@ Mac Phreak
Not bitching, just being cheap :D
60 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
Surely these 'smart' meters will be no different from existing half-hour meters that are mandatory for large supplies to commercial/industrial buildings?
They're no different from normal ones other than they phone up the energy provider and inform them of how many KWH's you've used. They have no visibility of how you used the power only how much.
In order to gain visibility of what appliances you've been using and for how long would require substantial rewiring to folk's homes which would cost a fortune. Therefore all that could happen is the meter is changed to a half-hour type of unit (they look largely the same bar the phone cable).
The only savings the energy suppliers will have is that they won't need to employ meter-readers and it will eliminate usage estimates that may be too low.
It's because they insist on the Acrobat plug in to print the postage labels it doesn't work. If you set your browser to pretend to be Windows it fails as it can't find the plug-in. OSX has the same problem. I had to use them to send a parcel last week ended up phoning them as I couldn't get a machine that would talk to their system.
Once upon a time, the atmosphere of the Earth was almost entirely CO2, there was no Oxygen at all. Then, as bacteria came along it changed. The Earth didn't explode or melt, it was fine.
Before the last ice age kicked in, the level of CO2 was 17 times higher than it is now, and guess what, it didn't blow up then either.
If CO2 affected the temperature then the IPCC, NOAA or the BBC would be able to show a graph that illustrates this, but as it doesn't, they can't. Occasionally it follows a similar path but the CO2 level lags behind the temperature.
If man-made CO2 affected the temperature then again they'd be able to show a graph but they can't because it doesn't (10 years of cooling despite CO2 rising).
So it can be illustrated that our CO2 emissions have no affect and that CO2 doesn't cause catastrophe to the planet so there's no need to save it.
The IPCC warns that if we carry on for another 200 years (despite having run out of oil & coal long before that) then the sea level could rise 1M which would be terminally bad also (I'm sure it wouldn't take that long to build a wall in areas liable to flooding).
Essentially they've no evidence it's man made, no evidence it can be stopped, no evidence it's really a problem. You don't need to be a scientist, you just need to look at what these people are saying to see how it just doesn't add up.
I'm just glad that more and more scientists are distancing themselves from this.
Not wanting to repeat everything already said but the biggest problem I've seen with BD is the lack of software, the average shop has nothing worth buying. There's still loads of great films that haven't had a proper DVD release yet so by the time there's a decent BD version of them the format will be obsolete.
"Actually, the Apollo program was cancelled--with a couple more missions already slated and the Saturn rockets for them already built--in order to divert money into the Viet Nam war effort.
So, which expenditure would have benefited us more, do you think? Seems like a no-brainer to me..."
The Apollo program ended in 1975 shortly after Skylab, the same year the Vietnam war did so the money wasn't diverted to that.
The $200Bn ISS, the marvellous, technological wonder it is will be ditched into the ocean in about 10 years time with little to show for it, and what then? Will they build yet another space station or is that a bit too 20th century now?
I've often tried to find out what actually goes on up there but I'm sure that all they've discovered is how to build a space station and how to live in one.
If they have another brief visit to the Moon or take an Apollo-esque trip to Mars it will be nothing more than a vast money spending exercise struggling to justify itself. The next big project has to be putting people, permanently into space, if building a Moon base puts them a step forward to achieving that then great, if not then no thanks.
It is worth noting that after the Apollo programme had been cancelled the money was simply absorbed into everything else, no-one had a tax cut or anything beneficial.
Sick of all these boxes, TV's always had integrated receivers all they needed was an antenna with at most a VCR underneath. Nowadays the space saved by moving to a flatscreen is lost by the massive stack of boxes underneath it (360, PS3, Xbox 1, ATV, Sky/Cable, DVR, BD, region-free DVD, AV Amp, Media Centre PC etc).
No wonder BitTorrent is so popular it's the easiest way to watch your programmes in HD.
How does SUSE force you to use YAST? It's a computer management tool that centralises every single config so you don't have to keep dotting about your system locating all the different bits in order to set up your system. However if you want to do that then you can, it doesn't break anything.
Every time I read negative comments about Suse it's usually based on an incorrect assumption or simply BS.
Although I prefer CentOS on the server I think OpenSUSE is by far the most polished distro for the desktop.
Given that the manufacturers are supposed to make a loss on the hardware and make it back on software sales which console is making the most money? The Wii is popular with parents buying the machine for their kids but I doubt it's as popular with folk who buy games machines for themselves and it's those people who have the larger library of games.
they sold over 70,000 of them back in 2006 alone, curious that the market has changed in such a short space of time.
Can't say it will be a shame to see the back of this it never seemed to be particularly good at what it did, although weighing over 2 tons and still returning 16MPG is reasonable achievement but if fuel economy is a concern you shouldn't buy a big or powerful car. Never been one to get upset about someone else's car though.
Given the huge mileage cars generally do in the US a lot of the high revving little Euro/Jap cars we have over here just wouldn't go the distance. Anyone arguing that US engines/vehicles are generally less efficient than their Euro/Jap equivalents just hasn't looked at the figures.
I did exactly this, I held off on HD-DVD/DB until there was a clear format, then bought a PS3 and now buy all my films on DB.
MS need to swallow their pride and bring out a DB equipped 360.
(preferably one that doesn't look like a toy with a nasty Fisher Price'esque interface that sounds like a Hoover which overheats for fun, but then I am picky).
Have always found the installer a PITA on RH/FC If for what ever reason a package can't be found or doesn't install during the installation no matter how trivial it is the whole thing quits and you have to start from scratch, no skip option. I have always found it very feature-light as a desktop OS so improvements are welcome there. IMO openSUSE is a lot more intuitive. KDE4 is still very much a beta so despite looking nice I'd be selecting Gnome. Have always liked it on the server though, very logical and reliable and my default choice.
But it obviously isn't, sure the screen can take an HD signal from an external device but it's not the same thing.
I'm sure theres a legitimate case for Trading Standards here, there has to be loads of people who've bought new digital HD sets in anticipation for HDTV broadcasts only to find that what they've bought it not compatible.
is being able to read MS Visio .vsd files natively.
Other than that it does the job, is stable and easy to use. My workstation has run SUSE with KDE for over 8 years, although it used to be a little clumsy back then it's very polished this days. The home PC also runs it and the family haven't had any problems using it.
All this talk of recompiling kernels and struggling with drivers, packages & whatnot must refer to something else called Linux as it doesn't represent anything I've had to deal with.
If the MS box didn't have any 3rd party virus/security apps then it would get owned pretty quick.
Safari wouldn't have been running as root so you shouldn't be able to pwn the OS.
If folk don't know how to use a FW then it's their own problem if something happens.
Still I run Firefox and this problem will be fixed so until I hear otherwise I'm not concerned. It's hardly going to make me sell my white box and buy a grey/silver one.
If there's bits of dead human lying around on the surface of the Moon and if any kind of bacteria or similar is subsequently found up there on future Luna missions how would we be 100% sure that it was native and not something that had been dumped there by this?
Also how would you be able to verify that they'd actually put the ashes up there?
I hope that the people with $10K to spare have something better to spend their money on.
The replacement can't bring things back, the final Shuttle mission is supposed to be to collect Hubble and return it home, couldn't do that with Ares.
My biggest concern is that the ISS is scheduled for decommission around 2016 - 2018, given that it won't be completed until 2010 that's a short shelf life for a $200Bn project that serves an ambiguous purpose.
As only functioning as an MP3 player it's not the lightest but as a play everything media player then there's little to beat it on Windows IMO. Never found something it didn't know how to play.
What's the alternative, Windows Media Player, iTunes, Real Player? They're all hopeless by comparison.
Space exploration is a fantastic subject which in the grand scheme of things costs very little. Although Mercury isn't perhaps the most interesting place in the Solar System it should be studied, and for £200K it's not going to hurt.
Looking forward to seeing the close ups and the New Horizons pictures of Pluto a few years afterwards.
These greenies routinely exaggerate their figures in order to get their BS published. You can easily use a clip on ammeter just after the plug to see how many amps any device is pulling, times that by the voltage of your power supply (220-230Volts normally) and you'll get your wattage figure.
Without even looking, I'm 100% confident that the figures GP have come up with are nonsense.