You don't understand. All companies, AMD and Nvidia manufacture certain chips. Each chip has certain failure rates. When certain amount of cores fails, they are switched off in software and sold for less.
AMD does this. Nvidia does this. Pretty much everyone making complex chips does this. It's massively uneconomical to throw away an entire chip over partial failures.
There is a way to avoid it, but it's problematic so people typically don't use it. Grid separation.
You put your solar panels on separate circuit and install hardware that doesn't allow for Panel > Grid power flow.
The problem is that hardware is expensive and solar power without net metering is prohibitively expensive. The entire point of making solar power affordable in many places has been net metering, but that was done without considering the consequences for the utilities. And as a result, in places like Australia, poor ended up footing the bill for the rich.
France, just across the border from Germany, get about 70-80% of energy from nuclear. So much for "tarnished reputation" being a factor in producing power.
And frankly, it's not a "fantasy". The concept of wind power providibg significant amount of energy is feasible. The problem is the technology required, which we do not possess yet. My problem is that instead of investing in the technology, Germany invested into massively implementing technology not yet ready for the mass implementation. Almost all of their problems are essentially symptoms of this aspect of the issue.
You'll have to define "horribly outdated". Most of the electric grid systems are upgraded as needed, as grids are an investment for centuries, not years. Even burner based power plants usually have a lifetime cycle of at least 40-60 years. A power plant built 40 years ago is not "outdated" - especially if it had its mid-life upgrades done and as a result has modern automation and control systems, as well as other relevant upgrades done.
Same goes for the grid. It's perfectly functional and stable. It does exactly what it's designed to do - ensure that people don't have to think if they are going to get power from the grid when they plug something in, turn something on, or have a major factory going through a complex production cycle. That's grid's job, and it does it admirably in most of the Western countries.
This issue isn't quite as major as the cost. In general, these pieces of equipment that require quicker response to AC frequency changes at feed in than specified in grid's specs will have some soft of backup power regardless. I don't recall hearing of a significant relaxation of grid specs in Germany over renewables, do you know something I don't?
German Environmental Agency had to obfuscate the follow-up numbers for political reasons, so you'll find that many sources cut off at 2009. However it had to continue reporting, and as a result, the numbers are there, both on its own page and on Eurostat's.
The narrative may not be "agreed upon", which is understandable considering how many Greens politicians put their careers on the line with implementing the failed policy, but it's factual. German Environmental Agency numbers are simply not up for discussion.
German Environmental Agency had to obfuscate the follow-up numbers for political reasons, so you'll find that many sources cut off at 2009. However it had to continue reporting, and as a result, the numbers are there, both on its own page and on Eurostat's.
This is standard modus operandi for three local trolls: angelsphere, dblll and amimojo. 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.
Here dblll relies on relative ignorance of most people of how grids and grid stability actually works. Instead he simplifies the model to make it look feasible to a layman - grid is essentially a pool after all, and surely if there's input somewhere, it would balance out the lack of input at another location?
In general, that is indeed correct, and how grid is generally balanced. But as with all engineering problems, devil is in the details. And details make his model utterly ridiculous and completely unfeasible. The problems here is DISTANCE and LOCALIZATION OF PRODUCTION.
Most of German wind power is located in the North. Most of the consumption is in the South-West. This means that power must be pushed over large distances, with a lot of transformers and substations balancing the flow. And when the supply suddenly dies, it takes a while for automation to switch back. At the same time, the sheer volume that tends to go offline at once is quite large, as production is concentrated in certain regions. As a result, if you do not have spinning reserve in the producing regions, by the time switching brought you power from the South, your grid in the North is already down and you have countless transformer fires if you tried to keep it up regardless.
Nuclear has the exact same problem actually. We here in Finland are currently building a 1.6GW unit in Olkiluoto. As nuclear is far more reliable, we need much less than that capacity of installed spinning reserve, so if his hypothesis of "distance doesn't matter" was true, we could just increase our imports from Russia, Sweden and Estonia to make the shortfall. We have very good connections to all of these countries and routinely both import and export power.
In real world on the other hand, we had to build a 300MW power plant in Forssa, about half way between the new plant in Western Finland, and major consumption centres in Central Finland and Helsinki to provide the spinning reserve for this new unit. Because distance matters.
Actually, that's incorrect. Pump storage is completely incompatible with modern renewables because of the way it's designed to work. Turbines and pumps cannot be directionally switched easily, so the process for switching directions is designed to be done twice a day - pump water during the night, flush water through turbine during the day. It's a predictable cycle, so directional shifting can be planned in advance and executed.
Renewables would require near instant mode switching. Which is incompatible with aforementioned systems, and as a result, Germany is actually shutting down its pumped energy storage gradually.
This isn't about frames per second but latency of each frame.
Today most GPUs render things into a buffer, and render two-three frames ahead (double or triple buffering). Far more important, as noted by Carmack in the speech (seriously, go watch it, it's very informative) is being able to do just-in-time rendering and send it straight to the framebuffer to minimize latency.
Actually it's far worse. Right now, users on the same electric grid as the solar user are directly subsidising the solar producer through higher utility payments. This is due to inherent instability of solar production and spikes this causes, which require more complex grid management to keep the grid stable. Which means more costs, which are paid through price on delivered electricity, which is lower to the solar producer.
This is already the case in Australia, where this has been decried as a direct subsidy from the poor to the rich (poor generally can't afford solar while rich can, and poor are basically paying for solar panels of the rich through their higher utility payments).
I suspect that even through pundits will resist, the real costs of having residential solar hooked to the grid will be pushed back onto solar users so they don't free ride off other people's backs by instituting some sort of "grid stability fee" for anyone who has solar hooked to the grid.
Because I recall explaining it to you already, just a few weeks ago. Right here on slashdot. And here you are again, trolling on the subject as it it never occurred.
To those ignorant, he's correct, but the reason isn't that renewables are functional, but that legal system for selling electricity was jury-rigged to serve unstable renewables at the cost of everyone else, from customers to competitors.
Electricity in Germany, like most EU states is sold on exchanges and spot sale price is determined based on it, while long term contracts usually are at least loosely based on those prices as well. And in Germany, there is a law that dictates that before you can sell any coal/nuclear power on exchange, ALL of produced renewable power must be sold.
In other words - when wind blows, if you're running a nuclear or coal plant, you cannot sell any of your produced electricity until your wind/solar competitors sold everything they produced. At the same time, you are not allowed to shut the plant down, because you need to sit on the grid as spinning reserve for when wind blows too hard or stops blowing to pick up the slack.
This has resulted in ridiculous paradoxes, such as the fact that spinning reserve which is mostly coal and natural gas has become unprofitable, causing bankruptcies. Not because electricity is cheap - when renewables are down, the spot price is ridiculously high, and when you count the subsidies in Germany which are pushed to building and maintaining renewables, electricity in Germany is incredibly expensive for end customers. But at the same time, when renewables do produce, coal, natural gas and nuclear plants cannot sell electricity (not because they don't produce energy, but because laws ban them from doing so!) and are forced to actually pay people who take their electricity (again, grid balance!)
Which in turn prevented renewables from being hooked to the network, because you cannot hook wind or solar to network without almost entire capacity worth of spinning reserve sitting on the network - you risk grid collapse and those rules are there for that very reason. The situation is utterly ridiculous and is a great example of just how dysfunctional the current German model is. Because the moment you remove this particular rule, electricity cost would collapse and renewables would dive deep into the red as their unstable production cycle would mean that the only times they could sell was the same time that others can sell, meaning their electricity would always be very cheap and far below levels needed to pay back for the plant.
Germany is a great example of an utter failure in terms of emissions as well. The moment is started implementing the aforementioned policy, it had to break its Kyoto targets of CO2 emissions reduction (more spinning reserve needed due to inherent instability of renewables), and after 15 years of stable yearly reduction of CO2 emissions, Germany's CO2 emissions grew for several years after implementation of these policies.
Yes, and I'm an emperor of China. That's the problem on the internet, people can say whatever they want about themselves. Even when it's obviously either false or they are genuinely incredibly gullible.
Because you see, vast majority of people that did come out of USSR understood that shit that was fed to them was propaganda. That's where the infamous Russian humour comes from. You on the other hand swallow bullshit that is even thicker than stuff Pravda printed back then, and genuinely believe it.
Conclusion: you're not who you say you are, or you are the bottom fifth of them at best in terms of ability to comprehend politics.
On the other hand, he was actively committing all the acts listed, and his "reveal of FSB plot" was a highly questionable piece of information delivered on request of said mr. Berezovsky and paid by him. It was notably far from the only such an act. Mr. Berezovsky, before killing himself due to depression had a bit of a megalomania going on according to UK newspapers, and really liked to think that he was important enough for entire country to aggressively hound him.
In reality, he later went into severe depression after UK got really, REALLY tired of his anti-Russian antics and after he ran out of money to pay them off, as he lost most of it to his former Russian colleagues in UK court. He ended up killing himself, which was confirmed by UK police, but still to the day is being "whistleblown" by his wife as a "succeessul assassination by Putin".
So yeah. Whistleblowers everywhere. If you're naive and ignorant that is.
You seriously think that you as a voter have a significant impact on what candidates are pre-selected for you to get to vote for into the important political posts?
I have no words. Truly, if I were listening to a Soviet citizen in the 50s, he'd be less ignorant of political reality in his country than you appear to be about political reality in yours.
"The system" doesn't refer to some mysterious ephermal existence, but the political and legal system built up with a certain goal in mind that exists right now.
Man killed with polonium wasn't a dissident, but what US would have called a "terrorist" if operations he undertook against Russia were undertaken against it instead. That is active spy recruitment, channelling finance of military assistance to various separatist and anti-establishment groups in Russia and so on. If you call him a dissident, you'll have who reclassify a whole lot of people US calls terrorists today into "dissidents".
US has an active assassination program running RIGHT NOW killing people like him every week or so. So you should have been awake for a long time now.
See, that's the beauty of the Western system, as compared to for example Russia. There, if private companies dump dissidents, it's "oh noes government's fault". But in the land of the free? That's just private corporations exercising their freedom!
The only actual difference? Slightly greater plausible deniability that works on people like you. Apparently. Because you see, there's no "conspiracy". There's simply the system that is set to encourage not employing those who resist status quo. Conspiracy implies secrecy, and there's there little secrecy about this issue, as you yourself point out.
Better idea. For every piece of work they shift, their taxes go up to support communities they dump. As in, they are forced to shoulder the real costs of outsourcing, rather than "outsourcing" the cost to the tax payers.
But in today's system, where corporations are people with human rights and capital has more rights than most people, that's not going to happen.
You know, it's pretty sad that people like you are willing to pretend to be protecting the freedom, all while happily supporting the system which people who were actually protecting the freedom fought against. And then screaming abuse of "they protected YOUR freedom" at people like me who point out the fallacy, using ridiculous hyperbolic talking points to deflect attention from the subject.
Except that they are specifically giving up their freedom. For the right cause. So this isn't about "cost of freedom", but "doing the right thing costing people their freedom" as in modern West, being poor is effectively a crime that limits your freedom greatly.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't understand. All companies, AMD and Nvidia manufacture certain chips. Each chip has certain failure rates. When certain amount of cores fails, they are switched off in software and sold for less.
AMD does this. Nvidia does this. Pretty much everyone making complex chips does this. It's massively uneconomical to throw away an entire chip over partial failures.
There is a way to avoid it, but it's problematic so people typically don't use it. Grid separation.
You put your solar panels on separate circuit and install hardware that doesn't allow for Panel > Grid power flow.
The problem is that hardware is expensive and solar power without net metering is prohibitively expensive. The entire point of making solar power affordable in many places has been net metering, but that was done without considering the consequences for the utilities. And as a result, in places like Australia, poor ended up footing the bill for the rich.
How does a one specific scandal related to a completely different issue address the issue I raise?
Oh wait, poster:dblll. Deflectionary tactics. Yellow press style write up.
Bah.
France, just across the border from Germany, get about 70-80% of energy from nuclear. So much for "tarnished reputation" being a factor in producing power.
And frankly, it's not a "fantasy". The concept of wind power providibg significant amount of energy is feasible. The problem is the technology required, which we do not possess yet. My problem is that instead of investing in the technology, Germany invested into massively implementing technology not yet ready for the mass implementation. Almost all of their problems are essentially symptoms of this aspect of the issue.
You'll have to define "horribly outdated". Most of the electric grid systems are upgraded as needed, as grids are an investment for centuries, not years. Even burner based power plants usually have a lifetime cycle of at least 40-60 years. A power plant built 40 years ago is not "outdated" - especially if it had its mid-life upgrades done and as a result has modern automation and control systems, as well as other relevant upgrades done.
Same goes for the grid. It's perfectly functional and stable. It does exactly what it's designed to do - ensure that people don't have to think if they are going to get power from the grid when they plug something in, turn something on, or have a major factory going through a complex production cycle. That's grid's job, and it does it admirably in most of the Western countries.
This issue isn't quite as major as the cost. In general, these pieces of equipment that require quicker response to AC frequency changes at feed in than specified in grid's specs will have some soft of backup power regardless. I don't recall hearing of a significant relaxation of grid specs in Germany over renewables, do you know something I don't?
And here are the actual cold, hard numbers:
Here is the trend until the implementation of the policy in 2008:
http://www.theglobaleconomy.co...
German Environmental Agency had to obfuscate the follow-up numbers for political reasons, so you'll find that many sources cut off at 2009. However it had to continue reporting, and as a result, the numbers are there, both on its own page and on Eurostat's.
Here for example is the report on EU-wide 2012-2013 comparison which shows very well just how badly Germany's goal was damaged by Energiewende:
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa....
Here is the same report for 2011-2012
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa....
P.S. Der Spiegel is "right wing press" now? Really?
The narrative may not be "agreed upon", which is understandable considering how many Greens politicians put their careers on the line with implementing the failed policy, but it's factual. German Environmental Agency numbers are simply not up for discussion.
Here is the trend until the implementation of the policy in 2008:
http://www.theglobaleconomy.co...
German Environmental Agency had to obfuscate the follow-up numbers for political reasons, so you'll find that many sources cut off at 2009. However it had to continue reporting, and as a result, the numbers are there, both on its own page and on Eurostat's.
Here for example is the report on EU-wide 2012-2013 comparison which shows very well just how badly Germany's goal was damaged by Energiewende:
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa....
Here is the same report for 2011-2012
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa....
This is standard modus operandi for three local trolls: angelsphere, dblll and amimojo. 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.
Here dblll relies on relative ignorance of most people of how grids and grid stability actually works. Instead he simplifies the model to make it look feasible to a layman - grid is essentially a pool after all, and surely if there's input somewhere, it would balance out the lack of input at another location?
In general, that is indeed correct, and how grid is generally balanced. But as with all engineering problems, devil is in the details. And details make his model utterly ridiculous and completely unfeasible. The problems here is DISTANCE and LOCALIZATION OF PRODUCTION.
Most of German wind power is located in the North. Most of the consumption is in the South-West. This means that power must be pushed over large distances, with a lot of transformers and substations balancing the flow. And when the supply suddenly dies, it takes a while for automation to switch back. At the same time, the sheer volume that tends to go offline at once is quite large, as production is concentrated in certain regions. As a result, if you do not have spinning reserve in the producing regions, by the time switching brought you power from the South, your grid in the North is already down and you have countless transformer fires if you tried to keep it up regardless.
Nuclear has the exact same problem actually. We here in Finland are currently building a 1.6GW unit in Olkiluoto. As nuclear is far more reliable, we need much less than that capacity of installed spinning reserve, so if his hypothesis of "distance doesn't matter" was true, we could just increase our imports from Russia, Sweden and Estonia to make the shortfall. We have very good connections to all of these countries and routinely both import and export power.
In real world on the other hand, we had to build a 300MW power plant in Forssa, about half way between the new plant in Western Finland, and major consumption centres in Central Finland and Helsinki to provide the spinning reserve for this new unit. Because distance matters.
Actually, that's incorrect. Pump storage is completely incompatible with modern renewables because of the way it's designed to work. Turbines and pumps cannot be directionally switched easily, so the process for switching directions is designed to be done twice a day - pump water during the night, flush water through turbine during the day. It's a predictable cycle, so directional shifting can be planned in advance and executed.
Renewables would require near instant mode switching. Which is incompatible with aforementioned systems, and as a result, Germany is actually shutting down its pumped energy storage gradually.
This isn't about frames per second but latency of each frame.
Today most GPUs render things into a buffer, and render two-three frames ahead (double or triple buffering). Far more important, as noted by Carmack in the speech (seriously, go watch it, it's very informative) is being able to do just-in-time rendering and send it straight to the framebuffer to minimize latency.
Actually it's far worse. Right now, users on the same electric grid as the solar user are directly subsidising the solar producer through higher utility payments. This is due to inherent instability of solar production and spikes this causes, which require more complex grid management to keep the grid stable. Which means more costs, which are paid through price on delivered electricity, which is lower to the solar producer.
This is already the case in Australia, where this has been decried as a direct subsidy from the poor to the rich (poor generally can't afford solar while rich can, and poor are basically paying for solar panels of the rich through their higher utility payments).
I suspect that even through pundits will resist, the real costs of having residential solar hooked to the grid will be pushed back onto solar users so they don't free ride off other people's backs by instituting some sort of "grid stability fee" for anyone who has solar hooked to the grid.
Do you even know why?
Because I recall explaining it to you already, just a few weeks ago. Right here on slashdot. And here you are again, trolling on the subject as it it never occurred.
To those ignorant, he's correct, but the reason isn't that renewables are functional, but that legal system for selling electricity was jury-rigged to serve unstable renewables at the cost of everyone else, from customers to competitors.
Electricity in Germany, like most EU states is sold on exchanges and spot sale price is determined based on it, while long term contracts usually are at least loosely based on those prices as well.
And in Germany, there is a law that dictates that before you can sell any coal/nuclear power on exchange, ALL of produced renewable power must be sold.
In other words - when wind blows, if you're running a nuclear or coal plant, you cannot sell any of your produced electricity until your wind/solar competitors sold everything they produced. At the same time, you are not allowed to shut the plant down, because you need to sit on the grid as spinning reserve for when wind blows too hard or stops blowing to pick up the slack.
This has resulted in ridiculous paradoxes, such as the fact that spinning reserve which is mostly coal and natural gas has become unprofitable, causing bankruptcies. Not because electricity is cheap - when renewables are down, the spot price is ridiculously high, and when you count the subsidies in Germany which are pushed to building and maintaining renewables, electricity in Germany is incredibly expensive for end customers. But at the same time, when renewables do produce, coal, natural gas and nuclear plants cannot sell electricity (not because they don't produce energy, but because laws ban them from doing so!) and are forced to actually pay people who take their electricity (again, grid balance!)
Which in turn prevented renewables from being hooked to the network, because you cannot hook wind or solar to network without almost entire capacity worth of spinning reserve sitting on the network - you risk grid collapse and those rules are there for that very reason. The situation is utterly ridiculous and is a great example of just how dysfunctional the current German model is. Because the moment you remove this particular rule, electricity cost would collapse and renewables would dive deep into the red as their unstable production cycle would mean that the only times they could sell was the same time that others can sell, meaning their electricity would always be very cheap and far below levels needed to pay back for the plant.
Germany is a great example of an utter failure in terms of emissions as well. The moment is started implementing the aforementioned policy, it had to break its Kyoto targets of CO2 emissions reduction (more spinning reserve needed due to inherent instability of renewables), and after 15 years of stable yearly reduction of CO2 emissions, Germany's CO2 emissions grew for several years after implementation of these policies.
Yes, and I'm an emperor of China. That's the problem on the internet, people can say whatever they want about themselves. Even when it's obviously either false or they are genuinely incredibly gullible.
Because you see, vast majority of people that did come out of USSR understood that shit that was fed to them was propaganda. That's where the infamous Russian humour comes from. You on the other hand swallow bullshit that is even thicker than stuff Pravda printed back then, and genuinely believe it.
Conclusion: you're not who you say you are, or you are the bottom fifth of them at best in terms of ability to comprehend politics.
I suppose that's one way of looking at it.
On the other hand, he was actively committing all the acts listed, and his "reveal of FSB plot" was a highly questionable piece of information delivered on request of said mr. Berezovsky and paid by him. It was notably far from the only such an act. Mr. Berezovsky, before killing himself due to depression had a bit of a megalomania going on according to UK newspapers, and really liked to think that he was important enough for entire country to aggressively hound him.
In reality, he later went into severe depression after UK got really, REALLY tired of his anti-Russian antics and after he ran out of money to pay them off, as he lost most of it to his former Russian colleagues in UK court. He ended up killing himself, which was confirmed by UK police, but still to the day is being "whistleblown" by his wife as a "succeessul assassination by Putin".
So yeah. Whistleblowers everywhere. If you're naive and ignorant that is.
You have what?!
You seriously think that you as a voter have a significant impact on what candidates are pre-selected for you to get to vote for into the important political posts?
I have no words. Truly, if I were listening to a Soviet citizen in the 50s, he'd be less ignorant of political reality in his country than you appear to be about political reality in yours.
"The system" doesn't refer to some mysterious ephermal existence, but the political and legal system built up with a certain goal in mind that exists right now.
Man killed with polonium wasn't a dissident, but what US would have called a "terrorist" if operations he undertook against Russia were undertaken against it instead. That is active spy recruitment, channelling finance of military assistance to various separatist and anti-establishment groups in Russia and so on. If you call him a dissident, you'll have who reclassify a whole lot of people US calls terrorists today into "dissidents".
US has an active assassination program running RIGHT NOW killing people like him every week or so. So you should have been awake for a long time now.
That's what wikileaks effectively did. They ended up cut off from entire worldwide payment and banking system almost entirely.
See, that's the beauty of the Western system, as compared to for example Russia. There, if private companies dump dissidents, it's "oh noes government's fault".
But in the land of the free? That's just private corporations exercising their freedom!
The only actual difference? Slightly greater plausible deniability that works on people like you. Apparently. Because you see, there's no "conspiracy". There's simply the system that is set to encourage not employing those who resist status quo. Conspiracy implies secrecy, and there's there little secrecy about this issue, as you yourself point out.
Better idea. For every piece of work they shift, their taxes go up to support communities they dump. As in, they are forced to shoulder the real costs of outsourcing, rather than "outsourcing" the cost to the tax payers.
But in today's system, where corporations are people with human rights and capital has more rights than most people, that's not going to happen.
You know, it's pretty sad that people like you are willing to pretend to be protecting the freedom, all while happily supporting the system which people who were actually protecting the freedom fought against. And then screaming abuse of "they protected YOUR freedom" at people like me who point out the fallacy, using ridiculous hyperbolic talking points to deflect attention from the subject.
Except that they are specifically giving up their freedom. For the right cause. So this isn't about "cost of freedom", but "doing the right thing costing people their freedom" as in modern West, being poor is effectively a crime that limits your freedom greatly.
Master password system of some kind is about the only reasonable solution. KeyPass etc.
It's a very effective method at discouraging effective and functional resistance against status quo.
Similar procedures were used against key people behind Occupy movement according to similar reports.