Posts by JDX

Does EV adoption just encourage 2-car families?

I am not aware any current EV has long-range capability. I know Clarkson loves to milk this on TV, and that for typical work-commuting it should be fine, but around this time of year lots and lots of people are driving multi-hundred mile journeys in heavily laden vehicles. And of course lots of people do drive long distances every day for work.

So is the model that's suggested you have a little EV to get to work or the shops, AND a nice petrol estate?

I'm no sysadmin

But given the incredibly conservative nature of the aero industry, how did they end up with 3 separate systems that have ANY connections at all? I'd have assumed they were totally independent systems.

Or is the fact you can't get into the system (no WiFi or handy ethernet sockets) used as a claim of security - like how even an unpatched XP box is perfectly safe as long as it never goes on the internet and has all its USB ports ripped out?

Of course now WiFi IS starting to appear on planes, and they let you use your own devices to access in-flight entertainment, any such 'air-gapping' is threatened. Is that what's happening here?

Genuinely interested, if anyone can explain or point me at a good article.

It's a neat idea but as someone commented, I'm not sure it solves a problem - sounds more like something you'd do as a school project!

I was curious what sort of speed/bandwidth this might deliver, is it viable for replacing WiFi or intended for much less demanding background stuff?

How long has CD got?

The fact that CDs and DVDs are still in widespread use hasn't stopped manufacturers dropping them after all :(

I wonder how they managed it

Tax aside - it's a separate issue - I wonder how on earth one of the most successful franchises managed to convince anyone they were a good awardee of £40m given their highly profitable track record.

There IS more to it than just CT because of the jobs involved (and huge amounts of corporate NI paid) but still it's pretty crass to take a huge grant and then pay 0. Sounds like they got a great person in their bidding department, but could hire someone in the PR department to advise on this sort of thing ;)

Idiocy aside, why didn't it stop?

I agree that modern cars should be able to detect and react to stationary objects in the road. Going further, why should a modern car allow you to hit anything at all? It seems like they have the tech to do this but choose to only use it in certain cases - no?

Forget self-driving, just as a safety aid it would be good. When parking, the sensor could stop the car once it thinks you are about to bump something (you could have a way to override this if needed). When driving, an obstacle could first be highlighted (beeping/lights) then trigger automatic braking.

An interesting proposition

I imagine it will get a lot of flak here but this seems a reasonable use of machine learning. It might for instance learn your coding style. Or it might be awful. An interesting project either way.

Lots of people are saying "it's the coder's fault not the language"

But I wonder how many of those people have left these sort of bugs in their code? Even if they're good enough and diligent enough not to now, would they like to guarantee none of their older code is still in use somewhere which might have bugs? Have they checked every open-source code-file they use to ensure it meets their own standards?

That's the point. Errors are inevitable. When you look at even the most skilled and most conservative engineers, mistakes happen - billion dollar satellites explode on launch or fail due to sometimes quite simple errors.

I thought chrome restricted non-visible tabs already? Certainly some rich web-sites only load when they are active... I've made the mistake of knowing a site takes a while to load, and switching tabs while I wait, only to realise it just stopped until I returned.

A few nice things

Catalyst sounds great if it works... and everyone doesn't have to rewrite their apps to be compatible. I wonder if it'll be an emulator since apps are compiled OBJ-C (I think) and if that means you can't run games, etc. Or if they'll ban some apps, so you don't just use the £1.99 version instead of the £29 desktop application?!

Using your iPad as an additional monitor sounds kind of neat especially if it lets you use your iPad as a remote thin client on your Mac. I know you can use VNC et al already but...

"language suited to the age of the child"

Perfect for most adult users too then ;)

So what is Rust then?

I went to their site and it's all market-speak about how great it is. So I went to the documentation and then through to "the book".

Nowhere did I get a simple page or paragraph explaining what Rust IS, and why I should want to learn it... if it's compiled, what platforms it supports, yada yada. I am sure I find this but I'd put that on the website if it was me!

Stadia

I don't see any coverage of this which is somewhat odd.

"Calculator will still go through the usual testing, compliance and quality processes"

Good one.

Is this accurately reported El Reg?

Your article focuses on YT having removed millions of comments. Whereas BBC's article focuses on the fact they are going to auto-detect videos containing small children, and block comments on them - in coming months. These are quite different angles and I've no idea which is more important or accurate.

I miss my 1020

I had the Lumia 1020. It was amazing. Not as a phone, certainly not as a smartphone (though I was a fan of Windows Mobile until they spoiled it) but as a piece of engineering and camera tech it was stunning.

A phone that could magically extend into the form factor of a tablet would be awesome. Except it can't be significantly more bulky/heavy as a result and the large form factor must be perfect. Easy, huh?

Before people jump in to lampoon overpriced kit, I'll reiterate what I said on a recent review of another high end MS laptop (I forget which): if you're paying someone 6 figures to work for you, or earning 7 figures from the work they do for you, an extra £3000 on their laptop is a small outlay if it a)improves productivity even a small amount b)makes them feel happy and valued (which probably leads to a) regardless)

Battery life

I'm curious how the batteries work at this altitude given the extremely low temperature. Do they use fundamentally different battery tech or are there workarounds that your smartphone doesn't have?

An update from an Actual Mars One candidate...

A friend of mine (in the 100 people selected for future phases if and when anything happens) posted this:

http://hannahgoestomars.tumblr.com/post/182761467414/mission-update-dont-panic

I'm pretty cynical about the project's chance of success but the ridicule from El Reg is little better than tabloid nonsense, I'd have expected better but they're as keen to jump on a bandwagon as anyone else, it seems. The plan has always been to hire people who do know how to build and deliver safely, not have some guy in a shed do it. The initial plan of 2023 is ludicrous but probably no more so than most of Elon's projected dates.

More likely is that Elon just gets there first IMO, or buys out/takes over projects like M1.

It's 2019 and...

... you don't need to put what year it is in the title.

So the sole purpose is to force the device not to constantly be listening to you and uploading the data, which they claim they don't anyway, with another device which is listening the whole time to tell the first device when it can listen?

I can see the attraction for paranoids / privacy enthusiasts but how do you deafen the smart speaker by making noises too quiet for human ears to hear?

Surely it's also quite easy to tell if Alexa et al are maintaining a link when you're not commanding them, by seeing if your network is sending data constantly? IIRC they listen locally for the activation command _then_ send voice to the cloud for remote analysis - it must be very easy to tell when they are or are not doing this, so easy in fact that they would be instantly sued to heck if they were?

Presumably you can also rig up a similar effect by blocking the thing's network access except when you wish to use it, which is neater than whispering into it the whole time?