Posts by Anton Ivanov

Super-soldier exoskeletons ready for troop tests in 2010

Different cattle of fish, err suits...

He can carry that weight only _IF SOMEONE ELSE HANGS IT ON HIM_.

Based on the photo the suit only actuates legs and allows load carrying, It does not actuate hands like the Raytheon one. That is a completely different ball game. So while this "supersoldier" can carry a mortar with its ammo on his own he cannot actually lift it himself. Someone has to help him.

This is more along the lines of what was recently shown by one Japanese company (with weird sense of humour in their marketing department). It is likely to find applications in helping disabled people long before any military application.

In any case, as far as military applications are concerned it looks like Heinlein was right. His Moon is a Harsh Mistress depicts exactly what the suit should be and frankly we will most likely end up with exactly what he described. There is simply no point to carry an actuated exoskeleton without integrating it with armour (save on structural elements' weight), weaponry (deal with recoil and allow heavy armament), sensors (why carry separate powerpacks for sensors and exoskeleton?), etc.

India's Reva to pitch 'invisible' e-car reserve battery

Yuck...

Hideous visibility. Almost like someone tried their best to obstruct as much of your view as possible. No thanks (even if it passes crash tests, which I find a bit hard to believe).

German boffins invent steel Velcro

Re: Maybe it's because I'm an idiot.

7 tonnes strictly perpendicular without bending it . If you however want to unzip it you bend one of the sticky strips to unzip it.

There is very low (if any) likelihood that this will ever be unzipped.

If you have gone as far as using steel velcro to bind one surface to the other both of them are least likely to be flexible. So it is pretty much a "stick-on-forever" use.

For the same reason it is least likely to see a lot of use in construction as well as other proposed applications because it requires "German precision" in aligning them exactly before the two are pressed together. That is not feasible for most applications. The usual way of fixing two heavy things to each other is sliding them into position until the bolts or welding points align and with this you cannot do that.

Amazon API crackdown neuters book apps

Re: getting something for free - costs Amazon money

Nope, the likely problem is that at least some of the cover art and pictures are not licensed for reproduction anywhere besides the amazon website. By allowing apps to pilfer the content unimpeded Amazon puts itself into a position of assisting an infringement or infringing on copyright.

Celebs join call for official Turing apology

Re: You can't unbreak a broken window

Sure.

Following the same logic slavery is OK (they got an apology). If we stick to this logic even further so was shooting shell-shocked WW1 soldiers as deserters (they got an apology and a posthumous pardon). And so on.

The fact that homosexuality at the time was a criminal offence does not by any mean make it a valid excuse for the lack of apology and lack of posthumous pardon.

Feds break Apple's code of App Store silence

Apple and DRM

Two years ago, when I kept saying that the DRM infrastructure _WILL_ be used by apple to control applications I was flamed into a crisp by Apple fanboys every time. Well... Time will tell. Actually it already did...

Cat awarded online high school diploma

Re:dumb cats #

More likely smart than stupid. I had to stop for a ginger one yesterday. The bastard was using a marked pedestrian crossing. Properly. Could not believe my eyes, but hey, if a crow can do it why a cat cannot.

IT grad sues school over failed job hunt

Perhaps some merit... #

Ah, Bingo, finally someone said that.

Education is presently oriented toward "employment". I hate to be blunt, but when it fails in this regard the recipient should be entitled to some redress.

Yeah, I know that the real target of University education does not sound sellable. My dad (who taught in Unis for most of his working life) had a saying: "The university diploma is not a document which certifies that you have learned chemistry, or math or anything for that matter. Never was, never will be. It is a document which certifies your _GENERAL ABILITY_ to learn. It shows that you are capable of learning material to a specific level of difficulty and using it to get a job done"

This message unfortunately is not something which a sales dork (which is what Uni admission departments are nowdays) can convert into applicants and from there to cash flow. So they lie about employment orientation and employability.

To make the matter worse, the actual study material after that is modified to make the kids employable as per the demands of the current day. This makes them instantly unemployable tomorrow, because instead of being trained to learn and self-learn they are trained to a specific employability. There is an extremely good description on this in Azimov's "Profession" and frankly it should be made a mandatory first year reading material in all engineering schools.

While I have no sympathy for the lady itself (sorry sub-3 point average is a FAIL), someone needs to take Universities to the task and make them stop misselling education. That, and actually educating kids instead of satisfying the HR buzzword bingo grep fetish.

KDE 4.3 promises polish, polish, polish

Re: How to slow your computer down to a crawl #

Depends on what in your computer is slow.

If your computer has a disk subsystem with high latency - yeah, KDE is a pain. On low latency disks (flash) and NFS it can run circles around gnome. The underlying reason is that it reads one thing too many from icons, mime and theme directories. That stuff is in dire need of optimisation, but that is probably the only thing that is still a bit on the slow side.

If your computer has one core too many you can probably not even notice that bits of gnome like its key management sit at 100% usage all the time. However, KDE does not and if you are using a machine which still has only one logical CPU you will often find that it behaves better.

As far as hogging memory Gnome and KDE are on par at the moment. There was a point where KDE required more memory than the average machine on the market and caused most systems to spend too much time swapping. That is no longer the case. In fact it has not been the case for 5+ years now.

And so on. Apples and Oranges.

Flying 'Motorbike'/Reliant Robin 'to take off next year'

Interesting

Looks like a variEze with oversize cockpit to accommodate the folded wings and ducted fan. Proportions are not so off actually. It may actually be able to fly. The drag from the cockpit will be much higher than on an Eze, but as the saying goes: "Pigs can fly, provided that they have been given a sufficient amount of thrust".

China seals town after plague deaths

Re:

Re: I smell a rat #

You better not. That is _ONE_ thing you do not want to smell in a plague area.

Re: Geographic Infection Vector #

Plague has very low incidence of stomach infections. They are known, but rare. So run-off is not very irrelevant.

Re: @Anonymous Coward 19:49 #

Wrong, this is how it _STARTED_, every time. When we compare Chinese and European historical records we can see that every single major plague pandemic for the last 2000 years started somewhere around that region. Be afraid, be very afraid. By the way I am not joking.

Tokyo battles monstrous murder of crows

Resistance is futile, crows will win

Hehe... a bird that is smart enough to use cars and traffic lights as tools to crack nuts is not going to go down that easy. There is some really impressive footage by the BBC Wildlife team featuring David Attenborough where a Japanese jungle crow drops a nut in the middle of a pedestrian crossing into traffic, has it cracked and patiently waits until the light for the cars turns red. Then it goes and collects the scraps. In fact, I would not be surprised if they now have learned to press the buttons on the crossing. After all, the crow family are the only other animal besides dolphins and higher apes to pass the mirror test for self-awareness.

Apple nabs 90% of all 'premium PC' dollars

Re: Get a Mac! #

Absobloodylutely right. I am still using P3 for a media center. I had to change the original P3 with a P3B/1400 due to recent "improvements" in vlc, but P3 none the less. Works with Debian with flying colours. Same for laptops - a 5 year old compaq nc4000 is still perfectly usable as long as you do not run Winhoze on it. It is about as fast as an iBook and cost much less even when new. And so on.

So from this perspective (answering Christian Berger) Linux customers are probably willing to spend 100 on hardware alone, not 1000. That 100 being mostly for RAM and disks :)

Startup crafts DVD-Rs for the 31st century

If it is carbon/carbon it is not hype

If it is carbon/carbon the 1000 years may in fact be a lower bound estimate.

Also, one of the largest cost factors in media upkeep is the climate control for the storage. You still have to pay for that with the other long term systems while this one does away with it. As a result it is likely to pay for itself much faster than expected.

Windfarm Britain means (very) expensive electricity

Accumulators, accumulators, accumulators

While Britain has very few locations for the classic accumulating hydroelectric there is enough space in the Wash to build "anti-island" style reservoir accumulators for half of Europe. They will also produce some energy "natively" from tidal flow as well.

MontaVista boasts 1-second Linux boot

Why ... oh ... why...

I was playing with some scrap yesterday - 8 year old P4 Tehoma. Under 1s wake up to a full desktop out of ACPI S3 (suspend to RAM) when running diskless, 2.7W consumption in suspend-to-ram. A modern system using an embedded CPU with corresponding RAM running a dedicated application should be able to do that in tens of ms without any special Montavista spice. For PPC or ARM platforms the power consumption in suspend would have been negligible as well.

That is besides the point anyway, because modern car computer has seconds if not tens of seconds to boot. All it needs to do is boot when you unlock the car using the central locking, instead of when you stick the key in the ignition. By the way, some japanese manufacturers already do that.

It would have been nice if Montavista directed their energy towards something more useful instead of reinventing the wheel and making it square in the process.

Honda promises hybrid Jazz, CR-Z next year

I will buy it if it comes with a proper stick

If it comes with a proper manual gearbox it will be a top candidate on my "next vehicle" list in 3-4 years time (I hope not to have to buy one before that). By that time the tech would be in a shape where it is worth buying for Joe Average user.

Honda delivered a manual gearbox with the original Insight and Civic and both were very reasonable cars to drive around town (especially the Insight).

Eurostar tunnels through UK border ring of steel

re: Everyone in the UK

Slightly wrong.

Everyone passing border control is guilty until proven innocent. If the immigration officer decides not to let you in the country there is bugger all you can do. You are not entitled to sue them, you are not entitled to legal redress and not entitled to compensation either.

That is the case in ANY country. Not just UK, Australia or USA. Nothing we can do about it.

It all went apeshit 100 years ago when the Americans invented the idea of immigration controls and Visas (it is an American invention). Before that, the fact that your government entrusted you with a passport was sufficient for you to travel anywhere. Not everyone got a passport either because getting one costed the annual income from a small village in some countries.

Samsung N120

The USB powering feature is not unique

It is quite handy if you use a 3G modem. It may take it anything up to a minute to boot, pick up a 2G network and handover to 3G from cold. If it is powered however it can connect nearly instantaneously.

As a result having USB powered even when in sleep/standby/off is actually quite handy for a netbook. Oh an by the way, the Lenovo S10e does that too for standby mode.

The return of the diskless PC

The diskless PC never went away

I have 9 active PCs in the house - 4 desktops, a media center, firewall/PBX and kitchen PC (cookbook/media/stereo) and the house server. Only the house server boots from its own RAID set - everything else is diskless using Linux (there was a period when the firewall ran BSD). Quiet, low power (7W to 30W),maintainable, reliable and it JUST WORKS (TM). No data loss for 9th year straight and counting.

So as far as I am concerned the diskless PC never went away and is not going anywhere anytime soon. Yeah, fine it is not supported by Microcrap. So what, who cares? Microsoft is not the answer, Microsoft is the question and the answer is NO.

Bing 'better' than Google for advertisers

Better for a given set of values of better

My 7 year old recently had to write a paper about "Nocturnal Animals". One of the websites with reference information he was given was MSFT Encarta. Guess what kind of advertisements started popping up when he queried that for "Nocturnal Animals". Cough... Cough...

The best netbook-friendly Linux distros

Re: Debian

Lenny works out of the box on Lenovo netbooks except WiFi. WiFi needs downloading a driver off Broadcom website after that it works flawlessly. I have been running it for a few months now and it JUST WORKS (TM)

Russia stings Microsoft with monopoly case

Is it the first of April again?

Someone... Buying... Windows... And paying for it... In Russia...

Sorry, does not compute...

Fans decry tennis gal's breast-slash plan

re: i agree

She is silly, a mixed double with her onboard is guaranteed the cup 100% of the times. Cough...

That may not be as much money as she will get from a solo career, but it is guaranteed money none the less.

Dell taps VIA Nano chips for custom mini-servers

Step back to Cobalt days

Kate, as one of your customers I can say - you missed the point.

Different horsepower at stake here.

The NANO also has Crypto acceleration for AES. Firefox and IE now all have AES as standard so forcing it in the webserver as a preferred cipher should not be a problem. Via can deliver much higher secure web transaction rate than any of your Intel based hosting gear and it can hook up via a VPN to a back-office without the VPN incurring any overhead.

I have ran AES benchmarks with Via in the past and a measly 800MHz C5 (from 4 years back) was running circles around a 3GHz Dual Xeon and delivering roughly twice the AES rates.

As I actually use my VM for a VPN concentrator, if I had the option of replacing my memset VM with a via, I would definitely consider it. So should anyone running a small secure website.

Paris, to signify our dear Memset CEO having a blond moment.

Asus to slash retail Eee PC line-up

Bad move

Beofre Asus had the entire market covered. Now there is a good opportunity for Lenovo and Aspire to eat its shorts. They are cheaper by 100£ for roughly the same feature set - 10", 1.2Kg, 160GB HD, 1G RAM and WinXP.

Herschel and Planck safely away

Minor correction

It is Earth-Sun L2, as there is also Earth-Moon L2 which does not have a lot of the Earth-Sun L2 merits like being constantly shaded from the Sun's radiation.

Dell punts £199 10in netbook

Hm... Makes me think if I made the right decision

I recently bought a Lenovo S10e which has a nearly identical spec (160G disk and XP which was promptly defenestrated in favour of Debian).

The price/spec on this makes me think if I have indeed made the right choice.

An unthinking programmer's guide to the new C++

Re: Out-of-order loops

Yeah,

After reading this tripe and comparing it to Perl I really want to see the justification C++ people put into calling Perl unreadable.

Super Micro rack-mounts micro Atom server

Appauling cooling... As usual

First thing I notice in this one is the fan working against the top of the case instead of having a blower. Bad design. There is plenty of space to put a low rev big blower forward from this to take in air from the front. Similarly, what exactly prevented them from putting the power supply into a separate compartment to ensure it gets correct airflow? Disk has no cooling and airflow and is left to stew itself...

Bad... Absolute hodge-podge...

I would rather use one of the much better mini-ITX rackmount cases already available out there instead of using this.

Peugeot preps 4WD diesel hybrid

Re: Needs a motor and a generator

It needs a much less complex transmission. The weight savings especially in a 4-wheel drive car are likely to be quite significant. Keep it simple and stupid. I am not a Peugeot fan, but I have to admit, I like the design.

Pudsey Bear refused UK passport

They are mistaking her for the wrong bear

Case of mistaken identity. Someone probably thought of P. Bear being Paddington Bear - hence an illegal immigrant.

Microsoft cries netbook victory against Linux

Re: Linux is hard to get

Agree, I just bought a Lenovo S10e and had to buy it with Winhoze. I went to install Debian on it straight away, but as far as the stats Balmer uses it still runs XP.

I will look at this however from a different perspective.

Linux or not the netbooks are a victory for the consumer. The real story is the loss for Vista. The consumer refused to be force-fed a sucky product with reqs sucked out of a finger which had nothing to do with what they wanted. As a result they took their money elsewhere. There is a lesson here somewhere for all those management people who think they know better and think that they can throw out customer requirements because "they know better".

Google admits data center podification

Re: Nice server

Quote : Guess those disks will be raided

Least likely. Some form of clusterfs with redundancy through the cluster. Cheaper, faster and more resilient. This way the hardware can be terminally dumb and you just plug/unplug them as needed.

Fire suppression?

Quote: As it turns out, the Googleserver includes a power supply that packs its own battery, which means it can operate even when the server loses power from the outside

Which raises some very interesting questions regarding fire suppression. That system is all very good until one of these beasts catches fire. After that you get the University of Twente Deja Vu event: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/20/fire_devastates_dutch_internet_hub/

Hyundai readies Volt-style hybrid

Re: Looks like a baleen whale

Exactly, my thought as well. With dis-proportionally small flippers (cameras instead of mirrors I guess).

It is also not particularly green. Lugging around a 156 bhp engine will definitely cost money. Especially if it is an engine made by Hyundai and not let's say Daihatsu).

It is clearly an evolutionary dead-end like the Prius. A motor-in-wheel hybrid with an optimised constant rpm generator will cost much less and be much more drive-able. Though as this is a hyundai nobody expects it to be drive-able anyway.

eSATA: A doomed stopgap?

You missed a few points

1. The actual 3.0 pinout overlays the normal one so you can use 2.0 devices, so it is not a clean backward compatibility story like 1.1 to 2.0. It is backward compatibility at some extra cost - connectors, silicon, etc. The cost may end up comparable to the cost of an eSATA port.

2. USB2.0 relies on the host CPU for one thing too many and is very CPU intensive.

In any case, you are missing the main advantage of USB over firewire (or eSATA for that matter). It is the hub support. A consumer can easily connect many USB devices and a board designer can easily add ports using relatively low cost electronics. While eSATA in theory can support multiple logical units on the same channel and the firewire spec should have allowed for hub devices, in reality these are nowhere to be seen. So USB coming along had no problems winning the market despite its technical inferiority.

Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbook

Small range of viewing angles is actually good

For those of us who work on public transport this is actually a must-have feature. My HP screen has nearly 180 degrees visibility which means that all people sitting next to me can read it. I would gladly change it for a screen with under 30 degree viewing angle.

Expedition to probe cavern lake 3km beneath Antarctic ice

Re: As long as

I am more worried about a dead ancient berried under the antarctic StarGate. Or digging out the StarGate in the first place (though should not bother the Goaul'd that are sleeping).

Super Micro squeezes four servers into one chassis

lex has been doing this for ages

Similar designs using mini itx orm factors have been around for ages.Lex, travla, etc

State bill would turn RFID researchers into felons

Re: I feel safe now...

Both of my kids have RFID passports (they are the default in the UK now). All it takes to secure them is to put foil in protective backing. 2 min job. It annoys HMG border controls a bit because they now have to open it and skim it properly, but hey, they are there to do a job and they are supposed to look inside anyway.

So just move the tinfoil hat off your head and onto your passport.

UK boffin: Social networking causes cancer, heart attacks, lupus, dementia...

Some grains of thruth... Some...

"People should moderate how much they use the Internet and monitor the uses to which they put it."

Actually: "People should use the Internet to communicate to real people, not invent virtual relationships and delude themselves into considering them as real". In other words - I do not quite see how this applies when you are communicating with people you know and the Internet is a continuation of face-to-face communication and vice versa.

However, once you have realised that online "friends" are starting to replace real ones you really need to get out of the basement and go and see a shrink.

Nudie subterranean rat protein could arrest human ageing

You are sligthly wrong. Just slightly

Quote: live many times longer than other rodents, and remain attractive, fit and virile the whole time

These rats are unique in the sense that they are the only mammal to have a hive society. The "queen" does. The "workers", soldiers, etc do not. They also obey the queen unquestionably, defend it from any danger and behave the way ants and termites do with regards to their hormonal overlord. They are also kept totally sterile.

So frankly, this research has a possible different angle. The proteins that provide this long age may in fact be the proteins which also guarantee the soldiers and workers submissive behaviour and their guaranteed sterility.

For some reason when reading this "This Perfect Day" by Ira Levin comes to mind.

The dark horse in data centre I/O simplification

Why PCIE?

Why PCIe? If we go that route we might as well look at hypertransport (or its Intel analogue). Makes much more sense. In that case the rack of servers is not just using virtualised IO. It can use both virtualised IO and memory and be an arbitrarily big NUMA system.

Granted, OS designers will scream for a while, but overall, NUMA scheduling, memory allocation, etc have answers now and most OS-es can support it properly. In fact multicore+multisocket or multicore+multithread is a form of NUMA already.

VIA spins mini-mobo disk array

Bwahahaha

I have been doing these for years as DIY. In fact some of my "corporate" IT collegues are bound to shiver with "non-compliance" jitters when reading this article.

In any case this is an area where Via has always been extremely good. For example in 2001 it was doing 2-3 times higher disk access speed than a dual CPU Xeon (Intel OEM motherboard) with price per IOP difference of nearly 20 times. While Intel has improved considerably Via can still beat it in this area due to much lower prices (though Atom has probably evened up things quite a bit). Though even in that case Via has an ace up its sleeve. You can have an encrypted array "free of charge" - CPU support for crypto.

So, what is the price on this box?

Hacking the Apple TV

Ugh

And all that just to get it to do what I want? No thanks, I would rather go and buy a Popcorn Hour. It is higher spec, the drive is "anything you like", no hardware hacking, built in bittorent client, runs linux and "JUST WORKS(TM)".

Not that I need it. My current set-top box is a P3 with a fanless nvidia and vlc. Dunno what magic did the guys at Nvidia do to the XVideo scaler, but frankly I have yet to see anything that gets even close (well, with all that spare FPU power onboard it is actually not that difficult).

California to get 'space age' three-wheel EV

Finally, this looks like my wife's next commuter car

Finally, something that I can give the significant other and get my damn Daihatsu back. When are they going to sell it in the UK?

Russian rides Phantom to OS immortality

Os level serialisation instead of file?

Os level serialisation and memory persistence instead of file? Fantastic idea? Not so sure.

First of all, The computer is the network. Try to move data around without the concepts of file, stream or message. End of the day, they will have to be added to his wonderful contraption so that the computer can communicate effectively with other systems.

This will also be the day when his "elegant" "better than Windows" system will understand why Linux and Unixes have came back from the brink of extinction and have continued to gain inroads in the market at the expense of Windows - they make network programming indistinguishable from file programming. I agree, the file paradigm sucks, however we are yet to find anything better for network communications.

Second, I have had to work with people who carried this idea (nailed onto an Agile Java Buzzword Compliance banner). Their project was wonderful (at power point level). It also failed miserably in the field. The moment the serialised data size went above a certain threshold it went belly up and stayed belly up destroying all data in the process.

Council fields world's first rubbish-fuelled rubbish truck

not First

Russia during WW2 converted quite a few vehicles to run on gas-generators. You load a tank with rubbish and wood chops, warm it (by burning some of it) and use the carbon monoxide, methanol, formaldehide and other nasties mix which the dry distillation of wood (and suitable rubbish) produces as a fuel for an engine. Hideous, smelly, inefficient but works.

Germans also used the same technology (to a lesser extent) in the later stages of the war.

So it is most likely not the first rubbish truck powered by rubbish.

Hybrid fusion-fission reactors to run on nuclear 'sludge'

Old Idea

I remember seeing this in Scientific American 20 odd years ago. The sole difference was that they were using non-enriched/depleted uranium there to burn up high energy neutrons.