Posts by nedge2k

Wait...£84mil AND a refit? How much is that refit costing? Who is footing the bill for it?

Windows Mobile (Pocket PC) was an awesome platform and to a degree, is still better than what's out there now. If they had just done the UI refresh properly, keeping the underlying Windows CE base and allowing for backward compatibility with the old .CAB packaged applications and integrated said apps into a proper store, quickly - instead of the gimped abortion that was Windows Phone - they'd still be a player.

Speed would bother people less if they weren't being charged for something they weren't getting and had no way of getting.

My inlaws are charged for 24mb but barely see 1mb. They can't do anything about it, BT won't do anything about it (rural) yet they are still charged full whack. I'm on 80mb but only get 42mb (I would switch to 40mb but the package i'm on has unlimited this that and the other, no traffic shaping, lower contention etc. etc.). FTTC will fix their issue eventually, FTTDP or G.Fast will fix mine, eventually.

OFCOM should force ISPs to pro rata the charges. ISPs know what speed you'll get and should charge proportionally for the speed you get. Only getting half speed? Then pay half price!

Um..

Max Mosley is NOT the boss of F1. He WAS the president of the FIA, the sports governing body. Bernie is the boss of F1 (for now...).

Have to say, been with Plusnet for 6 years now and rarely had an issue with them.

"if roaming were enforced, there'd be no incentive for operators to build infrastructure"

...apart from the fact that they'll be charging each other for using each other's infrastructure, giving them more incentive to sort their own networks out to controls costs?

um, even when they were new in 2012, the GTX 690's were only like $1K - not $5k

The fundamental part of a self driving system, before ANYTHING else, is being able to see - i.e. decent cameras. I don't care what clever tricks you can come up with in terms of radar/lidar/ultrasonics, no camera (that would be fitted to a car anytime soon) can match the human eye's abilities. As humans, if our vision becomes impaired, our license is taken away. Until a camera can match the human eye, self driving is a dangerous pipe dream. In fact, even if there were cameras that could match or beat the human eye's abilities (and were cost effective enough to put in a car - all about the margins remember), self driving cars are an accident waiting to happen - especially the ones planned with no manual controls! What happens when there's a system crash - software never has bugs, right? System hack - auto makers are great at security, right? EMP? Radar jamming? IR floodlight? What about all the other cars with ultrasonics pinging about, telling me they're all going to happily co-exist?

It's progress for the sake of progress, it's already killed once, it won't be the last time and it'll lull the great unwashed into a false sense of security, then they die.

Fuck ABS, fuck traction control, fuck parking sensors. Strip all that shit back and teach people how to drive properly. Gimme a Mk2 Escort with a roll cage and harnesses any day of the week.

</rant> :)

Triangulate?

Wait, what? I was always under the impression telco's only ever stored info about the cell you were connected to and that they only triangulate on request? There's a big difference between you being within a certain radius of a cell tower and actually triangulating you to within a few meters...

Ha!

Well, serves him right for a) being one of those fucking annoying condom, tour de france wannabe, MAMIL's and b) being stupid enough to think anyone gives a shit about his cycling habits.

Re: Your phone works on electricity

Can you actually analyse a scent to enough of a degree to make it practical though?

Surprised Google hasn't become its own CA by now...

No limited to VAG but not too much to worry about...

I doubt very much this is limited to VAG cars - FTDI chips are quite prevalent in most diagnostic cables. Also, the chances of an indie garage laptop (dealers have proprietary kit) being patched and up to date are incredibly minimal - most are still on XP, hell i've seen some still running '95.

That aside, most garages forgo PC software and use a dedicated Snap-On tool that covers most makes/models and won't interact with a PC. It's only small specialists and home mechanics that will used software like VCDS (formerly VAGCOM) - which is what I assume they're talking about here - as it's significantly cheaper than the dedicated aftermarket/OEM equivalent.

In short, if you take you car to a dealer for stuff - nowt to worry about, non-event. If you take it to an indie specialist to have the central locking recoded to allow something like remote window opening, you're taking a risk.

Re: Your phone works on electricity

For anyone this is affecting, dump WMC and move to Kodi (formerly XBMC) using the MediaPortal TV Server. Shit's only gonna get worse. I loved WMC but Kodi is way better overall - although the series recording isn't great by default.

er...where the hell is this £13 on PC?

This'll just be a re-badged china special. Take your pick from ZTE/Huawei/etc.

Re: Your phone works on electricity

Worth mentioning you can now get the far superior LG G Flex 2 with 32GB sotrage for £230 on ebay (new). Yes, the SD810 chip does have some aggressive throttling when it gets hot but it's a LOT of phone for £230...

Re: Chrome is neither sleek nor speedy these days...

Chrome is becoming a bloated joke itself. I recently used a shitty old Macbook running Safari on a 3rd world connection and it fetched and rendered pages MUCH more quickly than Chrome was on my 2015 i7 XPS 13 - although full disclosure, I'm running W10. Still...

...and when I say "much", I mean a couple of seconds compared to tens of seconds.

Re: Your phone works on electricity

Never ceases to amaze me how much of a rip off caterham are. 30k for that vs 25k for a Zenos E10 with a 200bhp engine or 25k for a Toyata GT86 if you want more creature comforts.

Re: Your phone works on electricity

Until I got the new QHD XPS 13, I thought high-res screens on 11-13" laptops was a waste of time, along with touch. I only bought the QHD because the 1080p display wasn't yet available to UK punters and supposedly wouldn't be for "a long time". A month later, Apple announce their stuff and low and behold, FHD screen is now an option...

I still mostly stand by that POV but the QHD screen on the XPS is bloody gorgeous, even if I have had to take a hit on the battery - but i'm plugged in 90% of the time so it doesn't really matter to me anyway. Windows scaling in W10 does a good job too.

I just wish they'd realise getting rid of SBS was as big of a mistake as Windows 8 was/is. They soon did a u-turn on metro, somehow I don't think they will on SBS. Obviously small businesses in rural areas with shitty internet connection don't exist in their world.

Personally I'm investigating Zentyal. Been waiting for 3.5, which has just dropped, then will see how well it performs.

Our biggest problem is Sage ODBC - which is Windows only and is, unfortunately, an important requirement. Hoping I can do something with Wine.

Done this myself recently but I opted for a more integrated approach - a NanodeRF (arduino clone) which has built-in RF and Ethernet - so it can accept commands directly without the need for a dedicated computer to relay commands. I literally built it in the first instance to turn the bedroom light into a "sunrise alarm" during the winter but the plan in the future is to have a Harmony-esque control structure - i.e. you assign devices to activites - and have it all configurable on the fly. Long way off though! Here's my code for anyone interested: https://codebender.cc/sketch:27612

Re: Your phone works on electricity

GT5 was horrendous for a game that took ~6 years to make and GT6 is not much better. The majority of the cars are 'standard', with the rest being 'premium' yet all sound equally awful. I also fail to understand why people praise the handling. It seems most cars are biased toward terrible understeer. If you throw a car into a corner and brake or let off the gas, the back end will come out. So far with the 'standard' cars in GT6, this is not the case - no matter what drivetrain arrangement they have.

The Forza franchise has its problems, not least of which are its arrogant developers but Forza 4 is still the best console racer.

If you could combine Forza 5 graphics with Forza 4 gameplay and the (visual) driving experience (feel) of NFS Shift, you'd have the perfect console racer.

Of course, that's until 'Project Cars' comes out...