Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
""... the Daily Mail reports.""
But you're missing the whole "English/Welshman's home is his castle/small businessman/state interference" vibe which sends DM frothing at the mouth for different reasons.
Now if had some photogenic teenage daughters as well...*
*Regular DM online readers know what I'm talking about.
"That implies that once they have swapped out their 50 loaner batteries they have to wait for one of them to come back before they can serve their 51st customer."
You are assuming that they will not charge any of the batteries they have swapped out and will simply stock up until re-collected or sent to another station for collection by their owner.
I don't think that's correct.
"Planning any non-trivial trip with the constraints that you have to visit all of your destinations without running out of charge AND also finish up with your original battery pack is an NP-hard problem. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain."
Probably better with the "joke" icon, unless you can prove your assertion.
"Seriously... it becomes impractical for a station to do this.. and there is no way to track if the battery is older, newer, what's the price if newer, what does the station do with the older..."
You have no idea what you're talking about.
This is not a D cell. It's a major subsystem which may or may not have inbuilt electronics ranging from an EPROM that gets up dated with every charge data/duration to its own processor.
IOW the battery tells the charge station all about itself. Otherwise it will have a bar code or RFID that will pull up its entire known life history and update it accordingly.
The first option allows more charging station autonomy, the second should give a more detailed service history and prediction of battery life expectancy. Either is viable.
"All EV's are f-ugly and I wouldn't be seen dead in one."
"OK the Roadster is pretty good looking but I can't afford it"
"OK the S class is affordable but it does not have the range I need for my life"
"OK the (updated) network of charging stations in the sat nav helps but it will take me hours to charge (for free)"
"OK so I can change the whole battery faster than some cars can fill up at 1/2 the price but I have to come back here to collect my (recharged) pack for free?"
I'm hearing a rather whiny note here, but it's not coming from the engine compartment.
"It would add context to mention this that crisis and price gouging scheme was made possible by "free market" deregulation. And also to note that the total cost to California is over 50 billion, and that the bankruptcy of Enron meant it only paid 202 million back or about 1-2%. The Enron records were destroyed when Bldg 7 was demolished on 9/11, along with DOD records needed to investigate what happened to the 2.3 trillion Rumsfeld said was missing on 9/10."
And that's your first ever post to this site.
Because if it is then they can pick up a bunch of charging stations cheap.
Giving people the choice between a free (but battery hammering) charging technology or a charged (but fast) swap system is a smart move. If Tesla can leverage this and get it adopted by other mfgs they can become major players in the infrastructure market. Why build your own when you can license or rent use of some one else infrastructure?
Thumbs up for the idea.
"These cars can only race any distance as a hybrid not as a true EV. Audi has been doing well with their hybrid so Nissan figures they might as well cash in on the PR. The sales figure totals for all EVs combined is so insignificant as to be a joke. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand you need a really long power cable to drive these cars more than in the city."
There's a fine line between cutting edge humour using exaggeration for comic effect and coming across as an idiot.
Your downvotes suggest you might like to refine your writing style?
"Most of the 'hybrid' racing cards are using KERS. They aren't even remotely similar to the hybrid road cars like the Prius. Apples meet oranges."
In that case, depending on wheather they are allowed this season all F1 cars would be "hybrids."
I think you need a bit more storage than that to qualify at Le Mans as a hybrid.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/21/tesla_battery_swap_tech/
Perhaps those pit stops may be a bit shorter than you think.
And getting you technical information from Top Gear is, shall we say, unwise?
But to me the really interesting point just slipped out.
"There have been hybrid electric cars competing in the race for the last four years and they now dominate the race"
From "WTF, it's a hybrid?" to being front runners in 4 years is pretty impressive. sure it's impossible to say how much of that tech will make it to normal road cars but its a hell of an achievement.
With 80% in the US and 40% in the UK it sounds like a hell of a lot of the high volume stuff is being done by the machines.
And (it appears) they can be fooled easily
I'd suggest what really stuffs the market is the high frequency trading and high frequency cancellation of those trades.
Not to mention that positive feedback phenomena which can make trading so exciting.
It costs a f**k of a lot of money to duplicate the functions and then test the software, to confirm you have.
You cannot overestimate how far a bank will go to avoid having to re-implement a system, especially a system that has been running reliably for decades.
BTW what's tended to happen was support systems were added over the years. Firstly as applications on the mainframe, then (typically) on DEC VMS boxes, then on to various flavours of Unix, then on Windows (and Linux) servers, with rising levels of virtualisation as that technology has improved.
Would reverse engineering this "architecture" to re-factor the system so some modules were brought "closer" together be a good idea? Probably.
Is it going to happen. Probably not.
So why replace it?
IIRC Assembler had a big part to play supporting ATM's on OS/370, but that decades ago due to response speed and number of them. Hard to believe it's still a key tool in the MF developers arsenal.
Back in the day Cybermation built an awesome mainframe scheduler.
It was the mother of all TSR's. The devs (patching a live mainframe OS) must have been quite special.
Sadly CA bought them and the rest is history.
But the Information Commissioner has said that "data protection" is a BS excuse.
I think he might be in a position to knowledgeably comment on the issue.
So someone knows who said "This report can never see the light of day."
And it looks like (if the CQC wants to salvage any reputation for doing its job properly they'd better fill in the blanks now.).
I suspect HR at nominet might already know the answer to that question..
However until it's made public I'm not happy.
That is not an argument to give up.
The internet protocols made some assumptions which are no longer valid.
All users were authorized to use the internet by default (no bad guys) and all users knew what they were doing and the operator (back then mostly governments) is not interested in peeking.
None of these can be relied upon any more, despite the fact there is no legitimate reason for 24/7/365 surveillance of all internet traffic in a country that still believes in the presumption of innocence.
It's time for a new generation of protocols which support privacy and security. So I don't have to say who I am all the time but when I identify myself it really can only be me.
IOW it's time to make the egg "hard boiled"
"I, for one, have only every actually done 3 interviews sitting on the employer side of the desk. I find the information about what worked (and didn't) for Google helpful. Doubly so now that I have my own company and it's future growth to worry abou"
Let me suggest that if their qualification are important to their ability to do the job people actually check them because people have a tend to err, lie.
For the rest may I suggest you set up a dummy environment and get them to actually test their skills. It's going to be time consuming but with virtual machines should be fairly easy to re-set for the next candidate.
"I was having visions of them solving the radiation exposure problem by hollowing out a large enough asteroid for Earth-Mars trips."
It may not look very sleek but there's a lot to be said for being inside a large fresh water tank inside about 10m of rock
It's radiation protection level is formidable
But, no, that's not what Con-gress wants.
It's the Appropriations act that dishes out the real cash.
There will also be a Senate version of this and the White house will have a version as well.
Do you ever feel that the idea in "Eagle Eye" for a decapitation strike on the US leadership's only flaw
was it didn't take out the Congress and Senate as well?
Issiah Berlin's comment about "negative" and "positive" freedom seems rarely more obvious.
"They threw out all the technical schematics of the Saturn V etc - so they are starting from scratch and they'll never get the wherewithal to overtake China"
That's a UL. The schematics exist and are IIRC in a warehouse in Kansas City.
The Moon could like deep space give experience of long term closed loop life support and (possibly) the use of small(ish) nuclear reactor power systems.
But so could the asteroid mission. What it can't give is experience of work well outside the Earth Moon system.
But your right trouble comes when the Legislature sets the goals.
This uses both a very clever computer generated hologram (optical phase plate) to give the doughnut beam and also some very clever chemistry to deliver 2 separate photo activated reactions.
Note that's lambda/42 and that's without a)UHV system and b)a $10m+ synchrotron.
The downsides are you can't write 2 lines very close together and its direct write (serial) processing.
OTOH what if you write a 300mm wafer with a 100 simultaneous beams?
The holy grail of optical storage? I think not. But damm clever and with lots of potential. Worth a thumbs up.
"New stuff means an extended shutdown and recertification."
This is the biggie with certain embedded tasks, space, defense, nuclear and transport being the main ones.
It's why jet engine controllers still run with Z80s for example.
It's good enough to get the job done (but the devs may have had to use some very clever tricks to a) Handle complex tasks with the available processing power and required response times and b) Prove their solution meets the task constraints.
The trouble really starts when the documentation goes "missing."
The PDP 11 (like the PARC Alto) had a main processor built from standard 4 bit TTL "ALU" parts and their companion "register file." So 2nd, 3rd,4th sourced. I'm not sure how many mfg still list them on their available list in the old standard 0.1" pin spacing.
El Reg ran a story that Chorus (formerly British Steel) ran them for controlling all sorts of bits of their rolling mills but I can't recall if they are
I think the core role for this task is the refueling robots for the CANDU reactors. CANDU allows "on load" refuelling. The robots work in pairs locked onto each end of the pressurized pipes that carry the fuel and heavy water coolant/moderator. They then pressurize their internal storage areas, open the ends and one pushes new fuel bundles in while the other stores the old ones, before sealing the ends. However CANDU have been working on new designs with different fuel mixes (CANDU's special sauce (C Lewis Page) is that it's run with unenriched Uranium, which is much cheaper and does not need a bomb making enrichment facility) and new fuel bundle geometries, so time for a software upgrade.
And 128 users on a PDP 11/70. Certain customers ran bespoke OSes in the early 90s that could get 300+ when VMS could only support about less than 20 on the same spec.
Note for embedded use this is likely to be RSX rather than VMS, which also hosted the ICI developed RTL/2, which was partly what hosted the BBC CEEFAX service for decades.
Yes, it's an anorak.
"I got home and found my boss in bed with my wife.
"WTF is going on?" I yelled.
"Remember when you said you would do anything for that promotion?"
"Yes..?" I replied.
"Get undressed, when I have finished with her, you're next...""
And in a similar vein buying a nice house
"The problem here is that that powerful bastard almost certainly didn't get to be a powerful bastard by being even-handed, thoughtful and taking the flak for his fuckups, but by hoovering the ceiling[1]."
[1] A process that involves sucking up and all the crap travelling downwards.
I will have to remember that one.
The behaviour definitely sounds familiar....
"The trouble started when a) we needed to bring more people in & found out the going rate at that time for the job and b) next pay round time came & I was offered slightly under inflation. I left soon after that."
Older and a little wiser.
You just try to avoid doing it again.
"I left very soon after and took holiday the day I handed in my notice, apparently the boss was seen with his head in his hands asking what they would have to do to keep me on as I was "invaluable"."
The answer to that BS is "Look me in the eye and tell me if you were in my shoes and know what I know about the pay rates round here you would not be doing exactly what I'm doing."
If they say "I would stay" you know they are either a)An idiot b)A psychopath who will lie through their teeth.
If their honest they might be worth staying in touch with.
"Is the USA included in this list of 'data secure destinations'? Inquiring minds want to know..."
Yes. Probably why the DVLA sent it's driving test data there on a thumb drive (which got lost) and the last 2 UK national censuses were processed by Lochheed Martin, also in the US.
I think Israel is also "trusted."
"The PNC doesn't hold vehicle information. That's the DVLA database which is a completely separate system. Get your facts right."
True
PNC2 holds the "Stolen and suspect vehicle index."
There are plenty of other reasons for a vehicle to be on the PNC apart from being stolen.
Which means either you don't know as much as you think you do, or you're being misleading.
"Honest question: how does this database's so-called "due process" square with the EU "right to be forgotten"? I'll leave the question of "should such a database exist" for other threads, but I do wonder how "unproven or non-essential-to-task personally identifiable information" can be stored indefinitely against someone's will?"
Much the same way that number plate recognition data is stored for (IIRC) up to 5 yrs in the UK for no very good reason, other than "Because we can."
As you might have guessed the Police National Computer (actually PNC2, as they retired the original, Siemens I think, mainframe years ago) runs multiple applications and databases.
However the UK has a thing called "The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act" which allows that for a lot of crimes after a period (IIRC 8 years) a conviction is "spent" and you don't have to include it on an employment application. That does not include sex crimes and I'm fairly sure murder and armed robbery, but it supports the idea that you have "paid your debt to society" already and persecution over events nearly a decade ago (at least) should not be forgotten in most cases.
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