* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Affordable, self-healing power grids are closer than you think

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Well, duh.. Time for DC?

Distribution of DC isn't done a lot because DC arcs are self-sustaining

HVDC links are _extremely_ closely supervised and have a mountain of bloody expensive control electronics at each end which isn't needed for AC distribution

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The 1.2GW wind turbine? Very Big Panrls?

"Future extensions may take the whole Hornsea complex to a total of 6 GW"

There's a huge difference between "nameplate rating" and "actual output"

Most windfarms are lucky to achieve 30% utilisation factor and the annuallised output is usually closer to 22-25% of nameplate, with extended periods at 0-5% (unrelated to scheduled maintenance)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I beg to differ

"nuclear and geothermal can also have problems with inland generating stations running low on cooling water in a dry year."

They can also have problems with that cooling water being returned at too high a temperature to rivers, thereby having to derate

BOTH issues have the same proximate cause: Geothermal and water-moderated nuclear power are low temperatire "wet steam" producers, which makes for thermally inefficient steam turbines due to the low delta-temperature unless provided with copious quantities of cooling water (This is quite apart from the wet steam being hell on turbines, making them a high maintenance cost items)

Unless you can feed a steam turbine with _at least_ 650C steam, you're facing serious downsides. I keep seeing proposals for geothermal power claiming 750C feedin (I'll believe that when I see it), but nuclear power can only operate above 350C at the reactor outlet if it's not being water-cooled (above this you end up with steam voids inside your reactor and these are bad news when the water is your moderator as well as coolant)

ORNL's MSRE ran at ~750C (which gives 400C headroom to the 1150C limiting temperature of fission reactions) and spent time at up to 850C to verify everything would handle heat excursions safely (electric heaters meant that it didn't need to be critical during temperature testing). TMSR-LF1 doesn't have published specs on its operating temperature

UK AGRs run at 550C but newer designs are capable of 650-750C (this doesn't solve the waste problem that you don't have with MSR designs, but at least the turbines are relatively efficient)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I beg to differ

Hydro isn't particularly green and produces a LOT of methane

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: ICD-10-CM G31.9

"...'green hydrogen' will become economically viable, once 'renewable' energy starts becoming cheaper...."

To be blunt: the only way green hydrogen will become "cheaper" is by widespread rollouts of molten salt nuclear energy plants - and it will STILL be three times the price per joule of the source electrons

This is where the fundamental conceit of piped hydrogen proponents falls down - natural gas is popular because it's 1/3-1/5 the price of electricity. Nobody is going to pay for it if it costs more than just running wires

Historically, electricity production accounts for only about 1/3 of our ENTIRE carbon emissions. Renewables can't bridge the gap between "replacing existing electricity production" and "making enough extra electricity to cover the other carbon sources", so their existence can only ever be regarded as a stepping stone along the way - they are NOT an "ends", merely one of the "means"

WRT "tidal" energy, the ecological impacts of large scale deployments are something that most people fail to take into account. Canada abandoned the Bay of Fundy proposals because it was realised that deploying it would result in extra tidal swings right down the east coast of North America - to the tune of 60-foot tides at Maine, 20-foot tides at New York and an extra 3-5 feet of tidal swing at Florida.

Yes, the Fundy proposal could have supplied 1/3 of Canada's needs, but at cost of unleashing ecological devastation upon its neighbour

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Scotland and wind

"Even 50% yield means a 50% price spread qualifies the business case."

Except that you need to build a cracking plant, storage system (moving parts) and all to levels of safety which are rather mind boggling, thanks to hydrogen's ability to get just about anywhere

It's easier and cheaper to use batteries - which can be placed anywhere on the grid that's convenient (eg: at the load end of long transmission lines into cities)

When it comes to "using spare electricity" - we already HAVE such sites - eg: Dinorwig

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Scotland and wind

Or you could just setup a large battery at one of more grid nexus points and achieve the same thing

Which is what grid operators are doing (IMHO the wind operators should be forced to put batteries on THEIR side of the feedin point and levelise what they produce, instead of forcing the grid to put up with wildly variable output for which they're forced to pay top whack. This is another example of indirect subsidisation of renewables which heavily obscures the REAL costs)

Lester (RIP) used to heavily push molten salt nuclear and thorium. China has had a test MSR running for nearly a year now - the first since 1969 and the first time a MSR has been thorium fuelled.

If it works out as well as the original research at Oak Ridge indicated - 80% reduction in build cost, 80% reduction in operating costs, 99%++ reduction in waste volume and several orders of magnitude improvement in nuclear safety - then MSR rollouts will obliterate the renewables industry.

To cap it off, a complete MSR including containment building is calculated at 1/4 the size of a coal burner whilst providing more heat energy - meaning MSR technology can essentially be "drop in replacement" for such burners at such stations(*) and rollout can be even faster than you'd think

(*) Traditional nuclear power is hideously expensive, partially because it can only produce wet steam (not hot enough) and causes extremely high maintenance loads on steam turbines as a result

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I beg to differ

"States have degrees of autonomy, so setting any national policy gets tricky"

For the most part, they don't. As soon as there are interstate interconnectors in place power grids are subject to federal policies

Texas has more problems specifically BECAUSE it has so few interconnectors and it is an island grid BECAUSE running interconnectors makes them subject to federal rules on resiliance, etc

The power grid started out with a bunch of small stations (for resiliance, etc) selling waste heat into district heating systems (Hence the common term "Heat and lighting" in a lot of old company names) and consoldated into larger generation sites (the first "large" site was Niagra hydro) because they're vastly more efficient as well as easier to operate in the face of varying loads

The Federal policies on power distribution already existed but were given more teeth in the wake of the Enron Scandal - which was a result of California's attempt to make electricity a more "free market" commodity

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Questionable resolution

"please don't snip the ties"

Please don't use ties at all. They have a nasty habit of being pulled too tight and messing up cable impedances or causing microcracking in fiber patches

Velcros are much harder to overtighten AND reusable

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Power cycling can also break stuff

This scenario is why I had a script which checked running vs stored config and flagged differences

Alan Brown Silver badge

I spent 6 YEARS arguing that a power cycle would solve issues with one piece of SCADA kit which had been locking up regularly due to excess network traffic (I put it on its own VLAN, problem solved). Eventually it overrode manglement itself - and came up happily

When I left, they were still refusing to power cycle the other one

The FCC wants to criminalize AI robocall spam

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Do they get revenue from each called made?"

Yes, it's called "termination revenue" and it's about 1/3 of the income for an average telco

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Why on Earth are Robo calls even legal?"

They're not, except fir disaster warnings or "political canvassing"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Amend the US Federal Do Not Call Act

If you make telcos feel financial pain hurt for failing to prevent ban-dodging, then they will rapidly find ways to actually fix the problem

They only started going after the IP-based call centres because fraudsters were forging routing data (Which is several layers down from CLID) and the terminating telco wasn't being paid

Yes, they get paid - usually about 1/3 of the call fee (which is WHY they had a strong disincentive to cooperate in efforts to block inbound spam/scam calls)

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Candidate for Head of Linux Kernel Development

Something to consider is that the reason paypal did well and made him a billionaire is BECAUSE they kicked him out of management roles

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Linus being shouty is not really news

A large number of people on the mailing lists are PAID developers from companies which use Linux, posting on work time, etc.

Most of the drama queening I've seen over the years has involved those who "do linux" for their work, as part of their dayjob and have been told to be on the kernel list as part of their job description

Volunteers usually listen to feedback, don't keep pushing bad ideas and take major pride in the quality of their work

In this instance, inodes as unique identifiers isn't wonderful but it's all that we currently have. I've had to ponder somthing similar when trying to optimise backup strategies and work out where virtually all backup software isn't doing very well (most of it has major bottlenecks in various parts of the process which badly limit throughput once you hit LTO8+ tape speeds and volumes)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: A better long-term approach...

Pottering left. RH == IBM and despite the kernel contributions from that corner over the last 2 decades, the pendulum has swing back to proprietaryness as the rentiers take over again

Everyone's suing AI over text and pics. But music? You ain't seen nothing yet

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Italian singer Adriano Celentano wrote the song to mimic the way he thought American English sounded."

And he suceeded. Even native english speakers have to stop and listen to realise it's gibberish

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: the perils of miscommunications

I wonder what it would make of "camper Van Beethoven" (Would it have a matchstick man driving? Skinhead bowlers in the rear?)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Metallica rather famously spent a long time encouraging their fans to pirate their recordings due to the conditions of their recording deals meaning they effectively got paid nothing(*) - as soon as they regained the rights they pulled a 180 and became one of the more rigorous enforcer talking heads

(*) This isn't uncommon. Most recording artists end their careers heavily in debt. Of the ones who don't, they're usually in exactly the same position they started out in. (One of the OMD guys rather famously attributed the breakup to "When we started, I was living in a bedroom at my mum's and getting £30 week. Several smash hit albums and world tours later I'm still living in a bedroom at my mum's and getting £30/week. At some point you decide to go get a real job"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: You are right to be

"creators lose out on the long tail revenue"

If you think the rentiers give a shit about creators (except as being cash cows), you're very much mistaken

Alan Brown Silver badge

Copyright laws are currently insane

Media companies managed to obtain unprecedented levels of goverment control in the last 2 centuries and copyrights are at the point where they're actively HARMFUL to societal development

These outfits are busy shoring the dam up ever-higher but that simply means that the flood will be worse when it breaks

Copyright is necessary, but there's absolutely no need for my decendants to profit from my work for 50 years after I'm dead, etc. This is just ridiculous and likely to be looked at in future as one of the worst excesses of 20th-21st century stupidity

(Hint: In the current copyright environment, Dickens and others probably wouldn't have been nearly as prolific)

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Blockers

They're probably related to Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts

Fujitsu gets $1B market cap haircut after TV disaster drama airs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Procurement rules

"With massive barriers for entry for competitors"

Which there are, as anyone with actual competence is put off by the massive levels of indemnity that are mandatory in these contracts

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: 4% down ?

If Fujitsu and PO end up with less than £1billion in liabilities I'll be surprised

Don't forget the compensation payouts can be used to fund action for exculpatory damages (ie: Making the victims whole, not just paying them off)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Accounting system

The guild of seamstresses would like a word

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Accounting system

"Apparently this code is in Visual Basic 6"

At which point the fustercluck becomes utterly predictable

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Its not Fujitsu, its ICL

Judging from the scandals unfolding around Fujitsu inside Japan, I doubt it coule have made much difference if they did

Let's not forget that that Fujitsu C-level staff _threatened_ the British Ambassador in Japan with government-level economic retaliation back in 1998 when they were contemplating taking action over the Pathways disaster

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366565720/How-Fujitsu-became-a-central-part-of-the-Post-Office-scandal

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Let's set things straight

I'll have to agree on this. Dozens of sucessful projects were rewarded by having budgets cut. Th eones we knew were trouble (and said so) blew up in people's faces, to be met with "How much do we need to spend to fix this?" from those same people who wouldn't listen when we told them not to proceed with the project/vendor in the first place

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If government contracts with Fujitsu

the special powers Post Office has are derived from Royal Mail's privileges and position (investigating mail fraud, etc etc)

In the USA this was split off into the US Postal Investigation Service (USPIS) but that never happened in Britain and Post Office as a separated company should never have inherited this power (Banks don't have it, why should any other money handler?)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fushitesu

Which seems to be the same tactic they used in Japan - Fujitsu is in deep doo-doo there for similar reasons to Horizon and their name was mud even before the average Japanese heard about the British fustercluck

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fushitesu

Horizon is mostly Pathway rebadged and Pathway was an ICL product (Responsible for the greatest tech loss in British history - £1.5billion in 1999 when it was renamed)

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not just lower quality..

What did anyone expect with Doubleclick execs at the helm?

Alan Brown Silver badge

"as many authentic sites use the tactic, and SEO optimization, as an important revenue stream."

Most of these "authentic sites" using affliliate marketing are parasitic pyramid schemes

Chip wars could lead to oversupply as China increases domestic capacity

Alan Brown Silver badge

"this could lead to a market oversupply that would spell trouble for semiconductor companies elsewhere"

Or it could lead to "pork belly" futures traders exiting the market

In the last 30 years we've seen the Dramurai, the Rambus patent saga and before that, price manipulation of memory following the Sumitomo plastics factory fire (they made encapulation plastics. Ram prices doubled overnight).

Following the 2011 Thai floods we saw rampant scalping, followed by a massive drop in HDD quality and the makers treating customer with contempt

There are many areas of supply/demand where "futures traders" are parasitic. Whilst there's _some_ benefit in hedging and/or stripping down zombie companies, the vast majority are motivated to make as much money as possible in as short a time as possible with no care given to the longer-term effects of their actions

Home improvement marketers dial up trouble from regulator

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: remote cutoff

"The meter assumes a sinusoidal load current, and if it is not, then it will over-read"

For commercial premises, Pfc (load factor) is important but there's no excuse for recording this as bogus Joule (kWh) readings and if meters are consistently misreading then it's a matter not just for OFGEM but also the CMA and Trading Standards (weights and measures law violations apply)

If a fuel dispenser (petrol pump) was doing this, the operators would face criminal charges

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: smart meter

Yup, but people are still denying that it exists - as are several smartmeter pushers when the subject is brought up

Data regulator fines HelloFresh £140K for sending 80M+ spams

Alan Brown Silver badge

"bankruptcy would be the likely outcome"

This is a bad thing?

"Along with redundancy for 2,000 staff. That would be a poor outcome for the regulator and employees."

I believe that was the arguement for propping up BL, shipyards and a bunch of other lossmaking businesses for decades - As we saw, it doesn't work

"Technically it's not a fine, it's a Civil Monetary Penalty"

That's easily fixed by defining statutory damages - the company then has no leg to stand on (It's why the the American TCPA was so effective - stat damages of $500/call for individual claimants and $15,000/call if the FTC got involved (tripled for wilful violations) - Judges who threw out cases on the basis of "company damage" were given a _severe_ arse-kicking by higher courts, told to apply the penalties prescribed by the law and deal with cases as directed or be removed form the bench

Menacing marketeers fined by ICO for 1.9M cold calls

Alan Brown Silver badge

It doesn't really matter. There's an option to go after the companies which hired them - who will more than happily turn over who they engaged

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Let me guess

"They can just declare bankruptcy to get out of paying, create a new company, and start up their operation all over again."

As of February 2022, they can't. Changes to company law allow going after the directors _personally_ in the case of a liquidated company long after it's closed

The law was changed for the dual purpose of killing phoenixing and catching fake companies skipping out on covid loans

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Spam calls

"all the receiving Telco knows is which telco handed the call to them"

That's all they need to know in order to send a bill.

Telcos only started taking notice when the scam calls started interfering with deeper-level routing information that affected billing

CLI and origination data are separate fields but if you have an ISDN-Pri connection it's fairly easy to emit falsified data as the entire phone system assumes honesty if you have access at that level

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Spam calls

"What's needed is a number, say 1476, to ring immediately after hanging up to report the spam"

If you are on a mobile: text CALL [number] to 7726 (SPAM)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Sweet FA for those of us harassed

This is why the Americans created the TCPA - with statutory damages per call in order to prevent companies trying to wriggle out on "no harm caused" arguments

It was deliberately created as a way of making companies (and the companies that hired them) HURT - "death of a million paper cuts"

Google's TPUs could end up costing it a billion-plus, thanks to this patent challenge

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Simultaneous Development

"this is asking for trouble and Google probably took proactive steps to prevent them from being sued in the future."

"Do No evil" Google yes

Google with the Doubleclick poison pill is a quite different matter

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Likewise ...

> The next time they wanted work doing I said "No, I'm not prepared to deal with you any more."

I've done something similar - although in my case it was "due to your bad credit record, advance payment is required"

Which resulted in company owners initially asking wtf we meant - and going ballistic upon finding that an underling was making her stats look good by delaying payments to a raft of suppliers (which in turn had resulted in various "good customer" discounts having gone away, as well as some applying an "asshole tax")

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Likewise ...

The customer is only "always right" on matters of personal taste

Much like "Blood (of the Covenant) is thicker than water (of the womb)", it's one of those phrases which has been twisted to mean almost the exact opposite of the original intention

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The problem with government procurement...

"Unless you could take a whole senior layer of people off their day-to-day work and have them do nothing but write the response to brief, you wouldn't even be able to write a response"

Probably a good task for one of those AI thingies - and you can even tell it to throw in a few buzzwords, etc

Alan Brown Silver badge

one of the single biggest issues with software creation is that unlike any other aspect of business or manufacturing, the actual needs, processes and steps aren't fully worked out before the code starts being committed

In the case of these bespoke systems, nothing is modular so code blocks can't simply be improved and swapped out, which in turn makes it a cash cow for the contractor

The bottom line is that the management of POL weren't competent to write requirements, nor cognisant of it to hire in specialists who could actually create the requirements and contracts

As far as using WinNT is concerned... It's not exactly the first fustercluck I've seen and it's always championed by idiot managers who think that they know better than the experts

Alan Brown Silver badge

if they're woprth £500/day to avoid liablities of several billion then they're a better investment than a bunch of woolly-brained Civil Service managers and cheap interns

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hmm.

Fuji are in the doghouse in Japan for exactly the same filings that they are in Britain

It makes you wonder who was influencing whom

Incidentally, ICL lost a lot of antipodean computer business in the late 70s-early 80s to Fuji (then Facom) due to their rotten performance in the 1970s