Posts by Anna Logg

IBM wafts stat minimum redundo terms under noses of Global Tech Services staff

"An ex-gratia payment that equates to statutory redundancy terms" not seeing how legal minimum is ex-gratia :-/

Home Office cops an earful for emergency network feck-ups - £3bn overbudget and 3 years late

I read elsewhere that the requirement for resilience during power failure has been watered down, no big surprise as providing battery backup for cellular has always been expensive in terms of rollout and maintenance. Then there's providing that resilience all the way back to the core network and out again.

The whole concept of using a commercial cellular network for safety critical use is just bonkers.

Shocker: UK smart meter rollout is crap, late and £500m over budget

Re: Nah.. They won't be getting a grilling..

OK just doing this in my head but assuming 15 mins. fridge door opening per day that bulb swap saves about 25p per year.

BT, beware: Cityfibre reveals plan to shovel £2.5bn under Britain's rural streets

thanks for saving me the trouble of typing that

As a resident of the Bournemouth area the company name did seem familiar and I did the same quick Companies House search; I think all there is to show for it here is some dug up roads and pavements. Things got very messy! :-

https://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/15102417.100_roads_dug_up_and_work_abandoned__men_finally_jailed_for___160m_broadband_fraud/

or line wrap friendly URL:-

https://tinyurl.com/y8p72xb6

'Clearance sale' shows Apple's iPad is over. It's done

Re: Education PC seller says Apple is no good in that market

"Unfortunately it was all about Mike's ability to speak fluent cockney and haggle, which isn't something you need to see every week."

My favourite episode is where he's buying an old DS (IIRC) in rural France and tries the 'crafty cockney haggling' palaver on with the seller, who doesn't speak any English.

The wait is over ... Nokia's BACK!

I struggle to see these as "Nokia" phones in any meaningful sense when there is no Nokia DNA / IPR in them, it's a 3rd party product with a Nokia sticker on it.

Radical 5G rules proposed, but UK can address woeful coverage right now

Wow the 5G bandwagon is certainly gathering momentum.

Why all this talk about coverage? 5G is about capacity/bandwidth. not coverage; good luck providing any sort of coverage in the proposed 28GHz or 60GHz bands, for example.

50 years on, the Soviet-era Soyuz rocket is still our favorite space truck

"The goal was to develop rockets usable both to defend the Soviet state and get it into space."

"After several prototypes, the Soviets produced the R-7, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile."

ICBMs are a defensive weapon?

Analysts apply Occam's razor to Tesco Bank breach

Re: Points

After their 'devaluation' a while back that'll buy a set of 'X factor' coffee mugs or some such.

New MH370 handshake and wing debris analysis suggests rapid descent

Re: doing Conspiracy theories...

Indeed, given that after over a year and millions of bucks spent they haven't found the haystack, let alone the needle.

Lessons from the Mini: Before revamping or rebooting anything, please read this

Re: I am astonished

"I had one of those too... I liked the way the gear stick stuck out through the dashboard"

My wife had a Renault 5 like that; presumably they had a big pile of bits left over at the end of the 4's production run so used them up on early 5s.

Re: Are you saying the mini revamp was a success?

Indeed, anybody who thinks that "the redesigned VM Beetle had shown that the market liked a small city car with some character." clearly has no clue what size a 'small city car' is.

Tesla's big news today:
sudo killall -9 Autopilot

Re: How do you audit and qualify a neural net?

"Quite so - "better than the meatsacks" is a very low bar to clear"

No it isn't. Like I said, I reckon, as an imperfect driver, I have around a 99.99% journey success rate; if it wasn't that order of magnitude for pretty much everybody, every journey I make would be littered with accidents...and they're not.

"This won't really work until everyone has better cars."

Plus motorcycles, lorries, buses etc.

Re: Good grief

"And finally, as has been pointed out many times, human drivers are terrible. "

No we're not. A quick mental calculation and I reckon my personal driving success rate (i.e. arriving at my destination without having an accident) is around 99.99%, and I reckon I'm pretty average. The huge majority of vehicle journeys are completed without incident....and Google's autonomous cars can manage a mere 1500 miles between accidents, it seems. I'll stick with 'terrible' human drivers, thanks.

What's 5G? Who knows, but Qualcomm's designed a modem for it

Re: fool around with 28 GHz

This is what I've found baffling about 5G from an RF hardware perspective; these mm wave frequencies are expensive to generate and don't go anywhere. OK there really aren't any easy options for providing an RF channel 800MHz or more wide, but how the heck this can be turned into a commercially viable cellular system eludes me.

Smell burning? Samsung’s 'Death Note 7' could still cause a contagion

"Consumers can be surprisingly forgiving with companies that they trust."

Indeed. TalkTalk still have customers.

Nokia crawls towards comeback with new phones announcement

Re: Disappointing if true...

I don't think the manufacturers have bought any Nokia (as in the actual company) IPR, just the right to use the name; so fancy phones with fancy tech seem unlikely to me.

Ford announces plans for mass production of self-driving cars by 2021

Re: Take control when necessary

That's going to be a barrel of fun if there's 40+ ton of truck 20 feet behind you at 55.99 mph at the time....

Vodafone: Dear customers. We're sorry we killed your Demon

Re: Just goes to show....

I'm still using a circa 1999 Freeserve email address for some of my personal email; I thought it had finally POPped its cloggs a year ago when there was a two week outage, but no,much to my surprise it came back to life. I'm gradually shifting everything over to a GMail account as surely the Freeserve account will die at some point, I stopped using them as my ISP over a decade ago.

Microsoft's Windows Phone folly costs it another billion dollars

Re: Extinguish...

..and given that HERE Maps / Drive + won't be supported on WinMo 10 shortly, my one reason for buying into WinMo platform has disappeared.

http://360.here.com/2016/03/15/important-information-about-here-apps-on-windows-phone/

The PC is dead. Gartner wishes you luck, vendors

Am I reading this right?

"Shipments of PCs have sunk over the last five years - in revenue terms, not literally - from 343 million units in 2012 to an estimated 232 million units in 2016. Escherich stated: "In terms of revenue, the global PC market has contracted from $219m in 2012 to an expected $137m in 2016.""

So for 2016 estimated shipments of 232 million PCs will only generate revenue of 137 million bucks? - about 60 cents per PC? No wonder they're in trouble, or I've missed something.

RIP Prince: You were the soundtrack of my youth

Re: Unexpected

Whilst we're listing rock stars dodging the Grim Reaper, Iggy Pop was 69 this week.

Mitsubishi 'fesses up: We lied in fuel tests to make our cars look great

This is an interesting technical paper IMHO, covering type approval tests versus more 'real world' tests:-

http://preview.tinyurl.com/grbhwg6

Re: Only 10%?

"The intention is that it's used purely as a relative comparator, not an absolute, so that you know that a car with an official consumption figure of 70 mpg will be more efficient than one with a 60 mpg figure, and not that either will actually deliver the quoted consumption figure"

That would work if they all cheated in the same ways, but it seems they don't, judging by the differences between real world figures found on the 'net and the official ones - some cars with some drivers are pretty close to official figures, others way off.

It would help if cheating was made more difficult - measure a vehicle's emissions whilst it achieves its stated 0-62 time for example.

Is this the last ever Lumia?

The IPR?

Oh hang on, they didn't get that either.

I assume Ballmer wanted to buy a mobile phone company, Nutella doesn't want one.

How to help a user who can't find the Start button or the keyboard?

Re: Do organisations not use 360 feedback for support services?

A problem I've seen at several employers / clients is that there is no 'expert user' or whatever for applications, so people turn to IT support. I use Word pretty much every working day, but there are many many functions within it I've seldom/never used. So, when I want to use one of these functions it's just me and Google to try and find out how to do it. Microsoft's major league dicking around with the GUI over the years doesn't help either.

Aircraft now so automated pilots have forgotten how to fly

Re: Yet self driving cars are perfect?

"If a Google car gets confused, it can simply pull over and wait for a towtruck."

Maybe not, if there's 40 tons or more of HGV a few feet behind it at 59.99 mph.....

Ten years in, ultra-high-def gets a standard

..and 'Cloud Enabled'

EE recalls all 'Power Bar' USB batteries due to 'fire safety risk'

@Suricou

Spot on, don't know how on earth you've attracted a downvote???????

Keep your stupid drones away from piloted aircraft, rages CAA

Re: Consequences

This is what ingesting a crow at the wrong moment does to a jet engine:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1jZvlFmqQU

The longer version of the video is an object lesson on how to deal with serious doo-doo happening to the plane you're driving IMHO:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KhZwsYtNDE

I agree with other commentards, a drone would make more of a mess.

Smart Meter biz case still there, insists tragically optimistic UK govt

Re: I had a smart meter fitted last week

"But you don't need a smart meter to do this. Fit a clamp and display and you can get all this for a few quid. Nothing like the money required for smart metering. Lots of them can even work out the pounds as well as giving an energy figure."

Many local libraries will lend you one for free for a month, by which time the novelty of saving the cost of half a Mars bar a year by turning the loo light off more promptly will have worn off, job done,

SHOCK! Robot cars do CRASH. Because other cars have human drivers

Re: Honestly? Really?

"Humans are terrible drivers on the whole."

Well we're not that terrible, or 99.99% (estimate based on my own driving, don't have time to Google at the moment) of journeys wouldn't be completed without accident.

Re: Luddites

"Trouble is, that sort of utopia only really works if *ALL* cars are autonomous"

Make that 'vehicles' rather than 'cars' and I agree.

iPhone case uses phone's OWN SIGNAL to charge it (forever, presumably)

Re: Doesn't surprise me

CE does not require testing, manufacturers can self certify based on their own judgment call on whether testing is necessary or not; although they still need to present information relevant to the product to a Notified Body.

Re: Doesn't surprise me

Pretty much all cellular radio technologies vary the amplitude of the radio signal itself at a frequency within the audio range, so there is a finite possibility that audio equipment (particularly equipment with high gain and relatively poor screening) will be sensitive to this modulation and produce an audio output from it. Particularly so with GSM IMX.

RADIOACTIVE WWII aircraft carrier FOUND OFF CALIFORNIA

Post WW2 the UK and USA, at least, had more obsolete nearly new propeller aircraft then they knew what to do with (many were just pushed over the side of carriers), so nuking a few was hardly a great loss.

Sony tells hacked gamer to pay for crooks' abuse of PlayStation account

Re: ..

"One of the reasons I've never (and will never) give MS my credit card for my xbox live account. Pre-paid vouchers all the way."

Same here ..now. Around 40 quid's worth of transactions appeared on my PayPal account from Microsoft for XBox related stuff I hadn't bought, PayPal said not our problem, so gift cards it is from now on.

My self-driving cars may lead to human driver ban, says Tesla's Musk

Re: All or nothing

"The only way I see this working (in all honesty) is for it to be universal, and immediate. IE: December 31st 20XX - any driver worth his salt heads out on their last chance power drive on the road to nowhere"

Agreed - but this would be logistically and financially impossible, hence I really don't see how it can be made workable.

Re: Am I the only one...

Average drivers have to drive with lots of other traffic and pedestrians, and don't tend to drive the same few miles over and over again (well OK, apart from the daily commute)

Re: Am I the only one...

I'm particularly looking forward to that one occurring whilst I've got 44ton of lorry bearing down on my car-bot at 56mph!

Vodafone: Can't make calls on our network? Use Wi-Fi

Re: EE femtocell (“Signal Box”) no longer available from EE …

Not sure about the EE ones, but the Vodafone ones need to be registered on their website. I get text messages from Vodafone every so often informing me my femtocell has been moved, please register your new postcode blah blah, even though the thing hasn't been moved.

Telly behemoths: Does size matter?

Two for joy

"If you watched Magpie, you probably went to a comprehensive."

Yes and yes :-) I think Susan Stranks was the first woman I had 'feelings' for :-))

My late father regarded the BBC as a hotbed of communism (despite the fact he worked on the track at Vauxhall), so obtaining permission to watch anything on the beeb took considerable negotiation.

Marconi: The West of England's very own Italian wireless pioneer

Re: Timeless wireless communication ...

Speaking as an RF Hardware engineer who often ends up working on system debug, you wouldn't believe the number of misunderstandings this still causes. SW group enumerate the first physical transmitter in a radio system as TX0, HW group refer to it as TX1, and so on.

I've yet to meet a human being who starts counting on their fingers at zero!

Re: *ahem*

Whilst we're doing forgotten heroes of wireless communication, J. C. Bose remains top of my list:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose

Car? Check. Driver? Nope. OK, let's go, says British govt

Re: "Driverless cars are the future..."?

Me too, they probably made the same speech about DAB.

Re: @Chewi - Bristol? Try taking them to Clifton...

Like they said; surely it would have to apply to all road users, not just cars.

How would this work?

Mixing driven and driverless cars on the public highway would surely be a recipe for disaster.

An overnight switchover by everybody is logistically and financially impossible IMHO.

So what's the roadmap?

Living with a Renault Twizy: Pah! Bring out the HOVERCRAFT

Re: Wrong location

Mediterranean tourist areas and er.. Brockenhurst!

http://www.hireatwizy.co.uk/