Posts by Steven Jones

Server workloads to go '70% virtual' by 2014

Not that ambitious

If 70% of workloads are going to be run in virtual machines, then that still implies the great majority of instances will be physical. If we work on the basis of (say) seven VMs per physical machine (as that's reasonable an makes the maths easy), that means out of every 100 system images, 30 will be on dedicated physical servers whilst the remaining 70 will be virtualised on 10 physical machines. That ratio would mean 75% of physical servers would be for non-virtualised use.

One issue with virtualising (at least on x86/x64 hardware) is that the relatively small capacity of VMs can lead to "VM sprawl" as more instances are required for the same workload. That can lead to a big increase in support effort with many more OS images to maintain, configure and support.

Txt tax would wipe out half UK deficit, claims union baron

Economic cycle /= Boom & Bust

To be fair, Gordon Brown said he had abolished "Boom and Bust", not the economic cycles. What he did say he would do is balance the budget (net or investment expenditure) over the economic cycle. However, he failed to define precisely what the economic cycle was (it kept moving), and we all saw what happened with "boom and bust".

He also engaged in a lot of off-book accounting with things like PFI and public sector pension liabilites. He also presided over a period of debt expansion in the private sector too, and the growth phase was undoubtedly boosted by this and increasing government expenditure. The clue over whether a crash, rather than an economic downturn is coming, is usually asset and commodity price bubbles. Recently it was property, but it's also happened with stocks & shares and even tulips. We aren't really on a commodity price boom - it loosk rather like the price for oil, food & minerals is a sustained one.

To be fair, Gordon Brown is hardly the first to egnage in such behaviour, but I think that he set new peace time records.

For those who want to know how governments reduce their debt - well, a well tried and trusted one is to use inflation to decrease the real value of government debt. A bit tough if you have savings and interest rates (especially after tax) are below inflation, but that happened all through the '70s & early '80s. It is, of course, happening now.

Electric forcefield space sailing-ship tech gets EU funding

Not fastest

This may be the largest thing the human race has built (bearing in mind it doesn't exist), but it won't be the fasted. Whilst it is important to note the frame of reference (relative to the Earth, the surface of the Earth, the Sun, other planets etc.), a speed of 30km/sec would not qualify. The Helios probes approached 250,000km/hr or about 64km/sec at their closest approach to the Sun. In addition, the Gallileo probe reached 48km/sec when it was intentionally destroyed plunging into Jupiter. Even if measured against the Earth as a frame of reference, these will still beat this proposal.

It might be said that using a gravitational well is cheating, but at least these craft were built..

Article deleted

Opening the floodgates...

OK crew, what we need today is a story which will incontrovertibly prove our readers are the worst punners on the planet...

WikiLeaks' Assange to be indicted for spying 'soon'

Extraterritoriality

@David Wilson

It would be interesting to see what the US response would be should one of their citizens publish something covered the Official Sercrets Act or whatever equivalents exist in various countries. I rather suspect that any extradition request on those grounds would get short shirft in the American Courts as it would most certainly be covered by the first amendment.

The Pentagon Papers judgement did not appear to depend on the sensitivity of the data. It appeared to be based on the means by which the data was received. In other words if the journalist had hacked his way in, or directly solicited the information, then he would have been culpable. However, if such papers were just handed over, then he was within his rights to publish them.

Of course the real issue about extra-territoriality is the ability to enforce it, which when it comes down to it depends more on political relationships and factors as anything else. Personally I doubt that Assange would ever get extradited from Sweden to the US. I'm personally very grategul that the Swedes will probably have to deal with the political fall-out rather than the UK.

McKinnon is different

McKinnon hacked into computers. Whatever Assange has done, nobody has seriously suggested he has done that. The Pentagon Papers ruling determined that journalists would only have committed an offence if they had solicited such a break-in into classified systems. However, it does seem that the US authorities are attempting to change the rules and limit the definition of a journalist so it does not include those with political motives.

US Air Force studies fruit-flies to build killer insect swarm drones

Hollywood may be interested

Why does this feel more like the pitch to a producer for a Hollywood disaster flick? I see the Cyberswarm series, where microbots turn on their erstwhile masters as a sure fire money winner.

ASSANGE ARRESTED in London - in court later today

Warrant

Indeed, you are correct. I would assume this is under the European Arrest Warrant which does not have a very high standard of evidence required in order for it to be enacted. Indeed, pretty well no evidence at all, on the basis that all the relevant countries are covered by the ECHR. I believe you can only be extradited on a charge which can be matched to an illegal activity in the UK. So you can't be extradited to Austria for holocaust denial which is an offence there. However, even if the detailed interpretation of what Julian Assange did, or did not, get up to in Sweden wouldn't result in a guilty verdict in the UK, there's plenty of fudge space. The Swedes do not have to provide any prima facie evidence of any crime (which you would for extradition to most of the World).

The arrest is for questioning at this stage and is going to be interesting due to the somewhat arcane and intricate area of Swedish sexual politics.

The year's best... HD TVs

Oh dear...

"here are those that literally, caught our eye"

Really - is it a glass one which fell out and got stuck in the stand? Repeat after me, literally is not a word that you can use to strengthen a metaphor...

nb. Ken Dodd has a joke about catching a a glass eye which plays on the metaphor. But then he knows how to use language...

Minister 'C*nt' promises £50m to get fabtastic fibre for all

Confusing Market Research with Market Test

You are mixing up market tests with market research. Market tests normally involve a small/medium scale piloting of a products, typically in a defined target area. As it is a market, and not a technology test (or trial), then it will usually involve charging for the product and looking at such things as take-up rates and processes.

But since when did bothering to find out what the terms mean stop anybody commenting on it?

Not a Spoonerism

Heremy Junt or Juremy Hent are Spoonerisms. This was not. Such a slip involves transposition of the first element of two words. I suspect I far more likely explanation is that this is the unconscious carrying over of editorial room banter into the live programme, or what if commonly known as a Freudian Slip.

James Naughty has previous on this. In 2005, in an interview with Ed Balls, he asked "If we win the election" and then corrected himself to "if you win".

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/observer/archives/JamesNaughtieWinningtheElec.mp3

Bombshell in platterland: WD tried to buy Seagate

MTBF misunderstanding

This is a common misunderstanding of MTBF. An MTBF figure tells you nothing about the lifetime of a particular product. The MTBF figure and service lifetime are two completely different things. What the MTBF tells you is how many failures should be expected, on average, for a given number of operational hours. If you have 1,000 disks and operate them for 8,000 hours, then that's 8,000,000 operational hours. If the disks have an MTBF of 400,000 hours then you would expect about 20 failures.

However, that doesn't tell you anything about the service lifetime of the drives. You might find those MTBF numbers are only valid for the first 50,000 operational hours (a little over 5 years of continuous operation) and then the MTBF markedly worsens and almost none are still operable in 100,000 hours (by which time they will be well and truly obsolete of course).

There are lots of things wrong with MTBFs and the stats from disk manufacturers. They won't generally tell you service lives (which they probably won't know anyway. as they'd only accelerated ageing to test) and, as some studies have found, batch-to-batch variations can be enormous.

But people should never equate MTBF with service life - they are completely different things.

Herts cops 'ate the evidence' at scene of crime, court told

Acceptable Evidence

I'm sure the court is fully empowered to decide what is, and what is not, allowable evidence. In this case I've no doubt there would have to be corroboration from the Pizza company and phone records as to the source of the order and delivery address plus witness identification who can attest to the hand writing.

You also don't look at something like this, or cell phone location information in isolation. Evidence is cummulative, so this may be just part of a picture. Ultimately it is for the court (and, most specifically, the jury) to decide on the credibility of this with the judge deciding what is, and is not, admissable as evidence.

Silly Headline

Clearly the evidence was on the pizza box, not the pizzas. If the police hadn't bought them cheap and the boy had gone away then the evidence would have been lost.

Of course it's possible to argue that they should have realised the significance at the time, but without knowing the context, it's difficult to say. However, what they didn't do is eat the evidence as clearly they weren't very partial to masticating packing materials.

SanDisk, Sony pitch über CompactFlash spec

CF and form-factor

It seems to me it would be a bright idea to separate the form factor from the electrical interface. Certainly this sounds nothing like CF and, if it's completely incompatible, then why bother with the current form factor? I can quite see that higher capacity units require more cubic millimetres, but just allow for a range of different form factors with adapters (as with SD).

To be honest, I would have thought eSATA would be a better interface than PCIe. At 300MBps it's plenty fast enough for anything around at the moment and it has the great advantage of being hot-pluggable (on sensible operating systems) and supported by current operating systems straight out of the box. Indeed quite a lot of PCs have eSATA already, and those that don't can be readily equipped.

Inventor only entitled to share of employer's actual patent earnings

Inventor's rights

I find the basic principle quite odd. If you are an employee, and aren't involved in the risk involved in paying for the development, testing or even funding your own time, then it strikes me that this is an odd right to have in the first place. Arguably, if the companies want to promoite inventiveness in their workforce, then they can put such conditions for profit sharing in their terms and conditions of employment. Indeed good companies have had such suggestion schemes for a long time and it's easily possible to add further payment schemes which promote this.

Basically, if you want to benefit from a state-granted monopoly, then do the entrepreneurial thing, if necessary involving a business partner to share the risk. Personally I think the whole aread of IPRs has been going in the wrong direction for many years (with the US showing the pitfalls of an overly indulgent system).

Blu-ray barely better than DVD

Misleadingly titled

The title of this piece is, very probably, deliberately misleading and provocative thereby maintaining El-Reg's tabloid headline style. Of course if it's not deliberately provocative, then it's merely sloppy journalism.

What Which found was that much Blu-Ray *content* is barely better than DVD, not that Blu-Ray is barely better than DVD. It's an important point if people are being ripped-off paying premium prices for something that is no real improvement, but it's not the technology that's in question - it's the production and distribution companies who clearly aren't doing a proper re-mastering job.

WTF is... up with e-book pricing?

eBooks

I use my Kindle only to read out-of-copyright material. There are tens of thousands of titles like that, and others I know do the same. It would be interesting to know if that's typical. If so, then then the economics of eBooks for the sellers may not look so good.

Plasma space-drive aces efficiency numbers: Set for ISS in 2014

The unreachable goal

It would never reach the speed of light, not matter how long you accelerated at 1G. From the occupants point of view they will still feel the same force, but measured from any other frame of reference, it might appear to get ever closer to the speed of light, but it won't get there. Also if they measure the speed of any other object, they won't see that moving at the speed of light either.

Not all is lost though - from the occupants point of view, they will apparently get to the destination quicker due to time dilation than would appear to be the case from those in the frame of reference of the starting point.

That's the special theory of relativity for you.

The only way that anything with rest mass can get to the speed of light is essentially to convert that rest mass to energy, hence Einstein's famous equations. Short of matter/anti-matter anilation, it won't happen.

Of Kuwait and DSLR cameras

Definition...

So does that mean they can use film SLRs? Or maybe the new generation of exchangeable lens cameras that don't have movable mirrors but keep the same size sensors, comparable controls and can often mount the same lenses? There are the Olympus & Panasonic micro four thirds system cameras, or the Sony NEX series. If you are really trying your luck, the Sony A33/A55 that have an EVF and a pellicle mirror and are externally virtually indistinguishable from a DSLR (as they lack the "reflex" action, they are not DSLRs).

Of course I might not want to argue the finer bits of camera construction semantics with a policeman from Kuwait.

Immigration caps won't touch tech transfers

Dependent's health/schooling etc.

It seems to me that companies bringing in staff in under these conditions ought to be made liable for schooling, health and other social costs for dependents as the tax on a £40K salary is not going to come near to covering those, especially if it involves special costs to state schools.

It would, surely, be relatively straightforwards to insist that there was medical insurance for dependents, school fees were paid and so on.

Not the real target

About half of foreign students attend "sub-degree level" courses and attend private educational institutions of somewhat less top grade standards. Many of these course have very large elements of practical versus academic components - in other words, the worst of them are really not much more than a cover for bypassing the work permit system.

Lots of scams here - and the state degree level institutions are not really the target. Whether there will be more attention to dependents is another question.

Bish says sorry for right royal Facebook rant

Whilst we are at it...

Whilst we are getting rid of the monarchy, could we disestablish the Church too please, and stop the state subsidising of religious propaganda by funding faith schools?

VAT fraudster gets 9 years for refusing £40m bill

£6bn

The claim was that it was £6bn, not £600m. However, this isn't the same sort of thing. This VAT fraud was quite simply lying on the VAT forms. In the case of Vodafone it was a "difference of opinion" about the allowability of Vodafone's tax avoidance scheme. In effect, HMRC have said that tax avoidance schemes are only allowable if they say they are, although ultimately they could get tested in court (and HMRC do not win all these cases - there are plenty where they don't).

If HMRC were confident enough about the allowability of the scheme, then they could have pushed on with it, although there was no guarantee of winning. So in this case they compromised for what they could get. Of course what can't also be ignored is the danger of a pyrhhic victory. Evenr if HMRC had won that one, it's open for large companies to move operations between countries and, in the longer term, more revenues could be lost than gained.

The truth is that countries are in competition for jobs, investment and corporate tax revenues. Turning it into some sort of morality play is a big miostake. It's a hard-headed investment decision for both companies and states alike.

nb. any extra tax paid by corporations will be refelected by lower share prices and/or dividends. That might be OK if it only hit the very wealthy, but it doesn't. It affects many people with savings, endowment policies, pensions and a whole host of other things.

Stoke Council avoids fine over lost childcare data on USB stick farce

Fining public bodies

Could somebody tell me what the rationale is for ever fining a public body? Any such fines are paid for by the poor old tax payer and/or loss of services to cover the cost.

Any sanctions should surely be against the miscreants. Possibly the most sensible thing would be disciplinary procedures decided on by an independent body, but I don't see how one bit of the government paying fines into another bit helps the rest of us. In the case of a private company the shareholders are penalised, but then at least they've got some ways of inflicting pain on the board.

Why Microsoft is Acorn and Symbian is the new CP/M

Analogy?

Surely a completely pointless and inappropriate analogy. Things are what they are, and mapping some surrent circumstance to an arbitrary past one in such a loose manner is not exactly telling us anything apart from about the author.

Has CERN made the VATICAN ANTIMATTER BOMB for real?*

Ok - it's been a while...

I'm not sure all those quantum properties apply to all sub-atomic particles, but fair enough. It's been nearly 35 years since I did anything like quantum chromodynamics, and I'm not sure it stuck then. My memory is failing, but not so badly as to spot sloppy reporting by the BBC.

Heaven knows what Fox News makes of it. Probably reported as a new terrorist threat.

Misleading R4 BBC coverage

I got seriously annoyed by the sloppy coverage of this by BBC R4 news last night, partly repeated on the Roday programme this morining.

Crime number one - repeated on the Today programme. Stating that antimatter is the opposite of matter (whatever that would be). It's not - if it was it would have odd properties like negative mass. Instead it's material made from a bunch of sub-atomic particles that have the reverse electric charge (like the electron/positron particle/antiparticle pair). Some neutral particles, like anit-neutrons are made up of antigluons which carry this property (and some are their own antiparticles).

Crime number two - stating this was the first time antimatter had been created. It's not - antiparticles with mass count as matter. Instead, these were the first captured antiatoms.

Crime number three - stating that when matter and antimatter encounter one another they produce nothing. Wrong. They produce a lot of energy in the form of photons. Indeed if if didn't do that, then there wouldn't be much of a story to be made about a matter/antimatter bomb.

This might seem immaterial, but it's not - it's fundamental. Shame on you BBC. Puns fully intended.

Blogger faces terror charges for 'naming MPs'

Evidence?

Given that we've no idea what the evidence is here, then I guess we might have top do something radical and see what is presented in court rather than prejudging it. I assume it's rather more than a simple list of the name of MPs who voted in favour of the Iraq invasion. That's public information and available from sites such as http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ . In the meantime the headline does seem to be jumping to conclusions.

Cyber cops crush plod-snapper site following Millbank riot

Perjury

"That isn't me" would, in that context be a lie, and lying under oath in court is, by definition, perjury. Of course you don't have to testify, so you don't have to lie about whether you were there so the prosecution has to prove it (and the defence can still present evidence it wasn't you without testimony). Only the defence can call the accused, but if you do stand and lie under cross-examination then technically it would be perjury. Also, any lawyer who advised a client to lie under oath would be in very serious trouble indeed.

In general, perjury cases in England are rare and normally only prosecuted where a proven lie has resulted in a miscarriage. Mostly lying under oath as a defendent in a criminal trial in the UK will get you a longer sentence compared to pleading guiltly in the first place.

Planning - including for life...

I'm sure the NUS didn't plan the violence, but there's usually some who will be planning for it if they think they can get away with it plus a few more hot-heads who get sucked in.

Anyway, it's about time that we had a proper review in this country over tertiary education. For far too long sloppy thinking about the merits of university education had it that economic success would come by just putting more people into that form or education. As it is now, we just have a large number of disappointed graduates who find that they can't get the career that they thought they'd get and have large debts as well. On R4 on Monday the head of Majestic Wines proudly boasted that almost all their staff were graduates. So is that really the sort of job where you need a degree, or just a filtering method Majestic use to select people that at least have the motiviation to complete such a course?

It's a telling point that the major European country with probably the best trained workforce (Germany) sends far fewer people to Univerisity than its major competitors. In fact not much more than about 60% of the OECD average. In fact the growth in tertiary education in the US has coincided with a decade in falling livving standards for the average worker (the very rich have done very well, the middle classes, much less). This mantra of education, education, education fails miserably when it's education without purpose. Fair enough, but that's a hobby - not an education.

However, what the Germans do have is a superb system of vocationally orientated training and some proper careers. What we need is an education and training system that offers young people some hope, career prospects and, frankly, not just a place people go for 3-4 years because we can't think of what to do with them. Extending adolescence for several more years is all very well, but I know far too many disillusioned young people who have been failed by this system.

Of course the University lecturers have an interest in maximising numbers, so are hardly a disinterested party.

http://www.bibb.de/en/51670.htm

pardon

The AC's comment rather proves the point that you should stay away from keyboards and the Internet when under the influence of intoxicating substances.

Legality of advice

I'd be interested to know if they ran any of that advice past a lawyer before posting it. I rather suspect there's a big difference between what would be normal advice not to incriminate yourself, legal rights and those items which essentially were instructions to interfere with evidence and perjure yourself in court.

On a few of the items of advice then I suspect they are getting close to conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

No hiding place - facial biometrics will ID you, RSN

Picasa and face recognition

"It's not perfect, but it’s pretty good."

At least so far as Picasa is concerned, not it's not "pretty good". I've got well over 50,000 photos which Picasa catalogs, and the face recognition is risible. The vast majority of matches are false positives. The feature is now turned off.

It's notable that Lightroom, which is my preferred way of handling photos, does not have such a feature, useful as it would be if there was a workable solution. Maybe one day.

Brocade: Vertically integrated IT stacks are dying

Not entirely disinterested viewpoint...

As Mandy Rice Davies (almost) said, "he would say that, wouldn't he". Hardly a disinterested party.

In some cases vertically integrated stacks work very well. Just look at what Apple have based their entire business model on. IBM did much the same, with great success, until the competition authorities forced competition and interworking into the mainframe market. We saw something similar with Microsoft who (games consoles apart) did, at least, stay clear of the hardware side. We now have Oracle building a very strong position which now covers more layers than any IT company before.

3D printers, one-dimensional enemies

Sueing manufacturers?

Of course the manufacturers of 3D printers couldn't be (successfully) sued. If providing a means of reproducing a copyright item could be sued, then every manufacturer of scanners, printers, photocopiers, CD/DVD burners etc. would be in the courts (note that a produce designed to overcome DRM technology is different).

The collection of levies on blank media (in some countries) is not a matter of civil law. It's no different to the PRS having the power to extract money for public performances. A matter for parliament, and not a civil court case.

AMD chip chief: 'one day, microprocessor skyscrapers'

Eiderdowns between electric blankets...

"lower thermal charachteristics could act as a sort of insulator between two toasty cores"

So just how is putting a thermally insulating layer between two hot cores going to assist with removing heat from them? It's surely going to make the problem worse.

The subject of 3D semiconductor fabrication regularly reappears over the years, but we've yet to see much come of it. The issues of fabrication, cooling and design are incredibly difficult.

Hitachi refrigerates rack rears

Heat Pipes

Heat Pipes do indeed work that way, and are much more efficient. However, you would need servers especially built for the purpose, which is pretty well what you won't get in a co-lo environment. What you need is a solution that will cool general purpose servers.

I don't think this can be the full cooling story. It will have a narrow working band in that it can only cool servers where the exit air temperature is higher than the outside air temperature, and the air temperature coming out the back panels cannot be lower than the coolants boiling point (which has to be high enough to condense at outside air temperatures).

So I see this something that reduces the air-conn power bill and will need to be supplemented with normal air-conn equipment.

BT shields gentle customers from Min of Sound pirate raids

Innocent/guilty

Dear oh dear - that was clearly the everyday use of the word innocent, and not the definition used in criminal trials. As it happens, any case that was brought on this would be a civil one and nobody is found guilty in such circumstances. They might be found to have broken copyright and damages awarded against them in court. There is not assumption of innocence in civil cases as it simply doesn't apply. You either win or lose a case.

There are criminal cases for breach of copyright, but generally they only apply where there is commercial exploitation. This particular trawling exercise was not looking at that.

Time and time again people on these boards fail to understand the difference between criminal and civil law (not helped when the media describes "damages" as "fines").

Chinese Kindles hop firewall to freedom

The real deterent

The Kindle browser is so awful it's going to be far more effective at detering use than anything the Chinese government could ever put in place.

Stealth Carbon 'efficiency' tax could close UK data centres

Emission exports

"The government bureaucrats don't realise that broadband communications mean it's just as feasible to operate your lights-out data centre in Dubai, Brazil, India or Malaysia as it is to operate it in London's Docklands."

Some truth on that, but no amount of broadband will do anything about the speed of light. The latency to some of those locations will be in the 100-200ms region for a round-trip. That makes it unsuitable for quite a lot of IT uses, especially as complexity increases. For some applications, like real-time trading, every millisecond counts.

There are also issue about security of data, and European data protection standards will prohibit, or at least make very difficult, the export of some types of data to these locations.

However, the biggest issue with any carbon tax is that is can simply export the CO2 emissions to a different country (as has happened with the CO2 emissions associated with manufacturing industry). A tonne of CO2 is a tonne of CO2, whether it is emitted in China or Cheltenham. Of course if the activity is exported to a country with low-emission electricity generation (effectively that's cheap hydro or geo-thermal), then that will save emissions, but that will only happen if the pricing mechanism across the world is common.

In other words, a CO2 tax in Europe alone would have only limited effects as any industries which are inescapably CO2 intensive will migrate to cheaper climes where this is possible.

Of course we could build some more nuclear power stations, although for some bizarre reason, these were not properly recognised as low-carbon generation systems.

Radioactive Litvinenko poison trails now much easier to detect

There is a provable trail

"having been poisoned with the isotope polonium-210 by sinister forces whose identity is easy to guess but hard to prove"

Nope - not in this case. Very easy to prove. However, as the Russians will not allow extradition or questioning of their nationals then it hits a brick wall. The evidence trail, cause by the polonium-210 itself is compelling and points directly to the immediate culprits, although whether such individuals could be persuaded to provide evidence to convict their masters would be another issue. In fact the cheif suspect is a member of the Duma and beyond the reach of law.

As it is, with the Russian state on their side it's academic.

Tech grads least likely to find a job

IT grads

As a sign of the times, graduates in Chinese are reported as having the highest starting salary.

In the meantime, with the news that new IT graduates have the highest unemployment rate, one wonders if IT skills will be still seen as justification for entry into the UK. Yes, it might well be that the particular skills aren't there, but that's as much a reflection of the failure of BT industry to develop staff skills as anything else. However, the real truth is that UK businesses just see UK IT people as too expensive.

The terabyte iPad is coming

"Flash doesn't break and doesn't need backup"

"Disks break; flash doesn't. It doesn't need backing up."

Even if this was true, the idea that you wouldn't need to backup on the basis the media won't break is daft. Quite apart from corruptions, misops, accidentally deletions/reformats, mobile devices are ffar more easily lost/stolen. Anybody who does not have a backup regime for their data (or some way of recreating it) is running at risk. As any experience IT operations person can tell you, reliable hardware (like flash is supposed to be) is about data availability. Backup (and related archives) are a completely different set of needs.

Also, where does the idea that applying de-dupe to MPEGs or JPEGs come from? Unless this means eliminating duplicate files (which is more a matter of good data organisation than a proper use of de-dupe) then applying the technology to MPEG/JPEGs is essentially useless as the chances of any duplicated blocks on highly compressed data when all the redundancy has been removed is essentially zero.

You can easily achieve multi-generational backups (where eliminating duplicate files is desirable) using traditional backup software.

Also the comment that flash is an ideal backup target is surely only true if you eliminate the costs element. In general, backup does not require the low latency high IOP requirements of online or transactional usage. What you need is high-bandwidth streaming performance with low costs per GB (which is why tapes hang on in the enterprise space). For domestic or small business backup, HDDs are usually the best compromise, and I suspect will remain so for a while. Broadband speeds will have to be increased by a couple of orders of magnitude before cloud backup and restore will compete with a single eSATA external drive which can approach a gigabit of data bandwidth. Cloud storage might be alright for the most volatile data, but it's still quite difficult, slow and expensive to use for very large multi-media files. An AVCHD file at maximum rate is around 11GB per hour, without edited versions. It will be a while before online services are fast or cost-effective enough to compete with a 2TB eSATA drive for this purpose.

Israel to join list of 'adequate' data protection nations

Oh dear...

I think you can safely say that no private data sent to an Israeli company for processing can be guaranteed safe from access by state security. Of course that might well be true for many other countries as well, but as there have been proven examples of the Israeli government producing counterfeit passports (which the promised Margaret Thatcher they would never do again, but which they seem to have reneged on), then I suspect there will cause a lot of disquiet.

I'm waiting to see whether the EU will approve the data protection laws of any Moslem countries. One suspect that there will be howls of outrage if that ever happens.

Highest point on the Moon found: Higher than Mount Everest

Like for Like Comparison

A bit more research around reveals that the best estimate for the mean radius of the earth is about 6,371 km (depending on the methodology chosen). The point on Earth furthest from the centre is usually considered to be Mt. Chimborazo in the Andes at 6,384.4km. A simple substraction of one from the other provides for a difference between the highest spot on the Earth compared to its mean diameter (the same basis as the Lunar figure) as 13.4km. compared to a little under 11km on the Moon.

Clearly there's there's some uncertainty over the Earth's mean diameter (and I can only find it quote to 4 significant figures), but the difference is large enough to conclude that, on a like-for-like basis, the highest point on the Moon compared to it's mean radius is less than the equivalent on earth.

On this basis, Olympus Mons, 25km above the surrounding plains in Mars, is not as high as Mt. Chimborazo as it is 13km above the Mars mean radius.

Mean Radius

A little more research indicates that this is the height above the mean radius of the Moon (not the lowest point) so we'd need to know the mean radius of the Earth's solid surface rather than the sea level (which clearly isn't the mean radius either with, or without the oceans content).

Nonsense

"The highest point on the Earth is at the summit of Mount Everest, which is 8,848 meters (29,029 feet) above sea level. The lunar high point is 1938 meters higher than that of the Earth!"

This is clearly nonsense as the Moon has no seas (rather than areas called seas). If you do this on an equivalent basis (considering only the solid surfaces) then the tip of Mt. Everset is over 19,700 metres higher than the low point.

LOST Vulture One PARIS spaceplane FOUND!!!

Off-the-shelf

Hasn't Lewis pointed out that you could have bought an off-the-shelf one from the US at a third of the cost and with the electornics (on board camera) working properly and it could have been delivered in a quarter of the time.

Where's his column on this scandal of waste?

Duracell MyGrid cable-free gadget charger

What I'd really like to see...

So a product only of use to those to lazy to plug a connector into the bottom of a phone?

I also see a problem. There surely can't be many people who haven't quickly had to locate their charger as they are warned of a low battery level during a call in order to continue it. It's not going to be very easy to do that with a device like this one.

I'd echo all those that just want a standard connector. In fact I'd go further - I'd like a general purpose multi-outlet DC "brick" whith a single connector type that can negotiate with the devices it's powering. That way I could replace a dozen or more DC adapters with one or two. I could have a single device for powering a laptop, a router, charge a phone, the camcorder, a USB drive, battery charger, printer, speakers...