Posts by Paul Hargreaves

Re: Inevitable

> the better off will just continue to consume electric or gas as and when they want, regardless.

I sort of agree your point, but some of us with electric cars are actively using dynamic pricing to reduce our cost per mile with an added benefit of helping balance the grid and offset some CO2.

Money isn't necessarily the only motivator to those who can afford to make decisions.

Re: Get burned?

> Do you begrudge the fees for driving licences or passports?

Yes.

Re: People relying on the previous behavior?

Bug is /dev/random hanging when it'll never get any new entropy, which can happen at boot time and is what the ext4 patch managed to trigger.

Re: Get burned?

> 30 seconds out of your day to provide ID and carry on.

Just to note, assuming you're carrying ID. What if you're not?

Re: Get burned?

If it's invisible but still tangible, I suspect most of the world will be ;-)

Re: Confused...

Obligatory Mythbusters polishing episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI

Re: Get burned?

Is AWS a monopoly? Are there viable alternatives that have market presence? If so, it won't be an issue.

They haven't stolen your domain name. You don't own it, you've just purchased rights to use it.

You need to go back to the person you paid money to and ask them to sort it out since you have a contract with them which now they are in breach of.

Re: Home security problem

I assume you've got something that keeps your internet traffic running in roughly the same cycles when you're away as well?

Plus you leave your mobiles at home when you go on hols so that the local towers still log where you are?

Re: Get burned?

I thought the wholesale bloodbath had already happened.

FC feels a bit like mainframe or tape, won't go away for the reasons you state, but isn't a growing market with new entrants looking to displace McData/Brocade/Qlogic etc.

Re: Disgusting2: Have humans ever lived in a time where industry was this disconnected from users?

"control their hotel experience with the sound of their voice"

Me: "Hey Room, Please stop the slamming doors in the corridor and the noisy traffic through the window, and the screaming drunks at 3am."

Room: ""

Me: "<sob>"

NIv6

> the NI number. We'd just need to issue it at birth, not at 16

Sounds like we're going to need NIv6...

Re: Irresistible force vs immovable object?

> How is the EU going to prosecute the USA based registrar for correctly following USA law?

Assuming the registrar has any legal entity in the country (i.e. either a subsidiary, or people employed) then they'll be the ones being taken to court as the representatives. This is what's been happening with Uber in London, for example.

A court could go after the money; to Visa, Mastercard etc and tell them to stop accepting payments in the countries where the law is being broken.

The courts could tell the ISPs in the country to block any requests to the particular domains owned by the extra-territorial entities, similar to how they block the fake rolex and torrent sites.

etc.

Re: Get burned?

> How many times can you spin up a hard drive before it fails

Depends on the drive. Modern drives can cope quite well - e.g. 600,000 on/offs: https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-5e8DS1954-2-1712GB-en_GB.pdf

> how many times can you write to flash before it wears out

Depends on the drive but wear levelling and the 'archive' nature of the workloads means that I'd be surprised if many fail. If placed into RAID sets of a reasonable number of drives you can multiply up the write endurance by all the drives (again, assuming a reasonable filesystem above) and you'll then not be able to sustain enough writes before your system is out of warranty since the controller will bottleneck.

Re: Get burned?

> VAT (permies dont pay this)

Neither, really, do contractors. You're just acting as a tax collector for the government. You calculate your rate and then, if you're registered for VAT, add the appropriate VAT rate onto the top.

Re: I told you years ago ...

TCP/IP is not designed for the web either.

I'm not sure I understand your point.

Re: Battery shape?

In EVs you don't replace the main battery pack every 3-4 years and those batteries are under even worse loads. Obviously different battery tech, but also the whole battery management & heating pieces make me wonder if the same could also be applied to 'normal' cars for the 'normal' battery?

Yes we do... though it's called a supplement and we only pay it for 5 years.

Re: Are we hearing about every single accident involving a Tesla?

> I am inclined to think though that Autopilot is too much of a compromise between driverless and driver assisted that is likely to result in the meatbag manual pilot being rather too slow to intervene in the event of something unexpected, particularly if that unexpected thing is related to another meatbag.

Not with the current level of autopilot. On a non-motorway when you engage it you definitely keep your hand(s) on the wheel since the car will react like a learner driver and, for example, over-steer or slam the brakes on thinking that a car in opposite lane is about to do something. By having your hand on the wheel as the car attempts to do something that you weren't expecting then it'll turn itself off automatically.

It's still a much better experience than driving without, but once you've spent more than 10 minutes you quickly learn the limitations and how to correctly handle it. On the motorway it's fantastic, similarly on large A-roads it's amazing, but on smaller A roads, or normal side streets, autopilot isn't perfect. Nor is it sold as such.

> Why

Credit card? 20 seconds. Filling in online request forms to IT, then back-and-forward with managers/directors to get permission? Much longer.

And this is how shadow IT was born. Because of these sorts of tensions. You'll have one business team who go 'I just need x' and an IT team who have to try to keep everything stable and working...

Re: The interesting bit...

> first time a hardware neural network has been put into a consumer product.

My Tesla would like to say Hi.

Re: Facile Emanations

Not sure what analysis you were hoping for. I'll have a crack...

*** Analysis ***

Samsung have a lot of these units, which contain last years hardware and will likely only get 1 year of updates*. Technically a large proportion of the units will be refurbished so, at least in countries like the UK, wouldn't be able to be sold as 'new'. Which is one reason they won't be sold here, at least by Samsung.

The price of them is high when you consider the stock of units was already produced, so the only cost was for refurbishment (new, smaller battery). In all likelihood Samsung are trying to 'pull a fast one' and recoup a significant portion of the revenue lost from the original sale.

* Based on the experience of older Samsung devices like the S6, which got 2 years.

== End of Analysis

Side note: As an ex-Note 7 owner who was stiffed by Samsung through this debacle, my boycott of all things Samsung is still going strong. Well, all things apart from posts of course ;-)

Re: Vacuum

That sucks.

Re: Awww.... come on !

I agree.

Samsung tried stock for a while with the Google Play Edition, but even when they weren't adding TouchWiz they still took forever to release updates. Example: http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s4_google_play_edition_finally_receives_android_51-news-13959.php

S7 only got recently updated because there isn't a newer flagship; I had the Note7 (RIP), and I suspect the second the S8 ships the S7 will start to get the same treatment the S6 gets currently.

Samsung are crazy; not only do they have TouchWiz, they also have Good Lock, which is actually more useful IMO than TouchWiz but... wow... they must really have nothing better to do than maintain (or not) all these different versions of stuff, an entire Store. Oh, and the Game Launcher stuff, GearVR, etc. etc. etc.