edogg
Re:Indian government blocks access to forty-three mobile apps
on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @03:00PM (#25202406)
Is that a bad thing? Seems like Japan is a pretty nice place to live.
Re:I Miss Working from the Office
on Saturday November 21, 2020 @06:24PM (#25173503)
I had friends in Hawaii who were stock traders, they really had to wake up early
Re:Study identifies reasons for soaring nuclear plant cost overruns in...
on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:58AM (#25168262)
The components we are installing have chips in them, but we don’t worry about what chip because the manufacturer of the product keeps it working the same way. The modicon quantum Plc uses the pentium 166 chip and was released in 1994 and I can still buy it today from Schneider although they encourage new installations to use a newer product. I am sure I will still be encountering old quantum Plc in the field when I retire, the platform will have a 50 year lifespan.
Even when a line of controllers is end of life the manufacturers provide an upgrade path to their newer product line.
Re:Study identifies reasons for soaring nuclear plant cost overruns in...
on Friday November 20, 2020 @01:05PM (#25163088)
You have drawings that show how it works and a supply of spare parts. When it stops working people can figure out why using the drawings and then fix or replace the broken or worn out components.
Re:Airbnb S-1
on Monday November 16, 2020 @10:42PM (#25120061)
25k seems excessive, but 10% of a years anticipated revenue might be appropriate.
It is not unusual to have to but up a bond in order to bid on a contract.
Re:A 5-story building in China 'walks' to new location
on Sunday November 15, 2020 @07:15PM (#25106386)
the building was saved and moved instead of being torn down in order to preserve architectural heritage. From the outside the building doesn't look special.
Re:Rolls Royce plans UK class of mini-nuclear plants
on Thursday November 12, 2020 @12:15PM (#25071991)
Giving a grant to an existing company with a long history of technical excellence and delivering products to build a new product and a factory for it means jobs that don’t go away. A power plant built creates jobs to run it for as long as it exists.
On the other hand All construction jobs are not permanent - they finish building the project and have to move on to the next one, if it is the factory for the power plants, the power plant itself, the next power plant, or something else.
18 million pounds is a lot of money, but it’s a pittance compared to what tech companies are raising from VCs. In relation to the size of tech companies and the size of investments in them, 6000 jobs and the kick start to an industry for 18 million pounds seems like a bargain to me.
Re:Rolls Royce plans UK class of mini-nuclear plants
on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @10:14PM (#25065999)
It’s 6000 jobs, generating electricity without producing carbon, sustaining an industry and construction and manufacturing know how, and creation of a product for export. These seem like worthwhile pursuits to me and a good use of public funds.
Re:New Zealand struggles with plague of peacocks
on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @10:33AM (#24980523)
The cost of the property reflects the value of the rents, the cost of financing, property taxes and maintenance. Rents are probably not that out of wack with the landlords costs. If the landlords revenue does exceed costs you could see it as either money the landlord needs to save for future major repairs like new roof, new appliances, payment for their labour, return on the down payment invested, etc. if you can’t beat them join them and if you can’t join them then maybe it isn’t quite so easy and cut and dry.
Re:The self-driving car is a red herring
on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @05:38PM (#24924412)
Whistler, BC
Re:Dutch flying car gets permission to drive on European roads
on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @11:59AM (#24920330)
There are little air strips all over the place you could land at and then instead of having to figure out a ride to your destination which can be difficult in rural areas you can drive.
Re:A CIA Officer Visits Moscow, Returns with Mysterious, Crippling Hea...
on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @02:20AM (#24915834)
A Canadian study linked the illness symptoms of Canadian and American diplomats in Havana to heavy use of the pesticide used against mosquitoes for Zika virus.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/havana-syndrome-neurotoxin-en...
Re:How 30 Lines of Code Blew Up a 27-Ton Generator
on Tuesday October 27, 2020 @02:29AM (#24904921)
It sounds like they changed the settings on the protection relays synch check function to allow it to close the generator breaker with the generator out of sync. Or maybe they added a phase shift correction factor to the voltage transformer inputs so the relay thought the generator was in sync when it wasn’t. Either way changing some settings that allow a machine to be destroyed is ... not an achievement. Engineers all over the world put great care in to calculating and identifying the relay settings that will protect the machine instead of allowing it to be damaged. Uploading incorrect settings is like intentionally missing a basket in basket ball, it’s not very impressive.
I am sure generators have been connected to the grid out of phase and had their shafts broken before. I have seen a colleague accidentally jumper out the entire sync check circuit and we would have closed the generator breaker had the breaker’s close coil not been burnt out (the reason for the errant troubleshooting).
It is concerning that destroying this diesel generator was even necessary. Maybe they needed some good video to get some funding.
Now on the other hand if they somehow hacked the relay then that’s a problem. Older relays just had serial ports but new ones have Ethernet and you can send settings by ftp, and things I remember from bbs days like Kermit Or zmodem or something. Not ssh yet anyway.
So yeah it is easy to do damage, you can shoot insulators or transformers with a gun or you could release a thousand squirrels or snakes and that would cause outages too.
One power plant was great it just never seemed to have any electrical problems. Someone went to update the relay settings after it has been operating for years and found out no settings had ever been uploaded to the relay!
Re:Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet
on Monday October 26, 2020 @11:24AM (#24897156)
I would be interested in reading one of the studies in which the default was set to an inferior product and people stayed with the default despite there being a superior competitor and nearly zero effort required to switch.
Re:Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet
on Sunday October 25, 2020 @08:52PM (#24891700)
i'm not arguing that it's bad to pay to be the default. If the default service is worse than another people will switch to the other service. People install all kinds of apps on their phones, they can switch the default search engine too.
Re:Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet
on Sunday October 25, 2020 @03:17PM (#24889057)
It’s just the default - if another search engine is compelling people are free to switch
Re:Deep geothermal energy is poised for a big breakout
on Thursday October 22, 2020 @12:08AM (#24854794)
are your advantages that prevent industrials from installing their own cogen know-how and economies of scale in project management, procurement, frabrication, installation and commissioning? I wouldn't have thought a company like fortis would ignore 7MW for 30 million * however many compressor stations they have that are near the distribution lines.
Re:Deep geothermal energy is poised for a big breakout
on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @08:23PM (#24853752)
With the downturn in oil and gas in Alberta Is there a lot of talent and drilling rigs available? Maybe it is a cheap time to drill some holes?
Re:Odroid-HC4 is a $65 2-bay network attached storage device
on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @12:48PM (#24849592)
I got a Synology 218. It does checksumming like zfs to guard against bit rot. and I didn’t have to spend any time wading through how to’s and blog posts to make it work, “just works” out of the box
Re:Why Does the U.S. Have Three Electrical Grids?
on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @11:56PM (#24844624)
Ac transmission lines are regularly 500kv with some famous ones in Quebec being 750kv. I believe there are even higher now.
Re:Mystery Weapon Attacks Continuing, Even on U.S. Soil
on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @12:00PM (#24838929)
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/canadian-research-...
Or google Havana syndrome pesticide
Re:Mystery Weapon Attacks Continuing, Even on U.S. Soil
on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @02:04AM (#24834349)
The attacks in Cuba were found to be illness brought on by new pesticides and aggressive use around embassies to kill mosquitos to prevent diplomatic staff from catching Zika virus.
Re:Most homebuyers and renters not warned about flood or wildfire risk
on Monday October 19, 2020 @06:32PM (#24831762)
Where I live sellers have to disclose underground furnace oil tanks that they know of. We don’t get hundreds of pages of disclosures, maybe 10 pages of documentation such as zoning and covenants and surveys and seller disclosure form.
Re:Most homebuyers and renters not warned about flood or wildfire risk
on Monday October 19, 2020 @03:24PM (#24829887)
Such as?
Re:Cheap Electric Power Measurement: Repurposing a WiFi power plug
on Saturday October 17, 2020 @09:26PM (#24814872)
I think the repurposing is as an alternative to powertop as he is looking at what makes his laptop use more or less power. He wants to use the power measurement feature of the WiFi receptacle to analyze the power efficiency and consumption of code running on the computer.
Re:Cheap Electric Power Measurement: Repurposing a WiFi power plug
on Saturday October 17, 2020 @09:25PM (#24814868)
The author of the article uses KST from KDE to generate the plot from the CSV stream. KDE is amazing. It is used by airbus for analyzing sensor data test results, others in astronomy, and myself in commissioning power plants. KST is so good for zooming and scrolling around plots generated from live and historical datasets really quickly. It outshines all the analysis software on big SCADA systems like osi pi, factory talk, wonderware, etc.
Re:Eric Yuan's Visa Application Was Rejected 8 Times
on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @10:29PM (#24784214)
TFA leaves out what the problem is with Cisco that wouldn’t allow him to allow his engineers to improve webex while they all worked for Cisco.
What else aren’t people at Cisco able to achieve because they are at cisco?
Re:Spotify, Ever the Fans of Openness
on Monday October 12, 2020 @11:00PM (#24761825)
Napster was pretty close to that
Re:Separating Hype from Hydrogen: EU's 6GW Electrolyzer Plan
on Friday October 09, 2020 @11:36AM (#24730914)
I’ve worked on 30 small hydro projects and don’t think I’ve seen a single tadpole killed. Often they have to create new habitat if some existing habitat is altered to compensate. Probably 15-30% of the total project budget is spent on environmental permitting, monitoring, and design and construction of functionality that make the plant environmentally friendly such as restricting rate of change of water level to 1” per hour
Re:Pointers from Portugal on Addiction and the Drug War
on Thursday October 08, 2020 @12:30AM (#24715816)
To the century of humiliation starting in 1839 with the opium war [1]. I’m told saving face is very important in Chinese culture. I could see it being quite easy for people in China whose job it might be to prevent the export of fentanyl or fentanyl precursors to only do the minimum to keep up appearances. not nearly as blatant as the British but were but we aren’t getting any help from China in preventing the deadly drugs from being shipped here. It would be better if they would just send actual heroin instead of having casual mdma and cocaine users dying from fentanyl.