Posts by John Robson

Re: Capacity

You can get heat pumps which will output north of 16kW of heat... if you're losing more than that then you have a serious issue, or a *very* large house (at which point a pair of pumps might be a reasonably option) or you should actually install windows and doors rather than just leaving gaping holes in your property.

A flow temp of 50 degrees will require non microbore pipework to your radiators, but assuming a 20 degree room temperature then you've still got a better thermal gradient radiator-room than room-external with an outside temp of negative 10 - which is not at all common across the vast majority of the UK.

Re: Remember when a 200MHz clock increase was something worthwhile?

I remember when 15MHz was sufficient that it had to be turned *down* via a button on the front of the case in order for games to run at a reasonable speed.

Re: the iDud ?

I'm considering buying a 13 to upgrade my current daily driver... it would displace an 8 from the youngest offspring.

The 8 has now dropped from "latest" OS to security updates only, the previous gen got their last updates in July, so I've got some months to consider the upgrade.

The bigger issue is that the 13/14 are basically the same phone - satellite SOS and crash detection aren't exactly deal breakers for many - that one additional GPU and "photonic engine" don't really feel like significant upgrades either. Oh, I just spotted the bluetooth upgrade from 5 to 5.3... be still my beating heart.

Going to the 15 we then have... one generation newer chip, updated cameras, and a (noticeably) brighter screen - more reasonable upgrades, but a 33% increase in base cost (over the 13).

So... the 15 will sell, but it will sell more when it's no longer the flagship, with pricing to hurtmatch.

Re: Problem?

Quite - that doesn't mean that all drugs should be legalised though (and obviously there is a wide category of what "legal" actually represents).

Re: Whateve

"So what disabilities did they consider?"

Telling a disabled person that you're offering a disability friendly service, when they have already tried (and often failed) to use it is.... well, I'll not go there.

Re: GB left the EU

What are you smoking?

Re: Intriguing....

He's not blessed, he's a very naughty scientist.

Re: Nitpick...

Whilst technically true, it probably depends on how you count benefits.

The ONS publication "Effects of taxes and benefits on UK household income: financial year ending 2022" splits out direct and indirect (VAT and other duties) taxation.

"The proportion of people living in households receiving more in benefits than they paid in taxes decreased from 55.0% to 53.8% in FYE 2022."

If I look closely at figure 5 (which compares not deciles, but dodeciles (is that even a word?)) then it looks like the bottom two fifths of the population get more in *cash* benefits than they pay in indirect and direct taxation combined.

I can't find the raw data, but it looks like the third "fifth" get more in cash and indirect benefits than they pay in tax, it's not until the fourth and top "fifths" that the taxation significantly exceeds the cash & indirect benefits.

So I'm reasonably comfortable that the 40% is close enough for a discussion - not saying it's 40 rather than 39, but it's overwhelmingly likely more than 30...

Re: A brief look back

That was an article pre Falcon9

Re: As AI use continues to grow, the race to find alternative ways to power datacenters accelerates

Oh dear - the cap was never on the bill, but on the unit rates.

Re: Whose paying for waste disposal?

"The open dirty secret about Nuclear power is Nuclear waste. The US has literally thousands of tonnes of unsafely stored waste and super fund sites."

~90 thousand tons... which isn't "unsafely stored" it's stored in casks which are sufficiently shielded that radiation measured whilst leaning up against them is lower than the natural background (because half the background radiation is blocked by that same shielding). The amount of waste increases by ~2 thousand tons a year, from ~800TWh of generation.

That much (the annual production) fly ash is generated by coal power stations generating just 20GWh* of electricity - and I'm completely ignoring any waste that goes up the chimney - and fly ash is well known to be a concentrated source of radioactive material - and since it is completely unshielded it actually releases more radiation than a nuclear plant (MWh for MWh).

So for 2000 tons of fly ash, which releases more radioactivity to the environment you get 20GWh of electricity.

For the same amount of waste you get 40,000 times as much energy, and less release of radiation to the environment.

Of course there is also the minor inconvenience (TM) of climate change to consider.

*

2018 figures suggest that in the US:

1PWh of coal generation

102 million tons of fly ash

So that's ~ 51,000 times more fly ash than nuclear waste -> 1PWh/51,000 = 20GWh

Re: Reduced battery life

"It is also a waste of energy compared with a Powerwall type solution. You can apportion some of the car battery's weight to V2G and it is not efficient to be lugging that around with you."

Or you look at it the other way around - you have a large battery because you wanted it to make 5 journeys a year easier... and for 23 hours a day 360 days a year it's just parked doing nothing.

Now you can use that battery as a whole house UPS, giving you several days of "normal" running, or a week or more "reduced load" running from an asset you are paying for anyway.

V2G is a different sum game from V2H, but the same applies - you're not committing that battery to "nothing but V2G", you're using it for driving long journeys and then running an induction stove whilst camping, or your house when you get home. Typical cars need ~5kW/day on average in the UK, so 360 days a year your 50kW EV battery has a 90% reserve - maybe assume that a car only moves 50% of days, then you still have an 80% reserve. Reserve that you might reasonably want to be there for a few days a year - but why not have the ability to use it for the rest of the year.

>> Because they have the resources to actually overcome those challenges in the pursuit of cheap power to feed their habit.

> But they don't.

These companies have very deep pockets indeed Apple would be the eighth richest country in the world, MS the twelfth, Amazon the fourteenth....

They really do have the resources to develop something like this, not only to reduce their own power bill, but also to sell the technology to competitors and grids across the world.

They'd also see a significant boost in their corporate image.

I'm not holding my breath - but they're some of the few places where the desire and the funds could come together relatively easily.

Re: "Solution: new Linux features to fill in the missing gaps"

"But in Win11, doing this breaks the OS."

And yet this is somehow an improvement over versions which didn't need an internet connection to whore you out without your informed consent?

(I get that there is a difference between the OS and the specific UI you run on it - when I ran linux desktops the distinction is obvious - but the choice doesn't exist with M$, so the UI is part of the OS (since they can't be separated).

The same is true for MacOS, and there are some really crap UI decisions on show there, but the OS has a firmer foundation than M$...

Re: Still need a copy editor...

In which case switch tense properly...

"we've added progress indicators to guide people through the multi-step sign-up process and [we] rewrote copy and labels to be more intuitive"

I still think having whole sentence in the same case by replacing 'rewrote' with 'rewritten' is the cleanest correction.

Re: Orbital inclination

The likelihood of much of it reaching the ground at the targetted location is infinitesimally small.

Launch a tungsten telephone pole and let's talk again.

Re: This from a country

So you're saying it *is* your fault (personally) that school children across your daft country have to have "live shooter" drills, and get shot so often it barely makes the news any more.

Re: Same Footprint

You can buy a compute module and a carrier if you like...

Re: Too pessimistic

Soil pipe - so a pretty big hole.

Mind you my first house was a concrete construction - and the aggregate they used was flint... I was going to chain drill holes for a dryer vent... and by the time I was a couple of inches into the wall with the first hole... the hole was about 4" across and was well lit internally from the sparks off the flint at the tip of the drill.

Re: How long?

"With any kind of co-ordinated and automated effort, you could probably pull that off Azure in under an hour, tops."

You're assuming Azure could feed it to you that quickly.

Re: Why I stopped using Starlink

"Starlink would NOT let me run a VPN to protect my financial data"

I call bull.

No issues running a VPN over starlink, besides which you're presumably not rely solely on a vpn for encrypted financial data.

Re: GridWatch

Not aware of many lockdowns in 2023 yet.

But yes, covid does seem to have given us a boost in the ongoing decline of mileage.