Posts by Mike

Level 3 wilts in London sunshine (again)

Caves etc

What a lot of the nay-sayers seem to ignore is the concept of thermal mass,

With the sheer mass of rock surrounding a subterrainian DC, there is an awful lot of heat that can be absorbed. Often to the extent of weeks or months of normal heat load. (Google specific heat capacity for more information)

Due to the large area of the rocks the heat ebbs away fairly easily into deeper rocks, especially if the rocks are damp.

If this isn't enough alone to stop it long term, then sure add some aircon, but you should able to use the cool night air more than most other DCs, since the rocks soak up the 'coolth' as well as the warmth...

David Tennant quits Who

A title is required... Lord? Sir?

>The next one will be the Peter Davison of our era.

>So he should clearly be taken from a popular prime-time series about vets.

>Is there one?

Animal Hospital? So that would suggest Rolf Harris as the next Doctor...

"Have you guessed what it is yet?"

Alien because, well, its sci-fi...

Alleged Brazilian botnet herder faces US extradition

You just have to ask...

...how many is a brazillion?

The leather one with E=mc^2 written in binary with studs.

Ofcom tailgates Google with radio usage map

OFCOM not worth 126M?

What some people are forgetting is that OFCOM doesn't just deal with radio, but also with the telephone networks. This is a lot more labour intensive and I would guess that it takes a far larger percentage of their budget than the radio allocation and enforcement stuff...

Skull and Crossbones since there is a pirate angle.

DIY SSD packs in CompactFlash card pair RAID rig

DIY?

You can do a similar thing on desktops by just pairing up IDE->CF adaptors with onboard RAID on most modern mobos. (Or SW RAID if you want to run Lunix)

2010: the 5TB 3.5in HDD cometh

Re: In 2020

"Do you think we'll look back at these 5TB disks we had in 2010 and laugh at their puny size?"

I doubt it, even now many people who don't have massive mp3 or tv show collections grabbed from the net are still able to use a 20gig drive and not feel too cramped.

If you consider the current top of the line is approx 1Tb, then they are only using 1/50th of the capacity of these drives... and I don't think that this will get much higher in the next 2 years.

So while some users will always be hitting the limits of their storage capacities, I think the average will be somewhere between these extremes and over about 200gig really wont care.

Biggest issue I see with these mega-capacity drives is the error rates of them doesn't seem to be going down. On a raid controller that will abort a rebuild if it encounters an error, a rebuild on RAID5 at these capacities is likely to fail a lot due to these unrecoverable errors. We need some new filesystem types (ZFS gets us most of the way there) that checksum internally and can recover from these types of errors.

Cobbler pieces together mass Red Hat Linux installations

a load of old cobblers?

"but most of the time, these tools cause more problems than they are worth."

Obviously spoken by a guy who doesn't need to install many identical systems and attempt to keep them running. A decent sys admin can keep 80+ systems running and updated on his own. If you chose to do stuff without automation, you will be lucky to even hit this number.

"What I would really like to see is more knowledge based systems, ones that will check configuration, offer a number of alternatives, and analyse current setups, reporting their view of what they think is happening, with snippets of how to change. An intelligent book if you will. But, not many like to make those style of system, oh well."

You mean like puppet? The reporting 'what they think is happening' should be done by monitoring software, unless you chose to reject the paradigm of 'do one thing and do it well' that is common (and proven to work well) in the Unix world.

Paris because I can help her with an installation...

Jihadis: We turned hacked killbots against US troops

A title is required

lol@ 'BlackTurbans'

Prehaps this will turn into one of those security memes like armadillo security architecture (crunchy on the outside and crewy on the inside)

The flame, since friendly fire isn't...

AMD plans 12-core server chip for 2010

Mangy Cores?!?

Nuff said...

Mines the one with the wearable computer and the tekgear glasses.

This DVD will self-destruct in 48 hours

Extending the time period...

My guess is it reacts with either oxygen or nitrogen (oxygen I'd guess) in the air to cause the degradation... so you should be able to improve the duration by putting it in the fridge (slow the reaction) or putting it in another container and flooding it with something inert (carbon dioxide or nitrogen)

Mines the white lab coat...

Pirate Bay to sue music industry

Misread that as...

International Federation of the Pornographic Industry

Where's the Paris Hilton angle?

The 'green' car tax grabs that don't add up

Re: motorbikes

Its not just motorcyclists that drive around for recreation... even car drivers do it...

Difference is that a motorbike can beat congestion most of the time, a car can't it just get stuck in it.

Opera CTO: How to fix Microsoft's browser issues

amanfromMars making complete sense?!?

I am suprised to see amanfromMars making complete sense today...

Prehaps the AI is getting better...

The warning triangle since if AI is getting better it really is time to run for the hills...

iPhone auction fakes swindle the impatient

Not English?!?

Prehaps these phones aren't UK versions.

French law prohibits the locking of handsets to a network, while this may make them more expensive than equivilent UK versions, it should be possible to get a box sealed version.

Although I'm not sure when the French lauch actually is...

UK lags Europe on PC sales

Trends

Without seeing the trends from the past few years and knowing more comparative info its hard to make definitive conclusions on these results.

Is the UK market already saturated?

Do people in the UK use computers for longer?

Are self-built systems counted?

How are these sales counted?

Are these figures extrapolated from a small sample and is there inherent skew in the figures...

Do we even care?!?

:P

Sun: MoD has Bond/Potter/Klingon cloaking device

Way to do it...

The way I would do it if I was designing it would be to use a massive lenslet array over the whole exterior of the tank.

Each lenslet would consist of a small semiconductor with integrated optical sensors and leds, covered with a hemispherical lens over large groups of these pairs of sensors and leds.

The problem comes not from the manufacture, which is fairly straight forward, but from the interconnect between the sensors on one side of the tank and the leds on the other.

Overall, it could give cloaking and external 3d displays for a fairly trivial amount of power.

Galileo scepticism rife even in Brussels

Russian GPS

There already is a Russian GPS system...

its not as complete as the US version, but it is functional.

http://www.spacetoday.org/Satellites/GLONASS.html

But even now the are attacks on US GPS equipment, it is fairly trivial to produce signals that a non military gps receiver will interpret and think its elsewhere in the world. Hopefully Galileo will remove that possibilty along with far greater accuracy.

Half of European calls to be mobile by 2008

National Rate 0870

Many people aren't aware that 0870 numbers will be disappearing soon, next year to be exact. Being replaced by the new 03 prefixes for national numbers with no where near the revenue share that currently exists on 0870.

Also, not all companies have a geographic number instead of the 0870, sure many that are big enough to have PRIs running into their companies do, but its perfectly reasonable to deliver 0870 via VoIP.

Is your phone free?

More bad naming...

@Rodrigo Valenzuela

Its almost as bad as the Vauxhall Nova, which I'm told beans 'doesn't go' in spanish...