Posts by DuncanLarge 1046 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2017
> The removal of high carbon sources and replacement with low/zero carbon sources reduces the overall carbon footprint
Ok, not that really makes a difference but why do you think that there is no issue with replacing a so called "high carbon" source with a high litium source?
Why are we sitting back and ignoring the litium pollution threat?
> Every new upgrade to renewables/battery storage that is added to the grid instantly upgrades all vehicles to cleaner energy as well.
Er no.
Sorry but the so called renewables are just the same issue: pollution and environmental destruction, only re-formed into a new shiny package that lets everyone go crazy about how shiny it is and ignore the problems it causes. In 30 to 40 years time I'm expecting we will all be screaming and protesting about how the dead old solar panels are being dumped in some poor country somehwere, poisoning their water and creating a crisis that will end up on the BBC in a documentary just like the plastic one they recently had.
I also dont think that placing highly flammable, unstable, heat intolerant and poisonous lithium based battery tech all over the countryside is a good idea. I certaily wouldnt want to live near one in case it go up and the wind is blowing in my direction. I'd expect emergency gas masks to be carried by all adults and children aka WW2 in towns and villages near such facilities.
> I know plenty of guys in skilled trades whose pay rises have been below inflation for years
I left university around 2006 and got a job as a Software Tester.
I got 1 pay rise during the six years I was there. That was when my probational period ended.
When I was forced to leave that job I was out of work for 8 months and got a job in IT again, but only after taking a pay cut. The money paid all the bills and got some food. The rest went onto the petrol used to drive there and back leaving £50 at best at the end of each month.
> utilities are soaring in cost to fund "smart meters" now forecast to save nothing and in fact to be a growing cost and thus the roll out has stagnated.
And those of us smart enough to avoid them are being punished by having all the deals and fixed rates etc removed from selection, thus taking more money out of the household.
> (Likely to be discovered in 30 to 50 years that the whole thing involved brown envelopes between ministers and smart meter manufacturers along with copious levels of incompetence.)
I think thats going to be a lot more than just smart meters. Que the panorama investigations and weeks of breakfast radio talking about the swindle(s) over and over till they get distracted by the UK suffering from a weak storm that only touches the northern tip of scotland, yet we named the storm.
> Latest ad campaign has dropped any mention of savings in favour of branding the electricity grid "outdated"
Reminds me of that CGI silver robot trying to convince us that FM was being switched off and we all had to, ahem, downgrade to a low bitrate, 1980's codec using, mono, expensive and battery eating radio service called DAB. Better than FM quality my asre.
> If you want to make a difference - don't have kids or keep it to two maximum
Actually the scientists say this has no real effect at all, Harry, Kate, pay attention.
> that suspending democracy in favour of a climate saving dictatorship is being openly discussed in positive terms by some green activist groups.
Thats the first step for some of them to start floaing the idea of human culling...
> The point of 99% of drivers being within 50miles of a charge point
Only 20 more miles to the beach then!
Also, what about those who are (more likely) to have a dead car when 6 miles from their home, say in the village down the road a bit, yet the nearest fast charge point is about 50 miles away.
How do you charge your car then? Just to get home?
> Most don't have auto transmission, they are single geared
Thats the same thing, no clutch and an auto transmission stick.
> prefer not to go back to manual. Try a test drive in a Tesla and you'll never consider a manual box a useful addition. This is coming from someone who had many fast manual sports cars.
Well, sorry but I have know many people who are completley dying to have clutch control on their auto systems. I like my cluctch control. A small ramp in a car park thats covered by snow is no issue for me yet several on my workmates are pratically drawing up plans of attack because their auto transmissions would just use too much power or just slip. It was quite annoying when they wouldnt let me go first, probably because they knew I'd just exit the car park like it was nothing.
Drive a tesla? I havnt ever seen one and I really dont think they will let me test drive one, unsupervised considering how expensive they are. If someone is looking over my shoulder asking questions, watching the manual user try to figure out how to stop himself graspong for a gear stick that does not exist I'd rather ride a bike.
As for sports cars? I drive around tonw and the countryside. A manual sports car is very different from a manual everyday car. You would have fared better compating with an auto land rover. Oh wait, they dont exist, I hope.
> visit a public fast charger to top it up in a few minutes
Visit? Currently that would be a day trip. Also, it wont charge your car fully in a "few minites"
> and you didn't have a second car
That is most likely the case considering the government want us to give up our cars, even the EV ones. Also, who the hell would have/could afford to have a second EV??
> and there was no possibility of taking a taxi
A taxi, on a 80 mile trip? Good luck finding a cab company that will do that and when you eventually find one good luck taking out the loan from the bank.
> or ringing a friend or relative
Ah but maybe your phone is dead (died after you got the call to collect the kid) and you stupidly disconnected the landline. Oh and then there is a national powercut because a wind farm was shutdown due to "too much wind of all things" and the lightening from the storm blew up some stuff that killed a gas powerstation (sounds familiar, I think this happened about a week ago), so now you cant charge your phone, or your car.
Yet, if you keep a full jerry can on petrol in the shed "just in case" suddenly you find you can drive...
> Once it stops being a niche market the overnight period will become peak, not cheap.
Actually, what is likely to happen is all the smart meters will be able to let the energy provder detect when you are carging the car (they will use data mining on the usage data supplied in 30 min segments to determine your pattern) and they will charge you differently during that time.
Some smart meters have been able to allow researchers to identify what TV programme you are watching, although I doube that will work in practive it shows that be monitoring your power draw they can determine when you wahtch TV, when you are out, when you run the washing machine etc. All of which are ripe for offering different pricing models.
The EV's will at some point also be talking to the meter and the larger network. The power companies are hoping to use EV's as a power reserver, having some discharge power back into the grid when they need a boost. Whether they refund that money or not is a good question, as you already paid for it.
Having the EV's talk to the network will also allow the companies to control which EV's charge, at what rate and when.
I can imagine the complaints now, when people wake up to find their EV's discharged due to a configuration issue in the power company that ended up having the EV's never charge and instead emptied them into the network. Combine that with a smart meter that is not metering correctly so charges you for the discharge of your EV (it thought you were charging it instead) and you will then not be able to get to work and wll spend a long while in a premium rate call queue to india on the weekend to try and convince the supplier that you are owed a refund and compensation.
Today we have people calling up their power company to try and convince them that they have not been using huge amounts of electricity over the past month and that the smart meter is faulty:
https://community.scottishpower.co.uk/t5/My-Energy/Smart-Meter-showing-incredibly-high-usage/td-p/1530
> As in Solar powered, battery storage
We live in a world that used to tax people for the number of windows / bedrooms and clocks they had in their homes.
I wouldnt put it past the government to tax the number of solar panels on your roof once they need the money. And the great thing is they can see them from the street, or from a future drone that they may use to detect panels.
> So, with car of 200 miles+ quite common now
I wouldnt say that electric cars are common!
Most people thinking of getting one will go for the first generation Nissan Leaf as on the secondhand market thats starting to look like having a sensible price.
But EV's are far from common. Every time one is in town charging on the normally unused/abused/faulty charging points people turn their heads like they are seeing it for the first time. This year so far I have seen maybe 3 EV's driving and 1 charging. However I see hybrids everywhere, plug in hybrids almost but not quite as rare as EV's.
It will be a long time before more EV's are seen. Downsides are auto transmission and price. In a country (UK) where the vast majority of cars are manual transmission, being forced to an auto one is a big step. Only people rolling in money or wiling to risk financial agreements would get a brand new car anyway, most going for the 2nd or 3rd hand one from the local showroom/garage or independant sale. Those cars are very likely to be 5 or 6 years old at the youngest with many still in decent condition at 10 years.
> Let's be honest, the council tip will do one of two things... landfill if it's old
I was at the tip a while back and took a look in the "small appliances" skip as you do.
Saw a BBC micro in there. Probably chcuked in there "because its old". If only they knew the National Museum of Computing in bletchley down the road would have had it even for parts.
If I had grabbed it I know what I'd do with it. I'd use it like a big RPi and have it water my garden by operating valves and pumps.
> Scavengers cut their costs, so they're fine with "withdrawals" as well as deposits.
Where I live in the UK the local tip has CCTV cameras to catch you in the act of scavenging. The tip staff however scavenge openly anything they think will go on ebay. When you walk up to the skip with something that catches their eye (like a sky tv box) they will helpfully take it from you to "save you the trouble" of chucking it into the skip yourself.
I even found that the entrance to the tip is covered by ANPR so they can match you to your numberplate thus find out where you live should they need to recover any items you "stole".
> And will he recycle it, or just dump it in the bin out back?
If the shop is like the one I worked at as a teen the stuff will be looked through by the young teens/adults and carefully placed out the back next to the skip on a day with good weather. Then they will go round the back "on the way home" and grab whatever took their fancy.
The geeks in the bunch will pick up the stuff the normie ones leave because they dont know what it is, it looks too old and uncool or its broken and they cant think about fixing it. Its like a buch of seagulls picking apart a bag of rubbish!
> A degausser/HDD eraser
Unfortunately that will not have any effect on a tablet or mobile, or basically anything using solid state storage.
That device can only wipe a magnetic storage medium. It has no effect whatsoever on a medium that stores electrical charges. You may be thinking that a current will be induced in the device, that could happen and may even damage it. But what gets damaged? The flash chips? Or the interface controller? The induced current strength would depend on the length of copper trace on the PCB that connects to a (hopfully) critical pin on the chip. Many of this chips pins could get to the same potential voltage thus wont nescesarily do damage anyway.
This study had the SSD's put through a degausser. They suffered no damage whatsoever:
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf
No, recycle those too.
The DRAM has no storage ability after the power has been removed for long enough. Test it and if its working sell or reuse it.
HDD's (if working) can be wiped securely using the ATA secure erase command. This will wipe all areas of the disc, even blocks marked bad. If the drive isnt working then use the drill. If you cant use secure erase for some reason you can just wipe it with zeros. Modern drives have such a high density that simply overwriting a file once makes it basically impossible to get the data back unless you really really want it and have the time and money (the drill wont stop them in that case).
SSD's, modern ones (some time after this report https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/21/flash_drive_erasing_peril/), should implement the secure erase command properly. Old ones were found to not do so and even lie about it. Overwriting the drive however is a different beast. Due to the self destructive nature of SSD's they usually come with a significant amount of extra space reserved for use automatically for replacing bad blocks or wear leveling. The secure erase command SHOULD wipe these areas too but again YMMV depending on the age of the drive. If the SSD is not fairly recent and did not have FDE enabled you may wish to drill through each chip.
USB flashdrives should be shredded. Unless you encrypted them too.
TBH if you are going to the length of drilling through the drives then that data thats so sensitive should have been encrypted in the first place. Read up on it and implement proper file or filesystem encryption so next time you can recucle the drive responsibaly and remain secure (to a reasonable extent).
If you need to hide data from evil governments or men in back destroy the drives, or use paper next time, it burns extremily well.
Wait, I can recycle this sh*t?
Lol I keep loads of stuff (and buy more off ebay) due to my in-built collector (hoarder) instinct for keeping hold of old tech "just in case" and as part of a retro collection.
I also hoarded some scsi hdd's and server VRU's as they could be sold on ebay to those poor souls trying to keep aging hardware running in a business that has no care about whats in the server room or how old it is (I've been there). Never did get around to selling much of anything so its all just dumped into drawers in my house.
I would have taken the stuff to the local tip but I was reluctant as I did not think that I could trust it all to go into the recycling process and not just end up in landfill with ET carts.
Perhaps its time I have a bit of a clear out. Just the useless stuff mind you, the HP DL380 PSU's and VRU's. The floppy disc drives that came out of servers that I cant remember, the scsi HDD's that had a questionable life span remaining when I salvaged them. I'm keeping my 486 and other old PC bits, I have uses for those.
I tend to use my mobiles till they start falling apart. My laptops mostly hail from 2012 or 2013. I keep hold of many things that still work till they just die, for example, if I want to record some birdsong or other outdoors sound I will likely just use one of my working minidisc recorders as they record audio and I have them so why buy a flash based one?
I hate e-waste. I've never been keen on simply going with the flow and grabbing the latest tech just because it has a different colour option and larger screen than last years model.
shutdown -h now for a second time: Mag editor fires parting shot at proprietary software
It doesnt matter about GNU/Linux being in the background, or in a VM.
GNU/Linux is just one OS that makes use of FLOSS software. There are others.
The important thing is to talk and advocate about the licensing and ideas about FLOSS. Focusing on just the OS is falling into the same mistake the Open Source group did where they removed all talk about protecting rights and freedom and only talked about being open in the respect of improving code quality. Now look where we are, with the Linux Journal suddenly realising that things are getting locked up and we are lacking freedom. They blame how GNU/Linux is used rather than blaming the real issue, that nobody is properly making efforts to talk about that freedom. Well Richard Stallman and the FSF is, but thanks to the efforts of the open source movement he finds he has to constantly remind those he talks to that he has nothing to do with open source at all.
Free Software incorporates the benefits of open source, while focusing on protecting it. It s a political idea. Open Source tried to avoid all that, now we have this situation where companies grab our code and use it as a platform to create proprietary systems.
If we apply this to cars: We need to find ways to push people to not think about the car, but how they are restricted or not with what they can do with the car or where they can go.
Funnily enough this is precisely what Richard Stallman and the FSF have been talking about over the last several years. The GPL version 3 tries to address this, yet there are those who try and stick to the GPL v2 thinking thats all they need, or they dont like GPL v3 because they secretly want to be a bit more proprietary, or they sell out and pander to big corps because they want to mentally come because big corp uses their code. The GPL v2 does what it says in the license text however clever people are leveraging ways to subvert and work around it in ways that got us into this situation, adoption of GPL v3 would (should) have fought against this.
There are also the other Free Software users/developers who prefer total freedom. They develop and use software under MIT licenses, which is a Free Software license, but does nothing to protect you from bad actors. They are so into freedom that they believe there should be no restrictions at all. That sounds great, but that includes the bad actor that wants to lock you up in their code / protocol. With the car analogy this would be like having a car that you are totally free to do anything to, anything with and take anywhere. Then you leave it in a car park where the car park owner takes a liking to it and legally transfers control to him. You come back to find you must pay to access your car and that the car will now only start on a sunday just because the new owner thinks it should. A GPS has been fitted, tied into the ECU so when he sees that you are driving to Coventry, he can kill your car because he for some reason hates Coventry and thinks you should pay more to go there.
The Open Source movement got the ideas and licenses into business by dumping the political arguments of freedom. This worked but it now looks to have worked too well. Now its time to unify the Free Software and Open Source movements so we can start working on getting control of the car back.
> it'll finally kill off tape
Yeah and pigs will fly.
Chimps will recreate romeo and Juliet.
Aliens will land at the whitehouse and apologise for pranging earth in the 40's near Roswell and for being so late due to "family matters", ask where their craft is, visit Area 51 and see what happened to the occupants and then file a lawsuit with our legal system, sell their story to the papers...
Yeah, we are really going to give up a standard open format that is LTO that stores tebibytes in a resilient, proven, transportable, light weight package.
What are we to use instead?
Spinning rust platters that require clean room environments to fix issues with their EMBEDDED electronics that cant store data without having to automatically correct multiple errors all the time and cant be shouted at and if they are badly made will sandpaper the platters while they spin (ahem samsung, IBM).
What about expensive electron buckets on a chip called an SSD, no moving parts sure but it degrades every time its written to as we must literally force electrons through a quantum barrier, degrading it as we do so. Oh but the trapped electrons are like prisoners finding a way to escape, constantly reducing the stored charge till it gets to only a few years later when the flash controller cant determine if the bit is a one or a zero and reads it differently each time. Now we are not talking about just one bit here, due to the amount of data we can assume that there will be multiple bits affected by the ravages of only a few years, some will not be detected or corrected and some of those may corrupt the filesystem metadata needed to get the file.
As for the embedded electronics. We live in a world that has heat and gravity. These very annoying facts of nature can destroy your drive simply because a BGA chips solder balls get cracked or maybe a bad capacitor spews its load all over the board. Having a drive fall can crack these solder joints or flex the PCB cracking the tracks. This would kill your drive dead and need a clean room to repair, unless you are lucky enough they can just swap the PCB.
Yet if you drop an LTO tape its just fine. Oh, the plastic case broke? Move the tape to a new one. Thats why they have screws.
TLDR:
WIth the amount of data we have to preserve these days I really doubt that LTO will give way to more expensive, yet convenient alternatives such as HDD and SSD. These are too error prone and subject to damage that tape is practically immune from. A successful backup system would combine both. Different media = eggs not in one basket.
Tape is far from going anywhere. Maybe if we all stop needing storage. Get rid of the photos etc. But I doubt many will be wanting to part with that.
I once (ok three times) installed win 10 from scratch.
To save having to wait for it to update itself, I triggered the update manually. I only triggered it, I wasnt picking and choosing what to install.
It broke itself each time, needing a fresh reinstall to try again. I was really pissed off when I found that if I just waited hours for it to do it automatically it had no issue.
How the hell is waiting for updates to install any different than clicking "check for updates"?
1. They will need it because: They can get it, you agreed to it and it makes them money. Also licensing and activation counting.
2. The old methods will eventually become unsupported, be laughed at in reviews and blogs as "crazy things we used to do". Then they will drop support, it will be announced here where we will all try and convince the world how dumb its being in blindly accepting its loss.
3. Yep proprietary shit. > That partition is trivial to nuke if one wants Linux instead, so it would have zero impact on non-windows OSes.
Really? You really think they will let you do that when they could use it to lock the device to windows and maybe to yourself, thus stopping you from selling it (licenses cant be transferred). "Nuking" it will end up breaking secure boot which could brick the machine if they implement a TPM in such a way to do it.
Dont put t past them. You are a product, your data is a product and it pays to find ways to tie you into the devices and systems used to harvest you.
> if you are getting lots of windows crash and burns then you are doing something wrong.
Like running what is considered by some to be a toy operating system?
https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-298.htm
- Steve: I like Windows.
- Leo: Oh.
- Steve: I don't like Windows 7. I like XP. Maybe someday I'll like Windows 7.
- Leo: But Steve, it's a toy operating system. You said it.
- Steve: It is a toy. And, I mean, it really is.
Sure Steve Gibson was talking about XP but, here is the epiphany, windows hasn't changed much at all underneath. Its the same code with a different UI slapped on it every few years with only a few parts being changed or replaced, which turn out to be broken or not fit for purpose while they slowly re-introduce the original feature set of the original code. Now that Win 10 is a constant beta they can change loads, and test it on you.
Windows 10: Stable as a rock, till it rolls off the edge.
Windows 10: Stable as a rock, till the forced major update re-maps all your drives because the developer didn't perform a regression test thinking it should be YOUR job.
Windows 10: Stable as a rock till the next forced update is recalled several times as it keeps wiping user data.
Windows 10: Stable as a rock, when it works yes, but provides you with several inconsistent UI design elements that change depending which program you are using, two control panels, fast start up mode that means shutdown IS NO LONGER SHUTDOWN and gets turned back on EVERY TIME AN UPDATE GETS INSTALLED, a talking AI thing called cortana that everyone rushes to turn off when setting up a new machine, and you used to like creating your own custom theme/look? Well sorry but you cant do that anymore. You cant chose the f*cking title bar colour to fix the stupid UI choice of making the active and background title bars THE SAME COLOUR SO I CANT TELL WHAT APPLICATION HAS FOCUS.
WIndows 10 best feature? The right click menu on the start menu. Ok, its been there since 8.1 but I love it.
> so you do need a relatively fast internet connection, preferably unmetered
If I had to do this on a metered connection I'd think it would be cheaper to buy a flash drive from somewhere and write a recovery image to it and keep it in my "important stuff" box where I also keep the spare car keys and whatever else I think I might not do without.
Of course, if that image ages too much I may have to pay for more data anyway to get the updates, so maybe the OS can help me keep the flash drive up to date by reminding me to consider plugging it in so already downloaded updates can be slipstreamed in?
I may be on a houseboat using a 4G router that gets me about 10meg at best in the middle of a canal!
This feature makes sense if you are using a device hampered by not having sufficient ports etc.
Well this was set in 2030 in a world where the internet literally was in you brain.
The hacker was clever in that nobody would find it easy to hack his chosen storage method, it was old and simply the last thing anyone would think of using.
You realise I'm talking about an episode of an Anime?
You can go on ebay or amazon and buy bags of assorted rubber replacement cassette deck belts. Many youtubers into reviewing old cassette decks etc frequently use such assortments to replace worn out belts.
Make sue the new belt fits and is not too tight and certainly not too lose. Everything should freely rotate.
What has the word size got to do with it?
Last time I tried using the latest 64 bit debian install had no issues accessing a floppy.
But I agree, download and maintain an older complete distro for such uses. I'm considering using jigdo to download blu-ray and DVD iso images of the entire debian 7 distro.
I also do this to ensure I can guarantee access to file formats that I'm using that possibly may not be easily accessible in 20 years depending on how things go. I should in 20 years be able to fire up a VM or some kind of emulator used to emulate older machines (like we do today) and install debian 7, move the data into it then see if I can convert it to a format that did survive.
> Main problem is these machines have small memories
Add more RAM or put the floppy drive in a computer that has a newer motherboard. I have a 3 core athlon 64 with 8GB of DDR3 ram sitting around with an on board floppy controller and pci/pcie expansion slots that will take a pci controller if I really need one. Its only 10 years old.
Can be a good idea to upgrade "recovery" machines to the latest stuff thats still compatible. I only stopped using the 3 core athlon 64 (its a 4 core phenon with 1 core disabled) a few months ago when I splashed out on a new Ryzen 5.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
