Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

Re: On hobs choice

"Ferromagnetic metal" probably is a better choice.

IIRC you can induce eddy currents, and therefore heat, in non-ferrous metals as well. The induction circuit just has to be designed to work with (or adapt to) the material in use.

Re: Capacity

Those of us who understand them know that they are an excellent part of the solution

Those of us who understand them know that they can be part of the solution, in some circumstances. The problem is those who think they're a magic panacea in all cases. Like EVs, they're not.

Re: Start right, now

Washing machines should all have hot water intakes

That one's actally not very useful. Modern machines use so little water that unless you have a large tank of hot water right beside them, the chances are they'll not draw enough water for any significant amounted of pre-heated water to reach them before they are "full".

Re: Capacity

just like (air sourced) heat pump tumble driers (located in the largely unseated utility room) are totally incapable of actually drying washing.

Mine works very well.

Re: A daft idea from the beginning

Vast ‘battery’ storage facilities like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

I wouldn't call Dinorwig "vast", it can store 0.003% of the UK's annual electricity needs...

Re: Technical question - advice politely requested

why not exchange my gas water boiler for an electrically powered induction heating boiler?

Doesn't matter if you use inductive or simple resistive heat, you'll still get 100% of the electricty turned into heat in the water.

The thing about heat pumps is that they pump heat from outside to inside, so 1kW of pumping power can being 3kW of heat into a house, about 3x as efficient as any sort of resistive or induction heater.

Unfortunately electricity is about 4x as expensive as gas, so heat from gas is still cheaper.

Re: Hydrogen in pipes

Don't know why you got downvotes, you're quite correct. Town gas was about 48% H2, 48% CO, and 4% 'rubbish'. The 48% CO made it highly toxic, hence the popularity of head-in-oven suicide a la Sylvia Plath, but no-one got their undies in a twist over H2 leaks.

Re: Capacity

Nope, no irritating noises (and it wouldn't be continuous anyway).

The same is true of air conditioners - until they're 5 years or so old and the bearings start to wear. Then they'll drive your neighbours mad.

Re: Capacity

The only real source of "green hydrogen" is by cracking existing natural gas down to hydrogen

I believe that's termed "blue hydrogen". There's also "white hydrogen", although how realistic that is remains to be seen.

Re: Capacity

Hydrogen is really small, and therefore leaks. This means potentially none of the existing infrastructure is suitable.

And yet much of that infrastructure worked just fine for town gas made from coal prior to the 1970s. Town gas that was about 48% hydrogen.

Re: Electricity for heat pumps

As it happens, we have a uniparty parliament with the same inconsistent, poorly planned, uncosted mess of an energy policy. You can't tell them apart.

Sadly the case in too many European countries, which is why people are increasingly voting for extremist/populist parties, just to try something different. Unless moderate politicians start offering us a real choice it isn't going to end well.

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Mandatory sprinklers, 20MPH limits, I'm surprised they let you leave the house without hi-vis vests and a hard hat.

It may be just one bell, but if he forgets to repair it, or is taken ill and leaves before he can do so, then what? I doubt if the people injured in a real fire later because there was no bell to alert them would see it as a matter to just "chill".

Never mind just being sacked, he was close to criminal endangerment charges.

Sony, Honda tease EV that aims to be a lounge on wheels

Re: And a snip at $$$$$$

I still find it difficult to believe that leaning hard on the brake pedal wouldn't stop the car. I've never had any car where the engine could overpower the brakes, unless this is a purely brake-by-wire setup, which sounds lethal.

British boffins say aircraft could fly on trash, cutting pollution debt by 80%

Re: Approval process?

I don't think that's just an approvals issue.

Lead was added to gasoline to improve its apparent octane rating, and prevent knocking. It's easy to get the same effect by refining the fuel to be higher octane, it just makes it more expensive but should not, in itself, require new approval.

A bigger problem is that the lead in fuel has a lubricant effect on the valves, and manufacturers found that they could machine valve seats from softer metal if the engine ran on leaded fuel. Phasing out the lead means reworking the engines or waiting until the older engines reach end-of-life, and I'd guess that the expected life of an aviation engine is many times that of one in a car. Until most engines can run on unleaded Avgas they can't phase out the leaded version.

municipal solid waste, and other less-than-appealing sources

Remember all those jokes about Ryanair charging people to use the toilet?

Now they'll be levying a "fuel contribution" surcharge if you don't make an on-board contribution...

LinkedIn lays off nearly 700 staff, engineers to suffer the most

Re: No surprise

It's a convenient self-updating address book, not much more. At least having no R&D will help with "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

India's AI vision calls for 80 exaFLOPS of infrastructure

80 exaflops of AI infrastructure build

Oh joy. Now we'll have AIs calling us from India to tell us that they're from Microsoft support and have detected that our computer has a virus.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Re: Is anyone surprised?

making to so-called"problem" non-existent.

Except for UFS filesystems, where 32-bit time_t is hardcoded in the on-disk structures. After 2038 historical disks can still be read OK, but it won't be possible to write them with valid dates.

Re: my friend's software might be older than your friend's and still in use...

I remember seeing one bit of equipment in CERN for which no details of the monitoring API were available. Monitoring from the control lab was via a video camera aimed at the LCD screen on the box, displayed in a window on the management workstation.

Re: Proof Of Concept Business

his only major sin was a function which was 4000 lines long.

I remember looking at C code from a supplier and finding a 1500-line switch{} statement.

Scary, but I have to admit that the code was really rock solid, we made a lot of money from it over the years.

Atlassian buys 'asynchronous video' outfit Loom for almost $1 billion

Re: Video bloggers for Jira

Yeah, it's got to the point now that if I have to search for How-to information I just exclude responses from YouTube in my query as a matter of course.

Brit competition regulator will make or break Vodafone and Three union

If you don't offer dividends to shareholders, they won't invest in the shares. It's little different to borrowing from a bank, tell a bank that you want a loan but will only pay 2% interest, and see how many of them offer to lend you money.

Personally I prefer to see profits shared among investors, rather than handed to bankers.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Re: The UK can no longer afford nor staff a viable health service.

It's got damn-all to do with the Tories, or with Labour, this is pure NHS management fuckup. From the RCoA's own website:

" ANRO sits within NHS England and is the responsible organisation for overseeing the whole of the national recruitment process ...They manage the policy and procedural formalities from job advert to job offer. ANRO liaise with local education offices and recruitment leads to coordinate and deliver recruitment.

The Medical and Dental Recruitment Selection section of NHSE oversee all of specialty recruitment and represent the 4 statutory education bodies (4 nations). They ensure the standards in delivery of recruitment across all specialities are equitable and fair. They have representation from the BMA junior doctor representatives, the General Medical Council, National Institute for Health Research, Royal College recruitment representatives and Academy of Medical Royal Colleges representatives.". No sign of a government minister of any stripe in there.

Your phone's cracked screen may one day heal itself, but try not to drop it for now

rumor among Apple followers that the igizmo maker is on the brink of delivering a device with a self-healing screen

The iPhone 15 was a near miss, it seems to be self-heating. One little letter...

Never mind SETI and NASA, if your Ring somehow snaps ET, Amazon might give you $1M

Doorbell camera

showing unusual, extraordinary or unexplainable behavior

Three weeks before Halloween? What are the odds...

Amazon had secret algorithm to hike prices, claims FTC

Re: Find it on Amazon for a price check

Isn't that just going to encourage the Amazon pricing practices that are being complained about?

Security researchers believe mass exploitation attempts against WS_FTP have begun

AFAIK, WS-FTP is an implementation of SFTP, with SSL under the covers.

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

These days I prefer multiple side-by-side portrait windows on a pair of landscape monitors.

You shouldn't be able to buy devices that tamper with diesel truck emissions on eBay, says DoJ

Does eBay actually sell anything? I'd expect their argument to be that they're merely a marketplace which puts buyers in contact with sellers, and any accusations of wrongdoing should be directed to them.

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

Re: Err?

. Or maybe I'm just very, very lucky and have suffered only a very few power cuts over the 40 or so years I've lived in this house.

You've probably never had a house fire either, but I'll bet you still have fire insurance.

When it's warm and sunny and all is well with the world, it may seem like no big issue if the phone's out for an hour or two.

A snowy evening when the power is off because of a downed line, and granny has just slipped on the ice in the dark and broken her hip, is a very different matter. When you need to be able to dial 999, you generally need it right now.

Re: “Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads” (Doc Brown)

How will you escape from the bad guys if you can't tap morse code out on the plumbing?

Re: I wonder

or perhaps more correctly moving it from the exchange into the subscriber's home.

Well, except for the batteries, generator, and redundant switching equipment. All the things which make the ordinary telephone network far, far, more reliable and resilient than a broadband internet link.

Re: What's the worst that could happen?

Has any pilot programme actually tested that scenario? I doubt it.

It has been tested, albeit unwillingly: https://raeng.org.uk/media/xrrigg0m/raeng-living-without-electricity.pdf

The results were pretty much as you'd expect, after the first few hours nothing worked except the old POTS lines, which continued to function throughout.

Re: Plug into back of broadband hub

I have a Fritzbox with Zen, and their digital voice offering. It works well, although is expensive for international calls.

I do have a mini UPS on both the Fritzbox and the ONT, so have some protection from power outages provided whatever is at the other end of the fibre still has power. One nice feature of the Fritzbox is the inbuilt DECT base station, so even my cordless phones still work if there's no power. It also sends voicemail via email, which is handy.

better than expected due to communicating the merits

Or rather by not communicating the downsides.

Oracle's $130M-plus payday still looms on horizon for Larry and Safra

Re: "Comprised of"

It could be " is composed of", or "comprises", but "is comprised of" is incorrect on both sides of the Atlantic.

Doom developer John Carmack thinks artificial general intelligence is doable by 2030

I'll need a midget, a large box, two laptops, Discord and an internet connection.

See the Mechanical Turk

Car industry pleads for delay to post-Brexit tariffs on EVs

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

You've highlighted the true problem there. All this "net zero by 2030/35/50/whatever" is based on "big hope" that if the designated "bad" stuff is banned some solution to all the problems will magically appear. What we need is joined-up planning, not hoping for unicorns.

Cime on, no-one expects that...

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

The battery on my EV is 96 modules. The overall battery costs about 8000 euros, so an individual module ought to cost 80.

The problem is that batteries aren't designed to have replaceable modules. Some new cars are even using the battery as a structural component to save space and weight, so there's no way to replace it wthout a complete teardown, never mind just replacing one module.

Re: Lie

with carmakers finding themselves still hopelessly reliant on components from China and elsewhere to meet demand.

The demand just isn't there. At the moment Volkswagen has cut EV production because demand has fallen 30% below supply.

Re: Sacrifice all to the God

If 45% of the car's value comes from components made in either the EU or the UK, there's no tariff in either direction. If less than 45% comes from UK or EU components, for example if the battery is Chinese, there's a 10% tariff between EU and UK, in either direction.

The aim was to encourage manufacturers to build batteries in either UK or EU, but so far that's not happening.

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

40% efficiency for petrol engine is wildly optimistic. That's Formula 1 efficiency including the heat recovery.

Typical road cars are maybe 25% efficiency for petrol and a bit over 30% for diesel.

Current figures I've seen are 30-35% for petrol, 40-45% for diesel. For petrol, that's a pure Otto cycle, something like an Atkinson cycle as used in hybrids can do slightly better, Toyota claim 41% for the Prius engine.

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

So my EV was built with a 40kWh battery that gives about 200 miles range: 5 miles per kWh

On paper, maybe. Just like a diesel might get 60MPG on the artificial test cycles that they have to legally quote. In practice, not so much.

A Renault Zoe has a 51kWh battery, official range 239 miles, but in practice it manages more like 180 in good weather, 150 in cold weather, and it's still considered one of the best.

Microsoft hiring a nuclear power program manager, because AI needs lots of 'leccy

Nuclear reactors run by Microsoft. What could possibly go wrong...

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

I know someone who set up "Take the money and run" as the music on hold for the sales department.

Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza

Re: I don't understand...

Oh Canada would disagree,

I thought we were imposing sanctions on poutine?

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Re: A 1980s minicomputer at the bottom of a mine ?

Ask TEPCO.

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

Re: So answer this.

commercial map producers throw in a few deliberate errors in order to discourage their competitors from copying their maps

Yes, they do. Useless trivia: these are called "mountweasels".