Posts by fridaynightsmoke
82 posts • joined Wednesday 13th April 2011 18:26 GMT
Re: London centric obsessing
"Why not place your office in Brum"...
Shhh, don't tell them that! We don't want Shoreditch twats and 'social media consultants' moving up here, FFS.
Re: We already have a system that you pay more the more you drive...
@Drem: The last figures I saw, the fuel duty and VED from lorries alone pays for all the road construction and maintenance in the UK. All the taxation on other motor vehicles goes elsewhere.
So no, car drivers are not being subsidised by other taxpayers. Much the opposite.
Road pricing. No thanks.
They call it 'Road Pricing' here, and every time it comes up people tell the government where they can stick it. The 1,800,000 signatures on the UK Gov petition site against it (the most any petition on there has ever had) says as much.
As said above, we already pay huge amounts of tax proportioned both to road use and fuel economy in the form of fuel duty. A massively expensive per-vehicle tracking system would either raise less money for the government or cost motorists far more and have attendant horrible privacy implications.
Everyone likes to imagine that road pricing would leave their commutes clear and/or save them money, which cannot be the case. It depends on pricing *someone* off the roads, and that someone is you.
Cash is king.
That is all.
Posted in SimCity 2000
Police stations
I still have that sound clip burned into my brain.. the one with the siren then a garbled woman saying something like "betas copburger 128 9" or whatever. It doesn't help that it seems to be the go-to clip of police radio used on TV, films etc.
Re: Fake Profiles
I had a message once from a supermodel who lived in Wolverhampton. Her pastimes were walking on the beach and skiing in the mountains. I didn't realise there were beaches and mountains near Wolverhampton. Also I didn't know they used US 110v sockets in Wolverhampton, but according to her photos they do. You learn something every day, don't you?
Forklift performance
The poor acceleration of forklifts is due mainly to their enourmous weight- a '2.5t' forklift will weigh approximately 4 tonnes unladen. They do usually use small car engines, tuned for increased torque at low revs.
The slow acceleration is also largely by design; you don't want >4 tonnes of iron with forks sticking out of the front doing any appreciable speed in your average warehouse, surrounded by meatbags and goods of varying fragility and monetary value. On the open road the rear-wheel steering also makes forklifts very unstable at speed (well, >10mph).
Penrith Motorway Services... IN SPACE!
Was there an episode about running out of Ginster's pasties and the diesel being ridiculously expensive, or was that an actual visit to a services?
This is what happens, Larry.
I do hope the researchers shout that at the chunk blowing 'bot.
Re: That Google story is amazing
$220,000,000,000 / $750,000 = $293,333 returned per dollar invested, over 13 years.... which is rather better than the average savings account.
I think in the 'wounder!' stakes this comfortably beats the story of the record exec who turned down the Beatles.
Begin settling space,
and ship off thousands of vegetarians to Mars- what's not to like?
At first I was excited by this news...
... but then I realised that I don't bloody want Win8.
Good thing the printer was working,
otherwise a call would have gone out for PC Load Letter.
Not just Apple
I had one of the cheap (£10) Cherry keyboards here at work, which met a sticky end after I spilled about half a can of Coke on it...
I tried disassembling and cleaning, which stopped the keys sticking down, but still I had several 'dead' keys. Closer inspection revealed the sticky acidic beverge had seeped underneath the rubber membrane and corroded the tracks on the flexible circuit board.
That keyboard made its way to the Tyseley incinerator and has been replaced with another £10 keyboard, a MS model this time. If it lasts 6 years like the old one did, I'll be happy. Especially if it takes half a coke to finish it.
More rules = more loopholes, idiots.
"Them avoiding tax increases my taxes" - no it doesn't. The government taxes as much as it can from everyone and then spends accordingly.
"Why can't we ban fees for intangible goods?" - so any foreign software or internet company makes 100% profits on their UK revenues then?
"Why can't we have the government/EU make up lots of new rules.." - yes, because poiliticians are oh-so trustworthy aren't they, and would never engineer exemptions for their donors and big tax hikes for non-donors...
"Why can't we send $Globocorp packing and have indy outlets instead?" - all the UK customers of $Globocorp would disagree. Every time they use $Globocorp, they make a decision NOT to use $Competitor. There is a reason for that.
Had this in Brum for about 3 years.....
Congrats on catching up, yanks ;)
Re: by all accounts, a bit of a wrong 'un
Jimmy Saville and The Age Of The Train, eh? Shame he didn't seem to take any notice of the age of anything else....
Re: Try reading the article
I blew a candle out the other day, it was horrible, there was wax everywhere and the windows shattered.
Apparently.
Idiots!
It's quite clearly the supports for an ancient elevated roundabout.
Re: Who Cares...
"And, when was the last time you saw a domain name on a print or TV advert?"
webuyanycar.com, confused.com and wonga.com all were advertised on the radio this morning when I was driving to work.
Almost every print advert I saw in The Times today had a domain name shown.
I used to work at McD
It was my first job... the McFlurry chocolate was roughly dosed by the dispenser (similarly to an optic in a pub).
Giving extra choc to favoured customers/employees was quite common, along with extra fudge in the sundaes, 'special' burgers with an extra patty etc. The standard response from management was to get an unofficial bollocking, unless someone was really taking the piss and noticeably doing it regularly, in which case further action would be taken.
I was once collared helping myself to a sundae consisting mostly of chocolate sauce, instead of the 1cm at the bottom of the cup a regulation single pump of the dispenser would give you. It lead only to a 'quiet word' from the shift manager.
I wonder if there's more involved in this case, eg a pattern of regular 'bad employee' behaviour (whatever that might be), each instance just below the threshold for 'doing something' and this case providing the excuse for a sacking; or whether the manager involved is just a power crazed arse. We shall never know.
Vulcanism
So an increase in vulcanism means the locals won't necessarily live long, or prosper?
Posted in NZ bloke gets eel stuck up jacksie
Re: Hug an eel
It's obvious what happened.
He didn't know his arse from his eel-bow.
But-
Some sod will no doubt erect a speed camera just past Jupiter, enforcing a 0.40C speed limit to protect the unique patterns present in the asteroid belt....
Re: Erm...
"You could have searched on any search engine for "1 wire seral" and found that it requires a ground connection as well as the signal connection and thus requires two wires to function. But you didn't."
Which means that a SIM can't communicate with a phone using 1 signal connection (in addition to the ground already mentioned) how?
Re: Erm...
You could have Googled "1 wire serial" and enlightened yourself by reading about the well used protocol called "1 wire", in use for many years; but you didn't.
Posted in I spy: Drug drops and foxy couples
Re: 10x optical zoom?
I would assume that these binoculars have a significantly longer minimum focal length than a camcorder, therefore the '10x' on these will give you a closer look than '32x' the very wide-angle lens of a camcorder.
TL,DR: 10x a lot is more than 32x not much.
Posted in Humanity facing GLOBAL BACON SHORTAGE
Re: Idea
"People are wasting resources on unnecessary things!!", says man using computer, drawing ~200W from the national grid to post brainfarts on an internet forum.
Again.
Right..
Won't this lead to a big increase in fly tipping, backyard burning etc etc?
As for 'reducing packaging', that falls into the same bin as 'reducing lorry miles'; all concerned have teams of people already working on that. Believe it or not, encasing stuff in packaging (and sending lorries down the road) costs surprising amounts of money, so companies who do such things already have a substantial interest in reducing both.
Re: Reason at last
...and it's not our fault you didn't object to the plans for the intergalactic bypass, either.
Re: And of course...
For company contracts, calls between the company mobiles are normally free*.
*well, bundled anyways.
Blowout != puncture
A puncture is a slow loss of tyre pressure, via a small (i.e punctured) hole.
A blowout is a sudden loss of tyre pressure (and often pieces of tyre) via a big gaping hole.
Re: Use of waste heat?
"You're forgetting a few other forms of energy... Kinetic, Sound, Light etc..."
....which all end up as heat.
Re: Use of waste heat?
"I would also take issue with the 55MW in / 55MW out as there will be a bit of work done with the power!"
As far as I know for all practical purposes 100% of the electricity used by a computer (or anything else electronic) ends up as local heat. The 'work being done' in this case is the shuffling of bits, and once they're shuffled they have the same energy content as before. Possibly if the site was writing vast quantities of flash memory and then physically shipping it out, then some of the 55MW would leave as electrical charge in the memory, and not as heat.
The upshot is that if your house is electrically heated with no Economy 7 meter (like mine, unfortunately) you could in theory replace your heaters with an appropiate number of computers (drawing the same total power) and have your 'heating system' mine Bitcoins, or run Folding@Home or whatever, and get more value out of the electricity you would have used anyway for heating.
Radio good for discovery
Radio is good for discovering music precisely because it's someone else's choice. If you're just searching on Youtube then 99% of what you hear is your own choice, therefore you're unlikely to hear anything new.
As for 'recommendations', a lot of the time people are reluctant/too busy etc to actually listen to something new, whereas on the radio you're almost forced to. The tradeoff is of course having to listen to several hours of godawful shite* to hear one good track (on average).
*in one's opinion, YMMV
Why is my money being spent on this?
That is all.
Re: The Sun eh?
I thought a sizeable number of FB users were already tits....
We dropped Sage
like a proverbial sackful, and went to Moneysoft for our payroll (~10 employees). Never looked back; easier to use, cheaper, no nagging sales calls at all hours wanting us to upgrade to Mega-Ultra Payroll V.9282878.
"Hello helloooo....
I'm at a place called Walthamstow,
It's everything I wish I didn't know..."
Surely?
Bigger purchase orders
by putting more purchasing responsibility in one chair means bigger (potential) bungs from suppliers.
Re: Why on earth
I would imagine that in this case "prosaic outcomes too, such as BMW selling Toyota Europe diesel engines from 2014" might mean BMW selling engines TO Toyota, rather than FROM Toyota.
Re: Turns out
In 10,000 years time people will be scratching their heads at a complex arrangement of 'stone' pillars somewhere north of the lost city of Birmingham, marked only by a mysterious tablet reading "M6"....
I need a donner,
donner,
a donner is what I NEEEED-
hey hey
Posted in Samsung snafu grounds blue Galaxy S III
Re: Not too unusual
Very true, PCBs that designed or manufactured back to front are not uncommon... I think I saw one that was somehow manufactured inside out once :)
Always check your Gerbers carefully, kids.
Traffic stats
The last time I looked, a properly busy stretch of motorway has something in the order of 150,000 vehicles per day; so if there's one GPS jammer 'hit' in 3 days on average, that gives 1 in 450,000 vehicles having a GPS jammer.
Or ~2 in a million.
Posted in Motorola strengthens Defy+ with JCB logo
We've got Samsung Solid Extremes,
used by industrial field service engineers. The phones normally have a hard life being knocked about or having tools etc dropped on them and historically were broken by the end of a 1-year contract. The Samsungs have so far lasted just over 2 years and are still going strong; not a single engineer felt like his phone needed replacement, all the batteries are still lasting well (>1 week standby) and the appearance of them is still alright, excepting a little grubbiness.
If these 'JCB' phones are as tough as that we would almost certainly order a handful, and start using them for work orders, technical information etc (the Samsungs are quite basic in functionality).
I'll be interested to see if these are actually as rugged as they're made out to be. If they are, there's probably a big market out there waiting for them.
Very interesting indeed....
I thought the biggest rockets could only launch ~30 tonnes, let alone 11,000 .....
Hurr hurr spikey steering wheel hurr
Thank you AC for repeating this concept which has already been outlined by at least a dozen other commenters above.
I eagerly await all of your further suggestions for perhaps running mains electrical cables uninsulated at waist level, liberally greasing escalator treads, or perhaps fitting large tubs of boiling acid alongside all beds (to catch people careless enough to fall out of bed) in order to instill a sense of necessary care and attention into the populace.
Wow, what a novel and groundbreaking idea
I mean, packaging wine inside a plastic bladder, held within a cardboard container. Maybe next they can imagineer a 'jumbo' version that holds 3 standard bottles of wine (to further reduce the carbon footprint per L), and maybe even make it a cuboid shape so it takes up less space on trucks, shelves etc. A box of wine eh; extraordinary!
