Posts by ukaudiophile

Re: So what?

The decimation of the high street will get much, much worse if councils and government don't realise that people have better things to do with their spare time than waste it waiting for uncomfortable, overpriced public transport to get them to shops, or keep treating the motorist like a cash cow to fleece every time they leave the house, get stuck in traffic jams, have speed cameras on every street, only to park in overpriced or heavily time limited free parking whilst predatory traffic wardens are ready to pounce if only a few minutes late.

Why should I be bothered with this? Why right has the high street to expect to survive with this attitude. Let the high street die, it's outlived it's use. I'll take click and deliver to the door by Amazon any day.

Yes, two which they've so far admitted, which impacted a mere 207,000 customers including their bank accounts.

In my books, that level of recklessness means the company should be closed down and I would certainly never trust that company with any of my data. The fact that they outsource to Wipro tells me all I need to know, and the fact Wipro staff used a 'rogue' portal to access customer information which they should have been nowhere near.

It's the same reason I don't use Facebook, I have zero confidence in my information being protected to a standard I deem adequate.

Re: A pragmatic view?

I'm a current EV owner (only had one for 5 months) and a massive petrol head, I always said I'd never buy an EV or hybrid. I drove 3, one was overpriced and uninspiring, another was plain awful, the final one was simply one of the finest handling and performing cars I've ever driven in 30 years of having a driving licence. Needless to say which one I went for!

30 mins to get 70% charge in at Sainsbury's is rather optimistic unless your local Sainsbury's has a much better charge rate than the two near me which can only put in 3.5Kw/h (around 10 miles of range / hr) or unless you have a very small battery. The motorway fast chargers can do that, and are superb. Basically I can half 'fill' my car in less time than it takes for me to have a large coffee & a pastry.

I hear a lot of complaints about not being able to charge at home, and I'm afraid that for many current apartment dwellers and terrace house owners with no off road parking at the back, this is an issue which I hope will be addressed in the future with charging at employers and at shopping centers. What we need to do is get planners to ensure that homes being built today have off road parking, there is precious little reason to give planning permission to a house builder who does not have off road parking for at least 1 if not 2 cars. All apartment developments should also have similar provision. If the Government is serious about trying to get people into EV's in the future, they have to start thinking about this now.

As for range anxiety, it's not on my radar. I can comfortably drive 200 miles on a single charge. I've known high performance cars that can't do that on a tank of fuel. I can commute for almost a full week on a single charge, and most places I go to have accessible charging facilities.

The infrastructure is still not perfect, but remember we're trying to make a fundamental change to a fuel station infrastructure that's built up over a century, and we've only been installing these charge points for a handful of years. We're doing pretty well. Ask yourself this, how many petrol stations were in the UK in 1911? That's ten years after the first Wolseley rolled out of the factory. EV's have only been widely available for 5 years in the UK, so we're doing pretty well. I agree that EV's aren't the answer for everyone, but they are an increasingly valid option and will only improve (at a far faster rate than petrol or diesel cars) over the next few years.

Re: All Pi's need USB3!

You can't just float things like 'you'll have to wait for Pi4' without giving us more details, that's just cruel.

Is the Pi4 under development? How far are we away from some sort of announcement regarding it's capabilities & price? When might we see this available to buy?

BTW, the Pi team are doing great work, currently have a 2B and a 3B, will probably get a 3B+ in next couple of weeks.

Re: The Cult of Tesla

"Many people may not want to pay the related premiums for that kind of performance - it will be interesting to see what the insurance group will be!"

The cost of Insuring a Tesla Model "S" is about the same as insuring an X5 or a Touareg, hardly in the bargain basement, but certainly not unreasonable given the value and performance of the car. Given that Model 3 is around half the value of a current S and has slightly lower performance, I suspect the price will be lower, though if the Autopilot features show a statistical decrease in Tesla's involved in accidents over the coming years (or the evidence from their onboard cameras prove it's not the owners fault) then expect those figures to reduce further as the evidence builds up.

Re: Khan being an idiot on this one

What would actually be more reasonable to say would be 'I will live within my means and use the money I have wisely and intelligently, not just hold my hand out and demand more at gunpoint when I've spent everything inefficiently and recklessly'.

His tax income is falling, you either get more efficient, or simply stop wasting money on fatuous projects with no ROI, but as a typical socialist he believes that everyone works to pay taxes for his pet projects.

If he actually cared about the air quality, he'd be spearheading a campaign to reduce the the density of people in offices in London, stopping further development within the M25, & accepting the loss of tax income as acceptable to achieve real reductions in pollution within the M25, but that is clearly not his agenda, his agenda is clearly to prioritise increasing his tax income over everything else. I hope people remember this when the next mayoral election is held.

"Cycling UK should be lobbying for drivers to pay for safety devices on bikes or helmets that driverless vehicles can easily detect."

Maybe Cycling UK should have the wit to put together a group buy of such devices after their design and structure have been defined by the car companies, and offer these to their members at a discount? Why should the motorist pay for these, such devices are for the cyclists benefit, so they should pay for them. Maybe if Cycling UK spent less time trying to blame everyone else for incidents involving cyclists and instead promoted responsible cycle ownership and use then maybe they would actually achieve results to benefit cyclists.

It will be interesting to see if a full investigation of this incident is carried out looking at the actions of the cyclist in relation to other road traffic and conditions, rather than the usual action of the Police which seems to be find a way to completely blame the driver, no matter how tenuous, and end the investigation there.

Frankly you need cameras to record what's happening on the road now, not to protect against uninsured drives, but so you actually have evidence to protect yourself, because if you're a motorist you can't rely on the Police to be thorough & impartial.

Re: Taxes are for little people...

"But don't worry, I'm sure the millennials will pay your pension when it's time to collect it. Surely they will be done working through their 6-figure college debt by serving coffee by the time you are due to retire."

Amusing Nolveys, you seem to assume the Millenials will actually work in a coffee shop. I'd doubt it, they'll probably be protesting that, because they have a media studies qualification, they're entitled to expect anyone with a pension to pay it all out in taxes and grants so they don't have to sully themselves with little issues such as 'earning a living' and 'capitalism' and instead spend their time debating the 'Sociological relevance of Hollyoaks episode 14,000'.

I think it's also telling how trust between individuals and the Government has broken down to the point that I, and I'm sure many others, read your post and thought 'If only more people thought like this and were aware of the abuses of power by our Government and European bodies'.

Wish I could upvote your post more than once.

Re: why oh why?

If the price was right (for Samsung right now, shipping these out at <£200 would be about right, better than zero) I would buy one (or two) without hesitation. I've used the original Note, Note 2 & Note 4, each one was excellent, so I'm sure the 7 would be superb now they have the battery issue resolved.

As for taking them on airlines, I don't care, I don't fly.

You have my sympathies Archie.

How can a company be big enough to justify multiple levels of seniority in it's IT dept, yet be small enough to have a network which doesn't require VLAN's?

To have a manager who cannot understand their use is frightening, how many clots like him are there out there in IT management? I take it the company is now out of business? Did he move the corporate internet connection to TalkTalk to save money?

Re: Do you actually know anything about the course?

No, it's not a one off. GCHQ has an ongoing process to recruit apprentices, so whilst the number they hire might vary, the fact that they are hiring does not, so there will be positions available for the forseeable future. GCHQ are actually pretty open about the kind of people they're looking for, so it would do no harm to approach them directly even if the kids who you're thinking of are a year or two away from being the right age.

Good luck!

Re: Mini projectors

Please tell me the first movie you'll be screening outdoors will be Blade Runner? That movie just lends itself to being shown on a summer night on a white wall with a star lit sky overhead.

Re: Security deserves more attention. @Phil W

Intractable Potsherd:

You hit the nail right on the head, distance learning is a fact, it works, it's results are as good as any fixed university, and it's cost effective, so why are we paying for all of these university buildings and students accommodation when they could stay at home studying, have lectures delivered via webcasts and if they need to speak to the actual lecturer, they can speak via video conference applications like Skype. You could house the actual teaching staff in an anonymous office building on an estate and get rid of many of those costly university buildings and extra staff to run them. Big savings all round! Now the only university facilities you need are for those with highly specialised equipment in the fields of research (and even then much of that could probably be virtualised) whilst the purely academic courses such as maths don't really need any specialised equipment, so need no space on a university campus.

Meanwhile we could remove the high costs of the intangible courses (such as your humanities, arts and others which have no tangible return or use) and just have those vanity courses taught on line in an efficient manner, the reduction in building and staffing would make the whole cost of the vanity courses affordable to those who were interested and remove another burden from the tax payer.

Proprietary backup format = No backup

You make a good point, storing ageing data in a proprietary format is fraught with problems.One site I worked at had a badly organised backup & storage system which eventually failed. Recovering the data involved building a Netbackup server from scratch to recover the data. If those files had been stored as a regular tar ball or a filesystem dump they could have been recovered far more rapidly.

Don't confuse the backup with the archive. When I backup archive data, I always use the original format and ensure an O/S install disk is kept with it. I tend to favour optical media now, I find it durable and readers are easy to come by (I can still read CD-ROM's from 20 years ago). This way, once the O/S is up and running, the data can be accessed easily.

Avoiding proprietary formats means there is one less problem between you and your data.

Re: The psychoacoustics of the saleman...

Actually the days of the dedicated Hi Fi salesman are long since over, now the best salesmen in these stores are almost invariably the stores owner. I remember a store local to me which I frequented as a teenager, and when the late 80's recession hit, the bank sent in management consultants, who decided that the owner could get down his operating costs and pay their vast interest rates and consultancy fees by firing the experienced sales people who had a relationship with the cusotmers, and replacing them all with students working part time at a fraction of the price (this was before minimum wage). This was basically inflicted on the poor store owner to reduce his costs in order to keep the 'support' of the bank. The store owner complied, and within 24 months was in receivership.

the other problem is the greed of both distributors and stores, with some distributors demanding 30 - 50% profit margins, and dealers wanting 25 - 35% on source components and amps, 30 - 50% on speakers depending on brand and marketing power, and 40 - 60% on 'accessories' like stands and cables. It's no wonder the actual cost price of this equipment has little bearing on the final retail price, a typical relationship in Hi Fi is of 7 - 8:1 relationship of cost to final selling price.

it's this kind of thing which makes Hi Fi equipment seem so expensive.

Now the staff in many of these stores are little better than Currys staff, thoughb I will say the staff in Richer Sounds are the exception to this rule, courteous, intelligent and genuinely helpful, if you are buying any lower to midrange component you can do a lot worse than speak to someone in Richer Sounds.

Re: Backlit - Edge or direct?

Hello,

Joseph: Can't argue with anything you say, I think your anlysis of the marketplace is right on the money, people want the 'look' of the panel rather than the unadulterated 'performance' of the direct panel with the slight aesthetic downside of having a thicker panel, they go for the looks of the device rather than pure performance, though local dimming edge lit panels are better than they used to be, they still lag behind direct backlit displays. Likewise, the digital bling is there for the mass market and it does pull down the price of the finished product, I just mourn the mass market going towards digital widgets rather than demanding the best possible display quality.

Yes, the chipset choice was probably made a couple of years ago, but I still found ti odd that the review didn't chastise Sony for this oversight given the more technical audience reviews on here usually attract.

Whilst local dimming edge lit TV's are much better than they used to be, I can still see light traces at the edge of the screen on dark scenes with bright details. This is less of a problem for me as I am fortunate enough to use a video projector, but for many people they have to use panels, so they will have this slight but irritating side effect of edge lit screens vis a vis direct illuminated screens.

REgarding the broadcast option, yes, you're projections are pretty much spot on, broadcast reference panels are hideously expensive, but I just wish there was still a market niche big enough to justify Sony resurrecting the Profeel name from the late 80's. Probably just a hankering for the old Sony at it's best.