I am pleased the deal has gone wrong because I’m not sure I like the idea of another large chuck of UK energy producing capacity being at the mercy of a foreign company. For example of how this can affect us look at what has happened to UK gas prices since we started importing much of our gas from the former Soviet states.

I am sad this deal has turned sour because EDF may have given the British Nuclear industry the kick up the arse and the pair of balls it sorely needs. At this point I think it is fairly clear, we need more nuclear power. France uses nuclear for most of their energy needs and do they suffer from soaring energy prices right now? No. Surprisingly we were ahead of the game 50 years ago, we were one of the first countries to invest in large scale nuclear power production, but have since fallen behind a lot of other developed countries when it comes to nuclear energy production.

If we had kept pushing forward with nuclear energy research we may now have even better waste processing facilities than we currently do at Sellafield, and be a few steps closer to the holy grail of energy production Nuclear Fusion.

Cheers

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”

I simply cannot understand why the government needs to make this many requests, and I know that National government will trot out the usual lines, such as “blah blah blah terrorism”, and “blah blah blah national security”, which to a point I agree with, but I think 500,000 in one year is pushing the limits of what is really required. What’s even more worrying is that 1,707 of them were made by local councils. What possible use can local government have for needing telephone and communication records? To check if I’m recycling correctly? Some councils listed, to combat dog fouling, because I’m sure people ring or e-mail friends all the time and brag about letting their dog shit in the street.

This is just one more example of just how much this government likes spying on it’s citizens. There are 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK, and each citizen is seen by them 300 times a day. Did I just fall through a time-warp, I could have sworn it was 2008 a minute ago, not 1984. To be honest I see no end in sight, the British public seem to have long ago given in to CCTV and now accept being watched every time they leave the house. Personally I think it is unacceptable and the government should give a valid reason for each and every CCTV camera in the country, and blanket arguments like terrorism shouldn’t be enough. Real reasons such as decreasing crime by a quantifiable amount since being installed, or to aid detection in high crime areas.

Now before you take to the street in protest of the cameras, please remember, they’re watching you.

Cheers

I added the time to the date on the top left of the posts, I’d never noticed before but if I post twice on the same day it was previously just showing both posts with the same date.

The permalinks are working again, a little mod_rewrite action in the httpd.conf and that’s all sorted.

There are a few other small backend problems, the php MySQL module is older than the MySQL version I’m using, this has come about due to a lack of installer for MySQL and me having to drop in the packages myself. I may recompile php, but again I was not up to this last night, first though I’ll weigh up whether I can really be bothered sinc it doesn’t seem to be causing me any issues, and if it ‘aint broke, then don’t fix it.

Cheers

Back then [In 1998], we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google’s index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day

Cheers

Well as some of you may or may not know I recently moved house. Since I was hosting the site myself for financial reasons it meant there would be a certain period of downtime while the phone line and Internet connection was sorted out. I was aware of this and could live with it.

What I could not have foreseen was that at the same time I would have an Install issue with my little MacMini server and would be forced to reinstall the only copy of OS X I have, 10.5 onto it for web serving purposes. On it’s own this was not a problem, obviously I have backups of the site and the database so just restore them and away I go. Simple. Except up until very recently MySQL AB did not produce a compiled version of MySQL for 10.5 on PPC, only on x86. I did attempt a few times to compile the database from source but with no luck. I was seemingly stuck. As a stop gap I used the drop in solution MAMP which worked for the most part other than a few little quirks, like sometimes the web server would stop running for no reason and MAMp would not be able to start it again as it still thought it was running. This created a problem where I had no control over whether the server was up or down, with no serious monitoring effort the server may fall over and I would be non the wiser.

That is what had been happening for the last few weeks, but now MySQL AB have pulled their collective fingers out and delivered a build of MySQL for 10.5 PPC, a quick install and it’s up and running.

Fingers crossed it will be ok now, time will tell though.

Cheers

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

Cheers

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

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

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