Posts by itzman

Pen+tablet bandwagon finally rolling, Nvidia leaps aboard

Ohmigwqad

After 20 years in IT I can't use a pen anymore...

iPHONES and 'Pads BANNED in US for violating Samsung patent

Re: Waste of Space

hey, can I patent the concept of bribing governments, or is there simply too much prior art?

Hitchhikers' Guide was WRONG, Earth is not in a galactic backwater

Well, there goes the neigborhood, then.

All the Vogons will be moving in.

Vote Earth Independence Party!

Think your IT department's parochial? Try selling to SMEs

Re: What's good for the SME might not be good for the sales rep

I remember a close friend who used to sell minicomputers back in the day being asked 'what solution he would recommend for stock control' to one small customer.

His reply, 'in terms of cost benefit, a trained storeman and a card index would suit your business better than any computerised solution would' did not go down well..

I always found SMES an easier sell. Perhaps because I too was an SME and used to having to base every single decision on overall cost-benefit analysis. And my sales approach was 'select from products and methodology the solutin that best fits customers needs' rather than 'select from solutions the most expensive one that will advance the IT managers career at his employers expense, and my retirement fund'

How Microsoft shattered Gnome's unity with Windows 95

Re: So in summary..

Linux is not a window manager. Or a desktop.

What counts for 3rd party apps is a reliable X-window API at the least, and that tends to be common across all distros, and better a reliable graphics library, and that is getting to be GTK or one of a couple of others, all of which seem to be available on all distros.

Just because Apple and MS have decided to make 'look and feel' the defining criterion of brand differentiation, doesn't mean anyone else needs to, wants to,or has to.

Indeed for the power users - the generators of content, rather than the consumers, it is almost a matter of complete indifference as to how their application gets launched. What matters is the application, and its own menu system and controls.

Re: I'm not sure Microsoft *has* won.

Mate is stable enough here. Its a lot more stable than W95 ever was :-)

My bleak tech reality: You can't trust anyone or anything, anymore

Nothing is secure

But if you want to get as close as possible, simply don't use online passwords at all.

And certainly not third party repositories of them.

I don't have mobile devices. If I want to log into my bank, I do it form one location behind a firewall over an HTTPS connection.

I have my own mail server. My mail is not held on anyone else's, bar the fact that it is in fact a VPS, so fleetingly before it gets downloaded to my own personal mail system it might be visible.

Maybe my home server is less secure than a professionally maintained cloud. Maybe the fact that its inaccessible from the internet means it is in fact far far more secure. Ditto my desktop machine. Short of burgling the house I don't see how anyone could get at the data.

I am the sysadmin they warned me about. You want secure and you want trust, if you can't trust yourself, who can you trust?

The internet will never be secure. Too many random people on have root access to too many machines. Use it sparingly, fleetingly and assume that in the limit, whatever you put out there is 100% available for someone else's scrutiny, and that someone, you can't trust.

100% security and trust you cant do. But anyone who wanders around with their data and means to access that data on a portable device deserves to lose it. Ditto if it is on someone else's cloud.

And, frankly, one persons private data on a couple of machines at a residential address are hardly a tempting target for the hacker.

New EXPLICIT pics support notion of moist, welcoming past for Mars

No: sand rounded rocks are different in topology. Much rounder and smoother.

Minty fresh Linux: Olivia hits the virtual shelves

Re: Mint looks really nice

Well I run legacy windows apps in virtual box. Screen update is a bit slow, so possibly no use for games, but its adequate for 3D/2D graphics.

Re: Color me unimpressed

yes. I had problems with broadcomm on a laptop. Got there eventaully - there is a bit of nonfree code you need to install and then it all mostly works - as well as wifi on that laptop ever did.

Re: hmm

Yes. the better half's power PC MAC G5 is unsupportable more or less.

she would go for a linux with an OS9 style window manager like a shot..

It is a matter of taste

Xfce is minimalist and fast. If that's what you like, use it.

I like a little eye candy, as long as its MY eye candy, not whatever the designers decide I am going to have. So I prefer maya.

Ubuntu's Shuttleworth: Microsoft no longer dominates PC biz

Re: If I could, I would never use Windows again

Indeed. I run two apps on windows in a VM. simply because there are no realistic alternatives that work sufficiently well to replace them.

In my personal computing world the three outstanding shortcomings were 3D graphics, a good vector 2D graphics package and a really good page layout program, like e.g. Quark. Scribus looks to be good enough for most typsetting applications, but Inkscape is dire and buggy, so I stick to Corel Draw and there is no 3D equivalent to Rhino.

I think that the application space has matured to the point where these sorts of programs stopped really evolving years ago. What they should do, is more or less defined. They could be recreated - and they are being recreated - for Linux with only a few man years of effort.

OK the Gimp ain't photoshop. It aint even Corel Photopaint, but unless you are using it professionally day in day out, it isn't unusable or too clunky.

And in any case the desktop itself is simply not something most people who use a computing device actually need, anyway. Workstations are to create content: most people consume it. And a slab is good enough.

NASA: Trip to Mars would exceed 'fatal cancer' radiation risk

re: EvemnLEO might not be that safe.

Well, I know lots of people - knew lots of people - who have died of cancer or are dying of cancer, who never went into orbit, so your post isn't worth the bandwidth it occupied.

I think about 20% of people die of cancer one way or another. Eventually. The local GP is fond of saying '80% of male cadavers over the age of 80 show prostate cancer of some stage or another'

The longer you live the more chance that one of a thousand factors will randomly cause some cell to divide and mutate...into a cancer.

Re: superhero powers

There is even less evidence of superhero powers than there is of cancer.

Re: Assuming LNT

Of course LNT is well on the way to being thoroughly debunked as a PREDICTOR of cancer rates. It is a REGULATORY limit, and its predictions have failed to live up to expectation in every single case where people are exposed to long term chronic low level radiation.

But then that's not surprising: It was developed by drawing a straight line from where data did exist - people dying after massive exposure to high level radiation in the A-bomb attacks on Japan, and a few 'lab accidents' - to the origin.

Thus giving rise to the myth that 'there is no safe level for radiation - even the government thinks so'.

100msV/year is not unknown in a few places on earth. Ramsar for example. There are no detectable cancer increases there.

What cancers do occur from radiation appear to be intimately connected with the biological activity of the radionuclide responsible, and whether or not particles get lodged inside the body to act as hot spots.

In short its very much a threshold. And indeed some cell research suggest that DNA contains two copies of itself, and unless both match, the cell dies. Like digital transmission, it is 'parity checked' . So mutations are normally killed. Which would lead to the situation that seems to match reality, that the rate of 'successful' mutation requires strong PEAK doses and will exhibit strong non linearity around a threshold value.

Whether or not you believe the results or the logic, Wade Allisons 'radiation and reason' raises some interesting points.

There are a few other papers out there on cell division and mutation under mild chronic radiation that also seem to support the non-linear with threshold type models.

And the most significant long term result from Chernobyl, is not how many people died, but how many did not die.The LNT adherents were predicting hundreds of thousands of deaths. They simply never showed up in the data. The official death toll IIRC by the WHO stands at 78. Mostly those involved firefighting at the plant itself who received massive peak doses.

The simple fact is that as Wade says,

"Although the public accepts moderate to high doses of radiation when used benignly for their own health, non-medical international safety standards are set extremely low to appease popular concerns - these specify levels found in nature or as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA). Yet modern biology and medicine confirm that no harm comes from radiation levels up to 1000 times higher and realistic safety levels could be set as high as relatively safe (AHARS). Indeed the local damage to public health and the social economy caused by ALARA regulations imposed at Chernobyl and Fukushima has been extremely serious and without benefit."

(http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Public_Trust_in_Nuclear_Energy.pdf)

I.e. that the level at which a detectable increase in radiation induced cancer occurs is about 100-1000 times higher than the LNT guidelines currently in force.

You may not choose to believe that: but the evidence is slowly rolling in that LNT is almost useless at predicting cancer death rates. Although it is a laudable standard (the regulatory limits) to aim for.

UN to call for 'pre-emptive' ban on soulless robot bomber assassins

Re: Hmmm

..Fred Saberhagen. Beserker series. Intelligent weapons of mass destruction roaming te galaxy settling old scores that lost relevance millions of years before. A drone got nuthin on them muthas

Re: Hmmm

There is another series of SciFi stories about the residue of automatic weapons left wandering the galaxy long after the conflict they had been built for had ended.

I cannot for the life of me remember where they are, what they are called or who wrote them. I think they appeared as short stories.

Tears, laughter and bankruptcy: How not to go bust

Re: Baliffs at the front door, equipment out the back.

less a Cloud, more 'raining debt'.

Re: Difficult

When selling to companies in the '90s we always used to cue the salesmen to look out fr the ratio of Mercedes, BMWs and Jaguars in the car park to Vauxhalls/Opel/Ford and the like. Above 10%, we refused them credit :-)

Warming: 6°C unlikely, 2°C nearly certain

Re: Where exactly is the warming happening?

Mostly it is happening in rather clumsy simplistic computer models that fail to take into account about 80% of the relevant factors.

Back here in the real world, the natural thermostats that keep the climate more or less constant over the millennia seem to have kicked in to provide lots of cooling cloud and ice formations that will reflect the incident sunlight back into space before any CO2 has a chance to do its thing.

The exercise is left to the reader to establish whether a 1% change in global coud cover has more or less impact than a doubling of CO2 concentration.

Hot new battery technologies need a cooling off period

asuming nuclesar electric power generation....

what in the end matters is whether the total cost of ownership of a fuel car running in completely synthetic hydrocarbon fuel is better or worse than the cost of an all electric battery powered car.

In the same way that what finally matters is the cost of spiralling hydrocarbon fuel versus nuclear power in electricity prime energy generation.

(It is accepted that so called renewable energy will never be reliable or competitive as an alternative).

There is also an issue of how much lithium there is available and extractable and sensible energy costs..

BEVs work in an overall context for short haul uses to electric train stations. Equipped with charging points. The problem of transportation be solved that way in a fossil energy free world, but its not a drop in replacement for the motor vehicle.

Re: The battery is only one part of the problem

Actually the recharge time is NOT so much of a problem. There are many techniques for storing electricity that will cope withshort term peaks pretty well. Including - ahem- batteries.

No energy density, safety and cost are the three major parameters.

Now it gets serious: Fracking could RUIN BEER

Exactly so

If their beer has to be comprised of ONLY H2O then they are already well in breach of their own regulations, cos what comes out of the ground or down the stream is TEEMING with dissolved chemicals.

Sodium calcium and magnesium carbonates, probably not a few sulphates of the above metals. Plus iron oxides.

If its peaty steam probably a fair mixture of organics as well.

Fracking is generally well (sic!) below the water table anyway.

Which leads to the inevitable conclusion that this is nothing to do with beer, water quality or anything but a naked commercial interest in ensuring that only the filthiest water polluting lignite is used in conjunction with the disastrous whirlygigs and solar panels to destroy the German economy.

Phones for the elderly: Testers wanted for senior service

Fun with father in laws 'senior phone'

I mean there it was - massive keys, and not many of them.

But what did they actually do?

:Luckily it came with an instruction manual, the size of a playing card.

By scanning it at 2400 DPI and reprinting a small part of it on an A4 sheet we were able to figure it out eventually.

I mean every octogenarian has access to a scanner and a laser printer and GIMP, don't they?

Epic FAIL.

Paul Allen buys lovingly restored vintage V-2 Nazi ballistic missile

Re: Tipping

1/. it wasn't physical contact. The tip vortices off the aircraft wing were enough to destabilise the thing beyond its ability to recover.

2/. it was preferable to shooting at a live bomb

3/. it wasn't that hard since they maintained a straight course at a constant height and didn't shoot back at you.

COLD FUSION is BACK with 'anomalous heat' claim

spotting snake oil

Yerrss. If i had such a device I'd talk earnestly to some lawyers first. Then Id keep my mouth shut and build a working prototype and couple it up to something like a Mamod steam engine driving a generator. Then I'd invite people to see it generating electricity hour upon hour. I wouldn't go near a scientific journal AT ALL. I'd head straight to a company that could build the thing and get capital to patent it, protect it and fight its corner. Then once it did work I'd get the recognition I deserved. The the scientists could pick over it and see HOW it worked.

Re: No Brainer

could have a few pounds of radioactive muck inside it...decay heat etc etc.

Re: No Brainer

I am sure it could continue..until the internal battery runs flat.

But what use would cold fusion be? we want rampantly hot fusion to drive steam turbines.

Stand aside, Wi-Fi - these boffins are doing 40Gbps over the air

interesting wavelength

Tried to find out a bit more about it - 1.5mm it is. Used in radio astronomy. Its deep infra red.

not hard to generate, and not much to interfere with it.

Used in potential non-X-ray type security scans.

SHOULD get through small holes - i,e. wire mesh. Dust and rain shouldn't be a huge issue. Birds? well you might get a bit of packet loss ... but I suspect this will be domestic use - inside the home, and it SHOULD bounce around fairly well.

we will see in due course. I don't see it as a particularly good point to point last half mile replacement.

Climate scientists agree: Humans cause global warming

Statistics show....

That over 97% of Christians believe in God.

Prankster 'Superhero' takes on robot traffic warden AND WINS

here's another one

I got a ticket for parking in a prescribed place.

I nearly fought it on the grounds that a prescribed place is one of the few places you are categorically and legally allowed to park.

Hemp used to make graphene-like supercapacitors

power density is not Kwh/kg

"power density of up to 49 kWatt-hours per kilo "

I think you mean 49KW/kg,

Because an ENERGY density of 49kWh/kg would be about 1000 times better then the best battery, and would mean that we would have electric cars with a 1kg battery pack...and a range of 200 miles.

That doesn't rate a short sentence in an el Reg article: that's front page news on the financial times.

Firefox 21 ships with performance-profiling Health Report

Re: Crashes?

mmm. Mine hasn't crashed in AGES. But that's not Mozilla's problem., That's Adobe's. And maybe down to a duff graphics driver. Its amazing how many bugs are in graphics drivers...

UP FRONT

well my upgrade asked me before loading whether I wanted to 'share my problems'

Re: Hope not more bloat....

clocks in at 250MByte RAM usage.

however did mosaic and Netscape work on windows 3.1?

Rolls-Royce climbs aboard Bloodhound SUPERSONIC car

Re: I'm not sure what the point it.

well the basic idea is to turn it into a high speed train powered by wet cow farts.

Obviously.

Sun lets loose with THREE record eruptions in 24 hours

Re: Another casualty of climate change

I mean, what are the decommissioning plans for the SUN? why isn't it shielded? we really should ban fusion reaction - its far too dangerous and leads to all sorts of emissions of dangerous radiation... With renewable energy, who needs the sun?

Re: Bleeding obvious

Indeed. If e cant keep fusions sustained and built te equivalent of a gas turbine, lets have a nuclear internal reaction 4 stroke fusion engine.

super chargers and ceramic pistons in ceramic cylinders massively compress hydrogen, a laser acts as spark plug or even do something cute with a spallation target on the piston, the resulting fusion 'flash' drives the piston down and spins up yer rear wheels. For more efficiency run the hot exhaust gases through a steam plant to drive a steam turbine.

Never mind keeping a plasma stable, just have a series of big bangs..

Get that running at 20k RPM and it will make a perfect formula one engine 'Look ma, no fossil fuel'

Intel Centerton server-class Atoms: How low can you go?

Re: Single unit power? Think bigger....

I am not sure that logic stacks up. The grunt per watt is not as good as a more gutsy board, and so rather than e.g. 10 of these, virtualise ten units on a better CPU. Then you CAN manage a raid disk and all the goodies, and if they are high peak to mean services, you won't be any less power hungry and you will have a lot of grunt available to cover any individual peaks.

I see this as the hardware where you want complete control, and you want it locally, not in someone else's datacentre.

So typically file, DNS and mail server with mirrored disks on overnight rsync and maybe a corporate internal web server serving up to 100 staff or so. And a platform, to host a small corporate (mysql?)database.

I.e. FILE/LAMP/DNS/DHCP/EMAIL for SOHO/SME.

And possibly remotely managed by a company who can access it via SSH over the internet

Re: Have I missed the part

thought it was 7-8W stated somewhere..

I have a fanless atom MB in a case with two big disks ruining as the 'house file server and dns server and backup repository for various websites and machines'

It is gruntless when used as a web server doing big calculations - resizing images in real time out of the database was a nono, so I moved that to a virtual server on the core internet. But for GP data string and 'little' jobs like DNS it's pure magic.

I think you have to say this is a tool with a niche application. where you want complete hardware control for light duty, and a single server with no VMs is enough, this sort of box is really excellent.

If you have low average but high peak CPU needs, a rented VM on a fast machine is better.

But this sort of box makes an ideal SOHO/SME server. rather than outsourcing to a cloud, bring it all in house in the certain knowledge that with e.g. Debian loaded up,. its gonna be rock solid for years at a time. And no one else can get their hands on your data...

Queen's Speech: 'Problem of matching IP addresses' to be probed

If more proof were needed...

That the political class has even less understanding of the Internet than the general public, this has to be it.

Endless argument and billions spent on solutions to non-existent problems that don't even work and will never even work.

Unless everybody is bolted to a fixed IP address and massive router flap happens when they connect via a wifi hotspot, there is never going to be a way to guarantee IP level traceability, and NAT rules anyway.

Even if you stuck a MAC address in the packet, that too can be hacked away.

Of COURSE it would be simple if every single message could be uniquely tagged to an end user or piece of physical kit. It would be simple if we all had chips embedded in our foreheads uniquely identifying who we are so that our movements could be recorded in real time on Stasi Central's computers. "we note that you and your neighbour's wife's GPS are coincident in her bedroom for over three hours: vote Stasi or your wife gets to hear".

Like all grandiose and lazy political schemes, it will cost a fortune, wont work, and will simply irritate people.

Secret UN 'ZOD' climate deliberations: UK battles to suppress details

Re: Business as usual

"it remains politically impossible to take action to curb greenhouse gas emissions."

Remain impossible? hell where have you been the last ten years? Action - hundred billion dollar action - has been taken without any evidence at all. The planet is awash with green tech that will do everything from powering your laptop to giving you a cosmic orgasm to rival the Big Bang. Or so we are told.

The fact that none of it has worked to peg back emissions, and the world hasn't actually suffered as much from climate change as it has from the supposed remedies to it, is not germane to the point that action has been and continues to be taken DAILY.

Adobe kills Creative Suite – all future features online only

Re: Somebody PLEASE!!!!

try GIMP and Scribus.

Mooreslaw: Chopping up chips for the future

Has Guy Kewney been forgotton already?

Yes.

Apache attack drives traffic to malware

Re: As vague as the last post on this subject....

thank you. That explains it..

CURSE you, EINSTEIN! Humanity still chained in relativistic PRISON

Gödel et al

You have hit upon a key issue in metaphysics.

Self reference. All systems of thought that attempt to describe a universe in which the thinker exists, are self referential and all can be shown to contain essentially Gödelian type statements.

Douglas Hofstader has explored this in some detail, and a very good outline description of the issues is Hilary Lawson's 'Closure' ..

In popular culture of course the issues is raised in the 'Matrix'. A completely artificial universe is totally indistinguishable from a 'real one' if it fools all the senses all the time.

Hilary Lawson's thesis is that it cant do that completely all the time, there will always be gaps. A place where some logical self referential statement will lead to complete and final uncertainty.

WE (and I) suspect that the most glaring place today in our current scientific worldview is indeed areas like quantum physics. With the illogical conclusions that whether the cat is dead or not is 'caused' by our consciousness of its state. In his idea system, its not just the cat. EVERYTHING is 'caused' by our perception of it, in the sense that the world-as-we-know-it is not the real or the final world. It is brought into being by our attempts to intervene with it., and that intervention consists of a separation of 'us' from 'it' which both defines what we are and defines what the world of our perceptions will be. This has an exact analogue in quantum physics where it is the attempt to intervene in quantum reality that causes it to 'collapse' into classical 4D space from a radically difference phase space.

All intersting ideas..

Re: Prove it?

"If you are building castles in the air with untestable buttresses supporting untestable towers and resting on untested assumptions then you are not doing science any more."

No, but you are doing Climate Science :-)

Re: The "two cars, one red one blue" thing

"Whenever I buy a car it's the wife that has the last word on the colour, not the universe."

When she became your wife she became a relative.

So its just general relaitivity, after all.

Simples!