Posts by Steven Jones

Boffins: Ordinary lightbulbs can be made efficient, cheaply

Really?

Given that the article says :-

"American boffins believe they have developed a process which can make the oldschool lights more efficient than energy-saving lamps."

And that the claim is that these bulbs will use less power than a 60W incadescent light bulb yet produce the light output of a 100W then I think that this is not compatible with the view that they are as efficient as (florescent) energy saving bulbs. The latter have something like a 75% reduction in power usage.

In raw numbers a 100W GLS (incandescent) bulb produces about 17.5 lm/w (at best). This proposal (if it worked on a whole filament - yet to be proved) would get it to about 28 lm/w. However, we can already get to 24 lm/W using quartz-halogen bulbs (which are, of course, still incandescent) so that isn't so much better than proven, working technology. Both compare unfavourably with compact florescent bulbs at 60-70 lm/w. Even then, there is scope for new technology as yet to be developed to considerably exceed the efficiency of compact flourescents as they are still less than 15% efficient.

There are good theoretical grounds for incandescents being unable to compete in the low energy consumption area. Essentially this comes down to a simple matter of physics - the light output from an incandescent source is governed by the black-body radiation curve. In the case of incandescent light bulbs, the vast majority of that is emitted in the infra-red area. The only way to get more of the curve into the visible light part of the spectrum is to increase the operating temperature. Theoretically you might increase the efficiency of such a bulb by a factor of 4 or more over a tungsten GLS bulb, but you are then faced with the problem that no know material will stay solid at the required temperature and such a device would emit a great deal of damaging UV unless filtered.

So, in summary, we can pretty well match these claims already with tungsten-halogen bulbs at, I suspect, a lower cost than developing some new technology, and neither gets anywhere near a compact florescent despite what the article implies.

@Sean

You are a patronising git, but then you probably know that. If you are worried about toxic chemicals, then worry about those emitted by coal fired power stations. Now quite apart from the fact that fluorescent lights can be treated as hazard waste and therefore the release into the environment can be controlled (and there are moves afoot to reduce the mercury content), then consider the following fact. In the US in 2006 coal powered generating stations put something like 50 tonnes of mercury straight into the atmosphere, or about the same amount as there is in 9 billion CFLs. With the population of the US being about 300 million, then that would mean scrapping the equivalent of 30 CFLs per person per year to equal that.

In fact if you take the mercury put into the atmosphere by the higher power usage of the incandescent bulb with a typical US mix of energy generation by fuel, there's not so much difference between the that and the mercury used in a CFL over the lifetime of the latter. Follow that up with the ability to control the release of the CFL mercury into the environment by suitable reprocessing, and that the Hg content is being reduced, then this particular item is a non-issue. I don't recall anybody complaining much about mercury in fluorescent tubes until CFLs came along.

In any case, mercury is not easily absorbed into the body unless it is in an organic form. There have been recent examinations on mercuray amalgams used in fillings to show that there has been no detrimental effects on people. I wouldn't go around handling the stuff in a calaier manner, but there is some perspective required here.

Pillar Data - Larry Ellison's other storage company

It's an appliance...

"The Sun 7000 business model, with its commodity hardware aspects, is good news in Oracle-land, but its open source software is not. Not to Oracle, any way. Neither is the bag-of-bits aspect of the 7000's software environment particularly attractive to many customers. Here are the software lego blocks; now build the storage array hardware and software system yourself. No thank you. I want to have an easier time implementing my storage array. Again, this is Pillar talk from the Pillar camp.)"

Oh dear Chris - did you fall asleep during the SUN presentation, or haven't you had an invitation to one yet? The Sun 7000 Unified Storage Device is very much an appliance. Think of it as a cut-price NetApp lacking a few features (but with much faster processors), using relatively slow, large SATA drives boosted (if you are wise) by some flash SSDs, and you aren't too far off the mark (apart from the bottom-of-the-range 7110 which uses 2.5" SAS drives and doesn't have the SSD option). All the hardware, software and so on is supplied by SUN. The software is a carefully controlled, bolted down version of Open Solaris and ZFS, but that doesn't mean that it is anything else but an appliance.

Of course, if your are brave enough, then you can build your own device using the software set, as, indeed, can other vendors. But the SUN 7000 is not a brew-your-own configuration, and if you go round adding your disks to such a config then expect your support from SUN to evaporate.

Eurofighter Tranche 3: Oh please, God, no

Risk theory...

"You need proper ballistic missiles, because the other side need to be sure your counterstrike can't be stopped. "

What a mind-numbingly, illiogical comment. Clearly Lewis doesn't know much about risk theory. All that is necessary is a deterrent that presents a realistic chance of getting through in enough numbers to cause unacceptable losses. The other side need to be pretty near damn certain they can stop your counterstrike as the consequences of failing are huge with the destructive power of nuclear weapons. Of course I'm assuming that the relevant authorities on each side are rational and can do the relevant maths.

Now it might just be conceivable that a super power could develop something which can stop cruise missiles and the like and if you are largely surrounded by water and huge distance you might be able to keep enemy surface shipping from close enough to your shores. However, for sure that doesn't apply to the likes of Iran, which is the type of country where a realistic threat might appear from. Of course if the military are gamblers, then all bets are off.

So, no doubt, Trident is the gold-standard of nuclear deterents, but it's by no means the only potential alternative. Probably its greatest advantage is that it is more easily managed and doesn't require as many weapons scattered all over the place with the consequent problems that involves, if only to proliferation.

Wolfram Alpha - a new kind of Fail

What's going on

What's this - a Register article mentioning Wikipedia other than just as a way of sneering at it. Whatever is going on?

Telstra bins UK support staff

It's economics stupid...

All those types who keep rabbiting on about this being a way of lining shareholder's pockets, then wake up. It's not - it is all about costs (at least apparent costs). If you are undercut be a competitor that is doing this, then your company will have to do it too. It's happening for exactly the same reason that you flat screen TV is made in a place with low wages. It's price pressure, and once it becomes a matter of relative labour costs, then the outcome is driven by economics.

Of course there are downsides - everybody knows that, but the price pressures are such that companies in the west are effectively forced to off-shore jobs. Certainly now is not a great time to be doing the sort of job that can be done from a third world country.

Nb, when legal services start being offshored, then you can expect politicians to wake up given that so many of them are lawyers. Perhaps we could off-shore the entire legal system? Imagine, the defendent and witnesses could remain in the UK and the whole of the rest of the expensive system - juries, lawyers, recorders, judges could all be off-shored using video links.

Perhaps I'll suggest that to my MP - imagine how much would be saved on legal aid and prosecution costs...

Electric racer hits the track

weight/endurance

So races could last "up to" 45 minutes depending on conditions. With 60KWh on board, then that's equiavalent to about 80KW average assuming 100% efficiency, or full power for about 40% of the time. Given that Li-Ion batteries lose capacity over a number of charge/discharge cycles then I think that, combined with other thermodynamic losses, means that 45 mins must be very much the absolute maximum and most will be a lot shorter. Of copurse if these things had regenerative braking, then that could make a substantial different, but there is not mention of that. In any case, these are heavy beasts - a Formula 1 car with comes in at about 70% of this mass including the driver. Adding a full regenerative braking system would add even more and, as various F1 teams have found, can make a mess of the balance of the car in braking.

The solar-powered electronics are a gimmick. The contribution they make to the overall power consumption of the car will be negligible.

Gov 'smart meter' plans: Sky box in charge of your house

Intelligent devices

To make this work needs intelligence in the electrical appliances - expecting consumers to rush round plugging and unplugging devices as the unit rate changes isn't going to be very practicable. Some of this is going to have to be very dynamic indeed as inherently variable generation like wind & wave comes more and more on strream.

What is needed is something like freezers that can adjust power consumption according to the cost of electricity. It's perfectly possible in the short term to use cheaper electricity to cool the contents of the freezer more than normal and use the "thermal intertia" effect to cut power consumption during expensive periods (as sort of reverse energy store). Similarly, all sorts of other types of devices could have energy stores. Clearly batteries (albeit that's expensive), but the ultimate would surely be when it is integrated into electric transport. It's perfectly feasible to imagine the battery in your electric car "smoothing out" the demand on the grid at peak times (albeit I think this is only acceptable with "plug in" hybrids to avoide being stranded if your battery has been drained because you boiled a kettle at peak rates).

As everybody realises, the real problem is that nobody has cracked the problem of storing large amounts of electric power in a cheap and efficient manner. The person that cracks that will deserve riches which even Bill Gates couldn't dream of.

Uni students invent 'radiation-proof' cloth for Moon tents

Textiles...

So these guys' extensive insight into textiles gives them expertise in the absorption characteristics of ionising radiation does it.? Amazing what they teach them these days - perhaps they are working on the lead-lined underpants to protect where most male students keep their brains.

Oracle 'faster, cheaper' with VMware

Too many mistakes

There are just too many mistakes and items taken out of context in this article to go through them. It looks like a barely changed regurgitation of some press release from EMC based on a very specific and unrealistic scenario. Software licensing costs of Oracle and how to optimise them is a serious subject, worthy of looking into. An item headlined like Oracle 'faster, cheaper' with VMware is not doing it. Oracle running under VMWare can never be faster than on raw hardware of the same specification. Possibly, there is some quirk of licensing rules that can be exploited to make it cheaper, but I only say possible. This article doesn't demonstrate it.

Too much sunshine makes you commit suicide

Hardly news

This is hardly a new observation. An article in the Guardian on 12th May 2005 repoprts something almost identicals (the first half of May clearly being the peak period for reporting increases in suicides in the early summer, at least in the northern hemisphere).

A short extract...

"The seasonal effect is seen all over the world, with the northern hemisphere witnessing a big rise in suicides in May and June and the southern hemisphere seeing a similar rise in November. While no one has a complete explanation as to why, the leading theory is that the increase is down to the effects of sunlight on our hormones."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/may/12/mentalhealth.society

Satellite to offer 10Mbit broadband to entire UK

Latency sensitive?

"Eutelsat said that it will offer latency-sensitive services such as IPTV and VoIP via satellite. Fremaux conceded that the updated technology will not overcome latency problems for online gamers, however."

There some mixup of terminology here. IPTV is not latency sensitive - provided that there is sufficient bandwidth to keep the video buffers fed with data, then it doesn't much matter if the latency is 10ms or 1000ms (subject only to the buffer having to be larger with long latencies to allow for retry times and, of course, that real-time feeds will be further behind with longer latencies). VOIP is latency sensitive in the sense that you get that annoying gap between question and reply, but really what matters is "jitter" - that is the variation in the arriveal time of packets, and packet loss. Jitter is not latency (although higher latency routes can get higher levels of jitter). As you don't want to wait several seconds for a reply, using large buffers to deal with "jitter" and allowing retries to handle packet losses is not viable.

Realtime games are a different matter - that really is a pure latency issue.

Honda executes 180° turn on plug-in e-cars

@JohnG

Indeed the lack of availability of a fueling infrastructure is a problem for hydrogen powered cars. But it isn't the fundamental problem - that is the essentially very poor thermodynamic efficiency of the whole supply chain that simply can't be got round as it is dictated by some basic laws of physics (primarily those involved in the electrolysis and the unrecoverable energy lost in compression or liquefaction stages).

Thermodynamics and the hydrogen economy...

Indeed the "hydrogen economy" has been looking very suspect for a long time. The entire end-to-end process is thermodynamically highly inefficient. There is not only the problem of producing the stuff in the first place, but more problematical is the storing and transporting the damned stuff. Compressing it of liquefying it is a very energy intensive.

Firstly, if hydrogen is produced by electrolysis then that is only 75% efficient (only if somebody can come up with a way of using sunlight and biological processes to produce hydrogen will that be overcome - and even then, it could very well be better to produce electricity direct). Then there is the efficiency of compression or liquefaction and transportation plus the final conversion efficiency in a fuel cell.

With compression to sensible levels, out of 100KWh electricity generated only 23KWh will be available to drive an electric vehicle. Use hydrogen liquefaction, and that drops to 19KWh. In contrast, the equivalent power transmission electricity/battery cycle can achieve almost 70%. The compression/liquefaction losses are inescapable - they simply come from the laws of thermodynamics.

So the "hydrogen economy" suffers from this huge problem of thermodynamic efficiency. In fact if you use fossil fuels to generate your electricity, then it is far, far more efficient to fuel your car direct. Put in a best case 40% thermodynamic efficiency for the power generation step, and the best case delivery-to-wheel efficiency is a miserable 10% compared to perhaps 25% in a car engine. Unless somebody really does come up with a Nuclear fusion reactor such that it is (to use a quote used on fission power in the 1960s) "to cheap to meter", efficiency will remain an issue. The chances of nuclear fusion being that cheap are vanishingly small given the overwhelming engineering challenges.

Of course the problem with battery storage is range and there is only so much that can be done with the technology. That's why the future is surely "plug-in" hybrids. Use battery storage for the average commute and a liquid-fueled IC engine for longer distances. Note that liquid fuels needn't be fossil fuels alone, although bio-diesel and the like have their own problems.

The hydrogen economy is virtually a non-starter. People have got carried away with this beautiful notion of producing only water out of the exhaust of a vehicle. But look at the overall cycle and it starts to fall apart (of course the Top-Gear crew are very fond of hydrogen power, but Clarkson is a scientific ignoramus).

Homer Simpson 'nuclear waste spill' panic at nuke sub base!

@muscleguy

I'd certainly agree that we shouldn't be complacent over handling nuclear materials. However, and there is a big however, you appear to be comitting that mistake of treating all nuclear materials and leaks as if they have the same potential consequences. Frankly they don't - a leak involving a small amount of tritium is simply not comparable to that of (say) high level nuclear waste from a reactor core. Tritium is not accumulated in the body over time in the way that some heavy metals would be. That's quite apart from the total amount being absolutely insignificant to the total quantity naturally in the sea.

I would expect the precautions being taken to have some relation to the risks being taken. You, on the other hand, appear to be taking an absolutist approach to this. However, people involved in risk management will know that this is not the way it works - the systems and processes that are used to handle different situations vary. Some of the materials involved in the use of radioactive materials in medicine and biological research are inherently more dangerous, if only because they are often designed to be biologically active. For instance, treatments for cancer and over-active thyroids. X-Rays are another example of ionising where repeated doses to medical staff represent a significant occupational danger unless properly controlled.

None of this is to say that there aren't some extremely unpleasant materials being dealt with in the fuels handling of the submarine nuclear reactors. But that does not appear to be what was being dealt with here. It's a bit like equating the safety systems surrounding the management of an oil depot (which failed dramatically at Hemel Hempstead a few years ago) and those in the refilling of a cigarette lighter. Much better to expend most of the effort on the former where the risks are so much higher.

In this particular case the information in the PDFs looks typical of what I'd expect from this soprt of investigation. It's certainly worth the investigation to find out if there is a wider risk - what is the worst case scenario with this sort of incident? But it doesn't warrant deliberately alarmist articles that neglect to provide the facts.

Of course one of the real issues about this case is that Faslane is in the middle of what ammounts to a political civil war between the Scottish Labour party and the SNP. I wonder whose decision it was that the Devonport submarine facility was to be closed in favour of concentrating the facilities in Faslane?

@John Smith

Tritium is a naturally occuring isotope. It is created in the upper atmosphere by the irradiation of hydrogen nuclei with cosmic rays. It falls to earth as rain and appears in the groundwater and seawater. However, as it has a relatively short half-life it does not accumulate.

When atmospheric nuclear bomb tests were being carried out, atmospheric levels were greatly increased, but these days thay have fallen back to something much closer to natural levels. The quantities being discussed in this article are tinier still than naturally occuring ones (once the dilution effect of the ocean is taken into account).

@Boris the Cockroach

Ok - solid plutonium in a bag isn't particularly dangerous (within limits), but what is very dangerous is plutonium in the environment. You really don't want plutonium dust, even in microgramme quantities lodged in your lungs. The decay of plutonium via its various products will emit highly ionising beta and alpha particles. Not to much of a problem if you've got air and a layer of plastic (or even skin) between you and the emitter. Much more of an issue if its directly irradiating living cells.

Quite apart from the danger of making a big bang, you really don't want plutonium freely available as it is an extremely good way of contaminating a large area. Now a few microgrammes of Plutonium in the lungs or other parts of the body won't kill you immediatrely; it might never do so, but for sure it will increase the long term risk of various cancers. It's not as immediately dangerous as Polonium 210 simply because the hald-life is so much longer. You really don't want either in malevolent (or careless) hands.

Solwise Piggy 6 multi-device powerline network adaptor

a "mere" 100ma?

If this device is actually consuming 100ma, and that is at mains voltage, then that can hardly be described as "mere" as it is about 24 watts. That's as much as a typical PVR when turned on (and not in standby) and would cost something close to £25 per year in electricity consumption, Of course is may have power-saving circuitry, but that's not a nominal amount.

I'm a bit doubtful if this is really the consumption - 100ma is too much of a round number, and 24W dissipated in something that size will feel a bit more than warm.

Yorkshire man wakes up Irish after brain surgery

continuity error?

*******

His wife-to-be walked into the ward, and heard a commotion including "someone singing 'Danny Boy' really loud. It sounded like a drunken Irishman, and all the racket seemed to coming from the direction of Chris’s bed."

Mrs Gregory then realised the Ronan Keating-a-like was her future husband who had apparently been reset from tyke to jackeen. On spotting his wife, he apparently declared "It's da broid."

********

Now does this mean that the guy already had a soon-to-be-divorced wife who happened to be in the room at the same and, by sheer coincidence, his new wife-to-be is either currently, or was married to another Mr. Gregory...

US lawmakers to de-silence electric cars

@Maxime Rainville

It's worth doing a bit of research on this first - it isn't just blind people who are affected, it is ordinary pedestrians, the elderly, children. Tests have been done on this - people are adapted and evolved to use all their senses to detect danger. The tests that have been done show that this is only a problem below about 20 miles/30 km per hour. Above that speed, road noise suffices and nobody is suggesting intrusive noises - we aren't going to have cars with sirens or the type of warning beeps they put on reversing lorries. Something that beams a bit of noise in a forward direction suggesting of a moving object would do the job. Given that this would have a trivial effect on the cost of any electric car, it's hardly a big imposition to make.

As for the person who suggested it is not a problem for bicycles - well yes it is. I know when I'm out and about on a bike I have to be specially wary of pedestrians that haven't noticed me and can't hear me. It's a particular problem on shared use routes. That's why I have a bell on my bike (shouting at a pedestrian is a lot more intrusive and aggressive sounding than letting one know gently by an appropriate audible warning). Also, being hit be a bicycle is likely to be far less damaging than a car. Bicycle have not been around for "centuries" - the modern safety cycle only came about in 1885, and even the "high-wheel" only went back to the 1860s and were very rare; prior to that velocipedes were just toys and barely count. In any event, bicycles really required good road surfaces which simply didn't exist centuries before.

Baby Shakergate: Apple officially sorry

Idiotic comment

Type your comment here — plain text only, no HTML"but Apple has now appointed itself arbitrator of what is just in poor taste and what is actually "deeply offensive". We look forward to the Internet Watch Foundation referring to Cupertino when faced with difficult decisions about such things."

Dumb, stupid remark. Apple vet what applications run on the iPhone so they can hardly allow themselves to be associated with what many would regard as deeply offensive. As they approve these things it is fundamentally associated with their brand. Should somebody write something like this for a more open programming platform (like the MAC) then Apple wouldn't have been in this position. Also, you can put whatever offensive-to-some video that you like into an iPod, although don't expect Apple to stock it.

Of course you can raise the issue over whether the iPhone should be a completely open platform so anybody could download whatever offensive material you like. But when you get something through a company outlet then don't expect them to be uninterested in the association with their brand.

I should add I hold no brief for Apple, but nobody with a few brain cells to rub together can blame them for this. Clearly the author of this particular article has styled himself after the unreconstructed 1970s student rag mag humour which I recall usually had a page of dead baby jokes. Students - really pushing the boundary of humour then...

Lost laptops cost companies $50k apiece

"Independent"

Just what definition of "independent research" is the Ponemon Institute using when it states on its web site that is what it specialises in. This is just a piece of research designed to come out with an answer that suites its sponsor. I've no doubt they will claim they do this research using "independent" methods which cannot be undermined by their client. However, everybody knows that's eyewash - if it had come out with results which didn't favour its sponsor, the results would not have seen the light of day. The subjects investigated will have been narrowly defined in such a way that it will invariably come out with what the sponsor wants to hear.

As usual, yet another bit of "research" that's probably most useful as toilet paper. The only reports that are "independent" are those which are not sponsored and not behoven to any particular interest group.

Oracle stares into Sun for storage future

@Matt Brynat

You don't need to spend your cash, hard-earned or not, to acquire the rights to the Niagara. The design is open sourced. Of course you still have that little issue of designing the server it fits in, paying for the fabrication, future developments and so on.

Database Storage

I seriously can't imagine Oracle being in the storage hardware business in the long term. I would expect Oracle to seek to recoup some of the purchase price of SUN by attempting to sell off the storage hardware business to other vendors (assuming it can find any with deep enough pockets). HP, IBM, HDS and NetApp could all be in the fray.

In terms of storage software, that's a completely different issue. A software set that would allow commodity servers and networks to provide storage functions is certainly possible. With ZFS, Linux, Solaris X86 and clustering software they have many of the building blocks. HP are positioning the PolyServe product they acquired in much the same area. However, it takes time, and I remain to be convinced that customers really want general purpose servers as storage servers, but this sort of thing could be built into an appliance-type model with resilience and scale It's goping to be difficult, and unlike databases, there is less of a technical lock-in with any one storage supplier. With Oracle it is often not

One problem that Oracle are going to have to come to terms with the is the fundamentally different Open Source licesning models of what they have acquired from SUN and the Linux-based software that they have developed. The latter is GPL, unless they GPL'd the SUN open source software then there would be big problems merging the two (hence ZFS is a problem to put onto Linux in the way that it is installed into Solaris).

As far as storage and databases is concerned, in the case of high-performance transactional storage we are in the next 2-3 years going to get a radical shift to flash-based solid state storage. Already on a cost per IOP basis flash is ahead (and cost per IOP is often the big problem on transaction databases so you have to provide far too many spindles - just see any TPC'C' benchmark). Cost be GB is still going to be a long way behind hard disk for the forseeable future, but not so far behind that of the fastest, short-stroked enterprise disks. As far as latency is concerned, then hard disk can't get anywhere near competing. Fifty microsecond or better latency is possible with flash with hardisk being 100 times longer (uncached). Whilst this is going to revolutionise many transactional databases, it is also a fact that none of the current enterprise array manufacturers has storage solutions which can make full use of the number of IOPs that an array with a significant number of flash drives (especially SLC ones) could achieve. They simply run out of processing power. Also the FC protocols, SAN/Ethernet fabric pretty well gurantee not seeing better than 500 microsecond I/O latency.

The stage is set for a revolution in transaction database performance once the storage problem is fixed. Putting SSDs into current arrays is only a partial measure. I will be interested to see what Oracle come up with as the fundamentals have changed (the fastest SSDs by far site directly on PCIe buses, not on the ends of FC SAN networks).

JG Ballard — 1930-2009

@AC

Oh dear - didn't get the joke did you? As for any nasty messages about Jade Goody, well anybody who wrote those is a despicable, so I'm not sure how you made that connection that what you know doubt consider intellectual snobs would cheer that stuff along. Which leads me to suspect that you haven't much notion about anything.

nb, there is an element of truth in a joke though - culture doesn't feature strongly in the comments on this site

Philistines...

OK - now we know what the readership of this rag is like. Death of a towering figure of British intellectual and literary life, five comments to data. Over four times that number for the death of the producer of the Carry On films and an apparently endless string of Paris Hilton jokes.

I think JG would have appreciated that...

RIP JG Ballard

We have lost the single most innovative British writer of the later 20th century. We have nobody to match him and his unsentimental look at future societies. Never mind what the literary critics might say, who are often so far up their back passages that they can't see what the value of ideas are. I'm going to be depressed for the rest of the week over this news which he characteristically forewarned us of in his recent autobiography.

Profs: Human race must become Hobbits to save planet

Morphology of hobbits

Anybody reading Lord of the Rings would realise that hobbits are anthing but lean. They are short and quite stocky, so hardly conform to the professor's description of a lean race. Perhaps a better way that El Reg could have put this was they we all have to turn into Kate Moss, Keira Knightley or if you are male, maybe Gandhi. I can't off-hand think of a fictional race of humanoids that might fit the bill, but I'm sure somebody will think of something more appropriate than the slightly rotund and well-fed Hobbits who I seem to recall are fond of a good feast with precious little concern to modern dietary neuroses.

Oracle reels in Sun Microsystems with $7.4bn buy

Questions

1) What happens to Solaris & OEL now that Oracle have two competing operating systems which will both run on the same Intel-compatible hardware. Different code sources, bot open-sourced but with wildly different licenses.

2) What happens to the server and microprocessor design business. Is SPARC doomed? If sold off, who will keep that going when they are unlikely to be handed the ownership of Solaris too.

3) How are Oracle going to get money from SUN's open source software business given the latter never managed it. In other words, how are we going to be stitched up...

I'll assume the odds and ends of the SUN business, like the storage side will get sold off, although none of those have the strategic importance of the server and SUN open source software set.

Oh - and my sympathy to SUN employees - they are going to be paying the real price for this...

Pirate Bay guilty verdict: Now what?

@Yes Me

Yet another stupid remark which thinks the narrow logical rules applying to IT technology somehow carry over into law. Read the editorial conclusion - the judgement wasn't against anybody pointing to a site contravening copyright law either innocently or to support an articles (as the BBC did). It was a judgement against a business model that was predicated on the exploitation of copyright breaches. The argument that the site was there as a general purpose directory for innocent use of file sharing was fatally undermined by two things. First the stupid arrogance of calling it "Pirate" Bay and, secondly, because if lacked any means of taking down links which breached copyright. Indeed the only reason the site was popular was that it was largely used for streams of copyrighted material. These four made money from this business model (not necessary for a conviction of course, but no doubt a contributory factor to the sentence).

So can people finally stop equating eBay, Google, BBC and so on links to this case. It just tends to confirm your own loose contact with reality...

Wong Ship

If they were operating from Somalia I could understand the pirate boat. As it is, surely a bunch of Swedes marauding across international frontiers with the aim of aiding and abetting the looting of foreign goods should have chosen a long boat as their emblem. I'm sure that the Rover one is available if they fancing pirating something.

Of course, just like the Vikings, there will be some who consider consider these guys to be misunderstood, colourful heroes who were just dealing out to the wealthy what they deservered. Not everybody will see them in that light...

Pirate Bay loses trial: defendants face prison time, hefty fines

@garbo

"So, by this definition, I can take your Aston Martin for a joy ride, return it, and walk away without charge. So, theft is NOT theft if thief returns stolen property?"

In fact there is a specific offense covering that - it is called "taking without owner's consent". With most objects, such an activity (that is making use of without permission) would probably just be a civil offense (subject to damages only). In the case of doing this with a car (in the UK at least), this is a specific criminal offense.

Of course these attempts to make "breach of copyright" the same as "theft" are, of course, wrong-headed. They are two different things, which does not make "breach of copyright" necessarily any less a crime than straight theft. For "normal" breaches of copyright, then the offense is civil only (that is subject to damages). However, be warned - the financial impact of losing a civil case can be far, far worse than a criminal case. The two things that you can say is that you can't be jailed for losing a civil case (at least not directly - you might get jailed under contempt of court if you don't comply with court rulings) and that you don't get a criminal record.

UK (and most other jurisdictions) also allow for criminal convictions for copyright violation, especially if there is a serious attempt to make money out of it or to promote widespread violation.

The moot point over damages is just how much damage is done by enabling violation of copyright. It's clearly nonsense to say that every pirated copy is a lost sale but, conversely, it is equally ridiculous to say there have been no lost sales or, possibly as relevant, that the price of the "legal" item hasn't been forced downwards by the availability of a "free" pirated alternative.

Anyway, these four defendents appear to be both idiotic and arrogant and the various judges and courts of the world aren't likely to be persuaded by the school-yard level arguments of some of the twerps that post to this board.

@michael

"I rose by any other name would smell just as sweet"

do I need to pay to use that line or is it covered by fair use?

I assume you meant "A" rather than "I", but Shakespeare is long, long out of copyright so I rather think that you are safe on that.

@Matt

"If I tell a burglar where you live does that make me a criminal if he breaks in to your house and steals your car?"

No, but if you tell somebody where the owner's spare house key is hidden, or how to force open the kitchen window and have a reasonable suspicion that the recipient was going to steal the car then you would most certainly be committing a crime.

@Giles Jones

They were not locked up for copyright infringement. They are being locked up for deliberately facilitating others to breach copyright. The very name "Pirate Bay" hardly helped their defence.

As for not requiring media giants. I suppose you can make an argument that if the music market fragmented (as it is) into lots of independent artists, rather than a few media and industry-promoted over-paid mega-stars, then that might be no bad thing. It doesn't actually cost much to produce and distribute (most) music these days once the over-priced producers, managers and recording studios are dropped out. Although be warned - if they don't get you on recorded material, they surely will on live. It's interesting how those who begrudge paying £8 for a CD will happily pay £50+ for a ticket with booking, transaction and delivery fees more than the price of the album.

However, you might wonder who will finance those Hollywood block-blusters and mega-games. Now we are talking about serious money - from the 10's of millions to the hundreds of millions. Given that is a commercially risky game, then you really do need thoser mega-corporations. You can't produce the next block-buster film the way - well, not until we have computer programmes that can produce films, dialogues, realistic acting and plotting automatically - then we won't need the media giants. Until that happens, you are stuck with them or you do without big films.

Not surprising

This is not wholly surprising. First tip is if you want to produce a site to aid people in the unauthorised downloading of copyright material and you want to use the defense that it is just intended to help people find legitimate material, then best think about plausible deniability from the beginning. Calling something "Pirate Bay" looks like a deliberate provocation and hardly helps their case.

Secondly, all those arm chair lawyers (with which this site abounds), the actual operation of law does not revolve around your "how many angels can stand on the head of a pin" bits of sophistry. There are things like intent and even common sense taken into account. Not always - like the stupid ruling of a German court that Google image thumbnails breached copyright rather than being fair use. But what you can't rely in is so little bit of sophistry such as this has a legal use. I've no doubt you could use the butt of a handgun to drive in nails, but that isn't going to look too convincing in a court of law.

As for carrying this principle forwards to Google - well I think not, at least as far as criminal sanctions go. Google is clearly a general purpose search engine and used mostly for legitimate purposes. I think the worst that could happen is some authority somwhere imposing conditions on Google to not give links to sites which are breaching copyright. Very difficult to police of course.

However, in one sense it doesn't matter much, apart from the consequences for the defendents in this case. Technology will move on and later generations of file sharing will get more and more difficult to close down, as they will be inherently decentralised and will also use other tricks to avoid users being tracked.

Tough on e-vehicles, tough on the causes of e-vehicles

Power Generation

This article appears to be missing the biggest hole of all. Dense charging networks aren't going to be much use if you don't have the electricity generation available. The country is already faced with power shortages in the next decade due to the number of power plants which are to be decomissioned in that time, including most of the nuclear capacity. Given the lead time for nuclear, then we could well be forced into rapif fill-in with fossil-fueled plants just to meet current requirements (pun unintended). I suppose the batteries in the electrically powered cars might usefully soak up some of the peaks from notoriously variable renewables, but I think that's a side-show and would require an intelligent network (and also demonstrated that hybrids will be the real need).

To put the numbers in perspective, if we have 1m cars (a small fraction of the total vehicle usage in the UK) powered primarily by electricity, and these each use 20Kwh per day (enough for a moderate daily commute) then that's 20GWhrs per day of extra generation capacity or over 7,300GWhrs per year. That's approaching the total output of Sizewell B just for a very small percentage of national transport needs.

The power generation and distribution side of this equation had better be considered if more than a few percent of cars, buses and lorries are to be considered.

I have a feeling that a far larger and quicker saving in CO2 usage and energy consumption could be made through policies that promoted efficient cars more quickly. The electric vehicle side of this equation is no quick fix.

Steptoe storage vendors cash in on junk platters

To be charitable

I feel I have to be charitable here and say that the complete lack of any skepticism on what this technology can actually really do is nothing to do with the journalist having been taken out for a few good lunches and falling for a few PowerPoint slidesets.

What I read here is a whole lot of speculative stuff which may, or may not have some merit but falls far short of any real provable results. So there is some form of RAID system sealed into a canister and the device controller does the job of the external RAID controller. Maybe, just maybe there's something in their which reduces failure rates by dealing with the engineering details, like the source of vibration.

However, there - and there is a big however, disks essentially fail because they have moving parts running to incredibly tight tolerances at high speed. Engineer them to a higher standard, and they will fail less often - but they will still fail. They fail for more reasons that vibration - lubrication, manufacturing faults and so on. Further, batches of devices fail early due to differences on the maunfacturing line at the time. Many people will have experienced this on real arrays and servers - several disks failing over a few months. Not too much of a problem with individual drives. The hot spare kicks in, and you plug in a replacement (for many arrays, that's a self-service option). With several drives sealed into a canister, then if you get too high a failure rate, then the canister will need replacing (and the data all has to be moved off unless there is RAID across the canisters).

No maybe there are some advantages - only one motor to spin all the drives up? Maybe one spindles and set of bearings, but to me it looks more like a RAID-in-a-can and hardly a hug breakthrough and not exactly disruptive technology.

Ultimate point is that hard drives are fundamentally flawed. Lots of moving parts and performance that does not scale at the same rate as capacity (capacity goes up as the to the square of the increase in linear density, sequential access as to the linear density and random access barely at all). Disks are essentially a bodgy, slow, power-intensive and unreliable storage medium with poor latency and will ultimately get demoted to slow, mass storage over the next few years. The technology explained here makes no significant difference to that.

How the government uses dirty data to legislate morality

Excellent Journalism.

It's a delight to come across some decent journalism. Sadly it's a rare thing these days, but I really welcome somebody taking along, hard view at what passes for policy making in this country. Much of what comes out from politicians and journalists (plus not a few comedians) is pre-digested views based on dubious research of the worst order.

Whilst on the subject of ridiculous use of statistics in the name of fashionable policies, one might want to look at what the FSA and Ofcom are up to on food and dietary standards. Recently Chris Hoy has been lambasted by some self-appointed outfit called "The Food Commission" as one of a number of sportsman promoting what they call "junk food". His crime? Well he's been putting his name to what the FSA and Food Commission define as a "high sugar" foods in the shape of Kellogs Bran Flakes. This story was picked up by Ben Goldacre's usually excellent Bad Science blog (in the microblogs) where he joined in the condemnation.

Well the facts are these - the FSA defines any food as "high sugar" if it contains more than 15gm of Sugar per 100gm in weight. Ofcom use this to ban the advertising of so-called "junk foods" on children's TV (not that there is much of that, partly because there's not much left to advertise). The FSA use these percentage figures for various evil ingredients (in their view) without any consideration to the actual amount eaten. So Marmite is really bad for the salt contents - but then who eats 100gm at a go. For that matter who eats 100gm of dry Bran Flakes? According to Kellogs, a portion of Branflakes is 30gm (which would be about 7gm of sugar - even if the average portion is a bit bigger, then actual amount isn't that high). Of course the percentage of sugar is even lower when the milk is taken into account (albeit he total amount is a bit higher).

Now compare this with orange juice. That passed the "high sugar" tests as it is only about 12% sugars. However, if we take an average (not very large) portion of orange juice as 200gm then that's about 24gm of sugar from that source, or over three times that from a portion of bran flakes.

The FSA has been promoting it's ridiculously simplistic "traffic light" labeling system on the basis that it is "clear". However, it is technically vastly inferior to the GDA system - the latter actually takes into account portion sizes, it allows you to plan a diet (there are no bad foods - just bad diets) and allows you to take into account the various ingredients that go to make up a meal (your bran-flakes and orange juice breakfast is high in sugar; but primarily due to the "green light" orange juice). But no, we have to go along with this infantilised FSA traffic light scheme that is fundamentally based on the idea that people are children.

Of course, the real thing the health food lobby don't want people to realise is just what huge levels of uncertainty there are in things like "safe drinking limits" - essentially much of the science is contradictory and changing. Take the fiasco of eggs being blamed for high cholesterol. None of this stops politicians and pressure groups acting as if it is certain.

Incidentally, for those (including the BBC) that think that "natural" sugar in foods) including honey) is fine and added sugar is "bad" then think again. The body doesn't much care - essentially all carbohydrates get broken down into sugars before they are absorbed. It's just that dissolved sugar is more immediately available, and the actual differences between glucose, sucrose, fructose, lactose and so on as far as the effect on the body are concerned are not that important (produce a fruit smoothy or orange juice and you've already made the sugar more readily available by breaking up the plant cellular structure). Also, contrary to much of what is said, the "evidence" that sugar gives you type II diabetes is minimal (being fat, not taking exercise does - and sugar will help rot the teeth). So keep the weight down, and make sure you eat all the nutrients, but don't think there is some magic level of sugars that will keep you healthy.

Nb. I emailed Ben Goldacre about the inadvisability of just quoting pre-digested (pun unintended) stories like the one he picked up vilifying Chris Hoy, but he too has a habit of ignoring things which don't suit his thinking (which also has blind spots). He recently posted another one about the PRS spat with YouTube/Google where he characterised it as "good news for independent musicians" as the commercial music industry was committing suicide (equating the PRS with record companies - far, far from the case). One of his blind spots is dislike for big companies (especially pharmaceutical ones).

Tesla Roadster runs for 241 miles in Monte Carlo e-rally

Agining batteries...

You might get 250+ miles whilst the batteries are new, but wait a few years and the capacity could be not much more than half that. Like all batteries, Li-Ion ones age and lose capacity.

Apple muffles PC noisemakers

US Patent System - again...

Is this article there to yet again prove what we all know, that the US patent system has lost itself in a miasma of trivialities.

The Quick - and the Dead in the Water

Resign or retire...

Judging by the Bob Quick's biography he is already well past the standard plod's retirement age, so I rather expect that he's going to be collecting his pension. He's also probably worked out that he isn't exactly going to be in favour with what's likely to be the next government.

EC blasts mobile masts away from schools and hospitals

@H Kaker

You are quite right about your crippled logic. There's a little factor called the inverse square law. Quite simply, 1W held 10cm from your ear is equivalent to 100W at 1 metre, 10,00W at 10 metres and a megawatt at 100 metres. Which is maybe just as well as television transmission masts, unlike mobile phone masts, to transmit at megawatt levels (albeit at different frequencies).

Before anybody else raises, yes the inverse square law does require that signals are radiated equally in all directions and that directional antenna, such as those on many mobile phone masts, do concentrate their power somewhat into a smaller area. Also, mobile phone masts transmit all the time whilst your mobile phone is only next to your head when you use it.

However, it is still the position that once you are a significant distance from a mobile phone mast then any exposure you get from your own mobile phone into your head is almost certainly greatly in excess of that from the mast itself.

Go-Between actress backs McKinnon extradition fight

Literary references

"The past is a different country, they do things differently there"

My favourite opening to a book, as it plays fast and loose with tense. However, one wonders if this article was written just to show that the author had read at least the first page of The Go-Between and can make a weak joke about it.

Google force feeds Web 2.0 to US gov

Government and business are different...

I hope this niaive twerp has woken up to government and business being there for two fundamantally different purposes. Business is their solely to make money within the constraints of the law.

Governments aren't there for that - they are meant (at least in democratic companies) to be representative of the peoples views and work in their collective interests. They have to do in a way that balances different interest groups. If that breaks down, then the result is social strife and tension. That means government is constrained by all sorts of rules that don't apply to businesses. That's as it should be - history shows that if there is one thing worse than a rampant commercial organisation, that largely only cares about money, it is a rampant political movement. Think nazism, communiusm, maoism, the medieval catholic church. I can't quite imagine what a combination of state and commercial organisation might be, but I suspect it won't be pretty.

Let the government get on with setting the framework within which commercial operations run, but don't go mixing the two.

That's not to say that much state use of technology and processes isn't ossified and stuck in time, but a blatant throwing away of constraints on government behaviour in favour of individual commercial interests is not one of them. That way will lead to the Coca Cola White House or the Big Mac Pentagon (no doubt somebody is working on it).

BBC fined £150k over Manuelgate

@Dave SImpson

Perhaps you ought to put yourself in Andrew Sach's position. Not only do you have the embarrassment of Russell Brand phoning you up and telling you what he did to your grand daughter, he and Jonathan Ross decided to do it on air. If any of us cared to do this from our company's premises and associated it with their name then we'd be out the door in a trice. Even without broadcasting it is bad enough.

If you can't see what's wrong with that and you'd be happy for some load mouth to broadcast this all over the airwaves then fine. Drop him the name of any of your female relatives (he's not that fussy), and we can all tune in. If he won't oblige, then I'm sure there is some other oik that would no doubt do so. So a couple of media load mouths got embarrassed their wrists slapped for behaving like immature and embarrassing imbeciles. For many of the rest of us, we would probably be sweeping roads for a career. In their case, they got a bit of a ticking off and their careers will continue as normal (and in Russel Brand's case gives him an hour of nice easy new material to include in his act).

Also, for those stupid apologist for this pair of cretins who claim this is "edgy" - grow up (are you listening Sue Perkins with that ridiculous line in "poor us" persecution that she claimed comedians were subject too in a BBC lecture?). It's juvenile, childish and crap without any redeeming qualities. The pair make a career in taking the piss out of others, are we meant to shed tears for them?

The really ridiculous thing is that we, the license payers, are paying for this escapade. No doubt the BBC have already spend several times this on senior managers expenses, PR consultants, lawyers and the like. Take it out of Jonathan Ross's salary - I don't see why we should pay for this juvenile crap.

Students Union reps vote to ban cheap booze for students

Too late

Missed the deadline for April fools day did we? Students voting to make booze more expensive and we are expected to believe that...

However, to be serious, it is exactly this sort of playground where budding politicans practice their control-freakery. The likes of Jack Straw and Trevor Phillips came up exactly that way. The latter I remember as the head of Imperial College student union leading what was then called "the broad left" (essentially a bunch going from soft Fabians through various stages of other-worldy Marxists and Trots with the odd true loony like Piers Corbyn to round it all off).

The IC studen base, being full of engineers, was far more interested in cheap beer than posturing politicians. But one thing would have never happened - and that was Trevor Phillips arguing for more expensive beer. The rugby and rowing fraternity would have chucked him in the Serpentine.

Brits build e-car friendly solar parking bay

@Tamer Shafik

Whilst I'm no fan of the capabilities of many in the ecological movement to do a few sums, you have made the mistake of not allowing for the difference in thermodynamic efficiency of a petrol engine with that of a battery/electric motor combination. That is very substantial difference, possibly as much as 2.5:1. This means the 1100KWh would be the equivalent of perhaps 250 litres of fuel per year. That's about one-third of my annual usage or about 3,000 miles (1.6lite Focus diesel).

Personally I have considerable doubts over how realistic that 1100KWh is in a UK environment and I suspect the capital costs alone will mean this isn't cost effective at this point. However, if cheap enough solar cells combined with "plug-in" hybrid cars could be produced then it might make a significant dent in annual consumption of oil for travel.

Of course there is no reason whatsoever why the solar panels have to be anywhere near where the car is parked (save for a reduction in transmission losses). By making use of the transmission system, solar power could be fed anywhere. What would then be required is "smart" charging systems in battery storage systems (such as those in cars) which drew charge when surpluses were being produced from notoriously peaky renewable electricity generation. You do not want to have to temporarily start up a bunch of gas-fueled generators in order to charge up cars. Better the cars themselves have that generation capability built in (hence the preference for hybrids) and they charged themselves primarily off surpluses.

Linux chief calls for FAT-free Microsoft diet

Lean diet...

Firstly the real problem is software patents - that's the bit that needs fixing. For the most part copyright infringement should be sufficient - most software patents are trivial and essentially produced for protection.

However, on the realism of going FAT free, then he has a hard job (to put it mildly. FAT is the de-facto standard for mobile devices that present as storage to computers. Virtually every camera, every mp3 player, hard disk camcorder, gps, mobile phone that presents as a storage device uses FAT. Then there's also all those devices, like electronic photo frames, that take various flash card formats. They also only use FAT. Unless we are to throw away all these devices, legacy support for FAT is going to be required on computers for many years to come, and there is no prospect whatsover of an change soon. After all, what manufacturer is going to use an alternative unless there is a virtually universal alternative which is so ubiquitous that it can be expected to be installed on most computers. Yes, you can install new file systems into your PC, but that's a further chore for the consumer, and yet another thing that can go wrong along with something to be supported.

I will confidently forecast that FAT will be with us for a very long time and that legacy support (at the very least) is going to continue to be required.

Super Talent flashes the big whopper

Latency

I hate this single minded concentration on throughput. The most important parameter with SSDs is what are the latency figures? Of particular interest is that for writes, especially small random writes (random reads tend to be OK). For many operations it is the random write latency that is the killer.

Also for these type of devices to be usable as system disks it will need BIOS support which all booting from PCI-X slots.