Posts by zerocred

Germans increase office efficiency with 'cloud ceiling'

They don't need windows...

Geddit?

Reaching for my coat cos its actually raining outside.

UK's solar 'leccy cash slash ruled unlawful

yeah, and getting subsidies to install them in the first place.

Has anyone tried the feed-in scam?

Has anyone bought cheap (regular price) electric from the next door neighbour (at say, 13p/kWh) and feeding that back into the grid and pocketing the 42p/kWh?

Of course you'd need a couple of solar cells on the roof to complete the story, and you couldn't run this scam at night.

Or has Apple patented this idea already?

Several people did something similar with special bulk rate calls to their own premium rate numbers at night in the beginning...

Lumia sales fail to set world alight

That is jus

brillia

I also hat

the stupi

black stri

up the righ

side. Make

the whole

screen lob

sided.

Please Nokia skunkworks - have an Android or something else for a plan B. And have /slightly/ rounded corners so not to infring apples patent/design/copyright/trademark on curves that are non straight..

£1m 'Nobel prize of engineering' named after the Queen

Give it to Dyson

Cos the world has changed so much as a result of his engineering success that he moved the production off-shore, along with the production engineers presumably.

Its true, we don't need engineers in the UK - or if they do they just open up the floodgates and get loads of cheap ones from Inida or China.

It is not a career (in the UK) for anyone considering it.

Privacy blunders by UK biz soar, websites least trusted

Ministers least trusted?

Q. Why don't thay nail the minister tossing government documents in the park a UKP10K fine?

A. Cos he'd probably be able to expense it, and the ICO doesn't really give a fuck what the government does - there is no point in taxing/fining itself.

Virgin Media to beef up mobile-data backhaul

low end

Yes, but that could be due to all sorts of reasons (other users, coverage, radio conditions, backahaul not to mention other bottlenecks etc).

It is fantasy to believe LTE will delver 100Mbps everywhere.

Sure it is a /bit/ more efficient and uses more bandwidth at a site - but it isn't magic, it's still radio it won't work worth shit if there is no signal or bad interference.

New UK 'leccy meters remotely run via Voda 2G

What about when the operators want to refarm the 2G to 3G?

Then the electric firms need to change all their meters again?

Remote meter reading is obviously a good thing but how much longer will GSM be around?

However, smart metering (control of household appliances) is hyped up as a panacea of energy ills - it doesn't reduce total energy consumption or make my stuff more efficient. So just how much benefit will it really bring?

(I too work in mobile/telco space)

Why do they need to individually control my fridge anyway?

Would it not be better to send a broadcast message telling all fridges in a certain area to avoid powering on for 10 minutes (or whatever) at peak times?...

Otherwise they need to send a message to every fridge individually in the target aread which means either having a permanent data link or SMS to each meter > fridge.

If they really need to individually address every component in the home that is just dumb/ bandwidth wasting/bad design stupidity. So now the telecoms network is going to fall over (like on New Years eve) every tea-time/FA cup Match because there are going to be millions of messages sent in the same instant preventing your kettle from boiling.

Furthermore it doesn't save energy at all, or make my stuff consume less or be more efficient - it merely delays the fridge coming on when it should so the fridge will consume even more power when it sdoes come on (=less efficient)... Yeah whose fucking benefitting now?

What fuckwit thought this is a good idea?

Diary of a not-spot: Vulture hack vows, I will never pay BT again!

Are you that annoymous guy that has just been arrested?

He lived somewhere without broadband too...

Stranger danger: Worse online, or on the street?

CEOP never did get back to me...

When I told them I had sent a completely naked picture of my 2 minute old son to people on the internet.

Should I be worried?

A cloud hangs over the sysadmin

If it needs more IT people with more skills and experience....

Then how is the cloud gonna be cheaper if it consumes more people?

(I didn't read the paper)

I'll be telling my son to become a Doctor or Lawyer and stay the fuck away from IT or Telecoms - Oops, they're getting outsourced too...

World Health Organization: Mobile phone cancer risk 'possible'

You might not have cancer - but...

All the RF engineers with kids that I know had girls.

Except for the others who had boys.

Mines a boy! Maybe its not RF either...

presumably the non-ionizing radiation cutting you mean = laser?

I presume you mean cutting metal using something like a 10kW laser focused on a 1sqmm?

I'd imagine that is somewhat higher power density (~10GW/m^2) than any base station where the power density can barely reach 1W/m^2. Its probably a higher power density than the highest power broadcast/military/radar antenna anywhere too.

Actually lasers have a different ICNIRP guidlines as they aren't RF - you can even see the bright ones way outside the visible spectrum, once with the left eye and once with the right.

So non-ionizing radiation like any heating process is fine as long as you don't get too much of it. Its funny how people think nothing about sitting in front of a 3kW electric fire (3kW/m^2) or lying in the sun 1kW/m^2 (and that is ionizing radiation!!) yet worry about RF power equivalent to a fridge lightbulb on a pole 200m away.

But this is about phones - if they were so harmless we'd all be alive.

iOS dev nemesis Lodsys pressures Android coders too?

Talk about patenting the wheel.

To get a anything patented - aren't you supposed to have an 'inventive step' that is not obvious to somone familiar with the art?

Anyone familiar with shareware will be familiar with the "send $10 for full functionality" messages - upgrading 'in-app' is an obvious step (with the introduction of app shops) if not already prior-art .

Apart from that, a random search on Google finds firms making 'free offers' for decades (e.g. glovesinc.com) with the hope you buy the service - so it is hardly a whole new business process either.

So what exactly did they patent that wasn't obvious?

What's the next patent claim? Hyperlinks? one-click purchase? using a computer for fun and profit?

Come on - these patents are nothing more than fuel for the screwed up US patent system...

Euro report slates wireless comms, recommends smoke and mirrors

Better to ban diydrogen monoxide.

Para 35 ... “The representatives of mobile telephony have for years espoused the same paradigm and the same line of argument, in which they invoke the soothing discourse of most international agencies and institutions ...[snip]...

At very high levels, the radio frequency fields are plainly liable to produce harmful thermal effects on the human body, in the estimation of all parties moreover.”

They say drinking a litre of water a day is OK, but drinking excessively large quantities of water is deadly, and everyone agreed.

Maybe their time should be spent legislating against Dihydrogen Monoxide much nastier:

* is called "hydroxyl acid", the substance is the major component of acid rain.

* contributes to the "greenhouse effect".

* may cause severe burns.

* is fatal if inhaled.

* contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.

* accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.

* may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.

* has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.

Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used:

* as an industrial solvent and coolant.

* in nuclear power plants.

* in the production of Styrofoam.

* as a fire retardant.

IPCC report: Renewables can never meet energy demand

to the next generation

I think we have already.

LEDs won't reduce energy consumption

History tells us that /even more/ efficiency probably won't reduce overall energy consumption either...

Improved efficiency LEDs may not reduce energy consumption:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/25/led_save_energy_not/

also consider Jevons Paradox:

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

Basically we consume way too much energy the big populations hardly consume any (until china /really/ gets going).

Anyone who thinks switching off a few lights and unplugging their phone charger, and maybe installing insulation, double glazing etc, will be enough, is living in carbon free dreamland.

So I'd say the next generation is fucked.

Australia, give up your fixed broadband!

Wireless and wires == apples and oranges.

I noticed the irony before I got too far down the article.

Wireless and wired are good for different things and shouldn't really be compared. When the 'always-on, high throughput' is taken to mean 'always high throughput' the wireless users are in trouble!

When the wireless operators/users start to think they can compete with a pair of wires for either download speed or monthly data volume they will fail.

I see it every day - people who think LTE will mean they can stream 20Mbps HD video surveillance video 24x7 - till I point out that's equvalent to 6Tbit a month - or about the equvalent of 6,000 average iPhone4 consuptives.

Wait for that phone bill.

Mobile operators ditch Tube plans

Lost opportunity - probably the last. At least the Luddites are happy!

You see, if they had done it years ago when calls cost 4 quid a minute then the operators could have afforded it and it may have actually made new ca$h from the extra coverage. However, now there is no reason to do it at all cos everyone is on all-you-can-eat dataplans so there is no extra money to be made to do it. Except maybe from some TfL staff members stutatory internet porn break or whatever the incluse term is these days - now they have to make do with mags.

But you guys, with your 40 hour weeks and paid holidays have absolutely no fucking idea what is going on and what is going to happen. Your happiness that no phones are ringing will be short lived. That's cos no-one will be able to afford them because you'll all be on social security (which will pay 93p a week) because the Chinese have already taken all the manufacturing jobs, next services and no-one in the UK will be paying tax cos no one will have a job. The myth of a serviced based economy will be over around the same time as the olympics because China inc will pwn everything.

Disclosure: I designed the parts of the phone coverage system in XXXX, YYYY and ZZZZ - none in the UK. I'm from the UK and I think its a shocking shambles that London doesn't have coverage in the underground - but that will be eclipsed the olympic-sized shambles still to inflict itself on us all. Flame away.

120 Underground Wi-Fi hotspots will erupt in 2012

WiFi at platform will cnabilize the tunnel traffic that never was.

You do spend 98% of your time on the platform- so maybe its a good cheap ass non-solution.

Fukushima: Situation improving all the time

I'm off to buy shares in each and every nuclear co.

But really - they're down ~20%

Fukushima on Thursday: Prospects starting to look good

I appreciate the contrarian view.

Keep it up. Let's hope everything ends as well as it can.

Huawei to gift underground coverage to London

So sorry that my reading The Register on my phone bothers you so much - NOT!

I guess you get easily annoyed. Yes it is a pain in the ear. As I recall on the London underground the trains themselves are ear-splittingly loud - quite impossible to hold a conversation and no doubt ruining your yogic meditation after the long hard day with your earphones on.

Don't get me wrong I don't like loud people on phones any more than you do and if the gereral response to people on the phone is they get it rammed down their throat they will learn not to do it. But it is vey convenient to be able to pick up your email and send the odd text on the move - I think that's what they invented these moving phone things for. To claim a fraction of your already unpleasant journey on TfL is made completely unbearable by someone on a phone for a mintue between the screaming tracks is ludicrous.