Posts by cyberdemon

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Re: And we also want EV's?

No, clearly it is Your sarcasm detector that is faulty. The statement is too obviously false for it not to be sarcasm. No troll/joke icon needed.

Re: And they said...

> What is the return on that analysis? How can it manage to be so valuable that it not only pays for those expensive endless gigawatts of electricity but also turns a nice and evil profit at your expense?

Because they can sell the data analytics to whomever they like.. Your data is worth more than you realise.

See recent reg article: https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/pregnant_womens_data_sold/

Microsoft happily spend endless gigawatts and giga-dollars on GitHub and LinkedIn so that they not only "own" all open-source software, but they also "own" all software developers too. Even your Office 365 account is handily tied to your LinkedIn account by default, so that Microsoft knows how hard you work, your style of work, how you phrase sentences, how you interact with your colleagues. Ultimately it could replace you with a tweaked version of GitHub CoPilot that writes code the way you do and even pretends to be you on Microsoft Teams - the technology is there to do it, the data is there, only that pesky issue of 'ethics' prevents them from doing it. There are even companies who offer a special "service" to bereaved families by turning a dead person's online data profile into a personalised chatbot/deepfake of the dead person. It's fucking creepy I tell you.

distribution losses vs transmission losses

> The problem seems to be power distribution capacity rather then generation. .. We should see data centres clustered round power stations.

Yes and no. Low-voltage distribution is the real problem. Long-distance HV transmission is extremely efficient (less than 2% losses in transmission, IIRC) because it happens at hundreds of thousands of volts, so you need less current for the same power, and the resistive losses of a cable (which are the bulk of the losses) go up with the square of current.

So actually siting a datacentre next to its own HV substation would be just as good as putting it next to a power station. The trouble is that 400kV transformers are incredibly expensive, so there's no point in building a small one just for a datacentre, you have to build one big enough for a city, step it down to 132kV for transmission around the city, then 33kV to the really big datacentres, 11kV for the medium sized ones, and the really crappy little ones would need to tap off 415V from the same distribution wire that supplies houses etc.

The 415V and 11kV local distribution lines in most cities (and even the 132kV and 33kV distribution mains) are hugely overstretched due to the expansion of electric heating and EVs etc, not just datacentres, and as they get hot, the resistance goes up even further. We lose about 10% in this local distribution (iirc again)

> That would include the landing points of the off-shore wind farms.

Er, probably not a good idea for reliability, wind farms have a habit of tripping offline very suddenly, even if the wind IS blowing (e.g. if it is blowing too hard, or if the grid frequency goes too high or too low)

Re: And they said...

No I don't think so - because if the hosting is on-site, then the energy would be spent only on performing the necessary functions, rather than the endless gigawatts that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook et al spend analysing, modelling, optimising and manipulating every last keystroke, mouse-movement, and soon to be eye-twitch of every one of their data cows users.

China's 7nm chip surprise reveals more than Beijing might like

Re: Ours

ASML was the victim of a few "unfortunate accidents" over the course of the last few years and I'm sure China had Absolutely Nothing To Do With It.

• A mysterious fire destroyed the production line for their XUV lithography machines
• A Chinese employee ran off with the designs their XUV lithography machines
• The main source of purest-quality Neon required for manufacturing the lasers that go into these XUV machines was er, invaded.
• Meanwhile there were several unexplained fires at many of their customers who were producing chips for the west.
• And now, that other big ASML customer and the main source of Chips for the West also stands to be invaded..

I am sure none of these things are related. (yeah, right) How many microcontrollers are needed to make one modern missile, I wonder?

Oh yeah, and you can forget Western unity - the bot-farms and social network manipulation machines find it extremely easy to rig elections & referendums and create zealots to sow division and hatred in the west.

Intel's net positive water use only tells part of the story

Re: Obviously

Ah, the old accountancy joke.

What's 2 + 2?

Accountant: What would you like it to be?

The same thing as the Carbon Credit system that allows wind farm operators to be paid twice (or thrice if you include the subsidies) and biomass operators like Drax who can somehow claim to be carbon-negative whilst burning down a forest

Apple network traffic takes mysterious detour through Russia

Re: I doubt if it is related, but

Oh great, latency in the hundreds if not thousands of milliseconds and a signal contention ratio worse than trying to have a conversation with the ref from the stands at a football match.

No thanks. There's a bloody good reason that we have fibre optics.

I doubt if it is related, but

Earlier this week I came across the story about the fibre optic cables in Paris being cut by persons unknown

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/07/25/2014241/the-unsolved-mystery-attack-on-internet-cables-in-paris

It wouldn't surprise me if there was a major attack on internet infrastructure being planned by Russia.

Suppose the Russians paid some cargo ship to drag an anchor across the Bristol Channel, to cut off most of our network links to the US. Then, just like the gas, we would be dependent on the East for our communications.

Martin Shkreli, out of prison for running a Ponzi scheme, now pushes Web3 thing

Re: Shkreli

I wouldn't be surprised if he IS, and he's brazenly flouting that, too.

Re: Shame

By the sounds of it he's heading straight back there, by doing the very same thing he was sent to prison for in the first place

UK government refuses public review before launch of NHS data platform

Re: Last

It's also a standard scumbag tactic these days to accuse your rival of your own crimes. Partygate vs "Beergate"? There was an order of magnitude or three difference in the scale of the rulebreaking, but the tories like to claim that Labour was "just as bad" and therefore it's all moot.

The scale of lies and manipulation on the leave side were staggering. I'm sure they can dig up some instance of a remain-side campaigner having lied, but then again there was plenty of false-flag skullduggery going on, they could have been a deliberate straw man.

Putin "de-nazifying" ukraine.. now accusing them of war crimes.. It's not so much the pot calling the kettle black as the skillet calling the crockery black. It's a war of rhetoric and I'm sick of it.

Re: Trust is non-existent

And our NHS medical records can be sold off to the highest lowest bidder!

Meanwhile the EU is actually doing a lot to tackle data-slurping by big tech twats.

It also has an impeccable standard in Human Rights, something that Priti Patel & co would dearly love to abolish.

The brexit-voting tories are just a nasty landlord-class who long for feudal powers to turn the rest of us into serfs, and the brexit-voting labour are a sad bunch of xenophobic simpletons, hoodwinked by a bus, who thought that brexit was about funding the NHS and keeping johnny foreigner out (e.g. my friend's mother, who said she voted brexit to "get rid of all those bloody pakis...") - if only they could comprehend what the tories were planning for them, and for the NHS.

Would that be The thin end of a Freudian typo?

Re: Last

> it was the population as a whole which voted fro Brexit.

Wtf? You brexit lot have a screw loose.

If the boot were on the other foot, i.e. 52/48, you would be screaming for another referendum, and I would reluctantly have to agree. But if it's 48/52, you are shouting "we won you lost get over it you remainiacs"

If a decision of that magnitude doesn't achieve a clear majority, then obviously it has to be put back to the people.

What if it were down to the last vote? Would you still say "the people have spoken, we won you lost get over it"?

I recall being told that the brexit referendum would use the same rules as a general election, i.e. there has to be a majority to call it a done deal. Then we had the "non-legally-binding" vote, and it surprisingly went your way by the narrowest of margins after all of the lies and dirty tricks, i.e. mass manipulation on facebook. Then you changed the rules afterwards and said the People have Spoken. Well sorry, the people certainly have not.

As far as I can see it, the main beneficiary of Brexit was Vladimir Putin, because it divides and destabilises Europe and the other Western alliances. And of course he had the means to rig it his way, since he had such good mates in the tory party via Alexander Lebedev, and he had a whole department dedicated to rigging foreign elections on social media.

And the tory party, known for its greed and megalomania, know that the Queen will shortly gasp her last. They want to seize absolute power so that they can tear up the rulebook and do whatever the hell they like. Selling us all out to Palantir is just the start of it.

China seeks global leadership for home-grown fast charging standards

So, use USB?

TFA gives a good reason to avoid using QuickCharge (Qualcomm) but it does not explain why China would not want to adopt USB-C like the rest of the world?

The last paragraph seems contradictory with the previous ones.. i.e. EU and US to mandate USB-C

> By developing fast charging standards, China is therefore giving itself a chance of making some home-grown tech widely accepted. ®

Surely, by developing its own non USB-C charging standard, China would be shooting itself in the foot in terms of making some home-grown tech widely adopted?

Maybe the home-grown charging standard will be more USB-C compatible chips? But the article doesn't say that.

AWS sales boss claims Microsoft's softened cloud licensing regime is a sham

Pot calls Kettle a Monopolist

Cry me a river, you both need to be broken up

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

Or, maybe as I alluded to above, because the camera records over everything in a ringbuffer fashion, there are no files or blocks on there that haven't been written to OR read in years, unlike Dabbsy's collection of ghastly audio.

Re: About a billion web pages have been authored to help

SIM cards use a VERY different technology, they have a few hundred kilobytes of EEPROM, NOR flash, or sometimes SLC NAND, all of which stores single bits of data on relatively large MOSFET gate capacitors.

SD cards use hundreds of layers of stacked QLC NAND, which stores 16 different values (4 bits) using the analogue value of each tiny gate capacitor, and the gates themselves are much, MUCH smaller. It doesn't take much in the way of excessive temperature or quantum tunneling to knock a gate charge off by the 6% needed to change its value.

They paint over the cracks with an utterly ridiculous amount of error-correction codes, but my guess would be they don't actively read and refresh data like DRAM does. Instead, the SD card looks at the error correction codes when it reads each block, and will relocate the block (thus refreshing it) if the block has correctable errors, so, something that has sat on the SD card for a long time as a read-only and rarely-read file such as "Worzel Gummidge's Greatest Hits" will eventually suffer from bit-rot.

It's also possible that the SD card will suddenly claim to be blank if more than a certain percentage of reads are bad.

I'm not sure how the QLC NAND on the phone itself is kept in better nick though. My guess would be that the Android OS would deliberately go round and read files/blocks periodically so that they can protect them from this bit-rot. Conveniently they probably don't bother to do this for SD cards, because as Dabbsy suspects, Google wants them to go away so that it can force people to buy more expensive phones.

(I just realised your post was about the contacts of the SIM cards, not the memory tech, but my post still stands^ :) )

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

Re: Bet

> Calling wind ineffective is disingenuous.

It is inneffectual as compared with its capacity and raw materials. We need to use the amount of copper that would be needed for a 100MW gas/steam turbine, in order to to build a wind turbine that only produces 10MW on average. As per TFA, this a huge waste of resources given the twin problem of an energy crisis and a copper shortage.

It certainly is PROFITABLE though, as you say, even without subsidies. So why the F@@k are we still subsidising it??

Trust me, I work for a company that makes battery storage systems and BMSs. My assumptions about battery storage are not off.

Storage is NOT anathema to price spikes because we can NEVER do bulk storage of the kind that could replace gas for even a day. Not even with "all the batteries in the world". The energy-cost ratio is orders of magnitude off, and the world doesn't have the manufacturing capacity nor the resources to do storage on that scale.

Repeating myself here: Batteries are useful ONLY to stabilise the grid for the few seconds/minutes that it takes to spin up or slow down a big GAS turbine, that is why wind and batteries benefit fossil fuels by adding volatility, they don't ease volatility and they will never replace fossil fuels. That is the sad reality.

And no, other storage technologies such as gravity, fuel cells, flow batteries, heat batteries, solid-oxide etc are not even close to matching lithium batteries - they are hopeless for bulk storage. The only thing that comes close is pumped hydro, but unfortunately we don't have the resources to build artificial mountains.

Re: Quick charging

Neither is Lithium. The amount of water needed to mine the current 100k tonnes per year of Lithium is already draining aquifers dry in south america. We don't have enough Copper or Cobalt for all that electrification either.

Endless Economic Growth is not feasible.

We have to go into a global recession, that is the only thing that is feasible. Standards of living have to plummet very soon or we are all toast. That's why the tory party are so busy making castles for themselves, before they take us back to tudor times and try to ride out the next peasants' revolt.

Sadly I think the only thing that might save the planet now, is a massive crash in population due to global thermonuclear war.

Re: Bet

Yes, why do you think that gas companies like Shell invest heavily in wind and solar to boost their fig-leaf credentials, while throwing mud at sensible alternatives such as Nuclear for decades..

Wind exists to create volatility, and volatility is incredibly profitable, especially if you're the one with the weather model and a fast gas turbine.

It's just not terribly good for keeping the lights on. But who cares about that eh? We get even MORE money when the lights flicker and we have to step in to "save the day"

Batteries are good for only one thing: Stabilising the grid frequency in the few seconds/minutes that it takes to spin up or slow down a big gas turbine in response to intermittent wind & solar, and getting paid £££££Dosh for doing so.

You are quite right to point out that they will Never, EVER be useful for bulk storage of the kind that could help us phase out gas, not even with unlimited natural resources and an order of magnitude increase in performance, and the oil companies know that too.

Baidu crashes the cost of robo-taxis by 75 percent

Re: Let the Chinese Test This One

Autonomous cars could be used everywhere already if there were no (unpredictable) humans on the roads.

>I think Baidu is considered to have the best facial recognition systems in the world

Indeed, but it will be trained mainly on the occupants of the driverless vehicle. No neer-do-wells allowed in the vehicle. Unpersons may enter the vehicle but the doors will be locked and the destination will be locked to 'Gulag', and collision-avoidance systems may be silently deactivated. Bad luck if you get in the car and only then realise that you are an unperson.

It could be used to identify pedestrians, but I think even Baidu would struggle to identify someone in another car who is wearing a Covid Mask & Sunglasses. Then again it only needs to read the license plate if it were illegal to get in a car that isn't registered to you & doesn't have internal facial recognition.

The biggest problem in the west, meanwhile, will be the insurance industry. Who pays for the insurance on a driverless car? How do we adjust the premiums? whose fault was it? What do we do about that little toddler who was misclassified as a piece of litter?

Whereas in China, presumably there is no need for mandatory insurance - if two cars collide, the driver/occupant with the lowest social-standing with the police pays up or goes to jail. Much easier.

And if it doesn't work, well, we can just ban the humans from driving in the big cities at all. If you're too poor to own an autonomous car, take a taxi, or a bus, or get on your bicycle. And "poor" in China means you don't have any favour with the authorities.

Court OKs billion-dollar Play Store gouging suit against Google

Re: I wonder

And the rest will go to desperate ex-PPI claims "companies" and fraudsters.

"Do you own or have you Ever owned an Android phone or tablet device? Have you ever purchased an APP on the Google Play App Store? Then You could be due Compensation! Text MUG to 0989-PARASITE NOW"

Copper shortage keeps green energy, tech ventures grounded

Re: Bloody batteries and solar panels

Indeed. But sadly, even nuclear power is not able to work in an apocalyptic drought scenario (at least not in its usual configuration, which uses evaporative cooling towers) https://www.energylivenews.com/2022/07/18/is-heatwave-putting-strain-on-nuclear-power/

IMO, we should be building nuclear reactors underwater.

Less requirement on shielding and aircraft-collision protection (which is one of the biggest costs for the EPR design) and a whole ocean of free cooling water.

How's this for your diversity argument btw:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/13/smart_thermostat_strain/

Re: Bloody batteries and solar panels

Yes I am aware of the diversity argument. If I was using 30kW (120A) then I would blow the main 100A fuse. I live in an old house in Southampton, it's fairly typical for the area, electricity was retrofitted to the house some time in the 1920s-30s, and it has a 100A fuse, which probably wouldn't blow until a few minutes at 120A (as I understand it, fuses are only guaranteed NOT to blow at their rated current, and typically blow significantly higher - they are only there to protect the wiring from catching fire. MCBs are different of course) and the demand is unlikely to stay that high for that long.

Showers are indeed resistive (as I mentioned :P), and their usage is pretty intermittent - they are only used for 5-20 mins at a time, depending on who's in them, and it's unlikely that everyone on the road will step into the shower at the exact same time.

Heat pumps and EVs on the other hand, draw power for hours at a time, and tend to go on and off demand at the same times. So the diversity argument doesn't necessarily save us.

But yeah I don't know how the phases are split, if there's single-phase down each side or three-phase, but the wiring is ancient. It is single-core (concentric) i.e. the shield is neutral. Looks like a paper-insulated cable going into my old bakolite 100A fuse (and from there to my old bakolite electro-mechanical meter which you can pry from my cold, dead hands, metaphorically speaking.)

But my main argument is: Even when the cable or transformer isn't exploding, it IS getting hot and wasting energy. It's not MY energy its wasting, because its upstream of the meter, but it is the reason why local low voltage distribution is so lossy compared to HV transmission. If my lights go slightly-but-noticeably dim when I turn the kettle on, then I could take a voltmeter and make a good guess at the internal resistance of the mains supply at the distribution board, and thus estimate the off-meter losses caused by that extra 3kW kettle load. If that resistance changes over time, then it's probably due to the changing temperature of the cables/joints/transformer windings.

Re: Bloody batteries and solar panels

Yes indeed, I assume I have piqued their rage by pointing out some of the glaring flaws in the renewable energy groupthink. No, Heat Pumps, EVs and renewables are NOT going to save us. But they are a great moneyspinner for some shifty air conditioning salesmen and biomass lumberjacks. Heat pumps are literally just air conditioners that can run backwards. If we install 300,000 heat pumps per year, that means we are also installing 300,000 high-powered air con units into badly-insulated houses. And the weather is getting hotter. What could possibly go wrong with that eco-idea? Last decade if I had an air conditioner I would have been a social piranha; people would tell me that I am selfishly ruining the planet for my own comfort. But now, I can just write "heat pump" on it with a marker pen and suddenly I'm an eco-hero?

In some ways, I wish that the Lithium Battery had never been invented. It gives us a false hope. People seem to think that we can continue our post-1980s consumption unabated, all we have to do is build more windmills and solar panels and store the energy in batteries to keep the lights on. But unfortunately it's simply not possible to store Terawatt-hours (the UK uses approximately 5 TWh per week, and we have had periods of calm weather where we have used 18TWh of gas before the wind started blowing again). Even if there were no shortage of copper and you could divert all the world's battery factories to making batteries for the UK, it would take decades to build a battery big enough to replace gas here for a week. But as TFA says, copper is limited, (so is Cobalt, and Lithium too because it takes a massive amount of water to extract, as does silicon wafer manufacture for solar panels) so the whole battery-revolution is doomed. Sorry Britishvolt et al, but you were sold a lie. The UK can never be self-sufficient in battery manufacturing, cos we need raw materials innit (and also labour here is terribly expensive compared to China)

The only thing that grid batteries are good for, is stabilising the frequency in the very short term i.e. over the order of seconds to provide something similar to the stored inertia in a flywheel, as a replacement for the mass of spinning turbines that we have lost with solar panels etc. They cannot be used for bulk storage.

All this stuff about electrifying everything, carbon capture, the hydrogen economy, liquid ammonia storage, CO2 batteries, is pure greenwash and bollocks of the highest order. It is only good for one thing: Making a few rich people richer as they cream off from all the government and industry incentives for green tech. They are as much good as a shady one-man company in Norfolk company selling £meelions of useless or nonexistent PPE to Matt Hancock.

Biomass is deforestation. Biofuel farms and Solar panels are springing up on land that could be used to grow food crops. Captured CO2 will escape (and suffocate swaths of people/animals/fish when it does). The only sensible way to capture carbon is to let the forests grow, not to chop them down.

Thus, the only way we are going to get to net zero, is to change our consumption habits (i.e. everyone has to live where we work, and forget about the luxury of always-on electricity, and put some wooly jumpers on in the winter) or else we have to reduce our population. Both of those options mean, shock horror, that "economic growth" has to go in reverse for a few decades. Otherwise the planet is fucked. But then again, that's never going to happen so most likely we're already fucked. Only a massive population crash due to nuclear war has a chance to save the planet now. Anyone for cheese & biscuits? Who'd like to buy some weapons?

Re: Mode of failure

Yes, we could wire xmas lights in parallel, but then the whole string would operate at about 2V i.e. the voltage of one LED or fairy-light bulb, so to get a resonably bright string (lets say we want 5 watts), you'd need a lot of copper, because that's 2.5A, and the power loss in the wire goes with the square of that current.

If you string them all in series then you will get failures taking down the whole string, so it's less reliable, but it's much cheaper because you can use thinner wire.

Steel has a horrendously high resistance compared to copper. If you wanted to wire solar cells in parallel, even for a few kilowatts, you'd need thousands of amps and so you'd easily melt your steel sheet. Commercially viable solar farms operate in the tens of megawatts.

Of course in industry there is a balance between cost and reliability, because at the end of the day, poor reliability is just extra cost. Not so much for christmas lights though, if they fail then the consumer buys a new one.

Commercial solar farms do indeed run at thousands of volts i.e. thousands of cells in series. But they then connect multiple series strings in parallel, so that one cell failure would only take out a small portion of their capacity (but it still disables a whole string of 1000+ cells)

Re: Bloody batteries and solar panels

I guess it depends on the size of the heat pump. You're right though, 40A is a bit big for a domestic heat pump, in terms of continuous rating.

My gas boiler is 20kW and so I was assuming a 10kW motor in the heat pump.

I'm pretty sure you can't match a 20kW boiler with 1-2kW input, that would imply a CoP of 10-20, would it not?

A 10kW electric shower which draws 10kW at 240V draws 41.6 A - i'm not sure how you can cast doubt on that. If the voltage drops, it will draw less current (39.9 A) because it is a resistive load.

Whereas a 10kW EV charger is a constant power device. It will draw (for example) 41.6A at 240V, but if the voltage drops, that input current goes up not down - at 230V it will increase its currrent draw to 43.5A, to put the same 10kW into the battery. Of course it will not increase past its own rated input current, it will have to put less than 10kW into the battery or stop charging if the mains input drops too far.

Computers are the same. If you drop the AC input voltage from 240 to 220V, the computer will stay running, but the AC mains input current will increase to keep the power constant, because the load on the DC side hasn't changed. Most modern computer PSUs these days are wide-input-range, they will carry on working all the way from 100V to 300V input, the current changes to keep the power constant.

My argument is, that having a large portion of constant-power loads (such as computers, EVs, and inverter-driven compressors) on an ageing distribution network produces a slight positive-feedback effect, whereby excessive load causes a voltage drop, which causes the load current to increase, which increases the heating in the cables (by a square factor), and also causes more voltage drop.

TFA is about copper, not heat pumps or switched-mode PSUs. But I think if we are going to decomission two out of three of our energy distribution networks (gas and petroleum) and replace it all with electricity, then we are going to need to do a lot more to increase the capacity of the electric grid. That either means using a LOT more copper, to uprate the cables under the road from 400A to 1000A, or we will have to reduce the length of the low voltage transmission leg i.e. everyone gets 11kV pylons and a transformer outside their house, like wot they do in 'murica.

Bloody batteries and solar panels

Other technologies can make efficient use of copper, but batteries and solar panels cannot.

The reason is voltage: High voltage equipment only needs a small amount of current to transfer a high power, lower voltage systems need more current, and power losses due to resistive heating in the copper wire go as the square of current (I^2 R).

Lithium battery cells only produce about 4 volts, and solar cells only produce 1 volt. To have more volts, you need more cells in series i.e. more points-of-failure in series, so high-voltage batteries and high-voltage solar panels are unreliable, because one failure in a string of 1000 series-connected cells will disable the whole string. So batteries and solar cells tend to operate at low voltages and high currents, i.e. they need lots and lots of copper.

If I want to make a 10kW solar panel, I could either use 1000 cells in series at 10A, or 100 cells in series at 100A. The latter is 10 times more reliable, by some reliability metric. But it requires 10 times more copper to push 10kW around at 100A with the same losses than it does to push the same 10kW around 10A.

So either I go for low-reliability, or use more copper to reduce the resistance.

Motors, transformers and generators on the other hand, don't have electrochemical or photovoltaic cells in series, they just have longer coils of wire to generate higher voltages. It's easy to make a high voltage generator or transformer, we just need good insulation, and that insulation doesn't really degrade much with time, provided it is kept at a sensible temperature. The reliability of motors and transformers scales much better with voltage than it does for batteries and solar cells.

Batteries also have the problem of balancing of course. so the more cells in series, the more that small variations in cell capacity will reduce the overall capacity: Because the whole series string takes the same current, and if any one cell goes below 2V or above 4.4V, the whole pack is in serious trouble.

The next problem I can see with copper, is low-voltage (240V) local power distribution. Again, losses go as I^2 R, and the cable under my road is rated for 400 Amps. One electric shower is 40A, one EV charger is 40A, and one heat pump is 40A. But my street has 30 houses, so the underground cable regularly overheats and fails. (and while doing so, it is incredibly inefficient)

As the cable is overloaded, it heats up, and the power lost in the cable goes with the square of current as voltage is lost across the cable resistance. So when I turn my shower on, the lights dim slightly as the voltage drops.

If I bothered to, I could even measure this voltage drop and calculate the resistance (and the power loss) in the local mains distribution. But on average it is around 15% just for the last leg between the 11kV-240V substation and your house.

The kicker is that any electronic DC-DC load such as a computer, battery charger, or "inverter" appliance will automatically draw more current as the input voltage drops. This leads to exploding underground cables because as the voltage drops due to overload, the DC-DC regulator tries to keep a constant power, which leads to more current, and remember losses go as I^2 R. Even R is not constant, it goes up with temperature.

So TLDR, expect power cuts on Monday and Tuesday as more people fire up their air con units. Grid transformers may overheat. We may also run out of cooling water for some power stations too.

</doom>

Smart thermostat swarms are straining the US grid

Re: "Smart Meters somehow save people hundreds of pounds"

They also include a handy remote-controlled disconnector, which will perform load-shedding if demand-management fails. i.e. if you don't pay your monthly (or weekly) bill, then the lights go off immediately.

Probably, they will soon include a "feature" where the cash cow customer can set a limit on pricing i.e. if the price goes above £1/kWh then it will open the contactor.

We will all be squeezed bone dry for these fat cats. Free-market capitalism at its finest. Mrs T would be proud.

BT strike action is coming: Comms union to serve notice to company

Re: Agency workers

Outages?

I'm sure absolutely nothing will suddenly go TITSUP on the day of the strike..

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Someone should tell Dominic Raaab

Microsoft delays controversial ban on paid-for open source, WebKit in app store

Re: The guy apologises and in marches the drama brigade

I agree that it does sound like someone at MS did want to stop people from abusing its platform to profit from other people's open source work, but the reason for the Drama is because Microsoft already profit from other people's work on a huge scale..

Then again if you look at Google and Apple's app stores, the problem is absolutely rife.

The issue I have with App Stores in general though, is that I cannot easily link the binary distribution back to the source - I can't do `apt-get --build source [packages]` like I can on Debian.

On Google's app store, there are thousands of apps which package open source software, inserting spyware and adverts for someone else. And I can't use my phone to download and build an app from source even if it is available on GitHub, yet my phone is plenty powerful enough to run an SDK. It's as if Google, rather than trying to stop third parties from abusing open source like it does, are actively trying to suppress open source on its platform.

Re: Alternative engines

How can they ban web browsers other than specific implementations, and why?

What is their definition of 'web browser'?

Would they ban a lynx or w3m distribution? What about apps that use Web Services? Do they count as "products that browse the web"?

As for "[Do] Not attempt to profit from open-source or other software that is otherwise generally available for free, nor be priced irrationally high relative to the features and functionality provided by your product." I can understand the good intentions behind this (see tp2 below) but perhaps whoever said this doesn't realise the amount of MIT-licensed (and arguably GPL too) code that Microsoft have gobbled up and assimilated into WIndows and other MS products. Does WSL count as "profiting from open source"? Isn't everything that Microsoft has ever sold "priced irrationally high relative to the functionality provided"?

They should never have been allowed to buy GitHub or NPM (or LinkedIn but that's another matter)

If Microsoft actually wanted to help Open Source, they should stop abusing it themselves.

Gtk 5 might drop X11 support, says GNOME dev

In other news

Linux users ditch Gnome, switch to KDE, and live a happy, productive life.

PowerShell pusher to log off from Microsoft: Write-Host "Bye bye, Jeffrey Snover"

Don't ditch PowerShell

Ditch Windows. (and with it, PowerShell)

Problem solved.

Teslasuit demo: Taking a crack at force feedback with the 'Glove'

Mr Lister has worn out the groinal attachment

How will we write our name in the virtual snow?

IBM settles age discrimination case that sought top execs' emails

Re: The direction the US is going, they'll sign up the zygote and fire her when she's born.

Have you ever seen inside an Amazon warehouse?

Not chained in the literal sense I suppose, but with a system of AI-powered performance monitoring, which also controls the lower and middle management tiers.

"Worker 445621: You seem to have worked yourself half to death. You're fired."

Behold this drone-dropping rifle with two-mile range

Re: "lean" innovation

Go back to flower arranging, you're clearly even worse at politics.

Linus Torvalds says Rust is coming to the Linux kernel 'real soon now'

Re: Error Types

Can you please stop using the word English to describe the daft system of units that existed before the 20th century? Nobody in England, or indeed Britain, uses them anymore. (Except the Pint. But only because the British pint is bigger than the American pint.)

It's not Metric versus English, it's SI versus Imperial. And that empire withered and died a long time ago.

But you're right that we can still express velocity in metres per second, obviously.

Re: Seriously, are programmers that bad?

You are looking at the wrong job boards maybe, or perhaps you should study some microcontroller datasheets and widen your search to "embedded C / firmware engineer", because my company would pay good money, ~£70k, for a good embedded C developer.

We are using Zephyr RTOS and stm32, and although they (zephyr) are also considering Rust support, it isn't near reality yet. Plenty of really scary C macro-fu in their build system, mostly to support devicetree across various microcontroller architectures, and it's really nice. But you need to know how to do safe object-oriented programming in C. And if you think that's impossible, you are not ready.

Cloudflare explains how it managed to break the internet

Re: CDNs are evil!

The worst example of this problem, of course, being Google AMP. Pages auto-mangled by Google, and the original website doesn't even know that you looked at it.

To Room 101 with it

RSAC branded a 'super spreader event' as attendees share COVID-19 test results

Re: The safer each individual is, the safer the whole population becomes

Taiwan and China are very similar economies in that their main economic driver is export goods, not services. The UK economy is mainly services and very little export. (yes I agree this needs to be fixed, but you are not being realistic if you think this can change on the scale of years - it takes decades, even if we could find something that we could export competitively ...)

But, surely you must realise, that our service-based economy is impacted much more by covid-fear than Taiwan's export-based economy. Taiwan mostly produce computer chips that already come out of clean-rooms and heavily automated factories ... Economically speaking at least, it is Much easier for them to weather the storm of covid.

Re: The safer each individual is, the safer the whole population becomes

Ok, so are you saying that we should continue to ban public gatherings (China style), and damn the economic consequences for the hospitality, events, travel & other service sectors (which make up the bulk of the UK economy) in the face of a recession and spiralling inflation?

Re: The safer each individual is, the safer the whole population becomes

Ok, so nothing makes you completely safe (not even the vaccine, that I remember being told would give 95% protection against serious illness) - but surely a balance has to be struck somewhere?

There is danger in all aspects of life, and it may well be that humanity is doomed anyway - if our population keeps growing then something will come and get us in the end, be it war, famine, other kinds of pestilence etc. Or just plain old Death: If I am covid-positive but have no symptoms, and I am hit by a bus, then I would still count as a covid death. I think that quirk of the reporting may be behind some of the recent claims that "omicron killed more people than delta" for example.

If 50% of the population have covid then (approximately) 50% of all deaths will be covid deaths, even if nobody died from covid. And this is especially true if (even non-deadly or vaccine-protected variants of) covid is present in places where people usually go to die, such as hospitals and care homes.

I think your arguments (that we should all be as safe as we possibly can be) are very similar to those around Nuclear Power. It is not possible to reduce the risk to zero, but if we double or treble the time and cost of each plant by mandating hyper-redundant safety systems, core-poisoning shutdown systems etc, (or by banning new builds altogether and/or closing existing ones) then we can marginally reduce the safety risk.

After all that, we find that other things have killed us, i.e. carbon emissions, particulates, and, ironically, airborne radioactivity, from burning coal and oil.

How safe is "safe enough" for you? When can we have our lives back? Or would you have us sat in our basements wearing masks on zoom calls for evermore?

Crossbreed or are crossbred?

Indian government issues confidential infosec guidance to staff – who leak it

Re: "check the popularity of the app and read the user reviews [...]"

A better approach might be to set up a repository of open source apps for their employees to use, and disable the Google/Apple app stores.

Unfortunately this approach is not very feasible because Google and Apple have done their very best to kill off any open source development on their platforms, and they have largely succeeded.

There are some holding out against this tyranny though, such as /e/os, but thanks to Android's horrendously complicated SDK, it is almost impossible for an end-user to build even /e/os from source.

SpaceX staff condemn Musk's behavior in open letter

Re: This is what late stage Elon looks like

If by 'laying the foundations', you mean 'digging its grave', then yes.