Posts by Simon Ritchie 9 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Sep 2015
I did a quick Google search. Apart from stuff that only works on a phone or involves a social media account, alternatives to Skype include Google Meet and an open-source system called Jami (https://jami.net). One advantage of Jami is that it's point-to-point with no server in between. It appears that you only need a server for the two ends to find each other. Jami offers a connection service and you can build our own.
When discussing the limitations of these systems, you need to remember that they may well have been designed and written in the 1960’s. The NATS system may have at its core a COBOL programming running in simulation, firmly convinced that it’s running on an IBM mainframe, reading input from 80-column punched cards and writing output to a line printer loaded with music paper. My guess is that in those days, reverting to manual may have been a sensible reaction to bad input data, but over the years, the throughput has increased a tad, and the humans who have to intervene to fix the data couldn’t do it fast enough on a day of high traffic such as August Bank Holiday Monday.
Also remember that any change to the input protocol to make it more resiliant would demand changes to all of the hundreds of pieces of software running back at the airlines and the airports, feeding the flight data into the NATS system. Any change would have to be agreed and then implemented by all of the players. The airlines that are now screaming for compensation may be the very same airlines that have resisted any change to the system for the last few decades, because it would involve them spending money on updates to their own software.
Unless things have changed since I was there a couple of years ago, the Bletchley Park Trust has the rebuilt Bombe and the museum has the rebuilt Colossus. The two are on the same site, but they’re separate organisations and you have to buy a ticket for both. Also you could only get from one to the other by going back to the main gate.
They are both worth visiting but the Trust’s cafe was bigger and did hot meals. My advice is to do the Trust in the morning, have lunch there and do TNMOC in the afternoon. The TNMOC cafe is fine for drinks and they have (or had when I went) some very nice mugs and tee shirts.
I think that the fundamental problem here is that in a car manufacturer, product managers hold the purse strings. The second-hand car market has nothing to do with their bonus, so they are not interested in it. Spending money to make sure that the support system works for second-hand buyers is not on the agenda.
Until, as said earlier, GDPR comes along and bites them.
if this could be done in London (if), it could be better than the surface buses, which run at less than wallking pace because of the other traffic. If you could speed up the trip between each stop, a longer dwell time would not be such an issue.
However, as Crossrail discovered, boring tunnels under a city is not easy. There is already a lot of stuff under the ground and you have to find your way round it. Just below the surface, where he would put his not-bus stops, many streets already full with the ducting for power and comms cables, gas and water.
So yes, this is somebody who doesn’t even use mass transport, and knows little about it.
He’s not trying to draw his shareholder’s attention away from something else is he? Maybe his difficulty producing his target number of cars?
I have a coupLe of Raspberry Pi 2 machines and they are lovely, but I also like the shiny new kid on the block, the Pine64. It's the result of a very successful Kickstarter project and it's not on the open market yet, because they are still running around trying to fulfill the Kickstarter orders. It is (or was, before some bunch of old romantics kicked the crap out of the pound) about £5 cheaper than the Pi, has faster networking and promises "almost full motion" (whatever that means" 4K video. The hardware is there but the drivers are not ready just yet.
Oh, and it runs both Android and Linux.
This seems to assume that the market for a eBook is only limited by price. For a mass-market novel, that may be so, but it's not always like that.
I once worked for an academic publisher and their marketing strategy was to get colleges running courses to make one of that publisher's books the set text, and wrap their course around the book. As well as selling books to students, the publisher provided support material to the colleges such as online tutorials. In effect, they marketed an information package to colleges, often for free. Making money by selling books to students was just the useful side-effect that paid for all that marketing effort.
Once a publisher has persuaded a course leader to adopt a book as the set text, they can charge a high price for it, limited only by what the market can stand. Some students won't buy the book at all, and will attempt to share someone else's copy, some will buy it second-hand, maybe not the current edition, but some will buy it new. The number of new books sold will be some value less than the total number of students studying the courses that have adopted the book. As the publisher, if you reduce the price, a few more of those students might be willing to buy a new copy, but that's about the only control you have.
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