Posts by Dave 126

Re: The correct number of parachutes to own is n+1

Nah, it's like a four-leaved clover - it's luckier than the regular 3-leaved variety!

I've thinking of installing another cup holder on my laptop - the current one is one the right hand side, even though the fan exhaust* that would do a lovely job of keeping my coffee warm is on the left hand side of the laptop. That's poor design, if you ask me!

(* cooling a Core 2 Duo T9550 and an nVidia card... the machine is a fan heater that also does sums. I can't remember when I last used its optical drive. )

>If I had a quid for every colleague who hadn't caught onto the fact that the monitor isn't "the computer" so switching it on/off doesn't of itself make computing happen I'd be a good few pints better off.

I've encountered a few people who referred to the monitor as the 'computer', and the PC itself as the 'hard disk', and I've never been in (paid) IT support.

So, anecdotally, accounts like Terry's are (or at least were) far from rare.

Maybe hedonism, but I know quite a few retired engineers who amuse themselves, when not in the pub,with some silly projects. Last month, for a few days, a pub table was covered in schematics of a washing machine motor control box, being looked at by some very qualified physicists, engineers and mechanics... someone wanted to re-purpose the motor to make a hovercraft.

Then there is a local billionaire, founder of a very respected high-end manufacturing concern, who could have retired years ago. But no, in his seventies he goes to work everyday because he evidently enjoys engineering. If he retired, what would he do - build a model railway?

Then you have the Felix Dennis types, who in retrospect wished they had stopped earning when they hit £30 million. He clams to have given up the cocaine and prostitutes at the age of sixty, but even when he indulged it didn't take too much of his time from working.

Re: @ Mage Actually ...

Oh come on guys, the references to Judge Dredd and various computer games, not to mention light-hearted touches (Japanese pensioners being crushed by a robot, poker players being meatbags) should have suggested that the article was not a sober academic piece about AI.

Of course, a real human would have noticed that the article was partly tongue-in-cheek, leading me to suspect that some of the comments above were made by 'AI's in Beta.

Re: RIP the few -a testament to pioneer spirit.

It turned out Mr Feynman wasn't joking.

Re: I remember Challenger...

>I really wish Buzz Aldrin had been "first out the gate" as he would have been far more public and outspoken.

That was exactly the reason the mission planners chose Armstrong over Aldrin. They considered Aldrin a hothead.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/why-neil-armstrong/6362508 ( mp3 download )

Highlights of Why Neil Armstrong ? presented by the Space association of Australia and the Royal Aeronautical society. RMIT 24th March 2015

Re: Paint Drying 2: Dry Hard

That should be:

An Emulsional Roller-Coater ride

Re: At the Apple koolade again?

>Then why define the need for it to be running spinning rust?

No worries, Known Hero! The spinning rust was just was just low-hanging fruit. Like I said, there are many ways of judging 'faster', and the 'last-but-one desktop*' could cover such a range of machines that it's silly. :)

It's all good though - even a £25 Chromecast or Raspberry Pi can shunt out HD video at a faster framerate than many a desktop I've seen, desktops that for many popular tasks aren't frustratingly slow.

*The original author would not be too unusual if he had last bought a desktop in, say 2005, and had since just used laptops.

Re: >we tend to judge of our computers by their CPUs, rather than their complement of sensors

>Give me a phone which can run a bog-standard linux distro and applications please, and give me a linux distro which can run on a phone.

I won't give it to you, you can buy it yourself! If you want command line Linux applications on a phone, a Ubuntu phone will do that, or a Sailfish in some circumstances.

If you want to use Linux GUI applications on a phone, then you are a masochist.

(I tried using Inkscape on an Android phone. It was a horrible experience. I can imagine the same is true of many GUI Linux applications on a small touchscreen. )

Good luck.

Re: A computer without sensors is a pitiful, useless thing.

Quite a few modern phones already have a far higher pixel density than benefits the reading of web-pages and the like. Indeed, some of them boast so many PPI that one suspects it is more motivated by bragging rights than user utility, especially given the detrimental effect on the battery.

Re: At the Apple koolade again?

>"Apple cleverly added a proximity sensor - infrared reflected off skin" - I had a Nortel with an IR proximity sensor in 1997...

I once had a capacitive touchscreen phone that lacked a (ear) proximity sensor... after waiting on hold to a utility company for twenty minutes and just getting through to a human, my cheek brushed the 'End Call' button. The phone was lucky not to be thrown across the car park.

The first iPhone had a very poor battery life (one of the reasons it lacked 3G) so the proximity sensor also helped in that regard, as noted in the article. I don't know about your Nortel, but I imagine it had a reasonable battery life anyway.

Re: At the Apple koolade again?

I have no need to skew the comparison, Known Hero. In fact my very first sentence included " all I'm saying is that there are a few ways of interpreting the "Y is faster than Z claim"."

The original author made a throw-away comparison, but he knows what the last-but-one desktop computer he bought was. We do not.

He could have used any new flagship smartphone, and the chances are his claim would still hold, so I didn't see it as 'Apple Koolaid' (which OP claimed) since 'Koolaid' is used colloquially to cast doubt on someone's judgement. In this case undeservedly so, since the author's claim is plausible - or likely even, if his last few PCs have been laptops.

He wasn't saying 'Apple is great', but that 'Moores Law means you can get a lot of grunt in small package today'.

( There are people who will tell you that the iPhone is faster than damned-near any other phone, but they defend against claims of Koolaid by describing their testing methodology and any hurdles in conducting a truly objective test: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8554/the-iphone-6-review/5 )

Re: At the Apple koolade again?

The A9 chip isn't just doing CPU duties, it's doing GPU duties too - so all I'm saying is that there are a few ways of interpreting the "Y is faster than Z claim".

There is also the task-based measure of speed - how long does this thing take to open an email client, for example. I would imagine that the iPhone would load its mail client faster than any desktop computer that uses a spinning rust HDD. You might cry foul, saying that an app on iOS or Android app is smaller than a Windows/Linix equivilent, but he was clearly comparing two computing systems, not two CPUs.

Of course, the same is true of the top offerings from Qualcom or Samsung, too. The article author was just using the iPhone as an example against desktop computers, and wasn't comparing it to other phones.

In any case, Intel chips haven't got that much faster year-on-year recently... they have been 'fast enough' for some time, so Intel have concentrated on making them more power efficient (tangible benefits include longer battery on laptops, quieter operation and smaller form-factors on desktops.)

Re: Atoms

A 19 x 19 grid. So there are 361 intersections,or nodes. Each intersection can be Black, White or Empty.

So you have 3^361. That's 1.74×10^172, of which only 1.196% could be a legal move. So that's a mere 2.08168199382×10^170 possible combinations. That's 208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_and_mathematics#Legal_positions

Re: Very Impressive

>No it is not [AI, specialized or general]. Neither by Turing nor by Azimov's criteria.

It'll only be AI when it gets drunk, mooches online, and then proceeds to argue over semantics on an El Reg forum.

Bite my shiny metal ass!

Re: A sad day

A couple of things that are fairly self-evident:

- Anyone here who thinks they know what the NBT* will be has a strong incentive keep it to themselves.

- Apple are very, very far away from panic mode yet (remember, it's only Apple's own iPhone sales forecasts that are lower, based on last week's financial news about China where 1/4 of iPhones are sold. The markets knew this already). As such, Apple's attempts to enter the NBT won't be done hastily - they will have been actively conducting due process for years, and it's a game they have played well before. That's a not a guarantee they will succeed, of course, but they have a fairly strong hand.

That said, I already have every material thing I want... a phone to contact friends, and a vehicle to visit them in. My stereo system is loud enough, most of which dates from the 1980s. My coffee device, a moulded plastic plunger thing, makes good coffee anywhere. You get the idea. Come the Zombie apocalypse, I might revisit my chainsaw and shotgun choices of course, but for the time being I'm all good. So... maybe there isn't a NBT?

*Next Big Thing (TM)... (see comment above) yep, I'll steal that! Cheers!

Re: Just use firewalls and intrusion detection systems ..

>Did no one at the design stage ask the question as to whether these automobile systems could be hacked?

They had no need to ask that when they designed CANBus, because no one was in the habit of connecting it to anything that received wireless data. It's a sound system.

What is daft building a vehicle that includes a module that can both talk to the drivetrain and receive wireless data.

Re: Diagnostics and audio

You don't need a firewall, you just need to use *listen-only* modules where appropriate. After all, the store needs to listen to the network to get engine speed, but the stereo doest need to transmit anything.

Re: why?

iWhat DougS said.

CANBus's two speeds were traditionally Drivetrain and Infotainment/VAC. The Drivetrain ran at a higher frequency, and the Infotainment at a lower frequency. It runs on a twisted pair of wires, with ground being through the power supply to each module.

It's a packet-based system, with priority. All modules (NXP, Bosh, Whoever) can send and receive, and be either sensors and/or actuators. The high speed version will only run if both wires in the twisted pair are good, the low speed version is tolerant of a fault in either wire.

If you break down, you can still listen to the radio and wind the windows down whilst waiting for the recovery vehicle. So far, so good. Very good, in fact.

Further commands to remote control the vehicle could then be received via the car's built in cellular connection.

Very good, as long as you don't fit a digital wireless receiver to the vehicle's physical network.

I can't think of any reason why a car stereo needs to communicate to the drivetrain. But:

It's not just a bloody stereo these days; it's used to control drivetrain features, such as Sport / Eco modes...

(Not my old van, the £50 Lidl Stereo that plays SD Cards and USB sticks is still working and van doesn't have any built in Sat Nav or cellular radio. Actually TBH, recently it sounds like the capacitors in my stereo are on their way out, but must have got 5 years out of it.)

Re: 'Here in my car, it's a safe place to be, i can lock all my doors.....

Gary Numan is probably safe... he used a Mellatron keyboard, a splendidly analogue (and not networked) way of doing what people would now do digitally.

Each key was linked to a coiled length of magnetic tape, and playing the note pulled the tape across a head. Maximum 'sample' size was eight seconds, after which (or after releasing the key) you could hear the tape being rapidly wound back into its spool, if you held your ear near by.

Re: The stupidity is you

@Kevin

From the article:

[After playing the Trojan .WMA] "Further commands to remote control the vehicle could then be received via the car's builtin cellular connection."

So, the attacker doesn't need physical access to the car, they 'just' need to socially engineer the owner into playing the CD.

Re: NZ Rally

It would appear that the first AC doesn't appreciate the difference between concave and convex structures, from a mechanical strength point of view.

For anyone unsure if Bibbit was joking or not:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/once-upon-a-time-the-catholic-church-decided-that-beavers-were-fish/

From Hamlet

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

Polonius: By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.

Hamlet: Or like a whale?

Polonius: Very like a whale.

'Methinks' is just a different way of writing 'IMO'. There similarity of cloud shapes to other objects is clearly subjective, not objective. Also, Polonius is coming across as a bit of a sycophant.

Re: 4G

>Civilised parts of the country have more interesting things for you to to do than play with 4G phones

Er, the point of having a faster connection is that you spend *less* time waiting for your phone to display the information you need, not more.

>I can't be the only person who has their phone set to "prefer 2G" the majority of the time can I?

If you have a Sony with 'Stamina Mode', or a newer Android version on any phone, the phone will effectively be in 2G mode whenever the screen is turned off - i.e you'll only receive calls and SMS. It's great.

Re: Augmented reality

The Google Night Sky app is a nice use of AR, helping people take an interest in the sky at night. It will highlight constellations and planets etc.

Re: @Dave 126

>The people who have the most to lose from our disbelief are the ones who invested in carbon credits, renewable energy and their trading. It is already proven that without impressive taxpayer subsidy, wind and solar can't stand on their own. That's who is "grabbing power"!

There will always be people who will attempt to turn any situation to their advantage. That is human nature. There will always be bureaucratic mismanagement. That too is human nature.

However, these human failings say nothing about the validity of climate change one way or another. Indeed, as I said before, the logic of 'Who Benefits?' cuts all ways. If you are saying that some groups benefit from promoting a belief in climate change, then you should be able to accept that some groups benefit from promoting a denial of climate change. To be selective in how you apply your logic is intelectually dishonest.

So, we should all be looking at the evidence without it being filtered through interested parties. That is easier said than done, I grant you, given that it is a complex subject. It becomes even thornier, given its very real geo-political implications. We've had wars over oil, trade dealings with unsavoury oil-producing nations, massively polluting manufacturing states, aid to countries where it seems unfair to deny them the same access to cheap energy in their development as we once did... the list goes on.