* Posts by John Robson

5142 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2008

Tesla ordered to cough up data for Autopilot probe or face heavy fines

John Robson Silver badge

Re: WITCH-HUNT ! !

Yes - because this is a standard letter...

FSD is doing very well, not yet time to hand over the driving license, but it's really very capable indeed.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: 2 weeks?

As mentioned in the article it was the letter requesting the information, which *always* includes fine warnings - irrespective of manufacturer.

Lamborghini's last remaining pure gas guzzlers are all spoken for

John Robson Silver badge

> I guess I'm one of the vanishingly few to have an issue that's not for lack of trying?

From the voltage I guess you were in a different country, and from the anecdote you were renting on a trip, which is an interesting use case, but one that should be trivial to cover - as you pointed out there were two places that could/should have had destination chargers available...

But also - you made it work without much difficulty...

Even a 110V circuit gives ~ 2kW (1.8-2.4kW for 15-20A) which is about 6 miles/hour, so easily 60 miles overnight, or 50 for a working day.

That's 110 miles a day added on the very slowest of connections - even with a pretty excessive 45 miles round trip (feels like bad planning) that's 65 miles added per day without you ever having to visit anywhere special.

Would L2 chargers have been better - yes, if either location had what is basically a glorified light switch on a decent circuit then you'd not even have had to think about charging - just plug in overnight, or whilst working.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: What you said is only true

YouTube video of a Tesla which is rather quick on the track (search for dark helmet tesla for more videos)

Energy density is still increasing.

John Robson Silver badge

a) What uncertainties? There is no uncertainty any more, there is just a deliberate lack of research, or a lack of up to date research.

b) Not an option - that's the point.

c) Great, I don't suggest that BEVs are the be all and end all - public transport needs a huge amount of investment, and to be run as a public service, not as a profit centre.

EVs *are* the easy option, unsurprisingly the used market isn't mature yet.

a) What issue - the "I can't drive a million miles before breakfast" brigade are just one group that won't listen.

b) The point is that if the issues disappear with experience... because the issues aren't.

John Robson Silver badge

No - because the "issues" are raised by people who claim that they can't possibly do without fossil fuels for journeys which others drive quite easily without them.

There are vanishingly few people who actually have any issue that isn't purely in the "change bad" category.

John Robson Silver badge
Facepalm

You did - I failed to read it...

That means I'm taking plenty of comfort breaks throughout the day.

At which point - "ABC" always be charging...

You don't need an 80% charge in 15 minutes if each stop is ten minutes and you make several of them.

John Robson Silver badge

"The main use for services is usually for a toilet break, and stretch your legs a bit, not to fuel up."

Only because service station fuel is generally expensive... with an EV many more people will be using the motorway chargers on their journeys at the start/end of each major holiday.

We do need a good array of chargers at each service station, but that's a long way from "every space".

I'd like to see SMR or micro reactors located at service stations - with 10-20MW generation at each of the ~100 service stations that's a couple of GW for the grid when the chargers aren't in use, and therefore a 20MW grid connection available, so a max draw of 40MW, which would be a very substantial number of rapid chargers.

John Robson Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Ah yes - the "there aren't enough charging points" defence...

What - you mean you don't still carry a sack of oats?

John Robson Silver badge

People don't like change... that's always been the case, and petrol took a while to take over from horses.

We're in a position now where we don't have the time to take a generation or two to transition away from ICE vehicle (to whatever).

The "issues" which are raised are always raised by people who haven't driven an EV, not by those who have.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Ah yes - the "there aren't enough charging points" defence...

"It's a valid defence when the government is trying to force mainstream EV adoption now. There's no way, not with current levels of investment in power generation and charging infrastructure, that this country will be ready for hybrid-only new cars from 2030 and zero-emission only new cars from 2035."

So from a legislative perspective... in 2045 ish there will be few ICE vehicles on the road...

"During the first half of 2022 an average of 891 charging devices were installed each month. Fast-forward to the beginning half of 2023 and the UK is now seeing an average of 1,622 charging devices installed per month."

In terms of power generation... assuming all miles are driven at 3m/kWh then we don't need any more electricity generation than we had earlier this century.

The reasons for mandating V2H are nothing to do with "oh the grid can't cope" and everything to do with allowing people to use their assets more than 5% of the time, and yes - to act as a decent grid stabilisation option.

There are vanishingly few people for whom an EV isn't already suitable - I can't think of any actual examples in fact (ignoring such complaints as "must to a million miles to a ten second charge before I'll consider it" and "but it's got no clutch").

John Robson Silver badge

Ah yes - the "there aren't enough charging points" defence...

At what point were there "enough" petrol stations for our current fleet of vehicles... The infrastructure is being built, and there are a couple of decades before EVs will be the majority of vehicles, let alone all of them.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Lamborghini going EV ?

"A gas-guzzling supercar isn't economic, but you can floor the gas pedal without immediately checking how many minutes you have left."

Clearly never driven one hard... The Veyron famously had a 12 minute tank IIRC? (obviously rather difficult to find a location where you can burn through the fuel that fast).

An EV does lose more range when used at high power... but not nearly as much as you might expect - you really lose range by braking hard (and the two tend to go hand in hand). Accelerating onto a motorway, or as part of an overtake, makes substantially less difference than you might expect.

John Robson Silver badge

"I'd be happy to switch to electric when they can do 300km on a single charge and get an 80% charge in 10-15 minutes."

Well both of those are already possible... but neither are really necessary for the *vast* majority of users...

300km is 185 miles, so at least 2.5 hours - which is definitely comfort break territory, and that usually takes quite a few minutes.

80% charge would be 150 miles range (still over 2 hours), and at a reasonable 3.5-4m/kWh is ~40kWh... for that to take 12 minutes is a "mere" 200kW (CCS already supports 350kW).

Even the MG4 does 450km, and 135kW charging - not quite the 12 minutes you're looking for, but also 50% more range.

Indian telecoms leaps from 2G, to 4G, to 6G – on a single day

John Robson Silver badge

Re: 640K is enough for anyone

"I can only think that a meaningful use case is to supplant fixed (fibre) broadband to premises (FTTP)."

You'll never supplant fibre with a shared medium resource.

There are a small handful of cases where premises are sufficiently distant that it might be a reasonable option, but that runs completely counter to the probable coverage of the base stations.

In those cases Starlink already provides a decent (but still well behind fibre) connection...

Smaller cells can already be achieved by simply lowering the power of the transmitters, so you could pack an urban area with more cells if you were so inclined.

Autonomous vehicles is an appalling use case - you want vehicles to be as self contained as possible, though a rapidly negotiated local network could be useful - I'm approaching this junction, and can talk to the few dozen cars within 400 yards to share plans.

EU antitrust team closer to full-blown Microsoft probe, say sources

John Robson Silver badge

In my experience slack has been far better than Teams.

Calls (Huddles) work fine - and it's usefully integrated into various ticketing systems etc that make my life easier.

Probably helps that this machine isn't running an OS by a company that wants to kill slack and force everyone to teams... or am I being a touch too cynical?

Rocky Linux details the loopholes that will help its RHEL rebuild live on

John Robson Silver badge

"That would be like using Apple in an enterprise environment."

Plenty of Apple devices in enterprise environments, they have a strong tendency not to break.

Of course no Windows machine has ever broken in an enterprise environment...

Brit broadband subscribers caught between crappy connections and price hikes

John Robson Silver badge

fibre

Gah - I know it's in a quote, but are they talking about the UK market?

UK government hands CityFibre £318M for rural broadband builds

John Robson Silver badge

Ah, has that always be the case, will it always be the case...

640kb RAM anyone?

(Yes, yes the quote is almost certainly apocryphal, but the sentiment stands)

I just hope you don't run a data centre if you think that 100Mb is enough for anything... I'm hardly on the cutting edge in terms of networking - but Gb is definitely of benefit in this LAN, although I could probably do with a 100Mb external connection - assuming the latency was low and the upload was appropriate.

John Robson Silver badge

And who the cluck needs 10Gbps?? Seriously, stop stroking yourself.

Maybe video editors working from home?

But yes - in general that's massive overkill, but it's not that long ago that 1Gbps, or even 100Mpbs would have been considered massive overkill.

I'm old enough to remember having a 9600 baud connection, and that was amazing - in part because it was completely uncontested, and so if a download said 3 hours and 5 minutes it would take 3 hours and 5 minutes - enough time to head down to the bar for a refreshing glass or two, and come back exactly as the download finished.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: That's a lot of money

The hat doesn’t sound too bad…

Having recently had a foul waste connection installed for ~70m

John Robson Silver badge
Facepalm

CityFibre

Presumably it will be places which already have BT fibre laid then...

Google accused of ripping off advertisers with video ads no one saw. Now, the expert view

John Robson Silver badge

Do ads run?

Most of the time I find that ads stall, I can then "block" that ad and the video resumes happily...

Virgin Galactic finally gets its first paying customers to edge of space

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Bets

Neither needs a launch pad for standard operation - because they aren't the earth.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Bets

Well on neither the Moon nor Mars do you need a superheavy, which is what needs the orbital launch tower...

You build it by taking materials, or using local materials.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Bets

cow: learn to quote

cow: learn to quote

cow: learn to quote

cow: learn to quote

cow: learn to quote

cow: learn to quote

cow: learn to quote

Everyone else - learn to read.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Bets

The flights are cheaper because the technology for reusing rockets has been developed.

Yes SpaceX is in receipt of US government contracts, so is Boeing...

You seem to be confused about what those contracts are for, and how much SpaceX charges compared with other launch providers - they charge 60% of what boeing or roscosmos do for their seats, and only one of those has launched.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Bets

So you think that an airline could compete if it threw away each plane after a single flight?

The incremental cost of a starship launch will be disruptive - the ability to throw a substantial payload to anywhere in the solar system will change how we do research in the solar system.

What I don't buy is the point to point suborbital transport model - I can't imagine there are nearly enough people who need to get from, for example, London to Sydney in that short a time to make it a sustainable model - but then I haven't seen the passenger density yet.

The risks involved in the landing just don't make sense for something as trivial as on planet transport... those risks are far more reasonable when looking at interplanetary hops.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Bets

"a little premature to think it's going to be a paradigm shift. A successful launch would be nice."

Given SpaceX's history it would be a brave person to bet against them getting Starship to work (stupid bloody name for a rocket).

The big question, and the only real disappointment from the last test, is the performance of the heat shield.

The death of the sysadmin has been predicted for years – we're not holding our breath

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Biased A.I models written by white men

And I'd wager that their facial recognition systems are less reliable at identifying caucasian faces - minorities tend to be neglected.

And it's minorities in terms of "existing data", and the existing data inevitably contains current bias (training on a prison population for instance embeds the bias that exists in the current judicial system.

Getting unbiased data is a difficult problem - it's not insurmountable, but it does take active effort.

Comms watchdog to probe errors that left Brits unable to make emergency calls

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Ensure uninterrupted access?

There is 100%...

and there is taking 90 minutes to switch to the backup system... that's not even 4 nines.

Five billion phones are dead in drawers – carriers want to mine them

John Robson Silver badge

Re: "There's also enough cobalt to build batteries for ten million electric vehicles."

Yes - there are some batteries which use cobalt... but also those which don't.

LiFePo, which is becoming the go to choice for many applications, including EVs, doesn't use it at all.

John Robson Silver badge

"There's also enough cobalt to build batteries for ten million electric vehicles."

Why do people keep focussing on an element that isn't actually required for building batteries?

There's enough plutonium to build 15 car batteries as well - which is the same amount as would be required to build 30 billion.

NASA and miners face off over lithium deposits at satellite calibration site

John Robson Silver badge

Your current satellites only need a small area

This one that would have needed more got cancelled - so there will never be a need for more than a postage stamp of calibration surface.

I mean the fact that they know of a bird which would require that surface for calibration rather suggests that the area should be preserved for calibration.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Perhaps they can address storage too?

And you've just changed the spec in your post... no doubt accidentally, but an SD card is substantially larger than a microSD card.

An SD slot, as a secondary storage location - to which you can redirect the output files from the camera, or other specific apps, wouldn't be a bad thing per se... but are you specifying SD (max 2GB), SDHC (32GB), SDXC(2TB), SDUC(128TB), whatever format they come up with next?

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Side effects

Why move to one battery, just have both batteries removable... you could even arrange to be able to swap batteries out without the device powering down.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Depends on their definition of "easy" I guess

Doesn't matter - so long as it's easy for market stalls - *and* supported.

John Robson Silver badge

"Not so long ago I was told the useful life of a lithium ion battery should be ten years."

The useful lifetime of a lithium battery depends on the chemisty, but even more so it depends on the BMS.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Unique keys

Because the new key would contain the same ID as the previous key, and would therefore be the same ID... even if it was signed on a different day.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Unique keys

I went to uni with someone who had that issue at banks in the times of paper forms... 88 character name (and yes, I can still remember it all) simply didn't fit...

He ended up using just the first name (which was a reasonable length) and the last part of his surname - and missed out the rest.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Unique keys

Who needs a central database - we have cryptographic signatures.

An ID doesn't have to be stored centrally with other data to be a validated and useful "single" ID, it can simply be signed, and that signature verified on use.

Mega-data platform worth half a billion will suck in info from family doctors

John Robson Silver badge

No they won't have any access to the data we are asking them to file...

None at all... How bloody stupid are these people?

38 percent of tech job interviews offered exclusively to men: report

John Robson Silver badge

Yes - I'm interested to know how many resulted in interviews only being offered to women...

Missing Titan sub likely destroyed in implosion, no survivors

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Terminology

Exactly my first thought...

John Robson Silver badge

Re: RIP

Implosion would likely have been a virtually instant transition from biology to physics (apologies to Scott Manly)

Waymo robo-car slays dog in San Francisco

John Robson Silver badge

"cow: Thats exactly what i said"

That's because it was a quote...

No I didn't include a link - but then neither have you managed to provide any evidence to back up your claims... if you'd used google and searched for a snippet of the text I quoted then you'd have found the page pretty fast.

I don't know what happens in other countries - you claimed they didn't accept end user batteries, I demonstrated that to be false.

Have you worked out that there isn't any point in recycling batteries as they are sold?

And you appear to think that people just put EV batteries in landfill - something I have not seen any evidence for... partly because they are still in use, and partly because they're expensive and recycling companies can turn a substantial profit.

In 2020 Tesla reported that it achieved 92% battery cell material recovery in its new recycling process, and it recycled 1,300 tons of nickel, 400 tons of copper, and 80 tons of cobalt in 2020.

In the 2021 Impact Report, Tesla increased its battery material recycling to 1,500 tons of nickel, 300 tons of copper, and 200 tons of cobalt.

Now you need to find out how many Teslas have left the road... because the above stats are completely meaningless without that information.

John Robson Silver badge

I never said months...

I said "It doesn't take long"

It's on the order of a few thousand miles - your own chart suggests that it's between 7/6ths and 9/6ths of the manufacturing emissions.

It also suggests a lifetime of only 125k miles, which is quite short, and NMC batteries (and old tech).

The emissions from fuel vastly outweigh those from electrical generation - and the grid is well towards the bottom of the range shown (which is 50 - 800) That very top end of the bar assumes 100% of your power comes from coal - which is a completely ridiculous spread to put on given that they don't go down to the lower reaches of renewables or nuclear generation.

"And no recycling 1000 batteries is not a solution when millions of cars ae getting sold."

How many Model Ts were recycled between 1908 and 1915... because that's the question you're asking.

You need to ask the question "how many BEVs were taken off the road" and compare *that* answer with the the "how many batteries were recycled"

At the point where we have a saturated and mature market for EVs (which we don't, not even close) then you can make the sales/recycling comparison - it's valid for lead acid batteries, but not yet for EV batteries, since the active fleet is increasing.

UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete

John Robson Silver badge

Re: I recently did some calculation for someone who is getting an EV

It's based in part on emissions... The vehicle is the important bit though - the tax has nothing to do with the roads.

And yes it's an excise duty, but that is still a tax, it's just not based on value.

Really it should be split into two components - an emissions part and a mass part.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: I recently did some calculation for someone who is getting an EV

Vehicle tax... road tax was abolished in the 1930s.

Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Beacon

Have to be a pretty low data rate to allow for any other communications, but yes.