Control group
So where's the control group of women who didn't watch the soap or the violent show before having their level of aggression measured?
414 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2009
Connecting to the IPTV services (especially catch-ups like IPlayer) through the EPG is basically what you want. A consistent user experience with just one place to go to look for programmes. If it is on now, switch the tuner over to that channel and watch it. If it is on later, set up a recording. If it was on earlier, stream it over the network.
No need for a huge SLOW website-like interface for old programmes, which looks different from the grid-like interface you use for future programmes, which is hard for mother-in-law to understand, which means phone calls to me. (Basically I measure simplicity - and therefore suitability for public use - on an inverse scale of number of phone calls.)
My mother-in-law bought an object in an M&S sale for the sole reason that it cost 50p. She had absolutely no idea what it was, but "it was cheap!" and she simply can't walk past a "bargain". (It turned out to be a USB hub, so quite a good deal theoretically if not for the fact I already have two.)
I imagine most people are most interested in SSDs for their speed. The next most interesting number to me is power consumption. It's a shame that it doesn't feature much in these reviews.
My laptop runs continuously, mostly used as a desktop replacement rather than being lugged around. I was keen to replace the HDD with a SSD to increase reliability and lower power consumption, until I discovered that most SSD seem to have about the same power consumption as the equivalent HDD. That was disappointing. Would be nice if power consumption were included in the summary box.
"It is however on its way to become one by the nature of being the only way (or the only sensible no/low cost way) to do things."
Even if the internet did become the only way to communicate, that still wouldn't make it a basic human right. The human right would still be to communicate; the internet would still be simply a medium through which we could exercise the right to communicate (albeit a very important medium).
It's a coefficient, not a unit. You could determine it experimentally by measuring the length (or volume) of a piece of the material at one temperature, and then again at another temperature, and then divide the two measurements. Because you are dividing the same units the resulting ratio has no units. If you then divide it by the temperature difference you get the coefficient, whose unit is "per degree C". Hence "33.9 * 10^-7 / degree C".
I use a Google Calendar to set up long range reminders on the dates that the various long term things expire, including contracts, savings account special bonus rates, energy fixes, credit card 0% deals, etc. Set it up to email yourself a reminder a few weeks before so you have time to switch. I would prefer not to have ARCs but if you have any that aren't subject to the OFCOM ruling, this is one way to cope with them.
@Mark 65 hit the nail on the head (so to speak). Retail tradition is having lots of different stores for different things. That's exactly what Intel's AppUp product is, and exactly what Apple's App Store isn't.
Everything the Intel guy said was "wrong" with Apple should in fact be applied to his own product. Maybe he should have another look at Apple's sales statistics before commenting how wrong Apple is. They seem to be doing rather well actually.
When I saw the headline I thought I would get an article about someone finally making a mousemat with a built-in charging coil. Nope. Looks like that patent is still waiting to be grabbed.
The possible advantages are smaller or lower capacity batteries making the mouse lighter, and it can be continuously charged. Or, thanks to USB to the mat, it can switch off the mat until the charge drops below 50%, to avoid running the charger constantly.
Hey, don't say they don't do security theatre at the UK sea borders. Last year while travelling out of Dover on a coach trip, our coach was randomly pulled out for screening, and 5 bags were randomly pulled out of the hold for X-raying.
Fair enough, I suppose, random searches for drugs and so on. But then the 5 owners of the 5 bags were required to get off the bus and also walk through the metal detector. Now what, do you suppose, was that meant to achieve? They didn't search the coach itself, so anyone with contraband on his person is surely just going to leave it behind on the coach.
This is reminiscent of a few years ago when CRT monitors were standard and LCDs on their way. I remember looking forward eagerly to the day we all knew was coming, when LCDs would be the norm and nobody bothered with CRT any more. How far away it seemed. I guess it won't too much longer before we are thinking of spinning disks as somewhat quaint, but antiquated.
Ok, so here's the question, what other creative profiles can El Reg readers come up with? This should be fun.
I'll start with Coffee Pot Profile, which sends an alert to your Bluetooth enabled device to tell you how full the coffee pot is. (This crucial function, incidentally, is not without precedent. Webcams rose to their present prominence out of just such a humble beginning.)
You can already get polarising lenses in prescription glasses. Eventually I expect they will start offering prescription glasses with polarizing lenses which match the polarisation used in cinemas, which is a logical progression from where we are at the moment.
Lemme guess, 10000 people apply for the job, half of them receive "competitive salary" paycheques in advance but no-one actually knows who got the job, then a month before the event 4999 people receive demands to pay back the salary because - it turns out - it wasn't them.
I do like the competitive spirit though, it is in keeping with the games.
Crikey, all that to pay for a cookie? Even if it is a one-off, how much market penetration are you going to get by making people jump through all those fiery hoops?
On the other hand, here's what it takes to top up an oyster card:
Tap card on the reader
Say how much you want to top up
Pay with cash/card + PIN
Tap card on the reader again
Basically, for any process you are trying to get people to use, if the number of steps reaches double digits your process is going to fail.
There is no simple fix that will just "sort everything out". If there were, it would already be in place. This tax fiddle is performed by shifting numbers around and reclassifying them in ways that avoid the provisions of the letter of the tax law. If you change to a tax on income, those highly-paid, highly-intelligent accountants employed by Google and other big companies will simply shift the numbers around and reclassify them in a different way, so that they no longer look like income. Whichever bottom line you decide to target in your simple tax solution, there will be clever and probably-legal scheme to migrate the numbers away from it.
Hang on, in the absence of a link to the actual ITU statement, there is nothing in what was quoted from the ITU statement about self-driving cars. It just said they could navigate, much like the wife navigating when I'm in the driving seat, and foresee collisions, which is probably just a bit of obstacle detection. There's nothing to suggest "avoiding collisions" is anything more than automatic emergency braking. Is the lack of standards really the only barrier to self-driving cars arriving this year? I don't think so.
I find it really frustrating when pedestrians get to a crossing, press the button and immediately walk across before the signal has changed, which means by the time I reach it I have to stop at the red signal and wait for nobody because the pedestrian is long gone. If you're going to walk across the red signal anyway, leave the button alone!
Maybe it would help if the button only registered when pressed a second time after a few seconds of waiting.