synx508

As well as dubious wireless adapters Dell also shipped a USB GigE adapter for some XPS15 models that doesn't work for more than a few hours before the adapter crashes and needs to be power cycled by removing and reinserting it. I had a customer with one XPS15 that contained both the terrible wireless and terrible external wired network adapter.

The story gets better though, Dell shipped a demo model of a new XPS15 recently and we discovered the improved USB3.0 GigE adapter that it ships with is now stable, so got them to swap the older ones out but customers shouldn't really be testing hardware that is unable to perform its basic function reliably.

Not enough is being said about this, there are still no really energy efficient receivers and on a per-station basis DAB is also a lot more expensive to transmit. DAB only becomes energy efficient at the transmitter end because it's always transmitting a multiplex of many stations.

A few years ago I bought a battery-powered DAB radio so I can listen to Radio 4 in the bath. It will zip through a set of high capacity AA NiMH cells in around 2-3 weeks, the old FM radio used such a small amount of power that Alkaline cells made more sense and would consume around two sets per year.

Pressure sensitivity on a musical keyboard is known as "aftertouch" and is generally implemented in a "monophonic" way, the effect of pressure on any key is applied to all the currently depressed keys. The CS-80 implements aftertouch on a per-key basis, rather than common to all the keys. This allows it to be more naturally expressive. There have been a few MIDI keyboards that implemented CS-80 style aftertouch, but it's extremely rare and many of the implementations have been less than brilliant (but Ensoniq deserves recognition for even trying to do it on some very reasonably priced equipment).

Quite pretty but I can't figure out why anyone would invent their own non-ISO date format and then have to write a parser for it. Is it really so hard to start with the year?

Those steps might make you feel better but buy you very little in terms of privacy. Your telecoms provider will still know roughly where you are at all times, they have to, it's how their switches know which towers to route your traffic to and from.

Unless you tunnel all your data traffic they'll also get copies of that and may sell pseudo-anonymous website usage statistics to one of the web metrics businesses. In some countries they also intercept and modify web content that you might view.

And what can you do about the baseband radio processor and its code? Nothing. Assuming you have a tunnel in operation, the phone could still be collecting and quietly sharing metadata and you'd never know.

That's technology for you, forcing people out of their jobs!

It's definitely above the part 15 limits of 150 μV/m at 3m

I don't know the current drive capabilities of the Broadcom SoC, but let's assume it can perfectly drive a dipole antenna presenting around 72 ohms. The supply is 3.3V, I think. 3.3^2/72 = 0.15125W. In reality I doubt it's anywhere close to that, let's assume 50mW instead (it could be lower, I just don't know). According to a legit-looking field strength calculator I found online this works out to just over 0.5V/m at 3m! That sounds a bit high. Various factors would conspire to making even this much field strength unlikely, but it'd still exceed the FCC limits easily.

The Pi's output is also a reasonably decent square wave, as pointed out elsewhere. So there are some harmonics that are, themselves, above the part 15 limits.

In other words, don't do this, unless you have a spectrum analyzer, attenuator (don't forget to block DC). Actually, someone needs to do this with the right equipment just to find out how well it really performs.

The MH370 777 was fitted with ADS-B, which is how the various internet based tracking services managed to track it. Unfortunately, it was so far away from the nearest receiver site that the line-of-sight needed for microwave transmissions wasn't possible below 30,000 feet. If the plane made an emergency descent, it would've vanished from tracking very quickly though perhaps not as quickly as it did vanish. AF477 sent ACARS messages over its satellite communication link, as I recall, these are not sent as frequently as ADS-B messages but would be enough to locate the aircraft very approximately. The problem with any technical solution is it may not continue to function for the whole flight, which is why ELTs exist, but they're not indestructible or guaranteed to be in a position to transmit after a crash. There is only so much you can do with electrons, when you're facing the prospect of a large metal object falling 35,000 feet into salt water.

It's worth pointing out that you can't renew existing pro accounts manually, only accounts that are set up with recurring transactions will renew automatically. For some reason this doesn't include my account, as far as I can tell. I'm a little annoyed about this.

As I understand it, accounts that were originally a gift, like mine, don't get the recurring transaction treatment. This makes sense, but only up to a point, that point being where the owner of the account renews it with a different credit card and it becomes truly "theirs".

I am not sure that flickr gave this scenario due consideration, there must be a lot of people who received pro as a gift but have since paid to renew it will be unable to benefit from the reduced "grandfathered" price of $25.

These PCs and laptops are the very same machines that "apps" users are deciding they just don't need any more. Full desktop applications for Windows aren't going to go away, but as I see it they're not going to be ported to "So modern we can't agree a sensible consumer-facing name for it" rapidly, either.

I agree that it's a good place to be selling right now, as the competition is sparse and largely terrible. There are a lot of holes waiting to be filled. I don't think it's going to grow the way you seem to be predicting.

Computers are different now.

The schematic may be incorrect, as it seems unlikely that the relay would energise in an emitter follower configuration, where it'd have approximately 2.6 volts across its coil in the "on" state. Perhaps the relay should be between 5v and the collector of the transistor. Some relays are sensitive enough, though, so I'm not sure.

You might be interested in this response to a FOI request on the subject of pirate radio enforcement action. http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/141864/response/351401...

I bought my Windows 8 machine with the assumption that, as a touch device, it would give me a true "Windows 8 Experience". I can summarise this experience with the word "atrocious". This is a pity, because the device itself, an Asus S200E, is rather wonderful and extremely good value. I think Microsoft needed to do a lot more testing, perhaps UAT, Windows 8 feels like a pre-alpha product in many places. I'm getting to the point where I'm going to have to write some blog posts or something because it is quite unbelievably bad in certain areas. I actually quite like it, but it could be that I'm just feeling very sorry for it. You have to feel a certain amount of pity for a thing that regularly claims to be importing 342 of 200 pictures, or has an app that encourages me to launch the actual app I'm running in order to fix a problem with the app I'm running. I could go on…

0.37amps X 5volts X 64

This isn't about third party cookies, it's about cookies period - with the exceptions listed in the article. If you use your own analytics package, the chances are it will use cookies, so user permission will still be required. Log parsing isn't sufficient to get user-based statistics.

Usually two wires, often AC mains voltage Live and Load but some newer systems use low voltage. My own house has a thermostat that wirelessly communicates with a receiver near the gas combination boiler (water heating for hot water and radiators). The receiver simply closes an electrical contact to signal heating demand.

Ebay used to have some rich pre-registration features like "watching", but they seem to have been removed in the last year or so. They still track logged-out profiles and tease a login with items that "you might like" and recent search lists. These hang around for years, I expect somewhere in Ebay Towers there's a top ten list of the Ebay identity that has been spread most widely across devices/browser profiles.

ARM Holdings was the first company that popped into my head when I read the headline. Without ARM there would be no Facebook/Twitter because inexpensive mobile computing probably wouldn't have been invented yet.

As I see it, Clarkson and the team are basing their eco ridicule on the long view. They know that if they praise the current half-baked electric car technology, they'll look quaint and whimsical in 50 years when electric cars are practical. Better to be insightful and honest about just how far short the current offerings fall when compared with mature fossil-fuel powered vehicles, surely?

Your Macbook sounds as though it came from the same batch as my wife's Macbook. The Apple store replaced her battery free of charge well out of warranty and also offered a replacement casing. This could be a UK thing as it's pretty clear that there was a period where Macbooks were being manufactured below acceptable standards, the "Sale of goods act" would apply.

I bought a Macbook about a year after my wife and mine has been absolutely fine, no cracking and still with a good original battery.

I was also rather confused as to what I was supposed to be looking at and why it wasn't using setInterval.

Your script is nicer, the modulo and increment in the same line is very tidy. It's not hacker news though, is it, or am I missing something?

You misunderstand the meaning of test, the UPS tests itself periodically as part of its normal operation. In this case, if it fails the test it takes your servers with it.

I imagine the test is to ensure the accuracy of the battery runtime prediction, it transfers your load off line power and onto the inverter & batteries. Unfortunately something happens that causes the UPS to shut down or pause rather than immediately switch back to line power. Often the only evidence is that your servers power-cycled unexpectedly, sometimes the UPS actually switches off entirely during the test, however.

I have never had a good experience with APC UPSs, my favourite anti-feature is the self-test that ends with power to the load being interrupted. The "shuts off instantly when cable connected" anti-feature bit a colleague of mine recently.