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Comment Re: I think people just won't own these cars (Score 1) 140

shared insurance liability could be a great way of getting over what are likely to be a small number of high profile law suits in early days of adoption. as you say works great for vacination.

on side note people always quote the deaths from auto accidents. don't forget to multiply the figure by about 3 for accidents resulting in serious injury where long term care and support needed.

Comment keep it simple (Score 1) 272

a 2tbytes attached to router costs about $200. I then mount desktop and my documents on pc we have to it.

the Mac can also mount drive but sadly not as fluidly as above.

for pads and phones use ' es file explorer' folk can decide which video ,music files they want offline.

I have separate 2tbyte attached to nas via usb so backup using rsync every month ( then pop into loft ).

in home use cabling around house so heavy duty editing of video and raw photos don' t suffer lag.

key principal is everything on nas is ' safe' ( but see loft thing) everything local is copy.

figured out how to share music playlists between devices with a partial view of all content available. cannot recommend vlc for desktop and poweramp for android enough.

Comment There is a lot more to realism rendering (Score 2) 331

I think main challenge is the interaction between player and environment. On something like MW3 that is limited to blowing up the odd chicken, window or set piece designed into game.

I want to swish my ( virtual ) hand through a river and see ( and feel ) the water flow around it.

Any true physics model would require awesome cpu capacity. We have at one end mindcraft ( where the atoms are decidely blocky ) and second life ( where behavioural programs can be attached to objects).

My dream would be a virtual universe with atoms large enough to fit 1000 times current cpu capacity but behaves like a 'real' experience.

By 'atom' i mean the simplist construct in this universe which satisfies greatest potential complexity but still cpu possible.

In conclusion future 'games' will not be about fps or polygons per sec but model calculations.

Comment Why any coding metric is futile (Score 1) 203

I got first job doing COBOL back in 1995. Second code change I did I got called into managers office.

He asked how I felt about change. I stated it was easy being only 2 line change to 1 module.

That change saves us 2 million ukp a year he says.

Ever since tried to write as little as possible . Amazing what you can do when you understand the problem , understand the code and find the one change that does it.

Not sure my method of wandering through code, chatting to everyone and then submitting a 4 line commit would fit with IBM

Comment BBC takes great care of user data (Score 1) 64

As an ex-employee with no direct experience of this project but experience of this culture they will take great care of this data.

But mistakes are possible so any security flaws etc make sure they know quickly to correct.

If they haven't already they are probably more than happy to provide info on exactly what data points they are recording

Comment Https? (Score 2) 214

Internet last time I checked was just a commonly recogised way of routing ip packets.

I think they security is whatever protocol you choose to use on top of that.

I hear that ssl Is a popular choice these days. Does suffer from being 'open source' rather than a nice secure private protocol you can buy but seems to be quite popular.

Comment This could work in one of 3 ways none very good (Score 1) 182

1) a true swf to html5/JavaScript engine on the fly - believe that when I see it running

2) slurps out any rtmp url's it finds doing dynamic conversion to h.264 - won't work with sites using dynamic logic inside swf to assemble resource URL

3) virtual machine on server running flash which then streams result to iPhone - huge expense for app owner

Plus not sure sites using rtmpe like hulu would work

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