Posts by Robin A. Flood 18 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Feb 2008
I was walking through Girona (Catalunia) today when a woman went past me at warp factor five on a soundless scooter, about Vespa size.
On the side it had "ELECTRIC BIKE COMPANY".
It made me realise that mixing these silent devices and pedestrians in the same area may not be a good thing. So lets have a Harley Davidson sound effects chip in the motorbikes & scooters, and maybe a nice 427 V-8 recording in the SMART cars.......just to keep us walkers on our toes.
I must express my rage, disappointment, surprise etc., to read all these comments and find not a single tie-in about "something new for the Head of the FIA for use in his sex orgies".
Remember this phrase for winter holidays in Germany:
"Ich habe die Heizung gern auf Volldampf, aber sieh' Deinen Kugelsicherer BH aus wenn's Dir zu warm ist".
Prost !
RaF
Clive Harris writes: I find the rabid hatred of hybrids quite interesting, but I suppose it's inevitable from someone who's invested heavily in an obsolete technology and who can't admit they're wrong.
So let me see: the exciting new save-the-future technology is to take fossil fuel and burn it in an automobile engine to generate electricity which is stored and then used to turn the wheels and propel the vehicle...
In contrast to the old obsolete technology, which is to take fossil fuel and burn it in a automobile engine to turn the wheels and propel the vehicle.
The only amazing advance Toyota have made is in the area of PR, persuading people on one side of the Atlantic that their automobile is somehow propelled by fossil fuel AND electricity, and that a car that does 45mpg US is fuel efficient.
why stop with a 100 metre power cable? says Michael.
Depends on how well the cable connectors are screwed in each end, and what speed you are doing when all the slack's been taken up, Michael !
Car owned: 2004 Ford Galaxy TDi, seven seater, 90,000kms, urban fuel consumption 6.5l/100 which is 44mpg UK or 52mpg US. On long autopiste/autobahn/motorway runs, about 15% better.
Toyota Prius ? I think not.
I take issue with the Toyota being nicknamed a "Pius". Hardly a Catholic Car.
A far better name is the "Priapus" which indicates the type of people who buy one....
I was about to write that one never sees this car in Europe as nobody buys the Prius, because the vast majority of European cars in the same size category cost less to buy and have far better fuel consumption, when lo !
I passed one on a back road this morning - going very very slowly to achieve that famous 45mpg.
I've had a WiMax connection here in Catalunia since last summer and it works well, constantly at or even above the bandwidth I signed up for (which you can't say for Telefonica's copper-wire broadband.) There are occasional weather-related drops in connectivity but I'm 15kms from the tower, so can't complain.
Many towns and even small villages in Catalunia are installing free WiFi. It's run by the municipality and financed by what British call "rates" and everyone else calls municipal taxes. Access is for residents only and you get a password from the townhall if you are living there. System seems to work well.
The Beckhams when living in Madrid called their newly-born son "Cruz" which is a girl's name - in Spain traditonally used - like "Dolores" meaning pain - after a difficult birth.
The birth wasn't reportedly painful but guess the old brain cells were suffering, you Perfect Couple you.
Here in Spain I've had a broadband WiMax link for nearly a year, and other than the occasional thunderstorm passing the base station causing rare drop-outs, it is excellent. The uplink and downlink speeds are consistantly what I pay for, or higher - unlike broadband over wire by Telefonica - and I rate the service at 99%.
I see the French government over the border to the north of us is also pushing WiMax in rural areas; I guess once again British dithering is going to leave UK citizens in the lurch as usual.
Neither, it's meece or meeces. Don't you ever watch Tom and Jerry ? Back to subject. You can make a pretty good directional wifi antenna with an old windscreen wiper motor to steer it. An acoustic mike will log onto your persistant cough and follow you round the room with your PDA or laptop...hey ! Let me out of here ! Who turned the lights off ? Why did that Boeing 777 land short......?
I was chatting yesterday to a retired teacher who had brought a large group of German teenagers on holiday here to Catalunia last year, and said "they all had a great time". I looked at him and he said "of course, in the area where they come from the (parential) divorce rate is under 30% so we have far fewer behavourial problems than children from areas of Germany where the divorce rate is well over 50%...."
Incidently I do frequent runs to see what speed I'm getting from Iberbanda S.A., my Spanish provider. I only signed up for 512Kb (WiMax in Spain is more expensive than via Telefonica's phone lines so I took the lowest speed to save money) but I consistantly get over 500Kb both up and downlink.
My friends on Telefonica's broadband-over-telephone wires who have signed up for a 1Mg connection ran the same test and found on average they were getting 300Kb up and 600Kb down. Their perception of my 512Kb connection is that it's faster than their 1Mg connection. Kind of obvious......
Mountainous Spain with well-distributed communities has an excellent record on WiMax. My house uses a link perhaps 15 kms from the base station; I have a square microwave directional antenna on the roof and a four pair cable ethernet connection from that to my PC. The only time the link goes down is during extreme weather conditions such as torrential rain. I would not change it for the world and especially would not replace it with a broadband connection via the hopeless Telefonica phone company.
Can manufacturers spend a fortune ensuring their billions of cars have EMC (Engine Management Computers) which are not susceptable to electromagnetic interference from any source, right ? Right. So Land Rover Freelanders from the first five years of production frequently had to be towed away when parked near any Italian police station, because the Italian police use radios which locked the Freelander's Immobiliser. The manufacturer screwed up. So unlikely on aircraft systems ?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
