If you are ONLY counting people driving on highways vs the train to/from very similar destinations then yes, mass transit wins hands down, always has.
Now, considering that situation would only be a small fraction of the total number of people who use said highways then you are probably looking at something more like $45B vs maybe $6-8B adjusted.
Keep in mind that operating the train will not be drastically cheaper than repairing highways so long term costs are likely to be similar.
It really doesnt matter to me how or why or whatever, but Dell should see my issue and act instead of charging me a boatload to fix the machines.
If I take my error rate of ~25% and the discounted price of $120 for a PSU, as well as shipping of the defective machine back and forth $60, then I need to ad $90 to the price of each unit. That totally negates the price advantage of Dell over HP, Acer, IBM, etc.
My company currently runs a dell shop, running a mix of vostros, optiplexs, and over $100,000 in Dell servers.
I have been having issue after issue with the power supplies in pretty much every dell I run. We really like to run the SFF style units and they use a specially sized power supply. Dell refuses to acknowledge that there is an issue even though I have a 25% failure rate in power supplies at the one year mark. They offered to give me a SWEET deal of $120 for a replacement power supply (on a $400 unit), down from the $150 list.
So Dell has screwed consumers over on systems with bad capacitors, screwed consumers over with bad power supplies, cheated their shareholders by falsifying earnings, and competed unfairly by accepting bribe money from intel. bad company, bad products.
Whomever moded the post Score:5, Insightful, you are idiots. This has absolutely nothing to do with open hardware. This has to do with self destructing hardware. Not insightful, ignorant.
My argument is that if not for failures, you would not measure success. Failure is the measurement so logically that is where comparisons are made.
We typically measure a change in states, that is what we document, that is what we study. The change in technology comes down to failure or obsolescence. Logically, that means that we can measure failure rate. We can measure how long any perticular device will take to reach obsolescence and at what rate the drives are still functional.
Its human nature at its finest. we improve by measuring failure and making choices based on that. If we sat around measuring how successful we were, well, we wouldnt be very successful.
You cannot subtract percentages, they are a derived values.
simply put, if there are 100 drives, and 10 of them fail, they fail at a rate of 10%. If just one fails then they fail at 1%. In raw numbers, 10 drives failed vs 1 drive. that is a 10x variance, which is not 9% worse but 1000% worse.
how do you get 9% worse? 1% of 100 is, well, 1, 10% of 100 is 10, 1:10 is 10X different. 9% worse would be 1.1% return rate. you cant say 10% - 1% is 9%, thats not how it works.
not to defend apple's logic, but if they pay a license to someone, then that someone takes on the responsibility and risk for future patent infringement lawsuits. Apple, in good faith, licensed the technology from a party who was understood to own the IP. Granted, this doesnt necessarily totally shield Apple but its much better than an open source codec that has no buffer. If someone decides that VP8 infringes on their patent, then they would sue anyone that used a product based on the patent..
all the better reason for major governments to acknowledge some codec and either cut a deal or public domain it making it a defacto standard. VP8 is an excellent candidate for this, considering google open sourced it. The process of identifying such a codec should then make everything that uses it immune to patent trolling.
please be sure to read patent trolling as 'having a patent, watching that patent be violated, then sitting on it until the market is thoroughly saturated with the product before sending the cease and decist"
so what your saying is that 10/20 is a LARGER difference than 33/50??? that 1/2 is less than 2/3!?!? that if you only get half the mileage that is worse than getting 2/3 the mileage!?!?! really? Im going to need to tell my friends about this.
I would argue that though source material was produced in RGB, the sensors used are much MUCH better at sensing colors and outputting in RGB than an RGB LCD is capable of displaying. Adding more colors to LCD output should help overcome limitations in color correctness in LCD output. LCDs have not been very well known to produce very accurate output.
its not the fault of optical media that load times are slow, its the fault of the optical media reader!
Simply put, you could *EASILY* engineer a drive to have a constant spin velocity and multiple lasers to read the media.
With this method you could lower the RPM of the optical drive considerably. The lasers are not that expensive. You could put 4 or 5 lasers in the drive and haveplaced around the hub so that any laser could read any part of the disk. some firmware to disable non-functional lasers. constant spin velocity could lower the noise level. multiple lasers would decrease read latency considerably.
This would require ZERO changes to current disk production methods and improve not only performance but also reliability of the drives. Something like RAID for read heads. If one fails, turn it off and use 4. each laser is mounted on its own track.
With all the caching and pipelineing and uber-high speed memory buses that x86 has, which ARM doesn't, I just don't believe you.
IOW, benchmarks or you're full of shit.
Though I agree, I would point out that much of that pipelining is the break jobs down so they can be handled by complex CPUs and the caching is to hide the very long pipelines. ARM is a very very simple cpu in comparison with a much shorter pipeline. ARM7 just 3 stages. Cortex-A8 has 13 BUT many of those are really substages and many instructions can flow through a bunch of the pipeline in one clock.
What this really means is that an ARM7 cpu can do many MANY more very simple instructions in the same amount of wall time as an intel chip. 1.2Ghz x3 stages vs 3Ghz x14 stages is a big deal. The Core2Duo's 14stages can do some serious work, but the simplest work gets done slower than on an ARM system because it takes more clock cycles to get it done.
Here is a metric that I think is realistic. power * instructions/s * size.
You can put a dual quad core intel system in 1U of a rack and its going to draw 500W without any drives
How many ARM cores can you put in that same 1U of space, what is the power usage, and does that perform better for your workload?
x86 systems have a very complex set of requirements in motherboard and overall system. This gives a ton of flexibility. ARM systems need substantially less on the mainboard but the systems are less flexible in this regard as a result.
My math says that the ARM board out of the sheevaplug is 4"x6" (or slightly smaller). A 1U Rack is usually 19"w x 30"d. so 24"sq vs 570"sq means roughly 23-24 sheevaplug boards at 4W each. Ill round to 24 considering form factor can be adjusted pretty easily on these.
24 ARM cores at 1.2Ghz vs 8 Intel cores at 3Ghz. Thats 28.8Ghz ARM vs 24Ghz INTEL. Its also 500W vs 100W. if we are talking power usage here then its 5:1 or 144Ghz ARM vs 24Ghz x86 and I suspect that margin is enough to readily beat x86 at the same power consumption. If its raw performance then I suspect that the 24Ghz of x86 is going to run circles around the ARM setup.
So right now, I suppose you can match x86 in power/performance. If you need truly high performance computing, ARM isnt your choice. at $.10-.15/KW of power ARM cant beat x86 in the server rack but it can challenge it.
Where can ARM win in reguard to servers? here are some thoughts. DNS servers. do you need to burn 400W for DNS when you can burn 4W? Proxy server. email server for 100 users. small file server. IPPBX for 20 users. Firewall for 10Mb/s WAN.
In the datacenter I think that high performance vs price is the key. power only comes into play when the cooling systems have to be upgraded, price of power spikes, etc. Getting stuff done in a rack is more important than using less power because simply put, you could use less, high powerformance systems to reduce your power consumption.
I think ARM servers place is in small offices, homes, small businesses etc. you can build a VoIP PBX, DNS server, File server, email server, Firewall and Router out of a handfull of ARM servers in some modular design for under a grand and use under 100W
Really? Looks like you write with a thesaurus in hand. I might point out that Einstein wrote and spoke like the common man. So does Gary Kasparov. Trying to sound smart with malformed sentences is...well...having and equal but opposite reaction. Consider the comma a breath mark. If you take a second to breath you might get a little more oxygen to your brain.
I am equally proficient in typing in the 51 languages Google translate speaks in addition to the 1 language I am truly fluent in and the 3 others that I can ask for a date in.
Granted, I'm not a genius like the aforementioned folks so you could just been miles and miles ahead of me, looking down as if I were and intellectual ant in comparison to yourself.
100Mbit Ethernet = 12.5MB/s. Lets be generous and say you get %75 of that after TCP/IP and SMB overhead so = 9.375MB/s. It doesnt matter how fast your USB drives are as long as they can beat 10MB/s then 100Mbit ethernet is your bottleneck.
A sheeva/guruplug/open-rd can handle twice that so your bottleneck is still 100Mb ethernet.
How fast are these on gigabit? I have a sheevaplug with a moderately fast usb drive and I get...........about 6-8MB/s via SMB. How fast on 100Mbit Ethernet? 8-10MB/s. I think the USB chipset is the next slowpoint.
there may or may not be 'super science'. we cant live on this presumption. what we know today fits pretty close to our observations though not perfectly.
We may NEVER have a clear understanding of how everything works because there may be some aspect that we dont have the IQ, and possibly never will, to understand.
"we cannot rule out entirely the possibility of unimaginable space and time travel mechanisms."
we can within our science. until our science allows for such things we can consider them as a society, impossible. scientist should of course try to push the limits of our knowledge but any other assumptions are just fantasy.
Someday we could find that dark matter and dark energy are truly real and not a side effect of something else and that in fact they are usable for space travel or communications or power etc etc. What a great day that *could* be.
Someday we might find that string theory is just a side effect of something even more fundamental and that all of our observations of the universe have been a simple perspective on the truth.
but today, ~186kmps is the speed limit, going fast takes more energy that we can produce, and intelligent life is likely to be just as isolated as we are. Though they (smart aliens) are very likely to exist statistically, we don't know.
Also, we continue to become MORE reliant on radio waves and less so on physical wiring. Fiber optics become a backbone but wireless communication is key to advancement. There may be a shift in the data being sent from analog tv to digital data communications, but we are still sending the signals out and will likely send more and more for the foreseeable future.
Considering that space travel takes so long there is a balance between food and fuel. Less fuel equals less speed equals more food. More food requires more fuel because of weight. More speed requires more fuel but more fuel requires more fuel because of weight. A ship can really only be so big before diminishing returns sets in.
Making the assumption that our scientists are wrong about faster than light travel (that is, in regular space you cant go faster than light and effectively you cant even go that fast and opening a worm whole would take more energy than our solar system contains) then aliens would have to have: enough resources to scout planets. a radio wave doesnt really identify if the planet has enough resources to support their civilization. enough foresight to start scouting and to build the colony ship(s) before their resources are gone technology to help them survive for a thousand years in space.
seriously, we have be looking for aliens with seti since 1993. Any civilization that develops radio technology which would certainly be required for developing space flight would have to be farther than 17 light years away or we likely would have detected some signal. at a fraction the speed of light (maybe 1/10) its 170+ years in a colony ship.
As far as the aliens being robots, well, life seems to prefer to evolve biologically and I doubt that robots or computers would or even could ever evolve sans organic live. Electronic life, again, unlikely to evolve on its own. Could an organic life form screw up at create Cylons? sure. would they need our resources? probably not, they could mine asteroids and synth chemicals themselves. probably would want to come after us unless they percieved a threat -OR- they were idiotically programmed to kill intelegent life.
modern hypervisors are quite fast. Most of the perceived slowdown is a result of using something like VNC to access the VM.
basic linux install with KVM and the console glued to the VM. Get serious and contribute some software developers or put out some bounties to make a windows video driver appropriate for your needs.
What is at the brim? do you think that you have a performance issue? Considered a master/slave/slave/etc cluster? Do you do a ton of reads and few writes or many writes?
It's hard to say that mysql is at the brim without some explanation.
we make pretty efficient electric motors and alternators now. why not put a many-ton flywheel in a pit and apply a modest vacuum to the chamber. support the unit magnetically using some permanent magnets for lower rpm states and have some electromagnets that are used when the rpms go up during peak generation times. Do this specifically to extend the life of the permanent magnets and lessen the cost considering electromagnets will be cheaper to build and maintain for high loads.
Yes, you will have losses when using the electromagnets and if you dont take it to a pure vacuum you will have some drag but they will be a diminishing return on as you decrease the vacuum pressure and maintain that vs the reduction in drag. be sure to polish the flywheel down as smooth as possible and put a coating on it to reduce drag further.
Catastrophic failure? all the energy is stored horizontally. Any release will oppose the axles direction so a failed flywheel would shoot shrapnel into the ground sideways. likely totally destroying the facility but the above-ground damage would be much less than a fault-rupture from underground air pressure or a chemical explosion which is in all directions. Burried deep enough people on the service would feel a very localized minor earthquake. *dont put it on a fault line*
do you think that it is more efficient to compress air, then recover that energy or more efficient to store power chemically and recover it later? better yet, how about low-loss flywheel storage. What is more efficient compress air/decompress air or spin flywheel via motor, recover by alternator?
Any chance that we have the technology to create capacitors to handle a 24hour buffering of power without loosing too much while storing it? I know that this is the typical weakness in CAPS, that they are great for quickly storing and retrieving power and specifically buffering power but they cant store it for long without losses to heat.
except the gap between cities allow for agriculture and ranching in those areas and *should* reduce fuel expense and time moving produce to population centers. This breaks down when you buy mexican tomatos in NYC of course.
The tubes would let us move people and produce very efficiently AFTER the initial build cost is subracted.
I like the tubes, but thousands of miles of tubes will cost thousands of millions of dollars to build.
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If you are ONLY counting people driving on highways vs the train to/from very similar destinations then yes, mass transit wins hands down, always has.
Now, considering that situation would only be a small fraction of the total number of people who use said highways then you are probably looking at something more like $45B vs maybe $6-8B adjusted.
Keep in mind that operating the train will not be drastically cheaper than repairing highways so long term costs are likely to be similar.
It really doesnt matter to me how or why or whatever, but Dell should see my issue and act instead of charging me a boatload to fix the machines.
If I take my error rate of ~25% and the discounted price of $120 for a PSU, as well as shipping of the defective machine back and forth $60, then I need to ad $90 to the price of each unit. That totally negates the price advantage of Dell over HP, Acer, IBM, etc.
hundreds of workstations and a dozen servers, in nearly 50 different locations through the US.
Older machines seem fine, but the units purchased in the last 12-14 months have been dropping like flies.
My company currently runs a dell shop, running a mix of vostros, optiplexs, and over $100,000 in Dell servers.
I have been having issue after issue with the power supplies in pretty much every dell I run. We really like to run the SFF style units and they use a specially sized power supply. Dell refuses to acknowledge that there is an issue even though I have a 25% failure rate in power supplies at the one year mark. They offered to give me a SWEET deal of $120 for a replacement power supply (on a $400 unit), down from the $150 list.
So Dell has screwed consumers over on systems with bad capacitors, screwed consumers over with bad power supplies, cheated their shareholders by falsifying earnings, and competed unfairly by accepting bribe money from intel. bad company, bad products.
Whomever moded the post Score:5, Insightful, you are idiots. This has absolutely nothing to do with open hardware. This has to do with self destructing hardware. Not insightful, ignorant.
i can see where you are coming from.
My argument is that if not for failures, you would not measure success. Failure is the measurement so logically that is where comparisons are made.
We typically measure a change in states, that is what we document, that is what we study. The change in technology comes down to failure or obsolescence. Logically, that means that we can measure failure rate. We can measure how long any perticular device will take to reach obsolescence and at what rate the drives are still functional.
Its human nature at its finest. we improve by measuring failure and making choices based on that. If we sat around measuring how successful we were, well, we wouldnt be very successful.
it may look right, but that is in fact incorrect.
You cannot subtract percentages, they are a derived values.
simply put, if there are 100 drives, and 10 of them fail, they fail at a rate of 10%. If just one fails then they fail at 1%. In raw numbers, 10 drives failed vs 1 drive. that is a 10x variance, which is not 9% worse but 1000% worse.
how do you get 9% worse? 1% of 100 is, well, 1, 10% of 100 is 10, 1:10 is 10X different. 9% worse would be 1.1% return rate. you cant say 10% - 1% is 9%, thats not how it works.
not to defend apple's logic, but if they pay a license to someone, then that someone takes on the responsibility and risk for future patent infringement lawsuits. Apple, in good faith, licensed the technology from a party who was understood to own the IP. Granted, this doesnt necessarily totally shield Apple but its much better than an open source codec that has no buffer. If someone decides that VP8 infringes on their patent, then they would sue anyone that used a product based on the patent..
all the better reason for major governments to acknowledge some codec and either cut a deal or public domain it making it a defacto standard. VP8 is an excellent candidate for this, considering google open sourced it. The process of identifying such a codec should then make everything that uses it immune to patent trolling.
please be sure to read patent trolling as 'having a patent, watching that patent be violated, then sitting on it until the market is thoroughly saturated with the product before sending the cease and decist"
so what your saying is that 10/20 is a LARGER difference than 33/50??? that 1/2 is less than 2/3!?!? that if you only get half the mileage that is worse than getting 2/3 the mileage!?!?! really? Im going to need to tell my friends about this.
I would argue that though source material was produced in RGB, the sensors used are much MUCH better at sensing colors and outputting in RGB than an RGB LCD is capable of displaying. Adding more colors to LCD output should help overcome limitations in color correctness in LCD output. LCDs have not been very well known to produce very accurate output.
its not the fault of optical media that load times are slow, its the fault of the optical media reader!
Simply put, you could *EASILY* engineer a drive to have a constant spin velocity and multiple lasers to read the media.
With this method you could lower the RPM of the optical drive considerably. The lasers are not that expensive. You could put 4 or 5 lasers in the drive and haveplaced around the hub so that any laser could read any part of the disk. some firmware to disable non-functional lasers. constant spin velocity could lower the noise level. multiple lasers would decrease read latency considerably.
This would require ZERO changes to current disk production methods and improve not only performance but also reliability of the drives. Something like RAID for read heads. If one fails, turn it off and use 4. each laser is mounted on its own track.
With all the caching and pipelineing and uber-high speed memory buses that x86 has, which ARM doesn't, I just don't believe you.
IOW, benchmarks or you're full of shit.
Though I agree, I would point out that much of that pipelining is the break jobs down so they can be handled by complex CPUs and the caching is to hide the very long pipelines. ARM is a very very simple cpu in comparison with a much shorter pipeline. ARM7 just 3 stages. Cortex-A8 has 13 BUT many of those are really substages and many instructions can flow through a bunch of the pipeline in one clock.
What this really means is that an ARM7 cpu can do many MANY more very simple instructions in the same amount of wall time as an intel chip. 1.2Ghz x3 stages vs 3Ghz x14 stages is a big deal. The Core2Duo's 14stages can do some serious work, but the simplest work gets done slower than on an ARM system because it takes more clock cycles to get it done.
(this one got long, skip it if you are drowsy)
Here is a metric that I think is realistic. power * instructions/s * size.
You can put a dual quad core intel system in 1U of a rack and its going to draw 500W without any drives
How many ARM cores can you put in that same 1U of space, what is the power usage, and does that perform better for your workload?
x86 systems have a very complex set of requirements in motherboard and overall system. This gives a ton of flexibility. ARM systems need substantially less on the mainboard but the systems are less flexible in this regard as a result.
My math says that the ARM board out of the sheevaplug is 4"x6" (or slightly smaller). A 1U Rack is usually 19"w x 30"d. so 24"sq vs 570"sq means roughly 23-24 sheevaplug boards at 4W each. Ill round to 24 considering form factor can be adjusted pretty easily on these.
24 ARM cores at 1.2Ghz vs 8 Intel cores at 3Ghz. Thats 28.8Ghz ARM vs 24Ghz INTEL. Its also 500W vs 100W. if we are talking power usage here then its 5:1 or 144Ghz ARM vs 24Ghz x86 and I suspect that margin is enough to readily beat x86 at the same power consumption. If its raw performance then I suspect that the 24Ghz of x86 is going to run circles around the ARM setup.
So right now, I suppose you can match x86 in power/performance. If you need truly high performance computing, ARM isnt your choice. at $.10-.15/KW of power ARM cant beat x86 in the server rack but it can challenge it.
Where can ARM win in reguard to servers? here are some thoughts. DNS servers. do you need to burn 400W for DNS when you can burn 4W? Proxy server. email server for 100 users. small file server. IPPBX for 20 users. Firewall for 10Mb/s WAN.
In the datacenter I think that high performance vs price is the key. power only comes into play when the cooling systems have to be upgraded, price of power spikes, etc. Getting stuff done in a rack is more important than using less power because simply put, you could use less, high powerformance systems to reduce your power consumption.
I think ARM servers place is in small offices, homes, small businesses etc. you can build a VoIP PBX, DNS server, File server, email server, Firewall and Router out of a handfull of ARM servers in some modular design for under a grand and use under 100W
Really? Looks like you write with a thesaurus in hand. I might point out that Einstein wrote and spoke like the common man. So does Gary Kasparov. Trying to sound smart with malformed sentences is...well...having and equal but opposite reaction. Consider the comma a breath mark. If you take a second to breath you might get a little more oxygen to your brain.
I am equally proficient in typing in the 51 languages Google translate speaks in addition to the 1 language I am truly fluent in and the 3 others that I can ask for a date in.
Granted, I'm not a genius like the aforementioned folks so you could just been miles and miles ahead of me, looking down as if I were and intellectual ant in comparison to yourself.
100Mbit Ethernet = 12.5MB/s. Lets be generous and say you get %75 of that after TCP/IP and SMB overhead so = 9.375MB/s. It doesnt matter how fast your USB drives are as long as they can beat 10MB/s then 100Mbit ethernet is your bottleneck.
A sheeva/guruplug/open-rd can handle twice that so your bottleneck is still 100Mb ethernet.
How fast are these on gigabit? I have a sheevaplug with a moderately fast usb drive and I get...........about 6-8MB/s via SMB. How fast on 100Mbit Ethernet? 8-10MB/s. I think the USB chipset is the next slowpoint.
Pretty much the same story here but I moved over in 2006 to Dapper Drake. The 'prestige' or whatever you might call it with gentoo wore off.
there may or may not be 'super science'. we cant live on this presumption. what we know today fits pretty close to our observations though not perfectly.
We may NEVER have a clear understanding of how everything works because there may be some aspect that we dont have the IQ, and possibly never will, to understand.
"we cannot rule out entirely the possibility of unimaginable space and time travel mechanisms."
we can within our science. until our science allows for such things we can consider them as a society, impossible. scientist should of course try to push the limits of our knowledge but any other assumptions are just fantasy.
Someday we could find that dark matter and dark energy are truly real and not a side effect of something else and that in fact they are usable for space travel or communications or power etc etc. What a great day that *could* be.
Someday we might find that string theory is just a side effect of something even more fundamental and that all of our observations of the universe have been a simple perspective on the truth.
but today, ~186kmps is the speed limit, going fast takes more energy that we can produce, and intelligent life is likely to be just as isolated as we are. Though they (smart aliens) are very likely to exist statistically, we don't know.
Also, we continue to become MORE reliant on radio waves and less so on physical wiring. Fiber optics become a backbone but wireless communication is key to advancement. There may be a shift in the data being sent from analog tv to digital data communications, but we are still sending the signals out and will likely send more and more for the foreseeable future.
I don't agree with Hawking here at all.
Considering that space travel takes so long there is a balance between food and fuel. Less fuel equals less speed equals more food. More food requires more fuel because of weight. More speed requires more fuel but more fuel requires more fuel because of weight. A ship can really only be so big before diminishing returns sets in.
Making the assumption that our scientists are wrong about faster than light travel (that is, in regular space you cant go faster than light and effectively you cant even go that fast and opening a worm whole would take more energy than our solar system contains) then aliens would have to have:
enough resources to scout planets. a radio wave doesnt really identify if the planet has enough resources to support their civilization.
enough foresight to start scouting and to build the colony ship(s) before their resources are gone
technology to help them survive for a thousand years in space.
seriously, we have be looking for aliens with seti since 1993. Any civilization that develops radio technology which would certainly be required for developing space flight would have to be farther than 17 light years away or we likely would have detected some signal. at a fraction the speed of light (maybe 1/10) its 170+ years in a colony ship.
As far as the aliens being robots, well, life seems to prefer to evolve biologically and I doubt that robots or computers would or even could ever evolve sans organic live. Electronic life, again, unlikely to evolve on its own. Could an organic life form screw up at create Cylons? sure. would they need our resources? probably not, they could mine asteroids and synth chemicals themselves. probably would want to come after us unless they percieved a threat -OR- they were idiotically programmed to kill intelegent life.
I would argue just about every point here.
modern hypervisors are quite fast. Most of the perceived slowdown is a result of using something like VNC to access the VM.
basic linux install with KVM and the console glued to the VM. Get serious and contribute some software developers or put out some bounties to make a windows video driver appropriate for your needs.
What is at the brim? do you think that you have a performance issue? Considered a master/slave/slave/etc cluster? Do you do a ton of reads and few writes or many writes?
It's hard to say that mysql is at the brim without some explanation.
we make pretty efficient electric motors and alternators now. why not put a many-ton flywheel in a pit and apply a modest vacuum to the chamber. support the unit magnetically using some permanent magnets for lower rpm states and have some electromagnets that are used when the rpms go up during peak generation times. Do this specifically to extend the life of the permanent magnets and lessen the cost considering electromagnets will be cheaper to build and maintain for high loads.
Yes, you will have losses when using the electromagnets and if you dont take it to a pure vacuum you will have some drag but they will be a diminishing return on as you decrease the vacuum pressure and maintain that vs the reduction in drag. be sure to polish the flywheel down as smooth as possible and put a coating on it to reduce drag further.
Catastrophic failure? all the energy is stored horizontally. Any release will oppose the axles direction so a failed flywheel would shoot shrapnel into the ground sideways. likely totally destroying the facility but the above-ground damage would be much less than a fault-rupture from underground air pressure or a chemical explosion which is in all directions. Burried deep enough people on the service would feel a very localized minor earthquake. *dont put it on a fault line*
do you think that it is more efficient to compress air, then recover that energy or more efficient to store power chemically and recover it later? better yet, how about low-loss flywheel storage. What is more efficient compress air/decompress air or spin flywheel via motor, recover by alternator?
Any chance that we have the technology to create capacitors to handle a 24hour buffering of power without loosing too much while storing it? I know that this is the typical weakness in CAPS, that they are great for quickly storing and retrieving power and specifically buffering power but they cant store it for long without losses to heat.
see my other post. push air through the tube and dont make a vacuum. now people can breath. think drive through bank tubes.
except the gap between cities allow for agriculture and ranching in those areas and *should* reduce fuel expense and time moving produce to population centers. This breaks down when you buy mexican tomatos in NYC of course.
The tubes would let us move people and produce very efficiently AFTER the initial build cost is subracted.
I like the tubes, but thousands of miles of tubes will cost thousands of millions of dollars to build.