Posts by David_H
75 posts • joined Friday 30th April 2010 11:13 GMT
Didn't get one
I recently had to have my meter replaced as the old one was genuinely faulty.
The engineer had to find an old style meter from the depths of his van to replace it with as we have no 2G telephone coverage in our area - result!
And as we have just had a new meter, I expect us to be last in the line for an 'upgrade' to a snooping/remote kill one. Hopefully they will be a little more secure by then.
I have a real-time usage monitor and report my meter reading every month to the supplier. What positive will a smart meter give me?
Simple evolution
Crow scarer up the exhaust of an amorous couple - check
Contact explosives on the floor of the showers in the girls dorm at college - check
Fertiliser and diesel – check
Talking to from plod. “Show us how to do it. Wow! Now stop!” - check
Make things that go into space - check
It's simple evolution - but then most North American's don't believe in that either
Top Gear
How many times do people need to be told not to let Top Gear drive their cars?
"Rice in" very funny!
Scream
No-one in space, but what about all the tax payers, who have to fund this drivel!
The death is easy to explain
What this poor person had done to receive the wrath of the BOFH is harder to find out!
Posted in AMD: Star Trek holodecks within reach
Re: Holodecks aren't just about processing power
There are various military simulators where the floor is essentially made of roller balls that returns you to the centre of the simulation area as you walk around. Obviously doesn't work for multiple people walking to/from each other though.
Re: Sympathy for him but
The WW2 hand cranked generator/radio was my inspiration for a small, transistorised version as part of my early 1980's Craft, Design and Technology O Level. Power storage (really not more than smoothing of the cranking) was from a large capacitor, the rest of the circuit gleaned from wireless magazines. Being a spotty school boy, I wouldn't have dared to call anything other than the vacuum molded plastic box original.
U nit
Kft not Km
Re: ipod
Pea-pod - IPod
Pee-pad - IPad
Hmm... I thought that it was a good joke on each occassion. Obviously my sense of humour is not as common as I thought!
The Galaxy I bought her is the envy of her firends at school who were bought other alternatives (including Ipads) as they found it to be the easiest to use (they've spent all afternoon with their teachers comparing their tablets). The only thing that she and her friends report not being able to do that their Ipad endowed friends can do is access some free OU books. Listening to music, watching videos, downloading homework and uploading the answers (in Microsoft and other formats), etc. she and her friends have been able to do on all the devices. (Although some devices needed paid for apps to achieve the required functionality.)
Of course the fanbois will claim that even though the tabs have similar capabilities, I've failed my daughter because I have not bought into the 'cult of Jobs'.
Ahem...
"This is why Alexander Graham bell actually had to have a working phone before he could patent it."
As made by Antonio Meucci who had already patent letter for it!
So not a good example.
ipod
A few years ago my (then 9yo) daughter wanted an ipod for Christmas. Image the video of Christmas morning when she opened the correctly sized box to find a pea-pod inside and then the relief when the other present was an ipod.
Fast forward to this year when she wanted an ipad and got a neatly wrapped box with a Tenna Max inside it (pee-pad). Her other present was a Galaxy tab.
Am I the worst father out there?
Spring
How gloriously simple!
I would be suprised if they gathered a full 3D image with a spring mount though.
I designed something a little similar in the 90's, but I had a couple of mirrors to bounce the beam around, and could never get over the magnetic effects of the stepper motors driving them, so in the end that (and babies) forced it to be dropped. (I had inclinometers and magnetometers to work our which way up and in which direction the box was pointing when the laser was spinning round)
I matched the current 3D readings to the last set I took, a second before, to work out if/where I had moved and so did not have to worry about the harshness of bumps that the kit would take. Where there were junctions in the passageways I used to note these on the UI, and when I returned to this spot to map the other exits at the junction, I used this to identify the spot (I just could not get an accurate match up automatically if I had turned off the box on the return from the first passage end which I had to do to preserve battery life)
I even had a website to catalogue caves across the world, but the search engines of the internet superceeded what I had achieved. <GRUMBLE> And when I closed down the site, the hosting organisation kept ignoring my requests to close my account (every month for over 2 years). AFAIK it (Fishnet) is still sending ever increasing bills to the defunct email addresses 8+ years on! </GRUMBLE>
Agree
I've only tried to correct something once. With citations to peer reviewed sources and reports from government bodies.
It was deleted within hours. I try not to rely on Lie-pedia for anything.
Vogons
I'll have my thumb up for a lift on Friday then
Re: Remember the innocent have nothing to hide!
And when anyone ever says that to me, I always ask them how much they earned last year.
I've only ever had one person tell me, and their wage is published in an anual report, so they can't keep that part of their income secret anyway!
Even older?
If we are looking at low power server class computing how about a Feb 2004 "mini-cluster"
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/?p
Very impressive with the consumer tech available at the time!
Standards
As with so many 'standards' from so many 'authoritative organisations' it is a loose collection of the specifications of the first products on the market. There is no attempt to create a 'best practice' in the standard, just an attempt to include what is on the market.
There are very few standards that are actually defined before products hit the marketplace.
Re: Intel competitors
It was a NEC V series processor.
EPSON HX-20
Remember that the HX-20 also had two other really innovative peripherals in a portable:
• a speech generation unit
• a brail generator
Its younger brother the PX-4 was used for F1 timing systems (all coded in assembler and hijacking the barcode input for timing beams, by yours truly)
Epson also produced the QX-16 desktop on which I could run the same programs under DOS or CPM!
And the EHT-10, a hand-held with integral printer option (much loved by traffic wardens in Westminster in the late 1980’s, and by the Concorde baggage loaders)
Ah... life was so much simpler when a ROM disassembly was you bible!
Nice
But is sold out on the Arduino web-store!
That time of year
It that time of year when they print Holly on the outside of the Tampax packets - all ready for the Christmas period!
Blue water
When I went to the Tambrands site to maintain their warehousing system (IT link!) I was made by my colleagues to go on a tour of their R & D labs and they used red water (and I think glycerine) mixes. It was all a little bid to real for a lad who had grown up without exposure to such things!
Re: How much is too much?
My village sits on the end of a lead pipe containing paper insulated wires, and until someone 'accidentally' put a hole in the pipe in the valley between us and the exchange it was full of water. It took a week for the water to stop flowing out, and our speed has increaded since.
Anyway to the point. "wait until technology catches up" BT will not update our wet paper system as they say that they do not have anything that old, because the replaced it all years ago. Maybe in the towns it was replaced, but certainly in my area of the countryside BT are keeping us well behind 'modern' technology.
Re: Move House
I was brought up in the countryside, as that’s where the farming jobs my father did were. There were no other children my age in the village, and there were no busses to use to visit friends or to go to college. Also there were no shops or recreational facilities, so I know the sense of rural isollation from first hand experience.
Now, with the lack of any jobs in villages (other than the farmers who cannot afford to employ offspring let alone any-one else) rural isolation is even more intense. For young people there is little or no chance of having a social life outside of the web, with the lack of public transport, and the cost of car insurance and fuel making independence unaffordable.
For many rural children the internet is the only way of having a semi-normal social life. It is only fair that with the lack of other opportunites for rural youth, that the one that is available (the internet) is presented in a reasonable way, and that means at least at the governments own low speed target.
I perhaps ought to state that I am Deputy-President of the National Federation of Young Farmers Clubs in addition to working at the bleeding edge of electronics and communications, so I am in a fairly unique position to know exactly what I am talking about on this subject!
Posted in Humanity facing GLOBAL BACON SHORTAGE
Young Farmer and Rocket Scientist
We have had very good animal welfare rules for many years, and you will find British pork at the 'premium' end of the supermarket range as good welfare is more expensive than the truly disgusting conditions animals are kept in abroad. Denmark has been a foreign source for many decades#centuries# and is reasonable on the welfare side, but bringing them up to a similar standard to us is going to increase their costs. Southern Asia will only grow as a source for the 'value' end of the market as a result of this and their animal welfare will stay truly terrible for a long as I can forsee.
UK farming is very efficient, but in general we produce everything the most humane way, and that is how we can be undercut on cost. I always buy British and yes, you can taste the difference!
Rocket scientist logo, as you don't have to be to buy the best and buy British
Re: Seriously?
I'm a Parish Councillor, and I can assure you that in my rural parish we use common sense. We would look at path obstruction, noise and any roadway line-of-sight issues it might bring. If any one of those was a problem we would suggest a slight move (probably only a few feet). Job done!
Bring it on I say as we have (wet) paper insulated lines in my village.
Units or you nits?
"It's merely for illustrative purposes, and is therefore neither to scale, nor an accurate reflection of the final design of the Vulture 2 and its exact position under the truss."
"LOHAN regulars will note we've reduced the size of the aluminium plate behind the spaceplane..."
No we won't! See first quotation.
Good luck!
Three days
Three days to get an Indian guy over from Mumbai to reboot the power is not too bad!
Military Grade
How about latest Nvidia and Intel processors, soon after they are released, but made to work <these are the bits you are paying for> after a night in a tank in a freezing Siberian winter,and working in a helicopter in Iraq, and in the latest fighter jet, and on commercial spacecraft. The specifications for 'proper' mil-aero kit covers all of this on every board/box. Now you have to make it fan-less, and provide extended lives much greater than commerical boards, and be able to repair it for at least 10-15 years.
Try looking at GE Intelligent Platforms, or Curtiss-Wright for Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) boards that have all of this.
Damn! Have I just risen to a troll?
Re: Lets do it in stereo
Stereo ground observation from space is nothing new, but stereo for anything further than the inner planets just doesn't work - you can't get the observation points far enough away to make a difference int he image.
BBC Obligation
What about BBC's obligations of providing content freely to all?
I can quite happily view BBC on Satalite and on Freeview at the moment, but if the other content (often the more useful content) goes to IPTV then those of us at the end of wet, paper insulated, telephone wires (or other rubbish which BT claims it removed years ago) will no longer be able to get it (even overnight downloads only occassionally work for me).
At least some of the BBC Execs must live at the end of shonky telephone wires and see what is going to happen to their viewing?
Posted in Roman roads get the web maps treatment
A bit limited
Sitting here in Lactodorum it would appear that I do not exist.
Mind you my managers' attitudes to us and the wages they pay suggest Roman style slavery is not dead in the IT industry.
Posted in The Ethernet Alliance is thinking fast
Re: Stop pissing about and give us consumer 10Gb/s now
Now we are beginning to see the 10G PHYs with reasonable power requirements, they should become ubiquitious and hence cheap.
Re: Further anecdotal evidence
I agree about the demise of the 11+. I was in the first year in Northamptonshire not to sit it and so had to go to the 'new' Comprehensive (the old 'Secondary Modern'). They didn't know what to do with us brainy kids and I spent the next 3 years learning nothing new in Maths and to a lesser extent other subjects. This was an insult not only to me, but the Junior School teachers who had gone out of their way to get me the text books for the 11+ years, even buying some of the books themselves! As we started the fourth year of the Comprehensive, they suddenly realised that they would have to build a sixth form block to house us all in 2 years time - apparently the LEA meetings were interesting!
Streaming must be done to seperate those who do not feel inclined to study and will disrupt anything, from those who want to work and will do well if they are given the opportunity.
Re: Grade Inflation
When University was only for the VERY BEST students I didn't get in, instead studying 4 * HND at Polytechnic. Now 50% get into University and you only have to be slightly above average to get a degree.
Who gets the job interview? Me, who was not quite the very best, or the young oik who was only average, but got a degree.
Multi-guess
My eldest is taking triple science i.e. Physics, Chemistry and Biology as seperate GCSE's and is finishing these in the next few weeks. I never took 'O' level Biology , but did pass 'O' level Chemistry and Physics.
Anyway as she had full marks (40/40) on every paper so far, and although we praise her generously, I remained curious regarding the difficulty of the exams. So, I took one of her multi-choice GCSE Biology past papers as a test. Now, I will freely admit that I didn't know what half the technical names referred to, but from carefully reading the (leading) questions there was nearly always an obvious answer and I completed it in about 1/3 of the alotted time. And my score - 40/40 obviously! All I needed was a good grasp of English.
Re: Right, so I will need even more RAM
FFS - get yourself a high end graphics card! 256 cores + 1TB memory (or more) + proper parallel coding using CUDA. £300 will get you the dogs-danglies in the commercial world. If you want mil-aero specification - GE-IP have them for reasonable prices.
Image processing - visible, infra-red, microwave, radar, or all combined is exactly what CUDA on these high end graphics cards was designed for.
Re: Banish them from society
Didn't we try that with Australia once a long time ago?
Maybe the answer now would be the B Ark?
Thieves invitation
When I had a Smart meter at my last house, it was very easy to spot when I was away. There was basically no power taken except for the short spikes when the fridge and freezer compressors turned on.
When I was away on business, I could log into our online readings and tell my wife what time the consumption monsters (children) had actually gone to bed, rather than what time they were telling her they were going to bed!
If a thief could get hold of the consumption data they would know exactly when was best to burgle you! (There's no smart meter in this house and I aim to keep it that way!)
Lucky blighter!
Envious is not a grand enough name to describe how I feel.
I was lucky enough to have diner with Gavin Newman and see his slides soon after he did the "Planet Earth" HD filming down there - spectacular.
Infinite enery
Just tap the output of a woman scorned!
Plot?
This is about as far fetched as anything you hear about from DARPA. Are they going to be writing the script?
Bring back the Harrier!
Wind would have worked wonderfully this morning
Everyone turning on lights this morning as the fog and low cloud made it quite gloomy. But all the wind power could suppliment this requirment, except of course the fog was due to no wind. Nuclear is the only reasonable and reliable solution in a non-fossil fuel world.
Other way round
"Sorry for breaking into your car officer, but someone told me there were swine trapped in there, and you can't leave animals in a locked car" I don't think that excuse would work for the general public.
France
Can I use one of these to allow my car to go to France. The in-built SAT-NAV is capable of displaying speed/safety camera information, and so my car is illegal in France. In fact, as my phone is capable of downloading a SATNAV apllication, does that mean that I cannot take my phone to France either?
The Americans won't find it...
... because it wasn't invented there!
Northamptonshire
They've been doing this between water towers in Northamptonshire lately (10 miles or more per side of a triangle), although I don't think that it had anything to do with scientific or in-any-way useful matters.
An arts project I think, probably paid for out of my taxes :-(
or communicating with aliens
