Posts by DJO 1969 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2011
No it wont because the way a proposition is worded influences the results. Polling companies have known this for ever and will always word surveys to push people to the results they want.
It may only affect a small number of people but that's all you need to tip the balance one way.
I'm sure the consensus is utter contempt for the perpetrators, that goes without saying.
The comments allude to the fact that the existence of cyber-scum is and was well known but this company failed to take adequate protection or have detection protocols that would have found the intrusion earlier.
As for their PR, we know, they know, everybody knows; it's meaningless platitudes designed to have the appearance of doing the right thing without actually doing it.
Death penalty is not -and has never worked as- deterrent,
Absolutely this. Nobody commuting a crime thinks they are going to be caught, after all they know they are cleverer than the police so the penalty is irrelevant.
To reduce crime you need to increase the perception that the authorities will pursue and catch criminals.
being unable to determine the chain of those circumstances neither proves, nor rules out, foul play.
It's not foul play they are trying to determine. The question is was it a design/construction fault in which case the builders and designers are in big trouble or was it negligence by the crew/passengers - wedging a bulkhead door open or maybe a hatch wasn't closed properly in which case the builders & designers are off the hook.
A simple start would be to delay C suite bonuses by at least 2 years and have them contingent on any gains being permanent.
At the moment the bonus structure encourages short term thinking, this attitude needs to be deterred.
On a separate but related issue, if a company performs well enough for a bonus to be paid, every single employee and contractor should get the same proportionate bonus, limiting them to just the board seems like pure selfish greed. Bonuses all round boosts morale and staff retention all of which are good for the company, just giving the board bonuses breeds resentment and is very bad for morale and will increase staff churn which is always a bad thing.
Liquid helium is a superfluid which means it has zero surface tension so it will creep though any gap no matter how small. Unless the seal on a valve is a molecular fit (which is impossible given current technology) there will be leaks. The mission is to mitigate and minimise the leaks.
America is a democracy
No it is not. In a Democracy the party with the most votes wins. That does not always happen in America, if it did the GOP would have lost almost every election since Nixon.
America is a Republic (or maybe a Corporate Plutocracy) with some democratic institutions.
Actually I'm at a loss to think of a single country that is a true "Democracy".
Is it unreasonable these days to expect a newer processor to run faster
Actually, kind of yes. Most of the development is increasing the number of cores and better optimization of the cores but unless software is written to take advantage of more cores it'll not run any faster.
Newer CPUs can efficiently multitask more processes than an older CPU but it might not run those individual processes any faster. A new i7 may have 8 cores, a i7 from around 6 years ago had 2 cores running at the same speed as 6 of the cores on the new one.
Never fear, there's online help which will reliably get detailed instructions to do (almost) what you need but for a different version of Windows. - What idiot programmed that not to include the Windows version in the query, and more to the point, what moron signed it off?
Of all the things to scrimp on, not having proper documentation must be one of the daftest.
Moreover, it’s easy to forget how unstable a lot of software was twenty years ago.
Seems to be going backwards as the big companies cut down on pre-release testing and let the users find the bugs.
Look at Visual Studio, VS6 (from 1998) was pretty basic but it was steady as a rock, VS2022 is ludicrously overcomplicated and as stable as an egg in a hurricane - regularly needs restarting when it loses bits for no reason like the toolbox randomly emptying itself or a form suddenly not showing any controls - not critical errors if you restart but a pain and symptomatic of sloppy or inadequate testing.
Also VS2022 has been out for a couple of years and few of these issues have been fixed, looking on line you find reports of the same problem and a reply from Microsoft saying they can't reproduce it (if they tried) and don't think it's worth doing anything.
testing what is possible
Fuel cell technology is very mature, there's not a lot left to work out - possibly some fine tuning with improved or cheaper anodes, cathodes or catalysts but nothing groundbreaking.
The only thing to work out is safe and secure bulk hydrogen storage and transport. This is where it all falls apart, if you are going to store pressurised gaseous hydrogen you'll need huge tanks, if you go for liquid hydrogen smaller tanks will suffice but they need to be double walled cryogenic tanks and you'll need to absorb the high expense of compressing the hydrogen to a liquid in the first place.
Hydrogen has a place in the energy economy but I'm not sure this will be of any use except in the few cases where a datacentre is close to a hydrogen production facility.
The biggest problem is energy efficiency. The chain Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Electricity has an overall efficiency of around 30% which is appallingly bad.
Is hydrogen a good fuel for back-up generators?
It's impossible make a 100% leak proof container for hydrogen and it will embrittle many materials including stainless steel.
There does not seem to be a good fiscal reason for this, it'll have higher purchase and running costs than a diesel or gas generator so the only reason to go this way is either if it is subsidised or good old fashioned green-washing. (Which doesn't work because there is only a tiny amount of "green hydrogen" available now and for the foreseeable future),
we know small nuclear reactors work well and safely (as various navies have proven for many decades).
True but we have no idea as to the purchase and running cost for military reactors. If they are costed like most military procurement they will not be a financially viable match for civilian markets.
Jail time for the directors might focus their attention a bit better.
Not just that. Fines will come from the operational budget, ultimately that means either customers will pay more or staff will get reduced or delayed pay rises, maybe a lower dividend will be paid out. The one thing you can guarantee is the board will still get their rises and bonuses so the guilty parties are the only people in this who do not suffer at all.
Fines for corporate malfeasance should come from the directors personally or from their (grossly overstuffed) pension fund.
We have computers with multi-core CPUs running at GHz
I was just issued a new laptop with 10 cores to replace one with a paltry 2 cores. Both are i7s and 8 of the cores on the new machine are the same speed as the 2 on the old one. The upshot is that a process running on a single core is no faster and given the higher overhead and the way the "efficiency" cores slow down if they are not being used by a foreground process means that unless I muck about increasing a processes priority many programs actually run slower on the new machine.
In days of yore new processors were always a significant improvement, the jumps from 286 to 386 to 486 made significant changes but now we've had various "i" processors from Intel for over 10 years with little change apart from increasing the core count and some core optimisation.
when your credit card number gets stolen, you can change it.
No problem, if credentials are stolen give all customers free plastic surgery.
Another issue is that not all identical twins are best of chums and pretty much everybody will have at least one doppelganger out there - faces are not sufficiently unique for 100% accurate identification.
The only times the national debt has gone down has been under Labour administrations.
The notion that spending goes up under Labour and down under the Tories is a complete lie, the opposite is actually the case but hey, this is politics where facts are just an annoying irrelevance.
The important thing about borrowing is not the amount but what you do with it. The Tories largely borrow to cut taxes and to service existing loans which is a sure fire recipe for an economic death spiral while Labour mainly borrow for development which helps the economy.
Unlimited Lithium-7 but not so much Lithium-6 which is the hard to separate isotope needed for the reaction to produce Tritium, a reaction that so far has only been done at laboratory scale.
As for Deuterium, no real problem, we can get as much as we might need from the oceans.
Another factor is reliable contraception and plain old economics. Having children is very expensive especially in social backwaters like the USA where having a baby can cost over $10,000 before you even get the brat home.
So now people can choose how many children to have and when to have them so most will stop at one or 2 if they can afford that many.
If you want to encourage people to have more children make it less of an economic burden but as other costs have skyrocketed, mainly housing, basically we're screwed until the economy rebalances which it shows no sign of doing soon. If housing costs average earners more then 50% of all the money coming into the household, the system is fucked and most people will be unable to afford luxuries such as children.
I think the key word here is "could".
We "could" also have sustained fusion in 3 years. We "could" have commercially viable quantum computers in 3 years.
We wont have any of those, but we "could".
That does not mean his statement was wrong, just a bit misleading and rather stupid.
We "could" have anything in 3 years, or 30 years, or 300 years.
It is most likely that something is stimulating Telomerase production as that will lengthen the telomeres, the question is what is causing the increase in Telomerase?
It is produced by the body for many reasons including reaction to tumours and wounded cells trying to survive as long as possible as well as many less dramatic reasons, finding the cause here seem to be rather important if we are to draw any useful conclusions.
Then we'd either end up with no advertising
Adverts can exaggerate, adverts can use hyperbole, adverts can suggest. But outright lies are a step too far.
However this case does not just cover "adverts" but public statements by it's chairman and that is a very different matter.
It's because these instruments look at the local sunlight light passing through the planet's atmosphere. Only Venus and Mercury ever get between us and the sun and the former has no atmosphere and the latter the light is somewhat swamped by the proximity of the sun.
Even still the results from spectrographic analysis are not easy to interpret and different teams will get different results from the same data so there's still a lot left to understand in this field and better instruments like this will help to reduce the uncertainty.
Sunita Lyn Williams, nicknamed Suni in the United States and Sončka in Slovenia, is an American astronaut, United States Navy officer, and former record holder for most spacewalks by a woman and most spacewalk time for a woman. (Wikipedia)
Does anybody do the most basic of research before commenting, you know like the identity of the crew?
If you are cooling a whole rack then either you need a separate cooling system on each box or the coolant will need to be split into a separate pipe to each box - you can't daisy-chain them as the end of the line wouldn't get much cooling so either a stonking big pump or one smaller pump per box.
I can't see the pumps using significantly less power than fans, actually as the load on the motors is much higher moving fluids than for a fan moving air I suspect the pumps will consume more power than fans.
Of course in fluid cooled systems the waste heat is far more manageable being concentrated at a heat exchanger somewhere rather than blasted into the room and that is a considerable advantage.
For rack cooling if they use the big pump method they could have a redundant spare in parallel with automatic switchover if the first fails which would give a level of resilience impossible with fan based systems. (But in the real world, how often do fans fail in computers installed in air conditioned server rooms? And are pumps more, less or roughly equally reliable as fans?).
DLC's ability to cut energy costs by removing the need for some air conditioning in datacenters
So how and where are they proposing to get rid of the heat? It's the same amount of heat irrespective of the cooling technique.
Just dumping it out of the back of the rack will soon turn a computer room into a sauna and pumping outside is exactly what AC systems do and if you have to do it separately for each rack it is going to end up more expensive than a single room AC unit.
DLC is helpful in reducing the space and the noise but other than that there's little incentive.
Don't worry, you've not missed some startling news. People go on about generation ships or von Neumann probes but we are nowhere close to being able to construct either.
With either the theory says we could cover the galaxy in about a single rotation (~225 million years) which in human terms is a while but in galactic terms is nothing.
In all such cases the theory is unbelievably optimistic. Generation ships are a problem both technically and ethically, making something that'll last for several hundred years in the rather hostile environment space provides is asking a lot, as for expecting the people 6 or 7 generations down the line to do the colonization is a bit presumptive. As for von Neumann probes the technology to make self replicating probes is a distant dream and really a bit pointless, good for a bit of science but do we really want to seed a robot galaxy?
A way to circumvent the speed of light problem would change everything and while exceeding the SoL is impossible, in theory it should be possible to reduce the distance between points but without some exotic matter we've not encountered yet we don't have much chance.
'far left' viewpoints that the BBC tends to represent.
Have you ever actually read or watched anything from the BBC? Because that statement suggests not, more it is parroting the nonsense from Central Office that considers anybody to the Left of Thatcher to be raving commie leftist.
Today slavery is supposedly banned
In many countries yes, in the USA it is just restricted, slavery is legal if it is part of a punishment in prison.
As for bonuses, if the board thinks it should get a bonus then every single employee and contractor should get the same proportional bonus as they are the ones who did the actual work. Restricting bonuses to the C suite should result in something like a 500% penalty. Tax greed!
It's a "Bussard" and the energy required to form one would far exceed anything usable as fuel you could collect in it. If you had unlimited energy it would be a useful way to gather reaction mass.
Using a Bussard as a ramjet type of propulsion as opposed to a mass collector has a pretty major flaw apart from the prestigious energy requirements. It does not work in reverse, you cannot use it to decelerate when you get to (and zoom past) your destination.
Hydrogen on it's own is not a particularly useful fuel, you can't burn it without some form of oxidant. Some will be deuterium (or tritium if you're really lucky) but not enough to run a fusion reactor otherwise it's really only useful as reaction mass.
Look to the Culture series by Iain M Banks, he had some form of energy grid "above" and "below" space which could be tapped for unlimited energy and traction. Could we tap the Higgs field in a similar way? Almost certainly not but it's worth a look to make sure. For really silly ways to cross the cosmos look at anything by Harry Harrison.
If we want the stars we have to look at all the daft ideas until we find the one that isn't as stupid as it first seemed - we have to abandon Newtonian propulsion and interact directly with spacetime - many a Nobel up for grabs for anyone who works out how to do that.
No, no and a million times no. My PC is organised, if I know what I'm looking for I know where to look. If I don't know what I'm looking for no amount of AI indexing is going to help me.
If some people find it useful then fine but it shouldn't be enabled by default and ideally it should be in a module you can choose to install or not and can be cleanly uninstalled if it turns out to be not wanted.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
