Posts by cyberdemon

Intel's PC chip ship is sinking with Arm-ada on the horizon

Re: The big change is HBM

How convenient for Apple. That means they can sell that RAM at 5x its value, like they do with iPhones

Canada to remove China’s top messaging app WeChat from government devices

Re: This is just playing to the gallery, right?

I don't know about Canada, but there's no way Matt Hancock could have ordered billions of units of useless PPE without a communications channel to the manufacturer..

The UK government? On the right track with its semiconductor strategy?

@Tubz

This is a Local Fab for Local Wafers! We don't want any trouble here..

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

Re: Why not check out places that already have many EVs?

How about a sensibly-sized EV such as a Renault Twizy or Citroen Ami to take you to the shops/work every day, and on the rare occasions you need to shift a lot of stuff a long way, hire a Diesel-powered car or van? It's about having the right tool for the right job.

Electric SUVs should be paying SUV-rate road tax.

That said, I would love to see a compact high-speed gas turbine range extender / afterburner

Re: people like me who drive about 3 miles per week.

Have you considered walking? You'd only spend an hour a week travelling..

If you need to shift some stuff, those camping/festival trolleys are pretty handy.

Ok so "3 miles per week" is hyperbole. But nevertheless it must be quite a waste of resources and money to have your own car, if it is so infrequently used. Get a bike and use a hire car/van if you need to shift anything heavy?

That said, there are some EVs which are little more than souped up mobility scooters, like the Citroen Ami. My neighbour has one, good enough to go to the shops but i'm not sure i'd be happy on a motorway in it.

But it doesn't need a big battery, doesn't use lots of copper/neodymium, and doesn't need a special charger that draws a load bigger than the electric supply was designed for. It's what EVs should be. Not SUVs/vans/lorries where the technology makes no sense.

Re: The EV hysteria peak will pass before long

Will it though? We have signed it into legislation, and with that, doomed our local car, engine and steel plants to closure. No more German cars made with British steel (never mind British cars made with German steel), they are all going to be imported from China, and apparently may come with a remote killswitch

China are producing EVs at a loss for export (dumping). The reason exporters do that is to cause competitors to close down and create a reliance on their own products.

Relying on LNG imports is perilous too, because it can be easily blockaded. We have seen in Ukraine the new military tactic of attacking electricity grids. While the UK grid can barely keep itself upright with nobody attacking it.

I need a Private Frazer icon.

@ace2

I don't know what you've been smoking. And i'm not sure if I want any, thanks.

I said we need to reduce consumption. But it's no good doing that unilaterally, is it. Geopolitics says you'd just get trounced by your neighbours.

EVs on the other hand, are an even more profligate waste of resources than petrol cars. I'm talking Copper, Neodymium, Lithium, Cobalt. The stuff that we have to send poor people in ex-rainforest areas into vast open-cast mines to go and get for us. We already have to drain entire aquifers for the lithium, turning forests into deserts. Imagine scaling that up tenfold? You're mad.

Hence my post a few lines down. I believe in the problem, but the good solution was already rejected by us decades ago, now we have utter madness pretending to be the solution, and so, we're doomed.

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

> Otherwise I guess we'll turn into Cuba

Turn into Cuba, we just might..

Re: Not gonna happen

You forgot to pick your icon. :P

As far as I was taught, coal is fossilised wood, and "crude oil" and "natural gas" are from a mixture of petrified biomass, some of which is dinosaurs, but it hardly matters to the argument. It is finite and it is running out (unlike nuclear fission energy, which while also technically finite, is many, many orders of magnitude more abundant). And oil in particular has other important uses rather than burning it all.

It is getting harder and harder to extract, requiring more energy and pollution to do so. It does need to stop, but a reduction in consumption and a push towards more nuclear is the way to do it, rather than sticking to our existing profligate lifestyles and pretending that Wind and Solar are the answer. They are not, because that solution depends on gas to plug the 'dunkelflaute' periods. And we all know that large-scale storage is impossible, because it is infeasibly expensive, not to mention dangerous.

But I don't think enough people are going to ditch energy consumption, put on the hair shirt and start growing turnips, so the next alternative is War, when the resources run out.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

So in other words, the tories, labour, lib dems, and the greens, are all utterly hopeless, and jointly responsible for this calamitous situation we find ourselves in.

I can believe it. We're living in a world where Marketing and AI-driven social-sentiment-optimisation (i don't know if that's a real term, i just made it up) is what wins elections, rather than any kind of good governance.

We're doomed. Dooomed.

Bring back Corbyn, at least he's not lining his own pockets like the rest of them. Might stand a chance of re-nationalising some of the energy industry.

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

The idea of EVs charging off of Diesel gensets would surely strike despair into most people.

If you used Red Diesel to run a genset (~25% efficiency?) to charge an EV, would it really be cheaper than plugging it into the grid? If so then something is incredibly broken with the energy market (yes OK we all know it is broken, but is it THAT broken?)

Re: Not gonna happen

Not if you live north of Birmingham

Re: Did you buy or lease an electric car between 2019 and 2025?…

> It’s almost like you people are looking for reasons why these problems can’t be solved, instead of looking for solutions. Perhaps because you have a vested interest in petroleum?

Certainly not, I have no love for the oil lobby and I firmly believe that we have to cut our usage before the oil runs out, global warming or no global warming.

The ones who were in the pockets of the oil companies, whether they knew it or not, were(/are) the anti-nuclear lobby.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

And Why are they pegged to gas prices? It's a combination of two factors.

1: The electricity market systems we have which mean that the electricity price is set by the highest-bidding generator that is needed (even if the others bid low, they will get the high price) and the high bidders are always gas plants

2: The gas plants are always needed, because renewables are not dispatchable (we can't control the wind and sun to suit demand) and they do not provide synchronous inertia i.e. without gas plants we would be unable to maintain a stable 50Hz and we would get blackouts

We can't change the second one, but we could redesign the markets. But the tories wouldn't like that as it's "anti-business"

Re: People vastly overrate the amount of at home charging

Using fuel duty will be an underestimate as it excludes 'red diesel' used for agricultural and industrial purposes (large backup generators etc I assume can use red diesel)

And then there's heat pumps.. How much gas is currently used to directly heat our houses and businesses? AFAIK it's significantly more than the gas currently used for electricity generation.

Adding that up I would have thought the electric grid would need to at least triple in size if not quadruple, and it's expensive enough just to maintain it at its current size.

Re: No shit

Houses in new developments have a 40A main fuse if they are lucky, so they can't actually charge the car and boil a cup of tea at the same time, never mind take a shower

Re: If you bid too low

> You plug it in when you get back from work and you can unplug it before you goto bed.

Which just so happens to coincide with the UK peak electricity demand between 6pm-10pm

Re: Not gonna happen

The dead dinos are already becoming hard to find. If we can't replace them in a timely manner with Nuclear, then humanity has reached the edge of the petri dish. We can expand no longer and will have to shrink.

And we all know what that means.

Re: Did you buy or lease an electric car between 2019 and 2025?…

We have bucketloads of renewables. So much that the installed capacity already dwarfs our peak load by a factor of 2. But building a new wind farm or solar farm does nothing when its dark and still. And we don't even have the transmission capacity to shift the renewable energy when the wind is blowing. We have to pay them to turn off.

So we are hooked on gas, and no amount of extra renewables coming online will fix that.

Re: Electric HGV

And that, right there, is the second reason why Electric HGVs are not really a thing.

The first being how do you charge them up

Re: Not Just Charging Issues, Transport Infrastructure Too

And how much, pray tell, does an Electric HGV weigh?

Wear on residential and country roads is not chiefly HGVs. Your figures are for major roads and motorways.

Also "axle pressure" doesn't make much sense to me. In order to have a pressure, you must have an area, and an axle doesn't have an area. Wide tyres and more of them serve to reduce the pressure at the road contact interface

Re: No shit

My £5 says he's Jeremy Clarkson

I disagree with him as regards the B word, (and on overpowered cars) but sadly have to agree on EVs.

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

There was a very relevant documentary series by James Burke in 1978.

https://vimeo.com/247654145

Episode 1 starts off with how the electric grid can fail catastrophically and what that implies, and it goes on to ask if anyone really knows how to use a Plough anymore

> The vast cost of this would be of the order of three trillion quid

.. I saw that article and had assumed they were talking globally.

But no, it's just the UK.

Apparently the global estimate by Bloomberg is around the 21 trillion mark (call it 30 trillion) . So how does the UK, with <1% of the world's population need >10% of global expenditure to reach net zero? Easy.. Just look at HS2

Re: No shit

If you drive 30 miles per day, you'd be better suited to a bike. Especially once they standardise and improve the batteries on e-bikes. (Mandatory USB-C, please..)

7kW is considered a "slow charge" at least from the battery's point of view in terms of not damaging it.

And it doesn't matter how much surplus electricity there is nationally if the local residential grid can't handle it. I'm not sure where your "especially in residential areas" comes from, but if there is 10x adoption of EVs, overnight won't be a lull for residential circuits anymore.

People will put their EV on charge in the evening, and the "smart grid" will ensure that there is an orderly queue, ordered by how much each resident is willing to pay. And that will push the prices up and make even more dosh for the electricity companies. If you bid too low, you won't be able to get to work in the morning.

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

> The only other option is a low energy agrarian economy like we had centuries ago, but then we need the low population density to match... Cue the Soylent Green factories.

Alternatively, could I interest you in a pandemic, zombie apocalypse, robot apocalypse, or nuclear war?

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

It entirely depends on what is inside it, and you're not allowed to look, and there are no (that the Chinese manufacturers seem to care about) standards dictating what must be inside (unlike for IT and automotive).

If the battery has a proper BMS and well-made cells, then probably it will be OK, but most e-bikes apparently do not.

A "proper BMS" is one that a) monitors the voltage of EACH cell (not just the stack voltage, and under-voltage is just as bad as over-voltage) b) monitors the temperature of EACH cell, and c) has some coulomb-counting logic to measure the pack's capacity and how it changes over time. Any modern laptop does this, and you can even get a handy printout from Windows of your battery's health over time with the command `powercfg /batteryreport`.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

Electric trams seem to work quite well in Europe..

Or, from my personal favourite source of quotes:

"You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands."

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

We could put one on rails. What could possibly go wrong

Maybe stick to wires for that one.

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

In a fleeting attempt to dispel some of my own negativity and cynicism: Flow batteries are apparently promising. But they do require a rather large amount of exceedingly hazardous chemicals, and portable they are not.

The trouble is, any device which stores a lot of energy and has both fuel and oxidiser (for want of better terms for non-oxidation based power sources) in the same compact container is known by a more common name..

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

Ah well you see we won't need a Europort Container Terminal, because we're all going to be growing our own potatoes. And the IT suite will run itself, cos AI innit

Re: Mind you...

Sigh.

Roll on, WWIII

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

> Of course, you can order online

And your online shopping is delivered by..?

Oh yes, a Diesel powered van because even the greenwash-happy corporates have started to realise that their electric vans don't last very long before they conk out and take ages to charge, and time is money

Re: NIMBY

You'll be fine if your backyard is purloined to house the 132kV substation needed to bring that power from the coal plant or wind turbine in the other guy's back yard then?

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

Yes, you could buy an electric bike, if you a) have a shed to put it in where it won't get nicked and won't burn your house down if/when the battery explodes (yes, insurers are cottoning on to this, too)

and b) you don't mind the extra risk to yourself by travelling unprotected from collisions with 2-ton EVs driven by rich tw*ts who have little regard for your life because you're soft and light enough not to dent their battery

Or, you could just walk to work, the shops, your dentist etc because they are all going to be 15 minutes away, and the ones in your neighbourhood are going to be just as good as the ones in the nice neighbourhood..!

And then there's Insurance

EVs are getting hard to insure because the slightest dent to the battery writes it off as unsafe, and that is the most expensive component.

But it's pushing up the premiums for ICE drivers too, because if you prang an EV and it's your fault then it's your insurance company on the hook to pay for the battery

Also EV drivers tend to drive like maniacs with the increased torque. IIRC they have twice as many accidents as ICE drivers, according to insurance companies

Re: Not Just Charging Issues, Transport Infrastructure Too

They are not just heavier, but have much sharper acceleration too. It's the horizontal forces at the road surface that do the most damage, and F=ma.

We could at least charge them road tax

No shit

I predict that 400/230V residential distribution will be the first limiting factor in widespread EV adoption. We will need far more 11kV transformers to keep the current down to an acceptable level otherwise I^2R resistive losses are going to be too high. One EV takes 30A to charge at 7kW, and local transformers are limited to 3x400A, and we have about one per 100 houses.

But if we triple the number of 11kV substations at massive cost, we will then find the 11kV network needs upgrading. Then we upgrade that, and find the 33kV network is the bottleneck. Repeat for 66kV, 132kV, 400kV

Then something goes bang and the whole country is borked.

The electric grid is the most overloaded, inefficient, expensive, unreliable and vulnerable of all our energy distribution networks. Why are we piling everything on top of it?

Cruise blues: Robotaxi firm pauses all driverless operations

Re: stoppages .. hmm

Possibly an OTA update gone very wrong?

Where's Will Smith when you need him?

King Charles III signs off on UK Online Safety Act, with unenforceable spying clause

math doesn't bend

Another example of the Americanisation of the Reg. Where's the Cheeseburger icon?

Maths is short for Mathematics, not Mathematic.

Maths doesn't bend. (But Grammar does, apparently)

(And no, it shouldn't be "maths don't bend" either)

PIRG petitions Microsoft to extend the life of Windows 10

Re: Updates are not that difficult

Win10 is Win11 but with more native apps, and less "App Framework" apps. (And 11 has more Telemetry and more Ads). On Win10 you can safely uninstall ALL of the App Framework bloat, but doing so would break Win11.

MS want to force everyone onto 11 so they can obsolete their native apps, force everyone to use a Microsoft Account, and get more telemetry data and sling more ads.

The end of Win10 will be the end of Windows for many people. I've been a Linux man for 20 years but I can see more and more Windows refugees coming as Microsoft kettles its users into an Apple/Google model of forced cloud account and app store usage.

Re: My roadmap is "move to Linux" (for non-Mac users)

> The only users I might have a problem with are accounts, who use a bluetooth-thingy with a card to access the bank.

Chromium on Linux has good support for Yubikey / Fido2 / U2F, if that helps

Amazon workers are in a warehouse of pain, independent report finds

This explains why scamazon have just started running TV ads about how wonderful they are as an employer

Microsoft seeks EU Digital Market Acts exemption for underdog apps like Edge

Re: you cynics should try it

> it's basically like chrome but faster :-)

And with the Added Trust of Microsoft!

At least 5 people's sarcasm-detectors have failed. You should have used the Troll icon for that post.

.. Unless you were being serious, in which case you should have used the Coat icon.

Edge is Chromium with Microsoft evilware instead of Google.

Since I use GMail, Google already has me by the goolies. There's no reason to add another megacorp to that list. So I use Chromium on Debian. It's a memory hog but sod it, DRAM is cheap and I don't see how adding Microsoft bloatware and spyware would fix that.

Windows users need an easy way to get vanilla Chromium when they install, but neither Microsoft nor Google would like that very much.

CEO Satya Nadella thinks Microsoft hung up on Windows Phone too soon

Re: Regardless what you think of Microsoft,

N770 and N810, I had both. But the N900 was the game changer. You could use it like a laptop.

Imagine if it had been built today, in the days of USB-C, Miracast, cheap DRAM and Flash, and cheap fast processors of the likes that Raspberry Pi use

Sadly Meego was a disaster. Intel muscled in and replaced the Debian component with Deadrat for some reason, got rid of X and replaced it with Wayland, which was nowhere near ready at the time. Perhaps like Microsoft they wanted the whole thing to fail if it didn't go their way.

Re: Regardless what you think of Microsoft,

By which point? When they installed the trojan-horse CEO, or when they bought them out a few years later having tanked the company to get a good deal?

When Elop came in (his previous role being Senior VP at.. guess where), Nokia had just released its Linux (debian) based smartphone, the N900.

It was the best phone I ever owned. Had a huge open source community behind it. All the power of a debian box, in your pocket, with a slide out mechanical keyboard. It was the perfect portable SSH terminal, even X forwarding worked.

Then Elop killed all of that, and the company was listless. Just ready to be scooped up by the Beast of Redmond

Regardless what you think of Microsoft,

> I think it would've been nice for consumers if there was a bit more competition between ecosystems.

Yes, so they should have left Nokia well alone, instead of murdering it to foist their abominable spawn

Larry Ale-ison institute invests in Oxford pub linked to Tolkien, CS Lewis

Re: Struggling DBAs...

> At least they can say they're joining a union with plausible deniability

Only if they remember to start an atomic transaction first. Then they can roll back that union

UK to crack down on imported Chinese optical fiber cables

> Since Brexit, the UK has gained the ability

To shoot itself repeatedly in the foot with completely daft, populist yet self-destructive economic policy

88 Million is Chump Change on a national scale, and after we have finished(hah, as if it would be finished) building the Britishvolt of fibre optic factories, we will find that the UK-produced stuff is both expensive and shit, but the tory-chum directors have run off with all the dosh.

But national infrastructure depends on it, so Mr Putin and Mr Xi will be laughing heartily while the UK is yet again hoisted by its own petard