Posts by Roland6

Re: Don't forget truck drivers

>It's just that it's not going to make transportation an order of magnitude cheaper. (ie - this isn't "fusion power" for the Trucking industry).

you are borderline delusional if you think fusion power will be an order of magnitude cheaper (to the buyer) than the prevailing price of electricity at the time when multi-megawatt fusion generation becomes a reality.

>It might make good sense in somewhat confined places like

Don't need AI (autonomous) self-driving vehicles; in well defined and controlled environments moving stuff from A-to-B is a solved problem; just take a peak into an automated warehouse..

Re: Too early.

>"Nope - that's offset within a pretty short time"

Erm??? EV Myth alert.

According to Mercedes (who build ICE and EV's), the typical EV needs to be driven 90,000 miles before its total energy consumption (including production costs) starts to fall below that of the directly equivalent ICE car.

Given the typical UK car is driven for circa 7,000 miles pa, that's 13 years on the factory installed battery pack, given currently the life expectancy of battery packs is circa 7 years...

Re: Clippy behind the wheel

It gets worse, AI's won't see the road kill, the skid marks and deduce there is a motorcycle and associated rider somewhere on the road and/or in a ditch ahead...

Love the direction of your logic:

Not guilty your honour, it wasn't the bullet I shot into their head that killed them, it was their untreated medical condition...

Re: Got a Lenovo laptop?

>X220, does it still count as 'Lenovo'

Depends on your perspective. Given the history, it does seem that their ex.IBM business range is still something different to their consumer ranges.

>and should I be worried?

Currently no, as the X220 is a Thinkpad and thus business-grade, the affected laptops are all consumer-grade.

Re: That's the future

>Of course consumers would benefit from cheaper surplus power, instead of having to pay far more.

Haven't looked recently, but for many years, the utilities have priced Economy 7, so that for your typical home it costs (per annum) about the same or more than one of their other tariffs.

I suspect once we get over the hype around smart meters, we'll see similar convergence in tariffs with the fully flexible market price being on the face of it cheaper, but in practise about the same or more than the simple tariff in part because it requires more complex back office and billing systems.

Re: Efficiency

> If anyone can up with a more efficient reasonably economic way of storing electricity then the world wants to know.

Perhaps the need isn't so much to store 'electricity' but to store 'energy' and remove grid electricity and fossil fuels from the equation.

So for example the use of wind turbines to produce fertiliser feedstock is a good use of this technology because it can replace processes based on natural gas and (grid) electricity, plus the feedstock is only needed at specific times of the year when it is needed in large quantities.

Re: That's the future

>Electrolysis remains the least efficient way to create fuel from water

However, given the wind doesn't always blow, a process that collects energy and thus supports an asynchronous energy supply is probably a good choice, even if the conversion efficiency is not as high as what is achievable from using natural gas as a feedstock.

Re: Reinventing the square wheel

>Both Fortran and Julia are LLVM under the covers.

So Julia is effectively enhanced C and constrained by having to be used on C-biased OS's...

Interesting to note that none of the official releases support anything other than an x86 level workstation, personally I was expecting it to have executables for super and hyper-scale computers, as used by the (UK) Met Office.

Well having to totally rewrite it, will require all embedded assumptions to be identified and re-evaluated, including the forgotten ones.

>CO2 is NOT the control knob on the climate

Maybe, however the knowledge about the role of CO2 has arisen in recent years and could be taken to be unknown in the 1970's when the models were first constructed.

So you and other climate septics should be pleased about this project and lobby to ensure it gets all the funding it needs so that it can be completed and be useful...

Re: A language they cannot read?

Landin’s seminal paper “The next 700 programming languages” was published in 1966., the foundations of the Tower of Babel were being laid circa 1960....

Re: A language they cannot read?

>These students are probably postgraduate specialising in a field

Only problem with your argument...

The original models were also written by... Climate Scientists...

So the real question is what has changed in the field of undergrad & postgrad climate science that people no longer study programming languages relevant to climate modelling...

Re: Why IBM anything? A universal answer

I suspect the malaise infecting IBM is also infecting many other big companies, with the activist investors et al not really being interested in the product, just in the financial numbers and what they are doing to the stock price.

Part of Apple's wilderness years can be attributed to its senior executives having no concept of how innovative technology companies work and being overly focused on short-term shareholder returns - under Job's they perceived that Apple was spending too much on product development and not enough on directly competing with IBM/Microsoft.

I suspect this executive rot is also a contributor to the product development mess Microsoft are in with Windows...

Re: well yes, but...

>or maybe these prices are to keep the non-profits from going to open source products

In many cases they don't need to do that, brain dead existing customers are doing just fine. For example the NHS insists on forcing Teams on everyone: partner with the NHS and you have to use Teams, Onedrive etc.

They can't use Zoom, which is causing problems with patients as all video appointments have to be via Teams - they even expect someone in their 80's who has had a stroke master the technical details necessary to set up Teams so that they can attend an appointment with their consultant...

And I mean technical details not just click on this link, like they've been doing with Zoom...

Re: well yes, but...

>I’ve also never met a non profit that keeps a server less than 5 years so I’m guessing you’ve worked with much bigger ones!

The NFP clients of mine (sub 50 users) are looking to migrate from WS 2012R2 & Exchange 2013 all on hardware that is at least 7 years old.

interestingly, moving to MS365 creates a whole host of new problems; none of the small IT Support businesses that grew up with SBS that I've had dealings with have any real understanding of MS 365 and cloud - WS2012 was probably at the limit of their comprehension.

Re: Monkey see, Monkey do

>MS who have at least given us a few months to plan

Bit behind the times, you should of been planning some months back, as you've missed the end of March cut off date for the old on-prem grants...

Yes, MS have been playing games with the grants.

In March they still had a reasonable grant for on-prem Exchange 2019, only the only on-prem server with a reasonable grant was 2022, with no downgrade rights; only problem MS haven't given any commitment to supporting the use of Exchange 2019 on WS2022...

Re: No Browsers?

Even better ask the EU to add ones for al the other stuff MS wishes to bundle that compete with third-party products: Office, Media Player, PDF reader... Windows...

Because the Z-series from launch in 2000 was able to run large numbers of Linux VM's, it has been a little surprising that it hasn't become widely used in cloud datacentres.

Re: Fraud Detection

My UK bank failed to detect as fraud the opening of online shopping accounts with two different supermarkets on the same day and the purchase of circa £300 of groceries from each for click-and-collect in towns miles apart and miles from where I lived and miles from a transaction I made shortly before the shopping fraud (and was probably the one where my card was scanned).

The ironic laugh was, talking to the fraud department they knew about the click-and-collect scam, yet their system didn't flag such transactions and they thought my wife shopped at those supermarkets when the evidence from the account was that my partner regularly shopped in person at another supermarket.

I detected the fraud when the bank sent an unexpected SMS message to tell me my account was overdrawn.

>if language has poor impedance-match with interfaces designed for C then you should either not write programs which actually use these interfaces in language

This was a problem, and probably still is a problem when combining code from different languages. Eg. COBOL, Fortran and C. I suspect combining Rust and Swift with C, given their common form doesn't present the same challenges.

Re: Agitation seems mostly to miss the point!

>The point is simple: C is FAST in execution, but it may not be the best place to START implementing a design!

That applies to all programming, hence why professional software development organisations will have adopted a Structured Design Methodology and toolset.

Re: It isn't C that was/is fragmented

>I believe this was because they had decided to support too many variants of Unix (DEC Ultrix, SunOS, HP UX, AIX, DG UX, and Windows and VMS too).

In addition to bugs this caused another problem: position in the porting queue.

I remember bidding with one vendor's Unix box and then switching to another due to slippage in the DBMS porting. This also meant platform vendors were caught in a difficult situation, particularly on big bids, where Ingres/Oracle etc. were necessary to win bids, vying with each other to encourage suppliers to give priority to their port, so that they could pass the demonstration stage.

I suspect once you get outside the Wintel/Linux PC platform, these considerations still matter.

Re: gcc and LLVM are good but …

https://research.ibm.com/interactive/frances-allen/

Another lady to add to ElReg's Geeks Guide to Women in Computing.

Re: C of the '80s

I remember the size of output being a big talking point in the articles comparing C compilers. If memory serves me correctly one compiler gave a surprising result - an executable of almost zero bytes. On investigation the optimiser had determined that the source code performed no function as it took no input and returned no output and thus had optimised out the entire module...

Re: C of the '80s

Yes, there were a variety of compilers for the PC, I seem to remember Aztec-C being one of the better ones.

Not only were there language differences to trip up the unwary - I suspect some were there due to them taking differing approaches to handling the x86 segmentation model but there were also important differences in the libraries, such as what happens when you moved a file pointer beyond the end of the physical file - a condition not defined in K&R.

However, the author is just showing their ignorance. Yes porting C intended for Unix to another platform such as the PC/MS-DOS PC wasn't simple (in fact just getting the source off the Unix box on to the PC wasn't trivial) . Porting a C program from say SunOS (BSD) to NCR (System V) in the 1980's wasn't a simple recompilation and things weren't much better in the 90's, for example the Bull DPX/2 200 and 300 both ran System V on 68030 but as the 300 was SMP, everything had to be recompiled and retested (for one project we used a DPX/2 200 as a comm's processor as it had a certified X.25 card unlike the 300 at that time.

Similar issues arose with other languages such as Cobol, Fortran, Algol-60 and Algol-68, as all had vendor introduced differences and extensions.

Re: Water companies in England

>an experimental power plant, one I actually visited, that ran on cow manure

There is a reason why biofuel suppliers are locating their plants in farming areas.

Tomorrow Water''s idea makes logical sense, unlike your typical UK green energy project that locates fields of solar panels, wind turbines etc. miles from the purported energy consumers.