* Posts by Baldy50

511 publicly visible posts • joined 9 May 2016

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London to Dover 'smart' road could help make driverless cars mainstream – expert

Baldy50

Traffic lights

They have all this technology and IMHO it's not implemented correctly, if you use the A580 like me you will notice a vehicle at the lights say 200 yards ahead and the lights go on green but by the time you get there it's back to red, no vehicle has come onto or through from the junction from either side.

It's obviously far more noticeable late at night when traffic is light.

Why does it change back to red for the main road and green for the minor road, can't we have a system that sees say ten cars on the main road and two on the minor road and adjust the lights accordingly?

The vehicles on the main road might be doing 60 MPH and are arbitrarily brought to a standstill wasting a lot of fuel, five get through and five get stopped to let one car from a 30 zone get through in five seconds at that speed the other five would be through anyway.

I would happily be informed to slow to say 50 or any speed less than the limit for that road and get through the lights without stopping, a sort of continuity would result even at peak times.

This road is a particular pain in the bum as the speed limit on parts of it have been reduced to 40 MPH because of a few pedestrian accidents and at least one bicycle death.

It's a three lane road in some places FFS the same as most motorways so why punish the motorist because of a few dumb people, some nice roads around where I live and if two vans were meeting on parts of them the hedgerows would get a caress or two but still 60 MPH roads, absolute craziness.

If traffic lights were clever and detect that one side of the junction was far busier than the others it could instead of just being on a timer and adjust accordingly, maybe this already exist to a degree but I've never seen it in action.

I would happily see the day when all transport was driver less because the standard of driving today has fallen to a point where I dread it, I mean how hard is it to give way to the right? FFS! 32 years driving and not one crash BTW.

On a side note I hope they don't use ever use Mickeysoft for running any of these driver less vehicles!

On another side note recently lights have been changed for a raised roundabout instead at a congested junction and ruddy big bollards on the pavement, but they're digging it up again because big wagons can't always get round it and are apparently going to make it a bit smaller.

Another concern I suppose is you hear about people doing exactly what the satnav tells them to even if it's obvious there's no turning where it tells them to turn, what assurance could have that a map update could be corrupted on the vehicles system let alone hacked?

Could you have personalities for your car, BMW and Mercedes cars could be lane hogging pricks just to make it more true to life?

Ok that's enough bollards from me.

Ian.

Official: Microsoft's 'Get Windows 10' nagware to vanish from PCs in July

Baldy50

Re: W10 not all bad

Yes apart from AV Linux everyone of the distro's I have tried including and especially Mint have been so easy and quick to install, with I might add no need for the ATI driver disc as I do in Windows to get the graphics card to work properly.

I suppose we all have to do a little learning with regards to whatever OS we use, I have on occasion felt like an M$ employee however due to the amount of time spent keeping everything running A OK!

Like you say the OS should stay out of the way as much as possible and just let you get on with whatever.

As an informed amateur I am generally tasked to fix a family or friends machine and I’m frequently frustrated by device driver errors on co processors and adapter drivers essential to the machine working properly.

I have never had these sorts of problems with Linux, it all gets detected and works first time around, no searching for missing drivers (code28)!

Ian.

Baldy50

Re: sweeping generalisations about Linux

I don't think your a coward!

I believe if it were offered as an option when purchasing a new machine and some revenue for the Distro installed of course, it could be far more popular for the average user. But no ones selling Linux in the market, citing that it's only for geeks, how good can it be for free!

As it stands commercially there is no reason for any of the electronics outlets to do this, It's about making money and not giving people choice.

If W10 was a car it would only come in two colours and when pulling off the driveway in a hurry to do something important it would suddenly lose all power, make you wait half way off the driveway with the engine running and then need to be restarted to go anywhere after a lengthy wait.

Apart from Mac users most consumers think that Windows is there only choice and availabilityand the familiarity with Windows, over the past 21 years since W1 they can't really be blamed for sticking with what they know.

On older machines belonging to friends and family rather than bin the machine I get rid of XP (which I still love BTW) and install a Linux Distro, for general things like mooching around the web it can't be beaten for it's inherent stability, speed on older PC's and immunity to most of the malware out there!

XFCE is my preferred desktop generally and once I type in my PW or use as guest it is usable within a second or two, no spinney thing with nothing loading. The people I've converted to using Linux are happy because it works all of the time, it's fast and didn't cost a penny.

I was intrigued by the adoption of some Linux oldies and goldies to be introduced to W10 (rolling update, multiple desktops), I just think that It's time Redmond and the rest of the team made Windows work better and faster, be more resilient to malware, after all they are making a lot of money out of this.

I often wonder how much additional revenue for the computer industry has accrued just from removing malware alone.

Vista was beautiful to look at considering the look of XP at the time but didn't work properly, not even close. When your antivirus program viewed a Windows update as malicious and deleted it leaving the machine in a BSOD state, well kind of says it all!

If they can make it work well and the users like it then they have my blessing, I just feel it's going to be another 'like it or lump it ' you'll put up with what we sell you' mentality because of the massive market share they hold.

If Macs were the same price as Windows machines it might be a different market scenario, as Apple's OS is based like Linux on UNIX then far more people would be used to it as an alternative and it wouldn't seem so 'geekish'.

In fact I believe that to keep your Windows system in good order with all the AV, antimalware,repair and optimisation programs, etc... You'd be more of a geek than me!

Installed Zorin got a load of useful free stuff, no antivirus installed, two years on the same Distro no problems to date at all, if it works so well why isn't it more popular?

If only HP for example or any of the big names would just bite the bullet and get together with any of the software engineers and produce a Linux only machine saving consumers money, affording them with reliability and making themselves a name in the retail section of the industry to deliver choice and quality, a Swiss watch approach to modern computing, the cheap ones work just as well as the expensive ones!

Regards.

Baldy50

W10 not all bad

I've removed it five times now just from friends and families machines due to an accidental upgrade on 3 occasions and two willing to try it out, all oldish laptops, four to six years old and it run very sluggishly, Cortana didn't always work as well.

Recently installed it on a dell 380 dual core machine for a family member and found it to run faster than 7, no major glitches at all really and she is very happy with it.

I couldn't seem to get the multiple desktops to work though, it only minimised the window I was on and totally unlike the Linux distro's I'm used to using, any thoughts on this?

I find the most annoying thing about Windows are the lengthy updates, it will be interesting to see if W10 and it's rolling update work as well as other OS's with this feature.

I have been as much as possible staying completely away from W10 as W7 runs fine in a VM under Linux on my machine and I may give it a go just to learn what has changed just in case I need to help someone down the line, looked a complete idiot when I first tried to use W8 in front of a friend!

Regards.

Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise salute EU flag, blast Brexiteers

Baldy50

Re: The resources the government

Yep 50 mil a day is a lot of money for not a lot in IMHO, look at France 1.3 bil on one road, 2 bil in Portugal and over the past ten years a staggering 10 bil in Italy and just how much EU revenue was given for road repairs here? They are also spending EU revenue building bridges in Romania, Poland, Bulgaria and Greece.

Yes we do get funding to the amount of 4 bil back out of the 12 bil it costs us, but not spent where I would like it and I'm sure Birmingham city centre is much better now except we have to pay to go around it if you want to get past it a bit quicker that is, a free ring road would have been a better use of EU funding!

It puzzles me a bit as quite a few of our MP's ride bicycles so they must be painfully aware of the state our road system is in! Hard asses as well as heads.

Building houses near me like no tomorrow but not much in the way of roads for the families who will occupy them in an already congested area. Schools are thankfully being improved and expanded but just wonder how long it’ll take to drive the kids there?

I'm no financial expert but I suspect many MP's and their cronies (business buddies etc...) have a vested interest in the status quo that exists in the EU market place, wouldn't want to have to renegotiate any tax or import duties for example and definitely not to force them to crack down on third world inequalities for the pure sake of greed.

All produce coming out of Palestine is relabelled as produce of Israel as they do not have their own bar code and the farmers are treated very unfairly, big business cares about profit not it's workers in third world countries because they can.

The steel industry is unfortunately doomed! We import steel for example from Germany where the Business rates are a tenth of the UK and energy is less expensive too. Then if you look at the suppliers outside of the EU with poor wages and working conditions we just can't compete any more.

A lot of essential services in the UK are owned by foreign companies with little or no regard for the British consumer and in many European countries it is still illegal for a foreigner to have a controlling share in an essential service like water or power.

Working in an EU country I had to pay the usual taxes for my health of course and into the wealth fair state system. If I paid in for one and a half years I could be entitled to three months assistance, but you had to pay in first!

The EU and our own government has done nothing to help recover the vast sums owed the national health service or colleges and universities lost revenue due to the tourist abuse of these services.

In 1953 the IMF cancelled half of Germany's national debt and we finally paid America back in 2007 for the help during the war! (Shit I mentioned it), SORRY!!!!

It made perfect sense for the American government to throw money at Germany, to have military bases and to have such a strong influence in the heart of Europe.

Rationing in the UK however didn't end until 1954, so quite a slow recovery really!

I wonder if the Americans should pay us back for that illegal war they got us into, though since the world is so much safer now should we let them off?

I hope they roast that Cheshire cat grinning toad BLier, can't wait for the Chilcot report.

I think a German army has marched through Belgium twice this century without even stopping, so why are they suddenly running the EU?

OK my guess is the Russian and Italian Mafia owns and now controls Belgium through years of infiltration at every level within the government, police etc... Knowing the former USSR was doomed, they asked for the Italian Mafia's help and with a substantial loan from the Vatican they managed to do what no invading army has ever done and this unassuming little country now rules us all within the EU member states. Who'd have thought to look there of all places LOL.

Ok my rant and soap box away too!

Ian.

Snakes on a backplane: Server-room cabling horrors

Baldy50

Loved reading through this topic and the links but not one mention of the wankers that installed the tray or pipework between buildings.

Tray with botched corners and cuts with no regard for the installation engineers fingers, none of the cuts were de burred in any sense of the meaning and like razor blades having been cut with an angle grinder.

5" pipe is plenty big enough for 24 cat 5 and 4 fibre cables but a bottle of silicone lubricant and the works van were needed to pull the group through.

Bloody idiots used 90 degree bends instead of two 45's a contractor informed me, I don't know what bandwidth the fibre attained but I suspect very poor.

FYI I'm neat if I have the time/budget to do the job properly!

Try re cabling hospitals, steam pipes not lagged, open drains in places and vermin so when crawling on all fours to reach an old part of the hospital was not nice at all.

Ian.

Magnetic memory boffins unveil six-state storage design

Baldy50

?

You lot are confusing me somewhat, the article says that with three crossing ellipses and two states for each if the electron spin is to the right or left means 0 or 1 for each overlapping region, so six distinct states, how are the crossing ellipses read? region 1 (1) region 2 (0) region 3 (1) or variants on the 3 states they could all be 1 or all 0 ? But it's only 3 binary values depending how it can be read surely, if they can read the states on the 3 variables at the same time that’s different.

Could enough regions be read at once to give a direct instruction instead of decoding the separate bits of information to give the instruction?

Look before any of you lot start I'm just an electrician. OK!!!!!

Regards, Ian. Have they got a smiley wearing a dunce hat?

Google Chrome deletes Backspace

Baldy50

Yep fell foul of this one too a few times and now if I have to fill in an online form I will drink my brew beforehand, inform anyone nearby very politely to, under no circumstances bother me at all for any reason or get shouted at and pay attention to what I'm doing.

But if your going to bitch about something insignificant then what about you El Reg forum users having to scroll all the way back down after up voting something and not returning you to the previous place.

Also auto save would be a nice feature when posting a reply, in case the dreaded back space key is inadvertently hit!

Ian.

HD and SSD Prices not declining - why ?

Baldy50

Re: How to Recover Dissertation writing Files from Storage device?

I agree with 'allthecoolshortnamesweretaken'. Great user name BTW.

I’ve used recuva myself with success and other programs too, but usb drives are not the safest way to store by any means!

A walk across a carpet can generate many tens of kilovolts in static, so if the device was in your pocket and you touched it you could release the charge that you hold to the device? Not sure could the device also be at the same potential of the person carrying it and only in danger when being grounded to the computer for example? They're very easy to lose as well and slow, I think the memory chips that don't make the grade are used for usb drives.

Always eject the device and don't just yank it out of the machine in a hurry, if the copy software has been minimized and you don't notice the copy process has not finished data would not be written to it. If you try and eject the device before it has completed a task a warning will be given.

Back up is always the best option, even the humble CD or DVD if stored correctly would outlive a usb drive.

Portable hard drives are far better in almost every way apart from size, far faster transfer rates being my fav and as long as not playing ice hockey using it as the puck pretty robust mostly. I have had to put the casing back together many times on my media drive, it is quite easy to take apart and not the best example of portable storage, but still working and learnt my lesson to stop picking it up by the usb cable .

I do not plug it into any TV any more as it has a great many media files on it and after an LG corrupted the file system I had to put all the files back on. I don't understand why but as 'allthecoolshortnamesweretaken' wrote.

'USB sticks can be tricky, there are a lot of combinations of hardware and firmware, and some of them are pretty dodgy. I've had USB sticks that had limitations regarding the number of folders you could create in the stick's root directory, and the number of folders you could create in them, and the number of files you could put in there.'

It seems portable hard drives might have a problem too, probably just too much data for whatever software is running the TV to handle. Over 1Tb of data!!!!BTW. Didn't bother trying to recover and the drive could have done with some house cleaning so a re format was done.

I'm sorry you may have lost some very important work but I don't know many people that haven't fell foul of a data loss at some time in their computing exploits, backups are the only way to be sure.

'allthecoolshortnamesweretaken' is correct usb drives can just die on you although an indication of failure is being able to read but no longer write to a device and getting hideously slow maybe as well or a re format is needed badly?

What is the safest format for a usb drive?

My main machine and it's drives are all XT4 and are invisible without extra software to Windows. So my portable devices are FAT or NTFS so I can use them on other OS's.

I use NTFS on a couple of usb drives as some of the files I have are bigger than 4Gb, so FAT won't work.

I don't know if any of this is useful to you or others but the only rule I strictly adhere to is to never ever store anything on a portable device if it is not backed up somewhere safe, it is a rather 'Techie' sort of forum after all.

Ian.

Which audio format sounds better?

Baldy50

Wish I had my old equip

Hi, I guess we'll stick to digital formats!

No,No,No! Audio note 300b single ended pure class A amp, black box moving coil stylus on any decent turntable (Cast iron platter) preferably English and that goes for the speakers too.

Just have to let it warm up a bit and don't have the amp or turntable on any surface prone to sympathetic vibrations.

But to the point I believe WAV's are the best but most people including myself are perfectly happy with any MP3 file at a reasonable Kb's rate.

But and a big but, many software programs for some reason just extract the data and do nothing else to the file. CD/DVD players have complicated software to equalise the sound built in, you don't know it's doing and what it's doing is making it sound better.

If you like to store your music collection to a digital media then fine but download a free program called Mp3Gain and it will correct the amplitude of your music, just research the program please if in doubt it just sounds far less distorted and all you need to do is adjust the volume a little higher.

Many burning programs will 'normalise' the tracks before burning, the same thing really and if making yourself a CD for the car you don't want to be adjusting the volume all the time so normalise the files beforehand.

As stated above you can't always get the track you want at a good bit rate or a WAV file, I once DL'd some music for someone and one of the tracks when normalised had a gain of 136 Db!

If I had not checked it would even on a measly 4.8 K rig probably would have left the guests wearing speaker cones.

Low end PA speaker sensitivity, how much sound it kicks out per watt.

100 Db output measured with a 1Kh sine wave at 1 Watt input with the microphone 1 meter away in an anechoic room.

So to get 101 Db I put in 2 Watts, to get 102 Db I put in 4 Watts, to get 103 Db I put in 8 Watts, to get 104 Db I put in 16 Watts, to get 105 Db I put in 32 Watts, to get 106 Db I put in 64 Watts, to get 107 Db I put in 128 Watts, to get 108 Db I put in 256 Watts, to get 109 Db I put in 512 Watts and to get to 110 Db I put in 1024 Watts! It's a Logarithmic scale you see and as you can see very easy to run out of power and thats why your headphones work so well I suppose.

Regards.

PS (Db) does not stand for dumb blonde

So, what's happening with LOHAN? Sweet FAA, that's what

Baldy50

Obvious!

I'm sure Kim Jong-un and the North Korean military would love to see something go up without a hitch for a change.

Funny if you type in 'PARIS' on your browser the predecessor to LOHAN you get loads of lovely pictures of the tower etc... Now try that with LOHAN!

Regards, Ian.

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