Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Short sighted?

They are producing O2 and CO (which is just vented) from CO2, of which Mar has an abundance, ie 95% of the atmosphere.

Re: Plus ca change....

"At this point, using a 9-[pin sub-D connector for anything but a serial port is negligent design. Pick something else."

As others have already pointed out, 9-pin d-sub was in use for many different devices on computers before it got used for a serial port. Even before IBM standardised on 9-pin d-sub for serial, the Olivetti PCs (M20??) used 9 pin d-sub for both video and keyboard, one male, the other female. Yes, even PC keyboard connectors were not yet "standard" by then.

Re: Plus ca change....

I guess its one of the hazards of having a multipurpose connector - it can have many purposes, one of them inevitably being "finding out who actually read the fine manual before connecting random cable A to connector B"

yes, also very common in the early days of standalone personal computers. 9-pin and 25-pin D plugs were common, and there were no standard yet as to which was used for what. Male or female, 9 or 25 pin, could just as easily be almost anything from a joystick to a printer to a keyboard to a video out and whatever you think it might be, if you don't look at the manual or, if lucky, the on case legend, very likely is NOT what you think it is. In some cases, they may even be edge connectors directly to the motherboard, eg IEEE and other interfaces on a Commodore PET which may or may not be keyed, or if it is keyed, the plug isn't!!

For the downvoters, operating a mobile phone or SatNav by touching it is illegal in the UK including a built-in one, and you can be fined and get licence penalty points for doing so. Moving so many controls used while driving to a touch screen should fall foul of that same law unless there is a loophole or exception. Unless, of course, you know better and can explain it instead of just knee jerking on the down vote button.

Re: Surely this is illegal in some way?

HP at least, still do it now. Those big office printer usually leased? The last two digits of the model number is the Pages Per Minute or PPM rating, set at the factory. If you know how, you can increase it to whatever the deign max is for that "family", eg when buying ex-rental kit. IIRC, there's a "magic" toner" cartridge required to put it into factory program mode. I'm sure the info is out on the web somewhere.

Re: a £25 per year subscription to a service that identifies traffic cameras

Correct, at least in the UK. There even Police websites that list where and when their mobile "safety camera" vans are going to be. In some other countries, not so much. IIRC, in France that sort of service is illegal and you MUST make sure it's turned off on your phone or SatNav in case you get pulled over.

The fact you call it AM and not MW suggests your are in the USA where the long distances make it still viable for long range AM transmitters, especially for news channels. Here in the UK, the Medium Wave frequencies it's fairly barren nowadays. It's all FM and DAB. It might be different in the south Wales valleys or up in the Highlands of Scotland where MW propagation might still be a benefit. Even BBC Radio Four is considering dropping their Long Wave service. I think they said they only have a couple of spare main transmitter valves left and they are very hard to source now.

"and the mandatory "safety" BS is a major part of any car manufacturing cost."

Look at road death statistics for *any* country and compare miles driver per death or serious injury, then come back and tell us all about how "safety" is BS. I bet you still get a red haze every time you are legally forced to put a seat belt on eh?

"it's all about legal requirements *meant* to keep the cost high."

Or, looked at from another point of view, ie the point of view that brought in said regulations, "it's all about legal requirements *meant* to reduce vehicular fatalities and injuries".

"While it uses hardware already installed in my car, there is a cost to operate that Honda should be able to recover."

There would be no cost to the manufacturer if they allowed the phone to contact the car directly instead of via their server somewhere on the other side of the world.

"Cars don't last forever, so the subscription price clearly can be turned into a total price, statistically at least."

I wonder what happens if the heated seats fail out of warranty? Clearly the manufacturer still owns the mechanism since you didn't buy it, only rent it. They own it, so they should fix it at no cost to you. I bet the small print basically says, "tough, but as a 'gesture of goodwill' we might refund the last months subscription fee". And if you do pay yourself to have it fixed, they'll still want the subscription for the activation.

"even slowing down to a corner shuts down the engine"

Then it's broken and needs fixing.

"Then, no power steering or power brakes."

Very definitely broken, it needs fixing ASAP.

My car also has stop/start tech and it DOES NOT behave the way you describe. That would be dangerous and unsafe.

I don't know how it's implemented with an automatic gearbox but on my manual gear box, the car must be stopped and the gear stick in neutral. If on a hill, you can let it roll forwards and without touching the clutch pedal, the engine will start after a fairly short distance or reaching a certain, fairly low, speed. You can avoid the autostop completely either by turning it off (it stays off on mine, even through an engine ignition/key removal cycle) or simply by not putting the gear stick in neutral at a stop.

I can only assume the car manufactures have a loophole in the UK (and probably EU) laws about looking at a video screen while driving.

"electric handbrakes"

Oh dear, I hate them with a passion! Over the years I've had many, many hire cars due to my job meaning if mine is in for service or repair. Because of that, and my high mileage means it was a frequent thing, I find I can adapt to a different car very quickly. Except for those fucking electric handbrakes! At least with a mechanical handbrake, there's very little variation in where it can be placed or how it operates. But manufacturers seem to delight in being as obtuse and "different" in where they place the button for electric handbrakes and even how it operates. Some, you have to press the button to release it, others, pressing the button does nothing, you need to put it gear and start to drive off to release it. And of those latter type, some take longer to disengage than others so you get a bit of a jerk. And when stuck in heavy strop/start traffic, a manual handbrake gives you short rests for your feet, not constantly touching the accelerator, break clutch all of the time and ending up with muscle cramps. Ok, that last bit is an edge case, but a lifesaver on a a couple of occasions for me :-)

Re: Someone is working at the 'skipping the infrastructure' problem

Does it? Half the roof area, probably about 2 square meters in total, roof plus bonnet and car that weighs half that of a four seater. But then, that was only a secondary observation from me. The primary one was the original quote of most cars having less than 2 sq meters, which is incorrect and leads to vastly different numbers when it turns out there's at least 50% more in reality.

Re: If have the extra power to refine more petrol...

We're British. It will be a queuing system. First come, first served. If you get home late at night and are at the back of the queue, don't plan on going anywhere in the morning :-)

(But of course there will be shorter "special" queues for those who can pay more.)

Re: Cost of refining oil

"“It doesn’t take up agricultural land”: if we substituted UKs entire electricity supply with solar farms, that would use 200km2 which is roughly 0.1% of agricultural land. I’m not saying we should do this, but land use is just not an issue."

Not to mention the German experiment with vertically mounted solar panels so crops could still be grown, maintained and harvested with only a small fraction of the land lost to the panels and a pretty small drop in the panel efficiency.

Although the 200 square Km might be a bit of an underestimate.

Re: Someone is working at the 'skipping the infrastructure' problem

"The amount of car that can be facing the sun at any one time is little more than 2 square metres,"

You are right to be sceptical, but there's no need to go hunting for a worst case for your argument. Most car roofs are about 2 sq m, with another 1+ sq m for the bonnet/hood. That's a 50% difference in your calculations right at the outset. Taking into account the roof curvature and therefore the angle of incidence even in perfect conditions, ie noon at the equator, reduces solar cell performance a bit too, possibly as much as 7-8%. I doubt on a normal car it would be of any significant benefit, but on a very small, lightweight car such as the one being discussed, it very well may have some valid and practical use cases. I doubt they will be hugely popular if they make it onto the roads, but there are people who have a use case for tiny little 2 seater Smart cars, despite the fact many people still laugh at them even today!

Re: Someone is working at the 'skipping the infrastructure' problem

"and working at maximum efficiency, then it would not be able to drive quicker than about 25 mph before it used more power that it generated."

While it may have other problems, that is not one of them. It's always charging in daylight. It's not directly powered from the solar panels to the motors. There's a 10KW/h battery in there too. Night time driving over a long distance is clearly an issue, but those solar panels are extending the daylight driving distance even if they are not generating as much as you are using. I would assume it also has the option to plug in too. It's probably got at least as many use cases as those tiny little ICE 2 seater cars already on the roads. And, at least in the UK, it's classed as a "motorbike" in driving licencing terms since it's a three wheeler. I'm not au fait with the regulations on those, but if it had four wheels, I suspect it would be a non-starter across the UK and EU due to various regulations on roadworthyness and crash mitigations, eg crumple zones and how hitting a pedestrian might work out.

I like the fact they are trying out a non-standard design and look based on aerodynamics. Current EVs are incredibly "conservative" in their design. Few, if any, seem to have wanted to take a risk on an entirely new "look". It's not for me though. At least not yet. Maybe when I can afford to retire to sunnier climes!

Re: If have the extra power to refine more petrol...

"if all were EVs charged with domestic chargers overnight the peak electricity demand by the EVs alone would be well over 200GW - over 4 times the current peak demand."

yep, but the grid isn't now and never has been designed to cope with a worst case scenario of everyone turning on everything all at the same time.

Average car commute round trip in the UK is about 20 miles so many EV drivers will not need to charge every day, or just need a relatively small top-up. But on the whole, I agree with you. If everyone has EVs and only charge as needed or for short top-up periods, it's still likely to pass the current grid capacity and most likely the local infrastructure capacity. At the very least, there will need to be some sort of negotiation between the car and the grid as to whether/when it can charge overnight.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

"Assuming a base vehicle gets 35 miles/gallon, or 9 miles per litre."

That seems extremely low to me. Is that a large car restricted to town driving only or something? My average sized Diesel gets more like 46+ in town only driving. Maybe I have a much lighter foot than you or I don't drive so much in rush hour queues.

60mpg is more normal for my driving patterns, mainly long motorway trips with a little town driving at each end of the route.

"And you may look weird talking to yourself.."

Back in the day, when you saw someone talking to themselves walking down the street, it was the local nutter[*] and you crossed the road or otherwise avoided eye contact at all costs!

These days, half the people in the street are chatting away to their invisible friends and the ear buds aren't always obvious.

[*] Hey it was a different world back then, different words, different attitudes.

"Seems PEBCAK is also valid"

Luckily, PEBKAC and PEBCAK are both pronounced the same way, so no one can call you on it if they incorrectly[*] think it's the other spelling, unless you write it down.

[*} Of course *they* are wrong, whichever way you choose to spell it :-)

Re: never underestimate

Yes, in the early days of supporting users, you assume a certain level of intelligence that is wildly optimistic. But a few weeks in the job soon knocks that out of you :-)

Re: Plausible...

"has enough CPU cache to make even a typical Win98-era PC jealous."

I remember being awe of CPUs having 16KB of on-chip cache because that was the entire RAM size of my first computer. And the days you could buy secondary SIMM-like plug-in secondary cache modules, often a whopping great 128KB or even 256KB if you were rich!

Re: Plausible...

"Especially if you were around when 32 _megabytes_ was a lot of RAM!"

Or even, back when 32KB was a lot of RAM! I still remember saving up to buy that 32KB upgrade to max my system out at 48KB :-)

Re: Still cheaper than HS2...

"Given the utterly crazy prices you have to pay for a train ticket in the UK everyone will stick to driving."

Yeah, last time I looked, I think it worked out cheaper by train only if there was a single person travelling and were booked well in advance to get the best price. Two or more people travelling together, the car was cheaper. On the other hand, Newcastle to London is about 2.5 to 3 hours by train. Closer to 6 hours by car. So how you travel depends on who is paying for it, how long you need to spend at the destination, how many people are travelling together, what the local transport is like at the other end, whether you can plan in advance or not, and how much time you are prepared to "waste" on the journey. And probably many other factors too, such getting to from the start/destination stations in the first place.

Re: Still cheaper than HS2...

"Britain's two best connected cities."

True, and I upvoted you for that, but even as Britains two best connected cities, the line is at or very near capacity with no room for expansion. There may be cheaper ways to expand capacity other than HS2 though I'm not sure what that might be.

"To be honest given how few services actually need more than 20Mb/s that might be quite sensible."

Yeah. I'm on VM BB and it's fine. Without being on certain benefits and dropping to a cheaper "social" tariff, the minimum priced BB I can get from them is 120Mb/s. For me, that's massive overkill 99% of the time. And I can't even use it because my home network was "leading edge" back in the day when a dual 100Mb/s NIC in the firewall PC was the bees knees :-) I really ought to upgrade it one of these days. Internally, I now have a GB switch, so those newer devices on the LAN can talk to each other and the server more quickly apart from the WiFi devices because the repurposed WAP is only 2.4GHz.

In a way, my LAN+external connection is a reflection of what the poster above said about Spain and UK infrastructure. Spains is newer and better, UK was good but is older. You can't just swap out/upgrade an entire infrastructure quickly, easily or cheaply. There's a sort of leap-frog effect with big infrastructure. Some 3rd world countries have far better mobile coverage and pricing than UK or EU countries because they were building out from scratch with the latest 3/4/5G kit, not looking at the ROI on the 2/3G kit and a nationwide copper wired network. Assuming a "perfect" world and ignoring money-grabbing, incompetence etc that seems to be rampant in any large operation. If you just spent £20B on a network and have made £10B profits so far from it, you're not going to rip it out and upgrade to latest shiny just because your neighbour has the latest shiny without a very compelling reason. For the vast majority of the UK, current speeds are adequate, and most can easily more if the want it. (Although I admit and agree there are users left in the shit, even quite close or even inside major urban areas)

Like they are currently after MS in the OS arena? Oh, wait...

Re: Rabbit nozzles

"Feeding pet bunnies may not be the intended use..."

Except, maybe, at the Playboy Mansion. Or so I've been told :-)

Re: Worry less.

You seem to be missing a few facts. The ad industry grew and got rich long before there was any micro targetting of ads. They did very well out of "targetting" by placing posters on billboards in areas their target demographic were likely to see them or the sort of people that would buy and read a particular newspaper. Similar when radio and TV came along and adverts were "targetted" at the shows likely audience demographic and the type of show being broadcast. Ad agencies were not going bust every week through lack of feedback.