Posts by Ragarath 1074 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Aug 2009
Thanks, I did read Lewis' article earlier and agree with it. But the cost of rolling out the smart metres affects every household. They may be small to you but they are unnecessary and the cost of rolling them out to millions of homes is not small and can be better spent elsewhere.
That is what I was trying to get at in my post.
The system is designed to be secure end to end, with data encryption and no identification of customers in what is sent.
No identification of what has been sent but, we can and will bill you on it. That does not sound like no identification to me!
Personally, I think all this money should be spent on developing better ways to generate energy and in a cleaner way. And no I do not think wind and solar can do what we want. Instead it is all wasted on helping the energy companies make more money and will make little difference to most peoples usage.
If someone wants a cup of tea, the kettle needs to be boiled. They are not going to wait until a time predefined by the energy companies when the cost is less just to do that, or watch their favourite TV program, cook their dinner, do work on their computer and the list goes on and on.
The company said it now rakes in 30 per cent of its ad revenue from mobiles
Yes because it is easier to accidentally hit an ad on a mobile, thus the site gets charged a click through rate rather than a your ad was briefly shown rate. And this even though the person that accidentally did this left the site instantly.
Oh dear, I hope this was an attempt at some form of satire.
Do you even know what this is all about?
Anyway, my take on this is that the EU should stop pussy footing around Google, asking them to rework their offering. They obviously will only except it in a certain form, get some balls and tell Google what should happen.
I have tried VW's version, and it is useless... slow, and not very accurate... much faster to do it yourself...
Though to be honest they are still probably a thousand times quicker than the multiple people I have been behind while they try to get into a parking spot.
Yes but as the time before was measured as the radiation of a caesium atom, then this would be in waves yes? (correct me if I am wrong anywhere please)
We know that this is off by so many seconds in so many millions of years based on what? ephemeris time?
I am not a mathematician but is the ephemeris time formula the absolute time for a second? Is the new accuracy then measured against this formula rather than against the wave of radiation from caesium that we know is not accurate?
Being a bit of a dunce, how do you measure the second more accurately?
If we currently know a second to be so many vibrations of an atom, and using light here we increase the frequency so yes it is more accurate.
But what about the fact that the atom originally used was not perfect (hence the need for more accuracy) meaning that what has been measured here is slightly longer or maybe shorter depending on the measurement.
Have they actually redefined the length of a second here?
You need to stop a lot of new people breathing then.
But on what you have just said, can you prove that lowering CO2 too much will not cause the ice sheets (you know the ones that covered continents) to return? If not then where are the taxes on lowering carbon too much?
I am neither for nor against rather sitting on the fence waiting for the people more knowledgeable than I to come to some kind of consensus, but taxing things into oblivion is not helping either. We need to find a middle ground.
If it is to be a universal service obligation then surely it should be supplied by the government and paid for out of taxes or, at most a license like the BBC?
They have let private companies in, it is a free market and the fact that government is subsidising areas does not diminish that. If they did not subsidise then you can bet your arse that they would not serve those areas as I said.
Until the politicians bring it under this remit it is still a free market. Most markets have subsidies in one area or another at some point.
As I said above, the margins will get better for the wholesalers and in this I also mean ISPs. We may get a little tiny reduction passed to the consumer.
You may think £20 per month is good others may not and opinions vary.
On your point about charging for the speed they can give (from your post this looks like £1 per mbps) I feel that this would just mean the ISP would say, you can only get 1mbps, we are not going to supply service to you.
In my opinion you would not get them to spend more on the network. The network would only then extend to the places they know they can make a profit. You can't say they have to serve someone because well isn't it a free market?
You would have thought so, but my local Tescos are useless, no stock of what people want on the selves (always empty almost all the time) and never putting less of what people don't want on the selves to make room for the stuff that flies off.
I assume the stock management software tells them what is going on and the staff actively ignore it. Been like it for years. Or perhaps they just eyeball everything.
We are proposing a registration fee that is competitive with other gTLDs such as .com.
Translates to: "we can gouge more money out of people to protect their brands."
They could have done this many, many years ago but decided not to. Now the rest of the world offers TLDs for their country code they decide they can make money.
I would have brought them years ago when my portfolio started. I actually actively looked at ways to register a second level domain on .uk but they were not on offer.
And now they expect me to buy .uk to protect all my sites because they were too lazy to do it before.
They wonder why people were not keen?
Fortunately, we know that this state can still support life.
If it is a theory! I was going to post a similar comment, but mine was going to be much more conspiracy based along the lines of...
..They slipped up they have revealed they have found alien life and are harbouring secret discussions with ten armed worms that talk through their arses!
But then I would look crazy, wouldn't I?
And if you only pay for the service to do streaming then that is fine. As I said in my post, "I can see a lot of places (that was meant to be 'uses') that do not care about latency."
But if your using this for VOIP, Gaming etc. as well as business applications then it will affect is. And you can almost guarantee this test had no contention and was probably the only one connecting to that AP at the time. What happens when the whole neighbourhood is connected?
Your right, bring on robot combat league. Sammy on one side HTC on the other, winner takes all!
May the best bot win!
I feel dirty now!
Is it considered cheating to land via helicopter or is there some other part I am missing? Surely it is much safer, you know not being smashed against rocks and all and in my opinion is no different than landing on a calm day, if you lucky, standing on one leg chanting to you deity of choice.
Are the winds a problem?
When I am working it is not uncommon to have 16 - 20 individual applications open at once, including VM's and remote desktop sessions & to be referencing, comparing or duplicating content between those windows & applications.
How does win8 handle three large screens? Personally I'm not willing to risk my current well honed workflow to find out.
It handles it the same as any other desktop, you start the desktop (as you are in TIFKAM by default), open the application or program (depending on your terminology) and use them as you do now.
The bit here is showing TIFKAM running the apps side by side. Note you could swipe from the side to return them before or alt-tab but they would not be visible together.
I am not sure why but for some reason people think the desktop is for running the Metro applications and it is not. It is just harder to launch applications from there because they removed the start menu. You can launch desktop programs from the start screen but it is easier to install a start menu substitute or create shortcuts on the desktop (Ahhh the days of Win 3.)
Or you could have used the free www.classicshell.net although giving a donation is nice.
"Carbon ice"? WOW!!! That would be 'diamonds' then?
Really? Really? Are you sure? Aren't Diamonds caused by heating compression and cooling?
I found this in 1 minute, not hard to research:
1. Bury carbon dioxide 100 miles into Earth.
2. Heat to about 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit.
3. Squeeze under pressure of 725,000 pounds per square inch.
4. Quickly rush towards Earth’s surface to cool.
Carbon Ice as in Carbon Dioxide Ice (the same stuff diamonds are made from) is surely what the writer meant?
I am still confused because you seem to be ignoring parts of my comments you do not want to hear.
I said previously all you have to do is list "requirements" on your game and voila! Guaranteed target. Why do you care if someone cannot get their PC to work because of conflicting drivers? Why do you care if they are trying to play it with the less than stated on the requirements 8GB of RAM? Viewport size is the same.
These problems are for the gamer. All the xbox does here is abstract that from the gamer making it more friendly to people that do not want to know about that. All this is fine but a standard shipped PC from say Alienware or Lenovo does exactly the same thing. Which is what my original comment is about, consoles are just PCs.
So your writing for APIs then you still know what you are writing for yes?
Now I am confused. You said in a previous comment that you have known hardware to make it easier to write for. But have just said you write for APIs.
DirectX is not less optimised for every single graphics card. It is the opposite way around. If the card does not support a function of DirectX then that is the cards fault and not that of DX.
Does it work? Sure. But how well it works depends on AMD, NVidia and Intel
Lastly, do you think the likes of AMD and Nvidia are making cards that do not use the functionality they say they are? Drivers on the PC are continually made better (and I am sure the XBox ones will get updates) and the cards will state they support X and Y.
We will I am afraid have to agree to disagree on this matter.
Any company that released a game that insisted on a particular motherboard, a specific chip from a specific company, a specific graphics card - nope, a cheaper, more expensive or upgraded version will not do - a specific blu-ray drive with known spin-rates and the equivalent of a VPN to a dedicated gaming network would be laughed out of business in days and you know it.
Why are you worried about that? That is the job of the OS not the person writing the game. If they are writing the game for the motherboard ability I would be worried! The OS is supposed to abstract that from the developer, the game is written to the APIs. So you know the card does not support a certain type of shader, great you don't have to code that but if you want it on a system that does (they will) it needs to be coded anyway.
If this is not the job of the OS then why is it there in the first place? Am I missing something and are the people coding the games actually writing for every bit of hardware directly and do not need an OS?
I am not trying to be stubborn here, I am not in the industry of making games so do not have any direct experience so please enlighten me if they are writing directly for hardware and not APIs.
while I take your point entirely, the thing about consoles is that, as a developer, you know exactly where the target is. You don't have dick about with whether the user has a decent GPU or is going to bitch that his nice shiny Ultrabook with Intel's excuse for gfx onboard won't run it at over 8fps. You don't have to aim low on memory requirements. You know exactly what the sound output is and how the controllers work. Nobody is going to demand to remap the controls for their Logitech macro-able cheat-like-fuck keyboard. In short, you can optimize the holy hell out of everything because you have a static target.
While I get this entirely you have not considered several points. If they are creating a PC version anyway having two code bases for the same hardware kind of makes the point about optimisation useless. Companies can optimise for a PC, it's called listing requirements for the game. This has only been happening since I had my Acorn Electron so it is not something new that people have to learn. And comeon how hard is it to code this:
Normal input to jump = space. This is coded somewhere let me see this can even be and usually is some form of text file. User changes space to another key. Change that part of file. Really, is it hard? Sound output and controllers are mapped by the OS, all you have to do is ask the OS. Same as the Xbox One will require of developers for additional hardware.
How old is the 360 now? And how good does, for example, Assassin's Creed 3 look on it? Yet the hardware is basically obsolete by PC standards. You'd need a PC significantly heftier than a 360 to even consider playing it but when the hardware is fixed, you can work miracles.
The game looks as good as I can get on old hardware on a PC. I have not used the latest £400 GC since I were a lad. It is not needed now-a-days 2nd or 3rd generation back are ample for most games. And there is little need to upgrade the CPU now as they are all so fast anyway.
If this thing or the PS4 goes for £400 or less, it's cheaper than a current best-of-breed GPU. And it will last you approximately five times as long.
The GPU will last you easily that long with the same graphics (or better) there is no requirement to upgrade, but the option is there.
I really get why your coming from but you just used the argument I said was obsolete now, that it is a dedicated machine. It is not, it is commodity hardware put in a box but that you cannot change.
So basically, these things are not gaming consoles any more and are just becoming more and more like general purpose computing devices (AKA a PC.)
The last generation (not Wii) made me contemplate what the point is of owning both and this has just compounded my conclusion that a PC is all you need.
All the 'it is a dedicated gaming machine' arguments can stop right there, it no longer is that. My PC is optimised for playing games and yes it is dedicated to it when I play them because I am not trying to do other things when I am blasting away.
Oh and the last bit, when my graphics card starts to struggle with the newer games, I'll just pop in a new card and not have to wait 5 years to upgrade to the latest standards.
I think "deep dive" refers to jumping off the proverbial cliff.
For example:
Normal Dive: Jumping off the side of the swimming pool going under the water a little over your head.
Deep Dive: Jumping off of something high as in the cliff mentioned previously and going in well over your head. Well unless you pancake it but that's going to hurt.
Scuba Diving: Totally different ball game and probably started after the term was coined? (still good fun though)
"They need to look again at the bill, which has a lot of changes to stop it being a snoopers' charter. This ability is something that exists now, and will disappear. I have no doubt that if it goes we will be more at risk, so the deputy prime minister is, I believe, putting the country at risk."
If the ability exists currently, why did Woolwich happen and how will keeping it prevent another? Or am I reading the above wrong?
Then there are the people that use deleted items as some kind of store. But that's for another day.
The first thing I do when someone calls about email problems is delete their deleted items. I used to have people that store things in there, they don't now. It may take a few times to realise what 'deleted' actually means but they get there eventually.
Did you miss the part where I found that they're modelling heat emission using the Stefan-Boltzmann law, which is only valid for blackbodies, and that they didn't test whether or not this object is actually radiating as a blackbody (hint: it won't be), and that they would have to modify that law to T^(4+delta) with delta<~1? That's the point I stopped reading. The font is off-putting through experience: I've refereed a lot of papers and I have never seen a paper that I would accept for publication that was submitted in Word and standard MS fonts. That's not a reflection on Word, and it's not actually snobbery (which you may notice I acknowledged in the original post); it's an observation.
Whoa there, I think you misunderstood my post, and reading it back now I think I understand why (because I am a dolt). The snobbery part was meant to be light hearted (your the one that brought it up! and in response to yojb's post) and reading back dismissing was too harsh a word for what I wanted to convey. I should have used 'rubbishing' or some such. You even state in your original post "The rest of it may or may not be valid but if they're not verifying that" which in my opinion means you were although I must admit not just on the grounds of formatting.
From my post:
"I don't like the way they used a font I don't like so their publishing format and because of that I am dismissing their work (which I have not read and probably would not understand so I will not even go there.)"
I confused the way I was writing this and yes reading it back it looks like a dig at you because I was talking from your point of view to parrot back then continued using the first person in brackets to talk about myself. As in the not understanding part would be me, not you.
And yes, I do call myself a scientist. Back when things were scribbled on scraps of paper I would read things scribbled on scraps of paper. These days we can do rather better, and a seeming lack of effort makes me wary. Bad science inside -- or, at least, unacknowledged sources of error -- makes me even more wary.
Read my post again, it is not the scraps of paper, it was the ink in question or even (though not in the post) the style of handwriting used. Yes formatting and neat layouts etc. help a lot but work should not be discounted because it is not in what one person deems to be the correct way of writing it.
Gosh we are a lot of snobs aren't we. I don't like the way they used a font I don't like so their publishing format and because of that I am dismissing their work (which I have not read and probably would not understand so I will not even go there.)
You call yourself a scientist? What would you have done when things were scribbled down on scraps of paper? Complained that they did not use the right consistency of ink / carbon?
Just to throw something else in, (and because I am not sure if it would make that much off a difference) would the fact that the moon would have been closer also have made a difference? With my calculations using the speed the moon is moving away today, it would have been 11Km closer 3 million years ago.
Would this affect sea levels much? I am not sure can some astro boffin save my poor head?
Billing twice certainly shouldn't be possible. The process flow of a payment is well known, and the till shouldn't issue multiple receipts any more than it would accept two successive Chip-and-PIN payments for the same goods.
How many people have had the person operating the till say something has gone wrong, pull out what looks like a receipt and chuck it away? Then you have to make sure you look at that transaction on your statements to make sure it went through properly.
I have had this several times. so in my opinion these things are more likely till operator error / bad training. Maybe not, but it seems more likely to me that it reading a card 40cm away if they are built to the standard.
Anyone who thinks a global standard can ever be possible is really ignoring the whole of history.
I don't think that at all, hence the brackets and the "if it gets that far" part.
We can be optimists though, and hope. There will always be people that disagree with each other, but what we need to encourage is more cooperation not less.
Nothing ever got built/done by saying "It won't happen," "that can't be done" etc. Try, try and try again. Although I think there are other things that require this before worrying about tax evasion.
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