Posts by Anna Logg

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

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/

Acer Chromebook 13: The best Googletop on the market?

Re: One for dad

I think Chrome OS (or tablets) should be compulsory for technophobes

FTFY

Samsung makes investors happy with $1bn share buyback

Re: Desperate times

Spot on - Nokia threw billions into the share buyback furnace in the 2000s, achieving diddly in the process.

Buy Your Own Device: No more shiny-shiny work mobe for you

"...but this whole article read like an advert."

Indeed, I would expect an article to have some mention of alternative products / solutions at least: this just reads like a PR release from the company in question.

Sink your teeth into OCZ's ARC 100 SSD sizzler with tasty home-grown chips

I'm baffled as to why Toshiba have decided to keeping using the OCZ brand when it was well and truly devalued by the ~50% failure rates on some products.

Tough Banana Pi: a Raspberry Pi for colour-blind diehards

Re: Colourblind

Upvote for the first Stroudley reference on The Reg

It's BLOCK FRIDAY: Britain in GREED-crazed bargain bonanza mob frenzy riot MELTDOWN

Tesco

Judging by photos of the scene at my local one they're now operating a "Kick n'collect" service

Software firms are over-valued, says Huawei

Re: Definitions

You mean development as opposed to research? Design of new products was considered development in the various companies in the field I've worked for (including Nokia & Huawei.)

Sailfish OS tablet is GO: Fans stuff cash into Jolla's cap in hand

Re: Will Nokia buy Jolla?

"Nokia has partnered with Chinese manufacturer Foxconn to build and distribute the N1"

So, presumably a Nokia design built by Foxconn then; NOT a rebadged Foxconn product.

Re: Will Nokia buy Jolla?

"The N1 is foxconn rebranded kit"

I've still seen no factual evidence that this is the case, is there any?

NOKIA - Not FINNished yet! BEHOLD the somewhat DULL MYSTERY DEVICE!

Re: Nokia laughing at Microsoft..

Is there any actual evidence that this is a Foxconn design rebadged for Nokia? Sure, it's manufactured by Foxconn, but then they've been making stuff for Nokia for a decade or more, that's a whole different kettle of fish do doing the original design work.

Behold the Lumia 535 NOTkia: Microsoft wipes Nokia brand from mobes

Re: Naming/Numbering

Well a similar strategy doesn't seem to have done BMW any harm.

Samsung slams door on OLED TVs, makes QUANTUM dot LEAP

I've had this feeling for a while, now that OLEDs are just about becoming mainstream, they will be sidelined by 4K - apart from anything else the latter is always going to be easier to sell to Currys punters on the basis 4K is a bigger number than 1080.

Why Comrade Cameron went all Russell Brand on the UK’s mobile networks

Re: Kill two birds with one stone

I produced a feasibility study on doing just that for an infrastructure manufacturer back in 2008, and I've seen it done in Holland, so no reason why not. Don't mount the antennas behind the area blades though!

Happy 2nd birthday, Windows 8 and Surface: Anatomy of a disaster

Re: Pulled off on MS Office?

Much the same here; having used MS Office most working days since '96 it took me a couple of years to get my MSO 2010 proficiency up to MSO 2003 levels. The only small advantage I can think of to 2010 is the live preview of the potential results of a copy/paste action. Frickin' ribbon crammed with dumb ass templates / styles that seems designed to make my boring data analysis look like a Disney storyboard...and for some bizarre reason the ribbon defaults to the top of the screen, reducing the working area on widescreen monitors, which seem to be the only choice these days.

Vodafone does it in two places at once: Carrier aggregation to boost 4G

Well, meaningless big numbers provide good material for press releases, whereas "our indoor coverage is a bit less shit than the others" doesn't :-/

Personally the only way I can get reliable indoor coverage is a femtocell, and I'm not particularly out in the sticks (Hampshire coast).

Coughing for 4G, getting 2G... Networks' penny-pinching SECRETS REVEALED

" In your correspondent's opinion, to have regressed to the two-decades-old sound quality of EHR as a matter of course is penny-pinching of the highest order "

Really?. Don't think I've ever heard anyone moan about the actual sound quality of a mobile call in those two decades; dropped calls yes, lousy headsets yes, all sorts of other factors, but not the speech codec quality.

Music-mad Brits drive up hardware sales too – claims BPI

Re: "Copyright exception allowing them to make a private copy of a music CD"

Nope;until now there has been no legal right in the UK to create a backup copy of a music CD you own, unlike computer software on CD-ROM.

On test: Samsung 845DC EVO 3-bit Toggle MLC and 845DC PRO 3D V-NAND SSDs

Re: Odd use of concentric

Indeed, "concentric" is surely the wrong word; "centric" and "concentric" aren't synonyms!

BT: Hey guys, we've developed NEW MOBE TECH! It’s called... 2G

Re: Let's party like it's 1989

The only place I ever saw Rabbit phones used in anger was the Hutchison/Orange office in Bristol, and they probably had no choice in the matter!

Silent, spacious and... well, insipid: Citroën's electric C-Zero car

Re: Electric cars just aren't there yet.

Batteries and electric motors have both been under development for over a century, we're way way past the 'easy win' phase of development hence it's difficult to see electric cars in anything like their current form making much progress.

A first-world problem solved: Panoramic selfies, thanks to Huawei's Ascend P7

Re: Truisms Spoken Aloud

When I worked for them a few years back the Chinese Overlords pronounced it how-whey in a slightly Geordie fashion. Going back to the mid 90s many Americans I met pronounced Nokia Noe-kee-ah in an attempt (presumably) to make it sound like Ikea.

Windows XP is finally DEAD, right? Er, not quite. Here's what to do if you're stuck with it

Won't some of this stuff be running on XP Embedded?

"That “somewhere” can mean anything that’s not a PC – so passenger information systems, kiosks and airline ticketing systems.

And let's not forget ATMs: two-thirds of the country’s 60,000 cash machines are also, as of today, still trucking along on Windows XP."

Support for XP Embedded doesn't end until 2016, presumably a good chunk of the above will be running on that.

FWIW I was sitting in the pub the other evening, guy comes in and takes the Quiz Machine to bits (I assume he was invited...), in order to replace the monitor. When rebooted it showed a Win 2K Pro splash screen :-)

The Reg's desert XP-ocalypse aversion plan revealed

I'd start by going over to www.ninite.com, as that will create a custom link to automagically download the majority of programmes mentioned so far.

Hundreds of folks ready to sue Bitcoin exchange MtGox

Rule #1 of litigation: ensure that the party you are suing has the means to pay any potential settlement in your favour.

"The exchange has claimed to have 127,000 creditors and liabilities of 6.5bn ($64m), with assets of just 3.84bn ($38m)."

Fails Rule #1 then.

Desperate Venezuelans wiped clean of bog roll

Re: DESPERATE VENEZUELANS WIPED CLEAN OF BOG ROLL....

there's a (c)rapp for that

Ofcom ploughs up UK spectrum fields, reseeds them with 4G

Re: Double the power needed at the phone end?

All other factors remaining equal then yes, the mobile would have to transmit twice as much power to maintain a balanced link. Seldom that straightforward in practice, but upping the base station maximum transmit power by 3dB isn't the 'easy win' it might first appear to be.

@ James 51

..the same as will happen to the millions of smart meters and other M2M appliances that use GSM modems, they won't work. How OFCOM intend managing this issue - if they intend doing so - will be interesting to see.

Nokia Siemens slim-down continues

@Mage

Speaking as one of many ex-employees, it didn't do the ex Nokia Networks folk much good either.

UK's first 4G network just switched on - and it's not from EE

well good luck anyway

Nobody from Ionica onwards has made wireless broadband access work financially, but maybe now is the time when the finances finally work out. Maybe.

Thank Freeview for UK 4G by mid-2013 - NOT the iPhone 5 nor EE

Re: iPhone 5 not compatible with UK 800MHz band

Presumably the iPhone 5 supports LTE at 1800MHz though, so should work on the EE network.

DAB dad Pure deploys DVR

Re: Could be good

Same here, DMX mini system CD player started skipping after 14 months, then the DAB radio started losing its tuning memory randomly (both common faults judging by Amazon reviews). PURE's only repsonse was to offer a discount on a newer PURE product - and that discount was more than Amazon's normal price anyway. No more PURE products for me.

AT&T to mothball 2G network by 2017

could be interesting trying this in the UK

..given that the majority of these "smart" utility meters being rolled out at great expense use GSM modems for communication IIRC.

Gone fishin' with Nokia

Way to go Andy! The spirit of Seymour Bybus lives on!

SkyDrive slips snapshots into cloudy wallet

Re: Image Compression

There seems to be no way of changing the PC app so that full size is the default upload though; I doubt if I'm the only one that's accidentally staretd uploading a batch of pictures and then relaised it's defualted back to 2048 pixels wide again :-/

Avaya poaches Huawei veep Culmer to run UK ops

@Taylor 1

Having worked for Far Eastern companies I suspect it's more a case of lack of local authority to change anything without consulting a vast range of managers back at HQ.

Analogue switch-off hits London today

what about repeaters?

"the remaining digital channels [will] become available in all areas".

Even to those on repeaters which will only broadcast the "Freeview Lite" channel selection????

My mum lives in Weymouth, and her range of channels has actually decreased post DSO, because she's on a repeater.

Nokia v Apple nanoSIM format war: Victor will be named next month

Re: NFC

Software SIM? No thanks, I rather like being able to swap my phone number between phones in seconds.

Philips 42PFL7666 42in 3D LED Smart TV

Re: distract from the dullness of the content

Nope, becuase stereo sound is almost certainly part of the original production, wheares the TV adding some random light show of its own is not.

A million TVs to go dark across London

Re: when

April 18th guv.

HP offers contractors a choice: 5 per cent pay cut ... or 100 per cent

Re: Easy way to cut costs

Manage payroll??? Takes me all of 5 minutes to total my monthly hours and submit an invoice to my clients. Can't see any point in paying a third party to do that, particularly if you're a limited company.