* Posts by David Bilsby

8 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Apr 2011

Vanmoof Electrified Bike: Crouching cyclist, hidden power

David Bilsby
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Only 15 mins faster not 30 mins!

This electric bike must contain some out of this world technology. That 250W motor in the front hub is so powerful that it is able to distort space-time to reduce the stopped, non-moving, time by half!

In all seriousness though, how can a review conclude that this bike saved 30 minutes because it was electrically assisted when in fact 27 minutes of the journey on the Ridgeback was non-moving compared to only 8 minutes on the Vanmoof, there a saving of 19 minutes already! That would be like me driving across London on a Monday morning at 5am in a battered Reliant Robin in 2hrs and doing the same journey at 8:30am in a Jaguar XK in 3hrs and then concluding the Reliant Robin is faster than a Jaguar.

You didn't get the MeMO? Asus Pad 7 Android tab is ... not bad

David Bilsby
Happy

Better alternatives

Granted the spec of the MeMo Pad 7 is good, but actually not as good as the Advent Vega Tegra Note 7. I picked up one of these before last Christmas for under £100. It's got the excellent Tegra 4 processor from Nvidia which can churn out > 35000 on the AnTuTu benchmark. The screen is the same resolution and quite excellent. Stereo front facing speakers really improve the audio when watching videos, etc. It also has a really neat stylus for navigating or drawing if you fancy. Support from Nvidia with updates is also excellent.

Sadly it does not seem to be available from Currys or PC World at the moment otherwise I would definitely buy another.

What the world needs now is... a Bluetooth-enabled baby's dummy

David Bilsby

Perhaps I should shelve my invention idea

Given the stick this wonderful (NOT) idea has had, maybe I should shelve my patent on the iShatMySelf nappies. These where to have featured constant monitoring by Browntooth of the rectal evacuations of your little bundle of joy. Analysis of the stool contents to determine if you are feeding it too much sugar, fat or gin on the Pacifi. Immediate alerts of a wee and irrefutable to prove that it was the dog which has farted and not the baby.

Xenon: Bitmap Brothers' (mega)blast from the past

David Bilsby
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Re: Bitmap Bros...

Could not agree with more yossarianuk. I had an Acorn Archimedes and so many of your points applied to that as well, when compared to a Windows PC of the day.

OK at the time I was generally in a state of war with my Amiga ST owning friend as to which one of out computers was better.

Archimedes boot up to RISC OS desktop was super-super fast as it was all in ROM. Once there it was smooth and just so easy and intuitive to use. Sound was good, as well as graphics.

I remember getting an i386 DX4 100MHz add in co-processor card for my later RISC PC and being astounded at how big the heat sink was and how hot it got and still it was slower than the native ARM processor which had no heat sink at all.

What I really miss from those days was the ease in which you could just sit down and start programming and get a result. Just try doing that in five minutes on a modern PC!

David Bilsby
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Brill game

Played the original Xenon on my mates Atari at university. Then got the Xenon 2 sequel for my Acorn Archimedes. It was excellent on that.

Next-gen H.265 video baked into Broadcom's monster TV brain

David Bilsby
Alert

What a rubbish demo

I am sorry but did no one else think the demo was rubbish? Any video codec could have compressed someone resembling a statue against a static background! Come on, you only generally get to see how good a codec is when its given a challange. Take MPEG2 on freeview, if the scene is fairly static its pretty good, give it lots of motion or scene changes and boy it blocks worse than a bucket of LEGO.

What I would have like to have seen is how good it was and therefore its bandwidth if its a variable bit rate codec, when there is loads of movement, as it a real TV show or film.

HUD's up! Ubuntu creates menu-free GUI

David Bilsby
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Sounds awful

Ans what if you don't know exactly what you want to do with something, or at least how the action you want to perform might be named?

Quite often I just want to look at all menu options to see what is possible.

Oxfordshire cops switch speed cameras back on

David Bilsby

Re: Re: Whining anti-camera supporters

You make a very good point with regard speed cameras not stopping dangerous driving (rather than speeding if for now we separate those two categories). I too was passed this morning by an idiot who was both speeding and driving dangerously, i.e. overtaking in a completely inappropriate place given conditions and general visibility.

However unless we are all prepared to pay a considerable amount more in taxes to fund police to monitor these lunatics then sadly they will keep getting away with it.

You argument that speed does not kill, inappropriate speed may contribute is a glib glossing over of the problem. Acceleration / deceleration is what actually kills, whether that be deceleration of the driver in the car when they hit something or acceleration of the person hit by the car. Both of which will cause damage to delicate internal organs within the body. However from a physics stance, acceleration / deceleration is related to force which is related to speed and mass (weight). The mass of a car is constant, so the speed is the variable which matters as to how much damage is inflicted in an accident.

You may well consider 3am to be safer than 3.30pm and therefore give you the right to go 6mph faster, however your reaction time is the same, whether it be 3am or 3.30pm, and infact possibly slower at night. However your speed is the same, so if someone, child or not, appears in the road in front of you you have less time to react, therefore less time to break, therefore you hit them with a higher speed and inflict greater damage. There is no argument that mitigates this.

There are also many other factors as you say, so why increase the risk by speeding. The only way therefore to reduce the likelihood of an accident is to reduce the speed so if the unexpected happens, a dog runs across the road, you hit a patch of ice, etc. there is more time to take action.