Posts by Charlie Clark

Re: Storage ? Transport ?

Fire risks with hydrogen are generally, ahem, overblown and date back to the films airship disasters. But while hydrogen is flammable it's nothing like as explosive as a load of other things we like to burn and with the Zeppelin et al. it was the canvas, the frame and, oh, the fuel for the engine which caused the problems.

High pressure tanks are big and heavy and the comparison with compressed air is poor: with compressed air you don't need to worry about dispersion as you just compress more; it's also a lot harder to compress hydrogen than nitrogen and oxygen. Then you have to deal with the containment problems with hydrogen which is known to break down containers through adsorption.

Re: Just wondering

In semi-arid areas water is more important as a resource than as an energy source. I think there's an Israeli team which is looking at stripping water out of the air for this purpose. The desert can otherwise be better used for solar panels to produce power for use elsewhere.

Glad to hear it. As you know, solvers are great tools for certain generic problems. The more specific the problem, the better specific code will be.

I'd expect "Blang Reg Logistics Tokyo Inc." to have a library of detailed local knowledge that gets fed into program for every run. As I said, routing is a core competency of any logistics company.

Delivery routes should be the core competence of the logistics company and require specialised software based around solvers for the "travelling salesman problem". It's difficult to see AI helping much here except, perhaps, to infer traffic volumes, though these are also generally well known.

If Amazon is providing the routes then that does look very much like Amazon should be employing the drivers directly.

Anyone of my wife's tennis partners, and a chap called Gerald I bumped into the mess the other day.

Re: Hmmm

GDPR removed that particular figleaf as the cases pushed by Max Schrems amptly demonstrate. The idea of Google, Facebool, et al. was to do everything in Ireland with its tame regulators, GDPR allowed cases to be held in other juridictions, notably those of the customer.

Re: "Look at me legislation"

I left that connection to the reader.

Re: Could have fooled me....

The licence was chosen to make it easy to fork. And, of course, they'll have forked if they want a version tuned for their needs, not least for release management. But that doesn't meant they don't engage with upstream developments: they'd be missing out on some pretty good stuff and incorporating in a completely separate tree will become increasingly difficult.

Re: Could have fooled me....

A rising tide lifts all ships… apparently.

It will cost Amazon more to maintain their own completely private fork of Postgres than contribute relevant patches to the project now and then. But they're perfectly able to do that if they wish. Seeing as their revenue is based on the service they provide (managing the infrastructure rather than developing application) they're quite free to do just that.

Re: Nuff said

TCO is always difficult to work out but anything is cheaper than the system not running. But a lot of companies have found out that despite all the pay for licences and support, they get poor support. I've heard this particularly from Oracle. After all they've already got the cash and know that companies can't switch easily, especially if they buy up the competition, which both Oracle and IBM are good at. S&P 500 companies can probably afford to pass things up to the C-suite but there are plenty of smaller companies for which Oracle, et al look like costs plus contracts.

With the rise of companies providing commercial support for open source databases and managed hosting some companies are finding they have a choice. Companies that provide support only have a greater incentive to provide solutions than those that can also look forward to juicy licence fees.

Personally, I'm not keen on companies thinking they can skimp on DBAs by moving their data entirely onto someone else's platform but I can certainly see arguments for some degree of managed hosting.

Re: And energy?

It's not velocity you want for wind power, it's momentum: the atmosphere is too thin.

Re: And energy?

Solar is reasonable as the various missions have shown, wind is pretty useless due to the lack of atmosphere: there are winds but they windmills would have to be unfeasibly large to get anything from them.

Re: You need the nitrogen

However neither of these makes Mars uninhabitable, just very challenging and it is still probably the 2nd most hospitable place in the near universe

Firstly, let's not learn to fuck up the most habitable place before we start on the rest. I guess the term habitable is pretty flexible but even if some kind of semi-permanent structure would be possible on Mars, you're still going to struggle to get any of the resources to sustain life for any period of time given all the other problems.

Some of the moons of the gas giants seem to have more to offer, which is why missions are planned for them, though these will be purely scientific for the forceable future. Even with an intact atmosphere, reasonable gravity and possibly even liquid water, there lots of other hazards of living in orbit around a gas giant. But there are also things to be learned about being able to do it for future missions to other solar systems, should we ever be able to build spaceships that can travel fast enough.

Remember, this is on Mars…

2H2O -> 2H2 + O2 is not meaningly comparable with 2CO2 -> 2CO + O2 but if you really want to, the higher temperature and pressures involved tell you all you need to know.

Re: You need the nitrogen

The lack of an ionosphere, low gravity and magnetic field make Mars uninhabitable and you're worrying about complementary gases?

Re: 240 volts?

240 V AC is a consequence of using AC for power transmission. Powering a hoover with 5 -18 V DC isn't a problem as battery powered ones demonstrate. Of course, to boil a kettle you need around 20 times the current, but batteries and big capacitors can give you that.

As more and more buildings get some form of generation (wind, solar, bio, etc.) and storage it makes more sense to go with the DC and avoid all the equipment and associated losses of going back to AC to drive all those DC appliances.

Re: 240 volts?

It's nonsense: most electronic devices want 5V or 12V DC. At some point wiring will update to reflect this.

Re: Git is good, GitHub questionable

SEP - divesting itself of the hosting responsibility makes it Somebody Else's Problem.

Re: Rendering engine

Blink was a fork of WebKit but I think it's fair to say it's no longer based on it.

Re: Apple stepping back?

That's not really true: Microsoft just provides the hosting for the main repo + services. There's no transfer of ownership and they're already welded to Blink but it may give them more data to mine…

Re: biometric HASHES

Not if the hashes are properly salted you can't.

Re: Fishing Expeditions & Dreams of FOSS Alternatives to Privacy-Violator Waze

Fishing expeditions are too common in the US but they're illegal in other countries. OTOH, in many other countries it's perfectly legal to stop drivers and check their papers. Searches, et al. however, can't be done without reasonable grounds for suspicion. And, at least in the UK, cops don't have a great deal of cover if they go too far. This is down to the tradition of the civilian in uniform but also the excesses of the Met and other forces in the 60s and 70s.