Trend

Is the remains of MAPS - which used to be reasonably good (even if Dave Rand is a tosspot), but has gone to rack and ruin in the last few years. There's been quite a lot of discussion on academic mailing lists about them.

See also http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2011/08/a-disturbing-trend/comment-page-1/ - which is written and commented on by a lot of people who used to be MAPS biggest cheerleaders.

The explanation of how some IP addresses are ending up in the RBL was enough to convince $orkplace and others that MAPS usefulness has ended.

Not to worry, there are other other DNSBLs.

having said all that:

1: Lots of ISPs make a big fuss about their inbound spam filtering.

2: Very few apply any form of filtering to their OUTBOUND mail.

3: Anyone who uses their ISP email account for long-term purposes is a twit.

"Stopping spam" is a lot more about preventing it getting out (pollution prevention), than preventing it getting in - and that's best summed up by the question "Do you actually want to stop spam, or merely stop seeing it?"

I know ISPs and others regard abuse desks as a cost centre, but AOL found that by terminating abusive accounts they saved significant sums because most of those were on scammed cards (chargebacks are a killer), stolen identities, or had other issues which attracted significant costs (providing logs and other evidence for police is also costly).

Blue skies on most planets with atmospheres

Even on Jupiter in the top few hundred km.

Raleigh scattering, etc.

Standing charges

Are making an increase in their penetration, not a decrease.

Hint: if there's a "meter fee", it's a standing charge - and in my case it accounts for 1/2 the power bill (EDF)

ISO9000

Just says you fully document your procedures.

It doesn't check to see if the procedures are correct or are being followed. (It's possible to produce ISO9000 documentation describing how to fly a 767 into a large american building, as a f'instance)

ISO9001 and higher audit adherence to the procedures and covers ensuring they actually work.

"free pub wifi"

I tried it out, found the endless navigation pages and switched off wifi.

+1 for "unlimited" data tarriffs. If needed I usually just tether.

Falling faster than an orbitally delivered anvil.

Not that Zuckerberg cares. He's a sociopathic tosser of the highest order.

"How to make a small fortune on the Internet"

"First, start with a large fortune"

Cellcos don't care much

Ok sure, they can't charge for all the calls originating within their network.

Given the economies of scale most of the time generating the bill and handling payments eats almost all that revenue anyway.

They CAN and DO charge for calls originating elsewhere - and it's a lot easier to bulkbill XYZ-telco than thousands of individuals.

Too late for most people

Sony used to be special in analogue days, but those were long ago.

Oh FFS

Just give people in the affected areas satellite dishes and freesat decoders.

Not missing the point

If you want raw throughput then you're probably streaming and don't need ssds, except as buffering (I can get upwards of 700Mb/s from our large, slow, spinny arrays)

15k arrays are chosen for their IOPS rating. Shortstroking gives higher IOPSs by having the arm move shorter distances (end to end seeks take about 10 times longer than adjacent track seeks) but there's still the issue of rotational latency, etc etc.

For the last 4 years if I've needed IOPS then the media of choice has been SSD. I don't particularly trust it, so the setup is always highly redundant. Even doing that, the costs have been lower than trying to get the same IOPs out of rotating media arrays.

Yes, SAS600 is a limitation, but so is SAN - I have 4 * 8Gb/s interfaces in my current crop of fileservers as a f'instance (now approaching end of life) and the next generation will be faster.

SAN activity can be scattered across all the interfaces in and out of a piece of kit, so individual port limitations aren't much of an issue as long as there are enough ports in play.

If you want high speed SAN-connected SSD then you either slap a bunch of SSD drives into existing kit (which is wasteful and inefficient on a number of levels but gives higher IOPS immediately and cheaply ) or use a design which doesn't limit to the speed of SAS interfaces - it's not that difficult to make a linux-based SAN target which can have a bunch of PCIe SSDs for cheapish, fast access as a f'instance.

At the high end, SAN-attached solid state storage is incredibly fast - there's no way even a rack of shortstroked 15krpm drives can keep up - but also bloody expensive.

The era of enterprise spinnning media is pretty much closing out. Enterprise solid state storage has already eaten the high end of the market and this article is basically showing a push to move 15krpm stuff downmarket before SSDs get there.

Low speed rotating media will stay dominant for a while but it's only a matter of time before 2Tb flash is cheaper than the same capacity HDDs.

Only double?

I recall some disties charging 6 times the us price... then getting upset when we went direct.

Back in the 90s you could fly business class from Auckland or Sydney to SF or LA, spend a week in a top hotel, buy top end Mac kit, fly home, pay all duty, tax etc and still save a wodge of cash over local pricing.

Unsurprisingly, many did.

Thankfully the NZ govt saw sense and stomped on companies (chrysler) trying to use copyright or other inanity to stomp on grey market importing of cars. It's proved somewhat harder to deal with the Book cartels (tech books sold in NZ/AUS often retailed for 12 times US bookstore prices, even fiction was 3-4 times the USA pricing - and who wants to buy a US/UK magazine that's 8 months out of date for 4 times the US/UK cover price?)

"uh oh"

As a former telco employee I have to side with those who point out there are battery banks and generators to handle multiple DAYS of power outage at major excchanges.

Battery banks feeding busbars heavy enough to mostly _vaporise_ a spanner carelessly dropped across 'em (Witnessed this a few times)

Perhaps the local ne'er-do-wells stole the diesel and carted off the batteries and engines for scrap?

Shelves full of 15k disks

Have to compromise to complete with flash. Shortstroking is common even in 2.5" format.

As soon as you do that you lose most of the advantage over a PCIe flash card. The differences in power consumption will make sure of that even if the spinny stuff is slightly cheaper.

typical Dell

Old spec, low end hardware tagged as "linux compatible" - ususally 2-3 years behind the curve.

This is why we stopped buying them for desktop use (and mostly don't consider them for server use)

Has anyone anywhere

Ever seen prices actually double? Or even increase slightly?

It's not exactly the first time this has happened and the worst case scenario has been that prices don't decrease as quickly as might be assumed.

The only times prices have gone up is when competition is removed from the market.

@michaelkav

"What baffles the brain here is the copyright industries do not grasp people elect officials and if they anger the people they do not get elected no matter how many contributions are made to their campaigns. If people DO NOT WANT A LAW it will never pass (or be revoked) and not be enforceable. Lobbying has one fatal hole in it - people elect officials not the lobbyists"

Which is why lobbyists buy ALL sides. That way they get what they want no matter who's in power.

There's a lot of merit in the idea that those who run the country should be dragged into office kicking and screaming, then given time off for good behaviour (aka, "If someone wants that kind of power why the hell would you ever consider giving it to them?")

UK ISPs refuse to even consider it

With a couple of very minor exceptions.

My kit's been IPv6-ready for a while.

MHz madness

IME changing the multipliers doesn't do much except stroke the ego - the fundamental limitation is how fast you can feed the CPU and that side of things is fixed speed.

IE: What does this do faster at 4.7GHz (other than get hotter, faster?)

Follow the money

It will be intresting to see where the rabbit hole leads to.

I was hoping

For a unified CABIN standard dammit.

Back to the matter at hand. From the wikipedia article:

=====

Connector

The connector is designed for single phase electrical systems with 120 V or 240 V such as those used in North America and Japan.

The round 43 mm diameter connector has five pins, with 3 different pin sizes

AC Line 1 and AC Line 2 - have same size power pins

Ground Pin

Proximity Detection and Control Pilot - have same size pin

Proximity Detection - Prevents movement of the car while connected to the charger.

Control Pilot - Communication line used to coordinate charging level between the car and the charger as well as other information.

The connector uses a 1 kHz square wave at +/- 12 volts generated by the Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE), i.e. the charging station, on the pilot pin to detect the presence of the vehicle, communicate the maximum allowable charging current, and control charging.[13] The connector is designed to withstand up to 10,000 connection/disconnection cycles and exposure to all kinds of elements. Approximating one connection/disconnection cycle daily, the average connector's lifespan should be just over 27 years.

=====

I'm amazed they think that one connect/disconnect cycle per day is enough to design for. Somehow I predict the average connector lifespan to be about 6 years in the real world on cars and something less than 18 months on public charge posts.

As for the "proximity sensor" - unless this works until the connector bodies are well clear of each other there are going to be driveaway incidents - and if it does work like that it's going to be fun to make some "dummy plugs" and stall cars simply by slapping 'em on the bodywork near the chargepoint.

Discussions about 120/240V are largely irrelevant unless the design allows for less than 2kV live/earth isolation. (Lightning strikes are a bitch). It's not as if universal switchmode supplies are a new invention - and for real charging oopmh you'll need 400/440V 3 phase - which is more or less the same in all countries apart from frequency. It'd be incredibly shortsighted not to design for that too.

High voltage/current DC on a consumer-demountable conector = massive fail. DC arcs aren't self-extinguishing.

Bypassing US immigration laws

Won't help much.

Quite simply, the current protectionist-inspired uber-hostile attitude to foreign graduates of local institutes(*) has had an immediate effect on the number of applications to study at said institutes - and the remaining applicants have no desire to work in the ocuntries concerned after they graduate (for the most part they have employment guaranteed elsewhere).

(*)USA and UK have both gone down this path but others are folllowing.

The end result is that innovation is happening elsewhere and so are the business opportunities. If these policies are kept up the UK and USA will both end up as even larger parochial backwaters than they already are.

Patent and copyright abuse

Both exist to give the inventor/author a _limited_ time to profit from the work/invention.

Patent and copyright law have both been abolished and then recrafted in the UK as a result of widespread and systematic abuse (although one does have to go back a few hundred years). I suspect that before the end of this century there will be another great clensing.

I'm another one "opted in" on my mobile.

Because the IWF thinks the Sarracens rugby club should be blocked.

A bunch of issues

Firstly they were in a hurry so they used a tool which recorded random data as well as what they were after - and the engineer told them it'd do this - which presumably got written off as "not important" in the push to get clear of dependency on SkyHook.

I've seen a streetview car go past my house.

1: It would have 0.5-2 seconds of data or less - nothing particularly useful.

2: It would only get that data on non-encrypted networks

3: I have bigger issues to worry about (the script kiddy nearby who keeps trying to breach my WPA2 f'instance - I don't have the heart to tell him that I've triangulated his IP, so I know where he lives and the passphrase is long enough he'll be trying until the heat death of the universe)

The _only_ useful thing I can see Google doing with the data is to produce a list of _unencrypted_ access points.

Publication (or not) becomes the only real issue - and it took publication of open mail relays to start forcing those closed 15 years ago, so it wouldn't necessarily signal evil intent to do so.

(I left my AP open for a long time because one of the older pieces of kit didn't do encryption without breaking badly. The impetus for closing it was said script kiddie maxing out ADSL bandwidth.)

Wrt capturing IP addresses - the most likely IP address to be captured would be 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 - hardly a unique identifier.

After what happened in New Zealand

I start wondering if the book "Smith's Dream" or movie adaption "Sleeping Dogs" was simply 30 years early.

Jack Russells

My mother's thinkpad survived similar treatment from her Briard.

Dismantle, drop in bucket of water, etc.

The keyboard actually worked better afterwards.

Account manager, vs technically capable salesmen

I know which I'd rather talk to - and I spent 50k with Engage last year.

It's not about cost + margin...

It's all about "what the market will bear"

Just like running a telco.

Doing it the hard way

Of course he does, otherwise it wouldn't be El Reg :)

The vacuum chamber is hideously overengineered, but it should last for a while as a result...

Drive prices in data centres

When you're buying your storage half a petabyte at a time, drives make up a substantial part of array pricing (at the moment it's about 1/2 - 2/3 of the total when buying 2Tb units)

One thing most admins seem to agree on though - drive reliability is getting a lot worse overall.

How long before.....

... Disney opens a Doctor Who theme area?

Or a Buena Vista Dr Who film?

Glass plate

6mm glass won't crack and the idea is for it to blow off when the rocket starts.

Personally I would have used tried and true heavy duty laboratory gas jars but there's no reason this setup won't work for the intended purpose - however for pulling a sustained vacuum it'd be outgassing for months.

Using a flat latex ring with a lip over the outer edge would easily take care of slippage.Forces due to air pressure are easy to under (or over) estimate (Hint, 1: if something can hold 14-16 pounds of pressure there's no good reason it can't hold the inverse. The actual movement pressure on the sealing ring is likely to be trivial given the crossectional area around the jar's circumference.)

Leakage isn't a big issue, just use a higher capacity pump. Moisture is more of a problem - or lack of it in some cases after sustained exposure to low pressures.

Viglen

I bought from Viglen. Once. Over my objections. I was forced to. Never again.

Quoted 6 week delay from ordering to delivery and the system didn't work when it finally arrived after 12 weeks (Never mind that 2 weeks of that quoted delay is supposed to be burn in testing, it wouldn't even complete the bios sequence!)

Identical orders from other suppliers showed up, working out of the box, in 12 days and for significantly less outlay.

This is far from a unique experience. Given Viglen is just a whitebox company it's not a case of "plucky brits", etc etc

Overpriced dongles....

1: Powerline networking

or

2: Ethernet to a Wireless Access Point setup as a station.

The bandwidth on wireless is crap, especially if there are a few devices using it. (Remember, lowest negotiated speed sets the speed for ALL stations, so that shitty signal to the laptop in the kitchen is dragging everything else down)

MAC as identifier

Perhaps I should create something which starts generating a cloud of fake MACs and network activity for my wireless connection.