Bar-Stewards
Fortunately it looks like The Guardian crew are a bit better organised than many others. Still an expensive nuisance though. I'll wait till the dust settles, then make a donation. We need unaffiliated reporting.
5893 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2007
... nearly closed down a factory with a safety barrier they insisted on. This was on a machine that that took in sheets of printed thin card, 'pastry' cut them into small opened out pill packets, then folded them and glued them - it was an absolute work of art. The numpty decided that the moving machinery was too dangerous for the operators to adjust all the tiny hooks and levers that did the folding while the machine was running.
There was a slight problem with this, fine adjustments had to be made at speed to take into account things like air flow. The machine also must never be started with packets already in it. Nor must it be stopped while the glue line is running. I'm sure you can see where this is going! Medical supplies companies are extremely fussy about delivery times, so after the loss of a major company, the business decided to move the trouble maker to another unit that had 'greater' need of him.
P.S. It was also controlled by a cough PLC with plug-in I/O modules the size of a large book. For a while I had a regular job replacing driver transistors :)
While HVDC has issues, they are manageable.
All modern PSUs will run off 240 V DC, and will actually do so more efficiently, so no changes needed in the racks (unless they are using AC fans). The UPS(es) can also be of a type that has a 240V battery stack - they do exist. I've worked on them. Apart from charge balancing circuitry they are actually much simpler than conventional ones, and again more efficient.
The initial cost would be greater, but would be quickly offset by improved performance.
P.S. In the ones I saw, there was no power wasting inverter. Also, the AC mains input to the UPS was harmonically 3rd tuned to flatten the waveform and give the rectifiers an easier time.
Successive governments have sold of just about anything of value, so the barons are now scratching around for anything else they can make money out of. The NHS has been a prime target in various ways for some time. The only thing that's different is that these days thay hardly bother to make any effort to disguise the fact.
I'm well aware of the issues with SystemD, which I why I migrated all my machines to devuan.
I've no particular concerns about snap itself, more the way ubuntu is quietly installing it on otherwise normal upgrades, and transferring things like browsers across to snap packages. The average user would know nothing about this, and have no idea what to do if they were aware of it happening.
As has been said before this is a security risk. You have no control over exactly what is being installed. You can't inspect it or change the contents.
Removing snap (if you know how to do it) presents further problems in that ubuntu no longer offers some packages other than as snaps, and the average user is not going to know how to add other repositories (or even that they exist), and certainly would have no hope of compiling stuff. Come to think of it I wouldn't like to try compiling firefox!
I try to drive far enough from the car in front that when they brake, I can just coast and use up some of my 'buffer'. Sometimes the driver behind will get impatient and zip round me as soon as there's a gap in lane 3 but they don't get very far ahead, but the again there are times when a whole line of us end up at a nice steady pace. Zero stress, and significantly boosts your MPG.