I'm sure Tesla Motors would be surprised to learn that they have many tens of billions of dollars coming to them to rebuild the grid. And why are you bringing up federal loans earmarked to make up for shortfalls in the private industry when it comes to the advancement of technology to defend private industry anyways?
People aren't loaning because there's physically no money left. People aren't loaning because they can't tolerate the risk, especially when we just went through a crisis where our risk models catastrophically failed. The safest entity on the planet to loan to is the government of a superpower.
So, if I were in the private industry today and wanted to turn our patchwork of local electric grids into an actually coherent national system so it wouldn't be so gorram unreliable, unable to handle localized variable sources, and unable to tell less important consumption to shut off rather than take down the whole grid with it, how would I go about doing that? Who do I turn to in order to loan me the tens of billions of dollars needed to make it a success?
The biggest problem with this argument is that it's completely inaccurate. Its not being paid for with taxpayer money... now. It's being paid for with taxpayer money a couple years from now, plus a couple years worth of interest. The extra things that people are buying with their salaries from this are not coming at the cost to someone else *now*.
That may seem like a trivial distinction, but if that raises consumer confidence and restores the US (and world) economy even just a little bit sooner, then it's absolutely a good thing. Plus, unlike the other oft cited case of this (war spending), we actually get something out of it other than craters and rubble -- in this case, wind turbines.
It's a much simpler task. You use solar heat to drive an absorption or adsorption cycle rather than a compressor. Datacenters need lots of cooling, after all.
There's a pervasive myth that C++ is just objects on top of C. Or that because you can use objects, that means that you *have* to use them everywhere.
C++ is useful for tons of things. Someone who doesn't know how to use templates will create a nightmare's worth of code in a situation that calls for them. People who don't use object data structures in areas that aren't performance critical (and oftentimes even where they are, since there are a lot of optimizations in the std libraries that a lot of people miss out on when reinventing the wheel) often create a memory management nightmare and leaky code. People who don't use const correctness slow down their code and are at more risk for bugs. And on and on down the line.
You misunderstand the concept of cache hits. Whether you get a cache hit or miss isn't dependent on how much memory your *program* loads up; it's based on what's being executed at a given point in time. If you have a core loop iterating through some data structure, if you're not calling any big libraries, then they're not affecting cache hits for your core loop; the cache is going to be dominated by that data structure. Quite the opposite, C++ actually often has a *greater* chance of cache hits because data stays local to an object, and when a block of data is read from memory to the cache, you're more likely to get variables that you need cached.
Again C != C++.
C is a subset of C++. If C can do it, so can C++. Anyways, why did this become a C vs. C++ thread?
C++ and javascript aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, I'm checking slashdot right now during a break from debugging a home project that makes use of both of them. I'm quite fond of the mixture of a C++ backend with a javascript frontend that can be used over the web. In this particular case, it's an electric vehicle simulator that lets you specify your vehicle details and plot a route over Google Maps. The frontend uses form POST requests to call the simulator to run the CPU-intensive simulation on the backend (where it has access to many gigs of heightmap data). The backend talks to the frontend by returning javascript function calls with the results asynchronously.
I've done several projects of this nature before. One weakness is that if the backend takes longer than two minutes, the connection gets dropped. Not a problem on this project, but on a web-based Povray interface I did in the past (lets you customize car paint jobs, then renders the car in a variety of scenes), it was. The solution is simply to have the frontend take responsibility for periodically fetching the results from the backend.
All in all, I find it a very nice balance between the cross-platform web-accessible functionality of an HTML/Javascript frontend and the extreme speed of a C++ blackend.
For example, back while she was blogging, an ever-popular blog for writers was that of Miss Snark, a pseudonym of a NYC literary agent. She talked several times about the way agents and authors try to game their reviews and ratings. For example:
"Nonetheless I find it fascinating that buyers have cottoned on to the "five star friend" phenom. Miss Snark is as guilty as the next agent of both writing reviews (hey I DO like this book...I didn't exactly buy it though) and soliciting friends, relatives and passersby on the street to do the same. Time for a new strategy I guess....finding books from your cross town rivals and writing 1 star scathing reviews."
It's not just getting everyone you can to rate your book well -- it's also things like "front loading" (having your family, friends, agent, dog, whoever) buy as many copies as they can to boost the sales figures and attract more attention / make potential customers less hesitant to purchase it.
Adding insult to injury, you tell me the book was "warmly received by reviewers". What you mean is that Amazon has good reviews, so I know you're not playing on my side of the street.
Here's some help: "reviewers" at Amazon are not reviewers. They're reader comments. Generally anonymous.
In case anyone else hasn't mentioned this to you yet, Amazon reviews don't meet criteria of an objective review. (Miss Snark loves snarky reviews of course). You'd be better off to tell me your mom liked it.
If we're going for bad casting, I vote for Cheech Marin as Jet, Queen Latifah as Faye, Rodney Dangerfield as Ein, and Summer Glau as Ed. The soundtrack should be composed by Phillip Glass.
Add to that the savings in materials (1.5" copper wiring? Booster cables for diesels aren't anywhere near that thickness) and there's no real reason to change.
At least when it comes to HVDC power transmission, I've seen it reported that they can put *more* power over lines of a given thickness than they'd be able to with AC, *and* it takes less wires. The justification for the more power aspect is that the voltage is limited by arc-over, and in DC it's constant, at near max, while in AC it fluctuates up and down, averaging significantly below its max. Also, there's no skin effect. Concerning wires in HVDC: with ground return, you only need one wire, and without ground return, you need two. I saw one interesting scheme for retrofitting existing AC lines involving having two positive and one negative, or vice versa, with the matching ones each running at under their rated current and the non-matching one running over its rated current, but rotating which line is which every few minutes to prevent overheating.
Now, what goes on in HVDC is not necessarily applicable here, of course, since that involves extreme voltages and distances...
As opposed to the news of the new "fuck everybody" "Global Climate Change Czar", who was the one responsible for the Clinton-era ozone changes that had no scientific basis,
Amazing the anti-science idiocy that grows on this site like weeds. "95% of peer-reviewed papers on the subject say one thing, but the remaining 5% are the ABSOLUTE TRUTH and action on the other 95% has no scientific basis!"
I despise Common Sense Media. Their email opt-out system is broken. I've had to twice threaten them with the CAN SPAM act to get off their mailing list. The first time, they took me off... and then I magically reappeared on it six months later.
That's a good point, though. Today, we're in an environment where emails have been ruled to have the same constitutional privacy as telephone conversations. Back in the 90s, that wasn't the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's play Situation Replacement, shall we?
----
Location: Germany
When: December 1945
>> Can we get all the ugly from the Holocaust in the open so we can start to earn our respect back?
Help the victims. Heal them physically and mentally. Pay them. Acknowledge wrongdoing. Admit guilt. State the facts. Do this all extremely publicly.
But burn those goddamn pictures. All they will do is piss people off, no matter how hard you try to make things right.
----
Sometimes the ugly needs to be seen.
I'm sure Tesla Motors would be surprised to learn that they have many tens of billions of dollars coming to them to rebuild the grid. And why are you bringing up federal loans earmarked to make up for shortfalls in the private industry when it comes to the advancement of technology to defend private industry anyways?
People aren't loaning because there's physically no money left. People aren't loaning because they can't tolerate the risk, especially when we just went through a crisis where our risk models catastrophically failed. The safest entity on the planet to loan to is the government of a superpower.
By a scallop's forelocks, that is odd timing!
So, if I were in the private industry today and wanted to turn our patchwork of local electric grids into an actually coherent national system so it wouldn't be so gorram unreliable, unable to handle localized variable sources, and unable to tell less important consumption to shut off rather than take down the whole grid with it, how would I go about doing that? Who do I turn to in order to loan me the tens of billions of dollars needed to make it a success?
Note: When I said "this argument", I meant the GP's, not yours.
The biggest problem with this argument is that it's completely inaccurate. Its not being paid for with taxpayer money... now. It's being paid for with taxpayer money a couple years from now, plus a couple years worth of interest. The extra things that people are buying with their salaries from this are not coming at the cost to someone else *now*.
That may seem like a trivial distinction, but if that raises consumer confidence and restores the US (and world) economy even just a little bit sooner, then it's absolutely a good thing. Plus, unlike the other oft cited case of this (war spending), we actually get something out of it other than craters and rubble -- in this case, wind turbines.
Just thought I'd add: here's an example solar air conditioner. Some are even reversible and can become heat pumps in the wintertime.
It's a much simpler task. You use solar heat to drive an absorption or adsorption cycle rather than a compressor. Datacenters need lots of cooling, after all.
"... Washington came first, and he was perfect..."
And there's a pervasive stubborness about refusing to admit that that's not all it is. Perhaps back in 1980, but certainly not now.
There's a pervasive myth that C++ is just objects on top of C. Or that because you can use objects, that means that you *have* to use them everywhere.
C++ is useful for tons of things. Someone who doesn't know how to use templates will create a nightmare's worth of code in a situation that calls for them. People who don't use object data structures in areas that aren't performance critical (and oftentimes even where they are, since there are a lot of optimizations in the std libraries that a lot of people miss out on when reinventing the wheel) often create a memory management nightmare and leaky code. People who don't use const correctness slow down their code and are at more risk for bugs. And on and on down the line.
You misunderstand the concept of cache hits. Whether you get a cache hit or miss isn't dependent on how much memory your *program* loads up; it's based on what's being executed at a given point in time. If you have a core loop iterating through some data structure, if you're not calling any big libraries, then they're not affecting cache hits for your core loop; the cache is going to be dominated by that data structure. Quite the opposite, C++ actually often has a *greater* chance of cache hits because data stays local to an object, and when a block of data is read from memory to the cache, you're more likely to get variables that you need cached.
Again C != C++.
C is a subset of C++. If C can do it, so can C++. Anyways, why did this become a C vs. C++ thread?
C++ and javascript aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, I'm checking slashdot right now during a break from debugging a home project that makes use of both of them. I'm quite fond of the mixture of a C++ backend with a javascript frontend that can be used over the web. In this particular case, it's an electric vehicle simulator that lets you specify your vehicle details and plot a route over Google Maps. The frontend uses form POST requests to call the simulator to run the CPU-intensive simulation on the backend (where it has access to many gigs of heightmap data). The backend talks to the frontend by returning javascript function calls with the results asynchronously.
I've done several projects of this nature before. One weakness is that if the backend takes longer than two minutes, the connection gets dropped. Not a problem on this project, but on a web-based Povray interface I did in the past (lets you customize car paint jobs, then renders the car in a variety of scenes), it was. The solution is simply to have the frontend take responsibility for periodically fetching the results from the backend.
All in all, I find it a very nice balance between the cross-platform web-accessible functionality of an HTML/Javascript frontend and the extreme speed of a C++ blackend.
Hey, they could use more cake in the DOE. :)
I'd just love to hear him use the phrase, "Look at me, still talking while there's science to do."
You really want to push back the release of River Tam Beats Up Everyone by having Summer take on this role?
For example, back while she was blogging, an ever-popular blog for writers was that of Miss Snark, a pseudonym of a NYC literary agent. She talked several times about the way agents and authors try to game their reviews and ratings. For example:
"Nonetheless I find it fascinating that buyers have cottoned on to the "five star friend" phenom. Miss Snark is as guilty as the next agent of both writing reviews (hey I DO like this book...I didn't exactly buy it though) and soliciting friends, relatives and passersby on the street to do the same. Time for a new strategy I guess....finding books from your cross town rivals and writing 1 star scathing reviews."
It's not just getting everyone you can to rate your book well -- it's also things like "front loading" (having your family, friends, agent, dog, whoever) buy as many copies as they can to boost the sales figures and attract more attention / make potential customers less hesitant to purchase it.
Hey, it's sales... In the words of Miss Snark:
Adding insult to injury, you tell me the book was "warmly received by reviewers". What you mean is that Amazon has good reviews, so I know you're not playing on my side of the street.
Here's some help: "reviewers" at Amazon are not reviewers. They're reader comments. Generally anonymous.
In case anyone else hasn't mentioned this to you yet, Amazon reviews don't meet criteria of an objective review. (Miss Snark loves snarky reviews of course). You'd be better off to tell me your mom liked it.
I thought he made a good alien in The Day The Earth Stood Still. The problem is, he always comes across like an alien.
Keanu, a tip: The point of acting is to seem like you're not acting.
Oh, wait, Dangerfield is dead, isn't he?
Perfect; they can just splice him in from other movies he's done.
If we're going for bad casting, I vote for Cheech Marin as Jet, Queen Latifah as Faye, Rodney Dangerfield as Ein, and Summer Glau as Ed. The soundtrack should be composed by Phillip Glass.
If we switch over to HVDC for long-distance power transmission, they may well not be.
Add to that the savings in materials (1.5" copper wiring? Booster cables for diesels aren't anywhere near that thickness) and there's no real reason to change.
At least when it comes to HVDC power transmission, I've seen it reported that they can put *more* power over lines of a given thickness than they'd be able to with AC, *and* it takes less wires. The justification for the more power aspect is that the voltage is limited by arc-over, and in DC it's constant, at near max, while in AC it fluctuates up and down, averaging significantly below its max. Also, there's no skin effect. Concerning wires in HVDC: with ground return, you only need one wire, and without ground return, you need two. I saw one interesting scheme for retrofitting existing AC lines involving having two positive and one negative, or vice versa, with the matching ones each running at under their rated current and the non-matching one running over its rated current, but rotating which line is which every few minutes to prevent overheating.
Now, what goes on in HVDC is not necessarily applicable here, of course, since that involves extreme voltages and distances...
As opposed to the news of the new "fuck everybody" "Global Climate Change Czar", who was the one responsible for the Clinton-era ozone changes that had no scientific basis,
Amazing the anti-science idiocy that grows on this site like weeds. "95% of peer-reviewed papers on the subject say one thing, but the remaining 5% are the ABSOLUTE TRUTH and action on the other 95% has no scientific basis!"
I despise Common Sense Media. Their email opt-out system is broken. I've had to twice threaten them with the CAN SPAM act to get off their mailing list. The first time, they took me off... and then I magically reappeared on it six months later.
That's a good point, though. Today, we're in an environment where emails have been ruled to have the same constitutional privacy as telephone conversations. Back in the 90s, that wasn't the case.