Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Playing the "Enviromentally Responsible" card

"they recommend wrapping kitchen waste in newspaper - yet that ink is apparently toxic."

Newspapers have generally used soy-based inks for decades. The days of toxic inks are back in the 1980s

Re: Playing the "Enviromentally Responsible" card

Contrary to assertions, paper is one of the nastier items to manufacture (quite nasty chemicals used) and has a very limited number of recycle uses (the papermaking pul[ing process chops wood lignin fibres up and it can only get "so short" before it no longer works as paper)

Coated paper is virtually impossible to recycle into anything except building insulation

In a lot of cases it's virtually impossible to compost too, thanks to the preservatives/dyes/varnishes added

The mantra is "reduce", "reuse", "recycle" - it's greener to not print at all and jumping straight to the recycling stage is the greenwashing way of assuaging a guilty conscience

Ink cartridges, on the other hand are just bits of plastic and surprisingly easy to recycle if they can't be reused (most can be refilled)

That said, the cost and energy expenditure of recycling most plastics (or paper) is so high that you'd usually expend 10% as much oil simply burning the old stuff as fuel and manufacturing new items from virgin materials

It's complex - and "recycling" only really works for a limited range of stuff.

In most cases it's a horrendous expenditure of resources. Plastics/paper in particular are extremely low value materials with a very high recycling cost - should we REALLY be spending 20p recycling a soft drink bottle that cost 2p to manfacture and distribute (and constitutes 0.1p worth of raw materials), into another 2p bottle or is it better to find a better way of dealing with it at end of life, or finding a better value proposition for the distribution of the content?

"Cleaning" cycles

One of the more notorious "Anti-generics" tactics involved running excess cleaning cycles to drain the chipless items very quickly

It will be interesting to know how many pages people get out of these consumables vs chipped ones

Re: "Interxion have still failed to share any information and refuse to answer the telephone"

try having "geographically redundant data feeds" which run in the same duct for 3 miles, split out at the nearest town but then rejoin in another duct for the final 10 miles

Quality British Workmanship

Re: not DNS, not UPS

"usually an automatic transfer switch is."

A lot of this stuff is on cranky "Industrial ethernet" controllers which are fragile as all hell and prone to playing up

I have a half megawatt UPS on my watch which I haven't been able to directly talk to for over 5 years because the ethernet has locked up - I KNOW what's wrong and fixed the crash triggers a long time ago but getting manglement to agree to reboot it is impossible

Its compantion (800kW) had a similar problem but spontaneously rebooted 6 months ago after a similar period of downtime and "miraculously came back to life"

I'd been telling people what was needed the entire time and been shouted down - the "experts" from the vendor companies may know their UPS equipment and the Caterpilar engines but they are _NOT_ IT people(*) and never read the manuals or specifications for the interface equipment to know what takes these ($2000+) ethernet bridges out of service (Hint, never put your industrial equipment on the same VLAN as any other kit, they frequently can't cope with broadcast traffic and as we know painfully well. SCADA kit is frequently crappy as all hell)

(*) Seeing a field tech spit in a serial port plug to clean the pins is the kind of thing that really inspires confidence. I mean, really?? And you wonder why you have a corrosion problem?

Re: Petrol provides more energy per £ than mains electricity

> On £2 of electricity, you pay 9.52p in VAT.

If you're using a commercial charger, you're paying 34p in VAT for every £2 spent

Re: Petrol provides more energy per £ than mains electricity

"I'm having some difficulty reconciling your projection to my actual use"

There's a standard fallacy of assuming automotive engines are 30% efficient (45-50% on diesels)

This only applies under ideal conditions - max load/wide open throttle- and it's _rare_ on a car

It's more like 3-9% in real world conditions for (sub)urban engines (rising to maybe 15% in highway cars but this is offset by vastly higher air frictional losses). Diesels are only slightly higher

EVs sit at about 95% efficiency socket to wheel

Rapids are increasingly having to be backed by battery buffering. This significantly reduces the power cost to the operator but it's a higher upfront cost

Re: Petrol provides more energy per £ than mains electricity

The issue isn't energy consumption, it's net carbon emissions

EVs are a lower net emission overall. Refining petrol uses almost as much energy as the energy content of the fuel and the actual extractable energy per litre of an Otto engine isn't 30% (that's ideal conditions) but more like 3-9% under real world conditions (Diesel is better but not much better)

EVs are ~30% fuel to wheel from the power station including transmission system losses in most cases

Electrical generation only accounted for ~1/3 of carbon emissions prior to widespread adoption of renwables and renewables can only just outproduce carbon-emitting electrical generation. There's a big gap to fill

Yes I know you can theoretically fill the world's energy needs by paving a desert or three. There are practical reasons why this won't work, starting with transmission distance limitations, never mind that such a transmission system into Europe would be the largest single engineering project ever attempted in human history (even the South-North China canal being tiny by comparsion)

if we're going to keep using fuels like diesel or kerosene in applications where high density/portability is absolutely needed (long haul aircraft) then you need high temperature nuclear heat to drive a Sabatier process to produce it. LWR/BWR techology isn't hot enough

Re: Petrol provides more energy per £ than mains electricity

The long term solution is (and always has been) nuclear, preferably _NOT_ LWR as it's not safe enough.

China's got the revived ORNL MSRE project up and running on thorium at Wuwei

Hopefully the 100MWe planet will be only a couple of years behind it and beyond that, the design should be a drop-in replacement for coal boiler heat sources (unlike LWR, which isn't nearly hot enough)

But of course the "Quality British Solution" (Rolls Royce) will be installed, because politics even though it costs 10 times as much

Re: Secure boot is going where?

a lot of the chargers work with this, but reserving £15-60 quid up front and not releasing it for 48 hours is a bit OTT in my opinion (petrol pumps release it immediately the transaction finishes)

Re: "automatic network disconnection if unsigned software runs on the smart devices"

not just non-functional, but increasingly they're down for months at a time with everyone involved blaming everyone else

It was more-or-less designed with this in mind from the outset and this is the philosophy of the Axiom buildout

Re: where's the new one?

"...is ANYBODY constructing a new space station yet?"

Yes, actually. Several of them, despite Bigelo having gone titsup recently

Getting things up there gets easier with Starship too

Re: Best wishes

Airtightness isn't a major problem.

mutant superfungal growths are a bigger issue. That's what doomed Mir

Re: Well who'd a thunk ?

"Image search can easily find these images"

How many people pointed out that facial recognition stuff being deployed by the cops on London (and other) streets could just as easily be used by the Bad Guys to identify cops planted amongst them, etc?

Re: Landscape mode

1 swipe and a tap on mine

Re: Got nothing to do with self-regulation..

"But the bean-counters decided they were just going to churn out more and more variation of the 737 so they would not have to go through the whole certification's process for a whole new aircraft"

Nope. It was made clear to the beancounters that airlines would not buy 7J7s and what they wanted was a newer 737, so the beancounters overruled safety concerns and "made it so"

This predates McD arrival. The rot had already set in. McD just cemented the deal

Re: Got nothing to do with self-regulation..

The counterpoint to this is that the 737NG predated McD being on the scene and THAT airplane should never have been produced either (It was produced by accountants/management, demanded by customers and then the engineers told to make it work)

The bodging and covering up of dangerously substandard fuselage ribs on 737NG production lines also predated the arrival of McD on the scene

There's confirmation bias in the assertion. The truth is that Boeing was already substantially along the road that the import of McD manglement took and if it hadn't been, they wouldn't have been able to drive the company to the extremes that happened

Boeing's woes trace to the introduction of the 747. Massive restructuring of debts in the late 60s resulted in banks and financiers being in charge by 1971. After that the safety/engineering culture was steadily eroded and with or without McD along for the ride something similar would have eventually happened sooner or later (perhaps later, perhaps sooner. it's an unknown) - facilitated by the widespread regulatory capture environment in the USA (not just the FAA - the FTC and PUCs are shining examples of it still in action today)

Re: Pilots were no longer in charge

The FAA had already been documented shopping whistleblowers back to Boeing in the early 2000s

THAT was the point where regulators worldwide should have sat up and taken notice

Re: Procedural changes

"How long before an engineer who refuses to certify whatever Boeing wants is fired/retrenched/demoted/shifted to some other job by Boeing?"

about minus 20 years

Re: The People ARE The System.

LiFePo4 are slightly less energy dense than LiIon but they don't burn

Boeing chose the denser item over the safer one

Re: In Case of MCAS: Logical Reasoning, Calculus

"This is how the auto folks think and it seems it is a quite reliable method."

When you can pull a plane with 100pax over to the shoulder, let me know

In addition, let me know when such safety systems are regarded as adequate on trains or busses

Now lookup the Birthday Paradox for an example of why your assumptions are wrong

Re: In Case of MCAS: Logical Reasoning, Calculus

This is exactly what the customers DIDN'T want

The reason for flying 737NG/Max is that you can take any 737 pilot and slot him in the pointy end of any 737 with (at most) 1-2 hours reading the familiarisation manuals

This is WHY Southwest and others don't fly mixed fleets and WHY they didn't buy A320s and WHY they pressured Boeing so heavily to keep making 737s

As soon as a pilot has to be "certified" for another plane, he;'s either more expensive, requires hours in seat to keep the certification or less flexible in terms of scheduling (usually all of the above)

Everything that was done to the MAX (including leaving stuff out of the manual) was to AVOID the need to certify it separately to other 737s as far as the meatsack at the controls was concerned

Re: The People ARE The System.

"we ran all the tests and hey worked" - the testing mantra of European car electronics (which is why they break so easily outside the warranty period)

"no matter what we did, we could not break it" - hello Toyota

The FAA is no longer regarded as a trustworthy agency by other agencies and their homework is being checked by other countries. It will stay that way for a long time

CAA (china) approval in particular is critical for Boeing. China is Boeing's single biggest market and without it they're sunk

What's of more impact for them than the 737Max debacle is how the change in attitude from external regulators has impacted the 777X testing/approval process - notice how this has been dragging out? - and a fine tooth comb is being pulled over the entire 787 approval process

"After the FAA budget was cut, they had to cut back enforcement"

You have it the wrong way around

The budget was cut to ENSURE that enforcement was reduced

Re: Who are the customers?

fibre has bigger bandwidth than satellites

Almost all the existing europe/asia big data cables cross the Sinai and have proven susceptable to dragging anchors at the north end of the Red Sea. IIRC there was an event where ONE ship knocked out 4 cables in 20 minutes whilst waiting to transit the Suez Canal

Landbased cables have their own sets of problems and vulnerabilities no matter how hard operators try (where diggers don't succeed in screwing things up, thieves do it instead)

This is sorely needed geographic diversity

Re: Avoiding NSA tapping?

USN Jimmy Carter is on the case

Re: Dna

"Complex enough chemicals for the cycles of life to be kickstarted"

You can do that from inorganics and lightning. That much has been done in jars in a laboratory as long ago as the 1920s

Having organic chemicals is a long LONG way from assembling them into building blocks for complex stuff and an even longer way from a finished product

On the flipside, there's a fairly logical argument that life will probably form anywhere there's enough energy available as a way of maximising entropy and also that the basic building blocks will generally follow the ratios we already see because they're the ones mostly seen across the universe - but there may be local peturbations and the actual local permutations are a matter of conjecture

ie: Life is likely to be carbon-based (not silicon) and simpler versions respire using hydrogen before moving to faster oxidisation reactions. That still doesn't mean we'll recognise it when we see it

Nature is random, but given billions of years to keep rolling the dice it's going to hit a yahtzee every so often - the thing is that even on earth it's done that with different combinations at different times - mollsuc vs vertebrate eyes being a classic example (mollusc eyes are the right way around, vertebrate eyes came 200 million years later and are inside out)