Posts by cyberdemon 3488 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
Spiritual Opium indeed!
Over here, our teenagers spend all their time watching utter shite on YouTube/TikTok/Twitch/etc while in China they are studying quantum electrodynamics because they already learnt vector calculus and classical mechanics in primary school.
And what can they do with quantum electrodynamics? Design sub-5nm transistors of course.
Maybe all HPC and AI "COULD" all run on a unified platform. BUT SHOULD IT?
Who would control the unified platform? Bob Page?
Obscure reference alert: A pre-millenium (1999) computer game's preminition of a billionaire head of an AI company who wants to rule the world with AI weapons (mass surveillance and walking machineguns), and wished to concentrate all of the world's communications into his all-powerful AI. He also (in the game) engineered a terrible global pandemic called the Gray Death, and sold a very limited quantity of a product called Ambrosia that merely deactivated the virus in individuals for a short time, so long as they kept paying him.
https://youtu.be/FR7yhm5obtk?t=20989
See also: Black mirror, etc.
What Rob Farber calls AI is nothing more than an energy-munching statistical machine that is only really useful for mass surveillance, manipulation and oppression, and not much else. And it needs to be curtailed, severely.
Your mum features local dimming mate.
Jokes aside: Unless you're working on a TV, no it doesn't. You would notice immediately if it did, especially in "dark mode".
Personally, I enjoy "white on black" (aka "dark mode") on my Konsole terminal in Debian. But I certainly wouldn't want it on windows notepad. Changing the aesthetic of that old stalwart would make me wonder what else they changed.. e.g. the most frequent use case I have of Notepad is when I have something in borked Unicode on my clipboard, and I need to squash it back to 7-bit ASCII.
Worse: Not only was the "proposition" vaguely worded, but the title and content of at least one of the articles was a statement that went opposite to the "proposition". So if you disagreed with the title, then you should vote "For", and if you agree with the title, you should vote "against".
IMO, the vote options themselves should have been clear statements. e.g.
a) Cloud-dependent rented hardware is good for the environment and good for customers
b) Cloud-dependent rented hardware is bad for the environment and bad for customers
c) Nuanced/Undecided, see my answer in the comments
Interesting, I didn't know that underfloor heating could work with a flow temperature of 30 degrees, I'd have thought that at this temperature (below body temperature) you'd barely notice that it is turned on, and in in cold and windy weather it wouldn't have much chance of keeping the air warm. How many kW can an underfloor heating system put into a room if the flow is only 30 degrees? I'd hazard a guess that it would be about 100W per small-sized room, i.e. not much more actual heat than an old fashioned lightbulb (which produces heat, and gives you light for free!)
But I take your point about the psychological effect: If your feet are warm, you feel warm, so you save energy. There was a similar argument used against CFL and early LED light bulbs: The blue tinge made people feel cold so they turned the heating up!
Skirting-board heaters are just radiators without convector fins, aren't they?? How is that supposed to be any more effective/efficient?
I suppose the point is: If your house is extremely well-insulated, then you only need a very weak heating system. So a heat pump / underfloor coil will do the trick. But unfortunately in the UK, our houses are NOT well insulated at all, and cannot easily be improved.
As Mark T said: Because we can't afford to demolish and re-build our housing stock, which is what it would take here in the UK to bring them up to proper Heat Pump compatibility, with air ducts instead of radiators, forced air circulation instead of air-bricks and open vents in the loft, plastic wall-ties etc.
And even then: Our cold, damp weather really isn't suited to air-source heat pumps at all. They will ice up and be forced to enter a defrost cycle, wherein they run backwards for a short while, blowing freezing cold air back into the house to warm up the external heat exchanger. The efficiency metrics for heat pumps NEVER include the defrost cycle!
Norway has pretty dry air in winter, maybe you have less problems with ice.
How does underfloor heating help for heat pump efficiency? Isn't that just as bad, if not worse, than having radiators??
> Even if you just use a conventional electric fire to create the heat you get virtually 100% efficiency
No, you don't. You get about 50%, the other 50% is lost in generation and transmission from the gas-fired power plant which is the only thing propping up the electricity grid when it's cold and dark and the wind isn't blowing.
Whereas a gas boiler gives you 95% of the heat from the source gas, and it doesn't load up the electric grid.
Heat pumps only work with an extremely well insulated house where the radiators don't need to be much hotter than body temperature to keep the place warm when it's freezing outside. But such houses aren't common in the UK or Europe, nor can they ever become common, not without a significant demolition spree. Simply squirting polystyrene foam into the cavity wall and filling the roof with fibreglass wool won't make enough of a difference, because the cavity wall is bridged by conducting iron tie-rods and there are vents in the top and bottom of the house to allow natural airflow. If you plug those up, you end up with low oxygen levels, damp, and black mould.
No, 1MWh to produce a single bitcoin. Most transactions are tiny fractions of a bitcoin. And many thousands of transactions are processed with the production of a bitcoin.
Not defending bitcoin though. Not unless we had ubiquitous nuclear power. And even then, there'd be much better uses of the energy.
Err, not defending Bitcoin/Shitcoin (and not calling it 'Crypto' either because as an earlier Reg article pointed out, cryptography is losing its name to this crap) but can you please give me an example of a heat pump that can exceed 300% (or even 150%) efficiency in realistic UK winter conditions (never mind Sweden), when the source of heat is below 10 degrees C (i.e. outside air in winter) and the water output is above 60 degrees C (i.e. able to heat radiators to a point where they are effective at heating a house).
Your gas boiler will normally heat the water to about 50 degrees C on minimum and 85 degrees on maximum. Normally you'd have it set to 60 for efficient operation, but you may need to raise it to get good heating performance in the cold weather, especially if you live in an old brick house as so many of us do here in the UK.
I think you'll find that the 300% figure only applies with a ΔT less than 30 degrees (air to water, so if it's freezing outside, then your radiators only reach 30 degrees which is hopeless), and it drops to 200% around ΔT=50 C, i.e. radiators at 50 degrees which is still pretty hopeless. In cold conditions with a hot output comparable to a gas boiler, they are below 150%.
And remember, you have already lost a lot of that energy during electricity generation and transmission so they don't actually start at 100% (and if it's cold, dark and still, it won't have come from renewables). Factoring in the generation and transmission efficiency, they are frequently less than 100% efficient, even if the heat pump is running at 2.0 Coefficient of Performance ("200% efficient").
Whereas condensing gas boilers are genuinely 95% efficient, because they don't involve any Carnot cycle - we are not converting heat into another form of energy, we are using it AS heat, with almost no wastage thanks to the condensing system (whereby they use the exhaust gases to pre-heat the combustion gases).
What's more, they are RESILIENT. They don't put a strain on our rather fragile electricity grid, and if the grid does go down, we can easily run a gas boiler and pump with a small battery inverter.
And the amount of materials (copper, neodymium, refrigerant gases, semiconductors for power electronics, energy) needed to build these bastards is pretty horrendous. And they are all made almost exclusively in China.
They are also noisy and bulky, like an oversized air conditioning unit, which is what they are, really.
Open Source is about choice.
I run open source software (in my case, Debian GNU/Linux) because of the freedom it gives me - I know that if I don't like one solution, I can install another or write/hack my own.
I know that for this reason I will never have DRM or other "pay us to remove" anti-features in my software. And I am aware that "payment" includes surveillance data for many "free" closed-source apps. If any open source app were to start spying on people, there would be an easy solution involving a ubiquitous piece of cutleryware.
I agree that sometimes packages can be broken downstream in linux distributions, but reinstalling the operating system (even if you count debootstrap/chroot as reinstalling the OS) is never the only option. There's always a way around any problem, that's one of the most beautiful things about Open Source.
Whereas In your pre-packaged containerised world, you remove that freedom from users, by making it difficult for them to fix issues with your software by themselves, and make it more difficult for them to make it work with other pieces of software that you hadn't personally envisaged. But maybe you are flogging some closed-source, DRM-infested spyware/crapware and you don't want your customers looking too closely at what you are doing on their computers - In which case you are on the wrong platform mate, you can go and take a Running Jump.
Rather than force users to have some god-awful containerised linux system like Snap or Flatpak (or worse, Android, which just bungs a JVM on top of Linux and hides away the workings completely, and actively punishes users for trying to build applications from source - oops, you have debugging enabled - safetyNet failed, no DRM apps for you) I would prefer to educate and encourage users to build apps from source, so that they can understand how the system works, fix bugs or add missing features themselves, and contribute to the community project that they are using.
If I really don't like something in a Debian package, or some version that I want has fallen out of compatibility with my system packages, I can always run apt-get --build source [package], and fix it myself.
In order to calculate the environmental impact of "what I do for my computing needs", I need to include the amount of power that Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft et al spend rifling through the data I send them.
If I don't use the cloud, then that rather large part of my personal carbon footprint becomes zero.
And if I DID use the cloud, then I would STILL need many Gigabytes of RAM, many GFLOPs of CPU and indeed GFLOPs if not TFLOPs of GPU to run Win11 / Google Chrome / Facebook's latest VR Metaverse (cr)app, which spend so much energy on running 1000 javascript threads on every webpage, recording my every mouse-movement and eye-twitch, and rendering some shitty WebGL background that I never asked for, probably to try to sell me some advert for some piece of tat that I don't want.
Luckily, I have Linux, I have NoScript/ScriptSafe, and I don't use Facebook. Therefore my CPU and GPU can relax and throttle down (Or indeed turn OFF! What a novel concept in this age of Windows Modern Suspend..) until I actually need them to run a game, or for my own computations on my own data that I wouldn't trust anyone's damned Cloud with.
And don't tell me that running a game on someone else's computer and streaming it back to my monitor is in any way more 'green', except in terms of dollar bills for the people monetising the data.
This OS was useless from the start.
Would anyone buy a car on a buy+rent model where you pay 50+ grand up-front for the car, but also need to take out a £500/month subscription and accept regular over-the-air updates to critical and non-critical functionality, all the while signing an agreement that the manufacturer will remotely brick the car if you stop paying?
Er yes, apparently certain mugs will fall for this. They buy Tesla cars and Samsung mobile phones.
And before you whinge "But I don't pay a subscription for my samsung mobe or my tesla vehicle": Yes you do. You pay with your data. Stop sending your highly valuable surveillance data to Samsung/Tesla/Microsoft/Amazon/Google, and you have bought a brick.
Er yeah. This debate was fluffed because the title of the article is inconstent with the "proposition".
Apparently if you Agree with the title "The climate is turning against owning our own compute hardware. Cloud is good for you and your customers" then you should vote AGAINST, but if you disagree, you should vote FOR. WTF?
Did the Reg attend the Dominic Cummings & Vladimir Putin school of Electioneering?
Anyway, my vote is: The cloud is BAD for both the environment AND my privacy, because it spends too many megawatts analysing all my surveillance data points, and trying to predict and influence my future behaviours.
Long live customer-owned hardware with open source software that doesn't spend all its time spying on the data cow user.
I agree, but Australia seems to be something of a pit-canary for unpopular Authoritarian policy in the west. Australia does things that would cause riots in the UK, US and EU. But where they go, we all eventually follow.
RIPA: Happened in Australia first. Then Jacqui Smith introduced it to the UK.
Detention without charge if suspected of terrism. Hostile Environment. Slurping of medical records.
ID cards will be next. Then a ban on encryption. Then this.
P65 is easier to administer if you just slap it on everything. Your carpenter's square probably contained a high dose of Iron. If you swallow enough iron filings you will probably get cancer. Oh and if it's steel then it may contain a small amount of cobalt, a tiny fraction of which is radioactive!!!1
That was probably a coil gun, which I also built as a kid. It can only fire a ferromagnetic (iron/steel) projectile. Mine shot a nail, at a similar subsonic speed to your paperclip.
A railgun works on a DC linear motor principle, whereby a large current passes through the projectile between the rails, and generates a magnetic field in opposition to the magnetic fields generated by the rails themselves. It operates at millions of Amps, and any paperclip would turn to plasma before it even starts moving.
Actually I think that is one of the main problems with railguns - the need to clean off the remains of projectiles that have sputtered themselves onto every surface on the inside of the weapon.
From the paper:
Specifically, the hidden camera embedded in the object reflects the incoming laser pulses at a higher intensity than its surroundings due to an effect called lens-sensor retro-reflection. This occurs when almost all light energy impacting an object is reflected directly back to the source (see Section 2.2). These unexpectedly high-intensity reflections from hidden cameras cause certain regions of the ToF sensor to be “saturated” and appear as black pixels. LAPD processes these saturated areas to automatically identify the hidden camera.
So, it sounds like any glass bead would be identified as a hidden camera.
Err, yes, that's a few kilobytes of data per day, at best.
And while they (Mastercard/Visa/My Bank) might know the different shops that I frequent and how much I spend, they don't get enough data to properly analyse the things that I buy.
TESCO, Chipping Soddington, 53.21 GBP, Friday 13 April, 18:36
This gives them a very approximate location, i.e. country and vicinity, but it doesn't give any details of what I bought (though it does for Tesco, if and only if I use a Clubcard) or the exact coordinates of where I was. And my credit rating is literally THEIR legitimate business.
Whereas (for most people) Amazon collects: Their exact GPS coordinates at all times (via the App on their phone), a picture of their face whenever they enter their own home (via Amazon Ring), potentially anything they say in their private home (via Amazon Echo/Alexa/Spot), every exact product they buy, every product they have hovered over while scrolling and might buy, every product they have reviewed and they way they form sentences in such reviews, any websites that they visit without clearing Amazon's tracking cookies in their browser, any other apps they use in their phone (via Android/Apple tracking APIs which cannot be cleared/disabled), etc etc.
And for those poor sods who are unlucky enough to work for Amazon or one of its many subsidiaries, partners and customer companies (e.g. Deliveroo) then they are surveilled every second of their waking (and probably sleeping too) lives.
Meanwhile Facebook, Google, Microsoft et al are all competing to collect even more data. And they all use this data (at great expense to the planet) to build yet more power and more influence over everyone's daily life.
In other words, I would not trust Amazon or any of the aforementioned tech monstrosities with one iota of well-labeled concise data of the kind that I trust my credit card company with.
And that's not to say that I am a fan of the credit card duopoly that is Mastercard/Visa. I just trust them an order of magnitude more than I trust Amazon, because they have been around for longer and as such, our laws and regulations are well-established to stop any funny business from them.
> Your credit card company has more information on you, thanks to you people flicking that credit card out for £5 lattes, than Amazon will have in decades.
Err, no. Not by a long shot.
The data that banks and credit card companies collect has been very well-regulated for decades. Whereas the likes of Amazon, Google and "Meta" collect unregulated gigabytes of data about you all the time, and abuse that data to model and manipulate you.
I agree with the OP: Credit card data is far more dangerous in the hands of Amazon than it is in the hands of Mastercard or Visa, who are only allowed to use it to compute a credit score.
Hopefully Amazon would be subject to the same regulation, but I trust them a lot less than I would trust a labrador with my lunch.
Trivial patents like these are an abuse of the patent system, and a waste of the court's time.
And TBH, with the modern pace of product development, I think it would be fair to shorten the life of all patents to 5 years instead of 25.
If you haven't got your great idea to market by then, it's time to let someone else try it.
> you cannot even rely on the source code being correct, as some fixes were done in machine code in the compiled program, it was easier that way.
Easier to ensure their long-term job-security that way?
Re. "Central Abomination" of R'lyeh:
At some point you would have to consider which would be more costly: An army of Oracle consultants incrementally "upgrading" the system, or A tragic 'accident' involving the core mainframe and its entire disk array.
The UK is 'part of the problem' in that we still buy tat from China and India to prop up our economy.
Said 'Tat' includes Neodymium magnets for Wind turbines EVs and Heat Pumps, Lithium and Cobalt for batteries and EVs, and Silicon for solar cells (which would be much more effectively used nearer the equator), all so we can pretend that we are saving the planet (when like you say, our 'local' emissions already represent the tiniest fraction of global CO2 emissions). We are simply shifting the problem somewhere else.
The real problem is that our economy is fundamentally dependent on "growth". In the words of Agent Smith, the Human Race is a Cancer on this Planet. Globalisation has allowed us to 'Grow' far beyond our means, nothing we can do in terms of so-called renewable energy will stop that.
If only there was some kind of plague to reduce the numbers of humans to a sustainable level without causing WWIII. Oh wait. There was. Damn and blast those vaccine developers...
Nuclear is the way to a stable sustainable future, but I fear we in the west are far too late thanks to our shunning of it (because the CND took issue against our foolish use of civil nuclear reactors to develop weapons in the 60s) in favour of Gas and Oil (and probably Big Oil were backing the CND..)
Now globalisation is out of control, and if we unilaterally stop economic growth now, we will be overtaken and immediately threatened by Russia and China, who will still use Oil and Gas resources, as well as Nuclear.
In the end, we will have plenty of nuclear energy, whether we like it or not. (see icon)
VR is not a problem at all in my experience. It works brilliantly. Possibly better than on Windows.
The Forest, Dead Effect 2, HL:Alyx, Thrill of the Fight, Serious Sam.. Loads more. Only two of those are officially supported, but everything so far seems to 'just work' with Proton, so long as you tick the box that says "Enable Steam Play for all other titles". Then you can play almost everything on Steam.
> MS Access is a problem
I hope you don't mean to say that you actually use that pile of dinosaur shit that was called Microsoft Access.
Have you heard of SQL? Django?
Excuse me, but I own both.
And while I agree with some of your points, your post reads like a rabid conspiracy-nitwit of the kind that just discredits those of us with an actual logical point to make about the degree of control exerted by the megacorps.
Also, please learn the function of the carriage return key. You know, the one that looks like a backwards L-shaped arrow.
And if you're that paranoid, wait until you read about Intel Management Engine... There's no hiding from the CIA.
Have you noticed how they have *removed* the AutoSave feature from Office? Now, you *have* to be connected to 365, it doesn't do local AutoSave anymore. And if you are connected to 365, your every keystroke and mouse twitch are sent to Microsoft, who may or may not use them to train a GPT AI model of you.
And even if you "opt out" of "connected experiences", sometimes it is forced upon you by Group Policy, so you still get the data-slurping features like "Microsoft Editor" which analyses your text as you type and creepily tries to suggest things for you, like Clippy on steroids. Or the layout in PowerPoint that uploads everything to Microsoft and "helpfully" suggests ways to make your presentation look shit.
Windows and Office are nothing more than a data-slurping GDPR violation. Microsoft want more data than Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon. Data is the new Oil, etc.
Traditionally, Apple HAVE been worse at treating their computers like a lease/rental (sorry, you can't open that case) but Microsoft have caught up and are determined to go much further. Meanwhile Apple have scaled back some of their old user-hostile practices (which isn't to say they are great, just not quite as bad as they used to be).
If you want a computer that works for YOU and not someone else, use Linux. And familiarise yourself with some of the source code if possible - you may want to change it and contribute the odd pull request if you want it to behave exactly how you want.
