Posts by Neil Barnes 5908 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007
but with all that effort expended to get the thing up there, I can't help feeling it might be nice to push it up out of the way somewhere rather than down to a watery grave, just in case we might find a use for it later.
(Also, it's pretty when it flies overhead every now and then!)
It's surely important to remember that brontosauruses (brontosauri?) are thin and one end, fat in the middle, and thin again at the other [(c)Monty Python]
Perhaps the fat bit could be used for temporary buffering, or to provide alternate routes for two-way messages to pass each other.
I'm sure we had this argument around ten years ago, and after an initial thrashing around it all disappeared quietly into the morning mist...
"Best viewed with"/"Only works with"... it's almost as if there were no such thing as web standards.
(Though there is the point that a choice for an uniformed user is no more than a lottery: how does he rate one over another?)
The scammers.
Who have spent - in various incarnations - centuries learning how to con people out of their money. If someone falls for it, is it their fault? If a bank has reason to believe that they're giving money to the right person, and they're not, is it their fault?
As it happens, I moved a lot of money from the UK to a foreign account recently. My bank required me to be there in person to approve it, irrespective of the fact that they pay smaller amounts to the same account every month. It was a pain, but I think a worthwhile one.
My late father was scammed years ago - in a complex scam at the time which took account of him calling the bank back and then disabling his phone line so the bank couldn't contact him. The bank refunded him fifty grand or so... (we implemented a new protocol where he would call someone he knew, like me, in future similar events).
It's certainly a bit odd that the printers claim that there is no demand for something, yet complain when someone else provides it.
I've noticed that (official) e-books of current works often display the noise signatures typical of OCR of scanned pages. You'd think they'd have the material in the original electronic form somewhere around the place... nonetheless, I wonder if publishers have heard of publish on demand?
As an aside: at a language school where I am currently trying to learn German, the school requires you to purchase a couple of books every two months to follow the course, but have absolutely no objection to a noticeboard outside the office where the new books are sold containing many offers by past students to sell their used books rather more cheaply.
Nobody can stop me watching a DVD I physically own. Nobody can stop me listening to a CD I own. Nobody can stop me reading a paper book I own. At least, not without knocking the door down first, which might cause the neighbours to raise their collective eyebrow.
As I recall, all those things that people though they owned as electronic leased copies have disappeared at the whim of the subscription company.
(As it happens, I choose to use electronic copies of those items in most cases. But they're copies made by me of physical media.)
Just wanted to appreciate that phrase again :)
But I can't help feeling that the whole 'own nothing' culture has a fundamental issue: sooner or later, _somebody_ has to own the stuff. And that seems likely to be fewer and fewer people (companies, of course) as time goes by.
When everything you use and need is owned by a handful of companies, you can forget goverment: you are effectively in the control of those few companies: what you see, what you buy, what you use, everything about you will be mandated by them. And of course the majority of the people simply will neither notice nor care about this.
Already we have a handful of individuals who control more money than some fairly large countries...
Ah, the configuration in which your shoulders and elbows share space with your neighbours to the side, your knees are rammed into the back of the seat in front (complete with hard knobbly bits just where it hurts), the seats can't be reclined, and the table is is no practical use whatever?
No thanks.
Some websites (youtube, google maps, duolingo for example) would much rather you opened in the app than in the browser (android), and slap a big button over the website. As far as I can see this comes from the website, not the OS, but of course I could be mistaken.
What's the great advantage of an app, apart from the inability to kill the adverts?
Like you, I have not read the book in question - but pretty much any technical book I have read in the last fifty years includes phrasing early in the introduction or colophon similar to 'trademarks are the property of their respective owners'.
Yes, a company has to defend its trademarks and branding, but when you're defending, better I think that the guns should be pointing outwards and not at your own feet...
Easy. Given that most basic foods are essentially indistinguishable out of their packets - think potatoes, rice, pasta, beans, frozen peas - the algorithm is 'reduce the price'.
I find it fascinating that my local (DE) supermarket has its own brand beans at 69c, it's expensive brand at 99c, 'outside' brands around 1.99, and Heinz for 2.59 or thereabouts. For some reason, the own brand shelves empty first and most frequently. The same applies to the various rice brands available, the various pastas and so on.
The BBC used to use widely an XLR mains connector. It was considered pretty safe, until someone playing around discovered it was just possible to force a connection to a nominally non-compatible audio XLR connector... a certain amount of scope for mischief was available. Even after they were banned, five pin xlrs were still used to provide (via different pins) various SELV voltages.
I'm with you on this. The French Thing[tm] puts on the brake whenever you turn off the engine, or if you lift the switch. But it only takes it off again if you start to move forwards or backwards (usually a second or two later than you'd like it to) or if you lift the switch a second time, but only if you have your foot on the brake. Which removes any element of finesse from e.g. a hill start and requires extra automation to achieve it.
Instead of a cable and lever (y'know, like since forever) we now have an electronic system talking to the ECU, a couple of extra motors out there in the mud and rain, and brake pads which can't be changed without the appropriate (dealer) controller to release the calipers... putting the switch to enable the cruise control immediately behind the brake switch, so it is regularly hit by mistake, is merely a courtesy detail.
Thank you for saving me from pointing out what everybody should know, but many don't.
I suspect the reason for using 12V for 'legacy' systems is that the components of those systems are already out there, debugged, tested, and readily available. And spares are easily available off the shelf from a high street motor factor. 48V seems a logical choice: it's high enough that the thickness of the current carrying conductors can be reduced by half (i.e. a quarter total cross-sectional area) while not getting into any of those tricksy high voltage regulations - 48V is still considered SELV in most jurisdictions, I believe, so e.g. double insulation isn't required.
Have you seen the thickness of the main leads from the battery on a car to e.g. the engine earth or the starter motor? Thick as your thumb, these days...
Or in other words, we hate just selling you an overpriced car for a one-off payment, and we want to skin you a little at a time forever. And connected services looks like a nice easy way to do it, because data, right?
I wonder how we even managed to live without such beneficial semi-deities micromanaging every aspect of our lives?
My French Thing[tm] vehicle occasionally starts beeping at me and instructing me in large red letters to stop the engine... when the engine is already stopped. I have not yet found out why.
Curiously, my thirty year old Italian Thing suffers only from proper faults: most recently a leak in a fuel pump and a sad contactor in a starter motor. Oddly enough, any connectivity in that vehicle is amazingly well hidden...
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