* Posts by bombastic bob

10515 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015

Web trust dies in darkness: Hidden Certificate Authorities undermine public crypto infrastructure

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Renaming something “hidden”…

I use my own self-signed root cert for IMAP access from outside my LAN on a public IP (SSL only of course). I had to add it to the Android device I read e-mail with when I'm out and about. That would be a legit use of such a cert. I am sure there are many others doing things LIKE this.

"We discovered that a Windows Trojan implanted root certificates disguised as SecureTrust CA 2 into infected hosts"

This of course is a malicious use of such root certs.

So, are Firefox, Chrome, Android, and maybe OTHER browser/mail-reader makers going to offer a utility to tell you which root certs are installed that are NOT in their approved list (and let you delete them)? Maybe add a "scan root certificates" function to let users easily do that from 'settings' ???

It sounds like a legit feature request. So what if it causes trouble for firewall appliances. Let IT managers deal with the aftermath. "Security Now" is a better plan, along with more end-user flexibility and control

The Rust Foundation gets ready to Rumbul (we're sure new CEO has never, ever heard that joke before)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Stop

Re: Congrats

they have not aged particularly well

I completely disagree. What is your definition of "aged well" such that it would NOT cover C nor C++?

(a moving target that radically changes every few months is NOT "aging well" just in case that is what you meant)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

about that steeper learning curve...

Back in the 1980's I learned C programming in a night class at a local city college.

That's VERY important: you can take a night school class to learn C.

Is there such a thing WORLD WIDE for Rust? (I looked n the San Diego city college web site and did not see anything, but maybe my search terms were wrong... it's where I had my C class decades ago)

As for language speed, it's interesting that C and C++ (according to the article) are still a bit faster than Rust.

in fact, there was a comparison: "But so are Ada and FORTRAN" (FTFY)

I learned FORTRAN long ago, on my own from reading the docs. My assembly language prof LOVED Algol, and C was still mostly unknown outside of the UNIX community. I taught myself Pascal but wasn't really good at it. The C class helped a LOT.

And my first OFFICIAL I.T. job was programming in FORTRAN for the ASK/MANMAN system on an HP3000. Old school I.T. (The accountants liked me because I got all of their report backlog done and talked to them to see what they REALLY needed before doing it. Even the HR guy changed his mind after I provided him with some complicated reports he wanted. HR usually HATES me. But yeah, FORTRAN was a big part of it).

So it woulx seem to me that FIXING THIS OTHER PROBLEM, that is the STEEP LEARNING CURVE, would be the RIGHT thing to do.

(that and stop trying to use Rust when it is really not fit for purpose)

Ubuntu desktop team teases 'proof of concept' systemd on Windows Subsystem for Linux

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

I too am a BSD user, and prefer FreeBSD over Linux for a lot of things... but for certain benefits (like official support of RPi for example) Linux is often the better choice for production systems.

Still that means I have to *DEAL* *WITH* that 'S' word abomination (the init that shall not be named).

Yet if something is SO SUCCESSFUL then WHY TRY TO RE-INVENT IT ??

"Time for it to go its own way" - WHY ???

Others have commented that SystemD is a lot LIKE the way MS crammed everything into the registry. At first it was interesting until EVERYTHING DUMPED THEIR POLLUTION into it. I suppose SystemD will eventually grow in size (theme from The Blob playing in my head, the one by Burt Bacharach) until it becomes just as monolithic and "my god its full of CRAP" like the windows registry...

just how bad and icky do things have to get before people yell "STOP " loud enough for these JUNIOR engineers to HEAR IT? Let alone, LISTEN??

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: "2 users though have frequently requested systemd support"

Roughly twice as many as I expected.

The other must be a sock-puppet

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: @jake - "2 users though have frequently requested systemd support"

agreed. last 2 motherboards I purchased boot just fine with FreeBSD, no key required.

Both support Ryzen so they are pretty new designs.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: @jake - "2 users though have frequently requested systemd support"

yes but NOW we know their EVIL PLAN. Heh heh heh!

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Why not JUST install Linux???

(in a VM if your host system MUST be Windows!)

I am (right now) running Win-10-nic in a VM and updating it. It's been a year... and I just recently updated this FreeBSD box with the newest ports, kernel, userland. Might as well update the VMs too, right?

So maybe I'll play with WSL too, but that would be kinda pointless, I think.

(I like Cygwin anyway and use that on Windows 7 pretty frequently - rsync for backups really rocks!)

(strangely the icon dd not work without disabling scripts completely)

Boffins use nuclear radiation to send data wirelessly

bombastic bob Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: a small step

there is a well known (theoretical) nuclear reaction in which a moving neutron in the presence of a gravitational field has a probability of splitting into a proton, an electron, and 2 anti-neutrinos. This reaction conserves mass+energy, momentum, and particle/anti-particle balance, and for a very long time the anti-neutrinos were only theoretical.

In any case, the neutron communication beam would, in fact, end up decaying into anti-netrinos and free hydrogen-1 at some point.

icon, because, nuclear radiation, right?

unfortunately I do not know of any reaction that produces anti-matter proton+electron and neutrinos... at least not in THIS universe where matter (not anti-matter) won the "big bang" (theoretically). Maybe if it happens in the presence of ANTI-GRAVITY??

Oh, and to produce neutrons it may be a bit easier if you use an alpha emitter and boron. If done electrostatically (from an ionized beam of helium gas) it might actually be practical to modulate it with a signal. OK an adapted design of a travelling wave tube just popped into my head, morphed into a particle accelerator with a Boron-10 target. Mad Science!

Google wants US government to help develop chiplet design standards, so they're easier to make and buy

bombastic bob Silver badge
FAIL

getting government involved

getting government involved... would NOT be an improvement!

better for private industry to just step up and build competing foundries NOT in China and learn the obvious "do not put all eggs in one basket" object lesson.

yeah 'chiplets' too if it makes 'em happy. But we do NOT need GUMMUINT "gumming up" the electronics industry. Keep them OUT or EVERYONE suffers.

(keep in mind a great deal of this supply SNAFU, with ships parked too long off of the L.A. coastline as one example, may in fact be a DIRECT RESULT of GUMMINT being IN THE WAY, as usual, GUMMING things up and supplying plenty of red tape)

Two non-Gtk Linux desktops have put out new versions

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Variety is the Spice of Life...

you are "not wrong" - I also use MFC and Win32 to do the occasional windows application, with DevStudio 2010 (the last one before the 2D FLATTY and WinApe / Win-10-nic crap). i turn off all things that might reference ;Not and statically link everything. Then I can just ship a single .EXE to whomever needs it. heh.

I've toyed with GTK and looked at Qt. but most of my linux/BSD stuff is daemons and utilities, and web-based GUI for embedded. (and if you do it right you can make it touch-screen compatible AND avoid a FLATSO look pretty easily)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Variety is the Spice of Life...

at least they did a major revision before the major change...

(that way we can keep using the old one - "UP"grading is HIGHLY overrated)

A lot of Mate stuff still uses GTK 2 last I checked

bombastic bob Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Variety is the Spice of Life...

" It all boils down to bad design choices by a handful of developers that end up taking the Linux desktop over the cliff with them"

So, is THAT why the screenshots for the (NOW) Qt-based desktops mentioned in the article have 2D FLATASS min/max/close buttons in the address bar instead of 3D looking ones?

I was hoping for better... "my beautiful bubbles, STOP BURSTING THEM!!!" (said by 'Meracle", a playable game character in a P.A. from 'Star Ocean The Last Hope', a console game I could play indefinitely)

what's with that Win-10-nic look in X11 desktops anyway??? yeah, I use Mate with TraditionalOk, and *NOT* Adwaita!!! Let's hope these Qt-based desktops can do something similar.

Billion-dollar US broadband bonanza awaits Biden's blessing – what you need to know

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Their claims do not sound that far off though.

speed of light suggests that 500 miles of altitude (low orbit) would take about 3msec on each leg of the trip if it is directly overhead. Add equipment and queue delays like any router and it does not sound that bad at first. But to make that work you need a LOT of those satellites. This as opposed to something in geosync orbit (around 22,000 miles) that would be ~120msec each way.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Alert

and now, web pages will become even MORE scripty and bloated

just like how Windows became LESS EFFICIENT and PIGGY as CPUs got more powerful, and available RAM increased.

I suppose you might say

"The efficiency of a program or operating system is inversely proportional to the power of the computer that runs it"

- or -

"The efficiency of a web site is inversely proportional to the speed of the network that accesses it."

get used to massive CSS and javascript libraries delivered by nightmarish CDNs like you've never seen before...

(and do not forget that in theory those CDNs could be TRACKING YOU and SELLING THE DATA)

Turns out there is something everyone may agree on in Congress: Let netizens use mostly algorithm-lite apps

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: RE: Search engines exempt

you got MY up-vote

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Looks like a step in the right direction...

they silently excluded anything that sounds like GDPR though... while trying to make it APPEAR that they are "doing something"

International Space Station fires rockets to dodge chunk of destroyed Chinese satellite

bombastic bob Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Misleading headline!

I dunno, blasting obstacles with space weapons sounds like fun

Keep calm and learn Rust: We'll be seeing a lot more of the language in Linux very soon

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: The way in which this turd is being pushed “top down” makes me want to puke

I have no trouble at all using C or C++ (and do it all of the time, actually).

Memory management is simple if you just think about what you're doing. You can always use thread-safe reference counting (via atomic increment/decrement for example) if you need something that lives outside of a function. What's so hard about that?

And the primary code flow can be written to avoid the inefficiencies of "one size fits all" objects/classes. Error handling can get a "goto error_exit" where there is code that cleans things up the way they are. That happens a LOT in kernel code, i.e. use of 'goto' for error handling, because it is efficient.

Maybe there are just too many JUNIOR developers out there that need to be coddled and have their hands held by built-in idiot-proof memory allocation and the associated bloat and garbage collection, and all of the OTHER INEFFICIENCIES that go along with it all.

(take a look at how the internals of Linux and BSD efficiently handle pre-allocated kernel buffers, for things like file system I/O and the network stack - it's a wake-up call if you've never seen it - and long ago I started using similar methods for my own stuff because it works so well)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: The way in which this turd is being pushed “top down” makes me want to puke

You can polish a turd all you want. In the end, it's still a turd. Yes, I mean Rust.

Rusty turds. heh.

Also sounds a bit like another REG-COMMENTARD-ISM I've grown to love - "putting the lipstick on the NON-oinky end of the boar." (or similar)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Stop

Re: The way in which this turd is being pushed “top down” makes me want to puke

The problem here is clearly that there are dipshit C programmers that will keep allocating memory and passing pointers around “the old way”, because that's what they learned, because that's what they know. They will call the C filesystem functions, because they always used them.

Are you ACTUALLY suggesting that NOT using 'std' objects for your code makes you a DIPSHIT???

Personally I find the std classes to be INEFFICIENT and CUMBERSOME, as if you were trying to type with GARDENING GLOVES ON. Or something like that. I could write better templates in my SLEEP while DRUNK and they'd be more efficient and less like "academic self-pleasuring exercises".

Good C++ code often looks a lot like good C code, and may in fact be INTERCHANGEABLE between the two languages.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: aggregious

eh the spell checker accepted it. what the hell... it's late at night here and this font is too small to read properly with.

*DOH*

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: You spend a lot of time talking about C++

and there are MANY reasons why C++ is not being used within the kernel.

all of that housekeeping for unwinding things in the event of try/catch is number one.

And the fact that try/catch exists is unfortunately an indicator that if C++ *WERE* used n the kernel, a bunch of clueless newbies would try making use of it... to the detriment of EVERYTHING. Point is, if a lingo has "a feature" some people will eventually use it, even if it is BAD to do so.

it falls under "just because you can, does not mean you should". And I include Rust in that analysis as well.

The C language is efficient (and close to the assembly language it's compiled into) because it _IS_ by design. it's more or less why the language was invented, back when UNIX was ALSO being invented and it needed to be programmed in a language that was close to assembly, but portable enough to compile on multiple platforms.

Let's NOT just throw caution to the wind and adopt an incompletely tested programming lingo just because "Junior" likes it.

Now it seems that a SUBSET of Rust is being considered. That may be acceptable, just like a subset of C++ is used on microcontrollers that use the Arduino IDE. Some of C++'s more aggregious "trying to be all and do all" quirks have been carefully omitted, with respect to startup code and constructors and other things that just bloat up a limited program memory space. It's all documented over on the avr-gcc web pages at any rate.

So I would want similar from Rust: interoperability and fast/compact code should be number 1. Having a bunch of "but if" and "just in case" [paranoid] data checks and double checks in the code [thus stealing CPU cycles for pointless error checks] should be EXCLUDED (and such checks performed MANUALLY by coders, instead, like in C]. Automatic "features" that create inefficiency, in other words, should NEVER be used in the kernel.

The kernel guarantees certain things are valid. Properly written drivers would do the same thing. if it is necessary to add code that double-checks parameters to guarantee valid data/pointers/etc. then you might as well be WINDOWS. Linux should be SO good that such things are NOT necessary.

(so that gets back to how Rust is expected to be used, but I suspect perormance prioblems WILL be the most immediate concern and Linux runs on embedded and low clock speed devices for the very reason that it is STILL small and efficient by comparison to other things. Like WINDOWS)

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: One million homes - I don't think so

small reactors, as I pointed out before, typically have negative temperature coefficients, which mean that they can respond to varying demand much better than a coal, oil, or large nuclear plant could.

In short, as temperature goes up, power will drop, stabilizing the system.

Large reactors typically have positive temperature coefficients, making them inherently unstable. They raise power slowly, then maintain it at a constant for weeks/months at a time. Hydro, wind, and diesel plants take up the peaks. SMR would eliminate the need of peaker plants and varying load on hydro and wind. So it's a good thing if you believe that CO2 is hurting the planet.

(I do not believe CO2 is a problem but nuke power is a good thing anyway)

bombastic bob Silver badge

Re: Some submarine!

sub reactors are small enough to fit in a sub. Right?

And the rest of the area might be needed for secondary systems, power distribution equipment, nuclear waste storage, and the obligatory cooling towers to reject the "2nd law of thermodynamics" heat.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Happy

Waste re-processing and recycling needs to be taken SERIOUSLY.

And then we should be OK. Fusion is a decade or two away and we have PLENTY of Uranium and Thorium to build small reactors until then.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: This is good

Why not streamline the construction of nuke plants because they MAKE SENSE ???

And this SMR thing sounds like it would help. A LOT.

/me points out that the greenies who love electric cars should want a non-CO2 power source to charge them. Otherwise, you need coal and oil plants to provide enough power for your "green" electric cars, and when you do the math like I have, you can see that you need MORE than a single family dwelling's worth of surface area for solar panels to adequately charge your 25-50 mile per day electric car.

So do you want to REALLY reduce "carbon footprint" ??? Or, is it about controlling the FREEDOM of the average non-elite???

* If you believe that CO2 is a problem and you do NOT support nuclear, you are a HYPOCRITE

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

So there is a need to reprocess and recycle [not all of the fuel can be utilized, fission productsl have industrial uses, and nuclear waste has useful things in it like unspent fuel and useful fission products]

If you do it right, the waste will be minimized. And maybe the decay heat can become useful, too. You have to think CONSERVATIVE to see this...

But yeah be a doom and gloon anti-nuke woke activist and you'll get the upvotes from the choir, which is really a SMALL percentage of the population.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Nuclear powered shaver.

Small reactors (like those used on subs) are actually SAFER but a bit more expensive due to the highlty enriched fuel they will need.

a) Small size = negative "alpha T" (temp coefficient) meaning that they can respond better to varying loads. (this means increase in temperature causes power to become lower, a stable configuration)

b) no "all eggs in one basket" solution. Instead, distributed power sources. More reliable, at least in theory

c) modular design minimizing construction costs, maximizing profitability as long as the staffing requirement isn't too high.

I think it is an EXCELLENT idea, seeing as I operated a reactor on a submarine for almost 4 years.

(that means I know what I am talking about)

Bullseye! Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS scores an update with 'less closed-source proprietary code'

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Why?

there is nothing wrong with forking OLDER versions (i.e. without the bloat) and just maintaining them separately...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: "making things feel a bit more modern"

massive upvote for criticizing the obvious mis-use of the term "modern"

Also worth pointing out: what about older RPis with less than 1G of RAM ???

Apparently someone isn't looking at the BIG picture and existing install base.

Truck, sweet truck: Volvo's Chinese owner unveils methanol/electric truck with bathroom and kitchen

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Methanol as a store of energy for a fuel cell

how much electricity will this require?

(rhetorical question actually)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Methanol as a store of energy for a fuel cell

Diesel fuel is liquid energy, highly concentrated and relatively inexpensive compared to other fuels. Diesel engines are also very efficient (large scale engines as high as 50%), which is why they are used EVERYWHERE when it comes to producing propulsion power on a large scale (and flexible electric power on a moment's notice, i.e. "peaking" plants). I cannot imagine the physical size of fuel cells and fuel tanks that can crack methanol JUST to get the hydrogen, compared to that of a diesel engine.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2092678216302175

This article looks very favorably on fuel cells, but it is based on mathematical models, and not actual equipment. What it DOES say is that fuel cell systems are 40-60% efficient on HYDROGEN, or perhaps methane (I may have missed that detail scanning the article). Other fuels require some kind of 'cracking' which could dramatically lower efficiency, and the heat content (volumetrically and by weight) of "lightweight" fuels isn't as good as the heavier ones (like diesel fuel). Hydrogen gas is typically produced in large quantities using COAL, and the tanks that hold it are LARGE by comparison. Methanol tanks would ALSO need to be larger than diesel. So unless we have a spacecraft with liquid H2 and O2 available, fuel cells [from a practical standpoint] make less sense than classic diesel engines.

And In My Bombastic Opinion, re-purposing existing (proven) tech (diesel electric has been used in trains for a LONG time, for example) is better than trusting some new, shiny unproven tech too soon.

Apparently there is one fuel cell powered ship in operation in Germany, using hydrogen. My guess is that it does not scale well (like to an entire fleet) at this time.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: sorta like a motor home instead of a sleeper cab

not sure why methanol instead of diesel fuel though. Diesel tanks would be physically smaller, and the engine more efficient. It's the nature of the fuel. Alcohols are already "partially oxidized" causing them to have less heat content.

The focus seemed to be more on the electric side, though, swapping out the entire battery assembly and things like that. In my view, a diesel generator would be separate but connected up MOSTLY to charge batteries while you're stopped (or maybe run while you drive for hill climbing). Maybe it's the kind of thinking that comes from having been on a submarine...

An advantage to not running the diesel generator continuously is that when an engine is operating at max power it's also operating at (or close to) max efficiency. This is especially true for diesel engines due to the way they work. In general they should pollute less in this configuration, and you would not have to run the thing inside a city (let's say) and just run on batteries within urban areas when you can. Then of course when you need the extra power to climb hills you'd have both batteries AND diesel engine to do that.

But mostly, it would charge batteries when you're stopped. I guess [un]loading counts for that, too.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

sorta like a motor home instead of a sleeper cab

that's my take on it - aside from the autonomous claims.

An actual truck driver might appreciate not having to get a hotel room or even go to a truck stop for cross-country hauling though. This is a thing in the USA where it might take a few days to get from one coast to the other, with Rocky Mountains in between.

(or it's a place to "wait it out" if you get stuck at the bottom of a mountain because the pass is frozen or filled with mudslides or something similar)

I would have included a diesel generator to at least partially re-charge while you sleep.

The return of the turbo button: New Intel hotness causes an old friend to reappear

bombastic bob Silver badge
Alert

Re: I would lucky b**tard to anyone who has a Scroll Lock key

why don't we turn off DRM instead, and just leave the scroll lock key as-is ???

New year, new OS: OneDrive support axed for old versions of Windows from 1 Jan 2022

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: A remote personal file server is the way to go.

might be even cheaper to get a rent-a-server with ssh access. Then use scp or sftp to copy things onto it, and maybe the web server to download it (if you want it public anyway).

DSL costs quite a bit more than a rent-a-server last I checked. And the bandwidth would be better.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Free cloud storage killed the home NAS companies

ZFS is pretty cool, yeah. I boot into ZFS on my workstations for 3-4 years now.

Periodic 'zpool scrub' spotted a hard drive going bad before any real data loss. It's a real butt-saver.

(it's used on FreeNAS as well, as I recall)

[And last I checked OneDrive does not work for FreeBSD or Linux anyway]

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Free cloud storage killed the home NAS companies

do you really want your mp3 collection to be stored on someone else's server, subject to THEIR whims?

just thought I'd point that out. I have to wonder how much marketing information can be gleaned from someone's preferences in music... or whether the content's owner has legit copies or not, etc.

[de-duplication algorithms might look at binary mismatches as "possible copyright infringement" - just sayin']

bombastic bob Silver badge
Happy

Re: OneDrive

(see icon)

Linux PC shop System76 is building a new desktop environment in Rust

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Build back better?

interoperability notwithstanding (it better be there by default), as long as it's not time wasted RE-WRITING things into the new lingo, I'm somewhat OK with it. But there was once a big hype over ADA, but of course THAT fell apart. And Python (in some ways) took over a lot of what was once being done in Perl, so that worked out ok.

As long as the programming lingo being chosen is "fit for purpose" and does not create BLOATWARE, let them do what they want.

I'd just as well write in plain old 'C'.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: What's the point?

maybe they should allow writing the stuff in CRAYON

bombastic bob Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Let us hope ...

if it looks like TraditionalOk instead of Adwaita, I'll consider it... (I really *HATE* the 2D FLATSO and the too-skinny-to-grab-with-a-mouse Faux-scrollbars of Adwaita, which is unfortunately the DEFAULT for GTK 3, and somewhat difficult to change properly within Mate on FBSD).

Worthy of mention, THIS:

export QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SET_FACTOR 0

export QT_SCALE_FACTOR 1

export QT_FONT_DPI 120

export GDK_SCALE 1

export GDK_DPI_SCALE 1

And make sure the default GTK 3 theme has been changed from 'Adwaita' to 'TraditionalOK' using

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences theme 'TraditionalOk'

This should fix anything relying on GTK3 except FF and Tbird which NOW need some special help in about:config (and the Tbird equivalent of editing the advanced settings):

widget.content.gtk-theme-override 'TraditionalOk'

widget.non-native-theme.enabled false

(now if SLACK would just HONOR _MY_ PREFERENCES...)

(probably other stuff too, but I recently installed newer stuff and I had to do this to FIX ANYTHING GTK3 from having UGLY WORTHLESS FAUX SCROLLBARS in addition to any kind of FLATSO look)

anyway just thought I'd mention that... (it took way too long to figure out what to do about this, even with online searches and RTFM'ing)

Now that's a splash down: Astronauts spend 8-hour trip to Earth in diapers after SpaceX capsule toilet breaks

bombastic bob Silver badge
Coat

I'm sure BOEING would have gotten the toilets to work

nevermind reliably flying into space with an actual crew on board. And returning them to Earth. Alive.

OK I just had to say that. Well, THAT, and... POO! IN! SPACE!!!

[coat, please]

Oregon city courting Google data centers fights to keep their water usage secret

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: Ammonia

some of what you say, yeah, but not entirely accurate. still in principal you're in the right ball park.

Think of it this way: air conditioners are heat pumps. you compress a fluid or concentrate a salt, and then cool it (the 'hot' side, cooling tower or radiator fins). Then you expand the fluid or dilute the salt, causing it to get colder, and then it absorbs heat from the chilled air/water system (getting warmer in the process), and the cycle repeats.

Using an air-only radiator causes a size problems in large systems due to the large amount of heat that needs to be rejected. So, unlike a refrigerator or air conditioner in your house (or car/RV), they need to cool it using water and use a cooling tower to get rid of that large amount of heat.

They're not really getting rid of the water, though. They''re rejecting the heat. The water evaporates as part of the process. This process still works even in areas that have high temp+humidity so long as the chillers are designed to still work efficiently with very hot cooling water [like maybe in Florida].

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: 21st century

the lightest of CFCs is chloro-flouro-methane. It's about 2.5 times heavier than air. To get it to go UP you need a VOLCANO. I have worked with refrigerants and when I was in the Navy, a valve snapped of one of the air conditioning units while the boat was in port.; It took the ventilation system over 24 hours to get it out, and they had to put portable air blowers in the lower areas of the engine room to stir the air up enough, because REFRIGERANT IS SO HEAVY compared to air. And if you can't easily make it go up less than 50 feet, how the HELL does it go up 80,000 feet?

So yes, exactly what you said about refrigerant and ozone. In a lab it depletes ozone. In the atmosphere the CFC-like chemicals are put up there by VOLCANOS. If you calculate like for a hot air balloon, you would have to heat the lightest CFC to over 1200F to get it to rise up, and of course it would either break down or cool off before getting there.

But using CFCs to cool things down happens inside the building, most likely, making chilled water, and using cooling towers to reject the waste heat that is "heat pumped" by the chillers. The chillers themselves typically use CFCs (some use LiBr but those would use engine jacket water and exhaust cooling water from a cogen system). Then they have waste heat that uses a cooling tower. That's how I've seen it done when i worked at a hotel decades ago.

So: chiller makes chilled water at 50-55F on one end, and heats the cooling water (on the other end of the chillers) which leaves at 80-85F (sometimes hotter) and goes into a partially evaporative cooling tower in a semi-closed system, but of course you get evaporation etc..

So yeah that is the typical design. And cogen systems still need cooling towers.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: Astonished

every few decades NW USA gets droughts. Usually it is VERY rainy. But here's the thing: they are under contract to provide water for parts of California, and the contracts may not account for drought periods (as rare as they are, they still happen). In the mid-1970's I recall this happening before, and there was a bit of reform since water got rationed in Oregon while people in LA were hosing down their cars, and of course there was quite a bit of outrage. So yeah, the supply dropped a bit, but the demand stays about the same. And (probably) nobody takes responsibility for the poor planning.

After a year or two, beyond the El Niño and La Niña effects, it should be back to normal. But they need to plan for it and not ignore history. And California needs to stop feeding its limited drinking water to the delta smelt...

(/me bombastically points out that if delta smelt are as delicious as sardines, people would farm them and like cows, we'd NEVER run out, and it would take a LOT LESS WATER do farm them than to dump our limited drinking water into the Sacramento river to "save" them. So let's come up with some good recipes...)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Not all water is potable water, but only potable water is used for cooling at Dalles.

They COULD use grey water... but:

Depending on the quality of 'grey water' keep in mind that water used for cooling towers will affect the atmosphere in the area if there are bacteria etc. in it. Legionaire's Disease came from a cooling towere that had bad bacteria in the water.

Decades ago I worked at a hotel and the air conditioning used a cooling tower. We put a floating pool chlorinater in it to maintain the correct water chemistry. But yeah Legionaire's Disease was recently on people's minds back then, yet the precautions to prevent it were not all that hard.

I suppose if the grey water is as clean as the tap water, it would work well enough for cooling towers. Properly chlorinated, of course.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

we have the technology...

I would suggest building de-sal plants if you need more water. There's a really big ocean out there, after all. There's also waste water recycling, sometimes (jokingly) called "toilet to tap", though the effluent treated water is USUALLY cleaner than regular tap water (regardless of whether it was excreted from someone's kidneys).

In a 1st world country there is NO excuse for a shortage of water, ESPECIALLY when you are near the ocean. If you do not have enough, you MAKE MORE. SImple.

San Diego County has a de-sal plant that provides a significant amount of water for the region (I think it is around 20% of total water usage). If more of these plants are built, droughts affecting water availability would be a thing of the past.

NASA advised to study up on what open source, free software, and permissive licenses actually mean

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: CEO of an undisclosed startup

my corporation has been "a startup" since the early 90's.