Posts by Alan Brown

Re: "are suspected to be involved"

"Crime? I thought copyright infringement was a tort."

It is, up to a threshold (much higher than in the USA).

Organised copyright infringement _for profit_ can be a criminal offence. As a means of civil disobedience it's not.

Re: Does Microsoft get paid?

Even if it idoes have (micro)SD there's still no reason to support FAT - I'm happily using f2fs on my sd cards

Re: Dyson have a point.

"Someone must define a 'standard carpet' with an exact laboratory-standard mixture of dust particles of various sizes and a measured quantity of cat hair."

FWIW, they have. The issue is that testing takes place once, with a new device and there isn't enough material tested to actually fill a container/bag - so all that's being measure is initial efficiency - which to be frank, is crap on all of them.

Some time back a british gentleman managed to patent a system where the exhaust air is redierected down onto the carpet/floor just in front of the suction head. The result was that the same cleaning efficiency can be achived with about 25% of the power(*). As far as I'm aware there is only ONE cleaner on the market which makes use of this innovation.

(*) It also means that the fine dust spray which all vacuum cleaners emit (even the HEPA filtered ones) is eliminated and efficiency sapping fine filtration is largely unncessary because with the air being recirculated continuously the filters have a much greater chance of catching everything.

Re: So, how many still missing ?

A lot of the "not lost" ones are edited to hell and back thanks to syndication (stations would cut film to fit adverts and drop the ends on the floor). Finding another archive helps piece together the originals.

The same phenomenon was noticed with Star Trek TOS. Entire scenes were found to have been chopped out to make eps fit into advertising schedules (syndicated series are passed from station to station) and restoring them from the canonical archives (which someone at paramount had the sense to preserve) during the 1980-90s made things make a lot more sense.

"No, I mean thieves. If a book/film/whatever is on sale at £10 and you steal it; you just stopped the creators getting their cut of that £10. If you copy it - it's the same thing. (And I'll type this slowly so that you can keep up). THE. CREATOR. DOES. NOT. GET. PAID."

If I sell or give a boook/film away the creator doesn't get paid either.

Which is why there have been attempts to shut down the secondhand book and music markets (That's where the First Sale doctrine comes from).

Re: Hey Microsoft - here's an idea

" in fact, the GPL licence is deliberately compatible with this kind of business model."

Um. No. You can make quite a bit of money from GPL. Just ask Red Hat.

Re: It Was The Design

"One certainty is that it needed more development and validation work before it was shipped. "

One can also say that about Beagle (and not to use heavily patched prototyping airbags full of earth atmosphere water vapour as the actual flight devices)

Re: Nothing will make airships viable.

The formula for burning involves combining hydrogen from the fuel with Oxygen and Carbon from the fuel with oxygen.

The Co2 is lost, but the H20 is retained. As long as you can get close to the magic "1 gallon of diesel gives 1 gallon of water" you can make up the rest by putting a compressor onboard and using that to pull helium in/out of the gasbags. (Even if it doesn't get that close, it makes the compressor's load easier provided the weight penalty isn't too high

Given the size of these aircraft, I do wonder a bit whether enough emergency lift can be generated to prevent microbursts downing the things (That's what took out most of the airships. Weather radar wasn't around back then. Piss poor designs like the R101 didn't help either)

Re: "Electrical fire"?

"The really great thing about a car fire is that if everyone is clear of the vehicle you don't have to put it out."

If you don't put it out you have to repair the road after it burns out.

Re: Um...

Old Testament, (blood sex and revenge), superceded by New Testament (Love thy neighbour, etc)

If you subscribe to "an eye for an eye" then you're missing the point.

Re: 20k rpm?

"Those offer maybe 5-6x more IOPS per GB"

The _ONLY_ advantage that spinning faster gets you is faster sequential reads. Anything involving random headseeks is only fractionally faster than previously, but you lose a fraction more time waiting for things to settle.

That's why Seagate and others are looking at hybrid storage with flash write caching.

Re: Automatic

"Here's a thought: maybe you could actually use the handbrake for its intended purpose."

It's a parking brake - and using it at lights, etc is an instant license fail in a lot of jurisdictions.

Having said that there is ZERO reason whatsoever for modern auto transmissions to creep when idling and I wish makers wouldn't do it (Toyota actually _added_ creep to the Prius, because they thought that drivers would demand it)

Re: Not unlike real gold

"But there are certainly advantages to using it such as it being a highly efficient conductor and the fact that it doesn't suffer from corrosion."

It's the best heat conductor/diffuser around too. Apparently a solid gold frying pan is the best way to fry an egg.

(A National Geographic author tested one weighing about 3 pounds in the 1980s)

As for gold cased phones - not such a good idea if they obscure the antennas.

Re: Trin Tragula......

"Carphone Warehouse for example is just round the corner in Oxford Street."

Would you really want to buy anything at Carphone Whorehouse? The phones are one thing but being badgered into buying well overpriced accessories and unnecessary insurance grates.

Re: Standardised connector

"No, we'll end up with micro-USB"

With all its attendant problems about plug flexing breaking the contacts on the board by fracturing solder joints.

I've had to rework the solder joints on several mobile phones. The existing SMD designs just aren't built for this kind of activity.

What about wireless charging standards?

Re: some good points...

"DC would be great even in homes"

No, it wouldn't.

Why? Safety. Amongst other things one of the great advantages of AC is that any arc generated is extinguished every 20mS. DC allows self-sustaining arcs.

A long time ago I read a story about the old 300VDC distribution system in Sydney and one of the recollections published was of a light bulb burning out.

"The arc which formed as the filiament parted burned its way up the support wires in the bulb, through the base, bulbholder and was most of the way up the power lead to the ceiling rose before someone managed to hit the off switch"

Arc suppression is also the reason why a switch rated at 10A AC has to be derated to 3A for DC operation.

HV DC distribution in homes would result in more fires and fatal electrocutions (Muscles hit with DC never relax, AC is more like a series of hammer blows).

HTDC is great for distribution and now we have the technology for stepping voltages efficiently and without requiring several acres of space there are good arguments for using it right down to 11kv level, but DC in the home/premises requires a complete overhaul of local distribution, house wiring and appliances safety margins.

Re: Track pad alignment

"A touch pad that just did straightforward things like tracking my finger, with a marked area for a click, is usable; these days they seem to decide that random touches from your palm are intended as complex clicks and anything can happen."

Several linux GUIs (at least) have options to disable trackpad input while keys are being typed, specifically to deal with this kind of issue. I'm surprised this isn't standard in Windows.

Re: LOL

If you're close enough then a curved screen will give a more immersive experience - but only if the program material takes advantage of it.

For general home use I suspect enormoscreens will start being a less common item as more and more people watch on tablets.

Re: Typical waste of money

@Lee D

You're right about traffic lights, but roundabouts work well until about 98% full and then simply STOP.

Traffic lights at roundabouts are there to keep the roundabout flowing. If needed then the road is overcongested.

Re: Who thinks Nokia is in wind down?

Cisco are in denial mode. Just about every other major undercut undercuts them, but people still buy their product for the same reason that people still buy Windows.

Re: Another brick in the wall.

"Why oh why are politicians usually prats?"

Because prats get fired from real jobs.

Re: Join the club...

"A union member can strike. All the average citizen can do is refuse to vote."

The point is that "they" don't _want_ you to vote. Things get rammed through by relying on the average citizen not caring.

"I don't go abroad, I don't want the mag stripe"

A neobydium magnet works fairly well (or so I've heard)

Re: Chinese Hacking Group?

Seconded.

A group of the level of Hidden Lynx knows more than enough to well and truely obscure its path and it just so happens that a lot of chinese network infrastructure is badly secured (personal experience whilst tracking activities of script kiddies whose location I DID know).

The group could be Chinese. It could just as easily be Albanian, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian or based in the Good Ol' US of A. Given the level of the pun I'd say at least some of the people involved are native english speakers.