Posts by Steven Jones

Outfit which will save your Freeview TV from 4G interference stands up

Re: Is it just us?

It's nothing to do with rolling out digital TV. It's all about Ofcom's intention to roll out 4G on channels which have been freed up by digital TV rollout and which will, consequently, be in the range of TV tuners. If you still had analogue TV and there was a nearby 4G transmitter on a local frequency, it could saturate a masthead preamp as well. Contrary to the impression given by the article, the masthead preamps were also required in some locations for satisfactory analogue reception (albeit that some of the early digital TV rollout used reduced power so preamps were required as a stop-gap). Generally now, if you could get a satisfactory analogue picture without a preamp, the same should be true of digital.

The most satisfactory technical solution would be to install a masthead preamp that would respond only too the local Freeview channel frequencies. That way it would not saturate. Of course a filter stuck between the preamp and the aerial ought to do the job well enough if it is selective enoughl

Why is solid-state storage so flimsy?

SSDs and HDDs both require backup...

"if a hard disk starts going glitchy, I can usually back stuff off it before it's too late."

Usually isn't good enough (I've had HDs fail completely). That's why you have to have a regul;ar backup strategy, and that's equally applicable to SSD and SSD. It's also untrue that SSD's necessarily fail all in one go just as it's untrue that hard drives always fail softly.

Get that backup stgrategy sorted out, and get into the habit of running it daily. Incremental changes don't usually take too long to apply. Even if you run mirrored drives (as I do), it doesn't invalidate the need for a reliable backup as there it's always possible for catastrophic software, user or hardware errors to wreck your data.

Boffins baffled: HUGE EYEBALL washes up on Florida beach

DNA tests etc.

They can surely determine what animal group this belongs to with a DNA test as there will surely be sufficient information banked for the related marine animals. I also suspect that a detailed analysis of the eye structure will also help determine this. From there it ought to be possible to narrow down the specific species.

Big Blue beats off rivals to push out first LTO-6 tape drive

Re: @Steven Jones keeping the beasts fed...

If the data rate falls below the minimum matching rate, the drive will reverse the tape over the area already written in order to get up to sufficient speed to write again. Of course it is better engineered than earlier generations of streaming drives, and larger buffers help. However, whatever you call it - and show-shining will do - it still happens. Also, when you have drives that are designed for multiple 100s of MB/s, buffers get used up very rapidly, and the tape re-wind/write forwards process takes a significant length of time). I'll repeat again - if you are using high speed LTO drives, you need a very well designed backup infrastructure or you'll get a fraction of the specified throughput and stress the drives unnecessarily.

As for those that use remote site mirroring for DR and backup there (a design strategy which I often used), then fine, but that's not an LTO specific issue (you should still have multi-generational backups or you are prone to common mode failures - that is something that screws up your mirror, including a software bug, will still require recovery). There are many ways (array snapshotting, remote array mirrors, remote DB mirroring etc.) to ease this issue, but I'm of the old fashioned sort that thinks you don't have a valid backup until you have verified multi-generational media conversion option as a last resort.

Re: keeping the beasts fed...

@Mr Atoz

Your clearly not as familiar with LTO drives as you think. LTO does speed match, but only down to a certain level. There is a minimum streaming speed for all LTO drives, and drop below that and they will shoe-shine (although bigger tape buffer memory helps). It's also highly dependent on fata compressibility, as the minimum speed matching is at the raw (compressed level), so for highly compressible data, the feed rate has to be considerably higher than for incompressible data.

@AC

Of course keeping a separate tape SAN helps, but if you are performing host-based backup, the server still has to pull all that data over the disk SAN as well. In a true 24 hour centre, this is in addition to "normal" workloads. When you've worked with SANs with many hundreds of servers, some in Oracle clusters working at GB/s levels, and daily backup and archive requirements in one data centre measured in petabytes, you rather get to be familiar with issues such as static load balancing (LTO tape drives do not do dynamic load balancing - at least the ones I came across). Then there's the issue of legacy - most big shops will have a SAN constructed with drives, switches, links and servers of different generations and capabilities and it's far from easy making the required changes whilst keeping up a 24 hr services.

It's easy to do for a few servers, a whole different ball game in really big shops.

keeping the beasts fed...

As many people who've designed backup solutions can attest, the biggest problem with tapes is keeping them fed. That means avoiding saturating storage arrays, SAN links, servers and so on. Quite a difficult balancing act. If you are using host-based backup software (including database backup tools), then they can be stretched to the using just a couple of LTO drives. Once you drop below the streaming speed of tape drives and get into shoe-shining mode, then throughput drops dramatically. Keeping just two of these LTO-6 drives fed is tricky, even if you use multi-streaming from multiple sources (which introduces its own issues).

LASER STRIKES against US planes on the rise

Most of this story is nonsense. Annoying it might be, but dangerous? If the beam is really 6 feet in diameter by the time it , then the energy density of even a 1w laser (far stronger than the "pointer type") would be low, at about 0.4W per square metre. In comparison, the energy density of sunlight can reach over 1KW per square metre, over half of which is in the infra red (although the UV is far more damaging). The eye has defence mechanisms to prevent damage caused by sudden exposure to sunlight (although staring are the sun for any period of time is not recommended).

I have a very strong suspicion - approaching certainty - that the eye damage referred to in the article is not from a pilot "targetted" by a laser at a few hundred metres, but eye damage caused by these laser pointers in other contexts. I rather think that the source of this story is deliberately giving the impression there are pilots who've had their eyes damaged through being momentarily dazzled rather than through misuse of laser pointers at close range in other contexts (which is credible). Specific examples would have helped, of which none are provided.

Of course, it might be thought that even being momentarily dazzled could cause a crash, but in these days of automated approaches and safety systems at major airports? Seems very unlikely.

This story comes up regularly. I think there are far more real risks in life than this one...

Salt marshes will suck CO2 from air faster and faster as seas rise

Re: Nothing to see here

You're not your of course...

Re: Nothing to see here

When you can invariably predict the author of a science news item purely by the slant of the headline, it rather indicates your dealing with a polemicist and not a reporter...

All hard drive arrays will mutate into flashy faster hybrids

It's all about latency...

Enterprise arrays have had large amounts of NV cache for a long time, usually in the form of battery-backed dynamic memory. In some arrays this can amount to hundreds of GB. The main purpose of this is to reduce the impact of latency of physical disk I/O and to optimise that I/O activity at the physical device (by, for instance, such things as roll-up writes, full-width stripe writes on parity RAID, read-ahead on detected sequential I/O etc.). A secondary, but important function, is also to cache the logical configuration of the array (so virtual device definitions, sparse snapshot mappings and so on). That way the I/O latency for writes (which can generally all be cached unless cache is saturated due to back-end IOP congestion) and cached reads on a SAN can be reduced to about 0.5ms from perhaps 6-10ms (on a heavily used array). However, all caching mechanisms, whether NV dynamic ram or flash based get into areas of diminishing returns as each extra GB buys you less and less improvement. If you happen to be running the sort of random transactional OLTP app where the read hit rate on cache is relatively low, it is very likely your transactional time will be I/O bound by read latency. As modern databases tend to keep good read cache candidates in server memory, the array tends only to see the random elements. Thus it's not unusual to see DBs having logical rates of read I/O many tens of times higher than the physical reads. Thus the array tends to get all the difficult, uncachable reads. This latter is very commonly the limiting factor on transactional throughput on transactional systems. Ultimately hybrid approaches will always limit throughput unless the amount of cache approaches the total DB size.

There is also another issue - that is start-up time with "cold" cache in the database. Typically when such an app starts, the database floods the array with vastly more read requests than when the DB is running in a stable condition when its internal cache is populated. This tends to be far more random IOPs than the storage array can possibly cope with and thus I/O latency becomes very high. This, in turn, causes backlogs, poor caching behaviour and instability. Indeed very many large applications have to be started slowly to avoid this - it's not uncommon for large applications to require a ramp-up over an hour or two before reaching full throughput.

Cached (including hybrid array) approaches are of only limited benefit for these situations. For very large transactional systems with lots of random access, only a fully solid-state storage mechanism will meet requirements. Hybrid approaches are going to be of limited value in this area.

Google may face grilling by MPs over 'immoral' tax avoidance

MP grandstanding rather than doing their jobs properly

Yet another misleading, sensationalist article by which appears to be doing so by deliberately conflating turnover with corporation tax and comparing a 1.5% "duty" directly with 24% corporation tax. The latter is, of course, paid on profits and not on turnover.

This is not to say that there isn't an issue here. Tax law has undoubtedly not kept up with many aspects of online business. In the case of on-line advertising, perhaps the government might consider bringing forward a tax on the turnover of advertising in the UK. The technology exists to get a very good estimate of where on-line advertising is being targeted and the related turnover (after all, it's related to the way Google will bill advertisers). Companies offering on-line advertising (or similar intangibles) could be faced with effective bans on doing UK business should they not co-operate and try and stay outside of UK tax administration for the purpose of assessing turnover.

Also, taxation is based on turnover then that also makes it rather more difficult to avoid than using profit figures which are inevitably going to be based on international company structures and where they choose to be based.

Of course it may be possible that there's some EU tax law which will make such a thing difficult, but perhaps the MPs should give some consideration to the fitness and effectiveness of the laws they pass rather than grandstanding over "morality" issues which are really just issues of commercial management.

Cameron: We'll turn NHS patients into real-time drugs lab rats

By heavens there are some cynics on this forum. I believe no less than Ben Goldacre, no friend of big-pharma has been advocating the use of (anonymised) data by researchers. Researchers does not necessarily mean drug companies - it also covers those looking for the most effective treatment regimes.

Also, the idiot byline about "turn NHS patients into real-time drugs lab rats" is ridiculous. Nobody is suggesting patients will be entered into clinical trials without their knowledge (or forced into such). As always, clinical trials are subject to review by ethics committees.

The writer of this headline needs to grow up and not make tabloid misrepresentations. There is a discussion for grown-ups about the ethics of using individual health records, anonymised or not. However, to characterise this as patients being turned into lab rats is just plain dishonest.

Nikon D4 DSLR review

Re: Incredible quality

It's not true that amplification is the sole (or even major) cause of noise. There are, of course, sources of noise introduced by electronics such as quantisation noise, thermal effects and so on. However, even if these can be eliminated, photon shot noise can not be. That's a noise source that is inherent in the discrete nature of light with the SNR varying to the square root of the arrival rate.

So, even at base ISO, noise is still present in the very nature of light. That effect will be proportionately at its worst in the darker areas where the fewest photons are received, even if every single one was converted to an electron and the electronics introduced no noise of its own.

Freeview EPG revamp set for September

Duplicate channels...

I wish the Freeview equipment suppliers would come up with better ways of dealing with duplicate channels, which are increasingly common with the switchover and power boosts on the digital channels. You can end up with 2 or 3 copies of the same channel, with the duplicates shunted off down the end of the channel listings. It's often pot-luck which version of BBC1 etc. you get on the "prime" logical channel number for that station, and inevitably the one you do get has a marginal signal from some area whose local news has no interest at all to you whilst your one is off down the end of the channel list. I've yet to find a TV or set-top box that allows you to reassign the logical channel number to the version you do want. If the devices just placed the strongest signals for duplicates in the "prime" slot (as that's probably where you've pointed the aerial), it would help.

Of course you can do manual tuning. Just find the website to tell you which transmitter you want to use, what MUXes it's on. Then you have to clear out all the old channels as, the manual tuning for each mux won't clear out the unwanted channels, which normally means reverting to an auto-tune with the aerial unplugged before doing your manual tune on the chosen muxes.

Of course you have to do this differently on your collection of different TVs, set-top boxes etc. Then you have to try and talk your aged parents through the same process over the phone, when they can barely manage to perform any auto-tune, let alone a manual one and and grovelling under TV sets to making and remaking the aerial connection at the right point...

Lords blast UK.gov's fixation on broadband speed over reach

Re: First Principles...

Absolutely - that Lords committee sounds like it's full of a bunch of amateurs who haven't got much idea of the real practical issues involved. So they think dark fibre to streetside locations will somehow fix the issue by allowing any operator to install their equipment there leaving them with the tricky likttle issue of the "last mile". Just how many operators do they think will be prepared for the immense investment and maintenance to put in street cabinets, especially in areas with relatively low densities? Of course you might get this in some of the more densely populated areas (at the cost of having yet more cabinets cluttering up the streets), but that will only increase competition in well served areas - it won't do anything for the less densely populated ones. The only way to serve those areas will either be with differential pricing (and see a politician support that), or by cross-subsidy using either public money or a mechanism which forces it to happen in the private sector (which we have some semblance of now on the copper loop as the wholesale price is standardised and bears no relevance to the higher cost of rural provision).

As it is, the Lord's proposal seems more likely to increase competition in well served areas and leave poorly served ones worse off. If public subsidy is to be used, you need some notion of a complete solution, not one that doesn't tackle the most expensive part of the whole exercise.

Also, of course, speed matters up to a point. Retail products, such as HiDef multi-channel video require severl 10s of mbps, whilst businesses will increasingly need symmetrical speeds in the 10s or even 100s of mbps, especially if modern IT services increasingly move to the cloud.

Twitter airport bomb joke conviction binned in common-sense WIN

Re: Grow up and recognise twitter isn't private!!!

@Gareth Howell

If you can't, by context, work out if a remark is meant as a real threat or humorous, then I'd suggest you try practising, or you're rather likely to encounter a few awkward social moments...

Re: every person in the chain of events taking every joke seriously?

'The "joker" at the CPS should be disciplined, sacked, or prosecuted.'

Sadly, the original "joker" was supported all the way up to opposing the appeal at two levels of court. The current appeal was opposed with the approval of the current Director of Public Prosecutions. It tells you something about the way the system tries to protect itself, and responsibility clearly goes higher than some lowly lawyer in the bottom tier of the CPS.

Re: Wrong!

@John A Blackley

Don't blame the airport authorities - they guy who reported this had to do so because of the procedures. In court they testified they did not take it seriously. The first problem was with the police - they turned it into some form of spectacle by turning up (armed no less) to arrest Paul Chambers at work. The second problem was the CPS, in that they appear to have gone out of their way to justify this enormous reaction by the police. When they found that the original cause of arrest was unsupportable (that of making a threat), they found an obscure sub-section of a statute aimed at preventing harassment phone calls and applied it. By this time, a well known legal blogger (David Allen Green aka Jack of Kent) had picked up on a potential miscarriage of justice and advised Paul Chambers that he had a good case to plead "Not Guilty".

However, yet another state-appointed official in Doncaster - a stipendiary magistrate (or a lawyer paid by the state) went along with this finding the original tweet was "menacing". This involved postulating some theoretical individual that would have found such a tweet menacing, despite the slightest evidence that anybody had ever found it so, and only the possible existence of this particularly feeble-minded cousin of "The Man on the Clapham Omnibus" might be slightly troubled. Shockingly, this verdict was supported on the first appeal. Those of us with a cynical sort of mind (or, rather experience of bureaucracies, the member's of which first instinct is to protect the system) were not surprised. What it actually took was some judges senior enough to put aside the

The real question here is about role of the DPP (Keir Stammer), whose personal decision it appears to have been to oppose the appeal. Anybody bringing a reasonable amount of common sense to this would have noted it was an unsupportable case. One has to wonder if he has the right qualities of judgement to be in that post.

So, don't blame the people low down the food chain - it appears the higher up the system it got, the more those further up chose to defend the indefensible. This could have been cut short at any time by somebody with the courage to recognise a major system failure. As it is, we should all be hugely grateful to those involved in the the defence, like David Allen Green and, most critically of all, Paul Chambers as if we are to criminalise hyperbole and bad taste jokes many of us are in trouble. I should also add a vote of thanks to the judges who made this deliberation. Some have said that the prosecution should have made us doubt the system, but ultimately it is the facility to correct which is surely more important.

nb. "The Man on the Clapham Omnibus" has real significant legal influence in the law of England and Wales, whatever his fictitious nature...

ARM knees semi groins with 2 billion chip feat

Re: tiny slice billions of times

Difficult to make an immediate business case of course, given the piffling revenues and the very high cost of development and providing the whole development "eco-structure" required. However, if a large enough corporation (who might that be?), or a state intent on developing a strategic presence (which country might that be?) decided to buy into the market at whatever up-front cost with the thought that they could eventually obtain market dominance, then it might yet happen. Of course anti-trust and international market regulators would be alive to such things wouldn't they...

Sally Ride, trailblazing Shuttle astronaut, dies at 61

Pancreatic cancer in the news...

Three very recent deaths in the news - Sally Ride, Jon Lord and Angharad Rees. All pancreatic cancer, a disease for which has a very poor prognosis and the known risk factors are limited. Of course it's just a statistical coincidence, but as it killed my cousin at a relatively young age a couple of years ago, it does make me wonder if it's on the increase (now the fourth most common cause of cancer-related deaths in the world).

Watch out Fibre Channel: 12 gig SAS has arrived

FC competitor?

SAS is OK for simple systems, but it's no competitor to FC for large, enterprise computer centres. It simply lacks the connectivity, flexibility and switching capability.

Giant super-laser passes 500 TRILLION watts

Re: yup it's a frig'n word

An acronym is, by definition, a word

"A word formed from the initial letters of other words"

As far as I'm aware, acronyms do not have to be capitalises unless the initial letters of what they refer to are capitalised (such as is the case with NASA for instance). Clearly acronyms referring to organisations are usually capitalised, but those like sonar, radar and laser rarely are.

Of course acronyms have to be widely used enough to be accepted into recognised dictionaries before they can meet the rules of a game like Scrabble. So that means words like radar are acceptable. The sloppy tendency of many people to use the term acronym to refer to mere abbreviations doesn't help, but that doesn't change the accepted definition.

Fukushima powerplant owner forced to cough teleconference vids

"a triumph for nuke power"

So this is was the event Lewis Page described as a "a triumph for nuke power".

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/14/fukushiima_analysis/

When the official report acknowledges that the risks of such an earthquake and tsunami were already known and cultural/bureaucratic/commercial considerations meant that the appropriate contingency measures were not made. This also rather puts the lie to those who said the events could not have been foreseen in the comments to Lewis's article.

Of course it didn't seem to stop Lewis weighing in with an analysis of the position before the facts actually emerged of course. As it is, the suspicion that many of us had that short cuts had been made in safety considerations when designing, building and operating the plant in one of the most seismically active parts of the planet due to commercial considerations appear to have been justified, and that this is not just a matter of hindsight. No triumph for nuclear power, but a financial disaster that so nearly became an environmental one (albeit there remain considerable local issues).

NASA counts down to nuclear tank invasion of Mars

NASA mixing units again on Mars. What could possibly go wrong...

NASA engineers mixing imperial and metric measures in one video. Miles, kilometres? Feet, metres? Hope they get it right this time.

http://articles.cnn.com/1999-09-30/tech/9909_30_mars.metric.02_1_climate-orbiter-spacecraft-team-metric-system?_s=PM:TECH

Resistive Ram cache to make Flash fly, say boffins

Re: There are solutions...

Apologies - I new that. Why I write WAFL when I meant ZFS, I've no idea.

There are solutions...

There's an obvious fix for optimising the write cycles on SSDs with enterprise arrays, and that is to make use of the massive amounts of NV Ram (battery backed up) and use NetApp-style "write anywhere" type file systems or SUN's WAFL. (Files can be used to emulate block mode systems). That way, there's no necessity to scrub and write a whole page of SSD just because a few KB need updating. As SSDs don't suffer from seek times, then fragmentation is not a performance issue (speak it softly, but a NetApp with high space utilisation can suffer rather badly from that - it won't happen with SSDs).

Of course, there's still a write-cycle limit, but as it's possible to hot-swap HDDs anyway, then there's surely no fundamental barrier to hot-swapping write-exhausted SSDs. All that's required is a financial model for including write activity in the cost of ownership, and not just capacity charges based on GB.

Enterprise arrays use these very large NV RAMs to optimise write-back to HDDs already (as well as pointers etc.) by decoupling the write operation to the server from the back-end activity, thus you often find such arrays offering sub-millisecond random-write times with 7-10ms random reads as the former are buffered. Only if the number of back-end I/Os saturates the back-end I/O capacity and swamps the NV RAM does the random-write times suffer badly (although people might be amazed how many enterprise arrays hit internal processing and data path limits before the back end disks - and not even SSDs - are saturated).

Alan Turing 100: Visionary, war winner ... game maker?

Re: ...The Bombe, and where it got the extra "e"

As somebody else pointed out, the Polish bombes (and much kudos to them) could only solve the three rotor Enigma, and only then under the particular protocols adopted by the Nazis under peacetime (read Andrew Hodge's biography of Turing to understand why). Once the Nazis moved to a war-footing, added more plug-board settings and changed some other procedures the Polish bombes were unable to break the system and the changes required were beyond their resources.

Turing did not just work on the design of the Bletchley Bombes (which were made considerably more effective with Gordon Welchman's invention of the "diagonal board"), but he, crucially, made many advances in the use of probability theory to vastly narrow the range of search.

The Poles played an incredibly important part, not least of which was to show that the systems could be broken (and it's the system of usage, not just the machines). As it was, breaking Enigma required "cribs" - like bits of expected text at known points. Used properly, Enigma was essentially unbreakable using contemporary technology. If the Nazis had not been so blinded and arrogant about the impenetrable nature of the Enigma, then they would have investigated the weaknesses in their own procedures. It was interesting that they made no serious attempt to break the Britain's equivalent Typex machine (although the broke merchant navy book codes due to sloppy practice). There were also some parts of the Nazi military that did use Enigma properly, and their codes were never broken.

pre-electrical?

"Turing helped build the Bombe, pre-electrical computing at its best"

The Bombe was most certainly electrical - in fact electro-mechanical. Indeed each had several miles of wiring. However, what it wasn't was electronic, if that term is taken to mean using purely electronic signal controls with no mechanical components (although later, US Navy, Bombes did include a very limited use of thermionic valves to detect "stops").

However, there was really nothing in the early Bombes which the Victorians couldn't have understood. What was new was the maths and logic, for which Turing played a very large part.

British Waterways charity mapping data handed to Google for free

Use the roads only?

I use Google maps to plan cycle routes and you can, indeed use roads. However, there are other options with a bike - cycle paths, bridleways (in the UK), byways. Also, the algorithms of an optional car journey are not the same as for the optimal bike one. The cyclists is likely to favour minor roads over main highways, shorter distance routes through towns rather than busy bypasses. A cyclist might also favour a flatter route over a hilly one.

Of course you can force Google Maps to go via particular roads, but it won't do that for routes not open to motorised traffic. A further compromise can be made by choosing the "pedestrian option", which knows about some (not all) cycle routes, but unfortunately will also direct cyclists the wrong way down one-way streets, along footpaths and so on. So a dedicated cycle routing option would be nice, and preferably one that allowed for some control of optimisation rules as cyclists vary in their needs.

Finally, it would be nice if Google allowed combining "road following" with manual links on a single route as it is unlikely that it will ever know about every possible short cut.

Ofcom: High-speed hookups still a UK monopoly - except in London

Re: Wtf??

That £13 per month (£10.75 if bought a year in advance, of which almost £21 is VAT) is mostly paying for the line without which your broadband link won't be much use. There's always the option of a fully unbundled operator (available for the great majority), where the wholesale cost of the copper loop is incorporated.

That's not to mention this article is not about the OpenReach copper loop, but wholesale fibre services...

Ethiopia to send Skype users to the slammer

International termination charges

International telephone call termination charges are often one of the biggest sources of hard currency revenues in developing countries. Indeed these, often very high, charges have been the source of a lot of settlement disputes. This, not just domestic revenues, will be at the heart of this sort of decision. Expect several other developing countries to seek to protect their revenue streams the same way.

Vodafone's small, controversial tax bill validated by UK.gov

Re: too costly

You're rather assuming that there was a reasonable chance of actually winning the case. If, winning the case was unlikely (or it being found to be much less than £6.7bn), then your calculations don't work.

Ten... Sata 3 SSDs

Re: shame no random write figures!

I/Os per second matter, but the key (connected) criterion is latency. That's what really matters. This obsession with GB per second rather shows the reviewers don't understand why SSDs matter. If it's just GB/s and £ per GB, we might as well stick with LTO tapes.

As it happens, with SSDs in real life it's the more subtle things that will matter. If the latency and bandwidth are half decent, then it will revolutionise PC performance. What will matter in the long term is reliability and whether performance will degrade over time (something which happened with some early SSDs).

The calorifica value of a GB.

Well AC, if your criterion is £ per GB then SSDs will probably never fit the bill. However, what you've chosen is the equivalent of how many calories can I buy for my £. As such, you are clearly going to be basing your diet based on the products of Greggs (or Taco Bell if you are a citizen of the US). That's wonderful if all you do is low-value, manual labour but some do more interesting things.

For those with more discerning tastes, who value their own time and the responsiveness of systems, well we will value something more than just how many calories we can buy. There's a bit more to a storage than how many GB I can have.

EU lurches behind copyright free-for-all landgrab

Here's an idea. Make it illegal to remove attribution from digital works without permission in the same way that it is illegal to bust copy protection and encryption. That might make organisations think before they do it.

A public interest defence could be added to such a law where it is necessary to protect the identity of the source (such as videos & photos from conflict areas and where permission can't easily be obtained).

Flying Dutchman creates dead cat quadcopter

Think of the victims...

If it was a typical domestic feline, that cat would have been responsible for the demise of several avians, a group which it has now joined, albeit postumously. The former might not have seen the joke...

UK court rules Nokia infringed patent, Finns party on anyway

Not many Einsteins to go round, but...

"problem is that patent offices are not exactly stuffed with einsteins"

Whilst not exactly stuffed with Einsteins, the Swiss patent office at the start of the 20th century could, at least, claim the only one anybody has ever heard of.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail on Blu-ray

Strange criteria...

Anybody buying, or reviewing a Monty Python film on the basis of the quality of its audio and video technical quality has, frankly, rather missed the point...

Leica goes all out B&W for M-Monochrom camera

Re: hmm

@some beggar

By "removing" I mean removing the effect of. Manufacturers are perfectly capable of delivering sensors without the bayer matrix - just use a neutral (ie transparent) filter material. The colour density of the bayer filters is something the manufacturers tweak for individual customers.

And who said the tweaking of the firmware was just removing menu items? However, it also isn't going to be a massive job either.

Pricing

The pricing will be based on what Leica think the market will bear. If you can afford a B&W only Leica, probably to supplement an M9, they'll be fairly wealthy so adding another £1K to the price tag probably won't suppress sales.

Of course removing the Bayer filter won't have cost much (although a bit of extra tweaking on the firmware will be required for a small run), but otherwise the costs of manufacturing aren't going to be significantly different to the M9.

Root canal surgery officially more desirable than cloud migration

Root canal surgery & pain...

Root Canal surgery in my experience is painless. It's what caused you to need it in the first place that is the painful bit...

Also, what is it with meaningless comparisons like this one? Also, the article, and presumably the study it was based on is so full of vested interests and bland generalisation as to be just PR puff.

As anybody can tell you with complex applications, porting, whether to cloud or a completely new platform of your own is almost always an expensive and painful exercise.

ARM creators Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber

Acorn's demise in perspective...

The reason the Acorn project fell to pieces was partly because so many journalists, politicians and other influential parties were vociferous in opposing the use of a "non-standard" (that is non-Wintel) architecture machines in education especially. That, and the domination of business by MS Office and the need to exchange documents essentially lead Acorn into an ever declining market. There were some great applications written for the Acorn RISC machines (like Sibelius), but it was inevitable that it could not be sustained on that architecture. It's simply impossible to maintain a thriving development community of applications in such a narrow market based largely in one country.

Don't forget there were many other non-Wintel casualties in the US and a whole raft of alternative processors. Apple only just survived as manufacturer of an alternative architecture because of its dominance in some important niche areas, such as the "creative" sectors along with a somewhat grudging support from MS via a porting of Office (grudging, because it was something of a sop to US competition authorities). Acorn were never able to do what Apple did with the non-computing products, like IPod. With all its troubles, Apple was much better financed with a much more supportive investment sector and a larger market.

As it is, it was ineviable that Acorn would end up, as its name indicated, the seed for a number of small/medium enterprises specialising in niche areas. Competing with Wintel was always going to be near impossible. That ARM emerged from it is something of a miracle, but to keep things in perspective, the vast majority of the income from products using this architecture acrues outside the company. Essentially ARM does not compete just on the excellence of its low-power processor designs and associated eco-systems, but because it is very, very cheap. ARM is not Intel who can command income per processor perhaps 100x that of the royalties the former achieves.

Uni plagiarism site buckles under crush of last-minute essays

Re: Plagurism - maybe, maths no ...

It depends what the rated hours of service are. If it is 24 x 7 x 365, then you are right. However, if it only has service for normal working hours for measurement purposes then they are right.

Many services are available 24 x 7, but only supported for office hours. Depends on the service level agreement.

Look back in Ascii: Computing in the 1980s

UK hobby computing started in earnest in 1977...

Those who started home computing in the 1980s were Johnny-come-latelies. The first true UK designed hobby computer was surely the Nascom 1 release in December 1977. With a proper keyboard, screen output and supplied as a kit with full circuit diagrams and monitor listing, this was a proper hard-core hobby computer. Many were those who cut their programming teeth on this and the Nascom II released 2 years later. I still have mine, and a few years ago, at least, it was still working.

My first serious project was a porting of Dan and Kathleen Spracklen's Sargon chess playing program to my Nascom II, a slow and laborious process when I had no floppy disk drive.

The Nascom 1 featured on the first ever issue of Personal Computer World.

http://www.digitalretro.co.uk/Personal_Computer_World_magazine/PCW_obituary.htm

Vodafone fights India's retrospective tax grab

Re: Outstanding

@irish donkey

be careful what you wish for. If retrospective taxation becomes the norm, then you might just find the tax authorities come after ordinary people for more people when they decide keeping to the law is just a tiresome chore. Retrospective law changes are a menace to ordinary people as what is a legal act now, might turn out later to be something you get in trouble for.

It should be noted that some of the "anti avoidance" measures on the statue book are not quite the same as they already set out areas of uncertainty which need clearance before new schemes are exercised. Not ideal, but certainly not changing the rules retrospectively.

Another thing to note is that retrospective legislation is a sure way of scaring away inward investment. The Indian government may yet find they pay a penalty if they pursue this route. Also, if they abrogate treaties they've made with other countries, they could finds that's not cost free too.

10x power boost for Freeview as London analogue signal cut

Re: Better reception?

@fuzz

not quite true - the BBC HD channels are on a second mux (along with c4 & ITV HD).

Oracle v Google could clear way for copyright on languages, APIs

Legislative clarification anybody?

It is surely time that there was some government involvement in clarifying the purpose of IPRs rather than leaving it to courts to interpret. It should be remembered that the granting of monopolies in the form of copyright, patents, trademarks and the like was (or at least should) be done where it is in the greater interests of society and some recognition of natural justice. However, where this is just being used as a tool for extending scope of market control and reduction of competition, this is questionable. Undoubtedly the increase in the use of IPRs on the part of (mostly) larger US corporations is towards the control of markets and the generation of local monopolies through lock-outs.

It's about time a proper commission was put together to clarify these positions with the purpose of protecting the interests of the great majority and not those of major corporations seeking to generate areas immune from real competition.

Of course this introduces huge international issues, but there's a good case for some economic blocs to take a more liberal view of IPR extent than and increasingly litigious US corporate sector. There are, of course, very different interpretations of the scope of patents in the EU for instance.

ISPs should get 'up to' full fee for 'up to' broadband

Re: Wispa's superficial analogy

Indeed - and other services are cross-subsidised as well. Witness the delivery of letter to rural areas by postmen in vans. How much is it costing to deliver each item as against those in a suburban area?

That's not to say I'm against all cross-subsidisation, but it's nonsense economics to claim that those who happen, by choice or luck, to be on longer lines to claim that they are somehow being overcharged when the real costs are very much the reverse. If it was left just to be market, many of these places would get no service at all.

Wispa's superficial analogy

The problem with this is that most of the real costs of ADSL are fixed and independent of line speed. That's simply because that, apart from back-haul, the inescapable costs are largely those of the maintenance, return on capital, business rates and so on for things such as the local loop, power, DSLAM and accommodation. Indeed, as ADSL speeds are essentially inversely related to the length of the copper line, the real costs of supporting long lines (and inherent slower speeds) are higher than those for short lines, as the former requires more maintenance and capital (more copper, more telegraph poles, ducts and so on). Indeed rural lines are already cross-subsidised by those from suburban and city areas.

Of course the rational thing here is to have a separate fixed line charge and then variable rates based on the amount of data shifted and guaranteed back-haul bandwidth. That way those on longer lines will pay less for the capacity side and more for delivery. People might complain about this, but it's hardly unusual. If you live remote from a town you inevitably pay more for transport or local shopping due to higher costs. Indeed there are some infrastructure services, like main drainage, gas distribution or cable TV which are deemed not to be cost effective in some locations.

Comparison with Kg of sugar are just a nonsense. The costs of sugar are largely proportionate to weight whilst the costs of providing ADSL are far more complex.

It may be that it's social desirable to provide high speed comms to those remote from telecommunications infrastructure and for the rest to cross-subsidise it. However, outfits like wispa should not be misrepresenting this - as it stands, those who by luck, or choice, are on shorter copper loops effectively cross-subsidise long lines already.