Posts by handle 869 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
Funnily enough, Micro USB is more robust than Mini USB, both in terms of lifetime (insertion cycles) and reliability (positive locking).
The BlackBerry Playbook reverse insertion problem is because it uses a Micro USB A-B socket, into which it is easy to plug a Micro USB B plug the wrong way round, especially when used to the impossibility of doing this with a Micro USB B socket. Bad bit of design, that.
No, Chrome is not "basically Linux" - there's an awful lot more to an operating system than a kernel. But even if you want to dismiss the rest of the OS, the kernel itself is not free to Google because it has spent money contributing to it - akin to the Microsoft R&D of which you speak. It's not a charity, so how do you think it recoups its investment? Either by advertising or by selling cloud services.
Google won't release a Chromebook with a 500GB drive - the Google business model is built on targeting advertising at you by mining your data, so it ensures it gets its grubby mitts on it by preventing you storing it locally. Proprietary OSs don't come cheap you know.
Good. I await the update, and the withdrawal of such a head-scratchingly bizarre attempt at Beeb-bashing. Surely there are far easier targets to pick on? Or was it just calculated that nothing attracts the eyeballs like combining both sides of this site's schizophrenic attitude towards the BBC - everything about it is awful, but, erm, Dr Who is great - into one article?
No it won't. My Samsung Series 7 has a USB card reader ("Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0bda:0129 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTS5129 Card Reader Controller") which has not worked in Ubuntu until Saucy (13.10). USB just adds another layer of abstraction to the problems.
You can set a master password in Firefox which is then demanded if you want to look at the stored passwords (at least in the preferences GUI) and (possibly) before it will give certificates out.
The photo shows a silhouette of a micro SD card with the caption "STORAGE 8GB". The article interprets this as "8GB of SD card storage," which is ambiguous but implies an SD card slot. I don't: I interpret it as 8GB of internal non-volatile storage, as the internal storage figure is not given elsewhere and an 8GB SD card doesn't cost a fiver nowadays so isn't really a selling point. Use of the silhouette to represent non-volatile storage is an ironic reminder of the good old days before Google declareth that SD cards were evil.
The Motorola Razr I has an SD card slot. Google hasn't had time to sew it shut.
Just to expand on Natalie Gritpants' comment: a fundamental principle of hard disk drives is that the heads float a tiny distance above the platters on a cushion of air (or helium). They are not like floppy disks where the heads rub against the surface - neither heads nor surface would last long if they did.
It's a tiny amount of inert (non-poisonous) gas which is less dense than air so as soon as it escapes it will float away from you rather than suffocate you. If you're that paranoid you shouldn't allow an aerosol can in the house - that contains liquefied gas (i.e. there's a lot more of it) which is also inflammable and denser than air.
Update went without a hitch, apart from telling me that my 898MB download would take approximately 1 second to complete with my connection. Looks the same as before, except the lock screen says "en" on it and there's a corresponding character map/keyboard layout widget. Switching off Bluetooth still removes its icon, the keyboard illumination, fan and wifi hotkeys still don't work, but finally the SD card reader does - yippee! (Samsung Series 7.) No need to use the new widget, somewhat laboriously, to help me type "plus ça change"...
Read a good book that explains the subtleties of evolution, such as Almost LIke a Whale - it will answer all your questions.
Galling though it must have been when Dyson moved its production line to Malaysia, it seems a little odd to criticise when most other vacuum cleaners were never made in the UK in the first place.
Henrys are cylinder cleaners so inherently inferior compared to an upright of any make, as they do not brush, merely suck.
Oh and a point of my own - feel free to argue :)
Modern gas boilers have control systems designed to prevent them "short cycling" in central heating mode, because this is very inefficient and also reduces the life of the boiler. If you have a simple combination boiler without a thermal store, it has to fire up every time you turn on the hot tap or the washing machine fills. I imagine, therefore, that with the small amount of water modern machines use, heating it up with a combi boiler will not be very efficient. (Modern machines have recirculation pumps so there is no wasted water sitting in the pipework at the bottom, and the clothes are washed with a jet from above so don't need to be submerged.)
Um - that hasn't resulted in the "banning" of hot-fill washing machines, as a simple web search will demonstrate. So why else do you think they've disappeared?
Rather than ranting about your EU overlords, read an article here about why hot fill is pretty much a waste of time, even when the water is heated from a renewable source. TL;DR:
- Opening the hot fill valve fills the washing machine with "standing" cold water from the pipework before any hot water arrives from the boiler/tank at 0.7l per metre of 15mm pipe (some of which has to heat the pipe, too)
- The standing hot water then left in the pipework is wasted, unless you happen to have the heating on. Unless you have more renewably-heated hot water than you need, you will be paying money for this.
- Washing machines use far less water than they used to, so this problem is much more significant than it used to be (i.e. the proportion of heat wasted is much greater)
- Modern detergents work better at lower temperatures, reducing further the amount of hot water needed, and thus making the problem even more significant. How often do you do a wash at more than 30 degrees nowadays?
- Some clothes can be damaged by thermal shock - better to heat the water up slowly
OK, maybe I'm just being paranoid about the prospect of damage, although I have read recommendations to put the interface chips in sockets so that they are easy to replace.
However, I have definitely experienced problems due to using lights on different phases in the one DMX chain, which opto-isolators ought to solve. (I say "ought to" because I didn't have such a thing to test the hypothesis at the time.)
Mystery about MIDI's odd baud rate not solved yet. :)
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