"They are the company that handle the provision of fibre-optic connections to exchanges, which ISP's lease and resell onto home and business customers"
No, they are the company that handle the provision of old-fashioned copper wires to DSLAMs in the cabinets on the road. The whole fiber thing in the UK is simply a lie. Fiber broadband in the UK is practically non-existent, probably far below a million subscribers.
From the cabinets, practically all ISPs will also use OpenReach to backhaul those connections to an exchange, because it is rather expensive to lease fiber to every cabinet. Some ISPs will use OpenReach to backhaul from the exchange to a larger interconnection point, again because there are a whole lot of exchanges in the UK, and it is hard to do economically unless you are a very large ISP. However, TalkTalk has fiber to practically everywhere as well, so at least there you have options.
Virgin is the one exception to all this, their pretend-fiber is coax whereas OpenReach pretend-fiber is twisted-pair.
Insurance does not work like that. Insurance moves money around, it does not magically take the damage away. If a trillion dollars worth of damage is done, the world production will be severely affected, and many innocent people will still be hurt.
Bitcoin is a currency. A store of value. Currencies do not cause production or wealth, they just move it around.
It is sad that you are disappointed that Bitcoin does not cause production or wealth. However, it is fundamentally unfixable, so I hope you feel better about it soon.
(The real problem with Bitcoin is that it is a lousy currency because it is so illiquid. The whole point of a currency is to be liquid. 4 transactions a second is a joke.)
"Base load" is a fancy word for "inflexible production which can't follow demand". Which is exactly what solar and wind power is.
There is absolutely no problem with solar and wind taking over the inflexible power generation. They just need the flexible power generation for when their output doesn't line up with the load. Exactly like nuclear or coal. On the upside, at least they are reasonably easy to throttle on short notice, unlike traditional nuclear, and you never have a gigawatt of wind or solar offline for a few months because of maintenance or safety problems.
There is precisely one country where the switch has happened, so your statement is a bit meaningless.
Denmark is trying to be on the leading edge of the curve, and the reason for that is certainly the DKK signs in the eyes of the politicians. Ever since the first 3G auctions brought in fortunes, the politicians act exactly the same way whenever someone mentions the word spectrum.
As to the largest choice of equipment, it still can't beat FM here fifteen years after the introduction. As Norway demonstrated, switching off FM cuts off a massive chunk of listeners. This is because car listening is a large chunk of total listening, car radios generally do not get replaced for the life of the car, and even now DAB+ is something you pay extra for. Yes, DAB has the largest choice of equipment for any digital radio standard. Talk about damning with faint praise.
Like the AC says, DVB-T2 works absolutely fine up to motorway speeds. You might struggle on a high-speed train if you are going directly towards or away from the transmitter.
You can get portable TV sets for car passengers, they work just fine.
So explain why Norway switched to DAB+... There isn't all that much equipment to choose from, in the vast majority of Europe most new cars do not come with DAB+ receivers.
The only reason to switch to DAB+ is to be able to sell more broadcasting rights so we can have more stations playing the same music. But broadcasting rights are worth nothing if no one can hear what is broadcast, which is why Norway had to switch FM off.
DAB is transmitted at a higher frequency than FM, so it has worse ground-following properties. For hilly areas, go low-power DRM in the old AM band. That will provide FM-like quality with AM-like propagation. Or go DRM+ on the FM band.
FM does not have particularly amazing range and noise resistance. Something as simple as reflections makes it cut out regularly. The primary reason it works so well is that it is being blasted out at 150kW from 250m tall towers, whereas the competing digital signals generally get stuck with 25kW on a 50m tall tower.
That said, radio is legacy and needs to be treated like that, not infested with useless "upgrades".
DAB is a horrible standard. DAB+ is not so bad, except it is useless for local radio stations.
There are two sensible digital radio standards. DVB-T2 (because the transmitters already exist for TV, so the first 50 or so radio channels are practically free) and DRM+ (Digital Radio Mondiale).
DAB+ is almost as good as DVB-T2, but DVB-T2 was out years before. It makes zero sense to switch TO DAB+, it is legacy before it gets implemented.
FM is an extremely wasteful way to encode signals intended for human ears. It would take a very incompetent set of engineers to come up with a digital standard worse than FM. Alas, they succeeded in doing just that and saddled us with DAB.
DAB+ is a reasonably decent if not exactly cutting edge implementation of digital radio though. If you spent a comparable amount of money on making a DAB+ network like what was spent on the FM network over the years, you would get flawless reception and wonderful sound for the same amount of channels.
What happens instead is that DAB+ is underfunded and the bandwidth overcrowded with way too many stations. Many of them have to even fake stereo! The signal cuts out way too often because the transmission power is so much lower.
Just say screw it and stream. But who has a car radio for streaming that is as easy to use as the FM ones are?
The fundamental problem with BitCoin is not its volatility. The volatility will eventually go away if the underlying technology turns out to be sound.
The fundamental problem with BitCoin is that the number of transactions it can handle is orders of magnitude below what is necessary for a reasonably liquid currency with a total value in the billions of dollars. As it is, BitCoin only works as long as most of that money either sits still or moves around in huge transactions of at least thousands of dollars at a time.
It is entirely possible that the problems get solved. However, a quadrupling like BitCoin Cash has done is just nowhere near orders of magnitude improvement.
Here we go again with all the insinuations and accusations. The/etc/fstab was correct with the old init. It was incorrect with systemd. Therefore no amount of mount -a would have helped.
"So, you were relying on bugs to boot your systems?"
Have you stopped beating your mother when she tells you to come out of your basement?
systemd fails silently if something is wrong in/etc/fstab. It just doesn't finish booting. Which is moderately annoying if you have access to the system console and you can guess that an unchanged/etc/fstab from before systemd that worked for a while with systemd is now suddenly toxic
If you do not have easy access to the system console or you are not blessed with divine inspiration, that is quite a bit more than annoying. Thanks to the binary log files you cannot even boot something random and read the logs, but at least you aren't missing anything, because nothing pertinent to the error is logged anyway.
The problem is that one camp won't admit that old init is a pile of shit from the 80's whose only virtue is that the stench has faded over time, and the other camp won't admit that their new shiny toy needs to be understandable and debuggable.
A proper init system needs dependencies and service monitoring. init + monit does not cut it today. Systemd does that bit rather impressively well. It's just terrible at actually booting the system, all the early boot stuff that you could depend on old init to get right every time, or at least spit out aggressive messages about why it failed.
62% of the lower heating value or net calorific value. Counting like that allows modern power plants to reach combined efficiencies over 100% when they do district heating as well.
However, it is still a really good value even if I think it is cheating. Only fuel cells are likely to do significantly better, and they are not really viable yet. Maybe they will never be viable.
Yes. That is what an economic crisis IS. The economy produces less actual stuff, so obviously you get to have less than before. If you feel entitled to still have as much as you did before, well, feel free to feel cheated.
However, it is not the fiction of money that took that away from you. It is the reality of lower production.
The amount of bitcoin being used as a currency is diminishingly small, the vast majority is being held by speculators.
If anyone is doubting this statement:
Bitcoin is stuck at less than 10 transactions per second. Total value of all bitcoins is somewhere close to 200 billion USD. This makes Bitcoin practically useless for actual transactions. The ratio of transaction capacity to value just isn't there -- it only works if most of the money sits still the vast majority of the time.
Those 4 trillion made-up dollars (assuming that figure is correct, I haven't checked) were far less than the amount of made-up dollars destroyed when private banks and investment houses failed or got close to failing.
People love to complain about quantitative easing, but they have no idea how most money is ACTUALLY created and destroyed.
Central banks do not have that kind of control over the money supply. They can try, but since the vast majority of money is created and removed by private banks, the central banks are dependent on political control over those to actually accomplish significant changes.
There is plenty of economics with rigorous mathematical proofs. Generally the less useful parts of economics, since the axioms don't tend to match reality.
Slashdot Mirror
"They are the company that handle the provision of fibre-optic connections to exchanges, which ISP's lease and resell onto home and business customers"
No, they are the company that handle the provision of old-fashioned copper wires to DSLAMs in the cabinets on the road. The whole fiber thing in the UK is simply a lie. Fiber broadband in the UK is practically non-existent, probably far below a million subscribers.
From the cabinets, practically all ISPs will also use OpenReach to backhaul those connections to an exchange, because it is rather expensive to lease fiber to every cabinet. Some ISPs will use OpenReach to backhaul from the exchange to a larger interconnection point, again because there are a whole lot of exchanges in the UK, and it is hard to do economically unless you are a very large ISP. However, TalkTalk has fiber to practically everywhere as well, so at least there you have options.
Virgin is the one exception to all this, their pretend-fiber is coax whereas OpenReach pretend-fiber is twisted-pair.
Insurance does not work like that. Insurance moves money around, it does not magically take the damage away. If a trillion dollars worth of damage is done, the world production will be severely affected, and many innocent people will still be hurt.
Bitcoin is a currency. A store of value. Currencies do not cause production or wealth, they just move it around.
It is sad that you are disappointed that Bitcoin does not cause production or wealth. However, it is fundamentally unfixable, so I hope you feel better about it soon.
(The real problem with Bitcoin is that it is a lousy currency because it is so illiquid. The whole point of a currency is to be liquid. 4 transactions a second is a joke.)
Would he sleep on the street if the free housing allowed him to smoke?
"Base load" is a fancy word for "inflexible production which can't follow demand". Which is exactly what solar and wind power is.
There is absolutely no problem with solar and wind taking over the inflexible power generation. They just need the flexible power generation for when their output doesn't line up with the load. Exactly like nuclear or coal. On the upside, at least they are reasonably easy to throttle on short notice, unlike traditional nuclear, and you never have a gigawatt of wind or solar offline for a few months because of maintenance or safety problems.
There is precisely one country where the switch has happened, so your statement is a bit meaningless.
Denmark is trying to be on the leading edge of the curve, and the reason for that is certainly the DKK signs in the eyes of the politicians. Ever since the first 3G auctions brought in fortunes, the politicians act exactly the same way whenever someone mentions the word spectrum.
As to the largest choice of equipment, it still can't beat FM here fifteen years after the introduction. As Norway demonstrated, switching off FM cuts off a massive chunk of listeners. This is because car listening is a large chunk of total listening, car radios generally do not get replaced for the life of the car, and even now DAB+ is something you pay extra for. Yes, DAB has the largest choice of equipment for any digital radio standard. Talk about damning with faint praise.
Like the AC says, DVB-T2 works absolutely fine up to motorway speeds. You might struggle on a high-speed train if you are going directly towards or away from the transmitter.
You can get portable TV sets for car passengers, they work just fine.
So explain why Norway switched to DAB+... There isn't all that much equipment to choose from, in the vast majority of Europe most new cars do not come with DAB+ receivers.
The only reason to switch to DAB+ is to be able to sell more broadcasting rights so we can have more stations playing the same music. But broadcasting rights are worth nothing if no one can hear what is broadcast, which is why Norway had to switch FM off.
DAB is transmitted at a higher frequency than FM, so it has worse ground-following properties. For hilly areas, go low-power DRM in the old AM band. That will provide FM-like quality with AM-like propagation. Or go DRM+ on the FM band.
FM does not have particularly amazing range and noise resistance. Something as simple as reflections makes it cut out regularly. The primary reason it works so well is that it is being blasted out at 150kW from 250m tall towers, whereas the competing digital signals generally get stuck with 25kW on a 50m tall tower.
That said, radio is legacy and needs to be treated like that, not infested with useless "upgrades".
DAB is a horrible standard. DAB+ is not so bad, except it is useless for local radio stations.
There are two sensible digital radio standards. DVB-T2 (because the transmitters already exist for TV, so the first 50 or so radio channels are practically free) and DRM+ (Digital Radio Mondiale).
DAB+ is almost as good as DVB-T2, but DVB-T2 was out years before. It makes zero sense to switch TO DAB+, it is legacy before it gets implemented.
FM is an extremely wasteful way to encode signals intended for human ears. It would take a very incompetent set of engineers to come up with a digital standard worse than FM. Alas, they succeeded in doing just that and saddled us with DAB.
DAB+ is a reasonably decent if not exactly cutting edge implementation of digital radio though. If you spent a comparable amount of money on making a DAB+ network like what was spent on the FM network over the years, you would get flawless reception and wonderful sound for the same amount of channels.
What happens instead is that DAB+ is underfunded and the bandwidth overcrowded with way too many stations. Many of them have to even fake stereo! The signal cuts out way too often because the transmission power is so much lower.
Just say screw it and stream. But who has a car radio for streaming that is as easy to use as the FM ones are?
https://hackernoon.com/why-i-f...
I must admit that I did not know about Gentoos init system. It seems very sensible.
If you think your feedback was constructive, I suggest you re-read it.
The fundamental problem with BitCoin is not its volatility. The volatility will eventually go away if the underlying technology turns out to be sound.
The fundamental problem with BitCoin is that the number of transactions it can handle is orders of magnitude below what is necessary for a reasonably liquid currency with a total value in the billions of dollars. As it is, BitCoin only works as long as most of that money either sits still or moves around in huge transactions of at least thousands of dollars at a time.
It is entirely possible that the problems get solved. However, a quadrupling like BitCoin Cash has done is just nowhere near orders of magnitude improvement.
Here we go again with all the insinuations and accusations. The /etc/fstab was correct with the old init. It was incorrect with systemd. Therefore no amount of mount -a would have helped.
"So, you were relying on bugs to boot your systems?"
Have you stopped beating your mother when she tells you to come out of your basement?
It did not fail to a recovery shell after being left overnight.
And a generic recovery disk can obviously have journalctl installed. It just didn't. Which meant I had to mess with PXE and all that again.
Nothing pertinent to the error was logged. Feel free to not believe it.
Your attitude is part of why systemd is so reviled.
systemd fails silently if something is wrong in /etc/fstab. It just doesn't finish booting. Which is moderately annoying if you have access to the system console and you can guess that an unchanged /etc/fstab from before systemd that worked for a while with systemd is now suddenly toxic
If you do not have easy access to the system console or you are not blessed with divine inspiration, that is quite a bit more than annoying. Thanks to the binary log files you cannot even boot something random and read the logs, but at least you aren't missing anything, because nothing pertinent to the error is logged anyway.
The problem is that one camp won't admit that old init is a pile of shit from the 80's whose only virtue is that the stench has faded over time, and the other camp won't admit that their new shiny toy needs to be understandable and debuggable.
A proper init system needs dependencies and service monitoring. init + monit does not cut it today. Systemd does that bit rather impressively well. It's just terrible at actually booting the system, all the early boot stuff that you could depend on old init to get right every time, or at least spit out aggressive messages about why it failed.
power stations with diesel generators
No. Just no. Diesel generators are fine for backup for a data center, they are useless for grid use. Oil is just too expensive for that kind of thing.
62% of the lower heating value or net calorific value. Counting like that allows modern power plants to reach combined efficiencies over 100% when they do district heating as well.
However, it is still a really good value even if I think it is cheating. Only fuel cells are likely to do significantly better, and they are not really viable yet. Maybe they will never be viable.
Yes. That is what an economic crisis IS. The economy produces less actual stuff, so obviously you get to have less than before. If you feel entitled to still have as much as you did before, well, feel free to feel cheated.
However, it is not the fiction of money that took that away from you. It is the reality of lower production.
The amount of bitcoin being used as a currency is diminishingly small, the vast majority is being held by speculators.
If anyone is doubting this statement:
Bitcoin is stuck at less than 10 transactions per second. Total value of all bitcoins is somewhere close to 200 billion USD. This makes Bitcoin practically useless for actual transactions. The ratio of transaction capacity to value just isn't there -- it only works if most of the money sits still the vast majority of the time.
Those 4 trillion made-up dollars (assuming that figure is correct, I haven't checked) were far less than the amount of made-up dollars destroyed when private banks and investment houses failed or got close to failing.
People love to complain about quantitative easing, but they have no idea how most money is ACTUALLY created and destroyed.
Central banks do not have that kind of control over the money supply. They can try, but since the vast majority of money is created and removed by private banks, the central banks are dependent on political control over those to actually accomplish significant changes.
There is plenty of economics with rigorous mathematical proofs. Generally the less useful parts of economics, since the axioms don't tend to match reality.