Posts by John Tserkezis 2242 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2007
Perhaps they should be buying less coal and more natural gas.
Natural gas is more expensive than coal. Which is why gas is commonly sold to the larger consumers (power generation) around the west, because it's expensive to transport coal from the other side of the country.
'Plenty of it' doesn't count when dollars and cents are concerned...
Detecting high frequency signals at low light levels tends to get rather expensive.
My guess is that the signal will have to be modulated somehow. Much like TV remote control IR and IRDA used to. This would actually be manditory to isolate the pulsed light noise you're likely to encounter in this type of environment. Heck, I've seen TV remotes become entirely ineffective due to badly designed compact flourecent bulbs.
Getting 150Mbs under lab test conditions is entirely plausible, but under real-life conditions? The biggest problem is going to be the difference between light on, and light off, at the receiver, under ambient (sunlight through the window) light conditions. It comes down to signal to noise ratio. TV remote IR is not very tolerant here, but they generally don't have to, they just tell you to shut the damn shades and be done with it. But if this turns out to be like IRDA was, where the two devices have to placed "just so" to make it work, people are going to get annoyed - we've been spoiled with highly functioning devices nowadays and most of us will probably gravitate to a technology that "just works" rather than what's sexy. (apple products excluded - that's another subject)
"In the future you will not only have 14 billion (LED) lightbulbs, you may also have 14 billion Li-Fi's deployed worldwide for a cleaner, greener, and even brighter future," Hass said at the TED talk introducing the technology."
Firstly, LED lightbulbs are by far most commonly of a single led construction, with a phosphor that changes the colour to whatever shade of white you choose. The phosphor will prevent any useful on/off communication because it's just too slow. RGB leds have the flexibility to change colour, and they're fast enough for this on/off comms, but they cost a lot more. Saying that you "might" also have these LiFi's in their place is bullshit - no-one's going to pay for that.
Secondly, I want to second the other poster's quote about being a glorified IR connection - that's so last year. Heck, even RS232 is still in use today.
Third, and the real clincher, if you have the word "Green" in your marketing blurb, you automatically tell me it's a complete pile of crap. Mainly because you're so desparate to sell the shit, you've resorted to words that bring an emotive response without actually meaning anything.
You can print fake reciepts (users can't tell the difference).
Anyone who sells one phone, can sell 10 - all as they're doing it now, cash sale, no questions asked. - just the way they like it.
Or am I missing something and they wan to legistlate cash sales? - yeah I don't see anything going wrong there.
It won't cost Apple a penny as it will be down to the faulty part supplier.
Recalls *always* cost money. Always.
You have to let your users know. The advertising people don't work for free.
You still need to freight the bad stock back, and the good stock around. Drivers and trucks don't work free.
Then you have to install them. Your techs, and certainly third party techs aren't going to work for free.
Reputation. Make no mistake it's going cost you that, so you have to spend more on PR to counter that.
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Look at what happened with VW and their f***king DSG gearbox problems in Australia as an example of how NOT to handle a recall. Though I have to say, they made up for the reputation loss by spending up big on PR. Holy crap, even the publications that were poo-pooing their response (or lack thereof) suddenly had full page ads and nice shiny reviews. I guess anyone can be bought if you drive a dump truck full of money onto their front lawn. Oh well, maybe a dump truck was cheaper than actually fixing them all.
RT doesn't have an inaccurate touch screen, sounds like you have a faulty unit.
I've heard this defence many times with many different types of equipment, hardware and software.
Defending a pile of crap by saying that particular unit is faulty, doesn't change the fact that it's still a pile of crap, albeit a faulty pile of crap.
Firstly, it's not just the US that gouges on roaming rates - it's a widespread practice around the world.
Secondly, it's entirely unfair to say that no-one has called the carriers on their pracices, till now - it's been known for a long time.
The general concesus is that if you're going overseas - you put aside your sim card, and load another when you get to where ever you're going. If you're a smarty pants and know what you're doing, you call your carrier and roam - and after you get screwed anyway, you complain about it.
With the exception of apparently T-Mobile, the carriers pretend to care, and they still screw you. Flavour of the month here in australia is capped roaming charges - that sometimes cost many times a local destination prepaid card, or even departure-available global roaming cards, not quite as cheap, but still vastly cheaper than the pretend caps.
It's going to be a long, long time before this gets fair, the reason is there are a whole bunch of idiot users who insist on roaming the regular way - why should the carriers "fix" a system that idiots are still happy (or at least stupid enough) to pay for?
So what happens if the auto park malfunctions and rams it self in?
You mean like every other person in [insert suburb of choice here] does anyway?
At least today's vehciles will automate the crash, take pictures from their now many cameras, and print out a report that conclusively incriminates the OTHER non-smart car that was coincedently standing still at the time. And because they didn't have on board computing power and various sensors active at the time, they can't prove they weren't standing still.
Insurance companies will love it.
Anyway, don't worry about oversteer. Cars have ESC and simply will. not. skid. Saw it on Fifth Gear.
How conveniently you forget that you'll need to replace your brake pads and disks every two months.
It has its place, just remember there's a cost to everything - and the car makers are NOT going to tell you what they are.
Agreed.
Once they realised their voice income was under threat by voip, they reeled that in nice and quick. Also note that they charge the same for less data.
And now that they've done that, the voice plans have changed too. How much farther can you go than a three year contract before users finally realise they're being screwed? I bet a bit more.
"to seek public comments on a proposal to gather information from "approximately 25 companies that are in the business of buying and asserting patents,"
Isn't this kinda like asking the wolves on what should be done to stop them from taking the chickens?
I *must* be missing something, because it sounds like they have no plans whatsoever to stop or even slow down the trolls.
Ah, there I go, I've answered my own question.
These idiots have no idea how people work. Their idea of "good", is to take a highly complex, extensive and flexible piece of equipment and let one-brain-celled-rednecks drive it with a single lousy button. It can't be done.
"less IS more." is complete horseshit. It's all about layout, human psychology, and depending on the interface, human physiology.
I'm not trying to be pro-Samsung here, I sometimes site the ease-of-use when it comes to remote controls. I have a Topfield TRF-7160 PVR, which is reputed to have the worst laid out remote control ever devised on this planet. And yes, as a new user, I fumbled a lot. But once I got used to it, it worked really well for me along with the pleothra of features - as well as the other three users I asked (I know that's not a huge sample size, but I don't interface with humans much - so there). On the other hand I have a Samsung "smart" TV, as do some other family members, and while *they* don't rate too bad, holy fuck they're the most convouluted pieces of shit I've ever come across. Not to mention on some, the button layouts are smooth, which only works if you can *see* the markings - if you drive it in the dark, you're screwed (though I fixed that issue with some epoxy to act as a bump).
My point is quite simple. The more simple you make it, the less usable you make it. Number of buttons is only part of the story - A million buttons tend to freak new users out, a single button works well for new users. A million buttons are highly flexible, a single button is only really useful for making calls and you can get stuffed if you want to make it work like you want to.
Dammit.
Like some of the other comments, it's been done before, and has long since proved to be rather insecure. Besides, the Mythbusters team demonstrated this same fingerprint duplication technique in 2006. Not only that, it's been shown elsewhere, that a good (albeit short and very useable) regular password, offers more combinations than biometric fingerprints anyway.
Like I've said before, it's just not funny anymore...
Er, if it actually works as advertised, it should be called USB v10. But it won't, or at least, I'm not holding my breath.
USB 3.0, with a core backbone speed ten times faster than USB 2, can barely come up to three times faster in real life tests - not bullshit theoretical numbers plucked from the air.
In theory, you can say anything you like, just don't expect me to believe you.
In practice, I expect that USB 3.1 will approach speeds that USB 3.0 could only approach in theory.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/09/19/ios-7-bug-lets-anyone-bypass-iphones-lockscreen-to-hijack-photos-email-or-twitter/
"iOS 7 Bug Lets Anyone Bypass iPhone's Lockscreen To Hijack Photos, Email, Or Twitter"
"Jose Rodriguez, a 36-year-old soldier living in Spain’s Canary Islands, has found a security vulnerability in iOS 7 that allows anyone to bypass its lockscreen in seconds to access photos, email, Twitter, and more."
You *could* laugh about this, but it just isn't funny anymore - will apple ever learn?
However, because the carrier got in touch with the affected customers and provided refunds, the ACMA has issued a notice, but not imposed any other penalty.
Notice it doesn't say they actually *fixed* it yet...
From the same company that sends credit collectors to your place for an outstanding sub-dollar bill.
So if BC is considered a currency, then it would be illegal.
That is not the case. As you've already stated, "foreign" (non-Australian) currency is acceptable, but it needs to be converted, then dealt with as Australian currency for the actual transaction.
So bitcoin would work, as long as it's "cashed" into Australian currency for the beer transaction. All costs, taxes, fees and whatnot are dealt within the Australian realm - so it's legal.
But as far as the customer is concerned, they don't see (or need to see) the middle bits, for them, they pay bitcoin, they get beer.
While Dolby B didn't rock my socks, I was pretty impressed with Dolby C. I recently showed off a demo of the audio that it was capable of, an (untouched) digitised version of a recording I made from analogue TV 20 years ago (metal grade compact cassette). It sounded pretty much the same as the re-runs you get today.
I also showed off how NOT to do it. Horrendously hissy and bad sounding recordings from a similar era, cheap tapes, no noise reduction of any type, WITH subsequent digital "fixing" to clean up the mess. It helped, but was still a mess.
"Consumer grade" covers a WIDE area, so it's not really the fault of the crappy equipment, just your choice.
We had a client with DAT data tapes in a cartridge stack auto-feeder, that started the backups at Friday night, and had it finished halfway through Sunday. Along with regularly scheduled cleaning tapes at the right intervals, every six months the drive would fail, and they'd have it replaced under warranty.
You could say that it was driven past it's rated workload, but you could also say if you have a stacker that can hold 15 tapes, then why wouldn't you use 15 at a time? Hey, 30Gb was a lot in those days...
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On another note, I see at least several suggestions on this comments list about using 4Tb drives as your backup. If you've spent some real time with SATA drives, you'll know that they fail. Unless you're using them with some class of RAID, you're going to lose data - and lots of it - 4Tb at a time. I have four Western Digital Black (desktop grade) drives, with one failure after 2.5 years - not that long. I have about 10 Western Digital Enterprise grade drives in the works, but they're still new - so I have no idea how they'll do (although quietly hoping they'll last longer than 2.5 bloody years). My only other experience is with enterprise grade SCSI drives, but they're a lot lesser capacity and probably not as suitable for long term storage - even if they virtually never fail. On the other hand, we have tapes that are so old, we no longer have the drives to read them (though storage recovery firms that can prove the tapes and data are still good).
Although tape is the preferred long term data storage medium, HDDs are still viable for home users who don't care for high reliablity (or more accurately, don't want to pay for it).
Contact customer services. You’ll need to know 5 contacts from your contacts list, the month you created your account, and your signup email address.
I never had that many contacts with Skype, and when I signed up? Are you kidding? That was years ago and stuffed if I remember what I did last week let alone when I joined...
In other words, nothing's changed - you can never, ever, delete your account.
I'm shocked in exactly how not surprised I am.
It does however explain the free for all information grab they had been aiming for, it would just legalise what they've already been doing for some time. More importantly, it would obscure somewhat the current illegal status of their tapping.
Except they got caught with their pants down first...
I had an argument with some friends who claimed that open source was "free", compared to quite expensive closed options. I reminded them that perhaps the "purchase" cost was free, but you need to hire consultance to set it up, maintain it, install upgrades, worry about rare add-on modules that develop problems where development had stopped on them. Sometimes the stress isn't worth it compared to a proprietary option where all these fiddly issues are taken care of.
I'll have to change my tune a bit if something like this outage happens - yes I know it was a could issue, but it could very well have been an internet outage that brings your business to its knees.
At least with open source, you have choice in where and and how it works.
I had to give up on groups several months ago when Yahoo wouldn't let me log into any of my accounts without asking stupid security questions which I had no recollection of ever being asked or answering.
Log in, wait for it ask stupid questions, close that tab, open again and it'll take you to your groups page without asking again - for a while.
Yes, it pisses me off, not to mention they really need a streamlined way to handle spam - but it's "free", and you get what you pay for.
I suspected as much from the Reds. I didn't know how they could claim a higher MTBF for what is essentially a Green with tweaked firmware with a moderate price increase.
Now I know - they didn't affect the MTBF at all, they merely adjusted a few settings to make the drive self-destruct later rather than sooner.
There were reports of some Linux boxes chewing up the Load Cycle Counts in 2 years. Even my Black drives after 2.5 years of service have gone though 200,000 of the reputed 300,000 life count - and one of those drives has become flakey too. I'm now running higher end Blacks (WD call them enterprise), and the Load Cycle Count is sitting at 1, after a couple of months.
As long as you stay away from the bottom end of the market (where their bread and butter is) the more you pay, the better you get. Sounds obvious, though I'm sorry to see the relevant utilities no longer work - preventing you from getting a cheap drive that isn't entirely a piece of crap.
A really good way to get noticed would be to tell the song and dance person what they did wrong when they failed and help them fix it for next time.
In some jobs, this is a never-fail reciepe for getting yourself sidelined. It contrasts with the self-preservation philosophy of "never, ever help anyone", "always cover your arse" and, "if anyone screws up, whatever the reason, publicly lambast them" techniques that are prevalent there. Thinking back on some of the more horrid tech jobs I've held, it's kinda like australian politics really... Sigh.
how do 3 know you're tethered if you have an unlocked phone?
They don't. The tethering-block is a piece of software that runs on your phone. It is usually planted there by your carrier when you "borrow" a phone for a dollar and pay for it over the next thirty years on one of their overpriced plans. You get to buy an upper-market phone with a buck, and they get paid for the phone over the life of the contract with interest. What they don't tell you, is that there are a load of strings attached, and they've actualy given you an off-the-shelf phone with a few "minor" firmware changes. Such as network locking, tethering blocks, or conditional tethering being a couple of obvious changes.
If your phone was purchased outright, off-the-shelf if you will, the SIM card and carrier will have no idea that tethering is even happening - it just pumps data through.
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