Posts by Rogier van Vlissingen 9 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Dec 2008
Being that I am involved with harmonic filters, I am very aware that harmonic loads are horrible, and in fact we had a meeting with one of the utilities here in the US about this exact topic - how much smart meters would be thrown off by harmonics.
In the 60ś the typical harmonic losses in a building were 6-7%, nowadays it is 10-25%, so no wonder that these meters are thrown off by harmonics, but it's nice to see somebody did the research.
To be sure, Win10 Anniversary Upgrade crushed one big bug, me! After working for a year under Win 10 on my trusty HP Elite 8200 CMT with Quad i5-2500 and 16 Gb memory, and an ATI Radeon HD 5450 video card, the Anniversary Update brought the machine to its knees, and first, the video started giving trouble, then the webcam, then the printer, and finally someone on the AMD forum acknowledged that the drivers for Win10 were failing under the Anniversary Upgrade... For one brief moment, I thought of buying a new machine, but this machine has been a reliable workhorse and is plenty fast for day-to-day work. In short, after 25 years of saying that my next machine will run Linux, and periodically having at least dual-boot machines (though not this one), I finally decided that it was time to switch to Linux, specifically Linux Mint 18.1 Serena, and it's working like a charm. Since 2000 first Open Office and then LibreOffice had already become my main office suite, so the culture shock was not too great.
The only way windows is coming back for me may be as a VM, on my next killer Linux machine, which will have all the memory it needs to do that. But I don't like to have dual boot for an OS I need to use once or twice a year.
After Win10 Anniverary update my slightly older HP Compaq Elite 8200 CMT with ATI Radeon HD 5450 video card, 16 GB of RAM, and a fairly new WD Black 1 TB HD started acting up, first my Logitech webcam malfunctioned with Zoom teleconferencing. When nothing worked they recommended the uninstall/reinstall route, which would not work. My video card was acting up, and the newest drivers would not even install, then my printer (HP OfficeJet Pro 8630) began acting up, uninstall reinstall... never worked again. In the end it was on the AMD forum where I found someone who knew that their Win10 drivers for their legacy cards (Radeon HD 5000/8000, and RX5) were not working for many people under the Win10 Anniversary Update. That's when I gave up for the highest video card this system would support was 6570, and I would likely have had the same problem.
All of last year I had been upgrading family computers to LM 18.0, and found it working fine. My business desktop was the last holdout. So, after 25 years of steadily upgrading older hardware do Linux when MS dropped the ball, I am finally where I don't have MS to kick around anymore. Are there some challenges? Oh yes, a few, but this environment is much more manageable compared to Win, which is design to ensure you never understand what is going on.
In fact this article evokes my own time in the corporate world when I was involved in high level systems design, and really more of business process (re)design facilitated by IT, but the perception of a vast majority of my colleagues was that I now fixed computers. I've been feigning ignorance ever since. In fact I like to maintain that maintaining and supporting a PC is above the paygrade of 99% of people, even most so-called professionals, so we should really just abandon them and go back to pencil and paper. But nobody listens
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/happy_32.png
Besides the issue raised in the article, which addresses an interesting set of problems related to deep geothermal energy, there is another more unfortunate issue, which is that there is a tendency in an uninformed press, to confuse all geothermal energy to be deep geothermal, like they do in Iceland, and which has its fair share of problems, that certainly need to be addressed in a serious way. However vast tracts of geothermal use only heat exchange with the largest solar collector in the world - the earth's crust, and if done right are remarkably effective, and relatively simple to deploy. This stuff gets lost in the shuffle sometimes.
This is the kind of comment, particularly coming from this source, which can only boomerang on the maker.
During my time in the security industry I became at times aware of such serious security issues at verizon, it's not even funny.
Even without spending money on serious research it is easy to see how the communications companies and the banks and many others put peoples information at risk in numerous completely irresponsible ways, without even giving people the option to protect their information properly.
Thus a comment like this coming from such a direction, where the SOP is to prefer convenience over security regarding the data of their customers, is patently absurd, and it is a gratuitous attack to one group that is at least doing something about it, in a way that enables providers to fix problems. They should be grateful of the free service.
Yesterday I still had the chance to read some of this, but today it's gone. But good to see that the stimulus money has been effectively deployed in the suppression of the truth, and that the ever vigilant NY Times, noticed in a timely manner that also this bit of news was NOT fit to print.
If anyone followed Peter Drucker, he analyzed things quite logically 20 years ago, and came to the conclusion that the "financial industry" was ludicrously oversupplied, and not possibly a growth business. The bankers fooled us a while with developing a variety of scams, making planners in places like NY, and London think that the "financial sector" was a growth business after all. I figure let those bankers do some not for profit work, and get an idea what the word "service" means, financial or otherwise. Once they figure that out, they might get a handle on how to add value, instead of rip off the system, and from added value, they might develop some useful functions for their talents.
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