Posts by Paul Stephenson

Li-titanate storage balances Indianapolis power grid

@John

As i understand it you can't over produce on the grid, supply has to equal demand, hence the need for peaking plants, etc, instant on hydro and the likes for when we have shortfall.

locally stored/powered?

Your fast charge fore-court could be locally powered by a wind turbine as wella sa grid connection. on a windy day the charge capacity could be say 8 cars simultaneously, however on non windy days (the few we have) the capacity decreases to 2 or 4 whichever the grid allows.

the garage could also have some of these battery's anyway, so that when it's 8am and everyone wants to recharge thier car local stored capacity is available which recharges once the full car drives away, thus locally supplying the peak demand from a smaller grid feed. caching as it where.

Daily Mail loses employee info

technical problem?

How the hell does a technical problem result in a laptop being knicked?

I suspect that this will not be a front page spread in thier own paper, unlike when anyone else loses similar information :)

Orange tells customers they are now 'partners'

@Coward

Occasionally. This one caught my attention due to a nice big Vodafone logo.

lol @ ads

Nice big vodafone advert accomanied this article for me. Genius.

Mini-Me sues online celebrity muckraker over 'stolen' sex tape

@Steve

I'm sure a legoman would be adequate for mini-me, compared to playmobil figures. :)

North Carolina will pay IBM $750,000 for 10 jobs

local spending

They could stipulate in the terms of the agreement that contract work has to be local too, and supplies where possible locally sourced so the majority of the $362M goes into the local economy.

Adobe swings out Acrobat 9

Do my eye's deceive me?

or did amanfromMars just post something in more or less plain english? :O

@Alan, One day, we can but hope that price conversion does not equate to swapping the dollar sign. I doubt it will happen, but one can hope!

Ofcom chairman will quit next Easter

Teeth

Agree'd, the new blood better have some teeth and give this 'outfit' a good shake up.

Force listeners onto DAB by killing FM

DAB as standard for cars

The key to this would be getting DAB as standard in cars, as let's face it, unless it starts to happen in cars there's no way the general public will allow FM to be switched off. I certainly wouldn't be happy about being forced to upgrade my car stereo right now, just for the same of listening to the one radio station I use in the car. I'd give up on radio and just stick to my iPod probably unless Vauxhall start shipping the radio's dirt cheap after market :)

Virgin Media collects customer banking details on CD, then loses it

Did Virgin...

employ any recently fired Governement employee's perchance?

Yahoo! execs! stick! it! to! the! man!

@How much

Totally depends on the company - we've got 65 and we're worth about half a billion. Powerstation's don't come cheap :)

@Steven Raith

Probably because they know the company isn't going belly up *or* that when they do then Gov.uk will do a northern rock and bail them out.

British Columbia stray foot tally hits six

Leg?

"The object will ultimately be examined by a forensic pathologist in attempts to determine the source of the foot"

Surely the source of the foot was a leg?

UK electricity crisis over - for now

@pctechxp

You seemed to have missed the point that they fail _safe_, and no one bit of kit has only two sensors. I forget the technical term for it but you would normally have three sensors arranged in a way so that you always count on the response of the majority and not a single individual or the three as a whole. So essentially if a sensor said "hey ho meltdown ahoy!" the site would fail safe faster than a really really fast thing!

I would suspect in the case of a meltdown a whole bunch of sensors would be going damnwell crazy.

Sadly, the cheese eating surrender monkey's have a modern fleet of nuke running already, so they kinda have the edge on experience.

Been to the FHC site (well, Dinorwig), very interesting place but actually a net consumer of electrickery, which is a bit of a mind screw when it's a power station.

National Grid computers locked-down in outage cock-up

Likely to be seperate lans.

I'd have expected, and was confirmed above by someone that the grid control system and office networks are seperate networks, as is typical of pretty much every powerstation in the UK, it certainly is at the one I work in. If it wasn't - i'd be worried that they sit users on the same network as the control system. There is also a whole other DR site dedicated to controlling the grid, which if they both shared a central infrastructure would kinda defeat the purpose of DR.....

I've thankfully never experienced an outsourced infrastructure, but for friends who have it's generally a horror story.

Went to NGC HQ once, 'mission control' (real name unknown but its the grid managmeent room) is a cool place, very James Bond esque :)