Posts by RRRoamer

Should the IT department be accountable for energy use?

What is it with accountants and subdividing everything..

If you want to add power management to ITs tasks, fine. That would need to be considered for both old system replacement (hardware that is still capable of doing the job, but sucks on the electric teat a little too hard) as well as new hardware purchases (that old performance/watt metric that is never actually actuate or even completely truthful).

Of course, this means giving them MORE money for hardware purchases that will offset electricity purchases... Right...

If you decide that you just HAVE to charge IT for the electricity they consume, then you really need to go the rest of the way and charge each departement for all the utilities THEY consume as well.

Electricity? Check.

Water? Check.

Waste treatment? Check.

Fuel oil/gases? Check.

Building repair/upgrades? Check.

Building services? Check.

This could get out of hand pretty fast. In typical bureaucratic fashion, you would quickly end up spending FAR more money micromanaging things than you could EVER save by forcing this further down the chain.

But there is ALWAYS one more bean counter that just HAS to have ONE MORE BEAN to count!

French motorwonk savages hybrid cars

I still have to laugh...

My dad was driving cars 20 years ago that get better mileage than the current small hybrids do. Oil burner of course...

It was also cheaper to buy, cheaper to maintain and it only had ONE battery that would need replacing from time to time.

And the occasional glow plug.

US navy-v-dolphins judge says Bush can't overrule her

@heystoopid

I guess you have completely forgotten about the whole "separate but equal" part of the Constitution??? The fact that the President swears an oath to uphold the Consitution doesn't make him beholden to Congress or the Supreme Court.

The fact that the Chief Justice is allowed to swear in the President is irrelevant. The Constitution only says the President must TAKE the oath. It doesn't say who gets to administer it, or even if there IS someone to administer it.

You also overlooked the fact that the Constitution grants the President the power to be Command and Chief of the U.S. armed forces. Not Congress. Not the Supreme Court. Not any other Judicial branch. Not even your beloved Chief Justice. The President.

Which means any judge issuing orders to the military to do or not do something is pretty much Constitutionally groundless.

Seagate's US customers get refund

@Chris

"... that the engine on my so-called 2 litre car is, in fact, only 1,998cc.

Whom do I sue?"

The difference is that 1,998cc DOES round up to "2 liters" quite nicely. If they say "you have a 2000cc engine" when it is in fact 1998cc, THEN they are lying...

By the same token, if they want to call that drive a "1TB drive", then all is well. To one significant digit, it IS 1 TB. But if they call it a "1.0 TB drive", then they are lying to you once more as it is only 0.9 TB.

Oh, and the definition of GB=1024x1024x1024 has been in place a LOT longer than the SI definition of GiB. About the time drives started to hit triple digit MB sizes (and that is MG=1024x1024) is when companies started to lie about there capacity.

Because they could. And it made the gullible think they were getting a bigger drive than they were.

I wonder who convinced the SI group to define GB=10e9 instead of already in place and accepted GB=2e30 definition? I bet they worked for a hard drive vendor...

Strange how every other thing in the computer is referenced off a base 2 system (maybe because EVERYTHING in the computer IS base 2) except the hard drive capacity???

Shocked Shatner shunted from Star Trek XI

Yeah, but...

"Enterprise was ridiculous. A ship that's supposed to be a 100 years older than the Kirk Enterprise but was actually superior in all the ways that mattered."

Probably because the original ST came out about the time the transistor (bulk, in the little metal can with three wires coming out of it...) was hitting it's stride. They had NO concept of what computer systems and electronics would be capable in 30 years, let alone 200. Let's face it, your average smart phone has 10 times the processing power and at least as good of communication ability as the original ST series Enterprise.

Let's face it: when Enterprise (the series) came out, they really had NO choice but to update the electronics to something that was a bit more realistic based on what we can do now.

But it is kind of funny!

California teen offers GPS challenge to speeding rap

Obvious most El Reg reads don't know dick about GPS..

There are so many errors and out and out BS in the comments above that I just want to laugh!

"Doppler Shift"

"signal every 6 seconds"

"SI"

I ran the GPS master station in Buenos Aires, Argentina for a while back in the early 90's. Before I was sent there, they stuffed a LOT of GPS theory down my throat. So I DO have a pretty good understanding on how all this works and USED to have a VERY good understanding. Fifteen years has taken the edge off, so...

I have NO intention of saying HOW GPS works. That information is out there. If you want to know, look it up. Just stay away from sites were ANYONE can post because you will generally GET anyone posting...

So, a few issues;

Doppler: No. It's measuring a TIME delta between the code the sat is sending out and the code the receiver is playing. There is an offset in position between the receiver and the sat and that difference is a time offset. How much time tells you how far away the satellite is. Because of this, every GPS receiver on the planet has to have a very precise clock.

Differential GPS: Most inaccuracies in the signal are caused by signal propagation through the atmosphere. The trick is that ALL receivers in the same general area (say 30 mile radius or so) have pretty much the EXACT same errors in there signal. DGPS works with a GPS receiver at a fixed land base that you KNOW where it's antenna is. Then it sends out a radio signal with the current errors in the signal to all the DGPS receivers in the local area, so they can calculate a much more accurate position fix. "You are 5.12 meters lat, -3.43 meters long and 2.87 meters height from where your signal says you are"

Accuracy vs. precision: I always want to cry when I see how few people actual understand the difference between these two terms. Accuracy reflects how close you are to the "true" measurement. Precision reflects how repeatable your measurement is (no matter HOW accurate or inaccurate!). GPS tends to have VERY "accurate" VELOCITY measurements (not speed, but the vector velocity) because the very act of measuring velocity with GPS is a differential measurement, so the raw ACCURACY of your time base (and the signal errors as well) actually gets subtracted out of the measurement. Position still depends on the accuracy of the time base, so it tends to be much less "accurate" than velocity for any given condition/equipment.

So in very short: The raw ACCURACY of velocity of this guys GPS system is WAY more accurate than the police officers radar gun. Even if the data DOES show the kid was driving 2 meters over the edge of a cliff instead of on the road!

US law on age proof in explicit images is ruled unconstitutional

@Eleanor Rigby

It all has to do with how a Constitutional form of government is established. Our forefathers (and foremothers!) got together and DECIDED that the Constitution would BE the law of the land. Of course, I'm translating your "fucking word of God" to the more correct "law of the land".

If you stayed in school, you would know this. Oh. Wait. With the schools these days spending more time trying to make you "feel good" than "be smart", it's no wonder you come across as an idiot.

I would definitely recommend that you READ the US Constitution. It is a very interesting document. You will find that they spend a great deal of time word smithing the original Constitution and the first 10 amendments. After that, it gets more and more into legal jargon. Too bad.

If you still have a hard time understanding what they MEANT, I would have to suggest you do a bit of reading on the subject. This might surprise you to learn, but the folks that were around during the writing and ratification of the Constitution actually spent a great deal of time TALKING about what was meant and what wasn't meant. This was mostly through articles published in news papers (no TV, no radio, no internet!!!), so much of that actually survives and has been published in book form so we can go back and actually understand these folks thoughts.

Of course, this all assumes you CAN read...

Apple to roll out Mac OS X 10.5 next week

Hummmmmmm

"Tiger was $129, as is Leopard. Tiger family pack (5 licenses) was $199, same as the Leopard family pack."

If MS used common sense prices like this for Vista, I might actually be willing to buy it.

..

..

Right!

But if they offered it for XP...

I just wish Jobs would FINALLY decide that it can make money selling OS's instead of just hardware. I have all the hardware I need to run OS X, except for that little chip...

The Pirate Bay absconds with domain name of its nemesis

That could explain it...

"(Okay, yes, I know some US beer is drinkable these days. Vast majority still isn't, though...)"

I've yet to find ANY bear worth drinking. Of course, I DO live in the US, so maybe that explains it...

US demands air passengers ask its permission to fly

I try not to fly at home anymore either

One, I agree with Nick to a large extent. Pull all of our boys home and let the EU take care of paying to secure there own damn borders. Of course, this really would require us to pay attention to energy independence.

But I do have to admit that I can see NO way that the TSA can get their current security rules to pass Constitutional scrutiny. That whole virtual (for most anyway!) strip search just seems to get in the way of "Unreasonable search" and the "innocent until proven GUILTY" parts in the Bill of Rights.

Of course, I have no doubt that the US Supreme Court could easily figure out a way to justify it.

Judge rules Gore's film an inconvenient catalogue of errors

Just a couple of minor tidbits...

"and directed by a man with his own agenda therefore completely discrediting it" - Uhm, are you saying that Al Gore DOESN'T have 'his own agenda"??? Use that brush on BOTH sides of the isle if you want to use it.

And if I recall, at one point, the "consensus" was that the world was flat. I think we have pretty well PROVEN that the world is, in fact, round.

And a lot of folks around the world are forgetting that the say media idiots that were are jumping all over the current "global warming" band wagon are the very SAME media idiots that were all over the "new ice age" band wagon back in the seventies.

Everyone seems to forget that the Earth has heated up and cooled down an uncountable number of times over it's history. At one point, we had some very nice jungle on the polar caps. At other points, we pretty much had a solid ball of ice covering this little planet of ours. I, for one, am NOT going to loose a whole lot of sleep over the fact that it is heating up right now.

Heck, did you ever stop to consider the fact that we just might still be coming out of the last little ice age?

Google nabs patent for Sun's Project Blackbox?

The US Patent office at it's best. Once again...

Does the Patent office actually REVIEW patents anymore??? Maybe they have forgotten that they are supposed to review the IDEAS expressed in the patents and not just the FORMAT of the patent!

Idiots.

The RIAA will come to regret its court win

But what kind of music was the labels developing prior to downloads?

Does anyone else remember the assorted debates going on BEFORE Napster? What was everyone talking about? The cookie cutter CRAP being promoted by the assorted labels.

So I, for one, find this whole "but without the labels to promote new groups, what is going to happen???" debate amusing to say the least. They were promoting crap before downloads, they are promoting it now. I think it might be nice to hear what music could sound like when it hasn't been filtered through the ears of some damned been label promoter who's only real interest is the bottom line of his spreadsheet.

Federal judge slams Patriot Act

Hard to ague with that...

"Look in the mirrors, folks. You have the government you deserve."

Between public education and mass media, it's amazing that ANYONE in the USA even remembers that we HAVE a Constitution!

Music industry cripples eDonkey network

Exactly!

"You have to stop demand. And how are they going to do that with their stupid DRM requirements and silly prices..."

They have created an industry where the pirated material is MORE valuable than the (DRM equiped) legal material! How in the world do they EVER hope to stop people from obtaining the higher quality, DRM free downloads?

Until they realize that their pricing structure is totally out of line with what the material is worth to people, they are going to keep declining. Actions such as this are really not that important.

Of course, given human nature and history, they will NOT realize that error of their ways. Instead, they will ride this plane all the way into the ground. Some new startup that does not have all the historical "baggage" as the current industry will rise up and supplant them totally.

ICANN dukes it out with the USSR in cold war rematch smackdown

That's always the problem with innovation...

The US invented it, so they assumed it was just for them. But, they decided to be generous enough to expand it out so other countries could us it too.

Like it or hate it. Use it or don't use it. That's YOUR call.

New GPS sats to lack Selective Availability

So you REALLY think that EU GPS guilded weapons use the civilian signal???

Right...

The impact of SA had NOTHING to do with the Europe's military hardware. They are using the military signal anyway. SA would only impact all the civilian GPS users, including commercial aviation. The whole point of SA was to degrade the accuracy of "rogue states" that were forced to use the civilian signal for their GPS guided "stuff".

Of course, there are a couple of reasons why SA really isn't an option anymore: 1) GPS use has been far more critical to world wide commerce (aviation, survey, land navigation, etc.) than it was originally expected, 2) Commercial GPS receivers are MUCH more accurate even with a SA signal than the military ever expected. The advancements in cheap, small and POWERFUL digital signal processing along with super accurate clocks allowed much of the noise to be removed from the SA signal. And 3) differential GPS is wide spread and it almost always covers a VERY large area right around any major area that the "bad guys" would want to hit anyway, they can STILL get cm level accuracy in many target areas even with SA turned on.

SA's time has simply passed. Technology has rendered it pretty much useless at this point.

Intel chief waves wafer full of 'world's first' 32nm chips

Oh brother...

They are TEST SRAM chips. They will NEVER be packaged, they will NEVER be sold! There only purpose in life is to validate the manufacturing process all across the wafer. You get a LOT more information on an SRAM than you ever could on a CPU just due to the different way they work (not to mention transistor density).

Once that wafer has been fabricated and it has gone through sort (and just for the record, the wafers are sorted whole. They are tested again after the go through die prep and assembly, but only the good die get packaged and they don't package stuff that doesn't need to be packed, like validation SRAM!), it is pretty much so much silicon scrap. The only reason they would do anything else with that wafer is if they needed to look as some particular transistors to find out why they didn't work correctly and then it would go to failure analysis for more in-depth investigation.

As US threatens to trash GATS, Antigua responds

So when is the WTO going to rule that refunding VAT on exports is illegal???

As the WTO has forced down import duties, countries (other than the US) has transfered the taxation from import duties to VATs. Then they turn around and REFUND companies VATS on products that that export.

When the US did this on income taxes to US corporations, the WTO cried "corporate subsidy!!!" When all the other countries in the WTO refund VAT, well, that is just normal business policy, now isn't it?

The net result (for those of you who can't figure it out for yourself), is that the US effectively has major import duties when selling our goods to countries that they do NOT have selling their goods to us. But no one seems to care about this huge inequity against the US.

And there is one other aspect of all this no one seems to pay any attention to: The US is actually a FEDERATION of states. The Federal government can decided if they want to allow a good or service to be imported into the US, but the states still have the individual right to say "not here!" There is only a hand full of states where this type of gambling is even legal (It used to only two places in the US, but the decision that Native Americans can do what they want on reservation property has expanded that to a LOT of new locations in the last decade or so). So even if the US government DID allow all this gambling into the US, it would STILL be illegal in the vast majority of states. Of course, like much of the Constitution, the separation of powers is DEFINITELY being eroded in this country.

And neither the US government not WTO has the power to force these states to legalize internet gambling (or any other type of gambling for that matter). Some of you might be surprised to learn that the US government does not have the power to enter into a treaty with another country that is unconstitutional. And if the US government doesn't have the Constitutional power to force the states to do something, then they don't have the power/right to enter into a treaty that tries to force the states to do that same thing.

Oh and for the "Right to work" poster. "Right to Work" in the US is more of an ANTI labor union law. Basically, it is a law that says "you have the RIGHT TO WORK at someplace that has a union WITHOUT being forced to join the union". I'm all for "Right to Work"!

BioShockers delivered from DRM hell

Stupidity of it all

[quote]The fact is 99.9% of people ARE dishonest if they think they can get away with it, thats human nature.[/quote]

No. Actually, they are not. If you can't look around your own life and figure out why this quote is total and complete nonsense, there is no point in me pointing it out to you. It would be over you head.

Frankly, DRM has been responsible for spawning more pirates than it prevented. How many people have been in the situation where they buy a game, install it and then try to run it only to have the copy protection prevent it from running on their system?

What do they do? Normally, they call a friend or relative that knows a lot more about computers than they do. And this person shows them how to "get it running" by downloading and using a cracked executable. Now, they are happy. They are playing the game they bought.

But the next time a game comes out (especially by "that' publisher), they might just check to see if a crack is available before they buy it. Just to be sure.

And what do they find? The entire game ready for download. And who knows? They might be tempted to download it and "try it" before they buy it. And that is where the true human condition comes and makes them a full pirate: laziness. Why would they go to the store to buy the game when they are busy playing it already? It's not that they don't INTEND to buy it, it just they never get around to it. One sale lost.

Of course, the next time one of THEIR friends calls with a problem on a game, they know just what to do to get it "working".

Frankly, the game industry is in worse shape now than they would be if they had just left it alone. The downloads are STILL available, but now you have people who download the game simply because they are still pissed at you because of all the trouble your last copy protected game caused them.

Plus, I find it amusing that EVERY SINGLE GAME just HAS to be worth $50 (in the US for a "standard" PC game). Oh really? I have seen plenty of games that I would be happy to spend $20 or may be $30 on, but in no way would I spend $50 on it. Some of those games, I have purchased when they got dumped into the bargain bin. Others, by the time they hit the bargain bin, I had no desire to even try them. Not even for $10.

Is every single car on the road worth $400k? There are a few cars that sell for that much, so why don't car makes price ALL their cars that high? If they thought like the game industry does, they would try it.

Paramount, Dreamworks go all out for HD DVD

People are getting closer to getting off the fence. Which side, now that is the question!

I had some friends over watching a couple of movies on my 61" 1080p TV.

Everyone enjoyed the DVDs and thought they looked great (played on my HD DVD player that up converts). But I'll never forget the expressions of shock when I threw in "Batman Begins" in HD DVD. They were simply stunned that it looked as good as it did. By the end of the night, they were talking about getting a 1080p TV of there own for Christmas and about how "cheap" they had become in the last year or so...

At this point, HD conversion is just a question of time. There are enough good TVs, good HD players and good HD material that your average "Joe and Jane" are getting exposed to what a good home video actually looks like. After seeing movies in HD, they realize just how crappy they look on DVD on there old 36" CRT TV. With prices falling as fast as they are, the hardware just doesn't look that far out of reach anymore.

The HD format war looks to be more interesting (aka: irritating!). In my case, I have a HD DVD player.

Why?

Because it was the first one to hit the magic $300 barrier. That was the same price point I set for my first DVD player years ago. At the rate BluRay is selling, I might have got on the wrong band wagon. But it doesn't matter. Eventually, one of three things will happen:

1) HD DVD format "wins"

2) BluRay fromat "wins"

3) We continue to have both formats and the vast majority of players can play both formats equally well.

Either way, even if HD DVD does lose out, I'll still be able to get an HD DVD player to play my library for a LONG time to come (if you recall, you could get Beta players for almost 20 years after VHS "won" the tape format war!) AND I'll be able to really enjoy my HD TV while I'm waiting on other people to make up there minds.

Not a bad place to be in...

Blu-ray 300 outsells HD DVD version 2:1

Did you notice the price difference between BluRay and HD DVD?

Part of the reason BluRay is out selling the HD DVD disks is the price difference. You can get a couple of different DVD versions, a stand along BluRay version, but you had to get a DVD/HD DVD combo version which was quite a bit more expensive than the BlueRay version.

And yes, I bought the HD DVD version...