Re: Rubbish
Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious.
1596 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2007
It is a real submersible that looks like a Lotus Esprit and can actually be driven underwater (as intimated in the article when it referred to it being driven by Don Griffin).
IIRC the film used 3 different versions of the Esprit, real Esprits, a static prop for the wheel folding scene, and this submersible.
I think the car used for the beach scene was a real, stripped down (no engine, etc) Esprit that was pulled up the beach by a cable.
"Who gives a rat's ass about what "human resources managers" try to think about?"
Unfortunately, those who work at the companies that employ them.
HR "managers" in too many firms have power and authority (to hire and fire) well beyond their ability to understand the roles they hiring and firing for.
The current iPad mini is £70 more than the new Nexus, which outclasses it in almost every respect except, perhaps, build quality. It is £100 more than the old Nexus 7 (@ £170)
You can be sure that any "new" iPad mini will cost quite a but more than the current £270 (for the basic 16GB WiFi jobbie).
I would imagine that a "retina" mini is going to cost at least £50 more than the current model (the cheapest "retina" iPad is £70 more than a non-retina iPad 2), so you could be looking an a 16GB WiFi iPad Mini 2 costing between £120 and £140 more than the Nexus 7 mk2.
I too wondered how this may be more useful than a conventional photodiode / phototransistor. One thought is that semiconductors all suffer a voltage drop across the junction (0.6v for Silicon). This may not seem much, but for high power applications this can be a significant problem. When in its metal state I assume there is no such drop, so could be useful in that respect.
Annother idea is to protect solar arrays. Solar panels react rather badly to having current shoved up them the wrong way (such as when part of an array is in shadow and taking current from the illuminated panels). If the unilluminated panels can be made to "turn metal" when in shadow, and hence act like a shunt, they can be protected.
"While I'm writing this comment, all the rest of the comments in the thread have exactly the same number of upvotes and downvotes. People seems to be divided on this subject. :0)"
Hmm. All of the posts have a 1:1 vote ratio. Statistically unlikely, particularly when some posts have 6 or 7 of each.
Someone seems to be having a bit of fun.
App Inventor is still out there and is now hosted by MIT.
While is won't produce anything sophisticated, it is certainly more capable than this effort from Microsoft. It has no restrictions on devices and finished apps can be deployed to Play.
It is, as you say, based on the same "lego brick" concept as MIT's excellent Scratch environment.
You appear to be complaining about IT managers, the stuffed shirts who haven't worked with real hardware and software since the Pentium 2 was big news and Windows NT 4 was Microsoft's latest and greatest.
Many of them have never worked at the coal face in their entire careers and often don't know the difference between a terrabyte and a tampax, yet make decisions (based largely on a combination of fear, and what miscellaneous sales muppets have told them) that can knacker the entire company and make the real IT workers lives absolute hell as they are the ones that have to implement their bonkers policies and take the flack from the rest of the staff.
IT Managers. Worse than the Marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporations, and should probably suffer the same fate.
The point here isn't that the Apprentice is a load of codswallop, but that the prof thought it could ever be anything else.
Its entertainment. They get a bunch of the most obnoxious and incompatible assholes they can find and ask them to work as a "team" on an obscure project.
We sit back and laugh at them as they fail because they are the kind of repulsive and overbearing individuals we all love to hate.
"Nokia isn't locked to Windows Phone, they have other OSes, just not Android.
I know that, but Symbian is being relegated to "feature" phones, and they kicked MeeGo into the long grass.
There are 4 major "smartphone" operating systems. iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BalckberryOS. Of those, two are available for 3rd party manufacturers, Windows and Android. Samsung and HTC use both. Nokia only uses Windows. Why?
I would imagine that a Nokia Android handset would sell well, probably better than their Windows phones, so why don't they produce one?
"Have you ever gone into a phone shop and been told they're out of stock of Windows phones?"
Quite.
Vodafone are currently trying to ram Windows phones at me as an "upgrade" from my 2 year old HTC Sensation. Now why would they be doing that? Can't shift them? Being paid to push them? Or a combination of both?
Andrew 66:"Yes, but they make way fewer than they do Android phones - that's the point...
And, obviously, this is because of Google's anti-competitive practices rather than Android being more popular?
The EC might be better off asking why Nokia is locked to Windows Phone. It certainly doesn't make good business sense for them to put all of their eggs in that particular basket unless they are contractually obliged to.
You have hit the nail on the head. Big business likes the free market, but only as long as it favours them. If it starts to favour the consumer then they get their tame politicians to introduce artificial constraints on trade.
Or introduce their own constraints (such as region coding) and then get those same bought-and-paid-for politicians to back it up with draconian law (DMCA, for example).
"Even the parallax view – fluff that shuffles the wallpaper as the phone tilts – is vitally important as it marks the iPhone out from the crowd. It’s the feature that will be shown off in the pub to prove the owner's superiority."
Right up to the point they see someone's Android device running a live wallpaper like the beautiful Ocean HD wallpaper.
Doesn't matter how you dress it up, iOS 7 is still a pig wearing lipstick.
@Tom 38
There is a world of difference between arranging interception of a UK citizen's comms on UK infrastructure and asking the NSA if they have any info. One takes a lot of arranging and cooperation between a number of companies / agencies / people, while the other is a phone call between an MI5 spook and an NSA spook.
Are we to seriously to believe that they bother with "ministerial authority " for these nod and wink exchanges?
"If the British intelligence agencies are seeking to know the content of emails about people living in the United Kingdom, then they have to get authority. That means ministerial authority," he said.UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Sunday that law-abiding Brits had "nothing to fear".
The point is, Dave, they can just ask the NSA who, by inference, do the snooping for British Intelligence, without oversight or "ministerial authority ".
"looks like 1984 is coming true after all and the media-mafia are doing their best to piss off paying customers."
And that's the rub, isn't it?
The obsession that the TV and movie industries have with (unsuccessfully) attempting to protect their content is merely giving their customers a piss-poor user experience (e.g Ultraviolet), right-royally pissing them off and actually encouraging them to turn to the "pirates".
The music industry seems to have learned its lesson. You can now easily buy unencumbered mp3s and surprise, surprise, the music industry is now turning up healthy profits from legal downloads and music piracy is on the wane.
"Amazon might be selling at the price you want to purchase at. They might not be selling at a price authors or distributors can survive."
That is the way the agency model works. Publisher forces seller to ask a fixed price, trousers most of the profit and passes a pittance on to the author.
With the wholesale model, the publisher sells in bulk to the seller at a fixed price and the seller can sell on at whatever price they like. The publisher still trousers the bulk of the profit and the author still get the same pittance.
In any case, the price I feel is reasonable for an eBook is, pretty much, in line with the opinion of most other people I have talked to on the subject. Its no good whining that the price isn't high enough if your potential customers won't pay more. If authors want more of the pie they should look for less greedy publishers or do it themselves (easy with eBooks).
"Amazon is coming across as a Robin Hood character in this, except its not just the wealthy nobles getting reamed, its also the market stall owners. But the peasants don't care, because, free stuff."
Who said anything about wanting "free stuff"? I certainly didn't. eBook have less intrinsic value than paper books (can't sell them, loan them,), have lower manufacturing and distribution costs and, therefore, should be priced accordingly. I understand that the real value of a book is what is written inside it, but there is no way any eBook should be priced higher than the same title in hardback.
Personally I'd say the correct price-point is around 2/3 the paper book price, and Amazon were closer to this than the cartel publishers.
"Shanks said Penguin believed Amazon was holding prices at artificially low levels with its strategy, and the publisher wanted to see what price customers would actually pay for ebooks.
Lets make that a bit more believable, shall we:
"Penguin believed Amazon was holding prices at artificially low levels charging realistic ebook prices with its strategy, and the publisher wanted to see what price customers would actually pay how much they could gouge customers for ebooks.
"Both the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice are already looking into whether patent trolling is affecting competition in the technology market, as the patent wars between big firms like Apple, Samsung and Googorola embroil more and more combatants."
It isn't the "big firms" who suffer at the hands of the trolls. Sure the trolls will have a go if they think one of their patents has been infringed by Apple, etc, but the real victims are the small players who cannot afford to defend themselves against these scumbags.
You spend time, effort and money developing an innovative product and getting it to market, then along comes Mr Troll and takes you to the cleaners. Yes, you can do due diligence and do a patent search, but often the Troll's claim is only tenuously linked to your product and they rely on being able to out-afford the legal costs.
The obvious solution, IMHO, is to introduce a rule for transferred patents. If you are the recipient of a patent (i.e, not the original owner), then you must be able to prove you are implementing that patent in order to defend it and the onus should be on the patent holder to demonstrate this, with the burden of proof increasing with time (if you have had the patent for a year, you'd expect to see concrete designs and, maybe, prototypes. If you've had it for 10 years then anything other than "in full production" would invalidate it).
"Unbreakable DRM would be so encumbering as to prevent sales; the trick is to make buying content easier than copying it, which is what ARM is hoping to facilitate with the Mali, but how exactly it works will be up to the manufacturers who using it."
Current DRM systems already prevent sales. It isn't the buying of content that is the problem, it is making reasonable use of it once you have bought it.
It works like this. Buy movie. Try to watch it, FAIL. Buy movie, try to watch it, FAIL. Download torrent, try to watch it, SUCCEED. The buying is easy. Its the watching that is the problem. Until the DRM obsessed media industries realise that DRM is a major driving force behind media piracy they will never beat it.
Titus Technophobe wrote:
"4. The police knew about them, but they didn't have any evidence
Errm yes, and how do you think the police go about collecting evidence?
Yep, they apply for a court order when they have reasonable suspicion that someone is up to no good for such things as wiretaps and search warrants.
These pieces of filth were known to UK security forces and could have (should have?) been under surveillance anyway.
It it, frankly, disgusting, that Reid, at al are using this incident to introduce this liberty eroding scheme. It just says to the terrorist scum: "yep, we're scared, you're winning". We should be sticking our stiff little fingers up to these cretinous pieces of filth and carrying on as normal.