matt-p

And yet I had stuff in other zones that was affected.

This has been a thing almost as long as I can remember. What's new here?

On a personal level maybe not yet, but for a medium business upwards it may make sense.

I think that's basically true, but the barriers exist because the state can't realistically afford a 100% take-up rate. Adding friction means people who don't really need say the extra £100 a month often won't bother with the hassle, while people who genuinely need it are more likely to decide it's worth the effort.

Obviously that's a very messed up and broken system. I'm not defending it at all.

I wonder where eu-west is.

I wouldn't. When you're operating at say 95% realtime capacity suddenly losing even lets say 10% of your compute leads to major pain.

Super super cool technology. Last I heard, most deployments outside submarine networks still require a spare fibre, and the interrogators are at least an order of magnitude more expensive than OTDR, which you’d probably still want anyway. It would be amazing to see the cost come down enough for widespread deployment though.

You say stupid, but I actually would find it sad to see beautiful buildings that are in many cases hundreds of years old defaced with loads of small condensers bolted on to the face.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't have A/C but rather all flats use one system with a large roof condenser, or where that is not possible district cooling or ground source.

I mean yes, true, thank you - fixed. Though I honestly thought permitted development existed for them in scotland and stuff too.

It’s not banned, but getting permission to install the outside unit is essentially “hard” in some parts of Europe.

In England, if you own a house, you generally have permitted development rights to install one, subject to some fairly common-sense rules. If you live in a flat, though, it’s a very different story: you will need planning permission *as well as* freeholder consent, and the process generally involves engineering/structural/architect drawings and freehold-consent paperwork. The freeholder can also charge you their legal and administration costs, even if they ultimately reject the application. Essentially it's >5K of paperwork which might be wasted if it's rejected even just to install a single 5KW split.

So in the hottest parts of London and other major cities, where a large proportion of people live in flats, installing AC can be very difficult in practice. In the cooler commuter towns, where houses are much more common, it’s considerably easier.

Why can't they build it into new flat blocks/houses? Nothing outright prevents it but everyone does their best to discourage it. The London Plan, for example, uses a “cooling hierarchy” which 'seeks to reduce any potential overheating and also the need to cool a building through active cooling measures' so good luck getting planning for it.

I don't know about 'very likely' though I too know some, if you were doing that you'd buy the 10G upgrade anyway right? Or a studio which comes with 10G

Eh, for what? Most people use it only for 'internet' and 1G full duplex is generally still enough for that. Happy for 2.5G though :)

I think it's actually good to have a forced reboot from time to time, but then I'm not very disciplined in closing stuff I'm no-longer using! Especially like docker containers I was using months ago, that I forgot to shutdown.

Another option is a 'maxed out' mini e.g M5 Pro/64GB. Mini is super easy to travel with if you know there'll be a 'dock' at the far end e.g office<>home or whatever.