Posts by GrahamT 460 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2007
Goodbye Alice in Wonderland/Through the looking Glass from the school libraries. (Alice Liddel's parents stopped Lewis Carrol from seeing her because of his unnatural interest) His photographs of her would be seized by the plod nowadays.
Does this mean we can't use the rhyming slang either? As in "He checked into casualty with a moby up his Gary"
You expect a good radio from Roberts, but the charger, while a good idea seems poorly implemented.
I have a fast charger (4 x 2Ah AAs in half an hour) and all the weight is in the power block - the "charger" is just a carrier with the electronics and a light to show when the batteries are charged. By providing a separate block like that Roberts could have kept the radio weight low whilst giving the ability to charge the batteries quickly, and while the radio was playing.
I guess it is all down to cost, though as my charger cost less than £10 including a set of batteries, I can't see that it would have broken the bank.
Mmm, 400bhp is 300kW, approx. (1hp = 746 watts) I reckon that on full power, that 40kWh battery will last about 8 minutes. It must go bloody fast if it covers 150 miles in that time.
Perhaps someone smarter than me can point out where I put the decimal point in the wrong place, because I'm sure Ford marketing wouldn't exagerate.
I downloaded the release candidate this week for my laptop and it is great; Wifi works out of the box showing all the networks around me as well as my own, all the apps and settings for my 8.04 apps were picked up correctly. It is responsive and clean looking (I replaced the default wallpaper ages ago) and feels very solid. All quite unlike Vista that I have dual booting on this laptop.
Once the final release comes out, I will put it on my server.
Who needs Long Term Support.
There is one International EDI Standard - UN/EDIFACT. (ISO 9735) Directories are updated twice a year, but are so stable now that any changes are minor, and you don't need to apply them if your current version works. We still have partners using 1994 versions quite happily.
There are of course national standards, particularly ANSI X12 in the US, and Tradacoms in the UK, so a trader might have to support two standards, but they likewise have been stable for years.
There is no coding involved in a change - we use mapping software and just change the mappings (drag and drop usually)
EDI isn't only about invoices. We handle 10s of thousands of EDI messages a day for bookings, shipping instructions, Bills of Lading and container status messages. There is no way these could be handled completely manually.
I have had 15 years of work out of EDI, even though I was told it was dying when I started.
As the title says, FUD from someone trying to muscle into a market that already has a stable working solution. What next? TCP/IP is always changing, (IPV4 - IPV6) so we should go back to using snail mail with document scanners?
A non-story.
I'm not going to shoot you down in flames; contacless charging is a good idea, I use it for my electric toothbrush every day. However, lines in the road probably wouldn't work as the infrastructure cost would be horrendous and you need the coils to be as close as possible to each other for efficiency.
A more practical approach would be to have large coils under the cab ranks and a lowerable coil in the cab. When the driver parks his cab, he pushes the recharge button to lower the coil onto the road and pick up the magnetic flux from the coil beneath. Starting the cab would lift the coil. In a perfect world this would be automatic so the driver wouldn't need to do anything apart from park over the charger coil.
Of course the taxi driver could just plug it into a post, but then you get the drivers who forget and drive off taking the post with them, and people tripping over the cable and suing the cab company.
I hope the cabs have regenerative braking to prolong the charge too.
100 miles is a bit short; a round trip from the city to Heathrow is about 33 miles and Gatwick is 60+. These trips are very lucrative, so only being able to fit one or two a day into a single charge would be a big disincentive. Top speed of 50 mph on the motorway is not going to be very popular either.
OK, it's not perfect, but it is a good effort. Like others I think recommening vi is a bit ott. I use it myself but would never try and show my wife, or fairly clued-up son how to use it.
I bought my wife a AA1 and the only thing I had to do was replace the naff email client with Thunderbird (she has separate personal and work email accounts/inboxes and the embedded email client doesn't support that - everything goes to the same inbox). That needed a fair bit of Linux/XML knowledge and could have been easier. It is a piece of cake on Ubuntu, but then Linpus is not Ubuntu. (unfortunately)
As she uses Firefox, Thunderbird and MS office on her XP desktop, she has no issue with using Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office on the AA1. She is the target market for the AA1 and likes it the way it is - if it were mine I would have installed Xubuntu on it by now, but I (like most ElReg readers) am not the target market.
Epileptic fits are triggered by flashing strobe lights of a few hertz, not several thousand/million. When was the last time a seizure was triggered by a light bullb (100/120Hz flicker on 50/60 Hz mains) or even a TV (25/30 Hz interline, 50/60Hz interframe) or cinema (24/48 Hz)
Secondly, 12Volt mains: someone has not studied Ohms law. For a given power current is inversely proportional to voltage. Reduce voltage from 240 -> 12, i.e divide by 20, and you multiply the current by 20, so instead of 13 amps flowing to your 3Kw appliance, you now have 260 amps. The mains wiring would be like 1/2 inch copper rods per conductor. (think car battery connections) As heat loss in the cable is proportional to the square of the current, then the heat would be 400 times what it is now for a given cable. That is why we move electricity around at high voltages then transform it down at the point of use if we need lower voltages or higher currents.
If you want a practical example, compare the huge low voltage third rail of the Underground and the - higher powered - thin overhead high voltage line of mainline electrified railways.
"...only bet you can make in the stock market is that it will rise. You would never be able to bet that it drops. "
If I went to a bookie and tried to bet that a horse would lose, would he take the bet? NO WAY. These wankers are betting on people losing their savings and pensions. How is that any way moral? The London City brokers got their £1/2m ($1m) bonuses in cash, not shares - they are already whinging that they won't get a bonus next year, as if we should sympathise. That money came from somewhere, not thin air, and that is our savings. Wealth is like energy; it can be generated, (by industry, not the stock market) converted to other forms(spent, invested) and wasted, but not destroyed. We are now seeing a form of entropy - the ultimate state of chaos.
It could be we are seeing the collapse of capitalism, as we saw the collapse of Soviet communism a few years ago.
It will be interesting to see what happens when America's creditors call in the trillion dollars that America owes to the world. (Euphemistically called the Balance of payment deficit) and cash in all their dollar holdings.
I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords.
Patrick Byrne is like Cassandra who was cursed to be able to see the future, but have no one believe her.
All I know is that I have only 5 years to go before I start drawing my pension, and I just hope there's something left in the fund by then, and it's not all pissed up against a wall by a City wide-boy.
I did my bachelor's with the OU. I had struggled with maths for years ( I failed "A" level maths, but did slightly better at HNC) I did a second level maths unit for my Technology degree and it was if a blindfold had been removed; I suddenly "got" maths. By the end of the course I had gone from struggling with Laplace to being comfiortable with multi-dimensional vector morphisms, and got a distinction for the unit. That is quality teaching which I hadn't had in 10+ years of secondary education.
Other units were just as good and challenging, and the OU made money by selling the materials to other Universities.
At the time I worked as a technician at a trad university and not only was the Reader for my course also the senior professor of my department at that University, but he had written the set book for my HNC course. The department I was in used OU materials as part of their degree teaching too.
Obviously things change over the years and some courses have issues, but that shouldn't put people off. Talk to other OU students for the course you want to take, rather than believe comments by people that wouldn't know a TMA from a CMA.
(If you want poor teaching material, then you should have seen my son's GCSE Electronics course book; the example circuits had short circuits, reverse biased electrolytics and other basic faults. Most would never have worked as described in the text. Unfortunately his teacher didn't have the ability to understand why no one in the class could get them to work.)
GT (BA Open)
The major problem with horns is that the lowest frequency 3db point is a function of the area of the horn mouth and the length. It is 40 years since I did the calculations, but I seem to remember that to get down to 20Hz (the recognised limit of human hearing) you needed a horn 40 feet long and 20 feet in diameter at the mouth.
A little plastic box won't hack it for bass notes.
None of my 3 Acer machines was made in the US. Surely it is more relevant what the exchange rate with the Chinese Yuan/RMB or Taiwan dollar is doing. If the US dollar is rising against other currencies, it should just mean Acer gets more profit from the US market. Did they raise prices in the US when the dollar was weak? Are they cutting them now?
I agree with the analogy about petrol. It was ever thus. Two weeks ago when oil was dropping from $150 per barrel to $100, my local filling station lowered the price/litre by 3 pence, then put it back up by a penny a few days later, where it has stayed. We will be lucky if petrol/diesel ever go back to the prices they were, even when crude oil does. The shareholders will be happy with their record dividends though.
"27km large haddock collider smashes barnacles together at 47 times the speed of matter, recreating conditions last seen shortly after Big Ben. Heat and pressure combine to create Cod particle, also known as Hog’s bison."
Full version here: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2008/09/10/cern_G2_cover.pdf
To be fair, the AA1 works fine out of the box without a user ever having to see xterm.
These tweaks are to change the basic consumer package to something that suits El Reg readers better, and we presumably, have no problems with xterm. Just think of it as the Linux equivalent of regedit.
All I've done so far is replace the email reader with Thunderbird, which took just a few minutes and no reboot.
This is posted using Chrome; but I had to boot into Vista for the first time for two months to try it.
First impressions are good; it imported all my bookmarks and settings, including setting the speel chucker to British English. It is fast and opens all sites OK. They look the same as in Firefox. Mmm... "Firefox" is shown as a spelling mistake! Still, not bad for a beta.
I can't wait for the Linux version to really test it.
It would have made more sense as an IE beater if Google had co-operated with Firefox rather than go into competition.
I see this firstly taking market share from Firefox (and Opera) as early adapters try it. The corporate market is owned by Microsoft, so unless it has an IE quirks mode (i.e. incorporates the same bugs) and the abililty to be controlled/tied down by corporate BOFHs, it won't make a lot of headway there.
A technology share with Mozilla could actually have made a difference, and maybe created a critical mass of "FireChrome" users.
My English C&P card works fine in France - however they are not accepted at 24 hour automated petrol pumps, but are at toll gates. This is more to do with policy than technology.
However, my Swiss C&P card (they are late adaptors - I only got the chip last year) doesn't work in France (again, policy as it is an ISO chip) and I have to sign when I use it. Almost every time I had to remind the check-out girl that I needed to sign even though a warning pops up on the reader display, and presumably their terminal. Even when I did sign, they never checked the card signature.
As my trolley has been full of potentially resellable booze each time, usually more than €100 worth, this appears to be a major security loophole.
Forget Asda - go to LeClerc or Champion with your cloned cards.
I bought a SNCF ticket on t'internet, to be picked up at a French station.
Put my credit card into the automatc ticket machine for validation, it asked for my PIN, said it was OK, thought about it for a minute or two, then came up with an error, printed out a slip of paper that said go to a desk for help and reset itself.
At the desk they tried swiping my card and typing in the number. Each time it crashed their application. If a normal credit card for a paper ticket has these problems, what chance a 'smart object'?
OK, so maybe they hadn't tested for a Swiss credit card being used from England to book a combined SNCF/Eurostar ticket, but I can't be the only foreigner that likes to book in advance for a better deal.
Btw, TGV train tickets have to be date stamped in a machine just before entering the train - so they are made of thin card like an airline boarding pass. Preumably these USB tickets are just for local journeys, like the Oyster card?
I saw Martin Clunes on stage in Tartuffe, and he is quite decent actor. However, the point about Leonard Rossiter is that he wasn't a comedian first, he was a serious character actor, with a long career behind him. Only after Perrin did he get more comedy roles (Rising damp, Martini ads...)
It would be better to remake FaRoRP with someone like Robert Carlisle or Christopher Eccleston and let the comedy come from the writing rather than a mugging comedian.
I wonder if Audrey (Sue Nichols) will leave Coro to be Reggie's secretary, Joan, again.
Let's face it, if you go to France and eat in a fast-food restaurant, you deserve all you get.
For €10-15 (including wine) you can eat better in a French Relais Routier, than almost anywhere else in the western world for the price.
Liam, the Daily Mail isn't always very accurate! How come we got BSE, Foot and Mouth, Swine fever, etc., and France only got it when they imported British beasts?
Pot, Kettle, etc. BSE was caused by feeding (British) cows, cow - following US practice, (But they slaughter their cows before the symptoms show. Tick, tick, tick... maybe that explains GW's policies.)
@AC - daft, some sort of joke I assume. Have you ever been to France? (or China, Jamaica or Japan for that matter) I've been to 3 of the 4, and all have good food, but it is always French food I go back to.
...paying the teachers to mark the scripts, like they used to do. It was a nice bit of extra pocket money for the overworked, underpaid plebs at the chalkface, and something to do during the dog days. Obviously you need invigilators to ensure consistency, but what do school inspecters do during the summer?
Alien because, it is an alien concept to get involved people doing what they know best, when you can pay ignoramuses a fortune to do a worse job.
Re: "..keep the blue collared workers in their place."
Sorry, I can't let that one go. My father was a coal miner, as were both my grandfathers. My mother and father could spell and write grammatically, better than 80% of the commentators here.
At school, my mate was one of the worst spellers in the class: his father was white collar. The difference was that my house was full of books and magazines; he owned one book.
Class should have nothing to do with education, though the working class tend to suffer most when the standard of education declines.
I am lucky that I went to one of the country's first comprehensive schools in the 60's, with loads of keen, committed teachers. (I was an 11+ failure.) I thank them with all my heart for freeing me from a life down the pit. My brothers who did go down the pit, spell and write correctly too.
These teachers even taught my mate to spell. Nowadays he would have been labelled dyslexic and left to stew.
Oddly, my children spell and punctuate correctly, and write gramatically - except when they are texting. They don't make these silly mistakes, so it isn't a generation thing either.
I blame Thatcher for starving the schools of money in the 80's and losing many of the enthusiastic teachers. I know one incredible teacher who left to become an insurance salesman, as he couldn't feed his family on a teacher's pay. A terrible loss to education.
Now the pay is better, but the damage has been done, and we have a generation of poorly educated young adults. These then become parents, and even teachers if the standards are lowered as suggested by this wally, and the downward spiral continues.
The answer is to raise standards, not to lower them.
illiteracy is not a "variant"; it is a curable illness in society.
<steps gingerly off soap box and awaits brickbats>
Setting myself up for a fall here; better re-read this 3 times.
I find it amusing that several of the commentators that disagree with this guy (no names, no pack-drill) have some of those common mis-spellings in their own comments - accepting the deliberately ironic ones. At least two use thier. OK, this is a common typo, and I've done it myself, but "People in glass houses, etc."
Having said that, I am quite pedantic about bad spelling and grammar, and my C.V. is checked and double-checked before it goes out of the door. I am, therefore, ruthless with poor C.V.s that land on my desk. If you use there/their incorrectly or don't know the difference between of and have, or misuse the apostrophe, you won't work for me. In addition, anyone applying for a job in I.T. who doesn't know how to change the spell checker from U.S. to U.K. spelling doesn't deserve to work.
Isn't that one of Terry Pratchett's laws of Narative Causality? Now if they'd found narrativium on Mars...
By the way, @Michael O'Malley, I always thought Persil was so called as it is French for parsley. Next you will be telling me Fairy Liquid doesn't come from fairies.
I recently read a book about witchhunts in the 17th century, where a lawyer was tried for aiding Jesuits in planning to overthrow the government (all made up and relying on paid witnesses), because he had defended them at trial.
He was sentenced to a traditional punishment for treason:
First he was to be hanged until he almost lost consciousness; (hanged)
Then he was to be cut down and his stomach opened, his guts pulled out and burnt in front of him; (drawn)
Then his sexual organs and limbs, then his head were to be severed from his body; (quartered)
Then his head was to be put on a pole as a warning to others. (though he was probably past caring by then)
Odd that reading some of the above comments reminded me of this, and here I was thinking we lived in the 21st century, not the 17th.
Oh, and despite the punishments, murder was far more common then than now in Britain, where we haven't had the death penalty since I was a lad.
I tried to look at the Orwell blog today using the link above. My company's content filter blocked it as a "Blog/social networking" site.
Oddly I can read pepysdiary.com everyday, and that is a far racier diary than Eric Blair's is likely to be: but then, who says censorship has to be logical?
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