The OP was referring to the use of recovery images of any sort (whether partition of optical disk) rather than supplying a proper Windows Installation disk. As it is, if your PC dies and you can't get a like-for-like replacement or for certain upgrades (especially mother boards), your recovery disk is useless as it's tied into specifics about the hardware config. Of course, the OEM end-user licenses specifically tie licences into a particular PC (without defining what that means in detail), but for many, access to a proper install disk at least allows for the possibility (activation issues allowing) of installing a new motherboard or the like.
CPU cycles as the most precious data centre resource...
"Virtualised multi-core, multi-threaded servers are impatient. They want data for the apps in their virtual machine instantly. It's odd; now that CPU cycles are cheaper than ever before, they are treated as the most precious resource in the data centre."
Rarely have a seen a case of missing the point more thoroughly than this quote. It's not that people are worried about "wasting" cheap CPU. It's that latency time on disk I/O has failed to keep up with processors. In consequence, for many applications, the application is bottlenecked by the storage. I know of many apps which spend 90% or more of their time I/O bound. So the issue is not "wasting" CPU time, but simply not getting through workloads fast enough or giving quick enough end-user response times. It's not the CPU time that's being seen as precious, but the poor end user who's sitting in a call centre with an impatient customer.
As for some sort of direct-access memory storage model over PCIe being faster, then of course. But just how relevant is that to most large real-world apps. Firstly it's an extremely good idea to establish a clear distinction between persistent storage and volatile working space. For this you need clear and controlled access methods with controlled APIs that can provide for security, protection from rogue apps, clean restart points, data sharing and much else. Those APIs can be at various levels - blocks, files, database etc. but exist they must. Those are also ideal points to establish shared access models and are hence ideal break points for network access (as anybody whose worked on large application architectures can agree).
Then there is the issue of just how many apps can exploit ultra-low latency times. I know of many real-world apps which are I/O bound at 10ms access times. However, I know of none which would be in that position with 100 micro-second latency times, an access time perfectly within the bounds of what can be achieved on common network protocols, such as FC or 10Gbps Ethernet. Indeed in many cases the largest element of that delay is not in the time on the wire, but in navigating the software stacks.
This is not to deny that there might be some specialist uses of direct memory persistent access models over PCIe, but these are likely to be very low functions. Perhaps the networked storage units themselves (albeit dealing with single point of failure issues is important).
It's only perfectly black if it doesn't reflect any incident light. Even in a completely darkened room with black walls there will be some incident light from other parts of the screen, even if it's only very small. Once manufacturers start using terms like "infinite" smell marketing hype.
I'd suggest a lesson in basic lens theory for the reviewer. The reason that f/32 is soft is nothing at all to do with the quality of the lens, but is just a function of the small aperture size. Any lens stopped down to F/32 (if that's an available setting) will exhbit the same effect. It's caused by the diffraction of the small aperture. In fact a 16MP APS-C sensor will gradually suffer increased levels of diffraction softening from around f11 onwards. By f32 it will be severe as the Airy disc covers about 8 pixels.
Having worked for a very large Oracle customer, I think some of the moves that Oracle are taking are looked on with a lot of suspicion. Declaring something close to war on HP is going to cause massive disruption to many customers as migrating massive enterprise apps and, especially databases, between hardware platforms is a massively expensive and disruptive. Whilst Oracle are continuing to support x64 and Linux, it's notable that they are explicitly not releasing some of the software technology used in the Exadata OEL cluster into their general releases. I was also in receipt of all sorts of FUD from Oracle sales staff over the support for Linux on x64 vs Oracle on SPARC. The reasons are clear - just compare the price of virtually any standard component on a SPARC server versus an x64 one (memory is a good place to start).
That leaves customers with the distinct (and not unreasonable) impression that Oracle are hell-bent on locking in customers for the entire hardware and software stack. Once a customer finds themselves in this position, costs start ratcheting up and the price of extricating yourself is huge. The industry has seen this before, and new projects will be put onto more cost-effective platforms. That's what killed DEC when they over-priced VAX and what drove almost all new applications off of IBM mainframes.
Also, I find El Register's lionising of the T4. Unfortunately Oracle have declined to publish the sort of low level benchmarks that allow customer's to work out if these are practical alternatives to M series machines. There are a bunch of carefully selected application benchmarks which tell you very little save a very strong suspicion that they've been chosen because they fit the heavily threaded multi-threaded nature of the T4. However, many large corporations will have had some apps which perform disastrously on T series due to the very slow single thread performance.
The advice for anybody looking at large scale future projects is to be very wary about lock-ins to proprietary architectures. Given that, I expect that Oracle will continue to lose ground.
"wonder what will happen next time it's struck by lightning?"
Those of us who've had the hellish experience of being in an IKEA store at a weekend will drop to our knees and think there is a god as the place burns to the ground.
This was not a case of driving a car that suddenly developed a fault, it was continuing to drive a car that was in a dangerous condition. There's no excuse for continuing to drive it like that - there are call-out services. The car was clearly in a known, dangerous state and if an accident at a junction had resulted then the driver would have been liable. Vehicles can go wrong at any time - we need to be sensible enough to know what is potentially very dangerous.
So this one is a user error. Airline pilots would be grounded if they took a plane up with a potentially lethal fault.
You demonstrate a common misunderstanding of MTBF with the operational lifetime of a device. The MTBF of a device is simply the average number of operational hours between failures. So if your company has 1,000 of these SSDs, you would expect one failure every 1,250 hours (or roughly one ever 52 days). However, the working lifetime of the SSD might only be 10 years. What this means is that after 10 years roughly 70 of these SSDs would have failed, but it might be that by that they've reached the end of their operational lifetime and they start failing at a much higher rate.
In fact, MTBF tells you nothing directly about the operational lifetime of a device. That has to be expressed separately, and it might be constrained by something other than the passage of time - in the case of SSDs, that measure might be the number of write cycles, whilst with HDDs powered-up time might be the relevant figure. With a car engine, it might be total mileage.
Of course it's right to be sceptical about MTBFs as these are not independently reported (and at the beginning of the devices life, they are extrapolated.
Surely, even in the land of the free, this one must be attracting the attention of the legal authorities. I suspect recklessly firing cannon balls in an urban area might just have breached some local laws.
I'm dubious over the validity of using measurements of the value of currency over time in calculating relative costs. Given that the vast majority of our current GDP comprises products, technologies and services that either did not exist in 1765, or would be so altered as to be completely unrecognisable, it's not a great measure of the real cost of something like HMS Victory to either the exchequer, or the country as a whole. Also, the country has a vastly higher (inflation corrected) GDP these days.
A much better way of looking at HMS Victory's cost is to take it as a proportion of the country's GDP, total State Expenditure and defence budget. According to the estimates at http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/index.php?year=1765, UK GDP was £89.4m in 1765 with £12m state expenditure of which defence was £6.1m. For those that care for such things, the national debt, at £133m, was considerably higher as a proportion of GDP than it is today.
The £63,176 capital cost was equivalent to a little over 1% of one year's defence budget, just over 0.5% of one year's state expenditure and approximately 0.07% of a year's GDP.
Current estimates are that a single one of the new carriers will cost approximately £6.2bn (although nobody really believes that will be the final figure). Taking this as a proportion of 2010's GDP, public expenditure and defence budget (£1,453bn, £660,6bn and £43.2bn respectively) this places one carrier at approximately 14.3% of the defence budget, 0.9% of state expenditure and 4.3% of GDP.
Whatever way you look at it (inflation adjusted, %GDP, %State spending or %defence budget), these new carriers look like expensive naval toys. Even in terms of the country's total output, they are something like 60x more expensive than HMS Victory. I suspect that Victory's 0.07% of GDP might get you a submarine or three frigates.
Of course the headline is nonsense - £16m is just 0.001% of the GDP, so in terms of national affordability, that 5 year maintenance figure is about 1/70th of the initial capital cost.
Very convenient for the Swiss, not exactly known for having a lot of music, film or other such content which citizens of other countries might wish to download. Now, of course, should any other country want to break any of their companies' many patents, they might take a different line. In the meantime they will carry on acting as a convenient location for many a despot's ill-gotten gains and facilitating wealthy tax evaders.
Of course if a space ship confines itself to space and planetary bodies without atmospheres they do not have to be aerodynamic. However, short of some magical property that allows spacecraft entering a planet's atmosphere to avoid the normal laws of aerodynamic, it would seem rather sensible to make them work well in that environment. After all, the Space Shuttle was so designed as were the re-entry capsules for manned missions using disposable rockets. So the alien's choice of an aerodynamic saucer shape might appear quite sensible, albeit unnecessary for the mother ship which is presumably sitting out beyond the atmosphere.
It's notable that Arthur C Clarke (who cared about such things) had the Discovery 1 as a functional, deep-space design and not an aerodynamic one.
Incidentally, Prof Brian Cox once acted as an adviser on a Sci Fi film, and he noted that one thing which always had to be included was sound effects in a vacuum. Space battles simply don't seem to be convincing without those.
Indeed the Sun - and a lot of it. However, one advantage of artificial hydrocarbons is that the can be readily transported, as the oil industry demonstrates daily. However, that would still leave the enormous problem of covering millions of square km of suitably sunny land with the appropriate plant and keeping it supplied with fresh water etc.
Humans use roughly 500EJ of primary energy a year whilst about 3,000EJ (equivalent) of biomass is created every year. If all 500EJ of primary fuel (the great majority of which are fossil) was to be replaced by artificial hydrocarbons, that would be equivalent to about 17% of the World's annual biomass generation. That's a lot of land area - in the millions of square km, and getting enough freshwater to (say) the deserts rather than displacing agricultural or natural rain-forest and the like is going to be an engineering project, the like of which has never been dreamed of to date.
Congratulations on completely an utterly missing the point. The issue is about the thermodynamic efficiency of the photosynthesis process. What that means is how much of the energy in light gets transformed plant (or other biological) material in terms of its embedded energy content (basically the thermal energy when it's burned). Yes, CO2 is necessary, and yes (up to a limit) more CO2 will allow plants to grow faster, but not beyond the limit given by the theoretical thermodynamic efficiency of photosynthesis (and in practice, not that high). So if photosynthesis-based processes cannot, in practice, turn more than 6% of the energy in light into bio-fuels, that's what you are stuck with - however much CO2 you throw at it. The energy produced is simply limited by the light.
Theoretically, the inherent photo-chemistry of the photo-synthetic processes might be able to reach about 10%, but that would mean engineering living organisms which had virtually zero overhead and an improbably high level of efficiency of other processes. Evolution has had about 3.5 billion years to work on the problem.
In comparison, good solar panel thermodynamic efficiency can reach about 20% with the theoretical limits approaching 40% using silicon (albeit only reachable in lab type tests at the moment).
Either way, it's going to take an enormous amount of land and fresh water (and maybe phosphate and potassium) to generate all the artificial hydrocarbons we would need to replace fossil fuels.
One little problem is that that photo synthesis in real organisms is less than 6% thermodynamically efficient in converting light into plant material (often much less). That's before anything required to turn it into hydrocarbons (either by external processing or directly within the organism). The basic chemical reactions allow for somewhat higher theoretical efficiency, but just how well that can be engineered is debatable. After all, evolution has had the odd few billion years to work on the issue.
What this means is that huge areas would be required to produce all the hydrocarbons we currently use. After all, for the great majority of human kinds history, bio-fuels are all we had at vastly lower population densities and levels of personal consumption. No doubt we can improve on growing trees to burn as fuel, but it's very unlikely to match using up the stored energy resources laid down over hundreds of millions of years as the direct, and indirect result of photosynthesis.
What we really require is something which is much more efficient at turning solar (and thermo-nuclear) power into synthetic hydrocarbons which are, the article says, conveniently energy dense and (relatively) safe and cheap to store and handle.
"He has argued that repeats of the programme would put his return to work at risk."
In which case the BBC would have done us all a favour. Given the amount of damage a 44 tonne truck could do (3-40 times the kinetic energy of a car at the same speed), it occurs to me that the last thing we want is a driver twice over the legal limit driving one of these things, let alone being on a mobile phone as well. It also rather brings into question the sentencing a £115 fine and a one year ban is fairly mild given just how dangerous such a vehicle can be capable of far more damage than a car.
Finally, surely one has to wonder about those recruiting truck drivers if the it's the appearance on a BBC programme which would be the deciding factor. I would rather hope that prospective employers would take more note of his actual conviction and ban, or do such matters no form part of recruitment?
If this device can latch onto any unprotected WiFi network there is a very real possibility that the owner might be deemed to have committed an offence in the UK. This story from El Reg in 2008.
"BT are legally required to connect a telephone line to any residence or premises in the UK."
There is a caveat to that - it's cost-limited to £3,400 pound. If the installation costs exceed that figure it's a cost to the customer. Having said that, it takes an awful long time time to recover £3,400 at wholesale line rental rates, especially when such costs include maintenance, rates and so on.
I'd be more convinced about these comparative reviews if there was anything approaching a blind test. As it is, all this talk of superior audio and video quality is just so subjective as to be useless. Of course, the expense of doing properly controlled blind tests is enormous, but as it stands all this impressions stuff has to be taken with a large pinch of salt. For much the same reason, the Hi-Fi mags long ago went into unknowing self-parody propagating myths and pseudo-scientific nonsense.
I'm waiting for the first comparative review of HDMI cables, then the end will surely have come.
I have read this several times and I also fail to see where this breaks the second law of thermodynamics. If there's a temperature difference, and this can be exploited to produce electricity, then there is surely no contradiction. What would be a contradiction with the second law is if useful energy would be extracted from a device at a uniform temperature.
Just calling something "waste heat" is not sufficient - that's just a qualitative term. A thermal power station's waste heat might be a horticulturist's useful source of energy for heating a glasshouse. The clever trick would be to extract any useful work once temperatures have been equalised with the environment. Then somebody can claim a miracle.
"The breakthrough when flash becomes affordable is thought by many people to be TLC (triple-level cell) – 3-bit multi-level cell NAND – which adds a third more capacity to flash cells."
Wouldn't going from 2 to 3 bits per cell add a half, not a third more capacity?
I rather suspect that reconnecting many hundreds of individual pairs under considerable time pressure to restore service isn't going to result in 100% accuracy. Maybe the person who screwed up by sending out tens of thousands of email addresses might be stuffed down a manhole to splice wires as a form of punishment.
After all, we know that time pressure is no excuse, especially when there's important things like The Register's email list to deal with. It's not like restoring telecoms services is anything like as important as that.
Are these things being assessed by structure engineers? Are there engineering and cost criteria, or is it just aesthetics?
The existing lattice designs were produced for a reasons such as strength, resilience and economy of materials. It strikes me that some of these new designs are quite pretty but will present engineering issues. For instance, those single column designs will surely need much deeper foundations than something more widely based. The central column will have to survive quite high bending forces and will either have to be quite large diameter, or built of thicker/stronger materials, or possibly both. Also, how will these designs cope with changes in direction of the grid lines? That inevitably ends up with high side forces (although I suppose that pylons in such location could be built to a stronger standard whilst maintaining the aesthetics.
Finally, I suspect single columns are more vulnerable to sabotage than lattice arrangements which are actually more resistant to damage. Indeed, a lattice design can be engineered to allow replacement of failing/corroded members without having to dismantle the whole thing. I don't see how this can be done with these single column designs.
Let's stop ISPs looking at IP addresses and other fantasies...
"But headers contain IP addresses, which may or may not be personal information which ISP's aren't supposed to look at."
Isn't it a trifle difficult for an ISP to route a packet with looking at the IP addresses?
Of course the issue is what such information can reasonably be used for, not whether it can be looked at. Clearly the header contents have to be looked at for reasons of routing, traffic balancing, intrusion detection, general traffic management, capacity planning, service management and dozens of other legitimate purposes.
The whole net neutrality debate is characterised by the use of emotive terms playing to the audience and precious little to do with the real technical issues of making efficient and reliable uses of networks.
SUN used to at least publish T-series friendly basic processing benchmarks (like SPECjbb). Now Oracle are even suppressing these. These show-piece application benchmarks are all very well, but they bear no resemblance to how these ERP packages tend to get configured and used in real life.
Sensible people will be asking how do these machines compare with x64 on throughput, response times, costs, power consumption and so on. That's where the real competition is.
nb. T series performance can be a very tricky thing - once those H/W threads start competing for the core resources, then you can get dramatic worsening of response times (depending on app). Of course a carefully tuned app benchmark is not going to be entering those dangerous waters. It will be tuned for the marketeers, not systems people...
It would be more impressive if they actually quoted a typical weight for such a frame. I rather doubt it will out-perform a carbon frame which has similar shock damping characteristics (anyway, it must be better than large diameter aluminium which has horrid shock absorption). I also suspect that they have to build in a much larger safety factor than with less variable materials which are less affected by environmental degradation.
Given that bamboo will bio-degrade, I hope they treat this with lots of (nasty) preservatives, our you might find this nice expensive frame will have lost a good bit of its strength after being stored in a damp shed for a few years.
Nb. for comfort, I don't think anything beats a titanium frame.
It's what is called an anti-competitive activity. It's an attempt to lock out competition by exploiting a customer base who are locked in by their own investment in systems (many of which were developed before Oracle took over).
It's an old, old story - just look it up. Eventually competitition authorities have to be involved. It happened to IBM, Microsoft, Standard Oil and a number of others.
Yet more signs of Oracle wanting to own the world...
Oracle did not invent columnar compression. It's been around for decades. What is concerning is that Oracle is limiting its availability to its own hardware.
It looks like Oracle are lining up a formidable array of corporations as enemies among which canbe found HP, IBM, NetApp and EMC to name just four. Anybody who can find common cause among that lot has pressed a few carefully placed buttons.
This is going to keep a lot of lawyers in work and make not a few even richer than they are now. I can just imagine the lobbying going on with the regulatory authorities at the moment. That's assuming the regulators have the stomach for such a fight.
The new M series processors are all developments of Fujitsu's SPARC64. The T series just can't compete - and never can - on single thread clock speed. Because of the way that T series despatching works it's virtually impossible for it to emulate al the single-thread speed-ups required for a super-scalar processor. Even clock-for-clock without core contention, the T series is only about 30% of the per-thread throughput. Sometimes it's a lot worse.
Unfortunately for the proponents of T series much application code out there is not amenable to parallel running.
This is going to strike horror into the heart of many an Oracle customer. They can surely feel the ropes tightening around them as expensive proprietary hardware becomes the norm. At least with x64/x86 support, there was some choice of suppliers and competition. If that ever goes, and Oracle becomes the vertically integrated company that Ellison appears to wish it to be, then that's where IBM was back in the 70s.
I see a backlash coming - from Oracle's customers.
Satellites were put into orbit long before the Shuttle. Indeed the Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and unreliable way of putting communication satellites into orbit. Satellite communications would exist if the Shuttle had never been heard of.
The Hubble is a bit different, of only because of the maintenance tasks. However, even that could have been done with manned rockets. The shuttle has been an expensive mistake and never came remotely near the original ambition of weekly launches.
The idea that the Shuttle improved anybody's life is a nonsense. It could have been done cheaper using other means.
Of course it's nothing like the waste of money of the ISS...
It might be wise if Tim Worstall spent checking the assumptions here. Number one, it to take the weight of the copper, and not the whole cable.
This is 24 AWG cable with a core diameter of 0.51mm. That's 0.0255 x 0.0255 x PI x 100 = 0.204 cubic centimetres per metre length. Now double that for one pair and it's 0.408 cubic centimetres per metre length. Now add a (generous) 10% for the overhead of twisting (local network cable is lightly twisted). That yields 0.449 cubic centimetres per metre length of one pair. Multiply that by the density of copper (8.94gm per cubic centimetre) and that's 0.449 x 8.94 = 4gm of copper per metre of twisted pair. There are 1,609 metres in a mile, so that's 6.4Kg of copper per pair per mile. A 10 pair cable would therefore have 64Kg or copper per mile, not 132Kg per mile. That immediately slashes Mr. Worstall's valuation by over half as about half that weight will be sheathing.
Then we have the big question - is BT's figure of 75 million miles an estimate of the total length of cables, total length of pairs, or total length of wire? If we take the total number of BT lines in the UK it's of the order of 25 million. If that 75 million miles is 10 pair cables, that implies an average of 30 pair-miles per line. Even allowing for some spare pairs, this is clearly ridiculous. If the figure of 75 miles is pairs, then the total "pair length" per line is around 3 miles, probably not an unreasonable estimate - broad band spends indicate average line lengths are in the region of 2-2.5 miles leaving about 15-20% "spare" lines. If I do the same for total wire length, then the result (1.5 miles per line) is rather too low to be credible.
So, I would suggest that BT are quoting an estimate for pair lengths knocking 90% of Mr. Worstall's fanciful estimate.
So on that basis, we have 75 million miles of pairs x 6.4Kg = 480,000 tonnes of copper in BT's network. That's still £2.4bn of copper, a tidy sum, but nothing like the 20 x estimate that the author of this piece has calculated.
There's also another thing - if the value of the copper alone in BT's network was really £50bn, and we adopted a modest 7% ROCE, then Ofcom should be allowing a line rental income on that basis alone of £3.5bn per year, or about £12 per month on just the copper before including the capital value of the ducts, poles, maintenance, rates etc. As that's approaching half the wholesale monthly costs of a line, that's clearly nonsense.
So I would suggest, Time Worstall has overestimated the value of the copper in BT's network by about 95%.
Unfortunately, the only person not to benefit from this is the vehicle owner. Any chance they could make it compulsory? Apart from my car of course - I'm always careful...
"jettisoned the lunar module Snoopy into solar orbit"
Really? Isn't it more likely in a lunar orbit. In the unlikely event there was enough fuel on board to take Snoopy out of lunar orbit into a solar one, I think we can safely say it's likely to be lost for ever.
I'd agree - those images look like a complete fake to me. Quite apart from the rather wide-spread displacement of all these capsules (in the liver?) can scanners really produce images which so clearly show cocaine capsules without even a shadow of any organs? Indeed there's pretty much nothing but drugs and skeleton shown.
"PIA has to be sorted out – and quickly - in a way that allows fair competition with different providers able to invest in our broadband infrastructure. It’s also important that we have a properly competitive market in retail fibre."
"Mobile phone operators must put aside competitive differences and work together in their common – and our national - interest to make this happen."
Dynamic range compression and MP3 lossy compression have absolutely nothing to do with one another. They are completely and utterly different things. CDs and other earlier forms of recording have used dynamic range compression. In essence it simply means making quieter sections louder. It was done for good reasons - so that quiet passages could be heard in noisy environments and for radio broadcasting, and for bad reasons. The latter is essentially to make records sound "brighter" or, some might say, less easy to ignore.
MP3 lossy compression is a completely different thing - it basically loses less audible features. An MP3 file can exceed the dynamic range of a CD as it does not use linear encoding.
Anyway, this is hardly a new phenomenon. It's called the "loudness wars" and arose from music producers wanting more of an instant hit. As it happens, the dynamic range on almost all contemporary music is nothing compared to some symphonic pieces which truly only work in quiet rooms or on headphones.
"The only way to make a compact size body work would be to add an extension tube between the body and the lens"
Which, of course, is precisely what the many adapters available for the NEX and micro-4/3rds cameras do. Their primary role is simply to attach to the lens and camera mount and adjust for the difference in the register distance (some have a secondary role to provide for limited electronic interfacing of provide some semblance of manual controls for the lens.
One thing to note is that short-register digital cameras with large sensors have problems with colour shift, fringing, vignetting and other nasty effects at the edge of the sensors on wide-angle lenses due to the high angle of incidence of light rays at that point. This can only partly be dealt with through special (and expensively designed) sensors, like the Leica M9's plus firmware/software fixes. There are actually unexpected advantages in SLR's large register distance, as the necessary retrofocus designs make the light rays more "telecentric" - that is they arrive at the sensor surface and its stack of AA, IR & bayer filters at something closer to 90 degrees.
I see you are another who has fallen for the small photositer myth which is repeated as receivedc wisdom everywhere. The important issue is not the size of the photosites (within reason), but the total sensor area as that, with suitably scaled lenses, defines the amount of light available which is ultimately what limits the image quality.
The Dynamic Range of small photosites is lower than that for larger ones as the noise floor is ultimately limited by photon shot noise. However, that ignores the increased spatial frequency of the smaller photosites. Feed that into the mathematics, and for any given output size and common technology, the noise and DR effects are cancelled out by the increased spatial frequency. Further, as on all but the Foveon-sensored SD1, sensors use bayer-pattern 2x2 colour mosaics, the colour fidelity of an image will continue to improve until the 2x2 cell size drops below the resolving power of lenses (which would need about 100MP on an APS-C sensor). Of course the (not much over 1 micron) photosites on some camera phones have long passed the abilities of their lenses to resolve detail (and they also tend to be diffraction limited), but the real damage is simply the sensor is very small and there's limited light to deal with.
There is also plenty of evidence that increased MP counts on systems cameras are not damaging image quality - quite the reverse. If you go to the DXOmark site and look at the overall sensor ratings of any one manufacturer's sensors of the same size, there is an upward trend with MP counts. Of course technology changes help too, but even on common-technology sensors, the higher MP one tends to rate higher at common technology levels.
http://www.dxomark.com/index.php
Sensors can be optimised for different purposes. Nikon's FF D3S gets better high ISO than the much higher (but also older) D3X, but its optimal range image quality is worse. Hence the older, higher-MP D3X has a higher sensor rating than the D3S albeit the former is based on a Sony sensor design now a couple of generations old.
The specs at least are a little behind the Sony NEX-7 announced last week. That sports 24 MPiX, 10 FPS, a 2.4 million dot EVF, 10 FPS, ISO up to 16,000 and video at full hi-def at 50 or 60fps (depending if it's a European or US model), pop-up flash, focus-peaking and tilting back LCD.
However, the NEX-7 is an expensive option. Reputedly the NEX-5n is much better value, great high ISO (top end 25,600) but no flash, no built-in EVF and "only" 16MPiX.
The Sony NEX range is much favoured by those adapting high-quality legacy lenses due to its very short register distance, which means pretty nearly any mount can be adapted that covers the APS-C image circle and allows for manual control of the lens, even if the adapter has to have some controls added. The Sony E-Mount spec has also been open-sourced for third party lens suppliers (not something Sony have a reputation for doing).
It will be interesting to see the Samsung pricing. I'd expect it to substantially undercut Sony, but they don't seem (at least yet) to have trumped the specs.
MTBF absolutely is critical when designing large storage arrays. It's the key number (along with mean time to recover - MTTR) that tells you the likelyhood of a double failure within in any one raid set. It is the size of the raid set, the number of failures it can withstand and the total number of raidsets that matter on a 200,000 array storage device (using RAID in its most general sense of storage redundancy). Note that MTTR on RAID sets including modern, very large disks can be measured in 10s of hours. One of the reasons multi-level protection is becoming more important - the other being unrecoverable read errors short of complete device failure that prevent RAID rebuilds).
There is a big question over just how trustworthy MTBF figures are. Google did a study a few years back demonstrating that failure rates are not random. They tend to be associated with particular batches, models and manufacturers (annoyingly they wouldn't identify the bad ones). Also, they found that failure predictors, including S.M.A.R.T. stats correlated very poorly with actual failures. I've had experience of that myself where very high and statistically extremely improbable failure rates were observed on a subset of disks over a month. That speaks of non-random failure modes. Those devices exhibited no warnings of any failures.
Note that some arrays make the definition of what constitutes a RAID set an extremely slippery concept. Also, the concept of RAID sets and the consequences of common-mode failures compromising redundancy can make this a very tricky analysis.
Also, I wish people would stop thinking MTBF has anything directly to do with the lifespan of a device. The MTBF is simply the average number of total operational hours that might be expected between failures for a large(ish) population of similar devices. The MTBF figure only applies to devices within given (and not well publicised) working lifespans. We have hard drives now with MTBFs approaching 100 years. However, nobody in their right minds believes these devices will actually run for 100 years before they fail - a decade would be good.
In general, very large storage arrays have to be self-healing with dynamic spares and (within the operational lifespan) will rely on a mixture of re-active and pre-emptive device swapping, but I don't know of storage suppliers who swap drives out at fixed lifespan intervals (although I have known manufacturers swap out batches of suspect drives where excessive early failures have been detected in order to pre-empt catastrophic failures).
Needless to say, manufacturers are less than forthcoming about this...
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Missing the point
@David Neil
The OP was referring to the use of recovery images of any sort (whether partition of optical disk) rather than supplying a proper Windows Installation disk. As it is, if your PC dies and you can't get a like-for-like replacement or for certain upgrades (especially mother boards), your recovery disk is useless as it's tied into specifics about the hardware config. Of course, the OEM end-user licenses specifically tie licences into a particular PC (without defining what that means in detail), but for many, access to a proper install disk at least allows for the possibility (activation issues allowing) of installing a new motherboard or the like.
CPU cycles as the most precious data centre resource...
"Virtualised multi-core, multi-threaded servers are impatient. They want data for the apps in their virtual machine instantly. It's odd; now that CPU cycles are cheaper than ever before, they are treated as the most precious resource in the data centre."
Rarely have a seen a case of missing the point more thoroughly than this quote. It's not that people are worried about "wasting" cheap CPU. It's that latency time on disk I/O has failed to keep up with processors. In consequence, for many applications, the application is bottlenecked by the storage. I know of many apps which spend 90% or more of their time I/O bound. So the issue is not "wasting" CPU time, but simply not getting through workloads fast enough or giving quick enough end-user response times. It's not the CPU time that's being seen as precious, but the poor end user who's sitting in a call centre with an impatient customer.
As for some sort of direct-access memory storage model over PCIe being faster, then of course. But just how relevant is that to most large real-world apps. Firstly it's an extremely good idea to establish a clear distinction between persistent storage and volatile working space. For this you need clear and controlled access methods with controlled APIs that can provide for security, protection from rogue apps, clean restart points, data sharing and much else. Those APIs can be at various levels - blocks, files, database etc. but exist they must. Those are also ideal points to establish shared access models and are hence ideal break points for network access (as anybody whose worked on large application architectures can agree).
Then there is the issue of just how many apps can exploit ultra-low latency times. I know of many real-world apps which are I/O bound at 10ms access times. However, I know of none which would be in that position with 100 micro-second latency times, an access time perfectly within the bounds of what can be achieved on common network protocols, such as FC or 10Gbps Ethernet. Indeed in many cases the largest element of that delay is not in the time on the wire, but in navigating the software stacks.
This is not to deny that there might be some specialist uses of direct memory persistent access models over PCIe, but these are likely to be very low functions. Perhaps the networked storage units themselves (albeit dealing with single point of failure issues is important).
Also puzzled
I'm with you - not sure what adding rather less than 1% to the altitude gets for them other than just proving it can be done.
Still not infinite.
It's only perfectly black if it doesn't reflect any incident light. Even in a completely darkened room with black walls there will be some incident light from other parts of the screen, even if it's only very small. Once manufacturers start using terms like "infinite" smell marketing hype.
It's diffraction limiting...
I'd suggest a lesson in basic lens theory for the reviewer. The reason that f/32 is soft is nothing at all to do with the quality of the lens, but is just a function of the small aperture size. Any lens stopped down to F/32 (if that's an available setting) will exhbit the same effect. It's caused by the diffraction of the small aperture. In fact a 16MP APS-C sensor will gradually suffer increased levels of diffraction softening from around f11 onwards. By f32 it will be severe as the Airy disc covers about 8 pixels.
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm
Squeezing the customer...
Having worked for a very large Oracle customer, I think some of the moves that Oracle are taking are looked on with a lot of suspicion. Declaring something close to war on HP is going to cause massive disruption to many customers as migrating massive enterprise apps and, especially databases, between hardware platforms is a massively expensive and disruptive. Whilst Oracle are continuing to support x64 and Linux, it's notable that they are explicitly not releasing some of the software technology used in the Exadata OEL cluster into their general releases. I was also in receipt of all sorts of FUD from Oracle sales staff over the support for Linux on x64 vs Oracle on SPARC. The reasons are clear - just compare the price of virtually any standard component on a SPARC server versus an x64 one (memory is a good place to start).
That leaves customers with the distinct (and not unreasonable) impression that Oracle are hell-bent on locking in customers for the entire hardware and software stack. Once a customer finds themselves in this position, costs start ratcheting up and the price of extricating yourself is huge. The industry has seen this before, and new projects will be put onto more cost-effective platforms. That's what killed DEC when they over-priced VAX and what drove almost all new applications off of IBM mainframes.
Also, I find El Register's lionising of the T4. Unfortunately Oracle have declined to publish the sort of low level benchmarks that allow customer's to work out if these are practical alternatives to M series machines. There are a bunch of carefully selected application benchmarks which tell you very little save a very strong suspicion that they've been chosen because they fit the heavily threaded multi-threaded nature of the T4. However, many large corporations will have had some apps which perform disastrously on T series due to the very slow single thread performance.
The advice for anybody looking at large scale future projects is to be very wary about lock-ins to proprietary architectures. Given that, I expect that Oracle will continue to lose ground.
Celebrate...
"wonder what will happen next time it's struck by lightning?"
Those of us who've had the hellish experience of being in an IKEA store at a weekend will drop to our knees and think there is a god as the place burns to the ground.
But there is a user error - and a dangerous one
This was not a case of driving a car that suddenly developed a fault, it was continuing to drive a car that was in a dangerous condition. There's no excuse for continuing to drive it like that - there are call-out services. The car was clearly in a known, dangerous state and if an accident at a junction had resulted then the driver would have been liable. Vehicles can go wrong at any time - we need to be sensible enough to know what is potentially very dangerous.
So this one is a user error. Airline pilots would be grounded if they took a plane up with a potentially lethal fault.
Misunderstanding MTBF
@DJO
You demonstrate a common misunderstanding of MTBF with the operational lifetime of a device. The MTBF of a device is simply the average number of operational hours between failures. So if your company has 1,000 of these SSDs, you would expect one failure every 1,250 hours (or roughly one ever 52 days). However, the working lifetime of the SSD might only be 10 years. What this means is that after 10 years roughly 70 of these SSDs would have failed, but it might be that by that they've reached the end of their operational lifetime and they start failing at a much higher rate.
In fact, MTBF tells you nothing directly about the operational lifetime of a device. That has to be expressed separately, and it might be constrained by something other than the passage of time - in the case of SSDs, that measure might be the number of write cycles, whilst with HDDs powered-up time might be the relevant figure. With a car engine, it might be total mileage.
Of course it's right to be sceptical about MTBFs as these are not independently reported (and at the beginning of the devices life, they are extrapolated.
Still culpable
In which case those who got the evaluation wrong should be in the dock for this one.
Legal action?
Surely, even in the land of the free, this one must be attracting the attention of the legal authorities. I suspect recklessly firing cannon balls in an urban area might just have breached some local laws.
Relative cost...
I'm dubious over the validity of using measurements of the value of currency over time in calculating relative costs. Given that the vast majority of our current GDP comprises products, technologies and services that either did not exist in 1765, or would be so altered as to be completely unrecognisable, it's not a great measure of the real cost of something like HMS Victory to either the exchequer, or the country as a whole. Also, the country has a vastly higher (inflation corrected) GDP these days.
A much better way of looking at HMS Victory's cost is to take it as a proportion of the country's GDP, total State Expenditure and defence budget. According to the estimates at http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/index.php?year=1765, UK GDP was £89.4m in 1765 with £12m state expenditure of which defence was £6.1m. For those that care for such things, the national debt, at £133m, was considerably higher as a proportion of GDP than it is today.
The £63,176 capital cost was equivalent to a little over 1% of one year's defence budget, just over 0.5% of one year's state expenditure and approximately 0.07% of a year's GDP.
Current estimates are that a single one of the new carriers will cost approximately £6.2bn (although nobody really believes that will be the final figure). Taking this as a proportion of 2010's GDP, public expenditure and defence budget (£1,453bn, £660,6bn and £43.2bn respectively) this places one carrier at approximately 14.3% of the defence budget, 0.9% of state expenditure and 4.3% of GDP.
Whatever way you look at it (inflation adjusted, %GDP, %State spending or %defence budget), these new carriers look like expensive naval toys. Even in terms of the country's total output, they are something like 60x more expensive than HMS Victory. I suspect that Victory's 0.07% of GDP might get you a submarine or three frigates.
Of course the headline is nonsense - £16m is just 0.001% of the GDP, so in terms of national affordability, that 5 year maintenance figure is about 1/70th of the initial capital cost.
Convenient conclusion - for them
Very convenient for the Swiss, not exactly known for having a lot of music, film or other such content which citizens of other countries might wish to download. Now, of course, should any other country want to break any of their companies' many patents, they might take a different line. In the meantime they will carry on acting as a convenient location for many a despot's ill-gotten gains and facilitating wealthy tax evaders.
Aerodynamic...
Of course if a space ship confines itself to space and planetary bodies without atmospheres they do not have to be aerodynamic. However, short of some magical property that allows spacecraft entering a planet's atmosphere to avoid the normal laws of aerodynamic, it would seem rather sensible to make them work well in that environment. After all, the Space Shuttle was so designed as were the re-entry capsules for manned missions using disposable rockets. So the alien's choice of an aerodynamic saucer shape might appear quite sensible, albeit unnecessary for the mother ship which is presumably sitting out beyond the atmosphere.
It's notable that Arthur C Clarke (who cared about such things) had the Discovery 1 as a functional, deep-space design and not an aerodynamic one.
Incidentally, Prof Brian Cox once acted as an adviser on a Sci Fi film, and he noted that one thing which always had to be included was sound effects in a vacuum. Space battles simply don't seem to be convincing without those.
Indeed the Sun - and a lot of it. However, one advantage of artificial hydrocarbons is that the can be readily transported, as the oil industry demonstrates daily. However, that would still leave the enormous problem of covering millions of square km of suitably sunny land with the appropriate plant and keeping it supplied with fresh water etc.
Humans use roughly 500EJ of primary energy a year whilst about 3,000EJ (equivalent) of biomass is created every year. If all 500EJ of primary fuel (the great majority of which are fossil) was to be replaced by artificial hydrocarbons, that would be equivalent to about 17% of the World's annual biomass generation. That's a lot of land area - in the millions of square km, and getting enough freshwater to (say) the deserts rather than displacing agricultural or natural rain-forest and the like is going to be an engineering project, the like of which has never been dreamed of to date.
There's always one...
@Anonymous
Congratulations on completely an utterly missing the point. The issue is about the thermodynamic efficiency of the photosynthesis process. What that means is how much of the energy in light gets transformed plant (or other biological) material in terms of its embedded energy content (basically the thermal energy when it's burned). Yes, CO2 is necessary, and yes (up to a limit) more CO2 will allow plants to grow faster, but not beyond the limit given by the theoretical thermodynamic efficiency of photosynthesis (and in practice, not that high). So if photosynthesis-based processes cannot, in practice, turn more than 6% of the energy in light into bio-fuels, that's what you are stuck with - however much CO2 you throw at it. The energy produced is simply limited by the light.
Theoretically, the inherent photo-chemistry of the photo-synthetic processes might be able to reach about 10%, but that would mean engineering living organisms which had virtually zero overhead and an improbably high level of efficiency of other processes. Evolution has had about 3.5 billion years to work on the problem.
In comparison, good solar panel thermodynamic efficiency can reach about 20% with the theoretical limits approaching 40% using silicon (albeit only reachable in lab type tests at the moment).
Either way, it's going to take an enormous amount of land and fresh water (and maybe phosphate and potassium) to generate all the artificial hydrocarbons we would need to replace fossil fuels.
Photosynthesis & thermodynamic efficiency
One little problem is that that photo synthesis in real organisms is less than 6% thermodynamically efficient in converting light into plant material (often much less). That's before anything required to turn it into hydrocarbons (either by external processing or directly within the organism). The basic chemical reactions allow for somewhat higher theoretical efficiency, but just how well that can be engineered is debatable. After all, evolution has had the odd few billion years to work on the issue.
What this means is that huge areas would be required to produce all the hydrocarbons we currently use. After all, for the great majority of human kinds history, bio-fuels are all we had at vastly lower population densities and levels of personal consumption. No doubt we can improve on growing trees to burn as fuel, but it's very unlikely to match using up the stored energy resources laid down over hundreds of millions of years as the direct, and indirect result of photosynthesis.
What we really require is something which is much more efficient at turning solar (and thermo-nuclear) power into synthetic hydrocarbons which are, the article says, conveniently energy dense and (relatively) safe and cheap to store and handle.
What about the risk to us?
"He has argued that repeats of the programme would put his return to work at risk."
In which case the BBC would have done us all a favour. Given the amount of damage a 44 tonne truck could do (3-40 times the kinetic energy of a car at the same speed), it occurs to me that the last thing we want is a driver twice over the legal limit driving one of these things, let alone being on a mobile phone as well. It also rather brings into question the sentencing a £115 fine and a one year ban is fairly mild given just how dangerous such a vehicle can be capable of far more damage than a car.
Finally, surely one has to wonder about those recruiting truck drivers if the it's the appearance on a BBC programme which would be the deciding factor. I would rather hope that prospective employers would take more note of his actual conviction and ban, or do such matters no form part of recruitment?
Potential Offence
If this device can latch onto any unprotected WiFi network there is a very real possibility that the owner might be deemed to have committed an offence in the UK. This story from El Reg in 2008.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/21/wi_fi_squatting_arrests/
Not El Reg's finest moment...
Given that headline, I'm not surprised Sara Bee decided to up sticks and leave El Reg.
Universal Service Obligation
"BT are legally required to connect a telephone line to any residence or premises in the UK."
There is a caveat to that - it's cost-limited to £3,400 pound. If the installation costs exceed that figure it's a cost to the customer. Having said that, it takes an awful long time time to recover £3,400 at wholesale line rental rates, especially when such costs include maintenance, rates and so on.
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/consultations/uso/main/
Testing methodology?
I'd be more convinced about these comparative reviews if there was anything approaching a blind test. As it is, all this talk of superior audio and video quality is just so subjective as to be useless. Of course, the expense of doing properly controlled blind tests is enormous, but as it stands all this impressions stuff has to be taken with a large pinch of salt. For much the same reason, the Hi-Fi mags long ago went into unknowing self-parody propagating myths and pseudo-scientific nonsense.
I'm waiting for the first comparative review of HDMI cables, then the end will surely have come.
Headline again...
So this isn't cloth made of gold, but cloth woven from textile threads coated with a very thin layer of gold.
Puzzled by the headline...
I have read this several times and I also fail to see where this breaks the second law of thermodynamics. If there's a temperature difference, and this can be exploited to produce electricity, then there is surely no contradiction. What would be a contradiction with the second law is if useful energy would be extracted from a device at a uniform temperature.
Just calling something "waste heat" is not sufficient - that's just a qualitative term. A thermal power station's waste heat might be a horticulturist's useful source of energy for heating a glasshouse. The clever trick would be to extract any useful work once temperatures have been equalised with the environment. Then somebody can claim a miracle.
A third more capacity?
"The breakthrough when flash becomes affordable is thought by many people to be TLC (triple-level cell) – 3-bit multi-level cell NAND – which adds a third more capacity to flash cells."
Wouldn't going from 2 to 3 bits per cell add a half, not a third more capacity?
Time pressure is no excuse...
I rather suspect that reconnecting many hundreds of individual pairs under considerable time pressure to restore service isn't going to result in 100% accuracy. Maybe the person who screwed up by sending out tens of thousands of email addresses might be stuffed down a manhole to splice wires as a form of punishment.
After all, we know that time pressure is no excuse, especially when there's important things like The Register's email list to deal with. It's not like restoring telecoms services is anything like as important as that.
Are there engineering & cost criteria
Are these things being assessed by structure engineers? Are there engineering and cost criteria, or is it just aesthetics?
The existing lattice designs were produced for a reasons such as strength, resilience and economy of materials. It strikes me that some of these new designs are quite pretty but will present engineering issues. For instance, those single column designs will surely need much deeper foundations than something more widely based. The central column will have to survive quite high bending forces and will either have to be quite large diameter, or built of thicker/stronger materials, or possibly both. Also, how will these designs cope with changes in direction of the grid lines? That inevitably ends up with high side forces (although I suppose that pylons in such location could be built to a stronger standard whilst maintaining the aesthetics.
Finally, I suspect single columns are more vulnerable to sabotage than lattice arrangements which are actually more resistant to damage. Indeed, a lattice design can be engineered to allow replacement of failing/corroded members without having to dismantle the whole thing. I don't see how this can be done with these single column designs.
Let's stop ISPs looking at IP addresses and other fantasies...
"But headers contain IP addresses, which may or may not be personal information which ISP's aren't supposed to look at."
Isn't it a trifle difficult for an ISP to route a packet with looking at the IP addresses?
Of course the issue is what such information can reasonably be used for, not whether it can be looked at. Clearly the header contents have to be looked at for reasons of routing, traffic balancing, intrusion detection, general traffic management, capacity planning, service management and dozens of other legitimate purposes.
The whole net neutrality debate is characterised by the use of emotive terms playing to the audience and precious little to do with the real technical issues of making efficient and reliable uses of networks.
Bad news week
What with flooded factories in Thailand, combustible Bravia TVs, mass hackings and now this, it's not exactly good news week for Sony.
(Although AP have given the A77 a glowing review).
I won't count any chickens
No SPECjbb's were released for the T3 - I don't see them doing it for the T4.
SPECjbb (and Specint for that matter) is a very easy benchmark to run - it takes a tiny fraction of the resources of one of those big app benchmarks.
Lack of basic benchmarks
SUN used to at least publish T-series friendly basic processing benchmarks (like SPECjbb). Now Oracle are even suppressing these. These show-piece application benchmarks are all very well, but they bear no resemblance to how these ERP packages tend to get configured and used in real life.
Sensible people will be asking how do these machines compare with x64 on throughput, response times, costs, power consumption and so on. That's where the real competition is.
nb. T series performance can be a very tricky thing - once those H/W threads start competing for the core resources, then you can get dramatic worsening of response times (depending on app). Of course a carefully tuned app benchmark is not going to be entering those dangerous waters. It will be tuned for the marketeers, not systems people...
Weight?
It would be more impressive if they actually quoted a typical weight for such a frame. I rather doubt it will out-perform a carbon frame which has similar shock damping characteristics (anyway, it must be better than large diameter aluminium which has horrid shock absorption). I also suspect that they have to build in a much larger safety factor than with less variable materials which are less affected by environmental degradation.
Given that bamboo will bio-degrade, I hope they treat this with lots of (nasty) preservatives, our you might find this nice expensive frame will have lost a good bit of its strength after being stored in a damp shed for a few years.
Nb. for comfort, I don't think anything beats a titanium frame.
Try looking up anti-competitive activities
It's what is called an anti-competitive activity. It's an attempt to lock out competition by exploiting a customer base who are locked in by their own investment in systems (many of which were developed before Oracle took over).
It's an old, old story - just look it up. Eventually competitition authorities have to be involved. It happened to IBM, Microsoft, Standard Oil and a number of others.
Yet more signs of Oracle wanting to own the world...
Oracle did not invent columnar compression. It's been around for decades. What is concerning is that Oracle is limiting its availability to its own hardware.
It looks like Oracle are lining up a formidable array of corporations as enemies among which canbe found HP, IBM, NetApp and EMC to name just four. Anybody who can find common cause among that lot has pressed a few carefully placed buttons.
The real gainers
This is going to keep a lot of lawyers in work and make not a few even richer than they are now. I can just imagine the lobbying going on with the regulatory authorities at the moment. That's assuming the regulators have the stomach for such a fight.
SPARC 64
The new M series processors are all developments of Fujitsu's SPARC64. The T series just can't compete - and never can - on single thread clock speed. Because of the way that T series despatching works it's virtually impossible for it to emulate al the single-thread speed-ups required for a super-scalar processor. Even clock-for-clock without core contention, the T series is only about 30% of the per-thread throughput. Sometimes it's a lot worse.
Unfortunately for the proponents of T series much application code out there is not amenable to parallel running.
He's coming for you...
This is going to strike horror into the heart of many an Oracle customer. They can surely feel the ropes tightening around them as expensive proprietary hardware becomes the norm. At least with x64/x86 support, there was some choice of suppliers and competition. If that ever goes, and Oracle becomes the vertically integrated company that Ellison appears to wish it to be, then that's where IBM was back in the 70s.
I see a backlash coming - from Oracle's customers.
You are right
I did - silly me. The real value is 5% of Tim's estimate so I should have said that 95% of his valuation is nonsense.
Nb. world annual production of copper is about 15 million tonnes per year..
Satellites were put into orbit long before the Shuttle. Indeed the Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and unreliable way of putting communication satellites into orbit. Satellite communications would exist if the Shuttle had never been heard of.
The Hubble is a bit different, of only because of the maintenance tasks. However, even that could have been done with manned rockets. The shuttle has been an expensive mistake and never came remotely near the original ambition of weekly launches.
The idea that the Shuttle improved anybody's life is a nonsense. It could have been done cheaper using other means.
Of course it's nothing like the waste of money of the ISS...
Minor correction...
I meant £12 is about double the wholesale line rental cost of course
Fanciful calculations
It might be wise if Tim Worstall spent checking the assumptions here. Number one, it to take the weight of the copper, and not the whole cable.
This is 24 AWG cable with a core diameter of 0.51mm. That's 0.0255 x 0.0255 x PI x 100 = 0.204 cubic centimetres per metre length. Now double that for one pair and it's 0.408 cubic centimetres per metre length. Now add a (generous) 10% for the overhead of twisting (local network cable is lightly twisted). That yields 0.449 cubic centimetres per metre length of one pair. Multiply that by the density of copper (8.94gm per cubic centimetre) and that's 0.449 x 8.94 = 4gm of copper per metre of twisted pair. There are 1,609 metres in a mile, so that's 6.4Kg of copper per pair per mile. A 10 pair cable would therefore have 64Kg or copper per mile, not 132Kg per mile. That immediately slashes Mr. Worstall's valuation by over half as about half that weight will be sheathing.
Then we have the big question - is BT's figure of 75 million miles an estimate of the total length of cables, total length of pairs, or total length of wire? If we take the total number of BT lines in the UK it's of the order of 25 million. If that 75 million miles is 10 pair cables, that implies an average of 30 pair-miles per line. Even allowing for some spare pairs, this is clearly ridiculous. If the figure of 75 miles is pairs, then the total "pair length" per line is around 3 miles, probably not an unreasonable estimate - broad band spends indicate average line lengths are in the region of 2-2.5 miles leaving about 15-20% "spare" lines. If I do the same for total wire length, then the result (1.5 miles per line) is rather too low to be credible.
So, I would suggest that BT are quoting an estimate for pair lengths knocking 90% of Mr. Worstall's fanciful estimate.
So on that basis, we have 75 million miles of pairs x 6.4Kg = 480,000 tonnes of copper in BT's network. That's still £2.4bn of copper, a tidy sum, but nothing like the 20 x estimate that the author of this piece has calculated.
There's also another thing - if the value of the copper alone in BT's network was really £50bn, and we adopted a modest 7% ROCE, then Ofcom should be allowing a line rental income on that basis alone of £3.5bn per year, or about £12 per month on just the copper before including the capital value of the ducts, poles, maintenance, rates etc. As that's approaching half the wholesale monthly costs of a line, that's clearly nonsense.
So I would suggest, Time Worstall has overestimated the value of the copper in BT's network by about 95%.
For whose benefit?
Unfortunately, the only person not to benefit from this is the vehicle owner. Any chance they could make it compulsory? Apart from my car of course - I'm always careful...
Solar orbit?
"jettisoned the lunar module Snoopy into solar orbit"
Really? Isn't it more likely in a lunar orbit. In the unlikely event there was enough fuel on board to take Snoopy out of lunar orbit into a solar one, I think we can safely say it's likely to be lost for ever.
Concur
I'd agree - those images look like a complete fake to me. Quite apart from the rather wide-spread displacement of all these capsules (in the liver?) can scanners really produce images which so clearly show cocaine capsules without even a shadow of any organs? Indeed there's pretty much nothing but drugs and skeleton shown.
"PIA has to be sorted out – and quickly - in a way that allows fair competition with different providers able to invest in our broadband infrastructure. It’s also important that we have a properly competitive market in retail fibre."
"Mobile phone operators must put aside competitive differences and work together in their common – and our national - interest to make this happen."
Spot the difference?
Confusing your compressions
Dynamic range compression and MP3 lossy compression have absolutely nothing to do with one another. They are completely and utterly different things. CDs and other earlier forms of recording have used dynamic range compression. In essence it simply means making quieter sections louder. It was done for good reasons - so that quiet passages could be heard in noisy environments and for radio broadcasting, and for bad reasons. The latter is essentially to make records sound "brighter" or, some might say, less easy to ignore.
MP3 lossy compression is a completely different thing - it basically loses less audible features. An MP3 file can exceed the dynamic range of a CD as it does not use linear encoding.
Anyway, this is hardly a new phenomenon. It's called the "loudness wars" and arose from music producers wanting more of an instant hit. As it happens, the dynamic range on almost all contemporary music is nothing compared to some symphonic pieces which truly only work in quiet rooms or on headphones.
@AC
"The only way to make a compact size body work would be to add an extension tube between the body and the lens"
Which, of course, is precisely what the many adapters available for the NEX and micro-4/3rds cameras do. Their primary role is simply to attach to the lens and camera mount and adjust for the difference in the register distance (some have a secondary role to provide for limited electronic interfacing of provide some semblance of manual controls for the lens.
One thing to note is that short-register digital cameras with large sensors have problems with colour shift, fringing, vignetting and other nasty effects at the edge of the sensors on wide-angle lenses due to the high angle of incidence of light rays at that point. This can only partly be dealt with through special (and expensively designed) sensors, like the Leica M9's plus firmware/software fixes. There are actually unexpected advantages in SLR's large register distance, as the necessary retrofocus designs make the light rays more "telecentric" - that is they arrive at the sensor surface and its stack of AA, IR & bayer filters at something closer to 90 degrees.
The small photosite myth
I see you are another who has fallen for the small photositer myth which is repeated as receivedc wisdom everywhere. The important issue is not the size of the photosites (within reason), but the total sensor area as that, with suitably scaled lenses, defines the amount of light available which is ultimately what limits the image quality.
The Dynamic Range of small photosites is lower than that for larger ones as the noise floor is ultimately limited by photon shot noise. However, that ignores the increased spatial frequency of the smaller photosites. Feed that into the mathematics, and for any given output size and common technology, the noise and DR effects are cancelled out by the increased spatial frequency. Further, as on all but the Foveon-sensored SD1, sensors use bayer-pattern 2x2 colour mosaics, the colour fidelity of an image will continue to improve until the 2x2 cell size drops below the resolving power of lenses (which would need about 100MP on an APS-C sensor). Of course the (not much over 1 micron) photosites on some camera phones have long passed the abilities of their lenses to resolve detail (and they also tend to be diffraction limited), but the real damage is simply the sensor is very small and there's limited light to deal with.
There is also plenty of evidence that increased MP counts on systems cameras are not damaging image quality - quite the reverse. If you go to the DXOmark site and look at the overall sensor ratings of any one manufacturer's sensors of the same size, there is an upward trend with MP counts. Of course technology changes help too, but even on common-technology sensors, the higher MP one tends to rate higher at common technology levels.
http://www.dxomark.com/index.php
Sensors can be optimised for different purposes. Nikon's FF D3S gets better high ISO than the much higher (but also older) D3X, but its optimal range image quality is worse. Hence the older, higher-MP D3X has a higher sensor rating than the D3S albeit the former is based on a Sony sensor design now a couple of generations old.
For an informed thread on this (with links)
http://reduser.net/forum/archive/index.php/t-30076.html
Not quite the outer limit of the EVIL envelope
The specs at least are a little behind the Sony NEX-7 announced last week. That sports 24 MPiX, 10 FPS, a 2.4 million dot EVF, 10 FPS, ISO up to 16,000 and video at full hi-def at 50 or 60fps (depending if it's a European or US model), pop-up flash, focus-peaking and tilting back LCD.
However, the NEX-7 is an expensive option. Reputedly the NEX-5n is much better value, great high ISO (top end 25,600) but no flash, no built-in EVF and "only" 16MPiX.
The Sony NEX range is much favoured by those adapting high-quality legacy lenses due to its very short register distance, which means pretty nearly any mount can be adapted that covers the APS-C image circle and allows for manual control of the lens, even if the adapter has to have some controls added. The Sony E-Mount spec has also been open-sourced for third party lens suppliers (not something Sony have a reputation for doing).
It will be interesting to see the Samsung pricing. I'd expect it to substantially undercut Sony, but they don't seem (at least yet) to have trumped the specs.
MTBF and operational lifetimes
MTBF absolutely is critical when designing large storage arrays. It's the key number (along with mean time to recover - MTTR) that tells you the likelyhood of a double failure within in any one raid set. It is the size of the raid set, the number of failures it can withstand and the total number of raidsets that matter on a 200,000 array storage device (using RAID in its most general sense of storage redundancy). Note that MTTR on RAID sets including modern, very large disks can be measured in 10s of hours. One of the reasons multi-level protection is becoming more important - the other being unrecoverable read errors short of complete device failure that prevent RAID rebuilds).
There is a big question over just how trustworthy MTBF figures are. Google did a study a few years back demonstrating that failure rates are not random. They tend to be associated with particular batches, models and manufacturers (annoyingly they wouldn't identify the bad ones). Also, they found that failure predictors, including S.M.A.R.T. stats correlated very poorly with actual failures. I've had experience of that myself where very high and statistically extremely improbable failure rates were observed on a subset of disks over a month. That speaks of non-random failure modes. Those devices exhibited no warnings of any failures.
Note that some arrays make the definition of what constitutes a RAID set an extremely slippery concept. Also, the concept of RAID sets and the consequences of common-mode failures compromising redundancy can make this a very tricky analysis.
Also, I wish people would stop thinking MTBF has anything directly to do with the lifespan of a device. The MTBF is simply the average number of total operational hours that might be expected between failures for a large(ish) population of similar devices. The MTBF figure only applies to devices within given (and not well publicised) working lifespans. We have hard drives now with MTBFs approaching 100 years. However, nobody in their right minds believes these devices will actually run for 100 years before they fail - a decade would be good.
In general, very large storage arrays have to be self-healing with dynamic spares and (within the operational lifespan) will rely on a mixture of re-active and pre-emptive device swapping, but I don't know of storage suppliers who swap drives out at fixed lifespan intervals (although I have known manufacturers swap out batches of suspect drives where excessive early failures have been detected in order to pre-empt catastrophic failures).
Needless to say, manufacturers are less than forthcoming about this...
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