Posts by Justin 34 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Feb 2007
The National Museum of Computing is well worth a visit. It has a separate entrance to Bletchley Park, and is easy to get to: it's within walking distance of Bletchley railway station, which is about 45 mins from Euston. I'm also proud that stuff once hidden for a few decades in our garage is now on display there
It's fascinating that the world generates so much information!
I couldn't help thinking why they need to archive quite so much data going back so long. The following story at Spectrum Data might help to explain: http://www.spectrumdata.com.au/total-data-management-solutions/oil-gas-data-management/geophysical-data-services/client-success-story---an-indian-odyssey
Another big data-producer is CERN, which generates up to 1 Pb per second (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/14/cern_cloud_helix_nebula/). They delete most of it, but still have to store hundreds of Pb. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte for other examples of Petabyte usage.
"Of course you have to question the intelligence of the student if he basically paid twice as much for the macbook as he would have done for a Windows laptop, only to put Windows on it anyway......"
I checked the prices of macBook, Vaio, Dell, Toshiba, Acer and a bunch of others. For the same top-of-the-range spec (identical processor, memory, disk, screen size) they all worked out at about GBP 1800. Maybe plus or minus 100. So you start looking at other things like build quality, number of USB ports, tray-less (=nothing to break) DVD drive, and the nifty magnetic power connector that means you can't trash your laptop by tripping over the cable.
I think the student made a very smart decision, even if he only ever runs Windows on it. Now his Macbook is unique too, and will help to pay his college fees.
Copyright is all about preventing other people making money from your work. So you can read books and listen to music from the library, but the copyright law does not permit you to sell that item as if it were yours to sell. That is what Copyright Law is for.
The "music industry" mafia has hijacked this perfectly good law. If they had their way, you would have to rent books from the library, you would have to pay to listen to every track the radio plays and you'd have to pay every time you play your own CDs.
The net result is that customers are fed up AND SO ARE THE ARTISTS. Musicians are releasing their music for free (e.g. creative commons license) and making their money on performances ... which is how musicians made their money traditionally anyway. In the end, the fat cat mafia middlemen will lose out, but they obviously aren't going down without a fight. IMHO they have already lost because they've lost the confidence of the public.
Long live the Internet!
The best thing that London 2012 could do after Beijing is to return to a sports-based Olympics rather than a show-off of culture. It would be hard to do (given the egos at stake) but in the long term, London would be thanked for breaking the ever-increasingly expensive cycle of oneupmanship. It's the obvious thing to do given the budget, and it would leave behind a legacy of sports rather than a hangover.
Blackberries? If you're going to watch it live, you expect to see tiny dots in the distance. If you want to watch close-up, you'll get better coverage (and value for money) watching at home.
It just goes to show that 1GHz and 1Gb RAM is more than enough for anyone.
The really clever bit is the maths (pencil and paper stuff) to approximate a model. Once you've got that worked out, the software model is relatively easy. Did you know you can do Mandelbrot Sets in Excel, you can do garden planning in Excel. You can even write books in Excel. It's only for stuff with huge datasets (like weather, finite element analysis, or oilfield simulations) that you need a supercomputer.
Perhaps the greatest thing about the web is that it isn't censored. It has created an environment where anyone can publish anything - whether it's support for Eugenics, stuff about Scientology, cars powered by water, or highlighting human rights abuses in Tibet. Some people are offended by these things and try to either shut them up or shut them down. The fact remains that the Internet has a culture of free speech. Information is now the hands of the individual, without any of the controls of an editorial or peer-review. So the onus is on the surfer to somehow not accept everything they read as "Gospel".
There's a question mark over whether Wikipedia is censored or not, but the end result is by-and-large very balanced, and has proven to be more reliable than people expected. But doing that for the entire Internet would IMHO destroy it, and put information back into the hands of the powerful. Come on Tim, surely you realise this.
I guess another consequence of this is that I'm going to have to get used to TheReg's new-look site.
The trouble with Creationism is that it assumes the existence of the Creator which may or may not be "God" and which may or may not be detectable. A lot of people can't cope with that premise. On the other hand, a lot of people claim to have met God, and use that as evidence, so there is a stand-off.
The trouble with Evolution, is that we don't really know what ultimately started the universe /life off, and though there is lots of evidence, there are many aspects that remain a mystery. Evolution also starts with some assumptions, some of which we have been brainwashed into accepting as "facts".
The trouble with this whole debate is that it is so emotionally charged (and has been since the day of Darwin), that nobody is really prepared to put their own agendas (mainly based on the question of a "Creator") to one side, and analyse it in a real scientific way - by which I mean looking at the assumptions (on both sides of the argument) and testing the hypothesis (regardless of how weird it seems) - instead of everyone bashing everyone else saying "you are wrong".
Father Fessio is right - we have lost the art of Philosophy.
Oh man, does Lloyds understand anything about security? Not sure if El Reg is being artistic in its descriptions, but if a bank staffer can see that he put a rude password in, then their security system is on a par with that of the Tax office.
I guess it really doesn't matter any more anyway. The Govt have "lost" my bank details to the Dark Side anyway.
Aliens? Nothing scarier?
"...I didn't consider Linux because with two young kids I didn't have time to fiddle with it."
I don't have time to faff around installing Windows. But with the Ubuntu install, I can use a browser (or play Sudoku, or most other stuff) AT THE SAME TIME as installing the OS. How cool is that?
In five years time we won't be arguing about Vista vs Leopard vs Ubuntu. It'll all be about the browser.
The Govt would do well to see the fiasco that happened in Germany with satellite-based HGV tolls. The system couldn't tell the difference between a lorry on the motorway and a lorry on a parallel "Bundes-strasse" (A-road). Meanwhile, the Austrians implemented a microwave (non-satellite) system that "just worked". We wait and see if .gov.uk will re-invent the wheel.
Is this the icon for peril-sensitive sunglasses?
Flooding used to be much worse - as evidenced by high water marks in places around the UK. Take Guildford for example : St. Nicolas' Church, about 5' above road level, 1968. There are hundreds of other "high water markings" on buildings around Britain. "Beyond living memory" ? It's a good job our predecessors knew a thing or two about how to record information for long-term use (no database, no backups, not even on paper records in the vaults of the council).
Aha! This would explain why my Thameslink ticket purchased on Feb 29th would not let me out at St Pancras less than an hour after I bought it. Fortunately there was a kind man waving everyone through the glass gate instead. Lots of people around were muttering "only had 4 years to fix it from last time!".
"Stop" cos that's what the barriers did at the top of the escalator.
Uh-oh. The aliens have infiltrated the SETI project and are sending a message home. The message might look to us like "Yoohoo, come and buy our warez" but hidden in the signal is a coded message "come on over for a pillage-fest" (Idea based very loosely on Hamilton's "Pandora's Star").
... it doesn't take much imagination to think of ways of redirecting child-benefit payments - someone only has to write them a letter, and the money's theirs. Same for my tax credits. It's going to take YEARS to sort this catastrophe out. Smells like an insider job to me :-(
Google Maps is usually pretty good at handling roundabouts and one way systems. Using details for two businesses that are almost next door to each other in Stevenage, it should tell you just to drive up Cavendish Road for 500 yards:
"SG1 2EH to SG1 2EQ"
Instead it takes you to a point halfway between two junctions of the A1M. Now I know the traffic is slow at that point, but it's not THAT slow!
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