Posts by Steve Todd

Re: 8 years for 15K

Or perhaps, less cynically, the bank knows about the problem, their support staff have been alerted and they are working on a fix? Computer F ups happen in banks too, sometimes costing them hundreds of millions in fees and penalties.

Go look for

"Midway Arcade" in the Apple App Store, it includes Gauntlet and Gauntlet II

Re: Are electric cars really usefull?

I would contend that nobody actually pays anything like £24k for an Astra, regardless of spec or list price.

It's not very hard to take the price of the Astra, with options, past £28K. The Beemer may have a list price starting below that, but for that you'll get 4 wheels and an engine. Everything else is an option.

You chose based in the purchase and running costs NOW, not when the government discovers that there are enough of them on the road to effect their revenue. When there ARE enough of them on the road to have that effect then the economies of mass production will have cut in, and they will be much cheaper to buy.

The main reason for the congestion charge is to cut pollution levels in Central London, not to do with traffic levels (traffic is actually flowing at the same speed, pretty much, as before the charge as they have introduced traffic calming to slow it down). EVs definitely help there.

Obviously for the same reason that

running a green felt tip around the outside of a CD makes it sound better. Mostly because you think it does. There's probably some effect to the wow and flutter of the source, but high end HiFi folk can rarely spot the difference with their treasured improvement in a blind A-B-X test.

Re: Range

See the post above about range drop. This is about 1% per 10,000 miles driven. Even at 20K miles/year at 4 years you'd still have 275 miles per charge in range, though fast charging would reduce this.

Re: Even without the 1 antenna -> 1 Subscriber model...

You live in the Aereo warehouse? It's not a domestic location. The exemption is for personal home use. Under no stretch of the imagination could the Aereo warehouse be considered to be a personal home location. Renting a house or flat on the other hand doesn't change it's status as a domicile.

TiVo doesn't rent you the machine or location. They also don't insist that you accept their TV guide in order to get the service (though it becomes somewhat less useful). The only part of the equation that they are providing externally are TV listings (which I believe they pay the TV companies for in order to source them), everything else is within the user's personal domestic space and therefore covered by the exemption.

Re: Still waiting to see where the power's coming from

The answer is in the difference between peak and off-peak demand. Economy 7 has been around for years to try to encourage people to use off-peak power because it's expensive to have capacity that isn't used, even more so if the government insists on adding renewables which are intermittent or cyclic in nature. EV charging with smart chargers can help even out the troughs, and it is even possible for them to help with the peaks too by feeding surplus energy (as defined by the driver, and at a profit to them) back into the grid.

Re: 14 years?

Wasn't just because of the laser attack. He was on probation already and had a history of bad behaviour. He got 14 years because of the combination of those things.

Re: What I want to know

And making the satellites costs nothing? Developing, testing and manufacturing 180 satellites will likely cost well north of $1bn by its self.

Re: coolest members of Apple

So if you don't desire to be cool then your coolness is infinite?

Re: Apple is no longer a product company

I guess you haven't tried pricing up Xeon motherboards and processors, nor workstation class video cards. Last time I checked I couldn't build an equivalent box out of parts for much less than the Pro.

Re: you have to heat it quite a lot before it starts to work

So if we give it another 50 or 60 years of research we may be able to start an oxide based fuel cell with less energy? This compares to Lithium Air cells that should be in production in 5-10 years and have 3 times the energy density of current Li Ion cells (think of a Tesla model S with a battery pack half the current size and a 450 mile range)

Re: What about all the conventional capacity needed

@Aitor, given your own numbers a 4Kw installation would cost €8,000 to install. That money could have been earning interest (or, more likely, you have to pay interest to borrow it) so you can safely ignore the increasing cost per year as that is offset. If you can manage ENTIRELY on the power of your PV system then the average household would take 15 years to pay that back, ignoring maintenance and storage costs (you're dreaming if you think the system will sit there and need no work for over 15 years). If you can't store all of that power, can only sell the surplus at wholesale prices and need to draw from the grid at night then the time goes up significantly.

Re: How things have changed

You're pushing it rather to describe the Xerox Star as a personal computer. It didn't use a microprocessor (using TTL logic, or bit slice chips in later versions) needed a file server and a print server to be any use and cost $16,000 just for the terminal, back when a secretary earned $12,000 per year.

The Apple vs Microsoft case proved that copyright wasn't a good way of protecting designs, so the Apple vs Samsung case was over two issues, design patents (the shape and design of the physical device) and utility patents (the way certain things were done in software), neither of which prevented competitors producing phones that were distinct from Apple's design, but Samsung decided they could make more money copying the iPhone as closely as possible.

Re: Tech that we want (but they never seem to give us)

I want a bloody desktop monitor capable of more than the bog-stock 1920 x 1080 they've been stuck at for the past decade.

You can't have been looking too hard. 2560x1440 screens aren't hard to find starting at about £400. 4K screens start at a little over £500 (though these are currently in limited supply).

Re: So, after legal fees...

It's about $5000 each, less legal fees

Re: Where did the author get this idea from?

Where did they ever say it was a "budget device"? They previously had been using last years model as their mid-range device and the previous years as entry level. The 5c took the innards of the 5, upgraded the LTE radio and a few minor bits and put it in a cheaper case. The 5 was dropped, the 4S was sold still as the entry level model.