Posts by MrT

Re: testing

Absolutely agreed about more realistic testing. There's an extra line on car adverts these days, the jist of which is "test results are for comparison only, don't expect to see those results in real life...". Versions existed before, but the disclaimer realises that no one drives to the test profile. 0-100kph in 30 seconds was probably chosen so a 2CV could complete things.

There are problems with short period tests, given the number of variables that could apply. The only way to gather realistic figures would involve a test fleet over a year or so. As that's logistically impractical (secrecy over launches, etc.) then a new range of 'best case/worst case' tests needs setting up. But, whatever test is created, gaming the system would still happen.

The reality is everyone drives their cars somewhere between 'as if they stole it' and 'as if there's an uncracked egg on the throttle and it's not breaking on this trip'. It's just the Euro cycle is on the latter end, with the world's strictest Celeration tracker wired up to send 10kVA up the driver if triggered...

Re: How long does the battery last?

Yeah, but it'll not get anywhere near 88mph doing that all day, no matter how long it's given...

Re: Let's See

Doesn't everyone find things in the last place they look? I'd be more worried if someone carried on looking for the thing they've already found...

Now, looking for the wrong thing, or starting to look in plain crazy places - oh yes, I can tick those boxes aplenty ;-)

Re: Parallel parking

Russ Swift would agree there.

He brought his team to the garage where my dad worked in the early 80's for the then-new Vauxhall Nova launch event. Did all sorts of stuff, including a routine in a FIAT Panda that went sideways so much that afterwards one of the salesmen looked at the car and all the tyre rubber on the forecourt, then walked off muttering to his colleague if he new of anyone wanting a car with square wheels.

Re: Doh!

If they haven't got one already, that could be the first article in a new 'WTFLA' spin-off collection of all the double-facepalm stories.

Re: AndroidVulnerabilities

'd' extends towards infinity by an exponential rate based on 'a' (where 'a' is the device age in months [unlocked handsets] or days [locked handsets]), inversely reducing 'm' so pretty much all anyone ends up with is 'f' and 'u', a big ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and a link to buy the latest yet-to-be-abandoned handset.

"if I could afford one, I certainly would buy one..."

... absolutely agree there, but now the Nomad has been released there's another option - a way to avoid the autoroute toll booths, or even the tarmac altogether (green-laning from Nice to UK...? :-D ). I'm not so sure if it'd get parked up on show in the same way as the Atom though. More extreme eye-candy for front-of-Casino would be the older limited run bewinged 500 V8.

OTOH...

... on that basis my old SGS3 is running the latest version ;-)

Re: Let me be the first to say...

...ad-libbing with a duck - sorry, Argentinian racing pigeon.

Re: 7 digit display...

Definitely, and what's more, we did have a girl called Debbie in my class, and calculators with a memory function too...

Self-parking...

...the S can do it, can't it? They even make a big deal of the latest ones letting themselves out of a garage and pulling out onto the driveway, all cosy and whatnot, ready to go to the first appointment in your calendar at a time that takes into account the traffic en route. If that's possible, just get out where everyone can see, then have the car tuck itself away. They could even fit the robosnake charging arm to the car and adapt it to pick tickets from the entrance barrier so you can get out before going anywhere near the inside of the car park.

It'd be nice if they enabled the configuration option for the X on the website so we can all spec up and dream on.

Re: From the board of VW AG

This is the company that fitted insecure vehicle security to save a tiny amount per car, then fought for two years after that was discovered to cover it up. The urea tank system costs a lot more than $1, so it's even more money saved/in profit/in bonus payments and share dividends.

Re: Still fancy a 'connected' car?

Remap fans beware - get one like the BSR boxes or the old MINI Oneclick jobs that can be reverted to factory maps for the MoT emissions test, then reinstated afterwards. Call me cynical, but if this action against VW sticks then one outcome might be that EMS firmware is checked, approved and sealed, and any aftermarket mods forced off the road.

Re: wha?

So many unintentional URLs out there...

abaresearch.co.uk

oldmanshaven.com

dicksonweb.com

powergenitalia.com

swissbit.ch

choosespain.com

La Drape, Les Bocages, Speed of Art and America's Pan King also made that mistake. I'm not sure whether the Turbomachinery Institute of Technology & Sciences (an academic institute in Hyderabad, India) isn't just a clever ruse to use tits.ac.in... maybe the Swissbit and Choose Spain people know the truth...?

“Often, we run tests like this not in reaction to a problem, but to learn,”

Dear (cough) Ad Age, listen to your 'Friends' (cough cough) at WaPo, then look at Mike's post above and ^^^learn from that^^^.

Well said, sir.

Re: "this time to review the opt-out process..."

"...just enough to mean that all the opt-opts already made will be invalidated because of some minor changes to the required wording. Everyone who has already opted out will be back in the list, and to prevent any stress or worry we won't tell them. Thanks to our old school friends at SmaxoGlythkline for lending us their legal teams to sort that one out."

Call me cynical...

It might not need any extra...

Current heliocentric speed 14.49km/s

1km/s is roughly 2237mph (data from Johns Hopkins University APL)

So, 32,424mph.

1 billion miles in 1220 or so days is 34,153mph. Depends on how close to 1 billion miles it has to travel, but delta-V for exactly 1 billin is around another 1,700mph max. At current speed it'll cover 949 million miles, which is 'nearly' enough at zero delta-V.

Re: Awesome

That old saying reminded me of one of Sir Ken Robinson's well known presentations about creativity in education, especially the bit about the 200ft high paperclip.

There seem to be a lot of other relevant clips on The RSA's YouTube channel as well, but the SKR one popped up in my mind first.

Boy band?

Not strictly "boy", but "Out in the Fields" could be rewritten to fit...

"Stored in the fields,

the data's just begun.

Out on the disks,

Records build one by one.

Wait! Back it up!

A thousand files could die each day.

Murphy's just a heartbeat away."

With apologies to Gary Moore and Phil Lynott, obviously

Give it a try...

...I've only ever had one PC setup where it overclocked by default (an old AMD Athlon setup, unlocked CPU and IIRC an Abit mobo) - TBH the board didn't really understand the CPU, which should have been 100MHz FSB x18, and set it to x20 without asking, which is about +11%. It never batted an eyelid for about 5yrs or so before I needed to save space and retired it in favour of laptops.

Worth doing. We rebuilt a bunch of RM Ones a year back by gutting them and fitting new mobo, CPU, RAM and a 120GB SSD in each. Just kept the box and monitor, but did the lot for about half the cost of a full refresh - about £190 each, and not much more time to complete (maybe a day). The room went from being unbearable to usable.

I've just dropped a 1TB MX200 SSD into an old Dell laptop (unfortunately now revealed to be susceptible to the Intel CPU cockup), plus a couple of 250GBs in two Toshibas, one on AMD Turion TL60 and another on a much newer Celeron 1000M. All are much better off for the switch from spinning disks - something like 16-25 seconds to login and then another 5-10 seconds to desktop, plus noise levels near silent as the fans don't spin up that often.

Fortunately, the Micron/Crucial Storage Executive firmware upgrade tool is a joke (web application, ships with outdated version of Java) and won't run on any of them, so hopefully I'll not experience the failure by firmware update that affected the Samsung SSDs a few months back. However, just imagine having 15-16TB go west instead of something that is more easily backed up...

The cork-pulling monkey and the elephant...

How about a rewording of the mug to "After I finish this coffee I'm going to move a 'backup' in the cloud..."?

In the end...

... the update advisor tool was being a bit cautious. The old A300D is currently running Windows 10 just fine on the old December 2008 ATI driver. I had to force the update to load, and then pointed the display adapter to the Windows.old folder to find the Win7 driver. I also had to remove a small collection of utilities to stop some instability, such as Toshiba's toolkits/updaters, the ATI Catalyst stuff and, oddly, all of the Freemake media downloader/converter titles, but in the end it works nicely.

The issue with the Dell laptop was down to me ages ago setting DEP to apply only to essential Windows files and services - once I'd dug that nugget from memory and reset it to all files, the Win8.1 and Win10 upgrade advisors found that the CPU was fine. And there was me thinking it was the Dell firmware blocking the XD setting... hopefully that will be a reasonably smooth process as well, but there is a lot more legacy on that system than on the old Toshiba.

Memories...

Get thee to the Life Science Centre in Newcastle - the place is currently stuffed full of retro gaming gear for the Game On 2.0 exhibit (runs until 03 Jan 2016).

Can't remember everything, but did play a maze game on the ZX81, 3D Deathchase on a ZX Spectrum with a natty little CompactFlash card drive fitted to the back, and a bunch of other good things. Can't remember what the Amiga was running. Their Beeb was busted, though, just showing static on screen (blown capacitor?) :-( ...

Sorry this sounds like an advert, but I've just spent the afternoon wandering about the place with a big grin on my face.

Re: I see what your butt did there...

That truly will be a bum call.

OTOH, what if the voice activation was triggered by a thunderous Bronx cheer?

Re: The processes failed before the strut did

Reading about the Apollo 13 mission, process failure happened then as well. By all accounts, the O₂ tank failure was due to a combination of the tank being dropped slightly during a test five years before the mission flew, plus the tank thermostat manufacturer not getting the memo about the shift from using 28 volts to 65 volts as part of the response to the Apollo 1 fire.

Space.com has a writeup about the incident.

Universe Today has an excellent series of articles about the incident. By curious twist of fate, the damaged vent pipe probably saved the crew from death as the tank stirring procedures had been accelerated to try to deal with the issue - it failed on the fifth stir, but whilst still in space with the lunar module docked, instead of on day 5 as scheduled, with the mission already on the lunar surface.

It seems the tank passed all tests as an item, but the combination of parts made a small bomb. The workarounds were accepted instead of triggering a concern, but then the timescale and complexity of the endeavour pushed the issue down the scale.

SpaceX is a lot smaller and responsive than the Apollo programme, and is data-rich. Some suggest bringing it all in house is a way forward, but they haven't the capacity for this. Keeping everyone communicating is more important - this rocket science thing is no place for folk to hide substandard work, for example. That they can pin down the cause is testament to SpaceX setting up systems to let them learn from every launch, not just the failures.

Re: When I were a lad at school...

...no-one wanted to work with "Damp Pete" for any length of time, let alone long enough to do some writing...

Re: Fairer system...

It sounds backwards, but start with the premise that many artists don't get paid all their royalties, plus the big labels can take upwards of 2 years between sale/play to paying the artists. This article is a few years old but explains something of what is going on.

WiReD has had older news posts about Kobalt, but the article from this month is not yet online. There was an example from Eminem's manager where he tested different payment systems on one of the rapper's songs. Each of the three writers went with a different company for payments, which should have been identical since they were for the same song. Kobalt came in far sooner, and the traditional companies were well over a year to pay. No artist can afford that delay, unless already well-off, so they will go to their company and ask for an advance on sales, maybe not realising their money is already there. The company then uses this advance to maybe secure a new contract with the artist.

It relies on lack of transparency in where the money comes from and where it is in the system. The aricle was more about how Kobalt made use of data to open up that information to artists. I'm not in the music industry so have nothing more to go on than articles and what others say (though my brother-in-law is a singer/songwriter) - it probably doesn't work that way for big names, and there may be many different ways to earn a crust, such as mentioned earlier in this thread. It just seems unfair on the artists, especially anyone trying to start out.