* Posts by werdsmith

7096 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Feb 2011

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: The electric cult

The powers that be run nice big old Aga ranges in their various kitchens.

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Re: Cost of refining oil

IT has Lithium battery too.

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Re: If have the extra power to refine more petrol...

They have a special deal with the power generators.

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Re: If have the extra power to refine more petrol...

We're British. It will be a queuing system.

They do queuing very nicely in Disneyworld. Or you can buy a Fast Pass. Fast pass EV charging - don't give them ideas.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

I've been told hybrids are better for some colder regions of the US (one of which, I live in).

Batteries don't like the cold

In Europe the nation where EVs have been adopted more than any other is Norway.

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Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

Off road parking has meant lower premiums for decades.

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Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

No, they aren't, not any more. These days most public chargers are around 50-55p/kWh for slow chargers, and up to 75p for fast.

Tesco chargers are 50p for fast and 23p / 40p for slow. Lidl about the same.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

No, not illegal. But needs building control to be notified and a qualified sparky to certify it safe.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

70p/kwh is 23p/mile at 3mile/kwh.

£1.50/litre is 17p/mile at 40mpg. So even less in a Prius.

Thats the price at our local supermarket charge points.

Tesco charges 23p / kWh on 7kW chargers 40p on the 22kW chargers and 50p / kWh on their 50kW chargers.

Lidl Podpoint chargers are similar (bo 7kW tariff).

What supermarket is charging 70p?

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

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Long wave really works effectively only in hours of darkness.

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They use sat radio in US to deal with long range.

My rental car had Sirius XM or something like that.

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My phone stays out of reach and out of sight.

It auto connects to the car by Bluetooth and is available by voice control but I rarely use it.

Phone holders should be banned.

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In Europe, nobody. I think that asking people to carry someone in a chair mounted on parallel poles is a bit demeaning.

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Almost all of them can be voice controlled so there’s no need shit your bed about it.

But I do prefer rotary physical controls.

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Electric handbrakes?

Thanks for reminding me that cars have parking brakes, I had virtually forgotten. They do their thing automatically,’no need for a human to get involved or worry about where it is.

Do you lament fuel injection and loss of manual choke mixture control?

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: connected services as a strategic imperative and a driver of future revenue

You are talking about EVs?

Cabin heating on ICE cars is done by waste heat from the engine (there’s a lot of it available). The exception to this is pre-heating before you move away.

NASA rockets draining its pockets as officials whisper: 'We can't afford this'

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Re: Still cheaper than HS2...

I use it to get to France.

My kids use trains to get to and from Uni every few weeks.

Commuting from Birmingham to London or vice versa might become a thing for a few people who will probably have their desk on the train for part of the days. And the media will be making a big deal about them, and the thickos will be triggered. But most HS2 traffic won't be morning and evening commutes 5 days a week.

They will be the kind of same folk who are using the fast Kings Cross to Leeds/York trains right now on hte ECML.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Still cheaper than HS2...

I used to commute because everyone did it, and I thought it was just the way things were.

Then it dawn on me what a complete and total waste of time it was and became determined to minimise it as much as possible.

With covid my commute is completely eliminated and it seems moronic to me that I ever did it.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Still cheaper than HS2...

thought HS2 went from almost London to almost Brum, didn't actually quite get there at each end.

It's going to Birmingham Curzon Street where the original Robert Stephenson London and Birmingham railway terminated in 1838 until New Street opened.

At the London end it's supposed to go to Euston (where the Robert Stephenson L&B also terminated) but the last stretch across London has been put on hold. So it will terminate out in the West London suburbs until an unknown time.

When the L&B was opened in 1838, steam locomotives were not allowed to go deep into London, so the trains got as far as Camden, and were then cable hauled the remaining couple of miles.

There are two big old tunnel bores that are now over three quarters of the way through 10 miles of Chiltern Hills. Imagine abandoning that to sunk cost fallacy.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Please, ell me another one, that one was hilarious

I ride the Eurostar over the HS1 route from London, through a very long tunnel and then through northern France to Paris. Right into Paris. It's been excellent for almost three decades? You'd have thought that it would have been closed down by now with all the mass deaths that keep happening.

Toyota servers ran out of storage, crashed production at 14 plants in Japan

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Re: Out of space

Tape backup. How long ago did you retire?

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Re: Out of space

Yes, in fact transaction logs grow large and the process to truncate them and keep them in trim is the backup. The backup writes the data off to another location. But the larger than usual transaction logs use up more of the space in the backup target volume which eventually fails. So the transaction log backups don't have enough space to write to, so they start failing. So now nothing is truncating the transaction logs so they grow and use up their volume (or file size quota). When the transaction logs can't grow anymore the DBMS stops doing stuff.

Or the transaction logs are set to a fixed max size and they hit that before the next periodic log backup.

You need to alert not only on remaining available space, but also on the rate that space is being consumed.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Lost in Translation?

How does one "organize" data which has been "deleted" from a database? (I'm presuming "organized" in this case means, "re-organized".)

Some of the data was deleted.

Some of the data was organised (possibly moving datafiles or logs to different volumes).

Two separate actions allows sense to be made of the sentence.

Musk's mighty missile is ready for launch once FAA says OK

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Re: Cost

It would be great if launchers could be from somewhere that had much lower gravity and minimal atmospheric density.

Then perhaps somebody could land and launch a spacecraft like it was 1969.

UK rejoins the EU's €100B Horizon sci-tech funding program

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Love Brexit related comments on Reg.

Watching the futility of the dwindling numbers of pro Brexit diehards flailing around trying to defend Brexit is very entertaining.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Turing...

Nobody who is alive or usefully active today has done any harm to Mr Turing. Laws that affected him were rescinded 55 years ago. I don’t hold people responsible for the crimes of their grandparents. That would be scummy.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

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Re: Need

Because Larry needs a faster sailing boat and all those future audit threats to keep it crewed.

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Re: Great job!

We don’t have a competent government. Neither the incumbent or the party waiting to step in to have a go.

Never at any time I’m my life have I witnessed a decent term of government in the UK.

So when I hear these discussions where the two ideologies are pointing the finger at each other

I just think “shut the fuck up you bunch of gullible wankers”. Neither side has a leg to stand on.

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

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Re: Question

@Throatwarbler Mangrove: nobody of any capability, competence or class would ever enter politics and therefore the only people who can achieve office of any kind are these narcissists and sociopaths.

It's a choice of vote for a moron or don't vote. As I understand it, this is not an unknown situation either here or on your side of the pond.

The world seems so loopy. But at least someone's written a memory-safe sudo in Rust

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Re: Mandate

Rust uses a runtime for somethings, like async functions.

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Re: Mandate

I am really enjoying getting into rust, now but the one thing that annoys me is the need to be online, the method to have all crates that you might need (all of them) available offline is ropey.

Concorde? Pffft. NASA wants a Mach 4 passenger jet

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Re: Civilian spend on, uh...

Turns out it has uses beyond aero propulsion.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: The internal expansion joints were quite wide

Somebody ripped that capped out of its eternal resting place (leaving some of the material still in the gap), a thief in Seattle.

The torn piece was returned anonymously but couldn't be put back in place very easily.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Is a Mach 4 Airliner Possible?

Virgin Galactic say hold my beer.

I guess the risk is mitigated by how little time is spent in the danger zone.

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Re: This project must not be allowed to happen

Now, for transatlantic, you are looking at 3 hours checkin to takeoff. So that’s 10hrs 45 down to 6hrs 45. Only 30% quicker.

VIP passengers and indeed first class passengers don't suffer the queues and waits that cattle class passengers do.

India lands Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on Moon, is the first to lunar south pole

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Re: Chandrayaan 3 did NOT land "at the South Pole"

It's still better than an article I saw on the BBC news web site last weekend that stated that any water near the Lunar South Pole hadn't been subjected to solar radiation, then told us later that the area would be great for a base as it can get up to 200 days constant illumination.

The article also seems to say that the lander is in a place which contains many craters pernamemtly shadowed from he sun. I'm not sure that's right either

The bottom of some of the craters at the south pole are indeed sheltered from the solar wind by their oblique situation - and are in permanent darkness and very low temperature. Shackleton would be a good example and would hold its water as ice. I don't think the BBC article suggested "any" water. And it is indeed correct about the long period of illumination. So as a simplified description of what might be found, it's accurate enough for general consumption.

So both are correct.

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I am so very impressed with how well executed a mission it is so far. India has a government committed to science and they understand the value of space missions, this will drive the nation forward.

Shame about the nations who don't have that vision.

Microsoft teases Python scripting in Excel

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My "pocket" calculators from both Casio and TI have Python capability and a sort of spreadsheet function.

Seems to be taking over as the de facto scripting language usurping the ECMA/TYPE JavaScript variants.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

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Re: Computer MOT

I had no fault but some engineers were working on a green street cabinet outside, knocked on the door demanding access to run a test, no appointment or even pre-warning. I refused, they said they might have to cut off our broadband and phone if we were the source of the problem so I suggested they to fuck off and do it.

They were openreach and I am on VirginMedia cable.

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

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I would say that the words "main object" suggest that it's mostly intact and some bits have broken off it.

Budget satellite drag sail shows space junk how to gracefully exit orbit

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Re: It works only if the satellite electronics still work at the end of its mission time.

"compared to small extra amount of fuel reserved for a de-orbit burn?"

Assumes that the spacecraft has any powered impulsion engine. They don't all use thrusters/boosters - especially cubesats. Their deorbit process is to put them at an altitude where the orbit decays over a roughly predicable time. By increasing drag profile you can use higher orbits where otherwise the things would keep on flying for the foreseaable. Like ProsperoX3.

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Re: Retrofit?

Many a dissertation has been written on such systems as a spacecraft that could change orbits to rendezvous with defunct objects and give them a tug to expedite their descent. It usually comes out quite costly, but a decent academic exercise nonetheless.

Controversial Chinese drone maker DJI debuts a cargo carrier

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Re: Given its operational ceiling of 6000 meters

That would be disappointing, as I would enjoy seeing busy little drones going about their business.

Like the Starship delivery robots, that have deliberately been given a cute personality so people like to see them.

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Re: Controverisal?

DJI are not only one of the first movers, they also make exceptionally good products.

Version 5 of systemd-free Debian remix Devuan is here

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Re: Being based off ...

English used to be written almost from phonetics and people could choose how they spelled words as long as the meaning communicated.

Standardisation happened with the need to communicate across nations, to make it easier to adopt as a foreign language.

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

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Re: A rude question

USA is currently working on a stop side underrides law which should be passed eventually. They already have rear underride bars law, but no major Hollywood movie stars have died because of side underrides, so it is taking longer.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

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I have my fingers cross for a flawless Chandrayaan landing in just a couple of days time.

Hold the Moon – NASA's buildings are crumbling amid 200-year upgrade cycles

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Re: NASA is responsible for it's budgets

A common fallacy. Business people's primary role is to make money, to maximize RoI. They on the whole don't plan for the long term and there are countless stories, including many on this site, that underscore this.

You are talking about Entrepreneurs, but the suggestion was about somebody who can organise and plan. Either way, a politician seem an even worse fit for the role, as they are people who will simply present what they think people want to hear.

30 years on, Debian is at the heart of the world's most successful Linux distros

werdsmith Silver badge

After trying and being frustrated with Fedora weirdness and awkward for the sake of it nature, I adopted Debian derivatives when Raspberry Pi appeared in 2012 and found it to be a huge improvement. It just made things more sensible. Though for me, OSes are generally just something that supports the application and I don't actually care about that layer, when something needs fettling I'll take the Debian stuff every time.

Cost of gallium goes up after Chinese export restrictions land

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I have some Gallium, a clear tube of it. I keep it on my desk as a curio because it turns to liquid on warm days. What a waste!