Posts by Steve 53

UK government plays power broker with small modular reactor suitors

Re: Hmm

Good pumped storage sites are hard to find, although there are a number of new projects (Drax are looking to double the output from Cruachan, although not necessarily storage capacity. Projects for Loch Ness). Pumped and Lithium are *great* at dealing with a dinner time peak, but we've just had a couple of weeks of Dunkelflaute and it's unlikely we can store anything like enough to deal with that, even with expansion of pumped storage, compressed gas and soforth.

There are some arguments for hydrogen for winter storage. As we stop putting ethanol into petrol maybe that's a winter storage option. But gas is very, very convenient as backup for intermittent renewables

Re: Hmm

The key problem with privately funding a large infrastructure problem is cost of borrowing and risk. We're paying a huge amount of money for the Hinkley Point reactors because the government wants to take zero risk with the project, it's pseudo privately funded (EDF being owned by the French state), and the cost of that finance reflects the very real risk that the reactor will be delivered late and over budget. It takes a long time and a lot of interest payments before a nuclear reactor will produce any usable energy.

Back when we did the large generation of UK nuclear reactors (AGRs in the 70s, Sizewell B in the 80s), the government took the risk and borrowed at a relatively low cost. Some reactors were massively late (Dungeness B in particular, was a shitshow of epic proportions), some only somewhat late. But the government got the reactors in the end, and the cost to finance was overall much lower.

Re: True, but pity they are all s**t

It depends why you're looking at SMRs in the first place. The problems with nuclear are build time and risk (primarily of defects which cause delay) which tends to result in high costs. If the SMRs can be delivered more quickly with lower likelihood of defects (Eg faulty welds, bad concrete pours, etc), then thermal efficiency is potentially a reasonable tradeoff vs a multi-year delayed EPR.

PWR vs "advanced" designs likely follows similar logic. Known technology is likely to deploy quicker with fewer risks

Gates-backed nuclear plant breaks ground without guarantee it'll have fuel

Re: Liquid Sodium. Really?

"It worked fine in France with Phenix and Super Phenix..". If you call those availability factors, corrosion issues and unexplained transients fine, then sure...

Re: Liquid Sodium. Really?

Pretty much my feelings. Sodium reactors have a long history of designers saying "Trust me bro, this one totally won't catch fire" followed by them promptly catching on fire... Hell, the Russians basically designed the things to be easily replaceable when they catch fire...

Tesla layoff circus runs into fourth week with another round of cuts

Re: Clown.....

Prices went up massively in the energy crisis, and only Teslas have come back down substantially (Ionity kind of have second place). Others have actually continued to rise (Gridserve).

There is an element of cost to service debt having gone up, and the CPOs are making huge investments. But charging more than the equivalent for petrol and forming a little cartel where nobody drops their prices... It's not overall going to help EV adoption

To misquote IBM

"A billionaire can never be held accountable

Therefore a billionaire must never make a management decision"

(Not OC)

Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels

Re: terminology

Cool.

They're actually a pretty efficient way of doing things when driving.

The octovalve is a level of over-engineering that other companies can only dream of. It's extremely good at shunting heat around, eg in the winter the heat from the AP computer, motor inverters, etc will end up being dumped in the cabin and/or battery.

The problem comes when you want to run the compute on it's own, for example when in sentry mode or when charging (That has a 300w overhead as well, because it needs to run the waterpump to cool the onboard charger).

And, privacy settings on a Tesla, I mean, there are settings available.. But if you want things like... navigation.. to work, you're going to to adjust the privacy settings.

I've used that terminology as that's the terminology tesla use for their compute architecture, and making reference to elements of their architecture was required for the argument to be coherent.

Not really, the compute is about 300w*. A typical domestic charger is 7kw

* Approximate draw when running the compute stack for sentry mode, which means running coolant pumps, AP compute and MCU. Actual AP processor is reportedly about 72w, although it's hard to verify that from decent sources, or confirm if that's for both of the processors or each.

It sounds a nice idea, but it's not something they designed the compute to do. (I'm assuming they're talking about the autopilot computer, which has meaningful compute power)

1) The autopilot computer is watercooled, which seems neat and efficient if you're driving the car and need to temperature control drive motors, battery packs, passengers, etc. But running the big waterpump just to cool the compute is a huge power overhead.

2) Waterpump and cooling system wear and tear, was it designed for 24x7 use? Is Tesla going to provide an extended warranty for those who (presumably) opt in

3) Flash use - was the MCU or the AP computer designed with the wear cycles for getting a constant stream of new data to crunch, or was it intended to receive an updated model about once a month (I suspect the later) and is Tesla going to provided an extended warranty

4) Charging - those with home charging might not be particularly fussed if their car chews through battery while sat on the driveway and recharged overnight. Those without home chargers, or away on the road may feel differently... I'd say charging cycles on the battery is unlikely to be a huge issue

5) Age of chips. Yes, they're mighty fine computers, but Telsa refreshes only about every 5 years, is the 5 year old AP chip in a 2 year old car actually worth the energy cost?

There might be some who would happily accept this for a small cut, but it's definitely one of those cases where owners would need to be able to opt in/out, and I doubt much serious thought has gone into the idea, the aim is simply to distract from the declining sales.

Nginx web server forked as Freenginx to escape corporate overlords

I've also been struggling to understand this. There is publicly available code, potentially in public use, which contains a security vulnerability.

Sure the responsible thing to do is to fix it, disclose and register a CVE so that venerable systems are patched?

I don't get why *not* disclosing is in any way a good or responsible thing to do, even if it's in a section marked experimental.

Bugs happen, it shouldn't be taken personally. It's the project's obligation to handle it properly so that users don't get owned. Or you could have a shitfit, and go fork a project on the basis that you don't want to make security disclosures?

Tesla batteries went from fully charged to fully disabled after botched patch, lawsuit claims

Re: Taxes

I think this was largely why the road charging scheme back 15 years ago didn't make it past debate. There is a natural aversion to having your car monitored in all locations, and it's not like they wouldn't hand the job over to Capita for them to leave it on an open S3 bucket...

Definitely no answer here which makes everybody happy, I'm just pointing out that retrofitting meters on every EV charger would be hard to do, and that Australia is already taxing EVs based on mileage (despite the obvious flaws, which would generally be less of an issue in the UK as it's unlikely this would be implemented in only a fraction of the country. Would make a European road trip a little less attractive, but edge case..)

Re: Taxes

>> Whilst you can trickle charge via a 13A outlet, all the new dedicated EV charging points are “intelligent”. Basically, they are controlled by a cloud service and an app. You register you car on the charging point, so it only charges registered EVs and the app and central server manage charging (both of EV and your bank account). As part of the smart grid, EV charging is treated differently to domestic usage, so can be separated. It is only a (intentional) small step to introduce differential pricing and taxation.

- Nothing stopping you having you having the mobile charger connected to a 32a IEC connector

- Some energy companies have offered discounts if you let them control your charging, but that's really up to you to agree

-- Generally the intent is to push charging away from peak times, which is good for the grid and bills overall

- They almost all use wifi, so change your wifi password and they're dumb chargers again

- The built in meters (Effectively embedded clamp meters) aren't calibrated, and you'd struggle to justify using them for billing

- The way a lot of chargers have been installed would make it physically difficult to retrofit a meter

- You can program them to connect to your own local control server if you wish

On the other hand, car odometers are recorded annually as part of an MOT. Thus far the Australian states which have implemented per mile tax have used this, with a few difficulties

- Can't differentiate in/out of state driving

- Clocking some cars is pretty trivial

Prices went up during the autumn energy prices, and haven't come back down. Either the charging companies hedged their electricity at a high price, or they're creaming off big profits (For re-investment I'm sure..)

The best priced "mainstream" charge provider is Gridserve at 69p/kWh. Nobody has blinked and cut their prices yet, but I suspect once one does, they'll all come tumbling down

Tesla superchargers today are are approximately 40p offpeak, 47p on peak (varies by location), most are still open only to Teslas, but other vehicles are welcome at a small portion for about 10p/kWh extra on the Tesla price, or £10/month. Telsa didn't hedge, and they've passed on a fair price to their customers. It's curious how they can do the decent thing in some scenarios, and yet in others royally screw over the customers

Military helicopter crash blamed on failure to apply software patch

We know from oh so many crash investigations that "normal procedure" can deviate from "documented procedure" over time.

No doubt the other chopper pilots are actually following the proper procedure now, and everybody is reminded regularly "Do this, and you might end up swimming", but it takes somebody experiencing the consequences to avoid little shortcuts. Hence the software patch was the best option, can't follow sloppy procedure if the system doesn't allow it

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

Re: "It is possible to pay a fixed, one-time fee to activate a monthly option permanently"

Devil's advocate, bear with me....

I get if they fit heated seats, and you have to carry those around with you then you should be able to use them. That's utter bullshit.

What's the difference between paying for GPS maps, and updated neural nets for Tesla Autopilot?

(On Telsa, map updates are free. Autopilot enhancements like lane change are the only real optional extra)

OK, you're paying data charges in the EU, but you can still roam free in, er, Iceland

Mobile reception is pretty good actually

Iceland is surprisingly good coverage. Even in the very underpopulated highlands we rarely lacked LTE

UK urged to choo-choo-choose hydrogen-powered trains in pursuit of carbon-neutral economic growth

Hydrogen is approximately 30% efficient, electricity in to electricity out, assuming no leakage or transport costs.

It's not a particularly efficient solution vs, say, lithium-ion batteries being swapped at stations with 80-90% efficiency.

That said, if we can generate it with offshore wind and avoid the significant costs of big fat electrical cables back from the wind farm, perhaps it can be made to make sense. "Off peak" nuclear, grid wind and soforth will likely eaten up to EV charging..

The question is how much can be economically produced, and if we need that for houses in urban areas with no room for ASHP/GSHP...

Tech contractor loses IR35 tribunal appeal: 'Right' to substitute didn't mean he could, say judges

Re: I'm going to go out on a limb...

Of course, as a full time employee I'd be getting notice / redundancy. As a contractor i would get very little. But other than that this seems reasonably balanced; you get a higher wage in exchange for limited job security, no pension contributions and no holiday, I don't see how this should affect the tax you pay.

Either contracting is made attractive to you because you're being paid more, and are in a financial position where you're comfortable with the risk of being let go at short notice / like the ability to leave a company at short notice, and the extra pay covers the perks you're not getting, OR you take paid employment, and the day rate for contractors go up due to supply and demand.

Yes, many large companies aren't paying their own share. Yes, that should be sorted. But that doesn't entitle you to argue you should pay less than the tax you owe.

The Wight stuff: Marconi and the island, when working remotely on wireless comms meant something very different

It's basically a crime to go in that direction and not visit the hovercraft museum at Lee-on-the-Solent, then take the IOW hovercraft over to Ryde...

Desperate Nominet chairman claims member vote to fire him would spark British government intervention

Re: I'm pondering how bad "government control" would really be

Such key national "assets" aren't for use on small things like Nominet, we need them on key national projects to make sure their "skills and wisdom" can affect the great british people on a national level

I'm pondering how bad "government control" would really be, assuming they wanted to run it as a simple non-profit registry...

Want your broadband fixed? Best write to your MP, UK's Zen Internet tells customer

Re: Clearly a maintenance schedule issue

As much as that "seems" to make sense, I suspect the failure rate is relatively low, and given there is a fibre rollout in progress it would probably involve replacing 10's of thousands of cabinets which are in reasonable condition and would remain so until the switchover.

Plus I suspect replacing a cab would be a substantial outage which would likely to result in residents with pitchforks in the current homeworking scenario.

The right thing to do here is be more ready to replace them once they start having issues...

Nominet claims effort to replace its board with 'safe hands' is invalid, refuses to put it to member vote

Re: a critical destabilising impact

I was also wondering how many techies would actually feel they need to down tools if their CEO was deposed. I very much doubt they're going to have a mass exodus....

LastPass to limit fans of free password manager to one device type only – computer or mobile – from next month

"The service is the best on the market for free users"

I would dispute that; Bitwarden has very few restrictions around free users, and charge much more reasonable annual fees for the limited premium features (Mostly advanced 2FA and TOTP). Some users sign up for premium just to support the developers.

While on a feature checkbox it's not quite got everything lastpass has, there are very few things missing. And generally, bitwarden executes the features it does have much better. When I left lasspass a few years ago, I didn't feel it had had any meaningful enhancements for years.

Lastpass is basically private equity trying to squeeze as much money as they can out of their users, hence price rises and policy changes...

Drone smashes through helicopter's windscreen and injures passenger

Based on the photo of the downed drone, It's a DJI Mavic Air 2 at 570g. Last I checked Chile require a parachute for anything over 700g but didn't have much by way of registration. Looks very similar to a Mavic 2, but the Mavic 2 has an upwards facing distance sensor on the back.

Surprised at the level of damage to the windscreen, less so at the general standard of drone photography. The Ocusync 2.0 on these drones allows control far beyond visual line of site, and once you're beyond VLOS you're only going to see a very limited forward view and no ability to hear a heli, so could easily be taken out by a heli from any direction other than the front.

Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button

I looked at the famous "Derby police peak district drone shaming" and cringed a bit after taking my A2 CofC, the shot taken above a car with people getting in and out made me wonder if there is an Article 241 question there... Could easily have derisked the shot by taking it from a 60 degree angle rather than 90.

Doesn't feel like they're doing appropriate risk assessments

UK network Three hikes pay-as-you-go rates by 400% to push punters to buy 'bundles'

Unlikely, this sort of BS happens far less often at the MVNO end of the market.

Re: Time for a complaint to Ofcom

I think that's reasonable on contract, but I don't think that's really necessary for PAYG contracts. I'm on three PAYG as my work SIM does most of the heavy lifting, and I'm rather annoyed by the increases, but I'm free to go wherever I want.

I would prefer if they were obliged to refund any outstanding call credit though. That aspect does feel unreasonable, even if it's only a fiver

Brit registrar 123-Reg begins 2021 in much the same way it ended 2020 – with DNS issues

This is not K8s on Istio with Space Thrusters and AI.. It's DNS hosting, stable technology for decades. How do you fuck this up so regularly.

Recommendation for Mythic Beasts for better features and a quiet life at more or less the same price...

AWS is fed up with tech that wasn’t built for clouds because it has a big 'blast radius' when things go awry

We've seen many occasions when a large DC-scale UPS fails to live up to it's name, and downs a whole DC. Equinix, BA to name ones in my recent memory.

A few servers going down is a lot more tolerable than a whole AZ, and with a larger number of devices UPS failures become a routine problem - much better than a very large one-off problem.

So, plenty of merit, until one of them catches fire or somesuch anyway...

SpaceX’s Starlink finally reveals its satellite broadband pricing for rural America: At $99 a month, it’s a good deal

To be fair, that's a lot to do with your choice of ISP, some content more heavily than others...

Re: Outside America

Remember that the Satellites will go over LATAM, and are a "bent pipe" design. This isn't as simple as selling spare capacity, it's that they can *only* serve LATAM customers when they're going over LATAM. So either sell the service at a country appropriate cost, or have them sit idle for a sizeable portion of their orbit.

The biggest barrier is the cost of kit, because that's the only thing which isn't "Sell it cheap, or don't sell it at all"

Working from home on Virgin Media's broadband? Too bad. Outage hits English capital

While the outage is obviously badly timed, heavy penalties for service outages will have unexpected outcome.

The expected outcome, of course, is that they're willing to pay more to put more resilience into the system in order to avoid the fines. This will sort of work, although it's likely that you'll see such costs passed onto the consumer.

The unexpected outcome is that the management team will start of have an unhealthy relationship with risk, suddenly upgrades are too risky to do, they end up on old software upgrades. Capacity upgrades are also risky, so they hold off on the capacity upgrades because they don't have financial penalties for capacity problems, but they do for outages.

The other problem is expectation of uninterrupted service on a consumer line. It's just not realistic that consumer services have 100% uptime; get a backup (4G router is cheap enough)

It's a free market, and IMHO the best thing you can do is jump ship if you don't like it. Virgin have had poor reliability with opaque service status messages (Our engineers are working to fix the problem as soon as possible...) since before they were virgin...

We moved to AAISP and are happier for it. Yes, some outages, normally very quick to advise of issues and generally pretty transparent with what went wrong and what they're doing to fix it. (Except DDOS attacks, for obvious reasons)

Raspberry Pi Foundation serves up an 8GB slice of mini-computing goodness

Re: Further back than that....

£75 is about the sort of price you'll start to see second hand NUCs. You're probably looking at a 3rd or 4th gen celeron or i3 with 4gb of ram at that sort of money, possibly with an older 120gb SSD, but if you're usecase is a linux server or desktop, you don't mind a bit higher power consumption and don't need GPIO (Which is probably more useful on a Pi Zero) then it'll run rings around it.

Of course I'm comparing new with second hand, but RPi tends to be for pragmatists..

Rogue ADT tech spied on hundreds of customers in their homes via CCTV – including me, says teen girl

Re: Camera in bedroom?

I suspect the salesman was bonused on the number of cameras installed / size of deal, so if they can persuade them that cameras in the bedrooms are 1) Safe 2) A good idea then they'll sell more cameras and make more money.

Only way to stop that is ADP having a corporate "No cameras in bedrooms FFS" policy, and even then the sales people will be grumpy about getting in the way of their ability to sell...

Magecart malware merrily sipped card details, evaded security scans on UK e-tailer Páramo for almost 8 months

Re: Wait

To be fair, they're using Paypal, not processing their own cards. The expectation is that paypal will take care of the security / PCI-DSS as the retailer will never handle to card details. Frankly Paypal shouldn't be offering the option to load in an iFrame - ie an environment they don't control the Javascript for

Broken your new Surface Go 2 already? Looks like it's a bit more repairable this time

Microsoft's update has added some much-needed horsepower

The "standard" pentium offering is a very, very small speed bump a 1.7ghz Kaby Lake process vs 1.6ghz. It was a moderately old design when the Go 1 was released, it's a very elderly processor now, and one which is noticeably slow even when being used for general web browsing.

All they've offered is the opportunity to spend an extra 90 quid (Only on the high end 128gb model) on a processor which isn't crippled by disabled turbo.

The surface go is a lovely machine, but £629 is an awful lot to spend on a machine which is only going to have tolerable performance.

Royal Navy nuclear submarine captain rapped for letting crew throw shoreside BBQ party

For the purposes of the act, I think it's entirely reasonable to consider the sailers to be members of the same household, given they've been in a tin can for months as ordered.. Providing they're quarantined, frankly it's not an issue if they organise a mass orgy on the dockside, let alone have a BBQ...

We need to apply common sense and science...

UK big five carriers bin wired broadband download quotas for as long as we're all stuck indoors

Interestingly, A&A (one of the few premium ISPs who have download quotas) beat ofcom to the punch by about 3 weeks. They're keeping quotas, but topping people up as needed. Seems to strike a decent balance between helping people with unusual traffic patterns due to Covid and keeping people accountable for their usage.

One of the few providers who beat themselves up if they have any packet loss due to congestion... But of course it needs subscribers who are invested in that idea as well.

Re: Stupidest Idea EVER!!

Few packages are actually have download limits, and it's unlikely the tiny fraction of users who have these packages (We're talking tight budgets here) are the sort of users who will suddenly download tonnes. Hell, we're probably talking about people with just a bit of DAS.

Probably not a problem...

Brother, can you spare a dime: Flickr owner sends mass-email begging for subscriptions

Re: "Sure, but they're providing the content"

Just because there is 1TB of disk space doesn't mean that the average user is going to use 1TB of disk space - as I said earlier, my usage was close to 4gb, which leaves a very fat margin for them at $49/year

Re: The Rubicon has already been crossed

It depends how you use Flickr of course, but the way I used it was to showcase my best shots, generally not in full resolution. While I do have ~500gb of photos taken over the years, only a tiny fraction of that ever saw Flickr. Looking at what I downloaded from Flickr when I evacuated, it was about 4gb for 12 years as a fairly avid user.

$49 gets you about 177Gb of standard S3 storage, assuming you don't want to do any intelligent tiering, infrequent access, etc. At retail I would have been costing them about $1.104 in storage a year, although AWS will of course cut special prices for people moving entire farms of storage over...

Of course, others might chose to use it as a backup solution, but even then AWS Glacier Deep Achieve is a cheaper option for anything up to about 4tb...

The Rubicon has already been crossed

This time last year, they blackmailed their users into either paying for pro, or having the majority of their photos deleted. I decided that $49 a year with a 25% discount for the first year wasn't something I could justify in perpetuity, so I let them delete the photos (I have my own copy, of course).

You'll be surprised to know that after deleting the majority of my photos, I'm not going to pay the same to keep the very limited selection of photos left.

They took a very hard line attitude, it was a gamble, it didn't pay off. (And I have paid for pro in the past, btw)

The email generally irritated me; $9 / month for netflix or spotify? Sure, but they're providing the content. Why would I pay $49/year for them to provide me what amounts to a bit of web hosting?

Suggesting that the price will increase in future years makes me glad I bit the bullet there and then... It'll be a shame to see it go, but it's a shell of it's former self.

Log us out: Private equity snaffles Lastpass owner LogMeIn

Re: Bitwarden

I've moved from LastPass to Bitwarden. Lastpass have upped prices year after year and provided very little by way of enhanced user experience as a result - which might explain why they're making such substantial profit by revenue. It felt very dated when I moved in April.

Bitwarden is less than 1/3rd of the price for premium, offers a solid set of features and has a noticeably nicer UI (IMHO). Self hosting is obviously a bonus, but I'm happy to have them host for me.

I've suggested a number of friends (mostly technical) move from lastpass to bitwarden, and they've all been happy.

Uber JUMPs at chance to dump load of electric bikes across Islington

Re: Weird pricing model

I actually have a Brompton. They're not particularly heavy as folding bikes go, but the weight is still substantial.

It's not worth the faf of dragging it through Waterloo station and bank, then around with me for the evening. I'd rather just pay a couple of quid to rent an bike for the short section where it makes sense.

Re: Weird pricing model

Yes, but I have to wait for a bus, and on the route I regularly bike rent on there are no bus routes which take me all that close.

Bug-hunters punch huge holes in WPA3 standard for Wi-Fi security

Off by default? Have you met the general public?...

Uber driver drove sleeping woman miles away from home to 'up the fare'. Now he's facing years in the clink for kidnapping, fraud

... But John Worboys ...