* Posts by David Taylor

11 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Feb 2008

UK's national grid 'ready' for e-car expansion

David Taylor

Transportation or Generation Capacity

Is this report just stating that the power grid has the capacity to carry sufficient power to charge all these cars? As I have no difficulty believing that.

I'd be slightly more surprised if they were attempting to say that we have enough generation capacity to *produce* the electricity required to charge all these electric vehicles. After all, we have been getting warned repeatedly that the UK is dangerously low on generation capacity even with the *current* demand.

Mystery chip found inside talking iPod Shuffle's earphones

David Taylor
Thumb Down

Breaking News - Electronic Device contains IC

So, this article is really just a bunch of speculation based on the shocking discovery of a chip inside a electronic control?

BT reprograms biz customers as hotspots

David Taylor
Stop

A new low indeed

I can understand why they would make this service opt-out rather than opt-in...

Who would volunteer to let BT resell the bandwidth you paying them for, back to you!?

Tto then suggest they give the bandwidth away to their customers is perhaps taking it a bit too far. For one thing, if they want to provide free Wi-Fi access to the internet over their connection, they could give the bandwidth away WITHOUT paying BT for it (again).

Irish cops tripped up by Prawo Jazdy dragnet

David Taylor
Stop

"It's not as easy as you think"

Yes, it is. The fields are all numbered and the meanings of each field is the same on all EU licenses.

Twitter's veracity chewed up by Britney's four-foot vagina

David Taylor
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@Gulfie

It's not the twitters, tweeters, or whatever you want to call them that appear to have delusions of self-importance, at least in this comment thread.

Flash cells near shrinkage limit

David Taylor

@JonB

I did a double take on that too, but the article does make sense. It talks about both "Phase Change Memory (PCM)" and "Programmable Metallization Cell (PMC)"

Dawkins' atheist ad campaign hits fundraising target

David Taylor
Thumb Up

@Jim Coleman

"it's not whether there's a god or not, but how you define "God".

Big beardy bloke going around [...]?

Perhaps not.

An intangible spirit that infuses all living things, yet has no sentience of its own?

Certainly."

If you read Dawkins' book, he addresses this point. He is not arguing against a "spiritualist" "pantheist" God - belief that God is some spiritual "force" running through the universe. Nor is he primarily arguing against a "Deistic" God that created the universe, then ran away - although he argues that that is highly unlikely. He is arguing that there is no theistic God, like the Christian, Muslim, or Hindu Gods; a God that can "punish" the bad and "reward" the Good, or interfere in the day-to-day running of the Universe. Furthermore, he is arguing that religion itself harms society more than it helps.

PM Brown dusts off one interweb per child plan (again)

David Taylor

Give them a break...

You can't expect the government to come up with brand new policies at a time when the economy is melting down.

There's far too much panicking about losing their jobs to be done.

Lords call for variable VAT to cut landfill

David Taylor
Black Helicopters

"choice editing"?

I guess even the illusion of living in a free country has been abandonded...

Space shuttle replacement delayed until 2014

David Taylor

Forget the giants and midgets

It's the poor people that have to sacrifice their heads to fit in the capsule that I feel sorry for...

MetaRAM double stuffs servers with memory

David Taylor

I don't get it

"The direction over the next decade is clear," Weber told us. "We're moving to multi-core chips that do more software threads. These processors will require much more memory bandwidth."

OK, you can double - or quadruple - the memory capacity of a server relatively cheaply. But that's not what the above quote is talking about. So, how does MetaRAM increase memory bandwidth? You penalize all memory accesses with increased latency and cram 2-4x as much data through the same bus. This does not seem like an improvement to me.