Posts by Steve 13 218 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Oct 2009
"Exactly how much use it is against passive homing missiles, such as types that track infra-red emissions such as those given off by a jet using full afterburner while trying to shake off a threat, remains to be seen"
Errr, no, it doesn't remain to be seen. It will be precisely zero use against an IR missile as it's designed as a counter to a radar guided missile. Duh. You've even written in the article that it's designed to replace foil clouds, not IR flare decoys...
I had my kitchen refitted recently, rather than spend £150 on light bulbs, I bought some decent KEF ceiling speakers and had the electrician run the speaker cable to the nearby (attached) garage.
My light switches only turn on/off the light bulbs. If a bulb blows I can replace it.
I can attach any audio source I like to the speakers, and being 8" across they sound pretty good.
I can listen to music without needing to turn on the lights in the middle of the day.
Basically keeping the audio and lighting separate is far more versatile and sensible than trying to combine them... And given the high price of these bulbs even the installation cost isn't a barrier. If the bulbs were £10 then I could understand them being used as a cheap, poor quality solution in preference to spending more and getting better quality. But they aren't. They cost as much as doing it properly, but only add disadvantages to the mix.
A better solution would be to have gimmics like coloured and colour changing bulbs as a secondary lighting device, not a primary one. When I want white light, I switch on the primary lighting circuit, and when the cleaner comes she does the same thing.
When I want mood lighting I turn on the lamp, and I expect it to remember what it's settings were, not have to be reset every time it's used.
I've got a number of LED lighting strips and bulbs, some remember there settings, others don't. I find the ones that remember the settings to be much more useful.
Apart from remote control (something I can't imagine using more than once to prove it worked), this seems like a less effective solution than programmable thermostatic radiator valves being fitted in each room.
Sure, this can take readings from multiple rooms if you spring for $79 for each extra sensor. And then what. It can do "turn on" or "turn off".
Thermostatic valves on the other hand can control the temperature in each room. On a timer. So if one room heats up faster than another, no need to worry about the wasted heat, the valve will cut the heat to that radiator.
The one thing missing is that these PTRV need to also be wireless, so that they can individually demand heat, no central thermostat at all, just that a room knows it's too cold and demands the boiler comes on. When no room is demanding heat, the boiler goes off.
Combined with the 5/2 24hr programmable timer you can have the bedroom warm slightly at 0700 on weekdays, and at 0900 on weekends, the bathroom the same, living room from 1700 on weekdays until 2100 or whatever is your preference, and each with it's own target temperature.
The wifi extender would be the most useful except for the fact that it needs power, and most people turn their lights off when they aren't in the room.
Of course you could also replace the power switch with one that communicates wirelessly with the device and doesn't really turn the power off... But now you can't safely change the bulb... So a replacement switch that does a 'soft' and a 'hard' off, just don't get them confused and touch the pins whilst replacing the £150 bulb when it's blown...
Bluetooth as an audio option is a terrible solution in a house IMO, not to mention the power problem again and the limited size that means quality will be poor.
What was the last one, IP camera, meh... Maybe, if that's on wifi and not bluetooth, although personally I like my cameras to point out of the house, not into it. Presumably this function will mostly be used by pervs to spy on guests in the spare room.
I use cheap d link cameras and apache reverse proxy on my synology nas. Not massively secure, the nsa and gchq can no doubt see that my car is still in the drive just like I can.
Images are ftpd to the same nas on motion detection, I doubt your average thief would know what it was or take it in preference to a laptop.
False positives are really high though, so I don't sink it to dropbox.
Had this setup for over four years now fyi.
It's a shame that the 802.11n speeds and 802.11ac speeds were not plotted on the same graph.
Trying to compare by eye the result of n and ac for the fastest router, it appears that in the "real world scenario" of being upstairs, ac offers no speed advantage at all.
It's also a shame that nothing further away than 8m indoors and 10m with LOS was tested.
My house happens to be larger than 10m square, and my garden larger still, some test of distance before bandwidth drops below X would have been useful, and a test within a building through more than 1 wall/floor and over more than 8 metres.
Yeah, at 36 I'm definitely a yoof, yawn.
Ooh, and good spot on the typo, that's given your reply much kudos.
Still, the plural of anecdote is not data, to correct my typo. Which if you didn't get it, means that no matter how many mates you ask, you have not collected any data. In which case the opinion is not based on any data.
Dude, I guess you're just too old.
Oh, and don't forget that the plural of anedote isn't data.
For what it's worth though, pretty much everyone I know uses it, and I'm not that young that we're talking about kids. University lecturers, solicitors, health professionals, and quite a few IT professionals.
And since you ask, what it does that text doesn't is group conversations. It's just instant messaging, it's nothing new, but it's convenient, on the phone and you can set up arbitrary group conversations, great for arranging stuff.
Not worth what they paid for it of course, but not as pointless as you seem to implying.
Surely the point wouldn't be to get from A to B, it would be a cruise in the same way that you cruise on an ocean liner. You stop at multiple point and eventually return to your destination.
Nobody points out that cruise ships must fail due to the slow nature of the journey, because the point isn't the speed, but the journey itself.
It might defeat the point of a holiday to YOU. But it's worth remembering that we aren't all the same.
Take the holiday that you want. Go to the middle of nowhere and have no signal if it makes you happy, but don't criticise someone who likes to be able to stay in touch. It's their holiday they are talking about, not yours.
I think you've been mislead by the reporting, the law does not allow a fine of £5000 for her.
The section of the act as quoted would apply to the suspect in this case, he illegally obtained private information.
The social worker in this case illegally disclosed it, which was not the offence that was quoted in the article, that was "illegally accessing or obtaining", she did neither of those things.
Surely 1 good reason to use facebook would be enough of a reason to use it.
Nobody claims that email is secure, but you use that (I guess), and I doubt that anyone can list 10 reasons to use email without some of those reasons being subsets of a reason already listed.
There are reasons to not post too much personal information on facebook, and I certainly don't care if you don't want to use it, nor do I want to convince you to use it. But the inverse IT snobbery being demonstrated by a lot of posters is a little bit ironic IMO.
So £1.68 to achieve a range of about 30 miles. Isn't that about the same price as half a galon of fuel, which would take the car just about as far... So no real cost benefit in running it, batteries that are at most only good for 10 years, and it costs an extra 10k upfront, even with a government subsidy.
But what if there's something worth watching, and I want to do something else right now...
AND I suspect that tomorrow when I have no plans, there may be nothing worth watching (as is often the case).
Maybe it's that 90% of people don't care if it's worth watching (hence playing angry birds instead of actually watching) or they are incapable of planning ahead...
Re: the multi tasking though - my OH will sit and play some game whilst we are supposedly watching a new episode from a series that we both like, but which she has just chosen to put on. Personally, if I want to watch it then I will actually watch, and if I don't then I'll go and do something else.
They didn't make any claim that all climate change was linked to human behaviour, in fact the cause of climate change isn't relevant to their study at all.
The result they have published just shows that when climate change occurs, human conflict increases.
They might have gone on to postulate that violence is often the result of conflict for scarce resources and that scarcity increases when the climate is disrupted in any way. But they didn't.
I go shopping in my lunch break all the time! Why wouldn't I, it's my time, the shops are in town, I'm in town, it seems the sensible thing to do.
I also clear my browser history when I leave a job (I can't clear the proxy logs of course, but it doesn't sound like they examined those)...
Going back to the story though, the guy shopped for a backpack, why would that cause his ex employer to call the police. His wife was shopping for a pressure cooker, on a different PC, on a different network. As it's been described there is no link between the backpack and the pressure cooker. Unless she actually borrowed his work laptop whilst at home to do that shopping.
From what I've read this a p2p solution, there is no 'cloudy' storage vendor involved, it's your own private cloud in essence, where you own,provide and control the storage.
Synology of course already provide an in-built tool that does exactly this, cloud station. But I'll take a closer look at this and see how it compares.
And another thing
"In that scenario, and excluding other trips (which will, after all, be spread across the second car that most car-owning households maintain), the daily commute comes at a price of $20 per hour."
" it's at least feasible that once the (considerable) startup costs are covered, a business model exists under which people will use autonomous cars, but never own one."
The conclusion that is drawn, doesn't even follow from the over simplified reduction in the earlier statement.
What does follow is a statement more like this;
"It's at least feasible ...blah blah... business model exists under which households will use autonomous cars *instead of owning a 2nd vehicle*"
And this makes much more sense, if 1 car is a secondary vehicle that is primarily used for commuting, and the actual cost of using an autonomous car is lower than owning it, then people might do that.
But, the assumption that an autonomous car will be significantly cheaper than a taxi is probably erroneous IMO. Driving a taxi is a low income job, in terms of hourly pay the vast majority of what you pay for a taxi does not end up in the drivers pocket, which leads to the conclusion that removing the driver would not result in a large cost saving.
Obviously driveless cars would cause changes in behaviour, but I don't think it would be in the way the author suggests.
The idea that a large portion of people might give up car ownership because a car can drive itself doesn't hang together for me. As a consumer cars that can 'drive themselves' already exist, we call them taxi's. There are very few people though that prefer to rely on taxi's for regular use rather than own a car.
Which isn't to say that there aren't people who don't own cars, there are, and these people use public transport, taxis, feet, push bikes, etc, as they choose. But the kind of people that currently own cars will in the vast majority (IMO) continue to own cars, even if the car can drive itself.
Perhaps the author isn't a car owner, or maybe isn't a typical one. I'd suggest that a typical car has a lot of personal property left in it, all of which would need removing if other people had access to the car during the day.
There are a few points about groups of people who are unable to drive currently (children mainly), this isn't a group with a large disposable income, nor a high requirement for motorised transport that their parents aren't capable of providing. So driverless cars won't suddenly see 10 year olds taking self driven cars to the next town.
Anecdotal, but if I consider my own usage, today the car could have gone back home instead of me paying to park for the day, but generally I cycle and the car stays at home anyway.
There's nothing inherently impossible about my usage that would stop me using an on demand service that lacked ownership, but I don't use city club cars and I don't use taxi's for regular journeys, I expect that the same economic arguments would apply, owning the car would simply be cheaper and/or more convenient.
Newton might have something to say... Throw a magnetic rock (whatever that is) out of a railgun in orbit and you just changed the orbit of the railgun. Now use chemical rockets to put it back in position (or ion thruster at best) and what did you really gain? Might has well have stuck the rocket motor on the rock in the first place!
Also, rocks would need balancing precisely, machining to fit the rail gun and covering in something conductive. Again, might as well just stick a rocket motor on the rock, it's easier.
I didn't see anything in the article about how they actually established that gadget use was responsible.
They might as well blame the increase in piracy of the coast of Somalia, unless they actually show a mechanism and establish causality rather than just speculate about it then the report is meaningless.
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