Posts by John Brown (no body)

"The paper is observing that if the peak was lower, by having a little more randomness in the demand, there would be fewer problems supplying the overall demand as it would be spread over a greater period of time."

That's true, but they are framing it like this is a revelation to the power companies. The power companies already know. They may not know precisely *why* it's happening, but they know it's happening and can account for it. On the other hand, as you say, it could be spread out more but that's really a public education thing, which the power companies might like to get involved in, but I suspect it would, in reality, end up with most[*] people thinking, "ah fuck it, I'll just add 'n' minutes to the timer". Most people will almost certainly add 1-5 mins, not actually making much of a difference. A real solution would be for "smart" home devices such as thermostats actually be smart and talk to others in the neighbourhood or the power company and negotiate a time around about when the user wants it on and come on sooner or later by some minutes.

[*] "most" being of those who even give it a thought, that is. There'll be plenty who think it doesn't apply to them or don't care, or assume others will do something. And, being the USA, there'll be a certain percentage who say something along the lines of "Muh FREEDOM!!! BigGuv/BigCorp ain't telling ME when I can turn on muh heat!!!"

Re: Great if you want to hand out free cash!

The DD is supposed be the average monthly cost of your expected usage over the next 12 months or whatever, but is usually set at a level that leaves you with significant overpayment at the end. Theoretically, the smart meter should be giving them better data to set the DD at a more realistic level. But why would they when they can hold onto £millions in overpayments, especially across the summer and collect the interest on it.

I've always found a quick phone call sorts out the high level DD proposed and get it back to a realistic level leaving me with a small overpayment come the next re-assessment. If it's over £50 I ask for it back and it's normally in my account before the next DD goes out.

Re: Great if you want to hand out free cash!

!I've had reasonable success with going back and saying "here's my usage over the last year/2years using your current pricing - you can see our monthly usage averages at x/month, so the DD should be reduced to that".

I've never bothered with all that. I just phone them up and complain they put it up too much and every time the person on the other end agrees and puts it back down again. No muss, no fuss, no "proving" my usage. It's just the "computer" sets a rate and it's always in their favour. I suspect it will be a bit different this year though when the next price negotiation comes around :-(

"if not worse than the long-lived things they have replaced."

I suspect that is the most salient point in the long run. A cheap electromechanical thermostat, maybe with a basic timer, probably lasts decades and more than "pays for itself" in carbon costs. Fancy modern "smart" thermostat, lucky if it lasts 5 years due to either electronics failure or the "smart" host going under or being deprecated and all the barely recyclable e-waste it generates over the decades the old style one will last.

Re: What if Twitter were holed below the waterline

Hey, don't bad mouth Bad Robot. They've made some decent films and TV shows :-)

Re: Musk's tweets

"He's kind of the textbook definition of "smug" and "smarmy". Seeing him get his comeuppance would be sweet to behold!""

True, but it'd be a shame if these shenanigans affect SpaceX :-/

Interesting voting pattern. Different wording might have reversed the pattern.

I downvoted you anyway for the way you brought your personal opinion into something that could have been worded neutrally and avoided the controversy while still making a good point.

Re: Reciva Radios

DAB isn't that bad. But you live in an area with a shite DAB signal. Not quite the same thing.

I drive a lot and find DAB is mostly a decent signal. On the other hand, anyone living near Tebay on the M6 in Cumbria or 10 miles up or down from there would think FM is shite using your logic because the only signal available is Classic FM. No other FM stations, no DAB. Plenty other areas like around the Lake District too. I suspect it might be something to do with large hills and small mountains, but I could be wrong.

"Most cars (in the UK at least) aren't bought any more. People just pay a monthly fee for 3 or 4 years then return the car."

At least until all those "smart young things", renting everything, owning nothing, start approaching pension age and suddenly realise they should have been paying into their pension pot, not renting heated seats and will not have a car once the pension kicks in and the salary stops, and now can't afford 90% of the "stuff" they've been renting all their lives.

That's probably be the next "pensions crisis".

Re: Nice

"Futurologist" seems to be a job title these days. I think it's what people who want to be SF authors end up doing when they find they can't write for toffee :-)

Unless, of course, without their human overlords directing their every action, they evolve into something "better" and go off to colonise the universe, wiping out any threats to their ever growing expansion. It'll just be a different civilisation to the one we would normally envisage for ourselves, not an ending.

Re: And the first meteor strike

Meteors? I'd be more worried about worn bearings and everything juddering to a halt, possibly abruptly and catastrophically!. Not to mention the many, many other structural and engineering issues in just building it, never mind creating or shipping the millions of tons of materials needed to build it.

"Whilst not defending Metazuckbook, isn't it pretty standard practice to lay off rubbish staff?"

Being in the 10% or whatever lower performers doesn't mean you can't do your job. If you keep culling the lowest performers, eventually you are going to be culling good people, no matter how big the org.

Re: Shock and Awe

"Humans were not built to handle this sort of scale. I feel awe and despair in equal measure. If this fails to move anyone, they just didn't grasp the reality of what they're looking at."

Oh, we do have the capacity. For a very, very short time. But as Dr Who said of Humans, they have an infinite capacity to forget and block anything extraordinary :-)

Re: There's a reason for this

"Maybe it's an excuse to hire 100s or more officers to "watch" the feeds 24/7"

Or, more likely, minimum wage civilian employees, with minimal vetting.

It also crossed my mind that any private individual agreeing to live stream their doorbell or other security cameras might be doing that 24/7. That could come as a shock for anyone on a capped or otherwise limited BB package. Especially it it's a package that lets you keep going past the cap and then bills by the MB.

Re: I had not thought this possibility through

It might be that after all the lobbying and permissions come down from Uncle Sam, the Israeli Govt. might just decide that NSO is a strategic asset and veto the sale.

Re: So

"probably with Tony Blair on its board"

And Nick Clegg as the janitor Director of PR Clean-up Operations.

Re: Another old

"If you've not had the above played out in front of you, are you even a real IT bod ?"

Yes, because I'm the contractor who gets sent to fix it in 3 days, not the one worrying about whether your PHB is a penny pinching moron. :-)

If you want same or next day service, you need to take out a maintenance contract, otherwise you'll be further down the list of priorities than our paying customers. (Although will always try our best to get there ASAP because you might turn into a contract customer, but we'd NEVER push an off-contract job above a contract job.)

Re: Pre-emptive swap

"proprietary disc formats that are unreadable without the correct RAID card"

Or even, the correct RAID card but the wrong firmware revision. Nasty memories of an ancient Compaq server many years ago :-/

Re: You need more than one

"But I air-gapped everything with a wifi extender from the router after that."

I had to read that again to realise you meant an electrical air-gap between the Internet and your kit rather than the more usual meaning in IT circles of "not on the network AT ALL" :-)

Re: The server was ok - after all, it could handle a failed a disk.

Okay downvoters, tell me why I'm wrong instead of just hitting a button and moving on. A server died and the diagnosis is a failed HDD in a RAID array where the solution is to replace the failed disk. Why did the server die? The whole point of RAID is that a failed disk, other than in a RAID0 config, shouldn't bring the server down, it pootles along in degraded state. The fact they thought replacing the failed HDD would be "the fix" means they were running with redundancy, otherwise they'd already be looking for the backups (ignoring, for the time being, that a 2nd disk failed after the fact, during the array rebuild and is not pertinent to the initial server death). I suppose it's feasible that the disk failed in such way that it caused the controller to have a fit, but I've never seen that happen before and if that was the case, on an outlook mail server, there WILL be data corruption, so again, a simple HDD replacement is not going to fix it

Re: Tone deaf article

"If there is a problem with the law it is that it may not be possible to hold Microsoft to account for actions taken by their badly programmed robot."

It may well eventually go to court to be settled, but I suspect the outcome of a "robot" doing something illegal will put the onus on the robot owner. They programmed it. It's their problem if they didn't test for and foresee all possible outcomes. After all, if hardware fails and kills someone, the designer/company is likely to be sued if a design flaw is shown. A "robot" doing something illegal is, be definition, a design flaw. The court case, when it comes, will be a super-sized, multi-pack of popcorn event.

I was wondering how they separate the good code from the shit code. Or does it all just get fed to the AI, leaving it potentially biased and possible liable to making incredibly bad or stupid suggestions. I wonder what the ration between good and bad code is on GitHub?