Posts by rcxb 807 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2018
From a time when many people thought that the significant defining feature of unix was unix networking.
There were lots of options for MS-DOS networking. Unix was pretty unique in support TCP/IP early on, though DOS got TCP/IP as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC/TCP_Packet_Driver
And at least one imitation Unix system never got networking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_%28operating_system%29
Starlink global capacity: ~1M users
Yeah, that's just awful reporting. Follow a couple levels of links and you get back to the original that says:
"Moffett’s study guesstimates that Starlink could ultimately serve as many as 6 million US subscribers"
Note that's only US households...
Americans without broadband access: 20-40 million
That's a rather ridiculous measurement. Personally, I wish I could get SLOWER, cheaper access rather than absurdly high-speed, rather expensive service. I don't need to stream 8K ultra high rate video to 10 TVs. Way back, SBC DSL was $13/mo, Time Warner Cable's entry-level package was $15, all available to everyone. These days, you go look for internet service. These days, you can get internet service installed for less than $70 unless you're quite poor. Sure, it's faster, but that doesn't help my mother who just needs to get government forms and whatnot.
I also reject the redefinition of broadband (multiple frequencies, opposite) into a speed measurement. Completely baseband technologies like ethernet count as broadband, while broadband services like DSL can't be called broadband, because somewhere along the way some lawyer in government decided that we can make any word mean anything. Do you think people really care whether an ISP can say "broadband" in their commercial? They're allowed to call their 1Mbps service "super fast" , just as long as they don't say it's "broadband".
> I'm sure that the solid ink phase printers that someone mentioned above are waterproof
Wax prints were waterproof, yes.
Fingernail scratch-proof? No.
Rather similar to a drawing in crayon.
Epson had waterproof inks in their printers I used some 20 years ago. However, any kind of soap or cleaner would easily ruin it. Laser printouts couldn't be bothered by any of that... you have to destroy the top layer of paper to damage the fused toner.
The different levels of glossiness really bothered me with those wax printers. Wherever there were areas of big changes in colour (such as from ground to sky, edge of a building, etc.) it would look like someone cut out a couple of glossy photos with a pair of scissors and stitched them together.
They were impressive in the early days of dark, slow and grainy low-res colour laser printers. But lasers got much better in short order; wax printers had nowhere to go.
Ripping people off is just what Lexmark does. They'd do it with inkjet to just as insane of a degree as they do with laser printers. Switching to any other vendor for any type of printer will save you money.
https://www.theregister.com/2003/01/10/lexmark_unleashes_dmca_on_toner/
https://www.theregister.com/2004/01/14/eu_recycles_lexmark_ink_cartridge/
https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/25/lexmark_v_static_control_components/
https://www.theregister.com/2010/08/24/lexmark_files_24_lawsuits/
https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/24/eff_mozilla_laxmark_patent_exhaustion/
https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/30/lexmark_patent_racket_busted_by_supremes/
They don't have a monopoly yet. Samsung is competitive with TSMC, and Intel is trying to bring in some of that contract work once they get their fabs back on track.
There's lots of fabs planned right now thanks to US gov investment. TSMC could well find itself on the wrong end of the "Pork Cycle" in a few years.
In phones, obviously, we know this is very important for selfies.
I find it jarring to read "selfie" and "important" in the same sentence.
Laptops are by far the most voluminous PC form factor – 54.7 million units shipped globally in calendar Q4 versus 14.7 million for desktop
Yes, I'd say desktop PCs don't get dropped, stolen, lost, or have their keyboards fail or batteries die nearly as often, necessitating fewer replacements.
they don't like having someone who doesn't respect national borders on their border
China certainly doesn't believe in established national borders. They operate on the might-makes-right principle. You need look no further than their "nine-dash line," island/base building in the South China sea, which is an attempt to steal territory from other nations.
Heard about PLOP years ago, and kept it around to try out on a lot of assorted hardware over a long time. I never found one case where PLOP helped me. It usually just froze the system on boot-up instead of actually booting from the selected media.
In the old days, projects like PLOP were useful. I think it was VMWare v1.x that wouldn't boot from some bootable OS installation CDs, while one floppy disk image "boot manager" with its own El Torito stack was able to help boot them. But that's ancient history.
That's not good news for investors
"Investors"? "Speculators" is more likely... Property investors already get a sweetheart of a deal, able to get a tax write off for every dollar of reduction in profits, no matter how harebrained the plan.
There's no shortage of demand for property in cities. If those commercial properties can be converted into apartments/condos, perhaps rents will finally fall, at least slightly relative to salaries, turning around the long decline of the middle class.
Denmark is a small enough country (with friendly neighbors) that I can't see that importing baseload power is a bad thing. If they have plenty of hydro, geothermal, etc., then by all means Denmark should put it to good use *when the wind isn't blowing. Though some tidal power generation would likely to be a good fit for Denmark as a backup for wind power.
I guess wood *could* be renewable, as long as all the transportation of it is done with renewables as well (hint: it isn't), and comes from large tree farms that can keep up with demand.
They're not anywhere close to maintenance-free like regular batteries. Pumps need maintenance, chemicals need to be periodically added, the electrolyte needs to be tested and rebalanced, etc. Not a good fit for a homeowner installation. Perhaps once they get popular enough that every cell tower has one, then you might be able to get a reasonably priced service that will support them.
Where they're a good fit is as a zero-emission replacement for a GENERATOR. Truck-in electrolyte every day to keep yourself running in an extended power outage. And instead of the source of that truckload needing to be an oil pipeline, it could be the nearest location that still has electricity and a similar model of flom battery.
The problem with both heady scenarios is that there are quite a few chemistries of redox flow batteries competing for supremacy right now. Until just one or two become dominant, there's too much variance to support multiple units, vs single installations large enough to have staff on-site full-time trained on that specific type of flow battery.
AA-sized rechargable batteries which last longer than the two years or less I get from currently- (ha!) available rechargable batteries.
Low self discharge NiMH batteries (like the original Eneloop) are rated at 2,000 charge/discharge cycles. Even if you were FULLY charging and discharging the batteries EVERY DAY, you should still get 5.5 YEARS before the capacity drops-off significantly.
It's only Li-Ion batteries, with cycle ratings of 500, that will fail to hold a charge after less than 2 years of heavy use, but Li-Ion AA batteries are rather an expensive, impractical gimmick.
Still need to invest in lots of fission plants for base generation though, which is sorely lacking worldwide.
Where do you live that base load generation isn't already very well met by rather inexpensive power sources already in place?
It's already in the name: "base load." That generally means the time of lowest demand where all the less efficient and more expensive plants can shut down, and consumption prices are at their lowest for just this reason.
If I told you I was down, I was down, would you lift me up?
Lift me up above this
The flames and the ashes
Lift me up and help me to fly away
Lift me up above this
So when you see me crashing
And there's nowhere left to fall
Will you lift me even higher
To rise above this all?
Take me up higher, reach for the top
Higher and higher, don't ever wanna stop
Somebody close the barn door!
Solar, wind and geothermal are mature technologies already undercutting nuclear, and they're becoming more economical by the day. Tidal power generation has a lot of promise, too. I realize there are some places in the world where these technologies aren't well suited, but Japan being an island nation along tectonic fault lines can probably put all of these technologies to good use. There are also an increasingly large number of grid scale energy storage options, which are also falling in price, reducing the need for peak or baseload power plants as well.
The idea that anyone would dump money into years of R&D for new nuclear power design right now, is akin to developing better CRT televisions. By the time they could be built and start producing energy, the renewable options will have driven the prices of wholesale electricity much lower. There will be no hope of selling electricity at a profit, and in fact early decommissioning seems quite likely. There's a small market for new nuclear power plants *right now*, but wait a few years for new designs and that market will have vanished.
No SSD support. No USB support. No 64-bit support. Barely multicore support.
NO idea what "SSD support" you think is needed... W2K can certainly be installed on SATA SSDs.
W2K certainly has USB support. What wasn't included was a USB-Mass storage driver by default, however there are simple 3rd party drivers that add it. In fact, there are USB drivers for NT4.0!
No 64-bit support just means no single application can use more than 4GB of RAM. I guess you won't be running Chrome, but otherwise you're fine.
W2K works on multi-core systems.
There is a whole community of people who are keeping W2K and XP in active use, today. With the MyPal browser you can still visit modern websites and KernelEx allows running lots of software that shouldn't work...
find the downlink stations that connect Starlink to the internet. Not all of the current flock of birds have laser side links so they need line-of-sight to a ground station (not customer units). I wouldn't put it past Iran to do some small unit night ops if they need to visit a neighboring country to disable a ground station.
Iran's neigboring countries include Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Pakistan. All countries who are reasonably friendly with the US and their military. So, Iran might be able to pull that trick off once, but they would be back in operation shortly, and there would be no hope of a second time.
And I wouldn't put it past the NSA or CIA to dump a truckload of money on Elon Musk's lawn to guarantee that the vast majority of operative Starlink satellites have laser links, in rather short order.
it would be trivial for a few drones to fly over a city and triangulate use of Starlink terminals.
Would it? Satellite dishes exist specifically to be highly directional antennas, and focus small amounts of RF energy into a laser-like beam, onto a tiny point, a long distance away. We're not talking about search-lights here.
It seems a fleet of drones would have to *linger* over every square foot of a territory (for a few seconds at least) to determine if any Starlink dishes are currently operating on the ground, and take even longer to pin-point the origin. The higher the drones go, the more area there is to cover. Iranians would simply need to leave their terminals powered-off most of the time, and visually search for drones before turning them on, briefly.
Iran may be able to optimize the search by using the wider down-link beam to hone-in on active areas, to start searching for ground stations. But that's not easy. With old-fashioned wide broadcasts you don't narrow down the search area much, and with very narrow beams (supposedly 1.5 degrees) you again have to be rather nearly between the ground station and the specific satellite it's currently accessing to pick-up a signal. Somewhere in-between those two extremes might be useful for Iran's search for surreptitious users.
Interestingly, the solid (non-mesh) style satellite dishes are equally good at focusing *sound* as they are RF energy, and drones certainly don't operate silently. Perhaps there's an opportunity to add a microphone to Starlink terminals, and automatically cut-off RF transmissions when a noisy object is approaching your line-of-sight path.
Snowed sabotaged his own whisleblower status by not JUST leaking evidence about the surveillance program, but also a truck-load of other classified documents that had nothing to do with it. Those damaged the US for no benefit to anyone, except perhaps Snowden's own desire for revenge. That's a good reason both sides can agree on the need for prosecution.
the surveillance apparatus he exposed – the bulk collection of US phone records – was found to be unlawful.
It was an open secret for a number of years before Snowden. The NYT reported on it in Dec 2005:
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-on-callers-without-courts.html
EFF filed a lawsuit in early 2006:
https://www.eff.org/cases/nsa-multi-district-litigation
Snowden only helped a bit, in that he made more evidence of it public, helping the legal processes go forward.
SystemD is a third-party "app" and has absolutely nothing to do with Linux.
Neither does glibc, or bash, or X11, or Wayland, or gtk or qt or GNOME... Everything but the kernel is a 3rd party app that has nothing specifically to do with Linux. But without them, the system would probably be called Android, not Linux.
Boeing was building other, more fuel efficient aircraft. However, airlines didn't want them because they weren't labeled "737". There are costly training requirements that airlines can avoid by staying on the same major model of aircraft.
American Airline basically blackmailed Boeing into creating the 737MAX, placing an order for a non-existent higher efficiency 737 that Boeing had not planned or started developing. Honestly, there's nothing wrong with Boeing relenting and building the 737MAX. They simply tried to cut corners (MCAS using just a single AoA sensor), maximize profits (charging extra to include an indicator that shows when AoA sensors disagree), and going to great lengths to claim there was zero pilot training needed on 737MAX's new systems (like how to disable the MCAS). If Boeing hadn't been quite as greedy, the 737MAX would have been a perfectly fine, safe aircraft.
Fuel cells do NOT act like batteries. At best, they work just like generators, but with potentially double the efficiency due to operating at much higher temperatures, though that usually doesn't work out as common hydrocarbon fuels can't be used directly, and the conversion costs energy. There's lots of data on them, and they've been in operation in special applications for decades, so I don't see what this "test" is going to turn-up. If they wanted to invest in R&D, that might help.
You know what acts like a battery? Batteries. And redox flow batteries* in particular can offer most of the advantages of both batteries (very high efficiency and easily rechargeable), and generators (unlimited runtime, storage in simple tanks, and possible to ship-in more as needed). It's obvious the future of backup electrical power is redox flow batteries, NOT fuel cells as they are only a tiny step forward.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery
Kyndryl? I'd run the other way. Why pay top-dollar prices for overworked, entry-level Indian techs? The seemingly proficient pre-sales technicians disappear. Then... prepare to be ignored.
I can't tell you how many times our sites were down ALL DAY, over and over again, until we informed them their systems had a problem. Each time we were assured they've got all the monitoring in-place properly THIS TIME. And then it happens again... and again... and again. Most recently, they suddenly switched to using an old, expired SSL certificate for our site... until one of our processes errored and once again we were notifying them our site is down.
And that's all AFTER we worked through and sorted out all the ways they misconfigured our site and could not figure out the problems (they caused) on their own. The lack of knowledge of, or interest in, our systems was astounding. It seems you get the exact OPPOSITE of what you pay for; as small, cheap shops show a bit of motivation and initiative. All we got was a lot of long conference calls where they ask us basic technical questions, and then forget all the work they were going to do until moments before the next call.
Going off of older numbers, the US gross debt as a percentage of GDP was lower than Japan, Greece, or Italy, and only slightly higher than France, Spain, UK, or the EU average. And the majority of it is held domestically, so who exactly is going to call it in?
What's particularly nice about the US federal debt is that electing politicians who complain about it, and say they will reduce it, just serves to INCREASES it even FASTER!
The most productive thing I ever did was eliminate the dumb terminals being widely used in my company.
With hundreds in use, there were several maintenance calls to IT about them every day. Users would accidentally hit Ctrl+S, power them off before logging-out, the program would occasionally puke dumping trash on the screen, etc. All scenarios users had no clue what to do about.
Poor descriptions of problems from non-technical users would lead the entry-level IT support person to always check the settings, verify the serial cable was working, often swap a keyboard (then need to test the removed one), etc. And this often took away productive time from the users, too, moving their desk for the day and whatnot. With a few hundred terminals, several people had full time IT jobs, for years.
All of this went away in a hurry when converted the terminals to locked-down kiosk Linux PCs running terminal emulators under X11. Everyone knew how to close a terminal emulator window when something went wrong, so no more IT calls. Not to mention the added productivity of everyone being able to have several different terminal windows open at once.
The privacy stuff only succeeded in making the web a worse place with cookie dialogs everywhere you go.
Correction: It makes websites of privacy-invading companies a worse place to go. I suggest you try going elsewhere. Plenty of websites do not have or need cookie dialogs, because they simply don't collect that data on anyone in the first place. What kind of cookie dialogs do you see here one el reg?
The SLS was projected to cost $6 billion, and slated to launch in 2016. Now, with overall costs at $23 billion and $2 billion per launch,
Funny, because the SLS was supposed to be the CHEAP option. At least the cheapest one Congress would accept. The actual cheaper options didn't involve any solid rocket boosters, but Orbital ATK spread enough money around to ensure that nobody was allowed to interrupt their gravy train.
Honestly, the only thing SpaceX really has going for it is that it isn't tied up in the same political garbage NASA has to put up with.
A very large part of North America standardised on Celsius some time ago
In a discussion of the Rankine cycle, how can we not use the Rankine scale for temperatures?
The US is 56% of the population of North America, so the majority does not use Celsius.
And the only appropriate icon for a debate over the benefits of metric vs imperial... Have a pint, mate. --->
My electric rate is about $0.10/kwh, so that's 20x the market rate.
And just where are you?
PG&E's rate is about $0.34.
SDG&E's Tier 1 rate was 34.5 cents/kWh as of Jan 2022.
SCE's rate is around $0.30/kwh.
So just where are you getting electricity in California for 1/3rd the going rate?
$2/kwh is NOT much money for energy storage. Each charge/discharge cycle shortens the life of your very expensive battery pack... That's why the vast majority of folks with solar panels remain connected to the grid. Pulling power from a remote power plan is vastly cheaper than batteries.
The term for this is: Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS).
According to the first source I found, the Tesla Powerwall comes in at about $0.30/kwh LCOS.
If they were offering $0.30/kwh, which is 3X what you say you're paying for electricity, absolutely NOBODY in their right mind would sign-up... you'd be losing money.
Sources:
https://climatebiz.com/tesla-powerwall-cost/
https://ertpw-ratemailer-updater.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/OutPutFiles/07-07-2022%2020:45:59.141/Peninsula%20Clean%20Energy%20(PCE)%20PG&E_ResidentialE1_07052022.pdf
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/energy-division/documents/electric-costs/sb-695-reports/electric-and-gas-cost-utility-reports-from-ious/sdge--2022-recommendations.pdf
https://ertpw-ratemailer-updater.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/OutPutFiles/08-18-2022%2015:28:16.665/Clean%20Power%20%20Alliance%20(CPA)SCE_Residential_08152022.pdf
> Lord, if you are American you get inherent privacy rights.
HA! US citizens do not have any explicit right to privacy. Only in the case of government/law enforcement agencies that there are specific restrictions.
And it's only a technicality that, since the CIA is a US organization, they have to follow some US laws regarding US citizens. The easy fix is for the CIA to just ask MI5, Mossad, et al. to spy on the US citizens for them, and hand over what they collect. And the arrangement goes the other way, as well. Politicians don't care about protecting the privacy of foreigners one bit.
What you're seeing are the last gasps of a regressive political party that is no longer viable on a national level due to shifting demographics. Trump was guaranteed to lose the second time around because about a million of his supporters had died of old age in the four years since his first election. So the far right party is trying every dirty trick in the book to somehow subvert the majority and prevent themselves slipping into permanent minority status.
you need to pay to cool that 3MWH/yr also
With traditional refrigeration air conditioning systems, that only adds 1/3 to the power budget. But big cloud providers don't use traditional air conditioning, they run at high temperatures (so often need to HEAT-UP outside air they pull in), and often use evaporative cooling instead of refrigeration where needed.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZUX3n2yAzY
maybe Microsofts spreadsheet needs to factor in this week's meter readings ....
Servers are expensive... around the price of an automobile. Their power consumption is relatively moderate these days. The purchase price of the server can far outstrip the cost of electricity to operate it, particularly if you can choose to locate your data centre somewhere with inexpensive electricity and moderate cooling needs.
Dell estimates 3MWH/yr on a heavy workload for their fully kitted-out R740 servers:
* https://corporate.delltechnologies.com/content/dam/digitalassets/active/en/unauth/data-sheets/products/servers/Full_LCA_Dell_R740.pdf
Even using the UK average of £0.28 per kWh, that would be just £840/yr. At 5 years, that's £4200. You'll find that a fully populated new server costs considerably more than that, and that's not even accounting for the much lower electrical rate Microsoft pays. Locating close to cheap electricity is a trick Aluminum smelters have been doing for decades.
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