Posts by Richard 12
1142 posts • joined Tuesday 16th June 2009 16:23 GMT
We do in fact have rules about that.
If you look at the small print in those car insurance comparison adverts, you'll always see a line that says "x% of customers acheived this saving".
There are trading standards guidelines for the percentage of line items and the amount of stock that must be available at the maximum discount for a shop or chain to claim "Up to y% off".
(Admittedly, in the case of chains they don'actually to need to have that stock available at every shop, just a certain percentage of them.)
Why would asking my courier be bad?
The couriers I use advertise "Before 9am/10am/12 noon/5pm", with different scales of charges for each for their next-day service.
I certainly do expect them to deliver before 9am if that's the service I paid for.
If they know that can't provide it, then I expect them to tell me what they can provide. "Sorry, we can't do a before 9am delivery to New York from Oxford, our fastest is next-day before 5pm and costs £x".
And if they fail to provide what I paid for, then I expect a discount/partial refund - which I get.
I also expect them to use the data they have to continually update their guidelines as to what they can and can't do so they are as accurate as possible every time I buy their service. If it turns out that next-day to New York stops being possible for whatever reason, then I expect to be told!
It's *not* as advertised, that's the point.
If a high street shop said "Up to 50% off" their goods, and the maximum discount of anything there was 5%, Trading Standards would be fining them for misleading the consumers.
There are specific rules about "Up to..." discounts that specify the minimum set of products that have to be available at the maximum discount, for both the 'number of line items' and the 'minimum stock availability' at the start of the sale period.
Secondly, the Weights and Measures Act says that it is illegal to sell a customer a "1 Litre" bottle of water that only contains 900ml, but it's fine to sell it if it's got more than 1L inside.
So manufacturers actually slightly overfill everything to make sure that they don't *ever* under-fill, and spend a lot of money on very accurate and precise measuring devices to minimise the over-filling margin needed. (We sell these weighing devices, it's stunning how fast they can pay for themselves!)
So why is it only ISPs that are permitted to advertise and sell a service that they *cannot provide to anyone*?
Would you be happy if you paid £10 for an "Up to 10Mb" service that gave you 1Mb, and then 'upgraded' to paying £30 for an "Up to 20Mb" service where you still got 1Mb?
By your reckoning, that would be absolutely fine.
One earlier poster suggested that the ISPs should be banned from advertising "Up to x" bandwidth, and instead could only advertise "At least x". I could get behind that.
That would mean that people living a long way from the exchange/poor exchanges could not be sold the 'fastest' product.
That way you'd be able to buy a 5Mb connection knowing that you'll get 5Mb. Of course the ISP will probably throttle your connection down to that 5Mb if your line is actually capable of more bandwidth, but you won't mind that throttling because you're still getting what you paid for.
Did he use public money or his own money?
I'm pretty sure it must have been his own private cash, as you can bet that the Telegraph would be baying from the rooftops if they even suspected that it was public money.
If he paid them out of his own pocket, then I don't see a problem here at all.
He's welcome to waste his own money discovering what other people think about him - though the fact that he thought that knowing was worth £5000 pretty much proves that he is a bit of an idiot.
(And the price indicates that the PIs were asking a very small number of people)
Either way, he is right that this has nothing whatsoever to do with the ICO - only the Parliamentary Expenses body (if he did actually use public money) and/or the Police should have anything to say about this.
If the private dicks used unlawful methods, then that's a matter for the police, and if they used lawful methods then there's no case to answer.
Still makes the guy an idiot, but there's no actual *law* against being stupid.
What rubbish from OFCOM.
The "Averages" stated give no useful information whatsoever - what happened to all the competent people who used to work at OFCOM?
Compared 'average advertised' and 'average actually provided' is utterly meaningless - they're going to advertise the faster connections much more than the slower ones. "We provide the slowest boardband in the world" isn't much of an advert, even if it's the product that most of the customers actually buy.
Where is the comparison of the shortfall between the product sold to individual consumers and the speed they actually receive?
That's before you get into the deviation - do *any* customers receive the 'up to' speed?
I'm pretty certain that the answer to that is no, which raises the question of by OFCOM, the ASA and Trading Standards are not stamping on these ISPs with great force for gross mis-selling.
No other industry can get away with 'up to' claims where no item/customer gets the maximum! A shop on the high street can't say "Up to 50% off" unless a significant percentage of their wares actually are being sold at that discount.
So where are the raw figures? Do we really have to do a FoI request to OFCOM to get anything usable out of them?
Yes, rotating black holes are one proposal for a closed timelike curve
The idea is that the spinning black hole is 'twisting' space, pulling you around with it. Spin it fast enough and go close enough, and you're pulled around faster than (apparent) c.
Trouble with the black hole one is that the hole needs to be really massive and spinning really fast, as otherwise you've got to be so close to it that you're inside the event horizon, thus your time-travel is irrelevant because You're Not Getting Out.
Anyway, all the designs for CTC-based time machines will never allow travel back to before the creation of the time machine as it's the geometry that's allowing time travel - when you get back to when the machine was created, there's no longer a machine to take you back any further...
On the other hand, it's likely that most (perhaps all) designs for time machines are self-destructive - if a photon (or anything else for that matter) can enter the machine, travel back and then re-enter the machine, you'll rapidly (instantly?) end up with an infinite number of them travelling though the machine, thus infinite energy and infinite energy density. In other words, a singularity.
Of course, that's assuming it doesn't go properly boom before reaching infinite density.
Nope, if you've got a stable wormhole then you've got a time machine. Possibly.
Here's how:
Put one end of wormhole on a spaceship. Send that spaceship on a high-acceleration round-trip journey, while keeping the other end at home.
When the spaceship gets back, its end of the wormhole has existed for less time than the end that stayed home (twins 'paradox'), thus creating a tunnel that will take you forward or back the difference between the ages of the wormhole ends.
Of course, it won't take you any further back than when you built the wormhole and it might destroy itself due to a feedback loop.
Aside from that, given that we don't yet know the true physics of wormholes, the age difference might have stretched the hole so you can't take less time than the age gap to travel through it in one or both directions, the hole might become impassable or otherwise snap if one end is accelerated 'too much', or it might turn out to be impossible to move the ends relative to each other.
The last possibility would make them much less useful of course - it would be a bit of a pain having to figure out an orbit of such a structure that keeps *both* the ends in useful places.
No, it's far from impossible - it's reasonably likely
Not from that particular rainy quasar of course, but one very similar.
You're forgetting one of the fundamental principles of cosmology - the idea that the universe is and was pretty much the same all over at large scales.
So if you see a rainy quasar 12 billion years away, then it's pretty likely that 12 billion years ago there was another very similar rainy quasar right where we are.
Posted in TalkTalk drags arse in Ofcom ISP survey
Erm, that's not how surveys work!
Surveys about anything work by inspecting a representative sample of <item>, then extrapolating the results to cover a much wider range of <items>.
So you ask some number of subscribers scattered across the country, chosen at semi-random. (Semi because you don't want to bias towards one particular area of the country.)
You don't let your respondents self-select (like those daft 'How did we do?' things you see in hotels), as you'll only get extremist responses that way, and you can't ask everybody because it'd be too much information.
Incidentally, my experience (via relatives) of Talk Talk has been pretty terrible, but not surprisingly so.
Posted in Nokia ‘giving away phones at cost’
I'm sure El Reg would love to
Except that it looks very likely that the N9 will never be seen in the UK.
Nokia seem to have decided not to sell it here, and just sell a very small number of them in a very limited fashion.
Whether that's because they actually want it to fail (thus avoiding the need for any semblance of support) or because they expect the market for it to be extremely small is unclear.
Posted in Russia’s space telescope in orbit
Quite trivially.
Societies take quite a while to die - it's taken quite a lot longer than one generation in almost every instance of a society disintegrating.
Amish is a really terrible example by the way, as there is no single Amish society.
You'd need to pick a particular example of an Amish society - they are all necessarily very small, perhaps up to 500 or maybe 1000 members at most. A large village, for example.
One could argue that they're not a society in and of themselves, but are a sect within the wider community - they pay taxes, use public roads etc.
That said, most societies actually disintegrate due to invasion or natural disaster.
This is where Science comes in - if the Aztecs or Mayans had done much science, then the Spaniards would not have been able to conquer them, and would have fallen to the superior numbers of locals.
Societies tend to perish when they interact with another society that has superior technology, or when a natural disaster that they can't cope with occurs.
The more science and technology you've got, the higher that bar is raised.
Posted in Apps overrated in mobile web wars
+++ath0 - Don't forget home screen/menu space.
How are you going to find one particular app if you've got hundreds installed?
You're either going to have to spend ages flipping between the fifty different Home screens, or type into that search bar. Search gets slower when there's more installed...
Not to mention that the only reason why iOS Apps don't slow down the machine very much when you've got loads installed is because it simply doesn't do pre-emptive multitasking. When that changes, you'll find that assumption of yours mysteriously goes out of the window.
Yes, Labour did that a lot
A very large number of Labour-sponsored Acts that purported to 'promote' something actually either outright banned it, or created massive red-tape thus effectively severely limiting it.
Don't forget that it was Labour that made it illegal to protest against the Government without a licence(!)
I'm with Anon here - I love my black-on-black WiFi switch.
An actual physical two-position switch is *perfect* for enabling WiFi and other radio modules.
In fact, the switch on the side of this Dell is great - WiFi symbol, red mark to show the "Off" position, and nice and big with a satisfying Click! when it's switched.
The tactile response of "Click!" OFF and "Click!" ON! is orders of magnitude better than a software tickybox somewhere, or some weird key combo like on my previous laptop.
A software tickybox is even harder to find, and might not even exist or work at all if your drivers aren't perfect. Plus you can't turn that on or off while doing something else (eg fullscreen application, sat in a VM or whatever)
Finally, when I'm connecting into a secure wired network, I like knowing that I'm not going to accidentally bridge to the insecure WiFi, becuase there's a physical switch on the side that's disabled the WiFi *in hardware*. No malicious software is going to be able to flick that switch!
So what exactly do they intend to sell in these stores?
Microsoft don't make any PC hardware, just some peripherals and games consoles.
I'm pretty sure that MS partners would not take kindly to MS making "Microsoft" PC hardware, and would look even more dimly on MS selling Dell, HP etc computers for less than their existing sales channels. Unless MS somehow handed them a better margin, which seems kinda unlikely as PC hardware margins are pretty tiny to being with.
So what will be in these stores? A line-up of Dell, HP etc hardware that's all available elsewhere for less money?
Posted in Entering a storage jail
@Daf L: Because they can stop your device working at any time
In many (though not all) cases of DRM, your device is capable of playing/displaying the content you've paid for *only* because the manufacturer (Eg Apple, Amazon, Sony etc) permits it.
In the world of DRM, if either the copyright owner or device manufacturer so chose, they can stop your device from handling their content or from handling *any* content.
Some concrete examples: Amazon remotely removed George Orwell's "1984" from Kindle. (And they couldn't have picked a better title to do it to...)
Sony revoked the ability of PS3s to run OtherOS in a mandatory firmware update.
The BluRay standard allows for discs to refuse to play on an arbitrary set of BluRay players.
The problem is: If %Device_Supplier% closed down all their DRM servers, then would their devices still work at all? In the case of quite a lot of software, the answer is already no - I don't know if the same is already true of hardware, but it seems rather likely.
Posted in Is Facebook worth more than Google?
Revenue, revenue, revenue! Profit!
If an established company has no revenue, then it's worthless. I don't care how many users you've got - no revenue means that those users are a *liability*, not an asset!
For a new startup, it's more complicated as you're projecting forward to work out what revenues you are likely to get in the future.
So very simply - Google and Facebook are both established. Neither are likely to have big revenue growth spurts without major acquisitions, they're both consolidating their market.
Which has more revenue? Which makes more profit? Which has better margins?
That's the data that tells you which company is worth more.
Numbers of "Users" tells you nothing at all, especially as it's impossible to delete yourself from either.
Posted in M-Edge e-Luminator Touch
Please, at least tell us the 'claimed' colour temperature of the LED.
The CRI would be nice as well, but most of these manufacturers don't publish that and I doubt you're set up to measure it!
A lot of consumer LEDs lamps are an extremely high colour temp (often well over 7000K) and use the blue/yellow metamer.
This is mostly because high colour temp appears brighter to the human eye against normal tungsten/warm white CFL, and the blue/yellow metamer is dirt cheap to make as it's just a blue diode with a yellow phosphor dot - but it's got a very poor CRI (~50) and CQS.
These also tend to be very different colours across the beam as well due to the phosphor deposition.
Good white LEDs use UV or deep blue diodes and a mix of phosphors to give a CRI around 80-90, the better ones also give a decent CQS.
These are available in a wide range of colour temperatures, and most people prefer lower colour temps (eg 3000K, normal tungsten) when relaxing.
For reference, 5600K is generally considered normal 'daylight', though a cloudy sky can take the colour temp up as far as 10,000K
I wouldn't say hubris
I'd say that this Tim guy knows far more about rare earth extraction techniques then your average media hack or man in the street.
Or indeed your average commentard.
Or me, for that matter.
Only works *inside* the local network
The concern here is very simply worded:
What happens when that corporate PC is outside the corporate network?
Inside, your sysadmin probably does all kinds of cool tricks to keep your 'internal' connections safely internalised, and that's great.
However, when your salesman goes out to sell stuff, he'll be connecting his laptop to the internet from the airport/hotel/coffeehouse, and so all those nice corporate network protections vanish.
I can guarantee that if you do put clever restrictions in that laptop, they'll get removed pretty rapidly because they'll interfere with the high-flying salesmen's vital work.
It is actually very difficult for an application to tell whether a given machine is currently running inside the 'safe' corporate network, or out in the scary world. So pretty much no application does so, it just tries to resolve it's corporate-network URL, and if that fails, it either tries to resolve the not-corporate network URL or shuts down if it's not supposed to run in the scary world.
Internet Explorer seems to
If you don't manually put the http:// or ftp:// etc before a raw IP address, IE 7 and 8 appears to try to do a DNS lookup on it.
So yes, some browsers really do appear to be that stupid.
You might argue that you should also specify the protocol, but did you *really* type "http://www.theregister.co.uk" to get here? Or did you do let your browsers autocorrect figure much or part of that out, like eveybody else.
That seems a remarkably low bar to aim at.
Did he say the time period the SLA was over, is it phrased as "Uptime" or "Availability", and does that only apply to unscheduled downtime?
99.9% service availability allows a single downtime event of ~8.76 hours if measured yearly, or ~45 if monthly.
That's a really long time if it happens during your opening hours.
I don't think anyone* is genuinely expecting 100% SLA, but 99.99% are pretty common - even the free version of the Google Mail service appears to have exceeded 99.99% measured annually.
*Except the kinds of managers who buy products based on the shiny wrapping.
And the Croats
Who are rapidly building nuclear power plants so they can sell the electricity to the Germans at a fun premium.
The only real question is when the Germans will change their minds.
Actually, it's one device with multiple roles.
The generic HID device allows you to define multiple endpoints in the *same* device, thus one HID-compliant device can be both the mouse and the keyboard.
The HID device I'm typing on right now is also my mouse - according to Windows 7, it's one device that sits in both the Keyboard and Mouse categories.
There's a lot of them around - it just tells the OS that it's both. Windows normally enumerates it saying "HID-compliant device" if it says anything and doesn't actually say whether it thinks it's a keyboard or mouse.
The USB device pretends to be the user typing on a keyboard
So it can do anything the user can, as long as it doesn't need to know anything the user knows.
In other words, it can do anything the user might be able to do without a password. If you already know the target operating system (or have a list of target operating systems), then it can issue suitable keyboard commands to upload interesting information, or download a program to do interesting things.
Ok, your device only has user privileges, but for a lot of attacks that may be enough.
Which leads to the question - should you be worried?
I'd say that unless you're doing something particularly secret and juicy, I doubt it as the attack is pretty expensive - and if the mark tosses the freebie into the bin, notices something odd and pops the lid, or even simply uses it on a system that doesn't contain the stuff you're trying to get, then it fails.
Cool idea though - hats off to PJRC and/or Atmel for the very-subtle marketing ploy.
Zero on the fuel, yes
The tax is instead on taking off, landing, and putting people and cargo into the planes.
Why? Because if we taxed aviation fuel much, they'd simply buy it somewhere else (eg France) and burn more bringing it here and back - the plane going London to New York could easily have just done a Paris > London hop right before, and it could have plenty of fuel on board.
"Not taxed" is not the same as "Tax break" - we charge them the tax on the things they can't avoid doing, like landing, taking off and putting things into the planes.
So calling this a tax break is wrong - taxing aviation fuel would be stupid, because it would actually cause the airlines to burn *more* fuel.
Air Passenger Duty is one of the taxes for airlines, along with taxes on the charges for landing and for flying in our airspace.
BTW - do you call the untaxed fuel in diesel trains a tax break as well?
Yes, I do fly.
However, I also know that aviation is a tiny source of CO2 and has made greater improvements in efficiency over the last ten-fifteen years than anything else.
The aviation industry is also putting quite of lot of their *own* money into low and zero net-CO2 emissions research.
Air travel is being used a beating horse - and it's not even a notable source of CO2 (approx. 2-3% of the world output in 2006/2007)
I also know that politicians taking money away from actual research and instead handing it out to householders is going to make the situation worse.
Now if the FIT money went to research and test plants, maybe we'd have more than one solution ready soon.
Large wind plants, large number of solar PV installations *should not be subsidised*. They must stand or fall on their own merits. It's pretty clear that they'll fall.
If we want to reduce our CO2 output, then the *only* currently viable method of baseload generation is nuclear fission.
If we don't like that idea for whatever reason, then we should be spending that money on research and test plants to find an alternative.
Instead, we're pumping money into white elephants.
@handle: Go on then
The builders comment is to do with maintenance. Unless the panels are maintained, the output will drop significantly as stuff covers them.
Maintenance at least means going up there and cleaning them, and you'll also need to fix your roof from time to time.
So the chances of somebody breaking your PV cells are much greater than somebody breaking my roofing tiles.
On the energy budget front, there's very little data and all of it is suspect.
The summaries I could find (very bad meta-study, my apologies), indicate a manufacturing-only energy payback period of somewhere between 3 and 7 years*.
That would imply that your panels would recoup between 2.8 and 6.7 times their construction energy budget over a twenty year lifetime.
As that's from 1989 study and I've only got the abstract, I'll assume that current models take half the energy to make and are twice as efficacious** - thus between 11.4 and 26.6 times.
However, these studies were of the panels themselves, and assuming maximum continuous rated output as per manufacturer and 100% efficiency of the associated electronics and ignoring all energy related to transport and installation.
So bear that in mind when you find out the load factors of your proposed install.
However, 10 times is still really very poor. For it to be really worthwhile, then you'd want at least a hundred times or a thousand times, if only because you know for certain that the energy used to dig up the bits and manufacture it came from a coal plant in China.
It is rather disappointing that so little manufacture energy budget data exists for anything, and there's almost no full-lifecycle data at all.
My real bugbear is that all this taxpayer's money is being thrown into a pit instead of working on actual solutions.
To be honest, I don't really blame you for accepting the handout - I blame the politicians.
I would caution you to ensure that you get a system that pays for itself in under ten years, because it will not be very long before the pendulum swings the other way and the FITs are cancelled.
There is some really exciting work ongoing, like diesel fuel from plant cellulose - put a bit of the FIT money there and a lot of transport could be running on biodiesel made from the waste paper, card and food that currently ends up as compost or in landfill.
* G. Hagedorn, "Hidden Energy in Solar Cells and Photovoltaic Power Stations", Ninth European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference, 542 (1989).
** I like that word.
There's a big difference in scale
The biggest single site steam plant in the UK is Drax, at 3.9GW.
On the current plans with >30GW of installed wind, National Grid think that we are likely to lose 15GW over a two hour period, relatively often.
In other words, they think that we could be losing nearly 3.8 Draxes over a couple of hours, several times a year.
Now, that's scary.
Not to mention that Drax can't fail that fast anyway because it's not a single generator - there are six complete independent generating sets.
All large steam plants (Coal/Oil/Gas/Nuclear) are built the same way.
So in fact, right now if we lost the whole of Drax, we'd get a blackout. We don't think it's likely that we'll lose Drax, but we might lose one or two of its generating sets, and we can cope with that.
The sane proposal is improved efficiency and low-carbon big plant generation.
The former is already partly being done, by helping insulation, and for some reason ground and air-source heat pumps are being covered by the FIT despite them not being generation.
CHP is a good idea, except that it's being done wrong - we should not be building a gas or coal-fired power plant where none is needed to send its waste heat into homes, we should be adding waste heat capture to existing plant requirements. (Yes, that'll often be a new-build as retrofit is quite difficult)
We should be building nuclear to take the baseload away from the existing coal.
We could be zero-carbon electricity generation in ten to fifteen years if we built the right plants.
Right now we're building lots of wind, some solar PV and *lots* of gas to cover when it's not or too windy and when it's dark.
We should be investing in research and test plants for wave, solar and anything else we can think of. Wind has already proven that it can't go large-scale regardless of the plant type due to large-area doldrums. Wave might suffer similar issues, I don't know yet.
Erm, going solar PV *is* burying your head in the sand
Tackling the issue means *tackling* the *issue*, not throwing other people's money into a pit.
We'll start assuming that man-released CO2 is going to cause enough climate change worth worrying about.
So, what do we do about this?
- Reduce usage of energy by improving efficiency of everything we do. Start with the big consumers which are heating and transport.
- Reduce the amount of carbon emitted by our energy generation systems, *full lifecycle*. Note that big plants of a given type are considerably more efficient than small plants, require less materials to manufacture than a lot of small plants with the same total output.
Now, does it make sense to push domestic solar PV using massive subsidies? What will that do?
- Note that Solar PV does not generate at night, and has the least output during winter. Those are the times when we use the most energy for heating and lighting, and that cannot be changed.
Aside form that, Solar PV has a pretty poor energy budget for full lifecycle - that's why it still costs so much. It's energy-intensive to make, impossible to repair*, has a relatively low output and is very difficult (maybe impossible) to recycle at the end of lifetime.
In a domestic situation it's even worse because it's in hard to access and easily damaged location. When a builder knocks a brick out of your chimney or drops a tool and smashes a tile, he'll fix it and it won't cost him much. If he smashes a PV panel, replacing it will cost him a fortune - so he'll charge you accordingly for any roof work, or maybe outright refuse to do it.
*When a cell dies in a PV array, it can't be replaced and it turns from being a generator to a resistor, radically affecting the rest of the panel. You can either leave the panel generating a lot less than it used to, or replace the whole panel.
Bloody hell, then it is even *worse* than I thought.
And I thought it was bad already!
So you're being paid 44.8p/unit generated, even if nothing whatsoever leaves the house?
I hate you then
You're not being environmentally friendly, you're stealing money from me, my family and everyone I know.
You're making electricity more expensive, making electric runabouts less economically viable.
You're putting more people into fuel poverty, spreading further misery around the country.
And you're doing that while thinking you're full of unicorns and rainbows.
The worst part is that it's not even your fault - it is the logical thing to do given the utter insanity of the Labour government that set this lunacy up, and the fatal lack of vision of the Coalition not to kill it with fire.
@Handle - Both are metered, both are subsidised to slightly different degrees.
It's a truly heinous scheme, even if you do want to force generation away from fossil fuels.
By paying the 43.3p for all generation, plus 3.1p on anything exported, this means that the 'real cost' of PV electricity is truly astounding.
Let's say that on average you use 90% of the generation and export 10%.
This means you'll get 43.3p generation plus 0.31p export tariff, a total of 43.61p per mean generated kWh.
You're only putting 0.1 kWh onto the Grid, which means *everyone else* is paying you an astounding 436.1p per Grid kWh.
Now the other way of looking at it is to say that you are part of the grid. That way, you are being paid between 43.3p and 46.4p per kWh, depending on how much you export.
Eitehr way, could you afford to pay that much for your electricity?
Slight correction- the FIT pays for everything you generate, not just the "Surplus"
You get paid the generation tariff of 43.3p for every kWh of electricity you *generate*, regardless of whether you use that yourself or not. (<4kW systems)
The Surplus (export tariff) is paid at an *additional* 3.1p per kWh on top of the generation rate.
See - it's even worse than you thought!
The FIT scheme really is genuinely the worst possible idea anybody could come up with.
Posted in Post Office going tap-cash in 2012
A year?
I give it six months, if that.
Regardless of how good the NFC protection itself gets, the underlying concept is flawed anyway.
Any person could take your NFC card/device and use it without any form of authentication whatsoever as many times as they like before the chip is either cancelled automatically or you realise that it's missing.
On top of that, an unscrupulous card reader can charge your card simply by walking past.
Even a scruplulous one can charge your card by accident because your card was too close to the reader when they turn it on.
So while any individual attack might not cost much, attacking becomes trivial and effectively risk-free to the attacker.
I do wonder who eats the cost of a reversed RFID transaction. (Obviously the consumer does eventually in terms of higher prices/bank charges)
Exactly!
There's a lot of people who use the Outlook client with a generic POP3 mailserver. Everything aside from email only exists on their computer - no contacts etc.
A lot of those don't have a Windows Live account and don't want to have one associated with their email - they just want their phone to sync to their Outlook.
Any product with "Pro" in the name is never for professional use
I thought everyone knew that?
It's all pretty much irrelevant now
Meego might or might not have run a set of amazing smartphones - however it is really aimed at the generic smart device market rather than specifically phones. There are quite a few Meego devices, most of them go inside cars.
Symbian did run a lot of good smartphones and featurephones.
Symbian is dead and buried, Meego lives on at Intel.
Windows Phone 7 was very nearly dead in the water before it even launched due to the association with Windows Mobile 6.x, and has received several cuts due to apparent MS incompetence. (I say 'apparent' because it's quite likely much of that is down to the operators rather than MS directly.)
So really, Nokia are on an extremely-high-risk path - for Nokia to survive, both MS and Nokia have to get their act together quickly enough to produce some feature-rich and *perfect* WP7 phones before the customers all move elsewhere.
If there is any smell of the Windows Mobile problems there at all, Nokia will fail.
If they fail to integrate perfectly with Outlook and IMAP, Nokia will fail. (Oh dear - WP7 currently doesn't sync to Outlook....)
However, if WP7 fails, Microsoft won't.
That's the basic problem here - Nokia have tied themselves to a brand-new, unproven ship made by a company with a history of ships that sink. Unfortuantely for Nokia, the captain of that new ship doesn't really care all that much, and is very well insured should it sink.
Posted in WTF are... connected appliances?
I thought everybody had this in their house already?
It's called a Building Management System (BMS)
I have a BMS in my home that controls all those things - PIR occupancy sensors, light sensors, the TV remote can adjust the lights and heating, and there's touchscreens around if the remote is lost down the sofa.
Plus some spare capacity for some fun christmas lights when I get around to it.
(I don't have atuomatic doors because I don't want them)
Of course, my job is to design and commission these systems - we drive lights, blinds, SmartGlass-style windows, video projectors, projection screens and interface to HVAC among other things.
The reason you don't have this yourself is probably down to the cost of the expertise to design and commission these systems. They are extremely powerful and flexible, so it takes a while to learn both waht they'll do and how to make them do it.
Posted in Peugeot iOn e-car
"380V three-phase DC charger"?
Do you actually mean DC, or do you mean three-phase?
Three-phase power *means* three differently-phased AC supplies, it cannot ever be DC.
According to the Peugeot spec sheet, the 'fast charge' system is a 330V DC supply. That is a *very* specialist supply, and you're not going to get one of those in a domestic situation.
- At 90% charge efficiency, you'd be drawing about 28.5kW from the supply to get that. Most domestic supplies have between 18 and 23kW absolute maximum available for the whole house, depending on when it was built.
(Nice to see Lithium Manganese Oxide batteries in use. I had some of those ten years ago, and they were bloody brilliant. Shame the availability was terrrible - somebody bought the lot of the small ones for DECT phones.)
Posted in Peugeot iOn e-car
I'd say the range seems fine for the target market
Commuting to and from work every day, plug it in overnight and never mind if you forget a couple of times a week.
Same as your smartphone.
The problem is that the UK target market is the one that lives in London, works inside the congestion charge zone and has a driveway or garage where power is available.
And that target market is one that doesn't really exist.
The problems are very different
The Grid doesn't really care how much anything costs to build etc. From their point of view:
Nuclear's problem is that it's "best" to run the nuke at approx. 90% max rated output continuously. Thus you need to shunt their 'spare' power into something else when demand is low and pull it back later in the day when demand is high.
Wind's problem is that it will very often flip from 'high output' to 'zero output' without warning.
Thus when wind is producing the most, the 'spinning reserve' also has to be at the maximum just in case wind tips over the top and shuts down.
So you see the issue? It is relatively easy to trim your nuclear so it can sit producing the daily mean, with pumped storage handling the variation. The spot price will bounce in exactly the way pumped storage needs (nuclear station might be paying them to take it away at times).
For wind, we need to have enough spinning reserve* to cover the entire wind generation capacity - and we are only expecting to actually use those warm spares for 38 days each year. That's going to make those spares extremely expensive!
*The spinning reserve would have to hold the grid up until some warm spares could sync, so wouldn't necessarily have to be able to handle the expected >5-day wind blackouts. However the full controllable capacity has to be there as otherwise we go down the rolling blackout** route, which would greatly increase the sales of diesel generators.
**Brownouts are not an option anymore. Gone are the days when the demand was primarily resistive, it's now mostly constant-power so reducing voltage actually increases demand due to increased cable/transformer losses.
No, it still works.
Any user who doesn't go through the landing page doesn't get any cookies.
Still not seeing the problem here.
- Remember, we're talking about tracking cookies here, not the cookies required to run shopping baskets.
The 'restricted' cookies are really those are related to advertisements and web metrics. So, you can only trace people through your site that have been to the landing page.
It might be possible to use referrer to help here as well.
Aside from all of that, if you have a "Do you want a cookie? Yes/No" question, you can be sure that almost everybody will say yes.
@Mattyod?: Erm, no.
Landing page: "Can I store a cookie?"
User: No
All other pages: "Is there a landing page cookie? If yes, store my cookie/modify landing page cookie. Otherwise do nothing."
That's not exactly rocket science, is it?
The law is phrased as "Covering your face so you cannot be identified"
So yes, it covers all of the above.
It doesn't cover everywhere or everywhen - I forget the specifics, but it's actually a simple extension of rules that exist in all European countries.
Try getting a passport in any European country without showing your face.
Abject fail there - you might want to read up on what National Grid actually does.
The National Grid is not some amorphous blob that you can throw stuff onto and pull things off whenever you like.
They work *extremely* hard to balance everything out.
Right now, they have a very smooth 'base load' that's basically all of industry and office working - most industry and almost all offices have a pretty stable use pattern.
Then you have domestic use, which is a very large number of very small users who spike up and down continually - however, all these spikes are very short duration, and it only becomes noticeable when a very large number of these users spike together (kettle after Corrie is the usual example).
The biggest *possible* single domestic 'upspike' is 23kW (zero use to 'about to blow your 100A supply fuse'). The biggest likely would be taking a shower or turning on the oven - 5kW or so.
Now, even a small industrial user is in the MW range, and places like steelworks and car plants are in the multi-gigawatt.
Consider what would happen if many small or mid-sized industrial users often (and only semi-predictably) bounced on and off grid at pretty much the same time as their wind power plants took over, then dropped the load (due to under or over wind-speed)?
As their publication says - The Grid can cope with a few of them. It can't cope with a lot of them.
And that's before you start to consider that the Grid will have to pay these wind power suppliers to *stay turned off* fairly often due to the idiocy of the contracts the Government have put in place.
@copsewood: No, there damn well isn't.
You know this if you'd actually read the study you linked to, rather than just the conclusion page.
That study is actually saying "We might be able to build enough pumped storage if we used every single possible location in the Scottish Highlands"
It completely ignores the environmental cost of doing so, the local outrage (you want to do WHAT to the loch?) and greatly simplifies the massive additional north-south interconnect infrastructure it would need, and the monetary costs of building everything.
In other words, it's a typical short study done by postgrads.
It's interesting, and I hope the guys who wrote it got good marks because they do deserve them - but it should not be considered the general 'green light' that you appear to think it is.
Except that relies on *knowing* it's doing that.
Everyone who already owns (rents?) a Leaf did not know that.
Everyone who doesn't read El Reg or Seattle Wireless still does not know that.
Do you see the problem yet?
Posted in Boffins develop working MALE PILL
Sarah, you're probably right.
I'll freely agree that many women who do want children don't want to achieve them through deception, especially deception liable to result in single parenthood.
I'll even give you the upgrade to Most.
However, that's *still* not all.
Several of my sister's friends* and certainly my cousin-in-law's husband's** 'bit on the side' got a baby through deception. Their motives vary, but are roughly based upon the idea that either the father or the state will be forced into providing financial support for the child and the mother.
*She's in a bad crowd. It's tough trying to get her out of it before something goes badly wrong.
** He's a turd, and she was a muppet. She's finally learnt from the mistake, and it does appear that he hasn't.
