Posts by anothercynic

Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist

Re: Satellite tech

The days of bonded (or even just single-channel) ISDN... *happy sigh* It was incredible what you could get done from halfway across the planet (literally) by dialing into an ISDN number in the US... The

California asks people not to charge EVs during heatwave

Re: Does this apply to everyone?

I suspect that they would be the ones to do it, but others won't on the basis that "I wonder if the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Prince Harry will be...". The extreme cynicism people have towards this instead of just doing the right thing scuppers initiatives a lot.

Although, to be fair, I find this somewhat amusing (not in a funny way) given that California knows that they are a hot state, that everyone relies on air conditioning (and much of Southern California relying on exorbitant amounts of water to keep things green), and that electricity usage will go through the roof when you make people buy leccy cars and then experience a heatwave.

Underwater datacenter will open for business this year

Re: At 700ft Nobody can hear your data scream...

I believe nitrogen is being used by Microsoft, so I would not be surprised if this lot do the same.

Japan to change laws that require use of floppy disks

Re: Time to modernise: magneto-optical disks

I think I have a SCSI interface card for the JAZ, if you should need one.

Re: Time to modernise: magneto-optical disks

No, @bombastic, the ZIP disks were 100MB and 250MB (depending on the edition). The 16MB disks were for the Bernoulli drive, a predecessor of the ZIP, by the same company (Iomega). The Jaz drive on the other hand was 1GB.

Zip was available in PP or IDE, Jaz on PP or SCSI.

Re: It's pervasive.

Pagers still exist and are still used widely, especially in on-call environments, although in the NHS it's the clip-phone that inevitably beeps. A friend is nuclear safety officer for a certain organisation in the country (can't go into detail for obvious reasons) and there's been the inevitable 'beep-beep' of the pager going off over an incident during dinners before...

Left-wing campaign group throws weight behind BT strikes

Because they can't afford to pay their rent, pay their energy bills *and* feed themselves and/or their children.

Food banks are meant to be an emergency measure, but it appears that some organisations and one party in particular believe that they're just there for the taking. Unfortunately, Trussell Trust, who run a whole network of them, are pointing out that while usage has gone up a lot, those donating to TT to be able to run their food banks has gone down too as people tighten their own belts.

California to try tackling drought with canal-top solar panels

Re: 13GW

Solar hot water is brilliant... we had this in the eighties a couple of thousand kilometres north west of you ;-)

The panels designed at the time were heavy as hell because they actually used glass and steel plating, but it provided some seriously hot water even in winter (although there we still had to backfill with an electric tank heater once the sun set).

Re: How about floating on reservoirs?

Yes, this one's a great thing to spot when you depart westwards from Heathrow, or if you are being brought into the airport from the west. :-)

You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups

Re: Stack popped reading that procedure....

11) remove and store B1 in the data safe. It is the backup copy of R.

Shirley you mean 'It is the backup copy of F'. :-)

But yeah, a glorious Tower of Hanoi problem and easily cocked up... Poor Boyle.

NASA scrubs Artemis SLS Moon rocket launch

Re: Fireworks

Especially with the latter two... Neither hydrazine nor N2O4 are nice things.

Re: One of the things not tested

SLS makes the machinery of the US government independent of the Russian one (Roskosmos). It's just like Europe who wanted independence from the US launch complex and founded things that eventually became Arianespace. And yes, having multiple different organisations build heavy lifters is a good thing.

This is why the Chinese are developing their own heavy-lift capability, why Japan does, why India does... they all don't want to be beholden to one of three nations/nation-blocs on the planet who can lift heavy stuff to orbit, as is their right to.

Re: Its a prototype

A friend of mine worked on Orion. He's sadly no longer with us. But the enthusiasm the guy had for rocket engineering was... boundless. He really wanted to see SLS fly. When that colossus lifts off, I'll raise a glass to Steve.

Germany orders Sept 1 shutdown of digital ad displays to save gas

Re: Pointless laws are pointless

Forced to pay in the sense that the *government* negotiated the strike price for energy from Hinkley Point C, which saddles *everyone* in the country with that strike price regardless of whether they'd like that or not.

Although, to be fair here, when you start building a £25 billion piece of power infrastructure, you'll want to know that you'll get a guaranteed price for what it'll generate so that you know whether it'll make a profit (of sorts) or not. And currently, the nuclear strike price set is something like £110/MWh (at 2021 prices), which, based on some of the other strike pricing I've looked at, is pretty much in the low end of what is currently being charged for wind energy from the Beatrice, Walney and Dudgeon Offshore Wind Farms, and also what Drax and Lynemouth (both biomass) charge, although it's twice as expensive as the Doggerbank Offshore Wind Farms.

Given that all gas-based power generation will head for Mount Everest, I think it's a fair strike price.

Re: Pointless laws are pointless

@VoiceofTruth, but that's where you're wrong. Supporters of nuclear power do not deny Chernobyl happened. They do not deny Fukushima happened. But they look at both as things everyone learned from and improved on what they did.

Chernobyl only happened because a) every safety mechanism was disabled, and b) the RBMK reactor design used at Chernobyl was *not* self-regulating. It is an unstable design. It allows the reaction to 'run away'. Russia is the only country that still really relies on that unstable design in its facilities, although they addressed some of the failures of the design in later iterations.

Modern pressurised water reactors, such as the ones pioneered by the US Navy for their submarines and then exported to the rest of the world as safe designs by Westinghouse, Toshiba, Areva (and its predecessors) etc, do not allow that to happen. Even the modern Russian design that is at the heart of the Ukrainian nuclear power station (Zaporizhzhia) currently under Russian control is of the design that if you don't bombard it with missiles or other armament and damage the reactor vessel, chances of a nuclear meltdown of epic Chernobyl-style proportions is not possible.

And Fukushima (of a boiling water reactor design) only happened because all the pumps and electrical equipment, which were not mounted high up, were drowned by sea water when the tsunami overtopped the sea wall, and no other infrastructure survived. The safety mechanisms largely worked, which is why you only had hydrogen explosions with the subsequent release of radioactivity (and the irradiation of the water then used to cool the molten-down cores), not a full-scale fire that blasted radioactive materials into the air and spread it over thousands of square miles like it happened at Chernobyl.

Hell, and even the nuclear accidents that are required to be reported by regulators across the world (which is why you know about them in the first place) are not nearly of the scale that are catastrophic. Everyone in the nuclear industry agrees that if you want to talk about catastrophic incidents, there are only 3, ever, in 60 years. You've already mentioned two. Three Mile Island is the third, and even *it* didn't even come close to what Chernobyl managed to achieve.

Re: Pointless laws are pointless

Unfortunately, a lot of this radiophobia comes courtesy of the UK, ironically. CND has a *lot* to answer for, as I've discovered (after starting to watch a lot of the archive that ZDF, one of the German public broadcasters, has started to put online). A lot of anti-nuclear campaigners in Germany got their inspiration from CND.

Re: FRA airport is very nearly in compliance with this law....

55C is considered to be a good temperature to keep Legionnaire's at bay if you have a lagged hot water tank.

If you have a condensing boiler, reducing the flow temperature will help your gas usage, more so if you have a condensing *combi*-boiler (i.e. you don't use the boiler to heat a tank of water), since your water will be at a lower temperature that you don't need to mix cold water back into (this is the irony of having your flow temperature too hot - you burn a lot of gas to get your water from 7C to 55-60C, only to mix more 7C water back in to get it back to 45C that you wash with).

Apparently many boiler manufacturers set a flow temperature default of 60C and many installers don't mess with it because, well, "the manufacturer knows best". Setting it to 55C is more appropriate.

Re: FRA airport is very nearly in compliance with this law....

Yes, this irritates me a lot in winter in Europe (and to a degree in the US/Canada) - heat turned up to max. You come in from the freezing cold, you get blasted by furnace temperatures, you undo all your insulation (read coat, undercoat, cardigan, scarf etc) to not die of heatstroke or drown in your own sweat whilst in the shop/mall/whatever, only to have to hastily redo it on exit whilst in the weird double-door vestibule thing.

Turn the heat down to 19C, the amount of people wandering about will *not* freeze but it will be cool, and yes, the staff will have to wear an extra cardigan or pullover to stay reasonably warm.

At least in greater conurbations in Canada, the underground shopping streets (read, tunnels between the different stores/malls) are a Godsend - they're not hot, but they are warmer than the glacial/arctic temperatures outside.

Re: FRA airport is very nearly in compliance with this law....

It happens everywhere... not just rural areas. Areas around football/sports stadiums, anything that is noisy... estate agents will go out of their way to finish the sale with zero thought to what happens after. The Home Information Packs were supposed to resolve some of this, but there we are.

Re: FRA airport is very nearly in compliance with this law....

Well, given Schiphol (AMS) is surrounded by Amsterdam, Haarlem and to a lesser degree Hoofddorp and Utrecht, and the flight paths into and out of AMS cross those cities, and the airport has four runways, I think that it is justified to ask the airport to be more judicious with its aircraft movements.

I've stood in Het Amsterdamse Bos (which as you probably know is the forest to the east of the airport) early in the morning and heard and seen jets come in for runway 27 or runway 24, and I've *been* on planes heading in on those two runways. Those two cross over Amsterdam and Amstelveen (and thankfully, turn over the IJmeer, which reduces the noise impact somewhat). I've also stood in the same forest late at night hearing the rumblings of jets spooling up for the other two runways, Runways 18/36 L and R. And the Polderbaan primarily, which like its sister runway is north/south, but which is more popular, hits Haarlem and Aalsmeer with direct noise. The Netherlands is *flat* and noise travels (even in Het Amsterdamse Bos).

Charles de Gaulle (CDG) is lucky in the sense that it only really has Goussainville (and maybe Gonesse and a smattering of Paris/Saint Denis's suburbs) to the west to deal with. They're judicious with their runway uses and can get away with night operations. Brussels Zaventem (BRU) is in a similar situation to AMS, which is why all major freight operators head for Liège, which has a south-westerly approach into runways 4L/R over farmland. Leipzig-Halle (another major freight airport) also lies primarily in farmland and has deal with only Schkopau or Merseburg to the west in terms of noise while the east is clear.

And Heathrow... well... I've sat in a hotel not too far from LHR where I've had to pause my conversation to let a jet pass in order to be audible. They're already under a noise curfew because I can understand the feelings of those in Harlington and Hounslow when they are constantly bombarded with jets coming in overhead up to 20 hours a day. To a degree I also commiserate with those in Mortlake and Richmond/Isleworth; I've stood on Chiswick Bridge with some really loud f***ers coming in overhead (surprise, surprise, usually the 747 or the 777). The A380 was again surprisingly quiet with more a rumble than a piercing whistling noise. If LHR's third runway ever happens, expect the noise curfew to be extended further with less aircraft movements allowed than they would like.

However, given I aviate (*cough*) regularly and have a vested interest in the industry, I fully understand the conundrum and the consternation as to why people are suddenly ganging up on airports and airfields. GA airfields (if they host only prop planes) I fully commiserate with; it's unfair given that those planes are not really all that noisy - hell, I have Oxford Airport just up the road). GA airfields with jets (the small-noisy-bastard business kind) are somewhat in between (*cough* OXF). As a comparison, I was at the industry day of one of the previous Farnborough Shows pre-pandemic where the A380 was a display plane. It trundled onto the runway *after* one of the little business jets that are Farnborough Airport's bread and butter was departing. The difference in noise profile was striking. The A380 was, despite its size and its giant Trent 900s, perceived as quieter by a significant margin! Ditto for the 787 that did its display that day too. The piercing howl of the small diameter turbofans would be an irritation at night or at times you'd probably want to relax, even for someone with a distinct aviation bent.

Re: FRA airport is very nearly in compliance with this law....

Not entirely correct. FRA wanted another runway (to go to four runways). The only way to get that extra runway was to agree to close for overnight traffic. They then tried to appeal the planning requirement. They lost, twice (first in Kassel, then in Leipzig).

They're allowed a certain number of movements a night, but in general it means no flights overnight.

LastPass source code, blueprints stolen by intruder

Re: Just the FAQs, Ma'am

If you run any browser extensions, those extensions will be able to get your password, yes...

Re: Why should they have those master passwords?

My point stands. Because inevitably PEOPLE. WILL. ASK. THE. OBVIOUS. QUESTION.

Re: Why should they have those master passwords?

Because inevitably someone will ask that question... "Will my passwords still be safe".

Japan reverses course on post-Fukushima nuclear ban

Re: Wind and solar

Sorry to have to poo-pooh your little rant there...

Yes, the low river levels are a big concern in France and they have forced EDF to reduce output from the plants that are online - but it's hardly making nuclear power unsafe. Coal would have a similar problem - you can't really run superheated steam turbines when your coal power station can't get any water to cool that spent steam. But I suppose you can get away with using air cooling to a degree.

Nuclear power is not unsafe. It requires more fine-tuning, but in its modern incarnation in pressurised water reactors, it is not unsafe. For a country like Japan, which has little in terms of gas, oil or coal resources, nuclear power was and still is a decent choice, provided the power station is built to modern standards, and after Fukushima, with upgraded tsunami defences. The thing is that Fukushima wouldn't have failed (and melted down) if the generators that were to provide power in an emergency hadn't drowned in sea water that inundated the facility. That's a design mistake the Japanese won't make again.

UK's largest water company investigates datacenters' use as drought hits

Re: Hosepipe bans

Indeed. I lived in Warwickshire for a time where I was required to pay Severn Water an extortionate amount of money based on a standing charge. I hated every year of it. When I then ended up in Hertfordshire (where it was a standing charge again), I demanded that Three Valleys Water (as they were called back then) install a meter (which they took 2 years to arrange). It was somewhat ironic that their letter to confirm a date of installation arrived several weeks after I relocated to more sensible Oxfordshire where water meters are a thing. ;-)

I think a lot of people are concerned that their actual metered water bill is going to be a *lot* more than the standing charge, but if that's what they feel, that pretty much would indicate to me that they *know* they are likely wasting water and don't really care... unless of course it hits their pocket.

Re: Water companies have leaky pipes because Ofwat requires them to

Of course, the problem there also is that they then fix the leak with a patch, but don't send a robot through the surrounding sections to see whether there are more leaks that would be best patched/preventatively repaired by fixing the entire pipe section.

Re: Hosepipe bans

Agreed. The hosepipe ban is pretty much the only thing they can apply given how many people are on standing charges, not water meters. If more people were on water meters, I suspect the urgency to save water would become a lot clearer.

I'm on a meter, and I very much prefer this because I pay for what *I* use, not what I, the house next door and across the road do, which is what you would be doing on a standing charge (if you're single, frugal, or sensible in water usage that is).

Although other arguments say that the water TW loses through leaks isn't really lost, I disagree. TW wants to build a massive reservoir in Oxfordshire, but the question is whether it is really necessary when Thames Water could be reducing the amount of water they have to process and pump into their network, only to... feed it back into the ground or let it run down the road into a storm drain (or worse, into people's homes, ruining those in the process) through leaks and blowouts.

Although TW also sells the thing as "oh, we'll reduce the amount of flooding in the area by pumping when it floods", the locals are not buying it, and there's a *lot* of cynicism, especially given how the weather patterns are changing.

600 million litres of water daily is a lot. That's 600,000 cubic metres, or an average of 240 Olympic-size swimming pools, *per day*. Add to this the general lack of investment in sewage plants and proper disposal of stormwater run-off (which inevitably ends up in the sewage system) which then causes overflows. The fact that a mere mention of heavy rain causes water companies to start dumping raw/partly processed sewage into rivers and onto beaches is a damning indictment. And yes, the fact the C-suites of water companies are getting bonuses when water pollution is still not an issue for them is the most galling of it all.

Amazon has repackaged surveillance capitalism as reality TV

Re: Apathy is the problem

It's good that you have mentioned this to the mother, because that's certainly where I would have started also. But - may I suggest that instead of going straight for the 'creep' jugular, you maybe approach said neighbour (unless of course you already have and had a negative reaction that warrants the 'creep' label) and point out that his Ring is recording more than just his immediate front door.

Four metres is not much...

OVH to hike prices, blames 'l'inflation'

Re: OVH based in a major nuclear country has trouble with Russian natural gas prices ?

0.3% (of annual) doesn't sound like much, but it still is significant at a period of energy stress in summer. And yes, as you point out elsewhere, a lack of strategy for replacing stations as they are eventually retired is a problem. Every time this just gets kicked down the road until everything suddenly is urgently needed.

I think Flamanville is the first EPR site in France, and if the construction there overruns like it did in Finland, I'll just say "Good luck" to France...

Re: OVH based in a major nuclear country has trouble with Russian natural gas prices ?

New reactor designs don't change the ancillary stuff - the stuff that makes the electricity from the hot water circulating between the heat exchangers (the steam generators as they are called) and the reactor.

There would need to be a big step change in the turning steam back into water part. That's what heats up the river water. The nuclear stations at the coast don't have that much of a problem because the French have also exploited the warmer sea water for aquaculture.

Re: OVH based in a major nuclear country has trouble with Russian natural gas prices ?

See my post below... it explains *why* France hasn't ramped up production.

Re: OVH based in a major nuclear country has trouble with Russian natural gas prices ?

You may be surprised to discover that French nuclear power output was ramped *down* over the summer because of the excessive drought and heat. As you may know, nuclear power stations need lots of water to provide cooling, and since French rivers have been at record low levels, there's not much of that water stuff to go around. And the little bit that *does* go around is not allowed to exceed certain temperature limits on return to the river.

Also, EDF has a bunch of maintenance to do, so they're importing power from elsewhere, which is somewhat more expensive given that it likely comes from gas- or coal-fired stations, which of course, if you paid *any* attention to the political landscape in the last 6 months, are seeing a surge in costs (the gas-fired ones at least).

See https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-reduce-nuclear-power-output-as-french-river-temperatures-rise for part of the reasons.

How important are tech and other contractors to UK? PM candidate promises tax review if elected

You're not wrong there. Unfortunately, Labour will have to suckle up to the mainstream media (of which the vast majority have a right-leaning slant, and the rest are either already in Labour's corner or are owned by Russian emigrés) in order to do what they need to. Blair did that, and look what he was described as by 'old Labour' (i.e. the trade unionists and the extreme left-wing).

None of the politicians and none of their supporters understand (or care to understand) that most people just want their lives to move along smoothly, and that usually lies around the middle of the landscape, maybe for some a little right and some a little left of the center. But, thanks to the systematic (and systemic) poisoning of the minds of those in the middle by said mainstream media (mostly those on the cheap-buy-a-paper-for-35p end), things are becoming so utterly polarised that at some point there'll be blood.

Yes, don't flatter or fool yourselves. Truss is not going to order the review. And when people do ask her about it, she'll waffle on about other things of higher priority.

And if, and hell will freeze over, she *does* order the review, it and its results will just wither and die and dot in the archives like so many others people have done over the years.

They want to be *seen* to do something, not *actually* do something. Right now anything is done to play to the gallery to get votes. There's no substance to any of it.

Rocket Lab CEO reflects on company's humble beginnings as a drainpipe

Sometimes you'll find that acceleration and/or vibration beyond certain parameters also leads to liquefaction, not just temperature. Maybe a combination of all three also lead to it here... ;-)

Re: 110%

However, in sport (just like in design), you should revise your design output at the point where you regularly (and consistently) exceed your design output to the margin you waffle on about :-)

There's only so long you can waffle on about having given 110% before it starts to sound awfully clichéed.

Two years on, Apple iOS VPNs still leak IP addresses

The Register asked Apple to comment and the company has not responded, which is not completely expected.

Not completely expected? Now now, El Reg folk... we know it's 'not completely unexpected'. This slight Freudian slip just amuses me (or I'd have reported it). ;-)

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

More like letting the cat out of the bag that the *existing* system is too complicated ;-)

But yeah, if you've been used to farthings and ha'pennies and crowns and shillings and guineas, suddenly only having to do multiply by a hundred to get the next currency unit up (and that only once!) would blow people's minds :-)

That said, India still has the crore and lakh which are used regularly. They won't refer to 150,000 rupees, but 1.5 lakh. The same goes for the crore. Makes the decimalised thing look... simplistic to the extreme.

Australian wasps threaten another passenger plane, with help from COVID-19

Re: Aircraft systems & resilience

That's why airliners use at least 3. They work on a quorum system - If you have 3 sensors, and one of the sensors doesn't play along, it gets ignored. If you have 4, and one doesn't play along,... you get the drift.

Software developer cracks Hyundai car security with Google search

Re: Criminy

That would be great, wouldn't it. But chances are that this is not the case...

Criminy

That sounds just... so fascinatingly typical!

People learn/do by rote, and this just absolutely reinforces that... Someone's silly mistake will now allow people like 'GreenLuigi' to do fun stuff with their cars... until Hyundai fix that problem.

Oh Deere: Farm hardware jailbroken to run Doom

Re: Internet of Farming Things

If that's the case, then Apple needs to also be taken to task over their use of some GPL software...

UK hospitals lose millions after AI startup valuation collapses

All conspiracy theorists take a step back from their keyboard

Here's the TL;DR on this:

1. Sensyne (Drayson) wanted to work on AI stuff for the medical sector. So far, so good.

2. OUH NHS trust and GOSH both were interested in this (because a) Oxford is always interested in advances in science and b) GOSH is always trying to make pediatric medical things better for their ultimate charges, the kids). So far, so good.

3. Sensyne says "we'll need some funding to do this, and we'll need data to train the AI" (note the mentions of a 'funding round'). OUH and GOSH go "we have data, but it'll cost ya". Sensyne points at the "we'll need money" statement. OUH and GOSH say "well, if you give us shares, you can have the data" (or maybe Sensyne said "we'll give you shares if you give us the data" - the end result is the same). So far, so good, because both trusts have a decent history where this is concerned.

4. Sensyne fails in their quest (or appears to fail in their quest, or is burning money left right and centre in the quest). They get delisted. They're *not* dead, but the shares are practically worthless.

5. OUH and GOSH write off this 'investment' they obtained by bartering data for shares.

6. Sensyne is *NOT DEAD*. It's *shares* are flatlining and it's been delisted, but the company hasn't gone into administration or gone bankrupt. They *DO* still have the data.

7. Yes, OUH and GOSH *have* lost money. The investment they got was in exchange for data. They should've gotten cold hard cash for it, they didn't. They took a stab at what could've, if Sensyne's quest had delivered a great result, turned into quite a good cash return (especially if Sensyne had gone and then sold itself to someone big). But, they failed, they haven't sold themselves, their shares are worthless, and thus OUH and GOSH's grand idea *also* failed.

8. GOSH and OUH *could* buy it back, and throw more good money after bad (but get their data back). They could buy Sensyne, terminate it, and get their data back. Either way, they would be throwing more money away, *actual* money, not "here's some imaginary value that needs to sit in an accounting column somewhere" money. No public money has gone anywhere (unless this point happens).

the end.

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

Re: Waste

Having to cycle out the fuel often was only a measure to prevent the breeder from burning up the material it was designed to make - plutonium. If the breeder was let to run through (and go from uranium to plutonium to other actinides), you wouldn't need to cycle through fuel all the time. Yes, unfortunately, things like metallic sodium (and even metal salts) were not that great a moderator to use. Water is better, it can be controlled.

The current designs (based on light water) and their predecessors came online when it became known that the Republic of Congo (well, its predecessor, the Belgian Congo, really) was not the only source of uranium (which at the time was rarer than hen's teeth - read the history of the Manhattan Project and its progeny sometime). Once uranium oxide could be mined and refined (and then subsequently enriched) faster and more effectively, there was no need to breed more fuel. You could just... burn through that, and then send your fuel rods to be reprocessed (to remove plutonium, which is the bad bad actinide that you weren't allowed to have - for obvious reasons), and then take your new fuel rods and plug them back in.

Re: Waste

Yes, but boy did BNFL screw the pooch with it... Too much low-level waste was simply flushed into the Irish Sea, to which Ireland and Isle of Man (rightfully so) objected. Then there were the cockups of things being left to rust away, break, release highly radioactive materials into spaces from where said materials couldn't be removed/retrieved, and just a generally bad management practice. It's the THORP plant that is costing an arm and a leg to decommission and decontaminate, not the rest of the WindscaleSellafield site.

That said though, many countries did send their stuff to the UK because we did know how to chemically strip out the actinides that didn't help the nuclear fission process.

Sadly, it turns out that the fast breeder reactors that were so popular in the fifties and sixties (primarily to make plutonium to make things go boom with) were actually the ideal design (with modifications of course) to have a much less wasteful/messy nuclear power generation industry, because they were designed to burn through a lot of the material, which, once reprocessed, had less of a bad half-life (think tens instead of thousands of years in decay half-life) than the modern enriched uranium designs (because everyone panicked about plutonium).

Re: Waste

CH4 is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, just FYI.

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

There's been a lot of discussion in Germany about nuclear power and possibly *not* shutting down all stations as soon as possible as a bridging gap to resolve the gas crisis.

Of course, we should also look to France to see what happens when a country puts all its eggs in one basket. Right now, a lot of the French nuclear power stations are forced to reduce the amount of power they produce because the rivers that provide the cooling are being heated up too much.

Yes, you read that right. If you go to ResearchGate, you can see the map of all nuclear power stations in France, of which the majority are sited not on the coast like in the UK, but on major rivers (like the Loire, Seine, Rhône, Garonne, Meuse), all of which are currently seeing exceptionally low water levels (thanks to the unseasonably hot weather) and the biodiversity of the rivers downstream from the power stations needs to be kept in balance (and thus the water may not exceed a temperature limit).

And thus... as much as nuclear is fabulous, it has drawbacks in that cooling is needed and lots of it. Environmental campaigners have pointed out that some of the UK power stations have also seen localised increases in water temperatures in the sea, but that can also be an advantage for aquaculture (as evidenced in France at Gravelines outside Dunkirk where a company called Aquanord is using the warm cooling effluent to breed and grow fish)!

So, green power will need some fine balancing - maybe use nuclear as base power (like the big coal stations are used in the UK), while solar and wind, which are less... regular, can backfill where needed and/or be used to supply pumped-storage hydro-power projects (like Dinorwig).

Warning: Apple 'could very easily' cripple Jamf

Re: Apple could very easily cripple jamf...

They had tools. They threw them out with the bathwater when they ditched OS X Server. And the Apple Configurator tool just about does the trick for much of what's needed, except when you have to roll things out. That's why Jamf managed to survive. They've provided the glue. Now Apple plans to make its own...

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

Familiar...

I believe a certain software vendor in the home counties had an impressive wine collection gathered by one of the two co-owners in one of the server/patch rooms for exactly the same reason. It was cool, it usually was dark, not many people had access (and those admins who *did* have access knew not to touch said alcoholic goods).

And apparently that arrangement persisted way past the day the owners signed their baby over to some investment bankers for a *lot* of wonga... until someone pointed out that since the baby wasn't theirs anymore, it wasn't appropriate for them to use said room in the building to store personal property. I don't know what happened next, but I suspect said personal property must've been relocated to a more suitable venue...