Posts by bigiain

or need to use things like pre-paid power cards as you don't have enough income for a bank account

Re: The story is ...

I think you'll find the scanner in the supermarket is way bulkier and more expensive than the scanner in the tape library.

The supermarket scanners have multiple beams coming in from multiple angles, with both a horizontal and vertical scanner.

Its not really a viable option to stay in the final salary scheme in these circumstances

The lack of pay rises hammers the final salary pension - while you could continue to build up the proportion of your final salary (probably by around 1/60th per year), the final salary will be sitting static.

If you leave the scheme, at least your final salary will be indexed up by CPI for your past contributions, you could be eligible for raises, bonuses etc (if any) and getting the company contributions to a defined contribution scheme.

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Re: Who cares

When are people going to get past the bull about carriers with no aircraft

The ship has still to complete sea trials, followed by work up as a ship before it gets to starting to work up with aircraft.

The first aircraft it will start working with are the helicopters - lynx, merlin, apache and chinook, then it can move onto aircraft TRIALS with the F-35s available now (we own around 3 aircraft), finally moving onto workup with more aircraft (up to 25) - US Marine will do if enough UK aircraft are not available - that will take until beyond 2020 - by which time we'll have the aircraft - 12 + helicopters are considered a sufficient normal load - only moving beyond that in an emergency situation - thus saving our taxes by not having more aircraft/pilots than needed floating about in a carrier.

Re: What would I do if I was running Apple's TV project

Joseph, I fully agree, building in tuners would require too much localisation.

However, then the problem for Apple is that the main interface people will use day-to-day is the cable/sat/freeview box - the only TV interaction will be volume, input select and occasional picture adjustments.

That means they're actually going up against the set-top box manufacturers. In this case, i would say its a much tougher fight for Apple - my Sky box's interface for example is much easier to use and more powerful than my TV interface - especially when its controlled by iPad.

Since the set-top boxes usually also control much of the content (Sky, Virgin) then i can't see the turkey's voting for Christmas by allowing Apple a slice of the cake.

I fully agree with you, as a techie user, you can do all sorts of things that would reduce power draw on a DIY homebased server to fraction of 45w (hacking routers, raspberrypi in today's article etc) - as a technical exercise for a keen techie, the cloud option would be a bad option.

However, non-techie users lack the desire and/or time to learn about this stuff, build the system and maintain it, so they would need to buy the proprietary home automation server unit or accept the power draw of running the software on a readily avialable home PC.

In any case - all the above options still require the broadband router to be powered - unless you want to incur the cost of the 3g dongle and data plan.

The cloud options may not reduce overall complexity - but it shifts that complexity away from the average non-techie user and onto the service provider(s) who (hopefully) have the technical skills. If they don't, the service won't be relaible and will fail as a commercial operation as no one will use it.

I'm aware that there is a cost to running the cloud service - powering the servers etc. but the data & processor demands on this application are relatively low, so the whole service could be run on very limited data centre based equipment. This would be much more efficient than thousands of individual power supplies running the individual home automation servers.

Current cloud services are reliable enough for this application - it would be very risky to use a cheap'n'cheerful home automation system running via home broadband or consumer 3G for critical functions (like monitoring Grandpa's pacemaker) whether cloud or home based.

Just cause you can't physically go and pull the plug yourself is not a reason not to place a degree of trust in it - Google Mail has yet to let me down in any way. That's not to say i 100% trust it - i just don't need a huge level of reliability and privacy for personal email.

Note that i did say "there are some ral advantages to using the cloud" I didn't say it's definitely the right answer - just one that should be carefuly considered.

The compulsory evacuation is to stop looting

It said on PM on Radio 4 this evening that the reason for the compulsory evacuation was to prevent looting rather than because of any increased radiation risk. Mind you, they didn't say that until after 5 mins of scaremongering crap.