As a Linux geek up to now I've always done digital music with a collection of hacked together scripts. After I was given an iPod I thought I'd try using with Windows + iTunes to see what the fuss was about. Apparently there are executives who think that excluding the 100 million+ iPod owners from playing their CDs will improve sales, and they're in charge of record companies.
Smart appliances are smart regarding their energy consumption.
Suppose you had a smart fridge that could read data from the power socket about the availability of power. A signal arrives that indicates a glut of power (it's got windy and the wind farms output has shot up). The spot price of electricity falls and your fridge switches on the compressor and cools the inside to 1C down from it's normal 4-5C. The temperature gets as low as 2C inside the fridge when a new signal arrives - there's a power shortage, the wind has stopped blowing and the nuclear plant down the road has shut down unexpectedly.
Scale this up to country-wide levels. The UK has 25 million households. With a fridge and a freezer each @ 300W each, that's 7.5GW of electricity consumption that can be switched off for hours at a time if there's a shortage of electricity. Add on all the commerical cold storage, all the datacentres & hospitals that can use diesel and drop off the grid if there's a shortage of electricity and a bit of pumped storage and you're quickly going to get to 10GW of the 50GW in use in the UK. If you can switch off 1/5th of the grids demand automatically suddenly unreliable wind power & solar power stops looking so problematic to use. Start bringing in massive amounts of battery storage in the form of electric cars and renewable 'unreliable' power sources really start making sense.
The beneficiaries of this are the environment, the power companies, the smart device manufacturers and eventually your wallet.
I believe that fridges and freezers consume ~ 5% of the national grid in the UK. You can over chill a fridge or freezer, and then switch it off for some hours, meaning that if the power company could control your fridge directly they could shut off 5% of the grid at peak usage time, and effectively store the output of turbines as cold in the fridge or freezer. It's not long term storage, but it'd cover a few hours.
Try a London data centre on LINX, or Amsterdam on AMSIX. A 10GE port into LINX costs £1850/month and if fully peered provides about half the internet routing table. Given all the major datacentres in London host hundreds of ISPs it can't be that hard to find one with a gigabit spare lying around.
We colo AppleTVs. Why? 1Ghz Core Solo, 18W. We also do Mac Minis. Why? 2x2Ghz Core 2 Duo, 40W. Let's put 125 Mac Minis, up against the IBM mainframe and see who's faster.
It's pretty much one click on the N95 from take to flickr. Bearing in mind that Nokia is the worlds largest camera manufacturer, it's not impossible that the market it going to shift at an utterly astonishing rate.
Most people don't buy SLRs, they buy point and shoot cameras, and Nokia's upping thier play in the market to have a reasonable point and shoot directly linked to flickr.
As an N95 owner, it's worth a great deal to have a reasonable point and shoot camera, combined with my phone and GPS. Download on demand mapping is fantastic.
I can't see any costs on the site so I don't understand how you can possible make an assertion about this being cheaper.
An amorphous silicon cell is typically 6-8% efficient, lots of commercially available cells are 14-16% efficient - more efficient than this scheme can possibly be.
I respectfully refer you to Homer Simpson, 'In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics'.
Assuming a hot temperature of 70C (black plate in strong sunshine) and a cold temperature of 20C, the theoretical efficiency limit is (343-293) / 343 or 14.6% - assuming a perfectly efficient generator and a very large capacity foe the 85% waste heat capacity.
At night, it's going to be more like 30C -> 0C which is down at 9.9% efficiency.
Even cheap solar cells do better than that, you'd be better off just buying solar cells.
Did you advise McDonalds before the McLibel trial.
The following statements are true (1997, 1999, McDonalds vs Helen Steel and David Morris
McDonalds endangers the heath of their workers and customers by misleading advertising, they exploit children, the inflict unnecessary cruelty to animals, they pay their works low wages and they are antipathetic to unionisation.
This cost McDonalds approximately 10 million pounds to prove.
It was found on appeal that McDonalds abused Scotland Yard to illegally gather police information, and that McDonalds food was a cause of heart disease.
Can you explain how this situation would work out.
A colleague of mine started work for us, got pregnant very early on and left after ten months to go on maternity leave. Difficult labour and eventually gave birth via C-section.
This is in the UK so it's all on the NHS and paid for by the taxpayer, the company don't provide private health insurance.
What would happen in the US - presumably the company would have some form of health insurance, but she wouldn't be covered so they'd just let her die? I'd really like to know how it would work. She's young in and wouldn't be able to afford to pay for the operation herself.
With PGP, I supply it with the key and the cipher text, it gives me the decrypted data.
In the DRM example, I provide the application with a key and the cipher text, the application then shows me the content but refuses to give me the decrypted data.
In the PGP case I can't break the app - it does everything I ask of it anyway.
In the DRM example, all I have to do is persuade the application to return me the decrypted data and there are lots of ways of doing that, e.g. writing a video driver that streams the output to disk, writing a sound driver that streams the sound to disk, disassembling the application and modifying it to copy the data.
The difference, is PGP is trying to keep the data secret from people who don't have the keys, the DRM is trying to keep the data secret from people who do have the keys.
So I download a file that's encrypted, and you give me the private key over SSL. Yes, no one can intercept the private key when you give it to me.
Of course if I then choose to distribute the private key anyone anyone can decrypt the original file and play it themselves. As soon as one person breaks the client app to save the private keys, the whole DRM scheme is broken.
Your basic consumer rights in the UK (possibly not Scotland..).
Sale of Goods Act 1977
The goods or service must work. If they do not work you are entitled to a refund or repair - your choice. If the merchant decides to refund you they are responsible for collecting the goods, if they decide to repair they are responsible for collecting the faulty goods. You are required to make the goods available for collection.
Consumer Credit Act 1974
Your credit card company holds joint liability with the merchant for any transaction you make. If you wish to take a claim to the court for a refund you can take the credit card company instead of the merchant.
Almost all credit card companies respond to this by giving you an instant refund and waiting for the merchant to prove to them that they have an absolutely cast iron case and they will win.
Distance Selling Act 2000
If you purchase a good where you are not able to view it first, you have seven days to reject the good. If you decide to reject the good you have to pay the shipping cost to return it to the vendor. They must give you a full refund for the goods, but do not have to refund the shipping costs.
Data Protection Act 1996
For a maximum of ten pounds a company must give you all personally identifiable records it holds on you.
In general the correct phrasing with customer service people is when they refer you to their terms and conditions you always refer to the bit that 'you statutory rights are not affected'. If they do not have a paragraph that states this, you ask them to confirm that your statutory rights are not affected. If they believe your statutory rights are affected, trading standards will get very very excited with them.
"$7 a gallon gas will absolutely destroy the economic well-being of the lower and lower-middle class workers in our society, but upper-middle and upper class workers will continue to drive the same as they did before."
As I said a couple of days ago, the price of petrol in the pump in the UK is currently $6.89 / US Gallon. We pay about the same per mile (17c or thereabouts).
Tony Blair? Illegal Backhander from an IT company?
Sounds unlikely to me, I mean his good friend Rod Aldridge who was until very recently the Chairman of Capita - a leader in government IT outsourcing - lent his party £1million on purely commercial terms.
The fact that the chancellor (and potential future PM) didn't know, the appalling record Capita have of completing any part of a government project other than the invoice, that Capita receive half their income from government contracts (£700million out of £1.4 billion) and that Rod is a government advisor on out-sourcing are all completely unrelated.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that you allege bribery here. That loan was purely commercial and it would be deeply libellous to suggest anything else.
The UK: Unemployment in the double digits over most of the past 20 years.
It's true that more than ten people have been unemployed over most of the past 20 years. Assuming you mean percentage of workforce, the pretty graph on page 25 of this pdf, may enlighten you.
It shows unemployment peaking in 1986 at just over 10%, dropping to nearly 5% in the later 80s, back to 10% in the early 90s and now down at 4%. A more accurate statement might have been,
The UK: Unemployment in the double digits in three of the past 20 years.
Over a period of seven weeks, of the people searched under suspicion of being a terrorist six people were arrested for *drug* related offences, one for breach of the peace and one for criminal damage.
You'll note the lack of terrorism related activity there.
Fortunately, our now ex-home secretary, confirmed that there has been no abuse of the law.
"The Terrorism Act 2000 is not being applied in the prevention of protests at RAF Fairford. Powers under this legislation are applied solely for the prevention and investigation of acts of terrorism."
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2003-05-13.111793.h&s=fairford+terrorism#g111793.q0 "We do not comment on operational counter-terrorist measures, but the Chief Constable, Gloucestershire Constabulary, has informed me that powers of stop and search under the Terrorism Act were used, for the purpose of searching for articles of a kind that could be used in connection with terrorism."
"Lawful protests were not prevented at RAF Fairford during the recent conflict in Iraq as a result of use of the Terrorism Act 2000.
The use of the stop and search powers under section 44 was authorised and confirmed according to statutory procedure for a designated area which included Fairford. They were therefore available to officers during the policing of the protests. Such powers are confirmed solely to enable officers to search for articles that could be used in connection with terrorism."
Just for no UK citizens who aren't up to date on UK politics, David Blunkett is our ex-home secretary, who was sacked from the cabinet for fast tracking passpo
Well, according to the Misco catalogue I received this morning MS Office standard costs £300. At my local computer shop, RAM costs £75/GB, so I could have 4GB of RAM for my machine.
On a price performance comparison MS Office uses 7MB and OO.org uses -3960MB.
Slashdot Mirror
Adventures in an iTunes nation
As a Linux geek up to now I've always done digital music with a collection of hacked together scripts. After I was given an iPod I thought I'd try using with Windows + iTunes to see what the fuss was about. Apparently there are executives who think that excluding the 100 million+ iPod owners from playing their CDs will improve sales, and they're in charge of record companies.
http://www.mythic-beasts.com/
:-)
A page that got slashdotted
http://roughly.beasts.org/
Our account of being slashdotted
http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/20040911-more_introspective_nonsense.html
Another page that got slashdotted.
http://ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html
That's all on our shared hosting server cluster. A Mac Mini will hold up fine too.
We're no stranger to being slashdotted
Smart appliances are smart regarding their energy consumption.
Suppose you had a smart fridge that could read data from the power socket about the availability of power. A signal arrives that indicates a glut of power (it's got windy and the wind farms output has shot up). The spot price of electricity falls and your fridge switches on the compressor and cools the inside to 1C down from it's normal 4-5C. The temperature gets as low as 2C inside the fridge when a new signal arrives - there's a power shortage, the wind has stopped blowing and the nuclear plant down the road has shut down unexpectedly.
Scale this up to country-wide levels. The UK has 25 million households. With a fridge and a freezer each @ 300W each, that's 7.5GW of electricity consumption that can be switched off for hours at a time if there's a shortage of electricity. Add on all the commerical cold storage, all the datacentres & hospitals that can use diesel and drop off the grid if there's a shortage of electricity and a bit of pumped storage and you're quickly going to get to 10GW of the 50GW in use in the UK. If you can switch off 1/5th of the grids demand automatically suddenly unreliable wind power & solar power stops looking so problematic to use. Start bringing in massive amounts of battery storage in the form of electric cars and renewable 'unreliable' power sources really start making sense.
The beneficiaries of this are the environment, the power companies, the smart device manufacturers and eventually your wallet.
I believe that fridges and freezers consume ~ 5% of the national grid in the UK. You can over chill a fridge or freezer, and then switch it off for some hours, meaning that if the power company could control your fridge directly they could shut off 5% of the grid at peak usage time, and effectively store the output of turbines as cold in the fridge or freezer. It's not long term storage, but it'd cover a few hours.
It's a big IF though.
Ooh look, I found one.
http://www.askwebhosting.com/special/841/UK_London_datacentres_transit_from_%C2%A37_per_mbit!.html
£7000/month. Probably more on a 1 month contract, but it ain't going to be that much more.
Try a London data centre on LINX, or Amsterdam on AMSIX. A 10GE port into LINX costs £1850/month and if fully peered provides about half the internet routing table. Given all the major datacentres in London host hundreds of ISPs it can't be that hard to find one with a gigabit spare lying around.
We colo AppleTVs. Why? 1Ghz Core Solo, 18W. We also do Mac Minis. Why? 2x2Ghz Core 2 Duo, 40W. Let's put 125 Mac Minis, up against the IBM mainframe and see who's faster.
http://www.mythic-beasts.com/appletvdedicated.html
It's pretty much one click on the N95 from take to flickr. Bearing in mind that Nokia is the worlds largest camera manufacturer, it's not impossible that the market it going to shift at an utterly astonishing rate.
Most people don't buy SLRs, they buy point and shoot cameras, and Nokia's upping thier play in the market to have a reasonable point and shoot directly linked to flickr.
As an N95 owner, it's worth a great deal to have a reasonable point and shoot camera, combined with my phone and GPS. Download on demand mapping is fantastic.
I can't see any costs on the site so I don't understand how you can possible make an assertion about this being cheaper.
An amorphous silicon cell is typically 6-8% efficient, lots of commercially available cells are 14-16% efficient - more efficient than this scheme can possibly be.
I respectfully refer you to Homer Simpson, 'In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics'.
Assuming a hot temperature of 70C (black plate in strong sunshine) and a cold temperature of 20C, the theoretical efficiency limit is (343-293) / 343 or 14.6% - assuming a perfectly efficient generator and a very large capacity foe the 85% waste heat capacity.
At night, it's going to be more like 30C -> 0C which is down at 9.9% efficiency.
Even cheap solar cells do better than that, you'd be better off just buying solar cells.
Did you advise McDonalds before the McLibel trial.
The following statements are true (1997, 1999, McDonalds vs Helen Steel and David Morris
McDonalds endangers the heath of their workers and customers by misleading advertising, they exploit children, the inflict unnecessary cruelty to animals, they pay their works low wages and they are antipathetic to unionisation.
This cost McDonalds approximately 10 million pounds to prove.
It was found on appeal that McDonalds abused Scotland Yard to illegally gather police information, and that McDonalds food was a cause of heart disease.
Can you explain how this situation would work out.
A colleague of mine started work for us, got pregnant very early on and left after ten months to go on maternity leave. Difficult labour and eventually gave birth via C-section.
This is in the UK so it's all on the NHS and paid for by the taxpayer, the company don't provide private health insurance.
What would happen in the US - presumably the company would have some form of health insurance, but she wouldn't be covered so they'd just let her die? I'd really like to know how it would work. She's young in and wouldn't be able to afford to pay for the operation herself.
No.
With PGP, I supply it with the key and the cipher text, it gives me the decrypted data.
In the DRM example, I provide the application with a key and the cipher text, the application then shows me the content but refuses to give me the decrypted data.
In the PGP case I can't break the app - it does everything I ask of it anyway.
In the DRM example, all I have to do is persuade the application to return me the decrypted data and there are lots of ways of doing that, e.g. writing a video driver that streams the output to disk, writing a sound driver that streams the sound to disk, disassembling the application and modifying it to copy the data.
The difference, is PGP is trying to keep the data secret from people who don't have the keys, the DRM is trying to keep the data secret from people who do have the keys.
So I download a file that's encrypted, and you give me the private key over SSL. Yes, no one can intercept the private key when you give it to me.
Of course if I then choose to distribute the private key anyone anyone can decrypt the original file and play it themselves. As soon as one person breaks the client app to save the private keys, the whole DRM scheme is broken.
DRM and SSL encryption are completely different things.
SSL encryption is to allow A to send data to B without C being able to copy it.
DRM is to let A to send data to B without B being able to copy it.
Except that *by definition* B has to be able to read it. If he can read it, he can copy it.
Your basic consumer rights in the UK (possibly not Scotland..).
Sale of Goods Act 1977
The goods or service must work. If they do not work you are entitled to a refund or repair - your choice. If the merchant decides to refund you they are responsible for collecting the goods, if they decide to repair they are responsible for collecting the faulty goods. You are required to make the goods available for collection.
Consumer Credit Act 1974
Your credit card company holds joint liability with the merchant for any transaction you make. If you wish to take a claim to the court for a refund you can take the credit card company instead of the merchant.
Almost all credit card companies respond to this by giving you an instant refund and waiting for the merchant to prove to them that they have an absolutely cast iron case and they will win.
Distance Selling Act 2000
If you purchase a good where you are not able to view it first, you have seven days to reject the good. If you decide to reject the good you have to pay the shipping cost to return it to the vendor. They must give you a full refund for the goods, but do not have to refund the shipping costs.
Data Protection Act 1996
For a maximum of ten pounds a company must give you all personally identifiable records it holds on you.
In general the correct phrasing with customer service people is when they refer you to their terms and conditions you always refer to the bit that 'you statutory rights are not affected'. If they do not have a paragraph that states this, you ask them to confirm that your statutory rights are not affected. If they believe your statutory rights are affected, trading standards will get very very excited with them.
"$7 a gallon gas will absolutely destroy the economic well-being of the lower and lower-middle class workers in our society, but upper-middle and upper class workers will continue to drive the same as they did before."
As I said a couple of days ago, the price of petrol in the pump in the UK is currently $6.89 / US Gallon. We pay about the same per mile (17c or thereabouts).
For reference, I'm in the UK, petrol currently costs 97.8p /litre at the pump.
That's, £3.70 per US gallon, or $6.89 at the current exchange rate.
I regularly hire cars, having measured the mileage on them they've all done over 10 miles to the litre, that's about 40miles / US gallon.
The idea that 20-30mpg is a fuel efficient vehicle is (to me) laughable.
Google should just raise the stakes.
Pay Google $100/Mbit/month or they cut off all the cable customers from all Google services.
If they join up with Yahoo, Microsoft (Hotmail,MSN), AOL (AIM) then they could cut off almost all webmail, search and IM from all cable customers.
Tony Blair? Illegal Backhander from an IT company?
m
Sounds unlikely to me, I mean his good friend Rod Aldridge who was until very recently the Chairman of Capita - a leader in government IT outsourcing - lent his party £1million on purely commercial terms.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4841748.st
The fact that the chancellor (and potential future PM) didn't know, the appalling record Capita have of completing any part of a government project other than the invoice, that Capita receive half their income from government contracts (£700million out of £1.4 billion) and that Rod is a government advisor on out-sourcing are all completely unrelated.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that you allege bribery here. That loan was purely commercial and it would be deeply libellous to suggest anything else.
It's true that more than ten people have been unemployed over most of the past 20 years. Assuming you mean percentage of workforce, the pretty graph on page 25 of this pdf, may enlighten you.
http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp9
It shows unemployment peaking in 1986 at just over 10%, dropping to nearly 5% in the later 80s, back to 10% in the early 90s and now down at 4%. A more accurate statement might have been,
The most positive numbers are here, 895 arrests, 138 charges under the terrorism act.
.205366.h&s=search+terrorism+section#g205366.r0
.199416.h&s=fairford+terrorism#g199416.q0
.139088.h&s=fairford+terrorism#g139088.q0
.183826.h&s=raf+fairford#g183826.q0
.103483.h&s=fairford+terrorism#g103483.q0
.111793.h&s=fairford+terrorism#g111793.q0
.130339.h&s=fairford+terrorism#g130339.q0
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/security/terrorism-an d-the-law/terrorism-act/
Now, that's not too bad, what's more worring is the stop-and-search misuse, 2003-2004
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2004-12-21
Roughly, 33000 searches under the terrorism act *that year* leading to 373 arrests.
More worryingly, the record against protestors at the american nuclear air base.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2004-12-13
2254 stop-searches were conducted.
How many people were charged and prosecuted?
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2003-11-20
"I will write to my hon. Friend and place a copy of my letter in the Library.", translation "There's no chance I want the public to know."
Fortunately this question gets asked every few months, and once the government made the mistake of answering it.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2004-09-01
Over a period of seven weeks, of the people searched under suspicion of being a terrorist six people were arrested for *drug* related offences, one for breach of the peace and one for criminal damage.
You'll note the lack of terrorism related activity there.
Fortunately, our now ex-home secretary, confirmed that there has been no abuse of the law.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2003-03-21
"The Terrorism Act 2000 is not being applied in the prevention of protests at RAF Fairford. Powers under this legislation are applied solely for the prevention and investigation of acts of terrorism."
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2003-05-13
"We do not comment on operational counter-terrorist measures, but the Chief Constable, Gloucestershire Constabulary, has informed me that powers of stop and search under the Terrorism Act were used, for the purpose of searching for articles of a kind that could be used in connection with terrorism."
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2003-10-06
"Lawful protests were not prevented at RAF Fairford during the recent conflict in Iraq as a result of use of the Terrorism Act 2000.
The use of the stop and search powers under section 44 was authorised and confirmed according to statutory procedure for a designated area which included Fairford. They were therefore available to officers during the policing of the protests. Such powers are confirmed solely to enable officers to search for articles that could be used in connection with terrorism."
Just for no UK citizens who aren't up to date on UK politics, David Blunkett is our ex-home secretary, who was sacked from the cabinet for fast tracking passpo
Well, according to the Misco catalogue I received this morning MS Office standard costs £300.
At my local computer shop, RAM costs £75/GB, so I could have 4GB of RAM for my machine.
On a price performance comparison MS Office uses 7MB and OO.org uses -3960MB.
How about developing an application for end users that runs on IIS6 and IIS5 and IIS7 and before releasing it wanting to test it?
Innocent man herby defined as man who waited up in order to shoot a fleeing criminal in the back.
I guess there's a reason in the US that the postman doesn't walk up the drive.