The Shinfield Road lights don't even work properly --- about 1/5 of the time the filter light doesn't cycle. My suspicion is that when someone presses the button on the pedestrian lights, the pedestrian cycle replaces the filter. The result is that when the light goes red, people waiting for the filter light will just go anyway out of sheer frustration. Yeah. Good one.
Speaking of pedestrian lights, notice how they don't actually have any lights on them? The only way to tell that it's safe to cross is to stare at the little control panel. Which is, of course, behind you while you're waiting to cross. What were the council thinking?
Usually, they just cross --- I live in Reading, UK, and it's full of roundabouts that work like this. There's usually an island between the two lanes just as the road enters the roundabout; partly this is acts as a spreader to split the lanes and make the junctions easier to manage for cars, but as a side effect it gives pedestrians somewhere to stop in the middle, so they only have to cross one lane at a time.
When I started to drive I hated roundabouts; there were too many places to look and I couldn't track all the inputs needed to negotiate them safely. Once I got used to them, I really like them. They scale beautifully to the level of traffic and varying number of exits and can keep the traffic moving smoothly up to quite heavy loads. On really heavy traffic there's various tricks you can do to keep them working well: one cunning one is the use of spiral lanes. In this variant, as you approach the roundabout you move into the correct lane for your destination, merge onto the roundabout and follow your lane straight into the appropriate exit.
They're particularly good on motorway exits; a common approach is to have an elevated roundabout above the motorway, with sliproads connecting roundabout exits to the motorway. You can leave the motorway, merge onto the roundabout, and then it becomes trivial to select your exit either to a minor road or back onto the motorway in either direction.
They don't work well when the traffic isn't evenly distributed; imagine a four-exit roundabout with heavy traffic moving east-west and you want to get on to the roundabout from the south. You'll end up spending quite some time waiting for a gap, because you have to give way to the traffic that's already on the roundabout. If there's traffic coming from the north, it all works properly; they enter the roundabout, force the east-west traffic to stop to give way to them, which creates a gap that you can move out into.
They completely fail when you put lights on them. Once that happens, all the elegant traffic management falls apart completely and you end up with complicated, frustrating multistage junctions. There's one terrible roundabout in Reading (at Winnersh Triangle; locals will know it) where not only have they put lights on it but in a desperate attempt to solve the traffic problems have actually put a road straight across the middle. Years of tuning have reduced the irritation level to merely annoying, but it's still a poor junction. But then, there isn't really such a thing as a good junction at that level of traffic.
Right now the Reading council has a thing about replacing small, effective roundabouts with lights. Everyone is screaming high heaven about it. One set of lights they just put in (Shinfield Road) has pretty much doubled my commute time, due to lousy design, failure to do the research, delays, and generally Not Being A Roundabout.
I've been noticing that a lot of business related email from, e.g. energy suppliers, airlines etc use multipart/alternative with an empty plain text section, so resulting in them looking as if they're completely blank if I tell Thunderbird to prefer the plain text version. In fact, I've just had to switch to preferring simplified HTML just so I can read the damned things.
Do you have a citation for the Note crash test reference? I can't find anything (I didn't know it had even been submitted for testing).
I tend to judge cars on how useful they are, and to me being old is only an excuse if you're interested in classic cars, which I'm not. I realise that small cars are unfashionable in the US, but I've just driven 1000 miles round Ireland in one on tiny country lanes, and I couldn't be more pleased: the handling is precise and crisp, it's spacious and really comfortable inside, visibility is mostly superb (the high driver's position gives you a great view at the front, but the two back pillars do give you large blind spots), it holds an incredible amount of stuff, and it's really cheap to run. I think we filled up twice, and it's not as if it has a particularly large fuel tank. I'd be perfectly happy to do a US transcontinental trip in one.
Are those US gallons? If so, 30 MPG is pretty poor. My father has a not-very-new Nissan Note which gets nearly twice that (55ish miles per US gallon, depending on how you drive).
I keep my Trojans in the bathroom cabinet, but it's not very satisfactory --- all that shouting in ancient Greek keeps me awake and they throw spears at me when I'm in the shower.
Sitting downstairs on the shelf next to the TV, still plugged into the N64...
(Not that I use it any more. But I'd much, much rather be using the N64 controller with its weirdly asymmetric but incredibly comfortable stance than the Game Cube controller. Or even a PS2 controller, where the analogue sticks aren't actually under my thumbs.)
Well, these are energy storage units rather than energy generation units. The electricity is generated elsewhere by cheap baseload generators and these flywheel units store it until it's needed to makeup shortfall by peak load. This gives you enough time to spool up the slow-reacting baseload generators.
What they're replacing is probably gas turbines, which are expensive to run but have a very short reaction time and are generally used to meet peak loads. And gas turbines are generation units, so you can't really compare them directly.
Existing tech for energy storage is stuff like pumped storage ---you use surplus electricity to pump water from a low lake to a high one, and then it flows back through the turbine to generate electricity. I used to live near the Ben Cruachan pumped storage station. It can generate 440MW for 22 hours and can start up in 30 seconds, which is pretty damned impressive. This flywheel installation can generate 20MW for 15 minutes, so it's nowhere near the same league, but is likely to be vastly cheaper and a hell of a lot more portable, not requiring a mountain to install it in.
I recently changed energy suppliers because they were basically unable to communicate effectively. Whenever they sent me an email, it would be blank. (They were using multipart-alternative but only sending the HTML part. Nice.) Their online website was so badly written that an attempt to view my gas and electricity bills at the same time would confuse it --- yes, their web designers hadn't heard of tabs. Instead of using HTML widgets they'd use little embedded flash thingies containing a text field, resulting in such hilarity as the web browsing doing a Page Down while typing the space between words.
My new supplier is much more coherent and knows how to, e.g., write basic HTML, which is a good sign.
However, they're still not actually sending me the bill. Instead they send me a link to a web page which will let me view my bill. The only way to actually get a copy on my own machine is to print it, which kinda defeats the purpose of electronic billing. And I have been burnt by having to go to a remote website to view these documents before --- when my bank reduced the availability of online bank statements from 12 months to 6 months, I suddenly found myself unable to get at rather important tax information.
What would be really nice is a standard interchange format for bills. PDF is not it. That way, they could send me the file, I could drop it into my accountancy package, and it would pull out the relevant information and include it in my budgeting. Don't think it'll ever happen, thoguh...
It is not a moisture barrier, nor is it there to block "sheetrock mites".
That's what you think. I'm Scottish; our building standards require us to use paisley-backed foil insulation in the walls to act as a barrier to keep microscopic haggis from migrating through the walls into our drinks cabinets, and consuming all our whisky. It's a serious problem. I wouldn't be at all surprised if other countries didn't have something similar.
My father has some socks made from bamboo fibre --- they feel like cotton, and apparently also behave like it. Given how easy bamboo is to grow (i.e., it's really hard to stop it), using it for fibre seems like a really good idea.
There used to be a site called sweetcode.org back in 2003 that showcased of interesting open source projects. It ran for a bit and then died; the most recent version is archived here. These days it's a squatter site, worse luck.
Even now, eight years later, there's some interesting stuff there --- ReVirt, a logging virtual machine that captures the state of the system over time, so if there's an intrusion you can wind back the clock and see how it happened? convertfs, which can convert one filesystem to another in place?
I'd love to see something like that these days (although it doesn't really fit open.org's mandate). It would take a lot of curation, though.
This could easily be a buildup for a larger attack, yet no one has done anything substantial yet.
Some actual hard evidence that China is involved in any any meaningful way would be nice.
From the article:
They caution, however, that there is no way of knowing whether the hackers are Chinese, or some other nationality routing their cybercrimes through China to cover their tracks.
What's with all the xenophobic vilification of China these days? We're getting a steady stream of OMG CHINA EVIL articles, none of which are actually backed up by any evidence. What is this, Fox News?
By the way, AWS is Amazon Web Services, and you can run a free mini-instance forever.
Are you sure? According to their Free Usage Tier page, you only get the free 750 hours of micro instance usage per month for the first 12 months --- after which you have to pay. Unless there's information elsewhere I don't know about?
There is no middle ground (from my perspective). You either go “dumb phone” or all out.
I have a medium phone; an Alcatel OT-808. It's a tiny square clamshell. Folded up it's about 6x6x1cm. Unfolded, there's a 320x240 screen and a basic but adequate QWERTY keyboard. It runs some no-name OS but has the IBM J2ME engine. It's got a battery life of about three days, a fairly crappy camera, and is GPRS only.
I use it mainly for text messages (a QWERTY keyboard makes these so much easier), plus some phone calls. I also use it for web browsing using Opera Mini, ssh to my home server using a hacked-up version of MidpSSH that can cope with the keyboard, and Google Maps. Using ssh I can read and send email (with cone), send/read Twitter (with twidge), etc. I've also used it when desperate as internet access for a laptop. I spent a week on holiday once where it was my only internet access. Worked fine.
I'm not on a payment plan; I use PAYG with Virgin Mobile. A text message costs about 10 pence. Internet access costs 30 pence a day, only the days I use it. It's limited at 25MB per day, but you'd have to struggle really hard to use 25MB in a day with GPRS. I pay approximately twenty pounds every six to eight months.
It cost me 35 pounds from ebay. If I drop it in the bath, I can say, 'damn', fish out the SIM, and throw it away...
Slashdot Mirror
The Shinfield Road lights don't even work properly --- about 1/5 of the time the filter light doesn't cycle. My suspicion is that when someone presses the button on the pedestrian lights, the pedestrian cycle replaces the filter. The result is that when the light goes red, people waiting for the filter light will just go anyway out of sheer frustration. Yeah. Good one.
Speaking of pedestrian lights, notice how they don't actually have any lights on them? The only way to tell that it's safe to cross is to stare at the little control panel. Which is, of course, behind you while you're waiting to cross. What were the council thinking?
pir.org has a long list of registrars that do .org.
Usually, they just cross --- I live in Reading, UK, and it's full of roundabouts that work like this. There's usually an island between the two lanes just as the road enters the roundabout; partly this is acts as a spreader to split the lanes and make the junctions easier to manage for cars, but as a side effect it gives pedestrians somewhere to stop in the middle, so they only have to cross one lane at a time.
When I started to drive I hated roundabouts; there were too many places to look and I couldn't track all the inputs needed to negotiate them safely. Once I got used to them, I really like them. They scale beautifully to the level of traffic and varying number of exits and can keep the traffic moving smoothly up to quite heavy loads. On really heavy traffic there's various tricks you can do to keep them working well: one cunning one is the use of spiral lanes. In this variant, as you approach the roundabout you move into the correct lane for your destination, merge onto the roundabout and follow your lane straight into the appropriate exit.
They're particularly good on motorway exits; a common approach is to have an elevated roundabout above the motorway, with sliproads connecting roundabout exits to the motorway. You can leave the motorway, merge onto the roundabout, and then it becomes trivial to select your exit either to a minor road or back onto the motorway in either direction.
They don't work well when the traffic isn't evenly distributed; imagine a four-exit roundabout with heavy traffic moving east-west and you want to get on to the roundabout from the south. You'll end up spending quite some time waiting for a gap, because you have to give way to the traffic that's already on the roundabout. If there's traffic coming from the north, it all works properly; they enter the roundabout, force the east-west traffic to stop to give way to them, which creates a gap that you can move out into.
They completely fail when you put lights on them. Once that happens, all the elegant traffic management falls apart completely and you end up with complicated, frustrating multistage junctions. There's one terrible roundabout in Reading (at Winnersh Triangle; locals will know it) where not only have they put lights on it but in a desperate attempt to solve the traffic problems have actually put a road straight across the middle. Years of tuning have reduced the irritation level to merely annoying, but it's still a poor junction. But then, there isn't really such a thing as a good junction at that level of traffic.
Right now the Reading council has a thing about replacing small, effective roundabouts with lights. Everyone is screaming high heaven about it. One set of lights they just put in (Shinfield Road) has pretty much doubled my commute time, due to lousy design, failure to do the research, delays, and generally Not Being A Roundabout.
I've been noticing that a lot of business related email from, e.g. energy suppliers, airlines etc use multipart/alternative with an empty plain text section, so resulting in them looking as if they're completely blank if I tell Thunderbird to prefer the plain text version. In fact, I've just had to switch to preferring simplified HTML just so I can read the damned things.
Do you have a citation for the Note crash test reference? I can't find anything (I didn't know it had even been submitted for testing).
I tend to judge cars on how useful they are, and to me being old is only an excuse if you're interested in classic cars, which I'm not. I realise that small cars are unfashionable in the US, but I've just driven 1000 miles round Ireland in one on tiny country lanes, and I couldn't be more pleased: the handling is precise and crisp, it's spacious and really comfortable inside, visibility is mostly superb (the high driver's position gives you a great view at the front, but the two back pillars do give you large blind spots), it holds an incredible amount of stuff, and it's really cheap to run. I think we filled up twice, and it's not as if it has a particularly large fuel tank. I'd be perfectly happy to do a US transcontinental trip in one.
Are those US gallons? If so, 30 MPG is pretty poor. My father has a not-very-new Nissan Note which gets nearly twice that (55ish miles per US gallon, depending on how you drive).
I keep my Trojans in the bathroom cabinet, but it's not very satisfactory --- all that shouting in ancient Greek keeps me awake and they throw spears at me when I'm in the shower.
Corrolary:
Depressingly I've encountered people who would think he was being serious.
Sitting downstairs on the shelf next to the TV, still plugged into the N64...
(Not that I use it any more. But I'd much, much rather be using the N64 controller with its weirdly asymmetric but incredibly comfortable stance than the Game Cube controller. Or even a PS2 controller, where the analogue sticks aren't actually under my thumbs.)
Well, these are energy storage units rather than energy generation units. The electricity is generated elsewhere by cheap baseload generators and these flywheel units store it until it's needed to makeup shortfall by peak load. This gives you enough time to spool up the slow-reacting baseload generators.
What they're replacing is probably gas turbines, which are expensive to run but have a very short reaction time and are generally used to meet peak loads. And gas turbines are generation units, so you can't really compare them directly.
Existing tech for energy storage is stuff like pumped storage ---you use surplus electricity to pump water from a low lake to a high one, and then it flows back through the turbine to generate electricity. I used to live near the Ben Cruachan pumped storage station. It can generate 440MW for 22 hours and can start up in 30 seconds, which is pretty damned impressive. This flywheel installation can generate 20MW for 15 minutes, so it's nowhere near the same league, but is likely to be vastly cheaper and a hell of a lot more portable, not requiring a mountain to install it in.
No --- because the torque you steal from the Earth as you spin them up gets dumped back into the Earth when they spin down again.
"We do what we must, because we can."
I recently changed energy suppliers because they were basically unable to communicate effectively. Whenever they sent me an email, it would be blank. (They were using multipart-alternative but only sending the HTML part. Nice.) Their online website was so badly written that an attempt to view my gas and electricity bills at the same time would confuse it --- yes, their web designers hadn't heard of tabs. Instead of using HTML widgets they'd use little embedded flash thingies containing a text field, resulting in such hilarity as the web browsing doing a Page Down while typing the space between words.
My new supplier is much more coherent and knows how to, e.g., write basic HTML, which is a good sign.
However, they're still not actually sending me the bill. Instead they send me a link to a web page which will let me view my bill. The only way to actually get a copy on my own machine is to print it, which kinda defeats the purpose of electronic billing. And I have been burnt by having to go to a remote website to view these documents before --- when my bank reduced the availability of online bank statements from 12 months to 6 months, I suddenly found myself unable to get at rather important tax information.
What would be really nice is a standard interchange format for bills. PDF is not it. That way, they could send me the file, I could drop it into my accountancy package, and it would pull out the relevant information and include it in my budgeting. Don't think it'll ever happen, thoguh...
That's what you think. I'm Scottish; our building standards require us to use paisley-backed foil insulation in the walls to act as a barrier to keep microscopic haggis from migrating through the walls into our drinks cabinets, and consuming all our whisky. It's a serious problem. I wouldn't be at all surprised if other countries didn't have something similar.
My father has some socks made from bamboo fibre --- they feel like cotton, and apparently also behave like it. Given how easy bamboo is to grow (i.e., it's really hard to stop it), using it for fibre seems like a really good idea.
Unfortunately, their affiliate program is also asinine...
"Asinine" is the record labels' established business plan AND profit model, you understand.
In fact, "Asinine" might actually be a record label.
It is. http://www.emusic.com/label/Asinine-Records-CD-Baby-MP3-Download/402721.html
(Admittedly, it's more of a 'label' than a label, having released one album and apparently being a self-publishing pseudonym, but still...)
There used to be a site called sweetcode.org back in 2003 that showcased of interesting open source projects. It ran for a bit and then died; the most recent version is archived here. These days it's a squatter site, worse luck.
Even now, eight years later, there's some interesting stuff there --- ReVirt, a logging virtual machine that captures the state of the system over time, so if there's an intrusion you can wind back the clock and see how it happened? convertfs, which can convert one filesystem to another in place?
I'd love to see something like that these days (although it doesn't really fit open.org's mandate). It would take a lot of curation, though.
Also, don't forget to check out Mary Gentle's Grunts, which is told from the point of view of the orcs... and who are definitely the bad guys. Oh yes.
Hilarious and in incredibly bad taste.
This could easily be a buildup for a larger attack, yet no one has done anything substantial yet.
Some actual hard evidence that China is involved in any any meaningful way would be nice.
From the article:
...if you read TFA.
What's with all the xenophobic vilification of China these days? We're getting a steady stream of OMG CHINA EVIL articles, none of which are actually backed up by any evidence. What is this, Fox News?
Damn!
Oh, well...
By the way, AWS is Amazon Web Services, and you can run a free mini-instance forever.
Are you sure? According to their Free Usage Tier page, you only get the free 750 hours of micro instance usage per month for the first 12 months --- after which you have to pay. Unless there's information elsewhere I don't know about?
There is no middle ground (from my perspective). You either go “dumb phone” or all out.
I have a medium phone; an Alcatel OT-808. It's a tiny square clamshell. Folded up it's about 6x6x1cm. Unfolded, there's a 320x240 screen and a basic but adequate QWERTY keyboard. It runs some no-name OS but has the IBM J2ME engine. It's got a battery life of about three days, a fairly crappy camera, and is GPRS only.
I use it mainly for text messages (a QWERTY keyboard makes these so much easier), plus some phone calls. I also use it for web browsing using Opera Mini, ssh to my home server using a hacked-up version of MidpSSH that can cope with the keyboard, and Google Maps. Using ssh I can read and send email (with cone), send/read Twitter (with twidge), etc. I've also used it when desperate as internet access for a laptop. I spent a week on holiday once where it was my only internet access. Worked fine.
I'm not on a payment plan; I use PAYG with Virgin Mobile. A text message costs about 10 pence. Internet access costs 30 pence a day, only the days I use it. It's limited at 25MB per day, but you'd have to struggle really hard to use 25MB in a day with GPRS. I pay approximately twenty pounds every six to eight months.
It cost me 35 pounds from ebay. If I drop it in the bath, I can say, 'damn', fish out the SIM, and throw it away...
On the downside, it's pink.