Posts by jmch

"Funny no one says nothing about climate change when it comes to shiny new tech, be it hardware or sofware, the resources needed to produce it or operate it."

Actually, a lot of researchers and activists are looking into it, the topic of this article being but one example!!

And generally speaking, there isn't much wrong with increased datacenter power consumption in and of itself - as human technology develops, we are going to consume more energy, and as IT becomes more advanced it's normal that information processing is going to increase it's percentage of total consumption with respect to, for example, heavy industry. What we need to make sure is that we are able to meet the increased power demands using renewable and clean power and distribution technologies.

(it is, of course, depressing that a large part of the computational power is going to personal data tracking* and cat videos**)

*This, at least, we can legislate against

** inevitable

"TL;DR A system could be built bottom up. No massive central contract is needed. Software would be an add-on to existing medical record systems by the providers of those systems. Not every patient nor every possible item of data might be served by this but the system could start earning its keep from go-live and grow out from there. Perfection is the enemy of the workable."

Exactly this is what is needed. A cynic might note that there's very little in there that could be turned into a multibillion pound contract and that's why it hasn't happened yet

"if a commercial generator can't make nuke pay without huge government subsidy; then how can a datacentre?"

Basically, SMRs, exactly because they are smaller and self-contained, presenting a smaller risk than a large plant, are (since a couple of years, and at least in the US) regulated differently than large plants. Since a large chunk of the cost of 'traditional' nuclear power station are due to over-regulation, I could see how it could work commercially to work SMRs over larger reactors

Re: Market pricing factors

It's not just 4 providers vs 3, it's 4 covering the UK vs 3 covering an area 40X as big, and the increased possibility that in some remote areas there's only 2 or even 1 provider

Re: Carbon sinks

"Food and fodder gets returned really quickly, textiles less so. Structural stuff should last a good while. "

Even if the carbon in structural and textile items would eventually get returned, capturing the carbon for anything between 10-100 years is already helpful now. Anything that can make the hugs changes required more gradual. And yes, food and fodder get returned almost immediately, but it could provide an economic incentive in the case of combined-purpose vegetation.

"There are limits to the rate at which photosynthesis will remove carbon, however"

I think what's important to get a handle on is - how much land, equipment and power does one need in order to remove X kg of carbon from the air per year? And how does that compare to the cost and land requirements of planting enough trees and plants to capture the equivalent amount of carbon? I honestly haven't the faintest clue to an answer, but AFAIK current CCS technology is not very good and extremely expensive.

Too bored with jumping down the rabbit hole on so many topics.... BUT I have to say that AC is spot-on with regard to the Iraq 2 war, where the highest levels of government in US and UK knew the information about WMD they were feeding the press was fake, and the invasion of Iraq was a pre-ordained target that was going to happen, whatever excuse was dreamed up. Also nice of US-government-friendly media to parrot the government line in the aftermath of 9/11 - done by Saudi bombers with Saudi religious fanaticism and Saudi funding, so lets attack Saudi Arabia Afghanistan, and to boot turn up international domestic surveillance and spying by several notches.

Re: Private Jets, that's the problem

Yes, US airlines have, indeed, evolved into banks that also happen to fly planes and pretty much all their value is now tied into their frequent flyer schemes. This has absolutely nothing to do with monopolistic behaviour or antitrust. Each of the 'big 4' has between 15 and 17% market share (https://www.statista.com/statistics/250577/domestic-market-share-of-leading-us-airlines/).

Amazon, on the other hand, have close to 40% of the "online sales" market (https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-the-leading-retailers-in-us-e-commerce/), with the next closest at just over 6%. Most of the other major "online" vendors are actually online portals of physical shops (Walmart, Target, Costco....) or consolidated verticals (Apple), with the next platform (eBay) having less than a tenth of "online sales". If the category were "online sales platforms", Amazon would probably be around the 70-80% mark.

It's not even remotely comparable.

Re: Now that you mention it

"It's a threat, and the people promoting driverless trucking need to explain how their threat model accommodates it."

Let's start with the obvious, which is that human-driven trucks hardly ever get hijacked, because the value of goods on them usually isn't worth the hassle and the risk. A human driver on minimum wage isn't risking life or limb to protect their employers' cargo, and self-employed truckers have insurance against that sort of thing. Having robo-trucks won't change that calculus significantly from a criminal point of view.

It is also unlikely that high-value cargo would be transported by robo-trucks without additional security layers.

Re: Insider again?

"How come we don't here about such heists in non crypto banking"

Non-crypto banking has plenty of decades in which to close attack vectors and build up an industry best-practice. And there have been plenty of insider jobs against non-crypto banking in decades past...

Almost all of these involve an insider, whether they were 'in on it' or coerced into participating:

https://www.thrillist.com/culture/most-successful-bank-robberies-of-all-time-biggest-heists-in-history

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

"So about 20 chargers for each pump."

Sounds about right, though I would think that you probably don't need *all* the spaces to be electrified because many people will have home chargers and will arrive at the car park with a full-ish battery. So you need maybe 100-150 charging spaces. Clearly 4 charging spaces is ridiculously inadequate. The good thing is, with this model, you don't need these chargers to be 100-200kW+ superchargers, 20-30kW max will be quite sufficient (and also better for the batteries)

Re: I don't understand...

"Proper Brussels friteries have curry ketchup..."

In fact AFAIK the term 'ketchup' derives from the Indonesian 'kecup' (same pronunciation), which was introduced from the former Dutch colony to the Flemish locals. Kecap Asin is more spicy, Kecap manis is sweeter, but still in a more savoury sort of way, so I can see a curry-ketchup mixture working.

My complaint against ketchup is really against the more westernised version, which is far too sweet, and far too little tomato-tasting for my taste

Re: Talking of airlines

"cheap flights end up much more expensive"

The Ryanair model. Your flight is £1*

*£129 including taxes, booking fee, checkin fee, cabin-luggage-bigger-than-a-handbag fee, fee to be in a queue that is moving slightly less slowly than the other queue, choosing a seat with more than 6" legroom. And that'sll be £15 more for an inflight sandwich and coke, thanks!

Re: Good for the planet?

Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming.

Just muddying the waters. Anthropogenic factors are making a measurable difference in outcome

Warming is slower than predicted, Climate Policy relies on inadequate models.

Yes, the exact prediction is difficult. So let's stick our heads in the sand and not do anything until the models are perfect, yeah???

CO2 is plant food, the basis for all life on Earth.

There is far far more to Earth's ecosystems than 'more plants'. Significantly, the amount of CO2 and related other changes isn't itself the issue, it's how quick it's happening so life can't adapt fast enough.

Global Warming has not increased natural disasters.

Pull the other one

Climate Policy must respect scientific and economic realities.

Absolutely. Current climate policy in theory is a lot of bleating about how much we need to do. In practice, global policy is still far too friendly to fossil fuels, and much care is being taken not to upset too many economic applecarts

"he's going to voluntarily kill the goose that is laying the golden eggs"

Given that Twitter was already losing massive amounts of money even before Musk bought it out, more like the goose that was eating the gold coins.

Re: I feel for them

" the consulting company just hired a bunch of people who probably have no business doing this kind of work and tossed them into the meat grinder"

That's what consulting companies do! Win contracts with their top consultants doing the demos, then get the latest green hires to do the work. Plus, people consistently underestimate, by orders of magnitude, the complexity of migrating an ERP system. And the lawyers setting up the contracts often have no idea of all the things that could go wrong to safeguard against in the contracts

Re: Windows Server?

"PostgreSQL does more than MS SQL Server in many ways and has a better dev experience overall"

Native DB functions, maybe, but for me the compelling selling point for MSSQL Server was the BI suite that comes with it. SSIS is far from perfect, but a big step up from coding an Enterprise Data Warehouse ETL with just native SQL. SSAS is equally far from perfect, but the end users love being able to do on-the-fly analysis without having to wait for everything to recalculate. And the suits love that the BI suite comes essentially for free with the SQL Server license (on-premises at least)

Re: whatever it is that Parliament has decided is the right boundary for privacy

"...stated that using a distributed ledger could "cut costs", when single crypto transactions on blockchains are using insane amounts of energy."

In fact one of the main points of blockchain technology is to make transactions expensive *on purpose* because this forces distribution of control (since no single party can have the power/wealth to unilaterally process transactions). BUT keep in mind that it is unlikely that a Central Bank Digital Currency would have a truly distributed architecture and related increased costs. The central bank / government will want to design a blockchain with central control built-in (which would save costs with respect to distributed control).