Well done to the Law Lords. As a general principle, any adverse quasi-judicial process like the "black-listing" of individuals which has a major impact on the ability of a person to live a normal life should be subject to appropriate safeguards. Some of the decisions made can have extremely far reaching effects comparable in impact to court decisions. I realise that some of the issues will involve security or confidential information, but the operation of systems based on "intelligence" alone under the opaque cloud of some government agency or other is a recipe for injustice. Subject to appropriate safeguards the processes involved should be as transparent as possible - at least to the individual concerned.
"A hypervisor is a piece of software that lets multiple copies of another piece of software each believe they have the entire system to themselves. Back in the 1950s, this was called an operating system. What is proposed here is a return to a micro-kernel operating system, with the desktop personality (aka, OS) running on top."
Good heavens - how many misconceptions. Firstly in the 1950s operating systems pretty well didn't exist. Early applications were written to the bare metal - that is they talked directly to the hardware. Gradually manufacturers introduced tools and software to make this easier to do, although the low level hardware interfacing code was still included in each application. By the 1960s operating systems had emerged which were environments in which a single application could run within a controlled environment offering some higher level services. Things such as I/O could abstracted to operating system services, although even then some applications got very close to the hardware devices by direct calling libraries that issued I/O instructions to the hardware (dig into z/OS and you will find that many of the older access methods have still got this structure, although the OS intercepts the actual I/O call). These early operating systems would only run a single applications at a time and only later did versions appear which allowed multiple applications to (apparently) run simultaneously. Early versions of these multi-taking operating systems (and the hardware on which they ran) tended to lack mechanisms to protect them from each other - a badly written application could write all over the storage belonging to another. Modern multi-tasking operating system with proper security and isolation didn't really become common until the 1970s. (PCs followed the same path, maybe 15 years later).
There is a fundamental difference in intent between an operating system and a hypervisor. Essentially the former is designed to provide services and an environment within which applications are run. In consequence, the services offered are largely abstracted ones of use to the application.
In contrast, the intent, of a hypervisor (at least in its purest sense) is to emulate a physical server. If implemented properly it will virtualise CPUs, I/O devices, memory and so on. The vast majority of business applications are not written to work in such an environment. In the case of mainframes, hypervisors started out as pure software (VM being the obvious example) and efficiency was gradually improved through moving resource-intensive virtualisation tasks into microcode. Eventually pure micro-coded hypervisors appeared (a route down which microprocessors are heading albeit using direct silicon logic and not via microcode).
There are similarities between some of the technologies used in operating systems and hypervisors, but the second is a much more constrained thing. Its job is to pretend to the code it is hosting that it is a physical machine complete with I/O ports, clocks, interrupts and so on. . VMWare ESX and the like are not throwbacks to the operating systems of the 1950s (which didn't exist in a recognisable form at that time anyway), but to VM which emerged during the 1970s. Of course there are lots of grey areas - hyperviser aware operating systems, hypervisers running within a general purpose operating system, not to mention completely abstracted virtual machines, such as the Java VM. But the principle remains.
There is a lot of common technology in hypervisors and microkernels, but the latter is really the set of low-level primitive services required to allow for the implementation of an operating system whilst a hypervisor (in its purest sense) is there to provide virtual machine environments.
To test the Clown Prince of the House of Common's proposition that electric power produces less CO2 than a cyclist, then here's a calculation of a bread-powered cyclist vs an electric bike recharged using the UK mains (assumed to be 460gm CO2 per KWh).
First maked the assumption that 100W of human power drives a bike at the same speed as 100W on an electric bike (with the extra weight of the electric bike, that might not be quite true, but let it pass). Also assume that human beings have a thermodynamic efficiency of about 30%in converting food into mechanical energy (humans are subject to just the same laws of physics in this regard as any other way of burning fuel with oxygen to produce mechanical energy, albeit the mechanism is more complex). Also assume that any cycling mechanical energy is in addition to rest rate (and that riding an electric bike requires no extra human energy).
To power a bike at 100W for an hour using electricity means that 0.1KWh (360KJ) is required, which is 46 gms of CO2 with curren UK grid production mixes.
Typically bread has about 200-250Kcals per 100gm and its production and distribution is estimated at about 65gm CO2 per 100gm. Put the two together, take the average 100gm of bread as 225Kcals, then we get about 0.29gm CO2 per Kcal or about 0.069gm CO2 per KJ . With human beings having a thermodynamic efficiency of about 30% in producing mechanical power, that means about 0.23gms CO2 per KJ of mechnical energy.
This means that 360KJ of bread-fed human mechanical energy would result in about 83gms of CO2 emission. I'll omit the CO2 breathed out (which would be significant) on the basis that it would be absorbed by the food plants used to replace what was eaten.
So (for bread power at least), it appears he is right - the electric bike only generates about 55% of the CO2 when compared that for a similar amount of mechanical energy from a cyclist. No doubt the cycle is a bit more mechnically efficient, which will narrow the gap, as would choosing a less CO2 intensive food source (although I chose bread as it was reasonably good in that respect). For a fried-breakfast powered cyclist, then the numbers will be a lot worse - even with a more calorifically-intensive food source due to much higher CO2 emissions in production. Also the electric bike requires more energy in manufacture - but then there are sources of electricity witrh lower CO2 than the UK average grid.
So save the planet, and get an electric bike is the answer I suppose.
So $180 for 300GB is 60 cents per GB. Given that flash storage (retail) is not much more than twice that and prices are declining rapidy, then what is the future of this technology? I'm not sure what the longevity of flash storage is, but random read access speed is vastly higher. Also some form of archival flash storage would not require drives at $18,000 a time. It's not there yet, but in two or three years time?
To make holographic disks make sense, then the capacity will have to be much higher and the costs a lot lower.
Also, any outfit that relied on a 50 year media lifetime without regular refreshes is running a major risk. Experience shows that digital media often has a much shorter lifetime than originally advertised.
What this article doesn't mention is that this is a plug-in hybrid. It certainly isn't going to take you "hundreds of anxiety free miles" on one charge. A 16kWh battery is pretty puny - let's optimistically assume this hefty vehicle requires just 12Kw (10% of it's rates power) to push it down the road at a vaguely reasonable speed. It's going to run out of juice after about 80 minutes - not something that's going to take you hundreds of miles. In reality I suspect that you'd be lucky to get 50 or 60 miles on electricity alone.
Not to say it isn't a good idea, but please call it what it is - a plug-in hybrid. I suspect the roof-top solar array is an expensive gimmick unless you have some very strong sunshine where you live and don't travel very far.
It's misleading to say that the write duty cycle doesn't apply to tape drive. LTO4 has a (complete) read/write durability of 200 end-to-end passes (at least from one manufacturer). That makes it suitable only for backup and archival purposes. Well, OK - ti applies to writes and reads and it is the medium, not the drive that has the limit. Written once per week and an LTO4 tape will only last 4 years.
Tape drives will, of course, potentially last longer, but only if they are regularly maintained (especially if the duty cycle is high).
As for Erik Aamot and don't use flash SSD for primary storage, that's nonsense. All drives are prone to failure, whether flash or physical. They also wear out (and people shouldn't confuse MTBF with expected lifetime of a drive - the latter is a lot less than the former these days). It's for exactly those reasons that RAID is used along with other techniques to maintain data integrity. We have 10s of thousands of disk drives with Petabyes of storage and modern arrays allow for the hot replacement of failing devices without service disruption. The practical issues of write duty cycles on SLC flash are frankly not a problem with proper controller logic.
It might well be that 3 & 4 bit MLC does not yet have enough write duty cycles for use on write-intensive systems, but SLC (albeit at a cost) is most certainly suitable now.
The only advantage that HDD has over the best SLC flash is cost (albeit that's a very large issue). On performance SLC massacres HDD and in 3-4 years time top-end hard drives will be obsolete. HDDs will then be handling the bulk access, high-capacity, mdium access speed market.
A classic case of the media falling for junk statistics by a self-publicising academic with a vested interest, both for the the publicity and for commerciall interests. Wissner-Gross is co-founder Enernetics and you can sign up on its website for some (chargeable) services to evaluate the "greenness" of your web site.
This particular piece of self-publcity was even packed up by by David Aaranovich on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday (who, as a journalist, ought to be a bit more sceptical about this sort of stuff).
Quite how this guy came up with his numbers has not been published in detail, but it would appear that he is doing his CO2 emission calculations on boiling enough water for a cup of coffee, and not a whole kettle full (but boiling a kettle sounds so much worse doesn't it?). On that basis, 5g might be about right (although that's only about enough to drive the average European car about 30 metres).,
The other side of the calculation is the power used by your Google search - well the great ad purveyor in cyber-space have come out with vaguely believeable numbers which are a tiny fraction of these figures. However, the difference appears tocome about because the good professor has included liberal allowances for the electricity used by your PC, monitor, comms equipment and heaven knows what else including the viewing of the results. If we assume an average PC, monitor and comms equipment uses about 150 watts then it will be responsible for about 75gm of CO2 per hour, or a little over 1gm per minute. Spend 5 minutes looking at the results of the search (including going to the results) and you might be able to justify a 5gm calculation.
So it's not the Google search that's the issue - it's basically just using the damned PC. But it's so much more newsworthy to attach the name Google to a news briefing than just say that using a desktop PC for 8 hours generates about 600gm CO2 or roughly the same as driving 4km.
I realise all the above is variable - run a laptop and your usage will be a lot less. Run the latest graphics card and you'll probably melt a glacier somewhere in Switzerland. But what it doe go to show is that the media world is full of lazy journalists quite able to uncritically quote dubious numbers, to which we could add politicians. The same sort of nonsense occured with spurious calculations over cellphone charges left plugged in (which ended up splattered all over the Lonbdon underground in enviro-aware advertising by the Mayor of London's office).
Of course it is perfectly possible for anybody to mask what they are up to by using encryption, anonymising proxies, out-of-country email servers and so on. However, what you can't hide is that you've initiated an IP session to one of these entities. I've no doubt that the government wil rely on the vast majority of people not bothering about this and that the patterns of access of those that do would provide for intelligence information, although it might not provide courtroom evidence. It would mean that if a person was suspected then a much more detailed investigation could take place. I have no doubt that there are already powers to do more detailed tracing of an individual subject to the appropriate legal authority. Also, if a PC was seized which had been used for such things then it's very likely evidence could be found (even an Internet cafe).
What the EU legistlation does not allow for is data trawling requests - that is simply ploughing through huge amounts of data looking for suspicious behaviour. For that I primary legislation would be required. I've no doubt that the intelligence community would simply love a huge database listing every IP access be everybody in the country (and to everybody in the country). However, the data volumes to do this are mind boggling. They are bigger, by orders of magnitude, than the data for phone calls.
As far as the EU legislation not having any impact on the data that the large ISPs keep, I rather doubt that's true. I suspect that most large ISPs don't keep information about every IP address accessed by every individual and relevant time stamps for periods of a year. They simply don't need that much information for their purposes, except on an exceptional basis, and it's not needed for billing (where this is relevant, then summarised patterns are likely to be enough). I've no doubt they keep summarised activity records, IPs allocated and so on for a lengthy period, but itemised data, even without the content data about each connection made would be simply enormous..
"It seems unlikely that this technique would be able to cope with the days-long calms which some critics of wind power have pointed out"
Understatement of the year, and it has barely started. In still conditions, the air resistance will bring the turbine to a stop in a few minutes, even if the blades could be feathered. This is clearly just designed to even out short term speed variations and get more power during gusty periods.
As usual there are loads of misunderstandings about this issue. Firstly, BT does not decide the numbering system in the UK and hasn't for many, manny years. That's Ofcom's role (and, before that, Oftel), and they define what the structure of the numbering system is, the role of 0845, 0870 and so on.
Also to the paranoid AC, call centres and the like on 08xx numbers do not get the originating phone number if it is supressed by the caller (although it is passed through the phone network, it doesn't get as far as the terminating point). The only exception is the operators of emergency services, like 999 for obvious reasons.
The way that charging for 0845, 0870 and the like work is that the wholesale operator of the service (and there are lots of those) makes a termination charge to the originating network. It's a (regulated) charge, either at a fixed rate for some numbers or over a range of rates for premium rate numbers.
It is totally up to the retail seller on the originating network, whether that's fixed line, IP or mobile, how much to charge their customer. In fact all termination systems work in essentially the same way - it's just that the regulated rate for 0845, 0870 and so on is higher than for normal, geographical numbers. It is that higher termination charge that allows for revenue sharing with the company using the number.
So what's the big deal here - flash memory is non volatile and provides plenty enough read/write cycles to store the system state on a typical piece of domestic equipment. I suppose this approach might mean that the working memory is non-volatile so it simplifies the design.
However, some of this misses the point - it's simply not possible to run some of the other elements of a stand-by system, like wake-up triggers (timers, IR receivers, timer displays and so on) without consuming some power. Something like a PVR has to consume some energy just tracking the events it is programmed for. Getting down to sub-watt power envelopes for that isn't exactly difficult.
However, at least if the power is cut to trivial levels then maybe the hair-shirt individuals that see standby modes as the work of the devil will look at something more important. They've been giving the mistaken impression to the population at large, and some ill-educated media and politico types, that standby makes a significant difference to the energy consumption problems where it is, at most, a very small persentage of the total energy use of the country. There are also easy (techincally speaking) solutions to the challenge. In a variation Tesco's words, every litlle helps, but it helps very little.
Save the planet - give up bold face. Also use san serriffe fonts, clearly a waste of ink and toner. Also, think carefully about punctuation. Is that exclamation mark really necessary and wouldn't a full stop be sufficient? Colons and semi-colons should only be used in moderation and never where less extravagant punction would do.
Perhaps El Reg could do a survey on the most eco-friendly font. Something spindly and weey looking should do - and it would so much better fit the IT person's image.
Of cause the Register makes this slang up. It's their major pastime as far as I can see. Anyway, "Leccy Lizzie" is obviously an attempted alliterative nod to the "Tin Lizzie", or Henry Ford's T Series that brought motorised private transport to the masses. In this case massed private electric propulsion (at least in part) to the self same average member of the public. That's very different to the electrically powered hyper-priced toys over which this organ normally salivates. This sort of thing is not the complete answer, but it is at least a practical idea which could eke out oil supplies, at least for commuters. Also, if it forgoes expensive, and potentially unstable, lithium batteries (a metal with distinctly limited total worldwide resources) in favour of more common materials, albeit at the expense of battery-only range, then that's a reasonable compromise to make.
What is needed now is a power distribution system which allows these type of vehicles to charge up more cheaply at times when electricity is in surplus. Given the inherent variability of many sources of renewables (wind, wave and solar all suffer from this), then a storage system is essential to make the best use of them. Probably this would require some sort of device, fitted within the car, that interacts with the electrical generation grid by modifying the charge rate according to instructions. Possibly this could piggy-back on the cellular phone system to avoid major infrastructure spend where two-way communication is required. Where cellphone coverage is an issue, one-way communication to the car could use frequencies with more reach. Combined with GPS in cars, the grid could fine-control the draw rate in different geographical areas according to available supplies. It might even be possible to reverse the flow to fill in for brief shortages (but that's trickier as it would require mods to household wiring). In effect, the on-board generator would be acting as a backup for the mains grid system. Such a device could also be used to "adjust" the price of electricity used for charging the car. It would also be possible for such a system to interact with commercial recharging systems (imagine charging stations in places of work, in car parks etc).
What people won't like is that this could be used for charging motorists an excise duty for electricity used to charge car batteries. I cannot imagine European countries long forgoing the revenues from fuel duty if electricity did take a large part of the market for travel. It's possible to imagine such devices being compulsory with big fines for bypassing them.
2Tb will bring about yet another reduction in the I/O density (IOPs and MB/s per GB). It's in the geometry - the Greeks would have understood. Capacity scales by area, sequential read speed linearly and random IOPs scarcely at all...
Blaming ADSL (as such) is completely the wrong target. The basic IP protocol lacks the necessary QoS to guarantee voice services over a WAN. It's subject to all sorts of issues with regard to jitter which are bound to affect voice quality. That's especially so if you are on long latency links such as internation ones.
If you want QoS with IP then MPLS is the way to go - but that doesn't come free. MPLS is perfectly possible over ADSL, but just expecting a contended data network service to offer the same service levels as voice is rather like expecting to be able to drive down a public motorway without being held up by the odd traffic jam. You need a "toll lane" for guaranteed service.
This looks like 600 servers with 64GB of memory each. Assuming that these are dual chip machines and with disks and so on then allow say 500W per server (including air-con overheads etc.) That's 300KW (or perhaps £250K per year in electricity at UK prices).
I think I'd ask questions about resilience to. With 600 servers there are going to be lots of failures - software and hardware. Unless this solution is inherently resilient to both, then service levels will be appalling unless the type of access pattern allows for a high degree of data partitioning so that only some queries fail. Duplicating memory is going to be expensive, although I guess that other approaches could be taken.
Personally I would go along with flash being faster, more reliable and much more power efficient. Just to do a rule-of-thumb calculation, 45MBps read flash is available (retail) for about $10 per GB. 40TB of this stuff is approximately $400K. Double it up for reilience and add a bit more for luck and you can have $1TB for $1M. Potential bandwidth is massive as (based on available devices) 40TB would give a theoretical bandwidth of about 12GB per second and you could read the whole lot in about 7 minutes. If the queries don't require every byte to be read you can do better (reading and processing 40TB in a dtabase would take a lot of CPU power).
Of course this is all theory and the hardware and software to connect this many commodity Flash devices is maybe not there, but it does show the potential in the technology.
Incidentally, commodity flash is very poor at random small writes, but the 45MBps devices I refer to can write at that rate sequentially.
I assume this will work by local media caches in the network closer to the point of consumption to which any service provider can connect (at the moment it all has to go back to central points). It won't help with capacity issues on the copper pair, but it will help greatly reduce the bandwidth futher upstream. That also includes the content providers bandwidth and server capacity.
In fact if this is done properly then it could be used as a way of distribution from "edge-of-network" as well by allowing the peering of caches across the core. Good for read only stuff - it would certainly help the likes of YouTube and allow them to distribute much higher bandwidth content without crippling network charges (that's if they have most of their access to a minority of the videos).
Add a bit more computing intelligence into the network at local points of presence (maybe on virtualisation famrs) and you could even distribute application functionality alongside content so that it is closer to the user with lower latency (for some things the speed of light - or at least the propogation peed of a signal down copper/optical fibre is the limiting factor). Of course producing standards for this is going to be tricky indeed.
Using civil law to sue people for stuff like this is not enough. The perpetrators of this were engaged in an atempt to extract money through fraud. It's the criminal law that needs to be thrown at these people. Maybe the threat of a prison sentence might deter them.
That's not to say that the ad brokers don't have some civil liabilities if they are being negligent in checking.
As for those people who suggest that nobody with their wits about them would have fallen for this. Well there are many, many people for whom a computer is a tool, and not an obsession, and they have a right (at the very least) to expect those perpetrating fraud to be dealt with appropriately and for systems and suppliers to at least use due diligence in vetting their customers. We wouldn't tolerate con-men making door-to-door calls, nor should we accept this sort of thing.
"That isn't a privacy thing, it's defamation (if the context given for your image is bad, i.e. look at lardy). It's an insult. And insulting someone is or can be illegal."
Defamation is a false accusation or a misrepresentation of somebody's motives, actions, morals or similar to their disadvantage. Insults are only defamatory if they are grossly untrue. Calling (or implying) somebody is fat when they are is not defamation. Calling John Prescott both fat and a fathead is neither defamatory (as the first accusation is true) or defamatory as the second part comes under fair comment and there's plenty of evidence for it. Well I suppose he might try and sue somebody for it but even on the UK's ridiculous libel laws he won't get far. Insults can also be illegal (in UK law) if they are liable to cause a breach of the peace and there are some grounds - race, religion, sexuality and so on which can get you into hot water if they are deemed likely to lead to hatred.
However, calling somebody fat when they are is neither insulting or defamatory in any legal sense.
That's not to say that picking on somebody off the street at random to humiliate or poke fun at should be considered acceptable behaviour. I feel this ought to be the role of standards bodies rather than the sledge-hammer of the law. I'm suspicious of privacy laws when they stray into (literally) public areas or severely impinge freedom of speech. Unfortunately the press (in the UK at least) have hardly shown themselves to be responsive in the way that they tend to treat the press complaints commission as little more than a minor nuisance.
It's simply not true that the image definitely breaches guidelines. It would require a court (and jury) to decide that one. It's potentially in breach - that's the problem. It's all highly subjective and would involve the judgement of a random group of people in a jury (well, as random as juries get). The actual affect of the image will depend on the person looking at it. There is no absolute standard in this case.
Of course the likelyhood is that if somebody did have a similar image then it's very possible that pressure would be put on the person in question to accept a caution rather tahn the lottery of a court (note that accepting a caution is not to be taken lightly - do that on this sort of charge and you are likely to find yourself barred from all sorts of careers and passtimes).
Note that I say similar image - this one is on the cover of an album which is widely available. Unless the police are to go round prosecuting everybody who has a copy (or an edict was made that they were to be destroyed based on a court test case) then I think it very unlikely that anybody would get a jury to convict and I suspect the police know that.
However, I would advise people not to publish this picture on a personal website - it is just not worth being provocative and, at the very least, some might find this sort of photo pushing the bounds of decency even if some others rate it as art. That some rock band wants to be provocative and push the boundaries is their choice (and they might get away with it on artistic grounds). Gratuitous use might just attract unwelcome attention.
This is the precautionary princple of course - and it is precisely this climate of fear that makes people and organisation act conservatively. Anything associated with risk and people fear that a legal steamroller will flatten them in its path. There are plenty of places now where what might be deemed "bad taste" will effectively terminate a career.
Two questions here - firstly, it's only an illegal image if/when a court rules on it given the grey area this is in. However, it might be considered to be prudent to not make such an image available if only for self interest reasons. There is, incidentally, a difference between a website which has a policy over how it manages and controls its own content (which is what Wikipedia does) and censorship in the control of what people can and cannot see elsewhere. There's a considerable difference between the two. Wikipedia is as a joint community venture, it is not anarchy or complete free-for-all and never has been. The author of this piece ought to be able to tell the difference.
However, the second issue is El Reg's provision of a direct link to the offending Wikipedia page. that surely is inviting readers to go and look at such an image (and maybe making them liable to legal sanction).
Is, of course, the oceans. Pick a location where the sea is cold all the year round and use a heat exchanger to dump the heat. That's something the designers of Nuclear power stations have known about for years. Air cooling is never as reliable - even up a mountain (at least to accessible heights), the air can get warm. At high altitudes the air density is significantly lower which lowerstthe effectiveness of heat exchangers.
Of course you want to choose a place where the sea is cold all the year round - but the USA has Alaska, and the sea there is very cold (plus I assume they have significant hydro potential). Even further South the Pacific is generally pretty cold as there's not much of a continental shelf (although being on a subduction zone, then earthquakes and tsaunami are always a danger).
Of course being posted to Alaska might not be that popular....
There are several very good 24 inch monitors out there with street prices around the £260 mark (and that's good ones with sub 5ms times - there are budget options available down to less than £175). That will give you a 1920 x 1200 display which is 540,000 pixels more than this 22 inch and more total surface area.
Speaking as somebody who deals regularly with high volume transactional databases measured in the many TB range on servers and enterprise arrays with many 10s of GB of cache then I can tell you what the real problems are or are not. Firstly log writes - the requirement here is minimal latency. Enterprise arrays with non-volatile write cache deal very nicely with that with sub ms write times. As the stage-out is asynchronous and sequential in nature then a RAID-5 arrangement works just fine (write two copies to two places for that extra level of confidence). SSDs don't offer much here. In general even random writes aren't too much of an issue as they are all cached and the stage-out is asynch (except in the extreme where the random write rate exceeds the IOP capability of the database which you've naturally striped far and wide).
Generally speaking hard disks are acceptable for sequential reads too - arrays and DBs with read-ahead, parallel access and so on mean that (generally) hard disks will do the job.
However, where hard disks do fail is on random reads. Latency is around 6-7ms for a random, physical read. Youe can keep throwing cache at the problem (and the right place to do that is the database cache, not the storage array), but at a certain point you get into the law of diminishing returns. We have OLTP databases where, even with a 99.8% cache hit rate, random read I/O is responsible for about 70% of DB transaction time. Throwing more cache at it has very little effect after a certain point because the locality of reference is too broad. It's still not cost effective to hold a 5TB database in physical memory - quite apart from the cost of the memory, all that RAM uses a great deal of power. There is also a more fundamental problem - the time taken to populate that cache at application/DB startup. What you will find in the early stages of starting your DB and application is that performance will be very poor as you have to do physical I/Os to populate that database. You can therefore get very lengthy startup times indeed - if it's bad enough that performance is hit you have to stage users in over a long time.
This is where SSDs are a potential saviour. If random read time can be brought down to sub-ms times over an FC SAN (about 0.5ms is about the limit at the moment due to latency in switch and fibre transitions) then it will lead to a huge increase in performance of some types of applications.
As for lifetime issues - well it's not as if hard drives last for ever. We have RAID systems to provide continual availability for storage based on physical disks. There are plenty of ways that SSDs could be configured to cope with "bit rot". For those that point to hard disks having a lifetime measured at half a million (or more) hours or 60+ years, then they do not. That's a common mistake as people mistake MTTF figures (meantime to fail) with device lifetime. MTTF is a statistical measure of the average number of operating hours between single failures for a given set of devices. Crucially this only applies within the rated lifetime of a device. After that failure rates increase rapidly. It is perfectly possible (indeed it is very often the case) that MTTF figures can be much greater than the rated operational lifetime of a device.
Nothing lasts for ever - SSDs won't, but neither do hard drives.
Nope - Survivors is The Day of the Triffids without the perambulating killer plants, not the other way around, John Wyndham got there in 1951, well over 20 years before Terry Nation.
I sincerely hope that The Day of the Triffids is better than the 1962 film where the vicous vegetables just need a dose of salt water (the book ended with the main protagonists oin the Isle of White with the final result to the war between man and fiendish flora yet to be resolved).
If the BBC want to film a Wyndham novel then they ought to try The Kraken Wakes (which would make a good no-expense-spared-turn-your-brain-off Hollywood block-buster).
It's hardly worth commenting about the article itself as it is almost as silly as the TV programme.
However, there is a serious subject regarding the robustness of modern civilisations being so reliant on technology and specialists. Medieval Europe suffered a population loss of between 40 and 60% (estimates vary) duing the 14th century due to the Black Death. However, society bounced back as it was inherently resilient - communities were self-sufficient, the population were largely generalists and able to survive. It did have huge social effects - the start of the ending os feudal serfdom in England for a start.
However, we do not live in such a society - we live in one with a huge diversity of narrow specialists. It doesn't greatly matter if the cellphone network keeps running autonomously for a few days or weeks. When the limited number of specialists who understand a key componewnt die then so does your system. Western civilisation is based on a whole series of very finely balanced systems. Modern business and society places an emphasis on efficiency, specialisation and centralisation. It builds in resilience to what might be called minor catastrophes - say the loss of a single oil refinery. However, it is not robust at a systemic level - look at what happened with the petrol price protests when fuel distribution was stopped for just a few days. Look at what happened to those much vaunted financial risk assessments by individual banks once the trickle of defaults turned into a cascade.
The one obvious thing on Survivors (which, in the TV series at least, must have been showing death rates of 99.99% or more is that at least the population was reduced to a level where sustainable approaches using primitive technology could be used (and lots of tinned food). However, the reality if one of the key components on which western civilisation depends would be unpleasant indeed. Maybe not a 99.99% death rate but distinctly nasty.
For those who point to modern technological understanding being too good for such a catastrophe to happen - well there have been plenty of civilisations that have failed before due to environmental or other issues. It would be complacent (to say the least) to think we are immune and we also have this little problem that the World's population is perhaps 15 times greater than at the time of the black death.
New Scientist ran a special on this a few months ago - worth looking up, especially for politicans and business leaders. Many El Reg hacks have this entertaining, almost Victorian complacency about the inevitability of progress. This article is as shot full of holes as the TV series.
Another line from El Reg hacks decrying the dangers of Web 2.0 to go along with their continuous nagging about Wikipedia (an system, which despite it's faults, has hugely added to everyday life). It's about time they stopped worshipping at the feet of Andrew Keen and his dreadful book.
Anyway, the ridiculous thing about this is that it has nothing to do with Web 2.0. It's just another bit of propoganda from a well-funded interest group. So they selectively report? Well so does pretty well every other interest and pressure group and political party you can name. If it wasn't on the web, it would be in ads, or meetings. The difference is now that there are channels for less well funded people to answer the points.
The protection against misinformation and selective use of statistics is a well educated and rational populace who listen to cases with a sceptical outlook. This particular issue is a propaganda war between two sides, and has nothing to do with Web2.0 and was going on long before the Internet became part of people's lives.
If anybody wants to see what life would be like when only "proper" journalists could report and comment on scientific studies, then take a look at Ben Goldacre's Bad Science site (and other, related, sceptics in the blogosphere). Journalists are no arbiters of truth with some precious insight into the state of the world. Some are good, some are bad, sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong.
In this case, read up about it - the true followers don't change their minds anyway. If you are in the happy (well, I assume its a happy position) of not having to defend an instinctive belief, then it can be quite rewarding.
Well there's nothing like being patronising. Of course idle processes don't use cores, although there is always some background activity gomg on and it is increasing. However, there are desktop applications which do use multiple cores - I know, I have some of them. Image and video editing are the obvious ones. Multi-media replay, "immersive" games, ray tracing, engineering simulations - these are all examples where extra cores can be used.
OK - most of the time these cores will be idle most of the time, but with modern power management they don't have to be wasteful, and the cores can be there when they are needed. Some of us do rather more demanding things with PCs than type things into Word. I use a four core machine at home, and there are times - often lasting an hour or more, when it is running almost flat out. I'd much rather use software that can use multiple threads efficiently rather than consuming mega larger amounts of power at wastefully high clock rates (power consumption increases disproportionately with clock speed - clever power management and suitable software is vastly more energy efficient).
Of course it is a moot point to consider if a country is actually advancing if the inhabitants spend more of their time watching TV, gossiping on the phone, watching YouTube, playing online games and the like rather than actually doing something...
But then Ofcom are in the game of justifying their own saleries based on what they deem to be of value.
Oh dear - you don't resolve a multi-threading application problem by running lots of inidividual copies in their own VMs. You still have the same parallelisation problem - just that you now have to load balance over multiple operating systems. Of course there is still a use for techniques for consolidating lots of individual servers onto one box using VMs, but that should not be mistaken for getting more throughput through a single application. There are ways of exploiting multiple OS images for some typles of applications - network load balancing web servers for instance, but generating lots of VMs just to exploit more cores is a wasteful exercise - all those VMs need operating systems, memory and CPU overheads, IP addresses, configurations. It's called VM sprawl. Load balancing over multiple physical servers for resilience reasons is fairly sensible. Load balancing over multiple VMs on a single system when there are better ways is just wasteful.
It's much better natively to use environments which can use multiple threads within a single (or more limited) number of OS images. Any decent commercial database can do this, as will J2EE and any number of other run time environments. For most commercial, multi-user systems you often get sufficient parallelisation through supporting multiple users and hence transactions (a single transaction using multiple threads is rare and not usually necessary).
On the desktop the last thing I want is a dozen VMs. About the only advantage I can think of is limiting the scope of any virus infection (although I now have to manage multip[le VMs). Even if I do have multiple VMs there is only so much multi-tasking I can manage in my head. I just can't directly use that many very explicitly separate work threads. Admittedly most desktop applications do not exploit or need multiple threads. For the most part these don't have highly demanding CPU requirements. However, there are some that do, especially in the area of multi-media handling. Video, Audio and Photographic processing are examples of application areas where modern software does exploit multiple threads. These are, of course, specialist areas but for that very reason there are algorithms and software libraries that do exploit threading.
I'm rather less enamoured of hardware threads though - these are virtual CPUs and, whilst they can increase throughput, you can pay a very large penalty in damaging single thread speed once contention does set in. At the very least it confuses basic system performance numbers through non-linearity of reported CPU usage when compared with core utilisation.
It sounds beleivable, although I wonder just how much useful energy those solar panels will collect. However, is there a coming problem with Lithium supplies. According to Wikipedia (yes - I know that el Reg considers this to be the greatest source of incorrect information in the known universe), then the estimated recoverable Lithium reserves amount to about 35 million tonnes (of which known reservers are 11 million tonnes). The US alone has an estimated 250 million passenger vehicles. So that's about 140Kg per US passenger vehicle. If we take that worldwide then maybe we are down to about 30Kg per passenger vehicle (if we look at known reserves then it's about 10Kg per vehicle).
No doubt somebody will should "Club or Rome" at me now - but before people see this as the saviour of personal transport we had better have some idea about the fundamental supply position.
Does anybody know if there is legislation in place which allows the BBC, or their nominated enforcement company, to check perform large scale checks address checks with ISPs?
Of course it is currently possible for a copyright holder to force disclosure of the name and address of an ISP customer for a given IP address at a point in time provided that there is reasonable evidence of copyright violation.
This is wholly different - there will be millions of IP addresses which access this, and the great majority (it is to be assumed) will be license payers. Just because you are watching TV online is no evidence that you are doing so without a license. Performing large scale checks against TV license records would require massive processing and, unless allowed for in legislation, would no doubt break the Data Protection Act.
I suspect a rather more likely option is that viewers will be required to enter some unique details about their TV license or themselves (possibly via a logon of some sort). If excessive numbers of sessions are detected with a given identifier then that could provide sufficient evidence of wrong-doing for investigations to get going.
Personally I can't imagine that there will not be some system like this - I'm sure it won't be like iPlayer with open replay allowed to any UK IP address without any credentials being provided.
As others have pointed out, if this was somebody forging a copy of somebody else's boarding pass then the head count would pick it up. If people go back to the original Atlantic Magazine article they will find the exposee is how to bypass the US government's no-fly scheme by creating a second boarding pass matching other identification (like a driver's license or passport). The airlines don't check the "no fly" list immediately before you get on the 'plane - they only check the other ID you have.
Legacy is just what we use to call yesterday's big fashionable idea that failed to deliver only to be replaced by the latest IT bandwagon that will disappoint in turn. No doubt we will never learn.
This is less of a response to stolen credit cards (usually that's pretty obvious when that has happened) than to online frauds and cloned cards. Having had that happen to me twice, then I am strongly in favour os one time password systems. The current PIN system and online checks are wide open to replay attacks - a one time password system will eliminate those possiblities.
It's stepping on dangerous legal grounds to comment on the particular merits of this case, but for those know-it-alls who post breezily about stopping in time, bear in mind that the official stopping distance from 70MPH, including reaction time, according to the Highway Code is 96 metres or the length of a football pitch. That's a little over three seconds travelling at that speed. How many people leave a 100 metre gap or over three seconds to the next car given the crowded state of our motorways. If you are unsighted by a vehicle in front, or it's dark and there's an obstruction in the road, then this sort of thing can happen frighteningly fast. So beware, and don't get complacent. Anybody could get caught out.
That's a completely different issue to texting - that's up to the courts to decide.
Well if you do go round shooting "dear", especially "old dears", then you should manage a jolly good bag. It's easy, but not very good sport as they can't move that fast - those old ladies aren't that sprightly.
I think that Tom Lehrer summed it up well in the "Hunting Song" - something that could almost have been written for Dick Cheney. However, I'm not sure we can blame PETA for the fate of his victim as, as I rather suspect he wasn't a member of the organisation.
Good stuff - also notable is Peta's recent rebranding of fish as "sea kittens" to improve their public image.
http://www.peta.org.uk/sea_Kittens
You can even make your own "sea kitten" complete with choices such as Fu Manchu and German Moustaches. Hours of endless fun for children playing with racial stereotypes.
If there is a judgement against SourceForge then it's difficult to see what the French courts can do. It's not like Google who make money in many countries and have some for of legal presence there for commercial reasons. I suspect that the worse that the French courts could do is to get ISPs to block local access to the Sourceforge website ,which wouldn't go down to well in France and would, I suspect, have very little effect on Sourceforge itself.
As for the intent versus capable thing - well intent is difficult to prove where there are legitimate uses for software. It don't mean that the French courts won't take that view - but national interpretations would vary on this.
"It is most certainly not the job of a juror to go away and do a little research, with the possible exception of if there is some sort of formal exam at the end of this piece of research. Call it a law degree if you will. ;)"
That's a classic "argument from authority" (as is your IT support argument - surprise, surprise I also have worked in IT and for a long time - anecdotes about the damage caused by those with a little knowledge can equally be counteracted with the damage done by the completely naive computer user - or even being able to discuss problems with them).
Anyway, I think I ought to point out that a law degree qualifies people in the law. It doesn't in itself qualify them in statistics, science, finance, forensics, psychology or a whole host of other technical subjects. In particular, becoming a barrister makes you an advocate. It trains and picks out those that can use tools of persuasion, like emotional arguments, the subtle undermining of credibility of witnesses, dealing in spurious certainties and the like. Successful barristers are something like legally trained actors - knowing how to deal with people in the context of the court's arcane laws. It's no coincidence that government and the top echelons of industry are stuffed to the gills with lawyer/advocates; people who know how to manipulate and persuade. Tony Blair, a man of somewhat limited intellectual capability, was a superb advocate and manipulator of people (if you doubt, that, read the hatchet job that Robert Harris did on him in the scarcely disguised portrait of Blair in his book Ghost).
But back to the possibly even more pernicious subject of expert witnesses. They too often plea the "argument from authority" position. These are not theoretical concerns - one of those (the Sally Clarke and like cases) I've already mentioned. Another example is the disgraceful case of Shirley McKie, a policewoman wrongly accused of perjury. The case hinged totally on expert witnesses from the Scottish Criminal Record Office testifying that her thumbprint was found at a murder scene. The police had been keen on eliminating unidentified prints as it provided a potential line of defence for the accused. As is routine in these cases, the prints were all checked against serving officers, and this thumbprint was identified as belonging to Shirley McKie, a policewoman who had been in the area. However, on being challenged, she maintained that she had not entered the house. Not only was she sacked by the police force, she was prosecuted for perjury in 1999. The most pertinent point here, was that the "expert witnesses" from the Scottish Criminal Record Office flawed identification of the thumbprint was defended on the grounds that they were the experts, and mere laymen would not be able to appreciate their years of skills. In fact it was no such thing - the basis of finger print matching is fairly straightforward and, for a large part, is a matter of judgment and not science. The basic criteria are not defined statistically in a truly objective way - it's a game of probabilities, especially with partial prints. In this case it was clear to all that the finger print matching was highly uncertain once the basic principles of the process were established (and it was no small thing - three witnesses from the Scottish Criminal Record Office all testified the same). This case is to be subject to a public enquiry, such are the implications.
Back to IT. We might also look at all the false convictions (and the suicides) following the highly flawed "Operation Ore" said to have identified thousands of users of child porn in the UK. Many people were convicted (and even more had lives destroyed) by accusation, and what is worse, cases that went through courts on faulty expert analysis. Again the line from the prosecutors was an "Argument from authority" one - that the expert's view was sacrosanct and a mere layman (which include the lawyers) couldn't be expected to understand the logic. Trust me - I'm an expert was the line.
So I rest my case. Of course IT people make crap advocates, so I don't expect this to sway any jury. I don't believe that that most lawyers make great seekers of truth. It is just not an analytical subject in the sense that a scientist would recognise. Indeed most scientists are not favoured by lawyers as expert witness - they tend to be too measured and apply too many caveats. Lawyers prefer the type of scientist-expert witness that has a clear view, a theory, a line that they will argue. Eventually the some of the worst of these "scientific" zealouts get found out, but only after huge damage has been done to people and lives. Without educated people who can analyse what they are told, then we are lost.
Out best defense is an educated (and self-educating) populace, but I will readily admit that in a world which will listen to the crack-pot views of Prince Charles, that the average jury might not contain many such people.
Doing a bit of research on the Internet might actually give people a bit more of a clue as to whether the barrister is talking rubbish or not. Barrister's are not neutral - they are paid to make the best possible case for their client. So called expert witnesses are often not independent either. The days when a bunch of illiterate peasants were wheeled in to pass judgement on the basis of the persuasiveness of the respective advocates ought to be confsigned to history. Having better educated jurors ought to facilitate that.
Of course the chances of our education system actually producing such well educated and intelligent individuals (especially when defence barristerrs tend to reject anybody vaguely educated) are minimal, and it is the principles that count. Somebody who cares to research the nature of DNA or fingerprint evidence rather than just be persuaded is a good thing in principle.
That's nothing at all to do with attention span problems - that's a completely different thing to people actually doing a bit of reading up on subject matters. A basic knowledge of probabilities would have immediately revealed the nonsense behind the Sally Clarke cot death conviction for instance. Being able to bring a sceptical mind to bear on evidence is a good thing - the judiciary don't much like the idea that people in jury's have independent minds.
I, like you have no debts - quite the reverse. However, if you think this won't affect you then think again. Taxes can hit you, the value and return on your savings can be hit. For a 40% tax payer then it's already the case you can't match inflation (especially if measured against RPI and not CPI). With driving down interest rates, then even the absolute value of liquid assets could be reduced in real terms (that's already happened to things like pension funds). Then, even if you do find yourselof immune to the financial implications, there are very likely to be social consequences of high unemployment which you can't escape. Many of us also have relatives and friends that aren't going to be so well placed which is of at least personal concerns.
Also don't think of just moving abroad to escape all this - unless you've locked your savings into a solid foreign currency, then the value of sterling assets could decline.
A very good article in the Telegraph last week pointed out that one of the largest losers from this current financial shake out are the people who have been prudent. Who have saved, who have put money into long term investments. Where has that money - put into stocks and shares, into bank and telecommunications gone?
So we had better hope that somebody comes along who is better placed to identify a more stable basis for the UK economy than that self-declared financial genius Gordon Brown.
Ask not for whom the financial bell tolls - it tolls for you (apologies to John Donne).
"If legislative force is required to reduced the world's car-fuel consumption, simply banning engines above 1.6 litres from domestic vehicles would be a big start"
It's a seriously bad idea for governments to start dictating technology like that.
It makes slightly more sense to legislate on outcomes (like the EU target of new passenger cars hitting 130gm CO2 per km by 2012). What makes even more sense is to provide financial "incentives" to meet environmental targets. That way you can get the market to work for you.
Lots of clever comments here on how you can get more power out by synchronising the pumping out the reservoir and filling it up at the right points in the tidal cycle to get out more than you put in. Well that's all well and good, but this is meant to be a reserve power store, emptied out (or filled up with potential energy if you wish) when there is a surplus of online capacity and filled up (emptied out of potential energy) when there is a deficit of online power. The problem is that there is no way of synchronising the tidal range and these events.
In fact if you used this scheme to store surplus power from any tidal barrier schemes then it';s guaranteed to happen at pretty nearly the worst time (well unless you electricaly link up with a tidal barrier system several thousaand km away).
Given the Dutch are past masters are reclaiming land, then possibly some of the colossal costs of this scheme could be offset by using the material dredged out to produce saleable land.
Does anybody have a quick calculator on the costs of dredging out this lot? It would be relatively easy to do the energy calculations. Obviously this mamoth bucket would have to be emptied and refilled many, many times over just to get back in energy equilibrium.
Quite apart from anything else, it is ingeneous, and there are plenty of places off of the east coast of England that could be adapted to this purpose. We might even be able to reconnect the UK to the European mainland this way (might upset the ship owners though). Perhaps we could build that replacement to Heathrow in the Thames estuary after all based on material dredged from thes things.
Giga engineering might be back - Brunel would have loved it.
Thanks for this - I'm by no means new to the forum, but have not had the pleasure of reading amanfromMars's stream of consciousness material that brings novel constructions to the English language. I will bear this in mind in future and treat his stuff the same way as some of James Joyce's rather less structured prose.
Even 133x isn't that fast. Theoretically you get about 20MBps and the fastest CF around (300X) should give up to 45MBps. However, that's theoretical and often cheap CF cards are asymmetric in performance. You get far faster reads than writes.
However, the real problem with CF Nand flash will be that random write speed will be atrocious. You could get as few as 10 writes per second against the 80 random writes or more you would get from the most modest of laptop drives.
So for writing large sequential files, such as a Digital camera might produce, then (moderately) cheap flash might be acceptable, but as a general purpose disk replacement they will be dreadful. The SSD drives have got extra things to speed this up somewhat, but prices for now are high. However, flash prices are dropping through the floor so hold on.
For the most part, the best way of speeding up an old PC is to add more memory. Putting in a faster disk has more limited benefits and cheap flash would be awful.
And of course there are pedestrian crossings at all convenient points in housing estates,and village roads and all the suburban roads and carparks...
No, I thought not so another facile comment. There have been studies already started into this - above about 25mph then tyre noise apparently suffices, but at slower speeds people either underestimate distances or don't hear the vehicle if it's further away. It's not just blind people either.
The changes required are modest and they don't need to be intrusive. Various blind organisations are sponsoring research on this and it is readily resolvable.
Of course this has nothing at all to do with faked V8 noises so that petrol- (electromotive-) heads like Jeremy Clarkson can go into ecstacy.
Of course you can come up with an explanation you like to interpret the Bibilical creationist story in whatever you like. It's very easy to come up with allegorical interpretations or redefine the words as you see fit and, of course it's impossible to prove it is wrong.
But that utterly and totally misses the point - it's not science; any explanation that is not, in principle, falsifiable immediately identifies itself as unscientific. What might be the point is if the nature of science as a methodology was properly taught in classrooms then truly people might learn to think for themselves. They might then understand the difference between different methods of understanding.
It would be a jolly good idea if some of the more rigorous branches of philosophy were taught in schools (and to schoolteachers) and then we might not get this sort of nonsense of mixing up creationist theories and evolution as being equally valid interpretations of the same phenomena when, in fact, the former is based on an axiomatic faith system.
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1091 posts • joined Monday 21st May 2007 21:57 GMT
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Well Done
Well done to the Law Lords. As a general principle, any adverse quasi-judicial process like the "black-listing" of individuals which has a major impact on the ability of a person to live a normal life should be subject to appropriate safeguards. Some of the decisions made can have extremely far reaching effects comparable in impact to court decisions. I realise that some of the issues will involve security or confidential information, but the operation of systems based on "intelligence" alone under the opaque cloud of some government agency or other is a recipe for injustice. Subject to appropriate safeguards the processes involved should be as transparent as possible - at least to the individual concerned.
@Ken Hagan
quote ::-
"A hypervisor is a piece of software that lets multiple copies of another piece of software each believe they have the entire system to themselves. Back in the 1950s, this was called an operating system. What is proposed here is a return to a micro-kernel operating system, with the desktop personality (aka, OS) running on top."
Good heavens - how many misconceptions. Firstly in the 1950s operating systems pretty well didn't exist. Early applications were written to the bare metal - that is they talked directly to the hardware. Gradually manufacturers introduced tools and software to make this easier to do, although the low level hardware interfacing code was still included in each application. By the 1960s operating systems had emerged which were environments in which a single application could run within a controlled environment offering some higher level services. Things such as I/O could abstracted to operating system services, although even then some applications got very close to the hardware devices by direct calling libraries that issued I/O instructions to the hardware (dig into z/OS and you will find that many of the older access methods have still got this structure, although the OS intercepts the actual I/O call). These early operating systems would only run a single applications at a time and only later did versions appear which allowed multiple applications to (apparently) run simultaneously. Early versions of these multi-taking operating systems (and the hardware on which they ran) tended to lack mechanisms to protect them from each other - a badly written application could write all over the storage belonging to another. Modern multi-tasking operating system with proper security and isolation didn't really become common until the 1970s. (PCs followed the same path, maybe 15 years later).
There is a fundamental difference in intent between an operating system and a hypervisor. Essentially the former is designed to provide services and an environment within which applications are run. In consequence, the services offered are largely abstracted ones of use to the application.
In contrast, the intent, of a hypervisor (at least in its purest sense) is to emulate a physical server. If implemented properly it will virtualise CPUs, I/O devices, memory and so on. The vast majority of business applications are not written to work in such an environment. In the case of mainframes, hypervisors started out as pure software (VM being the obvious example) and efficiency was gradually improved through moving resource-intensive virtualisation tasks into microcode. Eventually pure micro-coded hypervisors appeared (a route down which microprocessors are heading albeit using direct silicon logic and not via microcode).
There are similarities between some of the technologies used in operating systems and hypervisors, but the second is a much more constrained thing. Its job is to pretend to the code it is hosting that it is a physical machine complete with I/O ports, clocks, interrupts and so on. . VMWare ESX and the like are not throwbacks to the operating systems of the 1950s (which didn't exist in a recognisable form at that time anyway), but to VM which emerged during the 1970s. Of course there are lots of grey areas - hyperviser aware operating systems, hypervisers running within a general purpose operating system, not to mention completely abstracted virtual machines, such as the Java VM. But the principle remains.
There is a lot of common technology in hypervisors and microkernels, but the latter is really the set of low-level primitive services required to allow for the implementation of an operating system whilst a hypervisor (in its purest sense) is there to provide virtual machine environments.
CO2 comarison - electric bike vs bread power
To test the Clown Prince of the House of Common's proposition that electric power produces less CO2 than a cyclist, then here's a calculation of a bread-powered cyclist vs an electric bike recharged using the UK mains (assumed to be 460gm CO2 per KWh).
First maked the assumption that 100W of human power drives a bike at the same speed as 100W on an electric bike (with the extra weight of the electric bike, that might not be quite true, but let it pass). Also assume that human beings have a thermodynamic efficiency of about 30%in converting food into mechanical energy (humans are subject to just the same laws of physics in this regard as any other way of burning fuel with oxygen to produce mechanical energy, albeit the mechanism is more complex). Also assume that any cycling mechanical energy is in addition to rest rate (and that riding an electric bike requires no extra human energy).
To power a bike at 100W for an hour using electricity means that 0.1KWh (360KJ) is required, which is 46 gms of CO2 with curren UK grid production mixes.
Typically bread has about 200-250Kcals per 100gm and its production and distribution is estimated at about 65gm CO2 per 100gm. Put the two together, take the average 100gm of bread as 225Kcals, then we get about 0.29gm CO2 per Kcal or about 0.069gm CO2 per KJ . With human beings having a thermodynamic efficiency of about 30% in producing mechanical power, that means about 0.23gms CO2 per KJ of mechnical energy.
This means that 360KJ of bread-fed human mechanical energy would result in about 83gms of CO2 emission. I'll omit the CO2 breathed out (which would be significant) on the basis that it would be absorbed by the food plants used to replace what was eaten.
So (for bread power at least), it appears he is right - the electric bike only generates about 55% of the CO2 when compared that for a similar amount of mechanical energy from a cyclist. No doubt the cycle is a bit more mechnically efficient, which will narrow the gap, as would choosing a less CO2 intensive food source (although I chose bread as it was reasonably good in that respect). For a fried-breakfast powered cyclist, then the numbers will be a lot worse - even with a more calorifically-intensive food source due to much higher CO2 emissions in production. Also the electric bike requires more energy in manufacture - but then there are sources of electricity witrh lower CO2 than the UK average grid.
So save the planet, and get an electric bike is the answer I suppose.
Costs
So $180 for 300GB is 60 cents per GB. Given that flash storage (retail) is not much more than twice that and prices are declining rapidy, then what is the future of this technology? I'm not sure what the longevity of flash storage is, but random read access speed is vastly higher. Also some form of archival flash storage would not require drives at $18,000 a time. It's not there yet, but in two or three years time?
To make holographic disks make sense, then the capacity will have to be much higher and the costs a lot lower.
Also, any outfit that relied on a 50 year media lifetime without regular refreshes is running a major risk. Experience shows that digital media often has a much shorter lifetime than originally advertised.
"hundred od anxiety free miles"...
What this article doesn't mention is that this is a plug-in hybrid. It certainly isn't going to take you "hundreds of anxiety free miles" on one charge. A 16kWh battery is pretty puny - let's optimistically assume this hefty vehicle requires just 12Kw (10% of it's rates power) to push it down the road at a vaguely reasonable speed. It's going to run out of juice after about 80 minutes - not something that's going to take you hundreds of miles. In reality I suspect that you'd be lucky to get 50 or 60 miles on electricity alone.
Not to say it isn't a good idea, but please call it what it is - a plug-in hybrid. I suspect the roof-top solar array is an expensive gimmick unless you have some very strong sunshine where you live and don't travel very far.
Write Endurance
It's misleading to say that the write duty cycle doesn't apply to tape drive. LTO4 has a (complete) read/write durability of 200 end-to-end passes (at least from one manufacturer). That makes it suitable only for backup and archival purposes. Well, OK - ti applies to writes and reads and it is the medium, not the drive that has the limit. Written once per week and an LTO4 tape will only last 4 years.
Tape drives will, of course, potentially last longer, but only if they are regularly maintained (especially if the duty cycle is high).
As for Erik Aamot and don't use flash SSD for primary storage, that's nonsense. All drives are prone to failure, whether flash or physical. They also wear out (and people shouldn't confuse MTBF with expected lifetime of a drive - the latter is a lot less than the former these days). It's for exactly those reasons that RAID is used along with other techniques to maintain data integrity. We have 10s of thousands of disk drives with Petabyes of storage and modern arrays allow for the hot replacement of failing devices without service disruption. The practical issues of write duty cycles on SLC flash are frankly not a problem with proper controller logic.
It might well be that 3 & 4 bit MLC does not yet have enough write duty cycles for use on write-intensive systems, but SLC (albeit at a cost) is most certainly suitable now.
The only advantage that HDD has over the best SLC flash is cost (albeit that's a very large issue). On performance SLC massacres HDD and in 3-4 years time top-end hard drives will be obsolete. HDDs will then be handling the bulk access, high-capacity, mdium access speed market.
Junk Numbers
A classic case of the media falling for junk statistics by a self-publicising academic with a vested interest, both for the the publicity and for commerciall interests. Wissner-Gross is co-founder Enernetics and you can sign up on its website for some (chargeable) services to evaluate the "greenness" of your web site.
This particular piece of self-publcity was even packed up by by David Aaranovich on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday (who, as a journalist, ought to be a bit more sceptical about this sort of stuff).
Quite how this guy came up with his numbers has not been published in detail, but it would appear that he is doing his CO2 emission calculations on boiling enough water for a cup of coffee, and not a whole kettle full (but boiling a kettle sounds so much worse doesn't it?). On that basis, 5g might be about right (although that's only about enough to drive the average European car about 30 metres).,
The other side of the calculation is the power used by your Google search - well the great ad purveyor in cyber-space have come out with vaguely believeable numbers which are a tiny fraction of these figures. However, the difference appears tocome about because the good professor has included liberal allowances for the electricity used by your PC, monitor, comms equipment and heaven knows what else including the viewing of the results. If we assume an average PC, monitor and comms equipment uses about 150 watts then it will be responsible for about 75gm of CO2 per hour, or a little over 1gm per minute. Spend 5 minutes looking at the results of the search (including going to the results) and you might be able to justify a 5gm calculation.
So it's not the Google search that's the issue - it's basically just using the damned PC. But it's so much more newsworthy to attach the name Google to a news briefing than just say that using a desktop PC for 8 hours generates about 600gm CO2 or roughly the same as driving 4km.
I realise all the above is variable - run a laptop and your usage will be a lot less. Run the latest graphics card and you'll probably melt a glacier somewhere in Switzerland. But what it doe go to show is that the media world is full of lazy journalists quite able to uncritically quote dubious numbers, to which we could add politicians. The same sort of nonsense occured with spurious calculations over cellphone charges left plugged in (which ended up splattered all over the Lonbdon underground in enviro-aware advertising by the Mayor of London's office).
Encryption and so on
Of course it is perfectly possible for anybody to mask what they are up to by using encryption, anonymising proxies, out-of-country email servers and so on. However, what you can't hide is that you've initiated an IP session to one of these entities. I've no doubt that the government wil rely on the vast majority of people not bothering about this and that the patterns of access of those that do would provide for intelligence information, although it might not provide courtroom evidence. It would mean that if a person was suspected then a much more detailed investigation could take place. I have no doubt that there are already powers to do more detailed tracing of an individual subject to the appropriate legal authority. Also, if a PC was seized which had been used for such things then it's very likely evidence could be found (even an Internet cafe).
What the EU legistlation does not allow for is data trawling requests - that is simply ploughing through huge amounts of data looking for suspicious behaviour. For that I primary legislation would be required. I've no doubt that the intelligence community would simply love a huge database listing every IP access be everybody in the country (and to everybody in the country). However, the data volumes to do this are mind boggling. They are bigger, by orders of magnitude, than the data for phone calls.
As far as the EU legislation not having any impact on the data that the large ISPs keep, I rather doubt that's true. I suspect that most large ISPs don't keep information about every IP address accessed by every individual and relevant time stamps for periods of a year. They simply don't need that much information for their purposes, except on an exceptional basis, and it's not needed for billing (where this is relevant, then summarised patterns are likely to be enough). I've no doubt they keep summarised activity records, IPs allocated and so on for a lengthy period, but itemised data, even without the content data about each connection made would be simply enormous..
day long calms
"It seems unlikely that this technique would be able to cope with the days-long calms which some critics of wind power have pointed out"
Understatement of the year, and it has barely started. In still conditions, the air resistance will bring the turbine to a stop in a few minutes, even if the blades could be feathered. This is clearly just designed to even out short term speed variations and get more power during gusty periods.
misunderstandings
As usual there are loads of misunderstandings about this issue. Firstly, BT does not decide the numbering system in the UK and hasn't for many, manny years. That's Ofcom's role (and, before that, Oftel), and they define what the structure of the numbering system is, the role of 0845, 0870 and so on.
Also to the paranoid AC, call centres and the like on 08xx numbers do not get the originating phone number if it is supressed by the caller (although it is passed through the phone network, it doesn't get as far as the terminating point). The only exception is the operators of emergency services, like 999 for obvious reasons.
The way that charging for 0845, 0870 and the like work is that the wholesale operator of the service (and there are lots of those) makes a termination charge to the originating network. It's a (regulated) charge, either at a fixed rate for some numbers or over a range of rates for premium rate numbers.
It is totally up to the retail seller on the originating network, whether that's fixed line, IP or mobile, how much to charge their customer. In fact all termination systems work in essentially the same way - it's just that the regulated rate for 0845, 0870 and so on is higher than for normal, geographical numbers. It is that higher termination charge that allows for revenue sharing with the company using the number.
And this is a breathrough?
So what's the big deal here - flash memory is non volatile and provides plenty enough read/write cycles to store the system state on a typical piece of domestic equipment. I suppose this approach might mean that the working memory is non-volatile so it simplifies the design.
However, some of this misses the point - it's simply not possible to run some of the other elements of a stand-by system, like wake-up triggers (timers, IR receivers, timer displays and so on) without consuming some power. Something like a PVR has to consume some energy just tracking the events it is programmed for. Getting down to sub-watt power envelopes for that isn't exactly difficult.
However, at least if the power is cut to trivial levels then maybe the hair-shirt individuals that see standby modes as the work of the devil will look at something more important. They've been giving the mistaken impression to the population at large, and some ill-educated media and politico types, that standby makes a significant difference to the energy consumption problems where it is, at most, a very small persentage of the total energy use of the country. There are also easy (techincally speaking) solutions to the challenge. In a variation Tesco's words, every litlle helps, but it helps very little.
More Ideas
Save the planet - give up bold face. Also use san serriffe fonts, clearly a waste of ink and toner. Also, think carefully about punctuation. Is that exclamation mark really necessary and wouldn't a full stop be sufficient? Colons and semi-colons should only be used in moderation and never where less extravagant punction would do.
Perhaps El Reg could do a survey on the most eco-friendly font. Something spindly and weey looking should do - and it would so much better fit the IT person's image.
@Chris Cooke
Of cause the Register makes this slang up. It's their major pastime as far as I can see. Anyway, "Leccy Lizzie" is obviously an attempted alliterative nod to the "Tin Lizzie", or Henry Ford's T Series that brought motorised private transport to the masses. In this case massed private electric propulsion (at least in part) to the self same average member of the public. That's very different to the electrically powered hyper-priced toys over which this organ normally salivates. This sort of thing is not the complete answer, but it is at least a practical idea which could eke out oil supplies, at least for commuters. Also, if it forgoes expensive, and potentially unstable, lithium batteries (a metal with distinctly limited total worldwide resources) in favour of more common materials, albeit at the expense of battery-only range, then that's a reasonable compromise to make.
What is needed now is a power distribution system which allows these type of vehicles to charge up more cheaply at times when electricity is in surplus. Given the inherent variability of many sources of renewables (wind, wave and solar all suffer from this), then a storage system is essential to make the best use of them. Probably this would require some sort of device, fitted within the car, that interacts with the electrical generation grid by modifying the charge rate according to instructions. Possibly this could piggy-back on the cellular phone system to avoid major infrastructure spend where two-way communication is required. Where cellphone coverage is an issue, one-way communication to the car could use frequencies with more reach. Combined with GPS in cars, the grid could fine-control the draw rate in different geographical areas according to available supplies. It might even be possible to reverse the flow to fill in for brief shortages (but that's trickier as it would require mods to household wiring). In effect, the on-board generator would be acting as a backup for the mains grid system. Such a device could also be used to "adjust" the price of electricity used for charging the car. It would also be possible for such a system to interact with commercial recharging systems (imagine charging stations in places of work, in car parks etc).
What people won't like is that this could be used for charging motorists an excise duty for electricity used to charge car batteries. I cannot imagine European countries long forgoing the revenues from fuel duty if electricity did take a large part of the market for travel. It's possible to imagine such devices being compulsory with big fines for bypassing them.
Performance?
2Tb will bring about yet another reduction in the I/O density (IOPs and MB/s per GB). It's in the geometry - the Greeks would have understood. Capacity scales by area, sequential read speed linearly and random IOPs scarcely at all...
Lack or QoS in IP
Blaming ADSL (as such) is completely the wrong target. The basic IP protocol lacks the necessary QoS to guarantee voice services over a WAN. It's subject to all sorts of issues with regard to jitter which are bound to affect voice quality. That's especially so if you are on long latency links such as internation ones.
If you want QoS with IP then MPLS is the way to go - but that doesn't come free. MPLS is perfectly possible over ADSL, but just expecting a contended data network service to offer the same service levels as voice is rather like expecting to be able to drive down a public motorway without being held up by the odd traffic jam. You need a "toll lane" for guaranteed service.
Power and reliability?
This looks like 600 servers with 64GB of memory each. Assuming that these are dual chip machines and with disks and so on then allow say 500W per server (including air-con overheads etc.) That's 300KW (or perhaps £250K per year in electricity at UK prices).
I think I'd ask questions about resilience to. With 600 servers there are going to be lots of failures - software and hardware. Unless this solution is inherently resilient to both, then service levels will be appalling unless the type of access pattern allows for a high degree of data partitioning so that only some queries fail. Duplicating memory is going to be expensive, although I guess that other approaches could be taken.
Personally I would go along with flash being faster, more reliable and much more power efficient. Just to do a rule-of-thumb calculation, 45MBps read flash is available (retail) for about $10 per GB. 40TB of this stuff is approximately $400K. Double it up for reilience and add a bit more for luck and you can have $1TB for $1M. Potential bandwidth is massive as (based on available devices) 40TB would give a theoretical bandwidth of about 12GB per second and you could read the whole lot in about 7 minutes. If the queries don't require every byte to be read you can do better (reading and processing 40TB in a dtabase would take a lot of CPU power).
Of course this is all theory and the hardware and software to connect this many commodity Flash devices is maybe not there, but it does show the potential in the technology.
Incidentally, commodity flash is very poor at random small writes, but the 45MBps devices I refer to can write at that rate sequentially.
Local Caching
I assume this will work by local media caches in the network closer to the point of consumption to which any service provider can connect (at the moment it all has to go back to central points). It won't help with capacity issues on the copper pair, but it will help greatly reduce the bandwidth futher upstream. That also includes the content providers bandwidth and server capacity.
In fact if this is done properly then it could be used as a way of distribution from "edge-of-network" as well by allowing the peering of caches across the core. Good for read only stuff - it would certainly help the likes of YouTube and allow them to distribute much higher bandwidth content without crippling network charges (that's if they have most of their access to a minority of the videos).
Add a bit more computing intelligence into the network at local points of presence (maybe on virtualisation famrs) and you could even distribute application functionality alongside content so that it is closer to the user with lower latency (for some things the speed of light - or at least the propogation peed of a signal down copper/optical fibre is the limiting factor). Of course producing standards for this is going to be tricky indeed.
Suing is not enough
Using civil law to sue people for stuff like this is not enough. The perpetrators of this were engaged in an atempt to extract money through fraud. It's the criminal law that needs to be thrown at these people. Maybe the threat of a prison sentence might deter them.
That's not to say that the ad brokers don't have some civil liabilities if they are being negligent in checking.
As for those people who suggest that nobody with their wits about them would have fallen for this. Well there are many, many people for whom a computer is a tool, and not an obsession, and they have a right (at the very least) to expect those perpetrating fraud to be dealt with appropriately and for systems and suppliers to at least use due diligence in vetting their customers. We wouldn't tolerate con-men making door-to-door calls, nor should we accept this sort of thing.
@Mark
"That isn't a privacy thing, it's defamation (if the context given for your image is bad, i.e. look at lardy). It's an insult. And insulting someone is or can be illegal."
Defamation is a false accusation or a misrepresentation of somebody's motives, actions, morals or similar to their disadvantage. Insults are only defamatory if they are grossly untrue. Calling (or implying) somebody is fat when they are is not defamation. Calling John Prescott both fat and a fathead is neither defamatory (as the first accusation is true) or defamatory as the second part comes under fair comment and there's plenty of evidence for it. Well I suppose he might try and sue somebody for it but even on the UK's ridiculous libel laws he won't get far. Insults can also be illegal (in UK law) if they are liable to cause a breach of the peace and there are some grounds - race, religion, sexuality and so on which can get you into hot water if they are deemed likely to lead to hatred.
However, calling somebody fat when they are is neither insulting or defamatory in any legal sense.
That's not to say that picking on somebody off the street at random to humiliate or poke fun at should be considered acceptable behaviour. I feel this ought to be the role of standards bodies rather than the sledge-hammer of the law. I'm suspicious of privacy laws when they stray into (literally) public areas or severely impinge freedom of speech. Unfortunately the press (in the UK at least) have hardly shown themselves to be responsive in the way that they tend to treat the press complaints commission as little more than a minor nuisance.
@Dodgy Geezer
It's simply not true that the image definitely breaches guidelines. It would require a court (and jury) to decide that one. It's potentially in breach - that's the problem. It's all highly subjective and would involve the judgement of a random group of people in a jury (well, as random as juries get). The actual affect of the image will depend on the person looking at it. There is no absolute standard in this case.
Of course the likelyhood is that if somebody did have a similar image then it's very possible that pressure would be put on the person in question to accept a caution rather tahn the lottery of a court (note that accepting a caution is not to be taken lightly - do that on this sort of charge and you are likely to find yourself barred from all sorts of careers and passtimes).
Note that I say similar image - this one is on the cover of an album which is widely available. Unless the police are to go round prosecuting everybody who has a copy (or an edict was made that they were to be destroyed based on a court test case) then I think it very unlikely that anybody would get a jury to convict and I suspect the police know that.
However, I would advise people not to publish this picture on a personal website - it is just not worth being provocative and, at the very least, some might find this sort of photo pushing the bounds of decency even if some others rate it as art. That some rock band wants to be provocative and push the boundaries is their choice (and they might get away with it on artistic grounds). Gratuitous use might just attract unwelcome attention.
This is the precautionary princple of course - and it is precisely this climate of fear that makes people and organisation act conservatively. Anything associated with risk and people fear that a legal steamroller will flatten them in its path. There are plenty of places now where what might be deemed "bad taste" will effectively terminate a career.
Illegal Image?
Two questions here - firstly, it's only an illegal image if/when a court rules on it given the grey area this is in. However, it might be considered to be prudent to not make such an image available if only for self interest reasons. There is, incidentally, a difference between a website which has a policy over how it manages and controls its own content (which is what Wikipedia does) and censorship in the control of what people can and cannot see elsewhere. There's a considerable difference between the two. Wikipedia is as a joint community venture, it is not anarchy or complete free-for-all and never has been. The author of this piece ought to be able to tell the difference.
However, the second issue is El Reg's provision of a direct link to the offending Wikipedia page. that surely is inviting readers to go and look at such an image (and maybe making them liable to legal sanction).
Best Heat Sink
Is, of course, the oceans. Pick a location where the sea is cold all the year round and use a heat exchanger to dump the heat. That's something the designers of Nuclear power stations have known about for years. Air cooling is never as reliable - even up a mountain (at least to accessible heights), the air can get warm. At high altitudes the air density is significantly lower which lowerstthe effectiveness of heat exchangers.
Of course you want to choose a place where the sea is cold all the year round - but the USA has Alaska, and the sea there is very cold (plus I assume they have significant hydro potential). Even further South the Pacific is generally pretty cold as there's not much of a continental shelf (although being on a subduction zone, then earthquakes and tsaunami are always a danger).
Of course being posted to Alaska might not be that popular....
By a 24 inch monitor
There are several very good 24 inch monitors out there with street prices around the £260 mark (and that's good ones with sub 5ms times - there are budget options available down to less than £175). That will give you a 1920 x 1200 display which is 540,000 pixels more than this 22 inch and more total surface area.
@BlueGreen The trouble with cache...
Speaking as somebody who deals regularly with high volume transactional databases measured in the many TB range on servers and enterprise arrays with many 10s of GB of cache then I can tell you what the real problems are or are not. Firstly log writes - the requirement here is minimal latency. Enterprise arrays with non-volatile write cache deal very nicely with that with sub ms write times. As the stage-out is asynchronous and sequential in nature then a RAID-5 arrangement works just fine (write two copies to two places for that extra level of confidence). SSDs don't offer much here. In general even random writes aren't too much of an issue as they are all cached and the stage-out is asynch (except in the extreme where the random write rate exceeds the IOP capability of the database which you've naturally striped far and wide).
Generally speaking hard disks are acceptable for sequential reads too - arrays and DBs with read-ahead, parallel access and so on mean that (generally) hard disks will do the job.
However, where hard disks do fail is on random reads. Latency is around 6-7ms for a random, physical read. Youe can keep throwing cache at the problem (and the right place to do that is the database cache, not the storage array), but at a certain point you get into the law of diminishing returns. We have OLTP databases where, even with a 99.8% cache hit rate, random read I/O is responsible for about 70% of DB transaction time. Throwing more cache at it has very little effect after a certain point because the locality of reference is too broad. It's still not cost effective to hold a 5TB database in physical memory - quite apart from the cost of the memory, all that RAM uses a great deal of power. There is also a more fundamental problem - the time taken to populate that cache at application/DB startup. What you will find in the early stages of starting your DB and application is that performance will be very poor as you have to do physical I/Os to populate that database. You can therefore get very lengthy startup times indeed - if it's bad enough that performance is hit you have to stage users in over a long time.
This is where SSDs are a potential saviour. If random read time can be brought down to sub-ms times over an FC SAN (about 0.5ms is about the limit at the moment due to latency in switch and fibre transitions) then it will lead to a huge increase in performance of some types of applications.
As for lifetime issues - well it's not as if hard drives last for ever. We have RAID systems to provide continual availability for storage based on physical disks. There are plenty of ways that SSDs could be configured to cope with "bit rot". For those that point to hard disks having a lifetime measured at half a million (or more) hours or 60+ years, then they do not. That's a common mistake as people mistake MTTF figures (meantime to fail) with device lifetime. MTTF is a statistical measure of the average number of operating hours between single failures for a given set of devices. Crucially this only applies within the rated lifetime of a device. After that failure rates increase rapidly. It is perfectly possible (indeed it is very often the case) that MTTF figures can be much greater than the rated operational lifetime of a device.
Nothing lasts for ever - SSDs won't, but neither do hard drives.
@Andrew Halliwell
Nope - Survivors is The Day of the Triffids without the perambulating killer plants, not the other way around, John Wyndham got there in 1951, well over 20 years before Terry Nation.
I sincerely hope that The Day of the Triffids is better than the 1962 film where the vicous vegetables just need a dose of salt water (the book ended with the main protagonists oin the Isle of White with the final result to the war between man and fiendish flora yet to be resolved).
If the BBC want to film a Wyndham novel then they ought to try The Kraken Wakes (which would make a good no-expense-spared-turn-your-brain-off Hollywood block-buster).
Silly Article
It's hardly worth commenting about the article itself as it is almost as silly as the TV programme.
However, there is a serious subject regarding the robustness of modern civilisations being so reliant on technology and specialists. Medieval Europe suffered a population loss of between 40 and 60% (estimates vary) duing the 14th century due to the Black Death. However, society bounced back as it was inherently resilient - communities were self-sufficient, the population were largely generalists and able to survive. It did have huge social effects - the start of the ending os feudal serfdom in England for a start.
However, we do not live in such a society - we live in one with a huge diversity of narrow specialists. It doesn't greatly matter if the cellphone network keeps running autonomously for a few days or weeks. When the limited number of specialists who understand a key componewnt die then so does your system. Western civilisation is based on a whole series of very finely balanced systems. Modern business and society places an emphasis on efficiency, specialisation and centralisation. It builds in resilience to what might be called minor catastrophes - say the loss of a single oil refinery. However, it is not robust at a systemic level - look at what happened with the petrol price protests when fuel distribution was stopped for just a few days. Look at what happened to those much vaunted financial risk assessments by individual banks once the trickle of defaults turned into a cascade.
The one obvious thing on Survivors (which, in the TV series at least, must have been showing death rates of 99.99% or more is that at least the population was reduced to a level where sustainable approaches using primitive technology could be used (and lots of tinned food). However, the reality if one of the key components on which western civilisation depends would be unpleasant indeed. Maybe not a 99.99% death rate but distinctly nasty.
For those who point to modern technological understanding being too good for such a catastrophe to happen - well there have been plenty of civilisations that have failed before due to environmental or other issues. It would be complacent (to say the least) to think we are immune and we also have this little problem that the World's population is perhaps 15 times greater than at the time of the black death.
New Scientist ran a special on this a few months ago - worth looking up, especially for politicans and business leaders. Many El Reg hacks have this entertaining, almost Victorian complacency about the inevitability of progress. This article is as shot full of holes as the TV series.
El Reg and the dangers of WEB2.0 again...
Another line from El Reg hacks decrying the dangers of Web 2.0 to go along with their continuous nagging about Wikipedia (an system, which despite it's faults, has hugely added to everyday life). It's about time they stopped worshipping at the feet of Andrew Keen and his dreadful book.
Anyway, the ridiculous thing about this is that it has nothing to do with Web 2.0. It's just another bit of propoganda from a well-funded interest group. So they selectively report? Well so does pretty well every other interest and pressure group and political party you can name. If it wasn't on the web, it would be in ads, or meetings. The difference is now that there are channels for less well funded people to answer the points.
The protection against misinformation and selective use of statistics is a well educated and rational populace who listen to cases with a sceptical outlook. This particular issue is a propaganda war between two sides, and has nothing to do with Web2.0 and was going on long before the Internet became part of people's lives.
If anybody wants to see what life would be like when only "proper" journalists could report and comment on scientific studies, then take a look at Ben Goldacre's Bad Science site (and other, related, sceptics in the blogosphere). Journalists are no arbiters of truth with some precious insight into the state of the world. Some are good, some are bad, sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong.
In this case, read up about it - the true followers don't change their minds anyway. If you are in the happy (well, I assume its a happy position) of not having to defend an instinctive belief, then it can be quite rewarding.
@Dave
Well there's nothing like being patronising. Of course idle processes don't use cores, although there is always some background activity gomg on and it is increasing. However, there are desktop applications which do use multiple cores - I know, I have some of them. Image and video editing are the obvious ones. Multi-media replay, "immersive" games, ray tracing, engineering simulations - these are all examples where extra cores can be used.
OK - most of the time these cores will be idle most of the time, but with modern power management they don't have to be wasteful, and the cores can be there when they are needed. Some of us do rather more demanding things with PCs than type things into Word. I use a four core machine at home, and there are times - often lasting an hour or more, when it is running almost flat out. I'd much rather use software that can use multiple threads efficiently rather than consuming mega larger amounts of power at wastefully high clock rates (power consumption increases disproportionately with clock speed - clever power management and suitable software is vastly more energy efficient).
Life Values
Of course it is a moot point to consider if a country is actually advancing if the inhabitants spend more of their time watching TV, gossiping on the phone, watching YouTube, playing online games and the like rather than actually doing something...
But then Ofcom are in the game of justifying their own saleries based on what they deem to be of value.
VMs don't solve the multi-threading problem...
Oh dear - you don't resolve a multi-threading application problem by running lots of inidividual copies in their own VMs. You still have the same parallelisation problem - just that you now have to load balance over multiple operating systems. Of course there is still a use for techniques for consolidating lots of individual servers onto one box using VMs, but that should not be mistaken for getting more throughput through a single application. There are ways of exploiting multiple OS images for some typles of applications - network load balancing web servers for instance, but generating lots of VMs just to exploit more cores is a wasteful exercise - all those VMs need operating systems, memory and CPU overheads, IP addresses, configurations. It's called VM sprawl. Load balancing over multiple physical servers for resilience reasons is fairly sensible. Load balancing over multiple VMs on a single system when there are better ways is just wasteful.
It's much better natively to use environments which can use multiple threads within a single (or more limited) number of OS images. Any decent commercial database can do this, as will J2EE and any number of other run time environments. For most commercial, multi-user systems you often get sufficient parallelisation through supporting multiple users and hence transactions (a single transaction using multiple threads is rare and not usually necessary).
On the desktop the last thing I want is a dozen VMs. About the only advantage I can think of is limiting the scope of any virus infection (although I now have to manage multip[le VMs). Even if I do have multiple VMs there is only so much multi-tasking I can manage in my head. I just can't directly use that many very explicitly separate work threads. Admittedly most desktop applications do not exploit or need multiple threads. For the most part these don't have highly demanding CPU requirements. However, there are some that do, especially in the area of multi-media handling. Video, Audio and Photographic processing are examples of application areas where modern software does exploit multiple threads. These are, of course, specialist areas but for that very reason there are algorithms and software libraries that do exploit threading.
I'm rather less enamoured of hardware threads though - these are virtual CPUs and, whilst they can increase throughput, you can pay a very large penalty in damaging single thread speed once contention does set in. At the very least it confuses basic system performance numbers through non-linearity of reported CPU usage when compared with core utilisation.
Lithium Supplies
It sounds beleivable, although I wonder just how much useful energy those solar panels will collect. However, is there a coming problem with Lithium supplies. According to Wikipedia (yes - I know that el Reg considers this to be the greatest source of incorrect information in the known universe), then the estimated recoverable Lithium reserves amount to about 35 million tonnes (of which known reservers are 11 million tonnes). The US alone has an estimated 250 million passenger vehicles. So that's about 140Kg per US passenger vehicle. If we take that worldwide then maybe we are down to about 30Kg per passenger vehicle (if we look at known reserves then it's about 10Kg per vehicle).
No doubt somebody will should "Club or Rome" at me now - but before people see this as the saviour of personal transport we had better have some idea about the fundamental supply position.
Enforcement
Does anybody know if there is legislation in place which allows the BBC, or their nominated enforcement company, to check perform large scale checks address checks with ISPs?
Of course it is currently possible for a copyright holder to force disclosure of the name and address of an ISP customer for a given IP address at a point in time provided that there is reasonable evidence of copyright violation.
This is wholly different - there will be millions of IP addresses which access this, and the great majority (it is to be assumed) will be license payers. Just because you are watching TV online is no evidence that you are doing so without a license. Performing large scale checks against TV license records would require massive processing and, unless allowed for in legislation, would no doubt break the Data Protection Act.
I suspect a rather more likely option is that viewers will be required to enter some unique details about their TV license or themselves (possibly via a logon of some sort). If excessive numbers of sessions are detected with a given identifier then that could provide sufficient evidence of wrong-doing for investigations to get going.
Personally I can't imagine that there will not be some system like this - I'm sure it won't be like iPlayer with open replay allowed to any UK IP address without any credentials being provided.
Not well explained
As others have pointed out, if this was somebody forging a copy of somebody else's boarding pass then the head count would pick it up. If people go back to the original Atlantic Magazine article they will find the exposee is how to bypass the US government's no-fly scheme by creating a second boarding pass matching other identification (like a driver's license or passport). The airlines don't check the "no fly" list immediately before you get on the 'plane - they only check the other ID you have.
Legacy means
Legacy is just what we use to call yesterday's big fashionable idea that failed to deliver only to be replaced by the latest IT bandwagon that will disappoint in turn. No doubt we will never learn.
@wear and tear
This is less of a response to stolen credit cards (usually that's pretty obvious when that has happened) than to online frauds and cloned cards. Having had that happen to me twice, then I am strongly in favour os one time password systems. The current PIN system and online checks are wide open to replay attacks - a one time password system will eliminate those possiblities.
Stopping Distance
It's stepping on dangerous legal grounds to comment on the particular merits of this case, but for those know-it-alls who post breezily about stopping in time, bear in mind that the official stopping distance from 70MPH, including reaction time, according to the Highway Code is 96 metres or the length of a football pitch. That's a little over three seconds travelling at that speed. How many people leave a 100 metre gap or over three seconds to the next car given the crowded state of our motorways. If you are unsighted by a vehicle in front, or it's dark and there's an obstruction in the road, then this sort of thing can happen frighteningly fast. So beware, and don't get complacent. Anybody could get caught out.
That's a completely different issue to texting - that's up to the courts to decide.
@jim
Well if you do go round shooting "dear", especially "old dears", then you should manage a jolly good bag. It's easy, but not very good sport as they can't move that fast - those old ladies aren't that sprightly.
I think that Tom Lehrer summed it up well in the "Hunting Song" - something that could almost have been written for Dick Cheney. However, I'm not sure we can blame PETA for the fate of his victim as, as I rather suspect he wasn't a member of the organisation.
Sea kittens
Good stuff - also notable is Peta's recent rebranding of fish as "sea kittens" to improve their public image.
http://www.peta.org.uk/sea_Kittens
You can even make your own "sea kitten" complete with choices such as Fu Manchu and German Moustaches. Hours of endless fun for children playing with racial stereotypes.
Enforcement
If there is a judgement against SourceForge then it's difficult to see what the French courts can do. It's not like Google who make money in many countries and have some for of legal presence there for commercial reasons. I suspect that the worse that the French courts could do is to get ISPs to block local access to the Sourceforge website ,which wouldn't go down to well in France and would, I suspect, have very little effect on Sourceforge itself.
As for the intent versus capable thing - well intent is difficult to prove where there are legitimate uses for software. It don't mean that the French courts won't take that view - but national interpretations would vary on this.
@fraser
"It is most certainly not the job of a juror to go away and do a little research, with the possible exception of if there is some sort of formal exam at the end of this piece of research. Call it a law degree if you will. ;)"
That's a classic "argument from authority" (as is your IT support argument - surprise, surprise I also have worked in IT and for a long time - anecdotes about the damage caused by those with a little knowledge can equally be counteracted with the damage done by the completely naive computer user - or even being able to discuss problems with them).
Anyway, I think I ought to point out that a law degree qualifies people in the law. It doesn't in itself qualify them in statistics, science, finance, forensics, psychology or a whole host of other technical subjects. In particular, becoming a barrister makes you an advocate. It trains and picks out those that can use tools of persuasion, like emotional arguments, the subtle undermining of credibility of witnesses, dealing in spurious certainties and the like. Successful barristers are something like legally trained actors - knowing how to deal with people in the context of the court's arcane laws. It's no coincidence that government and the top echelons of industry are stuffed to the gills with lawyer/advocates; people who know how to manipulate and persuade. Tony Blair, a man of somewhat limited intellectual capability, was a superb advocate and manipulator of people (if you doubt, that, read the hatchet job that Robert Harris did on him in the scarcely disguised portrait of Blair in his book Ghost).
But back to the possibly even more pernicious subject of expert witnesses. They too often plea the "argument from authority" position. These are not theoretical concerns - one of those (the Sally Clarke and like cases) I've already mentioned. Another example is the disgraceful case of Shirley McKie, a policewoman wrongly accused of perjury. The case hinged totally on expert witnesses from the Scottish Criminal Record Office testifying that her thumbprint was found at a murder scene. The police had been keen on eliminating unidentified prints as it provided a potential line of defence for the accused. As is routine in these cases, the prints were all checked against serving officers, and this thumbprint was identified as belonging to Shirley McKie, a policewoman who had been in the area. However, on being challenged, she maintained that she had not entered the house. Not only was she sacked by the police force, she was prosecuted for perjury in 1999. The most pertinent point here, was that the "expert witnesses" from the Scottish Criminal Record Office flawed identification of the thumbprint was defended on the grounds that they were the experts, and mere laymen would not be able to appreciate their years of skills. In fact it was no such thing - the basis of finger print matching is fairly straightforward and, for a large part, is a matter of judgment and not science. The basic criteria are not defined statistically in a truly objective way - it's a game of probabilities, especially with partial prints. In this case it was clear to all that the finger print matching was highly uncertain once the basic principles of the process were established (and it was no small thing - three witnesses from the Scottish Criminal Record Office all testified the same). This case is to be subject to a public enquiry, such are the implications.
Back to IT. We might also look at all the false convictions (and the suicides) following the highly flawed "Operation Ore" said to have identified thousands of users of child porn in the UK. Many people were convicted (and even more had lives destroyed) by accusation, and what is worse, cases that went through courts on faulty expert analysis. Again the line from the prosecutors was an "Argument from authority" one - that the expert's view was sacrosanct and a mere layman (which include the lawyers) couldn't be expected to understand the logic. Trust me - I'm an expert was the line.
So I rest my case. Of course IT people make crap advocates, so I don't expect this to sway any jury. I don't believe that that most lawyers make great seekers of truth. It is just not an analytical subject in the sense that a scientist would recognise. Indeed most scientists are not favoured by lawyers as expert witness - they tend to be too measured and apply too many caveats. Lawyers prefer the type of scientist-expert witness that has a clear view, a theory, a line that they will argue. Eventually the some of the worst of these "scientific" zealouts get found out, but only after huge damage has been done to people and lives. Without educated people who can analyse what they are told, then we are lost.
Out best defense is an educated (and self-educating) populace, but I will readily admit that in a world which will listen to the crack-pot views of Prince Charles, that the average jury might not contain many such people.
A well know corporation will already be onto this
I'm sure detailed and intrusive satellite images will turn up on Google Extraterrestrial some time very soon.
@fraser
Doing a bit of research on the Internet might actually give people a bit more of a clue as to whether the barrister is talking rubbish or not. Barrister's are not neutral - they are paid to make the best possible case for their client. So called expert witnesses are often not independent either. The days when a bunch of illiterate peasants were wheeled in to pass judgement on the basis of the persuasiveness of the respective advocates ought to be confsigned to history. Having better educated jurors ought to facilitate that.
Of course the chances of our education system actually producing such well educated and intelligent individuals (especially when defence barristerrs tend to reject anybody vaguely educated) are minimal, and it is the principles that count. Somebody who cares to research the nature of DNA or fingerprint evidence rather than just be persuaded is a good thing in principle.
That's nothing at all to do with attention span problems - that's a completely different thing to people actually doing a bit of reading up on subject matters. A basic knowledge of probabilities would have immediately revealed the nonsense behind the Sally Clarke cot death conviction for instance. Being able to bring a sceptical mind to bear on evidence is a good thing - the judiciary don't much like the idea that people in jury's have independent minds.
@Pete
I, like you have no debts - quite the reverse. However, if you think this won't affect you then think again. Taxes can hit you, the value and return on your savings can be hit. For a 40% tax payer then it's already the case you can't match inflation (especially if measured against RPI and not CPI). With driving down interest rates, then even the absolute value of liquid assets could be reduced in real terms (that's already happened to things like pension funds). Then, even if you do find yourselof immune to the financial implications, there are very likely to be social consequences of high unemployment which you can't escape. Many of us also have relatives and friends that aren't going to be so well placed which is of at least personal concerns.
Also don't think of just moving abroad to escape all this - unless you've locked your savings into a solid foreign currency, then the value of sterling assets could decline.
A very good article in the Telegraph last week pointed out that one of the largest losers from this current financial shake out are the people who have been prudent. Who have saved, who have put money into long term investments. Where has that money - put into stocks and shares, into bank and telecommunications gone?
So we had better hope that somebody comes along who is better placed to identify a more stable basis for the UK economy than that self-declared financial genius Gordon Brown.
Ask not for whom the financial bell tolls - it tolls for you (apologies to John Donne).
banning ...
"If legislative force is required to reduced the world's car-fuel consumption, simply banning engines above 1.6 litres from domestic vehicles would be a big start"
It's a seriously bad idea for governments to start dictating technology like that.
It makes slightly more sense to legislate on outcomes (like the EU target of new passenger cars hitting 130gm CO2 per km by 2012). What makes even more sense is to provide financial "incentives" to meet environmental targets. That way you can get the market to work for you.
Tidal synchronisation
Lots of clever comments here on how you can get more power out by synchronising the pumping out the reservoir and filling it up at the right points in the tidal cycle to get out more than you put in. Well that's all well and good, but this is meant to be a reserve power store, emptied out (or filled up with potential energy if you wish) when there is a surplus of online capacity and filled up (emptied out of potential energy) when there is a deficit of online power. The problem is that there is no way of synchronising the tidal range and these events.
In fact if you used this scheme to store surplus power from any tidal barrier schemes then it';s guaranteed to happen at pretty nearly the worst time (well unless you electricaly link up with a tidal barrier system several thousaand km away).
Cunning plan to extend Holland...
Given the Dutch are past masters are reclaiming land, then possibly some of the colossal costs of this scheme could be offset by using the material dredged out to produce saleable land.
Does anybody have a quick calculator on the costs of dredging out this lot? It would be relatively easy to do the energy calculations. Obviously this mamoth bucket would have to be emptied and refilled many, many times over just to get back in energy equilibrium.
Quite apart from anything else, it is ingeneous, and there are plenty of places off of the east coast of England that could be adapted to this purpose. We might even be able to reconnect the UK to the European mainland this way (might upset the ship owners though). Perhaps we could build that replacement to Heathrow in the Thames estuary after all based on material dredged from thes things.
Giga engineering might be back - Brunel would have loved it.
@AC
Thanks for this - I'm by no means new to the forum, but have not had the pleasure of reading amanfromMars's stream of consciousness material that brings novel constructions to the English language. I will bear this in mind in future and treat his stuff the same way as some of James Joyce's rather less structured prose.
@Dan Elsom
Even 133x isn't that fast. Theoretically you get about 20MBps and the fastest CF around (300X) should give up to 45MBps. However, that's theoretical and often cheap CF cards are asymmetric in performance. You get far faster reads than writes.
However, the real problem with CF Nand flash will be that random write speed will be atrocious. You could get as few as 10 writes per second against the 80 random writes or more you would get from the most modest of laptop drives.
So for writing large sequential files, such as a Digital camera might produce, then (moderately) cheap flash might be acceptable, but as a general purpose disk replacement they will be dreadful. The SSD drives have got extra things to speed this up somewhat, but prices for now are high. However, flash prices are dropping through the floor so hold on.
For the most part, the best way of speeding up an old PC is to add more memory. Putting in a faster disk has more limited benefits and cheap flash would be awful.
@george
And of course there are pedestrian crossings at all convenient points in housing estates,and village roads and all the suburban roads and carparks...
No, I thought not so another facile comment. There have been studies already started into this - above about 25mph then tyre noise apparently suffices, but at slower speeds people either underestimate distances or don't hear the vehicle if it's further away. It's not just blind people either.
The changes required are modest and they don't need to be intrusive. Various blind organisations are sponsoring research on this and it is readily resolvable.
Of course this has nothing at all to do with faked V8 noises so that petrol- (electromotive-) heads like Jeremy Clarkson can go into ecstacy.
@Jamie
Of course you can come up with an explanation you like to interpret the Bibilical creationist story in whatever you like. It's very easy to come up with allegorical interpretations or redefine the words as you see fit and, of course it's impossible to prove it is wrong.
But that utterly and totally misses the point - it's not science; any explanation that is not, in principle, falsifiable immediately identifies itself as unscientific. What might be the point is if the nature of science as a methodology was properly taught in classrooms then truly people might learn to think for themselves. They might then understand the difference between different methods of understanding.
It would be a jolly good idea if some of the more rigorous branches of philosophy were taught in schools (and to schoolteachers) and then we might not get this sort of nonsense of mixing up creationist theories and evolution as being equally valid interpretations of the same phenomena when, in fact, the former is based on an axiomatic faith system.
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