Posts by Alan Johnson

A Logic Named Joe: The 1946 sci-fi short that nailed modern tech

Re: *Remarkably* sharp prediction?

John Brunner published at leat four outstanding novels. His career seemd to fade away for no obvious reason.

Wales gives anti-vaping Blockleiters a Big Red Panic Button

Re: Strange Sign

"It seems any regulation seems to be designed to prevent the use of these life saving devices, rather than improving quality."

This is nonsense. They certainly are not life saving devices. At best they are devices with no impact on health but with the strong potential for causing harm.

The purpose is to deliver an addictive pharmecutical to the user through the lungs. There are at least three potential risks, that there dangerous impurities, that the dose delivered is significantly higher than intended, that dangerous substances are generated by the vapourisation process (heating). The regulation that the register continues to rant against is very clearly aimed at controlling these hazards while allowing general use. It seems to me that the regulation is proportionate and sensible. It is reasonable to disagree with that opinion and with the detail of the regulation of E-cigarettes but unbalanced rants that compare regulation to the Nazis are not in any way reasonable. If there is going to be any error on the regulation of devices that supply addictive pharmecuticals with known hazardous effects into consumers lungs than I would prefer them to be on the cautious side.

Re: Strange Sign

I think he probably meant alum which certainly was used to aduterate flour.

Another common thing was to use copper salts to make pickled vegetables greener which definitely is not harmless.

Brexit: UK gov would probably lay out tax plans in post-'leave' vote emergency budget

"There is no way that the UK alone is going to get better terms than it gets as part of the EU which has a lot more clout in these situations"

Not only that but there will be overlapping periods of uncetainty for each country/block. Initially know one will know what is going to happen, then we will drop onto interim/default/de facto trading arrangements for each country, then there will be negotiations, finally there will be agreements. It will be tempting for countries to gain leverage by applying or thretening to apply punitive interim trading arrangements. Final agreements will take years, some will take a decade or more . It is very likely that there will be very few, possibly no, agreeements which are beneficial to the UK compared to the current EU based arrangements. There will be strong efforts to offusticate what the agreement means to save UK embarassment. Despite that the biggest damage will be in the long period of uncertainty. The uncertainty and poor agreements will be blamed on foreign governments rather than the predictable consequences of brexit.

The ‘Vaping Crackdown’ starts today. This is what you need to know

Regulation is sensible the article is not

The purpose of an e-cigarette is to introduce a pharmecutical into the body through the lungs. The most common pharmecutical is very toxic and addictive.

There are obvious hazards of overdose an dthe introduction of unintended chemcials into the body.

The idea that this should not be regulated in some way is crazy. Traditional smoking is known to be very damaging to health. We have no long term data but have good reasons to vapping will be much less damaging to health, but given what is known about nicotine even if there are no unexpected effects, impurities, acccidental over doses etc then there will still be a negative imapct on health. This has to be regulated in the same way there are food safety regulations for example. Those regulations were introduced because peoples health was being damaged in some cases dying.

The fact that vapping is probably not a dangerous a smoking does not mean that we should not make them acceptably safe. I cannot comment on thd precise quantaties and concenrtaions but the proposed regulations seem sensible and not at all onerous as evidenced by the fact that the article itself says that it will not seem like a crackdown.

I was prompted to read the regulations by the articles clear bias. They are in the main very sensible requirements on reporting, labelling and obvious basic safety requirments. The only thing beyond this are concentration and volume limits which as a non-vapper I have no idea about but there are clear safety benefits to having such limits. The fact that he regulation is so light show sthat he benefits of vapping are appreciated and a sensible approach has been taken.

The EMC regulations for e-cigarrettes are more onerous than these. Andrew seems to have lost contact with reality.

Hey British coders: DevOps – you're doing it wrong

Re: "lines of code produced or function points created" Nothing to do with ISO 9002

QMS standards like 9001 do NOT say that you must measure lines of code. They do say you should set measurable quality objectives and measure them. What you measure is up to you.

The problem is that it is very hard to think of good metrics for software development (or development in general). Even high level ones like delivery against original planned dates is difficult with dependancies on other groups, clients and changing requirments and environment.

Good thing this dev quit. I'd have fired him. Out of a cannon. Into the sun

Re: Let me guess, that last one was an academic?

I actually quite like numrical recipes at least the numerical parts but the code style is awful, not least in the use of single letter variable names starting with a and working through the alphabet as if the length of variable name was related to efficiency or memory usage.

The attitude of mind was illustrated when I tried to compile the code that goes with the book on a unix system. The numerical recipes code had a function called 'select'. This caused a lot of header file/linking issues with the completely unrelated POSIX call of the same name. Anyway after working around the issue I sent a nice e-mail describing the problems and suggesting that in time they modified all of the function names by adding a prefix to make the names unique or at least much less likely to conflict. The reply was that they considered the problem a bug in the OS I was using and they had no intention of changing!

Maybe not an example of awful coding but an example of an awful attitude.

When customers try to be programmers: 'I want this CHANGED TO A ZERO ASAP'

The comment about the one and zero sounds apocryphal

The comment is just too perfect and makes no explanation at all as to the mechanism or what the minor glitch is. It is also extremely unprofessional in tone. If such a serious situation can arise from such a small change is the whole design/architecture inappropriate? How do we know if some other bug may not cause a similar effect through a shared mechanism?

As for the prediction of the demise of a client company and the transfer of blame to the victim rather than those who wrote the software, it will appeal to those of us who code for a living, it makes us feel important and superior, but I suspect that a real story is being exaggerated or just made up.

BT dismisses MPs' calls to snap off Openreach as 'wrong-headed'

My experience of Openreach is that they are abysmal constantly missing promised appointments, then when arriving not having the ability to fix the problem and needing to call someone else, then missing some more appointments and only after several months fixing a line problem. When I complained I did not get very good mobile reception and therefore had no fallback phone or data services and that I would be charge dto us ethe visible BT network they suggested that if I changed to BT broadband as my ISP I would be able get free access on the visible BT hotspots.

They are a shockingly bad organisation who take unfair competition to new heights using their own poor performance to encourage transfer to BT as an ISP. It is difficult to imagine a successor organisation woudl nto be better.

Boeing just about gives up on the 747

Re: Aeroflot Flight 593

Why did anyone down vote this?

The pilot let his son and daughter have a go at the controls. The son managed to disengage the autopilot and put the plane in what became a steep turn which the pilots could not recover quickly enough and the crash that followed killed everyone. Ironically the investigation decided if the pilots had simply let go of the controls the plane would have successfully recovered itself!

I like the idea of letting childen and others in the cockpit but everything has a risk. Children or anyone else who is not qualified handling the controls is perhaps not justifiable in terms of the small probability but huge severity of possible consequences.

Death Stars are a waste of time – here's the best way to take over the galaxy

There are physical limits

"As far-fetched as this sounds, constructing such a large structure around or in a planet would be relatively easy with recursive manufacturing."

Except that with really large structures gravatational forces cannot be sustained by known materials which act like liquids under the immense pressures. OK it is science fiction so we can allow new materials or force fields but then why start talking about what is possible at all given we are free to postulate anything to overcome pysical limits (such as light speed!).

Star wars looks back into the past not the future because it is more emotionally satisfying. Battles are like world war II air battles or even earlier napoleonic wars type naval battles of attrition not smart weapons with a single hit kill capability. Swarms of small stealthed intelligent war machines are much more plausible but so what? They would not be fun to watch.

US Navy's newest ship sets sail with Captain James Kirk at the bridge

Re: Zumwalt's OS

LynxOS is a nice OS (IMH) but it does not have a Linux Kernel.

It is a realtime OS with support for Linux APIs (amongst others).

I have not used a recent version but it was very reliable and a nice environment to develop in.

Big Bang left us with a perfect random number generator

Re: Never Let an Astrophysicist do Cryptography

It is even worse because a known antenna as a source of entropy has a very obvious vulnerability. Thermal noise in a diode is difficult to gain phsyical access to but a huge antenna is anything but difficult to transmit to.

Anonymous UK 'leader' fined for revealing ID of rape complainant

Re: Twice?

'Either way, blaming a rape victim is never the right way to go - just remember, there is only one cause of rape, and that is rapists'

At best/worst she is an alleged rape victim. The assumption she is a victim is prejudging the man in this case even after the man was found not guilty. The fact that this is done is a strong argument for anonymity for the accused.

Interestingly and at the risk of provoking a flaming the studies on the prevelance of false rape accusations are all over the place from 3% to 90% of accusations. It is an inherently difficult thing to measure (estimate) but what is undisputed is that the overwhelming majority of those accused are not taken to court and found guilty so on the presumption of innocence there is a massive problem of those accused being unjustly victimised.

Octogenarian accused of performing sex act with a SHRUBBERY

Re: Is charging the right response?

Obviously a source of jokes but if the man concerned has no previous record then this strongly suggests a new neurological problem and that should be the main focus. Charging someone under these circumstances does not seem appropriate untill the likely medical problems have been investigated. He and his family have problems issues without a record of sexual offences.

Les unsporting gits! French spies BUGGED Concorde passengers

Anyone who does not assume that all states do this is very naive. I am sure that the US does the same on a vastly larger scale. Whenever there is a significant national interest for any state it should be assumed espionage and possibly worse takes place.

The Internet of things is great until it blows up your house

Articles demonstrate just how massively overhyped IoT is

The problem with the exampels for teh IoT as with almost everything I have seen is that the IoT makes products more expensive, functionally fragile, create security risks and does not add any benefits.

A smart iron is a great idea except that there is no need for the IoT but a machine readable ironing prescription on items of clothing. They already have human readable ironing prescription. IoT needs a machine readable unique item identifier or similar so has the same requirments on the clothing but adding the IoT has added no beenfit at all while complicating things and making the system more fragile. Using a smart phone's camera and bar code reading SW makes sense but then you just have a bluetooth connection to the iron and an App. Not really IoT at all.

The smart electric blanket, OK, but a better product has the body temperature cycle support built into the blanket, again why involve the IoT what is the benefit? I can only see downsides.

I rem

Google drives a tenth of news traffic? That's bull-doodie, to use the technical term

Re: How many of these are using Google as their address bar?

Well I use google as a sort of enhanced address bar even when I know the site I want becaus ei tis much easier.

If for example I want to go to Texas Instrument web site and look at the data sheet on a paticular component I can go to www.ti.com and then navigate through the product heirarchy or use the sites own search tools or I can just type TI [abreviated Part number] and then select the best looking link within www.ti.com. Google is much better at this than most sites and it is a consistent method across all sites.

The same is true of the guardian and other news sites. I can go to the guardian and struggle to find something or I can type a search for example "guardian left handed LGBT software discrimination" into google and go straight to whatver article I already know I want to read.

I only tend to type addresses when I want to go to the home page of a web site I know.

Radio 4 and Dr K on programming languages: Full of Java Kool-Aid

C should have been described

C and it's derivatives should be covered not only because it is probably the most successful and long lasting computer language, having a decade or two of general dominance and still being the language of choice for embedded systems 43 years later but because of the massive success of C derived languages, C++, Objective C, C# and Java to name just 4.

Vodafone didn't have a £6bn tax bill. Sort yourselves out, Lefties

Re: Grossly mileading and innacurate

The fact that the last legal action was a win by the inland revenue is a matter of public record.

This undermines the entire article and makes the writer lookrather stupid.

A Bombe Called Christopher, or A Very Poor Imitation

Not history

I found the film grating in the way it distorted history for the sake of simplistic over dramaticisation (which was annoying for it's childish implausability as much as its innacuracy) but I still thought it worth seeing as long as you treat the plot as fiction.

What do UK and Iran have in common? Both want to outlaw encrypted apps

Re: Risk vs benefit

It is all abour risk versus benefit but what is lost in the constant fear mongering by our government assisted by the media is that the rate of death from terrorism is very low far lower than it has been at any other time in my lifetime and arguably at an all time historic low although it is difficult to compare figures back a long way.

The threat that we are constantly remined about whould be compared to the threat from the IRA when we had regular bombings regualr deaths yet less panic and less erosion of liberties.

The paradox is that the rarer terrorist attacks become the more afraid of them we seem to get.

The benefit of new powers is notional at best given how low the rate of attacks is at the moment and the fact that whatever powers are given some attempted attacks will suceeed. WIth negligible benefits the case for more powers does not exist but I expect the powers will be given anyway.

What an ACE-HOLE! This super-software will whip you at poker, hands down

Re: So What? - Nonsense

The problem with the double the bet every time you lose strategy is that it only works if the player has an infinite amount of money. If you had an infinite amount of money then you do not really care. For any finite amount of money the expectation is that you lose money but structured in a way where you have high probabilities of small wins and a low probability of a big loss but in the long run the big losss outweighs the gains and you lose.

Is there ANOTHER UNIVERSE headed BACKWARDS IN TIME?

Re: Deep question with more than one mystery

Obviously we do not have space reversla symmetry if we have CPT but the mystery is still there why CPT?

Deep question with more than one mystery

There is more to explain than just the strangely high degree of ordering for small values of time which leads to the arrow of time in macroscopic physics.

Why is space and time minkowskian so the time dimension is singled out as having a different sign in the space time metric. Why? Why not all the same or two timelike dimesions?

Why do we not have simple time reversal symmmetry but have to tie it all together with other symmetries as CPT. We have (or at least we think we have) space reversal symmetry. This is independant from the observed assymetry in entropy.

Bernie Madoff's coders jailed for role in $65bn ponzi scheme fiasco

Re: WTF

No this is just silly writing some general purpose software does not expose you to being prosecuted.

If you develop software which is clearly and obviously intended to be used to commit a crime then you can be prosecuted rightly so you are at the very least conspiring to commit a crime.

In a similar way if you give somebody a lift to the bank it is not a crime but if you give a lift to a bank to somebody wearing a mask and carrying a shotgun and then take him home with a large bag of money you can be prosecuted.

Apple slapped in yet another patent battle

Where is the threshold for obviousness?

I read the first patent and the the trivial obviousness of it was stunning.

The hurdle is supposed to be not obvious to someone skilled in the art. The patent would not have cleared the standard of not obvious to an unskilled but reasonably intelligent child.

Nothing against patents but they MUST be non-obvious to someone skilled in the art. The opposite seems to be the norm.

Judge: Terror bomb victims CAN'T seize Iran's domain name as compensation

Bizarre in many ways

The legal theory behind this is that because Iran funded Hamas Iran is responsible for attacks committed by Hamas.

The idea of sueing states for the support of organisations whose actions you disapprove of is clealry a case of the strong doing what they like to the weak and massive hypocrisy.

No compensation has been paid the shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner killing hundreds (not even an apology!) or the bombing of an african pharmecutical factory which killed a low end estimate of 10,000 people. The US continues to fund many terrorist organisations and continues to launch drone strikes into countries which it is not at war at. There is no chance whatsoever of anybody getting money from thr US for any of this.

Hamas are quite clealry a resistance movement fighting a guerilla wa, approve or disapprove of their actions being able to use governmentsthat support their actions if universally applied would open a huge can of worms.

The issue of whether a domain name is property or not seems mild compared to this.

Computer misuse: Brits could face LIFE IN PRISON for serious hacking offences

Seriously confusing draft

The drafting is fundamentally flawed at the most basic level. In some cases it is clearly intended that a list of conditions shoudl be logically ANDed together in another place that they should be logically ORed together with no text at all to distinguish between the to cases. This is just broken. Which interpretation will prefail?

At a more fundamental level why do we need it? I am still very sceptical about the idea of hacking causing deaths and similar and for the all the most serious consequences surely we have enough laws already to cover death, serious economic damage etc.

It's 2014 and you can still own a Windows box using a Word file or font

Re: Why would you PARSE FONTS in the kernel?

I was going to ask the obvious question of why the hell fonts are parsed in the kernel but someone beat me to it.

The supposed answer that the reason is that video drivers are in the kernel is no answeer at all but points to the problem, a failure of architecture and design in windows.

You do not need to go all the way to a microkernel architecture to spend some time partioning graphics and video related subsystems so that what is in the kernel is a well defined minimum. Font parsing clearly would not be in the kernel of a well designed system.

Jony Ive: Flattered by rivals' designs? Nah, its 'theft'

Response to: Now I know many techies don't have much in the way of creative capacity

I take it you are not a 'techie'. I have worked in product design almost my entire life and I need to deploy creative and tehcnical skills. In my experience the only people who think engineers and scientists are not creative are those who are ignorant and/or incapable of technical work and lack the imagination to see why creativity is important in technical fields.

In other words those who are both ignorant and stupid.

In the wider debate about Apple the reason they get such a hostile reception is that they managed to claim as their own design elements they themselves copied and which were well established before they entered the market. This reduces innovation and the ability to be creative.

THE DEATH OF ECONOMICS: Aircraft design vs flat-lining financial models

Economics cannot be modelled

Economics cannot be modelled in this sense:

1. Any economic theory that works reasonably well is then used by financial organisations to calculate the consequnces of their own behaviour and 'optimise' for profit. This is a form of feedback that continues until the model fails which it inevitably will.

2. Economic theory is almost entirely based on the idea of a large collection of 'rational' agents acting in their best interest. This does not reflect reality where the psychology of people comes into play. In order to have an accurate model of economies we need an accurate model of people.

This does not mean that useful quantative and qualtative economic theories cannot be developed but economics as some sort of engineering disciplince is not possible.

The article itself seems written by someone devoid of significant knowledge about economics. The idea that GDP growth is tied to increased resource consumption is paticualarily bizarre for someone writing for a magazine read by software developers. The clus is that Software development and sales add to GDP.

On test: Samsung 845DC EVO 3-bit Toggle MLC and 845DC PRO 3D V-NAND SSDs

Odd use of concentric

I found the use of read (or write) concentric to mean read (foccussed, biased, optimised, dominated, orientated ....) really disconcerting. Am I an old Foggie and concentric is used to mean this nowadays or is it just the author? Funnily enough I could live with read centred although it is maybe not the best word. There are certainly a lot of other words the author could pick. The use of concentric to mean having a common centre is certainly a useful one an one that does not have lots of alternative words to scribe.

NASA tests crazytech flying saucer thruster, could reach Mars in days

Re: Here's another...

But the center of mass of the system as a whole is not affected. It is like running up and down a small boat. The boat will move backwards and forwards a little but you can't do more than oscillate the boat around an average position and the center of mass of the whole system does not move.

Ukrainian teen created in lab passes Turing Test – famous nutty prof

Dod it really pass or is it just noise?

Even if more than 30% of the judges in one test could not tell it was a machine this does not mean it actually passes because of uncertainty in the measurment. If for the sake of argument a judge has a 25% chance of thinking the machine is human (ie. the machine fails the turing criteria) and there are 20 judges then there is a 21% chance that 35% of judges will give a pass result. How many time si the turnig test run if you consider all teh entrants every year? Just probability/statistics will give a pass eventually. The turing test has been run many times so the fact that we get an outlier result should not be a surprise.

The sample conversation was very poor and no noticeable improvement from early efforts.

UK govt preps World War 2 energy rationing to keep the lights on

Politicians pandering to the Greens are the problem not the EU

The problem is politicians pandering to teh green fantasy in an attempt to buy votes by spending money on a power technology which is not just more epensive than any other but is fundamentally broken is teh problem.

Britain has spent more than enough money over a long enough time period to renew our generation capacity and reduce carbon emissions but it was spent on renewables which are useless as more than a marginal power source rather than a tehcnology that actually works. Gas would have been the cheap option, nuclear the environmentally friendly, safe, strategic power security option. Our politicians went for the politically convenient fantasy option that doesn't actually work and makes the technologies that do work more expensive by requiring constant hot backup.

In an ideal world this might rebound on the politicians and environmentalists responsible but I doubt it. The politicians who inherit the problem rather than those who created it will be blamed and the greens will probably take to responsibility at all and propose more broken technically illiterate solutions.

E-cigarettes help you quit – but may not keep you alive

Extreme regulation?

E-cigarettes deliver a drug into the body. There are significant issues if impurities are in the fluid or concentrations are wildly incorrect.

At the moment there is no regulation of aspects related to the effect on physiology or health of teh drug delivery. This is waiting for some short cut manufacturing or adulteration process to cause serious injury. There was a proposal to piggy back onto medical device regulations that I thought made sense rather than create new regulations but others may disagree. Effectively no regulation is waiting for a serious problem. The fact that real cigarettes are much worse should be a sobering thought. The tar that causes the problem is basically just a badly formulated pharmecutical delivering uintended chemicals as well as the nicotine and how many die every year from this?

Even with regulation there may be some incidents without it the probability/frequency is likely to be higher paticularily given price competition.

At the moment the risk of a real cigareete outweights the risk of a dodgy E-cigarette but the risk of constantly inhaling an uncontrolled mixture is significant. We have regulation of the food industry and the pharmecutical industry for good reason and the body is likely through evolution to be able to withstand unpleasant substances ingested better than inhaled substances.

Some regulation is sensible and the real debate should be the nature of that regulation.

Torvalds rails at Linux developer: 'I'm f*cking tired of your code'

Re: Mozilla

"Those sensitive gay people ruin everything huh? At least the UK establishment has never persecuted gay computer scientists. Oh wait that's right they basically murdered one of the greatest in history".

I am no fan of 'the establishment' but he was not 'basically murdered'. He was treated badly but they did not come close to murdering him. It is far from clearthat Alan Turing committed suicide. It is quite possible he died due to a stupid error but if he did commit suicide it was his own decision and not remotely forced upon him.

I do not understand the desire to turn a talented mathematician into some sort of martyred saint. Let his achievements stand for themselves without the embellishment of martyrdom.

Exposed: bizarre quantum sibling love triangle

No information transfer faster than speed of light

What this and other older experiments demonstrate is that QM is inherently non-local. Incredibly QM manages to be non-local yet prevents information transfer using the non-local nature. This is amazing when you think about it.

The non-locality also means it is not necessarily true that QM is inherently random, non-local hidden variables could be present and depending on your personal bias this may seem more or less likely than th3 traditional view.

iOS 7's weak random number generator stuns kernel security – claim

Re: Never use RAND()

From the code Marsaglia's is just an LCG - nothing wrong with that of course as long as the values are well chosen. Efficency wise I do not see the benefit of the 64 bit multiply all the upper bits get dropped later anyway. I like having more state than the output so if you have a 32 bit output you have 64 bits of state and a period (with well chosen constants) of 2^64-1.

Teh real point is use a PRNG for test data, simulation, monter carlo methods, padding etc but not cryptographic key generation etc.

Modern spying 101: How NSA bugs Chinese PCs with tiny USB radios - NYT

Re: Proving His Enemies Right

The US spy plane was flying right on the border of chinese airspace playing a game of chicken with the chinese airforce pilot who was trying to ensure the US spy plane did not enter chinese airspaces when both planes collided. The chinese plane and pilot were lost the US plane was only damaged.

It is very unclear and probably unknowable whether the US pilot, chinese pilot or both made the fatal mistake but the entire situation was instigated by the aggressive and provocative actions of US spy planes flying straight at the border of chinese airspace and seeing how they reacted.

Potrraying this as chinese agression is very misleading

How Britain could have invented the iPhone: And how the Quangocracy cocked it up

No Sympathy - whining because one of many possible funding sources was used and they did not give as much funding as needed is entirely the guys fault. Why did he agree and sign a contract if they were only providing a derisory 20K an order of magnitude less than required to get to a manufacturable product? Thsi smacks of wishful thining by someone without any sort of commercial clue. yes the British establsihment is woefully bad at supporting industry with a shockingly poor understanding of science, tehcnology and how to get things done but they are at least trying. The fact they gave money to someone who is commercially naise and incompotent reflects badly on all parties but the prime responsibility for failure belongs firmly with the guy who conceive dthe idea and set up th eproject and company not a government body who provided funding.

MPs: Ancient UK Border Force systems let gangsters into country

IT is not the issue

The very best an IT system can do is to assist in making decisions about which shipments, planes etc are high risk. Any sensible strategy has to include an element of random inspection to account for the certainty that there may be things we do not know and potential smugglers may anticipate what is and isn't considered high risk. Any sensible analysis has to assume that our risk categorisation will not be perfect. A potential 200 records that may be missed out of 650,000 does not sound that terrible to me.

If we have politicians trying to imply that border security could or should be perfect that is a bigger problem, potentially leading to all sorts of broken decision making.

Call yourself a 'hacker', watch your ex-boss seize your PC without warning

Re: CEH'ers

Hacker has many meanings and is still in use to simply mean someone who codes quickly, perhaps without a formal design and likes playing with code. This was the original meaning in a computer context.

Descrbing oneself as a hacker absolutely is not equivalent to saying you are interested or expert in security areas let alone you are someone who illegally attacks systems.

The verb hack to mean quickly modify code is still very widely used.

Boffins hide supercapacitors on silicon chips

Re: Still some way short of LiPo cells though

No idea whether your calculation is correct but the point about super capacitors is the very rapid charge and discharge capability and the number of cycles. They have nothing like the energy density of a battery. They can be used where batteries cannot and often make sense in conjuction with a battery to handle pulse power demands for example in a GSM mobile phone they make sense in addition to the lithium cell to make the most of the battery by evening out demand. Improvements to super caps are useful and integration within an IC is intriguing although I suspect a long way off. Integrating decoupling capacitance which needs good high frequency response seems a more urgent need in most applications.

Microsoft: Surface a failure? No, it made us STRONGER

Re: they must be doing something wrong....

Even if you think SW patents are acceptable FAT32 is an issue.

The problem with the FAT32 patent is that it is a stunningly obvious solution to a problem that only existed because of the pathetic design of FAT. The value of FAT32 patent is only FAT32's status as a de facto standard. Nobody designing a new filesytem would do anything as broken as FAT32. Patents that reward obvious solutions are bad because they inhibit innovation and competition. Patents whose only value is to allow implementation of a de facto standard and have no independant technical worth are very worrying especially when they are not offered under RAND terms.

UK investor throws £14.8m at firm that makes UNFORGEABLE 2-cent labels

No credibility

All credibility is lost with the statement that it is impossible to forge. A statement that it is hard or expensive to forge I could live with. I suspect any money invested has been thrown away.

Oh noes! New 'CRISIS DISASTER' at Fukushima! Oh wait, it's nothing. Again

Re: At the risk of...

The more we learn about the reality of worst cas enuclear accidents the more we find that reactors ar esfaer than we though much less radioactivity is released than was assumed in modelling. If you compare the worst impact of a catastrophic ereactor failure, chrenobyl with atotal death toll of immediate and long tern affects of far less than 100 to the worst case effects of other industries and power sources you realise that not only is nuclear much safer on average but the worst case impact is relatively benign. A quick comparisson to the worst renewable energy disater with 170,000 dead and several towns wiped form the map is significant but strangely ignored by greanpeace etc.

Big blue Avatar movie spawns THREE SEQUELS

Re: Great

I am stunned anyone can use the word good in association with the star wars prequels.

Avatar has a dull predictable and cliched plot poorly acted. It was saved by stunning visual effects. This will be harder to pull off with every following film. If the plot and dialogue are as bad as the star wars prequels they will be truely awful films.

Nothing says the sequels have to be poor but the omens are not good.

SMBs are tumbling into the cloud? Oh get real

Where is the business case?

Until there is a substantial business case the cloud will remain an amorphous meaningless buzzword for most SMEs - appropriate name really.