Posts by John Robson
626 posts • joined Monday 19th May 2008 14:40 GMT
Fail:
“One of the things we’re trying to do through our research is to understand how digital media can be made to meaningfully intersect with the physical world," explains Shaun Lawson, Professor of Social Computing at Lincoln.
Unless of course this in an Edison moment...
"I've not failed, just found 10,000 ways not to make a better light bulb"
Re: Fun fact
Surely we just shut the barrier and set it off?
Re: Quality is key
Their problem for me is that my 2-2.5 year old DHD is still working just fine - and I expect it to go on working for another couple of years at least.
This is a challenge - you make something that falls apart and get berated, but if you make something that lasts then you get no future sales, because in this arena things move so fast I'll be looking completely afresh by the time I need a new phone...
Re: Really?
35m in 3 million years is 11 micrometres / year
Tectonic plates move at around 1-10 centimetres / year
Not fast really - it's just a *long* time...
Fans overkill?
Is it just me that thinks that 4 fans is overkill for a device which basically doesn't need cooling in normal operation.
I know it will be running flat out more than most, but 4 large fans?
Re: 56000 mph
And does, regularly.
The earth is somewhat a larger target than the moon. It gets hit significantly more often...
Air - it's more important than just breathing...
Post PC...
My family now live in a post PC house - we have a combination of iOS and Android devices, and they serve our needs very well. If I'm being open then I also have a Linux server (Network services, including VPN) and a FreeNAS - but those are using old hardware to do the job of an appliance.
Pages and Keynote on the iPad are a bit limited compared with their PC versions, but they still do the job well for the professional author/speaker in the family. Google docs serve personal documentation needs quite well on both sides of the OS fence.
The one thing we can't do at the moment... manage music on the iPod classic.
I'd happily pay £30 (seems to be the going rate) for a dongle to connect the iPad to the iPod and manage it's music that way (remember the FreeNAS box for central storage), but for some reason it's not an option.
Pretty much that one single requirement is going to push us into buying a PC, which will (almost certainly) be a mac mini (our first ever mac) - so I guess they have their marketing right, or rather MS have it SO badly wrong...
PS - Yes I could probably use gtkPod or equivalent, but to achieve a sustainable WAF it has to be iTunes...
elreg
Hopefully they'll bring many of the missing features to the iOS versions -they're good, but they're a touch limited compared with the desktop versions...
Re: Interface (Verb)
No - it means make it think it's in a plane.
Oh, and don't let the avionics decide that at zero feet above ground level you've crashed, and should therefore shut down the engine...
Re: “advance the bold vision”
"Ribbon has (by and large) won users over"
Really?
All the users who have an extra couple of inches of monitor they don't actually want to use? I still hate it. I can never find what I want to use any more - I'm always hunting for functionality.
Re: 5G WHY at All ?
I'd quite like to see it used for broadband - much easier to deploy than "better copper" or fibre...
Just pop an antenna array onto your chimney and point it at the local base station.
Also likely to get better choice of providers and more reliable service (given how bad my copper often is)
Lampposts....
There are quite alot of these devices around.
They have power, they have elevation, they are more densely clustered in highly populated areas - cover the vast majority of "places where people are"...
Is it just me that thinks they'd make a good network for mini/micro.../atto cells - with a secondary mesh network connecting them together.
A national network of these, wholesaling out peering links (with authentication and subscriber authentication handled by the "ISP"). I know the concept of BT MkII is unattractive, but it has to beat trying to roll out 4 identical networks with high coverage...
Units,,,
There are two units of mass - the ton and the tonne.
They are quite similar, but not the same. It's not a question of spelling, but when one is talking about several of them per teaspoon you can take your pick.
In ElReg units...
1 ton is ~ 215 jugs
1 tonne is ~ 238 jugs
Posted in Oz chap blows his own Google Glass
Is it just me...
“If I want to access my emails I hold down the button on my earpiece and it will announce 'I'm listening', to which I reply with 'Open Facebook'"
Isn't "Open Facebook" an odd command to use to access email?
I think I'll wait for a while...
To let Wheezy prove it's mettle as a stable release...
Me - an early adopter? Well, OK, sometimes...
A decent email service would help a bit...
If it's a crime in progress then 999 is appropriate, if it's not then it can probably wait a couple of minutes to go into an email.
2 years on...
And I'm planning to keep my HTC Desire HD for another two years....
Who knows what I'll want by then...
Yes, because all technology is first tested in a final state, ready to be used for a random joe public's pet project.
Heck, even trains were initially dismissed as useless, as were cars and computers...
When will we able to define *which* WiFi connection to download apps over
Just because it's wifi, doesn't mean it's unmetered (phone tethers/mifi devices being the most obvious)
What colour was tasty again?
was it green?
FLAC
Of course you can - you just need to not do lossy compression.
Surely....
These things come from a small set of bank systems.
They've seen this kind of thing happen before - so why not map all DD messages, only ones you haven't seen before need a human interaction. That would be busy work for a few hours (to look at the historical values) and then only need to deal with exceptions...
10 seconds???
How far do you travel in 10 seconds - even at a sedate 20mph?
I hope it's under 10 seconds.
Re: You want to know if it'll work?
Although F1 cars have another couple of pressures (total mass, and total size) which tend to encourage very small flywheels (counter rotating to deal with gyroscopic forces) at very high speeds.
IIRC The Joint European Torus used to use a fairly hefty flywheel to power one of their diagnostic lasers...
Re: RE: There goes the use of in-flight devices....
I always use my kindle during take off, and landing.
Most of the time it's an idle device - when I hit a physical button it reads a little data from memory and pushes it to the e-ink screen.
I'm normally somewhat distracted at the moment of take off (into the clouds at any rate) and from the clouds to touchdown, since I enjoy looking out of the windows - but I've never had a flight attendant say anything to me about the kindle...
Re: We already have a system that you pay more the more you drive...
if only roads were the only cost of motoring.
recent eu study suggested an average subsidy of £815 pa per person in the UK - a little over the EU average of 600.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/25/car-pollution-noise-accidents-eu?INTCMP=SRCH
RaidZ
Does the variable stripe size not make this a much better approach than hardware raid anyway?
Anyone else still considering installing WinXP systems?
I know we're still installing them at work, but I'm seriously considering doing so at home...
Conductive rubber - or even just copper tape contacts on top of the rubber?
Why does this prevent the contact based approach?
Kerbal Space Programme....
I can't believe it doesn't even get a mention...
Re: But, But
From a consumer perspective it's probably nice to have a single reference for all of your "alerts from".
So an idle account which follows all your software providers emergency patch people etc could be handy. Of course you could put it together or use that good old fashioned "e-mail"...
Why this past tense talk about migrating to Win7?
Still on XP at work (one of my employers is on Win7) and "post PC" at home (i.e. tablets/phones only - I have a linux VPN endpoint and a FreeNAS box, but they're not PCs - despite the hardware)
Re: Seti@Attic
I never did get a visit from the police, although I think they might have been confused - I used to refer to it as "the farm" (as was the custom with SETI clusters at the time).
"Yes officer the farm is up in the loft..."
/me hears click of handcuffs, despite the carpet suddenly muffling my ear.
Stratolites?
I thought we were at the point where we could launch unmanned solar powered craft which would soar to the stratosphere and then stay roughly in the right place to provide a broad coverage...
Granular controls on the phone...
And a couple of "Ad server" applications so that freeware only needs to slurp an advert from a local service, not have full unfettered access to my network interface, would be a really good start.
But that's too obvious.
Re: Huh ?
And over a high latency network use NX from NoMachine.
Works brilliantly at scrapping the (multiple trip) latency associated with home broadband to remote server networks...
Timeouts?
Given the number of times my RSA token code has expired by the time I've finished typing it in and the machine has spent a few round trips getting authenticated...
I hope this is not a time limited process.. OTOH it looks really good for things like ATMs
But can we infer the pattern lock from the distribution of bacteria/fungi?
'cos that would be cool - gross, but cool.
Re: "Dell takes aim at iPad, uncloaks enterprise-level Win8 tablet"
Dell did smartphones?
Re: Looks like a Nexus 7 clone...
Then get a cheap chinese tablet.
If you're looking for a browser then they work well...
Keyboards....
My tablet(s) use them.
They don't define a PC though.
3D? - I only see 2D
And if the plastic is cold on laying will it actually allow you to build layers?
I presume there is some fiddling going on here, because the plastic did stick to previously laid plastic in the video - which implies that it isn't quite cold as it's laid.
Why remove them?
Just add another rack (and optionally power them down)
Besides with cold storage I suspect that the lifetime of most of the cells in the TLC will be good, they'll be read alot (eventually), but rarely written to.
Or just....
legislate against that which you want to restrict - looking into people's bedrooms.
Of course, that's already illegal, so they'd have nothing to do.
The devil finds work idle hands.
Re: Assume it was an auto box.
Some cars DO lock the steering if the ignition is off - non powered steering is OK at speed though, it's the slow speed manoeuvres that require strength
Gears?
Move gear selector to neutral - which in my renault can be done whilst coasting.
In our old renault my wife (hen fiancee) managed to knock it into neutral at 70mph on the A1 - that was interesting (i.e. "oh, has the tranmission failed")
I'm always sceptical of these stories - there are normally a good number of ways to at least limit the speed of these vehicles...
Posted in WTF is... IEEE 1905.1?
Redundancy
Is nothing without warnings...
So the Ethernet fails and everything is routed over WiFi. That's fine, but who knows the Ethernet has failed?
