Posts by rg287

Why Microsoft is really abandoning evaporative coolers at its Phoenix DCs

Re: So they need power?

In fairness, a quick search indicates MS have done a deal with a local solar generator to build out capacity for them to run mostly on solar (presumably not at night!).

What's weird though is the datacentres themselves have no panels on the roof. This isn't because there's other plant in the way - the cooling plant is all at ground level around the DC. Sure, I guess it doesn't make any difference to the bean counters whether you put panels on the roof or buy it in from down the road. But land in Phoenix isn't free (even if it's cheap - relatively speaking). And from a building-cooling perspective, actively sun-shading your roof with half a megawatt of solar panels is even better than painting it white. It does mean the roof needs the structural capacity for the weight of panels, but when you're building from scratch that's something you can reasonably accommodate.

This US national lab turned to AI to hunt rogue nukes

Re: Officially recognised???

Not sure who is the official doing the official recognition, or what "officially recognised" is supposed to mean in this context.

Under the NPT, a nuclear-weapon state is one who detonated a nuclear device before 1 Jan 1967 (surprise surprise, the five qualifying nations also happen to be the five permanent members of the UN Security Council). These are the only signatories who can legitimately have nuclear weapons under the treaty because the point of the NPT is to say "we won't develop/test/transfer tech"

India, Pakistan & Israel are not parties to the NPT. North Korea was, but withdrew in order to pursue its programme. South Sudan also hasn't got around to joining.

When 190 states are signed up and 5 aren't, that's generally a "consensus view" that you're in or out of the club.

But in practical terms yes, aside from the 5 NPT members, there are probably 3 additional "competent" nuclear weapon states (by which I mean they have a weapon system they could deploy with some expectation of "success" - not that using nuclear weapons is ever a successful endeavour), plus North Korea who make a big deal about testing a fizzle every now and then but could probably make a mess of Seoul even if the warhead just fizzled out and acted as a dirty bomb.

The US would sooner see TSMC fabs burn than let China have them

Re: Isn't that their plan?

If China invaded Taiwan it would be just the impetus that the US would need to call for an invasion of China

And how would they do that?

The US has a far more advanced blue water surface fleet, but trying to invade China? Getting past their enormous green-water navy, the land-based air force and then going toe-to-toe with the PLA and civilian population? No.

China's military has nowhere near the technological sophistication of the US. In neutral territory (e.g. a blue-water engagement), the US wins every time.

But what they do have is numbers - at home, countering an invasion force? Numbers count for a lot when you're not doing force-projection. Domestic logistics & supply chain is massively easier. Unless the US is going to open with the use of tactical nukes to decapitate the chain of command, it ain't going to happen.

I suppose - with Vietnamese support - you could try and occupy Hainan. But... why? What's it going to get you? You could also up the ante in the South China Sea and go turf the Chinese out their artificial islands in the Spratlys. But the mainland is a bridge (or twenty!) too far.

Dems, Repubs eye up ban on chat apps they don't like

Do any of the people up in arms about TikTok understand anything about how Google behaves? They have their tentacles freaking everywhere and it is impossible to avoid them. Yet TT is some sort of “security risk.”

And Twitter. A social platform now run by a Russia-sympathiser who has eliminated any meaningful moderation.

If I were in the shoes of Congress, I'd be keeping a very close eye on TikTok as a near-term threat, but I'd be treating Twitter as a current threat to democracy as a known and proven vector for foreign influence operations.

Just because it's owned by an American (in trust for his Saudi & Qatari backers!) doesn't mean squat. There are lots of American domestic terrorists in US penitentiaries. Simply saying "China bad, US fine" is insufficient. And before the downvotes pile in, I'm not calling Musk a terrorist (he's just a sociopath) - just making the point that being US-owned should not be a free pass, or earn you less scrutiny than VK/TikTok. Because the Russkies can use Twitter just as easily as millions of Americans use TikTok.

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Re: Gross misunderstanding of the tool

It is a language statistical model that strings sentences together in ways it has been trained to do. It doesn't understand context. It doesn't understand truth.

It all makes sense now.

Has anybody ever seen Boris Johnson and ChatGPT in a room together?

Chinese defence boffins ponder microwaving Starlink satellites to stop surveillance

Re: Working

Both companies have teams that exist purely to manage the twat's idiocy. They're successful in spite of him, not because of him.

Musk built those teams. He convinced Shotwell, Mueller and others to come start a rocket company that wasn't backed by old-space. Team-building was actually his strength as a CEO - finding the right people to answer his questions or fill the right seats in his company. But at some point he started drinking his own Kool-Aid, and this (declining) ability to get the right people in the right place seems to correlate with his falling performance as a CEO.

You're quite right, SpaceX is now successful because Shotwell is getting the work done in spite of Musk. But he recruited and built that team in the first place. That was the thing he was legitimately very good at.

Re: Working

Musk is an odious little twat, but that's no reason to deny the revolution in launcher cost and reusability that Falcon 9 has brought to the industry.

This. Musk is a sociopath. But I hear people say "nothing he has produced is good", and they're factually wrong.

SpaceX has been a fire up the arse of the entire space industry (and they currently hold an effective monopoly on non-Russian launches since ArianeSpace are currently flapping around trying to work out how to make Ariane6 as good as the original Falcon9, whilst ULA aren't going to do more than 5-6 Vulcan launches a year unless Blue Origin decide to become a serious engineering firm at some point and manufacture their BE-4 engines in volumes better than "we've just about managed to cobble together two for you". China and India are options for some people, but don't have the cadence to be a regular/reliable partner).

And whilst I hold no particular love for Tesla, their (poorly-built cars with panel gaps the size of your fist) have likewise lit a fire under parts of the motor industry, and broken the chicken-egg problem of charging infrastructure by just going and doing it themselves. They mainstreamed EVs and that's no bad thing.

It's possible to separate out the person and the business. I have great admiration for SpaceX as a business, and will continue to do so - because they're doing what everybody else in the world has spent decades talking about but not actually doing.

Re: Working

Check SpaceX own data, they destroyed over 30 stacks some of them carried a small payload but not all, just to get the landing to work - it takes a lot of recycled launchers just to get to break-even over the cost of disposable launchers.

This was factually incorrect. Pretty much every F9 experimental landing was a paying revenue launch - including proper multi-tonne payloads like Dragon to ISS (CRS programme). There were some oddities like Orbcomm-OG2, which was rather lightweight. But that was because it was a Falcon1 contract and it was cheaper for SpaceX to launch on a (then-proven) F9 than manufacture a one-off Falcon 1 (which they'd abandoned at that point).

Whilst the R&D was by no means free, their testing regime was on "spent" rockets which otherwise would have been deliberately dumped at sea (like every other rocket).

1) you must have a lot of launches using the same design stack planned.

Yep. That is how most rocket companies work. Design one rocket, sell it as many times as possible. They've now launched something in the region of 205 missions using 79 first-stage boosters. Which is rather less than the 1:1 ratio of missions:boosters that everyone else manages. On paper, that ratio isn't as good as the Space Shuttle, but they're also not charging a billion dollars per launch, and they haven't killed anyone.

2) you can only lift to LEO in order to have enough fuel left to make a controlled decent.

This is less limiting that you might imagine, since Falcon9 is massively overpowered and a lot of people want to go to LEO (widely defined as anything <2,000km) anyway. Tom Mueller ended up getting a lot more power out of Merlin than they expected, with the result that F9 is predominantly volume-limited. You can't actually get up against the mass limits unless you're launching a tank of water, or trying to go to Mars. And people going beyond Earth orbit tend to have their own propulsion/kick stages and only want to get to GTO anyway. F9 has launched to GTO this year and recovered those stages.

Re: How many is critical mass

they'll burn up but some fragments will be accelerated and climb into a higher orbit which will cause problems for other higher satellites which are less likely after a collision to decay and burn up.

Yes and no. Conservation of momentum applies, so something that was in a circular(ish) orbit may end up in a much more elliptical orbit, with higher apogee but much lower perigee. This could introduce debris to other - higher - orbital planes (on a temporary basis), which could induce kessler syndrome higher up, even though that debris will also circle down to a low perigee.

But the StarLink constellations are all in low enough orbit that even with some uncertainty around debris trajectories, the shells will self-clear within 5-10 years. Which is a major inconvenience to a lot of projects (science, comms, remote sensing, military, etc), but is also a relatively temporary blip in the scheme of things. It's not like being trapped on Earth for decades.

Its a long way from the Chinese and Russians doing ASAT demonstrations on satellites at 800+km which is going to stay up there for our lifetimes (and deorbit past/through the increasingly crowded shells at 3-500km).

I can't do that, Dave: AI drowns top sci-fi mag with story submissions

Re: "...AI could turn writing from a serious craft into a cheap commodity"

Publishers could solve the problem and continue as they are by ye olde fashioned method of asking prospective authors to drop into the office for a cup of tea and a chat when submitting their manuscripts; therefore imposing a time and travel cost on the person submitting something, or only accepting things a submission via email on a personal recommendation from another author. Or simply by charging money for reading and reviewing; which again increases the cost to everybody else other than the prats spamming people.

Travel is reasonable if you're trying to get your novel published. If you're trying to get a 400-page book to market, then train tickets and a few days doing the rounds, pitching the book over a cup of tea to publishers (or indeed, soliciting agents to go and do that for you!) is quite reasonable and a small cost compared to the time you've poured into the work itself.

But this doesn't work for short stories, poetry, articles or other short-form work for monthly anthologies or magazines. Even if we accept that's just for your first-time submission, and they'll accept emailed submissions going forward, it's not practicable for most people to jump on a plane to New Jersey to meet Neil Clarke and punt a 500word short story that you might get paid £300 for (I have no idea what their going rate is, but it probably won't cover transatlantic flights and a hotel).

Also, I believe Clarkesworld haven't even provided review feedback on submissions for a while because of how many they get. Not because stuff is plagiarised, just because a portion of it doesn't make the cut - so they're definitely not going to have time to spend chatting with you over tea and biscuits. And obviously they don't want to restrict themselves to contributors in the North-East USA.

Now, in practice, it would be nice to think that you could get published in a UK magazine and then gain a reputation which would get you on the "allow-list" for other outlets. A referral from another author is a nice idea. The difficulty with that is whether - in a genre or country - how many such outlets exist. There isn't (AFAIK) really an equivalent to ClarkesWorld in the UK - we used to have New Worlds, but short-story sci-fi is a bit niche (most mainstream sci-fi magazines are focussed on news from big franchises and established authors - Dr Who or James Corey). Other comparable publications may have the same difficulty in that it's difficult/impracticable for someone in Australia or Mauritius to get on the "allow list".

Which leaves paid-for submissions & reviews. This harks uncomfortably towards the problems with academic/journal publishing (although the likes of Clarkesworld would actually be paying their reviewers!), and there's the likelihood of a rash of predatory publications popping up (as per academic publishing) where you effectively pay to get printed, or for a (possibly not-very-helpful) review. Or the "publisher" just takes your money and runs...

Clumsy ships, one Chinese, sever submarine cables that connect Taiwanese islands

Re: State Actors

Reminds me of 'The Imitation Game' where, after cracking Enigma, the team at Bletchley Park carefully (and agonizingly) plan using the new-found capability without giving the game away through statistically impossible successes.

Which absolutely, 100% did not happen. Everything was handed (through a code name, to protect the source) to the war rooms, where the top military strategists decided what to do with it. Some of those people would have had no idea that it was SIGINT rather than HUMINT from a spy/agent. But it wasn't for code breakers to make strategic or tactical decisions.

Creator of Linux virtual assistant blames 'patent troll' for project's death

Re: Another one bites the dust.

Indeed, and $100k doesn't necessarily go that far in injection moulding. In the scheme of millions on litigation... it's small fry. And given the number of people they employed, I imagine it would have been rather less than 6months of payroll.

That being said, I've seen other kickstarters (and businesses) go bump through poor management of high-CapEx processes like injection moulding. I recall there was one heavily-hyped (is there any other kind?) boardgame kickstarter which collapsed spectacularly and shipped nothing. One of the "challenges" that the founder blamed was the cost of getting moulded prototypes which they then didn't end up using in the game. This led to two obvious questions:

1. You don't need actual game pieces or tokens to play-test a game or establish the mechanics. Bits of paper and card with appropriate scribblings will do. Artwork and miniature design is basically the last thing you do once you've finalised the game design and know exactly what/how many miniatures/cards/counters/tokens/dice the box needs. You shouldn't be getting moulds made for items that "don't end up being used". In fact, you shouldn't even be having the CAD done, because those pieces don't exist beyond a set of paper notes which didn't survive testing.

2. 3D printing exists. The idea that they paid for injection moulds for a short-run of pieces to play-test with... insane. The incompetence was deafening.

I have a feeling there was some fraud on that particular one as well.

Now I'm not saying that this applies here - the patent troll appears to be the bigger issue. But the moment you start commissioning hardware, life gets very expensive and there's plenty of startups and even well-intentioned kickstarters who have bit the dust for not managing that aspect of the business adequately.

Subsidies? All UK chip industry needs is tax, rule tweaks, claims rightwing thinktank

Re: Good grief

If we're going to ad. hom. away anything that doesn't fit our political leanings, I guess we should stop pretending this is a technology site.

It's not an ad hom to call them cretins - that's just based on previous poor performance. A few years back, the then IEA Deputy Director Richard Wellings turned up to a House of Lords Select Committee to "give evidence" as an "expert" and spent a significant amount of time slating HS2. He finished - when challenged with a quite reasonable question - with:

"I do not know any of the details of what HS2 would actually look like"

Indicating that he hadn't actually read the f-ing report they were there to debate! Which included a map... and a description of the project...

"Something something ... I'm very important and have an opinion so you should listen to me..."

Call me underwhelmed by the quality of their research...

If a child has blatantly plagiarised two of their last three pieces of homework... then you check the rest of their work all the more carefully (without giving the others a free pass either).

It is completely irrelevant whether these people like Liz Truss, were founded by Thatcher or are personal friends with Putin

Well... it is and it isn't. The first rule in reading any sort of document - historical, policy or research is to ask Who wrote it, Who commissioned/funded it, and Who was it written for? You don't believe everything you read in vendor marketing bumpf do you?

If it was written by an organisation which recently backed obviously-bad policies that tanked the markets, who do not like to reveal their secretive financial backers, and who are writing for a government with an extremely poor economic track record... then it is entirely reasonable to ask those questions and retain some scepticism when reading.

This is how Tufton Street operates. One logo puts out a report. Other logos declare it "exciting" or "innovative" or put out some "independent" study which comes to broadly the same conclusions. It's like a Russian propaganda campaign, with a half-dozen apparently-unconnected fake news sites which re-report each other's stories and build a fake web-of-trust. Once you know, it's obvious. But the average punter doesn't know that when the Taxpayer's Alliance put out a "study" and BBC News get someone on from the IEA to talk about it... they're one and the same.

As it is, they don't seem to be arguing for any sort of actual industrial strategy - mostly just lower taxes. For a specific sector mind you - but then next week they can copy-and-paste a different sector in, stick an IEA logo on the front and release a "new" report advising them to lower taxes for a different sector. And eventually that's just a general veneer of "lower taxes for all our mates".

They also argue against any sort of investment, rolling out the old trope of "the UK's severe fiscal constraints.", perpetuating this idea that the UK is somehow broke and cannot aspire to much at all. Investment doesn't have to mean picking winners or subsidies though, more like creating conditions for business to do well, clustering of skills and suchlike - and that tends to be a semi-proactive endeavour to develop those communities of private enterprise.

So this report is a nothing-report. It basically says "Don't do anything, don't invest, just do some tax credits for the companies who don't want to come here anyway because of Brexit, but who might register an office so they can launder some revenue through the UK and get that rebate."

This is all backed up by the guy from Gartner, who concludes:

Gartner vice president for semiconductors and electronics Richard Gordon said of the report that the incentives mentioned – taxation credits/reliefs, lowering barriers to skilled immigration, and cutting planning red tape – were "table stakes." He added: "They should be doing this anyway for any industry they want to encourage."

...

He went on to say: "I get the impression that they want to be able to say that they are supporting 'a semiconductor industry' in the UK, which is true but very narrowly scoped and targeted."

He's saying "Your industrial strategy is non-existent, this report doesn't say anything new - you should be doing it for everything. But the people in power don't actually GAF anyway, it's mostly for show".

Refer back to my comment on Who wrote it, Who commissioned it and for Whom to read.

A low-tax, right-wing advocacy group wrote a report that said "do as little as possible" for a government whose central policy is to do as little as possible. Call me shocked.

Re: Good grief

and yet The Register devotes the first third of the article to political conspiracy theories about the people who produced it?

No conspiracy theories.

CPS are based at 57 Tufton Street, and are closely aligned with the Koch-Brother backed shills in 55 Tufton Street. They were extremely keen for us to know how very clever the Truss/Kwarteng budget was. Right up until it wasn't.

Frankly, the only reason to give these people a platform is so that you can treat them with the contempt they deserve. Their "papers" and "reports" aren't worth reporting on in any sort of serious platform. Unfortunately, the current Tory government are somewhat in bed with them - hence our current economic malais, and hence why it is important to properly scrutinise the people who are "advising" our dear "leaders".

Look at these fawning sycophants: IEA: Who is Liz Truss

It is entirely reasonable to take their proposals with more than a pinch of salt. It was former IEA spokes-cretin Richard Wellings who made the - apparently serious proposal last year that:

One solution to the energy crisis is to suspend smoke control zones and other red tape - so that freezing pensioners could burn wood, old books etc. to stay warm this winter. But in reality they don't want people to have alternative, low-cost options.

Evidently Wellings has never tried to actually burn a book (they don't burn so much as smoulder). But we should all be very concerned about Austrians* proposing book-burning.

*Austrian Economists that is.

So here is a report that you tell us is welcomed by people in the industry

Well, it was vaguely welcomed by one person in the industry. And then another person pointed out that the proposals were actually just table stakes, and that whilst the government wasn't even doing that right now, the whole thing was lacking in ambition and could we please for the love of god have a fucking industrial strategy in this country. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

BOFH: Generating a report the Director can show the Board – THIS is what AI was made for

Re: Reports for the BOD?

Meanwhile, in reality, the company is going down the tubes... fast.

AI and in particular ChatGPT will only increase the likelihood of the BOD never finding out the real company situation.

What can go wrong? (don't answer that)

Pah, you don't need AI to hide the company's real situation from the BOD. Just sign up with a reverse-factoring provider and you too can pretend that your invoices and corporate debt are just a simple consolidated monthly expenditure. Your Asset/Liabilities will never have looked so good! The shareholders will be delighted.

You can even go bankrupt and not realise it for 6 months - just ask Carillion!

ChatGPT has absolutely nothing on the ability of financiers to confuse, obfuscate and generally bamboozle.

Cloudflare engineer broke rules – and a customer's website – with traffic throttle

Re: Enough with the conspiracy theories...

Enough with the conspiracy theories...

Hear hear. Quite unhelpful that the article makes this curious statement:

Actually throttling a customer without warning will likely fuel theories that Cloudflare, like its Big Tech peers, is an activist organization that does not treat all types of speech fairly.

I mean, I suppose some corner of Q or Parler will probably have a whinge, but since they weren't actually suppressing a political outlet, or in any way treating speech (nor suppressing traffic on any basis other than sheer volume), it's not a useful data-point in the general discussion of "Is too much of the internet going through CF, are they becoming a monopoly provider, is it a bad thing that the Venn diagram of "the internet" and "cloudflare" have been trending towards a circle for a while now (they'll never get there entirely of course, but there's perhaps more overlap than is healthy in a supposedly diverse and distributed network).

my site was DDoSed by an organised crime gang, and our ISP's 'help' was black-holing us entirely, on the grounds that the DDoS against us was taking down all the other clients in the datacentre. To be honest, I understood their decision then and I'd understand it again now.

I agree to a point... but your datacentre will have had some sort of fair use policy and you were presumably billed on transit, or some portion of your hosting was related to data - whether port speed or data usage.

Cloudflare has a policy too... but you literally sign up with CF to avoid things like DDoS. That's the package (and the entire point) - CDN, DDoS-protection and all-you-can-eat bandwidth (notwithstanding the explicit exceptions for images/video if someone tries to build the next Flickr/Imgur/YouTube behind it). If CF struggles with capacity, that's rather their problem - not the customer's. Of course it seems to have wrong-footed them that this was huge amounts of legitimate traffic with large requests - not a DDoS that they could kill at the edge, which rather stressed their individual link to that DC. But it's still their problem to solve.

All that being said, 3000requests/sec at 12MB per request comes to... 288Gb/sec, and $200/mo doesn't buy you a 10Gb port on most exchanges, so they were getting their money's worth whilst it was spiking!

Could 2023 be the year SpaceX's Starship finally reaches orbit?

Re: Way to miss the point

Let me remind you that back in the 1960s, rather more than 50 years ago, two completely separate organisations sent manned rockets around the moon and back, using essentially 1940s technology. One of them actually set humans down on the lunar surface. And then brought them safely back again.

They did indeed. As state-backed projects with effectively unlimited budgets.

And then brought them safely back again.

Yes, mostly. Aside from NASA killing the Apollo 1 Prime Crew and almost killing the Apollo 13 crew. The Soviets of course killed Vladimir Komarov, the Soyuz 11 crew and lots and lots of ground crew in the Nedelin and Plesetsk disasters of 1960 and 1980.

You would think, wouldn't you, that a half a century on the state of play would have progressed somewhat. But no.

Indeed. Write to your MP/Senator/Congressman/Party Official. Of course they probably don't concern themselves with trolls too much.

We are now supposed to applaud the fact that some bored billionaires managed to achieve weightlessness for a few seconds.

What does Blue Origin's sub-orbital fairground ride have to do with StarShip, Falcon or indeed any part of SpaceX?

Reality check: weather balloons go up to 40km.

And? Falcon 9 goes to 40,000km. As will StarShip when it exits the testing phase and they actually attempt an orbital launch.

Re: Gwynne Shotwell

Appears to be the one making SpaceX a success, reining in silly ideas from from whats-his-name.

Best hire he ever made, alongside Tom Mueller (CTO and largely responsible for the Merlin engine programme, which is the hard part - the rocket is mostly just plumbing. Engines are difficult).

But she is still the person who talked openly about using Starship as a vehicle for terrestrial commuters - has she recanted on that?

Did they ever talk about commuting as such? Starship has been touted for long-distance travel - Europe to Australia in an hour. Which could indeed mean inter-continental commuting.

There's no engineering reason why that can't be done, nor reason to recant. The political/regulatory hurdles are likely to be the sticking point (noise near populated areas, passenger safety, etc).

Re: I hadn't realised just how little these chancers have actually achieved so far

... and 0 (zero) with the Raptor engine. Not even an attempt. Out of curiosity : why don't they try a Falcon with Raptor engines ? Or any small-ish rocket to test it first in real conditions. Going all-in with Starship on the first launch of a Raptor is suicidal.

Because the plumbing for a Methalox engine is substantially different to a Keralox system. This isn't like sticking a bigger engine in a petrol car and you couldn't simply stick Raptor on a Falcon. By the time you'd bodged everything that needed bodging, you'd be sticking a raptor on a custom-built test article that - if you squint from a distance - looks a bit like a Falcon.

So they stuck it on their grain silo instead. This had the advantage that the grain silo had legs on, and you could test it from a concrete pad - not a Falcon launch pad at KSC/CC/Vandenberg, which would then be damaged if it failed, potentially delaying customer launches (or having to build/repair a Falcon pad at Boca Chica just for testing).

Re: I hadn't realised just how little these chancers have actually achieved so far

SpaceX so far: "a little over six miles".

Way to miss the point. It's hard to tell whether you're a troll or someone so unimaginative that you couldn't spend three seconds with google.

Obviously they've run over their deadlines. That's because sociopath Musk always sets ridiculous timescales and always blows them. He did for F9, for Dragon, Crew Dragon and Falcon Heavy (all of which are now highly successful, reliable and mature systems).¹

The test launches of Starship to date have involved boosting the reusable orbiter module up a few km in order to simulate the re-entry procedure and tricky "belly flop" maneuvre. Like all second stages, the orbiter is incapable of going to orbit without a first stage booster, which has not been tested yet - because that's a much simpler straight-up-and-down affair, much like the first stage of Falcon 9. They - quite sensibly - validated the novel aspects of the architecture before they spent time and money on the first stage booster (which is technologically quite straightforward, other than the potential harmonics issues of lighting up that many rocket motors in such close proximity).

Oh, and StarShip dev is funded through investment and internal profits - not government handouts (cough, ULA, ArianeSpace)

1. SpaceX is also the only game in town right now because Ariane and ULA cannot sell you a launch any time soon. The final launches on Atlas V and Ariane 5 are all sold out. They'll happily sell you a spot on Vulcan or Ariane 6... but Vulcan hasn't flown yet, Ariane 6 doesn't exist and both have a backlog of bookings which means you can't go to space on them until 2025. By contrast, SpaceX will sell you half a dozen launches this year if you need them. Musk's a sociopath, but all credit to the engineers at SpaceX - they're doing the hardest stuff in space, better than anyone else, with a flexibility and ingenuity that is quite astonishing. Vulcan is a disposable rocket, ArianeSpace keep talking about Ariane 6 being reusable... but there's precious little work being done on making that happen. Their "next gen" rockets are really playing catchup with Falcon 9... which managed its first landing >7 years ago. Meanwhile SpaceX are way ahead on the next big thing. If Starship works, Ariane and ULA will be hopelessly outclassed on every metric. And this is a bad thing. I don't want to see a monopoly provider. But it's where the industry is at. SpaceX are an incredibly productive and successful organisation.

Techies ask PM to 'prepare UK chip strategy as a matter of urgency'

There is the third possibility:

It is "invested in" by a bunch of VC scrotes so that it can "expand and develop".

The VC lot then asset strip leaving an worthless shell behind and millions of pounds of debt.

The great thing about this option is it's so flexible. It doesn't even need to be a tech company - Wedgwood got bought, asset-stripped ("Executive homes" on the estate's land, basically up to the factory walls) and then flogged on, laden with debt. Startups are leveraging the hype-train, but there's good money to be had in old brands who have some land or legacy assets you can flog.

Tech industry luminaries have politely asked the UK Prime Minister to pull his finger out when it comes to delivering a strategy for the future of the UK semiconductor sector, or it may not have one at all.

Tech industry luminaries have politely asked the UK Prime Minister to pull his finger out when it comes to delivering a strategy for the future of the UK semiconductor sector, or it may not have one at all.

FTFY.

Oh to live in a country which has an industrial strategy. Or any sort of strategy really... (not including dossiers titled "Developing my former neighbour's personal wealth").

UK Online Safety law threatens Big Tech bosses with jail

Re: A Start

We should extend it to make banking execs criminally liable for tanking the economy.

But Rishi would never do something that would land him and his former colleagues in prison (IIRC he was on the team that landed RBS with some of its most toxic/debt-laden assets).

NHS England Palantir contract extension could result in further legal threats

Returning data, what an interesting concept.

Presumably returning processed data, with whatever documentation is contractually required.

i.e. NHS have sent Palantir various datasets, who have processed and synthesised that data, possibly via intermediate stages into (a) new dataset(s) - and presumably returned some sort of data product, report or summary to the NHS.

It is not unimaginable that at the end of the contract, the NHS may be entitled to any processed data not already returned as part of those routine products (for whatever further use they intend, or supply to a new partner), or even intermediate data.

Basically ensuring the NHS have got everything they're entitled to, and Palantir have destroyed any working copies or archives.

Literally, look who's back: A comet that last swung by Earth 50,000 years ago

Re: A map of where to look would have been handy

I skipped the check for where in the sky to look and went directly to the long range rain forecast. My expectations were sufficiently low that I was not disappointed.

Apologies, 'tis all my fault.

I had a new telescope for Christmas. Consequently January is a washout...

Nexperia calls in the lawyers to save Welsh chip fab deal

Re: waking up late

agree with most, but I remind you, China has built up it's military machinery so much in the last 10 years it's boggling. Even creating islands to extend it's boarders and mount arms.

They have, but domestically. They have (on paper) an incredible brown/green-water navy which would make everyone including the US think twice about invasion.

But... force projection? How do you get that massive land army to the US? Or marched through Russia to Europe? For all their capability, they'd struggle to take an isolated island like Hawaii (once exposed in the Pacific against the US blue-water fleet and the land-based air/missile forces on Hawaii/Japan/South Korea).

Now, again, they could well be playing the long-game. Get their (slightly ropey) carriers working (one ex-Russian, one domestically built), learn how to operate them properly and then build 10 battle groups in quick order (they have the industrial capability).

But certainly in the mid-term, they're cementing their regional position (with a billion people and a huge manufacturing/industrial base). They stand to gain nothing from going to "hot" war outside their borders, except a loss of foreign business and inward investment. Patience is a virtue, and they're happy to take our money for the foreseeable. Post 2040 of course (by which time they could have 5 or 6), all-bets are off.

Re: waking up late

I hope it never get to physical war.

It doesn't need to - certainly not from China's perspective. They have their 5/10/50/100 year plans and they just sit there quietly chipping away at it. Develop an industrial base making cheap low-grade items. Use that base to develop more sophisticated industries - if the Western corps send you some tech then so much the better, but that's a bonus. A little corporate espionage here and there. A couple of decades later and you're the world's manufactory.

This steady and patient approach is quite apparent in their response to the invasion of Ukraine. Whilst they're not sanctioning Russia, they're also rolling their eyes at the way in which Putin is playing to the masses (and failing). They don't approve of his tantrums or immature grandstanding. They'd prefer a stable neighbour and partner applying the same approach. As it is, whilst China has risen to new economic heights, Russia as lost much of its industrial (particularly manufacturing) capability - their tractor plants were assembling knock-down kits from Czechia (until March 2022!) and we've all seen the sad demise of Roscosmos under Rogozin. All they really have now is resource-extraction. The cartel of Putin's mates have asset-stripped anything remotely complicated or sophisticated and are now bathing in money from mining and hydrocarbon operations.

Meanwhile Western politics doesn't even have a day-to-day plan. A week has always been a long time in politics, but in the past decade its dissolved into outrage-of-the-hour - in part due to social media and twitter I suspect. The need for a continuous news stream and a reaction/opinion on everything is a huge distraction. It's why Private Eye continues to do so well - take your news once a fortnight and let the actual news and matters of importance rise above the noise and squabbling.

In all seriousness, the UK Government doesn't actually have a formal industrial policy (not even one that says "we mostly let the markets manage themselves). It should be of no surprise that the tortoise beats the hare. Every time something like Newport comes up, it's after the fact because nobody in government is really paying attention - it takes a journalist asking "why are you selling this to the Chinese?" to get a review.

The reality of course is that whilst we don't want to "pick winners" the way the National Enterprise Board used to, the Government really should be supporting UK industry (and not just the bits owned by Tory donors!). For instance by underwriting cheap loans for companies like Newport to get their compound silicon processes up and running, or for Sheffield Forgemasters (now owned by the MoD anyway!) to tool up and make specialist nuclear energy components.

If there's war, it'll be because a western (probably US) leader decides it's necessary in light of their local politics - not because China has invaded somewhere. China doesn't need to go to war. They've got a billion people and oodles of resources (both domestically and through deals in Africa). The rest of us can take it or leave it.

Re: Capmmunism

HS2 isn't primarily aimed at commuters

It kind of is, but not in the way people think. As you say, HS2 displaces domestic aviation, but the real benefit is to the legacy network.

By removing non-stop services from the legacy lines, it's aimed at re-opening stations (or building new stations) - most people want to get from one side of Town A to the other, or not-quite-the-centre of Town A to not-quite-the-centre of Town B. You used to be able to do this with little local stations but these have been successively closed as rising line speeds blocked out local services which would impede non-stop express services. Our legacy network has 120mph trains blasting through small towns and villages, blighting them with noise whilst not actually serving them.

HS2 reverses this and rededicates the legacy lines to local and regional services. It allows the running of CrossRail or ThamesLink style services from Coventry to Wolverhampton through Birmingham using lines and platforms which are currently monopolised by long-distance London-Manchester/Glasgow services (which will now go into Curzon Street not New Street).

Of course it should have been an X-shape, with Curzon Street being designed as a through-station to allow a future South-Eastern leg to Bristol and Cardiff/Exeter. This would have made it a bit more obvious to the whiners that this isn't about "getting to London 5 minutes quicker" but overlaying the network with a new service type, which gets rid of the 120mph trains to which the legacy network is deeply unsuited.

It was also initiated by a Labour, not Tory, government.

It was, just barely - but in response to the Tories proposing it ~2008. Brown commissioned a study, which arrived early 2010. It had his name on but Cameron got to action it. So it's a cross-party project and everyone should be supporting it!

Miniature nuclear reactors could be the answer to sustainable datacenter growth

Re: What about the operational costs?

To some, "No user servicable parts inside" is a challenge.

That's what the G36-toting constables from the Civil Nuclear Constabulary are for.

Re: What about the operational costs?

To be honest I'm worried about the bit before that ... What happens when the .com that owns the data centre has to train it's staff in operating a SMR. The thought of a fresh-outa-college kid, a 35 MW reactor, and a loose-leaf folder en-titled 'How to handle a reactor scram' does not fill me with a lot of confidence.

Yes, but also no. There's no shortage of DC operators doing deals with local suppliers or energy co-ops. Just because they're building something to support a DC doesn't mean it will be run or even owned by the DC operator (whether that's a general provider or a specific .com). And nuclear plants are going to be regulated regardless of who owns them - which may be of a higher or lower standard in your jurisdiction but it's not as though Zuckerberg will be able to ring up a provider, have one delivered and get his interns to run it with no supervision.

As an example of on-site, Slough Heat & Power is a 47MW biomass station in the middle of Slough Trading Estate - which is largely populated by several significant bit-barns. Eyeballed on Google Maps, it's on a roughly 4-5acre site. This is comparable with Rolls-Royce's target footprint for their 470MW SMR, which would offer a much better energy density (and less air pollution).

Of course many of the smallest ones will be delivered as sealed units (i.e. the reactor can't be refueled - it's a "black box" with connectors for the working fluids & coolants) which are delivered, guarded and replaced by the provider with relatively few on-site operators who will be predominantly concerned with maintaining the steam turbines. No routine handling of fuel-rods or materials. Once a decade you swap the whole reactor unit.

Musk bans private-plane-tracking @Elonjet on Twitter, threatens legal action

Re: stalker

out of curiosity: WHY would anyone want to do that ?

Generally, it's to draw awareness to the number of flights being made by CEOs, their impact on the climate, the fact that in some cases they're using a private jet to hop barely 50miles. For someone like Musk who makes a living selling Teslas as "saving the planet", taking regular very-short-haul flights (lasting literally a few minutes) is a fairly hypocritical juxtaposition.

If someone would do that to me, I'd certainly be pissed-off and he certainly would have to count on any legal action I could take to prevent this. If I'm not mistaken, this is called stalking and is a crime, look at the Apple tracking devices and their legal troubles.

And you would laughed out of court - unless the case was being brought by a sentient jet who felt its human avine(?) right to privacy was being infringed. The offence of stalking requires a human victim. These accounts merely re-tweet whatever his jet is doing (he may or may not be aboard) and is public information which the jet itself broadcasts which can be viewed on FlightRadar24, ADSB-Exchange and other such sites.

Aircraft are not entitled to privacy. They impose a noise and pollution burden on the airports they operate from. They impose various societal ills upon the general population - and of course there's always the possibility that a terrorist will fly them into something. So they are regulated. Publicly.

Bill Gates' nuclear power plant stalled by Russian fuel holdup

Re: "more than 40 metric tons [...] before the end of the decade"

But still. We have doubts about being able to make one truck of the stuff? In eight years? Is it that hard? In a country that's been able to make enough HEU to build warheads by the thousands, and that was decades ago?

Or are there political reasons (fossil fuels lobbying, nuclear scaremongering, take your pick) for which we don't really want this work?

Most likely political reasons leading to over-privatisation of the industry by profit-making companies, which has lead to a catastrophic shortage of talent and qualified personnel.

Bear in mind Los Alamos had to shut down PF-4 (Plutonium Facility-4) for more than 4 years because basically none of the workers or management GAF and there were routine safety infractions including some very near-miss events that could have caused a criticality incident. Most of the actual nuclear engineers resigned because of the sloppy work and appalling management of the lab.

In 2016, Los Alamos violated nuclear industry rules for guarding against a criticality accident three times more often than the Energy Department's 23 other nuclear installations combined. As a guide to how serious this is... PF-4 is the only facility in the US that makes plutonium cores for warheads. So for more than 4 years, there were no new pits for warheads. No reprocessing of old warheads... no processing of liquid Plutonium materials.

This is also the nation that forgot how to manufacture key components of their own warheads.

Look like Bane, spend like Batman with Dyson's $949 headphones

What's sad here is that the comments have immediately gone to "sound quality will be terrible" and "it looks ridiculous", and nobody seems to be saying "if pollution is an issue, how about we reduce it?".

Technical solutions to social problems never end well.

If an urban area has unacceptable air pollution then you need to pedestrianise key foot-traffic areas, run a bus or tram in, provide some secure bike storage and ban private cars. Simples.

Re: Good idea

Metal and metal-oxide nanoparticles arise from exhaust, tire dust, and steel industry as well as from natural dusts in dry conditions. They are flat-out terrible for long-term health,

Exhaust & tire dust is indeed terrible for people. The obvious thing to do is ban private cars and ICE vehicles from urban areas and convert the rammed roads into cycle paths with planting. This solves the majority of both noise-pollution and air-pollution, as well as improving safety and reducing the number of RTAs and struck-pedestrian incidents.

Of course you still need a bit of space for delivery vehicles and some bus/tramways, but it means that we don't need to each spend £3-5k to protect our families.

Raspberry Pi hires former spy gadget-maker who baked devices into surveillance ops

Re: I was on Mastodon as it ahppened

Not only an American perspective. Anyone who has Russia (or any other dictatorship, like USA) as border neighbour, see that as a fact: Pi somehow needs a guy who's whole work is spying people.

No, no. Many people who have Russia (or any other dictatorship) as a neighbour will see this as "huh, interesting background in embedded electronics. He'll do some interesting stuff at RPiF".

Nothing wrong with being a Police officer. Nothing wrong with having done a bit of covert work - someone has to catch the fascists.

Now, if there was some suggestion of malfeasance, or if he was tied up in the "Spy Cops" scandal then that'd be another matter. But there isn't, and he isn't.

The story here is Liz Upton saying some really bizarre stuff on social media.

Also anything innocent is tossed to trash bin immediately: Professional spy doesn't know anything else than spying. Why would Pi need to spy on people? Which government TLA is now holding the reins?

If a TLA was holding the reins, they wouldn't get RPiF to do something so blatant as to hire one a former Police officer. They'd just quietly send the required modifications to the design groups. Or have an agent embedded in the design team. Quite why they'd hire them in a public-facing role like Maker-in-Residence is a bit questionable.

Hiring a member of the UK's facist police state? Not so much.

Interesting juxtaposition given that just this week, German Police busted open a far-right group planning a coup-d'etat. Do we think that operation was planned and executed with no covert surveillance? Is it a sign of a fascist police state that Police run covert surveillance? (Most people would say no, subject to proper legal frameworks and warrants).

The idea that British Police officers are somehow automatically fascists is worthy of a [citation needed] tag.

Does UK Policing have issues? Of course (mostly - though not uniquely - focussed on the Met). Does that mean we need to import US-based culture wars? Goodness no. The whole "Kill the Bill" routine in 2020 was utterly pathetic. Is there systemic racism and discrimination in the UK? Yes, in places. Are UK Police comparable to US cops? No, not remotely.

Alas, the lack of nuance shown all round is very sad (though perhaps not surprising).

* British company employs a former British TSO. This is not a big deal. It is telling that the buzzfeed article has to cite three Americans to whinge about this, mostly based on the (understandably, but irrelevant) fractious relationship between the US citizenry and the mishmash of Police Departments, Sheriffs Departments, State agencies and Federal bureaus, including a not small amount of corruption.

Quotes like this are telling:

“In my eyes, this behavior is completely unethical and the work Toby has done for 15 years is indefensible

I wonder if that chap (Matt Lewis, Denver) considers the covert work done by the Germans last week to also be "indefensible"? Maybe he's a Reichsbürger and is upset his mates have been locked up.

The actual story here is RPi's response to the criticism, and their ham-fisted handling of it - namely that they didn't recognise the underlying reasons why a load of (mostly Americans) were piling in with "But Police are fascists". This shouldn't be allowed to affect hiring decisions by a British company in Britain, but the failure to step back and ask "what's going on here" is very, very careless.

Under all circumstances though, the death threats received by RPi staff and the chap in question are all entirely unacceptable and unwarranted. I mean FFS. Sending people death threats because of a hiring decision (6 months by the way, he's been there since May writing technical documentation - but only just moved into the "Maker-in-Residence" role).

Equinix to cut costs by cranking up the heat in its datacenters

Re: We make a rod for our own backs...

Move the AC-DC conversion out to the same space as the air-con heating battery and harvest it there to offset the localised heat requirements within the air con & heat recovery systems.

That would prevent a lot of heat being generated in the server rooms, and the subsequent need to extract it again, with lossy recovery or completely wasteful exhaust systems, leaving more capacity for the actual cooling needs of the processors etc. within those server rooms.

Out of interest (genuinely no idea), what's the power loss on the AC-DC conversion stage vs. loss on the step-down transformer from 120/240V to 12V? Because obviously you can't supply power around the building at low voltages - the copper you need to carry that sort of current (hundreds/thousands of amps per rack/row) would be prohibitive. So you could do AC-DC outside, but it's going to need to come to the rack at high voltage and be stepped down at (or very close to) the server.

There are places where I have long thought that there are obvious inefficiencies - such as a UPS full of batteries converting 12/24/28VDC into 240VAC to shunt round the building and then back down to 12VDC. That sort of thing makes you think about whether it's more efficient to have a per-rack UPS outputting current at DC close to the server. Some people have also played around with the idea of rack-top hydrogen fuel cells in lieu of backup diesel generators. Piping hydrogen into a datacentre is it's own risk assessment, but again - you're going to get DC out of a fuel cell, which means you really want your servers to consume that directly without additional conversion steps. Which means you want the mains supply AC-DC conversion done prior to the server PSU.

I do note though that the fact that the hyperscalers don't seem to have done this in their (homogenous, bespoke-hardware) datacentres suggests it's not the most pressing concern in DC design.

Rackspace confirms ransomware attack behind days-long email meltdown

Re: So...

For the average small business, it's very hard to know who to trust with their mission critical stuff. They don't even know what questions to ask of a supplier, let alone what the right answers would be.

Which is why Google Workspace is so popular in SMEs. Sign up, give them your card details and away you go - through one (count them Microsoft! One!) management portal.

As much as I try to avoid the Googleplex in everything I do on moral and ethical grounds, I have to hand it to them that Workspace does make business email and document sharing extremely straightforward (with protections for auditing and over-sharing!). Just a shame it scrapes and spies on everything it touches.

I know a couple of small (2-5person) companies that used to self-host their website and email (cpanel on a rented server, usually with no backups or redundancy). Inevitably they all ran into having mail delivery issues because they hadn't fettled SPF/DKIM or someone on an adjacent subnet at the datacentre was sending spam and their IP had got blacklisted with a thousand other servers. Or Google/MS had just decided to be awkward.

Migrating half a dozen users to GSuite was a morning's work - set and forget. Some went to O365, but Google's pricing was marginally better (not sure now) and Google's onboarding really laid out the red carpet and held the hand of less technical users.

Re: So...

Until senior management/ business owners realise that IT is just as important to their business (not just a cost center) as the beancounters and needs to be resourced appropriately they will continue to have this problem. Few people would try and run their business without any accountants so why do they try and do without IT?

Some of them probably did. And their Microsoft-Partner/Certified MSP sold them some managed email using Rackspace Hosted Exchange...

If you're a small company of 20-30 who can't afford internal IT, then you'll probably take your MSP's advice (just as you would your accountant's). These days, your MSP will probably stuff you in Google Workspace, M365 or resell a hosted solution like this.

Gunfire at electrical grid kills power for 45,000 in North Carolina

Re: probably wasn't an act of terrorism

That's rather bad because things like large transformers are both vulnerable, and not exactly available off the shelf from the nearest Home Depot. I once watched a documentary about the challenges of hauling a large transformer to a power station. I think it weighed something like 300t, and moving it by road meant doing a bunch of re-arranging street furniture and remodelling roads so the hauler could make turns.

One of the larger manufacturers in Europe has a factory complex doing "grid solutions equipment" (f-off big transformers) not far from me. Periodically they close the roads to ship a unit. This doesn't cause much disruption because "periodically" only means once every 6months or so (and this is frequent enough that the street furniture is arranged to not be in their way, so the convoy leaves town at a sensible pace).

Lead times on this gear is measured in years. There's very limited flexibility in supply chains because the volumes are so low.

Re: probably wasn't an act of terrorism

One substation shot up in Moore County, NC: December 4, 2022

Ah, the article appears to be in error by using the singular when it states "after gunfire damaged an electrical substation and left 45,000 homes and businesses without power in near freezing temperatures."

Two substations were subject to criminal damage by firearms in what authorities described as a deliberate attack. The links in the article make this clear.

For what its worth, there is now also a wikipedia page which is a useful list of references and sources.

Whilst the authorities have not published a suspected motive, a number of - probably ill-advised - social media posts will be keeping a couple of FBI investigators busy on some due-diligence on a couple of individuals.

"The power is out in Moore County and I know why."

"God will not be mocked"

"Well done Jeff, Chris & John on the power station job"

etc...

Re: probably wasn't an act of terrorism

Hmmm... North Carolina? Nah, it was a hold my beer moment... And the power station may not have even been the object of attention. Ever see Mythbusters?

Hmm, two substations copping the same fate at the same time as a group of cosplayers are walting outside a drag show in combat fatigues and chest rigs?

Quite the coincidence.

I mean yeah sure. It's a possibility that two geographically dispersed groups had a "hold my beer" moment.

In reality, the Sheriff was quite clear in saying that they had sought assistance from the FBI "because those guys have more experience with domestic terrorism than local authorities".

They're not calling it terrorism yet, but they're not ruling it out either (which reads a lot like "blatant terrorism, we just need to document the motive so we can make it stick in federal court").

Britain has likely missed the boat for having a semiconductor industry

Re: Add it to the pile

Really? Piss poor standard of living for a majority? Which country are you talking about? The infrastructure and amenities are what the people want.

No. They're not. The people want energy security and affordable housing. They want public transport. They want active transport infrastructure.

British governments have withheld investment for all these things for decades (mostly Conservatives but Labour were extremely poor in some areas too). And once they were done cutting, they legislated to prevent anyone else (like local councils) providing them in their stead. They have cut back healthcare, policing and social services. And the cuts to social services mean the Police get called to deal with mental health crises because the social care crisis unit no longer exists. So Policing (with 20k fewer officers) gets an increased workload. They prevented local authorities from building new council housing, and withheld the revenue power they needed to fund capital infrastructure.

They promised the north a new railway. And when Transport for the North actually designed one, they said "No, no - we didn't mean to actually give you one. We need you to keep being deprived so we can talk about levelling up. We can't do that if you've already levelled up - then people will want something else, and where will that leave us?"

And when the North said "that's bullshit", they stripped TfN of their commissioning powers on the grounds of insufficient cap doffing.

It might be suggested that people voted for that. They didn't. Not exactly. They foolishly voted for the person shouting loudly about ImMiGrAtIoN, and perhaps they deserve what they get in that respect.

But they didn't vote for any of that. They were promised a better future. They were promised NPR, affordable housing and for the lights to stay on over winter... and (perhaps unsurprisingly), they're not getting it. Because they gave all the money to Baroness Mone.

'Russian missiles can't destroy the cloud': Ukraine leader describes emergency migration

Re: Oh dear .... that is certainly concerning and definitely disconcerting nowadays

This. You might prefer to migrate elsewhere in future, but when Russia invaded, we were all assuming Kyiv might fall within a week.

It was not who had the "best" product, but who had Snowball Appliances/Azure Data Boxes available and able to deliver them to Ukraine on a timeline measured in hours.

AWS made the offer, the Ukrainians bit their hand off. Maybe Azure could have met the requirement too, but they weren't banging on the embassy door offering their services.

Rolls-Royce, EasyJet fire up first hydrogen-fueled jet engine

The real problem for hydrogen that still needs to be solved is a reliable and safe way of storing it either under very high pressure or in a liquid form.

There is some very interesting work being done on "solid state" hydrogen storage where a solid medium is used to absorb the hydrogen under pressure, which then expels when you release the pressure. The vessels only operate at ~70bar rather than 700bar, no cryogenics required. You still have a tank full of solid absorption medium though, which is quite heavy. It's being proposed for freight trains where a heavy "fuel" wagon on a train of 100+ wagons is of no consequence. A couple of Canadian companies are trialling it on a converted "switcher" locomotive.

Storage solutions exist, but aren't necessarily a good fit for aviation, or indeed cars - it's useful for static storage or in a low-friction environment (like rail).

For aviation, syngas or biofuels seem like they might be easier to handle/store than raw hydrogen.

Massive energy storage system goes online in UK

Re: Still tiny

Highview Power are liquifying - their system is called CryoBattery. This takes the edge off pressures, but obviously incurs other engineering challenges in dealing with cryogenics.

They're touting capacities of >250MWh. It's unfortunately not very easy to work out what the density (MWh per acre) is, because the Trafford project is on a larger site alongside an existing power station and where they're also putting in a hydrogen production plant, etc. Someone could probably dig through the planning documents if they were inclined and figure out exactly how big the storage development is. It's probably "more" than Li-Ion batteries, but involves fewer REMs. A diversity of approaches (even if some are less space efficient) is good, in the event that one supply chain struggles in future.

Re: Per home usage

Is 1/3kW a standard per-home figure in such calculations or do they just make numbers up to suit?

I don't know where they got that numbers, but our daytime draw for two adults working from home is 270-350W (lights, 2 computers, NAS), so not far off actually. That's with gas heating mind.

Obviously there are spikes to >3kW when boiling the kettle, etc. But as a baseline, it's in the ballpark.

Albeit that ballpark is on its way up with increased electric cooking, heating and EV charging.

And of course the battery isn't supposed to operate in isolation. It manages voltage & frequency, and could theoretically "top up" a small shortfall in preference to firing up a gas turbine for a couple of hours (though GW-scale storage like Dinorwig is probably better at that).

Re: Frequency trimming?

One of the things that the big rotating machinery is good at is frequency maintenance. My understanding is that the inverters on wind farms are network-synced, and so can't drive the frequency.

So, can the monstrously-huge inverter on this lot do that?

Yes, it's one of the roles they tout on the website. Renewable smoothing; Voltage & Frequency Regulation & Demand Support. The batteries can cut in on extremely short notice (milliseconds) to avoid frequency excursion.

Stability was one of the key reasons that Tesla built the Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia back in 2017/18. Wind and solar were causing instability and brownouts as the grid didn't have enough inertia. If I recall, the Hornsdale battery ended up paying for itself in something like 18months through stability controls - more so than actual storage of surplus energy.

The new 450MWh Victoria Big Battery (also Tesla Megapacks) is likewise being built as much for stability and inertia as it is for storage.

Tiny

I worked on Dinorwig pumped storage power station (near Snowdon in North Wales) - that can store about 9.1GWh - over 46 times as much energy.

And even Dinorwig (incredible engineering feat that it is) isn't that big in terms of national demand - 9 hours worth of one nuclear reactor output, capable of running itself dry in about 4hours if you really open the taps. If the wind stops blowing for a prolonged period (e.g. one of those pesky high-pressure winter systems that leave us with dark, flat weather for a week), storing energy for a week's worth of demand is simply unfeasible. The storage required in itself is monumental, before we consider the surplus generating capacity required to fill it.

196MWh is a nice amount for frequency management and smoothing renewable inputs. It could even take the edge off the evening demand peak. It might also have prevented the 2020 blackout, which was predominantly down to a cascade of perfectly good generators isolating themselves due to frequency excursion (given this is in Hull, where the Hornsea field supplies power into, I suspect the 2020 incident is actually a key reason its being built!).

But it's not storing meaningful amounts of energy for actually filling demand.

And somewhere along the line it needs charging up first. Storage is no replacement for generating capacity. Which means if we "go green" and spurn nuclear, we'll need to keep a fleet of gas turbines around the country to fill in for mid-winter.

China declares victory over teenage video game addiction

Re: I declare the end of energy issues..

Three in the UK - Hendon, Glasgow and Croydon, which has caused some consternation in Parliament. The issue got extra attention when thugs tried to drag a protestor into the Chinese consulate in Manchester last month (the consulate is a legit consulate operation, but the incident rather demonstrates the lack of regard our guests have for local law and their preference for extra-judicial operation).

The Irish government closed one down in Dublin in October.

They usually pose as visa services/advice bureaus but are generally staffed by Chinese Police officers, "encouraging" dissident émigré to go home.