Posts by Solviva

EV battery can reach full charge in 'less than 10 minutes'

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

I'm sure somebody in the Green parties of the world will come up with the idea to add micro turbines to cars so they can charge whilst they're ploughing through the air. Free energy yay!

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

Is that 300 (example) miles on a new battery or your once-new worn in battery? Assuming new, and you exchanged it for a minimum 80% spec battery, then you'd get 240 miles minimum. If that's not sufficient for your trip between Cloverdale and Healdsburgh, then feel free to stop somewhere inbetween for a few mins to pick up another pack, which may take you 300 miles, but you know it will at least take you 240 miles. Kinda like when your fuel estimate says you've got 100 miles left, do you fill up then, or wait till it says --- then decide to fill up?

Let's assume you don't swap out your once-new battery. After a few years you'll no longer be able to travel between Cloverdale and Healdsburgh, ever, without stopping to recharge. Sure you can fork out for another brand new pack for the next few years, or sell on your car and buy a new one.

"Especially seeing as the swap-station gets a brand-new battery in exchange for an older one. Sounds lucrative, to me."

What will the swap-station do with this brand-new (actually once used) battery? Put it on display? Sell it to the highest bidder? Or just some lucky person gets to drive away with it, who then drops it off at another swap-station.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

Yes I realised I not sidestepped, just forget about that question.

If the battery was user-replaceable and there was a discount for taking home a pre-used good condition battery vs a brand new battery then I'd take the cheaper option. Others would pay for the shiny new battery. But battery swapping negates any initial battery investment.

Still the difference would be where for a micro-fee, think the cost of putting energy in to charge the battery plus the 'subscription' (not an ongoing thing, more the slight charge every time you use the service), you could swap out your battery for a charged battery of reasonable capacity for the life of your phone. Nothing's stopping you charging at home should you so wish, but when you're out & about, just stop in to any convenience store to get a comparable battery to yours that's pre-charged.

Think sodastream refills, you pay for the CO2 inside, and also pay for the initial bottle, and some of the fee you pay to swap out the bottle goes to ongoing costs above the cost of the CO2. You technically don't own the bottle, although if you melted it down for scrap metal nobody would care. This is similar to the battery, as CO2 bottles need regularly pressure testing and certifying. If you fully own your own bottle and take it to get refilled, then every so often you need to pay to get it pressure tested and certified. If you buy a used bottle, you'll potentially need to get it certified very soon (less value than a new bottle) - buy a new one and it's certified for the max period.

Would you accept a refilled sodastream bottle when 'buying' a new one, or demand a fresh out the factory, first-fill bottle when making the initial payment? Hint - there's no perceivable difference, and once you've exchanged it there's no difference at all.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

Bad comparison.

If your phone lasted but a few hours before needing a recharge, then a replaceable battery would give you instant power again. What difference does it make if you swap it for a 1 cycle battery or 100 cycle battery, assuming you're guaranteed a minimum say 80% capacity? Furthermore you're assuming a typical modern phone where batteries aren't (easily) replaceable, so no you wouldn't expect the dealer to fit the battery, you could do it yourself. Again, difference being you can take away a new phone, without battery, to the battery-swap shop. How are you planning to take your batteryless EV to the swap shop?

As it is, phones typically last a day, then you let it charge overnight which is a convenient cycle. Cars can be the same, but when you step out of the standard commute routine then it's nice not to have to stop for an hour every 4 hours to charge.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

How about a batteries not included model. You buy the car without battery, the dealer kindly fits you one for a modest price, which is not guaranteed new, but a guaranteed minimum capacity.

The battery-swap shops handle inventory, either offering the faded packs to those who don't need a big charge at that moment for some discount (2-tier battery-swap shop), else throwing them into the recycling system once they are less than the minimum mandated max capacity (1-tier battery-swap shop). BaaS.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

Mehh just wait for the EU to mandate USB-EV or USB-EU as the standard interface for EV batteries.

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: Does this mean there can now never be a USB-D?

Whilst the internal tab on a USB-C port is potentially vulnerable to attack, you'd have to be somewhat determined to damage it. It stops well before the the end of the port, so any occasional things would be unlikely to touch it. There's no way to accidentally mal-insert a USB-C plug such that it would damage the tab either, although if you tried inserting at maybe > 30 degree angle you could touch the tab with the plug and try to tickle it into submission.

Sample of 1, but Macbook (16" so a fair bit of mass) slid off the sofa (maybe 40cm), landed smack on the USB-C plug. First thoughts "Oh bugger". Upon inspection, the USB-C plug had sacrificed itself and bent significantly beyond repair (at the point where the metal of the plug meets the plastic), Macbook survived with a seemingly intact USB-C port, which worked perfectly and showed no future mating issues. Sad about the loss of the USB-C cable, but could have been much worse.

Re: Does this mean there can now never be a USB-D?

You seem to be missing the point whilst pointlessly bringing brexit into this.

USB-D spec arrives, looks good on paper, but in practice is it better that USB-C in terms of PD rather than transfer speed? At what point do the EU decide to allow devices to have USB-D ports, it's not like there will be many out in the wild to test as they would be otherwise banned in the EU, and what manufacturer is going to go on the line with a USB-C EU variant, along with the rest-of-world USB-D variant.

What if a fruity company comes up with a competing standard that blows USB-C out the water, makes it an open standard? Will the EU allow that as the next standard or refuse as it's not USB-[C-Z]? This isn't EU bashing, just looking at complications arising from this otherwise sensible decision.

Could you plug your EU device in when you visited the formerly-EU-UK? (actually yes if you stick something in the earth hole to open up the L&N holes then push a little). In fact Ireland still being in the EU I suspect you'd have the same issue there, so EU travel isn't painless, more each country specifies their own socket standard and it just happens that most of continental EU sockets reached a point of commonality that you can freely roam with your devices.

Italy seems a bit late to the party as most of the few buildings I've been in there still had their slightly different sockets, along with an EU type socket somewhere else on the wall.

Re: Does this mean there can now never be a USB-D?

But will the EU overnight greenlight USB-D, and then a grace period whilst you can ship either USB-C or USB-D?

How will the EU decide on permitting a new spec offered to them, and what's the risk of designing a new spec only to find that the EU turns its nose down to it?

Apple’s M2 chip isn’t a slam dunk, but it does point to the future

Not a fanboy here, but an 8 core processor 'only' giving 87% compared to a 12 core processor doesn't sound like much of an issue. Takes that bit longer to render each frame of youtube? Takes that bit longer to encode a video. Takes exactly the same time to load faceache. The takeaway is the barely noticeable performance hit is offset by the huge power savings.

Back in the day you could (would) pump extra volts and subsequently amps into your CPU to get those extra few hundred MHz at a significant power increase. Then power wasn't much of an issue as long as you could get rid of the heat, performance was king. Now performance is fairly stagnant, power costs real money, so the M2 for most tasks looks to be a jolly good choice compared to the space heaters that Intel has to offer.

Would be interesting to have an AMD comparison too, is that missing because they don't see AMD as competition or were they somewhat more embarrassed when compared to a Ryzen in terms of power & performance?

Dell unveils new XPS 13 devices with Alder Lake CPUs

If something is twice the size, you could say it's 200% (2x) the size, or 100% (1x) larger.

So conversely, if something is half the size you could say it's 50% (0.5) the size or 50% (0.5x) smaller.

100% (1x) smaller would be 0, i.e. you've taken away 100% of what you had.

1.8x smaller would be therefore be an imaginary -0.8x the size of the original.

New York to get first right-to-repair law for electronics

Replacing that M1-Ultra may be somewhat more difficult, but achievable by an experienced repair place. As you say, buying a new chip may render the repair non-economical, and you'll likely be waiting 3 or 4 months for delivery (in an ideal world, more than likely you'll be at the back of the queue and only get shipped the chip when they've started manufacturing and shipping the M2).

That's by far not the only chip on the motherboard, most of them are likely a few to a few 10s of dollars so easily affordable for replacement. The problem comes when they are 'special' variants of a mostly standard part which the manufactures have a contract with Apple to sell to Apple only, and so not available on the open market. Need a $10 part replacing on your motherboard? Only way right now is to find a donor board to pull it off.

Linus Torvalds debuts 'boring old plain' Linux kernel 5.18

Re: cryptographically signed licenses to enable dormant features in Intel silicon

"First I don't know many workflows which might require a 4x increase in RAM overnight. It happens, but usually it's foreseen, planned ahead, and integrated in the company's hardware upgrade cycle. Out with the old, in with the new, bigger, more modern servers."

It was an example. Doubling the RAM would have the same problem, depending on the original config.

"Second increasing RAM by >400% would require more than flipping some switch on the processor. Like adding that additional RAM for instance... "

Darn, I was hoping that dreaming of more RAM would instantly give me more RAM, sorry didn't know I needed actually procure said RAM and slap it on the motherboard. The problem isn't about buying the RAM, it's about it working once you've bought it.

"Chances are you'd need to change the motherboard, of course the power supply, obviously the memory, so actually it means buying a new server. Ideally with a new processor, since by that time there are certainly faster ones available (or simply because the new motherboard has a different socket)."

No, you have a decent server motherboard, with ooh 16 slots / CPU. Either add the new RAM in adding to the existing RAM, else remove the older modules and replace them with modules of double or quadruple the capacity. As mentioned, the point is not to be buying new motherboards, CPUs, PSUs for what is just a 'significant' RAM upgrade. Sure a shiny new CPU would be great, but maybe that extra 10-20% from a more modern CPU isn't worth as much as the performance boost from the extra RAM.

Of course of Intel hadn't artificially limited large RAM to a specific subset of CPUs then I wouldn't have come up with this corner-case and we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Re: cryptographically signed licenses to enable dormant features in Intel silicon

Please explain why you would pay for a license to enable a 'secret' function? This isn't about uploading unknown blobs to the CPU (which is already done, it's called microcode), simply flipping virtual switches.

The whole point of this is to be able to sell 'upgrades' to non-secret i.e. useful features. One that immediately springs to mind is they have versions of the same chip with different postfixes, one of these indicating > 1TB (or something) RAM supported.

If you only planned to buy 256 GB then why shell out for the extra fee for a large-memory processor? Then things change a couple of years down the line. Today, you'd have to buy (at least) a new processor to support that extra couple of TB you want to install. The future alternative could be you pay a modest fee to unlock the extra RAM, works out cheaper than buying a whole new CPU.

It's no different to buying a license key to unlock features in software currently. All this will be doing is adding support for licenses to be uploaded to the processor and I suspect ability to enquire about enabled capabilities of the processor, like an extended CPUID, CPUIDaaS?

Re: boring old plain 5.18

You could imagine AWS (other services are available) offering features on demand. You stump up the extra fee for those features, Intel collects their cut, and you can use them. Next month, customer Y doesn't need those features, AWS offer the same system without the feature.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Re: Everybody knows...

In my housing association's online booking system for the laundry room (welcome to Sweden!) it has a curious dialog for when you want to cancel your booking.

"Are you sure you want to cancel?"

Buttons available -

"OK" "Cancel"

Does cancel cancel the booking, or cancel the request to cancel....

To be fair, if the message really was "A is in use" then to any lay-person you could reasonably expect that to mean it's in use hence I can't use it. Would you try and bash the door down of a toilet that's in use so you could use it?

One would however hope they were given some training to understand what it actually means, seems like they might have missed that particular training session though

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

Re: Somebody's talking bollocks

While you're at it, why not add another few octets to future proof it.

Then roll out the new network stack to every single network aware device on (and off) the planet.

Sound familiar?

Re: Public IP's are the key point here

I think what you're trying to say is use these new addresses for the public IP address of a CGNAT network, so the CGNAT clients don't need to care about it. Well that's true... and holds so long as every other single IP publicly available address understands the new scheme.

Therein lies the problem, it's not the clients behind the CGNAT network, it's the public addresses (running systems unaware of the IP scheme juggling) which see traffic from what they think is a special address and discard it. It's those that need fixing. While you're at it, why not 'fix' them so they are IPv6 capable too. In which case, why bother fudging IPv4...

Years ago when we had a /29 at home (those were the days ;) so e.g. X.X.X.160 - X.X.X.167 were routable from the outside world, I made a small tweak such that the internal subnet was actually X.X.X.160/28 so rather than X.X.X.167 being dead wood, it was a fully usable address.

The only downside was that we couldn't communicate with whoever really did have X.X.X.168/29, but then I don't think we wanted to...

Releasing 240/4 to the world would likely work for the most part, but you'd end up with corner cases of old equipment ignoring those addresses and so that whole subnet would be like second-class IP address. Slightly better than NAT, but at the same time slightly worse.

"Changing these into recognized unicast addresses was previously proposed to the IETF more than a decade ago and apparently implemented in several operating systems now running in millions of nodes on the internet, and "has not caused any problems over the past decade," he states."

That's like adding a faulty disk to a computer for future use and when the OS correctly lists it as being present, reporting "it's not caused any problems since we installed it". Well no, but as soon as you 'activate' it i.e. mount and use it, then that's when you'll notice problems.

Outlook bombards Safari users with endless downloads

Re: Reason #12769

Gmail fully supports multiple accounts open in the same session. Each account gets assigned an id so you end up with e.g.

gmail.com/u/0/....

gmail.com/u/1/...

etc, no conflicts there. No forced logging out either, log in once and that's it for months/years/till you clear cookies.

Apple's return-to-office plan savaged by staff

Re: iHotel

Wait you expected running water in your Iroom? You're using it wrong, that's what the bucket in the corner's for.

NASA's modified Boeing 747 SP SOFIA to be grounded for good

Re: Shame, but understandable

Not sure whether to up or down vote... Indeed sad times, up vote it is.

I knew a Sofia that went up on SOFIA for some observations, not sure her named helped with her proposal :)

In terms of planes, the 747 & Concorde were something different, only ever enjoyed the former, shame about the latter. The A380 doesn't have the elegance of the 747, it just looks like a bloated tube. Maybe someone will come out with another elegant hump one day... RIP Mriya too, hopefully something can rise from the (totally pointless) ashes there.

Fancy a remix? Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu Cinnamon have also hit 22.04

Re: Removed, hidden, simplified

It's called "Think Different" AKA this is how we do things, and if you think differently then you're obviously using it wrong.

I've been a Macbook user since 2012, whilst the hardware is generally good, MacOS has plenty of annoyances that you simply can't fix, and with each new iteration more annoyances arrive. Clearly I'm using it wrong :)

Just as a latest example, previously you could hold a key down whilst clicking the wifi icon to view details about the network you're connected to & all other visible networks. Now as an improvement, you can only view details about the network you're connected to.

Re: Just what the world needed - two more Linux distros

Well not quite redundant, with Mint Cinnamon you won't get the 'lazy/inefficient' containerised apps (at least by default), contrasted with Ubuntu Cinnamon where you'll be offered plenty of apps each shipping with their own sets of libraries, aka SNAP/Flatpack.

But otherwise yes if you want Cinnamon then Mint would be your first and obvious choice.

Intel counters AMD’s big-cache PC chip with 5.5GHz 16-core rival

They could be on to something if they can make a CPU without the power consumption of a small star but WITH the heat output to match (the small star) ;)

Intel updates ATX PSU specs, eyes PCIe 5.0 horizon

Re: Still not seeing the point of ATX12VO

You do realise CPUs can demand a fair bit of current @ low Vs? Getting that power supplied via 3.3V or 5V (where it's anyway down converted to whatever the CPU wants) would require significantly thicker and/or more wires compared to pulling the current from a 12V line.

We take Asahi Linux alpha for a spin on an M1 Mac Mini

Re: Deleting macOS

Well, you can git rid of annoying features, such as

Close a window, the next window from the same program pops to the foreground. Why? Did I ask for said window to appear? No.

Customise the size of various elements as you wish. I've recently acquire the latest 2016 MBP. The DPI is even higher than the previous gen, and me not wanting to run at some 1920x1200 type resolution, go for the full 1:1 3456x2234 resolution. There are utilities to make the top menu bar black thus rendering the notch invisible. But there aren't any possibilities to enlarge the icons and text in this menu bar to fill the space, instead they are rather tiny. There's actually an option for the size of the menu bar items, regular or large, and large is still tiny here :) I'm sure most Linux WMs would offer you, regular, large, how large would you like? (or could be easily hacked to do that) Of course, this being Apple I'm using it wrong...

Review: ASUS dual-screen laptop may warm your heart, will definitely warm your lap

Finally got the new Macbook 16 delivered after only 3 months. The supplied USB-C charger has an interesting profile 28V @ 5A for 140W via the USB-C - magsafe cable. Just tried my old 100W USB-C cable (20V @ 5A) and it show's as charging at 94W...

Meta sued for 'aiding and abetting' crypto scammers

Re: They've never taken any down

I went through a period of maybe a couple of weeks where most days 3/4 ads I was served up were crypto scams. All by (different) seemingly innocent pages.

Click report as a scam. That ad disappears, only to be replaced by a different scam ad on the next visit. Whackamole gets boring fast.

Maybe a week later up pops a notification, "We've *reviewed* your report... oh great. Click on it

"Thanks for reporting this ad, while we're *reviewing* [hang on, you just said you'd reviewed, done dusted, finito, now apparently you're still in the active process of reviewing wtf?] this, it won't be taken down."

Of course not, you wouldn't want to lose your precious ad revenue now would you...

UK internet pioneer Cliff Stanford has died

My version of that was get home from school, dial up at peak rates, I think 4p /minute. Go to thereg, right click on all the interesting articles & open in new windows, disconnect after less than 2 mins & commence offline reading :)

Hmmm vague recollection 158.152.217.134 was mine - athletic - nothing to do with being athletic, but on the phone to sign up tried about 3 other logical things that were taken... In a slight panic what to say, looked across the room to see my brother's Russel Athletic bag and blurted out athletic which was available.

'Hundreds of computers' in Ukraine hit with wiper malware as conflict continues

Re: Denazify the Kremlin

Pah SWIFT? It's all about the NFTs these days innit!

Original picture of Pres P riding shirtless on a horse into U̶k̶r̶a̶i̶n̶e̶ New Rossiya - you can own it* for just 1 meeeeelion dollars.

*Well you can show you're a fool with a permanent record of your foolishness locked away in 'the' (which?) blockchain forevermore.

To err is human. To really tmux things up requires an engineer

Re: Step outside

Drove a car down south via Germany ending in Italy, Brother-I-L driving mostly. I'm kipping in the back in Germany, wake up to see us going through roadworks with an 80 limit, car doing 120... scream to slow the F down, he gets the hint.

Enter Italy from Austria, speed limit 30 for about 50km due to apparent non-existent road works (or to let the visitors enjoy the scenery). Cue us doing 30 as per instructions, km long queue behind us of locals all tooting their horns....

Something 4,000 light years away emitted strange radio bursts. This is where we talk to scientists for actual info

I for one welcome our new 555-wielding galactic friends!

Saved by the Bill: What if... Microsoft had killed Windows 95?

As part of the unofficial (ahem) beta testing of Chicago, I found it kind of cute but impractical to use. At the time Win 3.11 was a pretty good allrounder. NT 3.51 lacked the cuteness of '95, felt more robust than 3,11 but still a little impractical around the edges.

Can't remember if NT4 came along first, or Memphis betas (Win98) #oldmemphis@undernet but I do remember sticking a pair of ISA I think 4 MB expansion boards, populated with TTL DRAM chips removed from random boards my dad brought home, desoldered over the gas stove - heat till you can't stand the fumes, turn upside down & shaky shaky. This to get past the minimum memory requirement to install NT4. Took best part of a day to finish thanks to the speed of the ISA RAM, but once installed it worked fine without those...

APNIC: Big Tech's use of carrier-grade NAT is holding back internet innovation

Re: I've said it before and I'll say it again

MTU is only an issue for a single TCP stream. If you have stream going across the world and want Gbit+ speeds then 1500 MTU will cause you some teeth gnashing. Fire up multiple streams and the aggregate bandwidth across the link will support it. There's a minimal reduction in packet overheads on the wire with larger MTUs, but that in itself is negligible.

Re: I've said it before and I'll say it again

IPv6 didn't break backwards compatibility. If you have an OS that doesn't support IPv4 with IPv6 then that's the OS breaking backwards compatibility.

There's no sensible way to extend IPv4 to include more addresses. Any attempt at using extra fields in the header could work - except when talking to a device that doesn't know about 'IPv4.1' i.e. pretty much every home router. So you're back to square 1 - IPv4.

Re: That old chestnut

If you're on CGNAT good luck making a connection TO the device behind the CGNAT. Wireguard doesn't do anything magic in that respect.

Re: That old chestnut

"UP the minimum MTU on the backbone" do you mean the maximum? Upping the minimum won't help much.

Then most backbone equipment does support jumbo frames. That they aren't enabled is mostly because they aren't enabled by the peers, so 1500 it is. Even if the backbone all went jumbo, your router & local devices would still be sat at 1500 unless you went and changed them all (assuming they support jumbo frames).

Re: That old chestnut

"How many people want to initiate a vpn to a site that is on cgnat?"

More and more as CGNAT spreads further & further.

Vulnerabilities and censorship tools among hot new features in Beijing's Olympics app

Re: A lot of the list is for illegal items

"But first, let me take a ...." oh no, that word's illegal!

Hope no academics are travelling either since "Graduation certificate" looks to be a no-no too.

In fact education is so frowned upon, "Graduation certificate" is there 3 times hmm.

List must also be sponsored by that company who likes to promote baby formula since the natural act of breastfeeding would land you in hot water it seems.

Don't make an iOS of yourself – Apple's patched its OSes, you know the drill

Re: Digital Legacy

If you need a court order, then it's likely you haven't been trusted with access to the first item.

I assume there's a process to rescind item 1 less the once-trusted ex-husband/wife/thing holds onto it forever and a day...

Think that spreadsheet in your company's accounts dept is old? 70 years ago, LEO ran the first business app

Re: very little hardware remains

Ahh cake - just say no kids!

Amazon tells folks it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

To keep the universe in balance, Santander Sweden switched over the summer from MC to VIsa.

Re: Limited choice

"Walk away from the petrol station?"

Only if you ran out of fuel on the forecourt. I assume they wouldn't be happy with you parking your car on the forecourt.

Re: Ryanair Has Charged For Years

They haven't done this for many years. All payments are the same price, including Paypal.

Re: Ryanair Has Charged For Years

And I lamented the day when it was banned as I could no longer buy 0p / 1p flights with my Visa Electron card :(

Re: First Direct

Or not. The card providers get a kickback of the fee Visa & MC charge to the retailers, so for them it benefits for Visa to charge a larger fee as they make more from each transaction too.

That's why the 1% cashback cards suddenly became 0.5% or disappeared when the 0.3% cap was introduced - thanks EU!

Now, I'm just waiting for the 1% cahsback cards to return :)