Posts by handle

"Most batteries wear out because of overcharging."

Can you point me to convincing evidence for this please? The phone contains circuitry that will prevent overcharging, so leaving the charger connected overnight does not mean you are a "dimwit".

Re: why it's Droid-only

Except this isn't, for once, a Flash vulnerability. It appears to be another vector which just pretends to be something to do with Flash in order to get the user to execute it. 99% of Apple users won't know their device doesn't use Flash so would behave in the same way anyway.

Re: Science is a filthy tease...

@Andrew Jones 2: I haven't noticed any efficiency drop in my 5 year old PV installation so far, though I accept the capacitors in the inverter might not last for ever.

Re: Science is a filthy tease...

@Spit the dog: have you really not worked out that if the energy produced by the installation over its lifetime is far more than that embodied in it by the use of "Mongolian coal!!" (and it is), then the net result is beneficial?

Re: Barking in the wrong forest.

No (isolating) transformer is required by law to connect solar panels to the grid - is that different for wind turbines?

One thing you can't get away from is large capacitors to store the charge necessary to produce mains AC frequency.

The enormous variation in the power of the wind makes it hard to design something that will produce anything useful at all most of the time without destroying itself in a storm. Turbines also create vibration and noise (you will soon regret bolting one to the side of the house) and require maintenance. A car alternator's front bearing isn't designed to cope with the forces imposed on it by large wind vanes. You would also need to protect the alternator from the weather. People have tried to stick propellors on car alternators for decades with very little success.

"the battery discharges even whilst powered off."

Ah, fond memories of the Original EEE PC in 2008 - I sent mine back twice for motherboard replacement to fix this fault and of course as it didn't, then got a refund.

Just opened my "eee" folder on Yahoo Mail to check that for the first time in more than 5 years. Only took it a couple of seconds to retrieve that from who knows where...

"Why on Earth would a non-responsive bluetooth module stop a laptop from sleeping?"

@Jeffrey Nonken: because it's a hardware fault. You have a broken computer. The OS doesn't know, for instance, if the Bluetooth module is in a mode where it's slurping power at maximum rate and so will flatten the battery rapidly while everything else is asleep. Maybe its designers responded to angry complaints from similarly-afflicted users that their batteries go flat in sleep mode, and decided that honesty was the best policy: the OS shouldn't make promises it can't keep?

You can't blame any OS for not miraculously finding a way to work properly on broken hardware. Who knows - maybe the Surface Pro is being similarly dishonest about a hardware irregularity, leading to the "sleep of death" that people are complaining about?

Re: A: he is not a real musician

Yes, you missed at least four things here (having read the original blog and then checked to see if The Reg had picked it up):

- You can only download it again while you have internet access (obvious but still important)

- The system can conflate different versions of the same song, replacing one with another

- Apple doesn't support WAV files, so the original material has now been compressed

- If you take up the 3 month free subscription to Apple Music and then cancel it, all your music is gone forever, apparently.

What is a "normal" light bulb? Incandescent is distinctly retro even now. But even more retro are clear glass LED filament lamps, which bear a passable resemblance to incandescent filaments but consist of hundreds of tiny LEDs in series in a common phoshor-impregnated silicone rubber coating.

LED rear lights

"Makes me wonder how you can screw that up if you have a frigging 12 V direct current power supply that you can just connect to those LEDs directly."

Because running them with more current at a low duty cycle generates less heat for the same subjective brightness, which means you can use cheaper LEDs (and also consume less power).

"To make matters worse, some models have it, some don't, and sometimes it's within the same make."

Running at different frequencies I guess. The higher the frequency the greater the switching losses, i.e. heat generated in the driver circuit. Driver circuitry has become more efficient over the years.

Clean energy is the result of the subsidy, and its substatial level kick-started the market with the result that prices have dropped so there are still companies offering free solar installations. But I'm sure you are surveying every visible and invisible roof in your area at regular intervals to come to the authoritative conclusion that no more panels are being fitted.

Who would have thought, even 10 years ago, that the average householder would be able to afford solar cells at the scale required to cover their roof to generate at the kW level? And even when I had mine installed, the prospect of being able to store significant amounts of that at home was a pipe dream, yet it's now possible if still a little bit out of most people's league.

Re: What we need ..

Lightning strikes would provide a minuscule amount. Don't be fooled by their dramatic nature; the energy available per unit time per unit area is insignificant.

Re: Electric Cars: Rich People

Not as much massive increase as you might think. Better load management on the grid (even to the extent of getting your fridge to switch off for 5 minutes to shave the peaks), micro-generation (reducing the distance the energy has to be transported), and storage technologies like the ones discussed, which can also be placed close to areas of consumption as they don't emit pollution and don't have to be huge, and can be charged dynamically in response to grid capacity variations.

"Another thing, where is all of this electricity coming from?"

From renewables producing at the the time, and the same technology being used to store energy from renewables not producing at the time.

Re: Is it really about subscription?

The BBC had no choice but to create the iPlayer and other internet outlets or it would have sunk without trace years ago now. The loophole is due to the time it takes legislation to catch up; you could argue that it was the government that created the loophole by not reacting in a more timely fashion to the emergence of new technology.

The trouble with that is that it takes away any independence, because it is far easier for government to take away the funding should the broadcaster upset them. Russian TV, anyone?

Re: I don't watch the BBC on any channel or delivery system.

No, you don't have to pay, In the same way that if I never watch any commercial TV, I don't have to pay for it in the cost of anything I ever buy that's advertised on it, or not advertised on it because competitors don't have to reduce their prices.

Re: Then start showing ads

The TV licence has always been per household, as a moment's research on the internet will reveal.

Looks like another power consumption nightmare. You could probably do that with a Raspberry Pi with a couple of 2.5" external drives (or even SSDs) nowadays.

Re: Wheels

...and "floor" is just that, as opposed to "main road", "side of building", "lake", "school playground", etc, etc.

Re: "Ahhh.. pedestrians, off with there heads."

Ahhh... those who can't spell, off with they're heads.