"Lockheed-Martin has already proven to them what private industry is capable of."
Because there's no real comeback on them if they cockup. This is what happens when you sup at the teat of the military-industrial complex for too long and get too cozy in bed with the same.
SpaceX survive or die on their craft working. They can't afford to get it wrong - unlike Lockheed or Boeing.
Is the remains of MAPS - which used to be reasonably good (even if Dave Rand is a tosspot), but has gone to rack and ruin in the last few years. There's been quite a lot of discussion on academic mailing lists about them.
See also http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2011/08/a-disturbing-trend/comment-page-1/ - which is written and commented on by a lot of people who used to be MAPS biggest cheerleaders.
The explanation of how some IP addresses are ending up in the RBL was enough to convince $orkplace and others that MAPS usefulness has ended.
Not to worry, there are other other DNSBLs.
having said all that:
1: Lots of ISPs make a big fuss about their inbound spam filtering.
2: Very few apply any form of filtering to their OUTBOUND mail.
3: Anyone who uses their ISP email account for long-term purposes is a twit.
"Stopping spam" is a lot more about preventing it getting out (pollution prevention), than preventing it getting in - and that's best summed up by the question "Do you actually want to stop spam, or merely stop seeing it?"
I know ISPs and others regard abuse desks as a cost centre, but AOL found that by terminating abusive accounts they saved significant sums because most of those were on scammed cards (chargebacks are a killer), stolen identities, or had other issues which attracted significant costs (providing logs and other evidence for police is also costly).
It doesn't check to see if the procedures are correct or are being followed. (It's possible to produce ISO9000 documentation describing how to fly a 767 into a large american building, as a f'instance)
ISO9001 and higher audit adherence to the procedures and covers ensuring they actually work.
"Considering that the tape media roughly matches the price of the hard drive of the same capacity... pricewise, spacewise, powerwise, capacitywise, speedwise -- it doesn't make sense."
It does when you consider the (un)reliability, longevity and fragility of hard drives vs tape and then factor in the labour costs to keep the disk arrays maintained, etc (figure on one failed drive a day in arrays that size, plus 3-4 instances of silent corruption. Tape error correction is a couple of orders stronger than disk ECC.)
GM tried to relaunch the Vauxhall range in New Zealand about a decade ago and only sold 3 cars. They had to recall/rebadge the lot as Opels and even then they didn't sell well.
If you want raw throughput then you're probably streaming and don't need ssds, except as buffering (I can get upwards of 700Mb/s from our large, slow, spinny arrays)
15k arrays are chosen for their IOPS rating. Shortstroking gives higher IOPSs by having the arm move shorter distances (end to end seeks take about 10 times longer than adjacent track seeks) but there's still the issue of rotational latency, etc etc.
For the last 4 years if I've needed IOPS then the media of choice has been SSD. I don't particularly trust it, so the setup is always highly redundant. Even doing that, the costs have been lower than trying to get the same IOPs out of rotating media arrays.
Yes, SAS600 is a limitation, but so is SAN - I have 4 * 8Gb/s interfaces in my current crop of fileservers as a f'instance (now approaching end of life) and the next generation will be faster.
SAN activity can be scattered across all the interfaces in and out of a piece of kit, so individual port limitations aren't much of an issue as long as there are enough ports in play.
If you want high speed SAN-connected SSD then you either slap a bunch of SSD drives into existing kit (which is wasteful and inefficient on a number of levels but gives higher IOPS immediately and cheaply ) or use a design which doesn't limit to the speed of SAS interfaces - it's not that difficult to make a linux-based SAN target which can have a bunch of PCIe SSDs for cheapish, fast access as a f'instance.
At the high end, SAN-attached solid state storage is incredibly fast - there's no way even a rack of shortstroked 15krpm drives can keep up - but also bloody expensive.
The era of enterprise spinnning media is pretty much closing out. Enterprise solid state storage has already eaten the high end of the market and this article is basically showing a push to move 15krpm stuff downmarket before SSDs get there.
Low speed rotating media will stay dominant for a while but it's only a matter of time before 2Tb flash is cheaper than the same capacity HDDs.
I recall some disties charging 6 times the us price... then getting upset when we went direct.
Back in the 90s you could fly business class from Auckland or Sydney to SF or LA, spend a week in a top hotel, buy top end Mac kit, fly home, pay all duty, tax etc and still save a wodge of cash over local pricing.
Unsurprisingly, many did.
Thankfully the NZ govt saw sense and stomped on companies (chrysler) trying to use copyright or other inanity to stomp on grey market importing of cars. It's proved somewhat harder to deal with the Book cartels (tech books sold in NZ/AUS often retailed for 12 times US bookstore prices, even fiction was 3-4 times the USA pricing - and who wants to buy a US/UK magazine that's 8 months out of date for 4 times the US/UK cover price?)
As a former telco employee I have to side with those who point out there are battery banks and generators to handle multiple DAYS of power outage at major excchanges.
Battery banks feeding busbars heavy enough to mostly _vaporise_ a spanner carelessly dropped across 'em (Witnessed this a few times)
Perhaps the local ne'er-do-wells stole the diesel and carted off the batteries and engines for scrap?
Have to compromise to complete with flash. Shortstroking is common even in 2.5" format.
As soon as you do that you lose most of the advantage over a PCIe flash card. The differences in power consumption will make sure of that even if the spinny stuff is slightly cheaper.
"What baffles the brain here is the copyright industries do not grasp people elect officials and if they anger the people they do not get elected no matter how many contributions are made to their campaigns. If people DO NOT WANT A LAW it will never pass (or be revoked) and not be enforceable. Lobbying has one fatal hole in it - people elect officials not the lobbyists"
Which is why lobbyists buy ALL sides. That way they get what they want no matter who's in power.
There's a lot of merit in the idea that those who run the country should be dragged into office kicking and screaming, then given time off for good behaviour (aka, "If someone wants that kind of power why the hell would you ever consider giving it to them?")
IME changing the multipliers doesn't do much except stroke the ego - the fundamental limitation is how fast you can feed the CPU and that side of things is fixed speed.
IE: What does this do faster at 4.7GHz (other than get hotter, faster?)
Back to the matter at hand. From the wikipedia article:
=====
Connector
The connector is designed for single phase electrical systems with 120 V or 240 V such as those used in North America and Japan.
The round 43 mm diameter connector has five pins, with 3 different pin sizes
AC Line 1 and AC Line 2 - have same size power pins
Ground Pin
Proximity Detection and Control Pilot - have same size pin
Proximity Detection - Prevents movement of the car while connected to the charger.
Control Pilot - Communication line used to coordinate charging level between the car and the charger as well as other information.
The connector uses a 1 kHz square wave at +/- 12 volts generated by the Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE), i.e. the charging station, on the pilot pin to detect the presence of the vehicle, communicate the maximum allowable charging current, and control charging.[13] The connector is designed to withstand up to 10,000 connection/disconnection cycles and exposure to all kinds of elements. Approximating one connection/disconnection cycle daily, the average connector's lifespan should be just over 27 years.
=====
I'm amazed they think that one connect/disconnect cycle per day is enough to design for. Somehow I predict the average connector lifespan to be about 6 years in the real world on cars and something less than 18 months on public charge posts.
As for the "proximity sensor" - unless this works until the connector bodies are well clear of each other there are going to be driveaway incidents - and if it does work like that it's going to be fun to make some "dummy plugs" and stall cars simply by slapping 'em on the bodywork near the chargepoint.
Discussions about 120/240V are largely irrelevant unless the design allows for less than 2kV live/earth isolation. (Lightning strikes are a bitch). It's not as if universal switchmode supplies are a new invention - and for real charging oopmh you'll need 400/440V 3 phase - which is more or less the same in all countries apart from frequency. It'd be incredibly shortsighted not to design for that too.
High voltage/current DC on a consumer-demountable conector = massive fail. DC arcs aren't self-extinguishing.
Quite simply, the current protectionist-inspired uber-hostile attitude to foreign graduates of local institutes(*) has had an immediate effect on the number of applications to study at said institutes - and the remaining applicants have no desire to work in the ocuntries concerned after they graduate (for the most part they have employment guaranteed elsewhere).
(*)USA and UK have both gone down this path but others are folllowing.
The end result is that innovation is happening elsewhere and so are the business opportunities. If these policies are kept up the UK and USA will both end up as even larger parochial backwaters than they already are.
Both exist to give the inventor/author a _limited_ time to profit from the work/invention.
Patent and copyright law have both been abolished and then recrafted in the UK as a result of widespread and systematic abuse (although one does have to go back a few hundred years). I suspect that before the end of this century there will be another great clensing.
Firstly they were in a hurry so they used a tool which recorded random data as well as what they were after - and the engineer told them it'd do this - which presumably got written off as "not important" in the push to get clear of dependency on SkyHook.
I've seen a streetview car go past my house.
1: It would have 0.5-2 seconds of data or less - nothing particularly useful.
2: It would only get that data on non-encrypted networks
3: I have bigger issues to worry about (the script kiddy nearby who keeps trying to breach my WPA2 f'instance - I don't have the heart to tell him that I've triangulated his IP, so I know where he lives and the passphrase is long enough he'll be trying until the heat death of the universe)
The _only_ useful thing I can see Google doing with the data is to produce a list of _unencrypted_ access points.
Publication (or not) becomes the only real issue - and it took publication of open mail relays to start forcing those closed 15 years ago, so it wouldn't necessarily signal evil intent to do so.
(I left my AP open for a long time because one of the older pieces of kit didn't do encryption without breaking badly. The impetus for closing it was said script kiddie maxing out ADSL bandwidth.)
Wrt capturing IP addresses - the most likely IP address to be captured would be 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 - hardly a unique identifier.
Nothing statistically relevant on my mailservers. We're still rejecting 99.99+% of attempted email deliveries and still letting too much spam through, according to the users (through they raise merry hell about the 1-2 valid pieces of email we reject each month - usually direct deliveries from home mailservers housed on adsl connections.)
If anything, delivery attempts are still trending upwards every year.
Only if you want to pay significantly over the odds for whatever you want, be bundled with their overpriced insurance scam and likely be misled about what you're buying.
When you're buying your storage half a petabyte at a time, drives make up a substantial part of array pricing (at the moment it's about 1/2 - 2/3 of the total when buying 2Tb units)
One thing most admins seem to agree on though - drive reliability is getting a lot worse overall.
6mm glass won't crack and the idea is for it to blow off when the rocket starts.
Personally I would have used tried and true heavy duty laboratory gas jars but there's no reason this setup won't work for the intended purpose - however for pulling a sustained vacuum it'd be outgassing for months.
Using a flat latex ring with a lip over the outer edge would easily take care of slippage.Forces due to air pressure are easy to under (or over) estimate (Hint, 1: if something can hold 14-16 pounds of pressure there's no good reason it can't hold the inverse. The actual movement pressure on the sealing ring is likely to be trivial given the crossectional area around the jar's circumference.)
Leakage isn't a big issue, just use a higher capacity pump. Moisture is more of a problem - or lack of it in some cases after sustained exposure to low pressures.
I bought from Viglen. Once. Over my objections. I was forced to. Never again.
Quoted 6 week delay from ordering to delivery and the system didn't work when it finally arrived after 12 weeks (Never mind that 2 weeks of that quoted delay is supposed to be burn in testing, it wouldn't even complete the bios sequence!)
Identical orders from other suppliers showed up, working out of the box, in 12 days and for significantly less outlay.
This is far from a unique experience. Given Viglen is just a whitebox company it's not a case of "plucky brits", etc etc
2: Ethernet to a Wireless Access Point setup as a station.
The bandwidth on wireless is crap, especially if there are a few devices using it. (Remember, lowest negotiated speed sets the speed for ALL stations, so that shitty signal to the laptop in the kitchen is dragging everything else down)
Register
503 posts • joined Friday 8th February 2008 14:02 GMT
Page:
"Lockheed-Martin has already proven to them what private industry is capable of."
Because there's no real comeback on them if they cockup. This is what happens when you sup at the teat of the military-industrial complex for too long and get too cozy in bed with the same.
SpaceX survive or die on their craft working. They can't afford to get it wrong - unlike Lockheed or Boeing.
Trend
Is the remains of MAPS - which used to be reasonably good (even if Dave Rand is a tosspot), but has gone to rack and ruin in the last few years. There's been quite a lot of discussion on academic mailing lists about them.
See also http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2011/08/a-disturbing-trend/comment-page-1/ - which is written and commented on by a lot of people who used to be MAPS biggest cheerleaders.
The explanation of how some IP addresses are ending up in the RBL was enough to convince $orkplace and others that MAPS usefulness has ended.
Not to worry, there are other other DNSBLs.
having said all that:
1: Lots of ISPs make a big fuss about their inbound spam filtering.
2: Very few apply any form of filtering to their OUTBOUND mail.
3: Anyone who uses their ISP email account for long-term purposes is a twit.
"Stopping spam" is a lot more about preventing it getting out (pollution prevention), than preventing it getting in - and that's best summed up by the question "Do you actually want to stop spam, or merely stop seeing it?"
I know ISPs and others regard abuse desks as a cost centre, but AOL found that by terminating abusive accounts they saved significant sums because most of those were on scammed cards (chargebacks are a killer), stolen identities, or had other issues which attracted significant costs (providing logs and other evidence for police is also costly).
Blue skies on most planets with atmospheres
Even on Jupiter in the top few hundred km.
Raleigh scattering, etc.
Standing charges
Are making an increase in their penetration, not a decrease.
Hint: if there's a "meter fee", it's a standing charge - and in my case it accounts for 1/2 the power bill (EDF)
bugger Ipod nano
I want a tablet format like the PDAs in Tekwar.
ISO9000
Just says you fully document your procedures.
It doesn't check to see if the procedures are correct or are being followed. (It's possible to produce ISO9000 documentation describing how to fly a 767 into a large american building, as a f'instance)
ISO9001 and higher audit adherence to the procedures and covers ensuring they actually work.
beerWi-Fi"free pub wifi"
I tried it out, found the endless navigation pages and switched off wifi.
+1 for "unlimited" data tarriffs. If needed I usually just tether.
@just_me
"Considering that the tape media roughly matches the price of the hard drive of the same capacity... pricewise, spacewise, powerwise, capacitywise, speedwise -- it doesn't make sense."
It does when you consider the (un)reliability, longevity and fragility of hard drives vs tape and then factor in the labour costs to keep the disk arrays maintained, etc (figure on one failed drive a day in arrays that size, plus 3-4 instances of silent corruption. Tape error correction is a couple of orders stronger than disk ECC.)
Falling faster than an orbitally delivered anvil.
Not that Zuckerberg cares. He's a sociopathic tosser of the highest order.
Vauxhalls
GM tried to relaunch the Vauxhall range in New Zealand about a decade ago and only sold 3 cars. They had to recall/rebadge the lot as Opels and even then they didn't sell well.
Bad memories last a long time.
Grundig?
"Close to" generic-rebadging oblivion????
Close to???
Re: Not missing the point
If people want to use PCIe then they will do so.
If they want to use SAN, they will.
There's a _lot_ of resistance to using SSD, let alone PCIe cards at $orkplace and I'd expect to see that for a few more years yet.
few minutesday's trade"How to make a small fortune on the Internet"
"First, start with a large fortune"
Cellcos don't care much
Ok sure, they can't charge for all the calls originating within their network.
Given the economies of scale most of the time generating the bill and handling payments eats almost all that revenue anyway.
They CAN and DO charge for calls originating elsewhere - and it's a lot easier to bulkbill XYZ-telco than thousands of individuals.
Too late for most people
Sony used to be special in analogue days, but those were long ago.
Oh FFS
Just give people in the affected areas satellite dishes and freesat decoders.
Not missing the point
If you want raw throughput then you're probably streaming and don't need ssds, except as buffering (I can get upwards of 700Mb/s from our large, slow, spinny arrays)
15k arrays are chosen for their IOPS rating. Shortstroking gives higher IOPSs by having the arm move shorter distances (end to end seeks take about 10 times longer than adjacent track seeks) but there's still the issue of rotational latency, etc etc.
For the last 4 years if I've needed IOPS then the media of choice has been SSD. I don't particularly trust it, so the setup is always highly redundant. Even doing that, the costs have been lower than trying to get the same IOPs out of rotating media arrays.
Yes, SAS600 is a limitation, but so is SAN - I have 4 * 8Gb/s interfaces in my current crop of fileservers as a f'instance (now approaching end of life) and the next generation will be faster.
SAN activity can be scattered across all the interfaces in and out of a piece of kit, so individual port limitations aren't much of an issue as long as there are enough ports in play.
If you want high speed SAN-connected SSD then you either slap a bunch of SSD drives into existing kit (which is wasteful and inefficient on a number of levels but gives higher IOPS immediately and cheaply ) or use a design which doesn't limit to the speed of SAS interfaces - it's not that difficult to make a linux-based SAN target which can have a bunch of PCIe SSDs for cheapish, fast access as a f'instance.
At the high end, SAN-attached solid state storage is incredibly fast - there's no way even a rack of shortstroked 15krpm drives can keep up - but also bloody expensive.
The era of enterprise spinnning media is pretty much closing out. Enterprise solid state storage has already eaten the high end of the market and this article is basically showing a push to move 15krpm stuff downmarket before SSDs get there.
Low speed rotating media will stay dominant for a while but it's only a matter of time before 2Tb flash is cheaper than the same capacity HDDs.
Only double?
I recall some disties charging 6 times the us price... then getting upset when we went direct.
Back in the 90s you could fly business class from Auckland or Sydney to SF or LA, spend a week in a top hotel, buy top end Mac kit, fly home, pay all duty, tax etc and still save a wodge of cash over local pricing.
Unsurprisingly, many did.
Thankfully the NZ govt saw sense and stomped on companies (chrysler) trying to use copyright or other inanity to stomp on grey market importing of cars. It's proved somewhat harder to deal with the Book cartels (tech books sold in NZ/AUS often retailed for 12 times US bookstore prices, even fiction was 3-4 times the USA pricing - and who wants to buy a US/UK magazine that's 8 months out of date for 4 times the US/UK cover price?)
when can I have 1GB Ethernet connection to the web*?
I already have it (not at consumer prices and not at home).
"uh oh"
As a former telco employee I have to side with those who point out there are battery banks and generators to handle multiple DAYS of power outage at major excchanges.
Battery banks feeding busbars heavy enough to mostly _vaporise_ a spanner carelessly dropped across 'em (Witnessed this a few times)
Perhaps the local ne'er-do-wells stole the diesel and carted off the batteries and engines for scrap?
Shelves full of 15k disks
Have to compromise to complete with flash. Shortstroking is common even in 2.5" format.
As soon as you do that you lose most of the advantage over a PCIe flash card. The differences in power consumption will make sure of that even if the spinny stuff is slightly cheaper.
typical Dell
Old spec, low end hardware tagged as "linux compatible" - ususally 2-3 years behind the curve.
This is why we stopped buying them for desktop use (and mostly don't consider them for server use)
Has anyone anywhere
Ever seen prices actually double? Or even increase slightly?
It's not exactly the first time this has happened and the worst case scenario has been that prices don't decrease as quickly as might be assumed.
The only times prices have gone up is when competition is removed from the market.
@michaelkav
"What baffles the brain here is the copyright industries do not grasp people elect officials and if they anger the people they do not get elected no matter how many contributions are made to their campaigns. If people DO NOT WANT A LAW it will never pass (or be revoked) and not be enforceable. Lobbying has one fatal hole in it - people elect officials not the lobbyists"
Which is why lobbyists buy ALL sides. That way they get what they want no matter who's in power.
There's a lot of merit in the idea that those who run the country should be dragged into office kicking and screaming, then given time off for good behaviour (aka, "If someone wants that kind of power why the hell would you ever consider giving it to them?")
Linux on the desktopIPv6!UK ISPs refuse to even consider it
With a couple of very minor exceptions.
My kit's been IPv6-ready for a while.
MHz madness
IME changing the multipliers doesn't do much except stroke the ego - the fundamental limitation is how fast you can feed the CPU and that side of things is fixed speed.
IE: What does this do faster at 4.7GHz (other than get hotter, faster?)
Follow the money
It will be intresting to see where the rabbit hole leads to.
I was hoping
For a unified CABIN standard dammit.
Back to the matter at hand. From the wikipedia article:
=====
Connector
The connector is designed for single phase electrical systems with 120 V or 240 V such as those used in North America and Japan.
The round 43 mm diameter connector has five pins, with 3 different pin sizes
AC Line 1 and AC Line 2 - have same size power pins
Ground Pin
Proximity Detection and Control Pilot - have same size pin
Proximity Detection - Prevents movement of the car while connected to the charger.
Control Pilot - Communication line used to coordinate charging level between the car and the charger as well as other information.
The connector uses a 1 kHz square wave at +/- 12 volts generated by the Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE), i.e. the charging station, on the pilot pin to detect the presence of the vehicle, communicate the maximum allowable charging current, and control charging.[13] The connector is designed to withstand up to 10,000 connection/disconnection cycles and exposure to all kinds of elements. Approximating one connection/disconnection cycle daily, the average connector's lifespan should be just over 27 years.
=====
I'm amazed they think that one connect/disconnect cycle per day is enough to design for. Somehow I predict the average connector lifespan to be about 6 years in the real world on cars and something less than 18 months on public charge posts.
As for the "proximity sensor" - unless this works until the connector bodies are well clear of each other there are going to be driveaway incidents - and if it does work like that it's going to be fun to make some "dummy plugs" and stall cars simply by slapping 'em on the bodywork near the chargepoint.
Discussions about 120/240V are largely irrelevant unless the design allows for less than 2kV live/earth isolation. (Lightning strikes are a bitch). It's not as if universal switchmode supplies are a new invention - and for real charging oopmh you'll need 400/440V 3 phase - which is more or less the same in all countries apart from frequency. It'd be incredibly shortsighted not to design for that too.
High voltage/current DC on a consumer-demountable conector = massive fail. DC arcs aren't self-extinguishing.
Bypassing US immigration laws
Won't help much.
Quite simply, the current protectionist-inspired uber-hostile attitude to foreign graduates of local institutes(*) has had an immediate effect on the number of applications to study at said institutes - and the remaining applicants have no desire to work in the ocuntries concerned after they graduate (for the most part they have employment guaranteed elsewhere).
(*)USA and UK have both gone down this path but others are folllowing.
The end result is that innovation is happening elsewhere and so are the business opportunities. If these policies are kept up the UK and USA will both end up as even larger parochial backwaters than they already are.
Patent and copyright abuse
Both exist to give the inventor/author a _limited_ time to profit from the work/invention.
Patent and copyright law have both been abolished and then recrafted in the UK as a result of widespread and systematic abuse (although one does have to go back a few hundred years). I suspect that before the end of this century there will be another great clensing.
I'm another one "opted in" on my mobile.
Because the IWF thinks the Sarracens rugby club should be blocked.
Does it mean....
...That OCZ drives might become more reliable?
Re: Viglen
Just to clarify: The box in question cost a smidgen under £14k - and as a result they're no longer in consideration for about £2m in future purchases.
A bunch of issues
Firstly they were in a hurry so they used a tool which recorded random data as well as what they were after - and the engineer told them it'd do this - which presumably got written off as "not important" in the push to get clear of dependency on SkyHook.
I've seen a streetview car go past my house.
1: It would have 0.5-2 seconds of data or less - nothing particularly useful.
2: It would only get that data on non-encrypted networks
3: I have bigger issues to worry about (the script kiddy nearby who keeps trying to breach my WPA2 f'instance - I don't have the heart to tell him that I've triangulated his IP, so I know where he lives and the passphrase is long enough he'll be trying until the heat death of the universe)
The _only_ useful thing I can see Google doing with the data is to produce a list of _unencrypted_ access points.
Publication (or not) becomes the only real issue - and it took publication of open mail relays to start forcing those closed 15 years ago, so it wouldn't necessarily signal evil intent to do so.
(I left my AP open for a long time because one of the older pieces of kit didn't do encryption without breaking badly. The impetus for closing it was said script kiddie maxing out ADSL bandwidth.)
Wrt capturing IP addresses - the most likely IP address to be captured would be 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 - hardly a unique identifier.
What decrease?
Nothing statistically relevant on my mailservers. We're still rejecting 99.99+% of attempted email deliveries and still letting too much spam through, according to the users (through they raise merry hell about the 1-2 valid pieces of email we reject each month - usually direct deliveries from home mailservers housed on adsl connections.)
If anything, delivery attempts are still trending upwards every year.
Carfone Whorehaus
Only if you want to pay significantly over the odds for whatever you want, be bundled with their overpriced insurance scam and likely be misled about what you're buying.
Uk dot gov
Yet again proving that the best place to hide the truely unemployable is in the Civil Service.
After what happened in New Zealand
I start wondering if the book "Smith's Dream" or movie adaption "Sleeping Dogs" was simply 30 years early.
Jack Russells
My mother's thinkpad survived similar treatment from her Briard.
Dismantle, drop in bucket of water, etc.
The keyboard actually worked better afterwards.
Account manager, vs technically capable salesmen
I know which I'd rather talk to - and I spent 50k with Engage last year.
It won't stop
Route/IP hijacking via the old fashioned method of producing fake paperwork stating you're the owner of the IP blocks in question.
It's not about cost + margin...
It's all about "what the market will bear"
Just like running a telco.
HbbTV vs Youview
"We're committed to YouView"
aka Not Invented Here (NIH)
Doing it the hard way
Of course he does, otherwise it wouldn't be El Reg :)
The vacuum chamber is hideously overengineered, but it should last for a while as a result...
Drive prices in data centres
When you're buying your storage half a petabyte at a time, drives make up a substantial part of array pricing (at the moment it's about 1/2 - 2/3 of the total when buying 2Tb units)
One thing most admins seem to agree on though - drive reliability is getting a lot worse overall.
How long before.....
... Disney opens a Doctor Who theme area?
Or a Buena Vista Dr Who film?
Glass plate
6mm glass won't crack and the idea is for it to blow off when the rocket starts.
Personally I would have used tried and true heavy duty laboratory gas jars but there's no reason this setup won't work for the intended purpose - however for pulling a sustained vacuum it'd be outgassing for months.
Using a flat latex ring with a lip over the outer edge would easily take care of slippage.Forces due to air pressure are easy to under (or over) estimate (Hint, 1: if something can hold 14-16 pounds of pressure there's no good reason it can't hold the inverse. The actual movement pressure on the sealing ring is likely to be trivial given the crossectional area around the jar's circumference.)
Leakage isn't a big issue, just use a higher capacity pump. Moisture is more of a problem - or lack of it in some cases after sustained exposure to low pressures.
Viglen
I bought from Viglen. Once. Over my objections. I was forced to. Never again.
Quoted 6 week delay from ordering to delivery and the system didn't work when it finally arrived after 12 weeks (Never mind that 2 weeks of that quoted delay is supposed to be burn in testing, it wouldn't even complete the bios sequence!)
Identical orders from other suppliers showed up, working out of the box, in 12 days and for significantly less outlay.
This is far from a unique experience. Given Viglen is just a whitebox company it's not a case of "plucky brits", etc etc
Overpriced dongles....
1: Powerline networking
or
2: Ethernet to a Wireless Access Point setup as a station.
The bandwidth on wireless is crap, especially if there are a few devices using it. (Remember, lowest negotiated speed sets the speed for ALL stations, so that shitty signal to the laptop in the kitchen is dragging everything else down)
MAC as identifier
Perhaps I should create something which starts generating a cloud of fake MACs and network activity for my wireless connection.
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