.... and even better, once there ARE blackouts, the companies are able to convince it's customers that because electricity scarce, it should cost more.
So, you stop paying for maintenance, and get to raise prices. Isn't that precious?
In the USA, I've seen several instances nearly an entire state was without power, and it never hit the national media, and was never really discussed afterwards.
Large-area blackouts happen. They just hadn't happened in New York for a while.
The exceptions are markets with low barriers of entry. When barriers to entry are low, competition abounds. The higher the barriers to entry, the less competition there is, and the more the market fits your description.
Yes, "society" will survive. However, individuals can be a different story. Every hot summer, good numbers of people die from the heat even when they HAVE power. Take the power away, and things get pretty bad. And in the winter, it can be nearly as bad.
Also, small lapses in productivity can often be written off, but as for anything non-trivial, perhaps you should look more into the mechanics of what drives industry and economy. Guess what the driving factor is... energy!
Sure, Poland survived with long blackouts. And look what their economy and industry did during that time... next to nothing. There's a reason why our scientists were busy whipping out atomic bombs, and theirs were doing little: They were spending their time trying to survive, while because of our abundance of energy and division of labor, our scientists were able to do a lot of work. The same is true for all other aspects of the economy and industry as well.
Take a look at "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" for a good historical look at the real driving powers of innovation and production.
A true free market should respond to consumer needs. So - if it costs 10x more to provide failure free power and consumers don't want to pay 10x, they will not get it. Similarly, companies that are power dependant would pay more and get more reliability.
"should" and "do" are entirely different things. If it costs 1.25x more to provide reliable power, and electrical companies want to charge 5x more, then they use whatever legal (and often illegal) means to give the illusion that it's necessary to pay 5x more.
Before you argue with that, look at the quintessential example, Enron. They purposefully covertly created artificial blackouts to create a shortage, then bullied other entities into signing long-term contracts at the artificially inflated rates.
So, some of their actions were illegal. So, the rest were unethical. It doesn't matter, you can't just wave your magical wand of justice and make the consequences disappear. Even if California DOES manage to have the 10-year contracts nullified, Californians have already spent enormous amounts of money on those artificially inflated prices, and there's no way to get all of that back.
Here's where it gets really good: The companies that act the least ethically are generally able to pull in the most money, at least until the point at which they are caught/exposed/whatever. That means that until that point is reached (and sometimes after), the more ethical companies are automatically "naturally selected".
What does that mean? It means that without oversight/regulation, the market will tend to produce the most unethical companies possible without getting caught. In some markets, it makes less difference, but when you're talking about a service that is so entirely vital to economy, industry, and even LIFE, that's not what I want.
I'll take free markets in quite a few areas, but not in electricity. Electricity in my area has been tremendously reliable for decades, and a bunch of bugger-ups on the East and West coasts aren't enough to make me believe that I should run out and offer to pay twice as much to keep my service the way it already is - and the way it's already profitable enough to keep lots of companies interested.
Why is it that many of these countries have not had significant blackouts for years, decades even, and then they all have signigicant blackouts within the same six month period?
Because when the tree fell in the woods, nobody was around to hear it. Power outtages are one of the currently "trendy" things to report on, so you hear about much more of them.
Over the past several decades, the ability of the media to provide timely stories from farther away has greatly increased. Because of that, every glitzy, trendy subject can get far more coverage. When blackouts are the media's attention, you'll hear about plenty of them. When gun violence is their target, you'll hear about plenty of that.
The bit is that most of these things really aren't happening any more frquently than usual (sometimes actually LESS frequently!), but because you hear so much about it, it gives you the impression that it happens much more often.
Pick out a make, model, and color of car, and fixate your mind on it for a day or two. Suddenly, you will see far more of them on the road than you ever have before. There aren't really more of them, you just notice more of them.
Every eocnomic and/or industrial revolution in the history of our planet has come about as a result of an increase in the ability to provide energy. That energy can be in the way of food (provide more workers), or it can be mechanical energy to perform tasks WITHOUT the workers. In either case, an increase of energy production and availability has spurred the revolution.
So, if a country wanted to greatly increase it's industry and economy, it's not entirely unreasonable that looking for ways to provide as much power as possible at the lowest rates would be a great way to start out.
Here's some more to think about: In prtty much all of those revolutions, the changes came from the bottom up, so to speak - the workers/merchants were the ones doing the innovating, and freedom to do so was a critically important ingredient for the recipe to work.
In previous times, it wasn't very easy to get a monopoly on energy without stifling growth - once you completely controlled the food or other source of energy, the motivation to innovate was greatly stifled - people don't care about producing excesses of food if they know you'll just take it away. And if you didn't take control (left the market free), then there was plenty of competition in the markets of food, lumber, and other sources of energy.
Today, however, things are different. Our energy sources (oil, electricity, natural gas, etc.), which allow us to use much greater amounts of energy, are also very easily monopolized because of distribution. If you own the oil/natural gas pipes, the electrical lines, or the phone lines, then it's awfully tough for someone to cut in on your profiteering racket. To do so takes a governmental mandate, and as we've seen in the telecom industry, at times even THAT isn't enough.
Of course. Free markets seek to maximize profits. In a sector where the barriers to entry are quite high, companies are much more able to increase price by lowering demand. It's one thing if the product in question is a luxury item, it's entirely another if it's an absolute necessity.
To put it more simply, they can charge us more money for the same amount of electricity if electricity is seen as something scarce. If electricity is seen as something that there is an abundance of, then they can't charge us as much.
Speaking of "Free Markets" in the sense of electricity isn't quite the same as speaking of free markets in terms of something like, say, cabbage. In my city of 0.5 million people, there are at least 0.4 million people capable of producing and selling cabbage. So, if the price of cabbage went up dramatically, you'd see people planting cabbage and selling it at lower prices. The barriers to entry (seed, land, water) are very common and cheap. Competition works for the consumers.
Now, if Scottish Power, which owns the local electric monopoly (company) were allowed to do what they wish with prices, of course they'd jack them up. But purchasing a large generator, becoming a public utility, going through the red-tape, putting up bonds, etc. is a long, expensive, and difficult process. In other words, the barriers to entry are much higher, so far, far fewer people would be able to provide an alternative to Scottish Power. That means, of course, that while it's not a true monopoly, Scottish power would have the ability to squeeze more money out of us for no other reason that "We can, so we will."
When options and alternatives are available, competition from free markets works. However, until sufficient options and alternatives exist to create competition, a deregulated market is essentially a government-created monopoly. ("You have no competitors, and provide an essential service? Well, then, feel free to rake the serfs over the coals at your leisure.")
It is a sad story about our Western Civilization that communication between the top and bottom of companies is so bad it is non-existant.
It's not that communication is non-existant, it's that the "suits" don't want to hear anything that either challenges the fiscal bottom line, or what they learned in business school.
As I recall, the ARM processer doesn't have any floating-point circuitry, only integer. Something about using an integer-only CPU on a device that's specifically designed to do intensive, precise calculations just sounds terribly wrong.
Sure, you can still get the math done, but a real FPU will speed things up by a large factor. I'll bet that if you added a real FPU to the chip, you could chop it's frequency to 1/3 of the current, and still get better performance, at least in a calculator like this one.
The next RedHat release will, of course, be "10.0", invalidating all of the people who got their RHCE on 8.0, just like they invalidated all of the 7.x RHCE's by jumping straight from 8.0 to 9.0.
RedHat should just drop the.x extension, becuase they don't particularly seem like they're going to use it again.
Put it on a web page which gets any moderate amount of traffic. I did that with some spam-bait addresses, and it's amazing how much they generate. In a few months, they've identified over 22,000 unique servers sending spam.
... All of the other psychological problems that Dali had. He wasn't exactly "all there", so to speak, and it works show a good variety of other ways in which he was also quite disturbed.
I have a propane camping stove, plenty of propane, and plenty of canned food around. The servers I'm responsible for will stay running, the data center has its own generators, but our office will be dead.
That means I'd get to sit at home and play Monopoly all day. If I get bored of that, there are about a hundred things I can do for fun that don't require a bit of electricity.
Shoot, it would probably even be beneficial to people in my neighborhood. I'll bet that the park down the street from me would be teeming with people outside, enjoying wholesome activities and human interaction.
Instead of neighbors walking around the block looking for code violations to report to the city, they'd probably be actually interacting with each other, maybe even solving their problems without running to a baby-sitting city government!
I'm sure there would be consequences. Analysts would talk about how many hundreds of trillions of dollars were lost, but in the end, we'd all go back to work, take care of the stuff that didn't get done, and we'd have had a good time while it lasted.
Now, if the power outtage also included me being somewhere like the island of Manhatten or on a subway when it hit, that might be a bit less enjoyable, but unbeknownst to New Yorkers and Californians, the rest of the country works a whole lot differently than they do.
You get a few, or a LOT of messages that don't pertain to you. However, because the filters were in place, you got far FEWER messages than you would have received if the virus had been allowed to propagate.
We already have more than two launch craft, and they've already reduced costs by more than a factor of two. (The savings to launch a satellite by Titan instead of shuttle easily exceed 280%)
But we're not USING two craft at once. Let's say you have a mission that needs materials AND men. Well, under the "one ship for each purpose" idea, you're now launching TWO ships. Launch costs are at least doubled.
Let's look at two cases. First, the virus goes through to an end user. We'll assume the chances are 1 out of 10 that the user will become infected, and generate another 2,000 messages. Number of messages sent per average user: 201.
Now, let's say that a filter stops the message, and still sends a reply - but prevents infection. Number of messages sent: 2.
So, it looks to me like even if the filter DOES send a reply, there's still a 100-fold DECREASE in load vs. not having a filter.
Now, I'm not saying that virus filters SHOULD send the notification - that's open for debate. However, the simple statement that virus filters which DO send out notifications doubles the load is a tremendous simplification, and does not take into account the real-world DECREASE in messages sent when effective virus filters are in place.
Cash spurs innovation. So what? Scientists make "dual-use" technologies to get the cash from the Pentagon. So what?
I hate to burst your bubble, but that's the capitalistic way, which just happens to be the American way. All of the great achievements of this country have been driven by capitalism. To put it another way, all of the great achievements of this company have been driven by greed.
The incident in question involved a classified military satellite, and because of the classified nature, exact figures are extremely hard to pin down. The "Several billion dollar" figure came from one of TWO immediate family members of mine that were working on the project. It could be wrong, it could be right.
In the end, the proposal of having TWO launch craft (one for people, one for payload) will not only increase launch costs by at least a factor of two (probably more), it also has a great potential to make launch failures cost even MORE.
PS. Surveys mean exactly zilch. My use of the term was correct.
Slashdot Mirror
At least I've talked with a few who acted and talked as if they were honest. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out to be true. ; )
steve
I can hit ctrl-alt-delete with only my right hand without much trouble at all. Shoot, now that I try it, it's even easier with my left hand.
steve
.... and even better, once there ARE blackouts, the companies are able to convince it's customers that because electricity scarce, it should cost more.
So, you stop paying for maintenance, and get to raise prices. Isn't that precious?
steve
In the USA, I've seen several instances nearly an entire state was without power, and it never hit the national media, and was never really discussed afterwards.
Large-area blackouts happen. They just hadn't happened in New York for a while.
steve
Exceptions I know about are:
The exceptions are markets with low barriers of entry. When barriers to entry are low, competition abounds. The higher the barriers to entry, the less competition there is, and the more the market fits your description.
steve
Yes, "society" will survive. However, individuals can be a different story. Every hot summer, good numbers of people die from the heat even when they HAVE power. Take the power away, and things get pretty bad. And in the winter, it can be nearly as bad.
Also, small lapses in productivity can often be written off, but as for anything non-trivial, perhaps you should look more into the mechanics of what drives industry and economy. Guess what the driving factor is... energy!
Sure, Poland survived with long blackouts. And look what their economy and industry did during that time... next to nothing. There's a reason why our scientists were busy whipping out atomic bombs, and theirs were doing little: They were spending their time trying to survive, while because of our abundance of energy and division of labor, our scientists were able to do a lot of work. The same is true for all other aspects of the economy and industry as well.
Take a look at "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" for a good historical look at the real driving powers of innovation and production.
steve
A true free market should respond to consumer needs. So - if it costs 10x more to provide failure free power and consumers don't want to pay 10x, they will not get it. Similarly, companies that are power dependant would pay more and get more reliability.
"should" and "do" are entirely different things. If it costs 1.25x more to provide reliable power, and electrical companies want to charge 5x more, then they use whatever legal (and often illegal) means to give the illusion that it's necessary to pay 5x more.
Before you argue with that, look at the quintessential example, Enron. They purposefully covertly created artificial blackouts to create a shortage, then bullied other entities into signing long-term contracts at the artificially inflated rates.
So, some of their actions were illegal. So, the rest were unethical. It doesn't matter, you can't just wave your magical wand of justice and make the consequences disappear. Even if California DOES manage to have the 10-year contracts nullified, Californians have already spent enormous amounts of money on those artificially inflated prices, and there's no way to get all of that back.
Here's where it gets really good: The companies that act the least ethically are generally able to pull in the most money, at least until the point at which they are caught/exposed/whatever. That means that until that point is reached (and sometimes after), the more ethical companies are automatically "naturally selected".
What does that mean? It means that without oversight/regulation, the market will tend to produce the most unethical companies possible without getting caught. In some markets, it makes less difference, but when you're talking about a service that is so entirely vital to economy, industry, and even LIFE, that's not what I want.
I'll take free markets in quite a few areas, but not in electricity. Electricity in my area has been tremendously reliable for decades, and a bunch of bugger-ups on the East and West coasts aren't enough to make me believe that I should run out and offer to pay twice as much to keep my service the way it already is - and the way it's already profitable enough to keep lots of companies interested.
Why is it that many of these countries have not had significant blackouts for years, decades even, and then they all have signigicant blackouts within the same six month period?
Because when the tree fell in the woods, nobody was around to hear it. Power outtages are one of the currently "trendy" things to report on, so you hear about much more of them.
Over the past several decades, the ability of the media to provide timely stories from farther away has greatly increased. Because of that, every glitzy, trendy subject can get far more coverage. When blackouts are the media's attention, you'll hear about plenty of them. When gun violence is their target, you'll hear about plenty of that.
The bit is that most of these things really aren't happening any more frquently than usual (sometimes actually LESS frequently!), but because you hear so much about it, it gives you the impression that it happens much more often.
Pick out a make, model, and color of car, and fixate your mind on it for a day or two. Suddenly, you will see far more of them on the road than you ever have before. There aren't really more of them, you just notice more of them.
steve
Every eocnomic and/or industrial revolution in the history of our planet has come about as a result of an increase in the ability to provide energy. That energy can be in the way of food (provide more workers), or it can be mechanical energy to perform tasks WITHOUT the workers. In either case, an increase of energy production and availability has spurred the revolution.
So, if a country wanted to greatly increase it's industry and economy, it's not entirely unreasonable that looking for ways to provide as much power as possible at the lowest rates would be a great way to start out.
Here's some more to think about: In prtty much all of those revolutions, the changes came from the bottom up, so to speak - the workers/merchants were the ones doing the innovating, and freedom to do so was a critically important ingredient for the recipe to work.
In previous times, it wasn't very easy to get a monopoly on energy without stifling growth - once you completely controlled the food or other source of energy, the motivation to innovate was greatly stifled - people don't care about producing excesses of food if they know you'll just take it away. And if you didn't take control (left the market free), then there was plenty of competition in the markets of food, lumber, and other sources of energy.
Today, however, things are different. Our energy sources (oil, electricity, natural gas, etc.), which allow us to use much greater amounts of energy, are also very easily monopolized because of distribution. If you own the oil/natural gas pipes, the electrical lines, or the phone lines, then it's awfully tough for someone to cut in on your profiteering racket. To do so takes a governmental mandate, and as we've seen in the telecom industry, at times even THAT isn't enough.
steve
Free markets cause power blackouts?
Of course. Free markets seek to maximize profits. In a sector where the barriers to entry are quite high, companies are much more able to increase price by lowering demand. It's one thing if the product in question is a luxury item, it's entirely another if it's an absolute necessity.
To put it more simply, they can charge us more money for the same amount of electricity if electricity is seen as something scarce. If electricity is seen as something that there is an abundance of, then they can't charge us as much.
Speaking of "Free Markets" in the sense of electricity isn't quite the same as speaking of free markets in terms of something like, say, cabbage. In my city of 0.5 million people, there are at least 0.4 million people capable of producing and selling cabbage. So, if the price of cabbage went up dramatically, you'd see people planting cabbage and selling it at lower prices. The barriers to entry (seed, land, water) are very common and cheap. Competition works for the consumers.
Now, if Scottish Power, which owns the local electric monopoly (company) were allowed to do what they wish with prices, of course they'd jack them up. But purchasing a large generator, becoming a public utility, going through the red-tape, putting up bonds, etc. is a long, expensive, and difficult process. In other words, the barriers to entry are much higher, so far, far fewer people would be able to provide an alternative to Scottish Power. That means, of course, that while it's not a true monopoly, Scottish power would have the ability to squeeze more money out of us for no other reason that "We can, so we will."
When options and alternatives are available, competition from free markets works. However, until sufficient options and alternatives exist to create competition, a deregulated market is essentially a government-created monopoly. ("You have no competitors, and provide an essential service? Well, then, feel free to rake the serfs over the coals at your leisure.")
steve
It is a sad story about our Western Civilization that communication between the top and bottom of companies is so bad it is non-existant.
It's not that communication is non-existant, it's that the "suits" don't want to hear anything that either challenges the fiscal bottom line, or what they learned in business school.
steve
"... managers just ignored them."
The story of an engineer's life.
steve
"ARM processor -> better speed"
As I recall, the ARM processer doesn't have any floating-point circuitry, only integer. Something about using an integer-only CPU on a device that's specifically designed to do intensive, precise calculations just sounds terribly wrong.
Sure, you can still get the math done, but a real FPU will speed things up by a large factor. I'll bet that if you added a real FPU to the chip, you could chop it's frequency to 1/3 of the current, and still get better performance, at least in a calculator like this one.
steve
The next RedHat release will, of course, be "10.0", invalidating all of the people who got their RHCE on 8.0, just like they invalidated all of the 7.x RHCE's by jumping straight from 8.0 to 9.0.
RedHat should just drop the
steve
An elaborate troll? With a name like "Charlie Dickinson"? Nah, it *couldn't* be. ; )
steve
" Possibly only a blunt pencil lead would bear the vitality of words flowing from his fingertips."
Yes, and perhaps only a 2x4 would bear the "vitality" of repeatedly striking your skull for such a moronic statement.
Sure, you're a writer. You live for the flair. Maybe even for the drama. But puh-leez, get a grip on reality.
steve
Put it on a web page which gets any moderate amount of traffic. I did that with some spam-bait addresses, and it's amazing how much they generate. In a few months, they've identified over 22,000 unique servers sending spam.
steve
steve
I'm all for it.
I have a propane camping stove, plenty of propane, and plenty of canned food around. The servers I'm responsible for will stay running, the data center has its own generators, but our office will be dead.
That means I'd get to sit at home and play Monopoly all day. If I get bored of that, there are about a hundred things I can do for fun that don't require a bit of electricity.
Shoot, it would probably even be beneficial to people in my neighborhood. I'll bet that the park down the street from me would be teeming with people outside, enjoying wholesome activities and human interaction.
Instead of neighbors walking around the block looking for code violations to report to the city, they'd probably be actually interacting with each other, maybe even solving their problems without running to a baby-sitting city government!
I'm sure there would be consequences. Analysts would talk about how many hundreds of trillions of dollars were lost, but in the end, we'd all go back to work, take care of the stuff that didn't get done, and we'd have had a good time while it lasted.
Now, if the power outtage also included me being somewhere like the island of Manhatten or on a subway when it hit, that might be a bit less enjoyable, but unbeknownst to New Yorkers and Californians, the rest of the country works a whole lot differently than they do.
steve
Would be one of the triangular 3-button "MouseMan" mice, but with an optical mechanism. I'd take that mouse to my grave.
steve
My point still stands.
You get a few, or a LOT of messages that don't pertain to you. However, because the filters were in place, you got far FEWER messages than you would have received if the virus had been allowed to propagate.
steve
We already have more than two launch craft, and they've already reduced costs by more than a factor of two. (The savings to launch a satellite by Titan instead of shuttle easily exceed 280%)
But we're not USING two craft at once. Let's say you have a mission that needs materials AND men. Well, under the "one ship for each purpose" idea, you're now launching TWO ships. Launch costs are at least doubled.
steve
Let's look at two cases. First, the virus goes through to an end user. We'll assume the chances are 1 out of 10 that the user will become infected, and generate another 2,000 messages. Number of messages sent per average user: 201.
Now, let's say that a filter stops the message, and still sends a reply - but prevents infection. Number of messages sent: 2.
So, it looks to me like even if the filter DOES send a reply, there's still a 100-fold DECREASE in load vs. not having a filter.
Now, I'm not saying that virus filters SHOULD send the notification - that's open for debate. However, the simple statement that virus filters which DO send out notifications doubles the load is a tremendous simplification, and does not take into account the real-world DECREASE in messages sent when effective virus filters are in place.
steve
Cash spurs innovation. So what? Scientists make "dual-use" technologies to get the cash from the Pentagon. So what?
I hate to burst your bubble, but that's the capitalistic way, which just happens to be the American way. All of the great achievements of this country have been driven by capitalism. To put it another way, all of the great achievements of this company have been driven by greed.
steve
The incident in question involved a classified military satellite, and because of the classified nature, exact figures are extremely hard to pin down. The "Several billion dollar" figure came from one of TWO immediate family members of mine that were working on the project. It could be wrong, it could be right.
In the end, the proposal of having TWO launch craft (one for people, one for payload) will not only increase launch costs by at least a factor of two (probably more), it also has a great potential to make launch failures cost even MORE.
PS. Surveys mean exactly zilch. My use of the term was correct.
steve