58 karma · joined October 26, 2018
You should absolutely re-run these numbers to be sure, but you might find you can use electric heating far more often than you might currently be doing.
Agreed, but for a government service where you update your license, or tell them about selling a car or something, there's no real 'more' money. Being closed at 3am doesn't lose the opportunity in the way that it would if you were selling widgets. It instead forces the would-be users at 3am to wait until the morning.
Now, what the British Navy would do about this I'm not precisely sure. But even to escort the ships away would put a stop to it, and the UK wouldn't be cut off.
However, fundamentally, even if fibre took the most direct route from your house, directly straight-line to the datacentre with the server in, and then straightline from there to your friends on the East Coast, the time taken to complete that journey and back is still going to be 150-200msec or so; so it won't be as snappy as if you all lived nearby, sadly.
It's a nice idea, but sadly it'll lose out to commercial realities in many cases.
Sure, the vendor lock does allow them to sell the device at a lower cost, but you pay for it later.
I respectfully beg to differ. There are massive chunks of Scotland which have no cellular reception at all. There are many places where there is service from some-but-not-all providers. Of those places, there are a few where the service is glacial in performance.
Example: if you stop at The Green Welly Stop in Tyndrum (FK20 8RY), you'll have coverage from only two of the mobile networks. Vodafone and o2 have a coverage patch there. Have a look at the coverage maps (bidb.uk aggregates them all). It's absolutely patchy, and certainly not contiguous.
It's a bodge though, because it creates the extra monitors as 'virtual' monitors, screen records them, and sends the data to the dock. It doesn't play back DRM-protected video for instance. But if you don't need that, it works very well indeed!
Therefore, there's now an offence for this: Taking Without Consent: https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/theft-act-offences
Any other large-scale individual action driven by a particular event happening could also fall under this description; concert tickets going on sale for example.
Of course many workloads might not need to go from zero to 3,000 containers that quickly - but it's useful to know that the underlying infrastructure can do this so that you know it ought to handle far smaller demand spikes without much concern.
I'd also suggest running in as many AWS regions as you're able, so that there isn't a lovely block of bridges all in one region.
This website does some analysis on the pricing: https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile/
The useful part is that, if a user of the tariff is sufficiently engaged, not only do they save money, but by shifting their demand to follow supply it helps with the increasing adoption of renewable sources.
I browse with JS disabled, but when I hit a site which doesn't work properly (and which I want to use still), I can allow only the domains which it needs to work.
It's quite surprising how quickly many sites now load!