How many times have we had an electrical or electronic item that conked out just after the warranty expired? A lot I bet. Manufacturers nowadays build cheap and with a short life so you will get the latest and most expensive version as a replacement. It’s a fact but how many of you think that the lifetime is being limted by artificial means, such as a timer inside the box. A lot of you it seems if you are a Sony user.
Personally I think the risk is too great for a manufacturer to do and so I thought ‘conspiracy theory’
However, why would a TV need a software patch? Especially one that ‘fixed’ an errant controller that caused the TV on off switch not to work exactly after 1200Hrs. My Panasonic has an on off switch. No software required so why does Sony have one, and one with a bug in. Sounds really dodgy to me. Normal TV, button in and telly comes on. Sony version, button in check software….. for what? A decision whether to come on is what the conspiracy geeks are saying and I find I can’t think of an alternative reason for software on the switch.
It does remind me of every PC I’ve ever had though. When a new version comes out the basic system, oh so fast when you first got it, takes ages just to power up and get to the login screen. I feel a conspiracy coming on.
Data overload they call it. It’s where we have so much data that we just can’t process it effectively. Yet storage devices are being created so we can keep doing it without being forced to sort it out. Isn’t technology wonderful. I’m more guilty of this than the people I advise professionally to sort it out. On the plus side I don’t lose it I’ve got it all stored on my local servers and just keep adding to it. So no losses due to ISPs changing or whatever. On the negative side I still have my expenses data from 1990 and every version of my CV from when I got my 1st PC, all the data from the Y2K programme I managed and every project since then.
Sort it and keep it organised is what I tell the customer. Add in new data into the existing structure and ensure it is sorted.
If only I listened to my own advice. I have 4 Terabytes of data in various formats, pictures, videos and text. All in folders marked to be sorted and with a date. Just waiting for the time, when I will get round to sorting it, it will come, not because I have become efficient but because software will become available that will allow it to happen.
I was looking at creating it myself but as usual with my ideas I don’t have the resources. I want a graphics programme that will recognise a picture of a car and record it in the right catagory, kittens in another and my family members in another and so on. Recording the details in a searchable database. Flagging the few odds it can’t recognise for human inspection. Same with the books and text files, although that should be easier, just read all the words into a database and use them to search on with a link to the book. I really should get started on that one. It is in line with what I do and I’m getting fed up with knowing I have something yet being unable to find it within a reasonable time as I end up leaving it searching overnight.
On the plus side when I do get around to sorting it out I would envisage my actual storage requirements would go right down so I won’t need those bricks in the article.
Here is a car that is going to race it’s way to the top of a mountain. Only difference is that there is no driver just a computer controlling the vehicle, called Shelley. I’m sure it could make a very spectacular video if things get out of hand.
Personally, I can’t actually see a use for this type of vehicle. It uses GPS rather than cameras so it cannot react to anything on the road. It can only follow a very carefully recorded course. So hope there are no goats or other animals up there. It isn’t of much use for anything except in this sort of PR excercise.
However, in getting it to work the white coats will have had to make some pretty nifty computer algorithms. Such as controlling skids, braking envelopes etc. Now they would be handy to have in a car. A car that before it reached the limits of stability starts to take control and when it skids it corrects itself and steers itself where the driver was attempting to go before they lost it. Handy of all that ice we will get with Global Warming… errr…
Of course having cars do what the programmer thinks and not what the driver wants is pretty dangerous but the way we are heading now we, the humans, probably will be classed as do dangerous to drive cars in 20 years time.
In the meantime let’s see what happens in September. Will it become a plane?
When we look back we discover that many things passed on to us by our ancestors is more than just folklore and memories. Some of it science today is only just catching up on and discovering.
Take this article about Frankincense. Could it be that something so prized all those years ago was prized for more than we thought?
How many more rediscoveries are waiting to be made and old wives tales proved right. I wish I’d listened more to my Granny when she was giving out some of her sage advice. The only things I can remember is her homemade cooking. Interestingly enough another skill lost with this generation.
I think I go looking for some of the GrandMa’s recipe books, the ones where they make a meal for 6 with a dead squirrel and some grass. I think we will be needing it soon.
Well, it seems while the rest of the world pulls itself out of poverty and plans for the future the West is planning it’s way into third world status. I say third world because we don’t have a fourth world status yet. At least until we get there and create one.
Watch and weep.
It’s all true while we spend our money tilting at windmills, (isn’t that recognised as an excercise in futility), the world moves on.
I do believe that there is a place for pure science. Science that expands knowledge and gives us a better insight into how things are and how they work.
Sometimes though I think that there is a case for calling it a day and branching off into something else more productive.
This is one of those things. A new atomic clock accurate to 1 second in 3 billion years.
WTF! How can they be sure, has it been fully tested? What is the benefit of that over the old one, also untested which was half as accurate? I fail to see the benefit over the old cesium clocks, only accurate to 100 Million years, that have been around for a while.
And I’ll bet they are even now looking at the next version.
Moore’s law, less of a law than an observation, a bit like Murphy’s law, states that ‘the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years’.
Of course this was accepted as being valid in the short term but invalid over a longer length of time as we hit the limits of our technology and the media we work with. I and People of similar thoughts to myself have felt that although we would reach the limits on one substrate we would find another and the law would apply again until, of course, we reached the limits of that substrate and so on. We look at most things the same way, on the positive side.
Now, h/t Ivan, it appears that before we have even had a hiccup with silicon a new substrate has been found, graphene. A first generation graphene processor is already working at 250x a state of the art silicon chip and that is before we start the fine tuning and improve the manufacturing process.
A very impressive start. Wonder when we can expect to see them in our systems?
It seem to me that Iran is doing this new space launch on the cheap. Sending up a mouse to power the thing. I can imagine a little wheel inside. Have no idea what the turtles and worms are for. Must be a muslim thing.
I suspect though that this is less of a practical satellite, as in transfer electronic data and live footage (What does that mean?), and more of a message. Which is a bit worrying as the West is now run entirely by wimps and idiots.
It seems that every few minutes another story emerges declaring that the end of the world is near. Now that the global warming scam is unravelling, and all but politicians and greenies with hands in the cookie jar are rejecting the idea, someone has restored an old doomsday scenario. Fertile Soil is disappearing. Now, again, I have no idea if this is going on. My guess is it is but because of farming and land policy rather than farmers and land owners but that is a different issue.
So before we start trotting out the lines of we must do something, followed rapidly by give us some money and stop doing this, can we at least look at what is going on. We have thousands of years experience, billions if you look at us all together regarding soil management. We can work out if it is an issue or not.
If it is an issue, which I suspect is not the case, we already know ways around this from composting and other soil improvements to aquaculture. All of which do not require us returning to the stone age or giving 40% of our income, before tax to the government or quangoes acting on behalf of the government.
Personally, I coming around to the idea that is we executed all these whingy whiney greenies, the politicians who encourage them and the media who suck up to the politicians we will solve all the worlds problems. We would cut down on waste and inefficiency, cut the number of people, stop implementing policies that harm rather than help and we would all be a million times happier, not be killing each other and have a positive outlook just without the media alone.
On the surface it does have one major flaw. It talks, but the manufacturer has thought of that and it has an off switch. I’m sure later versions will have much greater interaction and more verbal facilities. The intention being to make a perfect version that will even get the beer and clean up.
It seems that like many expensive toys there is a back order on the units with pre-orders being taken.
Like all technology I see this as a double edged sword. Sure you get your needs sorted out and don’t get any earache after a hard days work it would reduce the requirment for the sex industry and sex slaves but more importantly it stops whingy whiny feminists and hard faced politicians going on about explotation and sex slaves. However, we need mini carbon based units to keep the species going until we have immortality.
Thinking outside the box for a minute if we could make them cheap enough we could send them to places like Afghanistan. One each. That would give us two wins, the first is that they would be too busy to be killing anyone. The secondis that eventually they would simply run out of nutters to send on jihads. From their perspective it would be great. No wimmin enjoing sex and they would enjoy themselves more knowing that one simple fact.
Now before I go out and order one I want to know more about the product testing procedures. I don’t want mine to be ruined by ‘The HedgeHog’
Conspiracies
How many times have we had an electrical or electronic item that conked out just after the warranty expired? A lot I bet. Manufacturers nowadays build cheap and with a short life so you will get the latest and most expensive version as a replacement. It’s a fact but how many of you think that the lifetime is being limted by artificial means, such as a timer inside the box. A lot of you it seems if you are a Sony user.
Personally I think the risk is too great for a manufacturer to do and so I thought ‘conspiracy theory’
However, why would a TV need a software patch? Especially one that ‘fixed’ an errant controller that caused the TV on off switch not to work exactly after 1200Hrs. My Panasonic has an on off switch. No software required so why does Sony have one, and one with a bug in. Sounds really dodgy to me. Normal TV, button in and telly comes on. Sony version, button in check software….. for what? A decision whether to come on is what the conspiracy geeks are saying and I find I can’t think of an alternative reason for software on the switch.
It does remind me of every PC I’ve ever had though. When a new version comes out the basic system, oh so fast when you first got it, takes ages just to power up and get to the login screen. I feel a conspiracy coming on.