Posts by SImon Hobson

Re: Party Line

All of my important stuff is in the cloud already

And there is another issue with the way things are heading. CGNAT is another nail int eh coffin of being able to choose - i.e. it further reinforces the power of the ever fewer and more powerful hosting and content providers to the detriment of end user choice.

Re: Please don't give the US cable companies more ideas.

You seem to forget that in the UK we have it quite good. While the majority of us are stuck with BT OpenRetch infrastructure, we have a choice of ISP. Over the other side of the pond, the market is disfunctional - with rules designed to allow ISPs to claim (for the official stats) they provide services that aren't actually available*, and with nice agreements between providers to carve up the nation into a number of small monopolies so they can give the public a good shake down.

* Things are divided into blocks, and if just one property (say one right next door to the exchange) can get a service, then the whole block is deemed to be able to get it. So massive areas are officially able to get high speed services via (e.g.) DSL but in reality no-one actually can - except that one house next to the exchange. So according to official stats, there's lots of competition, so no reason to (e.g.) reign in the cable companies monopolistic practices.

There's also the matter that if you have an apartment (flat in UK terminology), then what you can have may well be decided by which single provider the building management have decided to permit.

Re: ?

The main idea behind having so many addresses in IPv6 isn't that you can have that many devices, but that you can have many addresses per device. The default is for each prefix to be /64 - which means a space big enough for :

* Devices to pick an address at random and there be very little chance of a collision.

* Devices to pick multiple addresses, and still have a very low chance of a collision.

* Devices to regularly change addresses for privacy, and still have a very low chance of a collision.

Software doesn't support it yet, but in principle it would be possible for a browser to use a different source address for every site you connect to. There are lots of possibilities once you get away from the idea of having AN address per device.

Being able to have a /56 or /48 from your ISP means you can have multiple networks. Just think, stick all the IoT stuff on there own networks segregated from your private stuff :)

Fitting yourself saves an awful lot of the usual cost. You just need to install a fused spur in your ring main and ...

Just for the sake of anyone coming along and seeing this, there is more to it than that if it's to be safe.

Any embedded generation should be on its own circuit and must not share an RCD with anything. The reason for this is that some RCDs can fail to operate correctly when certain types of load are connected, and the presence of the solar inverter can effectively prevent an RCD from protecting you (and your loved ones). Also, having the inverter connected to (in this case, a socket circuit) means that if the MCB or RCD trips (or is turned off for maintenance), then you are reliant on the inverter "doing the right thing" and not trying to power the circuit while someone might be working on it. There should be double pole isolation that can be locked off between the inverter and the rest of the system.

No problem with DIY (I'll probably do that myself at some point), but there's more to it than just hooking it all up and seeing if it works - if you want it to be safe.

Thanks again, worth knowing.

My long term plan is all hardwired, but SWMBO seems to have a thing about me hacking the walls to bits !

I've fitted a thermal store, and the heating has a modulating pump so having the pump "deadheaded" while a valve opens is no problem - I have thermal-hydraulic (wax capsule) zone valves given the need to get the system at least vaguely usable pending getting "perfection" running :D

I was planning a completely custom job with a lot of Arduinos, but perhaps (given constraints on my time) that's not the right direction :(

Ah, sounds good. I think it's the Tasmota piece I'd not seen before.

Re: if you connect a device to the internet

It's ... complicated.

Part of the problem is that they typically build connections out to some vendor provided service, and often that service include reverse tunnelling so that using the bug ridden app on your phone, you can connect to the device in your home. Of course, if you can reverse-tunnel into your home LAN, then there's scope for someone else to - and you have to accept at face value the promises from the vendor that everything is secure (yeah right).

Then yes, there is stuff that will use uPNP where someone has been daft enough not to turn it off - then it's directly exposed without even that vendor provided layer to try and protect it.

One of the things I have done is build a smart heating system.

Out of interest, what system have you used, and how hard was it to do ?

I'm looking to do something similar myself - if I can ever get it near the top of an ever expanding to-do list. But when I look around I see systems that are closed and proprietary (and expensive); and ones that are more open but need a heck of a lot of work to put together.

Re: "The problem with IoT devices is that consumers tend to treat them as appliances."

Yeah, I know that feeling - but unfortunately it was either accept it or downgrade WifeV1.0 to ExV1.0

So I set up the WiFi to isolate it from the rest o the network.

Re: even more safer to operate?

You missed the minor detail of Windscale never being a power plant - it's sole purpose was to make plutonium.

Re: Look in the mirror

I have yet to see one good response

Ah, the "I see no ships" approach !

https://jonathangifford.com/april-2nd-1801-i-see-no-ships-horatio-nelson-turns-a-blind-eye-at-the-battle-of-copenhagen/

You have had a number of good responses. That you haven't seen them indicates that you are either completely blind, or wilfully failing to see them because it wouldn't support your flawed ideology. That you continue to respond to posts suggests that you can read them, so it must be the latter.

Re: even more safer to operate?

In your world it didn't even happen

Now then, you are projecting your ignorance onto others. I know full well that they happened, but I also know enough to understand why they happened, and why they do not represent current safety standards. You missed Chernobyl BTW - an example of what happens when you build something that's inherently unsafe due to the design, and then let the operators turn off what safety systems there are and perform unauthorised experiments.

Windscale, specifically the piles that used to be a big feature on the landscape (they started taking them down a few years ago), was never a power plant. The piles were air-cooled, graphite moderated reactors which had the sole function of creating plutonium for the weapons program.

Fukushima, a 1960s design (things have moved on a bit since) which had all its support services wiped out by a tsunami - yet "not a lot" happened. Yes there were some not radioactive at all hydrogen explosions, but given what happened to the plant, it did pretty well. Modern plants have different designs in that respect. For example, the Westinghouse AP1000 design includes "hit the big red button and walk away" passive cooling that will keep the reactor cool for a couple of days, long enough to get in with a tanker (or just a big hose) and top the header tank up. And SMRs are generally designed to be passively cooled for DHR (Decay Heat Removal) if it ever came to it.

And TMI. Well yes, a 1960s design with many flaws - and you may note that as a result of the accident, regulations were tightened up. The control & instrumentation system was apparently a usability disaster zone, of the sort that wouldn't get past initial reviews these days even for a non-nuclear system. Note that a key factor was that there was no indication of the actual position of a valve (only an indication of it's commanded position) - something I've known in other situations and which nearly sunk an oil exploration rig in the North Sea many years ago.

Re: even more safer to operate?

So are you denying that massive areas of land were heavily contaminated with oil, salt water, sewage, decaying animal and human carcasses, etc ?

And are you denying that something in the order to 20,000 - read that slowly, twenty thousand - people died due to the tsunami ?

As to the dumping of "contaminated" water into the ocean. As pointed out, the ocean is "quite large" - fish crap in the ocean, so are you suggesting that we remove all the fish because they'll contaminate it ? And of course, a big factor you miss is that standards are so tight around nuclear that it's not unknown for people/things to trigger the detectors on the way INTO work. Many parts of the UK (Edinburgh and that area for example) are significantly radioactive, more than would be permitted on a nuclear site - erosion of the rocks results in radioactivity flowing down the rivers into the sea. This isn't glow in the dark, cook an egg in a minute, radioactive water - its water that would possibly not raise an eyebrow elsewhere.

But I don't expect you to allow any facts to get in the way of a fatally flawed ideology.

Re: even more safer to operate?

Congratulations, we have a star winner who's proved to everyone with 2 brain cells to rub together that he/she doesn't understand radioactivity.

You can have highly radioactive materials. Their half-life is relatively short - more atoms decaying per unit time == amount of active material left decaying at a similarly high rate.

And you can have very long lived radioactive materials. Their activity is low because if it weren't low then they would decay a lot faster than is consistent with them having a very long half life.

What you can't have is very highly active materials which also have a very long half life - the two are mutually exclusive.

As an aside, I am reliably informed that TPTB did in fact have a plan for decommissioning (safely) the old Magnox plants. It's quite simple : turn off, cool it down, defuel it, then remove all the ancillary stuff so you're left with the reactor itself (about the size of a house). You then post a guard (in case someone wants to come and graffiti it or something) and leave for 100 years. After that time, the residual radioactivity is such that you can cut a hole in the side, walk in, pick up the carbon (graphite) blocks, and walk out with them. OK, somewhat simplified, but you get the gist.

But, the "what about the childrun" brigade come along and refuse to accept that letting something cool down before you deal with it makes any sense, so instead we have to deal with it NOW, maximising expense, and in the process creating a larger volume of radioactive waste to be dealt with.

Re: even more safer to operate?

Bear in mind that much of the problem is caused by the "anti nuke" lobby. Much of what is currently considered waste would in any other context be called "fuel" or "raw materials". We have the technology to stuff most of it into a reactor and vastly reduce the quantity - but because an intermediate stage involves plutonium then that's "bad".

Also, you need to differentiate between long lasting and highly active. It's a "candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long" sort of thing. If something is highly active, then it has a short half life - so you simply leave it alone for ... say a century and it'll be vastly lower in activity. If it's long lasting, the sort of "but it's dangerous for billions of years" then it's not highly active and thus isn't all that dangerous (from a radiation PoV).

Analogy. Someone has a gun and a thousand rounds of ammo. If the gun takes a minute to reload after each round, it'll take a long time to run out of ammo, but there won't be many bullets flying around. Put that ammo in one of those fancy machines that can fire it in a few seconds, then it'll be "highly dangerous" to be anywhere near the line of fire, but after a few seconds it's all gone.

But of course, as you're such an expert on nuclear energy you already knew all this but chose to ignore it.

Re: even more safer to operate?

Fukushima

Which ignores the inconvenient (for an anti-nuke person) fact that only a very small number died or were injured by the "nuclear" stuff. It's takes a cold hearted callous b'start to ignore the 20,000 who died from the Tsunami, and the vast problems caused by having huge areas contaminated with oil, salt water, dead animal and human carcasses, etc, etc.

Windscale

Nice of you to bring that up. Windscale wasn't a power plant - it was designed to do one thing and one thing only, create plutonium for the military. Also, if you look, you'll find that we don't build graphite moderated, air cooled, power stations. If you knew anything about the subject you'd know that having a big pile of graphite, heating it, and feeding it lots of air is a recipe for problems if you get it wrong. But then, I find that vociferous anti-nuclear are generally ignorant of basic scientific knowledge - and often proud of being ignorant. You come across as one of them.

Re: even more safer to operate?

If you push the "nuclear is dangerous, renewable are safe" agenda, then you can expect FACTS to be brought up that put your claims into context.

And using Chenobyl as a benchmark for nuclear safety would be like sending someone down a busy motorway on a penny farthing to prove that road travel (esp motorways) is dangerous.

Re: even more safer to operate?

We're not building any more Chernobyls

The west never did, even by the most basic standards we ever had it would have not been allowed.

Re: even more safer to operate?

You forgot about the bit where the design never met even the most basic standards we've ever had in the west - in the west it would never have been allowed to be built because the design was inherently not very safe.

Then the operators turned off what safety systems there were and performed unauthorised experiments.

And I'm only allowed one upvote for that.

Yes, some of us saw where it was heading, but when faced with the majority of the population who are "what's the problem ... ooh shiny", we were never going to get anywhere.

I got to visit Wylfa power station on Anglesey about twenty-five years ago - literally just stopped on the off-chance there was a visitor centre or something similar.

Ah, those were the days. I recall as a young child, [cough] decades ago, having lots of caravan holidays around Scotland. Dad used to just pop into one of the hydro stations and ask if they were busy. If they weren't they would usually be very happy to show us around - they took great pride in their stations and I recall them being spotless when I look back.

Couple of years ago I was up there on holiday and noticed that they are all closed up (automated) and looked dirty from the outside. But the fish ladder at Pitlochry is still there.

But I digress. Back when I was at school we got to go on visits to Sellafield and Caulder Hall. Back then we could walk across the pile cap floor of one of the Caulder Hall reactors. As you say, these days it's all razor wire and armed guards, and a visitor centre that's not even that close to the site.

Re: nice story

As for radioactivity - well Carbon has several common isotopes...

You forgot about the uranium (and other stuff) that's found in coal and end up going up the chimney. I think you'll find that the C14 is insignificant by comparison.

Re: nice story

Indeed.

To a certain extent, our "waste" problem is actually caused by various loud shouting pressure groups who have managed to get "fuel" relabelled as "waste" and turned a resource into an expensive problem. According to one expert at a lecture I attended a few years ago, we have enough wastefuel in stock to satisfy the entire lecky needs of the UK for around a century if we had the ability to use it.

As a parallel, when oil was discovered, the only use for it was lamp oil. But it was found that there were lighter fractions which if left in the oil, would cause lamps to explode. So these lighter fractions were distilled out and poured into pits and burned off. Now we call the lighter fractions "petrol" and use them instead of calling them waste and having to dispose of them.

Re: nice story

Come come, you can't expect people to apply logic and reasoning to a subject where only hysteria and lies are considered reasonable !

Re: never underestimate the stupidity of people...

Which is a good way to do it - you won't live long enough to make them all yourself.

Re: Don’t know about you

Not something I witnessed first hand, but told to me by a consultant that did a lot of work with IBM sites.

He got taken on a jolly to see a warehouse that was the pride of the automation supplier, and I assume using a lot of IBM kit to track stuff. This was waaay back before such things were normal.

So pallets of stuff came in, and an automated forklift would whizz it off down an aisle and put it where there was room - with the computer keeping track of where everything was. Worked great, and not being manned meant the forklifts could operate fast - which will be seen to be an important fact shortly.

But, this was a seasonal business, and in the run-up to Christmas, suppliers would be sending every bit of stock they could - even if it was sending a shoebox of stuff round in a taxi. Now, a shoebox on a pallet all by itself isn't very space efficient, so the system had another trick up its sleeve. It could whizz the forklift off up the aisle - but with a human on-board who's job was to stack that small box on an existing pallet.

The process was supposed to be: forklift stops, operator climbs out of safe cage and stack the box, operator returns to safe position, operator then presses button to say he's safe and the forklift can move again. But that was too slow, so the operators were expected to climb out onto the forks while the machine was moving, and press the button before climbing back into the cab. So moving between cab and forks while a high speed forklift was zooming up and down the aisles.

Apparently, the typical career for such an operator was about 2 months before they told the company where to shove the job.

One day, a forklift developed a fault, accelerated up to it's maximum speed and didn't stop at the end - it made itself a new door and fell over in the field next door. Fortunately no-one was on it, but the entire staff walked out that day.

Re: They call it progress

It is monolithic.

It may well be in different files, but it's not modular.

To be modular, then the different bits would need to communicate via documented and stable interfaces - it fails both of these, especially the stable bit. Then each module would need to do a defined set of functions. And if all this is done right, for any part it would be easy to sit down and build an alternative for that. Systemd isn't "done right", and they don't care. They reserve unto themselves the right to change anything, anytime, and without notice.

Re: They call it progress

starting services in the proper order, and concurrently

For what genuine reason, other than to cause instability and indeterminism ? Concurrently starting stuff then leads to all the problems we see of trying to properly handle all the "B can't start until A is running" stuff. And frequently, though much less so these days with solid state storage, starting things in parallel can slow everything down.

principle of least privilege

Which is presumably why systemd creates such a massively increased attack surface in PID 1 ? It actively breaks the principle of "do one thing and do it well" and "keep the most critical bits small".

security

Security and systemd ? In their rush to "fix" stuff that wasn't broken, working fast to embed as far as possible before the world wakes up, and with coding so bad that Linus told at least one of their developers where to shove his patches - they've had no end of security problems. And their attitude to reporting anything they don't consider important (lie, working properly) is stuff of legend.

Re: Software Junk

Some people, and particularly some people in the Linux mob, think that manufacturers owe them everything for ever

What a pile of male bovine manure.

What most people want is not that the manufacturer support a product for ever, not that the manufacturer will give them support in "doing other stuff with it", but that the manufacturer doesn't put more effort into preventing anyone using a product in any way not deemed acceptable to the manufacturer.

The "particularly some people in the Linux mob" actually would be quite happy if the device wasn't locked down to prevent them loading whatever software they want on it and using it how they like. If it doesn't work, fine, the manufacturer can wash their hands of it. But too much stuff now is locked down, and quite frankly there is a LOT of effort that goes into that. And mostly it's done under the cover of "but, security" while it's actually to create artificial obsolescence so the manufacturer gets to sell more stuff and/or prevent people buying stuff without giving the manufacturer 30% protection money.

The poster boy for open hardware used to be Linksys. You could buy a WRT54G and put different software on it - it was great. Linksys didn't expend any effort or provide support - they just left the hardware open and accessible so that people who wanted to could work out the details themselves. Back in the day, we (my employer) bought quite a few of those (instead of anything else) for just that reason.

Re: Microsoft should move beyond NTFS

Neither does the GPL ... now go and think for a bit until you understand why,

If you think the answer is "but it's going into the Linux kernel, it has to be GPL", then you don't understand licensing.

Re: It's the same old story with Linux - it's just one more thing

It swaps one appropriation for another in its total inability to play nice with other recognised open source licences.

Err ? It plays quite nicely - taking a commonly cited example, OpenSSH isn't GPL but Linux and OpenSSH play very nicely together thank you very much.

Now it is true that there are incompatibilities - and this comes up with (for example) ZFS. Is it the GPL's fault that ZFS (Sun's implementation) is released under a licence that's not compatible with the GPL ?

Additionally, it is a horribly written licence. The actual terms of the above are unclear when applied to that which isn't Linux

Rubbish, it's actually really easy to understand - at least at version 2 which I think is still the prevalent version. Really really simple :

If you give someone a binary built from GPL code then you also have to give them (if they ask for it) the source. If you take some GPL code and modify or expand it, then distribute that code, then you can only do so under GPL (you can't take code under GPL, and re-purpose it under a different licence). You can't add limitations/extras to the licence - so you can't remove those basic freedoms when you pass on the code.

That's basically it - what's hard to understand ? Of course, if your desire is to take someone's code, create a derivative work, and then sell that under a restrictive licence - tough. That's what most critics don't like about GPL - they can't take something "free" and create their own paid/closed version from it.

It's just a bad licence wrapped up in far too much shouty politics.

No, it's a good licence for some purposes - but I agree completely about the shouty politics.

Re: My BS-o-meter just shot off the scale - Easy System Fix

That was my thought - built when no-one thought there might be more than one rate change per year, and hence no way to manage it. I suspect that most fo the commentards on here with a "that's BS, all it needs is ..." have never worked on systems like this - huge, old, very large number of users and clients (so massive training requirements for even a simple change), and so high profile that there is zero chance of any hiccup going unpunished.