Posts by John Robson

The pollution in manufacture is slightly more than for an ICE vehicle... it doesn't take long for that to be completely swamped by the running pollution (which, lest we forget is also being belched into the middle of populated areas).

However the more important question is - why would there be a major recycling network anywhere yet - even the earliest EV batteries haven't come to the end of their useful life yet, they're coming into their reuse phase, it'll be another few decades before they're at the recycle phase.

Well you see if we can spin a "robot overlords" angle then we can say that heat pumps won't work when there are roadworks, and the EVs don't make coffee unless they are triple glazed.

Re: It is a radio service

To be fair I had an issue with cable connectivity which was almost metronomic, and was nothing to do with throttling (although I nearly throttled them)

Every evening (10:30 ish from memory) the connection would outright fail, and resume early in the morning (7 ish).

Took several visits from engineers in the daytime before I actually got a network engineer who understood the logs I had and we tracked down a short section of cable with a tight radius bend in the green cabinet - the core conductor had fractured, and thermal expansion meant that it connected OK during the day, but when it cooled overnight the fracture separated and the signal was lost.

Re: "Design Feature"

I was intrigued, so I ran ping for fifteen minutes against a device behind a remote starlink connection from a colo centre.

Out of 1000 packets sent I got just two with a ping more than 100ms (103 and 115 respectively), and no loss.

The average was 45ms, minimum was 21.8ms, only 6% (57) took 67ms or more (67ms is simply the average plus the minimum) and even those averaged just 77ms. So whilst the tail of slow packets is obviously longer than the "head" of very fast packets (which has a physical limit) it's sparse, and not stupidly long (high frequency traders and twitch gamers might want to pay for priority, I don't know if that has any affect on latency).

There isn't an obvious pattern in the latency data, though there are two clear sections which are a bit slower than the surrounding traffic - 417 - 431 (85ms) and 432 - 446 (62ms), though they are followed by a good patch (twenty with an average of 32ms)

So it wouldn't surprise me if we were talking as little as 15 seconds on some connections.

Satellite Map has a pretty nice live tracker, and watching that for a few minutes might give a little insight.

Re: 200mb/s for "10minutes or so" = ~15GB

Looking through:

The AUP has this clause:

"EXCESSIVE USE OF NETWORK RESOURCES. SpaceX reserves the right to engage in reasonable network management to protect the overall network, including analyzing traffic patterns to optimize services and preventing the distribution of viruses or other malicious code. SpaceX reserves the right to immediately restrict, suspend, or terminate Services without notice in order to protect the network or minimize congestion caused by unauthorized use."

The FUP:

"Traffic Neutrality. We treat internet traffic equally, without discrimination based on content, sender, application or service. Network management practices are deployed based on technical requirements for specific categories of traffic. These practices are applied in an “application-agnostic” manner, meaning that the treatment of traffic is independent of the content data."

"Distributing Data Based on Service Plan. We seek to distribute data among our users in a fair and equitable manner by (1) implementing network management policies when the demand for network resources actually exceeds supply," [item 2 is the priority service]

"Starlink seeks to distribute Standard data among our users in a fair and equitable manner. If bandwidth patterns consistently exceed what is allocated to a typical residential user, Starlink may take network management measures, such as temporarily reducing a customer’s speeds, to prevent or mitigate congestion of the Services. Bandwidth intensive applications, such as streaming videos, gaming, or downloading large files are most likely to be impacted by such actions."

The Specifications:

"Actual speeds may be lower than expected speeds during times of high usage. Performance varies based on location, time of day and the precedence Starlink gives your data in the network based on your Service Plan."

"Starlink users typically experience download speeds between 25 and 220 Mbps, with a majority of users experiencing speeds over 100 Mbps"

So nothing explicitly says that there is a 15GB cap on single downloads... it's a rather substantial amount of data to be pushing.

Maybe at 2 am is when all the businesses etc who pay for priority kick off their backups?

Re: "Design Feature"

I don't notice the switch, even during video calls...

The satellites aren't overhead for very long - orbital period is about 90 minutes, and that's covering a distance of ~24k miles, they'll only be in view for a few hundred miles of that...

So let's say they're each visible for about 2% of their orbit... that's about 2 minutes of visibility - and they'll not be used for that entire duration, they need to be found and tracked before they are used, and I don't imagine that performance is as good at low angles of elevation.

Re: What's the monetary damage?

Surely everyone who uses XP would instead buy WindowXX (what number are they up to now) at full retail price... no seriously they're not using XP because the latest version is too cheap and would cover their use case.

Re: "Frore is confident it can defeat dust": More details please.

Their system has a "blow backwards" mode, so their paper filters can be cleaned out by the cooling system itself.

Re: Reduce is always the first element of the mantra...

"-It can mean, as in the post above, choosing to walk to the local shop, or to school.

In rain, snow or 40 degrees."

The "but sometimes" defense...

40 degrees is far too hot to be walking to the shops (yes, I know you're clearly using an archaic temperature scale), but that's not the temperature all year round.

It's remarkable how many days of the year it's perfectly possible to walk to the shops.

For those who can't carry much that's fine, you don't need to buy a month's worth of food at a time - and that newfangled invention, I think they're calling it "wheel" can be used to carry a significant amount of goods for very little effort.

Yes there will be those who can't walk to the shops, but that's a very small proportion and we're talking about reducing excess use, not preventing all use of anything.

Re: Investment?

"Alternately, build several dozen nuclear reactors enmasse to a single design to force production costs down through serial production. This massive increase in the supply of electricity reduces costs to the customer"

Why limit yourself to dozens... We should be building hundreds of micro plants. Many of them can stack into existing power plant sites to replace the boilers currently fuelled by burning stuff, a couple of them at virtually every motorway service station*, stack a few at steel plants to power induction heating systems...

* Service stations are ideal... spread enough to be useful, high power connections already exist, even more power is needed, far enough away from nimbys...

Re: Reduce is always the first element of the mantra...

"Reduce is going to mean reduce living standards"

Not necessarily.

Reduce could mean restarting the government insulation programme - specifically targeted at those who couldn't otherwise afford to add insulation.

It can mean replacing old/failed gas boilers with heat pumps instead of new gas boilers.

It can mean, as in the post above, choosing to walk to the local shop, or to school.

There are plenty of ways to reduce consumption and improve living standards as a result.

Reduce is always the first element of the mantra...

Sleeping isn't the biggest issue in the world, though it is a constant draw - take the idle power draw and multiply it by 8.5 as a good approximation for the units used in a year (that allows for 260 hours of active use, five hours a week).

That kind of calculation means I'm not worried by the watt each of my smart thermostats and plugs take - they definitely help me understand and limit energy usage.

EVs are good compared with ICE, though walking is better, and a pedal cycle is the most efficient form of transport by a long way.

Re: Biometrics!

It's why facial recognition is never the only access method.

I moved to facial recognition because I tend to wear gloves alot (wheelchair)... then 2020 came along... and I am still typing the passcode :(

Re: Biometrics!

They're an id, not a password.

They're a pretty difficult to spoof ID as well.

Combined with the "something you have" you have a decent single factor authentication mechanism.

Re: Open source isn't an assurance of anything

No - you just don't have software involved... with the possible exception of optical sorting and counting machines to assist with the rather tedious task of counting the paper ballots marked with a pencil or a pen that the voter has provided (rather than a pen with potentially trick ink left at the polling booth).

Re: A good step forward, but not enough

Have you checked the source code of the compiler as well?

Not convinced I'd call a heater a parasitic load, though I can see why it could be. But even a couple of kW of heating (which is quite alot) is still "only" a 10% increase in the battery usage.

The real kicker is when they put a resistive heater, but not anything to heat the battery - that's the worst of both worlds.

But that's fortunately becoming less common - with efficiency actually being a fairly important marketing point nowadays.