Posts by Roland6 12429 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010
Nuclear energy has been “successful”, however, it’s not lived up to the 1050s hype…
I expect fusion to be similar.
Plus we can expect Westminster politicians, full of their particular party’s’ economic beliefs to look the gift horse in the mouth and stitch up UK taxpayers and businesses.
But I do agree, we should be investing and believe by doing so we increase our chances of having a better future.
>” Except we banned fracking and with prices coming down the price doesnt thanks to the UK market being structured to make unreliable forms seem viable.”
Fracking is largely a waste of time, due to the high energy costs, which are trending towards 1:1 (put in one barrel of oil to produce one barrel…)
In the UK once you crunch the numbers fracking is all about economic activity and wealth generation for a few, it is totally unable to produce the amount of product we consume for any significant amount of time. I seem to remember total UK frackable gas reserves were sufficient to supply 100 percent of UK demand for 2 years, in reality it was more like 5% for 10 years.
Yes, currently other than oil and gas, nuclear is our only viable fuel for guaranteed energy, shame once you look at world energy consumption, you will find there isn’t that much Uranium around…
>” The UK has the fourth highest domestic energy costs in Europe”
Given the sums of money being thrown at fusion, it does look like we are aiming the top spot. As I don’t see the cost of building and operating a facility capable of generating the massive amounts of energy we need cheaply.
Also once fusion is viable, expect private business to step in and charge “market rates” for the product…
>” So none of them are going to get us out of this hole.
We need something new. And fusion is currently the main candidate.”
Fusion isn’t going to get us out of this hole; fusion is investing in a lottery ticket - we might get lucky, but the odds are we won’t. So in the real world we need to be looking elsewhere to help us get out of the hole rather than expecting the lottery to get us out.
Given (too our knowledge) only humans are commenting, and we know AI hallucinates; are labels such “ChatGPT”, “Co-Pilot” simply flags to indicate what follows is something “I’ve made up in the style of a chatbot”…. So the real issue going forward isn’t determining whether some work is or isn’t human, but whether what is claimed to be “AI” output is in fact AI generated…
Surely, as this is the US navy, they should be forcefully chaperoning the field service engineer(s) to wherever the vessel is in the world (*), its not like the engineer is at risk: remember all the performers who entertained the troops in Vietnam…
(*) Delivery of said engineer can include Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning style of submarine link up.
I think you and Jake’s later comment indicate what this is actually about: using people who are not skilled in the art of programming and more specifically fluent or confident in a language.
The trouble is being fluent in a language also means your thought processes are aligned and coherent. Which is going to give problems, just like translating English into German creates problems due to their different grammars.
So it would seem the intent of using AI isn’t really to free experts up to think, but to enable their replacement by less skilled people.
From very early in my consulting career I learnt wearing a suit massively reduced the number of clients who expected me to deal with hardware issues or write programmes…
In my later career, I was grateful for the changing business dress code, I could replace the suits with more comfortable and cheaper clothes.
> Just as a PS.. This is a great video-
Agree definitely an interesting and relevant video.
Interestingly, I saw this then watched Clarkson’s Farm series S04:E07 & E08. It contained a much abridged but similar observation about sourcing ALL the ingredients for his pub restaurant from within 30 miles or even from within the UK.
>” Can we just accept it's not true for many reason, ”
But the best lies have a grain of truth in them.
Hence I suspect parts were seen that are not Mil spec. and are or could be used in (some) white goods.
I would not be surprised if the R military havent looked at white goods to see their potential. As Ukraine has shown, you don’t need bespoke Mil spec stuff, off-the-shelf consumer stuff with some modification can make some cheap but effective weapons.
>” the attempt to denigrate the industrial capabilities to suggest that our violence is superior technologically and therefore morally righteous..”
This is probably why it has been repeated across the media without fact checking. However, I wonder if Putin is laughing at the denigration and dismissal of his industrial base when he is sitting on large stockpiles of parts awaiting assembly…
>” Anyone person who thinks flying is about cpus. It’s not its about SENSORS.”
I think you are making a lot of assumptions about the sophistication of the missiles - something we are not being told.
A very basic missile only really needs a timer: fly level for x minutes then dive into the ground.
However, I agree if the R are making sophisticated missiles, where are they getting the sensors they will need from - stockpiles or new production/imports.
>” WHy doesnt R simply order boxes of the same chips found in washing machines straight from china ?”
They may well be doing exactly this.
There are two parts to this conundrum: equivalence of components and sourcing of those components.
Taking the claim at face value, would suggest semiconductor components (*) with the same markings as used in domestic white goods have been found in R missiles.
We have the step increase in white goods shipments to countries neighbouring and favourable to Russia. Now the challenge is determining whether these are connected. Practicalities and economies of scale suggest salvaging semiconductor parts from white goods is not a good plan; but it makes a good news story.
(*) From what I have seen, no one has suggested the R have been using complete assemblies, ie. Fully populated circuit boards.
Remember the protests were because of Trumps ICE action. Prior to the ICE action, LA was, by US measures “peaceful and law abiding”.
We should also remember Trumps questionable determination that “ the protests constitute a rebellion against the federal government.” and so deploy the national guard and protentially inflame matters further.
I came across this misleadingly titled YouTube piece:
How Putin uses washing machines to produce missiles: Russia’s neighbors help to bypass sanctions
Which whilst showing a step change increase in white goods consumption by a group of neighbouring countries, favourable to Putin, also notes Russia is in dire need of household appliances which could mean they are destined for consumers rather than salvage.
> One showed an early '90s vintage TI DSP chip
This the line of thinking I was favouring: whether early 1990s mil tech is broadly equivalent to recent white goods tech, thus permitting some level of reuse. We achieved a lot with 8 bit processors and FPAs and very limited amounts of memory. Given these were still largely discrete components and my pre 2010 white good also contain a lot of discrete components and modules it is not implausible that some components could be repurposed.
However, I am skeptical about the really modern stuff, given the amount of miniaturisation, integration and surface mounting in today’s electronics. However, I would not be surprised if discrete components have not been replaced by a more capable compute module that can be programmed to support internet and associated functionality: an Atmel AVR could run a washing machine or a missile.
Like the joke!
This is a project devoted to X11 and “pure” X11, so it is not interested in accommodating Wayland et al, it’s all about X11. So yes it will be explicitly free of DEI.
If your interest is in Wayland say, then don’t expect this project to welcome and accommodate you - X11 is what is says on the tin and that is what’s in the tin.
Not really. In all the surveys over several decades: Windows on Intel has been overwhelmingly the dominant platform with Apple accounting for circa 10% and everyone else less than 5%.
As for Windows on ARM etc. until there is a catastrophic event, don’t see this as being anything other than an attempt to discourage Non-Microsoft on ARM growing out of the phone market.
Thus as a serious user you have few real choices. A few governments could take China’s lead and major on a different OS and thus encourage standardisation of platform around that OS (ie. Instead of Windows compatibility being the primary consideration, it becomes a secondary consideration).
>” and it's impossible nowadays to find a decent 10 or 11" laptop”
Back in the day it was also very difficult to find any decent 10 or 11” laptop that was actually in stock and purchasable.
However, it was very easy to buy under powered and limited netbooks…
Intel and MS killed the small form factor laptop. Firstly by crippling the netbook and secondly by making decent ones excessively more expensive than 15~17” laptops; Apple with the iPad had a product that largely satisfied the demands of this demographic at a “reasonable” price.
Today, I use an iPad with a keyboard case instead of a Wintel laptop. Yes it was ~£1000, but it fits my use case.
When I saw a customer’s AWS bill was circa £500 pcm for a simple web fronted client relationship database application, I knew they were being scammed. Moved the application to a LAMP stack on a VM, now paying £200 pcm for a fully managed service, with no sudden bills due to AWS deciding to depreciate component services.
Agree, trying to ape the US majors is a non-starter, but we are not working under normal economic conditions. Trump only needs to wave his Sharpie out and suddenly a non-US business has no IT; under these conditions the US majors just can’t compete, the field is open to anyone who can get that companies IT up and running again.
Thus building a comparable cloud infrastructure is just good sense and exploiting a market niche. However, Christian Klein is correct, we don’t need 20 different operators, we need to back a couple. There are probably enough datacentres already being constructed in Europe (or being emptied by companies moving to the cloud) to enable a rapid initial build out.
I suspect it only needs the French, German and British governments to commit to a home/europe first cloud service and businesses will follow.
Nicely timed demonstration of the stupidity of self-driving AI, unable in real time to take account of dynamic events and so reroute around the protests, instead continue on their pre-planned flight path.
> Guess soon Google SatNav will have another red marker
Expect Waze to get it first.
The give away in the article that this is about “manager entitlement” is:
“ Members will find it deeply frustrating that the company are refusing to improve an offer that on average is worth a third of that offered to team members, but is also worth nothing at all to nearly five thousand managers and professionals.”
I would have expected BT to be spreading the Openreach approach to call handling across the entire business, namely no call centres and a Chat bot that provides no way to actually talk to a human. It seems e only way to actually talk to any one at OR is to get an engineer to visit any get them to call their supervisor. (Currently trying to resolve an “Internet upgrade” none of the ISPs serving a site admit to knowing anything about and the OR communication doesn’t name the ISP they are doing the work on behalf of.
>” If a redneck in a Wisconsin wood, casting a vote, can control your IT strategy, you've got the wrong IT strategy.”
Nice to see NextCloud are HQ’d in Europe, need more open source projects to relocate their Hq’s and repositories to locations outside of the US, so they can side step US export bans.
Given the speed things are moving, I expect we (RotW outside of the US) will need to “fork” several of the US HQ’d open source foundations within the next four years.
>” This is more about having a nice way to block "people of interest" from the cloud / screw up with their phone usage at will”
I would agree, as I know my phone/device and if it gets lost or stolen, I can log into my account from another device (assuming I have correctly set up account recovery in the event of my primary phone and/or device being lost or stolen) and deny access to my Apple/Google account from it. Okay this isn’t as simple as calling up a mobile operator, passing a simple security check and they then barring the device, but it is doable.
This seems to be more about the authorities saying to Apple and Google - we have this phone, please block logins to your cloud service, sorry we don’t know the account name.
Which suggests Apple and Google need to include IMEI validation as part of the cloud service sign in and connection maintenance.
> is that the servers often had better Internet connectivity than could be obtained on-prem.
You could obtain them, but for many businesses (and particularly web startups) they were eye wateringly expensive. Cloud allowed that cost to be shared.
The reason why “elastic” was a big thing, was how seemingly frequently new websites crashed due to unforeseen surges in user traffic, which tended to reduce to more predictable and manageable levels after a few days.
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