Posts by Electron Shepherd

Re: Sound bites bite back

The lady making the comment is Czech, so I imagine there's a bit of "lost in translation" there. I think she means that the impact of any severe injuries will be less. If I have an accident and am bleeding badly, my prognosis is much better if help can arrive more quickly.

But yes, airbag deployment doesn't automatically mean that you need medical attention. Having said that, it's hard to imagine an accident severe enough to cause the airbags to deploy where the authorities in some respect would not be involved. Even if you drive into a tree all on your own and are unhurt due to the airbags etc, you've still damaged the tree, which is someone else's property, so the owner of the damaged property has a claim against you.

I can see this being used to inform the authorities about severe accidents, even if the accident doesn't require someone to show up with blues and twos.

Re: Touchscreen too far..

I think voice has a part to play here. In my car, I can press a button on the steering wheel (which I can find by feel, so no need to take eyes off road), and I can set the climate control temperature, select a CD in the changer, change track, retune the radio, control the sat nav, make and receive telephone calls (I can say the number, no need to already be in the phone book) and more. This is a car from 2006, so it's not new technology. Even back then, it was a £250 option, so it isn't expensive at all (if list price for the option is £250, it probably cost about £50 to make).

I find that in traffic, coming up behind a big smoky diesel and being able to turn the air recirculation on simply by moving my left thumb about 1cm, pressing a button and saying "recirc" to be even safer than having a button on the dashboard that relies on muscle memory.

Re: Luck, or Unicode? Neither - just accurate coding to the API.

Windows 10 = Major Version 10.

This is only the case on Windows 8 / Server 2012 / Windows 10 if the application has been manifested for the relevant operating system. Without a manifest, it returns a lower version.

Re: Awful acronym

It's for "covert"

Re: Real title should be: Health apps and wearables make you nervous, but someone is getting money

Labelling food organic is another pet peeve. If it was inorganic it wouldn't be much use as food.

This sounds like a little bit of pedantry. Everyone knows what it means, and it's one of those many cases in English where the literal meaning of the words is ignored, and the intent behind them is taken as the meaning.

In much the same way that it usually isn't the food itself that's labelled, it's the packet containing the food, but we all knew what you meant.

Re: Missing the point ...

it is my belief that

it should not be possible for data to subvert the application used for viewing that data

it should definitely not be possible to subvert the system beyond that application

Those two goals sound like they are achievable.

The thing is, to achieve them, we need to work out how to write complex software that doesn't contain any flaws. No-ones done that yet.

Re: Windows-as-a-Service

Lots of people won't see things that way - they pay for everything else monthly, with no ultimate ownership. Imagine a typical London-based twenty-something:

1) They rent their flat

2) Their car is on a PCP, and has to be returned after 3 years

3) Their phone is on a monthly contract, and is changed every two years.

All three of those are effectively "renting", even though the tag is only usually applied to property. "Renting" an operating system is no different to them.

Re: What's the photo from?

Daenerys Targaryen

Re: But for any mission critical machine

Your "ancient" quad-core probably still outclasses the laptop. The laptop could easily be:

1) a single-core Celeron processor

2) using a heavily-fragmented 5400 rpm disk

3) running on batteries, so even less processing power than 1) would imply

Re: Unintended orbits?

Modern spacecraft navigate by the stars, just like humans (and some animals) have been doing for thousands of years.

NASA's Sextant mission is going to use the signals from pulsars, rather than visible light, but the principle is much the same.

Re: Oh?

If so how are they still in business?

You're confusing value, price and cost.

Value is how much benefit the purchaser gets from the product (may or may not be monetary)

Price is how much actual money changes hands

Cost is how much money the vendor spends to make the product

They are in business because the value obtained from buying the product is greater than the financial price of the purchase.

Revenue will be obtained in the usual way

It's a modern service running "in the cloud", so it'll be splattered with adverts.

Just imagine the targeting opportunities if you have access to someone's entire document collection...

Re: Human nature

The trouble with ideas like that is that they fail to account for the other side of accidents. If every car has the proverbial spike sticking out of the steering wheel, no seat belts and no air bag, and when I'm sat at the lights an inattentive driver crashes into the back of me at 50mph, the spike causes further injury to me, even though the accident was not my fault.

The Synology devices can backup to AWS, Azure and so on.

Re: I don't get it at all.

The official reason is that if you know how much electricity, gas etc. you are using, in real time, you will use less, and that since the utility company won't have to send someone out to read the meter, their costs are lower, and those cost reductions will be passed on to the consumer. *

The reality, I suspect, is to introduce the capability for demand- and time-based pricing, which is currently impossible for a read-it-once-every-three-months "old" meter.

*No, I don't believe that one, either.

Re lag, I think the opposite is true. I seem to recall a Top Gear episode where they reviewed the (I think) Lexus RC-F, and that had an LCD dashboard, because a mechanical rev counter couldn't respond fast enough.

As for crashing, even mechanical ones are computer controlled these days. There's no cable from the driveshaft to the speedo - it's all done via the ECU using data from the ABS sensors.

Re: This makes me so happy

far from being an original, genius, Pratchett invention, he's pretty much just copied the concept of the 'Guild of Signallers' from Keith Roberts "Pavane", published over thirty years earlier.

The bit you've missed is that the genius is in the copying, and the parodying and satire thereof. For example, Wyrd Sisters (an early Discworld book) opens with three witches, one of whom asks "When shall we three met again?". Apparently some bloke from the Midlands came up with that idea some time ago.

There's nothing new under the sun. That same bloke from the Midlands wrote the famous play about a couple of "star crossed lovers", and he pretty much copied the idea from a previous Italian love poem. Non-one says that Romeo and Juliet is not a classic of English literature just because the concept isn't original.

It's how you take the original, and extend and transform it, that counts.

Re: Convenience to whom?

Both VMware and Hyper-V have APIs. Don't use Xen or KVM so can't comment on those, but I would imagine that they do too.

As Martin Luther King said:

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."

Re: re. braking

Looking at the front wheel in the second photo and the cutaway powertrain image, it seems to have discs all round. I'd guess that the regenerative braking is used for gentle slowing down, and the discs are used when you need to stop more quickly.

Most people are right-handed, and they pick things up with their right hand. I use a track pad, but if I was going to plug in a mouse, and I was sat in front of the laptop, I'd be holding the mouse in my right hand, so my left hand would be free to do the plugging in. Having the socket on the left is more appropriate.

Also, every wired mouse I've ever seen has a cable easily long enough to go the width of a laptop, so it's not as if the cable won't reach to the right hand side even when plugged into the left hand side of the computer.

Or to put it another way...

A free way of doing something RightScale charges you for.

Re: Too Small?

For one card that you have in your pocket, too small is inconvenient. But imagine a standard 1U rack case full of these...

By my back of the envelope calculations, and admittedly not leaving any room for actual connections to the cards, you could get 75,000 of them in 1U. That's 14 EB, or 650 EB for a standard rack!

Re: interesting time for Dell, Juniper and others

Which may well be the main reason for buying them. $3Bn for a company making $5M profit / quarter isn't a sound investment in isolation.