unicron transforming veeerrrryyyy sslloooooowwlllyyyy
Posts by Glen 1
960 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
CRACK made by quakes FOUND ON MOON
Two UK airports scrap IRIS eye-scanners
Fondle my slab, baby: Inside the tactile world of Apple-fan iDating
Apple's secret outsource: 'Even more software to be made in India'
Monday 13th February 2012 17:47 GMT
'our' corporations....
whose?
These companies are sufficiently large that they can (and often do) up sticks to where the tax situation is most favorable.
I think you will find that many of 'our' corporations are Irish, or based in Luxemburg, or do business out of grand cayman etc...
Ultimately, any increase in tax will be passed on to the consumer.
Mickey Mouse Whois ban threat sparks privacy fears
Monday 30th January 2012 17:17 GMT 
I registered for dyn's secret registration service...
and had my co.uk domain 'expired' by nominet because the whois record didnt contain what they saw as valid info...
After too-ing and fro-ing with dyn, they refunded me, and said i can re-register, but not to select the secret registration option.
Strangely, last i checked, dyn still offers the secret registration service with .uk domains....
Google finally admits it wants to OWN YOU
OCZ refunds punter for dud drive shortly after El Reg steps in
Android-powered goggles bring virtual reality closer
Tuesday 10th January 2012 20:09 GMT
this is going to sound realy random, but bare with me...
in the milenium edition of pcgamer (or was it pc zone, i forget), they did a futuretech speculation article set up as a mock news report. One of the articles was how a gadget such as this erased homeless people from the users vision, optionally replacing them with cartoon characters.
Those of you familiar with dennou coil can see it's awesome future just a little bit closer...
Tempt tech talent without Googlesque mega perks
Tuesday 20th December 2011 17:36 GMT 
you hit the nail on the head.
the key issue is training.
Grads leave uni not knowing about much of the technology that they will be using later in their careers. Companies wanting to hire someone fresh out of uni who is an expert in X, only get their wish is they have influence on the syllabus.
A company that is prepared to invest in its staff will have a constantly improving workforce, none (less) of this 'do the minimum or you're sacked'. As long as they don't get over-skilled and search for pastures new... and that's the danger.
Companies don't want to spend money improving in house staff when they can hire for a specific skill. That way, they don't have to pay to have the staff member not doing productive work while they are being trained, only to have to give them a raise.
Then they whinge about a skills shortage, and want cheap imported labour to fill the 'skills gap' instead of plugging the 'wages gap' or the 'training gap'
Jedi light-sabre beats Taser in Oregon parking-lot fracas
Windows 8 fondleslabs: Microsoft tip-toes through PC-makers' disaster
What's that sound? It's PC sales plummeting into abyss
Valve says credit card data taken
NASA tells Voyager 2 to save its strength
Is your old hardware made of gold, or just DIRT?
Monday 7th November 2011 19:01 GMT
@AC
economics is rarely concerned with sustainability (look at how we got into the credit crunch)
While I agree that a sustainable approach would be preferable, until any such approach can compete on cost, it will only succeed with subsidies (such as FiTs). Anywhere such subsidies aren't available will continue with the unsustainable model.
You ask about cost in terms of stealing from our children. To even guess, would require us to predict the next 30/60/100 odd years of the metals/energy markets. Other than 'probably more expensive' any attempt at quantifying this (as you ask), would simply be guessing, and not in the scope of the original article.
>Having to revert to a lower standard of living
Indeed, but that is a relative term. The 4x4 stealing resources across time that you mention, *is a part* of some peoples standard of living, which they will have to forego to achieve this utopian sustainable future, or pay an ever increasing premium (as they already do), or move to electricity. (which could come from whatever the energy source of the day is).
Yes, energy will be more expensive. To the point where if you buy an petrol tanker and park it somewhere safe, you will probably get a better return in a year than if you had left the money in the bank.
The point I'm trying to make is that energy is currently ridiculously cheap compared to what it will be in the near future. With the ever increasing demand for oil, it is a case of use it or lose it, because someone *will* use it. A similar thing will then happen with nuclear power. It wont be until oil and Uranium run out that it will be in big business' interest to *seriously* pursue more sustainable forms of power. (how expensive does energy have to be before mining Helium3 on the moon becomes cost effective?)
No amount of solar/wind/whatever will stop the oil from running out. The only defence is to not need oil/plastics any more...
Of course, the countries/companies that are doing such sustainable R&D *now* will have a competitive advantage, but this may not be evident for 30/60/100 years. That makes it a *much* harder sell to the taxpayers/shareholders (except maybe in things like data centres, where most of the operating cost is energy).
Thursday 3rd November 2011 22:29 GMT
re: "outcome you prefer"
The preferred outcome is to be able to recycle everything at minimal cost, and maximum profit. If Tim could make a profit from recycling these marginal materials, he would.
As with any finite resource, as the supply dwindles, the price will go up. Materials that were not viably recyclable will become more viable. Unlike fossil fuels, these metals are rarely burnt off, they just get harder to get at as we move them around (with the exception of the stuff we fling into space).
Tim wants to recycle everything he *profitably* can, thus the emphasis on economics. You can be sure, even if Tim has let some of the marginal opportunities pass by, where there is a buck to be made, people will try to make it.
Given the volatility of the price of metals/energy, it would be pointless to quantify the numbers any further than a rough ratio. (for example, what will be the cost of moving XKg of Y metal Z distance in a months time? Ill bet it will be more than today)
As for "utterly vital" resources, you infer fossil fuels ("may already have peaked"), but this is simply the current cheapest way of doing things, *when* this is no longer the case, the *many* other options will be used, not because we will have run out, but because there will be cheaper alternatives.
note: I don't mean cheaper than *now*, I mean cheaper than the future sky high oil price at which solar/wind/whatever becomes competitive without subsidy. The price of energy will continue to go up while people are still having babies.
I think it is worth re-iterating that Tim (the author of the article) recycles as a business, and any assumptions he has made are either
a) not assumptions, but information that the origin of which could be commercially sensitive (such as his profit margin)
b) Discovered by hard won experience.
Windows 7 overtakes XP - finally
Boffins prove Queen ballad 'world's most catchy song'
Trust me, I'm a computer: Watson takes on health care challenge
Monday 26th September 2011 07:30 GMT
hmmmm...
i cant help but think that watson will end up being the doctor's equivalent of 1st line tech support...
The assumption is that the doc is competent, and not just blindly following what the computer says to do.
The flip side of that is if watson *isnt* followed because the doc thinks he knows better, and then turns out to be wrong...
You cant exactly send the engineer round to to a re-install and swap the mobo...
AMD snags Guinness World Record for clockiest chip
Friday 16th September 2011 20:54 GMT
@Rob - Fair Enough, in your specific case.
Your media PC is better specced i/o wise than my main system, so in your specific case, with all those disks, an older CPU, you are correct. However, I doubt that many people have that sort of setup, most NAS devices tend to be set up as either mirrors, JBOD or RAID5.
If people design the system to fit a specific task (as you have done), they can target the bottlenecks, and not waste money on new/overspecced equipment that wont benefit the job in hand. However, in general, when buying a ready made PC it is always the I/O that shows its age first (namely hard drive thrashing with too little ram). This is arguably down to software bloat (I'm looking at you Firefox :-|). Outside of games, there simply aren't that many things that are compute bound. At least not for the home user, and everyone else knows enough to tailor their machine to its task.
Id be interested to see the CPU load on the Xeon test you ran...
Atom processors and arm devices have taken off because these chips do almost everything the home user wants to do, despite being *much* slower than what is mentioned in this story. The rise of virtualisation came about partially due to how underutilised the contemporary server hardware was. BOINC and it's ilk are unobtrusive because they use very little I/O (as far as Seti/folding go). I could go on...
Tuesday 13th September 2011 23:33 GMT
@6hrs for dvd conversion
for my T5750 @2.0 Ghz, dvd encoding is i/o bound.
upgrading to a faster processor (and required mobo + ram) will do bugger all
(except for making faster busses available ;) )
For me, a faster HD will have a much bigger impact, at least until HD speed is fast enough for it to become CPU bound again.
Am currently leaning toward an APU with a nippy SSD...
NASA offers space shuttle food and tiles to schools
Slow broadband blackspots mostly in south, not north
Ten... outdoor gadgets
Saturday 20th August 2011 23:13 GMT
from experience, it depends.
if you leave them in a draw over winter, the self discharged battery will take quite a while to charge and youve probably fubared it anyway, by letting it go so low.
However, leave it on a windowsill, and jobs a goodun.
As for recharge rates, it depends on your usage, size/type of panel, and the weather. Most (non toy) units can probably manage 1 smartphone never seeing mains power, but that assumes panels are in a position to charge most of the time. Not just for ten mins when you notice the phone is beeping low battery.
If your going to try and run 3 phones and a digital camera off one, you are going to come unstuck.
For any more detail than that, you'll have to look at the specific figures per device. Eg my phone takes 1 hour to fully charge of a 5w charger. These panels will be lucky if they can charge their internal batteries at a rate of 1w (assuming expensive monocrystalline panels) , so plan accordingly.
NASA's Juno roars off to Jupiter
Virgin Media sees 36,000 cable customers scarper in Q2
Interstellar space 'full of Jupiter-size orphan planets'
Dropbox 'insecure and misleading' – crypto researcher
Tuesday 17th May 2011 08:34 GMT
both truecrypt and dropbox split things up on the block level.
Dropbox only uploads the parts of the file that have changed, and if a file in a truecrypt container is edited, only the block containing the file is re-encrypted.
That said, if you have a large container, and edit its contents a lot, you have the overhead of dropbox constantly recalculating the hashes...
Sony unsure if PlayStation Network user data was stolen
Tuesday 26th April 2011 07:03 GMT
with apologies to Pastor Martin Niemöller...
First they removed PS2 compatibility,
and I didn't speak out because I didn't use any PS2 software.
Then they removed the 'OtherOS',
and I didn't speak out because I only really played with it.
Then they released 'motion controller only' games,
and I didn't speak out because I can do without them.
Then they came for my credit card details...
How to build a national cellular wireless network for £50m
Friday 22nd April 2011 15:28 GMT
monopoly vs competition
i think there is a middle ground to be had here, where a standard is defined, and many vendors compete to provide the kit.
kind of how it is with wifi.
of course, that assumes ofcom will allow the effective unbundling of the relevant spectrum like in the 2.4ghz space, as opposed to the current mobile phone situation (networks 'own' the frequencies)
Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old
Saturday 5th March 2011 18:31 GMT
re: 65xe
I had one!!! (years later, 2nd hand from a car boot even then...)
trying to create my own awesome graphics - as 8 year old it consisted of scanlining my own rectangles and triangles, making up a rubbish version of the Jurassic park logo
don't get me started about the film trailer i tried to do...
Broadband tax scrapped in 'wash-up'
Wednesday 7th April 2010 21:04 GMT
not so much super fast BB as just BB
I thought the point of the tax was to pay for getting more remote areas wired up (~512kb-1mb up from 56k dial up, which compared to urban areas is not "super fast").
That's at least an order of magnitude increase (maybe two orders, depending on what speeds actually get rolled out)
On modern websites, it can take the waiting time from 30+ seconds for a single page to load. (grrrr flash ads) down to <3, and being able to use iplayer properly.
As they are going to have to dig up the roads (or replace ducted wires and stuff) to do it anyway, they might as well use fibre and do the job properly.
As for "need" vs "want" it is not *essential* for a person to own/have access to a car, but it lets you do things that you would otherwise not be able to do. The internet is rapidly becoming (if it isn't already) as useful as having a car. (Although i do see you point about a car(BB) vs a souped up sports car (Super fast BB))
Firefox 3.6 hits ice - won't show up till Spring
Wednesday 30th December 2009 16:20 GMT
re: people arguing about end of the decade
No.
Talking about the 201st decade is about as facetious as talking about the 3rd millennium. It implies there was no time before this, where in fact most of history happened before the year 1. (even using deluded creationist "young earth" dates)
As mentioned in a different thread, the millennium began in 2001 because there was apparently no year 0.
However, people celebrated it NYE 1999. So one could say this is the 10 year anniversary of that date.
or the fact that many people use the decimal system for tracking what year it is on the Gregorian calendar, and what they are celebrating is the change of the number of tens. (The "decade" if you will)
or rather less subjectively:
The fact that the astronomical year numbering includes a year 0.
That ISO 8601 has a year 0
so hapy new ISO/astronomical decade!!!
High-speed Chinese train kicks French, Japanese butt
Wednesday 30th December 2009 16:17 GMT
@jim
in many countries, the reason for the better infrastructure is that WW2 ensured that the Victorian era stuff was destroyed.
Many countries rail networks were either carpet bombed, or systematically destroyed to prevent enemy movement. (or both, at different stages, by different sides)
Starting from scratch in the 50s makes it a lot easier to make more modern design decisions, even if it was more expensive (costs more to build stuff twice). Especially with recovering-from-war levels of infrastructure investment.
Admittedly, this doesn't excuse the incompetence of various UK governments, but with the NIMBYs and the huge amount of money required, its little wonder most of the planned upgrades attempted have been incremental.
(i believe the st pancreas (lol) section was the first new track laid down in years... with planned links to Birmingham and Manchester, we may at some point at least be comparable to the TGV, which will by then be out of date... oh well...)
Jimbo asks online folk to play nice, be civil
McKinnon family 'devastated' by Home Sec's latest knock-back
Sunday 29th November 2009 03:32 GMT
quoted out of context for fun and proffit
"NASA and US Military systems, nothing to do with Intelligence"
on a more serious note. I am a brit, and think he should be prosecuted. The problem is, with the one sided treaty, and obvious scapegoating, it is no longer a judicial/criminal issue, but a political one.
I mean, at one point the phrase "hes gonna fry" was infamously muttered to mckinnon's legal council (referring to the electric chair).
Ex employees (of other companies) have done more damage (moniterally) and not had this level of "he's a bad guy" scapegoating. Little wonder he doesn't expect a fair trial...
Climate change hackers leave breadcrumb trail
US immigration dodge is permanent
Apple seeks OS-jacking advert patent
Tuesday 17th November 2009 00:40 GMT
how is this any different...
than the nag screen of so many shareware (or similar) apps? (winzip springs to mind)
or the please donate screen of vuze/azureus?
or those annoying flash ads that cover what your trying to read? until you click to close.
(thankfully disappeared since the installation of noscript circa firefox 2- are those ads still about?)
the list of prior art goes on...
i suppose its making the whole device useless instead of just the 1 program that makes this "innovative"... and i thought there was already a word for programs that prevent the user from using his/her device...
<insert troll answer - anything by ms, itunes, linux, bong! Times up, the answer i was looking for was in fact MALWARE (i would also have accepted virus/i)>
'F-22 Raptor stealth coatings are crap' case goes to court
Revealed: The amazing premise behind Ridley Scott's Monopoly
Palm Pre smartphone
Saturday 17th October 2009 01:13 GMT 
i may be a luddite...
I got an n95 8gb free on contract a few years ago, the supposed successors are waaaay more expensive, and don't do *that* much more than my n95 does.
iplayer? check.
gps? check.
email? check.
3g? check (this would have been obvious before the 1st gen iphone)
facebook/google maps/yawn? check.
what is it about these phones that warrants the extortionate price tag?
I dropped to sim only when my contract was up due to the lack of improvement.
Can anyone name a phone that's better than the n95 and is free on £35 a month contract?
I would really like to know.
US spontaneous human combustion raygun video released
Saturday 3rd October 2009 11:06 GMT 
3 words
POINT. DEFENCE. LASERS.
effective anti-missile technology.
ships (type 45 destroyers as an example) with these instead of a much slower to launch missile system?
if you can do it solid state as well, a nearly limitless anti-missile capability (while it has power, life of the components etc etc)
on a less serious note,
this + disco ball = mutually assured destruction.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
