Posts by Charlie Clark 12167 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
The VESA-LB vs PCI fight was one of the many "standard" fights that, while they encouraged competition, also held things back. VESA-LB was a horrible kludge but it forced Intel to work on PCI but really the problem was the industry sticking with ISA when it was known to be no longer suitable. If only IBM had been prepared to license MCA at a reasonable price in the early 1980s…
Which you'll find out if the downpour is greater intensity that drainage system can cope with and the water decides it's time demonstrate Archimedes principle. This is why there are usually pretty strong rules about what can go in the basement and what kind of failsafes (at other levels) you need.
They're already several existing projects for this but losses are probably lower due to the larger surface area and lower losses in the transformer. It's possible also to optimise transmission losses by using movable pads but the most important thing will be requiring the power to come from renewable sources (closed-loop systems become more viable as the cost of grid power rises).
The 50% is already clickbait but charging efficiency for mobile phones isn't really a problem. If you do the maths for a household charging its phones once a day you'll see this dwarfed by other household devices, especially anything that heats water. No, mobile devices themselves don't really cause problems, as evinced by their spread around the world even in areas with poor capacity, but they do act as a "pull" for more energy intensive data centres and networks to provide them all with content.
Given the sums being spent in this area, an investment of this size hardly counts, though it might in the form of credits for processing on Azure. Self-driving vehicles, especially trucks, require, pace Steve Balmer, telemetry, telemetry, telemetry from existing vehicles. This gives incumbents and their partners a pretty good advantage and they're already including it in their products.
Newsflash: Google doesn't make money from search results directly but from the skills required to provide those results. This is what advertisers in all kinds of different forms are more than happy to pay for and why Google has continued to invest to keep its lead. It also identified "conversational services" as a market a few years ago and has been building it skills their for years. Of course, this has been largely driven by search and voice recognition, giving it invaluable domain knowledge in an area where this is key: nobody needs a single AI customer support system for every possible service.
Both companies are anti-competitive but at least Google generally tries to keep customers through the quality of its services. Microsoft's race to be make everything a subscription entirely on their own terms is frankly alarming.
What you're suggesting is both incredibly complicated and even more expensive and it's just not worth it for the moon. Especially given the fact that within this decade at least three other countries will have demonstrated their ability to land stuff on the moon: Japan, India and South Korea.
I don't mind NASA getting more money but I really don't like the idea of the military getting even more influence over space policy than they already have. Lead by example and put research first.
Someone else has posted in the past that Tesla's profits don't come directly from vehicle sales but from the emissions certificates it gets issued and that these were winding down over 2022.
The only market where it has real volume is China and that is the market with the fiercest competition, not least in the area of batteries.
This is really the nub of the problem: as long as costs, regulation and dependencies are uncertain, investment will be minimal. In the meantime, in many locations renewable solutions + storage are already available and the costs continue to decline. There is even a solution for cooling using solar thermal adsorbtion.
But the nuclear lobby will continue to, er, lobby.
Oh, and El Reg, operationalize, really?
With the market conditions, it's going to be damn hard for startups that don't have a business model …
You'd expect it to be hard at any time for a company without a business model to get funding. Except that's just how the underpant gnomes of Silicon Valley expect everything to work: shower someone with lots of other people's money and the business model will come eventually. Fucked up!
This tells us a lot about just how successful sociopaths (both seem to exhibit some aspects and possibly even narcissistic, though BoJo and Trumpy are better examples) can be because they're prepared to fight harder than anyone else for personal advancement.
Anyway, does anyone really care anymore? Just like with the FIFA Bribery World Cup™, I'm bored now.
That's what happened in Western countries: the lockdowns kept infection rates low while vaccines were developed and deployed.
The correlation between vaccination start and excessive mortality isn't very good: the quality of primary and particularly care for the elderly is a much better indicator. The report from the expert commission of the German parliament this year concluded that restrictive measures such as lockdowns are effective for a short period of time only (6 to 8 weeks) and, in the case of schools, the costs outweigh the benefits. After any initial period, it's important to move to more standard approaches which shield vulnerable groups where possible.
Since mass vaccination, mortality in the over 80s and other risk groups has not declined siginificantly. In countries with the highest restrictions, the mortality rate has increased and started to catch up with (though still remains well below) that of other comparable countries.
It's a sad fact that future pandemics will also kill millions. While we have now demonstated that we can develop and produce relevant vaccines quickly and at scale, and there were some very impressive trials to find treatments – dexamethasone arguably saved more lives than any other single intervention – but we can't rest on our laurels.
It would be nice to see similar levels of effort and investment devoted towards antibioitics as, for example, resistant tuberculosis continues to spread.
The effectiveness is not as high as mRNA or vector vaccines but comparable with other classically produced vaccines. But these comparisons were done against the originals strains where the specificity of the spike protein is key. We have little or no data about variants with changes in the spike protein, which have significantly reduced the effectiveness of the mRNA and other vaccines.
The vaccination rate in China is around 90% of the general population, according to some studies. Unfortunately, this is not true for the elderly. While Chinese vaccines are less effective against the original strains, we have no data about whether they are as ineffective against omicron variants as mRNA ones were. This is important because most of them were developed using classical approaches and are less dependent upon the spike protein.
But, yes, we will see a huge spike in infections in the general population and probably high rates of hospitalisation and mortality among the elderly. Based on waves among vaccinated elsewhere in the world, the spike should be reached around mid-January, which would mean that Chinese New Year could largely go ahead as planned. There is no reason to suggest this is behind the government's change in policy but it is an interesting coicidence and certainly something Chinese citizens are actively discussing.
As more statistics become available the problems and the costs become clearer. Interestingly, deaths that can be attributed to Covid are at about the same level as a severe flu pandemic. Masks and quarantine are useful for protecting the most vulnerable, otherwise they can only defer infection. We were lucky to be able to develop and, more importantly, produce vaccines at scale, but these are now considered ineffectual at reducing the spread of the most recent variants. What we are seeing in most countries is herd immunity after infection.
The costs to the economy are staggering and the costs for the most disadvantaged children will be felt for the rest of their lives, not least due to the deferment of other illnesses.
But perhaps the most egregious mistake was failing to inculcate a culture of simply hygiene and responsibiity. among the population. Instead of learning to take respiratory diseases seriously and stay at home at the first signs, when state regulation was lifted, people largely went back to pre-pandemic behaviour, which is one of the main drivers of the current flu, RS and cold pandemics.
Why are there no tests for influenza or RS? Where are the mRNA flu vaccines. Why has so little money been devoted to the study of post-COVID symptoms? (There are some studies, but the budgets are tiny in comparison to vaccine and pharmaceutical treatment).
Regaring the modelling in the article, it's really best taken with a pinch of salt: vaccination rates in the general population China are very high, just not among the elderly. We're about to see just how well the vaccines can reduce the spread and help develop herd immmunity.
We have asked Huawei to comment on the veracity of this report and, if correct, why it has chosen this course of action.
Why ask? The CCP has decided that supporting the tiny Russian market isn't worth the potential hassle with the West, noting in passing, how western sanctions have made cheap energy even cheaper, with Chinese companies now making money on the carry trade of < $ 60 Russian oil.
Not really, and if we have electricity that's too cheap to meter, why would we bother using processes like Sabatier or Fischer-Tropsch to make hydrocarbon fuels?
Because, as nature demonstrates, they're excellent way to store energy in large quantities. Imagine something like a 5 KW domestic storage / fuel cell unit.
Safe, reliable and clean fission is somehow, also, always 20 years away… Add to that the manifold problems of integrating nuclear and renewables into a grid. But generation is, at best, half the problem. Consumption is at least a big a problem but is getting less cash thrown at it than many of the boondoggles the industry is waving around: the cheapest energy is the stuff you don't generate.
Lucky you.
I still can't disable outgoing video in the settings and have to disable incoming video to stop my 3-year old laptop going into overdrive. It's got better it's still pretty awful and that's even before we get into "you must use Azure" rules when trying to run on premise.
That's no way to run a railroad!
In this case, it's the Raspberry Pi Foundation that is the "small business" and Broadcom the "unscrupulous" supplier. The RPi was designed for hobbyists but became popular with industry because, despite its many limitations, it was a fantastic device for prototyping. But it would be a mistake to build a business around this without supply guarantees. This also essentially precludes buying from the grey market, especially when the manufacturer advises against it.
Other reasons for going outside Play Store: avoid some of the fairly arbitrary geo-blocking that is out there. And some developers prefer to provide APKs directly. For example, Telegram provides a version on its own website without restrictions that I think Google is forced by some governments to require.
This really is about consumer electronics.
What we could do with power tools would be something similar to make chargers and batteries interoperable for the same voltages. But seeing as these are the printer cartridges of the segment, it's going to be a cold day in hell before that happens.
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