I'm extremely dubious about the merits of allowing applications to write to persistent storage in servers without going through properly mediated O/S interfaces. There are extremely good reasons to have very well defined API storage interfaces (security, data sharing, validation, integrity etc.) implemented by operating systems and databases. Throw this away and chaos threatens.

It's certainly true that latency can be optimised by placing storage very close to system buses, but realistically the vast majority of real-world applications will gain very little benefit once I/O latency drops below the 100 micro-second mark (well within the limits of what storage technology can do). That's a 50-fold improvement on what 15K spinning disks can achieve. Of course older arrays don't have the processing speed to support such low latencies at high I/O levels (although they can just about get there from cache). That's an argument for improving storage appliances, not throwing away decades of well-founded application and storage architectures.

Once you throw away the idea of a separate networked storage pool (whether a physical or virtual pool), then it plays havoc with application and data centre architectures, data sharing, resilience, legacy applications, manageability and much else.

No, much better to retain established I/O API interfaces (block, file & database) and their attendant network protocols. For each of these there are centralised storage appliances available (SAN arrays, NAS arrays & DB farms/clusters/appliances) where the detail of flash implementation can be hidden.

It may also be that VM farms might have their own integrated storage solutions, but the majority of storage in major data centre applications will continue to be shared and that will require appropriate storage networks.

This is an article which has all the hallmarks of theory based on just one dimension of a problem.

It is technically incorrect to describe FTTC hybrid solutions which utilise copper pairs for the last few hundred metres as "abandoning DSL". Generally the copper part uses some form of VDSL which has the potential for 100Mbps or so. El Reg ought to know that DSL is a family of technologies (albeit based on some common principles), and ADSL is just one of them.

Could they not just establish some form of time standard which is decoupled from "Earth Time" and then maintain an appropriate offset. For those applications where an "absolute" time standard matters, then use that in conjunction, where required, with "Earth Time". For everyday apps where "Earth Time" matters, it's relatively straightforward to "stretch" time a little to provide for the odd "leap second" without creating big jumps.

It's not as if computer systems don't have to deal with multiple time standards anyway. Many systems have to cope with different time zones and so-called "daylight saving".

Uncontrolled audio quality comparison tests which are not performed using "blind testing" techniques are next to worthless. The whole area of audiophilia is riven with mumbo-jumbo, meaningless and undefined terms and snake oil salesman.

It's a huge deal to radically change the basic technology of any major entrenched company in note much more than a decade. It's especially difficult when you run straight into the established strengths of the type of consumer-based electronics specialists based in Asia. If people want to see how difficult such transitions are, I invite them to examine how many of the top 100 US companies (by capitalisation) at the start of the 20th century are still there a little over a century later. There are very few.

Inicidentally, it's not quite true that Kodak were never a camera company. Whilst there cameras were always aimed at promoting their film business, it has to be noted that the Box Brownie was absolutely at the forefront of popularising photography.

There is surely no more word that suits the El-Reg headline style than "slurp". It's got that wonderful heady mix of being disrespectful, unsavoury, uncouth,monosyllabic, confrontational and making everybody feel ever so slightly queasy and unclean.

So just how will the gas get into the vehicle or building without penetrating it? Drill a hole? Use a tiny, shaped charge? This doesn't sound easy to me given the range of materials and thicknesses it might have to deal with. Also, in a car, it seems to me that opening the windows might rather limit the effectiveness.

There's also the little question of what these gases are meant to do. Forget any ideas of fast-acting "knock out" gases. That's the realm of Batman cartoons. Thinks like tear gas might temporarily disable those in a vehicle or cause them to evacuate it, but they have to bedelivered in reasonably large concentrations.

I hope the people evaluating this are aware of the Hawthorne Effect where it was determined that increases in productivity were not down to changes in the environment (which included lighting changes), but the special attention the subjects were getting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

Of course people are now well aware that the original experiment (and the conclusions drawn) we somewhat flawed. However, the basic Hawthorne Effect is very well accepted.

This does not mean that environmental issues don't make a difference, but it's a good reason to be suspicious of press releases and *research* from interested parties.

"Virtualised multi-core, multi-threaded servers are impatient. They want data for the apps in their virtual machine instantly. It's odd; now that CPU cycles are cheaper than ever before, they are treated as the most precious resource in the data centre."

Rarely have a seen a case of missing the point more thoroughly than this quote. It's not that people are worried about "wasting" cheap CPU. It's that latency time on disk I/O has failed to keep up with processors. In consequence, for many applications, the application is bottlenecked by the storage. I know of many apps which spend 90% or more of their time I/O bound. So the issue is not "wasting" CPU time, but simply not getting through workloads fast enough or giving quick enough end-user response times. It's not the CPU time that's being seen as precious, but the poor end user who's sitting in a call centre with an impatient customer.

As for some sort of direct-access memory storage model over PCIe being faster, then of course. But just how relevant is that to most large real-world apps. Firstly it's an extremely good idea to establish a clear distinction between persistent storage and volatile working space. For this you need clear and controlled access methods with controlled APIs that can provide for security, protection from rogue apps, clean restart points, data sharing and much else. Those APIs can be at various levels - blocks, files, database etc. but exist they must. Those are also ideal points to establish shared access models and are hence ideal break points for network access (as anybody whose worked on large application architectures can agree).

Then there is the issue of just how many apps can exploit ultra-low latency times. I know of many real-world apps which are I/O bound at 10ms access times. However, I know of none which would be in that position with 100 micro-second latency times, an access time perfectly within the bounds of what can be achieved on common network protocols, such as FC or 10Gbps Ethernet. Indeed in many cases the largest element of that delay is not in the time on the wire, but in navigating the software stacks.

This is not to deny that there might be some specialist uses of direct memory persistent access models over PCIe, but these are likely to be very low functions. Perhaps the networked storage units themselves (albeit dealing with single point of failure issues is important).

I'd suggest a lesson in basic lens theory for the reviewer. The reason that f/32 is soft is nothing at all to do with the quality of the lens, but is just a function of the small aperture size. Any lens stopped down to F/32 (if that's an available setting) will exhbit the same effect. It's caused by the diffraction of the small aperture. In fact a 16MP APS-C sensor will gradually suffer increased levels of diffraction softening from around f11 onwards. By f32 it will be severe as the Airy disc covers about 8 pixels.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm

Having worked for a very large Oracle customer, I think some of the moves that Oracle are taking are looked on with a lot of suspicion. Declaring something close to war on HP is going to cause massive disruption to many customers as migrating massive enterprise apps and, especially databases, between hardware platforms is a massively expensive and disruptive. Whilst Oracle are continuing to support x64 and Linux, it's notable that they are explicitly not releasing some of the software technology used in the Exadata OEL cluster into their general releases. I was also in receipt of all sorts of FUD from Oracle sales staff over the support for Linux on x64 vs Oracle on SPARC. The reasons are clear - just compare the price of virtually any standard component on a SPARC server versus an x64 one (memory is a good place to start).

That leaves customers with the distinct (and not unreasonable) impression that Oracle are hell-bent on locking in customers for the entire hardware and software stack. Once a customer finds themselves in this position, costs start ratcheting up and the price of extricating yourself is huge. The industry has seen this before, and new projects will be put onto more cost-effective platforms. That's what killed DEC when they over-priced VAX and what drove almost all new applications off of IBM mainframes.

Also, I find El Register's lionising of the T4. Unfortunately Oracle have declined to publish the sort of low level benchmarks that allow customer's to work out if these are practical alternatives to M series machines. There are a bunch of carefully selected application benchmarks which tell you very little save a very strong suspicion that they've been chosen because they fit the heavily threaded multi-threaded nature of the T4. However, many large corporations will have had some apps which perform disastrously on T series due to the very slow single thread performance.

The advice for anybody looking at large scale future projects is to be very wary about lock-ins to proprietary architectures. Given that, I expect that Oracle will continue to lose ground.

Surely, even in the land of the free, this one must be attracting the attention of the legal authorities. I suspect recklessly firing cannon balls in an urban area might just have breached some local laws.

I'm dubious over the validity of using measurements of the value of currency over time in calculating relative costs. Given that the vast majority of our current GDP comprises products, technologies and services that either did not exist in 1765, or would be so altered as to be completely unrecognisable, it's not a great measure of the real cost of something like HMS Victory to either the exchequer, or the country as a whole. Also, the country has a vastly higher (inflation corrected) GDP these days.

A much better way of looking at HMS Victory's cost is to take it as a proportion of the country's GDP, total State Expenditure and defence budget. According to the estimates at http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/index.php?year=1765, UK GDP was £89.4m in 1765 with £12m state expenditure of which defence was £6.1m. For those that care for such things, the national debt, at £133m, was considerably higher as a proportion of GDP than it is today.

The £63,176 capital cost was equivalent to a little over 1% of one year's defence budget, just over 0.5% of one year's state expenditure and approximately 0.07% of a year's GDP.

Current estimates are that a single one of the new carriers will cost approximately £6.2bn (although nobody really believes that will be the final figure). Taking this as a proportion of 2010's GDP, public expenditure and defence budget (£1,453bn, £660,6bn and £43.2bn respectively) this places one carrier at approximately 14.3% of the defence budget, 0.9% of state expenditure and 4.3% of GDP.

Whatever way you look at it (inflation adjusted, %GDP, %State spending or %defence budget), these new carriers look like expensive naval toys. Even in terms of the country's total output, they are something like 60x more expensive than HMS Victory. I suspect that Victory's 0.07% of GDP might get you a submarine or three frigates.

Of course the headline is nonsense - £16m is just 0.001% of the GDP, so in terms of national affordability, that 5 year maintenance figure is about 1/70th of the initial capital cost.

Very convenient for the Swiss, not exactly known for having a lot of music, film or other such content which citizens of other countries might wish to download. Now, of course, should any other country want to break any of their companies' many patents, they might take a different line. In the meantime they will carry on acting as a convenient location for many a despot's ill-gotten gains and facilitating wealthy tax evaders.

Of course if a space ship confines itself to space and planetary bodies without atmospheres they do not have to be aerodynamic. However, short of some magical property that allows spacecraft entering a planet's atmosphere to avoid the normal laws of aerodynamic, it would seem rather sensible to make them work well in that environment. After all, the Space Shuttle was so designed as were the re-entry capsules for manned missions using disposable rockets. So the alien's choice of an aerodynamic saucer shape might appear quite sensible, albeit unnecessary for the mother ship which is presumably sitting out beyond the atmosphere.

It's notable that Arthur C Clarke (who cared about such things) had the Discovery 1 as a functional, deep-space design and not an aerodynamic one.

Incidentally, Prof Brian Cox once acted as an adviser on a Sci Fi film, and he noted that one thing which always had to be included was sound effects in a vacuum. Space battles simply don't seem to be convincing without those.

One little problem is that that photo synthesis in real organisms is less than 6% thermodynamically efficient in converting light into plant material (often much less). That's before anything required to turn it into hydrocarbons (either by external processing or directly within the organism). The basic chemical reactions allow for somewhat higher theoretical efficiency, but just how well that can be engineered is debatable. After all, evolution has had the odd few billion years to work on the issue.

What this means is that huge areas would be required to produce all the hydrocarbons we currently use. After all, for the great majority of human kinds history, bio-fuels are all we had at vastly lower population densities and levels of personal consumption. No doubt we can improve on growing trees to burn as fuel, but it's very unlikely to match using up the stored energy resources laid down over hundreds of millions of years as the direct, and indirect result of photosynthesis.

What we really require is something which is much more efficient at turning solar (and thermo-nuclear) power into synthetic hydrocarbons which are, the article says, conveniently energy dense and (relatively) safe and cheap to store and handle.

"He has argued that repeats of the programme would put his return to work at risk."

In which case the BBC would have done us all a favour. Given the amount of damage a 44 tonne truck could do (3-40 times the kinetic energy of a car at the same speed), it occurs to me that the last thing we want is a driver twice over the legal limit driving one of these things, let alone being on a mobile phone as well. It also rather brings into question the sentencing a £115 fine and a one year ban is fairly mild given just how dangerous such a vehicle can be capable of far more damage than a car.

Finally, surely one has to wonder about those recruiting truck drivers if the it's the appearance on a BBC programme which would be the deciding factor. I would rather hope that prospective employers would take more note of his actual conviction and ban, or do such matters no form part of recruitment?

If this device can latch onto any unprotected WiFi network there is a very real possibility that the owner might be deemed to have committed an offence in the UK. This story from El Reg in 2008.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/21/wi_fi_squatting_arrests/

Given that headline, I'm not surprised Sara Bee decided to up sticks and leave El Reg.

I'd be more convinced about these comparative reviews if there was anything approaching a blind test. As it is, all this talk of superior audio and video quality is just so subjective as to be useless. Of course, the expense of doing properly controlled blind tests is enormous, but as it stands all this impressions stuff has to be taken with a large pinch of salt. For much the same reason, the Hi-Fi mags long ago went into unknowing self-parody propagating myths and pseudo-scientific nonsense.

I'm waiting for the first comparative review of HDMI cables, then the end will surely have come.

So this isn't cloth made of gold, but cloth woven from textile threads coated with a very thin layer of gold.

I have read this several times and I also fail to see where this breaks the second law of thermodynamics. If there's a temperature difference, and this can be exploited to produce electricity, then there is surely no contradiction. What would be a contradiction with the second law is if useful energy would be extracted from a device at a uniform temperature.

Just calling something "waste heat" is not sufficient - that's just a qualitative term. A thermal power station's waste heat might be a horticulturist's useful source of energy for heating a glasshouse. The clever trick would be to extract any useful work once temperatures have been equalised with the environment. Then somebody can claim a miracle.

"The breakthrough when flash becomes affordable is thought by many people to be TLC (triple-level cell) – 3-bit multi-level cell NAND – which adds a third more capacity to flash cells."

Wouldn't going from 2 to 3 bits per cell add a half, not a third more capacity?

I rather suspect that reconnecting many hundreds of individual pairs under considerable time pressure to restore service isn't going to result in 100% accuracy. Maybe the person who screwed up by sending out tens of thousands of email addresses might be stuffed down a manhole to splice wires as a form of punishment.

After all, we know that time pressure is no excuse, especially when there's important things like The Register's email list to deal with. It's not like restoring telecoms services is anything like as important as that.

Are these things being assessed by structure engineers? Are there engineering and cost criteria, or is it just aesthetics?

The existing lattice designs were produced for a reasons such as strength, resilience and economy of materials. It strikes me that some of these new designs are quite pretty but will present engineering issues. For instance, those single column designs will surely need much deeper foundations than something more widely based. The central column will have to survive quite high bending forces and will either have to be quite large diameter, or built of thicker/stronger materials, or possibly both. Also, how will these designs cope with changes in direction of the grid lines? That inevitably ends up with high side forces (although I suppose that pylons in such location could be built to a stronger standard whilst maintaining the aesthetics.

Finally, I suspect single columns are more vulnerable to sabotage than lattice arrangements which are actually more resistant to damage. Indeed, a lattice design can be engineered to allow replacement of failing/corroded members without having to dismantle the whole thing. I don't see how this can be done with these single column designs.

What with flooded factories in Thailand, combustible Bravia TVs, mass hackings and now this, it's not exactly good news week for Sony.

(Although AP have given the A77 a glowing review).

SUN used to at least publish T-series friendly basic processing benchmarks (like SPECjbb). Now Oracle are even suppressing these. These show-piece application benchmarks are all very well, but they bear no resemblance to how these ERP packages tend to get configured and used in real life.

Sensible people will be asking how do these machines compare with x64 on throughput, response times, costs, power consumption and so on. That's where the real competition is.

nb. T series performance can be a very tricky thing - once those H/W threads start competing for the core resources, then you can get dramatic worsening of response times (depending on app). Of course a carefully tuned app benchmark is not going to be entering those dangerous waters. It will be tuned for the marketeers, not systems people...

It would be more impressive if they actually quoted a typical weight for such a frame. I rather doubt it will out-perform a carbon frame which has similar shock damping characteristics (anyway, it must be better than large diameter aluminium which has horrid shock absorption). I also suspect that they have to build in a much larger safety factor than with less variable materials which are less affected by environmental degradation.

Given that bamboo will bio-degrade, I hope they treat this with lots of (nasty) preservatives, our you might find this nice expensive frame will have lost a good bit of its strength after being stored in a damp shed for a few years.

Nb. for comfort, I don't think anything beats a titanium frame.

Oracle did not invent columnar compression. It's been around for decades. What is concerning is that Oracle is limiting its availability to its own hardware.

It looks like Oracle are lining up a formidable array of corporations as enemies among which canbe found HP, IBM, NetApp and EMC to name just four. Anybody who can find common cause among that lot has pressed a few carefully placed buttons.

This is going to keep a lot of lawyers in work and make not a few even richer than they are now. I can just imagine the lobbying going on with the regulatory authorities at the moment. That's assuming the regulators have the stomach for such a fight.