Posts by Chz 280 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2010
In Canada, at least, a constitutional change like that would require 100% of a full quorum of the provinces to pass. And it would be irresistible for someone, somewhere to try and tack on some other change that won't be liked to it. Making it nearly impossible to become a republic, short of public opinion swaying into the 80%+ range for it. I can't speak for the other Commonwealth countries, but Canada remains a monarchy mostly out of expediency.
"The greenies moan about digging big holes to dig up stuff so now the solution is to dig up more stuff. OK... We must save the planet by destroying it even faster!"
Well you've hit on the problem there. The real solution is not to consume so much, to not buy new cars, to rely more on shared resources. I do honestly wish the best of luck to anyone pursuing that solution - in the end, it's the only way we're going to save ourselves.
In the short term, digging up something different does result in a big cut in all kinds of emissions so it does represent a good short-term investment of effort.
I'm afraid I can't back you on the "why even try?" approach. I'm more of an optimist than that, and I don't believe there's such a thing as NEVER (within the boundaries of physics). Something does have to be done. We killed CFCs. We killed smallpox. We are capable of doing this, so long as the will and the funds are there. California is the 5th largest economy in the world, and the still beating heart of the tech industry - I think it will be a tremendous shame if they fail for not having the guts to see it through.
13 years is a long time.
California's power problems are not difficult to fix - the current set of brownouts have been due to reducing capacity on poorly installed lines to reduce the risk of wildfires. If they're willing to spend some cash, it can quickly be sorted. Renewables are still increasing at double digit percentages *per year*, and time-varied electric charges will guarantee most of the growth in consumption is off-peak.
To say there aren't enough minerals for the batteries is ludicrous - the Earth is full of them. Much like we currently have with oil, the limit is not how much exists in the Earth's crust, but in how much people are willing to pay to extract it. If batteries continue at their current rate of development, in 10 years they'll have double the capacity and charge twice as fast for the same mineral usage. And that's discounting any new, disruptive tech like aluminium cells (useless for small items, but a potential game-changer at the industrial level).
Basically, it's an entirely achievable goal, if - IF - they're willing to spend on it. Simply setting a law for carmakers that all cars have to be electric by 2035 won't do it. And that's where I remain skeptical. But I think you're being too pessimistic to dismiss it as not realistic.
The heat pumps are particularly bad for that. They sip power, but take ages. And they take an age to get up to the required warmth, so there's no such thing as tossing one item in for 30 minutes to dry it out - it will barely be lukewarm by then.
I am pro-nuclear, but I do have to point out that the French tried the cookie-cutter method and costs *still* spiraled out of control by the time they finished building the things.
Nuclear has to address the cost issue to be viable. No-one is going to pick it up en-masse until then.
I think most governments are missing a beat by not calling on the experience of the largest operator of nuclear reactors - most of a standard, cookie-cutter design - in the world, with no serious accidents to their name. The US Navy.
It's a pity what's happened to them. When they were a Huawei sub-brand they produced some of the best value for money phones in the market. (I've owned an Honor 8 and still use a View 20) The new Honor mostly makes things that aren't any better than the Xiaomi Redmi line, but at a significant price hike. Perhaps pulling out of the India market is a sign that they want to go more up-market now? The Indian market isn't terribly tolerant of higher-priced, premium devices. Of course, it could also mean business as usual, but since they were charging more than the competition they face-planted in India.
Under which laws of thermodynamics are BEVs less efficient than H2 fuel cells?
You can have:
Sunlight --> solar cells --> electricity --> electrolysis --> wet, impure hydrogen --> purification --> dewatering --> compression --> storage --> transportation --> fuel cell --> electricity --> travel
or
Sunlight --> solar cells --> electricity --> power grid --> batteries --> electricity --> travel
All those conversion losses look even worse if your power source isn't green.
So long as they *are* offering a one-time fee for those inclined, how is it worse than having to order things specced from the factory? It allows the manufacturer to drastically reduce the number of models they have to produce, and it allows the consumer some modicum of choice. They're not taking previously free features and paywalling them - these are things that always had to be paid for in some way. In addition, it's become a rare thing over the years for people to custom order a new car - most now buy something off the lot that meets their requirements. In this way, the dealers don't need to keep so many different equipment variants in stock and so it's more likely you can find the car equipped the way you want on the lot. So it sounds like a good thing, even if it admittedly could be abused.
For new cars, anyhow. While I think it sounds like a win for those who buy new cars, it sounds like a minefield for user car buyers.
It's an interesting distinction that I make here.
Tim Horton's Coffee(tm), as coffee, is utterly detestable.
Tim Horton's Coffee(tm), as a warm, caffeinated beverage isn't half bad and I've been known to enjoy it on occasion. It tastes nothing whatsoever like coffee and shouldn't be considered as such. But as a hot drink to go with a bit of pep juice in it, there are worse things.
Fried dough is fried dough. I don't find them better or worse than any other company that specialises in such things, and far better than what the supermarkets turn out. It's basically a question of whether fried, sweet dough is appealing to you or not.
I haven't tried it in the UK because they're studiously avoiding London. And I suspect I know why - their MSP in their home country is that it's acceptable food for cheap. Since London and cheap are an impossible pairing, they've kept out because no-one is going to pay silly amounts for their food and drink. They also started out up in Scotland, presumably because if they couldn't sell fried dough to the Scots then their entire business plan would be null and void.
I'd contend that they *are* replaceable, just not removable. I understand that doesn't make much logical sense, but I'm assigning "removable" to something that can easily be removed at any time (which no phone aligns to these days) and "replaceable" to something that can, with a little effort and a facility for dealing with fiddly things, be done in the home in half an hour.
The hardest part is waiting about while you heat the phone up with a hair dryer, try to prise the back up, realise it needs more heat and repeat. The actual battery replacement is not difficult if you have agile fingers. And if not, really, the cost is minimal (vs. buying a new phone) to have someone do it for you.
I've done my own twice, and I'm really not a DIY sort of person and I have fat fingers. What worries me more - and is likely the reason I've done it twice - is the flood of cheap crap masquerading as OEM parts.
Plenty of sites rely completely on CloudFlare/Akamai though. Witness how the internet explodes when one of them goes down.
Perhaps a poor example, as no-one in Russia needs better access to gambling, but I used to work for an online gaming company where the back end was connected by a 10Mb line. Every update had an hour's work of refreshing everything into CloudFlare first because if punters started to hit the back end directly it would choke and die in short order.
Speaking from a UK institute of higher learning...
We give the students 1GB off an internal NAS and staff 10GB, but encourage them to use OneDrive instead. Once enough of them are on that, the plan is to get rid of the on-site NAS and associated antivirus and ancillary kit around it. The disk itself isn't all that expensive, it's running it. The NAS is also used for everything that should have moved to SharePoint years ago and hasn't, so I suspect it's going to hang around for some time.
Individual departments generally handle their own storage for research and whatnot. There's zero central planning around it. Some of them may be using Google for all I know; I don't really care. I do know the CS school has its own proper NAS, as does the AV department because they host it in our DC like they should. Anything else is out there on its own in a closet or something.
I have to disagree. The 2GB/16GB (RAM/storage) models are long gone, and from personal experience with them an Atom processor and 4GB of RAM is perfectly adequate for all primary and most secondary school needs. Does the occasional thing run slowly? Of course. But that's an application problem - the same thing would run slowly on a better specced, twice the price Windows machine as well.
As a University, we have plenty of Macs around. I just don't see those things in reality. My associates and students manage to crash, bog down to useless speeds, and get malware on Macs just as effectively as they do on Windows. If you're talking about clued in users, then it's the same story except none of the above happen to Windows or Mac users.
Never been a fan of the Apple ecosystem or OSX, but even I have to admit the M1-based machines are pretty damned nice. Especially after Macbook development seemed to have hit a pothole the past few years, looking a bit sad next to an XPS. So good on them, and it's going to be a really difficult decision between the Spectre and Macbook I'm being offered at the corporate refresh. (Specs wise, the Macbook is all over it. But then I'd have to get used to OSX again after 10+ years away, and I'm not sure it's worth the bother.)
I'd missed the checkbox to opt for Windows 10 instead of 11 when I bought the Mrs a new Dell (they had a pricing oopsie, and to my great surprise they honoured it). The nicest thing I can say about Win11 is that it hasn't yet pissed my wife off. Win7->10 did. WinXP->7 did. So they must be doing something... if not right, then less wrong.
My 10 year-old managed to remove (and lose) a key off the keyboard of his Lenovo CB. Which has proved impossible to source short of buying a new keyboard, so he's learned to live with it. ("Why did you do that?" "I dunno.")
I'd bought it to help with school things, and then 4 months later the school bought every child a Chromebook! Granted, ours is nicer and he gets to not have to carry the school's one back and forth but still...
Obsolete? The second-best medium tank of the war, and the only one available in numbers.
Yes, the T-54 entered service in 1947 and made *all* other tanks obsolete (the Centurion never came into its own until it mounted the 105mm) but the Panther was still quite a credible opponent at war's end.
For £229, you can buy a perfectly good brand new dishwasher (even Which recommends Beko if you can't afford a Miele) which is probably quite a lot more efficient than your old one.
It will almost certainly break down after 5-6 years, though. At least ours did. Repair cost was quite similar to a new one, naturally. These things are a tough call - you cannot predict the reliability of a new machine, no matter what it costs. Even Mieles break down, and they don't offer a 10 year warranty on everything. (If you look closely at their prices, you can see that you're paying for just the extended warranty on some devices) So we have another Beko. Knock wood, it's been fine for 5 years and the drain pump that failed on the last one is an improved design.
The real pity is that people have generally stopped voting for their MP and vote party lines the majority of the time. Our LD MP represented a party I generally view with distaste, but he was an *excellent* local MP. Always visible, responded to emails promptly, and at least put enough effort in to look like he gave a shit.
Replaced by a Con MP who only responds to communications that toe the party line. (Which, as a freshman MP, is all he does) Though I admit it's hard to judge his public presence given the events since the last election.
I can't comment on secondary level education, but all the primaries in our London Borough have bought a huge number of Chromebooks in case of another closure. They're real bottom of the barrel stuff, though. The one I'd already bought my wee'un was all of £50 more, but at the prices these things sell at that represents a lot of functionality.
Our (then) teenager had a Chromebook for a few years, until he broke it. He bought himself a similarly-priced Win10 machine to replace it and regretted it utterly.
I believe he's now moved on to an expensive Win10 machine, but he'd be the first to say that ChromeOS was a vastly better budget option.
I have a View 20, and I received regular security patches until the spin-off operation started. The last one I had was for September's security patches and I've seen nothing since. I find it worrying that the new phone is China-only; might the rest of the world's Honor phones now be screwed for updates?
Teachers I've spoken to paint them as singularly awful devices. The eMMC is of such a low spec, Office takes around 45 minutes to install.
This spec as a Chromebook would've been fine. As a Windows 10 machine, it's severely lacking. I don't even understand why the government has specced Win10 when most of the schools that can afford their own limited IT program have gone with Chromebooks. (as have I for my 10 year-old)
"2015 Macbooks still supported by latest iOS and MacOS"
My 2009 Lenovo is supported by the latest Windows 10 version *and* the battery is fully user-serviceable. After swapping to an SSD, it's still fine for lightweight work as well. Your argument works for the iPhone because Google is a bit shit, but there's nothing especially durable about Mac hardware vs. similarly specced PC hardware. The reason most laptops get tossed in less than 5 years is because they're sub-£400 trash.
" an M1-powered Mac Mini with comparable spec costs $1,099."
I don't think that 16GB and 32GB are "comparable" when the likely use is software development.
If there were an M1-powered Mac with 32GB of RAM, we'd have already bought a dozen. But there isn't, and that's quite possibly why Amazon is still using the Intel-powered models.
OKI and Brother are the only brands I ever recommend. You can get a colour laser for under £150 and never worry about all the bullshit that comes with inkjets.
Yes, I have to go to Costco for photos, but the economics of home photo printing were never really compelling given the downsides of home ink printing.
As the owner of a Redmi Note 9 Pro, there is nothing vanilla about MIUI. It's certainly a step back from what I was used to with Huawei, as well. It's the most aggravating skin I've used in a while. But it's tolerable. Just.
The launch pricing seems odd - they're undercutting their own Redmi Note 9 Pro (which was the value leader up 'til now), with better specs. Maybe phasing out the Redmi name for mid-range devices in favour of Poco?
I wouldn't rate KFC with McDonalds, for two reasons:
1 - Quality control. McD's is famous for this. A Big Mac is a Big Mac, everywhere. Franchisees who don't keep the standard are quickly disposed of. KFC is horrific for this. They can't even manage to keep their franchisees in line with 5 ratings for food safety. A McD's with a food safety rating of 3 is put into emergency measures, while it's quite normal for KFC.
2 - The actual food. See this is the thing, and it relates to the quality control. KFC, when it's good, is really, really good. Unfortunately, it's rarely so and frequently quite awful. McD's food is so-so, but at least consistently so.
Side note: I grew up in southern Ontario, where we had our own KFC. Officially known as "Scott's Chicken Villa" in tiny letters, but "Kentucky Fried Chicken" in giant ones, it was set up by Col. Sanders himself when he fled the States to Canada for tax reasons. We famously had the best KFC in North America because of it. Sadly merged back into the PepsiCo empire after the Colonel's death. When I visit home, I still miss when you could get a loaf of warm, buttered bread with your chicken.
To be fair, phone size mostly peaked a few years ago. The larger screen sizes you see today come from shrinking the non-screen bits of the phone. That Dell phablet that was ridiculed several years back is still bigger than most phones today, despite a smaller screen size.
Yes, they're still a bit too big. But they're not really any bigger than a few years ago.
Most of the Android makers have done this. As of some version of Android, you can only install apps to the SD card if it's formatted to be a part of the system. If you do this, you can install apps there freely but removing the SD card will crash the phone. And accidentally formatting the card once you've removed it does even Worse Things.
Rather than provide support for the inevitable, most vendors just disabled the feature. I'd blame Google. The SD card app support was always shonky. They never should have included it half-baked the way they did back in Android 2.2 (or whatever - it's at least that old). Never worked well on my HTC Desire or anything else I've had since.
I remember some bloke selling his telly on Ebay not understanding why I was upset with him for the telly being larger than he said it was. (It was a 32" instead of the advertised 28"). The answer, of course, being that a 28" widescreen CRT is the largest thing that I can grab ahold of and move on my own. The 32" completely changed all the plans for moving it about. As it was, the TV stand bowed in the middle under the weight of the thing. It was well north of 60kg, IIRC.
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