Posts by Neil Barnes 3735 posts • joined 18 Apr 2007
If the need for another, indeed any, live mic as a way to control a computer. I look forward to the day when someone asking 'what's the weather, computer?' will be told 'open the bloody curtains and look outside, you moron!'.
I have colleagues, and they seem on the whole sane and balanced people, who swear by these things - to the extent of having multiple instances in the same room 'for stereo' - so there must be something in it... but I fear I am not the target audience.
They're pretty much like fridges or washing machines these days: no significant difference between them, and advertisers orgasming over fractions of a millimetre or pointless pixel counts, and all working like mad as to who can have the most irrelevant but expensive adverts...
the one with the 'pointlessly overpowered for its basic function' phone in the pocket, thanks --->
The CAA are pretty keen at the moment to have everything carry Electronic Conspicuity transcievers, but there's an awful lot of GA stuff out there that doesn't (including, I guess, pretty much every drone).
Still, one can hope that the GA pilots read the NOTAMs.
that there might be a time when every application on a W10 desktop would have the same look and feel, the same set of windows decorations, the same UI elements. And it might even look good.
Er, sorry, was in a parallel universe for a moment there. Blame the painkillers.
Possibly. The missus bought a note 8 a couple of weeks ago which was immediately updated to MIUI 11, don't seem to have any issues beyond the usual keruffle of changing phones.
Coincidentally (or not?) Virgin just flagged that they're sending her a new sim for 'compatibility' reasons (though I've received nothing) - I suspect that may be something to do with the merging with whoever it is that Virgin are merging with.
I can agree wholeheartedly with what DoubleLayer said, but go further: unless I explicitly decide to open an account with an online provider (e.g. Amazon, for the sake or argument) then any relationship with me ends when the purchase is delivered: all data save perhaps a legal minimum recording the purchase for guarantee purposes should be deleted. The example might be a bricks and mortar store where I walk out having handed over cash and with the goods and a receipt in my hand. No further contact.
If I do choose to have an account, then the provider may record that which I purchased, and other of its products that I may have viewed but not purchased. It should not use that information for advertising beyond on-page in-site suggestions, and most definitely sell it to other sellers.
In either case, where I came from and what I looked at there is none of their bloody business.
Neal Stephenson's System of the World trilogy has Newton as one of the main characters, and presents him in a less than flattering light. Mind you, few of the characters in that tale are ones to whom you might choose to look after your kitten when you went on holiday...
Is the huge number of online sites that insist on a password login when it is really inappropriate - for example: you want to pay a pencil? Certainly sir, you just need to log in first.
I've lost count of the times I've had to not log in to make purchases in the real world...
I've been a Xiaomi user for some time - though something of a luddite as I use it as little more than a phone; I never browse from it and have only a couple of apps that I use. However, that amount of tracking is something worthy of more investigation... the Forbes piece suggested that it was just the use of the browser - is that the case?
It would be handy if Word would allow you to set the number of spaces of the full stop - but then enforce it automatically. I can see their logic in asking 'is this a mistake' but once you've told it, it can silent correct either way.
Of course, this is the old tabs vs spaces argument for millennials :)
---> obvs...
I suspect, from talking to a few commercial pilot friends, that you'd get a significant fuel saving simply by putting electric motors in the wheels; it seems that a significant portion of the fuel load is burned simply getting from the terminal to the end of the runway. Jet engines aren't terribly efficient at low speeds, it seems.
In a similar vein; living as a child in a Victorian vicarage halfway down a fairly steep hill, I woke one morning to a loud bang. Finding the bed still level I apparently went back to sleep. Meanwhile, the grown-ups were investigating the 30-ton artic that had jack-knifed on the hill and planted its cab into next door's kitchen.
I recall a lot of acro jacks holding the wall up when they took the lorry out...
Which is not to say that it should be done. The problem is with web sources that use other than html+css and don't provide a fallback if the other is not available at the receiving end, not with the browser.
Page provider's argument: I can do all these exciting things if I know more about your browser.
My argument: you don't need to know also the colour of my socks. Code to the minimum required *by the customer, not your marketing department* and add bells and whistles optionally.
With the exception of nuclear fission/fusion, all power generation is powered by the sun. It's just a matter of when the sun's energy went in; might be yesterday or it might be real time, or it might be a few million years ago.
Of which - has anyone done the sums yet to see how much wind and solar generators affect the climate/weather? They're both trapping thermal energy and outputing it as thermal energy somewhere else... but I don't know how many gigawatts you have to pull from the environment before it's noticeable.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Join our daily or weekly newsletters, subscribe to a specific section or set News alerts
SUBSCRIBE
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2020
