Posts by Zola 331 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Nov 2012
Georgia, Texas, Florida - take your pick. It isn't happening in just one state.
Voter suppression of minorities is now Republican Party policy. Not that it's a recent thing, but they're so utterly brazen now.
The fact that something like this is happening across the USA but doesn't seem to concern you says it all.
> Isn't one of the things the left hate about Republicans is that they go to church? Have you ever been in Utah on a Sunday??
Utah? UTAH??? I'm sorry, but does Utah have a significant minority (ie. black) population that might not vote Republican?
Depriving Church-going black people of their vote on a Sunday afternoon in traditionally Democrat-leaning counties is but one of many legal challenges that have been brought by the Republican Party in order to suppress votes from minorities that will be voting for the other side.
The Republican Party is absolutely f*cking horrible.
Oh and I seriously doubt that Democrats "hate ... Republicans because they go to church". That's palpable nonsense. Republicans might claim to be the God fearing party, but pretty much only if you're white.
Of course, there wouldn't have been the long queues in the first place if the Republican Party hadn't gone to court to close down most of the voting stations in minority areas, which then meant that voters had to queue for literally hours in order to cast their vote. Which created the problem of people passing out while waiting in the queue.
So make handing them a bottle of water a f*cking crime, right?
And then the Republicans closed all the voting stations on Sunday afternoons in minority areas, because they know that a lot of minority voters will vote after Church.
The Republican Party is absolutely unreal. I have no idea how they get away with it.
> would be good enough, provided you can be sure of finding a working unoccupied charger at 200 - 250 miles.
And provided you have the time to kill. Not everyone will.
This is part of the problem with EV, compared with fossil fuel refuelling - it does take longer. Much longer. That's a big hurdle for many currently non-EV drivers to overcome. Spending an hour waiting for a vehicle to recharge isn't going to suit everyone, particularly if time is money and they're used to 5-10 minutes when using a pump.
(Very) fast charging (wired or wireless), top up charging (wireless), battery swaps, larger capacity batteries, better journey planning... hopefully the problem will be cracked eventually.
> 1200v is highly unlikely as the limit becomes what's possible with power semiconductors in addition to the rate at which batteries (LFP, NMC) can be charged. Insulation/arcing become a big danger as well.
I'm sure you're right. There are practical limits to how fast and hard a battery can be charged (without damaging it, unless some new miraculous battery chemistry is developed).
The thing is, 350kW DC fast chargers already exist and I'm sure there's someone trying to go higher, so while EV charging might be reaching the practical limits the cables on those things are still utterly ridiculous (some of them are thick and heavy copper cables within water cooled jackets, for crying out loud). The reason they exist is because people want to charge fast - rightly or wrongly, there's still the "5 minute to fill the tank" mentality and not everyone wants to take a dump or have a meal while "filling the tank".
But back to the point of this thread - wireless charging does appear to be a valid alternative to wired charging.
It may not offer the highest charging rates (at least not yet, and maybe never) but in terms of efficiency it's not nearly as far off wired charging as some people like to maintain (and according to some reports it may actually be MORE efficient than wired). The efficiency argument is starting to become nothing but FUD, based on trials and studies.
And there's no denying that wireless charging could also be a hell of a lot more convenient than wired charging, with "top up" charging being a very obvious benefit.
Sure, but you're not taking the cables that the user has to manhandle into consideration - they need to be light and flexible which is becoming a very serious issue when trying to deliver up to 500kWh, and they're not made of superconducting materials so the cable that plugs into the EV also has losses of its own.
EVs are having to migrate from 400v to 800v and no doubt eventually 1200v in order that the cables that plug into the vehicle don't melt while still being able to be lifted and manipulated by ordinary people.
It's those cables that are also responsible for the wired power losses that are making wireless charging competitive, which can in theory go to higher than 100kW without having to worry about users manipulating thick, heavy and in some cases water-cooled cables (also, ripe for stealing given the amount of copper in each cable).
High-power wired DC Fast charging is going to hit a wall eventually.
> wireless charging is horrendously inefficient
That's starting to become an urban myth...
Oslo, Norway trialled 50kW wireless EV charging with Jaguar back in 2020 (fleet of 25 i-Pace taxis, topping up between fares).
The pad to vehicle air gap is 99.94% efficient compared to regular wired charging (according to Loughborough University).
Once you take into consideration the losses in wired charging, the wireless charging system is actually MORE efficient.
A team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory demonstrated another wireless EV charging system earlier this year, achieving similar efficiencies of 96% at 100kW.
Indeed.
I had/have a Nokia N950 (the "developer" version of the N9 - basically an N9 with hardware keyboard).
Hardware and software-wise the N950 and N9 were by far the best Nokia phones the company ever made.
The hardware and software was absolutely stunning, years ahead of Android back in 2010.
The Harmattan UI that ran on the N9/N950 had the kind of gesture interactions that only came to Android 8 or 9 (and eventually iOS) something like 7+ years later.
Nokia had a vision to take Symbian and Meego forward with a common Qt base. It was all there. It could have worked.
If only they hadn't hired Elop, who killed it all. Tragic.
Will it earn Tesla $30,000 dollars per year per car?
Just like the Robo-taxi? LOL. I mean, when the cars are that profitable post sale, why even bother selling the cars in the first place and just keep them for yourself along with all the annual profit, becoming the world's biggest global self driving taxi firm?
That's what I'd do, if it were even remotely true. But then I'm not a tech genius.
A "default" password IS permitted after a factory reset, which must then be reset by the user.
An even easier solution is for there to be NO PASSWORD after a factory reset, and the user has to set a password on first login.
There's simply no need for a "default" password at all once the device has been factory reset. In fact, having a "default" (and likely well known) password is what got us into this mess in the first place.
> I did. It didn't work.
Sorry to hear that, but no idea. I did, and it worked. Ran Memtest86+ for a couple of days, all tests passed and has been working flawlessly ever since.
I bought the Kingston KVR1333D3E9S/8G listed on this page (which I'm sure you know about). There's probably cheaper options, I just couldn't be arsed hunting them down.
> Now there is the thing. For a decade-old server that cost me £90, I consider that 50% of the computer's price for more memory is excessive. Your mileage clearly varies substantially.
Mine cost me £200, then I claimed the £100 cashback. That was about 13 years ago. Spending £40 on something that has served me so well in 13 years and still had more life left in it didn't seem like a bad deal.
I also considered the alternatives, which would have meant a complete replacement (none of which would match the form factor) and there either were none or prohibitively expensive, so given all of that, £40 was an absolute bargain and no-brainer.
I recently upgraded an N54L to 16GB (2x 8GB) ECC RAM - just buy the known/recommended ECC RAM sticks (mine is Kingston, that I picked up for £40 the pair).
I mostly us it for storing movies and documents/git repos in a home environment (SMB & NFS).
It all runs great with TrueNAS Core and about 40TB of storage across 3x pools (2x RAIDZ-1, 1x mirrored & encrypted).
I have the 4x internal HDD plus 4x SSD drives (in a 5.25" cage in the CD slot) all hanging off an LSI-9211-8i, and a 2x drive JBOD connected to the external SATA. Boots off an SSD connected to the optical motherboard SATA (and I still have the 4x SFF-8087 motherboard SATA ports available!)
To be honest, changing the RAM was no big deal - it takes about 5-10 minutes to get the motherboard out and back (closer to 5 once you've done it a few times) and it's not really something you need to do often.
I ran FreeNAS 9 on this for years, and made several customisations (MySQL jails etc.) which bit me in the arse as it massively complicates OS upgrades, so now I keep it simple and stick to the plain TrueNAS system and upgrades are a breeze. The MySQL etc. runs on an RPi4 instead (and is actually better for it).
I'll probably stick with TrueNAS Core 13.x from here on out, but maybe keep an eye on any fork.
When's the full Tesla self driving (that actually works) going to be released? How many people have died because of Musk's outright lies regarding the capabilities of Tesla vehicles?
Or the self driving robo taxis that will earn their owners $30,000 a year?
How many years has he been promising the semi? Is that in production yet?
Milton may have told some porkies, but it appears his truck is now in production. And yet he went down.
On the other hand, Musk continues to tell some absolute whoppers, and people have died as a result, yet he skates.
If you can't see the disparity in the way they are being treated, I can only assume you're a total Musk fan-boi. And I'm not a fan of Milton - I just don't understand why Musk is getting away scot-free with all his bullshit.
Ubiquiti *did* release an update to address this type of user incompetence (ie. running with default credentials) but unfortunately, and entirely predictably (as it's Ubiquiti), it too showed a spectacular level of incompetence this time on behalf of the development team, which made the protection entirely useless.
Not only could the first boot "change password" dialog be dismissed with a press of the Escape button, never to be seen again allowing the default password to remain, but users could actually enter the DEFAULT password as the new password without any complaint.
Needless to say, the change should not have accepted the original default password, nor should it have been possible to dismiss and carry on. It should also not just have been a "first boot" password change, but retrospective.
Either this was incompetence from the development team (although any developer with half a brain cell would have realised the change they implemented was total nonsense), or the changes were specified by a lawyer who was only interested in doing the absolute minimum to cover the companies arse.
Do you have any idea what your are ranting about? Based on normalised sales numbers, ICE vehicles are up to 20x more likely to spontaneously catch fire than pure electric vehicles (avoid hybrids, they're death traps - probably because they're the worst of both worlds).
Up to 300 petrol & diesel vehicles are the cause of fires in the UK every DAY but yeah, EVs are the problem. Got it.
No. Just, no.
Luton (and Liverpool and Stavanger) car park fires happened because a petrol/diesel vehicle set fire to more petrol/diesel vehicles thanks to them all having plastic fuel tanks. Read the conclusions on the Liverpool and Stavanger fires, it's going to be the same with Luton - the fire spread rapidly due to plastic fuel tanks, and nothing to do with EVs.
Not sure which transport ship you are referring to, but if it's the Fremantle Highway then the EVs were all stowed on the lower decks and did not burn - it was only the petrol/diesel vehicles on the upper decks that burned. The empty loading deck between the EVs and ICE vehicles prevented the spread of fire from the upper decks to the EVs. Again, read the reports (rather than dealing with conspiracy theories).
Most shipping companies have rules when transporting Li-Ion-based cargo, especially EVs.
For example, the batteries in the EVs must only have enough juice for a quick spin around the dock and loading on/off the ship - maybe 10%-20%. They will be topped up once they are unloaded, and they will have been sat outside the ship for at least 48 hours prior to loading.
I would expect similar when a ship is fully loaded with Li-ion batteries - the individual cells should be at a fairly low state of charge, and should have been stable for several days prior to loading.
Obviously poorly packed cells could be damaged during transport (rough seas etc.) which could lead to puncturing, which might be the case here - none of the above precautions is likely to prevent such an outcome.
However if the cells were being shipped at a high state of charge and/or without adequate safety checks prior to loading then the shipping company has learned a lesson the rest of the shipping industry already knows about.
Yeah, right. Absolutely none of this sounds plausible, assuming the security firm engaged by the bank is legit.
I've worked for investment banks, had client-facing systems I'm responsible for PEN tested multiple times, and none of what you described ever happens (and if anyone did ask for that kind of access they would be run out of business).
Also, the fact you call it "PIN" testing only adds to my suspicion that you don't know what you're talking about.
The fundamental issue is that Intel decided to skip all privilege/permission checks when executing instructions speculatively, in order to save time. The privilege/permission checks were applied only once the path of the speculatively executed instructions was actually taken. This meant that inaccessible memory would be physically accessed by the speculatively executed instructions, and subsequently leaked, even if the CPU eventually threw a privilege exception.
This was a major design cockup that Intel *chose* to make. They must have know of the potential risk, but still considered it worthwhile. Conversely, AMD did not cut this corner in their own speculative execution design (it's why their CPU designs were not hit anywhere near as hard by Spectre etc.) as all necessary checks were applied during speculative execution, as one would expect.
The sad thing is that Intel has effectively gotten away with it all, and their customers have paid for it in terms of weakened security, loss of performance etc., while OS and compiler developers have had to apply increasingly shit workarounds.
This court case is a long time coming, but it's unlikely it will significantly impact Intels bottom line.
> since lost focus and is pricing itself out of the low power market
You know the Pi5 supports suspend mode with power consumption of 4mW?
And when fully powered and active it's using single digit Watts.
If there's more efficient hardware available then you were probably never the target market.
It seems there's a Pi to suit every level of performance, and/or wallet. It's easy (and cheap) enough to start with a Pi3 and go up or down to find the level of performance that your project requires.
For £5 more than a Pi4, the Pi5 offers significantly more performance and expansion potential, but if that's not required then the Pi4 may still be the better option. I run a headless Pi4/8GB booting from nvme and that's perfectly fine for my needs, maybe I'll take a look at Pi5 once the software and hardware (HATs) has matured.
I personally find the Pico support to be exemplary.
Makes me think the Backblaze figures would be more meaningful with the "drive lifetime write" figures - how can we tell if a drive failed after being absolutely thrashed to death (which would be expected) or if it failed while being mostly idle (or mostly read only), which would be highly unusual?
I wouldn't pay 1 penny (total, never mind as a recurring fee) to use Twitter:
A) there are (or will be) free alternatives (Threads isn't that bad, and improving, and also much less toxic than Twitter)
B) I don't trust Elmo with my credit card details. Period.
Seeing Twitter go behind a paywall would be the best thing to happen to it so that the mainstream media can forget about it, and it will die a slow death.
Those that are stupid enough to pay for it will continue to enjoy their toxic echo chamber, with even dodgier advertisers than there are now (all the big name brands appear to have left the platform based on the absolute junk I'm being shown).
God knows how he expects to attract new users to his pay-to-use platform when everyone has forgotten about it - I guess he'll need to advertise it (ironic).
Or maybe it will be free to Tesla owners, LOL.
Three are the same joke in my location which is a densely populated South London borough (postcode CR0), so their garbage network is by no means limited to "oop North".
4G data download speed on Three is measured in tens of kbps, sometimes single digit kbps, while the upload speed cannot be measured at all - it errors out. 3G is the same.
I put up with it for years (complained, but they refused to acknowledge they even had a problem - neighbours with different phones had the same issues with Three) as I had contracts on Three that used their femtocell in a location that no network covered at the time, but when Three turned off their femtocells a month after I had renewed for another 12 months I was left to count down the days until I could bin all the Three contracts, particularly as O2 coverage recently appeared in the location of the now ex-femtocell.
I'm now with Sky, which runs on top of O2, and it's night and day. And cheaper.
Avoid Three like the plague.
I must admit, at first I thought the idea of two CEOs fighting in a cage was incredibly unseemly and totally unnecessary. And in many ways, it still is.
However, everytime Musk opens his mouth to spout yet more BS it's made me realise that watching someone (anyone) BATTER THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF HIM until he begs for it to end, live on TV/internet and recorded for posterity, would actually be quite wonderful.
Starting to get a distinct Hwang Woo-suk fraud vibe from all of this, unfortunately.
If this turns out to be another fraud then the Korean science community could find itself in a very unfavourable situation.
Fool me once, and all that.
> P.S. as well as RAID5/6, don't use quotas either...
Graham... you're really not selling it!
BTRFS has been a "nearly there" filesystem for as long as I can remember... and it's usually the same issues that come up every time it is discussed. Why not focus on fixing them and stabilising the codebase before adding more fancy functionality?
Personally, I use ZFS. It works. Has done for more than a decade. No caveats required.
It's a massive shame that Linux hasn't been able to adopt it without the licensing issues.
GP != NHS
GPs are private and always have been as GPs refused to allow the formation of the NHS back in the 1940s until the Bevan government of the time cut them a deal that allowed GPs to remain private and outside of the NHS. This is why the GPs can sell their partnerships and their patients off to the highest bidders (Virgin Health Group, American health groups etc.).
So that kack computer system your dads GP surgery uses? Almost certainly not the fault of the NHS (for once).
SAMBA file transfer performance on low powered ARM devices is going to end up in the toilet once server signing is required - not so easy to add another core, or replace with a more powerful CPU.
I can see this being disabled by users on the Microsoft end. Hopefully it can be disabled on a per-share basis.
> Though if all that people want is a media player, pi-hole or other purely software solution then the Pi people may well find that those potential customers have already found other boards that satisfy their needs.
Pretty sure that's not really the target market for the RPi people - sales to such customers are a nice little earner, yes, but those customers are not the Foundations focus.
> "I don't even understand why you're making them rather than a newer model."
> "... which disappear in seconds"
I think you answered your own question.
And when there's strong demand for existing products that are in short supply, why introduce a new product (that may be in short supply) knowing it will experience even stronger demand? Clear the backlog first... no need to make life harder for yourself than it already is.
without informing anybody.
A very significant number of Three users (including those on Three-based MVNOs) did not receive the alert.
I look forward to the publication of the Three post-mortem into this incident (yeah, right).
I've got 2 contracts on Three and I'll be switching both once they come to an end later this year (not solely because of this EAS fiasco - that's really just the cherry on top of this shit network cake).
Debugging was a joy on VMS, regardless of language - single stepping a COBOL programme that called a module written in C which then calls a MACRO32 library, you could debug them all in a really easy to use and comfortable environment, switching seemlessly from one language to another as you step into/step out.
DEC were years ahead when it came to their common language environment.
Linux still doesn't come close, as gdb is horrible.
We were a COBOL shop, and in the very early 90s we needed to write a small amount of functionality (asynchronous multi-threaded terminal IO handling using QIO syscalls) where COBOL - surprise, surprise - just wouldn't cut it, and at the time DEC charged for their C-compiler (very expensive) so it was decided the only option was to write it in MACRO32.
Fortunately I already knew 68K assembler and the MACRO32 differences were pretty minimal, so it all worked out great (and I only crashed the dev VAX twice while testing, successfully getting VMS on one occasion to allocate a negative amount of virtual memory which was apparently something DEC had never seen before!)
But then about 2 years later the official C-compiler became available for free from DEC, and in hindsight it would have made more sense to convert the MACRO32 to C code but that never happened, so the MACRO32 code ran until the VAX systems were decommissioned in about 2010-2015 I think. I'm pretty sure they got their money's worth out of that code!
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