Posts by Ian K

Re: Strange ideas about why patents get published

"That was 2017 but I am sure you can find prior art dating back to the great library of Alexandria"

Not quite that far back (late 1990s), but IIRC one of the bits of background tech in "Earth: Final Conflict" was a pull-out roller screen on their handheld video whatsits.

Re: I'll allow myself a smug grin

> As far as I am aware the Z-Wave and Zigbee kit works with local controllers that don't need an internet connection to work.

In principle (not sure how often it happens in practice) Z-Wave meshes can be set up where devices only talk to each other (a button directly communicates with and toggles a switch, for example) can be set up, with no need for a central controller at all.

Usually Z-Wave and Zigbee meshes will have a central hub which manages rules and ties everything together. Whether this hub farms all the rule storage and processing out to the cloud, handles everything internally and requires no cloud connectivity at all, or is somewhere in between, varies according to the system.

Re: SNAFU

While I hesitate to say anything that could be construed as defending Santander, in the interests of fairness the article doesn't say that this outage was down to any sort of upgrade, let alone one to a critical system.

It does mention a fairly generic promise to upgrade systems, made in the last financial report, but there's nothing to say when that actually happened/will happen.

Re: Why bother with a dating site?

>> find a bar, get shit face drunk, puke on the first woman you can get to

>Romance is not dead

Just lightly concussed.

Re: IOT=Crap

@Alister

I think you are missing the point. It is perfectly possible to have all these conveniences, to control your lights by voice or from a smartphone app, and all the other things, without the need to use the internet or someone else's server.

I don't think I am; I'm fully aware of the options for home automation, and have decided that for the time being at least the best balance of functionality and ease of use is to be found with some internet-based components.

That is why people on this forum are disparaging of IoT, it is unnecessarily complicated and prone to being made obsolete or unusable at the whim of the manufacturer or service provider, much more so than discrete electronics or equipment based on internal WiFi connections.

Hubs, and the external things that tie into them, may go obsolete; that's why all the in-house stuff we use here is based on a non-proprietary communication protocol. If one hub goes dark we can swtich to another, if they all die a death for some reason I'll get a Z-Wave module for the Pi, install the appropriate public domain packages and use that as the controller.

If you think that what has happened to the Honeywell thermostat is acceptable, then fine, carry on as you are, but understand that a lot of the technically minded people who post on the Reg have seen this coming for a long time, and it won't be the last time this happens.

I have to admit that I'm a little amused that you're presenting this as "the technically minded people" vs me - without going into details I really have got a fairly technical background myself. I've got no illusions about cloud-based systems being perfect, but find their flaws and potential future issues worth it for the advantages they provide.

As far as what I find acceptable goes, the original Reg article describes a problem where the control system's entirely functional locally, just not accessable remotely via the app - given that any remote system's going to be dependent on the house internet working, and probably my phone being on the internet too (so already vulnerable to several external points of failure), I'd say the Honeywell issue would be annoying but not a deal breaker.

Re: Proof the Cloud is about surveillance not practicality, its badly / wrongly designed for IoT

"A small French company called Snips has been working for years on private-by-design voice recognition. Voice commands are processed on the end user’s device, making the data transfer unnecessary."

Ironically when I tried to follow the link to Snips on the Bloomberg page I ran into a "Manage Options on using your data" setup so Byzantine and fiddly it simply wasn't worth the effort of working through it; on quick examination it seems to want you to have a login and go in to set things for each advertiser individually, and the page where you start doing that's hidden 4+ inobvious links down from the simple "Just let us have everything" option.

So, I still don't know what their opinion of Snips is, but let's just say I have my doubts that it can match the cloudy setups as far as both price, practicality and out-of-the-box performance are concerned.

Re: CRTs

An honourable mention for that goes to the film Runaway (1984) - they wanted their characters to use portable flat screens, but as you say that simply wasn't an option at the time. So they used "loose" CRTs filmed at angles where only the front of the screen was visible, and positioned as if they were being cradled in arms, resting on table tops, etc...

For the most part if worked reasonably well.

Re: It just might be low energy photons providing the thrust

Photons having momentum is first level undergrad stuff - I'd hope the NASA people would have discounted that when considering possible causes of observations.

Plus, at very best photons emitted back in the direction of incident light would replicate the behaviour of a reflective solar sail - as the engine allegedly gives twice as much thrust as that, presumably something else has to be a factor.

While I was vehemently opposed to the mandatory ID card the last lot tried to bring in, I wouldn't automatically reject a voluntary system.

A lot would depend on just what information they wanted, and what they could do with it, but if it was limited to a simple "confirm identity, in similar situations as you already need to now, and nothing else" function I could see that being useful and not overly intrusive.

Re: Link?

Although in a similar fashion you managed to say there was no link without going on to provide a link.

FWIW the new system can be found here:

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/osmaps/