Posts by Steve 13
144 posts • joined Thursday 15th October 2009 13:13 GMT
I'd rather have
A stereo with a bit of flash memory built into it and the capability to connect it to my home wifi when parking in my garage. No data roaming (or indeed connection) needed then, just sync up x GB of music and off we go, taking all my music with me.
It sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
Re: Indeedy
That's a lack of self discipline.
Re: No you fucking don't.
"Do whatever is best for *you*" should be the mantra that contractors live by.
If the market is reasonable though, then saying "go ahead then" and calling their bluff might be the best response. If the market is slow then taking the cut and immediately hitting jobserve would be the alternative.
Re: Contracting Families
"Holidays are for when you don't have work (worst time to take a holiday), days off are when there's a bomb threat in the home office and sleep is something you've read about and are pretty sure is important"
Holidays are for when you're in a contract, when you're not it's time to be hunting for a new one and not spending a lot.
Days off are for whenever you like, so long as it's not going to piss off your client.
Sleep is something that happens after you've had an evening doing whatever you like, which happens after you've done your 7.5hrs and gone home. Your contract either specifies a professional day or around 7.5hrs, it doesn't say they've bought your soul for 6 months.
Maybe it varies depending on sector or location, but this works perfectly well for me, I'm coming up to the end of my 5th company year, and I've had just over a month between contracts in that time (in total).
I can't imagine that I'd ever feel the need to accept some sort of part time/on demand work from a client, they either hire me for 5 days/week for a minimum of 3 months or I go somewhere else, it could be that the somewhere else is further away, but that's one of the cons of contracting.
Re: Understandable
3 thumbs down for thinking that the old "spike in the steering wheel" is a really stupid analogy (maybe not an analogy, but it's clearly not a realistic idea either).
Anyway it presupposes that any accident you are involved in is your own fault, but clearly that isn't always the case.
Do the thumb downers really want to die because someone else caused an accident? I don't.
Re: @AC Appeals process a sham, sherlock
There is no legal debt until and unless they take you to court and win.
Re: Understandable
I wonder how approving you'll be after some idiot turns across you and you're impaled on your spike. Or do you think your own good driving makes it impossible for someone else to cause an accident that you're involved in?
Re: Understandable
Because that's what a typical teen drives of course. They don't drive the diesel focus which their mum owns... Or when they are actually buying a car they don't drive a 1.2 fiesta which is all they can afford.
Re: Understandable
Is there any evidence to support this, or is it just speculation?
Most young drivers don't have access to powerful cars, but you don't need power to crash a car, just bad driving.
Re: Not the full picture
"most people work in jobs where they have to physically do something or fix something"
I think you'll find that the service sector is now larger than the primary or secondary sectors of industry.
A lot of people need to be physically located, but even more people don't... But that sort of depends on how you define "need". I don't physically need to be in an office to produce code, but being co-located with the team is actually extremely handy.
Re: It will only work to move people around the UK if the tickets are cheap!
It's the time that stops me, not the cost.
I could, in theory, work in London for several hundred quid/day more than I do in my home city. But the 4 hr round trip makes it completely impractical, it would remain impractical no matter how little the tickets cost.
As it happens the tickets would work out at almost as much as the increase in rate, but that's not the primary or most important barrier.
@MrXavier
Nobody was claiming it was the finished product, it's just research. Sure it can't immediately be strapped to a commercial airliner and make it fly London to NYC in <1hr, but the data gathered goes into the next gen of research and eventually we have (hopefully) hypersonic airliners that can transition from turbojet to scramjet flight without booster rockets.
Re:ICBM launch, surely launching a hypersonic cruise missile is a damn site less conspicuous than launching an ICBM. So much less conspicuous that you could conceivably deny it all together, if anyone except the target noticed it in the first place.
Let me get this straight
They are trying to patent putting bluetooth transceivers into cars and carparks (they're already in phones), and having them communicate... And an app then using this communication data to tell you where your car is.
Which part of that isn't just using existing off the shelf functionality to do something obvious?
The app is the only bit that doesn't already exist, and as already pointed out, there is plenty of prior art.
Re: Spain - not cheap.
Why would drinking the tap water be an issue (in a 1st world western country anyway). I don't buy bottled water and compared to £1/day my food budget is basically unlimited.
Re: Is this The Register...
Is there any evidence that this particular bit of policy is being lead by any evidence?
Re: Applied Placebo Effect?
If everyone takes the "test" and everyone has their self esteem raised....
Then the chances of each individual getting a job are unchanged.
I assume you can explain how you'd draft this legislation?
Re: Crap argument
So your local corner shop, you think they should be forced out of business because you want to tax them on income (revenue) rather than profit?
The idea that a business can't have an allowable expense is incredibly stupid.
Re: @Tony
@Stuart
You think that paying yourself taxed dividend from taxed profit is the same as shifting profit offshore to avoid tax...
Logical failure.
Re: Hmm... @ AC no 1
She does pay tax on her income, the last time I checked dividends were taxed.
It's not the same headline rate as salary is taxed at, but given how easy it is for the government to change it, that must be deliberate.
Re: Less is More
So you only look at your fuel gauge when something goes wrong (ie when you run out of fuel)?
@Fizz
"It does also need to compute strategies, decide how to use the different bird powers to help the following birds to accomplish the total goal"
Does it actually do that?
Or does it (from the snippet of debug output that's given) try randomly throwing birds (presumably random birds when there is a choice) and see what the result is, discard ones with no effect, and keep replaying the level using known 'good' shots until random chance results in it stumbling on a winning formula.
The "changing target at random" doesn't sound very much like causal reasoning to me, it sounds like either a depth or breadth first search of all the possible game states, they are just enumerating the game state tree at some sort of defined level of granularity (ie how much it moves the target each time).
Posted in Review: Renault Zoe electric car
Re: completely useless beyond a few niche users
Maybe the people who "drive a few miles every day" should be introduced to a bicycle. Or perhaps have the point of their legs and feet explained to them. Or failing that, we can probably locate the closest bus/tram/tube stop for them.
Re: The fact that driving becomes an automatic skill is a good thing
"Driving is far more about observation, assessment and planning than it is about waggling wheels and pressing pedals. And it is that planning sequence that should take sunstantially all of a driver's concentration."
The fact that someone should be doing these things doesn't mean that they should be able to recall inconsequential details about the journey they just made.
Doing these things should (ideally) be at the level of unconscious competence as well. If you have to think about doing them, then you aren't good enough at doing them.
My pulse
Because my pulse is never raised at the airport due to wearing too many layers, carrying a bag around, being stressed about the poor service, arguing with the wife, bemoaning the lack of coffee or being up at 0400 to get there...
Is there any evidence that suggests that terrorists at airports have pulses measurably higher than the rest of the people pissed off at being at the airport and not on holiday already?
Re: Ta
Ta is slang for Thanks, not an abbreviation for Turrah (slang for goodbye).
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TA
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ta%20ra
Both Northern English slang.
Re: Not sure I'll bother
It's smaller than the S3 that is comfortably nestled into a normal pocket of my normal jeans at the moment, and that's with a case on it that makes it slightly larger.
Re: Concentration
And yet nobody ran into me this morning on my commute, and whilst I can't tell you the colour of any of the many cars that I passed, I can tell you that I was aware of them and hence didn't drive into them.
The fact that driving becomes an automatic skill is a good thing, there are different levels of ability at any given skill, but automatic, unconscious competence is the highest level. If you had to think about driving, rather than just doing it, you'd probably be sat next to your instructor trying to figure out how to co-ordinate two feet and two hands to make the car go without running into stuff (ie learning).
"This have people up in arms, in a good way"
Where are the subs?
"This *will* have" or "This has" presumably...
Re: But How
It won't, that bit can't be automated (at our current technological level), but the backhaul, from warehouse to warehouse all over the country can, there are warehouse staff (or automated systems) at either end to load and unload and the lorry goes from A to B, not A to Z via every delivery address on the way.
Even though automation causes short term pain, I can't see how it's anything other than a positive thing in the long run.
Re: The customer defines value
It's difficult to know in advance if it's actually going to be "worth your time to watch". If refunds were available for turning it off half way through due to being trash then maybe more people would take a chance and buy a film or music.
Posted in Honk if the car in front is connected
Pass a message to cars going the other way
I don't understand this bit of the article.
Surely a broadcast at the speed of light (in air, not vacuum), which is rebroadcast by a suitable car 500 metres back and so on (for a given TTL on the message), is more efficient than passing the message to a car going the other way at 100 kph and it rebroadcasting it in 30 seconds...
I can't see any reason that the direction of a cars travel would matter in the case of motorway traffic and congestion building up, any message can propagate through the network millions of times faster than a vehicle can move.
Re: the general idea, my commute isn't very interesting, I'd be more than happy to hand most of it over to a computer and have a snooze, or set off later, and start work in the car...
That doesn't mean that on some days I wouldn't want to drive myself, it's probably <75% of the time though.
Posted in Honk if the car in front is connected
Re: I see some potential in this...
Main engine switch off whilst you're traveling in traffic and you're likely to be parked in the barrier, facing the wrong way, maybe upside down.
Stopping high speed chases safely by going into 'limp home' mode, and then progressively reducing throttle response is surely a good thing though.
Posted in WTF is... Miracast?
Agreed with the AC
Just tried googling to see if I could plug something into a spare HDMI on my (rather old now) tele.
Two products come up, one a dongle from China and the other a Panasonic box.
I can't find a single av receiver that has it built in (which would be the ideal situation) although a forum mentioned that the Sony strdn1030 did (I don't believe it, the sony website and/or manual only mention airplay for music).
I like the idea, but it certainly seems to have very little traction in the market place at the moment.
Puzzled?
You were puzzled by someone walking the other way wearing glasses?
Re: Skeptical
Didn't he write another article recently about how he disliked wearing a watch?
"Barclays can easily afford its £290m fine for attempting to rig the global borrowing-rate benchmark LIBOR, and thus it can easily pay for the new wireless service."
Logic failure... A does not imply B...
In fact, the mention of the libor fixing scandal appears to be completely unrelated to the minor wifi story.
A spork is less useful than separate 'devices' because you use them simultaneously, or near simultaneously.
You don't do that with book reading and anything else the tablet would do, so having a single multi function device is more efficient.
Re: Outdoors
How does reading on the patio somehow make a tablet rubbish for reading?
Unless you mean because you're reading in the sun, in which case I agree.
Re: I represent the effect the study ruled out
Thumbs down for what? I posted the reality of my situation, I guess you don't like that reality whoever voted it down. Sucks to be you.
@Mage
No reason to buy an Apple product for 15 years, apart from the fact that they made the first decent smart phone and invented the tablet market...
I don't like them, I don't own any of their products, but you can't just ignore reality, they have been massively innovative for the past 15 years, hence their resurgence.
I represent the effect the study ruled out
(I'm 35 by the way).
I bought an eReader first (kindle, 2 or 3 years ago).
I bought a nexus 6 months ago.
I hardly ever use the kindle now, I'm perfectly happy to read for several hours at a time on the tablet, the only downside is battery life, I'd take the kindle if I was going somewhere without power, or the journey was long (long-haul long I suppose).
XPS extinct?
http://www.dell.com/uk/p/xps-laptops
The Dell XPS still exists, I'm typing this on one now, and it's got very similar specs to an Alienware of the same vintage (it's about 18 months old). The only differentiator at the time was that this didn't come with an SSD, so I added that myself.
It's the 2nd Dell laptop I've personally had, the 1st one (>6 years old now) is still alive and kicking at a relatives house. So I'm not sure on where the reputation for throwaway products comes from or how an Alienware badged machine can last any better than that.
Posted in Darth Vader is a pansy
Stones are normally slate coloured?
Maybe it's down to the geography of where you live.
Go somewhere that's primarily limestone and suddenly "stone white" makes sense.
Posted in Ten budget inkjet printers
All in ones?
How does a review with a by line of "all in ones" fail to review the ability to do anything except print?
it's leaking
he following error was encountered while trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/
Connection to 192.168.89.45 failed.
The system returned: (110) Connection timed out
It shouldn't be giving out internal IP addresses just because to many reg readers have clicked the link.
Posted in Ten... Father's Day gifts
It's a pretty poor list isn't it, things cost £400 which have a tendency to fly off on their own and never been seen again, vibrating wrist watches...
I was hoping for a little inspiration, but all I got was a little bit of my time wasted.
Posted in How to put "Stuxnet author" on your CV
You could generally put what government you worked for (most commonly your own) and MOD or DOD.
You can obviously talk about what technologies you used as well.
Worked for the MOD at Whitehall writing a traditional N-tier web application using xyz web framework and wizzy wizzy backend server technology.
The information that is covered by Official Secrets Act are the details about what you were writing and what it's supposed to do, it might make it more difficult to talk about in an interview, but you can talk about the technologies and general technical principles, just not the details of what you were doing with it.
Posted in SpaceX Dragon freed to push off home
already been spotted but...
25th May
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/25/iss_catches_the_dragon/
Today
Spent 2 weeks docked to the ISS. Erm, it's the 31st May today...
luddites
Presumably had el Reg existed when cruise control was being developed all the previous posters would have been there declaring why it would never work.
Most of the 'problems' don't appear to be even relevant, the wifi connection isn't neccessary to measure the distance to the vehicle with radar or laser, the gap could presumably be made much smaller if desired and auto emergency breaking systems already exist.
The system is specifically designed for following another vehicle whilst on the motorway, so traffic lights aren't a problem, nor is arriving at the sainsbury's depot. Presumably the wifi does have a use in making sure that you are following a vehicle in the right direction and giving you plenty of warning if you need to stop following it (ie for your exit or because it is exiting).
The test done here might be at relatively low speed, but it's more fuel efficient like that, and frankly if I can get in the car and then go back to sleep whilst it drives me the majority of the way to work then I won't mind it being slightly slower and saving me money.
