Posts by leon clarke

Unique?

'The Priv is unique in that nobody else is pitching a security-hardened Android at businesses that boasts top-end consumer specs.'

Presumably some words in that have precise definitions in order to make that true.Does Knox and SEAndroid not count as security hardening? Or are Samsung phones not 'pitched at Business'.

I'm going to guess they are using a definition of security hardening which describes something that no-one else thinks is worth doing.

15 year timescale

Over that timescale you have to assume some sort of technology like X-Point or some other phase-change memory will be developed. When that happens, its liable to be much more rapidly disruptive than flash was. I suspect that flash will look like a briefly-forgotten intermediate technology between disc and phase change. And things will get very hyper-converged very quickly - it's the only way to make use of the speed of phase change.

This has interesting implications beyond Apple

The Qualcomm 810 (fabricated by TSMC) has a well-publicised heat problem, leading Samsung to switch to their own processors for the Galaxy S6 and Qualcomm to switch from TSMC to Samsung for the 820. So at the time it rather looked like TSMC was having heat problems relative to Samsung. But now it's looking like TSMC have more than got their house in order.

(Heat and power draw are basically the same thing; where else does the power go?)

All together now

640 kilobytes, er I mean 512 start menu entries should be enough for anyone

External weed bins

...might be found to have the additional advantage of being self-emptying

That android on Windows strategy

Makes sense.

After all, a wise man once said 'When you're standing on a burning platform, you have to jump'.

This sounds exactly like the UK 'Amazon Logistics' operation that delivers prime stuff

...and involves random people in battered vans delivering the parcels. Either Amazon has very odd ideas about how to maintain a fleet of vans, or they're all freelancers in their own vehicles.

Rugby Balls

I'm impressed that someone from the University of Maryland recognises the moons as rugby-ball shaped. I would have feared that people from near Maryland would mistake them for American Football shaped moons.

CST-100's schedule looks interesting

According to Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CST-100

Pad abort test in Feb 2017, uncrewed flight to ISS in April, crewed flight in July. Presumably an in-flight abort test will happen in March.

That sounds like a remarkably short time to go from pad abort to crewed flight. It doesn't give much time for any lessons to be learnt from any minor anomalies between the launches.

My guess is that they've 'got' to be ready by June 2017 to get the NASA gig, but they don't think they'll be ready for pad abort before Feb. And they can pretend this is viable by assuming all those tests will go absolutely like clockwork.

So I guess SpaceX will be launching first, after 'unexpected' delays in Boeing's plans.

The Pi needs Windows for the same reason it needs RiscOS and Plan 9

Er, why at Ministry of Fun?

I'd have thought that if you wanted to do anything useful about anything to do with internet safety (as a minister), you'd have to be at the Home Office. That would give you involvement in things like the snooper's charter.

Whether or not she looks like a complete dead loss depends a lot on whether you compare her with successful people in the tech field, or whether you compare her to other ministers involved in internet stuff. I'm optimistic that she may be relatively good, because she isn't a PPE graduate who thinks that getting your secretary to print out your emails counts as using the internet (but she'll be unable to do anything as she'll have to tow the home office line on anything that matters)

Remind me who it was who organised the AES competition?

Surely they're responsible for all this strong crypto. They should be held responsible!

Um, is this true everywhere

I've rung (and then been rung back by) 999 twice, both times in London. On both occasions the incoming call showed up as 999. Maybe other 999 call centers can't program the phone system as well.

Finally

My android tablet is better in every respect than my Apple (Newton) tablet.

What's the definition of a foreign site?

Isn't amazon.co.uk technically in Luxemburg?

In which case many brits buy from foreign sites. I suspect many other national Amazon sites are the same.

(And I think there are EU countries without national Amazon sites, for whom Amazon insists on charging excessive postage fees)

The invention that's done most for living standards in the last 50 years

An interesting question, but I'm going to argue for better semi-dwarf rice.

Aren't the fire control systems of Belfast completely mechanical?

In which case, anyone hacking them over the internet (or defending against such an attack) is a genius.

I understand that Scratchwood was chosen as the target to demonstrate the guns' range; of all the targets that are very close to the guns' maximum range, it was deemed the one most deserving of a few 6" shells. So the guns can't reach slough and targets in central London aren't impressive enough.

So, would the new cabinet minister for the digital agenda need to have a post A-Level qualification relevant to IT?

84% of SMEs on the framework?

Presumably that's 84% of SMEs interested in selling digital services to the government that the government knows about. Or maybe 84% of SMEs who have previously sold digital services to the government. It clearly isn't 84% of SMEs since most SMEs don't provide digital services. It probably isn't 84% of companies that provide 'digital services' as I can't imagine there's an accurate list of them.

So it sounds like the statistics are being assembled in a way that lets the civil service ignore any company that thinks working for the government is a PITA.

Er, isn't it obvious that 'streetview' cars are really 'google maps' cars

I suspect that Streetview was just an excuse to explain why Google was trying to photograph every single street in the world without suggesting to their then mapping providers that Google was developing its own maps. Apple clearly need to improve their maps. That means they need cars like this. The lack of a big high-up streetview style camera (and the obvious presence of lousy map data on iPhones) suggests that all that's going on here is mapping and they won't be adding their own streetview.

I don't see a lidar so I don't think it's anything to do with self driving.

I'll see your audiophile cat 5 and raise you

Now everyone's using WiFi, you really need digital-grade audiophile air. I wonder if it's OK to use the same kind of air for the wifi path and the audio path between the speakers and the ears.

Google seems very clever in its use of capchas

Not only are they presenting you with a problem which computers are bad at solving. They're presenting you with a problem that they want solved. So for instance, the image capcha thing will obviously be used to improve image search just as the pictures of house numbers were obviously being used to improve google maps.

Oh, and zdnet has a rather good picture of the new EDSAC's boot ROM (which is a bit of a mechanical phone exchange)

http://www.zdnet.com/national-museum-of-computing-opens-edsac-display-recreating-1949s-top-computer-7000036216/

The boot ROM is one of those details that makes EDSAC so brilliant. Everyone else building computers at the time thought that building an electronic computer was an impressive achievement by itself. The EDSAC team also thought through what else was needed to let other people in the university to do something useful with it - so they invented boot ROMs and subroutines and so on.

To what extent are Apple prices grounded in reality?

My guess is they can only maintain so much of a premium over Samsung, so Samsung reacting to the Chinese will have an impact on Apple profits.

Very interesting

But any chance of a noddy version of this article - that actually mentions particular models of SSD instead of particular capacitor chemistry options.

I'm sure this is standard model aircraft terminology...

but why is the thing that connects the batteries to the servo called a battery eliminator?