Posts by d3vy 1633 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Mar 2014
"Well I had my Touran 'fixed' in April. Traveling to Switzerland ( a 3 times a year 1700 mile trip) returns 54-55mpg exactly the same as the previous 12 trips."
We have noticed no difference in the wife's Audi since it was done either, she spends maybe 70% of her working day driving so if there was anything more than a negligible difference we would have noticed by now.
"What if the car is parked in a location where there is no data signal? Do you set out on a journey only to come to an abrupt halt as soon as the vehicle picks up a signal and discovers that an update is available - possibly when you're doing 70 in lane 3 of a motorway?"
No, of course it wont.
In the same way that modern cars wont come to an abrupt stop when they detect something wrong they will flash up a warning and in the event that its a bad enough fault the car will either enter limp mode allowing you to continue at a reduced speed, or advise you to pull over immediately.
I cannot fathom the twisted logic that would cause you to ask such a question..
As for your question about the updates containing a bug... Again common sense tells you that this would be discretionary.. if the bug was that in 90% of the cars updated the brakes failed to work then yes.. I would hope that the cars would be immobilised until the issue was rectified..
For serious issues I'd think that the car pulling over and advising you to call recovery would be the best bet.
For less serious issues I'd expect the car to be able to continue until a suitable time to do the update (Probably when its charging).
In the event of a failed update then yes the car should revert to the last good configuration but subject to the above whereby it could remain immobilised depending on the nature of the issue,
"Today if a driver cannot be identified the owner (registered keeper) is ultimately liable. Why would you want to change this legislation if it would still work perfectly?"
Because it wouldnt work perfectly. That current legislation exists because it can be assumed that the cars owner would know who is driving it at a given time, if they dot know (or wont say) then they are given the penalty as it is assumed that they are either lying or it was them driving.
However that process is an exception for when the actual DRIVER cannot be identified not the default route that is taken. Besides, we WILL know who the driver was.. it will be Alexa, Cortana or Clippy... So why should we take the blame for something done by a piece of software?
Lets look at a scenario using your idea:
You own an autonomous car.
You maintain that car as per the manufacturers recommendations.
You go on a night out with some friends and end up miles from where you parked so you call the car to come and pick you up.
On the way to collecting you the (Driver-less, Passenger-less) car fails to detect a speed limit change and goes through a camera.
Remember, you maintained the car EXACTLY as you should have, installed all of the updates and ensured that all sensors were perfectly working and it still triggers a camera... Are you saying that YOU as the owner should be liable for those points?
I suspect that as autonomous cars become more ubiquitous we will see fewer and fewer speed cameras anyway as there will be less of a need for them so this probably wont be an issue in 15-20 years anyway.
Surely the way to manage this would be to make the local authority responsibe for providing real time speed limit data to autonomous cars... Some kind of transmitter in lamp posts or on existing speed signs.or even an API that can be called send your route and it returns current limits for the roads that your traveling on and near taking into account temp road works etc...
Having the cars recognise and read actual speed signs seems a bit stupid.
"If you need one of these things (or any other hi-tech mind distraction) when you go camping, you're missing the entire point of going camping!"
Well maybe for you, personally when I go camping its a means to an end... Ill camp close to the bottom of a mountain (Normally in the closest camp site) so I can be off and up it at first light... That does not mean that I dont want to watch a movie or something similar the night before/if stuck in camp because of weather.
Im sure that this will be helpful for the few people who have Phone only land lines... However what I want ofcom to turn their attention to is compulsory bundled services...
I need broadband (£26 p/m) so we have to have a BT phone line.
The BT Phone line has rental (£18 p/m)
If it stopped there then I'd be happy, BUT..
BT insist that if we have a phone line we also have to have a call package at £14 p/m.. We dont even have a phone connected to the line.
So every year I go through the motions of phoning BT, threatening to leave and they eventually apply a discount equal to the price of the call package to my bill for 12 months as long as I sign up for another 12 month contract.
I have to wonder how many others are just paying it and not realising?
Also while I'm at it... BT seriously £14 a month for evening and weekend calls? My O2 sim costs me £13 a month and has unlimited any time any network minutes... so your call package is not offering anything close to value for money.
I only started looking at the costs when I realised that we were only using one service (Broadband) and were paying close to £60 a month because of the bundled services. We are unfortunately stuck with BT though.
Another thing that I started to notice on the bill was an additional charge of £1 per month FOR NOT USING THE PHONE. When I asked they advised me to just make one call a month! What a ridiculous system!
@Annon.
Are you that guy that I had an argument with last year who said that logging in applications was unnecessary and anyone who did it was stupid?
You sound like the same guy... In that you are both very wrong.
"Requirements change,features added = new product."
HAHAHAHAHAHA, Yeah, OK.. Ill try selling that to the next client that asks for an extra check box on a web form.. NEW PRODUCT!
"Bugs fixes = you released bad code and are an incompetent liability to your customers"
I'd laugh again but I'm starting to worry that you might seriously believe what you have typed...
My code has never been exploited and has never needed any updates
Your code:
10 PRINT "I AM AWESOME!"
20 GOTO 10
I've got an idea.. instead of having one or two patients per home they could use hotels, they could get hundreds in then.. they could give some of the hotel staff medical training and possibly pay doctors to be on site.
Sorry... I've just realised that I'm describing a hospital. What they need to do is build and staff more hospitals instead of wasting more money on short term solutions like this.
"Surely, anyone on here with a modicum of common-coco never uses their real details for anything like this??"
It appears to be registered to Stringfellow Hawke who lives in San Remo... Lets get right on it.
I find it quite funny when I go into a pub and the wifi auto connects and I get a welcome back Mr FannyFace page in my browser.
"Can the US court order a US sysadmin in the USA to access the servers in Ireland in contravention of Eu law?"
Probably... but then ireland could ask for that sysadmin to be extradited... I know it sounds ridiculous but the US did it with Gary McKinnon so we should be able to do it the other way round!
"It's about data held by an American company (where ever)."
Lets simplify this. I (a UK/EU citizen) dump some dodgy data on a portable hard disk and drive from Manchester to somewhere in France and put that disk in a safe.
So that's data which the UK police want held by me (a UK/EU citizen) in France...
Can the UK police retrieve that drive without a french warrant?
No, they cant, not legally anyway.
"On the contrary, local employees would be expected to refuse a request if it in anyway risked contravention of local laws. It's illegal to ask an employee to break the law. And there would be little Microsoft US could do about it unless they want to break EU employment laws and pay out compensation. And still not get the data."
This actually follows on nicley from a comment I just posted about MS ie being a seperate legal entity.. it has its own directors who are legally responsible for ensuring that MS IE does not contravene any laws... If they just handed the data over without a valid warrant the Management of MS IE could be looking (at best) at a hefty fine or (at worst) prison time.
@Ian
"US citizen data taken offshore to Ireland. This would be similar to either German bank data laws or Swiss Data Laws concerning how to handle data."
Where to start?
First, its not a US citizens data as others have pointed out.
Second, We are not talking about MS, we are talking about an Irish subsidiary of MS, which is registered and operated from Ireland, For all intents and purposes its an Irish company which happens to be owned by Microsoft (for tax reasons).
The law of the country where the servers are located trumps the law of where the users originate.
"Sanction Microsoft in the US, I'd expect"
Very well and good, but surely the law in Ireland will override that and if that law prohibits the extraction of data to the US* then they cant really do anything...
* I seriously doubt that there are any laws that prohibit this, if anything I'd expect we** have agreements in place to allow it.
** Thats the collective we, Im not in Ireland.
"It was supposedly a picture containing a phone number. Not trivial to regex that."
OCR is something that exists... The problem being that it would take quite a bit of processing to OCR every picture uploaded... (But then FB and YT manage a significant amount of pre publish checking on video for copywritten content in videos so Im sure twitter could figure something out..
I suspect as I mentioned in another comment that the sudden surge in activity on her account because of her recent post regarding W simply flagged her account for further review meaning that her images were subject to additional checks (Either automated or manual)
" it happens immediately after she slags off Weinstein."
Yes but it also happens after a presumably significant uptick in the readership of her tweets as a result of slagging off w.
If I were writing moderation software is certain ally have it pay attention to accounts with sudden high volumes of activity..
Realistically given everyone that is posting about him would banning this one user really make a difference? What would Twitter gain from
Doing so?
"But it pretty much has flopped"
Even if it had flopped which I strongly contest.... What I was referring to was the childish renaming "xFlopOne", its in the same vein as Crapple, Microsuck, micro$oft and the more recent "Slurp" which seems to have missed the point altogether by not even attempting to be a play on the original product or company.
So regardless of the success or not of the product, stop with the ridiculous renaming of products, it was funny once*.. its not now.
* that one time it was funny was when it was spelled "flops" so it at least SOUNDED like box.
You're getting several product lines confused....
"It has a vinyl keyboard. And you have to prop up the screen" thats the surface pro, its a tablet with a keyboard cover - similar to an iPad.
"The odd hinge looked like it would easily break also" thats a surface book, thats a.. laptop with a fully functional detachable tablet.
There is also the new surface laptop which I didnt see the point of until I used one last week... really its just a windows PC, nothing special to see.. but the keyboard is great, the screen is great, its fast.. its just generally a decent machine.
"If high end hardware is considered "low margin" how is Apple so wealthy?"
Well... The first problem with your question is the assumption that apple sell high end hardware...
Im not saying they are bad.. its just this years iPhone is last years Galaxy with a new jacket.
Also.. Sweatshops help alot... but MS and others will also be using these.
"Those £129 laptops will do the same as your £2500 bling (bing) machine..... Pleb..."
Yeah... no they wont.
Those £129 laptops will have at most 4GB of RAM, they will not have an SSD and if they do it will be criplingly small (Such as the HP Stream laptops 64GB Hdd... honestly!) they will also have (AT BEST) an i3 CPU... at worst some celeron crud from over a decade ago (Again HP Stream, Im looking at you)
Now, I know that this isnt the use case for most, but I run visual studio, SQL Server office and at least one VM from my laptop... its (as mentioned before in another comment a 4 year old yoga 2 pro - 8GB Ram with an i7 CPU) it struggles sometimes when Im working so please do tell me how a £129 machine can do the same job?
"That is if the user can get into the thing, what if they are using it for the first time and you are faced with "we are getting things ready"? (or whatever the current phrase is).
I'm not defending first use in a coffee shop but I'm guessing other brands/OS's may survive it better, hell you could probably install and use Ubuntu on a separate bit of kit get your work finished then spend an hour browsing while waiting an MS OS to get ready, woe betide you if you want to then quickly shut down."
Utter horse shit.
The "We are getting things ready" screen is windows setting up applications, user profiles etc... This is why it happens AFTER you have entered your login details for the first time.
"hell you could probably install and use Ubuntu on a separate bit of kit get your work finished then spend an hour browsing while waiting an MS OS to get ready,"
Again - horse shit.
Unless ubuntu now installs in less than 5 minutes and you have no real work to do...
My laptop is an old (4 years) yoga 2 Pro... I can do a fresh install of windows and be at the desktop in around 20 minutes... Unless you're installing it on an old 486 there is no way that you are waiting that long for windows to get ready...
"You can specify what time of day you want to exclude any patching. I have mine set between 7am and 10pm, so any patching gets done when my laptop isn't in use."
You also get the option to deffer to specific dates, Ive been deferring the creators update for a few months now (takes a few seconds a week to select a new date from the drop down).
One of the main reasons I never bought any sonos gear is that I was concerned about future compatibility..
My main concern being that in 5 years they might drop support for any of their hardware that I own and it will cease to work with the supported version of their mobile app on the OS de jour.
Seems that this was perfectly reasonable, if they drop support for a line of speakers but continue to push updates to the app I guess the speakers stop working?
If I ever need to stream audio that badly Ill buy a chromecast audio.. it has exactly the same issue but at least its not £200!
"I do however hope that weather satellite imagery taken at the time in question has been examined. Granted it does not have he resolution to resolve an aircraft, but it does have enough resolution to resolve a contrail if conditions were such that the aircraft left one."
Why would they be spreading their chemikilz over the ocean? Turning the frigging fish gay?
:)
"Here, we've reserved you some products you didn't ask for and will charge your card details you gave us for a totally different purchase automatically unless you tell us not to!" - is this even legal? I dunno, but I've asked Trading Standards to have a peek, FWIW"
Not quite..
"We are going to reserve you some products related to others that you already own, let us know within x weeks if you dont want us to do this, if you change your mind you have TWO YEARS to opt out"
Ill bet trading standards will be all over it...
"Also 123-reg are competent (brilliant IMHO) at a tech support level, it's just their policies that suck arse."
They deleted TWO of my virtual servers along with THOUSANDS of others last year by mistake... So Im going to disagree with you there!
On the other hand Ive been with them for about ten years and thats the only real issue Ive had so I stuck with them - I spent a lot of time shopping round and couldn't find anyone to beat them on price for what I get/need from them.
"A straight .uk is better than the relatively pointless .co addition imo."
But the .co has a specific purpose, it tells us that the site is intended for commerce (as with .com).
"No need to double - 2 years free gives you the time to switch to .uk without additional cost."
Could you send me a list of the .co.uk addresses that you have registered at the moment, I need to put them all on back order so in two years I can demonstrate why you actually need both! :)
"If I provide some service - say product support, for example - through "myfantasticservices.co.uk", and my customers get into the habit of just typing "myfantasticservices.uk", then when the registration on the latter expires, I'm going to have a lot of pissed off customers. I might extend it just to avoid that.
That's why this is an underhanded move. It's an attempt to lock people in."
While I agree, its also quite a cynical view to take, they have emailed with plenty of notice so that you can tell them NOT to do it.
To be fair the other registrar that I use actually phoned me and asked if I wanted them and I said yes (Ill note that they are actually £3 a year cheaper than 123 for uk domains too!)
Given the scenario you mention if they hadnt given the option you'd be a bit pissed off if you didn't buy it and someone set up a site advertising handy-Js on myfantasticservices.uk
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