Wish I had got a free computer when I went to university there. They should buy all their ex-compsci-students one as well, IMO.
Free PC + £100 of mouse/keyboard/SD/monitor is a lot cheaper than a full PC. However I suspect that most development will be done on a main PC cross-compiling to the device.
And this hardware will provide a baseline computing platform to teach upon.
Yeah, and we can all live as nomads without housing as well, but I'm sure the first person to wrap a few bearskins over a wooden frame would be thought of as innovative by modern standards.
I'm sure that people understand that innovation isn't a black and white thing, and that some things are more innovative than others. Hence "the best thing since sliced bread" - i.e., something can be innovative but not as innovative as something else.
In the long term, something is innovative if we cannot live our daily lives without it. For example - indoor plumbing, light bulbs. In terms of always available communication the mobile phone was completely innovative. And the smartphone merely enhanced that and merged in myriad other devices into the single unit. A total innovation in itself, and making that conglomeration of functionalities usable in itself is clearly an innovation.
But maybe not as innovative as pre-sliced bread.
(note, I don't actually think that pre-sliced bread is that innovative, but maybe the means by which it can be pre-sliced and then not go solid or stale quickly is.)
Total data centre power consumption is a major problem. We have the space in the racks for more servers, but no more power. In that case getting (example figures) 50% of the CPU power at 25% of the power consumption is totally worth it.
The problem for these ARM servers is whether a 64-core cluster in 150W beats a quad-core low-power x86 server in 150W. "Beating" in this situation means either performance, cost or both.
If travel is significant, you need to reduce the instances of that travel. So 4 or 3 day work week.
8 hours x 5 day = 40 hours. I guess 4 days of 10 hours would be the solution for you. That saves you 2 hours a week of tedious travelling. Although if you like reading, travelling isn't all that bad.
Also, leave on time and don't care what other people think. Or aren't you worth it? Also, to be honest, 8 hours sleep is not common in the modern day. Let's call it 7.
Buy a thermos and have your coffee on the bus in the morning instead of at home. I found waiting for coffee to cool led to internet usage and being far later to leave the house.
At the end of this, you have a three day weekend, but only 4 hours to yourself the other four days. IMO the three day weekend is worth it, and you'll be refreshed enough to do 10 hours work in 8 hours at work - although getting them to cut you down to a 4x8 work pattern will be impossible!
I agree that 6 hours of work seems to be a good amount of work that can be done in a day. This is work beyond what you need to do every day - housework, etc.
I have recently had a baby. The baby can take an extra hour of work in the evening when I get home, and I have noticed that this means I am getting less done at my place of employment. Even though I am in work for nine hours a day five days a week. You wouldn't find me at work longer than that on a regular basis either. Been there, done that, you don't get rewarded. 8-7 jobs (like yours?) can fuck right off. I hope you are getting a per-hour rate to make it worthwhile.
Indeed my effectiveness at work is probably best after a three day weekend. I suspect that I'd probably be more effective overall working a four day week, even without stretching the hours worked each day.
When I started off in the big world of work my first company did a presentation about the three eights. Eight hours sleep. Eight hours work. Eight hours to yourself. This is what they deemed the ideal breakdown for optimum performance. People would get in at 9am, and leave between 5pm and 6pm, and they'd fill those hours with fairly productive work from what I remember. Good canteen too.
I don't think that this application is for you, an experienced driver with a £250 annual insurance premium.
This app is for younger drivers with >£1000 insurance premiums, where £20 of fuel is worth it to save £200. That's if they can stop themselves cruising down the motorway at 100mph at 2am because the road is so empty. Note that these young drivers will be in older, cheaper cars without cruise control too.
The only way around it is for the device to either mark down late night driving, or to require driving samples at specific times of the day, or for the device to take small samples totalling 200 miles from 1000 miles of driving - which would go some way to avoid the monitoring issue too.
Not only are secondary roads more dangerous, they're significantly more dangerous. Highways are very safe overall.
This scheme will work if Aviva play it right, not only because it will give a significant discount, but that young people (who are most likely to get into an accident) like to think they're great at driving, and will do anything to prove it to their peer group. Aviva should give out window stickers "I'm teh awesumist driva" so they can display their prowess whilst they drive in circles at night playing dubstep.
I wonder if they system requires the driver to drive at certain times of the day to get a representative sample, and to avoid the "200 miles of motorway driving at night" workaround.
And the only way to achieve that would be to storm the embassy - I doubt that Ecuador would let a few policemen into the embassy just because of some UK law, when the Embassy is Ecuadorian sovereign soil. So the only way to get Assange out of the embassy would be to forcibly storm it. And regardless of the threat, it's totally unlikely that this would happen, although David Cameron and friends are quite thick and don't seem to consider the ramifications of their actions.
Whilst I am sure that this comes down to some prissy high-ranking civil servant in the UK writing something that has correctly been seen as a very serious threat, it shouldn't have happened. This is why the civil service is rushing around trying to smooth it over.
What the incident does do is force Ecuador to grant Assange the asylum he has requested, because not granting it now would be seen as caving in to this threat. So in effect the letter is counter-productive. It does still leave the problem of removing Assange from the embassy and relocating him to Ecuador - I don't know how much protection diplomatic vehicles and diplomatic escorts have.
Unless, of course, the UK just wants Assange out of the country by any means, and engineering this setup will achieve that.
As the law that would allow the embassy to be "de-embassied" is from after 1984, I fail to see your point. Indeed it is likely that the law was brought in at least partially because of this incident.
I don't think you understand the concept of "universal healthcare" at all. All you are interested in is yourself. So you earn enough to pay for private healthcare in the US. WHOOPEE! We all know that most people don't earn enough in the US to get the level of treatment you received. And then you used up your savings because *shock horror* the insurance doesn't really cover the costs at all. Yet you think this is great. Incredible reasoning.
Also, you can get private healthcare in the UK if you choose and pay for it. It's not like you are forced to use the NHS.
For what it provides, the NHS is incredibly cost efficient. And it provides a lot. Sadly this won't be the case in a few years because the Conservative government (the LibDem portion of the coalition is so minor, we know who is driving these horrendous changes) over here is intent on fulfilling their 60 year old wet dream of dismantling it and replacing it with costly private mechanisms - that no doubt the MPs and their friends will have their sticky greedy fingers in.
No one wants a US-style (aka built by and for private insurance companies) healthcare "system" (in quotes because it really doesn't work over here) in the UK.
David Cameron and Andrew Lansley do.
But they're bending over backwards for the private corporate entities that would be running it.
The NHS is extremely cost effective, especially when compared to private heathcare regimes such as the US has.
If you're going to spend $110 on a keyboard... then why not wait a little longer and spend $150 on the best one that best matches your requirements?
And one that doesn't have a cranky USB port either.
Personally I'm not a fan of the numeric keypad, I never use it myself and it gets in the way most of the time. However I do like having a full-size cursor key setup. I hate media keys. Rarely use function keys. What is the best mechanical keyboard for these requirements (UK layout, screw that tiny return key on US keyboards)?
I believe F1 steering wheels have all the functions on them, in the form of buttons: http://www.formula1.com/inside_f1/understanding_the_sport/5287.html I'm sure they know the position of those buttons off by heart though, but that's their job! I'm also sure that the buttons are placed in the best place for them to use them whilst retaining a grip on the wheel, through the gloves, whilst keeping their eyes on the road. Maybe I'm nitpicking myself now!
However there is a good argument to be made for dials. Dials are very intuitive, and easy to find with your hand without looking. Buttons less so unless they're already under your hand (e.g., a remote control is usable because you have it in your hand and know where the individual buttons are, helped along by button shape).
I think that buttons on a steering wheel, in an accessible place to use without moving your hand from the recommended position, are a solution worth considering. And as many steering wheels already have media controls on them it's not far to extrapolate more generalised controls from them controlling a UI that's directly in front of the driver's eyes.
One of the main points of the discussion is about removing driver functions from the centre console, especially since touchscreens have started appearing there, and as the article and other posters have said - they're a really bad idea. In addition because a lot of the centre console functionality is no longer required, why not get rid of it entirely (or have a stack of cup holders:p) and save money, with all the separate interfaces replaced by one on the display UI on the dash?
I'm sure the car manufacturers have been working on this stuff for a very long time already though, so one of them is going to get it right eventually.
I think you've missed pretty much all the points I was trying to make in your quest to nitpick.
we're talking about large powerful vehicles which can kill people if the driver is distracted by playing around with silly technology-for-its-own-sake gimmicks
The point about voice control and steering wheel controls is to REDUCE DISTRACTION over the current UIs, and especially reduce the amoutn of time the driver is looking away from the road.
so you change the radio station and suddenly your speedo vanishes
I guess there's a patent or something preventing the ability to show multiple things on a display at once. Hint - the speedo can remain, but maybe the less frequently used dials can temporarily be replaced with the tool-specific UI. How often do you look at the rev counter, temperature or fuel gauge? How often do you look at them whilst you are looking at the radio to change station/CD/volume?
Maybe using the example of volume control wasn't sensible, but I had the naive thought that Slashdot readers could extrapolate or imagine more complex use cases, such as configuring the in-built GPS.
We're talking about voice control for non-simple UIs within a car environment, where the driver should be concentrating on the road and not looking and moving hands around a physical or touchscreen UI.
We're not talking about setting the volume on your home hifi, or configuring the microwave.
Or is your car a "household device"? You must have wide hallways.
Clearly it would be a voice input system that actually works in the car environment, built into the car (not your phone). A pair of microphones (one for noise cancellation) in the steering wheel would probably do the job.
Clearly programming the GPS with "Find me directions to XYZ" is far easier than navigating a UI with a few buttons, maybe using a touchscreen to get the destination in.
Definitely, in my mind the best place is on the steering wheel, in a line defined by the sweep of your thumb. You could probably fit four on either side of the steering wheel. The default resting place for your thumb should have the most important button in terms of car UI control - probably "home" to immediately show the standard dashboard display (or "On"/"Accept"), and "Off"/"Reject" for rapid turning off of things, like audio, or rejecting incoming phone calls to the in-car phone.
Note that they should be on the front of the steering wheel, because behind the steering wheel we already have the stalk controllers, and gear changers on more advanced manual cars.
Good post, and certainly describes the future of the car dashboard - hopefully in the near term rather than the long term!
Certainly a single display can replace all of the current dials, and also instead of, e.g., "Engine Warning" icon lighting up, it can say "Your O2 sensor is broken". When using steering wheel functions (only buttons needed are "function select" and "home (back to standard dash display)" ("up"/"down","home", left hand side of steering wheel) and "function adjust" ("up"/"down"/"disable", right hand side of steering wheel)) or voice control, the display can alter to show what you're changing directly, or even better it can be reflected off of the windscreen so the driver's eyes are never off the road. Maybe a "back" button. Hmm, pretty close to the buttons on an Android phone really.
All of the centre console gubbins can be eradicated. Who needs a bulky CD player when you can slot in a $20 32GB SD card with your entire music collection on it, or just have the car get the music off your phone/tablet (which in turn could be pulling it from your server at home)?
And current smartphone platforms are more than adequate for all this already, from a hardware point of view, but maybe the software isn't quite there yet for car control. Still, the latest version of Eclipse is available in a version for car application development, so things are clearly moving in the right direction.
I think the primary input has to be voice, with steering wheel buttons as a backup. Using buttons to select using the dash display will still take the driver's eyes off the road, whereas "turn on air conditioning", "volume down 50%" simply won't. Even if you need a "speech control" button on the steering wheel.
In fact, the Microsoft Steering Wheel is 100% buttons, all square and different colours, each controlling directly their own function.
Evidence for what argument? That the guy posted a death threat online, targeted at an Olympic competitor personally? I gave that.
Our police here in the UK have not yet developed pre-crime detection technology, so when they are shown a death threat against an Olympic competitor, it is inevitable that they are going to have to investigate it to ascertain the actual level of danger posed by the person making the threat. And if they want to question the guy once they've found him, they're going to arrest him!
The real question is where the case goes from here, now they know it's just a trash talking idiot. Will he get released with a police warning or caution, or will he end up going through the rigmarole of court, like the Twitter Joke Trial?
Once a threat against a person is made, the police can be called to investigate it more. This is what has happened, they've arrested the guy to question him.
He hasn't so far been charged, nor has the case matured in any way and been passed to the CPS to decide whether to prosecute.
At the time the tweets were made, the police don't know if it's a bad-mouthing 17 year old boy, or someone nearing a personal "John Holmes" moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Wish I had got a free computer when I went to university there. They should buy all their ex-compsci-students one as well, IMO.
Free PC + £100 of mouse/keyboard/SD/monitor is a lot cheaper than a full PC. However I suspect that most development will be done on a main PC cross-compiling to the device.
And this hardware will provide a baseline computing platform to teach upon.
Yeah, and we can all live as nomads without housing as well, but I'm sure the first person to wrap a few bearskins over a wooden frame would be thought of as innovative by modern standards.
I'm sure that people understand that innovation isn't a black and white thing, and that some things are more innovative than others. Hence "the best thing since sliced bread" - i.e., something can be innovative but not as innovative as something else.
In the long term, something is innovative if we cannot live our daily lives without it. For example - indoor plumbing, light bulbs. In terms of always available communication the mobile phone was completely innovative. And the smartphone merely enhanced that and merged in myriad other devices into the single unit. A total innovation in itself, and making that conglomeration of functionalities usable in itself is clearly an innovation.
But maybe not as innovative as pre-sliced bread.
(note, I don't actually think that pre-sliced bread is that innovative, but maybe the means by which it can be pre-sliced and then not go solid or stale quickly is.)
Total data centre power consumption is a major problem. We have the space in the racks for more servers, but no more power. In that case getting (example figures) 50% of the CPU power at 25% of the power consumption is totally worth it.
The problem for these ARM servers is whether a 64-core cluster in 150W beats a quad-core low-power x86 server in 150W. "Beating" in this situation means either performance, cost or both.
If travel is significant, you need to reduce the instances of that travel. So 4 or 3 day work week.
8 hours x 5 day = 40 hours. I guess 4 days of 10 hours would be the solution for you. That saves you 2 hours a week of tedious travelling. Although if you like reading, travelling isn't all that bad.
Also, leave on time and don't care what other people think. Or aren't you worth it? Also, to be honest, 8 hours sleep is not common in the modern day. Let's call it 7.
Buy a thermos and have your coffee on the bus in the morning instead of at home. I found waiting for coffee to cool led to internet usage and being far later to leave the house.
At the end of this, you have a three day weekend, but only 4 hours to yourself the other four days. IMO the three day weekend is worth it, and you'll be refreshed enough to do 10 hours work in 8 hours at work - although getting them to cut you down to a 4x8 work pattern will be impossible!
I agree that 6 hours of work seems to be a good amount of work that can be done in a day. This is work beyond what you need to do every day - housework, etc.
I have recently had a baby. The baby can take an extra hour of work in the evening when I get home, and I have noticed that this means I am getting less done at my place of employment. Even though I am in work for nine hours a day five days a week. You wouldn't find me at work longer than that on a regular basis either. Been there, done that, you don't get rewarded. 8-7 jobs (like yours?) can fuck right off. I hope you are getting a per-hour rate to make it worthwhile.
Indeed my effectiveness at work is probably best after a three day weekend. I suspect that I'd probably be more effective overall working a four day week, even without stretching the hours worked each day.
When I started off in the big world of work my first company did a presentation about the three eights. Eight hours sleep. Eight hours work. Eight hours to yourself. This is what they deemed the ideal breakdown for optimum performance. People would get in at 9am, and leave between 5pm and 6pm, and they'd fill those hours with fairly productive work from what I remember. Good canteen too.
As long as I get paid for them, and as long as it doesn't become a regular event, it is fine.
Overtime - very rare in salaries industries such as IT.
Bosses that extrapolate that you have done an all-nighter into being able to do it regularly: Very common.
You are lucky that your boss understands this and protects you from his bosses. Not everyone is.
I don't think that this application is for you, an experienced driver with a £250 annual insurance premium.
This app is for younger drivers with >£1000 insurance premiums, where £20 of fuel is worth it to save £200. That's if they can stop themselves cruising down the motorway at 100mph at 2am because the road is so empty. Note that these young drivers will be in older, cheaper cars without cruise control too.
The only way around it is for the device to either mark down late night driving, or to require driving samples at specific times of the day, or for the device to take small samples totalling 200 miles from 1000 miles of driving - which would go some way to avoid the monitoring issue too.
Not only are secondary roads more dangerous, they're significantly more dangerous. Highways are very safe overall.
This scheme will work if Aviva play it right, not only because it will give a significant discount, but that young people (who are most likely to get into an accident) like to think they're great at driving, and will do anything to prove it to their peer group. Aviva should give out window stickers "I'm teh awesumist driva" so they can display their prowess whilst they drive in circles at night playing dubstep.
I wonder if they system requires the driver to drive at certain times of the day to get a representative sample, and to avoid the "200 miles of motorway driving at night" workaround.
Diplomatic Segway?
And the only way to achieve that would be to storm the embassy - I doubt that Ecuador would let a few policemen into the embassy just because of some UK law, when the Embassy is Ecuadorian sovereign soil. So the only way to get Assange out of the embassy would be to forcibly storm it. And regardless of the threat, it's totally unlikely that this would happen, although David Cameron and friends are quite thick and don't seem to consider the ramifications of their actions.
Whilst I am sure that this comes down to some prissy high-ranking civil servant in the UK writing something that has correctly been seen as a very serious threat, it shouldn't have happened. This is why the civil service is rushing around trying to smooth it over.
What the incident does do is force Ecuador to grant Assange the asylum he has requested, because not granting it now would be seen as caving in to this threat. So in effect the letter is counter-productive. It does still leave the problem of removing Assange from the embassy and relocating him to Ecuador - I don't know how much protection diplomatic vehicles and diplomatic escorts have.
Unless, of course, the UK just wants Assange out of the country by any means, and engineering this setup will achieve that.
As the law that would allow the embassy to be "de-embassied" is from after 1984, I fail to see your point. Indeed it is likely that the law was brought in at least partially because of this incident.
I don't think you understand the concept of "universal healthcare" at all. All you are interested in is yourself. So you earn enough to pay for private healthcare in the US. WHOOPEE! We all know that most people don't earn enough in the US to get the level of treatment you received. And then you used up your savings because *shock horror* the insurance doesn't really cover the costs at all. Yet you think this is great. Incredible reasoning.
Also, you can get private healthcare in the UK if you choose and pay for it. It's not like you are forced to use the NHS.
For what it provides, the NHS is incredibly cost efficient. And it provides a lot. Sadly this won't be the case in a few years because the Conservative government (the LibDem portion of the coalition is so minor, we know who is driving these horrendous changes) over here is intent on fulfilling their 60 year old wet dream of dismantling it and replacing it with costly private mechanisms - that no doubt the MPs and their friends will have their sticky greedy fingers in.
No one wants a US-style (aka built by and for private insurance companies) healthcare "system" (in quotes because it really doesn't work over here) in the UK.
David Cameron and Andrew Lansley do.
But they're bending over backwards for the private corporate entities that would be running it.
The NHS is extremely cost effective, especially when compared to private heathcare regimes such as the US has.
Cheers! Nice. Also the non Ninja version: http://www.keyboardco.com/keyboard_details.asp?PRODUCT=804
It's got to beat the mushy "lenovo KU0225" I'm using at work that just puts me off doing anything.
Maybe I'll treat myself to this...
If you're going to spend $110 on a keyboard... then why not wait a little longer and spend $150 on the best one that best matches your requirements?
And one that doesn't have a cranky USB port either.
Personally I'm not a fan of the numeric keypad, I never use it myself and it gets in the way most of the time. However I do like having a full-size cursor key setup. I hate media keys. Rarely use function keys. What is the best mechanical keyboard for these requirements (UK layout, screw that tiny return key on US keyboards)?
I believe F1 steering wheels have all the functions on them, in the form of buttons: http://www.formula1.com/inside_f1/understanding_the_sport/5287.html
I'm sure they know the position of those buttons off by heart though, but that's their job! I'm also sure that the buttons are placed in the best place for them to use them whilst retaining a grip on the wheel, through the gloves, whilst keeping their eyes on the road. Maybe I'm nitpicking myself now!
However there is a good argument to be made for dials. Dials are very intuitive, and easy to find with your hand without looking. Buttons less so unless they're already under your hand (e.g., a remote control is usable because you have it in your hand and know where the individual buttons are, helped along by button shape).
I think that buttons on a steering wheel, in an accessible place to use without moving your hand from the recommended position, are a solution worth considering. And as many steering wheels already have media controls on them it's not far to extrapolate more generalised controls from them controlling a UI that's directly in front of the driver's eyes.
One of the main points of the discussion is about removing driver functions from the centre console, especially since touchscreens have started appearing there, and as the article and other posters have said - they're a really bad idea. In addition because a lot of the centre console functionality is no longer required, why not get rid of it entirely (or have a stack of cup holders :p) and save money, with all the separate interfaces replaced by one on the display UI on the dash?
I'm sure the car manufacturers have been working on this stuff for a very long time already though, so one of them is going to get it right eventually.
I think you've missed pretty much all the points I was trying to make in your quest to nitpick.
we're talking about large powerful vehicles which can kill people if the driver is distracted by playing around with silly technology-for-its-own-sake gimmicks
The point about voice control and steering wheel controls is to REDUCE DISTRACTION over the current UIs, and especially reduce the amoutn of time the driver is looking away from the road.
so you change the radio station and suddenly your speedo vanishes
I guess there's a patent or something preventing the ability to show multiple things on a display at once. Hint - the speedo can remain, but maybe the less frequently used dials can temporarily be replaced with the tool-specific UI. How often do you look at the rev counter, temperature or fuel gauge? How often do you look at them whilst you are looking at the radio to change station/CD/volume?
Maybe using the example of volume control wasn't sensible, but I had the naive thought that Slashdot readers could extrapolate or imagine more complex use cases, such as configuring the in-built GPS.
And WHOOSH for missing a joke too.
We're talking about voice control for non-simple UIs within a car environment, where the driver should be concentrating on the road and not looking and moving hands around a physical or touchscreen UI.
We're not talking about setting the volume on your home hifi, or configuring the microwave.
Or is your car a "household device"? You must have wide hallways.
Clearly it would be a voice input system that actually works in the car environment, built into the car (not your phone). A pair of microphones (one for noise cancellation) in the steering wheel would probably do the job.
Clearly programming the GPS with "Find me directions to XYZ" is far easier than navigating a UI with a few buttons, maybe using a touchscreen to get the destination in.
Definitely, in my mind the best place is on the steering wheel, in a line defined by the sweep of your thumb. You could probably fit four on either side of the steering wheel. The default resting place for your thumb should have the most important button in terms of car UI control - probably "home" to immediately show the standard dashboard display (or "On"/"Accept"), and "Off"/"Reject" for rapid turning off of things, like audio, or rejecting incoming phone calls to the in-car phone.
Note that they should be on the front of the steering wheel, because behind the steering wheel we already have the stalk controllers, and gear changers on more advanced manual cars.
Good post, and certainly describes the future of the car dashboard - hopefully in the near term rather than the long term!
Certainly a single display can replace all of the current dials, and also instead of, e.g., "Engine Warning" icon lighting up, it can say "Your O2 sensor is broken". When using steering wheel functions (only buttons needed are "function select" and "home (back to standard dash display)" ("up"/"down","home", left hand side of steering wheel) and "function adjust" ("up"/"down"/"disable", right hand side of steering wheel)) or voice control, the display can alter to show what you're changing directly, or even better it can be reflected off of the windscreen so the driver's eyes are never off the road. Maybe a "back" button. Hmm, pretty close to the buttons on an Android phone really.
All of the centre console gubbins can be eradicated. Who needs a bulky CD player when you can slot in a $20 32GB SD card with your entire music collection on it, or just have the car get the music off your phone/tablet (which in turn could be pulling it from your server at home)?
And current smartphone platforms are more than adequate for all this already, from a hardware point of view, but maybe the software isn't quite there yet for car control. Still, the latest version of Eclipse is available in a version for car application development, so things are clearly moving in the right direction.
I think the primary input has to be voice, with steering wheel buttons as a backup. Using buttons to select using the dash display will still take the driver's eyes off the road, whereas "turn on air conditioning", "volume down 50%" simply won't. Even if you need a "speech control" button on the steering wheel.
In fact, the Microsoft Steering Wheel is 100% buttons, all square and different colours, each controlling directly their own function.
This supports more of your assertions, I believe: http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/rileyy69-aka-reece-of-weymouth-and.html
Evidence for what argument? That the guy posted a death threat online, targeted at an Olympic competitor personally? I gave that.
Our police here in the UK have not yet developed pre-crime detection technology, so when they are shown a death threat against an Olympic competitor, it is inevitable that they are going to have to investigate it to ascertain the actual level of danger posed by the person making the threat. And if they want to question the guy once they've found him, they're going to arrest him!
The real question is where the case goes from here, now they know it's just a trash talking idiot. Will he get released with a police warning or caution, or will he end up going through the rigmarole of court, like the Twitter Joke Trial?
FYI, said tweet was aimed directly at Daley. It was subsequently deleted. That's why that link doesn't show it. This does: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/30/tom-daley-twitter-troll-dead-dad-olympics-london-2012_n_1720838.html
Once a threat against a person is made, the police can be called to investigate it more. This is what has happened, they've arrested the guy to question him.
He hasn't so far been charged, nor has the case matured in any way and been passed to the CPS to decide whether to prosecute.
At the time the tweets were made, the police don't know if it's a bad-mouthing 17 year old boy, or someone nearing a personal "John Holmes" moment.