Posts by slightly-pedantic

Scanning boarding cards

So when wh smiths at the airport requires your boarding card to be scanned they're getting all that info too?

Not in real world?

If my reading of the paper is correct, the victim's computer has to be told to decrypt carefully formulated packets of data, in a pattern, over the course of the entire period for them to fall victim- that sounds really hard to pull off!

They also mention various countermeasures- like acoustic shielding- however they don't mention doing anything about the power supply, like, for instance, putting (back?) in the proper smoothing capacitors!

mincing words

This is how TalkTalk admitted they'd handed out bank details in their email:"No banking details were taken that you won’t already be sharing with people when you write a cheque or give to someone so they can pay money into your account."

I am told that a cheap and effective solution is to use industrial grade earplugs then put ordinary over the ear headphones on as well. You have to crank up the volume so what you want to hear is still audible though. Anyone tried this?

Money not units

The average price of a SoC for mobile is much much lower than for these parts, so whilst the volumes are lower I suspect the margin more than makes up for that.

open source video editor

I eventually found an open source video editor to suit my needs in an unexpected place. It turns out that you can use the video editing functions in Blender and achieve quite a bit. However the ui is a little challenging!

impact of uncertainty

Whilst in the EU everyone can know with some confidence that the 'bad' things we can do are more limited, particularly with regard to trading with the EU. Anyone choosing where to base their operations then has a choice between a known status inside the EU and one that could take a radical and unexpected stance in an independent uk. Pity the poor middle manager of global co. who suggests they are based in an independent uk ahead of Eire.

surprise- a translation company doesn't understand IT

Our experience is that the real villain here is probably the translation company. We've wasted a load of time to try and set up a good way of working with them to get our client and web text translated: it's been a world of pain. Every time we ask any of them "what's the best way of managing the data transfer"- thinking there must be some savvy folk who do this right- we get blank looks. It seems they generally prefer excel, although of course they will change the code table and try and sometimes translate any HTML tags.

Why translation companies should be so bad at this stuff I don't know...

So The Register is where the UK (Ex) Tech VC's hang out now!

... and here's another wading now!

Having done a bunch of "Cleantech" investments it seemed to me that nearly everything I saw that could make a really big impact was beyond the scope of any but the most long term and substantial VC fund.

The kind of stuff that makes a difference on emissions tends to be competing with an established technology that's had the benefit of many cycles of optimisation. So if my new cement production, metal winning, or energy storage technology has a chance it must reach the point where it is working at levels of optimization that also take several iterations to approach.

Stuff that's going to make a big difference often involves big equipment, that means that those iterations tend to often be much slower than for more traditional venture investments:if the technology involves plant and equipment or significant scale-up to become economic, then each cycle of improvement can be years. In a 10 year standard VC structure you can get 6 years sometimes (assuming you don't invest on day 1 and need some time to realise at the other end). That's a very tight constraint.

Back around 2002/3 lots of large US VC's moved towards cleantech generally- it was interesting to observe that they often moved their focus to software optimisations around the edges of existing processes for exactly these reasons.

Dependency culture

Implicit within this story is that it was the responsibility of Nesta to filter from 1000's of applications the ones where the innovation alone has the potential to drive major shifts in business, and then to back those regardless of any of the other circumstances. The telecom industry, and I suspect the inventor, didn't anticipate the iphone phenomenon, yet we expect a government agency to have that kind of foresight?

I was investing myself during the period concerned and saw 1000's of applications, and yet never saw this inventor approach me for seed funding, and from the sound of the article, if efforts were made to raise commercial money they were not successful. Could it be that the inventor was a key limitation to commercialising his own technology? My experience is that no amount of brilliant innovation is sufficient to mean that you can commercialise a technology if the inventor has either attitude, capability or experience limitations. Perhaps we also expect that our government agencies should step in to fix those problems too?

During the years up to its recent change in status I know that Nesta invested in many truly innovative and brave technology ventures, often to the tune of several £100'000s. Every commercial investor in early stage technology knows you must miss some great opportunities in the 1000's you must reject. Putting pressure on such agencies to account for missed opportunities is likely to breed exactly the kind of defensive investment behaviour that will depress their potential for positive impact. What we should be judging Nesta on is those that it did back vigorously and the returns that those investments made.

My experience of Nesta was that it did have its limitations and constraints. However I did work with people who had a good understanding of what they were doing. If we believe that the state should be intervening in our economy through innovative seed stage investments then maybe the more important issue is that instead of improving provision, we've simply given it up. Nesta no longer does seed stage technology investment and as far as I am aware no alternative has been put in place.

Seems a little pointless

A typical toggle switch has an activation force of around 1N and a travel (with the old fashioned type) of maybe 10mm, so if we're 100% efficient we'd only get 10mJ of energy. If we assume that piezo mechanism recovers half the energy we get a useable 5 mJ per switching action.

On the other hand

A 3000mAh lithium AA cell has a 15 yr shelf life and provides enough power as 1.6 million activations of that toggle switch. OK they're £2 a go but I can't help thinking that this is solving a non-problem?

There's already a solution to this...?

I believe many telephone handset leads still use a special type of wire called "tinsel" where there is a nylon fibre core wrapped in one or more helical windings of copper foil. As you stretch the wire the helix extends to give you a much longer strain before failure- massively reducing cable failures on kinks, bends and stretches.

It seems to have gone out of fashion I suspect because:

It has a higher resistance so isn't ideal for low impedance headphones

It's a complete pain in manufacturing- special insulation displacement connectors are required and it's kind of tricky to solder!

Wasn't just emissions problem

I remember coding late into the night and being a bit disturbed when the machine spoke to me. (No, I was too young to drink then!). I looked out of the window to see a British Gas van in the street and all was clear- the Speccy was demodulating the van's radio set!

The good new is...

The new Intel Z2760 Atom CPU is actually a decent compromise- I'm regularly getting 10hrs battery life on my Ativ 500 tablet running Win8 Pro and use it as my main machine (I'm travelling a lot!). Basic office/web browsing is nice and fast and so the bigger laptop stays at home mainly for games! The machine cost me about £550 (albeit in Korea) so, for what I need, it's better than an ultrabook at about half the price. However, I hear this class of machine is hard to get hold of (screens+CPU?) so I think they're too late to make much impact this year- seems to me that ARM's competitive effect has caused Intel to up its game a bit!

PUE can be less than 1

There's plenty of room to improve PUE more. Iceotope, a new technology company based in Sheffield, is offering liquid cooled kit which means that the heat is extracted without active cooling and, as you get to drop the fans from each blade, the PUE is (at least in one interpretation of that number) ends up being less than 1.