Posts by Stoneshop 5954 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
One of somerset's few natural disadvantages - is it's not in the tropics
Be glad; if it were you Englishmen would shortly fall victim to the mutating properties of the >750THz radiation you would be experiencing there in quantities you'd be unaccustomed to, making your skin turn red and in a matter of days fall off.
it makes little difference whether you burn coal oil gas or uranium to get it
If you only take the immediate energy balance into account, no. But that's ignoring the effect that CO2 has in trapping infrared that would be radiated out into space, keeping it down here instead. And thus increasing the energy imbalance.
Never mind that you don't burn uranium.
Did you explain to him that, in effect, EVs DO have alternators in the wheels?
Vehemently no; we wanted him to get out of our hair (and lair) as quickly as possible without resorting to violence, so any info that he could have misinterpreted as "See, it can work (and thus, it will)" was out of the question.
We stuck with demoing a bike dynamo, and that even with no load but the dynamo engaged the bike wheel stopped quicker after giving it a shove, and that the dynamo got warm when actually loaded. "That is energy that has been put into the dynamo, but is not coming out as electricity. That bit is what's called conversion losses, and every bloody process that converts energy from one form into another suffers such losses. Hence, a perpetuum mobile is impossible"
This also reminded me of someone on a computer forum who had tried to get his UPS to provide longer runtimes by plugging its input into one of its outputs during a power cut. Alas, the UPS runtime got abruptly and markedly shorter instead.
Then you have all the stuff from the 50s and earlier without any form of insulation or cavity walls. Pretty much there the only option is to start again so you are back to square one.
I've lived in a house built in the first decade of the 20th century. No cavity walls, but the previous owner had put panelling on the inside, although only for the living room downstairs. It was some easy-fit system with large panels, so taking it down, putting insulation behind it and fitting it back was no big deal. The upper floor was more like an attic, with the actual walls ending a meter over the floor level, then a steep tiled roof with the top being nearly flat and tar-paper covered. The first floor had as good as no insulation, only hardboard panels against the inside of the roof to keep things from getting too drafty. Fitting rockwool with panelling over it, sitting between the roof beams and against the front and back walls did wonders for the energy bill and the comfort level (as did replacing the central heating boiler and the flash heater in the kitchen). Also, double glazing in the living room windows. Probably a mediocre improvement by today's standards, but a huge step up from what it was.
The tow truck driver asked why didn't I put an alternator on the wheel so I could charge it while I rode.
Some guy living nearby in Germany (but originally from Poland IIRC) postulated something similar when he visited our hackerspace a few years ago. "Just put dynamos on the wheels of a car to charge batteries, which you can then use to light your home in the evening". He could also not see fault with perpetual motion machines "that could be seen working in YouTube videos".
Even the concept of conversion losses was unknown to him.
I can't recall seeing a voltage selector switch on a PC that wasn't a recessed slider that you needed a screwdriver or similar for to change it. With some other electronic gear it could be an insert that you could only remove and put back another way with the mains lead removed, and a lot of audio gear up until the time they started using SMPSUs (blergh, retch) had a rotating switch on the back, with a slot that you needed a coin for to turn it.
An exposed toggle or rocker to select the input voltage looks pretty stupid to me, but as we all know, the computer industry is not above even extremely stupid stupidity.
I think I had my first dose of mains at age 4, playing with the radio, apparently by touching the pins on the mains plug pulling it out of the socket. And while the city we lived in back then had been distributing 127V, that was changed to 220V a few years before I was born. But it appears I have a very high skin resistance; even with today's 30mA GFCIs on every domestic circuit I occasionally feel that the wire I'm touching happens to be live, and they don't always trip (which they do without fail using a certified tester).
Doesn't seem to have harmed me. Neat party trick though, making a bulb glow just holding it.
Way back I inherited a inventory/catalogue system for a record library (the black vinyl kind) that basically used 3-digit years. Due to space constraints dates were squeezed into two bytes, coded as 5 bits day, 4 bits month and 7 bits year counting from 1900. As this only concerned the date of purchase and in some cases the date of removal (archived, lost, whatever), so at best a dozen years or so back from 1985 this was quite sufficient; the ones who built that version rightly expected that larger harddisks would come along before 31-12-2027, allowing a less restricted format. And indeed, two years later we upgraded from a 20MB MFM hardcard sitting in an Amstrad 1512 to an Olivetti 386 with a whopping 80MB ESDI disk. And with that, dates were stored as 4 bytes, in Julian.
A bigger problem was that the data records for that initial version overlaid the word field that the database toolbox used for its (singly) linked list of deleted records. That should not have caused problems, but under some circumstances a changed record was deleted (and thus added to that linked list), then written back into that same record number (instead of being re-added, which would likely have reused that record anyway, but keeping the linked list intact). That took a few evenings to chase down and fix.
All this was in Turbo Pascal 3 initially, later TP4.
the tank could be driven......
The article is using the wrong tense.
The guy had been driving around in it in 1978, but in 2015 it was sitting without tracks. And a trackless tank does not move anywhere under its own power, except maybe by running steel cables around something very solid and using the sprockets as winches. Which is rather cumbersome and with little range of movement.
That's a generator, not an energy storage system.
And while tidal energy won't actually stop in the foreseeable future and doesn't depend on the weather the way wind and solar do, it has its cycle where it slows, stops and reverses four times a day. Which you'd want a buffer for.
2. You need to move a lot of water. My cocktail napkin says you need to move about a cubic meter of water through 100 vertical meters to store 1kwh of energy.
One ton (1 cubic meter of H2O) through a 100m drop will yield 1000*100*9.8 Nm, rounded 1MJ, which is a bit under 0.28kWh
They don't. Not from the outside anyway. It's the energy they store that's now released rapidly and uncontrolled, heating up the cell to the point its component chemicals break down. One of those released components is oxygen.
The only way to stop a li-ion battery 'fire' is to quench it; the other two factors: fuel and oxygen, it provides itself.
Mechanical stuff has a VERY low energy density. Take this 600MWh storage, which is 2.16*10^12 Joule. One Joule is one Newton-meter. Ten Joule is the energy released by one kilogram (and a bit) dropping one meter. 2.16*10^12J is 2.16 million tons dropping 100m, or 216000 tons dropping one kilometer. 2.16 million tons is 2.16 million m^3 of water, or 863 Olympic swimming pools. Of which you need two, with 100m height difference.
And that's not counting conversion losses.
The Vianden reservoir in Luxembourg can hold 10.8 million m^3, with a drop of nearly 300m, so theoretically holding ten times the energy this installation can hold; its practical capacity is about 5000MWh. It takes an entire fucking hilltop, with the upper reservoir having a circumference of 4.8km. I've ridden around it. Dinorwig, written up in El Reg's own Geek's Guide to Britain a couple of years ago, is 9000MWh.
There have been projects with cranes hoisting and lowering blocks of concrete (not that nice with respect to the environment during production either, although it must be said that afterwards concrete has very little tendency to catch on fire; there are still the motors/generators though), or train waggons on inclined tracks, but those are in the piddlingly small league at best.
As my french prof explained you use the maiden name because people get married then divorced then remarried ad infinitum and if you keep changing the surname everyone will get confused and official papers lost
Two decades ago I was working at a company whose user environment was a mix of VMS and Windows, with VMS' Pathworks supplying the network shares. And because of this the user authentication had to match across those platforms; there was a tool that tried to keep passwords in sync but it tended to work one way only (change pw on VMS and Windows should follow) if it worked at all. For creating user accounts they had some scripting that worked well enough, but changing a username was a nightmare as it tended to break the password sync even more. Zapping the name and creating a fresh one appeared a fair bit simpler, except that now you had to fix file ownerships and group authorizations and whatnot, taking at least several hours of chasing down every last file and database access. So after the third or fourth marriage/divorce in as many weeks we stipulated that a username was just some way of authenticating you to the systems, and NOT a reflection of your real-world name. After that there were just two cases in two years where we did change the username, where the user had deep and very valid reasons to not have to use their old username any more.
PDPs weren't that wild, but the 8 and the earlier 11 models would have the filler front panels in black, the topmost panel half red, half purple, and of course the CPU panel with a row of red and purple toggle switches. The DEC10 and early VAXes were mostly light beige but with blue accents, the DEC20 was beige with reddish orange. Later VAXes were beige/brown (ugh). And then Bob (spit) Palmer changed the filler colour in the [D][I][G][I][T][A][L] emblem squares from blue (and it had been black before that) to burgundy (more ugh).
I have a couple, even one in the common multimeter form factor, about the same size as an Unigor (of which there are also a few around).
The electronics lab at the University had digital counters/frequency meters with four or five digits (not sure there), with columns of numbers showing the value by lighting a filament bulb behind the number for that digit.
It came not only with schematics but also a parts list,
I remember my parent's Telefunken tube radio (1955-ish) having an envelope inside with the schematics, as did the 1965-ish B&O telly; with the 1968 B&O tuner/amp it came in the baggy with the manual. Clearly the manufacturers figured that any repair shop could and would be fixing them, and none of this 'send it back to us' for what would often be just a single, cheap and commonly available component that had let out its magic smoke.
Though when affter some 20 years one of that tuner/amp's channels stopped amplifying I found it easier and cheaper to replace both with 20W amplifier ICs offering overload and short circuit protection (what probably killed that channel) instead of sourcing equivalents for the original parts.
If you're in a boat in inclement weather and the engine is showing a coolant or oil problem or whatever is when you want the engine to just the fuck stay running and bring you in. If it's just a sensor fault the engine will still be fine; if it's actual oil starvation or lack of coolant the engine could be knackered, but at least that's preferable over engine, boat plus life knackered and probably lost.
And expecting the supplier to fix a knackered engine is not what matters here.
Actually, you sound like the kind of person that could repair it.
Rather, would repair it, if the offending part(s) was/were available to buy for a reasonable price. Plus, for that kind of gear you have to consider whether afterwards you can recalibrate it if that needs to be done, or if it has to go back to the manufacturer/vendor anyway because you lack the sufficiently-precise stuff you need for that.
There were several add-ons for the Beeb to do so, and even with just one ROM socket you still had empty, an 8k or 16k SRAM and a wire to connect the SRAM's R/W to some equivalent signal elsewhere you could achieve the same.
"It's a 15-year-old LCD clunker supporting DVI and VGA only – even HDMI was too cutting-edge when I bought it. That's old LCD by the way: it gets so hot you could use it as a bar heater. Even the resolution – a screamingly high (when I bought it) 1600 x 1200 pixels – matches no self-respectingly modern aspect ratio."
Those 1600x1200 clunkers, same vintage, suit me fine, and have only marginally less screen pixels that the 1920x1080 screens at work offer (which we're allowed to use at home, but that leaves your work desk bare); getting a much better pair would have to come out of my own pocket. Their DVI input also matches the 4-way dual screen KVM, and the four dual-DVI PCs normally attached to that. One PC is now replaced by the work laptop for WFH via DP-to-DVI converter cables. Replacing the screens would also require replacing the notallthatcheap KVM and a couple of video cards.
And one of the nicest aspects of those 4:3 clunkers is that people are dumping them for next to nothing. Some were even rescued from the disposal bin at work, and found to be working quite OK, though one of the 21" is a bit dim and two 17" (1280x1024) had their panel replaced because of a single-column always-on red stripe*. Under warranty. Total stock: 9x 21", 4x 17". All Eizo.
* didn't make it go faster though, probably because the stripe was vertical.
And yet my colleagues and I have just been issued with new laptops with 8 GB. And 128 GB SSDs... So now we are all struggling to stop the "out of storage space" messages every time we use them.
My work laptop has 8GB RAM, and 128GB storage. And W10. It's one of the oldest in our pool, but an undeniable plus is that it can still sit on a port replicator, which the newer ones don't. Which also only have 8GB RAM and 128GB storage, a slight increase on the processor front and a noticeable increase in connectivity problems, so I'm keeping this one as long as I can. That port replicator would be replaced with some USB-C hub, and if I don't want to lug that one to work and back I have to buy a second one myself or be content to run one 1920x1080 screen via DP and the other via VGA, either at home or at work.
We're warned that storage on the laptops will be toast in case a reinstall is needed; there's a D: partition of about 40GB that won't be touched, but there's no way to point your user area there as it's all been solidly nailed down. c:\users\name\Documents gets synced to some OneDrive thingie, though, and there's little need for keeping documents on one's laptop.
Also, moved into a ten year old house here and had to redo so many circuits.
Mine was a 90 year old house at the time; it had been fitted with that electrickery stuff in the 1930s (found some gas piping for lights in the sitting room and the back room), then redone to less ancient standards in the early 1970s, and creatively modified in the 1980s including some rather unwise structural remodeling.
There was a hidden switch, or rather a dodgy joint, halfway up the stairs controlling the light on the landing; knocking on a plasterboard panel in the right spot had a fair chance of changing the light status. There were two junction boxes where switched live and neutral came in via different conduits (they were arranged in some kind of grid), even where their upstream boxes had the same switched live and neutral available. Oh, and using ground (yellow/green) wire for neutral (blue) was deemed no problem.
It was all taken care the next weekend.
And that collection of bodges was eclipsed when two years back I had to deal with a workshop that had been in use by a small-time weed grower. Junction boxes that couldn't be closed due to the number of joins in them. Junction boxes and the wiring inside charred but somehow still functional and not shorting. Yellow/green used for *live*. One fuse panel was to be taken out anyway so I didn't bother to trace each circuit to their fuse but simply shorted it (two circuits out of a dozen had to stay up to provide lighting while the replacement was installed).
The more serious electric drills (and the not-serious ones before cost became a major factor) have metal gearboxes that tend not to have an electrically isolating covering. You're supposed to hold them by the front grip, not the gearbox, but occasionally one needs to take off the grip when it gets in the way.
The better electric drills have an indication showing you're closing in on live wiring.
It's always great when someone installs a server and doesn't realise that the redundancy offered by two PSUs is limited somewhat when you plug both of them into the same power distribution unit.
Then yours wasn't an Alphaserver DS20 or DS25.
Three PSUs, can run on one but needs two for startup (and the third one for that n+1 redundancy during startup), but they MUST be connected to the same phase else they go frrzttt. Now of course you can run the power cords to different PDUs as long as you keep track of which phase you're using, but it's still an invitation to things going frrzttt when another sparkie is doing some impromptu replugging. With all three power cords going into the same PDU you can more easily ziptie them in place with a warning label attached (which will of course be ignored, but at least you've then done your part).
Instead it acts as the arbiter of "acceptable" speech and behaviour, to a standard far more restrictive than any free society would otherwise tolerate, censoring almost at random, according to the whims of an unknown, unaccountable minority within the corporation.
Also, those standards are to a very large extent the norms and values of white, male, well-to-do US company executives who have no fscking idea of how those norms and values apply, or rather not apply, to the rest of the world. From which stems the mishandling of such matters as the article refers to.
Their absolute unwillingness to address these matters, and the near-impossible task of getting them to correct even a single one makes them a poisonous boil on the arse of the world that must not just be lanced, but surgically removed, then treated as hazardous chemical waste..
By the sounds of the posts here, I am in a minority of one.
Work has furnished me with a laptop. Which I use for work and work-adjacent stuff. The other computers (servers, desktops and laptops) are my own, and will NOT be used for work or work-related stuff. Plus, they're all Linux, which just doesn't work that well with the access methods to get into our office environment and from there in our work environment. The only exception is when it's convenient to have one extra screen to display yet one more document when the screens attached to 'the other side' have all their pixels in use already; this is used both ways. But displaying a work document involves a hefty bit of faff and is used only in extreme cases where it would involve actual documents, not just public web pages. Screens, keyboard and trackball are shared via KVM, but that's dictated by the available desk area.
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