The problem is that vast majority of those "sinks" are predictable (i.e. people coming home from work at certain time) and can be planned in advance. Proper grid management is hugely about this particular kind of prediction. Solar individually rarely has much impact, the problem is that it's usually people on the same residential circuit (the wealthy) install solar, and being in close proximity they start to randomly go up and down in unpredictable fashion. That is a huge problem for keeping the grid stable, unlike what you list.
Right. Because we're known as the guys who have shitty relations with Russia, a large Russian minority that can be used to undermine our state from within, and are complete pushovers because we're not in NATO who's known to save people from evil Russian bear and not threaten to stab them in the back with tactical nukes on their main cities in case USSR ever decides to attack...
In real life on the other hand... Yeah, the exact opposite on all fronts.
Seriously, are you pretending, or are you really that stupid? In case you are, here's a little hint why Russians actually respect us, and why we had good relations with them ever since WW2 and all the way until today: http://img.chan4chan.com/img/2...
All right, let's try reposting the links as plain text in case slashdot formatting is mangling them for you:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/co2-emissions-kt-wb-data.html Trend until 2010. Policy I'm talking about is implemented in 2008. You can see the abrupt change in trend in 2009.
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/8-07052014-AP/EN/8-07052014-AP-EN.PDF numbers from 2012-2013 http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/8-07052014-AP/EN/8-07052014-AP-EN.PDF numbers from 2011-2012
Must the be notoriously unreliable wind power outage causing links to break, har har. Oh look, a cheap shot that actually works in the context -_-
P.S. Why are you talking about random drivel and then insisting that I "believe it"? Attempt at a strawman argument?
P.P.S. Since you are clearly unable to use google, here's the article. Found easily by searching "germany energiewende der spiegel". Google-fu is hard, I know.
The difference being that they saved on everything. The main reason why it was so cheap was because payload was positively tiny. It's not actually very expensive to get a light payload into space.
The costs increase as the weight of payload and accuracy requirements go up. They increase further as durability requirements on hardware, reliability requirements (very stringent on manned flights for example) and other similar factors go up.
India did an excellent job with their project. But it was still quite expensive, they had a lot of help from Russians who are champions in the field of sending stuff in space efficiently (saved on research) and so on. This stuff is expensive, and those who do the base research and development incur costs orders of magnitude higher than what it cost Indians.
Except that just like wind, it does. Mainly because producers on the same circuit tend to all flare up at once when sun shines, and stop sending large amount of power into the grid when it goes behind the cloud.
Wind has the same problem but only worse when wind exceeds maximum allowed speed. Turbine's gear switches into neutral, and turbine goes from maximum production to zero production almost instantly. Then as wind speed goes down, the opposite occurs.
Wait, you claim to be "electricity industry engineer" and you... don't even know that keeping generator's transformers in the grid when there's a fall out of large supply of power causes transformer fires because you can't keep the AC frequency in proper phase as the load on the remaining sources increases beyond tolerance levels? Which is why blackouts happen when a large enough supplier suddenly goes offline - because producers after experiencing overload switch off automatically when their generator goes out of phase.
You don't even know how expensive it is to pull high gauge high voltage lines and the necessary transformer units to get high voltage + keeping high volt AC in phase over long distances for moving large amounts of electricity? You don't know how expensive the automation behind the grid logistics that manages the whole is? You call those costs and efforts "trivial"?
I will indeed stick to my daily job, but I don't claim to be an "electricity industry engineer". I just have notable amount of understanding of how things generally work. You on the other hand are making such claim, and yet you appear to be utterly ignorant of the very basics of realities of electricity production and electric grids.
You must wonder every day, why all these "trivial" things aren't done well outside wealthy countries.
I defined your trolling very clearly in the first sentence of the post:
Use the arguments that look like they make sense to a layman, advance them with yellow press-style arguments and finish off by questioning the intelligence of anyone who dares to point out flaws.
For example if I were to stoop to your level, my argument would not be about the topic being discussed, but go among the lines of "well we know why you're a FORMER electricity industry engineer now, don't we?"
Why would they need to go to such uncomfortable lengths, which would likely make end product cost more for the consumer when same can be reliably done in software on a massive scale with no need to modify physical production?
The trend for last two decades has been to do things more efficiently in software instead of modifying hardware whenever possible due to inherent added flexibility and cost savings of the latter approach.
On a general level, I'm in agreement. CO2 emissions of coal cannot be dodged, though to be fair, most of the other problems with coal have already been tackled in Europe. Acid rains are no longer a problem with newer plants, nor are particles emitted any more. Older plants that had to be fired to match up Energiewende didn't meet those requirements, and there are quite a few older plants that really need to be upgraded or mothballed and new ones built.
So coal burning needs to be reduced to a minimum. But power must be produced. Which doesn't leave Europe with many choices, and after Germany turned away from nuclear, it doomed itself to coal, under the guise of "renewables". This is the part of the approach that I disagree with.
I'm in agreement. I'm a big believer in State providing the basic necessities, and then getting out of the way of private interests who provide luxuries.
I imagine working on it with open source nvidia drivers is not going to be much better, just in a different way. One is painfully slow, other is less slow but painfully crashy.
It's an official EU body of European Commission. You do not get any more accurate or neutral on politics than Eurostat. It exists only to provide relevant statistics. That is why I linked directly to it - your type likes to whine about "right wing media" being pushing this message. By quoting the sources of information, I can bypass this claim completely. This is the same source from which all media, regardless of political bent typically draws its numbers when it comes to Europe, because Eurostat is extremely reliable and has statistics on wide reaching amount of issues.
I would be amazed if Eurostat's page is actually down. Like the rest of European Commission pages, they are very resilient. So how about you try accessing it again.
Ah yes. This is the "will be solved very soon" (TM) problem, just like "will be solved very soon" (TM) endurance problem with wind turbine gears and other similar "will be solved very soon" (TM) renewable issues.
Problem is, the buildup is happening NOW. While the problems are still not solved, and there's no breakthrough in sight that will actually solve it, even though the demand and heated research has been going for well over a decade now. That is my problem with the system - wind power is great if you can make it work. We don't have the technology to make it work right now. So concentrate funds on relevant research instead of massive rollout of new technology that isn't ready for rollout because key components are not ready for mass production.
TVO and Areva are talking to each other through lawyers only now too. Problem was that Areva usually didn't do full top down management of its nuclear projects - instead French state energy company did. This was their first, and they boned it, hard.
On a bright side, this was a "full delivery with keys to the payee" (finnish idiom, not sure about english analogy, basically means that builder is fully responsible for the project start to finish and paying company just accepts the final delivery) kind of a deal, so it look like the only question now is how much Areva will be compensating TVO for the delays. And it's worth noting that TVO liked the project so much, in spite of all the delays, that they are in a massive rage in our media right now because government denied them a prolongation to their application for building a fourth unit in Olkiluoto. Their current one expires in late 2015, and they want more time to finish Olkiluoto 3 before they concentrate on getting final plans for Olkiluoto 4 nailed down.
Because your example is irrelevant, as it addresses apparent corruption within the system. We are talking about technical aspects of a completely different problem.
Car analogy: We talk about tyre grip on various roads using different tyres on a certain BMW model. You come in and tell us not to buy BMW because you had one and it had a problem with changing oil, then wonder why we tell you that your example is irrelevant.
As I noted above, this is standard yellow-press denial.
Russia has been an extremely reliable partner in energy for Finland ever since WW2. We rely on them 100% for natural gas and significantly for electricity. No significant outages since WW2.
No, because coal is extremely cheap to mine and burn. In totally free market, we'd probably have nothing but the most cost efficient power source for energy, and that's either coal or nuclear in places where geothermal and hydro isn't available or is tapped out. That's actually the main problem with getting rid of it. It's simply too cheap, too reliable and has too high power density.
It's also almost the most polluting in terms of CO2, which is why we're trying to get rid of it. That and the fact that most of the mercury that forces limits on consumption of certain marine food products comes from coal burning. Acid rains and other problems appear to be mostly eliminated with modern burning and filtration techniques, but CO2 just doesn't go away.
That is what is typically done. This didn't protect against such scams either however, as people did things like manually redrawing bridges on chips to disabled cores and so on.
And in many cases, this is impractical, and it's much more practical to simply have software disable the access to those extra cores. With firmware signing, it's likely safer than burning hardware bridges.
They work exactly as advertised. They advertise certain amount of cores in certain products. These cores will be functional and enabled. All of them.
There is no ripping off.
This is done by all manufacturers. Yes, including AMD. And Intel. And Nvidia. And all of those ARM chip makers. And pretty much everyone else.
Example: you have a plant that makes hypothetical chip with four cores. You know that 25% of all chips that come off the assembly line have 4 working cores, 25% have 3 working and one faulty, 25% have 2:2 and 25% have 1:3.
You market four separate products and call them i4 which is advertised as a four-core, i3 which is advertised to have three cores, i2 with two cores and i1 with a single core. You price them accordingly. Chips with 4 functional cores are named i4. Chips with 3 functional cores get software that disables the core that was deemed faulty and sold as i3. Chips with 2 functional cores have two faulty cores disabled in software and are sold as i2. And the remaining chips get 3 faulty cores disabled in software and are called i1.
Customers get exactly what they want - a chip with just enough cores to suit their needs, at appropriate price. Manufacturer doesn't have to throw away 75% of the production because 75% of it doesn't have 4 functional cores. Everyone wins.
The problem with this scenario is that quite a few of those faulty cores can still retain partial functionality - they just don't pass stress tests done by manufacturer. Then scammers buy i1, i2 and i3 chips and try to re-enable those faulty cores. If they pass even basic checks (and sometimes even if they don't), they relabel the chips as more powerful i4, i3 and i2 and resell them. This is indeed a scam. These chips will typically crash a lot due to faults in re-enabled cores.
And that is exactly what nvidia is trying to prevent here. Third party scammers scamming innocent customers by flashing the card with firmware that will attempt to re-enable broken cores, so it appears to be a more expensive card than what it actually is. This has occurred recently in Germany.
Most of people running gaming GPUs on linux are probably gaming.
That means nvidia's own closed source drivers. Open source drivers are utterly crippled when it comes to gaming, and it would take a huge masochist to use them.
That is why you make it as hard and expensive as possible to crack the protection. Criminal outfits need to turn a profit. Make counterfeiting process hard enough, and their profits dwindle and they go do something more profitable. You win.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that vast majority of those "sinks" are predictable (i.e. people coming home from work at certain time) and can be planned in advance. Proper grid management is hugely about this particular kind of prediction. Solar individually rarely has much impact, the problem is that it's usually people on the same residential circuit (the wealthy) install solar, and being in close proximity they start to randomly go up and down in unpredictable fashion. That is a huge problem for keeping the grid stable, unlike what you list.
Right. Because we're known as the guys who have shitty relations with Russia, a large Russian minority that can be used to undermine our state from within, and are complete pushovers because we're not in NATO who's known to save people from evil Russian bear and not threaten to stab them in the back with tactical nukes on their main cities in case USSR ever decides to attack...
In real life on the other hand... Yeah, the exact opposite on all fronts.
Seriously, are you pretending, or are you really that stupid? In case you are, here's a little hint why Russians actually respect us, and why we had good relations with them ever since WW2 and all the way until today:
http://img.chan4chan.com/img/2...
All right, let's try reposting the links as plain text in case slashdot formatting is mangling them for you:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/co2-emissions-kt-wb-data.html Trend until 2010. Policy I'm talking about is implemented in 2008. You can see the abrupt change in trend in 2009.
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/8-07052014-AP/EN/8-07052014-AP-EN.PDF numbers from 2012-2013
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/8-07052014-AP/EN/8-07052014-AP-EN.PDF numbers from 2011-2012
Must the be notoriously unreliable wind power outage causing links to break, har har. Oh look, a cheap shot that actually works in the context -_-
P.S. Why are you talking about random drivel and then insisting that I "believe it"? Attempt at a strawman argument?
P.P.S. Since you are clearly unable to use google, here's the article. Found easily by searching "germany energiewende der spiegel". Google-fu is hard, I know.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/high-costs-and-errors-of-german-transition-to-renewable-energy-a-920288.html
The difference being that they saved on everything. The main reason why it was so cheap was because payload was positively tiny. It's not actually very expensive to get a light payload into space.
The costs increase as the weight of payload and accuracy requirements go up. They increase further as durability requirements on hardware, reliability requirements (very stringent on manned flights for example) and other similar factors go up.
India did an excellent job with their project. But it was still quite expensive, they had a lot of help from Russians who are champions in the field of sending stuff in space efficiently (saved on research) and so on. This stuff is expensive, and those who do the base research and development incur costs orders of magnitude higher than what it cost Indians.
Except that just like wind, it does. Mainly because producers on the same circuit tend to all flare up at once when sun shines, and stop sending large amount of power into the grid when it goes behind the cloud.
Wind has the same problem but only worse when wind exceeds maximum allowed speed. Turbine's gear switches into neutral, and turbine goes from maximum production to zero production almost instantly. Then as wind speed goes down, the opposite occurs.
Wait, you claim to be "electricity industry engineer" and you... don't even know that keeping generator's transformers in the grid when there's a fall out of large supply of power causes transformer fires because you can't keep the AC frequency in proper phase as the load on the remaining sources increases beyond tolerance levels? Which is why blackouts happen when a large enough supplier suddenly goes offline - because producers after experiencing overload switch off automatically when their generator goes out of phase.
You don't even know how expensive it is to pull high gauge high voltage lines and the necessary transformer units to get high voltage + keeping high volt AC in phase over long distances for moving large amounts of electricity? You don't know how expensive the automation behind the grid logistics that manages the whole is? You call those costs and efforts "trivial"?
I will indeed stick to my daily job, but I don't claim to be an "electricity industry engineer". I just have notable amount of understanding of how things generally work. You on the other hand are making such claim, and yet you appear to be utterly ignorant of the very basics of realities of electricity production and electric grids.
You must wonder every day, why all these "trivial" things aren't done well outside wealthy countries.
I defined your trolling very clearly in the first sentence of the post:
Use the arguments that look like they make sense to a layman, advance them with yellow press-style arguments and finish off by questioning the intelligence of anyone who dares to point out flaws.
For example if I were to stoop to your level, my argument would not be about the topic being discussed, but go among the lines of "well we know why you're a FORMER electricity industry engineer now, don't we?"
Why would they need to go to such uncomfortable lengths, which would likely make end product cost more for the consumer when same can be reliably done in software on a massive scale with no need to modify physical production?
The trend for last two decades has been to do things more efficiently in software instead of modifying hardware whenever possible due to inherent added flexibility and cost savings of the latter approach.
This part of impact is a rounding error in comparison to fluctuations caused by all the solar users suddenly spiking up and down in production.
On a general level, I'm in agreement. CO2 emissions of coal cannot be dodged, though to be fair, most of the other problems with coal have already been tackled in Europe. Acid rains are no longer a problem with newer plants, nor are particles emitted any more. Older plants that had to be fired to match up Energiewende didn't meet those requirements, and there are quite a few older plants that really need to be upgraded or mothballed and new ones built.
So coal burning needs to be reduced to a minimum. But power must be produced. Which doesn't leave Europe with many choices, and after Germany turned away from nuclear, it doomed itself to coal, under the guise of "renewables". This is the part of the approach that I disagree with.
I'm in agreement. I'm a big believer in State providing the basic necessities, and then getting out of the way of private interests who provide luxuries.
I imagine working on it with open source nvidia drivers is not going to be much better, just in a different way. One is painfully slow, other is less slow but painfully crashy.
I'm guessing you don't have any knowledge about Europe if you do not know what Eurostat is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's an official EU body of European Commission. You do not get any more accurate or neutral on politics than Eurostat. It exists only to provide relevant statistics. That is why I linked directly to it - your type likes to whine about "right wing media" being pushing this message. By quoting the sources of information, I can bypass this claim completely. This is the same source from which all media, regardless of political bent typically draws its numbers when it comes to Europe, because Eurostat is extremely reliable and has statistics on wide reaching amount of issues.
I would be amazed if Eurostat's page is actually down. Like the rest of European Commission pages, they are very resilient. So how about you try accessing it again.
Ah yes. This is the "will be solved very soon" (TM) problem, just like "will be solved very soon" (TM) endurance problem with wind turbine gears and other similar "will be solved very soon" (TM) renewable issues.
Problem is, the buildup is happening NOW. While the problems are still not solved, and there's no breakthrough in sight that will actually solve it, even though the demand and heated research has been going for well over a decade now. That is my problem with the system - wind power is great if you can make it work. We don't have the technology to make it work right now. So concentrate funds on relevant research instead of massive rollout of new technology that isn't ready for rollout because key components are not ready for mass production.
TVO and Areva are talking to each other through lawyers only now too. Problem was that Areva usually didn't do full top down management of its nuclear projects - instead French state energy company did. This was their first, and they boned it, hard.
On a bright side, this was a "full delivery with keys to the payee" (finnish idiom, not sure about english analogy, basically means that builder is fully responsible for the project start to finish and paying company just accepts the final delivery) kind of a deal, so it look like the only question now is how much Areva will be compensating TVO for the delays. And it's worth noting that TVO liked the project so much, in spite of all the delays, that they are in a massive rage in our media right now because government denied them a prolongation to their application for building a fourth unit in Olkiluoto. Their current one expires in late 2015, and they want more time to finish Olkiluoto 3 before they concentrate on getting final plans for Olkiluoto 4 nailed down.
Because your example is irrelevant, as it addresses apparent corruption within the system. We are talking about technical aspects of a completely different problem.
Car analogy: We talk about tyre grip on various roads using different tyres on a certain BMW model. You come in and tell us not to buy BMW because you had one and it had a problem with changing oil, then wonder why we tell you that your example is irrelevant.
As I noted above, this is standard yellow-press denial.
Not sure if ignorant or stupid.
Here, educate yourself:
http://www.fingrid.fi/fi/sahko...
Russia has been an extremely reliable partner in energy for Finland ever since WW2. We rely on them 100% for natural gas and significantly for electricity. No significant outages since WW2.
No, because coal is extremely cheap to mine and burn. In totally free market, we'd probably have nothing but the most cost efficient power source for energy, and that's either coal or nuclear in places where geothermal and hydro isn't available or is tapped out. That's actually the main problem with getting rid of it. It's simply too cheap, too reliable and has too high power density.
It's also almost the most polluting in terms of CO2, which is why we're trying to get rid of it. That and the fact that most of the mercury that forces limits on consumption of certain marine food products comes from coal burning. Acid rains and other problems appear to be mostly eliminated with modern burning and filtration techniques, but CO2 just doesn't go away.
Out of nuclear, up massively on coal and gas you mean.
That is what is typically done. This didn't protect against such scams either however, as people did things like manually redrawing bridges on chips to disabled cores and so on.
And in many cases, this is impractical, and it's much more practical to simply have software disable the access to those extra cores. With firmware signing, it's likely safer than burning hardware bridges.
They work exactly as advertised. They advertise certain amount of cores in certain products. These cores will be functional and enabled. All of them.
There is no ripping off.
This is done by all manufacturers. Yes, including AMD. And Intel. And Nvidia. And all of those ARM chip makers. And pretty much everyone else.
Example: you have a plant that makes hypothetical chip with four cores. You know that 25% of all chips that come off the assembly line have 4 working cores, 25% have 3 working and one faulty, 25% have 2:2 and 25% have 1:3.
You market four separate products and call them i4 which is advertised as a four-core, i3 which is advertised to have three cores, i2 with two cores and i1 with a single core. You price them accordingly. Chips with 4 functional cores are named i4. Chips with 3 functional cores get software that disables the core that was deemed faulty and sold as i3. Chips with 2 functional cores have two faulty cores disabled in software and are sold as i2. And the remaining chips get 3 faulty cores disabled in software and are called i1.
Customers get exactly what they want - a chip with just enough cores to suit their needs, at appropriate price. Manufacturer doesn't have to throw away 75% of the production because 75% of it doesn't have 4 functional cores. Everyone wins.
The problem with this scenario is that quite a few of those faulty cores can still retain partial functionality - they just don't pass stress tests done by manufacturer. Then scammers buy i1, i2 and i3 chips and try to re-enable those faulty cores. If they pass even basic checks (and sometimes even if they don't), they relabel the chips as more powerful i4, i3 and i2 and resell them. This is indeed a scam. These chips will typically crash a lot due to faults in re-enabled cores.
And that is exactly what nvidia is trying to prevent here. Third party scammers scamming innocent customers by flashing the card with firmware that will attempt to re-enable broken cores, so it appears to be a more expensive card than what it actually is. This has occurred recently in Germany.
Shield is an ARM tablet that's shaped like a controller. Being able to stream a game from your GPU is just one of its functionalities.
Most of people running gaming GPUs on linux are probably gaming.
That means nvidia's own closed source drivers. Open source drivers are utterly crippled when it comes to gaming, and it would take a huge masochist to use them.
How does ensuring that certain FIRMWARE stays on the card do that, unless they are planning some sort of massive malware conspiracy?
This argument about drivers I could understand to an extent. But firmware?
That is why you make it as hard and expensive as possible to crack the protection. Criminal outfits need to turn a profit. Make counterfeiting process hard enough, and their profits dwindle and they go do something more profitable. You win.