* Posts by Arisia

26 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2013

Parts of UK booted offline as Virgin Media suffers massive broadband outage

Arisia

Re: Volt

It's pretty brave to run an old Draytek

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/08/draytek_router_malware_hiatus/

Move over, graphene. There's a new super-material in town: Graphullerene

Arisia

Re: Graphene is actually

480kW is already possible for EV's albeit I believe it's an 800V architecture (600A).

https://www.notebookcheck.net/XPeng-set-to-reveal-a-disruptive-480kW-EV-charging-network-whose-mass-produced-stations-add-125-miles-of-range-in-5-minutes.640557.0.html

California asks people not to charge EVs during heatwave

Arisia

V2G

Great to see you mention V2G.

The trials here in the UK have shown this to be effective with people making several hundred quid a year from it.

This will be a "must have" requirement from my next EV.

Pull jet fuel from thin air? We can do that, say scientists

Arisia

Jet engines have an efficiency (at best) of about 40%

Car engines are similar.

There's are likely good use cases (yes jets) but won't be cheap for a long while.

The 20% is also the optimistic "please fund us more" number. Going from 4% will be a long path.

Also Bain & Co, a charming bunch.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62408116

Boffins blow hot and cold over li-ion battery that can cut leccy car recharging to '10 mins'

Arisia

Re: Power required

Petrol cars have a max efficiency of 20-35%. i.e. a BEV is 3-5x as efficient as ICE using TOE.

Those who can, are going to charge at home. About 50-60% I believe. I do at least 90% of my usage as that.

That leaves a rump of the rest who are going long distance or don't have access to lower speed charging (no off road parking etc). Even relatively long distance, you start with a full charge so you only need the extra to get you there (+buffer).

In reality chargers will pop up in every car park (especially including work ones), supermarkets, multi-stories etc so suddenly even most of the the people don't have offroad parking won't need rapid charging most of the time. So suddenly the infrastructure required - though still significant - is a lot smaller than you state.

https://theenergyst.com/aurora-electric-vehicles-wont-break-power-grid/

I find it immensely frustrating that people assume that you would "fuel" an EV in an identical manner to an ICE. Stuck in a mindset of what they know. YMMV/statistics/damned lies/etc

Electric cars to create new peak hour when they all need a charge

Arisia

Even our government is years ahead of this lot

Wow impressively bleedin' obvious research. Equally bleedin' obvious solutions.

As suggested by our government. In 2011! https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/3986/plug-in-vehicle-infrastructure-strategy.pdf

There are improved documents with more detail that are newer btw.

Page 7:

Recharging at home

Recharging at home, at night, off-peak, is not only most convenient for drivers, but also maximises the environmental and economic benefits of plug-in vehicles by using cheaper, lower carbon night-time electricity generation. It also makes the best use of available electricity network capacity. To help people charge at home as easily as possible, the Government is:

• ensuring that smart metering in Great Britain includes the functionality to support smart charging of plug-in vehicles. This will allow recharging to react to price signals, ensuring that it can happen when it is cheapest for consumers and the energy system, subject to appropriate technology in the chargepoint or plug-in vehicle;

Meltdown, Spectre bug patch slowdown gets real – and what you can do about it

Arisia

Calling BS on the CPU graph

That's clearly some spinning processes eating several cores with the original load overlaid on top.

Nothing to do with the patch, except that the server didn't restart cleanly.

Tesla launches electric truck it guarantees won't break for a million miles

Arisia

Sport truck! 0-60 in 5 seconds

From https://electrek.co/2017/11/16/tesla-semi-live-blog/

- Tesla Semi will go 0-60 in 5 seconds, 20 seconds with 80,000 pounds

Ye Gods! When lightly loaded they'd give sports cars a hard time!

Arisia

Re: Tesla semi?

Air con only takes a few hundred Watts. The power usage will be lost in the noise. As electric motors are far more efficient that diesel there won't be the heat source in the first place.

The truck stops will have the mega-chargers so no engine required. I expect initial sales will be point to point though. General purpose will come later when the charging network has expanded out.

Finally, it'll still have normal brakes. They just won't, normally, be used much.

Car insurers recoil in horror from paying auto autos' speeding fines

Arisia

Re: From the department of stupid ideas

1. Yes LED is irrelevant. Has this statement been mangled after multiple hops... probably.

2. Streetlights aren't a silver bullet but they definitely helps as it avoid installing lots of additional posts in the road and so is much cheaper. Yes, there are several cases it doesn't cover and it doesn't work for everything. Flats typically have dedicated parking, so that's solvable though recalcitrant landlords will probably need "encouraging".

Of course the wiring needs in to the streetlights needs upgrading but it helps to avoid the posts for initial take up unless you think everyone will be in an EV in 2 years. The channels are there already. This reduces the costs considerably.

As for wrong side of the street Chloe, you could just park on the other side to avoid trailing cables.

ok yes, I know for high density terrace housing where there's no room for the cars anyway, it's not the whole solution but there are other (more expensive) options like kerb side chargers.

Other solutions like wireless charging are proven to work but are not (yet) cheap.

You start with the easy stuff, expand to the more awkward stuff later.

At this moment in time, it's hard to recommend an EV unless you have off-road parking.

Now they're looking at the next step to get _some_ people who don't have that onboard.

Blimey people, it's just electricity. It's not exactly a new problem.

Dahua IP cameras stung by Web interface bug

Arisia

Re: Binary blob

More info on Sofia here: http://marcusjenkins.com/hacking-cheap-ebay-ip-camera/

So that'll be a hardcoded unchangeable admin password running on an undisclosed telnet service that can't be turned off.

The simple rule with any of these cameras is not to expose them to the internet as they are mostly horribly insecure.

Google man drags Emacs into the 1990s

Arisia
Coat

Re: zx80

The workaround for a wobbly ram pack was to blu tack it onto the back of the zx81.

Also when the keys stopped working from overuse, you used a pencil to drawn around the button and it popped up again. For a while.

You could have just looked that up on the intern.... oh....

Hurrah! Windfarms produce whopping one per cent of EU energy

Arisia

Re: Battery cars are impractical

Actually it's not quite right that the main use is the urban shopping trolley. The most effective use of the current generation of EVs, e.g. Nissan LEAF, is as a commuter car. They can pay for themselves with the fuel savings.

The average LEAF does 40% more miles per year than the average petrol or diesel. This I think was unexpected by the manufacturers.

http://www.newsroom.nissan-europe.com/uk/en-gb/Media/Media.aspx?mediaid=128282

Elon Musk's $4.9bn taxpayer windfall revealed

Arisia

Re: Bargain

"because there are so many sets of made up numbers to choose from."

Yes precisely.

Every industry is subsidised along the way somewhere whether it's via tax breaks or via something more direct. It's a governmental policy decision to provide incentives for the outcomes we want. Now how that policy is determined is an entirely different discussion.

So to deal with some of the incentives

- factory incentives. These pop up for pretty well any manufacturer. Amazon $1.1bn http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/09/16/amazon-aws-tax-idUSL1N0RH2A820140916

- including all the car incentives is garbage as they are available to all the other competitors. The list is large. Like every maker of a CARB compliance car for California.

- same for solar. Plenty of competition. Solar city has 39% market share. And they don't even make the panels, just install them. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/solarcity-vivint-shares-fall-despite-rising-market-share-2014-12-09

It seems the incentives are working, so what's the problem?

That's what they're there for!

Arisia

Bargain

Seems a bargain compared to the fossil fuel industry

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27142377

Tesla, Nissan, BMW mull all-for-plug, plug-for-all electrocar charger plan

Arisia

"Nissan is the world’s largest maker of cars that include an electric motor, while BMW and Tesla account for 80 per cent of the world’s battery-only cars."

Well pretty well every part of that line is wrong apart from it has words.

Nissan is the biggest seller of battery only cars (BEVs). Toyota with their hybrids probably sold the most cars with an electric motor. Tesla own top end of the market but in volume not even close to Nissan. BMW are mainly selling range extended i3s not pure battery ones. Hard to find correct numbers but between 2:1 or 5:1 REx vs BEV for i3s.

Terminology: http://blog.ucsusa.org/comparing-electric-vehicles-hybrid-vs-bev-vs-phev-vs-fcev-411

Look inside ELON MUSK'S CAR! Tesla S wundervehicle has voom

Arisia

Re: Gadget lust

The closest Jag is probably the XFR as it's a full five seater.

That'll take £65k from your wallet, so only a couple of years to make that back.

Depreciation - who knows - but it's a fair bet it'll be better than the expensive to run XFR.

Which is unfortunate because I'd like a Model S :)

Arisia

Re: Depends a lot on the used market

Apparently there is a 600,000 mile Tesla engineering mule car which still has 70% battery life. Sorry, I can't find a proper source for that information though. 8 years is the warranty. If everything only lasted it's warranty life then an awful lots of cars would be in the scrapper. I think you can expect considerably more than 8 years life.

Arisia

Rapid Charging

Just so we can compare like with like....

The Leaf can use rapid charging too. This is at 50kW not 130kW but with the smaller battery can go from 0 to 80% in 30 minutes.

Apple's Hacker Princess dumps fruity firm for Elon Musk's Tesla

Arisia

Re: What a piece of work

Yeah, it seems the Norwegians hate the Tesla.

Useless in winter

Terrible sales

NASA shines a light on rehab plan for crocked Kepler probe

Arisia

Aerodynamic spacecraft

Perhaps future spacecraft should be looking at their aerodynamic shape for some missions.

Also using magnetic fields to manage direction using components with no moving parts. Anyway have an input on what's possible via electomagnets?

US watchdog snaps on thick gloves to probe Tesla's FIREBALL e-cars

Arisia
Facepalm

Did anyone actually read the article?

Currently the stats show it has fewer fires than conventional cars.

None of the people were hurt and the fire took a long time to spread as it was well contained in the front.

Also the fires were after high speed collisions.

High energy storage systems are always going to have the potential to fail hot with catastrophic damage.

If flammable liquids poured out of it in a crash, then what would the reaction be?

You know, like a normal car...

Gates, Zuckerberg to deliver free coding lesson

Arisia

Blockly

Crazy idea I know but I went to the web site and looked.

The demo tutorial is a maze navigator using Blockly which seems to be web based scratch.

http://blockly-demo.appspot.com/static/apps/index.html

For teaching basic logic this is ideal.

Boffins find MEXICAN WAVE pattern in random climate wobbles

Arisia

Pause then ramp?

So there's a pause for 30 years or so. Does it then ramp up twice as bad as before?

End the result the same but we get to live in denial for a couple more decades?

That's what I read from "By removing the long-term trend from man-made greenhouse gases"

Ground control? My space helmet is FILLING WITH WATER!

Arisia
Go

Re: It the Shuttle was still operative...

Space suit weight = 280lb (http://www.howstuffworks.com/space-suit4.htm)

Shuttle LEO cost per lb = $27,000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle_program)

Cost to lift a space suit = $7,560,000

Cost of space suit = $12,000,000

Repair costs etc = unknown

So it'd almost be worth the bother.

Anyway you could put it in SpaceX capsule for return. Their costs are approx $10,000 per lb with a full capsule.

http://www.tested.com/science/space/44509-what-spacexs-dragon-brought-to-the-international-space-station/

New 4TB drive spaffs half a telly season into your eyes AT ONCE

Arisia
WTF?

Shurely sum mishtake - $75.99 for 4TB!??

It's £140 for a 4TB drive here!