Readers’ comments
Your views and feedback from email and the web
Driving for perfection
Nicole Kobie asks, “Do driverless cars need to be perfect - or just better than us?” ( see issue 287, p127). I accept that driverless cars will be on the road one day, but that day is a long way off. The problem is giving AI the intelligence. To write the code that will cater for all driving conditions is too difficult, and learning by experience has the disadvantage of causing deaths during the learning process.
I have been driving for over 50 years and I am still learning. Now and again I encounter a novel driving situation. I react correctly due to a combination of foresight and intuition, and by skilfully controlling speed so as to have time to react. Knowing what that speed is in itself a subtle skill which is difficult to quantify.
To answer Nicole’s question, we need perfection, and it is attainable, one day. Don’t hold your breath. Alan Wheatley
Mr Not-so-cool for one reader
I thought I would try Paul Ockenden’s suggestion in your July issue ( see issue 285, p113) of using the Mrcool power bank to extend my Arlo Pro security cameras’ battery life. I purchased two Mrcools and tested them on two cameras: one with the original battery plus Mrcool and one with just the Mrcool. In both cases, the Mrcool was fully depleted in less than a week.
This was with light camera usage – just motion and sound detection, with no live feed – so I don’t see how they would extend the battery life up to six months as envisaged by Paul. Paul Radford
I notice you say you used Arlo Pro cameras for your test. In the RWC column you’ll see I was using an Arlo Go rather than a Pro.
If you’re getting less than a week’s use from the power bank, I suspect that you’re actually using the newer Arlo Pro 2, which is a lot more power-hungry when connected to a Quick Charge capable power source – when the camera detects this it enables various local processing functions.
The combination of the MrCool power bank and the Arlo Go camera continues to work really well here.
Ubuntu + Windows = Mac
Reader David Evans ( see issue 285, p16) asks why anyone would choose an Ubuntu-only laptop when dual-booting Windows and Linux is so easy. My last laptop was dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows. It was fine, until I noticed that the only time I booted it in Windows was to run the regular Windows updates…
Now I’m a happy Mac user. Chris Webster
Windows Update and Office repairs
We have five PCs at home and a five-machine subscription to Office 365. Over the past three weeks, the PCs have all updated to the latest version of Windows 10, after which every Microsoft app on each machine reported as not being “validated”. Attempting to validate online failed each time so, although the application would load and open, we couldn’t create new items. I checked my office
account and it was valid to March 2019 with all installs being valid.
The only solution appeared to be a full Office “repair” over the internet, which took 30 minutes on each machine. How can a company such as Microsoft be so inept as to distribute an update that cripples its own applications? As you can imagine, we are well fed up with all things Microsoft. Chris Moxham
More VoIP
I read your business buyer’s guide to VoIP ( see issue 285, p92) with much interest, having just gone through an upgrade to BT Cloud Voice with a client. There are a few things that we weren’t made aware of that I think people should know. First, missed calls become missed. Each phone acts as an independent unit, which doesn’t register missed calls if they’re picked up by another phone in the hunt group. This renders your missed call log on the individual phone useless, because many calls missed by the hunt group are buried in missed calls that were actually picked up by someone else. This is a common problem with VoIP systems. Second, portals are frustrating. Yes, they can show you just about anything, but it takes a long time to configure what you want. You can’t save a portal, and if you leave it then the timeout will disconnect you quite quickly. And there’s more. When messages are left they can only be left on one phone rather than held at hunt group level, meaning you can only deal
with them on the phone that took them. That means, if the person on that desk is away, another person will have to go to that specific handset in order to deal with voicemails.
Switching is (pretty much) a one-way process. The move to Cloud Voice was almost seamless with barely any downtime. The move back from Cloud Voice to standard ISDN will involve downtime of up to five days. (BT is optimistic that it might keep it to less than a day.) I can’t think of any business that can tolerate a day without phones – and no, you can’t do it at weekends.
So, if you’re running a business and considering VoIP, bear these points in mind. With one phone it’s probably quite a good system but when you scale it up to hunt groups and three or four phones it becomes difficult.
I asked BT about the missed call problem on several occasions during a training session. The response, “nobody ever complains about it”, was answered by a chorus from other users in the session saying, “it’s rubbish but what’s the point of complaining – nothing happens”.
Users no longer want to solve BT’s problems and simply put up with it. So, slowly, the system becomes worse
Blowing raspberries
Thank you for your article on building a Raspberry Pi home server ( see issue 286, p42). I take a different view, however. For the past two months, I’ve been using a Raspberry Pi as my main computer. Admittedly my requirements are pretty basic – just some online office work through Google Drive, a bit of browsing and email – but it’s made me question why more businesses aren’t rolling out the diminutive British wonder across their organisations.
It’s so cheap, easy to set up, simple to maintain and cheap to run. With four USB ports on the “larger” devices, built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and a decent OS, it’s surely got everything regular office workers could ever need.
Or am I missing something? Perhaps someone could enlighten me. Colin Robert
It’s made me question why more businesses aren’t rolling out the Pi across their organisations and worse and BT retains its low complaint scores. Neil Barton