Posts by cyberdemon 3496 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
Lol. Posting AC as usual...
I bet you a pint that Hydrogen will never contribute 2GW in total in the UK in the next 10 years, never mind their target of 10GW by 2030. I also bet a second pint that storing hundreds of GWh in Hydrogen proves infeasible.
But you'd need to take that mask off to drink it...
Yes, pumped hydro is great in theory, but in practice you need a Very Large Hill (a mountain), with a Very Large Lake at the top. These are rare in nature, and infeasible to build. Not impossible if you already have a nice mountain which isn't designated an Area of Natural Beauty and therefore you can get permission to chop the top off and dig a massive hole in it.. But even then, that gets you Hours, not the Days of storage that you'd need to plug Wind lulls. The efficiency isn't great (though maybe better than fuel cells) but the cost to is going to be in the tens of billions for a GW-scale facility, and it doesn't actually generate electricity.. Better to build a nuke that does?
And still, you have to get the electricity in and out of the facility. The biggest problem with the UK grid IMO is the transmission bottleneck - we can't easily build more pylons because of nimby landowners, and so we are unable to get the electricity out of Scotland when the wind is blowing (so we have to turn on gas plants and French imports, while paying the scots to NOT use their wind) and i'm not sure how storage fixes that problem, since all the feasible storage solutions are very short-term, and even then, storage is not the same as transmission capacity.
The reason that NG were so excited about Hydrogen, is because it could solve some of the Transmission problem. Put electrolysers in Scotland and Fuel Cells in England, and use the existing Gas network to pump it around to where it's needed. You obviously can't do that with stand-alone storage like a stationary battery or pumped hydro plant.. But unfortunately, for reasons of electrochemistry and physics, the Hydrogen plan didn't turn out to be very feasible either.
So, instead we are building HVDC links like they are going out of fashion. Not just between countries/continents, but inside the UK. Priti Patel famously opposed pylons and wanted to build a UK HVDC superhighway instead.. Apparently one can lay a 2GW subsea cable much faster and with less hassle from nimby's, than a traditional AC transmission line. (although it would use far more copper, and be more expensive overall)
What worries me about that plan though is that HVDC is asynchronous - by virtue of being DC - so it exacerbates the already perilous grid-islanding and frequency-instability that could cause a UK-wide blackout - and although we can sort-of fix that with some funky software, they are extremely vulnerable to sudden failure or sabotage.
Subsea AC cables then? Maybe. Although apparently they annoy the fish even more than the DC ones do. And just-as-prone to anchor-dragging etc.
Fuel cells and electrolysers are stuck requiring a hell of a lot of Platinum. There's no way we could go from a few Megawatts installed capacity to Gigawatts (never mind 150-300TWh/y as required by the UK's Future Energy Scenario plans) without exhausting supply of what is already a stonkingly rare and expensive metal.
Not if it's already been subsumed into GPT model weights. Then I believe it's impossible to remove without re-training the model from scratch.
The best they could do would be to add another 'guardrail' to prevent questions or outputs specifically about you, but those are easily bypassed by anyone determined or privileged enough, and having too many of those makes their system shitter and slower, so they are unlikely to do it unless forced to by a court
(number_of_customers x vulnerability_of_customers) / competence_of_it_staff
Attacks are becoming about increasing the search space for further victims of scams, and councils will be a prime target because so many people depend on them.
I am unfortunately a southern water hostag^Wcustomer and since their cyber-leak i have started getting many scam calls e.g. "calling about your housing problem"
These appear to be automated with an AI voice calling itself Sarah. I haven't been far enough down the scam but I assume it wants to collect info about any issues you do have which it will use to sell you a discount home improvement survey which doesn't exist
I dread to think how much misery they could cause if they obtained a list of phone numbers of vulnerable people who are in debt to their council / housing association / etc. It's pretty worrying
I don't think so, no?
Tap water is treated reservoir water, which is supposed to be rainwater
Treated sewage (and in 'exceptional' cases that are slowly becoming the norm) is allowed to flow into rivers, but NOT reservoirs, afaik. There would be too much microplastics and the aforementioned pharmaceutical chemicals in it, even after treatment.
This is apparently planned to change by 2030, but is unpopular for obvious reasons: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62708413
Good point. You'd probably want to test each batch of water with a mass-spectrometer, to test for anything that can't simply be filtered out or eaten by microbes which are then filtered out. But even then, i'd guess there are some poisons that could still be harmful even when below the noise floor of the instrument.
TBH I'd be surprised if this process is any more efficient than letting it evaporate and collecting rainwater.
Meanwhile the UFO Union are on strike
Not a good time for international travel, I do wonder WTF is going on
And then a few years later they did it to themselves
icon gates_horns, but I can't be arsed to exhume it
Standard procedure for Putin et al.
No amount of 'interference' could stop a despot from winning his own 'election'.
If anything, it's a message (and an excuse) that he will be interfering as much as he possibly can in the oncoming US and UK elections.
CPM? I had to look up that piece of marketing BS-Bingo
I don't really give a toss about their costs. What irks me is that different people see different versions of webpages and search results depending on who some data-broker thinks they are. That's what enables social manipulation.
Of course, social manipulation is ultimately what all Advertising boils down to, but at least with untargeted advertising it has to be done in the clear, where people can call out propaganda and abuse. Whereas targeted advertising allows abusive marketing practices to be done surreptitiously.
The Reg is a useful service. Facebook/twatter/ubend less-so
If the Reg were to embed some non-intrusive ads hosted by their own server that I could be sure weren't slurping my data to some ad-slinger company then I wouldn't block them. But as long as Javascript and cross-domain slurping is going on, i'm not having it.
Frankly I'd like to see the likes of Google, Meta and Microsoft broken up. If Google were to disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow, the only part of it that I would miss is GMail - their search is rubbish these days and AOSP would become so much better if Google died. But even GMail I use less and less these days. Youtube is a increasingly a cess-pool to compete with TikTok. The only part of Microsoft I'd miss is GitHub (which they shouldn't have been allowed to pillage in the first place) the rest of it (LinkedIn, Windows, Office, OpenAI etc) can be incinerated. Meta, I'd only miss WhatsApp (which again, they shouldn't have been allowed to buy) TikTok, X, amazon, Apple*.. I wouldn't miss these at all.
* Of course, some people would miss Apple a lot. There would need to be some kind of fanboi rehabilitation programme
Here's a pile of very genuine high quality personal data and i'll even give you a picture of me. Now pay up!
Not every problem can be solved by inventing a new market. Just look at Ofgem. As soon as you invent an artificial market, someone works out how to defraud it.
What I'd rather see, is a general ban on targeted advertising, data brokers etc. Not opt in or opt out, just Out. If that means a few Trillion is wiped off the NASDAQ, so be it.
I once had someone tell me that we couldn't POSSIBLY use Linux on a particular product - "because Linux is Open Source - That means Anybody can get in!"
Windows 2000 had been mandated by higher-ups, for a government type-approved embedded system. Each unit required three separate Intel Atom PC/104 boards each running win2k for the system to operate. Usually one of them was borked, so it usually didn't.
Of course, in this case, that was fine, because the product in question was the speed cameras on the M25 and M40 (ducks)
Borked cameras often required lane closures and someone to go up on a gantry to reset it.. In the end, they made most of their money selling dummy cameras
How often to wheels fall off planes in general? Whatever is going on, it is most certainly odd.
There seems to be a lot of media interest in -any- Boeing failure right now, and they also seem to be more frequent than normal. Something odd is going on. Either the Media have it in for Boeing, or somebody is sabotaging planes.. Or both. (or neither, it could be an emergent social-media phenomenon that after the door blowout everyone is on the lookout for more Boeing failures). Maybe the WEF-types are trying to reduce air travel ahead of WWIII while shorting Boeing stock? :P
If dipping into X is not for you, Plummer's history of Windows ZipFolders – and a good deal more technical detail – can also be found on his YouTube channel. ®
I'm just as disinclined to dip into the U-bend as I am to Plumm the depths of Xitter, that's why I read the Reg.
But you knew that, didn't you Richard.
Thanks for the article though, made me chuckle. And explains a lot about why Microsoft's Zip extractor is still so abominable.
No need for doctors anymore, our systems have profiled every person on the planet and determined exactly which ailments they will have before they have them, and exactly which medication they will need, with the magic of AI.
We've determined that you will soon be suffering from depression. Here's your advance prescription for antidepressants. Feel free to reach out to us if you would prefer to exchange it for a 10% discount voucher at Dignitas
Please note, this service may be terminated without notice when we get bored of it
So, where I previously worked, we had three "separate" networks.
We had one called ControlNet which was for the robot control systems and HMI terminals only; another called FileNet for the robotics-related fileservers, local domain controllers and HMI terminals; and a site-wide network which had internet access. Unfortunately the fileservers were also connected to the site network because so many people needed access to them in their offices.
So they sort of tried network segregation but ultimately all three networks were connected.
There was much argument from me and others, but it never changed. Fortunately there were no serious incidents.
Because so many industrial control systems and HMIs run Windows, I would guess.
But also because they may have shut their whole network down to stop any further intrusion
The yeast is still fermenting, but if they can't pump it out into the next vessel in their process then the taste will be ruined. Or maybe it won't, and they will sell it as a 'limited edition' batch. They could call it Duvel Scumbag, with 'extra scummy' foam.
There's KDE Plasma Mobile.. There's Sailfish
Unfortunately the biggest hurdle to both of these is that the hardware vendors have control via secure boot and e-fuses on the CPU itself, which will be blown by the bootloader if incorrect software is loaded, rendering the device hard-bricked. These mechanisms are mandated by Google in order to run Android OS, and also prevent downgrading to an earlier version of Android, so pretty much every device has them. Even Fairphone (the one device you would hope would not be able to deliberately self-brick) has them.
And obviously Crapple is as Crapple does - Tim Cook will be ice-skating in Hell with Steve before they allow third-party OSes onto IPhones.
One good reason is not being beholden to Microsoft's release cycle. You can choose to stay on a version that works and install whatever subset of updates at whatever timescale you feel to be prudent. Whereas with Microsoft, you get "Welcome to the all-new Teams! We've made loafs of changes which we think you'll love! If not, well, fuck off" or Google "sorry this product is being sunsetted. We kniw you have nowhere else to go.. Ha ha fuck off"
I've worked at a company that used Linux on everything, all the way up to the CEO's laptop. It worked very well, actually. It was a software/electronics company, with about 40 staff in 2011, so not a big company by any means.
But just because Microsoft has tools for lazy sysadmins and Evil HR, doesn't mean a company actually needs them, if it has a decent sysadmin and actually trusts its own staff.
If open source software doesn't fit your corporate culture, I'd suggest changing the corporate culture, rather than buying Kool-Aid from Microsoft.
Anyway, to play your little anonymous guessing game, I'd hazard a guess that some of the "missing components" you are referring to are:
so.. maybe you have an antique plotter that only works on GPIB with a kernel-mode Windows driver? Or some other unusual peripheral with proprietary Windows NT compatible driver support? Or antique software that relies on ActriveX/COM, or kernel-mode libraries for DRM reasons. I do have some software that works perfectly in Wine except for the USB DRM Dongle. If only there were some standard way of doing that! Well there are, but not enough vendors use them. Lack of third-party vendor support is a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom..
Wow, talk about Godwin's Law for a thread about what was at first an anti-deforestation protest.. Frankly from the pictures, Tesla already had more than enough land to double the size of their factory.. This was at worst "nimby"ism / at best a genuine protest against a megacorp destroying a local forest. But now criminal acts by a few who joined said protest are being shown to damage the cause of the rest. The media and commentators can choose a narrative, but this has little to do with Fascism, yet.
Frankly, I do worry about the progression of polarised politics.. Inequality and Injustice turn to protest. Protest (amplified by thugs on both sides) turns to riot. Riot (again amplified by thugs) turns to insurrection, and insurrection turns to bloody revolution. Demagogues and nutjob trolls can accelerate this decay, but rarely can they prevent it.
Remember that while the first victims in bloody revolution may be rich, the next (the vast majority of victims - e.g. in the case of Pol Pot et al) are the educated-but-not-rich. I.e. every genuine human on this forum..
The world does feel unstable atm, but prematurely declaring "nazis" does nothing to help it..
We don't know yet, my point is only to counter the idea that it was "obviously the protesters wot did it".
False flags do exist, and have done since long before the Trojan war.. He who claims that "anyone who talks about false flags is a self-discrediting conspiracy theorist nutjob" is a nutjob with an axe to grind himself.
I find this extremely worrying.. It would be very easy to launch nuclear weapons from the Moon to hit anywhere on Earth with no possible defence.. It would be the ultimate doomsday weapon. I can't see how we could trust anyone, never mind Russia and China to operate a reactor on the Moon (out of reach of IAEA observers, for sure) without the possibility or probability of it being used as a lunar weapons factory..
> it's not a subsidised rate.
It's subsidised via the litany of wonky markets that the UK has set up. Who decides how much money the wind farms get when we tell them to turn off? If that arbitrary amount of money were lower, would the night rates not be flatter? But if it were lower, then the windfarms would have less incentive to build... It's a subsidy. An indirect one, but a subsidy nonetheless.
The same with the other bonkers markets designed to slosh public money into the trough.. Who pays the CfDs? NGESO does (i.e. we do). Who pays the capacity market? NGESO does. (we do). Who pays Drax's tree-burning subsidies? (we do). Who pays for the carbon credits? (we do). Who pays the curtailment costs? (we do). Ofgem invents all these "markets" and pretends that it's free-market economics in action. It isn't, It's just a less-efficient form of subsidy, and one that's harder to follow the money to find any corruption that may lie behind it.
Also, many tariffs are directly subsidised by other tax/bill payers, and i'd be surprised if you weren't using one with your eco green set-up. Heat Pump tariffs for example where a portion of your HP usage is subtracted from your bill.. Solar feed-in tariffs, v2g tariffs, DFS events, these are all directly susbsidised.
> Imagine if we have EVs rolled out - you'd never need to curtail output at a wind farm again
Except we still would, because we have a massive transmission bottleneck, especially between England and Scotland. How do we get NGESO to build more pylons? Apparently we can't, because the nimby's don't like them, so we will invent another market for companies to build subsea HVDC links instead e.g. the recently approved Eastern Green Link and the 80-odd GW of projects waiting for approval. They are very expensive, unreliable, prone to sabotage, they don't contribute to synchronous stability of the grid (if anything they destabilise it and cause islanding), but who cares, we have outsourced all of that risk to the private sector, right? As usual the economists have ruined everything.
> but sometimes..
In a hot country where most people use Air Conditioning, then LED lights are a massive win. In the UK, we have our heating on for most of the year and turn it off for a few months in summer when it stops raining.. You might have no change in comfort, but that's because you have a thermostat.. When you have no extra heat sources, your heat pump has to run harder to maintain your setpoint, so you don't get a 95% reduction even if you really did have 10x 100W bulbs on all at once and have replaced them with 5W LEDs.. (btw I find that a 5W LED is nowhere near sufficient to replace a 100W bulb, I need at least 15W) and the crest factor on those LEDs is abysmal. You may find that your smart meter charges you more for a 15W LED than a 100W incandescent, because the peak current is higher.
Your heat pump may have a COP of 3, but due to inefficiencies, costs and dodgy deals in the generation, transmission and balancing/settlement systems, your electricity costs 3 times more than gas anyway, (at the times when you need heating, at least). So might as well get a gas boiler and be done with it.
I'm not saying it's nothing, i'm saying it's marginal, and IMHO not worth the extra faff from a heat pump, LEDs, EVs, smart meters etc. They can pry my Bakolite electromechanical watthour-meter from my cold dead hands.
Anyway, always a pleasure arguing with you Mr Robson. Have dome upvotes and an e-pint :)
> Not subsidised, it's just a time of day tariff, as have been available for many decades, because electricity prices fluctuate throughout the day - even going negative.
It bloody well IS subsidised! How much do we have to pay those windfarms to stop running when the wind is blowing? So much that even Ofgem has rolled out of its bed. The only reason the wholesale price occasionally goes negative is so that NG doesn't have to pay so much in curtailment costs! But that is rarely passed on to the consumer, certainly never "decades" ago as you say..
I don't really see what a rectifier has got to do with it.. A bridge rectifier drops 2x 0.7V, plus minimal resistive losses.. And nevertheless a fast charger is still plugged in to 415V AC, so needs its own rectifier anyway ...
LED lightbulbs ... often quoted as an example of how energy efficiency is somehow an unstoppable trend, but it's bollocks. Especially if someone is using electric heating, for example. But even if not, the "waste" heat from their lightbulbs would previously have warmed them up enough to not need to stoke up the coal fire. Now, we have all these wonderfully efficient LEDs which produce no infrared and ironically cause people to turn on their gas-fired central heating because they feel cold.
People who charge at home often pay a heavily subsidised rate 7p/kWh apparently) whereas general domestic utility price is more like 30p/kWh. Wholesale price that chargepoint operators pay is somewhere in the middle, and charging infrastructure is a big expense, paid for by bankers expecting a return on investment.
Then there's the inconvenient fact that fast charging is inefficient. Both chargers and battery (and sometimes even the cable) need active cooling at >50kW rates.
So without a severe rebalancing / reversal of taxpayer/billpayer subsidies, EV charging is always going to be more expensive at a fast charger station.
For a slow charger, the charging is cheap but the parking is expensive.
The second problem with "slow" ~10kW public chargers is that they usually do not have a dedicated HV substation, and rely on existing heavily-strained 415V underground cabling shared with domestic and light commercial premises. It's increasingly common to see overheating transformers and cables, e.g. that recent incident near the Old Bailey
So increasing the numbers beyond 10% minority adoption, never mind "net zero" numbers is not trivial at all
Really? A good reason for Windows 11? You owe me a new keyboard!
Running 'apps' designed for full screen attention on the desktop is the last thing I want. That's hardly going to tempt me away from Win2k never mind the silky luxury that is modern KDE.
And not sending my data to all and sundry either!
