Posts by Tony W

Air

An intensity of 120 dB is equivalent to one watt per square metre. 130 dB would be 10 W/m^2. There would be inefficiency in converting this sound to a continuous air flow (assuming this works at all - it's not clear from the diagram). The air would then have to be collected and sent to a windmill, with further losses, and the windmill would probably have low efficiency in such a low power air flow. Then as Mark85 pointed out, planes don't take off continuously, and even if they did, they wouldn't pass the "generator" continuously. So, if you're lucky, maybe a few watts from a big array. There is no way that this device will give a useful output, let alone repay the energy and cost that it would take to make it.

Maintenance?

I'd like to buy a printer that can be maintained. Like, cleaning the pickup roller and replacing it when worn out without disassembling the printer down to almost the last nut and bolt. I was disillusioned with HP when I found that on my "professional" A3 printer, the waste ink tank was full but couldn't be emptied and cleaned without breaking plastic parts. This is environmentally criminal as well as pissing off the customer.

And braces

Maybe the aircraft's own lithium batteries could be put inside one of these bags?

Too much auto?

I wonder how many of these calls are from people who rely on the auto power-off function? I find it hard to imagine how you could dial by accident if the phone is off and you have any sort of lock set.

Thanks Vodafone!

I changed from the default browser as soon as I received my phone, because Vodafone had populated its bookmarks with a whole page of their own choices that could not be deleted. Security by annoyance?

Is it only me

who would like someone to explain why the Chinese like keypads when they don't use an alphabet?

Will no-one think of the ads?

Fixed permissions are needed so devs can make money from ads which is fair enough. But the only permission they need for this is Internet access, so there doesn't seem to be a good reason why other permissions shouldn't be controlled by the user.

Apart from that, surely no app in the stupidly named play store should be able to make itself ununinstallable?

the cost of making TV has fallen by less than the rate of inflation

My head hurt when I read this. I think you mean "risen".

Many times zero equals

And the result of a web petition or poll is worth what it usually is. Amazing that anyone takes any notice of them.

Religion

Getting higher quality sound than the common herd is a sort of religion with some people. You will no more convince them that their chosen route to heaven isn't valid than you will convince religious fundamentalists of the same thing.

Maybe that's because music can have a direct line to the emotions, but, like sex, the effects aren't under conscious control. So people need a way to get in the right frame of mind. Concentrating on the finer points of sound quality forces you to pay attention to the actual sounds, and avoids distracting thoughts. And a feeling of inner satisfaction at being able to hear subtleties that escape most people probably helps as well.

The exact means doesn't matter so long as it achieves the desired result. In the mid 1950s a friend of my father's explained to me how listening to Chopin on his acoustic gramophone was a far superior experience to the new LPs. Perhaps it was the slower wow of the newer medium that bothered him. But I think it's more likely that, having invested money and emotion in a superior wind-up gramophone, music on an ordinary LP record player just didn't turn him on.

Gaana

apparently.

Recognise the limits of people

If you're driving, the law requires you to pay continuous attention to the road and traffic. But it's been well known for many years that human beings are incapable of closely monitoring, e.g. a radar screen, for long periods, without occasional distraction that will cause them to miss something they should have noticed. How many drivers can put their hands up and say they have never noticed something later than they should have done? Sensible people drive in such a way as to make allowance for occasional distractions, but even this doesn't totally deal with the problem. So self driving cars are the best way to deal with a vehicle's interaction with other moving traffic.

Real problem, sensible solution.

Leaving stoves on is a real problem. And as with many other problems that IoT is invoked to solve, that's probably the wrong answer. How about a motion sensor? Or even a rethink of stoves? You can't set a microwave oven to run with no time limit so why shouldn't stoves be the same?

Evidence

The vehicles will presumably be well instrumented, so there should be video evidence all round plus records of speed, braking and so so on. It should be a lot easier to find the cause of an accident when an automated vehicles is involved, than it is usually.

An app for that

There are Android apps that will turn WiFi off and on depending on what cell tower you're connected to, so you don't have to remember to turn it off when you leave home. I installed one to save battery and control attempts to connect to open networks. Takes a couple of seconds to override when I want to. Don't know about iPhone.

Wrong answer

First, the security solution already exists. I don't think I've ever seen a gas oven that didn't turn off the gas if it wasn't alight, and it would now be illegal to sell one.

Second, money would be better spent improving appliances' basic functions, but most people won't pay the extra. With most irons, the soleplate is unevenly heated and the temperature swing as the thermostat cuts in and out is too wide. Human minds are flexible enough to cope, but automation would probably play safe so the temperature would be lower and clothes wouldn't be well ironed. People would switch to manual and wonder why they'd paid for connectivity.

Anyway this is not the future I was expecting. Having a robot to set the controls of the iron so I can do the ironing seems a sadly limited ambition.

A plague

I use Word and also have to deal with LibreOffice documents. Both drive me to distraction on occasion but LibreOffice more often. At least Word doesn't insert page breaks and lots of new paragraphs within footnotes when saving to .doc (as needed for Amazon to convert to Kindle.) Word occasionally puts footnotes on the wrong page in a complex document - but then oddly enough, so does LibreOffice.

I am much in favour of creative writing being done in plain text but it's necessary to identify formats such as quoted blocks and subheadings so they can be preserved in subsequent formatting. Not always so easy, and in a long book I'd prefer to avoid doing it by hand.

An odd one worth remembering

Power socket with live-neutral reversed. Everything plugged in works perfectly. Equipment with earth-neutral reversed. Works OK (apparently) when plugged into normal socket. Put the two together: stops working. Luckily - because the metal cased unit was touching another that was properly wired. Muggins called out at 2 am. By the time I arrived everyone else had gone home. I moved the unit to get to the mains plug (so then it wasn't touching the adjacent unit) and replaced the fuse.

A narrow escape I've never forgotten. I could so easily have had my hands across the mains, which since the substation was in the building would have been a good 250 volts.

Moral: don't ignore the possibility of two separate faults, not very dangerous individually, being lethally combined. In this case both errors were made by professionals who should have known a great deal better.

Misleading conclusions

This study has been comprehensively debunked. See

understandinguncertainty.org/misleading-conclusions-alcohol-protection-study

So?

So it will be an automatic camera. How many people do anything other than point and click anyway?

By the way, the famous S5 camera gives very nice photos in bright sunshine but is dreadful in dim light. To adequately illuminate all those pixels often takes an exposure so long that camera shake blur makes the picture far fuzzier than on my old phone that had 1/3 of the "resolution".

Cyclists and motorists behave EXACTLY the same

Considering they are all people and very often the same people, it would be very strange if it wasn't so. And the way people behave isn't specific to road transport, it applies very generally.

They will mostly break rules when convenient if (a) they don't themselves think it will do much harm to themselves or others that they consider important, (b) there isn't much chance of getting caught and (c) they think their mates do the same thing. But which rules they break varies with the circumstances. Cyclists can't break all the same rules as motorists and vice versa.

In many cases people will seek to justify their rule-breaking with spurious arguments or minimise the extent of their rule-breaking: I was only going x over the limit, speed limits cause motorists to bunch up and increase danger, it's safer to jump lights and/or cycle on the pavement, data should be free, I pay too much tax anyway (for the huge VAT-free cash payment brigade).

I have my share of horror stories about motorists cyclists and bikers but I won't bore you with them.

I am not a professional psychologist but I base these comments on 60 years of observing people on the road and in other places.

If this is true, you would expect that the way to change behaviour is with a combination of enforcement and campaigns to alter public perception of acceptability. This worked to a large expent with drunken driving. But enforcement had to come first because people rely on their peer group to judge their behaviour and this is very hard to change from outside.

Criminal activity

I don't see why this criminal activity is MS's problem. I'm glad they want to help but surely the police should be interested. It's just fraud. People do a similar thing calling at the door and saying there's a problem with your gutters. It's not the house builder's fault.

Anyway what do you say to these callers? I'm tempted to string them along but usually haven't got the time.

Replaceable batteries?

What happens when the batteries won't hold charge shortly after the guarantee ends? I had a lovely cleaner that couldn't be opened without breaking it, even with a full security screwdriver set.

Why don't these manufacturers adopt the cordless drill battery model? Ecologically (and economically) terrible to throw the whole thing away when the battery gives up.

What will change?

I've found that life and health insurance companies demand complete disclosure of your medical records anyway. At age 55 I was refused insurance for being too ill to work because my records showed that I had been referred to a psychologist at age 24. It was such a minor thing that I'd actually forgotten the event - a single visit with no treatment nor followup. I'd had no psychological problems in the 31 years since, during which I'd been happily married and continuously employed. But insurance companies don't take risks.

So, although I'm in principle in favour of privacy, I wonder what difference this will make in practice. A doctor's appointment made in your youth can already come back to bite you when you're old.

Mixed blessing

Even more maps and charts with text that can't be read when enlarged because it's only a few pixels high.

How many more? .

A quick look In Play Store shows quite a lot of app names starting with "Android". It'll be interesting to see how consistently the rule is applied. It would be easy enough to screen for such names at the first application so clearly Google haven't been that bothered up to now.

A +minus point

When Google+ was introduced, they removed the long-standing and useful ability to force inclusion of a search term by putting a + in front of it. Could we have that back please? Yes you can use quotes but in my experience they don't work 100%.

Pet password hates

- companies that don't allow you to paste a password, and don't allow the entered password to be visible. So either you have to have a short one that's easy to remember and type accurately, or else you have to write it down.

- companies that ask you for a memorable word that THEY specify: Like "favourite piece of music" (mine changes weekly) or "mother's maiden name" (my grandparents didn't speak much English and my mother's name was wrong on her birth certificate, so I know two versions.) Etc etc.

- companies that reject passwords that don't comply with their rules, but they don't tell you what the rules are. Sometimes they don't even tell you that there ARE rules, you have to work out for yourself why your registration isn't accepted.

I have hundreds of passwords, so I use KeePass with a long pass-phrase, including a number that hopefully I won't forget until I'm too old to care. The KeePass data file is synchronised to my mobile via DropBox so I can also use their mobile app. I don't feel that my security is too bad. But I think it would be better if more companies allowed pass-phrases with spaces.

In one word - transients

Economists should take lessons from electronic designers. Calculating steady state response is easy, but often it's the transients that will blow the fuse. Abolishing planning will make some people instant millionaires and push others into major debt (yes a house does have very real value when you downsize or move to a cheaper area.) Included in the latter will be a lot of old folks who have no way replace their lost asset.

So how do you get from here to there? Any hint of a possibility that the law might change will lead to instant upheaval and instability. That's not a political problem, it's a real economic effect - just one that most economists that I've read don't deal with.

Add to that, the idea that free market heaven would be established if planning were abolished is nonsense. A few big companies would carve up the whole thing between them, take control of the vital transport links and (as usual) those that shout loudest about the free market would be the ones working hardest to fix it in their own favour.

Of course when we had few controls, what happened was that people built to take advantage of the existing often state-established transport networks, and the state scrambled to keep up with water, sewage, schools, hospitals and so on. Not an ideal model, but hard to work out how to replace it without some ... planning.

And no, I don't support rent control in the least - I'm old enough to remember its dire effects in London.

Very old news

I can only imagine that the author isn't familiar with modern hardware other than computers. Two old examples from my own field: digital hearing aids and high end sound level meters.

Usually I'm reasonably happy to choose the price/features point that suits me. But I was caught out when something I thought was a basic feature turned out to be an expensive extra. I argued that I'd told the sales engineer what I needed the equipment to do, and eventually haggled the vital "upgrade" at half price. It taught me a lesson.

Dog bites man

If a streaming service keeps working when it's subject to a sudden huge increase in demand, that's news. I would have been very surprised if the feed had kept working and no doubt so would the STV IT people. I'm not an expert in these matters, just going on experience.

Not surprised they wouldn't let the BBC stream it either. The relation between the BBC and Scotland is in itself a relevant matter in the debate.

Security?

With one device to access all the PCs, phones, tablets etc. on which you have accounts, you'd better look after it well. Unless it really is implanted. The way some crooks work, if is is implanted, probably not a good idea to have it too deep.

And how long before someone works out a way of cloning, it, as is done with radio car keys?

I hope "hard to bind a third party to a contract without their consent" is an understatement. I thought only the Government could do that.

Not Turing's finest hour

Turing was a very clever man but he hadn't grasped the open-ended nature of human conversation, with its almost infinite number of possible variations, so he underestimated the time before his test would be passed, and the amount of hardware needed to do it.

I predict that the Turing test won't be genuinely and convincingly passed for very many years. And that's just as well. I can't see a lot of legitimate uses for a computer that can successfully fake a human life history and experience, but I can see some nefarious ones.

Latest version, not always greatest version

My wife updated her rather old iPhone while we were on holiday. It gave constant trouble, and she was cursing until she could get to reliable WiFi to roll it back. Mr Google says she's not the only one.

How to make news popular?

You're asking for news that's still basically about politics, just a bit different. But the other news outlets that aim to be popular don't do that. They go for celebrities, sport, bashing whatever group is out of favour and dissimilar from their audience, and inaccurate sensational stories about health and the weather. That seems to work pretty well. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that any sort of hard news can be very popular.

I don't think hard news has ever been popular with young people, apart from a few politics geeks. They're usually preoccupied with sorting out their own lives. That's just one of the reasons why they shouldn't be allowed to vote.

Don't expect software to save you

Security software is sold with the false promise that it will virtually guarantee safety. People need to learn that it won't, and to be very paranoid, because they really are out to get us.

It would help to ban zip files as email attachments, they are almost only used by spammers (and people who mistakenly put incompressible files in them.) Apart from that, people need to learn to look both ways before opening an email as they do (well, should) when crossing the road. I've nearly been caught a few times but have learned to ask myself a couple of simple questions:

"Why would xxx (HMRC or whoever) make me open an attachment to find what it's about, rather than put more information in the body of the email?"

"Could I check the information on their web site instead?"

There's no hope for those who think they might have won a lottery that they haven't entered, but it is possible to train reasonably smart people to be a lot more cautious, and it pays dividends in reduced calls to sort out infected systems.

Why does anyone expect people to remember?

Even a casual internet user would likely need passwords for PC logon, ISP, email. router admin, Wi-Fi, bank, building society, Amazon, eBay, gas and electricity on-line accounts, Facebook and Twitter, as well as non-internet PINs for credit and debit cards. It's just not reasonable to expect human beings to remember all these. Most people I know have their pssswords written down, or have simply forgotten the less frequently used ones.

The only practical answer is to use a password utility such as provided with some AV programs, or a stand-alone utility such as Keepass. For me it's an essential piece of software.

I avoid creating passwords wherever possible but even so I have 392 passwords ... of which probably 1/4 are defunct and I will never need about 3/4 of the rest (only I'm not quite sure which 3/4.) Some of these belong to relatives in case they ask me to sort out problems with their email etc.

But they're easily managed with Keepass, and available on my desktop PC, laptop and phone, by sharing the encrypted password file on DropBox.

I only have to remember the master phrase, and I use that often enough to remember easily. Should I change it regularly though? Surely it it's secure I don't need to, and if it isn't, by the time I change it, it would probably too late.