Posts by Roland6 10735 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010
Suspect part of the uk problem revolves around who is responsible for the smart meter. If the local network provider was responsible, then all meters in an area would most probably be linked over the supply cable to a local management hub. However, it seems it is the energy company the consumer is purchasing energy from, who are building the smart meter network and they naturally don’t have full control/oversight of a segment of the local network…
> Having "non-standard" electrical configurations is bad bad bad.
A client has a domestic central heating/hot water boiler for the offices attached to a warehouse, unfortunately, the service company doesn’t read the notes and keeps sending out a person qualified to work on industrial boilers, who then can’t work on the domestic boiler, call out a domestic boiler engineer and they refuse as it’s installed on business premises which their liability insurance doesn’t cover them for…
As for non-standard PV/battery/generator installs, much depends upon the PV installer.
The PV install my neighbour had a couple of months back, included PV and battery, plus switchable EV charging from PV and/or Home battery, plus the distribution panel (in the meter cupboard) included a spare pair of connectors for a generator/second PV-battery array. Whilst the installer was using components they stocked, they were double checking everything as currently they were only selling a few of these more capable (and expensive) systems.
I suspect the utility installers have only been trained to do basic installs of their specific (more basic) system, hence why they run away…
> Yes so basically if you don't buy into the EV/PV subsidy game
From what I can see PV’s with intelligent battery control are a good reason to get a smart meter. Size your battery and PV array correctly and you will be drawing very little from the grid, but able to sell to the grid at times financially beneficial to yourself. Trouble is firstly these systems are expensive and more difficult to install and require a level of geekiness to operate. secondly, the benefits accrue to the consumer, not the supplier, which will be why the suppliers won’t be offering these systems…. Although, a smart disruptive supplier could act as a broker between users on the same local loop, enabling one users’ surplus to be used by other users instead of them waiting until “cheap” time to draw down energy from the distribution grid. As more houses have solar panels et al, we can expect to see more instances where dumping electricity back to the grid is not an option as there are insuffiicient users for that energy.
> I think what is coming is "limit pricing"
Given the level of debt currently ie. numbers of people struggling to pay, I suspect the energy companies will be wanting more people on prepay/PAYG, this also nicely gets rid of the centralised contract billing system and removes the debt the energy companies are currently having to manage…
Another trend/response has been to increase standing charges which have the effect of reducing the billing significance of “small” variations in dynamic energy usage (eg. Boiling a full kettle rather than just the amount of water needed for a single cup).
> They allow you to adjust your consumption to dynamic surge/discount pricing periods.
That doesn’t actually save me energy. Yes, I can reorganise my life to enable the tumble dryer to run at cheap rate time, but it will still consume the same amount of energy.
The only way I can reduce my energy consumption is to change settings (eg. Wash at 30C instead of 40C) or replace appliances with more energy efficient appliances. However, replacing appliances is no guarantee of energy savings: my 2021 dishwasher has a better energy rating than the circa 2003 one it replaced, but on the cycle I use most the energy saving is negligible but it does use 2 litres less water.
In saving energy, ie. helping me to change settings and appliances, my ancient Owl energy monitor has been of more use, as I could attach it to individual appliances and monitor their actual energy consumption when operated on different settings/programmes. About the only useful thing a smart meter gives over the Owl, is that I (the user) don’t have to configure the monitor to reflect my tariff and so the smart meter display unit can display a better approximation of my £ energy cost.
Given the world of smart meters, there is no need to actually take a picture; a mobile 2/3g base station should be able to establish a connection long enough to upload readings and download charging changes. Obviously, real-time or more dynamic tariffs and usage shaping is out of the question.
Missed icon, it was more of a joke than serious.
Climategate was more than emails, the full investigation uncovered a long running attack on climate research data (not just UEAs) from a group/groups unknown in the oil states of the US…
Basically, with historical reference data being held on computer, alter that record… Climategate (the full report) is a wake up call to the custodians of vast historical dataset such as the climate data, to ensure the data is secured against bad actors…
It’s a conspiracy!
Given the level of money washing around the climate change denier lobby groups, who were sufficiently well funded to attempt to hack climate data ( Climategate).
It would not be outside the realms of possibility for one of these groups to have seeded the clouds, just to create an incident they can use to discredit climate scientists…
Yes, they will want to tap into existing infrastructure as it will be cheaper for them…
They could however:
Lay their own interconnect
Build a zero carbon power generator on the site…
I bet their plans don’t include solar panels, wind turbines, heat recovery or reuse (market gardening)…
There is something not right about the assumption that a private developer can build a facility that will have a significant power draw and they expect the public/taxpayer to pay the capital costs of building the necessary generating capacity. I expect they will also assume someone else (taxpayers) to fund their coolant/water supply and waste water processing…
> Any places where food shortages occur are due to political issues, not lack of food.
Not quite so simple, Putin’s “Special Military Operation” has significantly reduced Ukraines ability to grow cereals, given Ukraine was one of the worlds major exporters of grain to places like Africa, that’s a problem…
> If they could process stuff that grows without any help like seaweed
Trouble is once you crunch the numbers, we very quickly discover there isn’t sufficient natural supply or land to farm to produce the quantities our industries demand; suggest looking at Drax…
> Saying that, there are new x86-32 SoC embedded PCs on sale today.
The laugh is the these will be used in “simple” focused applications, so most of the processing power will be used by the application. I suspect if we were to measure the number of clock cycles devoted to a specific application per second (ie. Unit of time) it would not be dissimilar to what a current processor with all the overhead of current OS’s, background tasks annd concurrently running anpplicaions also devoted to the same application.
At least C supports comments…
I remember writing an awk script, the final script was practically unintelligible, hence the documentation consisted of the steps I took (with commentary) to develop the implemented logic(*) and then fold it into the final script.
(*) the requirement was something that was simple to express in English, but not so easy to codify.
People who obviously only write and view code on screen, in days of yore, the line printerwith fan fold paper was your friend…
Personally, the issue was one of balance, nicely structured and readable code with lots of nested functions that run slow or larger less readable code (well without the fanfold printout) which could run with less overhead.
Obviously when writing real-time code (back in the 1980s) in memory constrained systems, you avoided excessive function calls.
I remember some of the early Unix documentation was simply papers/articles which gave examples and defined a few of the parameters, leaving the reader to discover the full parameter list for commands such as tar, dd. A task not made easy without access to source code.
I was being too concise
Tab = white space consisting of one or more space characters.
Obviously on the typewriter you could set the tab spacing (as you can with MS Word et al).
I suspect the norm for typewriters would have been 0.5 inches, circa 5 space characters.
For IT restricted to 80 columns (displays, punch cards etc.) and basic fixed width font, spacing of 4 spaces was deemed sufficient.
> Will Intel's shareholders agree to keep funding the fab construction or will they lose their nerve?
Depends on whether they can convince them that with this investment Intel will improve its chances of maintaining market dominance and thus be able to operate as a monopoly. Ie. Borrow the business plan of Uber et al.
>I mean just *how* do you print 6000 pages? In the whole 10 year lifetime of the printer, as a home user?
That's only 50 pages a month.
But basically, once you are in the buy once and use for circa 10 (or more) years without any additional consumables purchases, you don't need an ink subscription...
>It would be interesting if some Shenzhen startup managed to peddle printers...
Once you start looking beyond PCWorld - there is Kyocera, Konica Minolta, DEVELOP ...
The trouble is that whilst there has been a degree of standardisation in the enterprise space - it seems many have standardised on the Konica Minolta engine etc., the consumer market is still seen as something special.
>It never occurred to me until today that I’ve no idea how they got the names, DOB and addresses of basically every teenager in England - creepy.
Electoral Role.
If you were on the Electoral Role, political parties, companies etc. could pay to blindly send a mailshot to all newly turned 18 voters. Obviously, if you were on the public Electoral Role, they can directly send personalised mailshots to you.
Similar applies to births, deaths and marriages.
>I wouldn't be too sure about razor handles not being a loss leader.
Trouble is, yo probably think the handle is worth more than it actually is.
Going through the catalogues of marketing giveaways, I suspect the true cost of many mass market premium razor handles is sub 50p.
> … to let customers know its printers are intended to work only with cartridges with an HP "security chip."
Just visited PC World, none of the HP printers on display or in their (HP) shipping boxes carried any label to this effect.
As these shops store both OEM and third-party inks, the normal member of the public would assume the printer can take any displayed cartridge that claimed compatibility with their printer.
Also the “security chip” was only introduced to prevent customers from using third party inks…
Not got a packet of stamps to hand, but from that picture it looks like the stamps might have individual serial numbers, so what’s happened is someone forgot to scan the packet/sheet to change its status to released for sale/use.
OR… the behind the scenes issuing/sales system didn’t correctly record the sale/issuing of the stamps… and if that system is … Horizon, this would be par for the course…
> (in over 11,500 branches, each of which might have two, three even four active terminals at any one time)
Based on a own datacentre system I designed and installed in circa 2004 that’s:
A top end Z-Series fronted by 4 mid-range “Unix”(*) boxes, double it for failover and add a third as a spare/tertiary failover configuration in a different data centre.
Although with the number of back end integrations required, I would probably replace/supplement that Z-Series with a two-tier configuration of high-end Unix servers, making it easier to add/remove bespoke servers for specific product/service lines.
Obviously the in-branch server will also be a reasonable “Unix”(*) box, so most of the traffic will be transactions rather than terminal sessions.
Alternatively, you could go the web server approach, which would require a larger server infrastructure. in which case the in-branch server is minimised, but has the limitation that a loss of service would mean the counter closing rather than not being able to process particular services.
I suspect cloud providers will push this load on their rebranded version of IBM cloud.
The issues in development and testing is that, at this scale, is you don’t use the apps and dev tools out-of-the-box to build the production system, so many of the developers will have had no experience of this style of development.
I remember from that project the main DB application provider saying stuff could be done overnight, until we confirmed they had only used their toolset on DBs up to circa 400GB; we were going to be using them on a 4TB DB…
(*) By Unix I mean a Unix/Linux box actually designed to be a server to support high levels of I/O, rather than a beefed up PC running Windows/Linux.
> POL and Royal Mail are different organizations.
I seem to remember the in Post Office systems are operated through Post Office Counters Ltd.
I suspect this permits greater clarity over transactions and avoids monies destined for say Royal Mail appearing on and thus distorting Post Office Ltd accounts.
> Furthermore, the systems used in Asda for monitoring sales and reordering stock are going to be very different from the integration required at the post office for renewing passports, currency exchange, parcel tracking, etc
They are just back end integrations driven by the barcode. However, some do require front end integrations, which can be achieve in the same way web browsers run applets for passports, phone credits etc. with the applet selection also being driven by the barcode…
> ASDA PoS will not simultaneously be handling sales for Tesco and Morrisons as well as their own.
Suggest you visit Asda’s, Aldi et al.
Aldi are a concessionary for the National Lottery, to buy a ticket, just scan the bar code and the till will generate a lottery ticket as well as a sales receipt.
Asda etc. whilst being a consessionary for National Lottery, also enable you to top up mobile phones, buy iStore, Amazon etc. vouchers
Just because it goes through a single till doesn’t mean it is handled the same way in the backend and accounts.
As Ukraine is showing, the jet fighter has an increasingly limited role to play.
Also given how the US is struggling to build the current generation of jet fights in a significant quantity, I suggest defence monies would better spent on making existing tech more reliable, eg. having missiles that can handle being flown more than a couple of times before they need their gyroscopes etc. recalibrated (biggest cause of sidewinder failures).
> Maybe Huawei will accept meeting with Western engineers and sharing the technique ?
That would mean admitting Huawei is ahead of the US; can’t see that sitting comfortably with the MAGA crowd and their rose tinted views on American tech.
As for sharing the technique, the simplest will be to purchase some Huawei networking equipment; which the MAGA crowd have been doing their best to prevent people from doing…
> I did wonder why Apple would be the one to pay for Ireland breaking its agreement with the EU
Agree, this aspect of the case was not well explained by the media.
Basically, the EU ruling was Ireland gave Apple illegal state aid, and thus Ireland needed to collect the backdated illegal state aid from Apple and pay the EU its slice from it. The Irish government with Apple jointly appealed. The media to keep things simple, claimed the EU was wanting the money directly from Apple. The Irish government were happy for Apple to be in the limelight rather than themselves…
Given the amount of EU reconstruction monies that Ireland took in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Irish government really were trying to pull a fast one on this, particularly when they said they didn’t need the tax revenues and thus under pay those who financed the economic development of Ireland.
> apologies if this gets too much into nitpicking waffle
Accepted, apologies for not correctly labelling my comment as nitpicking mockery about the status of the Isle of Man.
Totally, agree over the decades TeamGB selectors have been flexible with the nationality requirement, when it comes to outstanding athletes. Yet we all cheer when they win for TeamGB.
Personally, having met and spoken with the guy (several times), Mark Cavendish is a really good ambassador for cycling. A few years back he spent an afternoon at Silverstone individually talking to a couple of dozen young riders (8~16 year olds), giving each 5~10 minutes and having his picture taken with each of them, one of those 12 yo kids subsequently went on to become the UKs junior road racing champion and is now targeting Los Angeles 2028, she still remembers that afternoon.
:)
I was alluding to actual zero carbon emission(*)ie. Nuclear rather than accountancy zero emissions …
(*) just to be up front, nuclear does have emissions, just not CO2.
If we locate the bit barns and population directly next to Sizewell, we are basically saying we don’t need nuclear to be miles away from people…
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