Posts by Doctor Syntax 33004 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
The problem seems to be power distribution capacity rather then generation. Given that it's easier to move data than power we should see data centres clustered round power stations. That would include the landing points of the off-shore wind farms.
It's not too difficult to envisage trade-offs - housing developers buying a data centre's power allocation when it moves.
"But I get the feeling an amount of irreparable harm has already been done to both parties"
Who are the actual parties? Musk, yes. Twitter the business? No. The other party is the Twitter shareholders. Whether irreparable harm has been done to them depends on the court's decision and the court is likely to protect them if it sees them as victims. Irreparable harm to Twitter the business? Very likely but it's just the football.
I can't think of many things that he could do to aggravate the judge more. However, this is Musk. Although presumably there'd be some administrative hurdles to jump. Would these include shareholder agreement. It might also prompt Twitter to ask the court to take control of his shares pending a decision.
"The more appliances such as these aircons, electric cars, domestic heat pumps etc can adapt to consume 'cheap' electricity, the smoother the consumption curve will be, until you will basically have a flat demand, and no 'cheap rate' electricity - at least not in the sense we now know it where night-time electricity is cheaper because of reduced demand. Instead what will probably happen is that the cost of electricity will depend almost totally on available supply rather than demand"
It's the other way round. Some uses are elective and some aren't. By reducing the price when non-elective use is lowest steers the elective demand to those times. It's the variable pricing that would smooth the demand, not the smoothed demand that would kill the variable pricing.
"No, that's a classic example of selection bias. We've forgotten all the crap that died right away and we only take note of the few survivors that are still around."
Many of us remember the pain of dealing with the low quality of 70s stuff & forget that anything that lasted actually belongs to those times.
"Sometimes I even get the feeling that the articles themselves have more purpose in seeding these discussions than anything else."
This one seems to have been very sparsely seeded. How did they get from looking for a connector to discovering the typewriter and then the rest of the furnishings were hot?
"the ignition system that was right behind the front grille"
I believe the car was designed with the ignition facing inwards. Late in development the engine was turned round, hence the grille-facing ignition and the noisy gearbox. I suppose the original version had problems routing the exhaust. It would also have had problems with frozen carburettors in winter.
"I'm hoping something similar will happen with digital stuff."
It won't Making cheap expensive stuff that wears out is far more profitable.
My dad worked for David Brown Tractors. The farmers couldn't wear them out. DBT were taken over and closed down years ago.
"This comment is quite funny if you grew up in 1970s Britain."
Not so funny if you were already an adult and were paying for it.
The engineering involved a great deal of precision. It had to do to ensure it lasted exactly long enough to get to the other side of the factory gate.
"except... EMAIL. That most basic of digital services."
Your ISP is even more basic of course.
But I download all email. I might then delete it (the deleted folder is set up to really delete stuff after 6 months) but otherwise it's cheaper than having extensive storage on the paid for service and safer than a free service.
"The consumer doesn't see it that way at all. "
And sooner or later one of the consumers who doesn't see it that way is going to get mad and take it to a small claims court to get their money back - and win. What happens then?
The new CFO is going to be in for a shock. Once other consumers get wind and start emulating that, then the original sales income starts bleeding away. There's no point in sending a fancy lawyer to defend each claim; it will cost more than the claim and, given the nature of the small claims route, they can't recoup the costs even if they win so it just bleeds money faster. If it was a class action they could afford to get the lawyers involved and limit the losses. It might be cheaper to back pedal and resume support or just liquidate the company.
Medium and media have the same problem as datum/data.
Worse, I have a book on XML Schema by an author (or maybe his editor) who obviously thought they were clever enough to know "schema" followed the same pattern and was a plural noun. It isn't. Schemas seems to have become acceptable as a plural alongside the original schemata. But the frequent use of "schemas are" sets my teeth on edge. Oh well, I don't need to read about XML very much these days.
A big problem here is that marketing departments persist in training customers to be phished by repeatedly sending out emails indistinguishable from phishing. The emails purport to come from the company but actually come from a spamming digital marketing company and invite the recipient to click on links. The worst of all are those (banks I'm looking at you) who include links that require a log on. They may claim to have undertaken anti-phishing training but to send out such emails they must regard responding to such emails as normal and their resistance to them is likely to be weak. And, of course, their victims customers are being trained to be phished.
The most useful thing the Online Safety Bill could do would be to include a clause punishing such behaviour with a mandatory 1% global turnover fine. Preferably doubling it for each successive batch sent.
"The reason is quite simple: for proper IT organisation you need expertise at multiple levels and money."
This is a managed service provider. Providing multiple levels of expertise is their job. It's not some small fashion retailer down the street, this is what they do for other people for a living. The entire business is paid to provide expertise.
FWIW my last gig before I retired was at a digital print service provider. Not quite the same as this but providing a secure IT-based service was their job. A separation between the office and the production system was absolutely fundamental to the way they worked. That was the best part of a couple of decades ago; it could be done then and its should be done now.
I do wonder, however, if a managed service provider could be vulnerable via one of their customers. If so then segmentation between customers should be standard.
I wonder if such businesses take elementary precautions such as keeping their office systems separate from those they use for providing the customer service. And maybe even segment the latter so that if one segment gets popped it doesn't affect the whole customer base so they really can say "only a small number...." and mean it.
Maybe it should be the trials and approvals that carry the rights to be licenced, along with the methods of synthesis if these are novel.
A molecular structure is, if not a natural occurrence, at least a possibility of nature. It should be no more patentable than an algorithm. Proving that a substance is an effective and safe treatment and in what circumstances, on the other hand, is what makes it valuable.
"Traditional modelling methods (10 years or so ago) would take the model of the amino acid sequence, simulate heating to a high energy state so the chain moves around a lot in to random confirmations and then reduce the temperature and simulate the rearrangement in to a low energy conformation. "
I'd have thought a more productive approach would have been to simulate the synthesis, adding one amino acid at a time. As each emino acid is added there must be relatively few low energy configurations which wouldn't involve a reconfiguration of the existing molecule so substantial as to require significant energy input.
"I'll just pick on the poorly-chosen example and ignore the significant points."
Whoooosh!
edakka saw the point even if you didn't. The print-out might not be for the user who generates it, it might be for someone else in a different place. They don't want to walk 2000 miles over here to pick it up.
Fair enough, the use case might be a picking list to be sent to the warehouse printer but it might still be 10 miles away. Even if it's just next door they don't want to walk over to collect it.
The job TCP was designed to do, has done and continues to do is to provide what looks like a reliable connection over a wide-area network which was not necessarily reliable and just fired packets around which is not a connection-oriented thing. There was always UDP as an alternative, relying on higher level protocols to fix up the reliability bit if it was needed.
In an environment where the connectivity can be taken for granted TCP isn't necessary so they could have been using UDP anyway although I doubt that that's what he's suggesting.
We use TCP/IP on our LANs because it's there and easier than having to worry about whether your printer is local rather than in head office 2000 miles away. It's worth remembering that your LAN's TCP packet, inside which your data sits, itself sits inside an IP packet which is designed to be routed over a WAN even though it's delivered locally inside and that sits inside an Ethernet packet. If this is using point-to-point fibre it won't need the IP packet or the Ethernet packet.
Before that there were other networking protocols for local networks so in a sense it goes back to those days.
Having a Linux kernel there may be convenient to those instances providing additional Android or Debian addons. But from the PoV of the basic architecture is it any more than a shim that could be replaced by something else such as FreeDOS if it suited Google? Although much is said about Microsoft wanting to take Windows users into their cloud a Windows PC is still very much more obviously a Windows box than a Chromebook is a Linux box.
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