Posts by Dave 126 10844 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
Having a faster reaction time gives the system more time to read the situation correctly.
Of course a lack of time isn't the root cause of all errors in reading the situation, but a system that has more time can be built to use more and varied methods to make a decision.
It's not the answer but its plausibly part of the answer.
*And only four channels that on a Saturday afternoon when you're not at school, showed nothing but boring sports and a black and white film*
Though now I've matured I would be glad of that source of black and white movies (apparently a fair few films that the BBC showed back in the 1980s haven't had dvd releases). As a child, TV was boring enough to drive us outside to climb / build / break / ride / set fire to something.
It's the same game, but with different nuances in different sectors.
The only washing machines designed so the bearings can be replaced (bolted drums, not welded) is Miele, and their machines cost 3x more than rivals.
Hotpoint readily charged me 20 quid for a small injection-molded door latch which melted, despite my protestation that a door latch on a hot thing should have been designed not to melt.
A Hitachi circular saw can be repaired for 60 quid, a new one from Lidl is 50 quid.
All cars are sold in order to make money from the spare parts. The spare parts are often bought by insurance companies, so it isn't clear to the owner. Building a car from the spare parts catalogue will cost you at least 3x the forecourt price of the car (not including labour, naturally). This was explicitly mentioned in Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Bicycles... you're probably on safe ground with bicycles, with healthy competition for most standard components.
Madness is trying the same thing again and expecting different results. Telling users repeatedly to do something and expecting them to listen.
A design or engineering solution is required. There are plenty to choose from, starting with office layout, translucent dividers, narrow-angle privacy screens, computers that detect the proximity of a work-issued ID card or mobile phone, pressure sensors in the chair, face recognition on the web cam...
> CAD with FreeCAD/OpenSCAD,
YMMV. Other CAD options that avoid Windows include:
-Autodesk products on macOS,
-OnShape through a browser (OS agnostic)
Both are proprietary, but your use-case might qualify for a free licence. OnShape is aiming to be a replacement for SolidWorks.
It's an ad for an Apple product that the above Microsoft products are designed to compete with.
Microsoft and its partners have this week been showing off the latest attempt to have Windows (and a mix of natively compiled and x86/64 applications) run on ARM - so comparisons to Apple's macOS on ARM transition a few years back will also be inevitable.
> recording them and filming them to associate the sounds with the activities they were doing at the same time.
People around a table in a pub, talking about how their past week has been, talking about what they're going to have for dinner, talking about the roadworks on the A476...
Talking about anything other than what they are doing at the time.
Indeed. More accurate than atomic clocks are optical clocks, which have only recently escaped the lab and into a rack mount. The first example application the developers give is 'GNSS resilience'.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231113157771/en/Vector-Atomic-brings-world%E2%80%99s-first-rackmount-optical-clock-to-market
The IT angle is that some viewers had problems with the Power button on their remote controls, or so I infer from the article:
>"for some viewers, Eurovision this year did not come with a please-please-oh-god-make-it-stop button."
A simultaneous Europe-wide mass failure of IR TV remote control units is big news!
Given that the chamber in question contains people who have felt the need to express their upset about an advertisement, failure to read the room may be a feature and not a bug.
It'd be interesting to see the demographic breakdown of a, people who complain about iPad adverts, b, people who actually buy the expensive iPads. I expect the latter group is older (and richer) than the former, and likely not too fussed about what the kids are saying.
As everyone else here as observed, the insurers' big losses are due to satellite failure unrelated to collisions or with more crowded orbits. That's insurers' losses.
These mechanical failure-type incidents are the main reason for insurers upping their premiums.
A much smaller contribution to the higher premiums is the larger number of satellites in orbit, according to the source report.
> Futurama did it first?
Futurama is often a loving homage / piss-take of older sci and sci fi ideas - being first isn't its point.
The idea of carrying everything in tubes has been a sci fi staple since before the Golden Age. In New York from 1897 to 1953, 27 miles of pneumatic tubes were to deliver mail:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_York_City
An earlier system was trialled in London from 1863, but was unsuccessful.
> it's going to have to be processed "in the clear" (unencrypted) by the car's processors.
I don't know enough to judge the the current state of homomorphic encryption efforts, but the remote processing of sensitive data is an area of active research:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
A layman such as myself always expected a computer to be good at calculus (just I expect a pocket calculator to be better than me at arithmetic), yet really bad at 'human' (or indeed animal) things like speech recognition, image recognition, and knowing when to stop beeping before I throw it out of the window. Or rather, computers were bad at these things until a few years ago.
A useful umbrella term for all these AI ML LLM NN approaches might be "Newish Techniques for Making Computers Less Rubbish at Doing Things That They Always Used To Be Pretty Rubbish At Doing"
It doesn't roll off the tongue, I grant you. But I find it useful as a placeholder.
Thank you for being a penguin who acknowledges that some people require software that is only available on Windows and doesn't play nice under Wine or a VM.
A lot of CAD is only on Windows, and whilst some folk have successfully moved to OS-agnostic browser solutions (OnShape seems to be well regarded), that route isn't suitable for all users in all situations.
> Don't know if you can get game controllers for a Windows PC?
You can, including the controllers from different generations of Xbox and PlayStation - though sometimes a dedicated wireless dongle or cable is required, sometimes they work out of the box with Bluetooth or USB.
You may have seen footage of military drone or industrial equipment operators using Xbox 360 controllers, presumably because they were made in their millions and are a known quantity. Just as you can go round to your mate's house to play Playstation and know the controller will feel the same as yours at home.
That said, for playing console style games I'd rather use a console. PCs lend themselves to mouse and keyboard games (shooters or strategy) or to racing or flight simulators with steering wheels or button encrusted joysticks.
> I suspect you'll find the majority of businesses dont need anything beyond Libreoffice.....and for gaming Steam has you covered.
Solidworks doesn't run under Linux, nobody on Reddit appears to have got it running under Steam. Libre Office Writer can't reliability export documents with tables that Word will read correctly. I don't like the situation, but I have to live with it.
Remember, computers are often used to produce files that can be read by suppliers and customers.
@Dr Syntax
I had the same thought. However, an older Reg article linked in this one offers a couple of clues.
1, It appears lots of data centres upgraded from vented lead batteries to lithium ion, which resulted in some extra capacity and different use profiles regarding charge cycles.
2, changes in electricity costs and the granularity with which it is billed. Daily peak prices can be ten times the lowest prices, so some data centres were already experimenting with running from UPS when electricity was at its most expensive.
Exactly, a roundabout isn't a special case that needs to be learnt: the same rules as for any other road apply. The circular bit of the roundabout is just like any road you are joining - the cars that are already on it have right of way over you. Leaving the roundabout is a change of lane so you indicate, unless the lane you're in is exclusively for leaving the roundabout.
The first time I encountered the Magic Roundabout in Swindon it causes me no problem at all. The same rules apply whether you're on one of the satellite roundabouts or on the central one.
I am only talking above about European roundabouts. I've been on one in Cambodia where cars go clockwise and mopeds go counterclockwise... I think because mopeds are treated as honary pedestrians? Clench what you need to clench and then do as the Romans do.
@Pascal
I agree that it was appropriate that the series ended where it did, at a natural break in the narrative. The cancelling I was referring to was after its original three seasons on SyFy. Fans campaigned, and then Amazon Prime Video produced the final three seasons.
It had a rocky path to production despite being received well by critics and fans.
I haven't read the books yet, but I've heard good things.
You're an optimistic soul!
Futuristic sci fi TV costs a lot to make, and even shows that were critically acclaimed over their first few sessions can struggle to to get renewed - such as The Expanse.
Video game to TV adaptions have a record that makes studios execs wary, too. The recent Fallout TV series being an exception, though post-apocolyptic settings have been shown to commercially successful on TV.
For spaceship battles IN SPAACE! we at least have Battle Star Galactica, and a few good things like Andor, and The Mandalorian from Disney.
Samsung added a dedicated Bixby assistant button to their phones some years ago. It is a most excellent feature, once you've remapped* it to Flashlight, Play/Pause or something else useful. I'd be loath to buy a phone phone without it now.
Of course Logitech make plenty of mice with no shortage of extra buttons, so it'll just be a software thing tied to this model (just as some Logitech software options are only available for their pricier mice)
*requires a 3rd party app called bxaxtions.
> It changes not being able to trust some content, to not being able to trust any content.
Sadly yes.
Though interrogating data and narratives does suggest that what is true and real is coherent, whereas batshit crazy bullshit isn't - i,e ML may be able to provide tools for detecting bullshit.
Sorry for my agricultural language, but 'bullshit' has become a technical term... Lies have an antagonistic relationship with the truth, bullshit is oblivious to it.
No, you couldn't, because parts stolen from, for example, a car, aren't then used to repair a device that is then always connected to the internet - and thus potentially a database of stolen parts. For that matter, cars have had windows coded to a particular vehicle for decades.
It would behove the self-interested 'right to repair' spokesfolk to acknowledge the benefit to the end user of not having their phone stolen, slyly or violently, for parts.
Once they do, we can better move towards a system of whitelisted parts from damaged phones being used for repairs.
The RTR folk should also acknowledge that durability and longevity are just as important factors as repairability. As should the media who give them free press to fill column inches. But hey, they've got tools to sell you.
If they do so, they will be more effective at highlighting where Apple et al actually are profiteering from selling new replacement parts.
The required arithmetic really isn't that tricky.
> I think I’ve thought about this too much. Am I on a list now?
Yeah you are, along with Agatha Christie, anyone who has borrowed an Agatha Christie book from a library, and anyone who watches several hours of crime drama a week on TV... so it's probably quicker to write down who *isn't* on such a list.
Indeed, it clearly wasn't 'fit for the purpose for which it was sold' at the time it was sold. Once upon a time this would mean that it was the seller's responsibility to replace it, regardless of guarantee period - I haven't kept up on what the current state of the loopholes that tech companies use to dodge responsibility.
Ah, thank you for clarifying. I knew they used some magic combo of laser and magnets to record, couldn't remember the details.
Dang, it was a great portable music format if you had a player with enough buffer for 'electronic shock protection'. And support for gapless playback between album tracks was great.
> You'd assume so wouldn't you, but SD cards, USB flash drives etc. as used on those "Gotek" and BlueSCSI devices are pretty unreliable. I've never seen a floppy disk zapped by static for instance.
Industrial SLC Flash drives with over provisioning and ECC in stainless steel housings and using a Railway industry DIN connector do exist.
https://www.terz-ie.com/?L=1
The Iomega 'Click of Death' takes on new connotations in a clickity clackity environment.
How reliable are Minidiscs over time? I know the data versions of the drives (NetMD) were late to market because of Sony copyright concerns (the same concerns that saw Sony give Apple's iPod a lead in the market), but I don't remember an MD going wrong on me. They're optical, so should be fairly resistant to magnets and static.
I'd watch that!
Of course there are limits to testing a 1/6 G vehicle at 1G, and in atmosphere.
Here's a 1972 NASA report looking at the differences between the predicted behaviour of the Lunar Rover and its actual performance.
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/documents/NTRS/collection2/NASA_TR_R_401.pdf
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
