Posts by toughluck

Now VW air-pollution cheatware 'found in Audis and Porsches'

Is anybody surprised by now?

Honestly speaking, that's what pretty much anyone was expecting -- once you cheat, you go all the way.

I won't be surprised if their turbocharged petrol engines, especially stratified injection (TSI and TFSI) were similarly affected, since they rely on the same lean burn as Diesel engines to claim the same fuel efficiency benefits with much the same problems as with Diesels.

What's wrong with them? I don't drive German, but I appreciate that CARB and CAFEE tested the Volkswagens alongside a BMW X5 with a 3-litre Diesel engine, which met the emissions figures in and out of the lab, so that's clearly achievable.

What upgrade cycle? Tablet sales crater for fourth straight quarter

Oh, but just you wait, tablets are going to replace laptops reeeally soon now.

Dad who shot 'snooping vid drone' out of the sky is cleared of charges

Re: Bullit County

@Dave 126: That is immaterial. He had no way of knowing if the drone operator was filming his daughters or not, and it didn't matter because the operator was invading his privacy.

If Mr. Merideth had a way of knowing that the drone was clearly facing away and if the flight pattern clearly showed it was flying through the area rather than loitering, then he could be in trouble. I presume the court established that. Even if not, if Mr. Boggs attempts to appeal or sue, the onus is on him.

In a similar situation, if you're cornered by a thug brandishing a knife, but you're armed, you have no duty to retreat, and you are not expected to inspect the knife to make sure that it's actually dangerous. If you shoot him and the knife turns out to be a plastic toy (some toys these are), it doesn't play much of a role, you had no way of knowing and you were protecting yourself against what seemed to have been a very real danger.

‘Insufficient evidence’ makes Brit cops drop revenge porn probes

Re: EXIF

Sigh... I meant a situation where the guy is innocent (as absurd as it sounds, men aren't always guilty!) and his ex-gf decided to make him miserable, post pics of herself and then try to implicate him.

How about I add something to the conversation:

- That's true, he used my phone to take my pics and then copied them to his phone.

- When did you say you broke up?

- September 20th.

- Timestamps in these pics say they were taken on October 5th.

And to the really daft: Oh, and look, there's a newspaper behind you clearly showing the date: October 5th.

Re: May not be me after all

Most of the pictures floating round still have complete EXIF data unless specifically overwritten by the photo editor of choice, so why not use that? If it is legit information (including, apparently, some device unique data), then it can obviously point to the exact device with which the picture was taken. Assuming of course that the data is not maliciously altered, but it's simply impossible to know all these unique details of an unknown phone or camera.

It would definitely help sift out reverse-revenge porn:

- That scumbag of my ex-bf posted nudie snaps of me on the interweb!

- Could you take and upload a picture from your phone ma'am?

- But those pictures you are showing were made with your phone!?

Many of the 175 cases of revenge porn offences investigated by UK police since a change of the law since April were dropped because of insufficient evidence, suggesting that they were dropped because of insufficient evidence.

There, FTFY. There's not an ounce of evidence that this is due to victims being too frightened, that's a complete non-sequitur.

Pure next in line to put boot into Dell

Shrinking market due to cloud

If you make your living from high performance storage arrays and performance is your key differentiating feature, then customers will flock to you simply because they need that last ounce of performance to feed data to their software.

Cloud storage is not about performance, it's about price. Having an array that can deliver ten million IOPS at 1 TB/s is meaningless when the Internet connection to the cloud supports just 100 GB/s and just one million packets per second. If your competition can deliver two million IOPS and 200 GB/s, but do it for half the price, your hardware is then useless for the cloud.

Many customers warmed up quite a bit to hierarchical storage and no longer need on-premises high-end arrays when all online data is in fairly small flash, and cloud is treated as nearline storage -- flash enabled that.

Faked NatWest, Halifax bank sites score REAL security certs

At the same time, banks block password managers

This is absolutely silly. Opera had a built-in password manager for years, and I've been using it for pretty much everything, including the banking site. I do remember my login and password, it's just that the password manager does not allow me to log in if the site details don't match what was provided initially -- field names must be the same, URL must be the same, certificate must be valid.

If I ever followed a phish link by accident, the password manager would not work. When my PC clock drifted and invalidated the certificate (I can't remember the details), the password manager refused to work with the site.

And yes, when the bank decided that password managers are banned, field names are dynamically altered, so the password manager fails to work.

This beggars belief. A password manager is a simple but extremely powerful tool, and does wonders for security, to the point where it's much safer for the average user -- hey, if the password manager doesn't work here, something is off, probably phishy.

Oh, and my mom's bank considers security to to be in the form of a 12-character password that cannot be changed, and to log in, you type in five randomly chosen characters. Considering that the password is a mix of lowercase and uppercase letters, digits and special characters, it's effectively impossible to memorize, but unbelievably easy to hack if somebody got their hands on the password list.

I don't know who does security at those banks, but it seems that they got all their knowledge from TV shows and week-long junkets with one 30-minute seminar on security.

Oracle ZFS appliance sales hit $1 billion

Does EMC's flash array contain ordinary spinning rust disks? Oracle's ZFS appliances do, so it's quite reasonable that customers will not rely on flash so much, which will lower the price quite a bit.

Watch out VW – French prosecutors are pulling on the rubber gloves

Exactly. Would any sane employee risk putting their neck on the chopping block without corporate approval?

Re: Let he that is without sin...

@VRH: Yeah, the test results yesterday were something. They only neglected to mention that they tested total/worst case emissions of Euro 5-compliant cars and presented results compared to Euro 6 emissions standards.

Re: Let he that is without sin...

You mean like a Ford Mondeo with a 2.0 TDCi (DW10) compared to a Peugeot 508 2.0 HDi is heavier by some 11% (150 kg) and has 11% higher fuel consumption? A Citroen C5 weighs about the same as a Mondeo and has about the same efficiency.

Or with a 1.6 (DV6), the C5 has markedly higher fuel consumption than Mondeo despite the same weight.

Or maybe it's because the fuel consumption figures can be easily achieved with normal driving? I've been able to get 30% lower fuel consumption in typical city driving than what the catalog states, and yes, it shocked me, too.

Mind you, they have about the same acceleration, so I don't understand where you get the "significant performance difference" from.

Very suspicious my ass.

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Sigh. Well, the e-mail said it's only virtually guaranteed to get bigger.

Are Samsung TVs doing a Volkswagen in energy tests? Koreans hit back

Re: This really depends on what's happening

CAFEE tested two Volkswagens (a Jetta and a Passat) alongside a diesel BMW X5, and only the Volkswagens exceeded their emissions (and by a very considerable margin).

And it's about emissions, not about fuel consumption. I thought it was a proven point that cars consume more fuel than the catalog says, wasn't it?

--

As for the TV using too much power -- I doubt that Samsung TVs detect the exact video that's being played. If they want to prove that Samsung gamed the test by detecting it after all, they should simply alter the video slightly (e.g., swap red and blue channels), assuming it's a normal RGB LED. If the consumption is markedly different, they have their answer.

Re: Unsurprising. This is *monitors* after all

@Flocke: That's what contrast ratio is about. Why should anybody care about a test in bright sunlight? Oh, this screen has 1.5:1 contrast, and that one has 2:1 contrast, so the other one is better (conveniently ignoring that the second set has a glossy screen and gets less diffuse reflection, hence can get better contrast, it will get specular reflections unless perfectly placed). What you need to be looking at is peak luminance (in cd/m² = nit), then you can work out the minimum luminance from the contrast, and decide if that's going to be enough for your usage or not.

As for 4K/UHD, you're way off base. The UHDTV standard specifies progressive framerates at 24, 25, 50, 60 and 120, the latter three can be broadcast interlaced. So at the very worst, you can get 25 Hz frame rate, never 15 Hz (there's no broadcasting standard that allows 30 fields per second).

If you're using a HDMI 1.4 compliant cable, then yes, you'll get a lower refresh rate, but it's going to be 2160f30 (not exactly progressive, but the signal will be de-interlaced). But it's only your fault for getting the wrong cable.

If you don't know how to interpret the results, you should ask somebody to help you pick the set.

Lies from VW: 'Our staff acted criminally but board didn't know'

Re: We only found out about the problems in the last board meeting

I get this recurring nightmare that the ones on top are the very best... and wake up in cold sweat realizing that there are people who could run the company even worse...

Find shaving a chore? Why not BLAST your BEARD off with a RAYGUN

Re: Lidl cartridges

Yeah, those 25 cartridges last about 12 shaves for me. I used a cartridge, then a second one on one occasion and then gave up on them. Left my face cut in places I have never cut myself before.

The missus is using them now for shaving her legs, though, and she doesn't complain.

I also tried the 3- or 4-blade job that Lidl sells, just slightly less dreadful, lasted about two shaves for me.

I'm using the 5-blade Gillette cartridges these days, and they're somewhat adequate, but as the price creeps up, their quality goes ever down -- I used to use them for months on end, right now I can't get more than three weeks from one.

The worst part is that, although I have very firm facial hair, I also have very sensitive skin, and if I shaved daily, I'd be glowing bright red all the time.

I tried an electric shaver before and found it also irritates my skin and doesn't really get all hair off.

I'm looking at this with great interest and I hope they bring it to market soon.

Tesla X unfolds its Falcon wings, stumbles belatedly into the light

Re: Door mirrors...

Vandalism deterrent? The lenses have to be on the outside and exposed so they can be broken. Or painted over.

Herbie Goes Under Investigation: German prosecutors probe ex-VW CEO Winterkorn

@Naive

Martin, please leave this forum alone, nobody's listening to you.

I'm aware there are some VW fanboys that for some reason protect and justify what VAG was doing. You're forgetting (or ignoring) three things:

1. When CAFEE of U of West V tested a Jetta and a Passat on the road last year, they ran them alongside a diesel BMW X5, and the BMW met the limits, while VW exceeded the limits 20-35 times. This vindicates the lab tests, and cars that do pass the test seem to be able to meet the limits on the road, too.

2. There are no legal holes in the test -- you are not allowed to tamper with the test much the same way as you're not allowed to cheat on an exam. If you cheat on an exam, it's not valid regardless of whether your answers were correct or not, and you'd be prosecuted for cheating even if you fail the test. The test, as such, is null and void.

It's the same situation here. VW tampered with the test, it's not valid, the cars do not and cannot meet emissions standards. It's an offense and much more serious than exceeding the emissions. VAG would be in trouble if it turned out their cars did not exceed emissions for 10,000 miles, but started to exceed them afterwards and it couldn't be predicted in advance. They'd be told to fix this discrepancy, but otherwise nobody would do as much as wag a finger at them.

3. VAG did not mess with the emissions test so they could shave off that last 0.01 g of NOx to just barely pass it. They flouted the standard and presented cars that are completely unfit. Not only in USA and Europe, but in any country that has any sort of emissions standard testing.

Not just California

EPA Tier 2 emissions standards apply US-wide. Euro 5 standards are less stringent than EPA's Tier 2, but VW still exceeded them.

Limits for NOx emissions:

Tier 2 rules: 0.043 g/km

Euro 6 (effective Sept. 2015) for Diesel engines: 0.080 g/km

Euro 5 (effective Sept. 2009) for Diesel engines: 0.180 g/km

Euro 4 (effective Jan. 2005) for Diesel engines: 0.25 g/km

If VW cars are exceeding the limit 35-40 times (I can't stress this enough, it's not 35-40 per cent, it's 35-40 times), then they can be expected to emit ~1.4-1.7 g/km. In other words, they don't even meet Euro 3 regulations (Jan. 2000) which were the first to limit NOx emissions in Europe.

Thousands of 'directly hackable' hospital devices exposed online

Re: Why are these on the open internet?!?

+1 for this. If it's on the open internet, why isn't there any form of two-factor authentication? Suppose you need a technician to dial into a device to do maintenance/collect data/whatever. Why not do it with an old-fashioned modem that you plug in only when needed? If it needs to be Ethernet, why not just unplug it when it's not needed and plug it back once it is, then unplug it again after it's no longer needed.

That's just common sense, which is sorely lacking if somebody thinks it's a good idea to leave it open -- on the internet of all places. I could, but just barely, accept it open on the intranet with a gateway server somewhere (but with no default password, and with the intranet secured by a separate password).

FFS, it's just complete basics!

Spirit of Steve Fosset lives on as glider is poised to soar to 90,000ft

Total non-sequitur

This tidbit:

The knowledge gained from this project will impact how the world understands and addresses climate change.

What? How is it supposed to impact how we understand climate change of all things??? It reminds me of Soviet propaganda, when the press release would read: The knowledge gained from this project will impact how the world understands and addresses Marxism and Leninism.

I mean, I have nothing against the project, and backing it just for the kicks and bragging rights, but be honest about it!

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

$ make desert

When the dust settled he realized that may have been a spelling mistake... and the waiter is probably no longer around.

VW: Just the tip of the pollution iceberg. Who's to blame? Hippies

Exactly that

The CAFEE of U of W Virginia did test a diesel BMW X5 next to two Volkswagens on the road -- the BMW was within or below the emissions limits, the Volkswagens exceeded them 5-40 times. This actually exonerates the tests themselves and confirms their real-life application.

If Volkswagen felt there was no possibility to meet the regulations and decided to cheat, I presume they went the whole hog and aimed for unprecedented fuel efficiency while staying below the emissions limits (while undergoing testing) and that is actually their biggest crime here -- they could have cheated just a little and perhaps exceed emissions 2-3 times, but they would probably be unable to achieve the same fuel efficiency figures.

I read that while Volkswagen Group marques use the same engines, they also write their own ECU software. Škoda has asked Volkswagen internally how it was possible that they were getting better fuel efficiency for similar cars while staying within the emissions limits and Volkswagen declined to answer. That led to comparable cars (Golf and Octavia or Passat and Superb) having different CO2 tax bands in the UK. Is that possible?

Win a free new car – just show Intel how you'd hack your existing one

I'd add a software code branch to cheat on MOT tests

Oh, prior art, you say. Sorry.

Where do I start?

1. By default: if the car does not have a key inserted, prevent any and all communication with world+dog. When overridden at the request of the owner, the only communication is with the external module, and absolutely no messing on CAN bus takes place, period.

2. Ability for the user to turn off physical communication at any time.

3. Since an air gap is not possible (it would require two separate alternators, two separate batteries and you may want the satnav to actually provide output on a car display), any communication to the car from the connected box must be approved by the user.

4. No OTA updates. A firmware upgrade must by done by one of the following:

- Downloading a digitally signed copy for your car, identified by the VIN, and loaded to a USB stick. There's no excuse for providing generic and unsigned firmware that can be reverse-engineered and made to work on any car.

- Mailing the new firmware version on a USB stick to your home address or having it ready for pick-up at your local dealership.

- Putting the USB stick to a clearly marked USB slot usable only for the purposes of a firmware upgrade. The slot must accept only this file and must reject anything that is not proper digitally-signed firmware. The car must signal that it's ready to load new firmware and ask you to accept it.

5. Nuke CarPlay from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. There's absolutely no viable usage scenario for CarPlay for any driver, it offers absolutely no benefit to anyone. Mirroring the phone screen, who the fuck thought that would be a good idea, FFS? Oh, Apple. Got it now.

Just the basics, really. With the number of cars on the road ever increasing, the last thing anybody needs it to be entertained by the car.

11 MILLION VW cars used Dieselgate cheatware – what the clutch, Volkswagen?

Re: Faulty test

Simon, how do the tests account for air resistance? Do they? It was my understanding that there must be a way to do it somehow, otherwise there'd be no point in (supposed) removal of roof bars or side mirrors to improve the results?

Re: Small print

@AC:

if the owner complains about the performance impact they'll be pointed at the small print saying that things like top speed and 0-60 time are not guaranteed.

Fair enough, but engine torque at a given rpm and maximum power at a certain rpm are specifications, and there's no way to weasel out of those. As is specific fuel consumption.

They can fix the nitrogen oxide emissions two ways: by increasing fuel consumption for a richer mixture to prevent NOx from forming or by lowering admitted air and recirculating exhaust gases more, which will hurt performance. Either way is not going to be popular with the punters and either will be grounds for returning the car.

Re: Software, mileage, and urea

@Chz:

That being said, neither of the tests are supposed to reflect reality. They're simply meant to be a comparison between models. The EU tests might be wildly out sync with reality, but assuming all manufacturers game it the same way then you can compare different cars with each other.

Really? I've done some research to cars from different makers using the same engines (centered around PSA, since they are in joint ventures with a lot of other makers). Here's what I found:

A Pug 508, Citroën C5 or Ford Mondeo will get about the same consumption figures for 1.6 and 2.0 turbodiesels.

Toyota Aygo, Citroën C1 and Pug 108 get exactly the same petrol engine and exactly the same figures for it.

Compare Pug 208 and a Mini with 1.6 petrol turbo (Prince engine) -- they get about the same-ish figures, Mini has slightly higher consumption which matches its boxier exterior and higher weight.

However, if you throw BMW 1-series into the mix, suddenly it gets better consumption figures than either of te above.

Throw in BMW 3-series into the mix and compare with Pug 508 and Citroën C5 -- the bimmer is heavier and larger than 508, but gets significantly better consumption figures. That's despite rear wheel drive, which is notorious for causing higher consumption.

I don't know the exact reasons, but would appear to match the reports that BMWs get 40-50% worse consumption than stated in certification tests while Pugs/Cits get within 5% of the official figures.

--

If the tests aren't even comparable, there's no point to them, and it would appear that the changes to be brought in 2018 (road testing for compliance) can't come soon enough.

Re: Faulty test

It's tied down, but can't be tied down too much -- the test needs to allow the car to slide off rollers if it's not actually making any progress.

If it was completely tied down, then the consumption figure should be well over 200 mpg (close to 1 l/100 km), since that's what I routinely get while closely following an articulated lorry.

Re: Faulty test

Not exactly true. I've responded above, but just to repeat: the certification test is performed on rollers in a wind tunnel. The car being tested needs to overcome friction, rolling resistance and headwind just like it has on a normal road. The advantage here is that the tests are comparable across makes and models.

The disadvantage? Well, VW dieselgate is the tabloid term, isn't it?

Re: Well, let's summarise this.

@theOtherJT:

We all know the "quoted" figures are nonsense. No one has ever achieved even close to the MPG or CO2 figures that are in the brochure.

These blokes would disagree with you.

@Nigel 11:

BTW my observation of diesels is that <10% of them emit >90% of the soot, and presumably fail their next MOT. Even as a diesel driver I'd accept a 4-monthly 10-minute mini-MOT to check emissions, which might accomplish more than all the new-car regulations combined. If you failed you'd have two weeks' grace to get the car fixed or to find a new car.

I have a 2005 Citroën C5 1.6 HDi and it only meets Euro IV regulations. Had to replace the EGR valve and several parts in the air intake since it was intermittently getting into service mode and exiting it with a large cloud of soot behind me. After the replacements, it's back to being completely smokeless. Definitely better than a 2 year old car that had its DPF removed.

You know the worst part? Those cars will pass the MOT emissions tests. It's an open secret that they do test for smoke, but particulate emissions are not smoke -- those clouds of soot you sometimes see are a particularly bad case, where the emissions are several thousands times worse than the allowed limit, and worse in fact than some pre-Euro I diesel engines. Other than being clearly visible to the eye, they don't register on the MOT smoke test. First, because the type of these emissions is different. Second, because the test is being done with clutch engaged and/or in neutral. This completely invalidates the test because all manufacturers include an engine protection mode that prevents burnout due to revving it too much. The ECU will only supply as much fuel as needed to keep the engine at the high RPM, but other than running a stationary DPF burn in service mode, the engine will never actually get hot from that or emit anything comparable to actual exhaust.

--

That's where a lot of misunderstanding is. Certification is performed in wind tunnels on rollers. The car being tested actually has to overcome friction, rolling resistance and headwind and is actually subject to simulated road conditions. The important difference being that the test allows very long acceleration and deceleration. Much longer than is usually the case (who accelerates to 30 mph in over a minute?). Air conditioning and heating are of course off. Radio, wipers, headlights and everything else is off, too (but those don't make as much of a difference as some people think they do). Manufacturers don't need to cheat by taking off the side mirrors, roof bars, blocking all air inlets, or anything. They are mostly inconsequential for the test, and the test tends to reflect actual, if very relaxed, driving.

It only becomes a problem when the car is on the road and the engine behaves completely differently from how it behaved in the lab.

Road testing is not going to be a catch-all, and some manufacturers will claim they were cheated if wind was very much against them or if the road conditions are worse on a given day. One thing it will definitely cut down on is unrealistic fine-tuning of on-board software to the narrow testing bands.

UK.gov wants a cloud wizard at £1,000 a DAY. That's more than the prime minister's salary

Translation

Candidates must have proven knowledge and experience of operating within a Microsoft private cloud system system, it said. However, they should also have proven knowledge in non-Microsoft technologies, such as Agresso, Cisco core networking, NetApp Storage, and HP Blade Centre and Compute.

Translation: We've bought all the above technologies because we were dazzled by sales representatives and now we need somebody to cobble together something useful from them, or we'll be indicted for improper purchasing.

LTO-7 has it taped, but when will 'bigger/faster' thinking hit the buffers?

Re: What's the real capacity

In short, you can't expose compression to the user and still use the disk as a block device.

Longer answer: Disks already employ compression internally. Read up on SSDs and how they handle various workloads and what happens to throughput when using SSDs to store pictures, music or video.

It's not exposed to the user, though. In theory, you could use SSDs to store several times their stated capacity, for logs for instance, but this would open a can of worms, like how to address specific blocks or what filesystem to use with them?

The SSD would effectively have to become a character device (much like a tape drive, in fact), and then it would be able to store data up to a compression-allowed maximum. You'd have to read it like tape, though, with accessing the inventory and probably metadata separately and then performing a "space" operation to get to the file and start streaming it.

It would work, but it's a lot of hassle for no apparent gain. And probably some companies already have patents around this invention.

Re: Disk has much lower fixed costs though.

Cheapest consumer disks maybe. Enterprise disks, no.

Re: In a year or two? Maybe in a decade or two.

Yes and no. You'll see television set makers market their 8K sets and will demand content from movie studios. Cinemas no longer drive all releases, TVs are starting to take over.

As for not needing all the footage -- when they want to release a director's cut, then gold director's cut, then platinum director's cut, then the ultimate director's cut, and finally the final ultimate director's cut (until the next movie in the series is released, at which point we start again), they will want all the original footage, thank you very much.

Re: In a year or two? Maybe in a decade or two.

Thanks for spotting these and for correcting me.

I made a mistake in my calculations, off by one order of magnitude. 28 TB didn't seem so small before lunch.

It should be 500 TB, not 28 TB. Not 2000 tapes, though, just 84 LTO-7 (less for T10000 and TS1150, even less for next generation).

If anything, I gave a ceiling of what you might reasonably expect as the absolute maximum that's going to be needed.

In the coming years, more and more content will be shot on high frame rates and 120 fps is definitely the maximum above which nobody is going to care. 60 fps is going to be the sweet spot, maybe even as low as 48 fps. Nobody's going back to 24 fps, though.

8K -- television set makers are demanding that and there's really no point in making movies 4K-only. I don't see the point of 4K, let alone 8K, other than the fact that it will make 1080p sets cheaper in the next few years.

Storing just the left frame and difference is not effective, since it doesn't make the resulting stream easier to compress -- the shift between the frames is not the same in all planes, the end result would be probably harder to compress or you'd expect horrific artifacts. If anything, the two frames are stored side-by-side.

You're right about storing just two frames, though. After all, a stereoscopic camera doesn't record three images, just two and must use either one or the other for 2D. So, 334 TB.

90 minutes, 120 minutes. If you shoot state of the art, you're going to make it longer rather than shorter, but it doesn't make an order of magnitude difference.

If my calculations were off, let's rehash them:

5400 seconds × 60 fps × 2 images × 8K×4K × 48 bits = 125 TiB*

*) 138 TB, I made the mistake of assuming binary prefixes previously (so an LTO-7 cartridge has just 5.46 TiB).

Four times less, so just 23 LTO-7 tapes.

That's just for the master. The full movie as-shot will have many retakes, so probably ten times that number, but still something that's more suited for tape than disk (although nobody's going to store the whole movie forever, unless it becomes a cult classic and will pay for its storage, so the studios will move back to reclaiming the stock for silver, so to speak).

And indeed, a lot of compression. You're right that cameras and storage can't handle the throughputs and raw capacity required at 95 Gbps, so we're going to be getting there very slowly. But yes, a handful of tapes (or disks) for the resulting whole movie is about right. Doesn't mean that a studio won't need several libraries to store all those movies.

Re: Tape is on it's way out.

Half price per GB every 18 months? Utter and complete bollocks.

I bought five 1 TB drives in 2010 (exactly five years ago) and paid £35 a pop (cheapest WD Green jobs and one Samsung).

Going by your estimations, the price today should be 9.38% of that £35. So I should be able to buy a multi-terabyte drive for £3.30 per terabyte. Nowhere to be seen.

Ah, but there was a flood in Thailand in 2010, you may say. So let's take 2011 as the baseline. Oddly enough, I bought one 1 TB drive in 2011. The same WD Green and I paid the same £35 for it.

By your estimations, price per TB should be 15% of the price on 2011. £5.25. I'd like twenty terabytes of that storage, but strangely, nobody's willing to sell at that price.

The best I can find is a Seagate 8 TB archive drive (£22 per TB), or a Toshiba P300 3 TB drive (£24.50 per TB).

An LTO-6 tape is £20 bought single (£8 per TB), probably half that if bought in bulk (so £4 per TB). LTO-7 is not going to be markedly more expensive, and even then, the extra capacity will more than make up for it.

If you don’t sustain the throughput, the tape drive won’t have enough data to write and would have to stop/pause, fill the data buffer and reposition itself before restarting. Each one of these stops takes several seconds and it will heavily impact performance or real throughput.

This is a well-known problem, which has already been seen and addressed in the past.

Yep. LTO for instance, throttled back by half as early as its first generation. Improved since, and then all the way down to 1/16th of the speed with LTO-4. I've tested LTO-6 with various speeds and it can throttle down to 3 MB/s with no shoeshining.

Taking the example of a picture database, the example given (pictures) is really bad. These days, a 3-5 MB picture file is metadata, a thumbnail, if you will.

It's a thumbnail of the actual picture, which will be hundreds of megabytes large. A 120 megapixel 16 bit raw file is going to be 240 megabytes in size, readily compressible, but certainly not down by 2.5×. A TIFF file of that picture is going to be about 720 megabytes, but more readily compressible (indeed, 2.5× compression can be achieved). In the end, however, you're storing perhaps 150 MB of the raw file, maybe 300 MB of the largest TIFF, plus a number of resizes (which, due to Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem, are less compressible since size reduction has compressed them already).

All in all, you're probably in the ballpark of ~1 GB per picture (natively). That means a library of just 6000 pictures. A reasonably smart archive is going to stage the popular files on a higher tier, and will make more than one copy. Once the file is accessed more than a set number of times, it's going to drop that copy, will not reclaim space, and then make another copy to prevent tape wear.

That's for pictures. If you consider movies, in a year or two, an average single movie master is going to be:

7200 seconds × 120 fps × 3 images (stereo+center) × 8K×4K (8192×4320) × 48 bits (4:4:4 in 12 bits) + 22.2 audio in 24 bit 192 kHz

28 TB for video and 90 GB for audio (funny how almost inconsequential it is) before compression. That's the thing that's going to be archived on these tapes (or, more likely, on Oracle's T10000E or IBM's TS1160).

I can't even call this an article. At best, it's an advertorial for SpectraLogic.

CHEAT! Volkswagen chief 'deeply sorry' over diesel emission test dodge

Re: Surely this is a form of fraud?

Euro 4 mandated reduced particulate matter emissions. You can meet these regulations two ways:

- keep temperature down to not emit more NOx and add a diesel particulate filter

- raise temperature to reduce particulate emissions, increasing NOx emissions, but adding selective catalytic converters that use AdBlue to reduce those NOx emissions.

Most manufacturers went the first route. Some (notably including Mercedes-Benz) went the other.

With Euro 6, you need both technologies to reduce emissions.

Let's NUKE MARS to make it more like home says Elon Musk

Re: What would the point be?

> The only thing that arsehat would accomplish by nuking the Poles

Why the hell would he want to nuke us, the arsehat?

> would be to ensure that such ~drinkable~ Water on Mars, was anything but...

Oh yeah, we'd piss in his Mars water, all right.

Re: Radiation shields in space

Mars is smaller than the Sun [citation needed], so the closer you moved to Sun, the larger that shield would need to be.

And before you say Lagrange points, just don't go there. Satellites at Lagrange points aren't. They constantly orbit around them in Lissajous orbits.

That matters here is Kepler's third law of planetary motion and the shield would simply go around the Sun faster than Mars would, negating the shield pretty much instantaneously.

@Michael: It's not because of vacuum. Times had to retract that comment about Goddard in 1969. The real problem is darkness. You can't cast a shadow in vacuum because it's already so dark.

Channel surfers and the irresistible rise of Content Delivery Networks

Meh

I'd say, put the video on the slowest tier of your network, could even be on tape. Save that flash storage space for ads, this seems to be the way that youtube operates...

Intel, Nokia, Ericsson square off against Chinese IoT threat

(...) battery life* of more** than ten*** years****.

*) Where "life" means "the ability to store any charge" as opposed to "ability to store enough energy to power a device for a given length of time".

**) Well no, not really.

***) Or one, or maybe ¼.

****) Assuming the device stays connected to mains power*****.

*****) Assuming the mains power does not lose power for more than ten minutes at any given time.

Ashley Madison lawsuit drops GoDaddy and Amazon as defendants

@Hans 1: More fool them.

It doesn't matter whether they had 0 chance or 100% chance. Intent counts, and it doesn't matter if the user got laid or not, they still need to explain themselves, but that's between him/her and his/her spouse.

If you hold somebody at gunpoint, you don't need to pull the trigger for a cop to stop you.

The remote control from HELL: Driverless cars slam on brakes for LASER POINTER

Re: Four rings of death

Worse still, singling out certain logos may be seen as discriminatory, and the manufacturer could be sued by owners or the manufacturer of objects marked with the four ring warning symbol.

Samsung’s consumer IoT vision – stupid, desperate, creepy

Re: Dumb ideas for IoT

Yeah, 10 quid less for the front panel, 50 quid more for NFC, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a computer, and a hopelessly broken and insecure OS. You're going to have to be power cycling that washing machine more often than it does a spin cycle.

Suppose you want to turn it off quickly. You have to fiddle with your smartphone and play around with the settings. Suppose Wi-Fi goes down, you need to reconfigure for Bluetooth and then go through the setup to accept it as a trusted device.

That's assuming it will accept more than one device to control it. So instead of using your phone to control the washing machine, you end up buying an extra phone as a controller to have it handy. So, a double-win for Samsung.

And for what advantages? Suppose the water pipe breaks in your neighbourhood. An ordinary washing machine will stop and not resume until you're back home. The IoT washing machine will connect to the water company, look up incidents, find that the water pipe is fixed and happily continue with the washing cycle, only to clog its filter and spray your clothes with mud that's inevitably in the piping after the repairs.

As for car traction control. So, it knows to micron level what the tyre grip is, but for some reason, indirect TPMS (no TPMS sensor in each wheel) can never get it right, and will alert you when the tyre is still perfectly fine. Worse still, suppose the standard pressure is 2.2 bar front and rear, but the manufacturer suggests to overinflate the front to 2.4 and the rear to 2.8 when the car is fully loaded. If you go by these suggestions, the car will immediately signal that the front tyres are critically underinflated.

The car would more than likely e-mail you with a link to appropriate tyres every day, and only the recommended model will change depending on who spent the most on advertising. Oh, and it would probably e-mail the authorities at the same time to tell them that your tyres are unfit for use and to request being towed away.

Fiery old geysers FOUND ON MOON: Volcanic past explained

Being a PR stunt doesn't mean it never happened.

Moon landings are, in my opinion, the highest historical achievement of mankind and represent the pinnacle of science at their time. That they were PR stunts is immaterial to this.

Embracing the life-changing qualities of USB power packs and battery extenders

This is why I prefer devices with removable batteries and veto those without in my buying decision.

And that is why I bought a Galaxy Note 3. So there.