Posts by Dale 3
283 posts • joined Tuesday 23rd June 2009 12:29 GMT
Re: mmmmm....
There are a few credit cards that don't charge a fee for foreign denominated purchases. Two that I know of are the Post Office Mastercard and Halifax Clarity card. I have the Post Office card primarily for holiday use and the occasional offshore purchase. They charge the "centre" rate, and no additional fee.
There used to be one or two debit cards that also charged no fee (e.g. Nationwide Flexaccount), but as far as I know none are left - they all now charge, typically around 2-3%.
A good place to find out which cards are best (and worst) to use is to look for "holiday spending" on the MoneySavingExpert website.
Re: One major disadvantage robots have over humans:
A problem that robots will always have is that they (or their operators) do not have a reasonable claim to self-defence. If police officers go in and get shot at, they can reasonably shoot back to defend their lives. If a robot gets shot at, they have no "life" as such to defend, so they (or their operators) are less likely to shoot back unless they become aware of an actual threat to a life. The robot is mainly going to end up being used for reconnaissance, trying to talk the guy down, or at best a tasering. Taser vs bullets, I'd bet on the bullets.
@Bankrupt the company through replacing glass doors
Apple has over $100 billion in reserves, and about 363 stores worldwide as at January 2012 (apparently). If each door cost $100000 to replace, and you smashed the doors of every store, every day of the year, and they were able to replace them every day too, and they didn't notice this rather obvious pattern of misfortune, and didn't post a few security guards to stop it, it would still take 7.5 years to bankrupt the company. That doesn't take into account additional cash they raise through sales over those 7.5 years.
That is how much money they have.
Growth
It's funny that they should suffer scalability problems; according to Wikipedia, "bamboos are some of the fastest-growing plants in the world".
Internet cleaning
Fortunately we don't ever get crossed lines on the Internet because of the annual cleaning day:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bltune-up.htm
Re: "...strategic maple syrup reserve "
Oh that is awesome!
Re: Tesla coil, bitches!
No that would be Facebook.
If Yahoo, it would be Tesla! coil!
But today it is iTeslacoil
Or perhaps pr-iOr art.
Supermarket shelves
Just back from South Africa where a couple of a the big supermarket chains have now equipped their stores with LCD price tags on the shelf edges instead of good old printed paper tags. Not sure whether they are updated wirelessly at a distance or by a person running around the store with a handheld programmer. I thought it was a bit of an overengineered solution but they must have found some benefit to warrant rolling it out. This plastic display and/or e-ink solutions I would have thought a better technology, not least because they would be easier to read than the blue-on-transreflective-LCD. You're also looking at tens of thousands of units per large supermarket, which could provide economies of scale quite early on.
At its strongest setting it has a grip strength of 140N and weighs about half a kilo
I wonder how much it weighs at its weakest setting?
In other news...
... burglars have announced their intention to ignore "do not rob" signs on people's homes. A police spokesperson said "keeping one's doors locked is more effective than putting up a sign."
Hurricane Sandy...
...when cloud services go bad!
stored obscured with the addition of zeros
So, that would be stored as UNICODE plaintext then.
£52.6m on marketing costs
Most of that went on mailshots through my door.
Posted in USB charges up to 100 watts
Re: How exactly are they doing this?
RTFA. The article provides the information, but you do have to actually read it..
Posted in WTF is... Li-Fi?
Doors
Too bad it doesn't work from one room to another, unless you leave the door open.
(Or it's between your kitchen and dining room, and you have one of those serving hatch things.)
Tickets
They should have involved the people* responsible for London Olympic ticketing. Look how well that is being managed.
* Probably best not to mention the company name
Re: Unexpected error
In the old days, an "expected" error was, for example, the user ejecting the floppy disk prematurely. The error was "expected" in the sense that the designer or developer spent some time thinking about what sorts of things could possibly go wrong, and coded against them. The most likely response would have been an error message - hopefully one more meaningful than just a coded number.
An "unexpected" error, on the other hand, is one that they didn't think of. But they still had the good sense to catch it, and display a coded number which could be reported to customer support to aide diagnosing the fault, so that in the next release it could be turned into an "expected" error and handled properly.
Re: I'd worry more...
Well I was also expecting a paragraph announcing some new Big Government IT Project, and was astounded to see this instead:
"The Met is also considering adopting software currently used..."
Control group
So where's the control group of women who didn't watch the soap or the violent show before having their level of aggression measured?
"previews of a digital image on an LCD screen"
Which part of 19th century photography involved digital images and LCD screens? Just askin'.
Re: hm.
Perhaps requires an investigation that invokes use of words such as "antitrust", "price-fixing", "cartel" and perhaps even "racketeering" if one tries hard enough.
IPTV through EPG
Connecting to the IPTV services (especially catch-ups like IPlayer) through the EPG is basically what you want. A consistent user experience with just one place to go to look for programmes. If it is on now, switch the tuner over to that channel and watch it. If it is on later, set up a recording. If it was on earlier, stream it over the network.
No need for a huge SLOW website-like interface for old programmes, which looks different from the grid-like interface you use for future programmes, which is hard for mother-in-law to understand, which means phone calls to me. (Basically I measure simplicity - and therefore suitability for public use - on an inverse scale of number of phone calls.)
Re: Pre-Order
My mother-in-law bought an object in an M&S sale for the sole reason that it cost 50p. She had absolutely no idea what it was, but "it was cheap!" and she simply can't walk past a "bargain". (It turned out to be a USB hub, so quite a good deal theoretically if not for the fact I already have two.)
Re: Re: Balls
Well I DID invest, and I am the proud owner of 5 shares. If the rumours turn out to be true, £6.26 of that $7B dividend is mine! (Less 15% dividend tax, of course.) Drinks all round.
Posted in Intel 520 240GB SSD
Power consumption
I imagine most people are most interested in SSDs for their speed. The next most interesting number to me is power consumption. It's a shame that it doesn't feature much in these reviews.
My laptop runs continuously, mostly used as a desktop replacement rather than being lugged around. I was keen to replace the HDD with a SSD to increase reliability and lower power consumption, until I discovered that most SSD seem to have about the same power consumption as the equivalent HDD. That was disappointing. Would be nice if power consumption were included in the summary box.
Good
Just remember to hold it right.
Posted in Phone maker punts AA-powered blower
Talk time?
I wonder what sort of talktime you get with a single AA battery and a phone wanting to transmit at up to 2W?
The only way
"It is however on its way to become one by the nature of being the only way (or the only sensible no/low cost way) to do things."
Even if the internet did become the only way to communicate, that still wouldn't make it a basic human right. The human right would still be to communicate; the internet would still be simply a medium through which we could exercise the right to communicate (albeit a very important medium).
Posted in Punctured Google+ leaks bored users
Google+
I can't really be bothered to sign up. I'm probably not the only one.
Posted in iPad 3 to debut Q3 2012 as iPad 4
Subscribe
I'm surprised they don't just distrubute these products on a subscription basis. People are paying annually anyway, might as well do it with a standing order.
Coefficient, not unit
It's a coefficient, not a unit. You could determine it experimentally by measuring the length (or volume) of a piece of the material at one temperature, and then again at another temperature, and then divide the two measurements. Because you are dividing the same units the resulting ratio has no units. If you then divide it by the temperature difference you get the coefficient, whose unit is "per degree C". Hence "33.9 * 10^-7 / degree C".
iTV
What a shame ITV is already taken. Lawyers, on your marks...
"under their own steam"
I thought they were supposed to be solar powered?
Sorry :-(
The LCD cartel
Don't you worry about that. The EU is expecting to Fast Track the investigation into alleged LCD cartel activity in 2024. As soon as the laserdisk investigation is finished.
Fab article
A tremendous return to form. Too many of the new writers seem to have lost the writing style that makes El Reg such a delight to read. Thank you, Mr Haines.
Scan
Actually 644 people have bought it and are in the process of scanning it. I guess that accounts for the low sales; everyone else is waiting for the upload to finish.
Google Calendar
I use a Google Calendar to set up long range reminders on the dates that the various long term things expire, including contracts, savings account special bonus rates, energy fixes, credit card 0% deals, etc. Set it up to email yourself a reminder a few weeks before so you have time to switch. I would prefer not to have ARCs but if you have any that aren't subject to the OFCOM ruling, this is one way to cope with them.
DVD-R
Is there a CD-R or DVD-R capable version of these? The wife's netbook wants to create its restore media on an actual DVD-R and won't simply create an ISO, which would have been the sensible alternative. One of these to create an ISO would be really convenient.
My vote counts
Pay real money for a negligible vote in a choice that doesn't matter, for an outcome that makes no difference to anything.
It's entertaining, I suppose.
speak to live tellers via touch screens
If you would like to make a deposit, touch my nose. If you would like to check your balance, touch my left ear. If you would like to make a deposit, poke me in the eye...
The traditional model
@Mark 65 hit the nail on the head (so to speak). Retail tradition is having lots of different stores for different things. That's exactly what Intel's AppUp product is, and exactly what Apple's App Store isn't.
Everything the Intel guy said was "wrong" with Apple should in fact be applied to his own product. Maybe he should have another look at Apple's sales statistics before commenting how wrong Apple is. They seem to be doing rather well actually.
Posted in Mobee Magic Charger
Charging mouse mat
When I saw the headline I thought I would get an article about someone finally making a mousemat with a built-in charging coil. Nope. Looks like that patent is still waiting to be grabbed.
The possible advantages are smaller or lower capacity batteries making the mouse lighter, and it can be continuously charged. Or, thanks to USB to the mat, it can switch off the mat until the charge drops below 50%, to avoid running the charger constantly.
Sea borders
Hey, don't say they don't do security theatre at the UK sea borders. Last year while travelling out of Dover on a coach trip, our coach was randomly pulled out for screening, and 5 bags were randomly pulled out of the hold for X-raying.
Fair enough, I suppose, random searches for drugs and so on. But then the 5 owners of the 5 bags were required to get off the bus and also walk through the metal detector. Now what, do you suppose, was that meant to achieve? They didn't search the coach itself, so anyone with contraband on his person is surely just going to leave it behind on the coach.
Not surprising
This is not at all surprising. Do we put signs outside our houses saying, "please don't steal my stuff", or do we use locks and keys? If you don't want websites tracking you, you don't do it by asking them not to track you, you do it by preventing them from tracking you.
Posted in All aboard the flash array train?
CRT vs LCD
This is reminiscent of a few years ago when CRT monitors were standard and LCDs on their way. I remember looking forward eagerly to the day we all knew was coming, when LCDs would be the norm and nobody bothered with CRT any more. How far away it seemed. I guess it won't too much longer before we are thinking of spinning disks as somewhat quaint, but antiquated.
Health records with a social element
Sounds like a great idea. Status updates would be colourful to say the least. Who wouldn't want all their friends commenting on their latest illnesses and afflictions?
Fridge sized
Shirley all they need is to add a fridge-sized fridge to solve the cooling problem?
Version number catch-up
I presume they are just trying to get Firefox version numbers to catch-up with IE, to help out consumers who think IE11 is better than FF3 because the number is higher.
Typhoon
I think it would have been quite entertaining to witness a Typhoon attempting this job. Surprising for the cow, but entertaining for everyone else.
