Posts by Alan Brown

Volvo: Need a new car battery? Replace the doors and roof

Re: Safety Questions

Volvo, who have also been known for producing mad concept vehicles they won't ever put into production because they _can't_ make them safe enough for mass market.

Re: Maybe what's needed is

Once you decouple fuel from drivetrain, you could easily make a stirling-based hybrid.

All the work's going into IC engined hybrids because that's where all the work has gone in the past. It wouldn't be particularly hard to make a IC/stirling cogen setup either.

Re: Bang the car, short the battery

They'r eonly different on the front window unless you have a seriously expensive motor.

Try a sharpened centrepunch on a side window to see what I mean.

Price rises and power cuts by 2016? Thank the EU's energy policy

Re: Physics!

There are some cogenerating boilers in the market (sterling cycle) but by all accounts they've not proved particularly reliable.

Re: @ TheOtherHobbes

"So is your pension which relies on these industries. "

If you're under 50, I feel fairly safe in predicting you won't get much anyway.

If you're under 40 then the odds are pretty good that retirement will be at age 75+ and pensions will be miserly.

Re: Biomass != fossil fuel

" Producing biofuels on an industrial scale actually needs fossil fuels to power the process."

Yup - and in the case of USA subsidised corn-ethanol, there is more fossil fuel used in the process than equivalent ethanol energy produced at the other end.

Re: A British thing?

"A 20% reduction in gas usage isn't actually difficult. Just insulate a lot of houses properly."

Unless gas prices double, the payback period is too long to make it worthwhile in most cases.

Setting a target is of no use whatsoever unless there's a way of incentivising getting there. Yes, you can mandate better insulation on new builds, but you can't do that for something prebuilt - and in a lot of cases it's impossible to improve insulation without incurring massive costs and/pr planning hassles due to NIMBYs and laws about "changing the visual character" of an area. (This has been widely used to prevent PVC doubleglazing being installed in various conservation areas. Alternatives are generally 3 times the cost. Insulating single-brick dwellings is even more fraught with issues as the best way to do it is to fit insulation as extrerior cladding)

Apple slams brakes on orders of (not so cheap) plasticky iPhone 5C

Re: explains why investors are dumping Apple shares

If you're in an "emerging market" try buying kitty litter anywhere. You just can't get it.

Petfood is readily obtainable.

It may be that this is the true metric of a developed market.

Apple's Steve Jobs was a SEX-crazed World War II fighter pilot, says ex

Re: Past lives

Who says that hw wasn't a member of the hun who got shot down in that past life?

Kids hooked up with free Office subs at Microsoft-addicted schools

Re: Many tools for the job?

"Students that have been taught to THINK will easily figure that out for themselves!"

Studnets who think for themselves are usually branded as "difficult" by teachers - most of whom are teachers because they can't get jobs anywhere else. (Yes I know there are very good teachers - my parents were among that group, but most of their colleagues were flat out THICK)

Samsung Galaxy Note 3: Once, twice, three times - a Very Large Phone™

Is it waterproof/tolerant?

The Sony is.

As others have said. It's a nice phablet and I want it, but I travel a fair bit to SE Asia and region locking is a dealbreaker.

It was eye opening in the backblocks of Myanmar to see locals using Note and Tab units for _all_ their business work. The portability and connectivity means that they're able to be used anywhere, including down at the market when procuring whatever's needed for the day. Users commented that it makes account reconciliation trivial.

Slip your SIM into a plastic sheath, WIPE international call charges

Re: A neat trick

It was 1 January 2001 in the book. But 1984 is running a few later so we can forgive him.

Custom ringback tones: Coming to your next contract mobe?

Re: Engaged

"The number you have dialled is purely imaginary, Please rotate your reality 90 degrees and try again"

Island-hopping Beardy Branson: I'm dodging rain, not taxes

what's a sq acre?

Enquiring gnomes wish to mine.

Tape rocks for storage - if you don't need to, um, access your data

"A simple trawl could send a tape-robot into melt down."

Only if you use simpleminded approaches to searches.

Indexing metadata is absolutely key. I can tell you what is on my tapes, WHERE it is on my tapes. WHEN it was recorded and what the SHA256 checksum is. No trawling needed to pull up XYZ file.

As for SSD: The currently quoted longevity figure is a 3 year shelf life. Drives flag themselves as "bad" when they estimate that the data obnboard will not be recoverable if left switched off for 12 months. (This is LONG before the drive becomes completely unusable)

Retaining business records for a long time is a legal requirement in most jurisdictions and your DPA request may well be trumped by Barnes-Oxley requirements, Inland revenue, etc etc etc.

Brazil's anti-NSA prez urged to SNATCH keys to the internet from America

Re: It might make them feel better

"What matters is how many companies important to the internet, such as Microsoft, Cisco, Google, Facebook and so on" CHOOSE TO BE "based in the US and can be pushed around by its government"

Thatr's understating it a bit. Even companies which aren't based in the USA become beholden to the US government everywhere in the world, should they have a single office in the USA (Several prestigious UK universities have recently found this out the hard way).

The only way around it is to create separate companies doing business in and outside the USA, and chinese wall them (Which is what IBM has done). Even then the USA government and its agencies (including the IRS) are trying very hard to batter such divisions down.

Ofcom, it's WAR! Mobe networks fire broadside over 2G spectrum pricing

Re: For perspective

"How bad is it really? Wikipedia indicates 75,000,000 active lines. The total fee for these carriers goes from GBP 48.8 million to GBP 225.9 million. This increases it from GBP 0.65 to GBP 3.01. i do think it's unlikely carriers will just eat the charge."

They could (of course) hand back large chunks of the band they hold and are just sitting on to keep out competitors.

ECHR rejects free speech plea over offensive online comments

Re: The European Court of Human Rights are ..

"Edwina Curry as basic revenge on behalf of a hundred million disgruntled eggs."

Ms Curry may be a lot of things, but she was absolutely right on the issue of salmonella in the UK chicken flock and excess cases of food poisoning as a result of it being tolerated.

Why vilify a whistleblower?

Remember this was the same UK where feeding ground up cows,sheep etc to other ruminents (cows) was regarded as a good thing - and where attempts to stop the practice were unsucessful until CJD started showing up in humans.

Control panel backdoor found in D-Link home routers

Re: None so blind, etc.

"So there's factory firmware that provides a backdoor"

It's pretty much accepted that every piece of embedded kit has some secret sauce to allow the makers to intervene when everything is badly screwed up, although usually it's in the form of some soopersekret login/pass pair.

Having said that, the sheer number of unconfigured routers I see on wifi isn't confidence inspiriing. There are still a lot of old pieces of kit out there even if more recent stuff has a random key or forces the user to set one.

Wanna run someone over in your next Ford? No dice, it won't let you

Re: Is it clever enough....

"Anyway, don't worry about oversteer. Cars have ESC and simply will. not. skid. Saw it on Fifth Gear."

I hope you remember that next time you run into black ice on a bend and find yourself approaching a bank sideways (I was travelling at 10mph, so no comments about speed thanks.)

Re: Umm...

"I've tried auto parking on different cars, it is shit..... I can park in spaces MUCH tighter and more accurately than it can..."

So can I, but it's pretty clear that there's a large number of people who can't park for shit.

Self parking is NOT going to stop people double parking, parking on double yellows, on corners, footpaths or on the wrong side of the road (yes, it _is_ illegal in the UK, unless park lights are left on) but it'll go a long way towards sorting out the wankers who leave 3 metre gaps front and rear.

Brace yourselves, telcos: Ofcom triples cost of 2G spectrum holdings

When will Ofcom....

1: Think about allocating the old AMPS 800Mhz band for 2/3/4G?

2: Think about allocating the original 450MHz NMTS (The norwegian system that AMPS was based on) for the same purposes?)

several reasons

You can run 2g/3g/4g in either band if the channelling lines up (it doesn't for 4g, as noted. Allocations aren't wide enough to handle 4G so there needs to be some juggling anyway)

The issues noted are that 900MHz works better in rural environments and indoors.

This means that O2/Voda have a distinct competitive/technical advantage (noone else has these bands) at a subsidised rate, simply because they were early players. There's nothing whatsoever stopping them handing the bands back or making better ouse of them, But if they don't pay for them why would they bother?

London plod plonks, er, pull request on EasyDNS

Re: "are suspected to be involved"

"Crime? I thought copyright infringement was a tort."

It is, up to a threshold (much higher than in the USA).

Organised copyright infringement _for profit_ can be a criminal offence. As a means of civil disobedience it's not.

Re: WTF?

The same City of London police who have a high membership of the cult of scientology and will arrest (or threaten to) anyone displaying a tshirt or sign which says "Scientology is a dangerous cult" anywhere near Bad Clam HQ (which just happens to be in.... the City of London)

RIP charging bricks: $279 HP Chromebook 11 charges via USB

Re: Does Microsoft get paid?

Even if it idoes have (micro)SD there's still no reason to support FAT - I'm happily using f2fs on my sd cards

Brit inventor Dyson challenges EU ruling on his hoover's energy efficiency ratings

Re: Dyson have a point.

"Someone must define a 'standard carpet' with an exact laboratory-standard mixture of dust particles of various sizes and a measured quantity of cat hair."

FWIW, they have. The issue is that testing takes place once, with a new device and there isn't enough material tested to actually fill a container/bag - so all that's being measure is initial efficiency - which to be frank, is crap on all of them.

Some time back a british gentleman managed to patent a system where the exhaust air is redierected down onto the carpet/floor just in front of the suction head. The result was that the same cleaning efficiency can be achived with about 25% of the power(*). As far as I'm aware there is only ONE cleaner on the market which makes use of this innovation.

(*) It also means that the fine dust spray which all vacuum cleaners emit (even the HEPA filtered ones) is eliminated and efficiency sapping fine filtration is largely unncessary because with the air being recirculated continuously the filters have a much greater chance of catching everything.

Digital 'activists' scramble to build Silk Road 2.0, but drug kingpins are spooked

As history shows

When you shut down one popular system on the Internet, dozens more pop up to take its place - whether that system was for good or evil.

I was wondering how long Silk Road would last and now I'm wondering how many forks will grow out of this event.

TWELFTH-CENTURY TARDIS turns up in Ethiopia

Re: So, how many still missing ?

A lot of the "not lost" ones are edited to hell and back thanks to syndication (stations would cut film to fit adverts and drop the ends on the floor). Finding another archive helps piece together the originals.

The same phenomenon was noticed with Star Trek TOS. Entire scenes were found to have been chopped out to make eps fit into advertising schedules (syndicated series are passed from station to station) and restoring them from the canonical archives (which someone at paramount had the sense to preserve) during the 1980-90s made things make a lot more sense.

Hollywood: How do we secure high-def 4K content? Easy. Just BRAND the pirates

"No, I mean thieves. If a book/film/whatever is on sale at £10 and you steal it; you just stopped the creators getting their cut of that £10. If you copy it - it's the same thing. (And I'll type this slowly so that you can keep up). THE. CREATOR. DOES. NOT. GET. PAID."

If I sell or give a boook/film away the creator doesn't get paid either.

Which is why there have been attempts to shut down the secondhand book and music markets (That's where the First Sale doctrine comes from).

Microsoft: Oh PLEASE, HTC. Who says Windows Phone can't go on an Android mobe? – report

Re: Hey Microsoft - here's an idea

" in fact, the GPL licence is deliberately compatible with this kind of business model."

Um. No. You can make quite a bit of money from GPL. Just ask Red Hat.

Why du

"Personally, I think a dual boot phone would be awesome"

Why dual boot when you could run both using vmware or similar? (Blueksy thinking)

Re: I fell for this once

"Windows CE as a mobile phone wasnt good as a phone"

Hence the reputation for living up to the monkier "Wince"

Having said that, it was tolerable on an iPAQ, but winfones were less than usable.

Dutch oven overcooked in World Solar Challenge

Why can't there be

An entry from scandanavia piloted by an inuit named Sven? It would of course have to be called the Volts Wagn.

Cambridge withdraws from World Solar Challenge

Re: It Was The Design

"One certainty is that it needed more development and validation work before it was shipped. "

One can also say that about Beagle (and not to use heavily patched prototyping airbags full of earth atmosphere water vapour as the actual flight devices)

Exciting MIT droplet discovery could turbocharge power plants, airships and more

Re: Nothing will make airships viable.

The formula for burning involves combining hydrogen from the fuel with Oxygen and Carbon from the fuel with oxygen.

The Co2 is lost, but the H20 is retained. As long as you can get close to the magic "1 gallon of diesel gives 1 gallon of water" you can make up the rest by putting a compressor onboard and using that to pull helium in/out of the gasbags. (Even if it doesn't get that close, it makes the compressor's load easier provided the weight penalty isn't too high

Given the size of these aircraft, I do wonder a bit whether enough emergency lift can be generated to prevent microbursts downing the things (That's what took out most of the airships. Weather radar wasn't around back then. Piss poor designs like the R101 didn't help either)

Re: Nothing will make airships viable.

"Why not use a vacuum?"

You're about 200 years late with that idea and the problem remains the same now as it was then.

The bouyancy provided by the vaccum is more than offset by the weight of the containment vessel.

Re: Nothing will make airships viable.

"The hydrogen only went up AFTER the rocket fuel coated outer canvas cover set on fire and the fire then burned through the gas bags."

That trope has been pretty much debunked. Research on the paint used along with chunks of the surviving fabric showed that while it would burn if provoked, it was self extinguishing almost immediately whnen removed from a heat source. The only way it could have burned as seen in the newsreel is if something was keeping it going from the inside.

Indeed, if the skin had been as flammable as claimed. there wouldn't have been millions of unburned fragments of it falling to the ground - it would have all burned up before it got there.

Hydrogen burns with an almost invisible flame and it's conjectured that with the brightness of the burning fabric (lit and sustained by hydrogen flames) quite effectively masked the burning hydrogen. Some substances emit pretty bright light in a hydrogen flame too - limelight springs to mind.

Re: Nothing will make airships viable.

"And why not use hydrogen - we should be able to make it workable now."

Gaseous hydrogen messes up just about everything it's in long-term contact with. Metals go brittle, but so do most things you'd think of as suitable envelope material (rubber, plastics, etc etc)

O2, Tesco Mobile go titsup for 220,000+ Brits in 13-HOUR 3G cockup

Bad week for giffgaff

They started having problems on Friday, thanks to an apparent database cockup - customers were unable to activate or topup until late Monday, etc.

'Safest car ever made' Tesla Model S EV crashes and burns. Car 'performed as designed'

Re: "Electrical fire"?

"The really great thing about a car fire is that if everyone is clear of the vehicle you don't have to put it out."

If you don't put it out you have to repair the road after it burns out.

'Stupid old white people' revenge porn ban won't work, insists selfie-peddler

Re: Um...

Old Testament, (blood sex and revenge), superceded by New Testament (Love thy neighbour, etc)

If you subscribe to "an eye for an eye" then you're missing the point.

Re: The law?

"Now whip me if I am wrong but where permission has been given to take such artistic photographs the photographer has the rights to said pictures..."

The photographer has to get a model release in most countries.

As for selfies, the recipient is not the photographer - for obvious reasons.

It should be possible to claim copyright and have photos taken down, but the fact remains that if an image is on the net then it will never ever disappear.

Seagate to storage bods: You CAN touch this (at last). Stop, HAMR time

Re: 20k rpm?

"Those offer maybe 5-6x more IOPS per GB"

The _ONLY_ advantage that spinning faster gets you is faster sequential reads. Anything involving random headseeks is only fractionally faster than previously, but you lose a fraction more time waiting for things to settle.

That's why Seagate and others are looking at hybrid storage with flash write caching.

Re: Space and power

"In the mean time, shingle is a more obvious choice than HAMR if high speed is not required"

If you think disks are slow to write now, wait until you have to overwrite sectors in a shingled setup.

I won't touch them for home or work use, even with someone else's pargepole. There's just too much to go wrong when you're partially overwriting adjacent tracks.

Re: Why laptop size?

"I can't understand why the Quantum Bigfoot drives died out"

They were fragile as hell, slow and not particularly reliable even when tended lovingly. I have a lot of other drives left kicking around from that era but no Bigfoots ever made it to the 5 year mark.

A £30,000, 295bhp 4G MODEM?!? Must be the Audi S3 Quattro, then

Re: Automatic

"Here's a thought: maybe you could actually use the handbrake for its intended purpose."

It's a parking brake - and using it at lights, etc is an instant license fail in a lot of jurisdictions.

Having said that there is ZERO reason whatsoever for modern auto transmissions to creep when idling and I wish makers wouldn't do it (Toyota actually _added_ creep to the Prius, because they thought that drivers would demand it)

Samsung: Sod off Apple, we've made gold mobile phones for way longer than you

Re: Not unlike real gold

"But there are certainly advantages to using it such as it being a highly efficient conductor and the fact that it doesn't suffer from corrosion."

It's the best heat conductor/diffuser around too. Apparently a solid gold frying pan is the best way to fry an egg.

(A National Geographic author tested one weighing about 3 pounds in the 1980s)

As for gold cased phones - not such a good idea if they obscure the antennas.

Official crackdown on Apple fanboi 'shanty town' ahead of London iPhone launch

Re: Trin Tragula......

"Carphone Warehouse for example is just round the corner in Oxford Street."

Would you really want to buy anything at Carphone Whorehouse? The phones are one thing but being badgered into buying well overpriced accessories and unnecessary insurance grates.

EU move to standardise phone chargers is bad news for Apple

Re: Standardised connector

"No, we'll end up with micro-USB"

With all its attendant problems about plug flexing breaking the contacts on the board by fracturing solder joints.

I've had to rework the solder joints on several mobile phones. The existing SMD designs just aren't built for this kind of activity.

What about wireless charging standards?