Posts by John Robson
626 posts • joined Monday 19th May 2008 14:40 GMT
Site fails
Although that's likely because i won't turn Javascript on for a site that has so little respect for my retinas.
Who cares about the treaty
He committed a crime here, and should be charged here.
Whether the US want to try and wade in after that is immaterial - he should be tried here first.
Posted in Home Office lost CDs on 3,000 workers
Re: Soon to be common place.
Never put down to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.
Competition? Standards?
I htink in this case I'd far rather have an industry standard, or should shops sell NTSC TVs as well...
I'll do it.
How long would it take to review all the staff and fire them all for gross incompetence before shutting the whole thing down and starting afresh by asking doctors, nurses and patients what they want/need.
I'm guessing a central database is not high on their list. A distributed filesystem might be.
Revenue^H Speed^H Safety cameras are evil
All the gatsos do is cause mass slamming on of brakes and rapid acceleration - costing us all money in increased fuel bills.
Specs at least maintain some degree of sense, except that people think that they are instant as well as average cameras and slam on the brakes anyway.
My real problem is the inappropriate positioning of speed limits, speed cameras and other road hazards.
We had a lane on a quiet road blocked off with lights recently because they were replacing a drain cover, in the week and a bit the roadworks were there I never saw anyone working. A metal sheet over the area, or just a couple of cones would have been enough - you could see the road for far enough to pass safely.
icon - It's what UK.gov want us all to do
Fire service radios
I really hope they keep analogue radios on dedicated frequencies for a while yet - there's no way I want them not being able to talk to each other.
Analogue systems are much better able to deal with marginal reception, and provide an essential backup comms link. It is a well understood and mature technology - not something that can be said about the equivalent digital systems.
@sam - Speed of light
Does change according to the substance through which it is propagating - it depends on the dielectric and magnetic properties of that material - this is how refraction works.
Of course the difference between air and air is enough to cause mirages and a whole host of other phenomenon, but that's still not really enough to change the maths by much.
Of course the model fails to account for the fact that the cashier can, in most cases, start scanning things while asking the question, thus wasting no time at all.
This is a ridiculous invention, it's not solving any extant problem.
Posted in ASA rules against citing 'hits' in ads
FFS
Who cares what metric they use, educate the public, don't ban the use of numbers.
This...
...
... I welcome our brainwashing overlords ...
Thinking is bad, war is peace...
Posted in Blu-ray to rule by 2011
Not for a while
DVD's are good enough for home use, in the same way that mp3 is good enough for almost all listening.
I'm not going to spend a grand or more to get a telly that looks no better than my current (decent) CRT.
The most likely change is to a projector, and I'll try to get one with proper HD resolution, that will simply use a smaller section of the screen for DVD playback (maybe put each pixel out as a 2*2 block, but no more "sophisticated" processing than that please...
So the treaty isn't in force
Surely an appropriate time for UK.gov to get something out of US.gov.
Until that treaty is in force we ain't following it.
@Onionman
Yeah - you'll still destroy the missile, but a decent mirror is more like 98-99% reflective (not sure how well it would cope with launch though) and corner cubing that could cause interesting problems for the jumbo - not much %age power gets back, but possibly enough to cause serious issues...
Don't bother with open DNS on Virgin
IIRC they snat you away to their own servers anyway, we need dns over ssl...
The network is still working
So all he's done is prevent the non sysadmins from accessing sensitive devices.
Sounds like the right thing to do to me. Principle of least privilege and all...
Recognising crypted torrents
"After all, they can't block unidentifiable traffic - for example running Bittorrent using SSL on port 443, the ISP can't tell what it is, the traffic looks no different to any other SSL traffic, just that there is more of it."
That's not true - the packet distribution of p2p connections is different from https, or vnc over ssl, or most other things...
Or they could just join the torrent (and not upload/download anything)
Personally - I think they missed the boat a few years ago. They'll never get it back, the best they could do now is to read these comments and realise that most people will pay a fair price for a fair product.
Handsfree phones
Which require you to shut your eyes....
Maybe not so good for road safety
SatNav on, brain off.
Given the amount of brain that would have to have been turned off for this to occur I have to question the safety of satnav devices.
Seek time and transfer rate
What else do you need?
Seek time should be zero, giving you a few ms advantage, then transfer rate - well, that should be limited by the interface, no need to get a spinning disk past a read head to get at the data...
Just because vista needs 40GB swap space (which it uses badly) shouldn't compromise the performance of an SSD - surely...
What have I missed?
Posted in Divorce for shouty YouTube wife
Throw me on the street with 750k any day
Title says it all....
Numbers
I know Daily mail units seem to be all the rage, but what do they actually expect to generate - what's the maximum power output, and the predicted average power over the year?
Count of houses is not a measure of energy or power, it's just crap.
Posted in Japan kicks off electric car format war
If they agree sensible standards...
Then they could migrate to the newer technologies.
Standard voltages and connectors, with enough current capacity to enable energy transfer comparable with a petrol pump...
Even if they are overrated for the first couple of battery generations, batteries can be replaced in vehicles - and indeed that's likely to be necessary, so why not upgrade the batteries every few years, the motors will be fine for a good long while...
This could be of significant benefit to the industry.
Posted in EU abolishes the acre
Stop this relentless march to base10
Go base 12, it's then easily divisible by 2,3 and 4 the three numbers I use most often when dividing a measurement, the only vaguely challenging calculation you are likely to want to do in your head.
Occasionally I'll divide the 10m boundary (less 3" for the end fence post) by 6'3" to work out how many fence panels I need - but there's nothing difficult about that.
A14 Average speed cameras
I've stopped that commute now, but those average speed cameras were installed and there followed a significant improvement in transit times / consistency.
My real concern is that if we have a £5 charge for using the toll hard shoulder, where do I park up when I break down?
HP should be penalised for that
Heavily.
As should supermarkets who shrink wrap bananas
one way hash of IP?
There aren't very many IP addresses, creating a hash table would take moments - OK, you might end up with two possible IP addresses per hash, but they're likely to be from completely different networks, and so easy to eliminate all but the correct one.
elreg
Forecourts already have decent 3 phase supplies - So what if initially you can only charge two or three cars at a time - you can't refill many more than that with smelly stuff.
More power infrastructure will be needed anyway, and these places are already well supplied.
The charging could actually be even quicker than above for many cars, very few journeys require a hundred mile range IF you can trickle at the far end (and most workplaces could provide charging parking places, as could most residential streets tbh)
The few real long journeys will need a supplement of some sort, probably a battery box that clips onto each bumper, or under the chassis. The added weight is valuable for long journeys, not short ones. For the seriously long journeys with unknown stations a trail generator would do nicely.
Umm, right
"O2 and Apple have addressed most of the barriers which held back mass-market take-up of the original iPhone, so we expect the iPhone 3G to sell well," said GfK director Anders Nielsen.
Yes, except supply it would seem. Which is rather critical.
Posted in Google and the End of Science
Data is meaningless
Without an interpretation to convert it into information.
That is most commonly done by hanging it off a model.
Of course you can argue that given sufficient experimentation there is no need to calculate plancks constant theoretically...
Posted in Prius hybrid to get rooftop solar panel
@ Waves
Um - 52mpg - that's not good, it's OK.
I just did gig up north - a three hour drive in a fully loaded van, with two people up front - we averaged 53mpg.
My 70 miles each way commute I averaged 50mpg over two years.
Both in standard two litre diesels, neither were being driven particularly carefully from a fuel efficiency point of view.
My boss drives a BMW 1 series, but one of the ED range - it regularly gets 70+ mpg on holiday trips, and tends to be pulling 50-60 in town as well.
By the time the pious has been built, and shipped back round the world it's already in significant amounts of carbon debt. Local materials are the key.
The American market doesn't seem to understand what an engine can do, and doesn't care about oil, because they'll just go and invade somewhere else. The EV1 was a good car, and should have been continued. GM should be in serious trouble for ditching it.
Good, Quick, Cheap
Pick two (at most).
Looks like they picked two - well done!
This is how systems get developed.
Posted in AVG chokes fake traffic spew
So - they're doing what we all said from the beginning
You know, the solution that makes sense.
Download it when clicked, scan then feed to the browser...
Posted in Are the ice caps melting?
Global weather
is poorly understood.
What we do know is that large amounts of greenhouse gasses could drive us towards a venusian climate.
There are sensible things we can do to reduce our dependence on technologies that continue to pump potentially dangerous gasses into the atmosphere. When the potential consequences are so dire I'd argue that it's worth studying, and while we do that to reduce the risks that we can see.
VESA mountings?
I'll pop a USB extension in for the keyboard/mouse
But with VESA the choice for an internet cafe suddenly becomes easy
Just need to force MS to release Office for Linux....
Or tell people that crossover works (as does a plain Wine install)
Bring back the EV1
Or at least it's modern equivalent.
Electric cars were around before petrol, and will bearound after petrol, we're just in the difficult phase where manufacturers can't work out how they are going to keep stuffing us for service charges...
UK.Gov in incompetence shocker...
Regulate / interfere if it becomes abusive in it's dominance, not before it's even started. It's clear that sky/virgin can't distinguish between their sitting bone and their arm joint.
A product can't dominate a market that doesn't exist yet, and can't do anything other than dominate a market which it creates (at least initially).
Also - there is nothing inherently wrong with a dominant product in a market. The likely outcome is genericide (see sellotape, hoover, xerox) as and when other people enter the market.
I'd love to teach A-Level physics.
I have a decent enough Physics degree, and do tutor various kids from my church, but there's no way I'll do it for the sort of money that is on offer.
If you want a skilled workforce then you have to compete with the rest of the market - teaching jobs just don't compete.
LOGO: I look good in goggles ;)
Posted in Google plugs YouTube into Playstation 3
Ummm
"Nowadays, all the stuff worth watching and listening to tends to be"...
Reruns, because no-one makes anything decent any more.
Our attention span is slowly being... umm, where was I ?
Posted in BBC begins fresh Freeview HD TV trial
No TV buying for me
Until an existing one goes pop. Then I'll probably look at whatever the latest early adopters are being forced to ditch...
Why are we doing this - if we just stopped TV broadcasts we'd save tonnes of CO2 ;)
Posted in Knight Rider satnav spied in the wild
Good plan
"Going to buy one. Not to use myself, you understand, but for all of the annoying people who know I've got a satnav and keep asking to borrow it."
Ah, the smell of sweet revenge
WiiiPlayer
a) too many i's for one cluster
b) this should be the first* of the set top box versions
* First, only because they've already announced it - IMHO they should do PS3 and XBox versions, and maybe even deal with pace etc. to make a tiny little iPlayer box.
Why is it too expensive
Either people are underutilising their servers so much that cloud will work by buying one license to server 10 companies, or they aren't in which case there's no point in clouding it.
Posted in Femto forum gets big ideas
Nice idea
Mobile phone charges while we use your broadband to VoIP you...
<<Comanpy pickpocket at work, do not disturb
Posted in Bloke crams 13 into Volvo S70
Tax and insurance for 12 months without it being on the road
That's all the penalty needed.
Assume you can insure a car whilst banned
Posted in Force listeners onto DAB by killing FM
Who are we kidding
It's going to happen and all of our radios will join all of our TVs in landfill, and we'll get charged for that as well.
Anyone up for organising a mass transport of TVs to Downing street when the anaolgue signal goes poof?
Of course they could allow us FM rebroadcast rights, so we can continue to use all of our old kit for another few decades.
Forced obsolescence should be paid for from the cabinets salaries.
Optimist
"Windows 7 (which to us sounds increasingly like Vista, mark two) will land about 18 months from now."
Yeah right...
Theories
I could have sworn we still referred to Einstein's *theory of* relativity.
I can't work out what an "acceptable" risk would be. We can't prove it won't implode and shatter the earth without firing it up, because we don't know the physics yet (else why are we building it).
OTOH we can't expect to do only things which are absolutely safe, or we would never go outside.
The potential danger here (supposedly destruction of the solar system) is quite high, but at what point is that risk worth taking in order to advance our understanding of the universe. is 20% OK, but 21% not?
I'm surprised no one has suggested a lunar build though (*I* know it wouldn't make a difference, but they don't seem to be thinking straight either)
Hmm - I see a secure tunnel to a hosting facility being used soon...
At least I trust them as a service provider, they explicitly firewall 6667, and officially disapprove of IRC servers.
That's it. Other than that it's a raw IP connection.
Posted in Phoenix spies probable Martian water ice
Too hot for dry ice
NASA are of course being more conservative with their announcements, but we all know that a media outlet can't be expected to evaluate evidence.
It looks most likely to be H2O(s), in that the correct conditions exist for sublimation, and the previous earth sample (unexpectedly clumpy) suddenly become unclumpy, that's plausible sublimation to me.
Of course only plausible, not proved.
How many articles
Two unrelated articles smushed together...
If the camera/computer systems doesn't require 10% of the engined power then it looks like a sensible system, can you tell it it's wrong as well though - for when some miscreant has turned the speed limit signs round?
For that matter wouldn't GPS with known speed limits work quite well.
