Posts by cyberdemon

Amazon to drop a cool $1B on Microsoft 365 cloud suite

Re: Why not LibreOffice?

> "We need 100% compatibility, so we're [stuck] going with Office".

At that point, they've got you by the goolies. They could increase the price or poison their terms (don't want your documents being used as input for GPT-n++? Tough shit) and you'd be [stuck] with that.

That is why they got antitrust suits lobbed at them left right and centre, but they don't seem to give a shit, because business execs think that anything other than the MS koolaid is a risk.

We need 100% compatibility with Microsoft. Which vendor shall we choose? It's a somewhat circular argument isn't it?

We need 100% compatibility with Oracle.. Which vendor shal.. Aargh

Re: Why not LibreOffice?

Well, 'tis the season for raising strawmen.

But .docx does not comply with its own "OOXML" spec, and Microsoft can tweak that noncompliance at will. They could even wilfully bork (i mean, upgrade to the latest non-spec) documents uploaded to linkedin so that they don't work even if the original would have done.

It's not Libreoffice's fault if MS keep moving the goalposts.

Anyway, who accepts .DOCX files from linkedin? PDF your CVs, please.

Or if it must for some reason be editable, perhaps use a truly open spec such as ODT, which MS Word supposedly supports. And if it doesn't work properly then, who do you blame? Libreoffice again probably

Re: Why not LibreOffice?

> A recent download of a .DOCX file from LinkedIn wouldn't open

Remind me, who owns LinkedIn?

Pfft

How on earth would scamazon spy on its employees without the data-slurping power of the Microsoft 345 admin portal? All the Teams integrations, interaction analyses, call transcripts and emoji-histograms of all their dronesfleshy money-sinks

Joke icon: the joke is that people seem to put up with this shit

3D printer purchases could require background checks under proposed law

> conspiracies fail miserably.

All of them? Are you sure? Have there not been several successful conspiracies throughout history, on this or even grander scales? The deposition of Charles I, revolutions, wars..

Supposing a supergovernmental group as powerful as the WEF were behind a deliberate "plot" to make people more dependent on technology, are you so sure that they would necessarily be doomed to fail?

Perhaps they wouldn't even consider it a "plot", just a Sensible Plan for the Good of all Things™️ ?

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/conspiracy-theories-aside-there-something-fishy-about-great-reset/

Tbh i'm sick of the way that any criticism of The Powers That Be, automatically gets lumped in with "Wackjob Conspiracy Theories". I think stuff like "The vaccine has 5G microchips in it" and the rise of the flat-earth society is so ridiculous that it could even be deliberate counter-propaganda to allow the media to discredit anyone who questions the official rhetoric.

Re: Where do you stop?

So, stop using books and get kids hooked on YouTube and TikTok so they never learn to read or write, but ban videos that actually teach anything useful?

We could also ban cash, shut down all domestic engineering industries, supply the populace with imported goods without local stock on a "just in time" model and turn everyone into "AI prompt engineers" who just extract bullshit from a machine in another country via the Internet, and "data cattle" who do nothing but feed the machine with new info.

What could possibly go wrong?

Gas supplier blames 'rogue' code for Channel Island outage

Curious

Obviously incompetence has to be considered before (and despite) malice (if you left the door open and your company got burgled, then the blame lies jointly between you and the burglar)

But it is curious that this event happened so close to a second mysteriously exploding gas pipeline between Finland and Latvia this week.

Generative AI slashes cloud migration hassles, says McKinsey partner

Re: Why would anyone trust someone from McKinsey?

Honour among thieves.. But not business consultants

And of course messrs McKinsey will be charging £300/hour while they wait for that command to complete

For an extra £100/hour they will employ an intern to wiggle your mouse to make the 'migration' go faster. (who they will pay the minimum wage, natch)

And when your house of cards comes crashing down after the generative AI migrates your database into /dev/null, who will you pay to sort it all out?

McKinsey, of course.

They will charge a princely sum for migrating a database back out of /dev/null, though.

Go ahead, let the unknowable security risks of Windows Copilot onto your PC fleet

Windows..

Which one would you like to be thrown out of?

Intel offers $179 Arc A580 GPU to gamers on a budget

if that's a hard limit on resolution

it will have unintended consequences for usability/stability and people will just return it as buggy.

Plug in a projector to your laptop? Oops, looks like it's slightly-over 1080p and we can't use it, soz

Oh dear, you plugged in a 1080p one but now we can't render your desktop, so better choose clone rather than extend..

Trying to miracast to that 4k TV over there? Oh noes.

Nuclear-powered datacenters: What could go wrong?

Fukushima was a very old design of plant that was hit by a terrible natural disaster - the tsunami itself killed about 50,000 people IIRC

Yet the "nuclear catastrophe" killed no-one. Even the 50 who went in expecting to die have been happily disappointed.

As I see it, Fukushima was a triumph of nuclear safety.

Plenty of seawater though, no?

You don't -have- to evaporate it. But if you do evaporate, you could condense it back and get a free desalination plant

Re: Fast Neutron reactor

These costs are caused by the utterly barmy regulations around nuclear (which seem to have been deliberately designed to poison the industry and stunt its growth), and the parasite industries that have grown out of those regulations.

The real problem with radioactivity is that it is so detectable in tiny amounts, and scary because people think it causes cancer, when really it's not going to cause harm at all in small amounts. Even pretty large amounts such as the dose received by the Fukushima 50, nuclear bomb testing engineers etc. have not caused anywhere near as much harm as we all expected. Why? Because life on earth has evolved to cope with quite a lot of ionising radiation in the background. The radiation was there before life was. Whereas we have NOT evolved to deal with microplastics, nanoparticulate carbon (which ironically exist in modern ULEZ-compliant diesel exhausts but not the old ones..) etc. etc.

The regulations at Sellafield are so ridiculous that they are measuring single Bequerels outside casks and saying that's too high. Literally if you can detect a single photon of gamma, it can't be shipped out. This I heard from someone who works in safety at the place.

I knew a project manager from that place too.. He said that the workers there would all conspire to make sure any new project manager would fail at his or her job, and would just get so frustrated that they eventually either quit or let the guys do whatever they want.

That is why decommissioning is so expensive. It's not just nuclear regs, it's UK Health&Safety legislation too, and in terms of cost the two are multiplicative.

But without bloody revolution, societal poison just never goes away. So I agree, the age of nuclear is over. Until someone drops a bomb on our heads and suddenly sellafield is the least radioactive place in Britain

Re: Interesting

> the fluctuations in the spot electricity market are a sign of a functioning demand-and-supply market. Price goes up the Aluminum plant decides it can do without leccy today, price goes down electrolyse the crap out of that cryolite.

My point is that you need fluctuations not just in the price but in the demand, to say that it is working. If the market were functioning then you would see the demand drop as the price goes up. But if you take a look, you can see the price goes from -50 to +200, or the opposite, in the space of an hour. Does the demand change? Not a jot.

The price has changed sign, the demand stays the same. That does not tell me that the market is functioning.

The aluminum plant, for technical reasons, can't just start or stop the plant at the drop of a hat when the sun is or isn't behind a cloud. It has staff to get out of bed, equipment to prep. If a smelting plant stops suddenly mid cycle it could be damaged beyond repair. It is equally daft to assume it is always ready to start up. If the owner wants to maximise the profit of his very expensive plant, he runs it flat out 100% of the time, or at least when the staff are awake. All of this load shifting stuff is utter bollocks.

Octopus and NG trumpet that their Demand Flexibility Service saved a whole 3GWh of electricity last year, which sounds a lot, but it is 6 minutes worth of leccy for the country, or about 0.0001℅ of the year

Re: Interesting

Lol. You really need to take a good look at that old Special Relativity equation that Mr. Einstein rather beautifully came up with.

Yes, fission goes only one way, but the amount of energy contained therein is so much that it really isn't worth worrying about.

Fusion has never been 10 years away. It will always be 50 years away.

Re: Nuclear fanboys keep looking for a business case for SMRs

More power and sooner, I could harvest energy from lightning using a kite.

It's reliable, continuous power we're talking about here

If they still have to kowtow to the IAEA, then they do have "western issues"

Re: Interesting

Like I said, the "free-marketeers" <spit> would just love this.

Just take a look at the graphs on "Drax Electric Insights". The price already fluctuates all over the place, from minus the average price to well over four times the average price, but this is rarely reflected in the demand graph. That shows that the "free market" system is a complete failure. People use energy when they need it. You don't say "oh the price is low today, better cook two roast dinners instead of one" and you don't expect your car to be empty in the morning when you need to go to work, because the price was high and it discharged.

The problem with all this is that it pushes the price well above what people can afford. It's just more pigswill for the electricity companies when they are the only game in town, after we get rid of gas and oil.

What about the guy who just wants a cup of tea on a miserable cloudy evening? He boils the kettle and sees he's been billed 3 quid for it.

I have an old style bakolite electricity meter, and a 10kW electric shower. I try to only use it when I know the electric company are making a loss. Feels like value for money to me

OCGTs running and frequency low... Time to have a shower methinks

Re: Lights @midgepad

"Keeping the lights on" is just a phrase meaning keeping the electric grid running. It's also the name of a rather good column on the subject in Private Eye.

When I said "the lights go out" I meant a loss of supply, nothing to do with lights specifically.

You must be one of our new American guests, How do you do

Re: Would a company really install a nuke?

And that's why private companies and PLCs should never be allowed anywhere near state utilities.

What are you blathering on about?

To be fair, the extra inertia provided by a nice big steam turbine like those found in a NPP, could have improved a grid's tolerance even to faults like insulator flashover. The transmission network has redundant circuits and automatic re-closing circuit breakers, so as long as there is enough inertia, the blackout only lasts a few seconds while the grid finds another route.

But if all you have are non-synchronous generators such as wind, solar and HVDC import cables, then in the event of a fault, the grid frequency can rise or fall so rapidly that everything has to disconnect to protect itself. And that's when you get a total blackout.

But I guess the lobbyists would have found that hard to explain to the general public

Re: Nuclear fanboys keep looking for a business case for SMRs

That argument is circular, and unhelpful. The cost of nuclear power comes from the regulations and the parasite industries that have grown out of those regulations.

What is the LCOE as you put it, of nuclear power in China? Is that not a 'Habitable latitude'?

Re: Interesting

Well I did say long-term/permanent downfall..

I think renewables would just mean intermittent and unequal service. I.e. If the wind stops blowing, the lights go out except for those who want to pay extra for their 'smart' meters not to disconnect them.

We could end up with an auction-style system, whereby however little electricity we have is supplied to the highest bidders. The "free-marketeers" would just love that, and I think the likes of Microsoft would put up with it, IF they thought that a high bid was enough to guarantee service. This SMRs thing suggests that they think the grid might go down completely, for a long time.. Scenarios for that are: 1: low inertia causes a nationwide outage and the "black start" plan fails to restart the grid in an acceptable time, or 2: enemy action.

Given how reliant we are becoming on subsea interconnectors for example, and the state of geopolitics, i'd say the latter is likely

Re: One thing commonly overlooked

Interesting post, but it misses the point that the vast, vast majority of the "low-level waste" that you talk about, is just stuff that is "potentially contaminated" so has to be classified as nuclear waste, even if it is not radioactive at all. The disposable plastic and paper overalls, gloves, overshoes that I had to wear when entering any controlled area, for example. These were packed into barrels and presumably buried somewhere.

On the other end of the scale, your other post mentions the site of the Trinity test, where we took a load of Plutonium and detonated it out in the open, causing incalculable orders of magnitude more contamination than any civil nuclear operation, not even Chernobyl would have come close to that. Yet the people of New Mexico have not turned into 'ghouls'..

We have daft rules like ALARA/ALARP that say anything that is classified as being part of the nuvlear industry must have emissions targets of zero, while the rest of industry gets away with murder, relatively speaking. Coal power plants chuck up vastly more radioactive material into the environment than the nuclear industry does. The site where I worked had a mass panic because some visiting scientist made a radioactive source out of a box of Gas lamp mantles (which are mildly radioactive) and they were far stronger than any of the sources the site was permitted to use, had to be shipped out at great expense and treated as intermediate level nuclear waste! These are mantles you can buy at a camping shop.

It really is insanity. The IAEA must be run by a mix of CND fifth columnists and Oil industry vested interests.

So why don't utility companies go for farms of SMRs then?

Also, nuclear reactors are fairly prone to suddenly tripping offline, due to extremely cautious failsafe systems, and I don't see why SMRs should be any different in that regard..

Used singly for a datacentre, they would need Diesel back-up, and a very long running tank for the time it takes to re-certify a reactor after it has tripped a safety system. But in a farm of a hundred or so, this could be handled easily without any major outage.

> It didn't go commercial, for reasons.

Reasons including the flip flopping of Margaret Thatcher.. Same reason we've barely got a railway left but have lots of motorways full of expensive, polluting, coffins on wheels.. And people moan on about the safety of nuclear power!

But yes, you're right, if they aren't useful for a private power utility, they're not going to be useful to a software company. Unless the software company just wants to do a bit of greenwashing, as mentioned in the webcast

But I would contest that the reason they're not useful is more to do with politics, fearmongering and overzealous regulation than anything technical.

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

Re: Certainly resisting at home

> VR is still pretty ardently Windows only from what I can see

Been happily using SteamVR with Vive / VivePro for 4-5 years now. Debian Sid. Last time I ran Windows on my own PC was 2013.

Yes, you can play Windows VR games through Proton

Re: not happening

It's trivial. You put /home on a remote fileserver

Microsoft Cortana's farewell tour comes to the Windows Insider program

Re: From the Other Side

I have been a good Bing..

Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

Re: Criticizing Chinese era lenovo on ElReg...

On one model that my company bought, it had a 120W brick and a USB-C port..

It would refuse to charge OR run even with a 100W USB-PD, even tried a USB-C-to-lenovoplug adapter, it recognised both but refused to use it, with the shitty firmware displaying an unhelpful message that a 100W charger is not sufficient, please use the 120W brick instead

The company sent both laptops back because of that. Complete idiocy on Lenovo's part.

When is a PC an AI PC? Nobody seems to know or wants to tell

Re: Uptick in fruitful work.

You must work in the Lenovo Marketing department

I'm sure you could offload your counterstrike playing to an AI that has learned to "slot enemies" far better than you ever could, thanks to a few billion rounds of training courtesy of users of 'cloud gaming platforms' like the one Microsoft just bribedvigorously lobbied regulators around the world to allow them to purchase and slurp.

And I'm sure a further iteration same AI definitely won't be used by a robot to 'slot' you and/or your children / grandchildren one day.

Nukes, schmukes – fuel cells could power future datacenters

Re: Efficiency is ~40% if you ignore the heat generated in the process.

When I said 40%, i was only considering the electrolyser and fuel cell components, which are about 50% and 80% respectively.

0.5*0.8=0.4

But as others have pointed out, the cost of compressing the hydrogen for storage is extremely non-trivial, possibly dwarfing the input cost of electrolysis.

Saying we can recover the heat and use it for district heating is the same as saying we can recover low grade heat from gas, coal and nuclear plants. We can, and that's called CHP. But we don't usually bother, because it's very complicated and expensive, and the plant isn't always running at the same time as the heat is needed. It's also a completely separate argument to the Hydrogen debate, because it applies equally to other fuels.

I need the Paris icon again

Have I read that right? Electrolysis of water is no more than 50% efficient, so the "energy used to produce it in the first place" is about twice as much as the energy that it stores. Three times that would be six times the energy of the stored hydrogen.

I know that liquefying Hydrogen (by cooling it to 1/10 of the absolute temperature of LNG) is expensive, but is it really this expensive? Shurely shome mishtake, or else nobody would be wasting their breath debating the usefulness of liquid Hydrogen as an energy store..

..right?

You seem to be conflating "synchronous condensers" aka rotating stabilisers, with flywheel-based energy storage.

Synchronous condensers are useful for adding AC inertia to a grid, stabilising the frequency, and they are quite well established for that. But they do not store a significant amount of energy. They will spin up and down in minutes or even seconds. Certainly not hours, never mind days

Flywheel energy storage on the other hand, intends to store a much greater amount of energy, and is not well established. It's also incredibly dangerous, far more so than the equivalent sized battery. When flywheels fail, they fail suddenly and spectacularly.

Flywheels absolutely cannot "smooth out renewable peaks and troughs" as you claim. The best they can do is prevent "grid islanding" by keeping the frequency stable for the two seconds that it takes for the grid to re-route following a fault.

New HTTP Error Code needed

HTTP 512 not enough power to service your request

> It's better than free... rather than paying people a premium to not generate electricity you pay them less than that to generate the electricity... you also then get to *not* pay someone else to burn crap later on.

Of course, I agree with you. But in our weird hodge podge of the worst elements of capitalism and communism where we hand out bungs and subsidies to private companies, the wind farm operators may well prefer to be paid for generating nothing (saving on maintenance costs, perhaps, of certain components), than being paid nothing for generating something.

But even if the energy were free (it isn't, even if we could scrap the subsidies) where are we going to get the raw materials for all these electrolysers and fuel cells? And where and how are we going so store the hydrogen?

It leaks if stored under pressure, and there all kinds of weird and wonderful issues if you store it as a cryofluid. The latter obviously taking a bit more energy, too.

Fuel Cells and Elecrolysers both work, if you have enough Platinum to build them.

Efficiency of the whole process is ~40%, from electricity in to electricity out, so it has to be on the pretense that excess, otherwise-curtailed wind power is 'free'.

But at the moment, wind generators get lots of money in subsidies when they are told to shut down. So is the excess energy really 'free'?

And if everyone tried to build electrolysers and fuel cells all at once, the price of both platinum and copper would rocket.

They work at 1.5 Volts (unlike Lithium batteries which have 4 volts per cell) so you need an awful lot more current and an awful lot more copper per cell, and you have to plate the electrodes in Platinum ...

So it is certainly not cheap. It may yet be cheaper than Nuclear, but that isn't saying much.

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

If there's one thing I can thank Musk for

It's Schadenfreude.

He's up there with SBF in creating wonderful point-and-laugh moments

But yes it is a shame that it hasn't imploded completely yet. It's boom-and-bust for purveyors of popcorn. But we have the US elections coming up, so that should be a decent source of mirth

Medium asks AI bot crawlers: Please, please don't scrape bloggers' musings

Webscraping Services

Thanks, katrinab, you have just added to my Depressing List of Things that I Didn't Know were a Thing. ™

Equal Employment Commission sues Tesla for racist discrimination, retaliation at Fremont plant

Re: Just look at Twitter

> Anybody qualified to be at the head (CEO and Board Chairman, for bog sake) of a big publicly traded company

What, like Elon sodding Musk??

Huawei's UK tech eviction reportedly caused Sky to fall on mobile customers

Wow, where's the popcorn icon when you need one?

There are so many shills, stooges and counter-stooges in this thread, it's quite entertaining

Re: Don't keep repeating a lie

Do they have the facility for "OTA" firmware updates?

If so, then they have the facility to install a backdoor..

Re: Don't keep repeating a lie

GTFO, our backdoors are for the Chinese secret police and organisations approved by the CCP, of which the NSA is not one.

Red Hat bins Bugzilla for RHEL issue tracking, jumps on Jira

As I understand it, Steve was very good at shitting on people, stabbing them in the back, and telling them they're fired. That's what a Junior Exec does, and he was so good at it he became senior exec and eventually chief exec. Stabbing and shitting his way up the stinking pile of Microsoft Middle Managers.

At that point there was noone left to backstab and the mask slipped.

I wouldn't trust him to clean a toilet, he'd be waiting in there with a dagger

55-inch Jamboard and app ecosystem tossed into the Google graveyard

Business customers?

It's the schools i'm worried about. They won't have the resources to install the alternative software etc. Never mind train staff on it. They'll just be left with a useless pile of junk, and be forced back to blackboards and chalk. Not necessarily all bad then I suppose

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Couple of fun bits from the Pi launch article you missed

Max 5.1V?! Wtf?

So there is only a 0.1V window for adequate power supply??

We're going to need a new USB-PD spec with remote voltage sense wires!

The alternative to stopping climate change is untested carbon capture tech

Re: This is bonkers

Because in China, local landowners and planning objectors are simply relocated to Xinjiang, and protesters are suppressed with machineguns