Posts by itzman

Logitech's latest keyboard and mouse combo is wired, quiet, and suspiciously sensible

I bought a cherry...

after the umpteenth logitech cheapo wore out the legend on the key caps.

MIT boffins claim liquid sodium battery could one day power aircraft while sucking up CO2

Ships ideal for nuclear power.

You don't need light weight on a ship. And it can carry plenty of radiation shielding. And if it sinks its covered in water and radiation can't get out.

Re: Huge quantities of molten sodium flying through the air?

You could say the same about aviation fuel, and reveal yourself as fundamentally someone who thinks only on Boolean logic.

Things are not safe, or dangerous in absolute terms. Only a plonker thinks that., They are relatively safe/unsafe.

People drown in water, It's therefore unsafe?

Aviation fuel especially kerosene is in the sweet spot between fantastically energy dense and bloody dangerous, and safe as houses and totally useless.

This fuel cell would look to be somewhat more towards the fantastically energy dense and bloody dangerous end of things. Like hydrogen is,

Shame El Reg is uneducated

And can't tell a battery from a fuel cell...

After clash over Rust in Linux, now Asahi lead quits distro, slams Linus' kernel leadership

The role of 'injustice' in software development.

Discuss.

I mean WTF does 'justice' have to do with software?

More people trying to bring political and social morality into what is fundamentally amoral engineering, just makes for bad engineering.

Following on a study that finds people will not date other people of opposite or different political persuasions, this has to be the last straw.

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

Re: Reading this makes me cry

One is reminded of the MCP in 'Tron'...

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Essential bolt on extra

is a westher station, to ensure that average recorded temperatures by the air condiioon and cooling outflows can be adjusted to exactly match climate model predictions

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Strange all these billionairse s in trouble vansishing at sea...

NC

Core Python developer suspended for three months

Re: "It was their behavior that got them there in the first place"

The right. A term used by people calling themselves liberal to cancel any ideas they find uncomfortable, in order to remove the need to actually think about then, which comes hard for a liberal.

Re: "It was their behavior that got them there in the first place"

"The routine cat-calling with terms like SJW, woke, racist, fascist etc from both sides exacerbate differences and inflame opinions"

This the point of language like that. It is the old Marxist Mindfuck trick of getting you to agree to something small and harmless and then using it to prove the world needs a Revolution and you are taught to hate.

Real life is just Us, Marxism always declares its THEM and us, and THEY are beyond the pale. And usually the targets of the projection that WE place upon them

So BLACK lives matter - an organisation that is by definition institutionally racist - declares that 'only whites (how racist is that?) are racist!.

And so on.

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Systemd?

Microsoft's answer to Linux.

Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check

not if solar plus battery costs 20 times as much as nuclear grid power and only lasts 6 yrears

Tney must be a real threat to renewables to jusify such a hatchet job

look into who paid for this

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

Meaningless babble¿

When you train an AI on places like facebook, where all conversation eventually descends to meaningless babble, why is it so surprsing that the AI does too?

CEO of UK's National Grid warns of datacenters' thirst for power

Re: More energy needed?

Better start building those small nuclear plants now.

The data centres are all moving in that direction, because renewables are simply pants for reliable power sources.

The grid is only setting up the data centres to blame for when (lack of) renewable energy crashes the grid completely...

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

Re: Game Theoretic Analysis

Sadly your game theory relies on sane and Christian morality following national leaders.

A world in which you are the last man standing and all that complicated tech you were afraid of and couldn't duplicate has ceased to exist, along with anything that stands in your way, and billions of people occupying land that you quite fancy owning, as well as a few billion you couldn't offer a future to , is an ideal outcome from the likes of the Ayatollah, and Putin.

And is not such a bad outcome if all those dead people were people you technically owed billions of dollars to, as well.

The nuclear Ctrl-Alt-Delete reboot of civilisations is favoured by many people .

And the winners write the history books.

Re: That was my thought, too.

Not nearly as much money as Putin has given them.

Putins oil income is in the hands of a few oligarchs and the state, who have no reason not to deploy it entirely towards benefiting Russia's enlargement and their own pockets.

Affordable, self-healing power grids are closer than you think

If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.

More eco nonsense from YAGS - Yet Another Grant Seeker.

Get the gummint OUT OF TE WAY with its regulations and subsidies and bureaucrats and let the market discover what works.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Think of the Grid!

Drax I thought still had one coal boiler.

But the ones converted to wood cannot be retro converted easily.

Re: Think of the Grid!

Ah! Another Art Student who Cant Do Sums.

Try computing the energy content of all the road fuel sold annually, taking an reasonable fraction - say 30% - and converting to KWh, and dividing by the hours in a year, to get the *average* amount of extra electricity required - even assuming the grid is up to it.

It comfortable exceeds existing generating capacity. Do the sums. Preferably without taking your socks off when numbers greater than ten are involved

Scientists mull Solar Radiation Management – a potential climate-change stop-gap

Re: Denier no more?

The denial of the overwhelming body evidence of refuting AGW is where the plot holes lie.

Re: What is it with morons

But who will bell the renewable cat and build these batteries made of unobtanium and fairy fart electrolyte?

In the end hte cost of a totally (or even partially) renewable grid far far exceeds a nuclear one, which doesn't need all the fairy farts. And handwavey technology that not only does not exist, but cannot.

Nature does not change the laws of electrochemistry just because someone wants to sell you a windmill.

folks in attendance...

...pretty much all agreed on one unequivocal fact: the Earth is warming and it's warming quickly.

Er no, that only because its morning here. In Australia its cooling quickly.

Nuclear-powered datacenters: What could go wrong?

Re: Why will SMR's be less regulated

Because they are small enough to not need active cooling under SCRAM conditions - they can use simple convection, and that removes a huge chunk of regulatory nonsense. You don't need to regulate a triply redundant backup system that you didn't install.

Because they are small enough to be build in a factory and *type approved*, thus not needing specific regulatory approval at each site, and small enough to be shipped more or less complete to the installation site.

And in the context of data centres, cheap enough so that you can have two for redundancy, and generate revenue from the second one when the first is operational.

SMRs are also cheap enough to be fundable by large industrial and IT corporations in a way a 3GW monster is not.

Re: Interesting

I havbe a relative in Norway. The price of electricity has doubled now they can sell it to the UK

Re: Interesting

I think that for commercial organisations running an SMR may have nothing to do with outages, but a simple acknowledgement of the fact that a modern SMR will deliver electricity at less than one third the price of electricity sourced from a 'renewable' grid.

China bans export of rare earth processing kit

"as the world moves towards net zero"

Bless!

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

Wet air is actually warmer.

|The rate of evaporation of sweat is massively greater in dry air. I can tolerate 50°C in a dry desert but am suffering in tropical damp heat of 35°C.

In winter it is the wind and the low *absolute* humidity that punishes.

I think the issue with people from cold countries was highlighted by my niece, who moved to te UK from Sweden at one point. There was snow on the ground and it was -5 °C but I dressed in simply a T shirt and IIRC a fleece. And drove to see her...

'Where is your winter coat?'

'Don't need one - 50 yards from the car to your door isn't going to kill me'

And that is it really, in cold climates people expect clothes with several inches of insulation and a windproof outer layer *as a matter of course*. We are more used to milder temperatures so we simply don't bother with all that arctic level crap.

And then feel cold as a result

Re: Just trying to work out which Led Zeppelin album to put on

"When the levee breaks"...Hydrogen scares me almost as much as lithium batteries do.

'Wobbly spacetime' is latest stab at unifying physics

Dead cert bet

No scientific theory is ever proven 'right'. At best. it's 'not wrong, so far'...

NASA to tear the wings off plane in the name of sustainability

NASA are not exactly amateurs...

Unlike the posters here.

Everything in airliner design is geared towards reducing total lifetime cost of the passenger mile. As engine designs develop, and the market changes, aircraft design also must change.

There is a complex optimisation between aircraft cruising speed (= more passenger miles per yer) , aircraft drag (=more fuel per passenger mile), wingspan (=less terminals can accomodate giant planes) and wing aspect ratio, (long thin wings have less drag - sailplanes) (=greater structural issues, needing more weight to bring strength).

Adding a strut creates lift, and reduces the need for wing root strength, but adds drag.

One assumes the overall equation is marginally positive, or they wouldn't be doing it.

You get the internet you deserve

Recycled excrement

Is infinitely sustainable and terribly green...and that's what we have been told we want and need.

Look! Up in the sky! Proof of concept for satellites beaming energy to Earth!

Of course...

...the cost and ecological footprint would only be 100 times greater than a nuclear plant or ten times greater than a windfarm, but hey, money grows on magic trees.

Sizewell C nuclear plant up for review as UK faces financial black hole

You may be sure

Not one penny of renewable subsidies will be affected.

And the UK gummint is not funding Sizewell. EDF is. At a strike price well below the holistic cost of any renewable+grid extension+ gas backup + rotten capacity factor + short lifetime + STOR plant + battery short term grid stabilisation + cost of inevitable grid outages..

Micro molten salt reactor can fit on a truck, power 1k homes. When it's built

U233 and bombs...

Really not a good idea. Its a nasty hot material and you dont want your military anywhere near it.

Japan reverses course on post-Fukushima nuclear ban

Re: Wind and solar

France decided to use rivers to cool some of its reactors, but then the envirionmental lobby decreed that warm fish was a nono, so they werent allowed to fully utilise them

Japan has a lot of coastline.

Windmills kill birds and bats and parachutists and cause sleep disturbances in humans.

Windmills are not safe.

Re: Wind and solar

"The development of nuclear power does not imply that renewable energy sources are not also being developed."

That depends on whether engineer politicians or profiteers are setting the policy:

"There is nothing a fleet of dispatchable nuclear power plants cannot do that cannot be done worse and more expensively and with higher carbon emissions and more adverse environmental impact by adding intermittent renewable energy."

Re: Similar to the way scrap metal is treated on decomissioning

Yeah, the science is settled. a gamma ray from material that came out of a nuclear plant is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from a gamma ray that occurs naturally when 'natural' uranium decays...

That's why you don't have to clear Dartmoor at 20mSv/yr, but you do have to clear Fukushima at 2mSv/yr

Like Ubuntu, just a bit less hassle: Linux Mint 21 'Vanessa'

Mint is looping

..then replace your hardware..

Being declared dead is automated, so why is resurrection such a nightmare?

I do miss Lemmy...

Thanks for the clip.

China rallies support for Kylin Linux in war on Windows

Perhaps the CCP will develop a shim to allow windows code to run on their Linux.

The world would thank them for that...

Microsoft sounds the alarm on – wait for it – a Linux botnet

Re: knock, knock.

I get thousands of root ssh attempts an hour, but root ssh is not enabled. I don't think any other user has been attempted

South Yorkshire to test fiber broadband through water pipes

Re: Great idea...

I think they felt that there was enough shit in the sewer pipes already.

Feds take down Kremlin-backed Cyclops Blink botnet

What happened to Gorgon Stare?

That I read about

UK Cyber Security Centre advises review of risk posed by Russian tech

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

There really are fairies at the bottom of my garden, and secret microchips in the vaccines they gave me.

The precautionary principle: A justification for spending enormous sums of other people's money on something that doesn't exist, and never will.

Cui Bono? Is that man warning you about this, a purveyor of a solution perhaps?

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Re: What about Assembly Language?

Fairly sure MSDOS precedes 8086 C and was written in assembler, as was CP/M...

Volcano 'shredded' submarine cable, vastly complicating repair job

Re: Turbidity currents

Cause was clearly Cthulhu

Fibre broadband uptake in UK lags behind OECD countries

Re: Why I'm spoiling the statistics

"What catches many out is the need for a double power outlet at the NTU so that the modem and router can be directly attached."

Not for those of us who have a cat 5 wired house. No need for the router to be anywhere near the modem

Re: It's of no interest to me.

Yes, today's content is easily handled for a normal household with 20Mbps.

I have fibre more for reliability and upload speed. - 10Mbps. The only time I notice the download speed is when software upgrades come along.

UK is a crowded islannd

That started the telephone revolution before anywhere else. It has a huge installed base of copper, and some very tight ducting.

It also has high wage levels for skilled people.

Its simply more expensive to throw fiber in, but it is coming.

Just be happy you don't live in e,g., rural USA. Or Germany.