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Comment Re:Solar is not enough (Score 1) 73

It's not, but that's where home batteries come in. I'm a new'ish convert to solar, having had it installed in March and so this will be my first winter with it. I also installed a 12kWh battery to go along side it. The combination pretty much takes care of all my daytime home usage, although it does not take care of my full usage since I also have an EV.

I charge the EV overnight, plus top of the battery on cheap overnight rates. Result is barely any daytime usage for me. How that translates to a 24 hour data centre of course is a question in its own right, would they start affecting the overnight rates? Hmm.

Comment Re:Rinse and repeat (Score 1) 21

USB-C? Apple were laughed at for only including USB-C on their laptops and there are still weird antique societies around keeping USB A kicking when it should have been buried over a decade ago.

If you mean only the world of phones - Apple changed their charging and connection standards three times. 30 pin -> Lightning -> USB C. Each one lasted about a decade, which is what they always said. Lightning came out in 2012, USB C didn't even exist as a standard until 2014. Should they have changed yet again after two years, thus annoying everyone?

Meanwhile, over in the rest of the world you had an assortment of barrel connecters, USB Mini, USB Micro, USB C. USB C emerged the winner (although you still get these hateful USB A->USB C power-only cables. I hate the USB C 'standard', never know what cable you're picking up), and yes Apple was arguably forced to change but then so were others. I'm still plagued by more USB Micro devices than I am USB C, a connector that Apple entirely skipped (thank god).

Comment Re:Incredible but doubtful about priorities. (Score 1) 223

The bigger problem will be manhole covers on suburban streets. These will get sucked out of the road not only wrecking your Tesla but likely also endangering the traffic behind you. You can bet that this feature will be geofenced and only available on approved racetracks --which, for 99% of buyers, simply makes it useless and expensive payload.

Comment Re:Incredible but doubtful about priorities. (Score 1) 223

The launch was a circus that PT Barnum would have been proud of.

A handful of specially built show-pony-cars that are ultra-light, only "flew" once (because they probably didn't have a big enough battery onboard to recharge those gas cylinders) and were the ultimate in Musk-level deceptions.

I'm going to do a full technical breakdown of all the reasons why what we saw was 100 percent marketing and why we will *never* see a Roadster 2 with the claimed specifications ever hit the market -- the laws of physics may be inconvenient but ignoring them is not an option.

What we saw in that demo was Musk, once again, coming up with a clever way to get hundreds of millions (perhaps more) of interest-free funding from people who slept through science classes in highschool. What's even more amazing is that this is the *second* time he's promised unrealistic deliveries, taken hundreds of millions in "reservations" and failed to deliver.

PT Barnum was so right.

Comment Re:Fucking Awesome (Score 1) 223

No word about the real-world range of the Roadster 2.

I find it interesting that Musk can create a show-pony car that does cool tricks that nobody would ever allow on a road-legal car but he fails to address the elephant in the room: "How far will it go on a charge?"

Why did he ignore this crucial aspect of any EV?

Easy, because he originally claimed 1000Km and it is much easier to get a lightweight show-car to do jumping tricks than it is to deliver a real-world essential such as decent range.

The Roadster we saw in the display is just a stunt-car, road-legal production vehicles will be just another fast EV.

If people want to risk quarter of a million dollars reserving one then only one phrase springs to mind:

"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me".

Comment Re:Bosses' folly (Score 3, Interesting) 107

Some of us have been there since the start (and looking at your uid, I'm guessing you have too). My name is in kernel commits from around the 98, and I was using Linux before then of course. I was even a Minix user on my ST at university.

Torvalds was anti source control. Others weren't and yep - started using Bitkeeper. Linus considered this "problem solved - you use what you like, I don't have to". Then he started using it. Then the reverse engineering debacle and then the "Well I'm not using any of the others, I'll write my own then" thing with git.

It certainly isn't down to him that people then started using it as the "if all you've got is a hammer" answer to everything - he's completely blameless in that. But I'm talking about the same kind of people that overused the Design Patterns book (one of the authors of which I've also met, although to my shame I can't remember which one - this was a corporate course and lecture being given at IBM Watson), the same kind of people that turned the very simple agile principles into the corporate behemoth Agile process-ridden abomination it became...those kind. They used git because of the hype, not because of the use case.

Comment Re:Bosses' folly (Score 5, Insightful) 107

I mean, that's exactly what Linus did with git. A lot of his criticisms of existing stuff weren't justified (he went on misplaced rants about how version control software was bad in concept for years), and people have essentially cargo-culted git into areas it wasn't designed for because 'Linus is cool'.

Quick reminder that most commercial software doesn't actually have the problem that git was designed to solve - multiple masters. It was designed to be able to share kernel source trees between Linus' own, Red Hats and I think two others (Yggdrasil and SUSE? It's a long time back and I may be misremembering that). They all had their own quirks and patches, and they wanted to be able to handle commits to any of their trees and accept/reject as per their own preference.

This is pretty much the opposite of what most commercial software wants to do. It wants a single master, with known commits, so that a single known version gets shipped in the end. This is the exact opposite of what git was meant to be, yet it gets used there anyway. I notice the summary talks about a centralised system - yep, that's what you want for commercial, not a distributed multiple master.

Comment It's all old (Score 1) 20

I like this stuff but...
  • Blade Runner (film not book) - 1982, 44 years old
  • Godzilla - 1954, 72 years old
  • Star Trek - 1967, 59 years old
  • Star Wars - 1978, 48 years old

Even the Marvel stuff dates back to the 60s. I think pop culture is a bit stuck in a rut - there are good sci fi series out there, and new ones need to emerge as major cultural touchpoints as well. It's all feeling a bit retread at the moment.

Comment WSL 1 vs 2 speed comparisons (Score 1) 57

Just to note, the WSL containerisation approach is horrible for anything I/O intensive. WSL 1 had ELF binaries supported by the kernel and ran natively, this is a far superior approach to WSL 2's containerisation when it comes to raw speed.

I benchmarked this a few months ago and it was between 300%-600% slower on raw disk performance I/O.

Comment Re:perovskite sucks (Score 4, Interesting) 42

https://www.photoncrystal.com/... gives a 10 year warranty on workmanship defects, and a 25 year warranty on the rated output (no lower than 85% of the initial output after 25 years). They give less warranty about how the curve looks than e.g. this company for traditional panels, but other than that it seems pretty comparable.

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