Posts by Steven Jones

Brits build e-car friendly solar parking bay

I see a problem

... I hope those solar cells are fixed down good and firm. Stripping the solar cells of of that is going to be a lot more remunerative than stealing the lead off church roofs.

YouTube yanks music videos from German site

Covers?

YouTube is full of amateurs performing covers. Those too will be in breach as the rules about songwriting copyright cover any public performance of a work. Theoretically you couldn't even play a video witgh people singing "Happy Birthday" as that is still in copyright.

One thing that I have never quite quite understood is how this works internationally. It's very likely that most of the commercial music played on YouTube in the UK was not written by UK songwriters. However, it's all such commercial videos that are blocked. Conversely, songs written by UK songwriters are still available on the US YouTube site (and other countries). Prresumably there are deals by which royalities are collected in other countries by their equivalent performing rights organisations. It all sounds horribly complicated - and one wonders, for example, what deal YouTube did with the US equivalent of the PRS.

Most undergraduates 'show fear when asked to do maths'

@mark

"how do you survive in IT?"

There are plenty of highly-paid snake oil merchant espousing the latest bit of received wisdom amply illustrated with fashoinable buzz-phrases and flashing of Power Point slide sets. The end up in management when they realise they are neither interested or competent in the technical side of IT. There job then becomes one of causinging great pain to the rest of us. They also probably never saw the need to learn how to solve simultaneous equations.

@Liam

A standard old line about why did I learn quadratic equations etc. yet I've never used the, That is making the classic mistake of treating mathematics like a set of tools and there's no point in leaarning the ones you'll never use. It is much, much more than that. At the core of mathematics is logic - it is at the very heart of rational analysis. It provides the tools by which problems can be modelled, that logical dependencies can be understood. It is a method of turning real world problems into a useful model. It is at the very core of logical thinking in a formal sense. That people generally can't do these things is the cause of so much poor decision making. It enables trivial increases in risks to be characterised in newspapers as major issues, simply because of the way of presentation.

Maths is not taught to an uneccessarily high level - it's a sad fact that plenty of superficial twats around don't understand why it is so important. That people can't do maths to an acceptable level puts into doubt that they are able to reason in an objective and logical sense. Which is maybe why so much persuasive argument is done through emotion.

Florida cops taser satnav lake plunge woman

Several Rules

That is rules about a good April Fool Joke :-

1) First, and most importantly, pander to prejudices. Fat Americans, PMS, dumb US cops, stupid females, satnavs etc. Those will grab plenty. Just throw NuLabour, Phorm and Jacqui Smith in and it would be perfect.

2) Rely on most commentators not reading the many comments already pointing out that this was (obviously) an April Fools joke (allowing those comments through was a brave move - probably as a result of much discussion; maybe El Reg does have ethics).

3) Rely on the fact that many commentators don't even bother trying to corroborate stories if it has already triggered one of their natural reflexes

4) Further rely on the deeply ingrained political correctness of some people to keep the joke (unknowingly) going by pandering to the feigned outrage of Ms. Bee to puerile jokes (the real irony being, of course, that El Reg is founded on puerile jokes)..

5) Use lots and lots of irony in the messages admitting this was actually an April Fools joke such that some people still don't realise what is going on (the ability to recognise irony is directly correlated with intelligence - never overestimate your readership).

6) Apologise for misleading people (I can't believe that you actually meant that - but I suppose that you have to pretend whilst actually going off to the pub for a laugh).

Ultimately you need to let the gullible down gently, and make them think that they were fooled by a sophisticated and subtle joke (you don't want to alienate them). After all, it;'s just the sort of people that fall for this sort of stuff that are the ones likely to fall for all of those advertisements. Gullible individuals are just those that these advertisers are looking for. "We have the most suggestible readership on the Internet would be a good line" - if only you could guarantee that they were trusted with any serious cash, but I guess their mothers only allow them pocket money...

and the Date is ?

So a posting on 1st April with no other trace on the Internet of this event...

Not to mention Ms. S Bee's tirade...

Moderatrix quits El Reg: Latest

The Jesteress

In medieval times it was the occasional and special privilege of the jester to be able to say what he really thought of the monster that reigned and oppressed him for most of the year. Ms. Bee has clearly let go her bonnetfull under somewhat comparable circumstances. It may appear to be an appropriately seasonal jest, but don't be fooled. If you were young rams, she'd be after you with the rubber bands.

'Big Brother' - the price of self-driving cars

@really

I have heard of the DARPA challenge, and if those vehicles running under wholly artificial controlled environments are some idea of a practicable technology that can be introduced into production in the next couple of decades, I think you will be severely disappointed. Yes, we might see something on collision avoidance, automatic parking and the likes but we are a huge distance away from a safe, reliable, everyday cheap technology. Yes, they ran in "mixed" mode simulated urban, but nobody is going to let these things loose on a real urban area for other than a test in a long, long time.

As for the US motor manufacturers looking at this? If they manage to survive their current financial problems in any fit state to do any of this it will be a miracle. As it is they are begging for bail-outs by the US government and are in for some serious restructuring.

Now I suppose the government might have some development money to throw at the problem, but I think they would be better off investing it on weening themselves off of imported oil.

Really?

"And it's worth noting that the only real difficulty in building cars able to drive themselves is that of letting the autodrive system know about other vehicles in a way it can understand."

This is utter tosh - the really difficult bit about producing cars able to drive themselves is not other vehicles (assuming they are suitably equipped). Far and away the most difficult part is dealing with real-world every day situations. All sorts of objects, animate and inanimate can be suddenly found on the road, need navigating around. Some of these can happen very suddenly indeed, and an alert individual will be able to sense when a child hasn't seen a vehicle and is about to run into the road, or a dog is loose on the pavement or somebody is unloading a van, or wheres pedestrians hidden by parked vehicles might emerge. There's dealing with temporary roadworks, not driving through a deep puddle and drenching pedestrians. People can hear and interpret audible warnings, they can see approaching weather patterns, they can see the unstable load on a lorry, that cyclist who is about to jump a light.

Yes, we might be able to produce vehicles which can drive themselves down a controlled environment, like a motorway, where the circumstances are controlled. However, in a suburban street the problem is vastly harder. There are still some problems where people and natural intelligence, whatever it's limitations, are vastly superior to anything possible in the field of Artificial Intelligence (which is very much the filed where this problem exists). #

This is yet another posting by an idealistic journalist who hasn't any real clue about the real complexity of this type of problem living in a dreamworld of flying cars and overstated demonstratioons a million miles from a workable technology.

Greenbird sail-car wafts in as future of zero-emission motoring?

re: Call me dense but . . .

If the machine had been "sailing" with the wind directly behind it, then it could, indeed travel no faster than the wind speed. Paradoxically as it might seem, the highest speeds are attained with the wind arriving approximating to 90 degrees from the direction of travel. The aerofoil shape generates "lift" which provides a force that propels the vehicle (or boat) forwards.

A thing of beauty

It may be completely useless as a form of transport, but if we are to take the form follow function rule as defining beauty, then this is just what this is. It is, asthetically speaking, gorgeous.

Well maybe I'm a bit harsh when I say it's useless as a form of transport, possibly ships might use rigid wings as a means of reducing fuel consumption (I think some companies were experimenting with the idea).

U2 song whacked my hard drive

Possible

I can't speak for this particular issue, but I can say for absolute certainty that loud music does cause disk problems. I have a Sony hard drive camcorder, and when exposed to loud music, expecially with heavy bass, it crashes with buffer overflow problems. With quiter music this does not happen. This fitted very neatly with a finding that a SUN engineer came up with that shoting loudly directly into a RAID array caused major disk performance problems - essentially very long I/O times (about 0.5 seconds), presumably as a head that had been moved off-track was re-alligned. It would not be surprising if this could also causes data corruptions.

Now whether a laptop speaker is capable of generating high enough volumes to cause disks to mistrack I wouldn't know for sure, but it is not impossible.

The sooner hard drives get replaced by cost-effective SSDs the better. The former are just top vulnerable tio mechanical problems, and as some people have found out to their cost, they don't tend to work much above 4,000 metres. If your lucky your iPod will recover at lower altitude, but there is no guarantee.

Otellini: 'I'd rather have Sun be independent'

@AC

Much more likely is that SPARC will survive longer term, what else enterprise viable is there(?).

At the top end - there's Power, Itanium (on a good day), but most of all I expect Intel to push x64 more that way as there development progress on Itanium has been tardy to put it mildly.

As far as other entreprise issues goes, the SPARC64 (owned by Fujistsu) is considerably better than the SUN UltraSparc processors (now effectively dead). It has much better RAS features than SUN ever put in. Whether Rock will ever appear in a real machine, who knows. SUN have canned enough SPARC chip versions already and it requires serious money to build new enterprise servers and it would leave SUN with a messy mix of legacy UltraSPARC, re-badged Fujistu SPARC64 and whatever ROCK servers would look like. All the same OS of course, but plenty of other hardware differences like the I/O systems. The space for top-end RISC is also shrinking as Intel's x64 processors eat the bottom end out of that market.

In the case of the Niagara-powered servers, they suffer from two problems Firstly single thread speed is inadequate for many applications. I've lost count of the number where a bottleneck gets hit long before the box runs out of CPU. Many critical bits of infrastructure hit that problem - T series machines work great as NetBackup media servers, but dreadfully as the master server. Any app with even one heavy single-thread process is prone to suhc problems. The other problem is, of course, x64 where you get good single thread speed, ever improving power efficiency and agrressive cost reduction (plus two suppliers, even if one is walking wounded).

The real reason for SPARC is legacy apps and the difficulty of migration. Now that IBM own Transitive expect a big push on that side should they get there hands on SUN. In 10 years time, SPARC will have gone the way of Alpha, MIPS and PA-RISC as I can't see Fujitsu managing to sustain it.

EU: Our Members need 'increased wood'

Use the wood

You don't living trees to sequester carbon. Trees have this wonderful and useful by-product called wood. Making more use of wood as a building material, properly made doors, furniture and in place of CO2-intensive materials like concrete would help. There are limits of course, but the average house could use a lot more wood. Also the w3aste material from wood can be used in a number of other ways such as insulation. Now this can't go on for ever - there are only so many houses and building, so much furniture and so on and eventually it will go to waste and rot down, but it could make a significant one-off contribution.

It's also possible to stop wood rotting down fully and releasing the CO2 by burying it, but it would be much better to use the stuff. A sensible scheme with a representative price for CO2 production (or sequestering in the case of using wood) would (apologies) allow for a lot of automatic market adjustment.

Will Big Blue mainframes run Windows?

@AC

It wasn't PRISM - it was PR/SM (Processor Resource/System Manager). In fact Amdahl got there first with MDF (Multiple Domain Facility), although PR/SM was much the better product when it came out.

Hardly something new

It's hardly something new to create a true virtual machine environment (abstracting even the instruction set and hardware architecture) in order to run software designed for an alien environment. Indeed for many years you have been able to download for free a mainframe emulator called Hercules and run it on your PC. The difficult bit is making it run efficiently. Apple used a technology called Rosetta from Transitive Inc. in order to transition from Power to Intel architecture (although not a full machine emulator). The same technology was used to support SPARC executables under Linux. Transitive Inc is now owned by IBM - the perfect vehicle for running alien instruction sets on mainframes.

Of course it is a much easier to justify porting from expensive hardware to a (relatively) inefficient software emulator when moving to cheap commodity processors. Running Windows on a mainframe is an expensive proposition if CPU or memory usage is substantial.

Police union leader calls for 'killer games' sales ban

Mixng up cause and affect

As usual this is somebody who can't work out the difference between a correlation with a cause and affect. That is people prone to violence could well be drawn to violent games. However, that does not mean that playing violent games causes them to become violent in the first place.

That said, people who spend their time play acting shooting other people are a long way up the sad delusional escapist scale. But that doesn't mean they are going to progress to really killing people...

BT names first 29 exchanges for fibre rollout

@General A. Annoying

The numbers would appear to be roughly in line with population. Your knowledge of geography would appear to be a bit faulty as there are two Welsh exchanges on the list.

Scotland have 10.3% of the exchanges (8% of UK population)

Wales have 7% of the exchanges (5% of UK population)

NI 3% of the exchanges (3% UK population)

England 79% of exchanges (83% UK population)

So perhaps a little more attention to facts on your part and a bit less bleating about discrimination would be in order.

Wikileaks tells Aus censorship minister to rack off

@AC

Nope - I didn't miss the point. Unless The Register misquoted, this is what was said :-

"Should the Senator or anyone else attempt to discover our source we will refer the matter to the Constitutional Police for prosecution, and, if necessary, ask that the Senator and anyone else involved be extradited to face justice for breaching fundamental rights."

There was no condition stated that it would necessarily involve just illegal actions in Swedish territory. Of course it's a moot point where something happens when communication occurs between two countries anyway. It is something that any potential leaker needs to be aware of. Whatever the bluster here, Wikileaks can't protect sources in foreign countries. The best that they can do is not reveal it themselves (for which you have to trust them). If you are going to leak something, then make sure that you can't be traced back home. This particular case is, of course, ridiculous but for some people living in truly repressive regimes the consequences can be dire.

Extraterritoriality

Jay Lim is also being an idiot by stating, somehow, that Swedish rules apply to information gathered from overseas. Clearly it means that Wikileaks can't be compelled in Sweden to reveal its sources. However, if you take this piece of legal guidance, then it would be illegal to investigate sources of leaks in any originating country once communicated to a Swedish journalist. This would mean, for instance, that it would be impossible for any government to investigate the leaking of any confidential information (whether state or personal) which happened to get published in Sweden on pain of the investigators being extradited to, and prosecuted in that country. Clearly no sovereign government is going to accept that, and for Swedish legal authorities to even attempt it would start a diplomatic incident.

Wikileaks should stick to what it does and not try and second-guess other democratic governments with empty legal threats. They will just look ridiculous, not to mention the dubious nature of extraterritoriality - something which we see far too much of from the US.

TomTom countersues Microsoft

@AC

"and the world uses Apple"

Yes, that well known company that has never hidden behind the use of patented or copyrighted technology in order to protect its own interests. After all, you can readily buy third party hardware to run their system software, play iTunes files on other MP3 player, use the iPhone on any network, easily get third party parts to fix Macbooks. What you mean you can't...

Sick of that crap office laptop? IBM can help You*

twisted prose, twisted mind

Forget for now the ethics of this "initiative", just try and put yourself into the mindset of the individual (or was it a committee?) that drafted the following atrocious garbage masquerading as a sentence

"If you undergo a Life Event during the course of the You* scheme year, this will not enable you to change your election during the payment term providing you remain eligible for the You* scheme."

Presumably capitalising "life event" has some lent it some very special, precise and, very probably, ominous meaning. I can see is that the use of plain English is clearly not in the job description of the drafter(s) of that particular travesty of the language. The sad thought is that the mind twisted enough to produce this probably carries the same approach into setting employment policies.

eSATA: A doomed stopgap?

Native USB 3.0 drives?

It's possible to imagine that USB 3.0 will be integrated direct into drives. In that case it would be possible to eliminate SATA from future motherboards provided that there is BIOS support for USB 3.0. Of course USB has higher CPU overheads than SATA, but processor power is not in short supply these days.

For the very fastest access, SSD cards directly plugged into PCI-X slots would do the trick, although that, again, needs BIOS support for boot disks. Future PCs with SSD cards for the system and hard disk support via USB 3.0 for bulk data would make a lot of sense. An intelligent operating system could even automatically place data onto the right sort of location based on access patterns.

Sun and IBM - What price Bigger Indigo?

Heading for systems monoculture

The systems editor of The Register might want to see a burgeoning of IT vendors, and presumably architectures, but to the average company running IT systems, they are profoundly fed up with technical incompatibilities. All those qualification matrices of application software, operating systems, I/O stacks, multifarious patches and so on. What companies want now is standardised architectures and a choice of vendors providing different service levels and costs. It's inevitable - not only can't all those system vendors afford all the R&D and support, neither can their customers.

Of course this is all has a downside. Firstly it could stultify innovation (but then much of what goes for innovation is just and old concept given a new name), and limited genetic variation might make the whole thing vulnerable to systemic failures, such as security (witness what the Windows mono-culture encourages). We might just be seeing the maturing of the IT market signaled by the last stage of consolidation when Intel's x64 architecture does, eventually, take over (almost) all the world. It's difficult to see how Itanium will limp on another 10 years, if IBM get there hands on SPARC then that architecture will die (and I can't see Fujitsu being able to fund it on their own when they don't even own the operating system). So for mainstream IT that will leave x64, Power (assuming IBM can keep that going) and not much else. If the next generation of x64 tackles the inherent scalability issues (and with socket compatibility with the next Itanium it will go a long way) then we could be very much in the end game.

London stab murder rate entirely normal, says top stats prof

Inconsistencies

I wonder if the the academic is also playing with words a bit :-

*******

'Tighe said: "To have four fatal stabbings in one day could be a statistical freak."

Au contraire, says the prof. It was a normal event, to be expected in London at regular intervals.

"Four murders on the same day in London would be expected to occur about once every three years, and it has done," says Spiegelhalter. "Seven days without a murder should occur about six times a year, and it does."

********

So the prof is rubbishing the BBC correspondent and, apparently, equating 4 fatal stabbings with 4 murders. Unless all murders in London are stabbings (and all fatal stabbings are murders), and there are none by any other means then you can't blithely substitute one for the other. Not to say there isn't a lot of media hysteria over these things, but at the least this was careless with words.

Some calculations....

Having noted that the article slagged off the BBC correspondent for claiming that 4 fatal stabbings in a day is a statistical freak and then saying that 4 murders will occur once every 3 years (note the shift in definition), then I put the relevant numbers from the professor's papers through a Poisson distribution for overall murders and fatal stabbings alone. If I take the figures for homicides of 167 in total (note, yet another definition change, although I think it rather less ambiguous to count dead bodies than whether it's manslaughter or murder) and the number of fatal stabbings of 68 (or, if you prefer, killing by a sharp instrument), then I get the following probabilities of precisely 4 such events in any one day :-

4 fatal stabbings - 0.000042 (or once every 65 years)

4 homicides - 0.001156 (or slightly more that once every 3 years)

To make these calculations you have to make certain assumptions (that all the homicides are uncorrelated and hence random). Of course it's unreasonable to do that - gang fights, revenge attacks and so on, but it would give you valid numbers for where these are truly random events.

However, I cannot blame the prof here - but I can blame the Register's reporting of it. This is what he says in his paper :-

"So although four murders in one day is not a particularly surprising event when taken over a period of time, the fact that they were all stabbings is more notable."

So in other words four stabbings in a day is unusual (on a simple random statistical basis, very unusual). Most likely the mistake (as usual) is the assumption that the types of murders are uncorrelated in a period of time. In any case, the reporting of this in the Register article is not representative of what the professor is actually saying and doesn't indicate any great depth of understanding of statistics - more a wish to give a BBC correspondent a kicking.

Mathematica man brews 'AI' Google Killer™

AI

"No, computers haven't solved this problem because there are no people who actually need it solved."

No, it hasn't been solved because nobody yet has come remotely close to understanding how natural intelligence works. Isaac Asimov had his mysterious positronic brain leaving the fundamental details

Speaking as somebody who worked a bit on expert systems and did program in Prolog, it became blindingly obvious that the so-called AI experts really didn't have a clue. I recall attending one lecture where an academic theorised on the moral problems of how to treat a machine which would have a brain equivalent to that of a "slightly brain damaged child", which he expected to have in a few years (this was 15 or more years ago). There were two types of AI people - the computer scientists, who somehow seemed to think that human intelligence could be treated like mathematical logic, and the cognitive psychologists who really hadn't the faintest idea how to come up with a coherent theory of the mind (didn't stop them thinking they were about to).

I feel we aren't much further forwards now. We can just program faster idiots.

Nb. where expert systems could be most useful - like brining to bear statistics on medical diagnostics, vested interests tended to block progress. Maybe because many of these much vaunted high level skills were shown not to be (and some of the practitioners weren't so good at it). However, present a computer program with a novel situation and it's lost.

Fusion-io ups SSD ante

Great but

I can see plenty of use for these things in transactionally intensive systems. It's not primarily the I/O rate - at the expensive of enough spindles you can get the IOPs or data rate. What really, really matters is the latency. 50 microseconds is a factor of 100x better than physical disks can do on uncached operations, and perhaps 20 times better than a cached operation over a typical FC SAN array.

In many cases we improve performance by throwing RAM at the database - even SSDs can't match a logical read. However, cache hits never hit 100% unless you can fit the whole DB in memory - you get into laws of diminishing returns. There is a further, and much more difficult issue - that is startup time. You might have a nice 200GB DB cache sitting there, but populating it from startup with 8KB random read blocks at a time can take 10s of minutes during which time your application servers are choking on the backlog of users trying to get back on. With a few of these things sitting on PCI-X buses that cache will fill much, much faster and during that startup period users won't be seeing response times extended by a factor of 10 whilst the cache is warmed up.

This sort of problem happens if you have an uncontrolled failover in an HA cluster, it also happens if you have to start a DR instance, and even Oracle RAC can suffer from severe periods of "brown-outs". Also, if putting a few TB of this stuff into a big-iron server enables you to halve the amount of incredibly expensive RAM (by PC standards) that you are using. It might even cost in.

However, there is an enormous problem - as these sit inside a server, they are fundamentally unsuited to shared memory clusters. That's a big, big problem for big enterprise systems. Putting SSDs into fibre SANs introduces a major bottleneck. Current arrays don't go near coping with this number of IOPs for a given amount of storage. Also, stick this through a normal I/O stack in the server, FC cards, SAN switches and arrays and you are looking at latency times approaching 1ms. So current shared storage architectures introduce latency of perhaps 20x what this can do, and I rather suspect a similar proportion of potential IOPs. Put this in an array and you might get 10x improvement in (uncached) latency whilst the technology could do 100x., and probably something similar on IOPs.

In the absence of a very low latency shared-storage version of this architecture, then maybe synchronous replication of databases across two machines. Do it across infiniband and you might see 0.5ms addition on synchronous replication to a second instance of the DB. It could work except for very write-intensive DBs as a cost, and it wouldn't be cheap.

So how much am I quoted for 20TB of this stuff, I have the ideal app...

Supercomputer niche chucks rocks at Nehalem

@Peter Lee

Of course a workload horizontally balanced across many machines is exploiting multi-threading, just not on shared memory. Pretty well anything that will load balance over multiple machines will load balance on a single machine assuming the software allows for multiple instances in a single OS (we have plenty like that). WIth NUMA architectures, affinity, improved memory bandwidth and larger caches it can scale very well as generally there's not much interference between the different instances. If you can't run multiple instances in a single OS there are always VMs )albeit there are overheads).

Once you start getting into the many, many tens of app servers, then other costs weigh in - all that configuration work, multiple instance installs, config management and so on.

Now this is not to say that a few big boxes is always better, just that there is a balance to be had unless you are Google and can afford to spend giga-bucks on engineering your applications and infrastructure. In many enterprises, the ability to run fewer, larger boxes with VMs or fewer boxes in a horizontally scaled app has some very considerable cost advantages up to a point.

Texting peer released from prison

Sufficient stopping distance

There are some people here who have no sense of reality. If you are required to be traveling slowly enough to avoid an accident with an unlit car or person who just happens to be in the outside lane of a motorway, you had better restrict your speed to about 40mph. Even at 60mph the "official" stopping distance including thinking time is 80 yards. Try you dipped headlights one day and see just how much they will illuminate at nearly the length of a football pitch.

Just hope that one day none of you are presented with a drunk guy wandering around in the outside lane of an unlit motorway at night. Well mayb you will be superhuman, or maybe you will be driving at a speed more suited to an urban road, but I suspect the know-it-all absolutists here will not be doing that. I once came across some kids who ran across the M4 in front of me during the evening - frankly, if the timing had been slightly different, they would have been dead, almost no matter who was driving. At 70mph things happen fast - slow and vulnerable groups like pedestrians and

The guy who was killed was drunk and he was ultimately the architect of his own fate. He could quite easily have killed somebody else in that state. It's a sad thing that he killed himself, but he was the one primarily to blame for his own demise.

None of this excuses texting whilst driving, but they are two different incidents. I don't have a problem with jail sentences for dangerous activities whilst driving, but for those that wish it beware. That glance at a map, that fiddling with the mp3 player or the satnav - well that might be deemed the same way. Just hope that there isn't a drunk wandering around the outside lane of your local motorway in the dark.

@bunglebear

Perhaps you should read the article again - he wasn't charged with causing death by dangerous driving. The dangerous driving was to do with taking text messages two minutes before the crash and, as the judge pointed out, has nothing to do with the accident itself.

The accident happened when the guy who was killed collided with the central reservation and stopped in the outside lane facing the wrong way. His car was clipped by another before the Lord Ahmed's car hit it with fatal consequences. From what I can gather, the charge had nothing to do with the death - it was purely about the prior texting 2 minutes before the incident, and the judge stated there had been little he could have done to have avoided the collision. There were no charges related to the actual death.

To be fair to him, he admitted the charge and didn't claim that his wife (who was in the car) had been making and taking the messages.

So for all you types who have texted whilst on the move, the fact that you haven't yet been involved in a fatal accident makes you no less guilty, and tabloid headlines which gave the impression that this was the cause of the fatal accident are probably deliberately designed to do exactly that.

Ethernet — a networking protocol name for the ages

The problem with physics...

The problem with the physics it is no respector of a reputation gained in another area. The issues regarding communications would have been solved one way or another - if it wasn't Ethernet that won out, it would have been something else. It suceeded through a sort of Darwinian process, and just shows how all pervasive a technology can be if it is available cheaply and can be freely adopted by entrepreneur companies. Fundamentally, once the immense capital cost of R&D is done, the incremental costs of communications is very low.

The problem of power generation is a completely different issue. It's not just a matter, as it was with the communications revolution, of technologies emerging from other areas which presented the opportunity. The technological direction of semi-conductor production virtually guaranteed, that in a reasonably free market, it would get exploited in this way. It is almost impossible in a western market to suppress cheap, exploitable technology. It oozes out through the cracks of veted interests and fills the voids and suddenly you are in a different world.

There is absolutely no such obvious cheap technology direction with power generation. Well there was, but it's called fossil fuels, and the resources laid down over many 10s of millions of years are being used up at a colossal rate. Beyond that it gets difficult - the fundamental power of the universe is nuclear fusion. Almost all natural systems on the Earth are powered by it one way or another (tides and the inner heat of the Earth are exceptions). However, the technological exploitation of this in a cost-effective manner, whether directly, or indirectly through trapping the SUN's energy, weather systems, biofuels or the like is an extremely tough problem. There is no guarantee that if it is done, that it will be cheap.,

Stating there is a need for something doesn't mean it will happen if the method doesn't exist. We have a need for a cheap solution to health and social care. That is never going to happen (well maybe if the robots take over, but then they probably won't have much use for us).

Science-boosting thickie questionnaire backfires

@Pondule

An interesting point, especially as I guessed that only 1% of the Earths' water was fresh. My excuse is that they are using an inconsistent definition of water. The 71% figure (they've now corrected it) does not include Antarctica, which is permanently almost wholly covered in ice. The same is true of much of Greenland and some parts of far northern Canada. To this we could added a few of the permanently ice-covered parts of various mountain ranges. So that should either count as water (pushing up the 71% by a few points). If course working the other way, they are counting floating sea ice as part of the water covered count.

So, as they are not qualifying the state of the water, they ought to be working consistently one way or the other.

So what is the answer - I've confused myself.

Nb. it's not just this mob that gets things wrong - in a recent article, New Scientist claimed that the Earth turns on its axis in one solar day. It doesn't.

BT rebuts database security breach claims

Off Shored Development

Lots of UK companies use off-shore developers these days. However, EU data protection rules are such that personal data should never be passed across.

BT job cuts start to bite ahead of March deadline

@it wasn't me

Clearly somebody not reading the article. The 250,000 is OpenReach, and therefore copper loops (perhaps 1% of the total). They could be BT lines, they could be LLU and nothing directly to do with retail broadband services. Most probably it is companies and individuals trimming back on land lines they can do with out (and companies going broke - the 800 Woolworths stores that closed probably had several lines each).

DNA database includes nipper and nonagenarian

Compulsion

It should be noted that the reason the European Court of Human Rights gave for their rulling was not that it was an abuse to retain the DNA profile, but that to do so for individuals who had been arrested, yet not been found guilty of a crime, was discriminatory. In theory, there is at least the possibility for compulsion, although I rather doubt the government has the stomach to try and drive that one through. Equally, I have absolutely no doubt that large parts of the government would like to do it.

YouTube blocks music videos in UK

Covers

Youtube is stuffed full of amateurs (and some semi-professionsals) covering songs - very mixed quality of course,.From a purely legal point of view, the songwriters would be entitlted to royalties from any performances broadcast. So it will be interesting to see if the PRS pushes that line. Now it might be that it would be considered to be a benefit to humanity to block 95% of these, but that would be a slippery slope in derivative works by any amateurs in a whole number of fields.

Isilon adds faster clustered file storage

JPEG Recompression

"This is digital media file-focussed deduplication with special mathamatical techniques used to compress the supposedly uncompressable, JPEGs and the like."

Of course JPEGs can be recompressed. In fact virtually any media format file which uses lossy compression, like JPEGs, MP3s, MPEGs and so on can be reduced in size at the costs of quality. No special mathematical (or even mathamatical) techniques required. Alternatively, you can perform a file conversion to a more compact format and regenerate the original data type (rather naughtily, some software used to do this with non lossy files such as TIFFS - they would convert to JPEG before storing and regenerate the TIFF, thereby losing detail. That was important on medical archival systems for things like X-Rays where detail can literally be life-and-death).

However, what is utterly impossible is to do a "lossy" compression without being aware of the data type is. Do that and you have an unreadable file.

Tiscali shares suspended on titsup fears

@Will Morrow

Good heavens - what nonsense. A single lightening strike will just happen to kill two exchanges by hitting one customer site? Well, if lightening strikes at customer sites were causing so much trouble, then it would be happening all over the place. As it is, quite apart from the basic phsyics problem of getting very high current flows down several km of thin copper, the termination at the exchange is quite well protected, and any surge that did happen would be limited to the affected line cards.

The real reason that single properties will not generally be connected to two different exchanges will simply be one of cost and configurations. Telephone networks have historically grown out from exchanges, and the ducting, copper loop, and configuration systems will be laid out that way. Also, systems and support arrangements are likely to be organised along geographical lines.

Should you have sufficient money, then any telecoms provider is going to be happy enough to provide diversely routed communications connections, but it will be expensive. Generally a gaim for the big boys. Very large data centres, large call centres and so on might have this - not medium sized companies.

Pillar embraces Intel SSDs

@Dwayne

Indeed the STEC will greatly outperform the Intel, but there are a couple of important points. Firstly, there is the not insignificant one on costs - it's debatable just how many real workloads actually require the number of IOPS that the STEC can can handle. However, there's also an important technical point. There's a big difference between putting an SSD into a server as a stand-alone drive, and putting it into a storage array. In the first instance, the storage array is very likely to be incapable of supporting the total number of IOPs that everal STECs (you simply runn out of the array's internal capacity). That would make all those theoretical IOPs unusable.

The second point, is that an array with appropriate software can mask some of the limitations of lower cost SSDs. The most obvious one is "roll-up write optimisation" where the array stores up multiple writes in NV Ram for staging out. Doing this properly is complex, but achievable.

So the choice of Intel vs STEC within an array could well be a good choice on price/performance grounds. Put the higher performance SSD into an array and you well not see anything like the full benefit anyway. Put a STEC drive into a serrver, and you are faced with the limiation of limited connectibility.

Sexy Namir sportster to rewrite fuel economy rulebook?

Odd stuff

First of all, what on earth is an "endothermic" engine. That adjective is usually used to describe a chemical reaction that absorbs heat (as opposed to exothermic). It would be a very odd type of internal combustion engine that was "endothermic". There is an alternative use of the adjective to do with describing organisms that generate heat to maintain body temperature. It's clearly just marketing rubbish as it just sounds vaguely exciting.

As for the 110mpg, then that's clearly infeasible. What I suspect is that you'll get something like 25km out of a fully charged battery and then maybe 14km out of the first litre of fuel (numbers very, but plug in your own estimates). That would give a long term average of about 39mpg (probably still optimistic). The strange phrasing guaranteeing "fuel autonomy" gives the game away that this is just some artificial scenario that they've conjured from the air.

You are also not going to be able to sustain that top speed very long. There is no way that an 800cc rotary engine and generator will generate 270KW of electrical. I suspect the rotary engine has been chosen primarily because it is compact for its specific power output, but this is no car to be doing 400km on an Autobahn at top speed.

In summary, another expensive toy for the well-heeled that is of virtually no practical use to the vast majority of road users. The best that can be said is that it makes for a test bed for some technologies.

Israelis develop 'safe' plutonium: good for power, bad for weapons

A bit mroe research

A bit more reading around on this indicates the proposal may be more to do with preventing the generation of weapon grade plutonium from using normal fuel-grade uranium in a reactor. Proper weapons grade plutonium has, apparently, less that about 7% plutonium 240. Fuel grade plutonium has considerable higher proportions of plutonium 240 and won't makie a proper "bang" in a fission bomb (but would make an extremely messy dirty bomb).

Now it is possible to generate something close to weapons grade plutonium in an LWR with more limited irradiation of uranium fuel (although it seems to involve closing down the reactor). Possibly the addition of Amercium into the Uranium fuel stops it generating weapons greade plutonium (at least without further isotope separation). This is what this article appears to say :-

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1235898328437&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

"Ben-Gurion University of the Negev engineers have developed a practical technique to "denature" plutonium created in large nuclear reactors and make it unsuitable for a dozen countries that are building reactors - mostly Arab or Islamic states - to produce nuclear arms. "

So not, as the Register article implies, a way of using "safe" plutonium in a nuclear reactor but a means of stopping one generating weapons grade plutonium in the first place - probably by preventing the generation of too much of the plutonium isotopes useful in making A-bombs. As it stands, fuel-grade plutonium is only of use in a "dirty" bomb.

@Sean Aaron

There are plenty of people arrounf that have been sufficiently trained in nuclear physics or chemistry to understand the difference between the two. The world is full of academics who make grand claims for their particular pet project without dealing with the real world issues.

As it stands, then there is, at the very least, a very valid question about how the proposal deals with the possibility of chemical separation. On the face of it there is no obvious way of eliminating the latter without supplementary physical controls - possibly some trusted party to load the stuff into the reactor.

Nice little comments like STFU don't betray an open mind, but rather one that isn't too interested in asking pertinent questions. Some of us don't take headline stories at face value - by all means we should see the final proposal. However, another common sign of a scientist flying their own particular kite is to announce headline items to be picked up by non-specialist journalists in order to generate publicity rather than a peer-reviewed paper (which this seems like an example of). Exactly that happened with the infamous cold fusion fiasco.

Something similar happened a couple of years ago when a US scientist (with a vested interest) was bidding for a state money for a wholly impractical and self-defeating proposal for generating hydrogen in-vehicles using aluminium pellets and water, However, anybody with a reasonable understanding of chemistry could easily see that the whole life cycle process was thermodynamically inefficient ,and the reprocessing of the aluminium oxide waste would generate huge amounts of CO2 (due to the use of sacrificial graphite electrodes are used and not the CO2 used for generating electricity),

Now I suspect that you aren't trained in either chemistry or physics but are quite fond of believing a story which suits your particular mind set. Some of us are a little more sceptical. I'm there to be convinced, but I want the answer to dealing with the chemical separation issue (and that's ignoring the "dirty bomb" one).

Chemical Separation?

I can understand and agent being added that prevents Plutonium being used in a fission bomb - presumably something that either means you need an impractically large critical mass, or possibly just something that stops it completely. However, as to the "guarantee" that the plutonium couldn't ever be used in a bomb, then that surely depends on how easily it can be chemically separated. Yes, chemical processing of plutonium is messy and potentially dangerous, but for a sufficiently motivated and ruthless large scale organisation, or rogue government, it is going to surely much easier to do than using the large number of very power-hungry, and difficult to operate, centrifuges that you need to produce enriched uranium. If yopu don't care too much for the safety of the operators, there are a lot of short-cuts you can take with chemical processing.

Now I don't know just how different the chemical properties of Americium and Plutonium are (they are both actinides), but I'll guess that it's within the scope of a graduate chemist to work out a process.

There is the other point, that the half-life of Americium isotopes are a great deal less than that of the "common" Plutonium ones, so you could theoretically wait until the former has reduced to the point where it has lost its ability to prevent the latter being made into a bomb. However, that's only a theoretical problem many thousands of years into the future.

Google Earth faces terrorist target airbrush bill

Logical extension

The logical extension of this is that posting any photographs showing significant detail of "potential terrorist targets" would have to be banned. Given that the list of public buildings is already very wide schools, churches, government building and so on, then add in commercial, transport, sports venues - in fact almost anything but private dwellings, then we end up with the nonsense that what must already be many 10s, very probably 100s of millions of photographs already available.

Now it might not be quite as convenient as using Google Earth, but it's extremely easy to search for images of any likely target building you care to name. Unless they are also to band online maps as well, the locations of these can be easily determined.

Now if course, the UK government wouldn't dream of following suit and passing some open-ended law open to interpretation by the courts, leaving the police a license to aprehend individcuals on something close to a whim. Something like a law which makes it illegal to photograph a policeman or member of the armed services that is likely to be of use to terrorists. Of course they wouldn't would they - I must have dreamt up the thought on a particularly bad day.

Of course there is an issue about satellite (or rather, aerial photography), and that is about individual and personal privacy. However, all this stuff is aimed at the public side, then clearly that doesn't matter.

ITV to sell Friends Reunited, axe 600 jobs

Doomed

The whole ITV business model is doomed. Free-to-air financed by advertising with an effective monopoly was all very well in the days before multi-channel, the Internet. It was the huge sums of money from that which financed programs like The World at War and Brideshead Revisited (and no, they were not originally BBC programs, whatever some twits on the Internet think).

However, in the days of media fragmentation (which includes the Internet) and PVRs so the audience can skip over the ads, then that model is increasingly broken. They can't afford to make really high quality programs any more as there isn't the audience to attract the advertisers (who also realise people are skipping the ads anyway). The UK audience base isn't really big enough to justify the type of commercial production and resale that the Americans can manage.

In the UK, only the BBC, protected by revenue from a tax on receiving equipment is able to fund the production of high quality content.

This has been a long, slow decline and it will continue, only accelerated by the current downturn. Expect more cheaply made programs, and more which can be financed by phone-in revenues. C4 & C5 are going to be hit the same way. ITV's golden age of the 70s & 80s are long gone, and ITV was outflanked by Murdock and his evil empire.

San Diego F-18 crash deaths 'avoidable'

A different approach

It will be interesting to see if the US authorities take a different view to this sort of behaviour to what they did on with the incident when a US airforce get severed a ski lift cable in Italy. Then 20 people were killed and the navigator deliberately destroyed video tape of the incident.

The very strong suspicion (to put it mildly) of many Italians was that this tragedy arose through some reckless adventurism on behalf of the pilot. Of course it was legally impossible to try the case in an Italian court.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D02EEDF143FF936A35750C0A96F958260

Child porn suspect ordered to decrypt own hard drive

@AC

"If an encryption passphrase is supplied, then the person entering it would be technically manufacturing files containing child pornography"

Good god - what nonsense. On the same basic argument a JPEG isn't an image until it is rendered on screen. This forum does have it's share of people incapable of applying common sense.

@Remy Redert

In fact it is very easy to show to a very high degree of certainty that there is an encrypted file or device. They pretty well all leave a fingerprint of some sort, and it's easy to eliminated false positives. Even with TruCrypt, it's very easy to detect it - there is a program call TCHunt that is very effective at finding encrypted volumes and the few false positives it picks up are easily eliminated. Some changes TrueCrypt might make the approach taken less effective, but it's very unlikely that detection could be eliminated.

However, what can't be done, is to prove the existence of a second, hidden volume within the TrueCrypt encrypted volume without knowing the second password. Decrypting the outer layer will not, in itself, reveal it. There might be suspicions - such a decrypted file system will have lots of unused space if there is a large hidden volume, but that's not proof.

Probably of more concern is that accessing the hidden files using real-world programs could easily lead to detection by the leaving of "fingerprints" elsewhere in the system. Thumbnails, temporary files, paging space. Only programs that are resident only in physical memory and which do not commit data to disk offer a reasonable degree of protection, and for machines with persistent physical memory (such as some NetBooks and people putting machines into standby modes) then there could, theroretically at least, be evidence in the machine's memory.

BT wins pricing control over faster broadband

Pricing

As this will be competing with existing copper loop (including LLU) and cable networks then it will have pricing competition. Yes, you can't get 40mbps out of an existing copper loop to the exchange, but if the premium for faster speeds is too high then it just won't sell.

People also need to be aware that this is all still subject to the various Competition acts anyway - if it was significantly underpriced, then it could easily fall foul of the opposite issue. That is predatory pricing. Imagine a case where a 40Mbps service competed very strongly with LLU offerings at less than half the speed. The LLU operators are not going to be too happy if their investment is undermined, and if there is a hint of predatory pricing, then expect the competition authorities to be called in.

It is also a wholesale service (but an OpenReach one - not BTW), but LLU operators are still going to wish to maxzimise their part of the total cost package.