Re: Anyone who still believes that insurance drops at 25 is hopelessly deluded

It is very odd, like Brenda said (and I mentioned before in this thread), if you try something crazy, you can end up with lower premiums.

I too managed to insure a ~200HP RWD sports car as soon as I got my licence. It was £350 a year, which for a male in the 18-24 bracket who just got his licence, was amazing. I repeated to the insurance company 3 times to make sure they understood my age and the fact I just got my licence. They said it was all ok.

The car proved so cheap to run that I still have it, the higher fuel consumption is offset by the lower cost of insurance, tax and everything else really.

Only catch is that I don't earn a "no-claims bonus" , but the insurance is so much cheaper that I don't care, and I don't have to worry about losing it if something happens.

Re: Understandable

Heh, and it is actually cheaper to insure a 30 year old car for a 18 year old, than any other car (due to qualifying for classic car insurance).

This is how I managed to insure my first car after getting my licence. It was the only car I could afford insurance on, and it was so cheap, that years later, I still drive the car to this day (I've pretty much gone off buying non classic cars, everything is more expensive on new cars, including maintenance, repairs, and taxes).

It's also a lot more fun to drive than modern cars, and entails a certain respect for driving. You feel everything through the car, and not having any computers to help you (or airbags) really instills prudence and thinking carefully before you do anything rash.

Personally, I think driving the car made me a better driver, and think everyone should do it at some point in order to grasp the fundemantals of driving, but that is just my opinion really.

Oh, and since I bought it, it has more than doubled in value, which is a nice change from the usual depreciation you get when you buy a car :)

Re: Perhaps not quite so hypocritical

That is ignoring the fact that, from what I remember reading about Google maps when it first came out. The "highest" zoom level were pictures taken from aircraft flying above (which is why you don't get this zoom level everywhere, some countries disallowed it).

The difference was that it wasn't a drone, so I guess there must have been some license paid for the right to this, and Google probably paid a lot for this data.

If I were to make a guess, I think Eric is worried that if anybody can launch a drone up and take photos as good as Google maps, all the money they spend on the data would be useless (Imagine openstreetmap with such photos).

Still, it could just be because he is a complete hypocrite, or both. Who knows. Still... not amused.

Re: That's USA, right?

@Mad Mike

Well, you can use any biomatter. Quite why would anyone grow food and burn it makes no sense to me. More likely to make use of non-edible leftovers, weeds, refuse, etc... that is not needed for feeding.

Not to mention, from what I heard about the EU, a huge amount of perfectly edible food is thrown away every day due to over supply. Things like the CAP keep EU farmers producing with a subsidy. What usually happens is either:

a) The good goes to waste, literally, they just let it rot, or

b) they dump it on the market, which in the past got them in trouble because they were driving farmers in the developing world bankrupt, and causing these countries to require food aid.

c) they don't farm the land at all. Essentially they a paid to keep the land fallow.

We don't have a problem feeding people, we generate more food that the entire human population needs. It is more about distributing the food, and the difference in production per sq/m in Europe and say, Africa.

Quite frankly, if we got all these extra European farmers producing crops for fuel instead of food, we may well stabalise the food supply, rather than having this unstable supply/dumping/etc... and also not have to pay people to not work.

Oh, and the food prices have little to do with food supply, more to do with speculators hoarding food on the commodity markets to make a fast buck.

Some of the research in biofuel now is in using algae, rather than plant matter. Nothing is insurmountable with this technology at the moment. All that it needs is refinement, and research into scaling it, which is more of engineering challange.

Also, the UK government has removed fuel duty for the first 2500 litres of biofuel you produce yourself for personal consumption, so unless you need more than 200 litres of fuel a month, you could in theory do this and get very cheap fuel (assuming they have not changed anything).

Re: That's USA, right?

There are alternatives to petrol/diesel.

Biobutanol is pretty much a total replacement for petrol, no need for engine modification. Ethanol needs modification to the engine/fuel system/fuel lines/ECU for cars that are not designed as "flexfuel".

Biodiesel works in old diesel engines, it needs a bit of refinement for use in modern direct injection diesels, but is not an insurmountable issue.

We have all the alternatives to synthesise fuel for transport (in fact, over a century ago, before fossil derived petrol/diesel, this is what cars/engines ran on).

The only reason we do not use them is because synthesis would cost more than the current prices of fuel. I seem to remember someone calculating that petrol would have to hit £1.20 a litre in order to make butanol a worthwhile alternative (note, that is £1.20 a litre of actual fuel cost, not including the crazy 70%+ tax we pay).

I do also know that biobutanol is coming online for small scale testing refineries in Europe, so people are planning for the future, and working on it.

Re: wtf?

Indeed, I feel the same. Not to mention there is one crucial difference. With a phone, If I really want to not be tracked, I can pull out the battery, or just leave it at home. Neither of those options are possible with the car (I mean, I can leave it at home, but that defeats the point of having the car in the first place).

And if the EU in its infinate wisdom decides to legally mandate this in cars (not sure if it is actually law yet), I suspect tampering/removing it will be illegal to boot.

And am I the only one disliking the idea of being forced to have to pay for a cellular contract for the car?

The more I see the general direction of the automotive sector, the happier I am with a 30 year old car. They are actively making new cars less desirable to me, and unless they ban old cars one day, I don't plan on buying (I guess if they manage to indirectly force me to not have a car, they win on the eco front anyway, so a win-win for them).

Re: Time to move to reactOS I wonder...

If they suceed in getting compatiability of reactOS up, then you don't need to rewrite IE6, you could just rip it out of an old windows install and run it as is. That is the benefit. I doubt wine (for example) will ever support activeX, as while it has API compatability, the OS-specific bits in IE6/ActiveX will never mesh with the linux system (at would be a massive job to do).

Re: Or Wine on Linux?

I agree, the reason I went with ReactOS is because I had hardware with windows drivers. Linux only has NDIS for networking, and getting windows drivers working in Linux is near impossible. Far easier to make use of an OS that allows use of windows drivers by design :)

Wine and reactOS complement each other, rather than compete. I believe they co-operate on the API/userspace area already.

Re: six to seven hour days?

Indeed! My minimum daily rate (as specified in my contract) is 9 hours a day (does not include on-call/weekend work, for which I am not paid overtime)! The other places I worked in had 8 hours minimum. Which job gives you less hours of work per day than that?

Unless I'm mistaken a 7hr day is from 9am to 4pm! I'd love a job like that! Even if it meant I had to spend an extra hour or 2 on my laptop at home.

Re: So where are we heading?

Hey, At least they would have solved the unemployment problem! They would need to hire people to monitor people!

If unemployment hits 50% they can hire one half of the population to monitor the other half. Imagine, your very own personal monitor! They can follow you around all the time!

</sarcasm, I hope...>

Re: What has changed?

Well, I presume outsourcing is the biggest thing really. Both the "old kind" of outsourcing your DC, etc... e.g. just leasing managed dedicated servers (possibly in another country) and cloud computing.

A few years ago I worked for SME's, and in each and every case I was eventually laid off when they shifted off the servers to the cloud (mostly Amazon's EC2). Most companies that are not core IT companies don't want the hassle of DC/server management. SME's first made the jump, and likewise once they contracted out that side of the business, had little use for the low-end IT jobs.

I presume now that as the cloud has begun to be seen as more legitimate, you have bigger and bigger firms considering it, with corresponding loss of the need for low-level IT staff.

Not that these jobs have vanished, the cloud/managed-DC guys still need people to work on the servers/racks/etc... however:

a) you get economies of scale, they need fewer IT jobs per machine managed

b) the jobs may well no longer be in the country, the DC may well be somewhere else, so the jobs essentially moved overseas.

I don't know about Capita in particular (I have no access to their internals), but I've seen it happen.

I did my job and wrote the tools to transition to EC2 for my company, then they laid me off. Same at the next company. At that point I saw the writing on the wall, and just contracted myself out (for far higher an hourly rate than I got before) to transition firms to the cloud, with the tools I've written and the experience I had doing it so far ( I didn't agree with the idea, I felt that losing their IT people and just being managers with developers in India would be a failure, but its their funeral, they were pushing for it).

Then I moved on, now I work for a large company, essentially as a sysadmin for their private cloud. IT is a constantly changing area, much faster than most others, so you just have to keep on your toes. That is the only way I can think of to keep up and keep your job from being outsourced...

Re: Mmmm, Hollow Point Zombie Bullets..... The cure to "Bath Salt" zombies everywhere.

Heh, looks like it has been done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_gun

(I'm stuck on the tube, at least there is signal...)

Re: Mmmm, Hollow Point Zombie Bullets..... The cure to "Bath Salt" zombies everywhere.

Surely if you want accuracy with slugs you'd want a rifled barrel in the shotgun? I don't know if they make them, or if it helps with slugs, but as a thought experiement (as you nicely put it).

All the shotguns I've used are smoothbore, but I'm sure someone somewhere tried to rifle one (CBA to google it now, on way back from work).

Re: already installed one

That's different though, because you did it and you own it, data included. You are still in control.

A government one would probably have rules against tampering/modifying, would be illegal to switch off and/or remove, you would not be able to decide when you want it to track you, and the data it collects would be owned by the government, to do as it wishes with (including selling it on to insurance,etc...)

I don't think many people are against tracking/telematics as a technology, more that they are weary of government application of said technology, especially once they get their foot in the door, they can later on extend it as they wish, including (potentially) dictating what the car does.

Re: What does Ubuntu offer?

Out of curiosity? what problems did you have with virtualising Debian? I ask because we settled on virtualising all our old Debian servers (running on a Debian qemu/kvm host) and have not had a single problem with them. I've even moved to virtualising all my old servers (broken laptops mostly) into one single server at home, all worked flawlessly :).

Virtualised some Ubuntu as well, and it was also painless.

I think 1 or 2 can happen, but not 3. If the worst comes to the worst they'd get bought out eventually. As witnessed by the number of fanboys, Sony brand name still has a lot of monetary value. They also hold patents and have some good technologies (e.g. Cell processor). They earn good money in non-consumer space in specialist areas (supercomputers, embedded systems, DSP processing, etc...)

The question is will the stock go up or down before 1 and 2 apply? I honestly cannot say. Depends on how much of a loss you're willing to take, and how confident you are in judging the firms potential for future performance! :)

Good luck! (Alas, I'm not allowed to invest, so I just get to watch)

Re: Point of order

I meant it in scope of them offering it running on PC's. At that point the only place you could get an ATRAC encoder was inside the hardware (although I assume somewhere in the deepest darkest depths, they had a software implementation used for those mastered minidiscs, which probably ran on PC's). It would also make sense that after 20+ years of development, Sony would continue to use ATRAC internally, as it is theirs. If they used mp3 they would have to pay for a licence + royalties. Lame is only allowed for research purposes (officially).

ATRAC was a very good codec, one of the nicest things about it is that you its quality was encoder led. This means that improvements in encoder quality didn't break old decoders. A music file encoded with ATRAC3 (For example) actually sounded better on an ATRAC1 decoder than an ATRAC1 encode would.

Plus it was energy efficient. My old minidisc player gave me 40 hours of playback from 1 AA battery (60+ hours if I used the internal battery as well). It took a long while until mp3 players caught up with that, and they didn't have the whole issue power draw from the rotating assembly (HD-based ones excepted).

It had a lot of potential like I said, it was Sony's control-freakery and paranoia about piracy that ruined their chances.

Re: ATRAC

And they already had it :) (After all, it was used in the Minidisc's already). It was their deployment of it that really messed everything up. If they made it as flexible as mp3 (multiple software encoders, published specs, etc...) they may have had some running against mp3 initially. It was for the time a very good lossy compression format, alas they didn't share, mp3 got refined (specifically thanks to the lame guys) and beat it out in quality in the end.

Instead I remember people hacking out libraries from realmedia encoder (as realplayer apparently used atrac for its audio streaming) and using those to (de|en)code atrac files on PC's. This worked ok, but without the keys needed to digitally encrypt the files prior to transfer to the minidisc (the net-MD concept they finally allowed after mp3 players had already taken off, too little too late really) it still pretty useless. The big advantage is that you could add your ATRAC files directly and have the software not transcode it for you (slowly).

My point is that Sony had some excellent hardware ideas, it was the execution from the management perspective that messed things up. I think that minidisc could have dominated had they made it as flexible as CD (or hell, they allowed people to "burn" Minidiscs on their PC), but they were so petrified of piracy, they crippled it fatally. People had to record from CD in "real time", and not surprisingly, when the first companies started the mp3-cd concept, the ability to quickly burn multiple albums on your PC to CD blew away Sony's chances.

Re: Stop Shafting Your Customers

Corrected the title for you.

Sony has royally shafted all their customers. Back in 1992 when minidisc came out, it could have taken the world by storm. Smaller than a tape, CD-quality sound (good enough anyway), can't scratch the disk as it in a case, recordable, even in the field!

By all intents and purposes it should have taken over from both tape and CD, but noo, Sony had to cripple it with proprietary lockouts, and even go so far to split the format in "Minidisc-data" and "minidisk-audio", and go so far as to prevent people making computer drives that could write minidisk-audio (nobody bothered with minidisc-data as a consequence).

talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Sony could have owned the media market pre-mp3 (and then had the clout to sustain and perhaps embrace the mp3 revolution). Instead the blew their leg off and continued to stagger on until the late 90's.

Once again, mp3's came out, rather than embrace them they made their own lossy format (Atrac), but once again cripped it with DRM and you had to use only their windows software (sonicstage was it?) which was a POS like no other (you had to check songs in and out, and if you checked it out 3 times, that was it, you can't listen to it anymore). Buggy as hell.

So now Sony blew their other leg off, and finally adopted mp3 (long after Apple and others had left them in the dust). Panicking now, they had the wonderful idea of rootkitting your PC if you stuck a Sony CD in there, for god forbid you wanted to rip it to an mp3! They ballsed the mp3 revolution up, so now have to stop you from doing it.

Great! So now they blew an arm off as well, another arm went with the otherOS and PS3, and well.. quite frankly they've run out of limbs.

I stopped with the minidiscs, and since the rootkit fiasco refused to pay Sony (and its sister companies) a cent. Forget about the shock of their share price plummeting, I'm amazed they survived this long. I assume it was momentum they built up from a time in the 80's when they built damn good quality hifi and electrical equipment... because most smaller firms would have collapsed years ago from this level of mismanagement and micromanaged freakery.

Re: WTF???

It's Japan, remember! http://news.3yen.com/wp-content/images/japan-crazy-shit-350x.png

Re: different beasts

That's pretty cool! You could get a gun's eye view :D Does the boat actually fire? (I presume the combat bit actually involves actually firing stuff at each other?). You could have some fun implementing a ballistic calculator into it, perhaps with range estimation :)

I have so many ideas for the pi, primarily because I can risk it in environments and experiments where the magic smoke/water damage is more likely. Places where I'd never dare stick an expensive PC.

Good luck with your project, sounds awesome :)

Re: different beasts

What he said! If anything this is more akin to Via's Nano-itx (at 12cmx12cm) than the rasberry pi.

The main selling point of the pi is that it is so cheap, cheap enough that you could take risks with it that you would not want to do with something costing 10x as much. Basically I see it as an experimental computer (something between a fully fledged PC and micro-controllers), something you can use to teach yourself, or stick it in difficult environments without risking a lot of money.

The Intel does not compete with it, they are in different leagues completely.

Re: How did they spot two worlds orbiting each other without a star?

So basically we got lucky :)

Thanks for the explanation! It does seem obvious in hindsight, lol!

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

Actually.. the religious nuts will probably continue to do sex the old fashioned way, especially if this is seen as "unnatural, impure, etc...". What may happen is that birthrates will fall for those who use these bots (especially if they form long term childless bonds with them), while the religious ones will continue to breed, resulting in a demographic shift towards the faithful.

How that would affect society in the future, I guess we'll see :)

Not my cup of tea personally, the thing I love most about the girls I dated is that they are their own people, with opinions, thoughts and feelings, rather than a robotic equivalent to a sycophant, but whatever tickles your tackle. Each to his own, etc....

Re: *still* not there

Ah sorry about that, I had a look at the rear of the 2400 ES from your link, and you're in luck! You have both a rs232 and a sirius control port.

Now the rs232 will depend on the encoding Sony use, but if they raise any pins high you should be able to get +10V when the Amp turns on. Easiest to test each pin with a multimeter with the amp on, find one that has a signal, turn off the amp and see if it drops. If it does, then you're good to go! :)

If you're not using the "Sirius" control port (mini-din on the top left), that could be perfect. The SiriusConnect port has a pin it raises high when the amp is on (known as the "Power enable" pin). It is so that you can turn on/off the Sirius receiver with the amp.

According to the pinouts I found here: http://www.pbase.com/mrubin/image/93526001/original.jpg (sorry, I can't use tiny.cc, etc... as I'm at work, and they are blocked) pin 2 is the "Power enable" pin.

If you feel you're competent enough with electronics, give it a try. It is probably easier than guessing with the rs232 port.

So actually, modern Sony HT equipment has more options than my old stuff, lucky you! :) I can see a few other ports to try, but that is going into proper hacking territory. Better to try the above low hanging fruit first. Good luck! :)

Re: *still* not there

Does it have an "AC outlet" something like this (to the right):

http://cdn.sulitstatic.com/images/2011/1015/081935750_0818089459e58fc5bd266b4f5d10f9ea742c3e810325d844e.jpg

My one had an "AC out", but it was a proprietary connector (some odd cross between US and Euro sockets, I presume you needed a "Sony adapter" cable to do it properly).

It was a solid state relay rated at 110V (US I presume). You cannot feed your 220V stuff directly, but you can stick 12V down one pin, and it will activate the relay (and complete the circuit), so you can drive another 240V relay if you want.

I had all sorts of Sony AV equipment, and the AC thing was very much a home theater feature (so you could turn on all your gear with one remote). I'd be very surprised if they actually removed this from new models....

What model do you have?

Re: Could someone explain to me...

Surely though P = I^2 * R.

Assuming the motor's power requirements are the same, then having a longer wire will result in higher resistance, which will increase the heat output of the wire for a given current, no?

And a Lotus? Nice! I've always been partial to the Esprit myself, but they are expensive to get a hold of! (Plus there is an issue of space living in London, otherwise I'd love to have a little classic car collection going!)

Re: Could someone explain to me...

They would have to be thicker, if you want the same overall resistance when you stick all that current down them.

Keeping all things the same, longer wires will have more resistance (is it a linear relation? I'm not sure), so if you want to keep the same overall resistance you'd need thicker wires (or better conducting metal in them).

I guess I was wrong about it being a new thing then. The oldest car I know that had the battery at the back was the BMW 8 series in the 90's (Along with the 90's Porsche 944 Turbo, but I believed that was in order to make more space in the engine bay for the turbo piping).

Out of curiosity, which classic car do you have? It would be interesting to see where the idea of sticking the battery in the back came from...

Re: Charging on the headphone plug: not a good idea

If the jack is intelligent enough to facilitate digital communication (which here is being used for Paypal's little item) I see little reason why the charger would not supply power until properly negotiated with the phone. Till then don't put any power down the jack.

That solves all the issues you mentioned in one swoop, except the shorting of the pins of the DAC, which I've never had an issue with, but I've only put 48V down it, and low current, not 1A (an interface to the phone system that malfunctioned). I agree that this would require more intelligence in the charger. Perhaps detecting a blip in current usage and cutting power, or just have the DAC protected. Usually they should go through high-resistance isolation transformers anyway, not be directly wired to the pins.

And I hardly use any insertion force, usually they work loose due to sitting plugged in, or moved about while plugged in. Usually it is the removal, where some cables have really strong notches that cause it to fail.

Not to mention the connectors are flimsy as hell. The cynic in me thinks the deliberately make them like that so you can't have a phone work more than 2-3 years. Not to mention there are a right PITA to get the right orientation in the dark, or when fumbling in the car.

If you ask my opinion, I wish they'd bring back the old (larger) Nokia charging connectors. Those seemed to work really well, fit in any direction, don't fall out or break contact, and I never had a connector failure. Plus almost everyone made compatible connectors anyway.

Re: What I don't get

Yeah, but if you read about this in detail, you will see that they mention that it uses the headphone jack of the phone.

It is true, most phone headphone sockets are longer than usual. They accept the usual thee-ring headphone jack, and also the 4-ring "hands-free" jack, which has an extra ring for microphone input.

I haven't seen the jack of this paypal addition, but I presume it uses the mic jack to send signals to the phone via some modulation. You should be able to do low-speed full duplex with this setup.

Also, headphone jacks are far more resilient than mini-usb jacks, being designed for repeated insertion/removal.

I wish they didn't standardise on the mini-usb connector for charging though. It really wasn't designed in mind for constant replugging. My last two phones gave up the ghost because the mini-usb jack broke due to repeated plugging in and out during the day for charging.

Better if they had standardised on the headphone jack for power (perhaps even longer plug, with 5 rings?) although then you could not listen to music while charging without a splitter...

Re: the batmobile beats this

To my knowledge turbines give poorer fuel economy than IC Engines (at least for the size you can fit in a car comfortably).

Where turbines shine is in power to weight ratio, which is important for aircraft, and they improve in efficiency the larger they are (hence why they try to stick a few big engines on aircraft, rather than many little ones).

AFAIK that is the primary reason they have not been used in cars so far. Not to mention noise limits in urban areas, really hot exhaust, and probably a few other niggles I've not thought of at the moment.

Re: Do: Re: Mi: I miss my panasonic kx-p4400

It takes nowhere near the same amount of space. Yes, the top sticks out a bit, but underneath is a lot of space. I can either put stuff under the tray, or just have it hang out the side of the desk, facing the wall. As most of the weight is still on the mini-tower like box, this is a very stable arrangement. It also frees up more desk space for my monitor and other office-things I use on a day to day basis.

I could not stick the large ones half off the desk without serious stability problems. As I mentioned before, I had both the brother and samsung laser printers.

I mean what, the thing was 4 inches wide? Truly a nice and efficiently packed laser printer. I guess I'm a minority in wanting these kinds of printers, which I guess explains why nobody makes them in this form factor anymore....

Re: Re: I miss my panasonic kx-p4400

Yes I did read it, and they still took a lot of real estate compared to the Panasonic. At least they look like they take up a lot of space. Perhaps future reviews could include the dimensions of the printers being reviewed?

Then again, I never had a problem with dust buildup, and while I would have to take the paper out to close it, I hardly ever had to close it, unless I was moving stuff around, which might happen once a year during spring cleaning. Otherwise it just sits there all the time.

I don't know, I think I hardly ever close my printers unless I'm moving them about, but that's just me I guess.

I had the previous Samsung model mentioned in the review, and the brother series, and they were both physically bigger (although very good printers. However the Samsung "Linux drivers" are a pain to install. Why couldn't they just provide a PPD file and be done with it, rather they had to wrap it in 100+MB of autoexec installers that need a GUI to run).

I could not keep those printers on my desk, so ended up in the closet, or on the floor (where they invariably get kicked and something gets broken). As you say though, each to his own :)