google car

400,000 miles of random driving? You would have thought the computer behind the wheel would have sobered up by now.

I'm pretty sure it's not "telemetrics"

it's just plain "metrics". The "tele-" bit means that you are very far away from something. On the other hand, maybe they were very far away from the user, and that's how the UI turned out the way it did.

"We empower literally billions of pounds of start-ups through our advertising network and so forth,"

I think he meant to say:

"We make literally billions of pounds through our advertising network and so forth,"

More honest, unlike their tax arrangements.

If those kids are as good as a Google engineer ...

.. why not hire some to maintain Google Reader? (and while they're at it, fix the long-lasting bugs in Google Drive client).

I suspect the reason Vietnamese kids can pass the Goog entrance exam is because Google are nowhere near as good as they think they are.

google's cloud is ok ...

.. but the Google drive client sucks ass. Constantly dies without any notification. How come all of Google's "brilliant" engineers can't produce a client that's as stable as dropbox's??

The more prestigious the prize tries to be, the fewer risks it takes. I predict this prize will fizzle in a few years as the organizers run out of obvious choices, and they haven't the guts to give it to someone interesting.

The solution is right here:

"The most commonly cited reason for firing up a rogue cloud was to save time and money, according to Symantec."

So the solution is to make the in-house cloud easier and cheaper.

Oh, wait, I don't think I've ever seen an in-house solution with those characteristics, because they are designed to keep management happy rather than the workers who use it.

seriously ugly

I would have said:

fuck it, it's yours. No way am I paying more than I already have for that p.o.s.

I think Schmidt IS confused about this

Capitalism is a system where the means of production - the capital if you will - are owned by one group of people (the capitalists) who then hire another group of people (the workers) to use the capital to create good which are sold for profit.

It has nothing to say about "maximizing shareholder value" (there might not even be any shareholders). It says nothing about whether avoiding tax is good or bad (and Adam Smith would say it's bad, because it gives advantage to companies with good lawyers, rather than good products, and Smith wanted the competition to be between products so as to yield the greatest good for the greatest number).

Schmidt was confused. He should have said: "It’s called greed. We are proudly greedy." But that wouldn't sound so good.

but its not black: definately mostly orange, with a white bit in the middle

that's because it's an inverse fried egg, which probably solves the chicken and egg dilemma in a very tasty way.

thin? why?

I just don't get why thin is such a huge selling point for a desktop. Makes sense for a laptop or a tablet, but the desktop just sits there. You don't have to lift it. Smallish is good, but obsessing about thin suggests they're distracting you from the fact that its FUCKING EXPENSIVE and they could, if they cared, give you the same performance for a whole lot less, if they'd just let it get a few mm thicker.

lack of thought exhibited

some idiot said:

"According to NOAA, all of the top 10 warmest years on record have occurred after 1997, when skeptics claimed global warming stopped."

One is not inconsistent with the other. If the global temperature flatlined on average after 1997, that would mean that global warming had stopped. But the years since 1997 would still be warmer than the preceding years so, with a bit of randomness, would continue to throw out records.

Personally, I think we're staking a LOT on what could easily be explained as random fluctuations.

should i call it ...

a phablet? or a tone?

I've got something to show you

(unzips fly)

You have to stand pretty close to see it

The new iPenis MINI !!

Who said size didn't matter?

Each light can be programmed to do 'most anything.

Like turn on. Then off.

age a factor here too

the pictures look more like hip grandma vs. scary bitch, rather than more or less feminine, but what do I know?

and if they have or haven't run out, why should I care?

IT

IS

A

PHONE.

How is it _possible_ to give a flying fuck about a phone? It makes calls, it connects to the internet, it farts, it plays a few games.

Obviously I'm not the target market.

Mine's the one with the TC in the pocket (the H fell off a week ago)

Clarke's law should have said:

Any sufficiently large bureaucracy is indistinguishable from a snail.

I'd buy that for a dollar!

Just so long as they don't ever get involved in Olympic security:

"You have 20 seconds to put down the gun"

"You have 20 seconds to put down the gun"

I guess some of your commenters aren't familiar with academic publishing

Those that say that e.g. " the real cost of publishing ... concerns finding appropriate peer reviewers, editors and proofreaders" because those services are provided free to the journal publisher by academics. Except proofreading, which is all but nonexistent.

Who would have thought that you could make so much money by employing highly qualified people (writers, reviewers etc) for free?

Re: Only the Foveon concept isn't particularly good

" A Foveon sensor will record it in either the red channel or the green channel, depending on the wavelength, and can't know that it's all gone wrong."

Apart from sodium vapour lamps, no naturally occurring colours are single wavelengths. So an orange light, which actually spreads all the way from say 450nm to 700nm, to varying degrees, will be picked up by both the red and green channels (maybe even the blue, a little). You should be able to calculate a fairly accurate CIE XYZ coordinates from that, which is all you need for colour reproduction.

Otherwise, not interested. Any camera costing more than £200 is too much for me.

Boffin?

You mistakenly call Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock a boffin. Clearly she isn't that, given her talent for shameless self-promotion; but she isn't a trick-cyclist either. I think we need a new catchphrase at El Reg.

Anyone lost GPS near Grantham?

It happened to me twice when driving to Cambridge on the A1. I figured it was either some GPS jamming from a miltary base or Margaret Thatcher's evil miasma.

Re: Re: apple PR

"Computers before the Apple Lisa/Mac looked quite different too."

Well, all but one. The Xerox Star workstation, which in terms of look and feel was completely copied by Apple.

I don't get it ...

Look, sersly:

1. The guy is megafat!

2. He only wears black

3. He has a stupid name

4. He's got something to do with teh interwebs

Must be guilty. Why don't those sheep-fucking NZ-ers get this!!

You know what I think would be funny?

Get on a motorboat and zip out to it just after it got launched, then smash it with a hammer.

Maybe only I'd find that funny.

Mines the one with the hammer in the pocket.

Your doorbell runs android?

Seriously, what is it? An HTC wildfire blutacked to the doorknocker?

smaller dock?

so you have to chuck out your old accessories. typical apple.

Someone tell me

Why is it always a "price point" and not just a price?

They could save a million

by simply cutting the pay of Ashcroft and Porter. Why wait til 2015?

Never mind about the battery,

what about the heat? You can't touch a gpu when it's going full blast, so how are you going to hold a phone which uses the case as the gpu's heat sink?

programming in schools is doomed by tick-box culture

Even if they did decide to teach real programming, you can be sure that before you're allowed to write the program, you'll have to

a) Write a full specification for it like the pros do

b) Decide which programming methodology to follow - waterfall, agile etc.

c) Finally write something that doesn't work

d) be graded on a & b, with scant regard for the fact that it didn't work.

Now, apart from the fact that this is good training for working on a large government IT contract, it just isn't how people get _interested_ in programming.

And in case you think this won't happen, my son did a woodwork project where actually making the object was less than 25% of the overall work.

probably useful ...

... for reading all those emails so we can catch all them pedos and terrorists.

And the choice is between ...

One teeny tiny sim from Nokia, and one teeny tiny sim from Apple. Shit, just toss a coin.

(Prediction: if Apple's isn't accepted, they'll implement it in their own phones anyway)

missing the point

"Even if counterfeit smart cards hadn't existed, it wouldn't have made any difference"

Maybe so, but that misses the point that if Sky colluded with a code-breaking and piracy operation against one of its competitors, even one as incompetent as ONdigital, then what they did was completely illegal.

+1 for robotics, -1 for evidence-based medicine

Apart from the fact that most prostate operations are completely unnecessary, that's great news!

The Fermi paradox.

So is this why there's no-one out there? Earthlike worlds at 1 AU are a rarity, because all the good orbital zones are taken up by some fatty bastard, farting methane and sweating.

ok, so where are they?

maybe they're all too busy playing "Angry Gnarfgles"

Fuel cell ??

A fuel cell, in a phone? I am sure it's passed the obviousness test, because most people would consider it obviously stupid, but really, when did just sticking two things together become a patentable invention?

Oh, wait ...,

The pilots were partly responsible but it was the computer that really killed them all.

This is the killer: lack of feedback. "Even while the airline was plunging to earth at 10,000 feet per minute, the pilots were not certain whether it was climbing or falling"

For some reason the pilots were unable to figure out the direction of the most important vector a plane has. Most of the blame here has to go to the avionics and the UI. Pilots can be trained to overcome these issues, but once stress kicks in the extra intellectual effort needed to decipher a poor display simply disappears.

>>After not playing for the second week, the effects were diminished, but not eliminated entirely.

"These findings indicate that violent video game play has a long-term effect on brain functioning," Wang concluded.<<

Since when has one week been defined as long term. Did Dr Wang stop the study at two weeks just in case that the effect would vanish completely at three weeks? The answer, folks, is yes.

Am I the only one who ...

when reading "Connected Car" immediately thought of an automotive centipede?

Mine's the one with the scalpel in the pocket.

Life of Steve.

Steve's not a "very naughty boy". He's the messiah.

If, as the fifth commenter says, "Law = programming", then the language is Malbolge. Or possibly an extremely prolix variant of COBOL.

than Light. Faster

I don't see how getting rid of one source of error is enough for a press release. Surely they should wait until they've eliminated all sources of error? After all, science isn't a desperate attempt to grab headlines with iffy results.

No, wait, it is.

[Paris, because she's a desperate attempt to grab headlines]

Well, a variant of the Fermi paradox makes it even more likely that we're alone. If we make a robot probe which a) flies to the nearest star and then b) builds two copies of itself which then fly to the next stars, you can see that once one is built, it won't take long for copies of it to have visited every star in the galaxy (basically just the width of the galaxy (100,000 light years) divided by the flight speed (with magnetic ramjets, a decent fraction of c). If 1/10 c is the best on offer, it would only take 1 million years for these probes to visit every star, including ours.

Hence, alone.

grammar troll

No-one actually says "An nostalgic ..." anymore. Why don't you just do english as she is spoke and say "A nostalgic .."