Posts by Alan Brown 16473 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"I have nothing but sadness regarding Intel IGPU drivers and Linux. Nothing but sadness."
Amen - that and the ability to crash many of their i8/9 series boards by writing a few bytes into the top kb of ram (memtest86+ will do it if you ask it to probe for memory)
Thankfully their networking people are a lot better than their chipset people.
They'll hire enouigh to actually keep their vdsl installation appointments instead of simply never showing up.
One can hope.
As for "exchange only" - if people are that close, then all it takes is the ISP to drop in VDSL kit and it'd work, but that appears to be too hard (as is putting a "FTTC cabinet" outside the exchange).
See post about damage down to contact pressure (axle weight)
The reality is that the vast majority of road damage is caused by heavy vehicles and _those_ aren't taxed at anywhere near the correct proportional rate. A single bus can do more damage to the road in one pass than a month's worth of cars .
BTW, the formula given isn't quite correct, it's a factor of the 4th power of axle weight AND the 2nd power of speed(hammer effect) - which is why really heavy loads are required to operate at very low speeds.
As for cyclist damage/CO2 - the only damage that cyclists do to the road is when they go under my car and they produce less CO2 in general than twittish gasbags in government. :)
1Tb in a credit card is no use if:
1: the storage medium is expensive or unreliable
2: The reader/writer is expensive or unreliable
3: the reader/writer is the size of a house.
4: the storage medium is fragile (if it can't be flxed, then it's no use)
IIRC the HP prototypes weren't anything near 1Tb and that size was a "potentially" one.
Are already there - one per platter surface.
Theyr'e not even multiplexing those, so there are definitely deeper issues involved than you might think (Most likely down to calibration being unique to each platter surface, so the only way to operate is to operate one head at a time.)
And they're not much different to the non-flashy versions (4G SSD onboard)
Seriously, maybe a _little_ faster to bootup but overall effect is between 10-20% improvement over a bare HDD. Not the highly optimistic figures toted in some quarters.
The effect is even less noticable on a linux system, presumably because of the much higher uptimes.
As an experiment it was worthwhile but any future purchases will be SSD-only unless going into a highly budget constrained environment.
BTW, if you want 5400RPM with caching, then use ZFS. It works fairly well on my fileserver (low power and reasonable response time), but I have no idea (yet) how well it scales past 10 clients - but in any kind of "multiple simultaneous read access (classrooms)" it should go pretty well.
Nasa would probably have dropped the ball.
I work with rocket scientists. Everything is hard. That SpaceX not only diagnosed and fixed the problem, but managed to save the mission speaks volumes for their competence.
SpaceX's man-rated stuff is likely to be far more reliable and safe than Soyuz or anything the USA Gov have produced (all the capsule-based stuff is derived from quasi-military rush jobs where safety was a second thought to the endgoal and we all know what a clusterfuck the Shuttle design was - the surprise is that it didn't kill more than 14 people.)
Commercial outfits can't afford to kill people at the same rate that governments can.
The simplest way of avoiding "eating the pump seals" is to use magnetic couplers. They're not difficult to make,. especially in this age of high power magnets. Fishtank filters have used them for decades.
Given what happens if a cooling rig leaks "mere" water, it makes sense to look at this anyway.
Because if you air-cool into a server room, you have to then cool the air and pump the heat outside, or use some sodding great air-exchange setup (with associated dust control and maintenance)
Both stages involve shifting vast amounts of air with fans and as a result server rooms can easily sit at 85-90dBA (loud enough to not hear equipment alarms unless you have your ear next to them.
Liquids are a lot easier to shift around in small spaces. That's why UK houses use plumbing and radiators instead of american-style air ducts.
I'm in the middle of scoping a project to upgrade our cooling capacity from 60kW to something more usable and the variety of options being offered are bewildering, to say the least. When a single 4U GPU box can be dissipating 4kW there's little room for messing up.
286kW at 100% efficiency perhaps: An automotive IC engine is at best 30% efficient (yes, I know engines can get slightly better but only under constant load)
Having said that, at motorway cruise the average car is expending somewhere between 2-5kW, so 24l/sec sounds like a slipped decimal point somewhere along the line.
24litres at STP, plus allowing sufficient air (O2 content ~20%) to allow it to burn, translates to a 2 litre engine spinning at ~80-100revs/second - 4-6000rpm. Allowing for 25% efficiency that's about 65kW and you really only need that for a few seconds at at time.
"Have they changed the rules? I was under the impression that there had to be a number of accidents within a specified time frame - and that there was no verification that the accidents were caused by speeding."
One of the "speed related" accidents listed as the reason for installing a speed camera near me involved a 92-yo driver having a heart attack and croaking at the wheel while negotiating a bend. Another heart attack at the wheel was used as justification for dropping the speed limit slightly further along the road from 70 to 50.
J Clarkeson made a claim a few years back that at least one of the M4 cameras was justified by a pedestrian committing suicide from an overbridge. I didn't believe it at the time but events since then have made me reconsider.
OTOH: If you speed and don't see the bright yellow box then you shouldn't be on the road at all. Ditto tailgaters and mr 35mph-man-in-the-right-hand-lane.
Various people are right - the foil lining in walls makes thinghs worse - but more importantly it's metallised windows and fire-resistant doors which deal the death-blow to indoor propagation.
Even back in the days of 800MHz analogue it was pretty clear that anything other than stud walls already blocks so much signal that what's seen indoors is a result of what's leaking in via wall voids (ie, windows and doors). Once you start limiting what can propagate through those then you may as well plug into a wall outlet.
As for standalone femtocells - they used to be called "rabbitnet"
"highly competitive" means that we have to pay 35% more for our 1Gb fibre tail than we would if we were 7 miles down the road where there are competing suppliers.
Why do you think BT moves so quickly to shut down any move by competitors to setup shop in areas where it's the only game in town? It's all about protecting the prices they're allowed to charge.
Is that the pricing bears little relaionship to their level of performance and a lot mroe to do with "brand premiums"
Fellow CCNA and CCNPs can feel free to downvote me but after hammering the snot out of a bunch of their stuff, I see no reason why most of Cisco's midrange stuff (eg 37xx/38xx range) is well more than twice the price of the competition - and 7 times the price of their own sg500 range when the sg500 kit is only slightly lower powered.
Beats them sitting by the side of the road ticketing people going 1-2km/h over the limit (This happens regularly in several locations. They have quotas to meet and often the only way to get 'em is to nail people who are within speedometer tolerances - note that speeding is an infringement in NZ, not a criminal offence unless it's _way_ over the limit or coupled with careless/dangerous/reckless driving)
Anyone who drives a car is already in the dvla database, complete with photo.
Same applies in New Zealand (and their version of the DVLA)
If you give a name and address which don't pop up a photo, then you're either driving without a license or impersonating someone who doesn't have one. Either way you're in deep shit.
"The best spacecraft for humans is the one we're all currently standing on, and that's not going to change any time soon"
About 100 years ago engineers were saying that the Titanic was its own lifeboat because of its doublehulled design and the unique watertight compartments which meant the ship could stay afloat if up to 5 were breached.
We all know how well that worked out, don't we?
(Conjecture: It's thought that if the ship rammed the 'berg headon, it would have crushed the bow and first watertight section, killing most of the off-duty boiler crew in their bunks, but everyone else would have been saved. Others argue that the shock would have fractured already glass-fragile cast iron rivets(*)along the hull and sent her to the bottom even faster than she did go)
(*) Cast iron of the day became incredibly fragile at temperatures below 3C. That wasn't well-known until some time later(**) but it explained the massive size of the gash in the ship's hull - survivors were castigated for vastly exaggerating how large it was when it turned out that if anything they'd underestimated the damage.
(**) White Star line and the builders were aware there was an issue after examining damage to titanic's sister ship in 1912 and seeing how hull plates had shattered after hitting a sandbank in the Irish sea. This gives rise to speculation that the sinking was an insurance job which went wrong.
"Shielding, its necessity and its weight, becomes the real issue because outside of LEO, and Earth's protective magnetic field"
Water is an ideal shield and there's an awful lot of it out there. It just needs to be appropriately shaped, positioned and warned (needs to be liquid - but any shade of paint other than "reflective silver" would do the trick)
L2 isn't really a position so much as an arc and there is already some junk there which needs to be cleaned up first.
"With DDR4 you install all of the RAM from the get go or replace all of it if you desire to increase the density."
I'd wager that 99.99% of all desktop PCs/laptops never have ram tweaks during their operational lifespan.
Half the time it's cheaper to replace an entire motherboard than pay for exra ram on an aging system.
It's a "parking brake", not a "hand brake" and it's only to be used while "parked".
The lever thingie is called an "emergency brake" Stateside - used for parking and for emergencies.
Putting the parking brake on at traffic lights, etc (as is common in the uk) is an instant license test FAIL in many jurisdictions. (I suspect it's because there's a fairly high risk that the brake shoes will freeze solid in subzero conditions)
Several EV enthusiats have "solved" the issue of long trips by prducing a "power trailer" - essentially a generator on wheels. This works pretty well by all accounts.
Several other crazies have extended the concept into "pusher trailers" - usually the front end of a FWD car under remote control. Surpisingly these are also reported to work pretty well.
In an EV it makes sense for the "heater" to be a full-blown heat pump rather than a piece of resistive wire.
The extra weight over standard cooling kit is minimal.
If someone's having to run an EV in cold weather and the heating off they're already operating at the ragged edge of oblivion or there are serious design flaws, given battery heat needs to be vented somewhere and the cabin is as good a place to direct it as anywhere in such conditions. It's more like those 1000mpg economy runs than any real-world operating conditions.
When batteries get cold their chemical reactions slow down - which means that voltage droops. The number of joules stored doesn't change though, so they provide reduced current for a longer period. (or as they warm up the "lost" power returns.)
This is why it's best to put your phone in an inner pocket if it's extremely cold outside.
In the case of electric cars it's more a case of trying to get rid of waste heat. Thse discharge/charge currents can make things toasty and smoky if not carefully managed (which also means a cold battery pack will wake up pretty quickly)
This effect is well known even in lead-acid batteries. At minus 40C you won't get enough current out to crank the motor(*) unless you switch on the headlights for a few minutes first - that discharge current is enough to warm the battery up to do its job.
(*) Or if you do, there's a high risk of cracking the battery plates.
I believe those are called "batteries" and a couple of them used to be deployed in every subscriber's house about 70 years ago. Everyeady No6 cells would last about 20 years.
When microphone power started being supplied from the exchange, it was called "Central Battery" operations and telephone circuit diagrams contained details of wiring for local or central battery right up to the days that the BT type 100 and its derivatives went out of production in the mid 1970s.
When I were a nipper (in the late 70s), we lived in a rural environment with party lines, hand cranked phones, human operators connecting every call and local batteries. The last of those didn't entirely disappear until the late 1980s
cabinet-based concentrators have been around for decades. Copper in one side, fibre out the other. It means subscriber loops in the countryside are only a couple of km long instead of possibly 15-20
There's nothing stopping BT deploying these in their cabinets already. A number of telecom manufacturers (incluing huawei) make DSLAM+Voice kit (30 line devices were about the size of a VHS cassette 6 years ago, probably the same size now, but capable of handling 200+ lines)
"It's light, but 5-10 is patiently absurd. That's more than you'd get for rape or manslaughter."
Let's see... interfering with the 999 services, for starters.
The penalties need to be set so high that wannabe cable nickers will think twice about it - and that includes coming down like a nuclear weapon on the yards which handle stolen goods.
Seriously - these twats caused millions of pounds of disruption and they get a slap on the wrist.
I know it's expensive to keep 'em in jail but there needs to be long sentences to deter wanton destruction of critical infrastructure. The threat of 10-15 years banged up is the kind of thing which puts 'em off.
As for your idealistic views: I live near Epsom and we (neighbours and myself) had to deal with a persistent offender from Epsom who repeatedly breached bail and his curfew. The police end up doing FUCK ALL about it - and when they did finally arrest him (several times), he didn't get any punishment for bail or curfew breaches (merely a warning from the bench which he ignored)
Ditto on his community service which he refused to do - and got away with not doing.
In the end he finally killed someone and got put away for that, which ended a couple of years of hell for everyone in the nearby area.
"Our own internal sales teams don't seem to understand when a customer says they want geographic diversity there is no point having 2 seperate circuits going between four different sites if your on net portion is on the same fibres! "
Amen: It's amazing how hard it is to actually verify that circuits being sold as geographically diverse really are.
The japanese mentality is "he's been arrested, he must be guilty" - which leads to even jury trials with clearly dodgy evidence gaining convictions - but in the meantime yakuza operate fairly openly without fear of arrest.
The japanese government has supposedly been trying to root out this type of police corruption since the late 1980s but I don't see they've gained much headway.
(FWIW, you don't _ever_ want to be caught speeding in Japan)
"On the subject of Dutch call centres claiming that they don't fall under the remit, being [art of the EU they should be aware of the Privacy in Communications Directive which addresses this exact area."
They are, but they won't tell you that.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2026
