Posts by abedarts

Fibre?

Won't we all be on 5G (6G, 7G, whatever) by then? Stringing cables around will be history.

Fine by me, I'll carry on using Google Docs

Or Drive, or whatever its called now.

So useful when the cars is driving itself

By the time this is ready for production the 'driver' will be relaxed in the back seat reading, sleeping or watching the scenery go by.

Google Pixel available in China?

Because if its not and I don't think it is, there goes their biggest market. Oppo, Huawei, Apple, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi and the rest still have a pretty big and booming playground to play in.

No wonder we are bored, nothing much has changed in 11 years

When Apple launched the first iPhone in Jan 2007 we suddenly had an exciting new thing that had never existed before.

But since then its just been incremental development - better cameras, bigger screens, longer runtime, but essentially the same thing nearly eleven years down the road.

Its no wonder we are a bit jaded.

Is the first video real?

There seems such a capability gap between doing a back flip and walking uncertainly about a stage and then falling off it - I'm confused. And the first video somehow looks fake, do the jumps and so forth look a little off to anyone else?

Using a lot of CPU

I was so pleased to hear of this new faster Firefox I immediately installed it on my Macbook Air, gave it a whirl to see if it really is faster and made it my default browser.

Then I noticed my lap getting warm, huh? Oh, FirefoxCP Web Content is using 105% of CPU. Great.

Oh well, I really wanted to like it it but its back to Opera; again.

HSBC too

Was down for a while this morning.

How Google won the smartphone wars - really?

I'd say it depends how you define 'won' - there are certainly a lot more Android phones sold, but Apple make way more money off iPhones than all the Androids put together. A quick search shows that Apple make around 80% of all smartphone profit, leaving just 20% for all the rest.

(I don't own or use an iPhone)

Not good enough yet, but

Isn't that how science and technology progresses, early versions are not great but incremental improvements really add up as the years pass. My first desktop computer wasn't that good either, but now look at them... well perhaps that wasn't the best example, but you know what I mean.

Customers won't do it

We read of endless security issues caused by IT professionals having not applied crucial patches so the chances of Joe Public doing it correctly and in a timely manner are basically zilch.

Autonomous cars will need to apply updates (patches) automatically, just like smartphone apps do now.

Anyone going to talk about the issue being reported?

Here we go again - you're and idiot because you own an iPhone, nah nah na nah nah.

NO, YOU'RE an idiot because you got a different phone!!!

(Going for the most down votes ever with this one - ears covered, peeking through fingers)

Title wrong

I think its 3.95 not 3.5 billion years.

Not just IT support

I had a complaint from some of the people in an office that it got too hot in summer and too cold in winter, so we got a builder in to fit some more insulation. I helped him a bit (ok, I watched) but it turned out to be much more difficult than we thought to get at the area concerned, so after a couple of hours of faffing about we gave up.

The office users told me some time later that it was much better now!

The trolley problem isn't real life

Its a waste of time worrying - in 40 years of driving I've never had to choose between running over X or Y group of vulnerable people, I just do the best I can and hope it never does.

As the article makes plain, we as humans are doing a terrible job at driving - nearly 2000 deaths / year in the UK and we are one of the better ones.

So I'll leap into a self driving car as as soon as I can afford one and in the mean time carry on listening to my smartphone and sat-nav system arguing with each other.

Just development

<Nevertheless, it does show the direction Uber is taking its self-driving car research. Rather than go fully autonomous, Uber will hire human drivers to do the difficult driving, refuelling and loading, and rely on software for the more simple stuff.>

A strange view, surely Uber et al are taking this step by step in the same way that all development is done. They don't want human drivers at all, not for the easy bits nor for the difficult bits, but the state of the art and the views of society and government don't make that practical quite yet.

In a few years we will be comfortable with transportation and many other tricky tasks being done by computers and it won't be many years after that when we will be wondering how on earth humans did these things. Like navigating around the world with nothing but a sextant.

Declutter!

I agree wholeheartedly with anything that declutters our urban landscapes. The problem is town hall planners; they never have a meeting on a Friday afternoon that goes 'Thats it, we've got enough signs and lines and traffic management blight everywhere, we can all quit now.' Oh no indeed, they keep on adding new stuff every week making it harder and harder to walk down the pavement or drive down the road, and a good deal harder to enjoy the beauty of our villages, towns and cities.

If this gives quicker, more reliable mobile broadband too, that's icing on the cake.

Not their job

"The UK government does not have a clear strategy on how to maximise AI and robotics for economic benefit"

Businesses develop and market AI and robotics and other businesses decide where and how to use it based on the economic benefits they see in its use. Government has a very poor record of understanding technology, and there is no need or benefit in their attempting to develop a strategy. The businesses paying over hard cash have the biggest incentive and are best placed to evaluate the economic benefits of their purchases.

Too long ago to matter now

One user with 'dodgy credit card activity' since the data was hacked 2 years ago doesn't sound like the end of the world to me.

But I'm not a journalist or a lawyer where having a sense of proportion is a sacking offence.

As silly as

This is like holding a cafe responsible for someones wrong doing because they used the cafe's power socket to charge the laptop they used in the planning, or sat under the cafe's electric light so they could see what they were doing, or used the water in the toilets to wash the hands that wrote the plans.

WiFi is just a utility like electricity, gas or water.

OK self driving cars aren't perfect

I don't think anyone expects auto-pilot / driving-assist / fully autonomous cars to be perfect; we will still have accidents for lots of reasons. However, the consensus is that we'll have a lot less accidents, and as we gradually perfect the systems the accident rate will continue to drop. Someone clever said 'science progresses one death at a time' and I expect it will be the same with this technology.

If the self drive system needs you to pay attention its not good enough, I imagine I'd stop paying attention very quickly once I'd got over the initial excitement. This is a backward step perhaps introduced as a placatory measure, but it can be no more permanent than having men with red flags walking in front of the car.

Nice work if you can get it

Imagine being paid to examine thousands of Excel spreadsheets looking for these errors. Aside from the incredible tedium (give it to the office junior) its nice way to spend time in a warm comfortable office with no deadline or particular objective in mind and you can then feel good about publishing 'important' research.

Brexit means Brexit

We are where we are and hoping for a second (third?) referendum or saying the first one isn't binding is not helpful.

What we need to do now is turn this into an opportunity and get on with being successful in the world in the way that no EU country is managing to be. The EU, or more probably the Euro, is dragging even a power house nation like Germany into the doldrums. We have to start working on doing better out of the EU than we have been while in - which incidentally isn't bad thanks to holding on to our own central bank, currency and control of interest rates.

Three works in france

Three's Feel at Home works fine for me in France. They don't allow tethering but otherwise I always find a partner network with good service.

A good alternative is to buy a local sim when you travel, but as there are many 4G bands UK phones usually won't provide 4G service in the USA, China etc.

'caveated' - can it be used as a verb?

Agreed - I don't trust them, hate their stuuf and don't use any of it

I had to use MS products for years when I coded for a living and in retrospect it was a terrible experience. Of course, at the time we thought that's just how software was; full of bugs, regular crashes, reboots to solve lock ups, frustrating, a new UI with every iteration.

Then along came Novell Netware which just ran and ran, didn't need rebooting every day and didn't crash - spooky, so software didn't have to be cr*p after all, who knew? And Linux proved the same thing.

So now I don't have to use anything MS and its great to be free of it. I wonder how long they've got left before they become the next DEC.

Blaming crypo is just an excuse

The authorities failed again in Brussels and they need someone to scapegoat. Blaming encrypted communications and Edward Snowden takes the monkey off their backs and puts it somewhere else.

If they had access to every word written and spoken electronically it would make no difference, except that they'd be blaming pigeon breeders for selling their birds without sufficient care and telling them that it was their responsibility to be aware of the contents of every note the birds subsequently carried.