Posts by jcpw

Fancy yourself as a bit of a Ramblin' Man or Woman? Maybe brush up on your cartography

Re: Any Idiot...

well basically yeah but the UK is a bit smaller and wetter than Canada, esp places people like to walk like the Scottish Highlands or Lake District. So Water? optional, quite likely to find some but a flask of tea ...; Fire steel? only useful if you take a gas stove too. You also might get arrested carrying a "rugged knife"

otherwise, absolutely!

j

Bank of England plans to shove cyber-microscope up nation's bankers

Microscope?

Sounds more like an Endoscope to me. So would that be, erm, more of a tails up than a heads up?

Sony nanotechnicians invent magnetic tape that stores 148 Gb per square inch

Density compared to HDD?

So how does that TB per square inch compare to the best HDD equivalent? HDD density seems to be hitting a limit (see the article about Seagate 10TB drives and HAMR)

EU: Let's cost financial traders $400m a day, because EVIL BANKERS. Right?

Re: Speculation

Speculation creates no wealth. Wealth creation takes time. All wealth creators need from the capital markets is long term investors to help fund their wealth creating activities. Ultimately our pensions depend on wealth creation vastly more than market efficiency.

Hey, Michael Lewis: Stop DEMONISING Wall Street’s SUPERHUMAN high-speed trading

What capital markets are for

The original idea was to connect people who had an idea to create wealth with people who had spare money. Wealth creation takes time, generally years. So sound investors dont buy and sell at the speed of light. Warren Buffet, who does quite well at this kind of thing, likes to be in for the long term. So what's the point of all the super-rapid turn-over? Well it allows those who do it fastest to skim a profit. The alleged benefits being lower spreads, arbitrage and liquidity. But if you look at the high percentage of profit the skimmers make you should be able to work out the price real investors and real wealth creators are paying for this "market efficiency". If it's too high, what can be done? Maybe remove that nice little tax break skimmers enjoy: they can offset losses against gains. And then tune the fiscal system to favour wealth creation rather than the casino. A lot of people have an interest in endlesly increasing the volume of trades, but it doesn't create any wealth, just consumes it.

New sat data shows Himalayan glaciers hardly melting at all

Almost all of the ice is in Antarctica

The Asian glaciers would have negligible effect on sea level. But they do regulate river levels so they could have a significant effect on drought, agriculture, etc.

Reg hacks confront really wide Oz load terror

Mesozoic traffic

Oz Brontos must be seriously large: 15 x the length of a bus! But maybe narrow enough to walk down the road, stepping carefully over oncoming traffic. Or not.

Desktop virt: Licence to bamboozle?

If you think MS is painful try Oracle

Oracle don't recognise any kinds of virtualisation that they don't sell so if you want to deploy Oracle DB or Weblogic on, say, VMware you just licence the entire infrastructure for every product. Dead simple and insanely expensive.

People have no bloody idea about saving energy

dont forget the freezer

My old freezer used £125 of electricity per year (yes I measured it). That's nearly a third of the total annual bill, probably a lot more than the washing machine + dryer (washing everything at 40 & line drying 9 months of the year). When it died I got an A+ one that will use £25 per year (based on the first 2 months measures). The new one only cost £250 so I will make that back in less than 3 years as well as being a little bit greener.

So If you have an old freezer, replace it.