It's now well known that Gordon Brown is totally indecisive and unable to make important decisions. As a result we have lots of initiatives to spend a little money to be seen to be "doing something". We have silly little uneconomic feeder schemes on solar and wind power, a fiddly little car scrappage scheme, endless talking about ID cards - but at the end of the day it's all fluff, and Brown is just working on the basis that the Conservatives will inherit the resulting mess and get the blame for dealing with it.
Data recovery was possible, and was not actually that hard, on older drives. The reason was the size of the bits, and the inaccuracy of the tracking servos. As a result, an overwrite would rarely be on exactly the same path as the original data. Mounting the disc in a special drive with precision tracking and more than one head meant that the overwritten data could be read by the leading head, and then used to generate a correction signal which was added (with the correct delay) to the signal coming from the trailing head which was on a different alignment and so was picking up more of the previous signal. We're talking raw signal here, not ones and zeroes.
Tedious and expensive, but several people made a good living out of doing it (one guy I knew did it as a hobby and made over UKP100K one year.) However, as bits get smaller, servos get more accurate, and tracks get denser, the modus operandi just ceases to exist any more.
Mind you, for security reasons I always dismantle old drives and bend the disks in half using a lump hammer. That, and the fact that hard drive magnets are just incredibly useful if you have a steel hulled boat and want convenient attachments for e.g. cable ties. They are powerful and very short range, and usually nickel plated. To buy a pair of equally useful magnets from hardware stores costs nearly as much as a drive.
The EU doesn't have the US concept that commercial damages should include a ridiculously inflated content as a punishment - most EU countries weren't founded by punishment- and Hell-obsessed religious fundamentalists (this is not a troll by the way, but sober fact) and the UK was with hindsight quite lucky that so many of its homegrown ones went where they did. As a result, commercial cases in Europe are just that. What this is likely to mean if it passes is that companies will have to be less careless about specifications - which is good - and about signoff - which is also good. And this is good news for those of us who happen to be properly certified software architects, because companies that believe in throwing it together till it kind of works will have to improve or go under.
The Conficker worm, by the way, would not involve Microsoft in billions of damages. When did you last see Yale go out of business because its doorlocks can be defeated by criminals? Security is a moving target. To be successfully sued under European law, Microsoft would have to be shown to know that their software was vulnerable to a particular attack but have done nothing about it (like the Ford Pinto case), or be shown to have violated an established standard which is required for CE marking of a software product, and yet to have CE marked the product. The well known Chinese habit of just sticking a CE mark on any old tat intended for the EU has not yet resulted in Chinese manufacturers going out of business.
I am not a lawyer and this does not constitute legal advice, but I have worked in the field of electrical product safety during EU harmonisation, and that worked pretty well. My own view? A proper regulatory framework for enterprise software in particular would be a good thing. Low value end user and free software will not be affected, but malware producers could be prosecuted.
All the people cast away on desert islands always seem to be pretty stupid. Perhaps they're onto something.
Incidentally, I agree with BadAnalogyGuy up there; with no competition and limited resources you would expect expensive brains to be evolved out. Cats, for instance, conserve resources in part compared to dogs because they have brains with some of the "higher level" functions reduced. However, I didn't mod him up because I strongly object to the term "retards". It's unpleasant, and insulting to people with lower IQs or learning difficulties. It would be far more accurate to point out that many children could survive in a predator-free hunter-gatherer environment from the age of about 8 on, so that possibly sets a bar.
While we've been worrying about a small company trying to make money by patent trolling large ones, the Masters of the Universe held whole governments to ransom. Bernie Madoff's petty cash fund is probably bigger than the entire SCO case.
I agree with your sentiment, but in fact the drum is coated with a thin layer that contains a small amount of selenium. Did you know that in many parts of the world poor soils have to be treated with traces of selenium because it is needed for plant growth?
The selenium isn't the issue, just as the trace of mercury in CFLs isn't the issue, it's the wastefulness of putting the whole, nonbiodegradable thing into landfills.
The biggest single difference you can make is to use the right technology. The most environmentally offensive laser printers use integral drum and toner combinations, with older HP machines being the worst of all - the cartridge is a large, heavy metal and plastic box that in theory is thrown away after a few thousand pages, and the toner is insignificant. As a simple example, I measured the contents of an 8000 page cartridge of an old machine once. The cartridge weighed about 1kg, and contained 150g of toner. Newer HPs still have the integral unit, but print perhaps 19-30000 pages on it, which is much better. On my current printer (not HP), the total weight of material that goes through the machine to print 18000 pages is less than that.
You can improve on this dismal performance by getting a commercial recycling company to refill old cartridges for you, but after a couple of refills the drum is no longer as good as it was, and print quality starts to deteriorate (on the other hand, one drum may be able to print perhaps 50-60000 report printouts or similar.)
Many of the more heavy duty printers use separate toner tanks and drums. This is far more effective at the expense of requiring an IQ in excess of 100 to replace toner. The drum unit may last from around 20000 pages on smaller machines to, say, several hundred thousand on a Kyocera. In Xerox printers I've looked at, the actual toner may account for more than half of the toner tank mass.
Quite simply the best and most effective way to make your printing less environmentally offensive is to go over the entire estate, identify the older machines that use heavy cartridges with a short life, and scrap them. (this will piss off middle managers who probably have them on their desks, but then they wanted it in the first place.) Then do a little homework on actual needs and replace them with something more cost effective. Replacing individual printers with workgroup printers shared among 5-15 people (based on their workload) reduces the carbon footprint per page printed for more than anything else, and tinkering with toner won't be significant in comparison.
Be careful of these numbers. The range of goods and services available today are different, and this makes comparisons hard to evaluate. In 1969 my father earned about $5/hour. To live in the same house today with the same living standard, with his kids attending the same sort of schools and going to the same sort of university, he would need to earn around $100. This feels about right because his grandchild, in the same kind of job (but where pay rates have increased in real terms) earns nearer to $200/hour. This is because overall living standards have changed upwards. So my feeling is that $120/hour is nearer the mark.
Although there were numerous models from different suppliers, the basic count up and count down 3 1/2 digit A/D architecture revolutionised instruments. It basically killed the analog meter, and also got us used to accurate electrical measurements for routine use. The best you could do with a mirrored AVO dial and careful zeroing was maybe 1%, while a cheap LED or LCD meter could be accurate to 1 part in 1000 as was far more portable. Nowadays, LCD meters typically consume only 250 microamps - more than the AVO, but you can run them from a single lithium cell for a long time - nearly a year of continuous use.
Before they came out, at one company I worked for, I replaced a measuring system using a storage oscilloscope with a box containing an RCA microprocessor, a precision comparator, and a D/A converter which drew the output on a screen for as long as you wanted, and then digitised the measurement sweep on demand. The entire thing including a monitor cost less than a single replacement tube for the scopes, and had infinite persistence without fading. That was when I realised how revolutionary A/A and A/D conversion were going to be. Nowadays you can do the entire thing with a single embedded microcontroller. But the 3 1/2 digit A/D is still much more accurate for single point measurements.
You mean "the problem with glue binding". Real perfect binding - individual sections attached to the backing which is then bound into the cover - is neither fast nor cheap, but it is durable. PU burst binding for paperbacks is quite durable and not too expensive.
This isn't a quibble. With some serious investment, a one off machine could doubtless be made to saddle stitch sections and then burst bind them, producing a book that would last long enough to be worth 15c/page. There's a chicken and egg issue here - demand needs to be created to justify investment, but a poor quality product will not create demand.
A one off machine will always cost more per copy than a full sheetfed press and binding line, but an awful lot of books get remaindered and pulped. One real disadvantage of a good one off machine for conventional publishers is that the cost of publication and promotion enables them to be gatekeepers, to protect their revenue model (just like the recording industry.) If Joe Bloggs can write his book, get it imposed as a PDF and make it available for on demand printing, the entire vanity press world just went out of the window.
It would be perfect for computers if it did not have letters that have different forms at the ends of words, annoyingly giving a total of 34 symbols. Also, I regret to tell you that you are factually wrong, because three Hebrew vowels do in fact make use of above the line letters. One of these is the "oo" sound, which is formed by the letter for w. Therefore, your reading is impossible. (So is Jehovah, which is not a possible word in Hebrew.)
Slightly more on-topic, modern Hebrew has spawned some really nice typefaces including the one for the Obama election badge which, owing to that very lack of vowels, could very neatly be read as "bless Obama". Masada was a big mistake, guys, also letting the Greeks get their hands on Christianity. If you'd played your cards right, we'd all be using Hebrew, and computing would be a lot simpler, SQL and Windows would be less of a pain in the backside.
Socrates - ADA (he used his logical skills to help the aristocrats gain power, the real reason he was executed.)
Plato - Java. (He believed in abstract objects but only had single inheritance)
Aristotle - SQL (he tried to systematise and arrange everything)
Aquinas -.NET languages. (Stuff pinched from everywhere and turned into an immense framework)
Hegel - C++. (Hegel surely wrote the first write-only philosophical language)
Descartes - Visual Basic (if you can make a picture of it, it must be right)
Pascal - Prolog.
Ada, Lady Lovelace - Lisp.
Bertrand Russell - Erlang or Haskell
Ludwig Wittgenstein - PL/1
"Moskin's firm has represented Microsoft in an anti-trust case before the European Court " - which they lost/ Not to dump on Moskin's firm, because Microsoft did themselves no favours at all, but there should only be two sorts of lawyer who try to influence the law outside the courtroom: those elected politicians, and those who have retired.
I have seen it suggested, forget where, that a new civilisation or visitors from space could tell, perhaps several millions years in the future, that we had once had a technical civilisation when they discovered the remains of (bronze) ship propellers, which would still be recognisable. (They may be the thickest bronze castings.) Stainless steel will be long gone, so probably will commercial grade nickel, though coinage metal may last.
Exegi monumentum aere perennius, wrote Horace, but with modern bronze alloys I wouldn't bank on it.
The other respondents haven't made this point, but it needs to be explained. The power to drive a ship scales with drag, roughly proportional to the hull surface area. The wind power scales to the sail area which, if you scale up the whole ship isometrically, increases directly with the hull area. Nice, isn't it? That's why big sailing ships and small sailing ships look so similar in terms of the apparent area of sail.
It isn't quite as simple as that because the sail supports increase in weight as rather more than the cube of the length, so the superstructure does get heavier in proportion as the ship gets bigger. The design has to be optimised considerably. But there is no reason why sail power should not scale, using modern CAD to do the design work.
Most seagoing sailboats are motor sailers already. Sailing cargo ships will need generators for refrigeration etc., so there is no point in NOT providing either a gearbox and prop shaft or an electric drive for emergency power and manouevering.
Clarkson is a joke. He's made a fortune out of pandering to low-IQ petrolheads, kind of a Rush Limbaugh for the guys who put wings on the back of front wheel drive cars. And now he seems to have started to believe his own publicity. But what he actually knows about IC engine and future fuels R&D could probably be written on the back of a postage stamp in marker pen.
They are conservative in the context of their own cultures. You (presumably American) may well not realise, this, but as a country of 300 million out of 7 billion, worldwide your cultural views are a small minority. I like many things about the US, have worked there, and have worked for years for US companies in the UK, but I am very English, and the cultural differences between me and most North Americans are huge. This does not make me a radical. It makes me a moderate, centre left Englishman who wants to preserve the traditional culture of his country.
Which, btw, includes allowing in immigrant groups and letting them gradually assimilate. We did it with the European Jews, the Chinese, the West Indians, the Indians, the Pakistanis, and now others from other Muslim countries.
For the British Government. I find myself again having to explain to non-UK readers that we do not elect the Prime Minister, and owing to our elective dictatorship system, the present Prime Minister has never, in fact, been voted for by anybody outside the Scottish province of Fife. The Home Office is run by someone, Jacqui Smith, who makes Condoleeza Rice look like the greatest liberal brain on the planet (and charges the taxpayer $3000 a month for her sleeping in her sister's spare bedroom). Unfortunately, just like you with GWB, we can do nothing about it until next year. Until late 2010 then, be ready for a stream of "how stupid can the British Government get?" stories.
Newspaper quality has gone down because of two main factors: unwillingness of users to pay for information, and dependence on advertising. What gave you the idea that an advertiser is the best decider of what you learn? Because that's what you're getting.
Google is destroying the independence of newspapers by reducing the value of their content below what it costs to generate it. This opens the field to special interests - the "news" promoted by Rupert Murdoch, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the RIAA and all the other shills for one industry or another.
How can citizen journalists get the resources to investigate Government wrongdoing, or wrongdoing by large corporations?
Google is going to turn news into a combination of press releases and dog show reports. And this is part of its declared mission. Its mission is to deliver eyeballs to advertisements. Google does no evil - to its advertisers. But it will involve all other content into a race to the bottom, until the only real, hard news is once again, as it was for most of history, available only to an elite minority who were prepared to pay well for it.
Slightly OT but I'd just like to point out that I know that - I wrote "Ported with WINE", as in "ported from XP to Linux with WINE". When I grew up, porting meant migrating from one OS to another with whatever it took to do that - though admittedly it usually meant BSD to ATT.
Most small family accounting businesses won't have a clue how to use WINE, and most commercial ones will not consider it because data protection is so important - the risk that your 7 year old data can't be read because of a minute incompatibility is just not acceptable unless you intend to keep 7 years of paper. If you can still run XP, and the software was designed to run on XP, you will not change unless it's a complete dealbreaker not to.
There are many people who run Windows-only programs, especially in the accounting world, and a lot of them will never get ported with WINE. How many people need to run accounting programs of one sort or another? A hell of a lot. Most of them run absolutely fine on netbooks - accounting doesn't use fancy graphics - which is the sole reason we have XP on netbooks. Why do I need Vista to print off a list of debtors or email statements? I don't. Win 2K is not much good for netbooks - it doesn't support all the hardware, especially the USB stuff.
So, much as I like Ubuntu 8.10 which runs on my servers, it is actually useless on most of our desktops and netbooks as it cannot run two out of our essential four programs.
Because accounting programs are very conservative and stable, I expect them to be running perfectly adequately on XP in ten years time. So why do I want Vista?
Do a bit of looking around and you will find more and more geologists are associating some earthquakes with climatic effects - such as weathering of the Himalayas. Did the earthquakes cause the breakup or are they simply associated? (correlation!=causation).
Slashdot Mirror
It's now well known that Gordon Brown is totally indecisive and unable to make important decisions. As a result we have lots of initiatives to spend a little money to be seen to be "doing something". We have silly little uneconomic feeder schemes on solar and wind power, a fiddly little car scrappage scheme, endless talking about ID cards - but at the end of the day it's all fluff, and Brown is just working on the basis that the Conservatives will inherit the resulting mess and get the blame for dealing with it.
Tedious and expensive, but several people made a good living out of doing it (one guy I knew did it as a hobby and made over UKP100K one year.) However, as bits get smaller, servos get more accurate, and tracks get denser, the modus operandi just ceases to exist any more.
Mind you, for security reasons I always dismantle old drives and bend the disks in half using a lump hammer. That, and the fact that hard drive magnets are just incredibly useful if you have a steel hulled boat and want convenient attachments for e.g. cable ties. They are powerful and very short range, and usually nickel plated. To buy a pair of equally useful magnets from hardware stores costs nearly as much as a drive.
If you have to fund it yourself, how do you know anybody wants the result?
If someone will fund you to do it, a third party outside the University thinks it is a good idea and worth something to them.
It's like MBAs: if you have to pay for it yourself, you're probably not MBA material. If your company wants you to do it, somebody thinks you are.
The Conficker worm, by the way, would not involve Microsoft in billions of damages. When did you last see Yale go out of business because its doorlocks can be defeated by criminals? Security is a moving target. To be successfully sued under European law, Microsoft would have to be shown to know that their software was vulnerable to a particular attack but have done nothing about it (like the Ford Pinto case), or be shown to have violated an established standard which is required for CE marking of a software product, and yet to have CE marked the product. The well known Chinese habit of just sticking a CE mark on any old tat intended for the EU has not yet resulted in Chinese manufacturers going out of business.
I am not a lawyer and this does not constitute legal advice, but I have worked in the field of electrical product safety during EU harmonisation, and that worked pretty well. My own view? A proper regulatory framework for enterprise software in particular would be a good thing. Low value end user and free software will not be affected, but malware producers could be prosecuted.
Incidentally, I agree with BadAnalogyGuy up there; with no competition and limited resources you would expect expensive brains to be evolved out. Cats, for instance, conserve resources in part compared to dogs because they have brains with some of the "higher level" functions reduced. However, I didn't mod him up because I strongly object to the term "retards". It's unpleasant, and insulting to people with lower IQs or learning difficulties. It would be far more accurate to point out that many children could survive in a predator-free hunter-gatherer environment from the age of about 8 on, so that possibly sets a bar.
While we've been worrying about a small company trying to make money by patent trolling large ones, the Masters of the Universe held whole governments to ransom. Bernie Madoff's petty cash fund is probably bigger than the entire SCO case.
The selenium isn't the issue, just as the trace of mercury in CFLs isn't the issue, it's the wastefulness of putting the whole, nonbiodegradable thing into landfills.
You can improve on this dismal performance by getting a commercial recycling company to refill old cartridges for you, but after a couple of refills the drum is no longer as good as it was, and print quality starts to deteriorate (on the other hand, one drum may be able to print perhaps 50-60000 report printouts or similar.)
Many of the more heavy duty printers use separate toner tanks and drums. This is far more effective at the expense of requiring an IQ in excess of 100 to replace toner. The drum unit may last from around 20000 pages on smaller machines to, say, several hundred thousand on a Kyocera. In Xerox printers I've looked at, the actual toner may account for more than half of the toner tank mass.
Quite simply the best and most effective way to make your printing less environmentally offensive is to go over the entire estate, identify the older machines that use heavy cartridges with a short life, and scrap them. (this will piss off middle managers who probably have them on their desks, but then they wanted it in the first place.) Then do a little homework on actual needs and replace them with something more cost effective. Replacing individual printers with workgroup printers shared among 5-15 people (based on their workload) reduces the carbon footprint per page printed for more than anything else, and tinkering with toner won't be significant in comparison.
Be careful of these numbers. The range of goods and services available today are different, and this makes comparisons hard to evaluate. In 1969 my father earned about $5/hour. To live in the same house today with the same living standard, with his kids attending the same sort of schools and going to the same sort of university, he would need to earn around $100. This feels about right because his grandchild, in the same kind of job (but where pay rates have increased in real terms) earns nearer to $200/hour. This is because overall living standards have changed upwards. So my feeling is that $120/hour is nearer the mark.
Before they came out, at one company I worked for, I replaced a measuring system using a storage oscilloscope with a box containing an RCA microprocessor, a precision comparator, and a D/A converter which drew the output on a screen for as long as you wanted, and then digitised the measurement sweep on demand. The entire thing including a monitor cost less than a single replacement tube for the scopes, and had infinite persistence without fading. That was when I realised how revolutionary A/A and A/D conversion were going to be. Nowadays you can do the entire thing with a single embedded microcontroller. But the 3 1/2 digit A/D is still much more accurate for single point measurements.
This isn't a quibble. With some serious investment, a one off machine could doubtless be made to saddle stitch sections and then burst bind them, producing a book that would last long enough to be worth 15c/page. There's a chicken and egg issue here - demand needs to be created to justify investment, but a poor quality product will not create demand.
A one off machine will always cost more per copy than a full sheetfed press and binding line, but an awful lot of books get remaindered and pulped. One real disadvantage of a good one off machine for conventional publishers is that the cost of publication and promotion enables them to be gatekeepers, to protect their revenue model (just like the recording industry.) If Joe Bloggs can write his book, get it imposed as a PDF and make it available for on demand printing, the entire vanity press world just went out of the window.
Slightly more on-topic, modern Hebrew has spawned some really nice typefaces including the one for the Obama election badge which, owing to that very lack of vowels, could very neatly be read as "bless Obama". Masada was a big mistake, guys, also letting the Greeks get their hands on Christianity. If you'd played your cards right, we'd all be using Hebrew, and computing would be a lot simpler, SQL and Windows would be less of a pain in the backside.
Socrates - ADA (he used his logical skills to help the aristocrats gain power, the real reason he was executed.) .NET languages. (Stuff pinched from everywhere and turned into an immense framework)
Plato - Java. (He believed in abstract objects but only had single inheritance)
Aristotle - SQL (he tried to systematise and arrange everything)
Aquinas -
Hegel - C++. (Hegel surely wrote the first write-only philosophical language)
Descartes - Visual Basic (if you can make a picture of it, it must be right)
Pascal - Prolog.
Ada, Lady Lovelace - Lisp.
Bertrand Russell - Erlang or Haskell
Ludwig Wittgenstein - PL/1
"Moskin's firm has represented Microsoft in an anti-trust case before the European Court " - which they lost/
Not to dump on Moskin's firm, because Microsoft did themselves no favours at all, but there should only be two sorts of lawyer who try to influence the law outside the courtroom: those elected politicians, and those who have retired.
Exegi monumentum aere perennius, wrote Horace, but with modern bronze alloys I wouldn't bank on it.
It isn't quite as simple as that because the sail supports increase in weight as rather more than the cube of the length, so the superstructure does get heavier in proportion as the ship gets bigger. The design has to be optimised considerably. But there is no reason why sail power should not scale, using modern CAD to do the design work.
Most seagoing sailboats are motor sailers already. Sailing cargo ships will need generators for refrigeration etc., so there is no point in NOT providing either a gearbox and prop shaft or an electric drive for emergency power and manouevering.
Clarkson is a joke. He's made a fortune out of pandering to low-IQ petrolheads, kind of a Rush Limbaugh for the guys who put wings on the back of front wheel drive cars. And now he seems to have started to believe his own publicity. But what he actually knows about IC engine and future fuels R&D could probably be written on the back of a postage stamp in marker pen.
Which, btw, includes allowing in immigrant groups and letting them gradually assimilate. We did it with the European Jews, the Chinese, the West Indians, the Indians, the Pakistanis, and now others from other Muslim countries.
For the British Government. I find myself again having to explain to non-UK readers that we do not elect the Prime Minister, and owing to our elective dictatorship system, the present Prime Minister has never, in fact, been voted for by anybody outside the Scottish province of Fife. The Home Office is run by someone, Jacqui Smith, who makes Condoleeza Rice look like the greatest liberal brain on the planet (and charges the taxpayer $3000 a month for her sleeping in her sister's spare bedroom). Unfortunately, just like you with GWB, we can do nothing about it until next year. Until late 2010 then, be ready for a stream of "how stupid can the British Government get?" stories.
Google is destroying the independence of newspapers by reducing the value of their content below what it costs to generate it. This opens the field to special interests - the "news" promoted by Rupert Murdoch, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the RIAA and all the other shills for one industry or another.
How can citizen journalists get the resources to investigate Government wrongdoing, or wrongdoing by large corporations?
Google is going to turn news into a combination of press releases and dog show reports. And this is part of its declared mission. Its mission is to deliver eyeballs to advertisements. Google does no evil - to its advertisers. But it will involve all other content into a race to the bottom, until the only real, hard news is once again, as it was for most of history, available only to an elite minority who were prepared to pay well for it.
to report that it doesn't think it's in Kansas any more?
Most small family accounting businesses won't have a clue how to use WINE, and most commercial ones will not consider it because data protection is so important - the risk that your 7 year old data can't be read because of a minute incompatibility is just not acceptable unless you intend to keep 7 years of paper. If you can still run XP, and the software was designed to run on XP, you will not change unless it's a complete dealbreaker not to.
So, much as I like Ubuntu 8.10 which runs on my servers, it is actually useless on most of our desktops and netbooks as it cannot run two out of our essential four programs.
Because accounting programs are very conservative and stable, I expect them to be running perfectly adequately on XP in ten years time. So why do I want Vista?
Do a bit of looking around and you will find more and more geologists are associating some earthquakes with climatic effects - such as weathering of the Himalayas. Did the earthquakes cause the breakup or are they simply associated? (correlation!=causation).