Virgin have a long history of announcing big splashy projects that never come to pass. Tom Bower's "Branson : the man behind the mask" reveals a lot of the detail about how they operate.
The most egregious example is Virgin Galactic. Branson soaked a ton of public money (another common feature of Virgin projects - someone else is always footing the bill, and more often than not they're taxpayers) and has regularly promised that space travel would be open soon to fare-paying passengers, yet has consistently failed to deliver.
He's made other claims, such as this one about working on an electric car which we can be sure is almost certainly rubbish as Virgin haven't a clue about carmaking or manufacturing in general, much less the capital to even try. Or the claim made about reduced-carbon jet fuel. You'll note a typical pattern - it's claimed to work and pass all the tests, yet mysteriously nobody appears to be buying it, and when you google it the only thing you can find are the usual smattering of breathless press releases.
The pattern here is familiar. Outside investors have been sucked in and Branson is already claiming that it is in the "early stages of commercialisation". I'll bet a bottle of Virgin premium vodka that within 12 months the press attention here is the last we'll hear of this project, and within 12-18 months it will quietly disappear.
The oldest CD in my collection was manufactured around 1990.
when I extract it in the computer and checksum it using "accuraterip" the audio is 100%, bit-for-bit, perfect. The CD returns the exact same signal that it did 25 years ago. I'm confident that in 25 years time, if someone wanted to play it, it would still be bit-for-bit perfect.
An LP cannot do that. Each time you play it, the sound gets worse. Scratches, tics, pops all get added. Dust ends up in the grooves which you simply can't completely remove.
So while I get that people prefer the sound of an LP, let's not pretend that this is about audio quality or reproduction, or about longevity. It's about adding artificial - analogue - effects on top of the work originally created by the artist.
Setting aside from the fact that even from brand new a vinyl LP will add pops, ticks, surface noise and other distortion to the sound.... you can't assume that when you are listening to a vinyl LP that you are not listening to a digital master. This recent uptick in the production of vinyl LPs appears to me to be largely opportunistic, and I'd guess a lot of the LPs are simply the original digital master, with all the clipping/loudness/etc, are remixed to create the cutting master used to create the LPs.
"Californication" is an exception in terms of albums from that era in that it was recorded and mixed on analogue tape. If the vinyl is cut from that master, then you are fine (excepting the limitations inherent to LPs). If the vinyl is cut from the next-generation digital master tape used to press the CDs, you've been fooled by hipster exhuberance.
I don't think the gauge is as big a deal as people are making out (not to gainsay the experts.. )
In Ireland we have a non-standard gauge. All the locomotives, rolling stock and track maintenance equipment are all standard designs which have been modified to fit the required gauge. It's certainly more of a pain than it would be if we had standard gauge, but acquiring new rolling stock, as has been done a lot recently, hasn't proved to be a problem at all. Up until recent years when Ireland could afford to buy new rolling stock brand new, the railway company acquired new railway carriages by obtaining used British carriages and modifying the wheelsets in their own workshops. If Ireland - not by any means an industrial powerhouse - can do this, it surely shouldn't be beyond the gift of folks in California..
I think it's the 1000VDC electrics that are the real problem. To solve this long term they'd have to deploy a second power distribution system - maybe an additional power rail, set up in such a way not to interfere with existing stock. It'd then be a case of either phasing out or retrofitting the existing stock while deploying new stock. The London and New York systems both run at around half of this voltage, the Paris system at 750VDC which is three-quarters.
I'm sure the clever people at BART have thought of all this. At the end of the day the problem really comes down to money.
How would a modern pressurized water reactor cope with a loss of coolant ?
The problems at Fukushima occurred when the external pumps which maintained coolant flow - required to cool the reactor for several days even after it has been completely shut down - failed due to water ingress. Isn't a PWR susceptible to the same problem ?
I certainly agree that modern PWRs, and other designs such as CANDU, are very safe in the sense that it is impossible for operator error to cause a runaway reaction. However, if a Fukushima-like incident which overwhelms all your backup plans occurs, you're still in trouble..
That's not a fair characterisation. I tested an upgrade of ZFS; it could do live, in place upgrades just fine. So you could swap out a RAID array of disks just by switching each disk and waiting for the rebuild. Of course it is an enterprise FS, and intended for people who'd rather add a new shelf of disks than run the risk of downtime.
ZFS never made any secret of the fact that it was designed to use lots of (cheap) RAM and an SSD backend to get consistent performance.
Sure. BTRFS is, arguably, a disappointment. It has a lot of the features of ZFS, but it doesn't seem to be anything like as user friendly or logical. When I played with it for the first time about a year ago, I found no out-of-the-box automated snapshot features, and had to install a package to handle this, which didn't seem to work reliably. It's also an enormous missed opportunity that BTRFS doesn't have the ability to natively do RAID-6, or the ability to use an SSD as a fast block cache in front of standard HDDs. ZFS has done all of this for many years now.
I'm sure someone will reply with details of how to do these things. But with ZFS it was obvious and I didn't need to spend a lot of time googling.
That said, there's nothing that says that ZFS on Linux is automatically stable either. It's been necessary to extensively modify it in order to make it work. Running either of these two filesystems in production on Linux would be a risky proposition. It's no wonder the major enterprise vendors haven't switched to use them yet.
Unfortunately at the moment it looks like the short term future of filesystems on Linux is based around XFS. Longer term, bcachefs looks interesting.
Battery research is far more important than building smaller phones and tablets. Increased energy storage density has important implications for household and grid storage, and electric-powered transport.
The problem is that there have been at least a dozen or so stories about new battery tech in the past 12 months. Some of them remind you of the old joke about nuclear fusion; it's always 20 years away. Enough crying wolf; wake me when I can buy one.
No it didn't, as the article linked shows. The Government (via the Intellectual Property Office) issued guidance.
After the legislation passed, several groups of rightsholders applied for a judicial review, arguing that the change would cause financial harm to them.
FYI - legislation in the UK cannot be overturned by a court.
The Amiga was not only first, it was still the only multitasking OS on the desktop in 1990. Windows didn't support co-operative multitasking until Windows 95 came out, and if I'm right neither did the Mac.
Google and Backblaze are not typical enterprise deployments. Each company has built what is effectively an entirely in-house proprietary SAN with a large dedicated team to maintain it. Regular enterprises, ie people who are not in the storage business, cannot do this.
FYI 15000RPM SAS drives will provide significantly more IOPs per disk than 7200RPM SATA drives. Depending on the application, that may be important. The firmware on SAS drives also tends to be tuned for heavily random workloads, and for operation within a RAID array. Cheaper SATA drives come with a shorter warranty and conditions on how frequently they are in active use. Outside of these, yes the drives are essentially the same.
I suspect SSDs will eliminate most of the remaining business case for deploying SAS drives in the near future as the cost per gigabyte continues to fall.
it's probably as much, or more, to do with the fact that electric cars require less energy to travel the same distance.
I worked out a while ago that a standard petrol car needs about 1.3kWh/mile, based on the energy content of petrol (gasoline) and a typical gas mileage of around 33mpg. A Nissan Leaf, on the other hand, expends about 0.25kWh/mile. The Tesla Model S is a bit more energy hungry, but it is also a much larger and heavier car with more toys typically installed.
This is before you price in the other consumables that petrol cars have in terms of servicing - oil, oil filters, fuel filters, air cleaner filters, spark plugs and time for a mechanic to deal with each.
On the other hand electric cars have the issue of the battery deteriorating over time.
The difference between the 60kWh and 85kWh Tesla Model S cash price is $10,000 or $400/kWh so I'm not sure about the article's conclusion that the battery costs $300/kWh.
The Nissan Leaf's battery is closer to $300/kWh (based on comparing the price of a Leaf with the Flex option in the UK, where you buy the car and lease the battery separately); but there appear to be various anecdotal concerns about the Leaf's battery longevity. Tesla's design includes an active battery cooling system, whereas the Leaf seems to be passively cooled, and this is leading to the battery capacity on a full charge dropping rather faster than would be expected over time.
Despite this I think the conclusions are right - Li-Ion battery can only continue to improve, and if any of the several proposed methods of improving the technology are made to work they will get considerably cheaper soon. I think electric cars are here to stay, and it's a good thing.
I went for a quick look into this. Wikipedia reveals that Virgin Australia is owned by Virgin Australia Holdings, which in turn is owned by a consortium consisting of a number of other airlines (Ethiad, Singapore, Air New Zealand), plus Branson's Virgin Group with a 10% holding.
Virgin Mobile in Australia, much like the Virgin broadband/phone/TV operation in the UK, is no longer anything to do with Branson - he sold it to Optus in 2006 and that company is currently wholly owned by Singtel. In the UK, Virgin Media is owned by Liberty Global.
This reveals how, these days, Branson really does business. Virgin is basically nothing other than a brand. It's a respected brand - funky, hip, cool, relaxed, and so on. But that's all it is. Branson isn't really an entrepreneur. The way I think it works is that people with a business idea approach him, put up their own capital, and ask for the use of his brand and his personal involvement as a promoter. In exchange he receives a generous shareholding of the new company - which, if the company is successful, he later sells. If it fails, those who put up the capital are left carrying the can.
The vast majority of Branson's business ventures have been failures. The places where he does well are in monopolies, such as international airline travel and running monopolized train services in the UK (Branson tried to run a regional airline in the UK called Little Red, but failed). Even then these are on shaky ground; Virgin Atlantic has only just begun to return to profitability, probably something to do with Delta taking a 49% stake in the airline over from Singapore Airlines, and he nearly lost his rail franchise, until his lobbying efforts revealed that the UK government had made mistakes in the allocation of the contracts.
The only reason why Virgin Galactic even exists is because the state of New Mexico ponied up massive subsidies (thanks to Bill Richardson) to build the thing there. Branson never risks his own capital on long shots. He's only involved because this is a way to create publicity for his brand. Likewise his Formula 1 efforts, and likewise this nonsensical idea that he has people building an electric car.
Branson is all showmanship and no substance. He wants people to think he is some sort of environmental activist as he believes it will benefit him and his company. You'll see - we'll never see or hear of any Virgin-manufactured electric car ever again.
Hats off to the guy - he's made himself a lot of money (nobody knows how much, though) - but excepting his long-past days in the recording business, he guy has never delivered a manufactured product in his life, and never will.
Being forced to open-source their largest software project is a quite conceivable (even if unlikely) outcome.
It's neither conceivable nor likely. VMware includes a lot of very, very clever technology. (I note in VMware ESXi 6 that they can now do fault tolerance with 4-way SMP. FT, for those who aren't aware, means that two physical servers between them can keep a VM continuously available even if one server fails.
It sounds to me as if VMware are prepared to contest the matter, which comes down to whether or not a court will accept that VMware have complied with the terms of the license.
The most likely outcome is that they will settle out of court. That will, most likely, involve an agreement to pay the litigant's legal costs, and some sort of time-bounded agreement to modify their software in such a way that it no longer breaches the GPL.
Rossi's time in prison was due to uncleared allegations of tax fraud and toxic waste mishandling [wikipedia.org], which even if true would have little to do with this story
He served time for them so they probably are true; and yes, this has everything to do with the story. This man lied to the government about his tax liability, and apparently lied to everyone with a false claim to convert toxic waste into oil.
Occam's razor sometimes shows that the seemingly improbable is actually the most likely explanation.
LOL. No it doesn't.
Occam's razor says (as a very basic summary) that in the absence of evidence or specific information, the proposal that requires the least assumptions is probably correct. Or, more conversationally, that in the absence of any better ideas, the simplest guess is probably the truth. The simplest guess here is that the guy is a fraud. The non-simple guess is that the guy is not a fraud and that our understanding of matter and energy to date (which is based on a huge body of actual scientific measurement and observation) is all wrong.
I think you are confusing this with Spock/Sherlock Holmes say that when all the impossible proposals are eliminated, the one remaining, however impossible, must be the truth. That's a good maxim to live by; the problem is that we haven't eliminated the possibility that the guy is a fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
Virgin have a long history of announcing big splashy projects that never come to pass. Tom Bower's "Branson : the man behind the mask" reveals a lot of the detail about how they operate.
The most egregious example is Virgin Galactic. Branson soaked a ton of public money (another common feature of Virgin projects - someone else is always footing the bill, and more often than not they're taxpayers) and has regularly promised that space travel would be open soon to fare-paying passengers, yet has consistently failed to deliver.
He's made other claims, such as this one about working on an electric car which we can be sure is almost certainly rubbish as Virgin haven't a clue about carmaking or manufacturing in general, much less the capital to even try. Or the claim made about reduced-carbon jet fuel. You'll note a typical pattern - it's claimed to work and pass all the tests, yet mysteriously nobody appears to be buying it, and when you google it the only thing you can find are the usual smattering of breathless press releases.
The pattern here is familiar. Outside investors have been sucked in and Branson is already claiming that it is in the "early stages of commercialisation". I'll bet a bottle of Virgin premium vodka that within 12 months the press attention here is the last we'll hear of this project, and within 12-18 months it will quietly disappear.
perhaps ?
When was TPP signed ?
The oldest CD in my collection was manufactured around 1990.
when I extract it in the computer and checksum it using "accuraterip" the audio is 100%, bit-for-bit, perfect. The CD returns the exact same signal that it did 25 years ago. I'm confident that in 25 years time, if someone wanted to play it, it would still be bit-for-bit perfect.
An LP cannot do that. Each time you play it, the sound gets worse. Scratches, tics, pops all get added. Dust ends up in the grooves which you simply can't completely remove.
So while I get that people prefer the sound of an LP, let's not pretend that this is about audio quality or reproduction, or about longevity. It's about adding artificial - analogue - effects on top of the work originally created by the artist.
Setting aside from the fact that even from brand new a vinyl LP will add pops, ticks, surface noise and other distortion to the sound .. .. you can't assume that when you are listening to a vinyl LP that you are not listening to a digital master. This recent uptick in the production of vinyl LPs appears to me to be largely opportunistic, and I'd guess a lot of the LPs are simply the original digital master, with all the clipping/loudness/etc, are remixed to create the cutting master used to create the LPs.
"Californication" is an exception in terms of albums from that era in that it was recorded and mixed on analogue tape. If the vinyl is cut from that master, then you are fine (excepting the limitations inherent to LPs). If the vinyl is cut from the next-generation digital master tape used to press the CDs, you've been fooled by hipster exhuberance.
I don't think the gauge is as big a deal as people are making out (not to gainsay the experts .. )
In Ireland we have a non-standard gauge. All the locomotives, rolling stock and track maintenance equipment are all standard designs which have been modified to fit the required gauge. It's certainly more of a pain than it would be if we had standard gauge, but acquiring new rolling stock, as has been done a lot recently, hasn't proved to be a problem at all. Up until recent years when Ireland could afford to buy new rolling stock brand new, the railway company acquired new railway carriages by obtaining used British carriages and modifying the wheelsets in their own workshops. If Ireland - not by any means an industrial powerhouse - can do this, it surely shouldn't be beyond the gift of folks in California ..
I think it's the 1000VDC electrics that are the real problem. To solve this long term they'd have to deploy a second power distribution system - maybe an additional power rail, set up in such a way not to interfere with existing stock. It'd then be a case of either phasing out or retrofitting the existing stock while deploying new stock. The London and New York systems both run at around half of this voltage, the Paris system at 750VDC which is three-quarters.
I'm sure the clever people at BART have thought of all this. At the end of the day the problem really comes down to money.
How would a modern pressurized water reactor cope with a loss of coolant ?
The problems at Fukushima occurred when the external pumps which maintained coolant flow - required to cool the reactor for several days even after it has been completely shut down - failed due to water ingress. Isn't a PWR susceptible to the same problem ?
I certainly agree that modern PWRs, and other designs such as CANDU, are very safe in the sense that it is impossible for operator error to cause a runaway reaction. However, if a Fukushima-like incident which overwhelms all your backup plans occurs, you're still in trouble ..
Another day, another "breakthrough in energy storage tech" vapourware article.
That's not a fair characterisation. I tested an upgrade of ZFS; it could do live, in place upgrades just fine. So you could swap out a RAID array of disks just by switching each disk and waiting for the rebuild. Of course it is an enterprise FS, and intended for people who'd rather add a new shelf of disks than run the risk of downtime.
ZFS never made any secret of the fact that it was designed to use lots of (cheap) RAM and an SSD backend to get consistent performance.
Sure. BTRFS is, arguably, a disappointment. It has a lot of the features of ZFS, but it doesn't seem to be anything like as user friendly or logical. When I played with it for the first time about a year ago, I found no out-of-the-box automated snapshot features, and had to install a package to handle this, which didn't seem to work reliably. It's also an enormous missed opportunity that BTRFS doesn't have the ability to natively do RAID-6, or the ability to use an SSD as a fast block cache in front of standard HDDs. ZFS has done all of this for many years now.
I'm sure someone will reply with details of how to do these things. But with ZFS it was obvious and I didn't need to spend a lot of time googling.
That said, there's nothing that says that ZFS on Linux is automatically stable either. It's been necessary to extensively modify it in order to make it work. Running either of these two filesystems in production on Linux would be a risky proposition. It's no wonder the major enterprise vendors haven't switched to use them yet.
Unfortunately at the moment it looks like the short term future of filesystems on Linux is based around XFS. Longer term, bcachefs looks interesting.
Battery research is far more important than building smaller phones and tablets. Increased energy storage density has important implications for household and grid storage, and electric-powered transport.
The problem is that there have been at least a dozen or so stories about new battery tech in the past 12 months. Some of them remind you of the old joke about nuclear fusion; it's always 20 years away. Enough crying wolf; wake me when I can buy one.
Last year the UK finally passed legislation
No it didn't, as the article linked shows. The Government (via the Intellectual Property Office) issued guidance.
After the legislation passed, several groups of rightsholders applied for a judicial review, arguing that the change would cause financial harm to them.
FYI - legislation in the UK cannot be overturned by a court.
The Amiga was not only first, it was still the only multitasking OS on the desktop in 1990. Windows didn't support co-operative multitasking until Windows 95 came out, and if I'm right neither did the Mac.
Google and Backblaze are not typical enterprise deployments. Each company has built what is effectively an entirely in-house proprietary SAN with a large dedicated team to maintain it. Regular enterprises, ie people who are not in the storage business, cannot do this.
FYI 15000RPM SAS drives will provide significantly more IOPs per disk than 7200RPM SATA drives. Depending on the application, that may be important. The firmware on SAS drives also tends to be tuned for heavily random workloads, and for operation within a RAID array. Cheaper SATA drives come with a shorter warranty and conditions on how frequently they are in active use. Outside of these, yes the drives are essentially the same.
I suspect SSDs will eliminate most of the remaining business case for deploying SAS drives in the near future as the cost per gigabyte continues to fall.
I understand that the standard motor is replaced with a smaller one on the AWD P85, but I take your point.
it's probably as much, or more, to do with the fact that electric cars require less energy to travel the same distance.
I worked out a while ago that a standard petrol car needs about 1.3kWh/mile, based on the energy content of petrol (gasoline) and a typical gas mileage of around 33mpg. A Nissan Leaf, on the other hand, expends about 0.25kWh/mile. The Tesla Model S is a bit more energy hungry, but it is also a much larger and heavier car with more toys typically installed.
This is before you price in the other consumables that petrol cars have in terms of servicing - oil, oil filters, fuel filters, air cleaner filters, spark plugs and time for a mechanic to deal with each.
On the other hand electric cars have the issue of the battery deteriorating over time.
The difference between the 60kWh and 85kWh Tesla Model S cash price is $10,000 or $400/kWh so I'm not sure about the article's conclusion that the battery costs $300/kWh.
The Nissan Leaf's battery is closer to $300/kWh (based on comparing the price of a Leaf with the Flex option in the UK, where you buy the car and lease the battery separately); but there appear to be various anecdotal concerns about the Leaf's battery longevity. Tesla's design includes an active battery cooling system, whereas the Leaf seems to be passively cooled, and this is leading to the battery capacity on a full charge dropping rather faster than would be expected over time.
Despite this I think the conclusions are right - Li-Ion battery can only continue to improve, and if any of the several proposed methods of improving the technology are made to work they will get considerably cheaper soon. I think electric cars are here to stay, and it's a good thing.
I went for a quick look into this. Wikipedia reveals that Virgin Australia is owned by Virgin Australia Holdings, which in turn is owned by a consortium consisting of a number of other airlines (Ethiad, Singapore, Air New Zealand), plus Branson's Virgin Group with a 10% holding.
Virgin Mobile in Australia, much like the Virgin broadband/phone/TV operation in the UK, is no longer anything to do with Branson - he sold it to Optus in 2006 and that company is currently wholly owned by Singtel. In the UK, Virgin Media is owned by Liberty Global.
This reveals how, these days, Branson really does business. Virgin is basically nothing other than a brand. It's a respected brand - funky, hip, cool, relaxed, and so on. But that's all it is. Branson isn't really an entrepreneur. The way I think it works is that people with a business idea approach him, put up their own capital, and ask for the use of his brand and his personal involvement as a promoter. In exchange he receives a generous shareholding of the new company - which, if the company is successful, he later sells. If it fails, those who put up the capital are left carrying the can.
And Branson will lose any such competition.
The vast majority of Branson's business ventures have been failures. The places where he does well are in monopolies, such as international airline travel and running monopolized train services in the UK (Branson tried to run a regional airline in the UK called Little Red, but failed). Even then these are on shaky ground; Virgin Atlantic has only just begun to return to profitability, probably something to do with Delta taking a 49% stake in the airline over from Singapore Airlines, and he nearly lost his rail franchise, until his lobbying efforts revealed that the UK government had made mistakes in the allocation of the contracts.
The only reason why Virgin Galactic even exists is because the state of New Mexico ponied up massive subsidies (thanks to Bill Richardson) to build the thing there. Branson never risks his own capital on long shots. He's only involved because this is a way to create publicity for his brand. Likewise his Formula 1 efforts, and likewise this nonsensical idea that he has people building an electric car.
Branson is all showmanship and no substance. He wants people to think he is some sort of environmental activist as he believes it will benefit him and his company. You'll see - we'll never see or hear of any Virgin-manufactured electric car ever again.
Hats off to the guy - he's made himself a lot of money (nobody knows how much, though) - but excepting his long-past days in the recording business, he guy has never delivered a manufactured product in his life, and never will.
Being forced to open-source their largest software project is a quite conceivable (even if unlikely) outcome.
It's neither conceivable nor likely. VMware includes a lot of very, very clever technology. (I note in VMware ESXi 6 that they can now do fault tolerance with 4-way SMP. FT, for those who aren't aware, means that two physical servers between them can keep a VM continuously available even if one server fails.
It sounds to me as if VMware are prepared to contest the matter, which comes down to whether or not a court will accept that VMware have complied with the terms of the license.
The most likely outcome is that they will settle out of court. That will, most likely, involve an agreement to pay the litigant's legal costs, and some sort of time-bounded agreement to modify their software in such a way that it no longer breaches the GPL.
Like this.
Virgin is a wealthy company backed by a very wealthy man.
And, according to Tom Bower, $200m in subsidies from the state of New Mexico, courtesy of a starstruck Bill Richardson.
Branson's core businesses are built around operating monopolies and extracting subsidies from governments.
Rossi's time in prison was due to uncleared allegations of tax fraud and toxic waste mishandling [wikipedia.org], which even if true would have little to do with this story
He served time for them so they probably are true; and yes, this has everything to do with the story. This man lied to the government about his tax liability, and apparently lied to everyone with a false claim to convert toxic waste into oil.
Occam's razor sometimes shows that the seemingly improbable is actually the most likely explanation.
LOL. No it doesn't.
Occam's razor says (as a very basic summary) that in the absence of evidence or specific information, the proposal that requires the least assumptions is probably correct. Or, more conversationally, that in the absence of any better ideas, the simplest guess is probably the truth. The simplest guess here is that the guy is a fraud. The non-simple guess is that the guy is not a fraud and that our understanding of matter and energy to date (which is based on a huge body of actual scientific measurement and observation) is all wrong.
I think you are confusing this with Spock/Sherlock Holmes say that when all the impossible proposals are eliminated, the one remaining, however impossible, must be the truth. That's a good maxim to live by; the problem is that we haven't eliminated the possibility that the guy is a fraud.
I can't think of a single good technology that originated at Sun
ZFS, dtrace ?