Posts by Alan Sharkey 295 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jan 2009
So, it relies on everyone having a modern phone. It relies on everyone installing the app. It relies on everyone carrying their phone with them at all times. It relies on some central service to do all the correlation. It relies on people behaving "sensibly" when they get pinged that they may have come near someone who might have the disease.
Can anyone see any issues here?
Alan
I've had virgin cable for 20 years now - apart from the line dropping around once every 6 months for about 4 hours, it seems pretty stable. Virgin TV is OK - comparable to Sky (apart from Sky Atlantic). I haven't had any support issues and the deal I have is, to my eyes, pretty good (500Mb/sec broadband+all entertainment, sports and film channels + unlimited land line calls + unlimited everything Sim card for £99/month).
The O2 merger won't make much difference to me unless they start removing things.
I shall have a rant here.
As the child grows up, he (or she) needs a "normal" name for the society in which they live. Anything outside the 'norm' and they get teased incessantly - because that is what children do. So, giving a child a name like this one is not nice for the child and only reflects the parents ego.
rant over.
Alan
svn commit like it's the year 2000: Apache celebrates 20 years of Subversion
Anyone travellinga reasonable distance (and I mean over 100 miles each way) will not want to wait 3-4 hours while their battery charges up. Personally, I commute down to Cambridge from Rochdale at least once a week - that's 180+ miles each way - to see my elderly parents who don't have a car and therefore have no interest in putting a power point in for any leccy car I may want (or not). My diesel BMW X3 does very nicely, thank you very much - and, as it's reasonably new, doesn't have those horrible emissions that the world tells me all diesel cars have.
And another thing - why do electric cars cost so much? They are a much simpler device with far less moving parts. That, surely, will deter most normal people from buying one.
OK - Rant over. I'll get my pills and wait for the man in the white coat
I've still got a Compaq luggable in the loft.
I used to live in a village where the train station was at the bottom of a hill. One day, it had snowed and the only road out was blocked. So, train it was. The luggable had a lovely nylon slip case to go over it. Which was great when I sat on it and sledged down to the train station. And, of course, at the other end, just pulled it behind me as though it was on wheels.
Ah, the youth of today - they don't know what they were missing.
Alan
I was told about a price rise. I had 200mb + free phone calls and all TV apart from the movies.
After a couple of false starts, I spoke to a lovely lady who offered me 500mb/s, free phone calls, all TV including movies and a sim card for my mobile with unlimited 4G - for £15/month less than I was paying. All on a 12 month contract.
Of course, I said yes!!!
Alan
I was working for a large telecoms company some time ago, They had links from the UK to Ireland. One in Scotland, and one in Wales. One night there was a huge storm in the Irish sea. A tanker dragged its anchor over the Scotland cable and a wall fell down in Wales, severing the cable there.
Oops!
Alan
and I have 5 network drives (to different areas of my NAS) and 5 subst'ed drives. They all seem to be OK in 1803 but I did have an issue for a while with one of my networked drives having a red X. It went away after a small update some time ago.
I would like the 1809 update purely so I can respond to text messages on my PC - but it's not worth blowing away my network drives just for that.
Most people I know use bluetooth headsets (and yes, you can use them on aeroplanes). Having leads dangling around is so 1980's :)
As to the notch, does it really matter?
For the price, it's a cracking phone.
Alan
PS - I have the OP5 but I doubt I'll upgrade - that does everything I want.
Surely database searches, which then output to a "hybrid" or "virtual" table have been around since the start of databases.
I can remember writing something like that back in about 1980 on a Data General RDOS system. And, doing it again in DBASE3 when we used that - and so on.
How did that get to be a patent?
Alan
"Edge computing, for the uninitiated, puts compute and storage capacity closer to where data is created, so it can be processed locally. Doing so avoids the cost of shipping data to a cloud and improves response times too. If an edge system spots something worthy of more attention, it will ship that data to a core cloud so that more processing power can be brought to bear."
Doesn't this just mean a local data centre? Like what we always used to have?
For a Friday.
I agree - I like the internet being "free" and will put up with the ads and data slurping. As I am now a poor pensioner (thank you DEC, for your final salary pension scheme), I do need to know what my outgoings are - and having "free" internet does help.
Alan
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