Posts by 27escape 207 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Aug 2011
The manufacturers magnetic attachments that can go on the meters and capture the LED pulses that the meters give out every x units of energy. These attachments can also 'talk' to the meter to obtain information such as units used etc.
It would not take much to extend these to send this information to the 'internet' so that your smart phone can read it.
The manufacturers obviously will not like this as its cheap and they will not get lots of new meters, they will whine about security of the meters, though this simple comms is not using security.
Note that payg gas meters already have a clip on unit that does this and communicates with a smart card to limit gas and display information.
Whether split-screen or lanparty or all getting together in the same online 'world', is always a blast, especially if you can manage to keep killing the same person time after time, even if its you being killed like that, very funny
Game/life theory - doing things with friends is more fun than on your own
If only IT type companies accepted remote workers, living in the North and asking companies based in and around London if remote working is available is a lesson in futility.
However I do know quite a few people in other businesses that are accepted as remote workers, for some reason IT companies can't keep up with the pace of IT or do not trust their workers
Now that the GCSEs and A levels are generally easier to pass, the entry levels to uni are easier to meet, the current trend that all school leavers go to uni, it is no surprise that people getting degrees come out of their education not getting the jobs they have been told they should get with their shiny degrees.
Surely it should not take some uni research types to work that out.
Reminds me of the government expecting that most university's would not charge anything near the full allowable price for tuition fees, hahaha, new average course fees £8,500 vs £9,000 full price!
Try not to throw valuable data away, it does not matter if you store it in RDBMS or NoSQL, if you failed to store it you will always fail to find it with a search.
A number of RDBMS allow you to store semi-structured data (think JSON or XML), just like their NoSQL brethren, this allows you to manage structured and semi structured data in the same system, allows you to keep to ACID and all those things that are important. Just don't mess (update/delete entries) with the JSON/XML structures too much as this could be a big DB hit.
Do indexing, yes even in NoSQL, saves your big HBASE batch jobs from taking far too long.
Most importantly understand your data and its relationships, if you don't know that a field exists because your developers are a bit vague, then you will never be able to search on it, unless it is in a RDMBS of course, where you will have that helpful schema to fall back upon.
And you can replace them every couple of years as they improve/decrease in price.
TV UIs are often a bit crap as Rovi have loads and loads of patents in this area meaning that the developers either have to work around obvious prior art functionality or get their companies to stump up cash for licenses.
Finally the software generally is not as good as PC software as the margins are so much tighter than on PCs, though the retail markups are much higher. This means less testing, cheaper development teams churning out any old crap in a few months for the latest variant on a tier 1 product, software is not backwards compatible as chipsets have changed, meaning the consumers have to suck it up or buy another TV.
Not so 'smart' now are they!
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