Even 95% is on the low side. Most residential-grade PV grid-tie inverters are listed as something like 97.5%. Higher voltage versions tend to do better.

Yeah, filters essentially store power during one part of the cycle and release it during another. Net power lost is fairly minimal, though not zero. DC needs filtering too: all those switchmode power supplies are very choppy.

NZ’s Parliament was regularly described as “more Westminster than Westminster” until we moved to MMP in the 90s.

It has its bugs but it’s far better than FPP and many alternatives.

Oh, indeed. I’m just pointing out that terrible & illegal DRM is hardly a new practice.

You can’t really have effective copy protection on any disc that can be played in a basic CD player; they’re just too simple.

So Sony’s approach was to put an autorun installer for a ‘music player’ on the disk too. If installed, it attempted to lock your CD drive from being used by any other software and couldn’t be easily uninstalled. And they pirated open-source software (yes, that’s possible) to build it.

SMH My Head.

Try the Sony BMG Rootkit, contained on music CDs:

In 2005 it was revealed that the implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs distributed by Sony BMG installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and “phone home” with reports on the user’s private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software’s existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.

Do you mean empathy? Apathy is more like indifference

I’m not sure there are any power grids past the tens-of-megawatt range that aren’t just a 2/3/4 terminal HVDC link.

Railway DC supplies usually just have fat rectifiers and transformers from the AC mains to supply fault current/clearing and stability.

Ships are where I would expect to start seeing them arrive, or aircraft.

Almost all land-based standalone DC networks (again, not few-terminal HVDC links) are heavily battery backed and run at battery voltage - that’s not practical once you leave one property.

I’m sure there are some pretty detailed reports and simulations, though. A reduction in cost of multi-kV converters and DC circuit breakers is essential.

Ah, it’s been a while since I used ChromeOS. Looks like Flatpak was founded about the time I stopped.

Ah, it’s been a while since I stopped using ChromeOS. That’s an improvement.

PV inverters often have around 1-2% losses. This is not very significant. You also need to convert the voltage anyway because PV output voltage varies with light level.

Buck/boost converters work by converting the DC current to (messy) AC, then back to DC. If you want an isolating converter (necessary for most applications for safety reasons) that converter needs to handle the full power. If it’s non isolating, then it’s proportional to the voltage step.

Frequency provides a somewhat convenient method for all parties to know whether the grid is over- or under- supplied on a sub-second basis. Operating solely on voltage is more prone to oscillation and requires compensation for voltage drop, plus the information is typically lost at buck/boost sites. A DC grid would likely require much more robust and faster real-time comms.

The AC grid relies on significant (>10x overcurrent) short-term (<5s) overload capability. Inrush and motor starting requires small/short overloads (though still significant). Faults are detected and cleared primarily through the excess current drawn. Fuses/breakers in series will all see the same current from the same fault, but we want only the device closest to the fault to operate to minimise disruption. That’s achieved (called discrimination, coordination, or selectivity) by having each device take progressively more time to trip on a fault of a given size, and progressively higher fault current so that the devices upstream still rapidly detect a fault.

RCDs/GFCIs don’t coordinate well because there isn’t enough room between the smallest fault required to be detected and the maximum disconnection time to fit increasingly less sensitive devices.

Generators are perfectly able to provide this extra fault current through short term temperature rise and inertia. Inverters cannot provide 5-fold overcurrent without being significantly oversized. We even install synchronous condensers (a generator without any actual energy source) in areas far from actual generators to provide local inertia.

AC arcs inherently self-extinguish in most cases. DC arcs do not.

This means that breakers and expulsion type fuses have to be significantly, significantly larger and more expensive. It also means more protection is needed against arcs caused by poor connection, cable clashes, and insulation damage.

Solid state breakers alleviate this somewhat, but it’s going to take 20+ years to improve cost, size, and power loss to acceptable levels.

I expect that any ‘next generation’ system is likely to demand a step increase in safety, not merely matching the existing performance. I suspect that’s going to require a 100% coverage fibre comms network parallel to the power conductors, and in accessible areas possibly fully screened cable and isolated supply.

EVs and PV arrays get away with DC networks because they’re willing to shut down the whole system in the event of a fault. You don’t want a whole neighborhood to go dark because your neighbour’s cat gnawed on a laptop charger.

That’s not really practical. For a lot of on-call roles, you need the experience of working on the equipment daily to know how to fix it.

Even if you alternated e.g. a week of on-call then a week of normal shifts, you end up reducing the amount of time you have that is completely non-work.

Firemen are absolutely not doing nothing until called out. There’s training, maintenance, cleaning, post-incident paperwork, and probably other duties.

Most Fediverse stuff has web front ends so that any modern browser will work.

My concern would be that Chrome is about to neuter ad blockers, and you can’t use a different browser without replacing the OS.

Both are also heavily privacy destroying.

Damn. Only needs to hit D H K M U X Z to get every letter of the alphabet.

There should be no need for tuning, tweaking, or optimizing on functionality this basic.

If you ask the processor, it will spit out a graph like this telling you what threads/cores share resources, all the way up to (on large or server platforms) some RAM or PCIe slots being closer to certain groups of cores.

Acorn/ARM apparently did much the same thing.

Doesn’t seem possible considering it’s a per ounce listing.

Perhaps it’s suggesting less than 1% impurity in the alcohol; i.e. methanol content?

I didn’t realise it was possible to hate every side of an argument this strongly.

It was a few years back, but after it hit ChromeOS EOL I’m pretty sure it just got some KDE distro; I don’t think I even used LXDE. Didn’t need to do much.

I was mostly using it for web browsing, forums, spreadsheets, documentation etc. Nothing particularly strenuous.

I did have one really fun time of modifying PDF engineering drawings by opening them in Libre Office Draw which it handled kinda OK.

It did get a 240GB SSD but everything else was soldered.

I got a surprising amount of use out of a similarly configured C720 as a general purpose portable machine.

Essentially no processors follow a standard. There are some that have become a de facto standard and had both backwards compatibility and clones produced like x86. But it is certainly not an open standard, and many lawsuits have been filed to limit the ability of other companies to produce compatible replacement chips.

RISC-V is an attempt to make an open instruction set that any manufacturer can make a compatible chip for, and any software developer can code for.