But you'll still lose some of the original power by storing it. And you'll still lose some of the stored power when you discharge it. Nothing is 100% - regardless of how that power is being stored.
And you've still got to build your batteries, no matter what form they take.
Very true. But there are losses all throughout power generation processes- coal power doesn't extract 100% of the energy from burnt coal, but it's still viable.
You just have to absorb these losses into the process. If building an eff-off massive power storage system is integral to having a working wind farm, say, then that's just how it is. The trick is ensuring the wind-power technology is good enough to absorb these extra costs and still be competitive.
"Batteries" (as in the chemical variety) aren't the only way of storing power. While they're the best way of doing it small-scale, they're generally way down the bottom of the charts for national-scale power storage.
Any system where you put power in, to do anything, and then can get power out at a later date is a way of storing power. I won't bore you by reeling off every possible or proposed way of doing this (thats what Wikipedia is for), but one example used regularly right this very moment is water storage. You simply construct a large reservoir or basin near a body of water. You use the surplus energy from your off-peak or high-generation times to power pumps, pumping water into the reservoir. When you reach peak power, or your power source goes down (as renewables do), you let the water flow out of the reservoir powering a turbine. One huge battery, not high-tech in the slightest, relatively cheap to do.
All sorts of others are mooted, from giant mechanical fly-wheels, to superheated rock-salt, to hydrogen production and burning. But like I said, look it up if you're interested.
So pirates (with swords, pistols, and cannons), knights (with swords, catapults, and axes) and space marines (with bazookas, space-fighters, and massive laser cannons) are all OK, but an archaeologist with a revolver and a whip is not?
I struggle to see the problem. If they were making Lego Abrams main armour, with infantry support armed with M16s, I might see your point.
Agreed. I put a bid on an eBay item once, labeled "10 old video cards, don't know exactly what they are" and won it for about £15. A couple of classics in there, including a GeForce 2 and a Voodoo3, and a whole bunch of OEM ones I didn't recognize and had to Google.
Bargainous. Never needed to worry about kitting out my old-hardware machines again. Well worth it.
Please do correct me if I'm wrong, but the 4000+ cores versus Flash playback was the punchline of an Xkcd, used to facetiously highlight and mock the subject at hand. 4000+ core support is not actually a feature of the new kernel release, let alone one that anyone dedicated lots of time to.
The release does have lots of features which, to a desktop user, will seem useless and are aimed at servers and super-computers. But actual 4000+ core computers don't come into it.
Lets please try to remember that the Concorde was originally designed and built 40 years ago, That's -4-0- years. Despite the fact they obviously would have refined and upgraded wherever possiblle in those 40 years, it's still a 40 year old vehicle.
Please find for me, if you can, any other aircraft which first flew on or before 1969 which is still being used, profitably, for trans-continental passenger services today.
Technology marches on. Concorde being withdrawn from service after 27 years in action proves nothing about the feasibility of a modern supersonic airliner designed and built today.
Indeed, the xkcd in question (a link to the page, not the image) doesn't hang on technical accuracy. It's absolutely a commentary on issues with the "Linux Desktop", with developers putting a relatively rare server concern such as support for thousands of CPUs ahead of something that pretty much every PC user expects to have (the ability to watch Hulu smoothly).
There is there the danger of getting carried away with "Linux on the desktop". Although Linux can be and is a desktop OS now, with all that that entails, it was originally, is primarily, and influentially will continue to be a top-dog server OS. It is in use in a huge number of server environments, and super-computer environments too. Features that benefit said servers and super-computers are important, just so much as the features for the desktop users.
Expecting the kernel team to abandon their primary market just because desktops are now important too would be a daft thing to expect.
It's "not a big deal", because the things they actually need to make progress haven't been made open. Adobe essentially only released what their rivals already knew- sort of "barn-door-after-horse-has-bolted" territory.
As such, Gnash's position didn't really change much when they did that, except by allowing them to feel slightly less in danger of being sued.
IMO, trying to reverse engineer Flash is stop-gap at best. Flash is hideous, and a decent long-term strategy should always involve ditching it for something better. Gnash is doing a great service in trying to break dependency on Adobe, but it shouldn't be seen as the solution to the problem.
What you say is completely valid and understandable, but it's a bit rich for people to raise such things in a thread like this.
This is a thread about a new kernel release, and it lists the new features said kernel release brings. Although broken Flash may be more pressing to you than anything listed in TFA, the kernel team who have made the release have absolutely no power to fix it. Complaining that "they should be fixing Flash, not mucking around with all these new features nobody needs" (as Xkcd does) is pointless, seeing as the two things are absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Incidentally, I still harbor the childish fantasy that Google will ride in on a white charger, smite the evil Flash, and establish a utopian video format to replace it (afterall, the owner of You Tube has plenty of incentive to do so). I mean the chances are looking slim now, but a boy can dream...
Only Microsoft and it's enthusiasts could view a company adding support for a popular system as caving in, admitting defeat, or endorsing a rival.
Back in the day, such things would be referred to as "adding useful features", or "doing what your customers want". But then, that's never exactly been MS's strong suit.
Exactly it. Bemoaning that they should have spent the money on pure-solar instead woud be ridiculous, given the facts.
The company from TFA owns a coal power plant. It was very expensive to build, and still has a lot of life span left. The odds of them suddenly saying "lets tear down this money-making plant right now and build a solar plant instead" is nil to none.
Spending money improving the green credentials of the plant is the best anyone should expect of them. If it turns out to be aa good business decision, here's hoping other energy companies follow suit.
As an aside, it's worth pointing out that the method they're employing should work with any type of power plant that uses steam to turn a turbine, not just coal. That accounts for most of the world's electricity supply, including all fossil fuels and nuclear.
People moving to Mac is good for FOSS. Not as good as people moving to FOSS would be, but still, take it as it comes.
One of Linux et al's biggest hurdles was, is and will always be MS's market dominance. Trying to persuade someone to move to a new system is very difficult if said person doesn't even know other systems exist. A world 49% MS, 49% Mac and 2% Linux would be far more promising for Linux than 90%, 8% and 2%.
The problem with trying to create the next "biggest show ever" is that that is very difficult. If they could all make the next Seinfeld, they would all make the next Seinfeld.
If they're avoiding making quality niche shows and failing to make big blockbusters, what does that leave them with? Making crap.
I'd think a lot of networks should focus more on making quality niche shows (which tend to garner high viewer loyalty and long-lasting DVD sales) than pouring more money into sitcoms which COULD turn out to be the next Friends, but will almost certainly sink to the bottom of a pit of 1000 other identical sitcoms.
His idea seems to be more based on the fact that concrete will act as a heat sink than on the concrete having a drastically lower temperature than the ambient. It'll work, but only in the short term- buried concrete doesn't loose heat fast, so once his machine has warmed it up, it's going to stop being useful for a fair while.
How useful it'd be to him depends entirely on what kind of usage pattern his set up can expect.
No comment on how sensible it is from an architectural perspective, though. If he's in an area where there might be freezing, I'd feel very uncomfortable about the possibility of expanding water pipes in my building's foundations. That's just me though.
According to the venerable BBC report on the subject, it isn't as simple as all that. While the vast majority of us possess chromosomes in the traditional formations XX and XY, there exist some 25 OTHER possible arrangements, which, taking into account a variety of other factors, can lead to an even larger possible selection of physical effects and outcomes.
The vast majority of us aren't in rigorous physical competition, and so might never know if we are one of these "intersex" conditions. If she of TFA does, how do you interpret the results?
Most of the important software we use is from the mid '90s, much of it written in the era of Win95. Fair amounts of it is Unisys Mainframe client software. The only new software on the computers is MS Office 2003, Adobe Reader, aand other such similar. None of which should ever, in an ideal world, be demanding a RAM upgrade.
My landline came free with- and is a prerequisite for- my broadband connection. Thus I have one, but wouldn't if that were not the case.
Comes in handy though. Even though I'm in a huge town in the middle of densely-populated England, I still only get a bar or two in most of my house. Not quite sturdy enough for official things.
My office has literally thousands of PCs, all running XP and 512mb RAM. It does the trick, and they won't be desperate to add more to it any time soon. Adding an extra £20 per machine in an office with thousands is no small bill.
If they're told they must upgrade to an OS with a higher overhead, and must in turn quadruple the RAM in each machine, that's a big bill. That's why companies don't want to lose XP.
Most of my myriad computers (laptops, for example) don't need to be left running. My laptop only needs to be on when I'm using it, any other up-time is wasted power. Standby/hibernate are fine, but a poor second in most respects to just having the thing turned off. Fast shutdown and startup are important for that.
Unless my computer is actually doing something over night, it goes off. I for one am hugely enjoying Ubuntu's recent improvements in startup and shutdown, and I'm sure I'd welcome it in Windows too.
Think of a hydrogen fuel cell as just that- a breakthrough in battery technology.
With conventional batteries, you create electricity and then store it in charged acid. With a fuel cell, you create electricity and store it by generating hydrogen, which you release by burning.
Assuming we can get hydrogen production down to a fine art, it has a lot of promise.
Actually, MCM stands for "thousand circular mils", with the M being from Latin "mille" (millennium, Roman numeral M, etc.).
One "circular mil" is the equivalent of a circle with a diameter of one mil, 1 thousandth of an inch. One MCM, then, would be a circle with a diameter of one inch.
Filling up a car with petrol takes only a minute or two, tops, and requires you to be hands on the whole time. Despite this, petrol stations make large amounts of money on secondary sales, as you mention.
This magic new car will take 10 minutes to "quick charge", most electric cars would take longer. Think how much money you can extract out of people in 10 minutes! Cafes, full shops, arcades, you name it. Considering the much reduced infrastructure needed for recharging over fill-up (no tanks, no fuel deliveries, no pumps, just an industrial connection to the grid and some appropriate sockets) and it looks like attractive business to me.
There's a reason NASA (and the rest) won't commit serious funding to Space Elevators. Essentially, they're too worried it'll fail.
If you pour $100s of billions into a project, there is just no way you could turn around and say "turns out that we can't do it after all". It's unthinkable. Space Elevators still have some real scientific doubts about how to get them working, and those doubts won't go away without serious research. But NASA can't spend serious money researching it if they think there's a possibility they'll fail at it.
Big rockets, on the other hand, they know will definitely work. They know that every dollar they pour into big rockets can have real tangible benefits, with no risk of it turning out not to be worth it.
Given a choice between big rockets and space elevators, they're going to pick the safe choice.
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But you'll still lose some of the original power by storing it. And you'll still lose some of the stored power when you discharge it. Nothing is 100% - regardless of how that power is being stored.
And you've still got to build your batteries, no matter what form they take.
Very true. But there are losses all throughout power generation processes- coal power doesn't extract 100% of the energy from burnt coal, but it's still viable.
You just have to absorb these losses into the process. If building an eff-off massive power storage system is integral to having a working wind farm, say, then that's just how it is. The trick is ensuring the wind-power technology is good enough to absorb these extra costs and still be competitive.
"Batteries" (as in the chemical variety) aren't the only way of storing power. While they're the best way of doing it small-scale, they're generally way down the bottom of the charts for national-scale power storage.
Any system where you put power in, to do anything, and then can get power out at a later date is a way of storing power. I won't bore you by reeling off every possible or proposed way of doing this (thats what Wikipedia is for), but one example used regularly right this very moment is water storage. You simply construct a large reservoir or basin near a body of water. You use the surplus energy from your off-peak or high-generation times to power pumps, pumping water into the reservoir. When you reach peak power, or your power source goes down (as renewables do), you let the water flow out of the reservoir powering a turbine. One huge battery, not high-tech in the slightest, relatively cheap to do.
All sorts of others are mooted, from giant mechanical fly-wheels, to superheated rock-salt, to hydrogen production and burning. But like I said, look it up if you're interested.
So pirates (with swords, pistols, and cannons), knights (with swords, catapults, and axes) and space marines (with bazookas, space-fighters, and massive laser cannons) are all OK, but an archaeologist with a revolver and a whip is not?
I struggle to see the problem. If they were making Lego Abrams main armour, with infantry support armed with M16s, I might see your point.
Agreed. I put a bid on an eBay item once, labeled "10 old video cards, don't know exactly what they are" and won it for about £15. A couple of classics in there, including a GeForce 2 and a Voodoo3, and a whole bunch of OEM ones I didn't recognize and had to Google.
Bargainous. Never needed to worry about kitting out my old-hardware machines again. Well worth it.
Please do correct me if I'm wrong, but the 4000+ cores versus Flash playback was the punchline of an Xkcd, used to facetiously highlight and mock the subject at hand. 4000+ core support is not actually a feature of the new kernel release, let alone one that anyone dedicated lots of time to.
The release does have lots of features which, to a desktop user, will seem useless and are aimed at servers and super-computers. But actual 4000+ core computers don't come into it.
Lets please try to remember that the Concorde was originally designed and built 40 years ago, That's -4-0- years. Despite the fact they obviously would have refined and upgraded wherever possiblle in those 40 years, it's still a 40 year old vehicle.
Please find for me, if you can, any other aircraft which first flew on or before 1969 which is still being used, profitably, for trans-continental passenger services today.
Technology marches on. Concorde being withdrawn from service after 27 years in action proves nothing about the feasibility of a modern supersonic airliner designed and built today.
Indeed, the xkcd in question (a link to the page, not the image) doesn't hang on technical accuracy. It's absolutely a commentary on issues with the "Linux Desktop", with developers putting a relatively rare server concern such as support for thousands of CPUs ahead of something that pretty much every PC user expects to have (the ability to watch Hulu smoothly).
There is there the danger of getting carried away with "Linux on the desktop". Although Linux can be and is a desktop OS now, with all that that entails, it was originally, is primarily, and influentially will continue to be a top-dog server OS. It is in use in a huge number of server environments, and super-computer environments too. Features that benefit said servers and super-computers are important, just so much as the features for the desktop users.
Expecting the kernel team to abandon their primary market just because desktops are now important too would be a daft thing to expect.
It's "not a big deal", because the things they actually need to make progress haven't been made open. Adobe essentially only released what their rivals already knew- sort of "barn-door-after-horse-has-bolted" territory.
As such, Gnash's position didn't really change much when they did that, except by allowing them to feel slightly less in danger of being sued.
IMO, trying to reverse engineer Flash is stop-gap at best. Flash is hideous, and a decent long-term strategy should always involve ditching it for something better. Gnash is doing a great service in trying to break dependency on Adobe, but it shouldn't be seen as the solution to the problem.
What you say is completely valid and understandable, but it's a bit rich for people to raise such things in a thread like this.
This is a thread about a new kernel release, and it lists the new features said kernel release brings. Although broken Flash may be more pressing to you than anything listed in TFA, the kernel team who have made the release have absolutely no power to fix it. Complaining that "they should be fixing Flash, not mucking around with all these new features nobody needs" (as Xkcd does) is pointless, seeing as the two things are absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Incidentally, I still harbor the childish fantasy that Google will ride in on a white charger, smite the evil Flash, and establish a utopian video format to replace it (afterall, the owner of You Tube has plenty of incentive to do so). I mean the chances are looking slim now, but a boy can dream...
Only Microsoft and it's enthusiasts could view a company adding support for a popular system as caving in, admitting defeat, or endorsing a rival.
Back in the day, such things would be referred to as "adding useful features", or "doing what your customers want". But then, that's never exactly been MS's strong suit.
I've always liked tidal power, as a concept. It's as reliable as clockwork, almost limitlessly abundant, and truly renewable.
And currently prohibitively expensive and unfeasible. Still, it's something to work at.
Exactly it. Bemoaning that they should have spent the money on pure-solar instead woud be ridiculous, given the facts.
The company from TFA owns a coal power plant. It was very expensive to build, and still has a lot of life span left. The odds of them suddenly saying "lets tear down this money-making plant right now and build a solar plant instead" is nil to none.
Spending money improving the green credentials of the plant is the best anyone should expect of them. If it turns out to be aa good business decision, here's hoping other energy companies follow suit.
As an aside, it's worth pointing out that the method they're employing should work with any type of power plant that uses steam to turn a turbine, not just coal. That accounts for most of the world's electricity supply, including all fossil fuels and nuclear.
People moving to Mac is good for FOSS. Not as good as people moving to FOSS would be, but still, take it as it comes.
One of Linux et al's biggest hurdles was, is and will always be MS's market dominance. Trying to persuade someone to move to a new system is very difficult if said person doesn't even know other systems exist. A world 49% MS, 49% Mac and 2% Linux would be far more promising for Linux than 90%, 8% and 2%.
The problem with trying to create the next "biggest show ever" is that that is very difficult. If they could all make the next Seinfeld, they would all make the next Seinfeld.
If they're avoiding making quality niche shows and failing to make big blockbusters, what does that leave them with? Making crap.
I'd think a lot of networks should focus more on making quality niche shows (which tend to garner high viewer loyalty and long-lasting DVD sales) than pouring more money into sitcoms which COULD turn out to be the next Friends, but will almost certainly sink to the bottom of a pit of 1000 other identical sitcoms.
6 meters is closer to 6 yards than 6 feet.
His idea seems to be more based on the fact that concrete will act as a heat sink than on the concrete having a drastically lower temperature than the ambient. It'll work, but only in the short term- buried concrete doesn't loose heat fast, so once his machine has warmed it up, it's going to stop being useful for a fair while.
How useful it'd be to him depends entirely on what kind of usage pattern his set up can expect.
No comment on how sensible it is from an architectural perspective, though. If he's in an area where there might be freezing, I'd feel very uncomfortable about the possibility of expanding water pipes in my building's foundations. That's just me though.
According to the venerable BBC report on the subject, it isn't as simple as all that. While the vast majority of us possess chromosomes in the traditional formations XX and XY, there exist some 25 OTHER possible arrangements, which, taking into account a variety of other factors, can lead to an even larger possible selection of physical effects and outcomes.
The vast majority of us aren't in rigorous physical competition, and so might never know if we are one of these "intersex" conditions. If she of TFA does, how do you interpret the results?
Most of the important software we use is from the mid '90s, much of it written in the era of Win95. Fair amounts of it is Unisys Mainframe client software. The only new software on the computers is MS Office 2003, Adobe Reader, aand other such similar. None of which should ever, in an ideal world, be demanding a RAM upgrade.
My landline came free with- and is a prerequisite for- my broadband connection. Thus I have one, but wouldn't if that were not the case.
Comes in handy though. Even though I'm in a huge town in the middle of densely-populated England, I still only get a bar or two in most of my house. Not quite sturdy enough for official things.
My office has literally thousands of PCs, all running XP and 512mb RAM. It does the trick, and they won't be desperate to add more to it any time soon. Adding an extra £20 per machine in an office with thousands is no small bill.
If they're told they must upgrade to an OS with a higher overhead, and must in turn quadruple the RAM in each machine, that's a big bill. That's why companies don't want to lose XP.
Come on, if any part of Murdoch's media empire is threatened by the internet, it's gonna be the soft porn.
Most of my myriad computers (laptops, for example) don't need to be left running. My laptop only needs to be on when I'm using it, any other up-time is wasted power. Standby/hibernate are fine, but a poor second in most respects to just having the thing turned off. Fast shutdown and startup are important for that.
Unless my computer is actually doing something over night, it goes off. I for one am hugely enjoying Ubuntu's recent improvements in startup and shutdown, and I'm sure I'd welcome it in Windows too.
Think of a hydrogen fuel cell as just that- a breakthrough in battery technology.
With conventional batteries, you create electricity and then store it in charged acid. With a fuel cell, you create electricity and store it by generating hydrogen, which you release by burning.
Assuming we can get hydrogen production down to a fine art, it has a lot of promise.
Actually, MCM stands for "thousand circular mils", with the M being from Latin "mille" (millennium, Roman numeral M, etc.).
One "circular mil" is the equivalent of a circle with a diameter of one mil, 1 thousandth of an inch. One MCM, then, would be a circle with a diameter of one inch.
Filling up a car with petrol takes only a minute or two, tops, and requires you to be hands on the whole time. Despite this, petrol stations make large amounts of money on secondary sales, as you mention.
This magic new car will take 10 minutes to "quick charge", most electric cars would take longer. Think how much money you can extract out of people in 10 minutes! Cafes, full shops, arcades, you name it. Considering the much reduced infrastructure needed for recharging over fill-up (no tanks, no fuel deliveries, no pumps, just an industrial connection to the grid and some appropriate sockets) and it looks like attractive business to me.
There's a reason NASA (and the rest) won't commit serious funding to Space Elevators. Essentially, they're too worried it'll fail.
If you pour $100s of billions into a project, there is just no way you could turn around and say "turns out that we can't do it after all". It's unthinkable. Space Elevators still have some real scientific doubts about how to get them working, and those doubts won't go away without serious research. But NASA can't spend serious money researching it if they think there's a possibility they'll fail at it.
Big rockets, on the other hand, they know will definitely work. They know that every dollar they pour into big rockets can have real tangible benefits, with no risk of it turning out not to be worth it.
Given a choice between big rockets and space elevators, they're going to pick the safe choice.