Mark Gilbert’s Blog

Well after what seems like an eternity I have managed to get my Internet connection at the new place sorted, which means I can get the site back up. The connection is a little slow but that may change soon, we’ll see how I get on with BT and various other issues.

Nice to be back anyway. I felt a little lost without the net at home, a little out of the loop if you know what I mean.

Anyway, that’s all for now and I should have a more full post tomorrow.

Cheers

Easily the best advert on TV right now. Saw this for the first time tonight and loved it. It’s ads like this that stand out from the rest. It’s well thought out with a catchy tune and makes the viewer laugh. Couple all this with some retro puppet action and they’ve got a winning formula.

Cheers

Well at this present point in time I would say that’s unlikely, but in the future, well who knows. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang called Intel’s integrated graphics offerings “a joke”, which may be true from a certain perspective. From another angle though Intel have done a pretty good job so far of sewing up the laptop graphics market, only a few niche items really contain Nvidia or AMD chips, the integrated graphics on desktops shows a similar picture too. Surely however when it comes in discrete graphics cards and chips Nvidia is top dog? Well yes, currently, although that may soon change and I’ll tell you why, Intel’s Larrabee graphics chips.

Intel intend to take a new approach to graphics, with the Larrabee chips being based off the x86 instruction set like most CPUs rather than custom graphics oriented instruction sets like most current GPUs. Intel senior vice president Pat Gelsinger said at the Intel Developer Forum last week in Shanghai,

“First, graphics that we have all come to know and love today, I have news for you. It’s coming to an end. Our multi-decade old 3D graphics rendering architecture that’s based on a rasterization approach is no longer scalable and suitable for the demands of the future.”

Early schematics for the chips suggest they are have 16 cores capable of operating in excess of 2GHz, but the number of cores can easily scale up to the thousands. This high number of general purpose cores fites very nicely with Intel’s current Tera-Scale project. The vision of computing and architecture that Intel sees in the future seems to consist of a high number of general purpose cores, which can be used for different tasks and reallocated on demand. For example instead of having a dual core CPU and a dual core GPU, Intel envisage a quad core general purpose chip that performs the tasks of both. Not running a game? Then all four cores can be dedicated to general processing tasks. Doing a lot of 3D rendering? Well more cores can be dedicated to the graphics processing. Work from that basis and scale up, which Intel is already doing, as they have demonstrated a prototype 80 core chip that can perform 1 TeraFLOP, hence the name of the project, while still exhibiting a TDP of 62W. In comparison the first system to achieve 1 TeraFLOP was ASCI Red. It achieved this in 1996 and used nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors running at 200MHz and consumed 500kW of power plus an additional 500kW just to cool the room that housed the beast.

I think it is this that Nvidia are really worried about. Not that Intel will develop a better Discrete GPU than them, because that would take a lot of effort, but more that their role purely as a manufacturer of discrete GPUs will become more and more marginalised over time.

Huang was quoted as saying that

“if Intel manages increase graphics performance by ten times by 2010, that’s barely up to par with current Nvidia offerings”

Although with Nvidia spending $1 Billion on R&D and Intel spending $6 Billion on R&D, Intel may be able to do just that and more.

Personally I think the Intel approach will win out, multi-cored, multi-purpose chips seems like the way forward to me.

Cheers

There are few things that get me more annoyed than politics, when I watch the news or read the paper you can guarantee that the stories that will annoy me the most will have a political element to them.

I recently read an article that really really annoyed me, SNP set 20-seat Westminster goal . Basically the SNP or Scottish National Party would like to get 20 seats in parliament at the next general election. In itself not a problem, but it is the motive behind this goal that I despise. Their motive is that with the Conservatives gaining a lot of ground on Labour in the polls the SNP anticipate a hung parliament and they feel that 20 seats would give them a key position in Westminster. SNP leader Alex Salmond said in a BBC Scotland webchat

“We could make Westminster dance to a Scottish jig.”

Hold on just one bloody minute, they already have a National Assembly in Scotland, do we English get any chance to make that “dance to an English jig”? Do we hell as like. Why is there a Scottish Assembly which decides on matters which only affect Scotland, yet we in England still have to have all our decisions made by Westminster where people in Scotland can influence policy which does not affect them? Please tell me how that is fair.

Why is education better in Scotland with smaller class sizes and lower University fees? Because the English subsidise them.

Why is healthcare better in Scotland, with people having access to life saving cancer drugs, and drugs that prevent eyesight loss through macular degeneration? Because the English subsidise it.

Why is £1800 more of tax payers money spent per Capita in Scotland than in England? because England subsidises it.

This all seems a little unfair on the already over stretched English tax payer, why should a small group of people get the most money from the Chancellor, rather than the vast majority of people who generate this money. Perhaps because the previous Chancellor and the current PM is Scottish, as well as seemingly half the cabinet, this may go a long way towards explaining the discrepancy in public spending between the two countries.

So, the solution, with North Sea oil revenues declining sharply of late Scotland is in even less a position to support itself, meaning even more tax money will have to be diverted from Westminster towards Edinburgh, this then would seem to be the ideal time for a complete devolution of power, move control of Scotland to Scotland, along with responsibility for funding their own public spending. This would cut the burden of support on England and he English taxpayer, meaning better facilities and greater spending on England.

Why not do it, the Scottish seem to bang on about devolution of power on a fairly regular basis, why not give it to them, cut them loose. Stop this half hearted approach that we’re currently stuck with.

Cheers

HP is poised to buy BT’s data centres off them in a deal reportedly worth £1.5 Billion. This deal would see BT offload it’ 40 data centres to HP according to the Sunday Times. BT would still have access to the centres under a 10 year deal which would also see BT’s management of HP’s voice and data networks extend worldwide.

The companies already have an outsourcing deal worth $1.5 Billion that was forged in 2004, including worker swaps. Now the ties between the two companies are getting tighter this will bring increased speculation of a merger of the pair. Obviously both companies are playing down this prospect the Sunday Times reports.

BT were unable to comment on the possible tie-up, but HP have said

If there are developments relating to the alliance between British Telecom and HP we will inform you through our usual channels.

Both companies will announce their latest financial results this Thursday, with BT’s announcement being the last for departing CEO Ben Verwaayen. Obvious benefits of an announcement being made now is that Verwaayen could leave the companies shareholders with a large pile of cash, courtesy of HP while making BT’s new developed services division more robust and profitable while HP on the other hand would be able to tout the massive deal to their shareholders.

As said previously both companies are playing the rumour down, but then they would, wouldn’t they?

Cheers

I did experience a short spell of server down time recently, due to some electrical work being carried out. Hopefully though that is all done now and things can return to normallity.

Cheers

It would appear that the eBay owned payment service PayPal is planning to block what it deems as unsafe browsers. PayPal is one of those websites and services which features most prominently in phishing attacks. PayPal said that

“browsers that do not have support for blocking identity theft-related Web sites or for EV SSL (Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are considered “unsafe” for financial transactions.”

Michael Barrett, PayPal Chief Information Security Officer was quoted as saying

“In our view, letting users view the PayPal site on one of these browsers is equal to a car manufacturer allowing drivers to buy one of their vehicles without seat belts,”

Sadly since the Safari browser doesn’t support EV SSL or have any kind of phishing protection then this may be on the list of banned browsers. Obviously older version of IE would also be included and as far as I am aware current versions of Firefox and Opera do not support EV SSL although both have pledged to in future updates.

I am really enjoying using the latest Firefox beta at the moment though, so for now anyway Safari is hiding away on my system. Whether this is all just talk remains to be seen, I don’t think they will do it though.

Cheers

It would appear that after an absence of almost 6 months that the Demonoid tracker is back with us again. It was taken offline in November 2007 after some problems with hosting, but now both the website and the tracker are back up.

If you had an existing account then it will still work, as it looks like they’ve managed to preserve all the old data too.

Cheers

For both monetary and other reasons I have changed my hosting provider. I did use Zen, but have recently begun hosting my website on my own server again. It gives me more control over the setup, but also saves me a bit of cash each month.

Cheers

Today the BBC launched it’s new look news website. The new look means a wider overall site, but sadly still fixed width, video and audio features incorporated into the page using the technology used in the iPlayer, with other changes include a new masterhead and larger images across the site.

More features are to come and the design is not completely finished but on the whole I feel it does bring the site much more up to date. You can read the BBC News site editor, Steve Herrmann’s round up of the changes over at his blog.

Cheers

Tonight I browsed to my usual Google homepage to be presented with a rather unusual sight, Google had turned the lights out, the Google homepage result is shown below.

Google users in the United Kingdom will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.co.uk homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don’t do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

Given our company’s commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Earth Hour campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful global event.

How green can you be? The UK’s carbon footprint is over 500 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Individuals account for 45% of this. Calculate your carbon footprint and find out how you can reduce it by turning off unused lights and other carbon-reducing actions.

I like to think I do my little bit, I don’t drive a huge car, I turn off lights when not in use and try to make sure TV’s are not left on standby. I suppose I could do more with regards to powering my computer off when not in use, but then it does already sleep when I’m away from it.

Here’s a good question, what’s the craziest thing you’ve done to save the environment? Answers in the comment section.

Cheers

AppleInsider is reporting that the Mac Mini may very soon be getting an upgrade, which may go further than just a drop in CPU upgrade in the existing unit.

Among the improvements destined for the new lineup are 45-nanometer Core 2 Duo mobile chips starting at 2.1GHz with 3MB of shared L2 cache, an 800MHz front-side bus (up from 667MHz), and a step up to the same Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics processor employed by the existing line of 13-inch consumer MacBooks.

Other more obvious upgrades would include a wireless upgrade to 802.11n, and possibly an optical drive change to standardise the DVD writer across the range. Whether this will happen or not remains to be seen, AppleInsider have been known to be wrong, they’ve said the Mac Mini was being killed off twice and yet it still lives on. I personally would like to see new Minis, I think they’re the perfect intro to Apple for Windows users and is how yours truly started down the Apple path.

Cheers

Well, that time of year came round where I have to decide on what new phone to get. Not being the sort of person to rush into a technology purchase uninformed I spend a lot of time debating and comparing all the options before finally making a decision. Seriously I will most likely give less thought to my child’s name than phones and other such tech things. I finally decided on the Nokia N95 and toddled off to the T-Mobile shop to get it. Except since I’m on a discount contract through my old job I cant have the N95, so on a whim I decided the N73 would probably suffice too, and went for that, horray hours of work down the drain.

As it turns out however things are not all bad. The N73 is actually a pretty good phone, it’s a smart phone, which is lovely, but not a big silly “look at me with my smart phone and touch screen, I have to use a stylus to control it but that doesn’t matter because it makes me look like an important cock”, but a subtle “yeah, I’ve got a smart phone, what of it?”

It’s a standard Symbian S60v3 affair, which fairly well apes the usual mobile phone interface. In most respects on initial glances it looks like my old Nokia 6280. However when you dive into the phone itself it becomes apparent that this is not normal phone. From the inclusion of PDF readers and office document viewers, to a flash viewer for the web it’s clear that this phone can do a lot more than just calls and texts. The real power comes from being able to install other applications on it though. For example, for some strange reason Nokia left out an auto keylock funciton. No worries, someone has coded one for you. Want Google Maps? Just install the application from Google’s website and you then have a local Google map client which can use your mobile masts to triangulate your location on the map. Throw in with that things like the Opera browser, and even Doom, not some cut down version of Doom either, a Symbian 60 application running the original Doom wad files. Throw into the mix a native Gmail client, an internet radio client produced by nokia and you have a very nice starting point for a great phone.

The camera is nice and take a good photo, with the usual amount of shutter lag, but that is only in the order of what I’m used to from previous phones. the flash is bright and the zoom good, combine that with the Carl Zeiss optics and it’s a very good handy snapper. Of course it will never have the clarity of my Canon Ixus 50 but it’s very good for when I’m caught short without a camera.

Now the negatives, it does go through battery fairly fast, it needs charging about every 48 hours. I have heard people say that smart phones have been prone to crash, well mine has not crashed once, so I’m happy on that front. Some people have commented that smart phones are slow and clunky, well I will admit it is a little slower than some other phones I’ve used, but not by much. Besides, if you want a phone that never crashes and is lightening fast get a Nokia 1200, bloody luddites, I’m sticking with my N73.

Cheers

The Web Standards Project has released the latest version of it’s acid test for browser rendering, surprisingly called the ACID3 Test.

Acid3 goes beyond the CSS tests implemented by Acid2 and tests a browser’s DOM Scripting capability, as well as continuing to probe visual rendering of CSS, SVG and webfonts.

The test itself can be found here along with the reference rendering.

The ideal score is obviously for your browser to score 100/100 and have the test rendering look exactly like the reference rendering, suffice to say there are no mainstream browsers out there that pass completely yet. Internet Exploder fails this test in a rather grand fashion, but then that is now the norm for any Microsoft browser and a web standards test.

Cheers

Yesterday AOL finally ended support for the Netscape browser. There will be no more updates, no even security ones from 1/3/2008. From it’s beginning as the Mosaic browser in 1994 right through to the height of it popularity in the mid-90’s, for most people Netscape was “the internet”. Internet Explorer has yet to take off, and Netscape offered the internet in a simple and easy package.

Somewhere along the way though it all went wrong for Netscape, personally I blame bloat. WTF was Netscape Communicator all about? The best thing they did was keep the source alive in the form of the Mozilla project. Then they also succumbed to the curse of bloat and spun off Firefox and Thunderbird. However while Firefox is the top dog in terms of alternative browsers now, their footprint has been growing steadily since the early pre-1.0 releases and they will seriously have to watch they don’t go the same way as their dear departed grandparent, Netscape.

If you long for the olden days when your browser did everything under the sun, including scheduling and e-mail, then take a look at SeaMonkey, it’s what remains of Mozilla.

Cheers

Microsoft has been fined €899 Million by the EU for violation of the 2004 anti-trust ruling. This amount is the fine is the sum of daily fines from June 21st 2006 to October 21st 2007. This makes Microsoft the first company to be fined for non-compliance.

I have previously mentioned that this was coming here.

Cheers

I know for those who live in earthquake prone zones it’s nothing, but at 00:56 UTC an earthquake of magnitude 4.7 hit the UK. The US Geological Survey puts the epicentre at 53.321°N, 0.314°W which is about 45 miles from me. I felt some shaking, doors and shook and bottles rattled. Luckily there has been no structural damage to my house. The UK Geological Surveywebsite is unsurprisingly currently unavailable, as is the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre site, but I will check it out and post a further update when it’s back up and I get a moment.

BBC News is also reporting the tremor.

*UPDATE* The British Geological Survey now have their findings in PDF format for your reading pleasure

*UPDATE* The British Geological Survey is reporting that the earthquake measured 5.2 on the richter scale and the epicentre was Market Rasen, Lincolnshire at a depth of 10Km. After shocks measuring up to 1.8ML were felt after the event.

Cheers

As we all know, Blu-Ray has fairly well won the HD DVD wars. It was included in the PS3 console which massivly increased it’s user base. I think it would be interesting to see figures breaking down Blu_ray player sales into PS3 sales and standalone player sales. This would give a clearer insight into how much of a part the PS3 has played in this battle.

The other question that goes round my head is this, “would the outcome of this battle been different if Microsoft had included HD-DVD players in the Xbox 360?” Perhaps not the basic versions, but the Elite versions only. I feel this should have happened and it may have been an oversight on Microsoft’s part not to. I understand the logic behind not oncluding HD-DVD drives in the 360, MS did not want to be seen as having a dead weight round it’ neck if HD-DVD lost, but that may have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Cheers

Most of the time I’m a fairly happy and content person, but every so often someone does something that really winds me up. For example Internet Exploder only sites really annoy me, HP’s Channel Services Network site only works correctly in IE. Firefox, Opera and other all fail to render it correctly. Is it beyond the powers of HP, one of the largest technology companies in the world to write standards compliant code? Of course it bloody isn’t but they just can’t be bothered to do things right.

I also find myself quite annoyed by a lot of things the government and it’s minions say and do. Appointing Michael Martin as speaker of the house, for example, mean that an incompetent buffoon who deserves to be removed from the post for his disgraceful conduct. At times during commons debates he seems to have very little grasp on what is going off, and since his position is to enforce and keep some kind of decorum, knowing what’s happening would seem like a key part of his role. During the newly appointed Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s second PM’s questions The Speaker completely forgot to call his name. The Speaker has to have wigged clerks pass him advice during parliamentary debates, nothing immediately wrong with a bit of advice but this is becoming all too regular. Besides if the man at the top needs constant pointers on how to do his job, you have to wonder how well suited to the task of advising him the people below him really are.

I could go on down this line but I’d be moving at a tangent away from my main point, which is the latest piece of legislation to come from Whitehall regarding ISPs policing their users. The government has said that ISPs who do no take steps to curb illegal downloads of music and films will face legal sanctions. The suggestion is that ISPs operate on a disconnection after ‘three strikes’ rule. Under the proposals, the first strike would be an e-mail warning from the ISP with the second strike resulting in suspension and finally termination of contract on the third strike.
It would seem that the Labour party has been receiving some rather large donations from the BPI and FACT.
Really how can this be enforced? An ISP would have to block access to every site thought to be offering links to illegal music of films, but this would not do anything to counter the so-called “deep web“. Therefore this would have to be paired with a policy of inspecting individual packets traversing their networks and then block users based on this data. However false positives would be a major problem for all approaches. What recourse would users have if they were wrongly identified as downloading illegal music? What happens when multiple people share the same network, who gets banned? If the person whose name the account is in then another account with another ISP could be opened in a different name.

However the point I think ISPs will be most concerned about is this effectively removes an ISPs “mere conduit” status as set out in the EU Electronic Commerce Directive (Terrorism Act 2006). “Mere conduit” status means that ISPs are not responsible for the traffic going over their network when they are not aware of the content, for example an ISP cannot be held liable if a terrorist attack is planned via e-mail or Paedophile ring is run on it’s network. The same applies to telephone companies such as BT and other similar organisations such as Royal Mail. “Mere conduit” status relies upon the fact that the carrier has no idea at all what is being carried, they are simply there to deliver the message, regardless of what it is. Without “mere conduit”, ISPs face legal action over traffic that’s outside of their control. This could drive ISPs out of business or drive customers out of the EU to ISPs based elsewhere.

In my opinion ISPs should not inspect any traffic traveling across their networks. I would not expect Royal Mail to open my post or BT to listen in on my phone calls. It violates my privacy as an individual. Nineteen Eighty Four was supposed to be a warning, not a guidebook. How far can an ISP go before they lose “mere conduit” status? Is spam filtering going too far? Messages have to be inspected to perform this task. Would blocking spyware infested machine that were spewing spam constitute waiving “mere conduit” status? Are ISPs which throttle bandwidth to P2P apps going too far towards monitoring traffic on their networks?

Will ISPs want to enforce this legislation? Probably not, but if it’s the law they will have very little choice. Will businesses be exempt from this monitoring. I work for an IT Services company which uses remote VPN links to other businesses including insurance companies, pension companies, banks and accountancy firms. I think some of our customer would be most upset that our ISP and their own was looking at their data. In some cases it may even be illegal for ISPs to inspect data since it could be in violation of confidentiality or data protection laws. Will ISPs even be able to inspect data that is encrypted? The government has clearly not thought this through properly, which leads me to either one of a few conclusions. Either the law will come into force and be ignored by everyone. The law will be shot down in the commons as it should be. The law will come into force, and will be enforced rigorously, then the whole UK Internet will simply melt down.

Which ever outcome actually happens this just goes to prove that the government is either not aware of the implications and practicalities of legislation it is proposing or is fully aware of both of these but chooses to ignore them anyway.

If you feel as strongly about this as I do then I suggest you sign this petition to the UK government.

Cheers

The most popular alternative browser on the web has just hit half a billion downloads. Internet Exploder is still the most common browser by a fairly long margin, but Firefox is gaining all the time.

Cheers