raggles

128 GB memory is also lame. I'm hankering for a windows equivalent of the mac studio that came with 512 GB.

In New Zealand at least, a lot of this data seems to come from imagery; it's quite outdated, the cables are all missing and the voltages are pretty hit and miss. Cool project though.

Not just America. People are stealing copper in very rural areas in my country; in many cases the price they get is hardly paying for the petrol to drive there. We have a whole team now in my company dedicated to repairing damage from copper theft, it's rampant.

I have a job that deliberately runs at 2am and 3am... to update the time in a bunch of really old PLCs for DST. And check that every other device on my telemetry network has correctly updated its time.

And this reminds me of the time that my colleague put DB15 on a whole bunch of drawings, and we ended up with DA15 connectors instead of DE15. If I see DB9 on any drawing that comes across my desk, it will be corrected.

I use both DA-15 and DE-15 all the time in my line of work, and I am fastidious about using the correct terminology on all my drawings. Manufacturers are ironically some of the worst at getting this right.

Right, but bitcoin is global, not just for one country. And while anyone can participate in theory, in practice the big mining pools always get their first. And if a quorum of mining pools gets together, they can fork the blockchain or do all sorts of other shit. Without those mining pools confirming transactions you can't even spend your bitcoin. As a functional currency, I just can't see how this is any better, like in any way. Probably why it hasn't actually become a functional currency and is just a traded commodity that everyone is hoping like hell won't crash and burn one day.

I don't really follow bitcoin, but last I checked over 75% of block confirmations came from the top 3-5 mining pools. That seems a hell of a lot more centralized than the traditional finance system.

Yes I have seen OpenGL applications refuse to start with AMD cards in some circumstances due to a bug in the AMD drivers, but never had a problem on NVIDIA cards

you aren't getting to use your remote GPU through it.

Um yes you are? I use AutoCAD and other software using GPU all the time over rdp

Am grid engineer. You nailed it. It can get incredibly complex modelling this stuff, and reading all the armchair observers banging on about 'single points of failure' is amusing.

I imagine there was some sort of cascading failure involved, as in the transformer tripped, but this then overloaded another circuit which then tripped, or there was a power swing that was unsustainable, then you get over\underfrequency tripping off load and generators... this can get quite complex quite quickly in power systems, especially smaller systems found on islands.

yea same boat. I've always wondered what normal depth perception looks like. On the plus side, it is fun to challenge people to wear an eye patch and play table tennis or some other activity and see how bad they are when they haven't developed monocular depth perception cues.

This is just not at all true, and we are hardly dependant on the USA, which makes up only 10% of our trade. The way that Americans think the world revolves around them is embarrassing.

I think this is changing, in my country the equivalent of PE will soon be required for a number of engineering disciplines, not just civil. But that's kind of missing the point, which is that professional engineering is guided by fairly comprehensive standards, such as those from the IEC (or ANSI, IEEE), and compliance with those standards is generally a legal requirement.

Yep, I'm an Electrical Engineer, and I also write code. I don't like the term Software Engineer, because there is none of the of the regulated safety and quality mechanisms required for software that are normally associated with professional engineering.

If only there was an equivalent to DnSpyEx for Java. Can't wait for Recaf4 to be ready.

It might be the colloquial term, but if you ask someone for a DB-15 connector then theres a good chance you'll get the wrong one. I regularly use both DE-15 and DA-15 in my line of work (among others), and any document that refers to a DB-xx for anything that isn't the DB shell size will be corrected.

I'm guessing it's for time sync, but any clock worth it's crystals will keep good time for quite a while. Every substation generally has GPS time sync if it isn't fibre connected, for synchrophasor measurements or accurate timestamped waveform captures for example.

Just coming here to say this. I was reversing a license file for some software so I could play with it yesterday, and I could implement the encryption/decryption code direct in the data processor of imhex, such a time saver.

oh dear, I wish I hadn't looked. So many of the power lines in my area have the wrong voltage, and zone substations with incorrect spellings. Now I feel obligated to fix it.

I noted 5-10 mins of near total blackout at 0630 Friday morning in the UHF band in New Zealand on the telemetry networks that I manage. Nearly all 200 of our radios reported unusable signal quality and interestingly some radios were down about 20dB+ on rssi as well. Observed it happening in real time, took about 2 minutes to figure out the problem... nothing else can cause that many radios to go down over such a wide area at the same time.

New Zealand has recently directed distributors to change to cost reflective pricing, which resulted in big increases in the fixed daily charge, and moderate decreases in the variable charge. Lots of people hated it, but it's clearly the right thing to do.

In my country there is no obligation for power distributors to connect new customers to the grid if it is uneconomical. Those people are expected to sort their own off-grid installation. Stringing 5km+ of conductor for one customer makes no sense at all. In fact, many distributors are actively paying a small number of (willing) customers to install off-grid installations so their grid connection can be decommissioned as it saves everyone money.

What do you use for face tagging? It's a tedious task, I used to use Picasa but it wasn't XMP and it's deprecated now

not OP, but I just find caves fascinating. You can be wiggling through small passage for hours and hours, and then suddenly find yourself in a cavern large enough to fit an airliner that not even the most powerful lights can see the other side of. There are passages that are completely white with flowstone, others with enormous crystal pools, others with formations that seem to defy gravity, and others with bones of prehistoric creatures (and of course most of them which are just boring old rock\sand\mud). Also, cavers are just fun to be around. It takes a certain type of person to want to go and get wet, cold and muddy in the dark for hours or days at a time.

Join a local caving group\club (grotto in the US I believe). Pretty much the only way, unless you happen to know an experienced caver that you can tag along with.

I love cracking these homegrown license schemes, people come up with really interesting stuff and as you say it usually only takes a few hours. Can't crack flex though :(

I like it too, but as a comms engineer working in electrical substations I have encountered many, many situations where it didn't just work, rs485/22 too. Issues with inter-chatacter delay, timing of control signals, different earth potentials, electrical interference, mangling of signals when going through multiplexers or media converters are common. Now that everything is fibre Ethernet my commissioning times are waaaay faster.

Your numbers are way out, poles usually last between 25 and 70 years generally depending on what they are made from. Hardware (pins, insulators, crossarms) last at least 15 years usually, often much longer. There is certainly nothing that needs replacing every 3-5 years.