Content is one thing, coverage is quite another....
OnDigital's main failing was it didn't provide the universal coverage that satellite could. OK, most urban areas with a service direct from a main transmitter site could get everything but for the rest of the country DTT was patchy at best. A dish nailed to the side of your house gave you a full service from Lerwick to Lewes.
The problem is that not all width/height restrictions are dual signed in imperial and metric measurements. Your average Eastern European wagon driver hasn't a clue what 6' 6" on a sign means, but will understand 2.0 m.
Did you see a big drop in range going over the pennines or other non-flat bits of the world? I'm interested how much of an effect gradients have on the range of electric cars, as they all seem to be just about usable for my 25 mile each way commute, but I do live in mid wales, a part of the world where flat bits aren't that common.
The resistor pack itself was probably £50 (rover ones that fail like clockwork are about that). The other £750 was probably the 6 months it took to remove the dash to get at it...
While this car does seem to be a better bet than some rivals I simply can't see myself spending real money on a renault for one reason: build quality.
Many family members and friends have bought renaults and the difference between reliability on what should be near identical models is amazing. Some have no probs while others suffered major fuel system and mechanical maladies on cars of a similar age and condition. Add to that the 1.9 DCi's tendency to lidderally blow itself up and you get a range of cars id never consider.
While most of the other sites can be blamed on contention Tregaron is a tiny rural town in the middle of west wales. I'd be willing to bet their slow speeds are down to long, poor quality copper rather than traffic, especially since BT Wholesale seem able to deal with contention better than the LLU crew.
I don't live in England (I live in Wales). There are mountains, but this test is being done in Cambridge, which is geographically similar to Northern France or the low countries i.e. flatter than a flat thing.
BT tried a similar trick up near Wrexham. They'd said that a certain village outside the town that broadband would cost a few grand for each house, so the villagers got together and started to look in to their own wireless install with guaranteed decent speed (5mbit or more). Once BT got wind of this they offered to connect all the houses to another exchange for £200 with 1mbit and a new phone number...
BT know full well they've got a monopoly outside urban areas for everything (voice and data). Even if you go for another supplier your still going to be passing some of that cash through to BT wholesale. They don't even have to try and win custom.
This will be a very handy technology for rural (or indeed suburban) data comms. It'll be interesting to see how it handles more rugged terrain than pool table flat fenland
Considering that 80%+ of tea drunk in the UK is in teabag form, the process for creating the >20% of loose tea must be seriously wasteful to provide enough "scrapings" for all those teabags. That, or you are talking rubbish.
Give me a properly brewed MUG of good, solid breakfast tea, with a dash of milk. No more, no less.
... It still suffers from the most annoying of android features.That feature is that you can't see a message's SENT time, only the time the phone received it. If, like me, you turn your phone off overnight or spent a lot of time out of coverage you end up with a slew of messages with no clue as to their relevancy.
Well, all you'd need is a Freeview/Freesat/whatever STB, a 625/405 line standards converter (can be run from a laptop IIRC) and then a VHF modulator tuned up to whatever frequency the set is designed to recieve on. Simple*
BL's Press department would apparently not lend out cars for extended periods, so continuity was a real pain with BL sending a yellow TR for one week's shooting and a blue one for another...
There are plenty of british made cars that are suitable. Jaguar, Land Rover, Lotus...
It's not the physical value of the data that's the problem....
...it's the value of that data to the company. For example a copy of a text file containing an innocuous list of part numbers isn't worth as much as a copy of a text file containing customer details and their order details.
I think that part of the reason that the australians like their big sixes and bent eights is that when you want to cover long distances in empty outbacks you don't really want to be stuck with some expensive and lean German engine that throws a pollution management fault in the middle of nowhere and that can't be fixed without the full gamut of dealer electronic diagnosis kit.
Sounds like FB's spotted a load of traffic coming from the orange network and has tagged it as spam. Relaxing to know it's not my new android handset at fault.
That is the one advantage of flash in the real world. 90%+ of consumer systems can use it with no issues. Until HTML5 is an agreed standard flash will remain on top.
But you can still buy Epson LX-300s new. OK, a £30 inkjet printer would knock the socks off it for quality and speed but an LX-300 will noisily bang away until the end of time itself. Perfect for logging jobs.
"They need a license and just like the rest of us they are obliged by law to carry it. "
I don't think carrying your licence with you is a requirement by law. IIRC the law states that if you get pulled over and you don't have your licence you are given a "producer", also known as the "seven day wonder" which gives you a week to produce your licence, MOT and insurance docs at your local cop shop. Your photocard driving licence isn't valid without the paper countapart anyways.I do carry my licence around with me usually, but that is out of habit/needing ID.
Modren diesels may sound better than old ones, but its a tradeoff...
Modern diesels are a world away from the 1980s/1990s van engines of old BUT they have traded reliability for performance and refinement. Modern commonrail diesels have a lot of injection and emissions kit that fails in spectacular and expensive ways.
A few years back I needed to fit a new radio to my car and chose one of the early bluetooth enabled units. It is the perfect case of it "just works" technology. My handset and the radio paired up straight away and have worked fine since. I also use bluetooth for file transfer between my phone and my laptop, but the transfer speed is rather low and if I have a large number of files to transfer I tend to dig out the USB cable. It is perfect for short-range peripheral interconnects with minimal fuss and bother.
"fact that you were lucky enough to flag down an openreach engineer, who took the time to go to the exchange and correct your faulty line is fantastic"
OK, so we managed to get the line activated eventually, but your missing the point that we wouldn't have had to do that if BT had done the job right in the first place and instructed the engineer themselves to do the job on time. This line was for a festival, and was one of several booked to be ADSL enabled for a two week period.Our line was activated, I can't remember if our wireless mesh suppliers' lines (2 of) or the TV company (1of) were ever activated. One was given an activation date of the 16th of June, very handy when everything had to be de-rigged and off site by the sixth...
Fact is BT still act like they're a monopoly, which to be fair in most of the country they still are. They get away with their 1980s SLA (Voice and fax/dialup is all they legally have to supply, if their lines are faulty or they've multiplexed you with next door and you can't get ADSL then tough) while knowing full well if they bugger it up totally then the government will have to bail them out.
I've nothing against the call centre STAFF, rather the SYSTEMS they're a part of. I work with BT nearly every day covering offices over a wide area, each one connected using BT wholesale supplied broadband and using BT phone switches and ISDN lines. When you get bounced from one call centre to the other for a simple query because business faults aren't dealt with by xyz call centre but rather centre 123, who pass you over to ISDN faults which is 456 and so on it does get demoralising. By the time you've got hold of someone with authority to dispatch an engineer your phone switch is so old sales are trying to sell you a new one...
And broadband being a switch of a button? How is it then that when we had a go-live date of the 20th of may for our ADSL line it still didn't work four days later but worked 10 minutes after we flagged down a passing BT van and asked the chap to punch the pair up to the right connection strip at the exchange?
BT openworld chaps with vans are a bloody handy lot in fairness. Unfortunately BT's impenetrable customer dis-service operations mean you can't get hold of them for love nor money. I doubt the strike will be noticed, just a lengthening of the usual support wait from two weeks to four...
DAB will have terrible coverage compared to FM even when wound up to full power. This is because the frequencies are up in Band III which doesn't carry as well as the current Band II frequencies of FM radio. Add to that the fact that it doesn't degrade gracefully and doesn't offer any advantage over FM for most people and this policy seems more and more misguided.
The simple problem with DAB is the fact that the coverage is pitiful compared to FM and MW/LW. Even when its wound up to full power the frequencies used are higher than currently used and thus won't travel as far. Its all well and good saying that ubiquitous wireless interwebs are all we need but the fact is that FM and MW/LW radio can be received at the moment in 99.99% of the country right now, whereas wireless internet via mobile phone networks is much more hit and miss.
Also, when everyone switched from AM to FM there was a marked improvement in sound quality and it made sense. The problem with DAB is that there is little gain (apart from the odd specialist station) and that depends on you being within farting distance of a transmitter.
One would think that a setup like this would run up its generators every few days to check all was well with the engine, alternator and transformers etc. and note if the damn thing works properly. Did they underestimate the power demand on the generator and overload it? Or has the credit crunch hit IBM to the point that its been running management cars on the red diesel destined for the generator...
As a school IT monkey I wrote a nifty little script using PS Shutdown to power off two IT suites and then use Wake On Lan to fire them back up in the morning. This worked fine, but the systems HAD to be left on overnight occasionally for WSUS updates.
As has been mentioned before sheep are already tagged with a number on a cheap plastic tag for ID purpouses and this system works well. This new system will involve farmers spending thousands of pounds on new equipment with all the headaches that new equipment will bring. For example, you have a barn in the middle of a field for sorting sheep that has no electricity supply. How do you power your RFID scanner and the associated PC/laptop? Methinks the sales of batteries, generators and 12v/240v inverters will go through the roof...
And regarding the Rachel Corrie affair, from what I can see (as an Impartial welshman) she was there of her own choice and decided to stand in front of 40-odd metric tonnes of armorued earthmoving equipment in a warzone, not usually the plan of action for a long, healthy life.
If the road that's going over the bridge a public road then use public money to help build it. Otherwise get MS to pay and treat it as a private road i.e. no public utilities to use the brige (water/electricity grid/gas) and MS can whack whatever private services they want over it (fibre etc.). If other people want to use the bridge then toll it.
A quick look at the Wale Millenium Centre performance listings...
And you'll see that Mary Poppins is being performed in musical form. Is this a new form of google advertising? Or just a suitable choice of "trap street" for cardiff?
If you want to change exchanges it's a right ball ache as you'd have to be physically re-wired in to the Taff's Well cabling. If for example Taff's well connects to the next street you could try asking BT, but be prepaired for either manic laughter or a massive bill.
The problem we have compared to other nations is that we have a much greater "make-do-and-mend" attitude towards national infrastructure than other nations. Nations like Japan have spent Billions over the last 30+ years keeping their telecoms networks up to date whereas ours is a mish-mash of 40+ years of haphazard expansion with little thought. BT are quite rightly asking why should they stump up the cash for fibre without being allowed to control the charge other operators pay to use it. It's a PLC and thus has to make money. If the Govt was serious about fully connecting the UK to broadband interwebs then they'd do as they've done to the railways and nationalise the cabling infrastructure and let BT, virgin, CPW etc. run their services on that infrastructure.
I have to admit as a techie who has to cover a large area it is handy to have somewhere like PC World where you can pop in at sunday lunchtime and get kit. Ok, the price isn't always the cheapest but when you need to get a system back online in a hurry £5 isn't going to break the bank. Halfords is the same when it comes to cars, not the cheapest or the best but by far the most convenient.
Yes, RX-8 wankel rotaries suck fuel down at a hefty rate, but do produce a fair bit of horsepower (not sure about the torque mind) but they do sound like turbines rather than engines.
Engine acoustics are important, would as many people have bought economical Turbo Diesel engines in their new cars if they still sounded like 1980s/1990s Peugeot XUD/Rover L-series motors? They were like tractor engines.
The answer to all this is to buy a twinspark alfa romeo. Under 3000rpm it's quiet and relatively economical, but get to a good road and you can open it out to 8000rpm with a nice wide power band thanks to VVT and Italian engineering. And of course it sounds like a proper engine...
...As long as you don't mind doing the opposite to what "green" campaigners have been saying for years and keep all your journeys to below a few miles. Electric cars simply don't have the range to make then viable outside urban areas. Even if you got 100 miles from a battery you usable range would be about 50miles on a long run, as you will have to get back home to charge it. Untill they develop a recharging infrastructure that can charge a battery as quickly as I can refil the tank on my car then i can't see it working.
"It sounds like it's got an ordinary hard disk. Wouldn't a SSD be more rugged?"
That might be the case, but a lot of this kit is designed to work with datalogging equipment etc. which probably works better with older H/W (hence the serial ports)
"for that sort of money you could buy three or four standard ones, and replace your lappy every year when it gets trashed."
Picture the scene, your in your tent in the arctic wastes, and your cheap laptop gives up the ghost. Who's going to courier you a replacement?
Another possible reason for using the case as a heatsink might be to keep the batteries warm and prolong battery life.
I'd much rather have the fire service/police on a combination of both a dedicated radio system such as TETRA and mobile phone. What you forget is that out in rural areas mobile phone coverage is patchy at best, and there are TETRA masts going up in areas not covered by any mobile network
Your £70 70A alternator was probably a service exchange one, new ones from Bosch/Lucas are about £120 retail (unless I'm buying them from the wrong place)
But I'm a member of the nuclear camp, In my area (Mid/North Wales) we have both windfarms and a former reactor, and I'd much rather the reactor, as it's much more compact with regards to land use and generates a great deal more electricity for more of the time.
Also, we have a lot of microgeneration as there are still many farms without a mains connection, these tend to be on Diesel generators, as wind turbines are simply not reliable enough, even the centre of alternative technology down the road (aka Hippie Heaven) have two great big diesel generators as backup to their renewable supplies. To me, that says a lot.
Register
52 posts • joined Wednesday 6th August 2008 11:08 GMT
Page:
Re: RM
RM weren't even that cheap for kit when i was a school tech.
Re: Content is one thing, coverage is quite another....
Much easier than getting a full set of DTT muliplexes pre-switchover I'm sure!
Content is one thing, coverage is quite another....
OnDigital's main failing was it didn't provide the universal coverage that satellite could. OK, most urban areas with a service direct from a main transmitter site could get everything but for the rest of the country DTT was patchy at best. A dish nailed to the side of your house gave you a full service from Lerwick to Lewes.
@ChrisC
The problem is that not all width/height restrictions are dual signed in imperial and metric measurements. Your average Eastern European wagon driver hasn't a clue what 6' 6" on a sign means, but will understand 2.0 m.
What's the range like if its not flat?
Did you see a big drop in range going over the pennines or other non-flat bits of the world? I'm interested how much of an effect gradients have on the range of electric cars, as they all seem to be just about usable for my 25 mile each way commute, but I do live in mid wales, a part of the world where flat bits aren't that common.
£800 resistor
The resistor pack itself was probably £50 (rover ones that fail like clockwork are about that). The other £750 was probably the 6 months it took to remove the dash to get at it...
Renault + complexity = oh heck...
While this car does seem to be a better bet than some rivals I simply can't see myself spending real money on a renault for one reason: build quality.
Many family members and friends have bought renaults and the difference between reliability on what should be near identical models is amazing. Some have no probs while others suffered major fuel system and mechanical maladies on cars of a similar age and condition. Add to that the 1.9 DCi's tendency to lidderally blow itself up and you get a range of cars id never consider.
interesting that tregaron's there
While most of the other sites can be blamed on contention Tregaron is a tiny rural town in the middle of west wales. I'd be willing to bet their slow speeds are down to long, poor quality copper rather than traffic, especially since BT Wholesale seem able to deal with contention better than the LLU crew.
@"Do you have mountains in England?"
I don't live in England (I live in Wales). There are mountains, but this test is being done in Cambridge, which is geographically similar to Northern France or the low countries i.e. flatter than a flat thing.
BT, The seventh circle of hell
BT tried a similar trick up near Wrexham. They'd said that a certain village outside the town that broadband would cost a few grand for each house, so the villagers got together and started to look in to their own wireless install with guaranteed decent speed (5mbit or more). Once BT got wind of this they offered to connect all the houses to another exchange for £200 with 1mbit and a new phone number...
BT know full well they've got a monopoly outside urban areas for everything (voice and data). Even if you go for another supplier your still going to be passing some of that cash through to BT wholesale. They don't even have to try and win custom.
very interesting...
This will be a very handy technology for rural (or indeed suburban) data comms. It'll be interesting to see how it handles more rugged terrain than pool table flat fenland
Au contraire...
Considering that 80%+ of tea drunk in the UK is in teabag form, the process for creating the >20% of loose tea must be seriously wasteful to provide enough "scrapings" for all those teabags. That, or you are talking rubbish.
Give me a properly brewed MUG of good, solid breakfast tea, with a dash of milk. No more, no less.
Tried it, but....
... It still suffers from the most annoying of android features.That feature is that you can't see a message's SENT time, only the time the phone received it. If, like me, you turn your phone off overnight or spent a lot of time out of coverage you end up with a slew of messages with no clue as to their relevancy.
@non existant spec
3.5 Inch jack? don't you mean 3.5mm?
@ "Does it get digital"...
Well, all you'd need is a Freeview/Freesat/whatever STB, a 625/405 line standards converter (can be run from a laptop IIRC) and then a VHF modulator tuned up to whatever frequency the set is designed to recieve on. Simple*
*The above statement may not be true.
A title is needed, so here be one...
BL's Press department would apparently not lend out cars for extended periods, so continuity was a real pain with BL sending a yellow TR for one week's shooting and a blue one for another...
There are plenty of british made cars that are suitable. Jaguar, Land Rover, Lotus...
It's not the physical value of the data that's the problem....
...it's the value of that data to the company. For example a copy of a text file containing an innocuous list of part numbers isn't worth as much as a copy of a text file containing customer details and their order details.
"expensive and lean German engines"
I think that part of the reason that the australians like their big sixes and bent eights is that when you want to cover long distances in empty outbacks you don't really want to be stuck with some expensive and lean German engine that throws a pollution management fault in the middle of nowhere and that can't be fixed without the full gamut of dealer electronic diagnosis kit.
Facebook just gives a "blocked IP" Message
Sounds like FB's spotted a load of traffic coming from the orange network and has tagged it as spam. Relaxing to know it's not my new android handset at fault.
Hammer: Meet nail-head...
That is the one advantage of flash in the real world. 90%+ of consumer systems can use it with no issues. Until HTML5 is an agreed standard flash will remain on top.
Bitch all you want about "old tech"...
But you can still buy Epson LX-300s new. OK, a £30 inkjet printer would knock the socks off it for quality and speed but an LX-300 will noisily bang away until the end of time itself. Perfect for logging jobs.
"They need a license and just like the rest of us they are obliged by law to carry it. "
I don't think carrying your licence with you is a requirement by law. IIRC the law states that if you get pulled over and you don't have your licence you are given a "producer", also known as the "seven day wonder" which gives you a week to produce your licence, MOT and insurance docs at your local cop shop. Your photocard driving licence isn't valid without the paper countapart anyways.I do carry my licence around with me usually, but that is out of habit/needing ID.
Modren diesels may sound better than old ones, but its a tradeoff...
Modern diesels are a world away from the 1980s/1990s van engines of old BUT they have traded reliability for performance and refinement. Modern commonrail diesels have a lot of injection and emissions kit that fails in spectacular and expensive ways.
Bluetooth: Quietly gets on with it
A few years back I needed to fit a new radio to my car and chose one of the early bluetooth enabled units. It is the perfect case of it "just works" technology. My handset and the radio paired up straight away and have worked fine since. I also use bluetooth for file transfer between my phone and my laptop, but the transfer speed is rather low and if I have a large number of files to transfer I tend to dig out the USB cable. It is perfect for short-range peripheral interconnects with minimal fuss and bother.
You could just ask the chap not to park on the pavement....
Why not just ask him not to do it?
Lucky enough?
"fact that you were lucky enough to flag down an openreach engineer, who took the time to go to the exchange and correct your faulty line is fantastic"
OK, so we managed to get the line activated eventually, but your missing the point that we wouldn't have had to do that if BT had done the job right in the first place and instructed the engineer themselves to do the job on time. This line was for a festival, and was one of several booked to be ADSL enabled for a two week period.Our line was activated, I can't remember if our wireless mesh suppliers' lines (2 of) or the TV company (1of) were ever activated. One was given an activation date of the 16th of June, very handy when everything had to be de-rigged and off site by the sixth...
Fact is BT still act like they're a monopoly, which to be fair in most of the country they still are. They get away with their 1980s SLA (Voice and fax/dialup is all they legally have to supply, if their lines are faulty or they've multiplexed you with next door and you can't get ADSL then tough) while knowing full well if they bugger it up totally then the government will have to bail them out.
A clarification
I've nothing against the call centre STAFF, rather the SYSTEMS they're a part of. I work with BT nearly every day covering offices over a wide area, each one connected using BT wholesale supplied broadband and using BT phone switches and ISDN lines. When you get bounced from one call centre to the other for a simple query because business faults aren't dealt with by xyz call centre but rather centre 123, who pass you over to ISDN faults which is 456 and so on it does get demoralising. By the time you've got hold of someone with authority to dispatch an engineer your phone switch is so old sales are trying to sell you a new one...
And broadband being a switch of a button? How is it then that when we had a go-live date of the 20th of may for our ADSL line it still didn't work four days later but worked 10 minutes after we flagged down a passing BT van and asked the chap to punch the pair up to the right connection strip at the exchange?
A strike at BT? Who'd notice?
BT openworld chaps with vans are a bloody handy lot in fairness. Unfortunately BT's impenetrable customer dis-service operations mean you can't get hold of them for love nor money. I doubt the strike will be noticed, just a lengthening of the usual support wait from two weeks to four...
You don't "need" a set top box..
What about TVs with integrated Freesat/Freeview HD decoders?
DAB = useless coverage
DAB will have terrible coverage compared to FM even when wound up to full power. This is because the frequencies are up in Band III which doesn't carry as well as the current Band II frequencies of FM radio. Add to that the fact that it doesn't degrade gracefully and doesn't offer any advantage over FM for most people and this policy seems more and more misguided.
Buying a new OS...
... Is like buying a car. Wait six to eight months for all the other saps to find the bugs out before starting the process.
The problem with DAB #3432
The simple problem with DAB is the fact that the coverage is pitiful compared to FM and MW/LW. Even when its wound up to full power the frequencies used are higher than currently used and thus won't travel as far. Its all well and good saying that ubiquitous wireless interwebs are all we need but the fact is that FM and MW/LW radio can be received at the moment in 99.99% of the country right now, whereas wireless internet via mobile phone networks is much more hit and miss.
Also, when everyone switched from AM to FM there was a marked improvement in sound quality and it made sense. The problem with DAB is that there is little gain (apart from the odd specialist station) and that depends on you being within farting distance of a transmitter.
Looks like someone dropped the danglie on this...
One would think that a setup like this would run up its generators every few days to check all was well with the engine, alternator and transformers etc. and note if the damn thing works properly. Did they underestimate the power demand on the generator and overload it? Or has the credit crunch hit IBM to the point that its been running management cars on the red diesel destined for the generator...
In my past life..
As a school IT monkey I wrote a nifty little script using PS Shutdown to power off two IT suites and then use Wake On Lan to fire them back up in the morning. This worked fine, but the systems HAD to be left on overnight occasionally for WSUS updates.
Technology for the sake of technology
As has been mentioned before sheep are already tagged with a number on a cheap plastic tag for ID purpouses and this system works well. This new system will involve farmers spending thousands of pounds on new equipment with all the headaches that new equipment will bring. For example, you have a barn in the middle of a field for sorting sheep that has no electricity supply. How do you power your RFID scanner and the associated PC/laptop? Methinks the sales of batteries, generators and 12v/240v inverters will go through the roof...
An armoured D9 is all well and good
But give me a Military spec JCB any day :D
And regarding the Rachel Corrie affair, from what I can see (as an Impartial welshman) she was there of her own choice and decided to stand in front of 40-odd metric tonnes of armorued earthmoving equipment in a warzone, not usually the plan of action for a long, healthy life.
Public vs. Private
If the road that's going over the bridge a public road then use public money to help build it. Otherwise get MS to pay and treat it as a private road i.e. no public utilities to use the brige (water/electricity grid/gas) and MS can whack whatever private services they want over it (fibre etc.). If other people want to use the bridge then toll it.
@Dave
Or someone's copy of Word hasn't been set to UK English?
@Pete
"get your existing customers to pay for ex-employees pensions"
Don't most businesses that have an in house pension work like that?
A quick look at the Wale Millenium Centre performance listings...
And you'll see that Mary Poppins is being performed in musical form. Is this a new form of google advertising? Or just a suitable choice of "trap street" for cardiff?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
@James Thomas
If you want to change exchanges it's a right ball ache as you'd have to be physically re-wired in to the Taff's Well cabling. If for example Taff's well connects to the next street you could try asking BT, but be prepaired for either manic laughter or a massive bill.
UK inability to plan for the future
The problem we have compared to other nations is that we have a much greater "make-do-and-mend" attitude towards national infrastructure than other nations. Nations like Japan have spent Billions over the last 30+ years keeping their telecoms networks up to date whereas ours is a mish-mash of 40+ years of haphazard expansion with little thought. BT are quite rightly asking why should they stump up the cash for fibre without being allowed to control the charge other operators pay to use it. It's a PLC and thus has to make money. If the Govt was serious about fully connecting the UK to broadband interwebs then they'd do as they've done to the railways and nationalise the cabling infrastructure and let BT, virgin, CPW etc. run their services on that infrastructure.
PC World, the hellfrauds of computing...
I have to admit as a techie who has to cover a large area it is handy to have somewhere like PC World where you can pop in at sunday lunchtime and get kit. Ok, the price isn't always the cheapest but when you need to get a system back online in a hurry £5 isn't going to break the bank. Halfords is the same when it comes to cars, not the cheapest or the best but by far the most convenient.
RE: Vendicar Decarian
Yes, RX-8 wankel rotaries suck fuel down at a hefty rate, but do produce a fair bit of horsepower (not sure about the torque mind) but they do sound like turbines rather than engines.
Engine acoustics are important, would as many people have bought economical Turbo Diesel engines in their new cars if they still sounded like 1980s/1990s Peugeot XUD/Rover L-series motors? They were like tractor engines.
The answer to all this is to buy a twinspark alfa romeo. Under 3000rpm it's quiet and relatively economical, but get to a good road and you can open it out to 8000rpm with a nice wide power band thanks to VVT and Italian engineering. And of course it sounds like a proper engine...
Paris: Because she likes a screamer...
Fine...
...As long as you don't mind doing the opposite to what "green" campaigners have been saying for years and keep all your journeys to below a few miles. Electric cars simply don't have the range to make then viable outside urban areas. Even if you got 100 miles from a battery you usable range would be about 50miles on a long run, as you will have to get back home to charge it. Untill they develop a recharging infrastructure that can charge a battery as quickly as I can refil the tank on my car then i can't see it working.
@Pete
http://news.bbc.co.uk/welsh/hi/newsid_7680000/newsid_7680400/7680408.stm
We have our own Welsh BBC news site thanks....
@AC1 and AC2
"It sounds like it's got an ordinary hard disk. Wouldn't a SSD be more rugged?"
That might be the case, but a lot of this kit is designed to work with datalogging equipment etc. which probably works better with older H/W (hence the serial ports)
"for that sort of money you could buy three or four standard ones, and replace your lappy every year when it gets trashed."
Picture the scene, your in your tent in the arctic wastes, and your cheap laptop gives up the ghost. Who's going to courier you a replacement?
Another possible reason for using the case as a heatsink might be to keep the batteries warm and prolong battery life.
It's a dual purpouse machine...
Once the heatsink gets a bit warm, you can fry sausages and bacon on it...
@AC
I'd much rather have the fire service/police on a combination of both a dedicated radio system such as TETRA and mobile phone. What you forget is that out in rural areas mobile phone coverage is patchy at best, and there are TETRA masts going up in areas not covered by any mobile network
@Tom
Your £70 70A alternator was probably a service exchange one, new ones from Bosch/Lucas are about £120 retail (unless I'm buying them from the wrong place)
But I'm a member of the nuclear camp, In my area (Mid/North Wales) we have both windfarms and a former reactor, and I'd much rather the reactor, as it's much more compact with regards to land use and generates a great deal more electricity for more of the time.
Also, we have a lot of microgeneration as there are still many farms without a mains connection, these tend to be on Diesel generators, as wind turbines are simply not reliable enough, even the centre of alternative technology down the road (aka Hippie Heaven) have two great big diesel generators as backup to their renewable supplies. To me, that says a lot.
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