Re: Winkers

I don't know why this was downvoted. A program to do that could actually be useful to some people. Stephen Hawking isn't unique.

Re: Just ban the use of Powerpoint in your organisation...

One advantage of mobile devices is that they are very bad at handling PowerPoint.

Re: Bristol

I may be wrong, but I believe that this is because the original version was "my dad bought oi...", and oi is not some comical Bristolian mispronunciation of "I", but an earlier English word meaning "me". I used to know a young woman from a farm in rural Somerset who spoke real Somerset, with its own vocabulary and grammatical differences, and it was a pleasure to listen to.

Similar things happen in Yorkshire English where apparent mispronunciations are actually from Norse words.

Re: Marketing Bods and Spin Doctors apply here

Apple and Google and Microsoft trying to get BlackBerry out of the enterprise. BB is unpopular (old fashioned hardware and software, often locked down by IT). So use BYOD to get the managers to demand to use iPhones etc. Of course, in a year or so when IT starts locking them down just s much or moreso, the users will complain. But so what? The mission has been accomplished.

Re: Oh come off it..

In the EU you can go out and buy a charger that will work with more or less any phone other than those iThings, from any one of the major phone suppliers.

There really is no reason why companies shouldn't buy a job lot of chargers and distribute them around the place. They are cheap.

So - was it a branded phone charger or an unbranded one?

If the latter, spot your mistake. If the former, inform Trading Standards.

Re: Oh come off it..

Yes, PAT testing doesn't really add any significant electrical safety. It really dates from the pre-moulded plugs days (I was there at the time, I remember) and consumer units that didn't have RCBs.

Fan heaters certainly don't come under BYOD, but in any case the load for a ring main is 32A and the fuse on a plug doesn't actually blow at 13A. It will survive quite a while at nearer 20.

In Europe at least there is no justification for companies not providing approved phone chargers. Laptops are indeed essentially untestable, whether corporate or not, because nobody knows how often that power brick has been dropped or whether the lithium battery is about to throw a short.

I agree: BYOD is a terrible idea because (a) it is an attempt by employers to make employees pay for essential work kit, (b) it is an IT support nightmare which will almost certainly defeat (a), and (c) it will make internal solutions harder to develop. H&S is a red herring. Currently the biggest H&S risk is staff with infectious diseases who don't get sent home and infect other people, which I suppose you could call BYOD - Bring Your Own Disease.

Re: Not gonna happen

Doesn't the Canadian Government have the same rules on national security as many others do, that allow them to block a takeover if it would create a national security risk?

Re: Not gonna happen

The problem is that the licensing fee would have to take into account the licensing fee for Android. It wouldn't bring in any money worth speaking of.

BlackBerry need to be given a chance. The relentless briefing against them suggests it won't happen, which is a pity. Annoying as OS 7 is, it is a very capable system which allows a great deal of control over device behaviour without needing add-ons. For some people (like my wife) the ability to control notifications in considerable depth is valuable, while having a big screen is of no importance whatsoever. OS 10 should build on this and be easier to use, but it won't get a chance in a world in which people never RTFM, and also think that, because after three years they can now kind of use an iPhone, it is "intuitive". It's very hard to get people to look at something which is significantly different from the installed base.

Re: Not gonna happen

He's a politician, that's a compliment. Most of them would give their mothers away to save the trouble of sending them Christmas cards.

Re: Arg

My Touchstone dock has a micro USB socket so the lead can connect direct to a phone. But I much prefer the reversible magnetic plug on my PlayBook. For no apparent reason, the new BlackBerries can't use it. Marketing departments, walls, bullets.

Re: quietly started using North American components where he could

Whoosh? Why did I single out those manufacturers?

Think twice before you get the word 'irony'. My point was that the existence of unions didn't stop Kia and Mercedes.

Re: Nope.jpeg

That's silly, like refusing to buy a case for your iPhone because it didn't come with one.

Startisback

Yes, I endorse Startisback. With it, I actually prefer Windows 8 to Windows 7, except for the infuriating popup box that says "There's a pretty useless, inferior Windows app to do what you're doing", or words to that effect.

Re: quietly started using North American components where he could

That would be why Kia and Mercedes don't manufacture in America, then?

Re: And the "Standard Model" is?

I often think that particle physics since the 1960s is the replacement for advanced theology. The kit is even bigger (and actually works), and important insights about the nature of reality come out from time to time, but the actual impact on people's lives is almost nonexistent (unlike cheap, unglamorous solid state and condensed matter physics which are transforming the world we live in, particle physics has nothing to show like the silicon integrated circuit). Particle physics was briefly of great importance when it nearly resulted in our destroying ourselves with nuclear bombs, but since then its contributions to society have been peripheral.

I can therefore imagine that yes, scientists with careers to forge and budgets to spend might keep searching for something they know deep down inside is unlikely to exist, just as many theologians are far too well educated to believe in "God". Because that's human nature.

Re: Looks like a Nexus 7 clone...

So buy a PB. The display is very acceptable, build quality is very good (I abused my first one for eighteen months and it still looks pretty good), and it runs a nice browser with Flash. It will get updated later this year to BB10 but, to be honest, I don't think that will be much of an improvement.

Re: Shame it isn't dual core

It looks like this is a cheap version of the Blackberry Playbook with a different back, poorer cameras, no magnetic charger plug, and either a slightly better or slightly worse processor depending on whether it is single or dual core.

And it will cost the same as my 64GB P/B.

Still,I expect you will be able to compromise your security by running Whatsapp on it.

Dear Sirs,

We have considered your patent application for an iPhone home button protector, and our reply is: "knickers to that".

Re: Questions

Given the price of 256G ssds it seems silly. Google seems determined to repeat the IBM mistake of releasing crippled hardware that lost them so much of the PC market. The Nexus 4 is another example. Trying to force users to do things your way always seems to me a bit of a short term strategy.

Re: So let me get this straight

It is not a non living entity. Android/chrome/iOS have producers and consumers that are definitely living, and money and goods exchange hands in an (artificially ) restricted environment. That is an ecosystem, from the Greek. oikia a household or farmstead, from which also comes economics, laws of the household. Ecosystem is surely a better word than paradigm, which just means a pattern or model and misses the dynamic aspects of the growth and decline of individual actors in an ecosystem.

This is what comes of wasting time at U learning Greek when I could have been learning Algol.

Re: "The keyboard will be obsolete in 10 years"

voice recognition + public transport = everybody thinks you are a dick. And the people who talk in the "quiet" carriages, well, they are dicks.

Re: The best kind of keyboard

Yes, but being brought up on ASR-33s is why some of us still bang the keys so hard. I like to be able to get to the end of a line with no characters missing, without having to look at what I'm typing.

I simply cannot understand people who sacrifice a proper keyboard on a smartphone for a bigger touchscreen. It's definitely fashion over function.

Re: Here's a thing...

How does rocket surgery work? lots of spanners and screwdrivers, and people with protective gear to mop up the RFNA when you get a leak.

I lie, I assume it's a conflation of "rocket science or brain surgery". It's kind of a portmanteau expression, I guess.

due diligence didn't catch them

Or of course they didn't exist and this is a blame evasion tactic by HP. Offering such a premium on share price - come on, someone was desperate.

Re: Hindenburg + Hydrogen = ?

Whether it is a fire or an explosion is just a matter of where you put the dividing line on the flame velocity scale. A lot of people think that the petrol/air mix in a car explodes, but vehicle engineers are well aware of the difference between explosion (detonation) and the desirable controlled burn.

If the volume of hydrogen is big enough that it cannot mix with the air instantly, hydrogen will burn. I used to demonstrate this by blowing big hydrogen bubbles, which burn impressively but quietly, and very much smaller hydrogen/air bubbles, which leave ringing eardrums.

A hydrogen filled airship burns.

Re: produces co2

I suggest you look at the cost of nuclear fuel reprocessing, where anybody is still doing it, and creep away silently.

Here's a good idea: never allow anything which requires large amounts of very rare metals. Only the hedge funds will make a profit.

as the cheapest hydrogen is produced from methane.

You missed the memo where somehow hydrogen was going to be produced by electrolysing water using too cheap to meter wind and nuclear energy. The whole thing has been thought up by people who have never tried electrolysing water on industrial scales or handling hydrogen. I'm reasonably blase about industrial risk; I've worked with radioactive isotopes, cyanides, oxidising agents and other nasties, but hydrogen scares me stiff. Just containing it has challenges known to nothing else. An industrial chemist I once worked with doesn't agree; he thinks mercury is slightly nastier. But it was his company that had to pay for the cleanup, and that affected his viewpoint.

The proponents of hydrogen as a mobile fuel sound like they should be an unholy coalition of chemical plant makers, rare metal suppliers, scientifically illiterate greens, and IC engine designers who don't care what the problems are, they just like the idea of an engine that doesn't carbonise its valves and cylinder heads.

Re: 24 litres per second?

24 litres of hydrogen at STP is about 2 grammes. If a BMW uses only 4 grammes of hydrogen per 100km, that sounds like thermodynamics just started taking magic mushrooms.

2 grammes a second = about 7kg per hour. That sounds a bit high; at 70mph my car uses a little under 4kg of petrol an hour.

So yes I think the number is wrong, but the number quoted for the BMW is not even wrong.

@rampant spaniel

While I do take your point, my 90+ year old father communicates with my almost equally elderly aunt in Australia (and with other relatives) entirely via the Internet, and uses it to research family history. She could have put it much more politely but I think the Germans are right - in 2013, Internet access should be a right not a privilege.

Re: Firefox OS

Exactly. The benefit of all-HTML5 is that you do not need to pay out for "apps" just so you can look at a website, and it can be fully cross platform so site owners have less development to do.

Re: can't deal with the idea of a motor vehicle not using gasoline

I don't normally respond to people who write 'lol', even ironically, but you totally miss my point. People do not always do very sensible things, even en masse. The uncontrolled development in the USA of the car-based economy is now causing big economic problems which Europe and Japan suffer from somewhat less -such as people unable to afford to commute to work because of rising fuel prices.

I don't get your point about Colchester at all - most larger British towns now have quite serious congestion problems due to the increase in car use.

Re: can't deal with the idea of a motor vehicle not using gasoline

In fact early electric cars were not crap - they were far better than horse drawn transport. In the days when city traffic was limited to about 12-15mph and the function of a car was to get you to and from the railway station, they worked very well. Early petrol vehicles were flammable, unreliable and, until the infrastructure was in place, hard to fuel.

The petrol engine wasn't a better engineering solution - what happened was that people wanted it for all kinds of status reasons and because it was better for rural use than horses, and society got designed around it, right down to city layouts, the road system and even commuting patterns. We are now stuck with it because change would be so expensive. But it is possible that things could have happened differently - like Robert Heinlein's idea of a society whose movement was based on moving pavements because solar power proved so cheap - and that the outcome would have been better.

Re: can't deal with the idea of a motor vehicle not using gasoline

This is an example of cherry picking. The average for thermal combustion power stations is lower than 60%, A decent Diesel car engine with a mechanised auto gearbox achieves around 40%. Your factor of 2 to 3 requires something like a Discovery with an LPG conversion, not something modern like a Fiat Twinair engine. You need to compare state of the art generation with state of the art vehicle engines, and average generation with average engines.

The sort of electric motors that achieve over 90% efficiency require rather a lot of control gear in a car; mine has liquid cooling for the electronics, which suggests that there is a fair degree of inefficiency right there. And although it is true that particulates are most effectively collected at a static power station, the demonstration of carbon dioxide capture is currently still at the fantasy stage, which is why it has been abandoned as official policy.

And then there is the real elephant in the room - how long lithium batteries will last in a car. As Boeing have just discovered, they are not yet a fully mature technology. Will they last 2 years like a phone battery, or how long? Even 5 years isn't very good compared to the 12 years or so that can be expected from a liquid fuel tank. That is a real added energy cost that has to be factored into an electric vehicle.

Re: Who cares?

Your example is an epic fail because a Guardian journalist recently reviewed the W12 Bentley and liked it a lot.

Re: can't deal with the idea of a motor vehicle not using gasoline

...and as Scientific American pointed out a few years back, there are many places in the US where, because of the means of power generation, electric vehicles produce more net CO₂ than a hybrid.

For all the defence of Tesla going on here, a Toyota Prius is cheaper, it's reliable, and does 600 miles on a tankful. Other manufacturers are now producing hybrid variants. The Tesla is out of date before it is even really commercialised.

Re: Faster, higher, better ...

The things are near enough exploding anyway. There is only so much energy you can get into a little box, lithium batteries are already getting close to dynamite energy density, and I doubt many people will want energy cells based on RFNA and UDMH any time soon.

You used to be able to get big batteries for BlackBerries with bulging backs, but marketing departments are creating the expectation that new phones will have enormous screens and be very thin. That simply does not go with good battery life.

Re: 4G scanning

You're thinking like an engineer. Phone carriers think like marketing departments.