I can't edit my previous comment (which incorrectly implied that the 3 stations at Droitwitch are going out of the same antenna), but I've done more research and have more information.
Droitwitch LW's antenna uses a T-aerial suspended between two 210m steel masts acting as massive capacitive top-loaded vertical monopole. The signal isn't beamed or shaped, it propagates omnidirectionally and this style of antenna offers _0 dB_ of ERP increase.
Even worse, they're transmitting AM, so the power output dynamically increases with the volume of the analogue audio being transmitted. If you cut off the input to Droitwitch, it'd still be putting out a 500kW carrier wave. When audio is applied the amplitude of the carrier is modulated, so for peak loudness (someone shouting or the loudest spike in music) it can take an extra 50% power to create the upper and lower sidebands - at peak, the Vapotron tubes could be putting out a combined 750kW.
The amplification stage is only ~70% efficient as well, so at peak power it's possible that the site is pulling nearly 1MW from the grid.
--
Compared to a modern UHF DTV transmitter station the differences are wild. The big transmitter near me is putting out 6* DTV MUX's at 174kW ERP each, but that's through a 15dBd UHF array at the top of the mast which gives an obscene amount of gain.
- Mains draw at the wall ~150kW (including cooling and ancillary systems).
- Total TPO (RF energy leaving the cabs) from each of the six transmitters is only ~52kW combined (8.7kW each)
- Output of the combiners after losses of ~0.5dB is ~46kW. We can expect another ~1.5dB of attenuation after forcing it up 300m of waveguide to the top of the tower so we're now sat at a "mere" ~33kW of RF energy going into the bottom of our antenna.
- 33kW with a +15dBd gain gets us to an ERP from the antenna of 1.044 MW.
--------------
Note: Numbers compiled from public sources. All mistakes and misunderstandings are mine. Whilst I do work in a tangentially related industry this is completely out of my area of expertise - in the same way that working as a cleaner at an aeroplane does not mean one knows how to fly or maintain a plane.
You're absolutely right and I was flagrantly wrong - Droitwich does use different antennas for the different LW and MF services (though still has to combine the output of two transmitters for the same service to increase the power and offer redundancy).
I was very much getting myself confused with some of their other transmission sites where they take multiple DAB or DTV services, modulate, amplify and combine them and then broadcast through the same antenna.
Also bear in mind that Droitwitch is radiating 3 different services. Talk Sport (1053 kHz), Radio 4 (198 kHz) and Radio Five Live (693 kHz).
My suspicion is that this means an exciter and a stack of amps per service, which then go through a two stage combiner and out to the antenna. There might even be a pair of exciters and amps per service depending on redundancy.
The combiners (certainly for FM/DAB/TV services) also cause cumulative attenuation as the signal gets combined each time, so even if all 3 are radiating at the same power, the first in the chain might need twice as much amplification to make up for losses.
> Anything in space is more expensive and way harder to do, for a datacenter there is no benefit.
If we pick an extremely fast orbit, then relativity means the hardware will age out (slightly) slower, so I'm sure that'll help with the maintenance issue.
It's the wrong way around though. Ideally we want to speed up our current compute ability not slow it down; if it experiences more time than we do then it can do more. Relative-MHz means my slower hardware becomes tangibly fast again.
General Relativity says mass warps space time, so we need to get these datacentres out of the Earth's gravity well. And the Sun's, and the Milky Way's; out into the deepest void of intergalactic space. The good news is that a maintenance callout is still quicker than some of the earth based DC's I've had gear in, but the bad news is that it doesn't get us much of anything at all.
Special Relativity lets us abuse time with speed (something I discovered as a teenager). Going faster than Earth means we experience less time, so we just need to try and slow down comparative to our home base. The earth is orbiting the Sun at ~30km/s, the solar system is orbiting the centre of the Milky Way at ~230km/s and our local group of galaxies is moving relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background at ~600km/s. We can easily get our DataSpaceCentre up to 1,000km/s or more, so we just need to point it relative to all that movement we mentioned above making stationary relative to the universe. It's completely doable, but (as well as far more variable response times to callouts) only gets us an extra second of compute over a human lifetime.
Fundamentally, we're attacking this problem in the wrong direction. Earth's gravity is comparatively minor, and our piddly ~600km/s relative movement is a tiny fraction of the speed of light. We should be filling The Earth with compute, and then decamping humanity into space and travelling at relativistic speeds. Or put the compute in space and move the Earth into the event horizon of a black hole. You can't do the inverse of Interstellar keeping Earth where it is, the maths isn't in our favour. If everyone lived on (a less moist) Miller's Planet, we'd get 7 years of compute every hour. It puts Moore's Law to shame; the relative MHz are obscene.
There's the obvious problem of communications. I'm led to believe there's issues with radio and light, so this probably isn't a job for fibre. Veritasium seemed to imply a battery, switch, lightbulb and a wire stretching around the globe would light instantaneously, so I'm sure we can come up with a new copper Ethernet standard for low latency over solar distances.
> I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled.
This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
~5 years ago there was a big push (in the USA) to try and solve it with STIR/SHAKEN but I've not been involved or paid attention since then, so don't know if anything came of it. It's a legitimately hard problem to solve though. Lots of engineering and backwards compatibility technical problems, but also political, logistical and commercial issues are abound. You've also got some turtle issues too; it's attestation all the way down.
I don't know how much better modern drives (and SSDs) have gotten[1], but as someone who started digital hoarding in the mid 90's, on-disk bitrot used to be a massive problem. The amount of my video, audio and pictures that suffered damage was palpable. ZFS offering to fix it was massive selling point and the time and based on personal experience, it delivered.
ZFS also lets you specify number of copies on a single disk. This sounds a bit weird, but as drives suffer block failures far more often than total failures, it's actually surprisingly useful in some situations.
[1] My suspicion is significantly, as storage sizes are now multiple orders of magnitude larger and errors per MB can't have scaled up linearly to match.
> ...before you'd want to change your subscription...
For anyone not in the know, Resolve has an exceptionally capable and feature rich free version. A lot of the AI features (and >4k editing) are locked to the Studio licence which is a one-time payment, but works simultaneously on two computers (including different OS's) and allows upgrades across major versions.
I spent less than $300 on it a decade ago and my licence works fine on new v21 released this week. My least-regretted software purchase in 3 decades.
iirc, the OpenFirmware boot image was larger than the equivalent BIOS image - I've got half a memory of resoldering ROM chips on ATi cards so they could be cross-flashed to work in G3/G4 PoweMacs.
If you enjoy this age of SciFi and don't mind radio drama rather than film, then X-1 is well worth checking out. It's a 1955- radio drama with a different short story each episode, quite a few stories from well recognised authors.
WinCE had a load of weird issues (and looked consistently awful), but moving onto PDAs and even phones running it from a world of Psion and Palm was like stepping forward a century. This might be rose tinted recollections - and helps that it coincided with with the consumerisation of WiFi and Bluetooth - but fond memories. I still can't believe how Microsoft had a surprisingly capable mobile OS years before Android or Apple and yet managed to fail so badly.
I've watched my work laptop reboot in the middle of installing Windows Updates without prompting me for a Bitlocker key. It seems obvious to even the casual observer that the pin isn't always required.
I don't remember which updates triggered it, but that was September 2015.
I don't worry about bandwidth or constant CPU use, but the one thing that will kill my mac is burning out the SSD.
The calculator gives numbers for nearly everything, but I can't obviously see how much space it needs for model storage or how many writes of temp files I should expect if I'm running flat out.
The linux kernel traffic control (tc) can do network emulation with qdisc to simulate bad network connections. Add latency, jitter, bandwidth limits, and settable levels of traffic loss to your network interface.
If you're testing hardware or vm's that don't support it or don't have root, you can stick your linux box transparently in the middle by bridging two interfaces, and apply your traffic mangling there. Testing wifi? Use a decent WiFi AP connected to one of these bridges and mangle your traffic once it hits the wire/after it stops being RF.
At a previous job I had a linux box set up with multiple bridges (each set with a different "testing profile" on different vlans) and trunked to a physical switch. Made it very easy for people in the office to attach physical devices through known bad network links by either using pairs of physical switchports or just dumping VMs/SSIDs into the right VLAN so they could test different things (simultaneously) without needing to reconfigure the actual mangling.
Worth noting that tc applies to egress traffic, so if you want a uniformly bad line it needs applying to both sides - but it does mean you can simulate unidirectional link problems too.
This probably isn't the point either, but I get an almost perverse level of calm knowing that for my most favourite albums, I own a physical representation of the waveform trapped in a medium.
I very rarely listen to them in that form, but I honestly like the idea that in a post-Carrington event, zombie apocalypse or mad-max style future where electricity or electronics become scarce, I can (if desperate enough) listen to them with a nail and a cone.
I've been using Win+R to paste it in the windows run box.
Amazingly still works on Win 11 and still seems to keep it local (bypassing the windows search), so I'm pleased to report consistent results for 30 ish years.
Of course, now I've mentioned it out loud, it'll be the next thing to go...
I don't know if it's just me being old and grumpy, but everything windows 8 and later (server 2003) seems like half-baked, unfinished enshittification. Trying to do something even vaguely "advanced" to a network adapter puts me back in windows 95 land along with the run box. The "manage" pane with device & disk manager and logs is from a totally bygone era yet it seems to still be the only way of getting that information. The worst bit is, I'm not complaining. All the bits that look and feel like they've been forgotten since Windows 2000 are the easiest, least infuriating bits of the system I interact with.
Droitwitch LW's antenna uses a T-aerial suspended between two 210m steel masts acting as massive capacitive top-loaded vertical monopole. The signal isn't beamed or shaped, it propagates omnidirectionally and this style of antenna offers _0 dB_ of ERP increase.
Even worse, they're transmitting AM, so the power output dynamically increases with the volume of the analogue audio being transmitted. If you cut off the input to Droitwitch, it'd still be putting out a 500kW carrier wave. When audio is applied the amplitude of the carrier is modulated, so for peak loudness (someone shouting or the loudest spike in music) it can take an extra 50% power to create the upper and lower sidebands - at peak, the Vapotron tubes could be putting out a combined 750kW.
The amplification stage is only ~70% efficient as well, so at peak power it's possible that the site is pulling nearly 1MW from the grid.
--
Compared to a modern UHF DTV transmitter station the differences are wild. The big transmitter near me is putting out 6* DTV MUX's at 174kW ERP each, but that's through a 15dBd UHF array at the top of the mast which gives an obscene amount of gain.
- Mains draw at the wall ~150kW (including cooling and ancillary systems).
- Total TPO (RF energy leaving the cabs) from each of the six transmitters is only ~52kW combined (8.7kW each)
- Output of the combiners after losses of ~0.5dB is ~46kW. We can expect another ~1.5dB of attenuation after forcing it up 300m of waveguide to the top of the tower so we're now sat at a "mere" ~33kW of RF energy going into the bottom of our antenna.
- 33kW with a +15dBd gain gets us to an ERP from the antenna of 1.044 MW.
--------------
Note: Numbers compiled from public sources. All mistakes and misunderstandings are mine. Whilst I do work in a tangentially related industry this is completely out of my area of expertise - in the same way that working as a cleaner at an aeroplane does not mean one knows how to fly or maintain a plane.