coming back to El Reg. That and years of deeply engrained habit. But mostly it's the writing.

Re: Allergic to EM wvaes?!?

"""Radio, TV (which is radio anyway), radar, background radiation etc. are all the same thing."""

Actually, background radiation isn't much like the rest. It is partly composed of gamma rays, which are still photons like the radar, etc, but all photons are not created equal. At higher frequencies (gamma / x-ray are highest) the energy carried by the photon becomes enough to trigger certain chemical reactions, like DNA breakdowns and similar unpleasantries. WiFi, etc isn't anywhere near that energy, which is why it isn't harmful.

The other components of background radiation (Alpha, beta, Neutron) aren't even kind of a little bit like microwaves or radio broadcasts.

I remember the (couple) days when I lined my baseball cap with aluminium foil... It ended up making my hair smell weird (weirder than usual anyway) so I had to give into the various parties attempting mind control. At least they seem to have gotten a good song stuck in my head today.

Bleh

I love my 2133, mostly because of the resolution. It's the only small / cheap laptop (I hesitate to call it a netbook) with a useable screen, which is the #1 most important bit of a portable computer. I don't know why everyone thinks that 1024x600 is a good resolution - maybe companies are trying to prevent cutting into their higher end laptop sales with these inexpensive computers, or maybe Atom just can't drive a real screen.

In any case I'm dissapointed, because it looks like the marketing droids in charge of netbooks have agreed that 1024x600 is a defining feature. I, like Torben will have to spend like 5 times the amount to get a useable small laptop which really doesn't offer me all that much more than the 2133.

For the record the Via CPU works fine, but the video has been less than perfect in my (unsupported by via) Linux distro of choice.

Oh well, the 2133 should last for a couple years, maybe the world will have sorted out what it wants in a laptop by the time I need it replaced.

x86 is good now?

I've always thought that x86 was kind of... useless. Sure it's popular, but that's largely for political and economic reasons which drove events in the 80s. And now nobody can really switch.

I mean all consoles now run PPC, mostly because it's easier to program, and it's simpler to put down in silicon.

I also rather think that the architecture is one of the last things that would affect a mobile browsing experience, with screen res and interface ranked close to the top.

Sounds like a bad idea...

I have some prescription wrap around safety glasses which distort out towards the edges, and they took a while to get used to. When I turn my head things tend to move closer together or farther apart, accordian style, and that's just no good for balance. I imagine that these things would be even worse, since they're designed for massive distortion.

I know in the US cyclists have to follow every law that a car does, when they ride on a road, which includes signaling, stopping at stop signs, and not wearing headphones. Of course everyone ignores that. I once saw someone that I know just about get themselves run over by a cop when she sped through a stop with headphones on, while not even bothering to look around the intersection. I think that cost her about $400 in tickets. But most of the time cops aren't there to catch the morons.

Probably not half bad

First off, how many morons jump right to "MS Can't count" comments without reading the 38 already posted? We must be on the Internet here or something for that sort of behaviour. That goes along with posting complaints on subjects of which you are ignorant, like the previously pointed out fact that 95/98/ME are counted seperately.

And then there are the comments about how much Windows7 will blow ass, since it'll be like Vista. I'm no Windows fan (I use it because they require me to at work, other than that it's Slackware or nothing,) but I have reasonable expectations for Win7. That's because I've used Win2008 a bit, and it was quite a slick OS, even running on my 2.5 year old desktop. From what I've heard, Win7 is supposed to be more closely related to 2008 rather than Vista, which makes sense, since 2008 is just an incremental improvement upon Vista with some server software thrown in.

Honestly 2008 ran faster on my desktop than XP did, and it's just about the first Windows release that I've ever enjoyed - I tend to keep the older version as long as I can to avoid the performance hit on the new version. And for reference I wasn't running Aero or anything to waste cpu/gpu power needlessly.

So Windows 7 could be decent. And they shouldn't have all that much development to do for it on top of what they've already done for 2008, so it might not even take them that long. There's always the great chance that MS will screw it up royally though.

Re: Do not play Russian Roulette with automatics

"""Do not play Russian Roulette with automatics"""

I actually went to school with someone who did exactly that. And from what I hear, it isn't terribly uncommon.

A better rule might be "Don't play with guns." They're fun and all, but you should know what you're doing. And that includes knowing that it's a bad idea to point one at your own head.

@It's a question of speed

"""100Gbit/s transfer speeds without just speeding up platters would be a good place to start."""

I really wonder what you'd do with that sort of storage bandwidth, seeing as how (dual channel) DDR2 800MHz does about 6.4gbit/s under ideal conditions. And a 16x PCI Express slot tops out at a theoretical 32gbit/s.

Oh yeah, and the fastest sata ports currently planned can only do 6gbit/s.

You should also know that the only way to speed up a large sequential transfer (Like your day long backup example) is to increase density, which seems to be the very thing that you'd rather they don't work on at all. The problem, which you noticed, is that speed increases relative to linear density (bits under the head per rev) whereas storage capacity increases relative to areal density. That means that capacity will increase exponentially faster than speed for rotating magnetic storage media.

The good thing about increased density is that smaller drives get cheaper, and you can put them into an array, where you can actually make them significantly faster, given that you know what you're doing.

But there's no way you're going to get 100gbit/s on anything at all short of some supercomputer interconnect buses. I believe that the fastest off the shelf connections that you can guy (for a whole lot of money) are still limited to about 40gbit, although I don't keep track of those and they may have increased recently.

@Tony W

"""Law of gravity next to fall?"""

Didn't you read that goldenballs story a week or two ago? DARPA is trying to do levitation with quantum fringe magic or something.

I think the real problem here is not hot laptops, but consumers who demand a quad core raid0 setup with an 18 inch wide screen. For some reason people have got it in their heads that a laptop can replace a desktop without drawbacks (except maybe price, but people will spend money on /anything./)

Oh and the researchers mentioned in this document seem dead set on wasting a hell of a lot of time in the near future. Maybe it's just their excuse for only publishing the occasional contentless paper while still sitting on the university payroll.

@jeanl

"""Remember...IBM's power PC CPU"""

As far as I can tell IBM still makes some pretty beastly CPUs. And I'm reasonably sure they make a lot of money off them too. And Power7 should be even more ridiculous. Oh and IBM PPC chips are the basis for the Xbox360 and Wii, plus the technology in there was extensively used in the Cell.

But obviously since Apple dropped them for a cheaper, lower performance alternative, they're dead right?

Too bad AMD has jerked us around so much with the Barcelona and related cores. K10 needed to be released about 18 months before it finally showed up, and with fewer bugs.

Screen Resolution

It seems from your chart of specs that the HP 2133 is the only mini notebook that has something other than a toy display. The only thing I want to see in this market is more screens with enough pixels to be useful. I have pocket-sized devices that'll do 800x480 - an actual computer needs to be able to display 1280x768 or it's completely useless. I suspect that my 2133 will last me long enough that other video chipsets and displays catch up.

The way I see it, the 2133 is a small and light laptop, whereas the rest of these devices are large PDAs. That's why I am perfectly happy paying $550 or so for the HP. It isn't fast, and I still have some interesting issues with the Linux display drivers, but I can do everything but play games on it. And that means having 6 terminals displayed and not overlapping. Plus the hardware crypto acceleration is just so neat.

I suppose it's a good thing that I've got decent close up vision.

@Phil Tanner

"""And if they can find a material to reflect the beam for the full length of the firing at point blank range, then surely a coating could be found to deflect the remainder of the beam after several kilometres of atmosphere has taken it's toll upon it?"""

I don't know the specifics about the mirrors that they use on this particular system, but if they're anything like other high powered lasers, they'll have some extremely precision ground mirrors with an extremely exotic coating vapor deposited on to an atom or two in thicknes, then they'll be hooked up to a few kW of active cooling equipment.

The price of even a smallish mirror is immense, and the size of the cooling equipment is significant, such that it is beyond unfeasable to make something like a missile that reflective.

Friday...

I've been working so much I didn't even realize that it was Friday until I read this thing.

So thanks Mr. Lewis Page, you made my week. Now back to that work stuff.

Replies

I haven't done any math on this or anything (Just half way through my first cup of coffee, what do you expect?) but I imagine that a cap bank to supply 500kW for any meaningful amount of time would be pretty damned large (Capacitors have about an order of magnitude lower power density than batteries.) Plus the laser (And any decent generator) runs AC, so you'd have to convert to DC and back to store it in the capacitors, and at 500kW that piece of hardware wouldn't be small either.

One of the attractions to lasers is that they /don't/ just fall out of the sky, as with normal automated projectile weapons currently used for perimeter defense. A laser will scatter as it travels through the atmosphere and probably be rather harmless by the time it gets to much else, assuming that there are no unexpected aircraft flying over combat zones. Those gating guns spew some large damned rounds, which have to come down somewhere, and hospitals, churches, schools, and mime troupes all have to be somewhere. And people would probably get angry if depleted uranium rounds drop on 3 of those.

@Zmodem

"""1.90GHz / i`ll stick to my 3000xp"""

Hahah, you still think cpu speed is related to clock speed! Maybe you should look into getting a 3.8 GHz Prescott, I bet they're cheap these days.

Replies...

For my porn, back when I was using Windows, I just created a new user in Windows, then ran my browser as that user. Sure anyone that wanted to could browse to the other user's profile and poke around, but it wasn't likely that I'd accidentally click something and have a bunch of porn sites in the recently viewed url list.

And as for what parents should do... Transparent Proxy. I know this works because that's how I accidentally discovered that my roommate was looking at (not even very good) porn while I slept a couple years ago. Squid takes a good 10 minutes to set up if you're running a Linux or BSD firewall, and if you're not... Then just assume your kids are looking at porn whenever you aren't in the room.

I don't even know why children get their own computers with unsupervised Internet access... Don't parents know that the internets are dangerous?

Re: But its a Dell....

"""SOMEONE JUST TELL ME WHAT TO BUY!"""

Get a HP 2133 if you want something that resembles a tiny laptop instead of a big PDA. 1280x768 is key, and I still haven't seen resolution specs on the Dell. I know the Via chip blows in the 2133 (except for hardware AES, that's neat) but who needs speed these days? Distcc and a little skillful trimming makes Linux quite useable in most cases.

Anyways I'm jetlagged beyond repair right now so thats all I've got to offer. Also a HP 2133 could smash an Eee to bits and not get much more than a scratch.

5 rather than 6

Could also be that one of the proposed turbines was just in a worse spot than the rest, so it had to go. You can't get them too close together, so 6 would probably cover a decent amount of ground, and thus a decent amount of radar area.

And to whomever suggested plastic blades... You probably underestimate the various forces on a rotor blade. Some people have mentioned blades 40m long, and wind pushes against the whole length of the thing, which causes a hefty tendency towards tip deflection. To maintain maximum efficiency, the contour and angle of attack of the blades has to be controlled, and if the ends of your blades are busy flapping around, you're probably not going to generate anything but entropy.

Plus they get spinning rather fast and you really, really don't want one of them breaking. That'd throw the whole thing out of balance at a high speed, which would completely destroy the turbine, at a minimum, plus huge chunks of machinery falling from 100m would be fun.

A composite blade would probably work, but many composites have conductive fibers, which would do allll sorts of fun things to photons. Think polarization and diffraction.

Wheeee

Neil Stephenson's new novel mentions something about how scientists got all their big toys taken away when some unknown, but probably scientist-caused events sort of destroyed most of life on the planet. I'd really hate to see that come true before the franchise capitalism America from Snowcrash!

@Michael

"""Could also be fun, if travelling in two cars, to have the HDD, battery and power supply in one vehicle, the rest of the laptop in the other."""

Actually if you're driving across the border the most inspection you're likely to get is a hand wave. I live near the Mexican border, and you don't even need a passport to wander over.

The most sane plan I've heard for avoiding checks is to fly into Mexico or Canada, then drive or walk across.

Most of the time that sensitive data isn't terribly large, so tar it, encrypt it, put .mp3 on the end and save it on your phone or mp3 player. And people have mentioned how trivial it'd be to stuff 8gb of information onto a Micro SD card and hide that somewhere, though I have no idea if it'd show up on xray through other objects. However, I doubt that they'd have enough metal in there to set off a metal detector. Just in case, tape it behind a rivet in your jeans or something so that the hand scanner has a good reason to beep at it.

I wonder if you could manage to distract the inspector by autoplaying some softcore porn when your laptop boots. That way at least the experience will be pleasant for both of you.

Well, I'm off to go fill my spare SD cards with entropy, as I'll be traveling tomorrow...

HP / Suse experience

I got one of those HP mininotes recently, and I let it take me through the Suse out of box experience. I was rather surprised that they hadn't actually set up the OS for the device - I had to select screen resolution and all sorts of technical stuff. Not that I minded, since after I grabbed the useful-looking config files I reformatted and installed Slackware, but I can see how this could confuse some people.

And it isn't exactly difficult to make a Linux image thats at least partially pre-configured for each type of machine you sell. Seems like an obvious thing to do, really. Then again the HP guys said that they fully expected people to install their own distro as soon as they got the notebook.

Comments...

I love how about 9 people responded to comments about how bad speed cameras are... before anyone actually managed to get the anti-camera comments posted. One would think many of these people read the title and skipped right down to assuming that everyone who speeds is obviously killing fractional children at every mile.

That's more or less consist ant with the personality type that'll believe all of those 'think of the children' arguments that are currently ruining the developed world.

And as others have mentioned, trusting a law just because it's a law is fundamentally wrong. You have to assume that the government is not only attempting to do everything correctly, but nailing it the first try in each case. I seem to be able to recall evidence of extremely illegitimate laws in the not-so-distant past of most large countries, some of which are probably still around.

Doesn't it just really piss you off to no end when you realize that there just isn't anything at all holding the government accountable, since the whole thing - all the checks and balances, and all the major parties - are composed of fucking tools?

And these days a revolution isn't even considered a proper response to bad government. Hell you'd just be called terrorists. Lets not get me started on that topic just yet though.

@Chris Miller

"""For the benefit of the hard of understanding, such as me, could someone spell out what the drawbacks are 'to the consumer'? I completely agree that it's wrong to advertise a service as "unlimited" and then impose arbitrary limits, but if services are offered with explicit limits, then those that don't want or need 100GB a month can pay less and stop subsidising those that do."""

I think that most of the outrage is at hidden or obscure bandwidth caps which are buried in the terms of service, if they are disclosed at all. I believe a lot of people confuse hidden caps with regular open caps, since the nicely documented ones are so rare that most probably assume they don't exist at all.

In any case 5 GB / month sounds restrictive for a mobile device, let alone a landline. I can't imagine many people wanting a 5gb plan unless they have some odd usage habits (Say for a cabin that they visit for a few days a month) and it's quit cheap. But as it stands the 5gb service costs just as much as many alternatives, so I'm not seeing much marketing sense involved.

@Torben Mogensen

"""My ageing Lifebook P2120 has a 10.6" screen with 1280x768, so I would not "downgrade" to smaller resolution"""

I totally agree. Seems like nearly all of these new tiny laptops have resolutions that I'd find acceptable on a pocket sized device. I've got a Lifebook P5020 with a similar screen, and there's no way that I'm ever getting an actual laptop with a lower res.

So I grabbed a HP 2133, which does 1280x768 on an 8.9 inch scren. It's slower than my 4 year old Lifebook, and the via hardware doesn't work perfectly with Linux, but it's far more useable to me than any of the other toy Eee clones would be.

So tired of this kind of thing...

Researcher: Hey I found an exploit, want details / help fixing it?

Company: We have no exploits! / Fuck you / no response.

- Months Pass -

Researcher: I'm going to present that stuff now.

Company: Oh hell fuck no, it's far cheaper for us to sue you now than to fix our products months ago.

I'm sure it goes differently based on which side is doing the talking, but this system is so fucked. It just seems like protecting your profits by litigation instead of by making them worth purchasing is entirely backwards.

Someone needs to do something, but it probably won't be me.

Re: time travel

"""@Charlie: How would data from "submaring fleets over the last 60 years" provide any insight into temperature trends in the 1730's?"""

I agree. There has been plenty of temperature data gathered over the last 60 years from a variety of sources. Letting out information about where various subs were at what time could obviously be a bad thing.

Plus 60 years is nothing on the scale of global climate. The value here is that these records go back for quite a while, which means you can look at longer trends and things.

I doubt that these scientists are pouring over data to find a few global warming / cooling events - they probably just wandered across them while compiling a set of temperatures which can later be used to compare with climate models.

Gods I wish the political side of this climate thing would go away. And the sad thing is that AGW is just about the last thing we should be worried about from CO2 / other pollutants.

Wow, sensitive subject here...

We all know that flying sucks. Unless you have a private plane and possibly some topless 20-something stewardesses...

Regardless of whether phones / children / snoring old women are allowed on the flight, it's going to suck. And you find that plenty of terrible people have enough money for first class. Last time I flew business I was coming off of ~50 hours straight awake and the guy next to me kept waking me up to ask for help with his sudoku. Idiots are everywhere, and in an airplane you just can't get away.

So no matter what people allow on flights, you need 3 things: Headphones that block, if not cancel noise; Music player with good battery life and exceptional volume; Dense reading material - extremely technical research reports, 18th century philosophy, multivariable calc textbooks, and Neal Stephenson novels have all served me well in the past.

The only drawback is that I can't hear the stewardess offer me a tiny bag of peanuts and a ginger ale... But no amount of phone conversation, screaming newborn, or catastrophic mechanical failure can disturb me.

Good responses...

So most of you seem to be saying that the storage industry should fix it's problems by telling it's customers to use fewer of their products. That'll go over well with the stock holders, I'm sure.

Most of the point of this article, I think, was that R&D spent on making storage more efficient is increasingly worthless, since it'll inevitably cost far more than any potential savings in energy. And trying to do more with the same amount of energy consumption will limit future growth, which this guy claims is what kills industries.

That 70's US automaker comparison, while I don't really understand why it's relevant, refers to the fact that there were loads (30+ I'd estimate) of US auto manufacturers before the 70s oil issues / the rise of the efficient Japanese auto, and afterwards there were just 3. I don't have any idea why the gas prices lead to fewer manufacturers, except that maybe the total collapse of profit left only the biggest players alive.

A few of you don't understand the difference between necessary energy use and wasteful energy consumption. A Hummer (the civilian models) uses energy wastefully, since it doesn't do anything that a station wagon can't, except theoretically off road, which nobody actually does anyway.

But everyone likes Aluminum, which happens to require a huge amount of energy to refine. There is no way to make aluminum from bauxite without expending something like 10 times as much energy as it takes to refine steel from it's ores. But you don't see hippies telling us we should stop using Aluminum.

In the same way, it is necessary to use a certain amount of energy to get a certain amount of storage, and if someone needs a lot of storage, they need a lot of power, no matter how many 2% efficiency gains the storage vendors make. Because they can't make that many.

And if power capacity doesn't expand, then obviously the entire IT industry will have a hard time selling kit, since none of their customers will have anywhere to plug it in.

fatigue

So obviously there will be the typical fatigue issues with engines and things, but that isn't really an issue on current airplanes, since you can replace bits and keep an eye on them. I imagine that the non-replaceable bits of the airplane are what he was talking about, since fatigue there would give you a heap of scrap.

And composites don't fatigue like metals at all, and you really can design out any of that kind of problems. In fact you sort of need to design them out, since composite fatigue is frequently difficult to detect, and it can lead to some pretty impressively fast and catastrophic failures.

And in case anyone is wondering, I've got both a degree in Mechanical Engineering and a massive hangover, and I have been working with high modulus carbon fiber composites lately.