But what of those 'pioneers' who have eschewed their keys in favour of their phones? Stuck on the doorstep for half an hour?
You made your nest, now sleep in it.
Posts by Stoneshop
5951 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
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Three-hour outage renders Nest-equipped smart homes very dumb
Thursday 17th May 2018 20:06 GMT
Re: Lessons learned
I'm sure there's a lesson to be learnt from all of this, but what could it be?
The same lessons that could have been learned from previous NEST failures, the Revolver fiasco, the OTTO lock bricking, and numerous others. But that requires a learning capability.
People have already switched off their own thinking before AI has sufficiently advanced to take over for them. In the meantime, as long as this stuff doesn't impact me, it's amusing.
Thursday 17th May 2018 18:17 GMT
Re: Unnecessary points of failure
It's not going to know you have run out of anything you wouldn't normally keep in the fridge. You wouldn't keep (for instance) cleaning stuff or tinned food in the fridge, so you'd still need to order that manually..
And neither would it know by itself that you'll be having guests over, one of which has some dietary requirements. It would only know if you inform it thusly, and it would be less convoluted if you went straight to the supermarket's website to order that stuff (including the tinned food and whatever else that's running low) or even go shopping in person.
Beer. Some of it gets put in the fridge, some of it doesn't.
Thursday 17th May 2018 18:06 GMT
Re: Younger brother
Well, the standard magic of you remembering what phone he has, finding out where he is exactly via some Internet magic, ordering a phone cable from Amazon and selecting their Direct Drone Delivery. And the entire process completing within the hour.
At least if you got the cable wrong because he switched to an iPhone from the Android he had when you last saw him, you got the location wrong because things don't quite work like in CSI, and/or Amazon not being able to get that cable to Bumfuck, AZ within the hour, he won't be able to bother you for a while because his phone ran down.
Airbus windscreen fell out at 32,000 feet
Wednesday 16th May 2018 08:39 GMT
Re: Last time this happened...
This is one of those situations where having a screw and hole which is a totally different size than everything else in the build.
Whatever unique size those fasteners are meant to be, there's always a smaller size that appears to fit. Always. So that approach won't work, and only exacerbate the problem of having to stock all those different parts, which, being manufactured in smaller numbers than standard fasteners, will cause them to be out of stock more often.
So that's not going to be a viable solution. People following the instructions, and using only the specified parts, is.
Tuesday 15th May 2018 19:06 GMT
Because he should have looked in his rear view mirror before the ground handling staff signalled him to pull back ?
The Turkish Airlines jet had just landed and was taxiing to its assigned gate when it stopped 30 meters short of its parking position. The Asiana then whacked its rear for sticking out too much. There's no pulling back involved.
Kind of like our cats, one tends to be really tardy getting out the cat flap which then makes one of the others poke his bum, signifying "Get a move on, okay?"
There's also the fact that jets can't move backwards under their own power, they need a tractor for that. Which would make the tractor driver responsible, not the pilot.
Tuesday 15th May 2018 18:39 GMT
Re: Last time this happened...
Although if, as described, the windscreen cracked, it may have broken up and blown out in separate pieces.
The accident investigation report mentions that they found the windscreen, the outside corner post fairing strip and a number of bolts in an Oxfordshire field. There's no mention of it being in several pieces, so I take it that it wasn't. Plus, it's a five layer glass/PVB laminate; the glass layers may crack but the PVB should keep the lot in one piece.
Tuesday 15th May 2018 17:16 GMT
Re: Last time this happened...
They said the design had changed so that the "recess" for the window is on the inside now , ie the frame part is outside the window , ie the pressure is pushing the window ONTO the the window frame rather than off it.
There's air pressure pushing the window out, and airflow past the window on the outside pushing in. Apparently the first is the greater of the two, but it would have stayed in place had all 90 bolts been of the right diameter (84 weren't, 8-32 UNC instead of 10-32 UNF) and the right length (the remaining 6 were 2.5mm too short). And the AAIC report notes that the window will be held in place even if not all bolts are present (provided they're the correct size): "The large number of bolts are required to prevent leakage of pressurised air through the window seal but the force of internal air pressure could be satisfactorily resisted by far fewer bolts."
Tuesday 15th May 2018 17:07 GMT
Re: Last time this happened...
Why would it need to be dismantled? If the instruments were that much in the way they'd block the view out of the window so much there'd be no point having one.
The instrument panel can be fully below the actual window and still block access to the bottom row of fasteners keeping that window in place.
Boffins build smallest drone to fly itself with AI
Wednesday 16th May 2018 13:02 GMT
Re: Excellent...
maybe we should think about once again creating small people that can control themselves without the need for human guidance.
Once they get to the stage that they can control themselves, in all pertinent aspects that is, they're not at all small any more, and the process will have taken the better part of two decades and a shitload of money.
Never mind that they still won't be equipped with an off switch.
Wednesday 16th May 2018 09:21 GMT
Yes but the Crazyflie 2.0 quadcopter it is on has a 240mAh battery, takes 40 minutes to charge and it can then fly for 7 minutes.
That comes out as a total current draw of around 2A, and a power consumption of some 7W (taking the battery going from 100% to near empty in those 7 minutes).
The maximum payload is 15g leaving little margin for it to be solar powered unless you want a duty cycle of about one flight per year.
Poking around on AliExpress to find a panel weighing less than 15g, several suitable candidates come up. With a power output of 0.25 .. 0.3W they can recharge the battery in a day or two, so that's 150 flights per year.
German IKEA trip fracas assembles over trolley right of way
Monday 14th May 2018 17:39 GMT
Re: Ikea trip rules...
I've got Ikea shopping down to a fine art; my PB is 65 minutes door to door
For values of 'fine art' that are roughly at 'Bob Ross' level.
I think mine is about 15, but I've never bothered to look at my watch. Even with dinner at the restaurant it's still under an hour easily.
Monday 14th May 2018 14:31 GMT
Re: Smiles in the aisles
Well last time I looked, things like the Tour de France or the World Rally championships, didn't go round and round and round and round.
Actually, the Tour de France did, initially. Just one lap, but they ended where they started.
One participant in the Iron Butt Rally, a motorcycle endurance event over eleven days and involving checkpoints roughly at the four corners of the continental US, asked on finishing "How many laps was this thing again?"
Prez Donald Trump to save manufacturing jobs … in China, at ZTE
Hacking train Wi-Fi may expose passenger data and control systems
Friday 11th May 2018 20:57 GMT
Re: Simple way to break/brake a train using WiFi
Even simpler: anonymously call the train operator that a radicalised person has boarded. Worked well enough for a train headed for Berlin from Amsterdam, couple of months ago. Except that the caller wasn't thorough enough regarding the 'anonymously' part, but that only bit him a couple of weeks later.
Fixing a printer ended with a dozen fire engines in the car park
Friday 11th May 2018 16:54 GMT
Re: Had the fire brigade called to a five star hotel, in Malta....
Wow, I genuinely didn't know they ever made non-automatic slot toasters.
They all sooner or later change from automatic to non-auto. And it depends on the tinkeritude of the owner whether they stay that way or not. Or even, as described above, get converted into an ICBBTM[0] launcher.
A friend of mine one day observed toast that had achieved a dull red glow by prolonged toaster exposure. He had just put the toast in when his then-GF called from across the road that they had coffee. The toast was duly abandoned, but the toaster not disarmed. Fortyfive minutes later one of them noticed a stream of blue smoke coming out the room where the toaster was[1]. A dash across the street and up the stairs, and the toast was manually ejected out the window. It broke into a few pieces on hitting the pavement.
[0] Intercontinental Burned Toast Missile.
[1] At the front of the house, thus visible from across the street. Had it been at the kitchen, it may well have toasted on for the rest of the evening, reaching a yellowish-orange.
Friday 11th May 2018 10:01 GMT
Re: Had the fire brigade called to a five star hotel, in Malta....
Went back to his room, forgot about it, passed out, and was woken up by alarms and sirens.
Back in university I was sitting in my room one day when my nostrils were sensing the unmistakable whiff of a well-done[0] tosti[1]. So I figured I'd better go to the kitchen and see if someone had forgotten about their tosti in progress.
Well, indeed it was so. The toasting device was one of those iron two-part forms with long handles that you put the sandwich in, then put on the gas hob. So, no timer or sensing element apart from one's own nose. Which was clearly out of order, as the perpetrator was sitting on the couch just a few meters away reading a newspaper, just as shrouded in blue smoke as the rest of the kitchen was. Note that the door to the kitchen was closed and my room was not directly adjacent to the kitchen either, so that whiff had a few hurdles to overcome on the way from the source to my room.
[0] at a previous habitat, one of my fellow 'cooks' kept insisting that 'well-done' was the right description for a piece of bacon reduced to a near-pure chunk of carbon.
[1] probably known to you as croque-monsieur, a toasted ham and cheese sandwich.
Your software hates you and your devices think you're stupid
Friday 11th May 2018 10:47 GMT
CD?
That's why you rip your CDs to FLAC, which then go to crowd out the asinine Powerpoints and incomprehensible Word docs colleagues, management and 'partner' companies send you[0]. Software turning these FLACs into audio signals tend to be able to collect info from the Internet and rename the file anonymously named Track0010.FLC to Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin II - 10 - Bring It On Home.FLC if the ripping software didn't bother to do so already.
For this you do need a CD or DVD drive, but after you're done ripping you can put it in the drawer together with its interface cable, so that it can be in the way when you try to find the interface cable for your PalmPilot that may have an ancient contact that you need to call just now, or the SmartMedia reader for the camera that a series of photos are still on that would clear up a disagreement.
[0] which you have to keep to allow you to figure out any changes in plans, requirements, schedules and specifications over time as they creep in and deviate from the original as agreed upon.
Glibc 'abortion joke' diff tiff leaves Richard Stallman miffed
Friday 11th May 2018 08:30 GMT
Re: Programming needs jokes
My favorite is from no less than the old, very buttoned down, Big Blue (IBM for you youngsters). In the 360 Assembler instruction set, a key instruction, "Branch and Link" uses opcode 69 (and I defy anyone to tell me that wasn't intentional).
One of the OSes for the PDP11 (can't remember offhand if it was RSTS or RSX) had the error code IE-NFW (error value 69) for "Network Host not Reachable"
LESTER looks up, spins its wheels: The Register’s beer-butler can see ...
Australian prisoner-tracking system brought down by 3PAR defects
Zombie Cambridge Analytica told 'death' can't save it from the law
Monday 7th May 2018 12:57 GMT
Re: Pass out the torches and pitchforks!
as if CA was staffed by actual demons in human form rather than living,
The Channel 4 report does give quite a lot of weight to them being, indeed, actual demons.
were I to mention that Barrack Obama himself benefited from a similar Facebook privacy invasion back in 2012
Once again, that was an OPEN REQUEST to invite FB friends into activities. Which has been pointed out to you every time you bring that one up. CA has been found to have been quite a bit less open about its doings.
IT systems still in limbo as UK.gov departments await Brexit policy – MPs
Sunday 6th May 2018 08:24 GMT
Re: Who smashed up the house?
Crap racist jokes like this are the _cause_ of your woes.
My woes? You're so barking up the wrong tree.
And geographical origin is not equal to race. Apart from that, a large part of the reason you'll find East Europeans working construction in Western Europe is that a) there are jobs here, more than there are at home, and b) those jobs' pay is better than those at home.
Good luck with you lot getting those jobs filled next year.
MacBook Pro petition begs Apple for total recall of krap keyboards
Saturday 5th May 2018 18:06 GMT
Re: Issue 1 of a comic
not Lenovo (remember that spyware).
As such something to be wary of, but it would only work on Windows. As you're planning to install Linux, that would make it a non-issue.
From https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty/ :
"Built into the firmware on the laptops' motherboard is a piece of code called the Lenovo Service Engine (LSE). If Windows is installed, the LSE is executed before the Microsoft operating system is launched."
if not preinstalled Linux, sane USB boot installation, with a BIOS that will pick up an install disk, not fight you to the death.
The only UEFI laptop that has nearly[0] ended as tiny splinters under a forcefully and determinedly wielded Fubar XXL was an Acer Aspire Switch 10. Not that I have much experience there beyond that one, just a couple of HP handmedowns from work and someone else's Sony (IIRC). My least ancient Thinkpads are X201's, and those still have a conventional BIOS which has no qualms about letting you boot from USB.
[0] until I thought better of it and figured that there would probably be someone who would be stupid enough buy it and use it as is, with W8.1
BOFH: But I did log in to the portal, Dave
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
