Posts by John Brown (no body) 25409 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"such that content is hidden unless you pay."
That mechanism is already in place. Go to a Twitter feed while not signed in (or, like me, you don't have an account anyway) and if you try to scroll down more than a few messages, you get an uncloseable pop-up refusing you further access unless you sign in.
"I'm thinking of a solid state version of the legendary Quad electrostatic speakers..."
That was my first thought when I read the headline. Same old, same old, but with different tech. I wonder if the inventors have even heard of electrostatic speakers?
I'm sure there will be uses for this new kit, and maybe it will improve, and though the tech is new, the idea isn't.
I'm still waiting for "wallpaper" screens. Walk into a shop, choose from various width rolls and the shop assistant then cuts off the length you want. Stick it on the wall. Job done :-) You could even past it up in portrait mode if you only even watch mobile phone videos :-)
"For the record, I am not a robot. Yet."
Prove it! Click all the squares that contain images of some culturally significant object that has no meaning to you or the country you live in but might mean something to the robot/AI conducting the test.
(Is it just me that sees the irony in proving you are not a robot to an "AI" algorithm?)
"You also have the option of ignoring the symbol and simply understanding that, if the device is not in the on/off state you want, flipping the switch should put it in the other one."
And to be fair, the option of simply not having any indication of which way is on or off isn't that unusual on many devices. Some manufactures seem to rely on people using their kit having a modicum of intelligence and noting that if it's not whirring or no lights are showing, it's either off or not plugged in. Or both. The user is expected to be able to figure that out for themselves. If they can't, they probably should not be touching it, never mind actually using it :-)
"Back in the last century, I was working as user support for a University [lets call it The University of Poppleton]"
I used to visit a university near Poppleton, let's call it the University of Bork. They had a campus-wide power cut. Much hilarity ensued as they discovered just how much of the network and various devices attached to said network, had only ever been soft-configured as the network and associated services had been changed, and/or retired over the years. Switches with unsaved config changes, devices with IP addresses handed out by now non-existent servers and, of course, the old favourite we all love, devices that had not been powered off in years having to be sent to the great junk yard in the sky because they couldn't cope with the first power cycle in possibly a decade!
"I guessed what the O mode was well before the end!"
Same here! One of those occasions, and being within the context of "On Call", I guessed that almost as soon as I saw the bit with O mode not working and I mode working. That's quite a rarity for me :-)
As others have stated, maybe the person calling should have been put in O mode! On the other hand, being the 90's, it may have been the users first use of a computer and it may have been an appliance device with just the one function. And thinking back, maybe not all that many devices had I/O labels on the switches. Domestic devices would more likely have on/off, or one of quite a few different ways of indicating the function.
"engage device manufacturers and explain why it would be nice if they open sourced the firmware"
But then it would be obvious and visible to the world just how poor the hardware actually is and we'd all be able to see the badly written kludges in the driver software that has to work around those hardware failings.
"When I ran out of floppies and cash I used to punch extra index holes and notches in the sleeve and insert them in the drive upside down - I was able to convert many single sided floppies to double that way."
I remember a friend telling how that was such a waste of time and money because it didn't work. It turned out he was punching the new index hole right through the sleeve and disk and therefore adding a second index hole in some random position.
An elderly reletive called me this one time saying she could start any programs. "Crap", thinks I, what could this be, so started with the basic diagnostics questioning and it turns out the Task Bar is "missing". It took a while to figure out that at some stage she'd managed to minimise the Task Bar down to about one pixel height. There was still a grey line along the bottom of the screen. If it had merely been "hidden", it should have popped up when moving the mouse to the bottom of the screen, but that wasn't it. I eventually managed to talk her through carefully grabbing the Task Bar and click dragging it back to normal. Phew! That would have a been a 200 mile round trip and no option of remote log-in then.
What it really shows is that people are put in front of a computer with no training and expected to know how things work, "because everyone does".
Windows has been telling us during the install for a couple a decades about how "intuitive" it is to use. Why would anyone need training? </sarc>
The A500Mini is already out and available. Comes with a mouse and gamepad, primarily intended for gamers, but you can plug a USB k/b in and boot Workbench. Easy to add games/apps above and beyond the supplied stuff too. Plenty of chat about it on The English Amiga Board
"The 6502 was on it's last legs by the time the ZX came out"
You're making the same mistake many people do. The Z80 and 6502 were of the same generation, and both started out powering the very first home computers, eg Commodore, Apple and TRS-80. The Spectrum and C64 were the next generation and both used improved versions of those same CPUs.
Likewise, people looking at Apple ][ and comparing the graphics with a Spectrum or C64. Again, a generational difference as well as cost difference. RAM and the chips to do graphics were hugely expensive at the very beginning of the home computer revolution. Things did move on quite quickly of course, but there are relatively clear generational lines.
"What they are asking for is limited permission (for training purposes only) to share that recording."
In that case, they should be saying "We may record this call for training purposes". The way they phrase it, they are offering permission to anyone listening in or participating in the call to "record it for training purposes". I might want to use those recordings to train my AI and they just allowed me to do it.
"It's basically risk-free, easy money for the bank. Not so much for someone who actually needs the loan."
That's the bit that feels so wrong about the entire system. How can it be cheaper to borrow and spend other peoples money rather then spending your own?
(Yes, yes, I know, investing in bigger returns than the loan costs etc etc, but it still "feels" wrong, especially when it's a successful, debt-free company that gets bought out with debt-financed loans, eating into it's profits and putting them onto the debt-ridden merry-go-round)
"Tesla is making a profit, but it would need to be about 20x bigger than it currently is to justify its share price, and that would be more than 100% of the total car market."
Share prices and corporate valuations are just fantasy wishes of gamblers investors, primarily short-term get-rich-quick types. The real investors, those with large stakes, are looking at long term trends, not short terms gains/losses. Just look at what happened to Netflix shares. It was obvious to everyone with an ounce of common sense there was a going to be a huge growth during lockdown and a huge reverse afterwards. The get-rich-quick investors piled in at the start of the rise and the smartest ones already divested as people went back to work.There's probably a lot of smaller investors that were late in when lockdowns started and have lost a lot by being late to divest. The big investors will mostly still be in because they've been in a long time, made a lot of paper profit and see the huge pandemic value rise as a blip. The price is still above what it was 5 years ago and will likely recover some of the recent days falls so those long term investors will probably still be quids in in the long run. Telsa has had drops in the 20% region a couple of times, but the trend is upwards overall, and are still massively overvalued.
Is that relatively recent or something you've been aware of for many years? I get the impression there was a push to get more freight onto the rails a few years ago, then never heard much more about it after it was pointed out much of the rail network is already near or at capacity.
"A leisurely trip to Florida, overnighting in the car as it tootles along if I don’t want to break my journey, no need to face forward, watch the traffic (and traffic jams - those will be a thing of rarity when everyone is doing it my way) and no steering wheel needed."
Except when it needs to recharge, pulls off the freeway into some scruffy little backwater Nowheresville because that's the only working, non-occupied charging point it can find, and you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of duelling banjos!!
Yes. Any car which requires a human to take over at any stage isn't autonomous. It assisted driving. A truly autonomous car won't have drivers control at all so using a hand-held mobile phone should be fine. On that note, it was interesting that thet statement didn't differentiate between a hand-held mobile phone and a hands-free phone, which ALL modern cars have the facility for. Hands-free use of a mobile phone is legal. Even m y crappy mid-range 6 year old car has bluetooth and voice control/steering wheel controls for my phone. A brand new AI car will surely have at least the same.
"And how will you find it when it parks elsewhere when it returns because the on street parking space it came from has been nicked by another vehicle?"
You press the "Come pick me up" button on your phone app of course!. Then you wait in the pouring rain for 15 minutes while your AI car "argues" with an AI car from a rival manufacturer over who has right of way down the now single lane road because of all the cars parked down each side. :-)
"You can already look at the stats for self driving vehicle incidents, since they are already driving more miles in a day than basically anyone will ever drive in a lifetime."
That's just silly. You are comparing aggregated AI driving of many, many cars with a single person. I frequently drive 300-400 miles per day. I wonder how many AI cars do that many per day tootling around town at 25mph?
Oh, and personal stats here: Last 20 or so years, ~1.2million miles driven, no accidents. There are probably many people out there, especially truck drivers, with far more miles than me and no accidents.
Yeah, and the subsidy is declining. As that disappears, and more people switch, the road tax will have to go up and per mile road charging will be introduced to replace the fuel duty losses to government income. I expect there to be no EV subsidy at all within the next few years and guarantee it will be gone by 2030 when the sale of new ICE cars will be banned. (Only 8 years away now!)
"much more so than in the UK/EU where rail is used much more extensively so there is much less long haul trucking."
Whilst I agree with your post, I'm not sure the above is true. I don't see freight trains with random containers on the flatbeds. What I tend to see are freight trains made up of one long train with identical tank or coal-like wagons in the make up. I spend most of my day on the road, and lorries make up a large part of the traffic on the roads here in the UK, many still EU registered trucks. Rail freight may possibly be a larger percentage than in the US, I don't know, but it doesn't seem to be a significant percentage based purely on my observations and "feeling".
We used to have a fairly decent number of "Freitliner" terminals around the country where local trucks would deliver standard shipping containers, forward them by rail, and get picked up by truck at the other end for onward local delivery. Many no longer exist, the remaining ones seem to be just trucking hubs or container storage sites now with rare or no rail head any more.
All the government chauffeurs who used to drive Ministers around will be retrained as litter pickers. There's a lot of skill in picking just the right kind of litter and putting it in the correct recycling bin.
Government Ministers, who never drive themselves, at least when on official business will, of course, be at the front of the queue for self-driving AI cars.
"installed Kodi on them to stream stuff off my FreeBSD box,"
A cheap Raspberry Pi will do that job silently and probably quite a bit cheaper in power usage terms. It'll also work with a TV tuner for live broadcasts and recording, although I've not tried that. You can also set Kodi up to use a shared database (stored on your FreeBSD server) so if you use your Kodi profile from a different device, watched and resume status will work.
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