Posts by BristolBachelor

Oficially Aluminium is Aluminium too, just ask them. However that doesn't stop it being spelt differently in different languages (e.g. American)

The article amused me but because I then read underneath to the part about Spain, where I am currently working.

In my block of flats, no one has access to their electricity meters. If they are smart meters, no one knows, or has a display to tell them how much electricity they are using. You know you are using a "lot" when the main incoming trip in your flat cuts off the power at 15A; you learn to synchronise use of the washing machine, microwave, vacuum cleaner, etc. A UPS is essential.

Strangly it's the same in Japan, where the limits per dwelling can be even lower, but the electricity meters seem to be exclusively eddy-current type with spinning aluminimum disks proudly on display giving direct feedback of how much you are using :)

Because 17000 MPH is bloody fast. How much petrol does it take your car to accelerate to that speed? :)

In comparison, I believe that the fuel needed to get high enough that wind resistance is minimised is not so much (not when you consider how much weight it has to get up there, with the payload and all the fuel needed to accelerate it to orbital velocity)

The energy suppliers already know that information, and more accurately too. Imagine all the errors reading millions of meters and adding them, compared to the errors reading the few meters that currently measure the grid! In fact you can even see the power used by the country because the graphs are published online (can't remember where; try Google if interested)

The only reason for these is to vary the tariff throughout the day (more than Economy 7), to turn-off the output for customers in dispute with their supplier, or to turn off peoples power in times of shortage (unless you are a member of the board of the elec company!)

If you only use off-peak electricity then you might benefit compared to others, but the off-peak costs probably won't go down compared to now; the on-peak will jump up.

Timing

If these are in low-earth orbit, you can only see them for a few minutes at a time before the Earth gets in the way of your line of sight.

9 minutes sounds like quite a long time to me. 2 minutes could be how long it was in sight of the ground station if it didn't pass directly overhead.

Surely this is only on the Jubilee Line extension? Or have they installed doors on the platform on the whole line now?

My understanding was that you can only go driverless when they have doors on the platform to match up with the doors on the trains (a bit like driverless lifts that everyone seems to think have been ok for ages!)

I'd agree, a snapshot is a backup, by definition.

However, if the snapshot is on the same physical device (a la shadow copy), it's not a very good backup against hardware failures (or flood/fire, etc.).

Also if you have some data that changes and some that doesn't, a snapshot is not a particularly efficient method for keeping a series of backups, whereas a snapshot plus deltas can be (IMHO)

Probably the need for anti-aliasing is that the image processing that the brain does tries to pick out "interesting" features, such as corners, where lines intersect, etc. that have high-contrast in 2 directions.

If you focus nicely on a pixel based display with a line at an angle, you see these "interesting" high-contrast points each time the line "jumps" from one row/column of pixels to the next, or the jagged bits of letters (the x as I type this is particularly bad).

I can't wait for higher resolution displays. In some ways, the substrate price could be the same (same size, possibly higher quality), with similar processing steps but the failure of individual pixels/sub-pixels should have lower impact, so manufacturing yeilds may not have to be affected. However the image processing requirements will increase quite a bit, and interconnect requirements means that the display will probably have to have some of the smarts on board to save having to connect 10000 signals to it.

I live about 40Km outside Madrid, and the temperatures here are generally 10°C cooler than the max in Madrid. Also at night at this time of year, they drop a lot more here than in the middle of the city. People in the city say that the summers have got worse and worse each year, but outside they have stayed about the same.

Also a company here has just used satellite measurements as well as weather stations, etc. to characterise and prove the heat island effect in Madrid; and it is getting worse each year; buildings get higher, power usage goes up, more air-con units get turned on etc.

2 (admitadly anecdotal) hints that the heat island effect is real.

It's not just that there's the delay in DAB; nobody specified what it should be. If you have 2 DAB radios playing in the house, you get a terrible echo effect because the timing is different between them!

I'm currently doing a contract in Spain, which is one of many countries that have looked at digital radio and decided that there's no point. (Out of interest, their DTV has started HD, but you didn't have to to buy a new box, because it is compatible with the old boxes too, unlike the UK where you have to replace your DTV boxes becasue they changed the standard before they even got around to turning off the analogue!)

I seem to remember being able to buy long-life bulbs, and seeing bulbs rated for 5000 hours (important if changing them requires getting out scafolding, or you don't want them to go out half-way through a show!)

However, most people went and bought the "Tesco Value" bulbs instead, with lifetimes so short they might not even work by the time you got them home!

(yesterday I saw that Philips have finally released a dimmable LED, 35W equivalent GU10 bulb, and for only 45€)

@Lallabalalla

What exactly do you manage to do with your Ericsson thingy?

Can you transfer things between it and your Apples?

Does it let you use an external keyboard on your Apples?

Will it report the GPS location of the Apple thingy over the bluetooth connection?

Will it share it's network connection for browsing or telnet?

Will it let you make a data telephone call like a modem?

Other Bluetooth thingies have done this since they came out; certainly my at least 4 year old Nokia did, while Apple thought Bluetooth meant "wireless headphone" and nothing else.