So what they are saying is that anyone outside the US can freely hack US servers without a warrant too. Surely they don't expect special treatment?
However, if a US government employee who was somehow involved in cracking a foreign server visited that country, they would presumably still be subject to arrest and prosecution?
What about extradition? The US has extradited people from their homes after they cracked US servers so they might struggle to argue that US citizens shouldn't be extradited in similar circumstances. Or has "I was breaking the law as part of my job" suddenly become a valid defence?
And of course "somehow involved" doesn't necessarily mean they were the ones doing the actual cracking - anyone who knew about it and didn't blow the whistle or put a stop to it is surely still responsible. The constitution doesn't apply to non-US nationals, but there are international treaties that say the US has to respect the laws of other countries too.
It also has to safely escape on the launch pad and shortly afterward, the very problem the shuttle had. Boeing and Spacex have well defined and soon to be tested approaches to escape from launch accidents. I haven't seen how Sierra Nevada plans on solving this.
I believe they have onboard bipropellant rockets for both second-stage propulsion and abort.
I don't have any particular hard-on for SNC, although I do think that competition is good so having their craft as well as Dragon 2 and CST-100 would be good (especially since they are offering something quite different). However, I'm just taking a bit of an exception to superficial statements like "they should be disqualified because it looks like the shuttle" rather than actually giving a damn about the technical detail.
It looks a lot like a cross between the shuttle and the old project Dyna-Soar (I think that was a skunkworks project). Most who remember the TV show 6 million dollar man, that was footage of a DynaSoar's unsuccessful landing
Yep, rockets are hard - there are lots of examples of non-shuttle launch vehicles exploding and capsules reentering in non-survivable ways too. I don't see "it looks like the shuttle so it should be disqualified" as having a lot of merit - you could equally say that the Atlas V or Falcon 9 "look like" a Proton rocket, and therefore should be disqualified because Proton rockets have been known to explode at times. Or the CST-100, Dragon 2 and Orion capsules "look like" a Soyuz capsule and they have been known to fail so they should be disqualified too.
How about evaluating each craft on its technical merits rather than what it's appearance resembles?
My thoughts exactly, which is why I had added "Sierra Nevada's orbiter resembles a mini space shuttle. That alone (remember the problems with the tiles) should have been enough to disqualify them."
Sorry, but what's wrong with how it looks? Yes, it's a space plane, but its mode of operation is pretty different to the shuttle - for one thing it sits on top of the launch vehicle, which makes it a hell of a lot safer!
As for myself, I'll be happy once the world learns to build systems that don't break on the apostrophe in my last name. I still come across plenty of systems that don't, and every time I am tempted to go "Johnny Tables" on their ass.
I'm still waiting for computer systems that can handle my address, which has a y with a circumflex in it... I frequently get letters and packages arrive that has "ŷ" printed on the address label! (Yes, even big international websites like Amazon, SagePay, etc. are incapable of using a valid UTF-8 character... In fact ISTR SagePay's API only supports ISO8859.
I agree about the MOT btw, I find it a royal pain in the arse because it's not like the tax disc where you get a reminder and do it online
When I let mine lapse by accident, I was sorting out the MoT for my car when I thought "I don't remember doing the van this year... oh crap", checked and discovered that I had indeed not done the MoT for the van 6 months earlier.
IMHO an annual check is a good idea, no matter how many miles you do - things still corrode when sat on your drive. I find the tax disc annoying because it's tied to emissions and claimed to be a "green tax" to discourage people from having vehicles that do poor mileage, yet I still have to pay that (quite expensive) same amount each year for my van despite the fact it only does a few hundred miles a year - I don't have a big problem with "green taxes" but I think they should be proportional and I don't see how charging the same for a vehicle that does a few hundred miles a year as one that does tens of thousands of miles is proportional at all. I would prefer the annual tax to be abolished and a proportional rise in fuel duty so that the total tax revenue would be unaffected. Although I know that if they did abolish tax discs they would use it as an excuse to increase fuel duty disproportionately.
the 25,000 mile a year car frankly never passes it's MOT so probably isn't really technically roadworthy for a short while before it's MOT given that it's being driven around with those failures prior to the test, whilst the 3,000 mile a year one hasn't failed an MOT for about 5 years now and never needs anything doing to it so it shows what a farce the MOT system really is - it's highly inconvenient and doesn't solve the problem it's meant to solve, low mileage cars are getting penalised for the sake of it, and high mileage cars are driving around unsafe regardless.
Last MoT for my van (which, as mentioned, does a few hundred miles a year): new brake pads + discs (corroded discs - something that low mileage vehicles suffer from), insecure headlamp (a plastic clip had aged, gone brittle and snapped. Official replacement VW parts would have involved replacing the entire headlamp mount for about £80, so it has been replaced with a couple of stainless steel nuts, which cost pennies and will probably outlast the official plastic thing:)
In fact, everything my car has failed on in the past few years (which does significantly higher mileage) has been essentially age related rather than mileage related - all the mileage related stuff tends to get checked and replaced when I service it, so the higher mileage actually just ensures that parts have been replaced reasonably recently and therefore won't be failed.
The authorities are actually pretty good on this, a friend completely forgot to renew his altogether and drove around for 6 months before realising, he phoned the DVLA to admit his mistake and they just told him not to worry, that people forget and as long as he's happy to pay it there and then that they wouldn't see any reason to pursue it
Sounds nicer than the message you get from the website... I let my tax lapse by about a month a few years back, renewed on the website (paying the full amount from the date the old disc expired). The website displayed a warning after I'd paid which essentially boiled down to "you've paid now, but you screwed up and so we might come after you at some point in the future and fine you £oodles".
my father forgot to display his new disc once, got pulled, but they took no action after checking he had renewed online
My wife spent about 2 months over seas a few years ago, her tax disc expired while she was away and she didn't realise. Caught a flight home on Christmas eve and got pulled over between the airport and home. Received a fine and points.
FWIW, the MoT is a bigger problem anyway since they don't send out reminders - I managed to let mine lapse by about 6 months one year by mistake. I've not looked into the new "paperless" tax disc system - are they still sending out paper reminders for tax discs or are they assuming people are going to remember to renew?
I am afraid we are using technology where technology is not needed.
Wireless gizmos are becoming very common since they mean you don't need to dig holes in your walls to run the cables.
I have 2 wireless thermostats - the wireless isn't used to set them remotely, it is used for them to communicate with the boiler. On the whole they work pretty well (and yes, I'm sure the protocol is so trivial that someone could probably sit outside my house and turn the boiler on/off if they cared enough). That said, if I could point my browser at the thermostat instead of having to fiddle with a UI that has a limited display and only a few buttons, that'd be pretty useful.
I have a wireless doorbell too. It has to be said that this doesn't work so well because the range isn't great - it certainly won't reach my office. Again, probably really insecure and someone who cared enough could probably make my doorbell ring remotely.
As we get more and more wireless gizmos like this, having them all use common infrastructure, such as the wifi network, rather than communicating using their own point-to-point links is probably a pretty sensible idea - it cuts interference between devices as well as extending the range (by virtue of the wifi network usually covering the entire house anyway, so being able to relay the traffic, possibly via multiple access points). The problem here is twofold: 1. Moving from proprietary protocols to a standard protocol like wifi suddenly means off-the-shelf hardware and software can be used to attack the devices. The old proprietary devices were really insecure too, but no one cared enough to engineer hardware to attack them - now your phone or laptop comes with the hardware you need. 2. These wifi-enabled devices are more powerful and can therefore do nefarious things that the older devices couldn't do - i.e. attacking an old wireless thermostat allowed you to turn the boiler on and off, attacking a new one lets you send spam, etc.
Hopefully people will exercise their legal rights to correct this kind of thing. For example, goods must be "fit for purpose" and of "reasonable quality". In other words, security must be reasonably effective.
Could be even more interesting if you paid to have it installed.
Unfortunately warranty legislation never seems to apply to software - how often do you hear people getting their money back from Microsoft because Windows is buggy (that would be a design or manufacturing flaw, which is certainly covered for physical goods).
Nobody needs a home thermometer and refrigerator connected to the internet. Gadget makers and tech press have been trying to foist this shit on us for years and nobody wants it. Let it die already.
I'm not sure that's true - this stuff hasn't really hit the mainstream yet, but the same can be said about a lot of technology early on (how long ago was the internet "only for nerds"?)
I can certainly see a lot of uses for this stuff - my home thermostat lets me set different programs for every day, etc. but the UI isn't great and its time consuming to set. The UI deficiencies are mostly down to the fact that it has a limited display and a limited number of buttons - if I could control it from my web browser it'd be much easier to use.
I'm not entirely sure what you'd expect from an internet connected fridge - it could be useful for stuff like dynamic power use to reduce the load on the electricity grid. But a more consumer-focussed idea would be tracking what's actually in the fridge (would require RFID labelled products or similar) - I can't count the number of times I've found myself in the supermarket and thought "I wonder if we've got any milk left?", or "Is there space in the freezer for this?" - being able to easilly check that kind of thing remotely would certainly be useful. At the moment this is all in the "nerds only" stage, but how long until it integrates with your shopping list, automatically tells you what you've run out of and is used by a large chunk of the population?
I guess something that will hold back adoption of these technologies is that they are in devices that don't frequently get replaced - I've had my fridge for 14 years and I'm not planning on replacing it until it dies. But then the same could be said for TVs and a lot of people have recently replaced perfectly good CRTs with LCD smart TVs so at some point the jump in technology gets good enough for people to bite the bullet and upgrade.
If you look closely at those pictures, in pretty much every rack there are redundant switches with absolutely nothing connected to them, yet they are powered on.
Really? Do you like the blinking lights? I measured my 24 port 3com superstack switch and it was 50 watts. I switched to a 8 port low power gigabit (i have 6 devices these days) and it runs at 8watts.
Calculating the cost savings of the switch, at.07 cents a kwh, 42w = cost per year savings of 25 dollars. Roughly the cost of the gigabit switch i replaced it with!
Yep, managed switches seem to be outrageously power hungry. In my cabinet I've got:
- Satellite patch panel (wired to the dish)
- 24 port 8p8c patch panel (wired to sockets in the rest of the house/office)
- 24 port managed gigabit switch
- Test machine which is completely underpowered and never turned on (at some point I'll get around to removing it from the cabinet)
- Sheevaplug
- USB hard drive for Sheevaplug
- VDSL modem
- VoIP/POTS gateway
- USB DVB-S2 receiver
- RIPE Atlas probe
- PoE injectors for 2 wireless APs that are dotted around the house
- Far too many PSUs for all of the above! (Although I have consolidated all the 12v supplies into a single PSU with multiple connectors. I've still got stuff that needs 9v and 5v supplies though)
The total draw is about 90 watts, probably about 50% of it going to the managed switch! About 25% goes to the hard drive I guess.
If anyone has any recommendations for 24 port managed switches that don't draw silly amounts of power when idle, I'd be interested (bonus points if they have some PoE ports).
The other problem I have is that no devices seem to be able to roam between APs sensibly - if I move from the house to the office my phone and laptop try to hold onto the incredibly weak signal from the house AP even though there's an AP in the office for them to use. I have to toggle the wifi off and on again to get them to reassociate. (And vice-versa when I move back into the house).
Esa says it will be a one-shot opportunity. Events will be taking place so far away that real-time radio control will be impossible.
What amazes me is that the lander has no RCS - it's launched at the comet, and if it bounces off or something there is no second go. I kinda expected the lander to have some RCS so it could automatically correct for unexpected troubles.
And who the hell plans on running a data center hard drive indefinitely?
ISTR that the big datacentres, such as Google, run drives until they fail - the systems are redundent enough to cope with a failure with no problems and they have so many drives that it's more cost effective to have a resilliant system and just run the drives into the ground than it is to preemptively retire them (and still have to cope with unexpected premature failures).
It's actually FTTC, and the last feet done via coaxial cable.
Yeah, thought as much - I was surprised to see someone saying that Virgin were doing FTTP. They certainly do FTTP for commercial installs, but I've never heard of it for residential.
TFS mentions high quality video. You're not streaming high quality video with 10 or even 20Mbps.
Netflix recommends 5Mbps for HD streaming, so you are wrong.
HD on the internet is definitely not the same as HD broadcast TV. When it was first launched, the BBC HD DVB-S channel was doing H.264 at a little over 20Mbps. I think they've reduced that a bit on the HD channels now but certainly nowhere close to 5Mbps. A quick look at a 35 minute programme recorded on my MythTV system from BBC One HD shows 2.6GB, which is a little over 10Mbps - the BBC transponders use statistical multiplexing though, so if you're watching something with more fast action then you can probably expect a higher bit rate than that though. I think BSkyB do around 8Mbps for their HD transponders (and people complain about the quality of BSkyB's HD channels).
The fact that Netflix skimp on the bandwidth a bit shouldn't really be news anyway...
That said, 4Mbps *is* enough for a lot of people - a very high proportion of people use their internet connection for a bit of web surfing and email. The proportion of people who regularly watch hour long HD streaming video channels is probably pretty low. Remember that Slashdot users aren't exactly the "typical" home internet user. (I say this having moved from a 6Mbps ADSL connection to a 40Mbps VDSL connection - for the vast majority of uses the 6Mbps connection was absolutely fine and the only real reason I upgraded was because switching ISP actually worked out cheaper than sticking with the old 6Mbps connection)
Actually, the link does not apply since the unfortunate victim in that case jumped off an 80ft cliff into a quarry. I am not aware of any account where the original challenge, a bucket of cold water to the head, actually caused the participant to expire and go to meet his maker.
The link I posted does mention some idiot woman who decided to chuck a bucket of water over herself while sitting on a horse. The expected thing happened - the horse bolted and the woman was killed.
Exactly what I came here to post. We had the demonstration of what happens when you immerse something in liquid nitrogen vs what happens when you pour it over the top. Even if you didn't get to play with liquid nitrogen in school, there are lots of videos of this.
Although I was under the impression that the Leidenfrost effect only worked well on bare skin, so I'm surprised he didn't get frost burns to his scalp and clothed parts.
Too many companies continue to take their product, fiddle / fuck with it for the sake of change (keeping UI designers in a job I suspect) and then antagonise their users. Google maps is a prime example, the new google maps is AWFUL compared to the existing one, lacking several key features. Please, stop fiddling and changing things.
In this case, I believe that it was a deliberate change forced on their users because it will directly benefit Facebook.
It's one of the (great many) reasons why using web apps for business frequently sounds nuts to me.
How often over the years have we heard stuff like "we can't switch from Office to OpenOffice because of the costs involved in retraining everyone to use a different UI"? Well with a "cloud app" you have *exactly* this problem, coupled with the fact that you usually get no notice that it's going to happen - you just log in one day and everything's moved around.
Oh yeah, I'll also point out that the original poster's numbers stuck out like a sore thumb before I even looked up the figures: Petrol is lighter than water, so its immediately obvious that 4.75 tons is going to be over 4750 litres (at current forecourt prices, about £6000) and I know I don't buy anywhere close to that amount of petrol each year. Doncha just love the metric system for making such things so obvious.:)
4.75 tons of petrol is 6445 litres. Since petrol is 85% carbon, we can divide the 6445 litres by 0.85 and we get 7582 litres of petrol containing 4.75 tons of carbon.
For the weight of a big tub of petroleum containing 4.75t carbon, I think you'd have: 4.75 tons of carbon /.85 = 5.938 tons of petroleum.
Your answer is wrong: 4750 Kg of carbon / 0.85 = 5588 Kg of petrol. It looks like you divided by 0.80 instead of 0.85?
5588 Kg of petrol / 0.737 = 7582 litres of petrol.
Secondly why would anybody pay for broadband internet, and only use it like ISDN or DSL?
Ok, I have a home connection that does 40Mbps down and 20Mbps up. It is capped to 100GB/month during the day (no cap at night, and this is when I run off-site backups and such). I never come close to exceeding that cap - the speed is useful for downloading the odd film, watching streaming HDTV, uploading photos, etc. for short periods. If I need to download a new Linux distro or something, I can do it in 10 minutes - doing this stuff over ISDN would be either very painful (requiring planning a download a long time in advance of actually needing it) or just plain impossible impossible. ADSL, again, would be rather a pain for the occasional large download.
On the other hand, if I were running bittorrent 24/7 I would be able to blow through 15TB of bandwidth in a month, were it not for the cap. But I'm not interested in doing this, so I don't understand why those people who are interested in shifting 2-3 orders of magnitude more data than me should expect me to pay more in order to subsidise the build-out cost of the ISP upgrading their network to support them.
The bittorrent crowd would characterise my 100GB monthly cap as terrible because, at full speed, I could blow through it in 5 hours. The thing that they completely fail to understand is that I never have any interest in blowing through it - I like a fast connection because it lets me do things quickly, not because I can download lots.
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So what they are saying is that anyone outside the US can freely hack US servers without a warrant too. Surely they don't expect special treatment?
However, if a US government employee who was somehow involved in cracking a foreign server visited that country, they would presumably still be subject to arrest and prosecution?
What about extradition? The US has extradited people from their homes after they cracked US servers so they might struggle to argue that US citizens shouldn't be extradited in similar circumstances. Or has "I was breaking the law as part of my job" suddenly become a valid defence?
And of course "somehow involved" doesn't necessarily mean they were the ones doing the actual cracking - anyone who knew about it and didn't blow the whistle or put a stop to it is surely still responsible. The constitution doesn't apply to non-US nationals, but there are international treaties that say the US has to respect the laws of other countries too.
It also has to safely escape on the launch pad and shortly afterward, the very problem the shuttle had. Boeing and Spacex have well defined and soon to be tested approaches to escape from launch accidents. I haven't seen how Sierra Nevada plans on solving this.
I believe they have onboard bipropellant rockets for both second-stage propulsion and abort.
I don't have any particular hard-on for SNC, although I do think that competition is good so having their craft as well as Dragon 2 and CST-100 would be good (especially since they are offering something quite different). However, I'm just taking a bit of an exception to superficial statements like "they should be disqualified because it looks like the shuttle" rather than actually giving a damn about the technical detail.
It looks a lot like a cross between the shuttle and the old project Dyna-Soar (I think that was a skunkworks project). Most who remember the TV show 6 million dollar man, that was footage of a DynaSoar's unsuccessful landing
Yep, rockets are hard - there are lots of examples of non-shuttle launch vehicles exploding and capsules reentering in non-survivable ways too. I don't see "it looks like the shuttle so it should be disqualified" as having a lot of merit - you could equally say that the Atlas V or Falcon 9 "look like" a Proton rocket, and therefore should be disqualified because Proton rockets have been known to explode at times. Or the CST-100, Dragon 2 and Orion capsules "look like" a Soyuz capsule and they have been known to fail so they should be disqualified too.
How about evaluating each craft on its technical merits rather than what it's appearance resembles?
My thoughts exactly, which is why I had added "Sierra Nevada's orbiter resembles a mini space shuttle. That alone (remember the problems with the tiles) should have been enough to disqualify them."
Sorry, but what's wrong with how it looks? Yes, it's a space plane, but its mode of operation is pretty different to the shuttle - for one thing it sits on top of the launch vehicle, which makes it a hell of a lot safer!
As for myself, I'll be happy once the world learns to build systems that don't break on the apostrophe in my last name. I still come across plenty of systems that don't, and every time I am tempted to go "Johnny Tables" on their ass.
I'm still waiting for computer systems that can handle my address, which has a y with a circumflex in it... I frequently get letters and packages arrive that has "ŷ" printed on the address label! (Yes, even big international websites like Amazon, SagePay, etc. are incapable of using a valid UTF-8 character... In fact ISTR SagePay's API only supports ISO8859.
I agree about the MOT btw, I find it a royal pain in the arse because it's not like the tax disc where you get a reminder and do it online
When I let mine lapse by accident, I was sorting out the MoT for my car when I thought "I don't remember doing the van this year... oh crap", checked and discovered that I had indeed not done the MoT for the van 6 months earlier.
IMHO an annual check is a good idea, no matter how many miles you do - things still corrode when sat on your drive. I find the tax disc annoying because it's tied to emissions and claimed to be a "green tax" to discourage people from having vehicles that do poor mileage, yet I still have to pay that (quite expensive) same amount each year for my van despite the fact it only does a few hundred miles a year - I don't have a big problem with "green taxes" but I think they should be proportional and I don't see how charging the same for a vehicle that does a few hundred miles a year as one that does tens of thousands of miles is proportional at all. I would prefer the annual tax to be abolished and a proportional rise in fuel duty so that the total tax revenue would be unaffected. Although I know that if they did abolish tax discs they would use it as an excuse to increase fuel duty disproportionately.
the 25,000 mile a year car frankly never passes it's MOT so probably isn't really technically roadworthy for a short while before it's MOT given that it's being driven around with those failures prior to the test, whilst the 3,000 mile a year one hasn't failed an MOT for about 5 years now and never needs anything doing to it so it shows what a farce the MOT system really is - it's highly inconvenient and doesn't solve the problem it's meant to solve, low mileage cars are getting penalised for the sake of it, and high mileage cars are driving around unsafe regardless.
Last MoT for my van (which, as mentioned, does a few hundred miles a year): new brake pads + discs (corroded discs - something that low mileage vehicles suffer from), insecure headlamp (a plastic clip had aged, gone brittle and snapped. Official replacement VW parts would have involved replacing the entire headlamp mount for about £80, so it has been replaced with a couple of stainless steel nuts, which cost pennies and will probably outlast the official plastic thing :)
In fact, everything my car has failed on in the past few years (which does significantly higher mileage) has been essentially age related rather than mileage related - all the mileage related stuff tends to get checked and replaced when I service it, so the higher mileage actually just ensures that parts have been replaced reasonably recently and therefore won't be failed.
The authorities are actually pretty good on this, a friend completely forgot to renew his altogether and drove around for 6 months before realising, he phoned the DVLA to admit his mistake and they just told him not to worry, that people forget and as long as he's happy to pay it there and then that they wouldn't see any reason to pursue it
Sounds nicer than the message you get from the website... I let my tax lapse by about a month a few years back, renewed on the website (paying the full amount from the date the old disc expired). The website displayed a warning after I'd paid which essentially boiled down to "you've paid now, but you screwed up and so we might come after you at some point in the future and fine you £oodles".
my father forgot to display his new disc once, got pulled, but they took no action after checking he had renewed online
My wife spent about 2 months over seas a few years ago, her tax disc expired while she was away and she didn't realise. Caught a flight home on Christmas eve and got pulled over between the airport and home. Received a fine and points.
FWIW, the MoT is a bigger problem anyway since they don't send out reminders - I managed to let mine lapse by about 6 months one year by mistake. I've not looked into the new "paperless" tax disc system - are they still sending out paper reminders for tax discs or are they assuming people are going to remember to renew?
I am afraid we are using technology where technology is not needed.
Wireless gizmos are becoming very common since they mean you don't need to dig holes in your walls to run the cables.
I have 2 wireless thermostats - the wireless isn't used to set them remotely, it is used for them to communicate with the boiler. On the whole they work pretty well (and yes, I'm sure the protocol is so trivial that someone could probably sit outside my house and turn the boiler on/off if they cared enough). That said, if I could point my browser at the thermostat instead of having to fiddle with a UI that has a limited display and only a few buttons, that'd be pretty useful.
I have a wireless doorbell too. It has to be said that this doesn't work so well because the range isn't great - it certainly won't reach my office. Again, probably really insecure and someone who cared enough could probably make my doorbell ring remotely.
As we get more and more wireless gizmos like this, having them all use common infrastructure, such as the wifi network, rather than communicating using their own point-to-point links is probably a pretty sensible idea - it cuts interference between devices as well as extending the range (by virtue of the wifi network usually covering the entire house anyway, so being able to relay the traffic, possibly via multiple access points). The problem here is twofold:
1. Moving from proprietary protocols to a standard protocol like wifi suddenly means off-the-shelf hardware and software can be used to attack the devices. The old proprietary devices were really insecure too, but no one cared enough to engineer hardware to attack them - now your phone or laptop comes with the hardware you need.
2. These wifi-enabled devices are more powerful and can therefore do nefarious things that the older devices couldn't do - i.e. attacking an old wireless thermostat allowed you to turn the boiler on and off, attacking a new one lets you send spam, etc.
Hopefully people will exercise their legal rights to correct this kind of thing. For example, goods must be "fit for purpose" and of "reasonable quality". In other words, security must be reasonably effective.
Could be even more interesting if you paid to have it installed.
Unfortunately warranty legislation never seems to apply to software - how often do you hear people getting their money back from Microsoft because Windows is buggy (that would be a design or manufacturing flaw, which is certainly covered for physical goods).
Nobody needs a home thermometer and refrigerator connected to the internet. Gadget makers and tech press have been trying to foist this shit on us for years and nobody wants it. Let it die already.
I'm not sure that's true - this stuff hasn't really hit the mainstream yet, but the same can be said about a lot of technology early on (how long ago was the internet "only for nerds"?)
I can certainly see a lot of uses for this stuff - my home thermostat lets me set different programs for every day, etc. but the UI isn't great and its time consuming to set. The UI deficiencies are mostly down to the fact that it has a limited display and a limited number of buttons - if I could control it from my web browser it'd be much easier to use.
I'm not entirely sure what you'd expect from an internet connected fridge - it could be useful for stuff like dynamic power use to reduce the load on the electricity grid. But a more consumer-focussed idea would be tracking what's actually in the fridge (would require RFID labelled products or similar) - I can't count the number of times I've found myself in the supermarket and thought "I wonder if we've got any milk left?", or "Is there space in the freezer for this?" - being able to easilly check that kind of thing remotely would certainly be useful. At the moment this is all in the "nerds only" stage, but how long until it integrates with your shopping list, automatically tells you what you've run out of and is used by a large chunk of the population?
I guess something that will hold back adoption of these technologies is that they are in devices that don't frequently get replaced - I've had my fridge for 14 years and I'm not planning on replacing it until it dies. But then the same could be said for TVs and a lot of people have recently replaced perfectly good CRTs with LCD smart TVs so at some point the jump in technology gets good enough for people to bite the bullet and upgrade.
If you look closely at those pictures, in pretty much every rack there are redundant switches with absolutely nothing connected to them, yet they are powered on.
Really? Do you like the blinking lights? I measured my 24 port 3com superstack switch and it was 50 watts. I switched to a 8 port low power gigabit (i have 6 devices these days) and it runs at 8watts.
Calculating the cost savings of the switch, at .07 cents a kwh, 42w = cost per year savings of 25 dollars. Roughly the cost of the gigabit switch i replaced it with!
Yep, managed switches seem to be outrageously power hungry. In my cabinet I've got:
- Satellite patch panel (wired to the dish)
- 24 port 8p8c patch panel (wired to sockets in the rest of the house/office)
- 24 port managed gigabit switch
- Test machine which is completely underpowered and never turned on (at some point I'll get around to removing it from the cabinet)
- Sheevaplug
- USB hard drive for Sheevaplug
- VDSL modem
- VoIP/POTS gateway
- USB DVB-S2 receiver
- RIPE Atlas probe
- PoE injectors for 2 wireless APs that are dotted around the house
- Far too many PSUs for all of the above! (Although I have consolidated all the 12v supplies into a single PSU with multiple connectors. I've still got stuff that needs 9v and 5v supplies though)
The total draw is about 90 watts, probably about 50% of it going to the managed switch! About 25% goes to the hard drive I guess.
If anyone has any recommendations for 24 port managed switches that don't draw silly amounts of power when idle, I'd be interested (bonus points if they have some PoE ports).
The other problem I have is that no devices seem to be able to roam between APs sensibly - if I move from the house to the office my phone and laptop try to hold onto the incredibly weak signal from the house AP even though there's an AP in the office for them to use. I have to toggle the wifi off and on again to get them to reassociate. (And vice-versa when I move back into the house).
Esa says it will be a one-shot opportunity. Events will be taking place so far away that real-time radio control will be impossible.
What amazes me is that the lander has no RCS - it's launched at the comet, and if it bounces off or something there is no second go. I kinda expected the lander to have some RCS so it could automatically correct for unexpected troubles.
And who the hell plans on running a data center hard drive indefinitely?
ISTR that the big datacentres, such as Google, run drives until they fail - the systems are redundent enough to cope with a failure with no problems and they have so many drives that it's more cost effective to have a resilliant system and just run the drives into the ground than it is to preemptively retire them (and still have to cope with unexpected premature failures).
It's actually FTTC, and the last feet done via coaxial cable.
Yeah, thought as much - I was surprised to see someone saying that Virgin were doing FTTP. They certainly do FTTP for commercial installs, but I've never heard of it for residential.
The proportion of people who regularly watch hour long HD streaming video channels is probably pretty low.
Maybe that's because their ISP is providing inadequate service so they know better than to attempt it.
Or maybe its because they just aren't interested and therefore don't want to pay for a faster connection...
TFS mentions high quality video. You're not streaming high quality video with 10 or even 20Mbps.
Netflix recommends 5Mbps for HD streaming, so you are wrong.
HD on the internet is definitely not the same as HD broadcast TV. When it was first launched, the BBC HD DVB-S channel was doing H.264 at a little over 20Mbps. I think they've reduced that a bit on the HD channels now but certainly nowhere close to 5Mbps. A quick look at a 35 minute programme recorded on my MythTV system from BBC One HD shows 2.6GB, which is a little over 10Mbps - the BBC transponders use statistical multiplexing though, so if you're watching something with more fast action then you can probably expect a higher bit rate than that though. I think BSkyB do around 8Mbps for their HD transponders (and people complain about the quality of BSkyB's HD channels).
The fact that Netflix skimp on the bandwidth a bit shouldn't really be news anyway...
That said, 4Mbps *is* enough for a lot of people - a very high proportion of people use their internet connection for a bit of web surfing and email. The proportion of people who regularly watch hour long HD streaming video channels is probably pretty low. Remember that Slashdot users aren't exactly the "typical" home internet user. (I say this having moved from a 6Mbps ADSL connection to a 40Mbps VDSL connection - for the vast majority of uses the 6Mbps connection was absolutely fine and the only real reason I upgraded was because switching ISP actually worked out cheaper than sticking with the old 6Mbps connection)
This is Virgin Broadband using fiberoptic to the home.
Umm, when did Virgin start doing residential FTTP?
Actually, the link does not apply since the unfortunate victim in that case jumped off an 80ft cliff into a quarry. I am not aware of any account where the original challenge, a bucket of cold water to the head, actually caused the participant to expire and go to meet his maker.
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/...
The link I posted does mention some idiot woman who decided to chuck a bucket of water over herself while sitting on a horse. The expected thing happened - the horse bolted and the woman was killed.
Well, its still less stupid than throwing a bucket of ice water over your head and then posting it on Facebook.
No, not really. Which one is more likely to get you killed?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
Exactly what I came here to post. We had the demonstration of what happens when you immerse something in liquid nitrogen vs what happens when you pour it over the top. Even if you didn't get to play with liquid nitrogen in school, there are lots of videos of this.
Although I was under the impression that the Leidenfrost effect only worked well on bare skin, so I'm surprised he didn't get frost burns to his scalp and clothed parts.
Too many companies continue to take their product, fiddle / fuck with it for the sake of change (keeping UI designers in a job I suspect) and then antagonise their users. Google maps is a prime example, the new google maps is AWFUL compared to the existing one, lacking several key features. Please, stop fiddling and changing things.
In this case, I believe that it was a deliberate change forced on their users because it will directly benefit Facebook.
It's one of the (great many) reasons why using web apps for business frequently sounds nuts to me.
How often over the years have we heard stuff like "we can't switch from Office to OpenOffice because of the costs involved in retraining everyone to use a different UI"? Well with a "cloud app" you have *exactly* this problem, coupled with the fact that you usually get no notice that it's going to happen - you just log in one day and everything's moved around.
Flashblock, surely?
Makes me think: is auto-playing HTML5 video a possibility? If so, can this easily be disabled in browsers' settings?
Flashblock will block HTML5 videos too.
Oh yeah, I'll also point out that the original poster's numbers stuck out like a sore thumb before I even looked up the figures: Petrol is lighter than water, so its immediately obvious that 4.75 tons is going to be over 4750 litres (at current forecourt prices, about £6000) and I know I don't buy anywhere close to that amount of petrol each year. Doncha just love the metric system for making such things so obvious. :)
The numerator above seems off: what is 6445 ?
4.75 tons of petrol is 6445 litres. Since petrol is 85% carbon, we can divide the 6445 litres by 0.85 and we get 7582 litres of petrol containing 4.75 tons of carbon.
For the weight of a big tub of petroleum containing 4.75t carbon, I think you'd have: .85 = 5.938 tons of petroleum.
4.75 tons of carbon /
Your answer is wrong: 4750 Kg of carbon / 0.85 = 5588 Kg of petrol. It looks like you divided by 0.80 instead of 0.85?
5588 Kg of petrol / 0.737 = 7582 litres of petrol.
Secondly why would anybody pay for broadband internet, and only use it like ISDN or DSL?
Ok, I have a home connection that does 40Mbps down and 20Mbps up. It is capped to 100GB/month during the day (no cap at night, and this is when I run off-site backups and such). I never come close to exceeding that cap - the speed is useful for downloading the odd film, watching streaming HDTV, uploading photos, etc. for short periods. If I need to download a new Linux distro or something, I can do it in 10 minutes - doing this stuff over ISDN would be either very painful (requiring planning a download a long time in advance of actually needing it) or just plain impossible impossible. ADSL, again, would be rather a pain for the occasional large download.
On the other hand, if I were running bittorrent 24/7 I would be able to blow through 15TB of bandwidth in a month, were it not for the cap. But I'm not interested in doing this, so I don't understand why those people who are interested in shifting 2-3 orders of magnitude more data than me should expect me to pay more in order to subsidise the build-out cost of the ISP upgrading their network to support them.
The bittorrent crowd would characterise my 100GB monthly cap as terrible because, at full speed, I could blow through it in 5 hours. The thing that they completely fail to understand is that I never have any interest in blowing through it - I like a fast connection because it lets me do things quickly, not because I can download lots.