Posts by TeeCee 9436 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
The screen's standard. Even without the satnav option.
Reversing camera and all the bits with as an addon is 900EUR and worth every cent IMHO.
If you don't take it, proximity sensors are standard.
25 quid satnav? With European maps, turn by turn, junction layouts and lane directions (i.e. bare minimum spec for driving)? Where?
I wondered at that too. The bog-loads of torque from nothing presented by the 'leccy drive do make it take off like a scalded cat.
Maybe the reviewer overdid it? The Achilles' heel here is grip. If you really clog it and break traction, it dumps the breakers on the inverter causing the electric drive and all that torque to suddenly disappear. It has to do this as that torque will snap a driveshaft or strip the transmission if a wheel spins and then grips at full chat.
Incidently, it is possible to disable that traction control by hacking the thing (Google it). This comes with dire "don't try this at home" warnings and *will* invalidate the warranty if anything breaks.............
Take back that Boffin icon forthwith!
Toyota's HSD is a full series / parallel hybrid system and allows the electric drive and engine to operate independantly of each other or in tandem. AFAIK, the only manufacturer kicking out a parallel only hybrid right now is Honda.
So HSD vehicles are exactly like an Ampera with a smaller battery[1] in fact. One of the main reasons the Ampera was delayed was they originally specced the Volt as a pure serial, but found its performance and especially its hill-climbing capabilities stunk like a pile of rotting badgers. The European Ampera launch was delayed while a certain amount of rethinking took place. Allowing it to also drive the front wheels directly from the engine via its epicylic transmission, in effect replicating the series/parallel setup of HSD, involved licensing patents off, er, Toyota.
In certain areas HSD is rather better than the GM tech as it can actually recharge the battery using the engine, something the Volt/Ampera does not do if reports are to be believed (if so, WHY?). This means that the engine can run at its most efficient speed and excess power produced gets squirreled away in the battery until needed. You have to suspect a Vampera's economy in "extended range" (aka flat battery) mode sucks by comparison to the Toyota product and I await "real world" figures with interest.
Given that the fleet market is where most cars go and given the choice of "fill it using the fuel card or plug it in at my expense", I fully expect the majority of Vamperas to run around in permanent extended range mode. This is likely to have two effects. Firstly, the BIK reductions for its headline CO2 figures will make a mockery of the system. Secondly, secondhand ex-fleet cars will invariably come with a shagged battery due to its lack of charge/discharge cycling and residual values will plummet.
All Vampera speculation is IMHO of course, I don't actually have a crystal ball and I haven't had a go with one yet.
I suppose I should come clean (hah!) at this point and own up to having a fleet Prius. No axe-grinding or leaf-munching involved though, it's purely a tax dodge.
[1] Although PHEV versions now exist with a bigger battery.
"People these days don't even know about cooked and raw."
Spotty, fresh-off-the-training-course SAN array admins certainly don't[1] in my experience.
Put it this way, Informix doesn't like it very much when some fresh-faced eejit recalls the course-imparted wisdom of "disks that do not have a filesystem on them are not in use" and moves all its raw storage onto another server somewhere else.....
Paris, the only other other thing alleged to go down that spectacularly.
[1] Although, to be fair to the poor-bastard-cowering-in-a-hail-of-shit concerned, presumably the trainers employed by a certain very large storage vendor are also unaware of this distinction.
"the need on Windows went the way of the dinosaurs when all Windows varieties moved to NTFS."
Er, bollocks!
You'll be delighted to hear than that a crufty windows box gets a honking speed hike from a good defrag, both online and (key here) offline for the metadata and registry hives.
Not too long ago, when filesystems on physical disks was the norm, we used to have to defrag our HP-UX boxes to maintain I/O performance. It's only the advent of the SAN arrays that's put paid to this.
Anything storing data to a filesystem on a single disk will benefit from defragmentation as ensuring that the actuator gets its blocks sequentially when reading a given file without having to move around all over the platter speeds up things no end.
Once you use a disk array that supports parallel access, the situation changes. For example, the good old IBM System/38 used to quite deliberately fragment data across all the disks it had available in a given storage pool and returned very respectable I/O performance at the time as a result, so this is nothing new.
NB: Your cheapshit RAID 0 array doesn't cut it here as that also benefits from a defrag. Reading block 1 from disk 1, block 1 from disk 2, block2 from disk 1 (etc ad nauseam) is still faster than having the heads hop all over the shop on all the disks. However, a fragmented RAID 0 setup will often outperform a defragmented single disk purely due to the benefits of parallel I/O.
In order to see no performance degradation from fragmentation you need a controller that supports I/O queuing, out-of-order reads/writes and "knows" where each data block is on any given disk without having to look it up from same. Then it can queue the read/write requests for a disk and satisfy them all with one pass of the actuator across the platters, much like Novell's old hashing and disk I/O elevator algorithms.
I'll just buy a drink for that nice dinosaur at the end of the bar now.
Hmmm, turning a tidy profit by copping a percentage of the bunce generated could be seen to qualify there.
It'd be terribly difficult to imagine a large business that didn't make any effort to analyse and monitor its revenue streams but instead just sat back, crossed its fingers and watched the anonymously sourced cash roll in.
Also "promote infringing sales" is an interesting one. If you go to eBay's perfume bit, select a specific brand and some of the offers are fakes, does that mean eBay itself is effectively promoting the fakes as being the brand......?
File under worms / can of.
"Magnanti said that she relates the story only as a cautionary tale to others."
I'd have thought that the only cautionary tale from that quarter ought to be that shagging for cash, telling everyone on teh intahtoobs all the gory details and also expecting to remain anonymous is doomed to failure.
If you set out to put the unmasking of your nom de plume character into the "scoop of the year" category, you shouldn't act surprised when the whole of Fleet Street starts playing silly buggers around you.....
As one who dislikes stickers I can assure you I don't give a flying f*** how many it comes with, as the first thing I do with a new machine is peel 'em all off anyway.
I've never actually bothered counting how many I peel off as I am merely obsessive, not completely anal.
"They also normally make the seed infertile, locking in the customer forever."
While it may have that effect, that's not why they do it and it wasn't their choice. It's a sop to the leaf-munching Luddites and intended to prevent any possible nasty gene thingies leaking into the wild. Many countries have legislation enforcing sterility in GM crops.
Company A's business has an insatiable appetite for huge amounts of hideously expensive bleedin' edge hardware and makes a shitload of hard cash from flogging advertising.
Company B's business has an insatiable appetite for huge amounts of hideously expensive bleedin' edge hardware and makes a shitload of hype from page views.
Which one is most likely to have its arse on a chair when the music stops.......?
That would involve getting into a very serious and unwinnable game of whack-a-mole.
For example: If anyone is interested in running a parody site, I see that "shiteonsunday.<TLD>" would appear to be available for every value of TLD. This has the dual advantages of both being immune to any NI domain snatch shenanigans and also being a name that more accurately describes the content under discussion.
1) Type your problem clearly on your iPhone.
2) Kneel on floor, close eyes, hold phone above head in both hands and say; "Ommmmmmm".
Your problem will be automatically sent to the inbox of St Steve, where it will immediately become not that big of a deal.....
Easy one. ATCs are smart people and therefore apt to vote the wrong way come union election time. Also they are the sort of people prone to asking difficult questions like: "Where did the union funds go?", "Was that 12 day 'fact finding' junket to the caribbean really necessary?" and "Why is it that all the candidates on this leadership ballot play golf together?".
Union leaders prefer unquestioning sheep and are prepared to go the extra mile for them. Anyone who can spell their own name and count to ten without using their fingers is a dangerous intellectual and any work-related grievances they may purport to have are most likely a right-wing plot to discredit the brothers of the union.
After all, there's only something over a quarter of a century to fix that in........assuming Android's still around in its current form by then of course.
If that worries you, I strongly suggest that you don't come here any more. Some of the articles are quite likely to cause heart failure in someone of such a fragile disposition.
The problem here is that they ain't getting 'em. The machines internal graphics drives are designed to performing graphics tasks quickly. So they should be, they shouldn't be in the business of validating everything sent to them.
The fact that some total arsehat thought it was ok to directly expose the graphics APIs to the web without mandating something to sanitise what's pouring in from the sewer is the problem. It's only the external input that needs rigorous checking, so that's where the checking should be done to avoid crapping on the performance of everything else.
The other elephant in this room is that there are almost certainly things happily running on PCs now with the odd bug or two in their graphics calls. Introducing rigorous sanitisation directly in the GPU drivers would break the lot of 'em.
It's worse than that.
The vast majority of those working there are recent recruits, so they didn't do it anyway. One of the very few people in the entire organisation who was actually around and involved in the hacking days is Crystal Tipps.
Basically they're firing 200 staff in an attempt to avoid giving her the push as, having many years as a senior NI filth-peddlar behind her, she knows where the bodies are buried and the dirt's hidden. This makes far more sense than Rupert and Rupert Lite (James) suddenly seeing the light and coming over all charitably sacrificial.
This is nothing to do with privacy law and everything to do with data protection.
Privacy laws are the anathema of Free Speech and should be regarded as the thin end of the wedge.
Put it this way. Under both the DE and FR[1] systems it would have probably have been illegal to break the MP's expenses scandal, not because of how the information was obtained, but because publishing details of an MP's expenses would be an intrusion into their private affairs.
[1] Certainly FR. They got away with a system of well-stuffed plain brown envelopes for "office expenses" for years because of this.
What happened to Compu$pend and AOL, the last two great, all-encompassing walled gardens of locked-in content.......?
Just as "giving loads of money to people who can't give it back" never seems to work for the Banking industry, I can't see "screwing your users and betting the farm on them not walking away" becoming a success in the online world any time soon.
Makes sense and I have actaully suggested a couple of times that webmail services do this to prevent them being low-hanging fruit for spammers.
I did qualify that with that they should set the thing to only block the obvious shit and also provide an "Outbound Spam" folder for manual flagging as not spam, so it can learn the difference and the user can see WTF is going on. Both of these rather important pieces of the process Apple would appear to have overlooked.
I suspect that the reason the examples got dropped is the vast number of phishing/scam mails knocking around purporting to be hawt newz about the ongoing train wreck in the Eurozone, so anything with "Greece" and "Brussels" in it gets the heuristic banhammer.
Given that it must capture the SSID and the geo-coordinates associated to be of any use, I'm not quite sure how capturing the associated MAC (if it does) makes it any more identifiable than it already is. Knowing this information, if knowing the MAC really floats your boat just drive round there and ask it.
Now, if they captured and stored the MACs using that point at the time it would be an issue I'll grant. There would be no justification for that, although I am not quite sure what nefarious purposes such data in isolation could be put to.
Ban those low-sulphur fuels that became all the rage a few years back.
Then we can all do our bit to combat Global Warming by driving around in humungous SUVs and/or massively powerful supercars........ideally petrol ones as we would want to burn as much of that shit as possible.
The countdown until Clarkson recycles* this comment on Top Gear starts now.
*He's probably against that sort of thing, so he'll claim his version's original and this one will go to landfill........where it will break down and emit methane.......christ, I'd better get that 8.7 litre LandWilly Turbo 4x4 now, I'm killing the planet here.
Yes, to have that many isolated incidents all occurring in the same place at the same time would seem a tad careless.......
For the latter part I would suspect that a certain hack, who just happens to share your initials of "AC", might have had an interest in ensuring that the Screws and its stablemates were still available to him as a potential place of employment once his job as HMGs Turd-Polisher in Chief came to an end. It would have been a terrible shame if he'd been forced to waste all that time spent with his tongue shoved up Rupert's backside.
"Windows.....accepts *any* name without dots in it as the more-trusted 'local intranet zone,'”
There's certainly no fixing that at ICANN, although someone in Redmond needs a swift education with the clue stick. No, not that one, the large one with the nails sticking out of it.
As for having your mail server known on your internal DNS as "exchange" rather than "exchange.<corp>.<TLD>", well if you've done that and it's going to be a problem you should look in the bloody mirror for the root cause of it. As ICANN don't retrofit common sense to the clueless, they can't fix that one either.
I dunno how it is everywhere else, but if we backed out of doing something every time it was shown to break some clueless pillock's crappy workaround, we'd never get anything done.
Atlatl (throwing stick). Cost is immaterial as it's a reusable component.
Pay Chuck Norris 990 pounds a time to sling satellites into orbit with it.
9.99 per launch for fuel and sundry consumables (beer and crisps).
There are probably other ways of doing this, but I feel that a solution using Chuck Norris and beer has a simple elegance that makes it stand out.
Much as I hate to poke holes in your argument, the '400 inherited this setup from the System/38, which also had that "the whole filesystem is an OO database" thing.
In 1977.
With a processor that made a 16Mhz 286 look athletic.
Raw horsepower was not the limiting factor in 2006........
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