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Comment Re:TV Tax? (Score 1) 15

Sky Q isn't non-satellite. Never has been. It was merely the next-generation Sky HD box, with a bunch more tuners in it and 4K capability.

Sky Glass and the accompanying 'Puck' boxes are the first actual Sky branded units that are IP-only. 'Now TV' was the previous effort that was more akin to Roku and Apple TV.

Comment Re:Tesla needs a station wagon and a small SUV (Score 1) 102

This. (At least the first part). Where the hell is the EV station wagon from, well, *anybody*?

Electric vehicles still need to be as efficient as possible until ranges get to the 500+ mile level, yet if you want luggage capacity, apparently you have to have an SUV with the aerodynamic profile of a brick wall and the handling of an angry cow. Hardly the height of efficiency

I really don't understand why every manufacturer is doing this, especially in Europe, where Sportwagon / StationWagon sales are still high. Volkswagen's ID.5 looked promising until it morphed into YASUV. "Space Vizzion" may do it, but it'll cost as much as a luxury cruise liner. Volvo? All their EVs are SUV style and their Wagons are hybrid at best.

I want a vehicle I can load an entire bass rig into (two basses in hard cases, 8x10 cab, rackmount head, tools and stands), that has a 300 mile range and can take on twisty roads at a decent speed without making me feel seasick. That's not been too much to ask for the last 40 years, I don't know why it is now...

Comment Re:Nobody was afraid Brexit would fail (Score 4, Insightful) 808

As a hardened British Europhile, I agree - that legislation was an utter travesty.

But here's the thing - how would that be any different in a 'brexited' Britain? Not only has the government in Westminster shown time and time again that along with having no idea about technology ('banning encryption', anyone?), they're more than willing to throw public interest under the bus in favour of corporate junkets, but without the political backing of the rest of the EU, they'll now be utterly unable to resist the demands of US media companies even if they wanted to.

Brexit will make Britain into Trump's bitch. And we're all going to get grabbed by the pussy.

Comment Does anybody actually read up on this stuff? (Score 1) 313

The amount of uninformed nonsense on here is astounding.

The update doesn't "slow down" the phone as such - it limits peak power draws when the battery is down on overall capacity and the spike would cause a reset (which happens in many other manufacturers' phones - FFS google this, people). Most operations of the phone will remain utterly unchanged, just heavy workloads will be slower than previously.

Say what you like about non-replaceable batteries (hardly specific to Apple) or a badly communicated update, or anything else about them, but the "planned obsolescence" claim is patently nonsense - unless you believe that a phone that runs *some* tasks slightly slower as it ages is forcing users to upgrade more than one that reboots when it hits a CPU intensive task.

Realistically, this feature should have been in place from the start - it's basic power management, but as usual the howling mob would rather jump on the OMG APPLE EV1L BURN THEM bandwagon than actually take an objective viewpoint.
Science

Flying in Airplanes Exposes People To More Radiation Than Standing Next To a Nuclear Reactor (businessinsider.com) 275

Traveling the skies by jet lifts us far from the hustle and bustle of the world below. From a report: But many flyers don't know that soaring miles above Earth also takes us out of a vital protective cocoon -- and a little closer to a place where our cells can be pummeled by radiation from colliding stars, black holes, and more. You can't see these high-energy charged particles, but at any given moment, tens of thousands of them are soaring through space and slamming into Earth's atmosphere from all directions. Also called cosmic rays or cosmic ionizing radiation, the particles are the cores of atoms, such as iron and nickel, moving at nearly light-speed. They can travel for millions of years through space before randomly hitting Earth. These rays don't pose much of a risk to humans on Earth's surface, since the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field shield us from most of the threat.

Comment No need to resurrect - some are still running. (Score 1) 245

www.mono.org (home page for a telnet / ssh bbs) has been running since the late 80s and is still going, several evolutions of hardware later (original hosts were whitechapel workstations, then sparc stations, these days BSD on a virtual host).

Account signup is free and a significant amount of the original content is still available...
The Internet

Amazon's Cloud Service Has Outage, Disrupting Sites (usatoday.com) 161

An anonymous reader shares a report on USA Today: Portions of Amazon Web Services, the nation's largest cloud computing company, went offline Tuesday afternoon, affected multiple companies across the United States but especially on the east coast. The outage appeared to have begun around 12:45 pm ET. It was centered in AWS' S3 storage system on the east coast. Many of the services that firms use AWS are for back-end processes, and therefore not immediately visible to consumers, though the outage could disrupt customer-facing activities like logins and payments. At least some websites that appear to be affected are: Airbnb, Down Detector, Freshdesk, Pinterest, SendGrid, Snapchat's Bitmoji, Time, Buffer, Business Insider, Chef, Citrix, CNBC, Codecademy, Coursera, Cracked, Docker, Expedia, Expensify, Giphy, Heroku, Home Chef, iFixit, IFTTT, isitdownrightnow.com, Lonely Planet, Mailchimp, Medium, Microsoft's HockeyApp, News Corp, Quora, Razer, Slack, Sprout Social, Travis CI, Trello, Twilio, Unbounce, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Zendesk.

The dashboard of Amazon Web Services, which tracks the status of the service, is unable to change color, Amazon said. It is because the status dashboard also runs on the service that is down.
Math

Maths Zeroes in on Perfect Cup of Coffee (bbc.com) 162

One coffee drinker's perfect brew may be another drinker's battery acid. For this reason, and presumably others, mathematicians are zeroing in on the equations behind the taste of drip coffee. From a report on BBC:Composed of over 1,800 chemical components, coffee is one of the most widely consumed drinks in the world. The work by Kevin Moroney at the University of Limerick, William Lee at the University of Portsmouth and others offers a better understanding of the parameters that influence the final product. It had previously been known that grinding beans too finely could result in coffee that is over-extracted and very bitter. On the other hand not grinding them enough can make the end result too watery. "What our work has done is take that [observation] and made it quantitative," said Dr Lee. "So now, rather than just saying: 'I need to make [the grains] a bit bigger,' I can say: 'I want this much coffee coming out of the beans, this is exactly the size [of grain] I should aim for." Dr Lee says he sets his grinder to the largest setting. By doing so, he says: "The grains are a bit larger than you get in the standard grind, which makes the coffee less bitter. Partly because it's adjusting that trade-off between the stuff coming out of the surface and stuff coming out of the interior. When things are larger, you're decreasing the overall surface area of the system. "Also, the water flows more quickly through a coffee bed of large grains, because the water's spending less time in contact with the coffee, helping reduce the amount of extraction too. "If it's bitter, it's because you're increasing the amount of surface area in the grains. Also, when the grains are very small, it's hard for the water to slide between them, so the water is spending a lot more time moving through the grains -- giving it more time for the coffee to go out of solution."

Comment Re:Fuck Social Responsibility (Score 1) 152

Alternative idea:

Let investors who value ROI over ethics go invest in a different company.

Tim Cook should be in the business of a number of things of which investor return is one and not necessarily the most important one, at that. Anyone who's invested in Apple over the years is well aware of this.

Comment Re:NIH? (Score 1) 97

The Commodore is definitely a fairer comparison, and doesn't fare well against the BBC, either.

The BBC may have only had half the memory in its most common form, but it had expansion ports the C64 could only dream of, a far superior BASIC implementation (with a built-in assembler), networking, disk drives that couldn't also be used as space heaters (and before you go on about the extra 6502 inside the 1541 disk drive - how many people actually made use of it?), co-processors, multiple ROM slots, and full documentation. Oh and a power supply that didn't randomly melt.

It lost out to the C64 on price and the number of games available; and as everyone knows, the key factor in what computer you bought in the 80s was how many of your friends you could swap games with.

I had (and still have to this day) a C64, but always found the beeb significantly easier to program.

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