Posts by Anna Logg 176 posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
Indeed, my only exposure to Vista was around 2009 when my daughter bought a new laptop (Dell 1545 IIRC) with 3GB of RAM, running Vista. I had no problem with it, startup was reasonably quick and it was generally a bit faster than XP. No real upside to Vista I could see, but it didn't seem anywhere near as bad as I'd heard.
The problems are a bit deeper than that though; an emergency services network (hopefully...) includes end to end redundancy and backup. Providing a meaningful (as in hours) level of RAN power backup in case of mains failure (generally via good old VRLA) is expensive to roll out and maintain. Then there's redundant backhaul etc.
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.
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
"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.
sudo killall -9 Autopilot
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
"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,
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.
"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.
"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.
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