* Posts by Kelley Johnston

7 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2009

Higgs data shows alternate reality will SWALLOW UNIVERSE

Kelley Johnston

Spider Robinson covered this a few years ago

One of his main characters - Nikola Tesla - described this possibility, and the entire book revolved around its prevention. I believe the book was "Callihan's Key", and one of his better ones.

White House forbids feds from reading WikiLeaked cables

Kelley Johnston
Headmaster

All very Gulliver's Travels

Remember the town of little people, Laputa? They employed flappers, whose job it was to flap the lips of the officials with a bladder on a stick. They could not speak in public unless their flappers did their job.

It seems that the Flappers have a union, and they *really* don't want to be circumvented here. If the sky was blue, it wouldn't be officially so unless they reported it.

It's the sort of thing we'd expect from the goverrnment of Laputa; after all, they were fictional. There wouldn't be any such behaviour in real life, would there?

Exchange 2010 dumps single instance storage

Kelley Johnston
Gates Halo

SIS there since the beginning

"Single Instance Storage has been around in Exchange for considerably longer than Exchange 2005 would have existed were it a real product and not something you made up."

Single-instance store existed in the beta versions of Exchange, such as the beta test release I used prior to its first commercial release. It was touted as one of the key differentiators to Lotus Notes. (The other key was how much less overall traffic it saved compared to Notes. Personally I was impressed by how much easier it was to administer.)

The value of SIS depends on the size of the groups you're spamming^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H connecting with. Culturally people are becoming spam-adverse, even within companies.

And since Active Directory and Exchange user lists are now aligned, I can see how any streamlining of Exchange Server may have a likely flow-on effect with server AD. Might have been a good move overall.

GSHP: The green tech even carbon sceptics will like

Kelley Johnston
Boffin

Stirling engines and heat differential

Search for "MicroCHP" to get a look at a few alternatives. The Whispergen unit from the New Zealand interests me from a grid viewpoint (I'm an E&U analyst with an international SI, not affiliated with Whispertech). It's a Stirling engine with a low floorspace requirement.

There are a number of ways to look at one from an overall energy usage standpoint. Feed it with gas and you'll dump about 5.5kw into your hot water system and about 800 watts into a battery system (you could run your house lights fairly comfortably on 12V with this, more bits with a bit of electrical plumbing).

With a Stirling, it's the difference in heat you're tapping, not just the heat from commercial fuel. With a bit of creative plumbing you could drive the motor from one of these from the difference in ground well vs. the air alone, and drive the generator directly from that.

As-is, it may not be hugely powerful from a size vs. output perspective (relative to say, a petrol engine) but there's a certain attraction to the concept of completely fuel-free operation.

Rather than heat the hot side heat exchanger with gas or diesel, you simply bury the cold side heat exchanger someplace colder than the ambient. The bigger the temp difference, the greater the power.

'Stop NASA bombing the Moon!'

Kelley Johnston
Megaphone

Neff

It is a tremendously bad thing to shoot holes in the moon's face when what she really needs is tender loving care. I vote we take a billion tons of dolphin-safe cosmetic cream and send it up there to heal her badly bruised complexion.

This may introduce a question as to how we send a giant space trowel to smooth it over all those craters, but (to quote Jack Welsh) strategy is simple; pick a direction and implement like hell.

There is no question but that to the surreal at heart a peach pit is equally donkey.

The Internet's most evil company?

Kelley Johnston

I disagree with the article's title's premise

This isn't the RIAA, folks, they're not suing poor motherless orphans or kicking babies. They're simply trying to adjust the way they present their content to the Internet. They're well within their rights to try; it's their pipeline, after all, and if they cave in to the bloggers and abandon the effort we'll all be poorer. Unless you intend to crowd source the data; all good if you do, but then you may be at the mercy of people with a barrow to push.

I suggest that a company's published values are usually a good indication of whether they're a true news organisation or not. This isn't your everyday shock-jock organisation.

http://www.ap.org/newsvalues/index.html

Boffins build super-accurate atomic clock

Kelley Johnston

inaccurate explanation

"Strontium belongs to a class of atoms called fermions" - dear gods. Crossed a knowledge band gap here we did, didn't we?

Fermions are a class of elementary particles. Atoms are made up of elementary particles. Strontium is an atom composed of elementary particles like protons and electrons, both of which are classed as fermions.