Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Oh, no: The electric cars at CES are getting all emotional

Re: fratzonic chambered exhaust

> "Fratzonic" - someone rubbed out the edge of the leading 'P'?

Or the designers actually wrote "Fartzonic" and marketing had to make a last minute tweak...

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Re: I only want a turbine

There have been many efforts to power a car with a turbine, but only as a genset? I'm not sure.

Jaguar tried with a hybrid concept, but the production model went back to standard piston engine, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_C-X75. I think noise is a problem.

Re: FUD

According to UK gov figures, total transport energy consumption in the UK in 2021 was 36.8 mtoe (million tons of oil equivalent), it was over 40 mtoe before the pandemic, so we can expect it to rise. About 12 mtoe were for haulage & buses, leaving around 25-28 mtoe for cars.

28mtoe is 325 TWh. We know that ICE vehicles are inefficient, only using 30% of the energy in the fuel. Let's be generous and assume that electric cars get the full 100%, so if we replace all ICE cars with EVs they will consume ~100 TWh of energy per year. That's a 30% increase in total electricity demand over the year (it's normally around 320TWh), and more than was generated by wind in the whole of 2021.

98TWh/year is 270GWh/night on average, so for an 8-hour charge that's an additional 33GW required, roughly the same as the normal peak demand. It would require ~4.5m 7.2kW chargers...

Of course taking averages like this is unrealistic, it will be very variable, but it still shows the scale of the problem, and that's just cars. Then add HGVs, and heat pumps...

Go to your own grid data, work out the difference between peak and night load, and divide by the normal size of an AC charger (in Ireland 7kW.)

If you get a number less than, say, 20% of the total number of cars in your country, let me know

UK peak is around 50GW (winter) and 37GW (summer). It's hard to get minimum figures, but around 28GW in winter seems to be the common figure so, 50GW-28GW is 22GW, divided by 7.2kW average home charger, that's 3m chargers. The UK has 33m cars which gives 10%, well below your 20%.

Re: FUD

Like most EV owners, I charge at night when the grid is not loaded

Which is only true because hardly anyone does it. Once everyone is charging overnight, that becomes the new peak period.

Re: "a strong desire to reduce refueling costs"

Very good points, for which I have no answers.

We know that people go to extraordinary lengths to avoid paying subscriptions for basic, cheap, things like encrypted TV channels, so I would expect that any technological 'solution' such as GPS-based road pricing with annual charges running into thousands will likely spawn a whole market for defeat devices, which are likely to cause problems to many users.

Re: "a strong desire to reduce refueling costs"

There's also the small matter of the £30bn in fuel duty that the government collects annually on the sale of petrol and diesel, and the 20% VAT. Home electricity only has 5% VAT. Once those taxes get added back into the running costs of EVs, either as tax on fuel, road pricing, or some other creative mechanism, EVs become more expensive per mile than ICE vehicles in almost all circumstances.

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

Re: Critical

Modern electronics will fail faster than a fuse, especially with "only" 50% excess voltage.

It used to be said that a transistor was "the fastest fuse on three legs". Still true when there are millions of them in a chip.

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Re: A couple of solutions, offered for free.

IMAP. I'm pretty sure that was a commonplace even in the mid-2000s.

RFC 1730 from 1994, I've certainly been using it since the mid-90s.

Re: I read this article to my son ...

It becomes a vote loser in a country where people educationally unprepared to counter the propaganda they read have developed lower brain reflex "public spending = bad"

Public spending is neither inherently good nor bad, maybe one needs to be "educationally unprepared" for one to to make such an oversimplified generalisation.

Like private spending, public spending needs to be appropriate and justified, more so than private spending perhaps because it's the taxpayers' money that is being spent for them. Some areas, like education, are pretty easy to justify, but others are less so. Nationalising a failing company such as an email provider because it is presumed "essential" but cannot pay its way rarely has a happy ending.

Re: I read this article to my son ...

The problem with nationalising supposed "essential" services, especially in times like these when we're being taxed until the pips squeak, is that the people who don't use those "essential" services soon start to complain about subsidising those who do. The railways is an excellent case in point.

It doesn't take long for it to become an election vote-loser, at which point the government finds that it can't afford to keep running them if it wants to stay in office, but can't afford to close them either, just like the commercial situation. They're then either underfunded and left to wither, or privatised again where they become someone else's problem.

Re: A couple of solutions, offered for free.

Isn't that just saying that they're removing basic authentication for IMAP, so you'll have to use something more secure? IMAP itself should still work fine.

Southwest Airlines blames IT breakdown for stranding holiday travelers

Re: Outdated scheduling software?

Star Trek's famous "tri-dimensional chess" was just a prop, with no rules to go along with it

I'll bet that somebody, somewhere, has written rules. Probably translated them into Klingon as well.

Don't lock the datacenter door, said the boss. The builders need access and what could possibly go wrong?

Re: rebooting the system

string together terms in a way that means nothing

The same ones who are incapable of reading an error message word-for-word from their screen, no matter how many times you ask?

e.g. "It says the WiFi isn't working", when the message actually read "License server connection failure".

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

Not limited to Tesla

My ordinary car has an auto cruise control that will adjust to the speed of the car in front. There's a junction near home where the road forks on a curve. Cars turning off across the oncoming traffic have to slow or stop in the turn lane, those on the main road can continue round the curve. Every time I do that, as I pass on the inside, the cruise control brakes unnecessarily. It clearly gets confused by the slow traffic and the curve, and can't work out what 'lane' it's in. I now know to cancel the cruise before I get there, but it was a surprise the first time.

Prime suspect: Amazon to loosen logistics and delivery from EU retail

Never mind letting sellers choose their shipper, what about requiring them to say which shipper they will use, so that we can avoid sellers who use Evri/Hermes.

Brit MPs pour cold water on hydrogen as mass replacement for fossil fuels

Look at the state we're in, and have been in as far back as we care to look.

And disputes between churches are probably the single biggest cause. It's the 21st century, way past time to move on from medieval superstation about which supernatural entity is best, and how to kill the most people who disagree.

Eurozone plans to formalize passenger data, improve security

Ireland was never in the Schengen zone, and some non-EU countries such as Switzerland are in it.

Corporate execs: Get back, get back, to the office where you once belonged

Re: We all traipse into the office for that critical meeting that HAS to be face-to-face..

But inevitably one person can’t make it so there is a Zoom/Teams inclusion

Why? If Zoom/Teams wasn't an option would you still expect someone who can't make a critical business meeting during the working day to be allowed to just skip it? If not, why should that one special person be allowed to insist on remote attendance? If they can't do their job, maybe they should be encouraged to look at new opportunities elsewhere?

Rivian abandons electric van partnership with Mercedes-Benz

but on continental Europe I'm not expecting any problems this winter

You should be, it's all over the French press at least, e.g. from BFM:

"Le sujet est désormais omniprésent dans le débat public alors que le mercure a drastiquement chuté ces derniers jours, marquant le début de l'hiver météorologique. La France pourrait connaître des coupures de courant au coeur de cette période hivernale, notamment à partir du mois de janvier 2023."

For the non French-speakers:

"The subject now crops up everywhere in public debate as the temperatures have dropped drastically in recent days, marking the start of the meteorological winter. France could experience power cuts in the heart of the winter period, especially from January 2023."

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

Alexa, create 10 El Reg comment accounts and upvote the above post from each.

Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

Not sure about the current situation, but it used to be the case that you didn't need to insure vehicles, you could opt to post a bond instead. IIRC it's what the GPO used to do.

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

There's nothing like water spraying all over the garage from a burst pipe to help you overcome that fear!

Re: "restore it to a bright red hue"

I suppose we should be grateful that it wasn't the "launch the nukes" button...

ChatGPT has mastered the confidence trick, and that's a terrible look for AI

Re: prove it!

> Write Tetris in C

main()

{

printf("Tetris");

}

NASA's Orion Moon capsule to splash down this Sunday

I'd hope that the telemetry would show that.

Still, things look good so far. The last moon landing was 50 years ago yesterday (and I remember it, which is vaguely depressing), we're long overdue for a return.

First-ever orbital satellite launch from British soil will be delayed

Re: Why are they doing this?

Where's Britain's empire when you need it, there were plenty of places near the equator they could have built a spaceport.

There still are. Ascension Island is only 8 degrees South (and perfectly named for this, as well)

Europe's USB-C deadline: Lightning must be struck from iPhone by December, 2024

by 2024?

And when will the next, incompatible, USB standard (USB-D?) emerge, around 2025?

Round and round we go.

Peekaboo: Once-hidden galaxy revealed to be window into cosmic history

Seasonally appropriate

It's behiiiind you.

Oh, no, it isn't

Using personal info for ads without consent puts Meta in EU's gunsights

Re: Appeals

Have the fines accrue compounded interest during the appeals process. The longer the appeals last, the bigger the potential penalty.

Musk's Hotel California erected at Twitter HQ, as some offices converted into bedrooms

Re: telling them he planned to make it "extremely hardcore"

There's another more worrying explanation for the arrival of the beds considering he said this.

He thought he was buying OnlyFans?

Rackspace confirms ransomware attack behind days-long email meltdown

These costs will not be passed on to Rackspace customers, according to the spokesperson.

If it affects Rackspace's bottom line then of course it will be passed on to customers, one way or another.

Cisco wriggles out from $2 billion bill for ‘willful and egregious’ patent infringements

won't end well

So from now on the lawyers will be studying every stock held in every savings and pension scheme that judges, their spouses and their children are connected to? How many old cases are going to get reopened?

Meta threatens to stop sharing news in USA to protest publisher payment plan

Re: Yeah, please do

The war on drugs gets everywhere.

Woman fakes pregnancy to smuggle hundreds of CPUs, iPhones into China

If I were going to smuggle chips, especially large BGA ones, I'd try hot-melt gluing them to the PCBs of otherwise allowed stuff like cheap radios. Scans wouldn't show anything abnormal, and the average customs agent probably doesn't have the training to spot that such a chip is unconnected and out of place on an FM radio board, even if they could be bothered to do a visual inspection.

Try to pass them off in a fake baby bulge seems doomed to failure.

Startup raises $30 million for wireless power delivery system

Re: Pigs might fly.......

"Don't step in front of the anten...

Ah well, never mind. That'll smart for a while"

Tech contractor who uses an umbrella company? UK tax is coming after them

Re: Victim blaming

It is especially interesting that HMRC seems to be always going after a contractor and not after the umbrella. Wonder why?

That's not what the article says. The very first line is "Britain's tax collection agency is clamping down on umbrella companies", and it goes on: "With a large number of umbrella companies suspected of VAT avoidance" and "Umbrella companies are firmly in its crosshairs". There's no suggestion that this is targeting contractors, quite the reverse.

With the complexity of IR35, lots of contractors are choosing to use umbrella companies to simplify their situation. The article would suggest that there has been a growth in unscrupulous umbrella companies attempting to cash in on this, but not properly managing their own tax affairs, in particular not paying the VAT they should. That's what HMRC is targeting, it shouldn't have any effect on the employees of those companies.

A brand new Linux DRM display driver – for a 1992 computer

Re: MIDI Maze!

The 68k architecture is still one of the nicest ones I've ever worked with.

US Air Force reveals B-21 Raider stealth bomber that'll fly the unfriendly skies

super stealthy ?

$200bn to build 100 bombers that should rarely if ever be seen, and whose main job is as a deterrent, not to be actually used?

Build 10, let them be seen 'accidentally' from time to time, and just say you've got 90 more flying around unseen. Presto, $180bn saved...

US commerce bosses view EU rules as threat to its clouds

Re: The power of the EU

it's their full time, five figure salary job.

€112,635.48 per year is 6 figures, not 5. Plus expenses.

Blockchain needs a reason to exist, Boris Johnson tells roomful of blockchain pros

Has anyone came up with a legitimate use case for it besides "marketing" hyperbole yet?

I rather think that was the point Boris was making.

'Russian missiles can't destroy the cloud': Ukraine leader describes emergency migration

Re: Why Now?

re:Invent is an annual conference, the previous one was in 2021, before the invasion.

Japanese convenience store chain opens outlet staffed by avatars and robots

Re: "Self checkouts keep costs down." -- Let's Be Clear

That's an inadequate argument. You don't know how much more prices would have gone up by if the supermarket hadn't kept it's costs down.

Re: "the company wants them to engage with customers rather than stay behind a cash register"

What about the arrow makers who were put out of business by guns, or the carburettor makers when fuel injection came along, etc? By the time I retired I wasn't doing the same job that I started at, the world changes every day, and we have to adapt. Why should shoppers have to pay more to supermarkets to keep on unnecessary staff? They won't, of course, they'll go to cheaper supermarkets, then all the employees of the expensive ones will lose their jobs when they go out of business. That doesn't help.

Re: "the company wants them to engage with customers rather than stay behind a cash register"

Not everyone has the financial ability to pay the higher prices that result from employing people just to wave your purchases past the scanner, though. Self checkouts keep costs down.

Personally I prefer the self checkouts anyway, they're faster and you don't have to wait in line behind some old biddy who wants to discuss her grandchildren's latest holiday with the checkout operator while she tries to find her purse and only then starts to pack her bag.

Boss broke servers with a careless bit of keyboarding, leaving techies to sort it out late on a Sunday

Re: Belt up

Not a good candidate for use on the ISS, I'd guess.

Re: whut?

I assumed something like: door presses keyboard against fan grille, grille touches fan which stops spinning, aircon overheats?

Re: Belt up

I was expecting some tale of woe involving the gyroscopic effects of moving disks that size while they were spinning. Head crashes have been caused by less.

Massive energy storage system goes online in UK

but according to Wikipedia the series ran from 1962 to 1977

Interesting, I didn't realise it had made it into the 70s.

value of one "new penny" was supposedly just under 2½ "old pence", but rumours of short-changing by unscrupulous shopkeepers still abound

As a child I remember thinking it was very unfair that a 5d packets of crisps was now sold for 2½p (6d) but hadn't got any bigger!

UK bans Chinese CCTV cameras on 'sensitive' government sites

Recording cabinet ministers snogging their mistresses?

EU still getting its act together on European Chips Act funding

Re: Les chips must be fabrique en France

French, bien sûr. What other language matters?