* Posts by Steve Todd

2644 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2007

Not got 4G? There's a reason we aren't called 'Four', sniffs Three

Steve Todd

Re: Not where I work it isn't

This is in the financial district, right next to a train station. At lunch time is slows to a crawl. This time of day it's back up to about 500k (and I get the same effect if I dissable LTE and fall back to 3G with EE BTW, so it isn't something specific to 3). The network just can't handle the load, that's the problem.

Steve Todd
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Not where I work it isn't

Central London, and on 3 I'm getting about 1% of LTE performance (240K down and 60K up, vs 20Mbit down and 17Mbit up on EE). Talk about battery life is also a non-issue for most folk. The original 1st generation of LTE chipsets were a bit power hungry, but the second generation fixed that and it really isn't a problem.

iPads in education: Not actually evil, but pretty close

Steve Todd
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Re: Sheep

And yet you ignore the link on this thread to an article by an enthusiastic IT teacher who explains how tablets have worked for him and his school in real life over a three year period. The problem here seems to be that your management are right, you aren't forward looking.

Steve Todd
FAIL

Re: Users buy SOFTWARE, or the ability to run it, not hardware - @cyborg

Your point was? Just because you weren't offered engineering drawing as an option at school doesn't mean that it doesn't and shouldn't exist. The failings of your personal IT training also have nothing to do with it. I don't agree with the modern approach to IT (which seems to think that it's fine to teach kids how to use PowerPoint, which is something I've never had occasion to more than view during my whole working life) while not explaining any of the theory and how the hardware works, but I don't suggest that this part of the course or something similar should be dropped entirely.

Here's the point you seem to be missing, badly: schools should teach BOTH the theory and the practical. If they are teaching the practical then they should be doing so in a way that will be useful if the child ends up working with it in industry. If they get both then they can work out WHY things don't work rather than doing them by rote.

Steve Todd
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Re: Users buy SOFTWARE, or the ability to run it, not hardware - @cyborg

The job of the school system is to teach BOTH theoretical and practical subjects. It's unlikely that history or religious education, for example, will have much practical application in the real world, but subjects like engineering drawing and IT are pretty relevant. The last thing we want is for one side of the equation to be taught in exclusion to the other, and yes, one of the aims is to prepare students for work in the real world.

Steve Todd
FAIL

Re: Sheep

So you threw a spanner in the trial due to your personal preferences rather than what would have worked. If you'd gone the iPad route then there would have been more available software and you could have locked them down to prevent the kids loading unwanted games etc.

Steve Todd
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Users buy SOFTWARE, or the ability to run it, not hardware

If they couldn't get the software that they wanted for Android then it doesn't matter how cheap they are, they've waisted their money. Apple have gone out of their way to ensure that plank is in place, complete with a textbook authoring package.

As for buying Macs for design work, they should be buying whatever is being used out in the real world so that the students know what they are doing when it comes to getting a job. If design houses out in the real world are using Macs (and where I work the design department is a little island of Macs among a sea of PCs) then that's what they buy.

Voda: Brit kids will drown in TIDAL WAVE of FILTH - it's all Ofcom's fault

Steve Todd
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Surely all they have to do

Is tell you when IN contract costs change (number of minutes, which numbers you can call inside these minutes, the same for texts and how much data you get). Those costs, wrapped up in your monthly bill, are what people worry about changing. If 0878 numbers change rates then most people don't care.

Apple share-price-off-a-cliff: Told you that would happen

Steve Todd

Another choice for using its cash

And one that Apple seems to be using quite a lot, is in stabilising its supply chain. It will prepay for some parts, help fund manufacturing capacity for others etc. Much of the cash on the balance sheet is listed at being in short term investments like this.

Review: Renault Zoe electric car

Steve Todd

I think you might want to check your math there

EVs usually consume about 0.2 to 0.3 kWh per mile driven. 22 kWh and a 75-90 mile range is about spot on. A full charge on an economy overnight tariff should set you back £2.50ish, so your £70 lease plus £20 quids worth of electricity should get you 625 miles (7500 miles per year). Your petrol car costs an extra £10-19 quid per month in road tax, so to match the economy of the EV it would have to average 49-55 mpg.

Steve Todd
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Re: completely useless beyond a few niche users

What the heck were you testing? That has to be about the least efficient EV I've heard of. £3.80 is about 25 kwh of power. Most EVs should get 75-100 miles out of that. Call it 150 miles both ways then that's a minimum of 2.5 gallons from a 60MPG car. 2.5*4.5*1.40 = £15.75 for your daily round trip. Charge off of Economy 7 power and the EV price comes down by 1/3rd.

Steve Todd
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Re: completely useless beyond a few niche users

Yeh, bicycles are completely practical for doing the shopping, moving young kids around, the old and infirm, in poor weather, in hilly regions etc. aren't they? They have a place, but don't assume that they are the answer to the problem.

Steve Todd
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Re: Aaand we have the obligatory idiot - @fishdog

Those batteries are highly recyclable (95%+) and have significant scrap value to ensure that they will be. The landscape won't be laid waste by piles of rotting batteries in the same way that it hasn't been laid waste by the hulks of rusting cars.

Steve Todd
FAIL

Re: Fail

That logic forgets that someone has to buy the car new originally, otherwise you will find that the supply of used cars dries up. Do you object to buying a used EV in 3-5 years time because of all the energy that went into manufacturing it?

Steve Todd
FAIL

Aaand we have the obligatory idiot

Who forgets that :-

1) 40%+ of UK power is from low carbon, relatively clean sources.

2) That percentage rises when you recharge off peak over night

3) That any pollution isn't in city centers where it is bad for health

4) That large, fixed power plants can be very much more efficient than small mobile IC engines (80%+ vs 30% max)

5) That improving a fixed generator will effectively improve all existing EVs

China Mobile spaffs £4.4bn on 4G 'trial'... before it even has a licence

Steve Todd
Stop

The potential market certainly isn't 700 million

It's maybe 1/10th of that, the fraction of the population rich enough to be able to afford to run a smart phone.

Space probe spies MYSTERY 'Cold Spot' in very fabric of cosmos itself

Steve Todd
Joke

Must be a crouton

What else could be floating in hot soup.

Samsung: We're doing smart watches too

Steve Todd

Re: I'm pretty sure neither of them were first to smartwatches

You can't patent the idea of something, you can only patent an implementation of it. Apple have a patent on a type of display band that wraps its self around your wrist for example, but providing Samsung's version isn't too close to the Apple patent then nothing is stopping them.

Steve Todd

Re: Me too, I have a TimeX

Technology has moved on rather. The best mechanical watches are accurate to a few seconds per day. Your TimeX would be doing well to be inside of half a minute per day. I have a Citizen that's about 5 years old. Its got a hybrid analog/digital face, is powered by sunlight, is accurate to within 5 seconds per month and automatically resets its self overnight using the radio atomic time signal (so those 5 seconds only apply if it can't pick up the radio signal).

Lets wait until these products are released and we can see what they can or can't do before we condemn them.

Samsung's new Galaxy S 4: iPhone assassin or Android also-ran?

Steve Todd

GLONAS satellites orbit

In a more inclined plane. The result is better location data in more northerly or southerly locations. As someone already said, it's not one or the other, it does both.

Steve Todd

Re: Swappability

The former problem is dealt with by having a phone with enough battery life to last more than a day (with use) on a full charge. The iPhone and many Android phones can manage that these days perfectly well.

The latter is dealt with by backing your phone up to the cloud. iPhone owners can for example move to a new phone and have everything restored and working within a few minutes.

Result: these are both non-issues for most people.

Freeview telly channels face £240m-A-YEAR shakedown by Ofcom

Steve Todd
Stop

Re: what a useless shower

After 15 years don't you think you've got your monies worth out of it?

Ten ten-inch tablets

Steve Todd

Re: Missed a trick

Ah, but have you seen the screen on the Nook? Not something that most Android tablets can match, especially at that price.

Steve Todd

Missed a trick

Write an Android image to microSD and insert it into the Nook HD+, restart and you have a full Android tablet.

New Apple TV may hint at Apple-Samsung divorce

Steve Todd

Or could it be

That the A5 in the Apple TV is a cut down part? It certainly doesn't need the amount of GPU horsepower that the iPad does and the GPU cores are the biggest part of the A5 chip.

1 in 7 WinXP-using biz bods DON'T KNOW Microsoft is pulling the plug

Steve Todd

Re: Supprised companies on XP

There are of course companies with bespoke software that won't run on anything later than XP. Either they don't have access to the source for this or the cost of re-writing would be excessive. In those cases it's a no-brainier to hang on to XP for as long as they can.

There's plenty of perfectly functional software on XP that just won't run on 7 or 8 (Microsoft wrote some of it for gods sake, look at their compatibility matrix some time) and any IT manager that spends his/her budget providing no visible benefit over what the users had wont last long.

Safety authorities to hold hearings into Boeing 787's battery woes

Steve Todd

Re: NiMH

LiFePO4 may be suitable though. No thermal runaway problems, much longer service life than LiPo, but a bit bigger and heavier for the same capacity.

Holy crap! EMC gives Vatican Library 2.8PB to store manuscripts

Steve Todd

So EMC are giving them a 6% discount

Doesn't sound too generous to me.

Europe tickles Microsoft with €561m fine for browser choice gaffe

Steve Todd

Re: I am not convinced either way on this

You don't seem to understand what a monopoly is, nor a legal undertaking.

A monopoly ISN'T illegal. The competition authorities may prevent you buying up other companies to create one, but a monopoly in a given field is perfectly OK providing you got there by creating the market or by being the seller of the most popular products in it.

Once you reach monopoly status there are restrictions over what you may do. You are not allowed to leverage your position to get you into another market for example. Microsoft were convicted of leveraging their position in operating systems to force their way into the market for web browsers. To settle this case they gave a legal undertaking to present users with a browser choice screen when the system is setting up. They broke this.

In order for Microsoft to (retroactively) comply with the agreement you were mildly inconvenienced. Tough.

Apple don't hold a monopoly in either PCs or phones, so they are not subject to these limitations. You can't just count devices made by a manufacturer, you count the whole class of devices otherwise you could claim stupid things like "you can only run Samsung software on Samsung TVs".

Apple patents situational awareness for oblivious fanbois

Steve Todd
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Re: "Or, sensing perhaps that you've fallen asleep, your iWatch could"

"my car has saved me a serious accident by applying the brakes and alerting me as the idiot in front braked heavily"

In which case you were too close to the "idiot" in front of you and not paying attention to the state of traffic in front of them. Sorry, who was the idiot again?

Review: Britain's 4G smartphones

Steve Todd
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Re: Pathetic: 500MB for 31 pounds

1) Unless my maths are wrong then that's only a single stream inside of 3.5Mbit/sec rather than the MULTIPLE streams you were claiming.

2) You certainly won't get 3.5Mbit/sec all over the country at peak times. I'm not even reaching 0.5Mbit/sec at the moment, and that's with 5 bars of signal strength.

3) YOU were the one to mention HD streams. I can however see the difference between HD and SD on a tablet with a better than 1080p screen resolution (hint: you look at tablet screens from rather closer distances than a TV screen).

4) EEs 3G network is no better than 3's, but then you can get unlimited 3G contracts (data, texts and minutes) SIM only for £16 if you're not going to spend most of your time in a 4G area.

Steve Todd
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Re: Pathetic: 500MB for 31 pounds

Your cheap £7 deal was SIM only and limited texts/calls. £31 includes a subsidised phone and unlimited texts/calls, its not a like for like comparison.

HD (at 720p) needs about 4Mbits/sec for decent playback. Unless 3 can AVERAGE more than that then no, it's not good enough for a single HD stream.

Non of the solutions you suggest will work well in a busy city centre, oh and the EE deal includes unlimited WiFi also.

Steve Todd

Re: 8Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up HSPA+ speeds

HSPA+ is fine in locations where there isn't a lot of users all competing for the bandwidth. In city centres its a different matter. I've just run a quick test. On 3 using HSPA+ I'm getting 440K down and 40K up, with a 340ms ping. On EE I'm getting 19.72M down, 18.05M up with a 43ms ping. It's not hard to see which I'd rather use.

4G in the UK? Why the smart money still says 'Meh'

Steve Todd
Stop

Re: Hi-Speed, Slowly

3G in busy city centres is unusabley slow. Web pages either time-out or take minutes to load. There's a limited amount of bandwidth to share around and many people competing for it. In these circumstances LTE is a perfectly rational (if somewhat expensive) choice. You don't need to be dealing in large chunks of data for it to become worth while and most users would be hard pushed to get though more than a couple of gig per month of mobile data.

BTW, the iPhone was a 2.5G device to start with don't forget.

John Sweeney: Why Church of Scientology's gravest threat is the 'net

Steve Todd
Stop

Re: Sweeney

You don't seem to understand the difference between a story presented to illustrate the truth (go look up the word "parable") and a story presented AS the truth. Fiction can be useful providing that its clearly understood that it is fiction.

Satanic Renault takes hapless French bloke on 200km/h joyride

Steve Todd

Re: Toyotas - @TRT

No hyper-mileing techniques used here, just accelerate up to the local speed limit and engage cruise control (there's quite a lot of 50mph urban dual carriageway around where I live).

Steve Todd

Re: Toyotas - @TRT

I'm guessing that you've got a 1st gen model then (average MPG went up from about 41 to 45 between the two, the former being about equal to a Metro automatic. 3rd gen models are still exempt from the congestion charge), or a heavy right foot. My 2nd gen seems to take about 10 minutes to get fully warmed up, following which MPG is almost always on the upper side of 50 (maximum efficiency being somewhere between 50 and 60MPH where it's hitting high 60s MPG average).

Either the difference in locks is down to different models or mine is a little dodgy, what can I say?

Steve Todd

Re: Toyotas - @TRT

I thought the best part about owning a Prius was giving much less of your hard earned cash to the tax man. I previously had a Jaguar S Type (just old enough to avoid the higher rates of road tax, but still heavy on the go juice), I estimate it should save me about £1000/year (for a low milage driver and ignoring insurance).

Steve Todd

Re: Toyotas - @TRT

Not entirely true. In the 2nd generation Prius I tried it in the key fob only locks in place if the vehicle has been moving. Powering up and engaging gear don't cause it to lock and you can still pull the key to shut it off, which is what threw me.

Steve Todd

Re: Toyotas - @Khaptain

Excepting that (1) the breaks on a Prius are rather powerful and can easily overcome the engine, (2) you can force the gearbox into neutral while on the move (some early models let you shift to Park, which could be a bit exciting) and (3) the electronic key doesn't lock in the dash when it's running.

Mobes with monster 72-core GPU to debut in China

Steve Todd

Re: Sadly 72 nVidia GPU cores

My mistake about the Nexus 10, it uses 2 A15 CPUs (so you should be able to use it for CPU speed comparisons) but the Mali 604 as stated. And no, I wasn't wrong about GPU power and lack of software support, it's still a DirectX 9 part.

Steve Todd

Sadly 72 nVidia GPU cores

Still can't keep up with 4 PowerVR cores, and they are still way behind the curve in terms of software support (DirectX 9, no OpenCL etc).

If anyone is interested in comparing performance the Nexus 10 tablet contains the Tegra 4 and has been benchmarked already. The A15 CPUs are fast, but power hungry. The GPU is a little behind the curve compared to the older PowerVR SGX5XT series and gets stomped on by the SGX6 series.

Just what does BT have planned for its 4G licence: We drill into UK LTE

Steve Todd

Have Offcom moved the goalposts

And allowed 3G on 900Mhz? More importantly do any phones support it on that band? If no to either of these questions then O2 will have trouble deploying 3G in the highlands as suggested.

France Telecom takes huge profit hit after swallowing €1.8bn writedown

Steve Todd

€1.2bn of that reduction in profits

Is listed against a part time working deal for employees near retirement age. They must have a lot of old staff on their books.

Mobe networks bag UK 4G for a steal - £1bn shy of Osborne's £3.5bn

Steve Todd
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Re: 4G, very nice

You seem to have missed out on the fact that 4G on 800MHz will give much better rural coverage than 3G on 2.1GHz. The 2.1 and 2.6GHz bands are all well and good for urban coverage, but need many more base stations to cover the whole country.

Steve Todd
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Re: Cheap contracts then? Oh no, wait..

The cellco's still need to build out the hardware to implement 4G, that's far from free. It's probably the most expensive part of the process, and blowing huge wads of cash on the original 3G licensed probably slowed the rollout of actual 3G base stations considerably.

Steve Todd
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Re: More TV spectrum gone!

That was always the plan. Analog TV was rather spectrum inefficient (mainly because you had to allocate multiple frequencies to a single channel and allow lots of distance between transmitters using the same frequency otherwise you'd get ghosting). Digital TV allows you to use the same frequency across the whole country for a multiplex of 6+ channels.

UK TV channels are allocated in 8MHz blocks. The 700MHz band alone is enough for 12 multiplexes, and we currently only have 10 in use (including 1 DVB-T2 HD multiplex)

Microsoft: You want Office for Mac, fanboi? You'll pay Windows prices

Steve Todd
FAIL

They seem to have forgotten why they made Office cheap on the Mac

Apart from the fact that they missed out some functionality, they needed to compete with iWork, which could be bought as individual packages for £13.99 a pop (and run on multiple machines). Most home users will find Apple's offerings sufficient so increasing the price is a great way to start a downward spiral.

EE's revenues dip, but smartphones lure in 200k new contracts

Steve Todd
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Re: 4G must be going badly - @I ain't Spartacus

Not sure where you got those numbers from, EE have NEVER charged that much for the basic plan, nor have they offered an unlimited 4G plan. The initial offer was £36 for 500mb and pretty much unlimited talk/texts. Extra data allowance could be bought in £5 blocks (1GB, 3GB, 5GB & 8GB). They added in a top tier 20GB plan for an extra £20 (total £76, with a temporary £15 discount). T-Mobile offered an "unlimited" 3G plan that was similar for £36, but that is throttled.