Posts by Bob Wheeler 381 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Oct 2007
I doubt they will go for the high end, as they already have the Range Rover still doing nicely after what some 30 years. Plenty of other makes there are well in the SUV/4x4 bracket.
So it will be interesting what they come up with at the replacement point of the real utility (plus some comfort) end of the market.
Two tales spring to mind.
Back in the days of 3.5 inch floppies, the metal sleeve had come off the floppy and had lodged in the drive, so the user jammed the floppy back in thinking the sleeve would re-attach, when that didn't work, he took a second floppy and really jammed that on in, thinking that both would then come out, that's when he phoned for help.
At another customer site they had an HP/Compaq EMA12000(?) SAN. For some reason the local IT bod wanted to tidy up the cables at the back, so he pulled them all out and all very neat and tidy re-routed them and went to plug them back in (without taking any notes of which cable plugged into what). Two things struck him as odd, the cables where not always long enough, and the connectors did not seem to match (the old thick SCSI connectors), So with pliers and a hammer he pulled the cable connector to stretch them and hit them home. He was only forced to call for help when after the fourth day the SAN was still down and the business was complaining.
"It also advises considering whether to create "a specific legal status for robots, so that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations...""
With the current state of technology, on so many levels this is just barking mad. How does an electronic person, such as those automated vacuum cleaners know about it rights? What about those electronic persons working the assemble line down at the Ford plant?
What are these folks eating/drinking/smoking when watching late night re-runs of the film 2001?
@ David 132
Your spot on in all your points, it is only the "refuel/recharge time" that is last element to be resolved, and that is only an issue for long distance journeys.
Most days I only average about 30 miles distance, so recharging over night is no issue. However I love long driving touring holidays, the last one was just over 4,000 miles in 6 six weeks around Europe. But is exceptional for many people, and I could always hire a car for such trips.
At the moment, the other biggest factor is the cost for the cars. In time this will come down when production volumes go up
As mentioned in the article, a fire on-board a flight is the crew's worst nightmare, even more so if your at cruising height.
While the probability of the Note 7 catching fire may well be low, it is still a possibility that is can happen. This is why they also banned flammable liquids, and also why they banned smoking (nothing to do with health reasons), all about a fire in a metal tube at 30,000 ft.
Some folks have talked about pranks, yeah well, most pranks are only funny for one side of it, the prankster.
Happy Bar Humbug
All the above points have been raised and debated so many times. I really don't understand why the Government just does not go back and amend the act to included the safe guards that any data retained can only be accessed on the production of a Judge's court order.
It's a similar problem with the RIPA act, far too many public bodies could access information on the nod of the their bosses rather then via a Court Order.
One of the other aspect of human labor being replaced by machines is the tax take that the government will have.
With each job replaced, the government will lose the TAX, NI etc., taken from that employment. the machine is not paid, so can't be taxed in the same way.
So while overall productivity may increase, and unless those displaced workers get other employment, there is less tax being paid and more unemployment benefits being paid out.
If, or maybe that should be when, the shift to automation becomes a significant factor, governments will need to re-asses how they balance the books.
In the UK, Waitrose supermarket has hand held scanners. You pick an item off the shelf, scan the bar-code, put the stuff in your bag. At the end of your shop, at the check out point, that pull the information from the scaner, and you pay.
Every now and then that do a spot check that everything in your bags have been scanned.
My wife loves it, not having to fill her trolley, unload it at the checkout, reload it again once it's been scanned.
From my understanding, when the controllers give an instruction "Turn to heading 270", the pilot responds with a confirmation message "Turning to heading 270". This allows the controllers to know that the pilot has understood the message, and has acted on it.
With this system, just hitting the 'OK' button on the screen does not confirm to the controllers anything other than the message has been received.
Or am I missing something here?
Back in the early days of PC's in the work place (IBM PC era) there was three acceptable ways of fixing faults
1) Promise the PC an extra 10 volts
2) Promise the PC a date with te fax machine/copiers
3) Slip the cleaners £5 to accidentally to push of off the desk/down the stair well.
Many years ago, I took a call, the user stated that "the network was down". I looked over at my management monitor (Novell Managewise at the time) and no, all my servers where up and in the green.
Talked with the user to try and narrow down the problem and it turned out that their mouse had stopped working.
Moral of the story is that users are there to do their job, not ours. To them, when a bit of kit stops working/misbehaves and it stops them doing their job then them, at times, it can be that the sky is falling. Our job as the techies is to support them, to keep the kit working so they can do their job.
Sure it can be frustrating at times when users misuse technical terms or seem to be unable to cross roads safely by themselves, but that's the job. Besides is cheers up a Friday morning reading about other peoples fun times on the hell desk.
One day I has a call from family member name redacted asking “How do I uninstall and re-install Windows Explorer”. Err year right, um no, you can’t do that I explained, what’s the problem I asked.
Him, being an avid reader of every monthly computer magazine (especially if they has a free cover CD), had installed SIX free trail anti-virus programs at the same time. When he powered on his computer they were all trying to scan the hard disk and falling over each other.
It took me day to sort that out, and two minutes to pull the data cable from the CD drive.
About a month later I had another call, “I can’t load a program from the CD drive.” Oh, well those free CD’s are notorious bad quality and can never be relied on to work on every computer I replied.
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