X was great for its time. But its time was when graphics hardware was slow and software was relatively undemanding.
Ha-ha-ha... you clearly never used an X-Terminal back when we were all going to have dumb terminals on our desks talking to The Cloud... sorry... super-powerful 68020-based Unix servers The X overhead is miniscule today, unless you're trying to push X sessions over the Internet, or video over the LAN.
It's not like 10 years ago it was enjoyable either to use a dumb terminal, and quite frankly I doubt it's improved (I think they were SUN dumb terminals connected to something I can't remember). These days you're still going to compete over resources over a extremely high latency link (relative to computer performance). Not to mention the increased use of graphical elements in the UI.
I use X over a low- and mid-latency networks all the time. It is working really well. X has indeed problems with high-latency links. But this is not a probem with the protocol which is nicely asynchronous but with xlib which serializes everything. This could be fixed, but the focus nowadays is too dumb everything down as much as possible for mobile devices. Don't kid youself, the driving force for MIR and Wayland is not the Linux desktop, but to simplifiy development of fancy mobile and embedded UIs.
The things X does well (e.g. network transparency) are really irrelevant nowadays (you can just send video instead of a render command stream, it will be better)
No, network transparency is much more than sending pixels. It is full integration: cut&paste, window management, client to client communication etc..
while it's underlying design makes many things we want now (e.g. smooth UI, hotplug display devices without spending 3 hours maintaining Xorg config, composited rendering, works on limited hardware) unnecessarily difficult and complicated,
I do not think this is true. The underlying design of Wayland is basically the same as X: Sending messages over a socket and some buffer sharing.
which encourages the proliferation of X extensions (XRandR, AIGLX), hurts the performance of the display stack,
Why does it hurt performance?
and actually break the one thing X does well (network transparency was dropped sometime around when they added Direct Rendering Manager to try and fix the X performance issues).
This is complete bullshit. X network transparency works perfectly fine still today. I use it every day. Yes, you cannot use direct rendering over the network. 99% of all applications do not care.
No, there is no advantage to that. I use the networking support of X every day. That it does not work anymore anyway is just FUD.
There is certainly some advantage in getting rid old rendering APIs, font management and stuff like that, but breaking decades of compatibility just for that is just a very bad trade-off IMHO.
Nonsense. There is no bottleneck. Wayland has exactly the same design as X. The only advantage is that it can drop some old stuff which is not used by modern clients. But this comes at a really high cost: broken backwards/forwards compatibility.
Not really. DC is actually better for transmission - especially under water which I guess a link between Norway and Germany would be. Also I think Norway is not part of the synchronized continental European grid, and HVDC might also be advantageous when connecting different AC grids.
Actually, you are absolutely right. Still, I think it was a major loss for Linux overall that this was done as a default upgrade to Gnome 2 - and not simply offered as an additional alternative (which even could have been the default for new installs).
"The biggest thing any program can do is not the technical details of the program itself; it’s how useful the program is to users. So any time any program (like the kernel or any other project), breaks the user experience, to me, that’s the absolute worst failure that a software project can make." (Linus Torvalds)
Yeah right because the kernel doesn't break its ABI/API on each release...
I am not sure what you mean... I can't remember that I ever had a single problem with compatibility related to the kernel. Nor did I ever have a problem at the libc level. Everything above which was UI related, lots of regular breakage.
I can't agree more. It is not that they are not free to develop whatever they want or that they are not free to stop working on Gnome 2.. The issue is that they misused the trust people put into Gnome 2 to switch people over to their completely incompatible and different Gnome 3 - breaking user experience.
Compare that with the philosophy of the Linux kernel:
"The biggest thing any program can do is not the technical details of the program itself; it’s how useful the program is to users. So any time any program (like the kernel or any other project), breaks the user experience, to me, that’s the absolute worst failure that a software project can make." (Linus Torvalds)
Seems I misunderstood what you wanted to say with "underutilized". If you want to say: we have more storage and more power from pumped storage then we actually use, yes. That is exactly the point of it, otherwise it would be risky to run the grid.
The sources you gave are irrelevant.
Your refusal to look at actual data or provide sources for your statements is annoying and makes all discussion with you pointless.
Linux with something as gnome3 as UI (and yes I tried), binary log files, and no network transparency (I use it every day and it works perfectly) and - even worse - broken backwards compatibility, indeed as no appeal to me anymore.
Now, I am not complaining that people develop such stuff - they are - of course - free to develop whatever they want. The problem I people have is that it is forced down on us on a regular upgrade path - instead of offered as an option. I also hate the lying and FUD (e.g. the network transparency is broken already bullshit).
In the end, this will just cause a split in the Linux community. The dumbed-down version with binary-logiles, fancy mobile-inspired UI, and no network transparency for people who just want a free alternative to windows and a version with backwards compatibility, and powerful command-line tools, and network transparency. And yes, I think this split might be a good thing.
Ofc power of pumped storage does not come close to 10GW, that is precisely the reason, we "only" have slightly under 10GW installed, more is not needed:)
Not coming close to the installed capacity is the definition of underutilized. My point is exactly that Germany currently has more than enough pumped storage, so what are you trying to tell me?
Pumped-storage definitely is also not profitable at the moment because solar reduced peak power prices...
That is nonsense in several dimensions.
Hey, I gave a source. Although I admit I should have said: building more pumped storage is currently not profitable. Maybe the old ones can still be operated in a profitable way, but considering the low utilization I somehow doubt it.
'Peak' power prices are high, and solar profits from that, there is no real decrease in prices around peak times due to solar power.
Peak power prices in Germany are *not* high anymore:
"The spread in Day-Ahead prices between peak and baseload hours reached an all time low of 4.36 €/MWh in 2013, the maximum spread was 2006 with 13.85 €/MWh (inflation adjusted in prices of 2010)." (fraunhofer)
Next is: "peak" does not mean what you think it does. That is why I put it in quotes.
You are not making sense. What is you definition of peak?
Third, pumped storage is not used for 'power production', it is a storage, hence the name.
Yes - again - I know this - why are you telling me this?
Finally: pumped storage plants are the most profitable plants in germany.
Interesting, that is why most projects have been put on hold?
“Currently, such systems are not economical to operate, but we expect a realisation for our project in the next ten years, this means not before 2023-2024,” said a Stadtwerke Mainz spokesman." (From the link I posted.)
They buy energy for negative prices, they not only get it 'for free' but get 'profit' on top of it.
Negative prices exist occasionally and only for short amount of time. They can make a profit at that time but not much because it does not last long. In the past they could make a lot of profit by buying cheap electricity in the night and selling it at peak time. This is much less profitable now because the difference between peak and base prices is much less.
Their comtribution to the grid is huge.
No.
They are the primary contributors to 'primary reserve energy' (seconds reserve, seconds as in time) and also important for 'secundary reserve energy' (minute reserve, minute as in time).
I don't doubt that pumped storage can be useful in providing balancing power. But the market for balancing power is not big enough to make them profitable right now.
The actual numbers (a bit outsated) about how much pumped storage germany has installed, you can find on wikipedia.
I know how much there is installed, thank you. This discussion is not about how much is installed, but how much is actually used.
And: pumped storage plants work both ways: they artificially increase demand to fit the current power production _and_ they are the prime contributor to fix sudden surges in demand and keep the grid frequency stable..that is what they are build for: demand shaping (that is what power companies call 'peak').
Power companies call demand shaping 'peak'? I don't know what you are trying to say....
Could we use more of them? Yes in 10 to 30 years when we are primarily renewable, but right now we have - 'typicaly german' - more than twice the amount we need to keep the grid(s) stable.
Thank you. This was exactly my point: There is more than enough pumped storage right now in Germany - despite the already high amount of intermittent power sources such as wind and solar. For 80% or 100% renewables more could be useful.
On the other hand, it might equally well be price discrimination where they turn off perfectly working features just to be able to sell the same product to different people for a different price. Who knows?
Does it matter? The product is different, whether the inaccessible bits are working or not is irrelevant. It isn't price discrimination because the product is different.
The real questions are: Should the consumer (or some reselller?) be allowed to turn the working features back on? Is it OK if NVIDIA tries to prevent this with code signing? If the features are actually broken, than these questions are of less relevance.
On the other hand, it might equally well be price discrimination
So what you're saying is, if you sold a computer on ebay and said "This computers CPU fan is bad - you MUST replace the CPU fan before use!!!" you are admitting to criminal fraud simply because I should somehow expect a working CPU fan?!
How on earth does that even make sense?
How does you reply even make sense? This has nothing to do with what I wrote.
They could be open and sell each chip at its fair market price for its level of functionality. Chips sold at the wrong price level can only happen if they *do* price discrimination. On the other hand, if product binning were the only reason as claimed by some posters this could not happen - there would be no chips sold at the wrong price.
There also better solutions than code signing if it were only about preventing people from getting silicon with broken cores sold as fully functional: Just publish the test result with the serial number.
On the other hand, it might equally well be price discrimination where they turn off perfectly working features just to be able to sell the same product to different people for a different price. Who knows?
So yes, people are aware that having an attacker control parts of the environment is a bad idea and this needs to be restriced. But for some reason this fix to dhcp does not cover all possibilties..
The question is, what language would they write good code in?
If Linus is right, C++ attracks bad programmers. So another language would not help. Personally, I stick to C. It is not the perfect language, but all others I tried are worse..
FWIW, C++ has many features that are strong improvements over C.
Well C++ has many features. They are meant to be improvements. But they are basically *all* broken.
Class encapsulation,
This is just syntactic sugar. But even this is broken: You have to put the complete class definition in the header - including private implementation details. How stupid is this? You can actually have much better encapsulation in C by putting an incomplete struct in the header and define the struct in the C file.
e.g. OTOH, it's also full of things that are only worthwhile if you are really interested in run-time optimization.
I am not sure what you mean by this... C++ is good if you want to do compile-time optimizations and you don't trust the compiler to do it for you, so you write your own program transformations using templates which run at compile time and generate super efficient code. Some interesting math libraries are written this way. But ofcourse, templates as a compile time language are just horrible and you would be much better off to write code generators in a proper programming language instead.
I once started to add a feature to firefox in my spare time and still haven't finished it because of it took much time... This C++ mess was certainly part of the reason, layers on top of layers... and horrible long compile times. I know very few people who write good C++ code.
I sympathize with the idea that scientist should try to explain their ideas to the general public, but I do not agree with the idea that scientific findings should only be taken serious if it is explained so well that I can be understood by the general public. Some things are just too difficult to be easily explained - and even if this is possible in some cases, it might take too much time and effort to explain it well. So yes, I think political decisions must sometimes be based on the authoritative advice from certain scientific insitutions.
But it is a long time since I read that book, and I think that while it explains the key ideas very well I would be surprized if it enables an average person to do actual computations in quantum field theory to verify some of its predictions on their own. For this, you have to dive into the math on a much deeper level. So the point still stands.
Slashdot Mirror
X was great for its time. But its time was when graphics hardware was slow and software was relatively undemanding.
Ha-ha-ha... you clearly never used an X-Terminal back when we were all going to have dumb terminals on our desks talking to The Cloud... sorry... super-powerful 68020-based Unix servers The X overhead is miniscule today, unless you're trying to push X sessions over the Internet, or video over the LAN.
It's not like 10 years ago it was enjoyable either to use a dumb terminal, and quite frankly I doubt it's improved (I think they were SUN dumb terminals connected to something I can't remember). These days you're still going to compete over resources over a extremely high latency link (relative to computer performance). Not to mention the increased use of graphical elements in the UI.
I use X over a low- and mid-latency networks all the time. It is working really well. X has indeed problems with high-latency links. But this is not a probem with the protocol which is nicely asynchronous but with xlib which serializes everything. This could be fixed, but the focus nowadays is too dumb everything down as much as possible for mobile devices. Don't kid youself, the driving force for MIR and Wayland is not the Linux desktop, but to simplifiy development of fancy mobile and embedded UIs.
The things X does well (e.g. network transparency) are really irrelevant nowadays (you can just send video instead of a render command stream, it will be better)
No, network transparency is much more than sending pixels. It is full integration: cut&paste, window management, client to client communication etc..
while it's underlying design makes many things we want now (e.g. smooth UI, hotplug display devices without spending 3 hours maintaining Xorg config, composited rendering, works on limited hardware) unnecessarily difficult and complicated,
I do not think this is true. The underlying design of Wayland is basically the same as X: Sending messages over a socket and some buffer sharing.
which encourages the proliferation of X extensions (XRandR, AIGLX), hurts the performance of the display stack,
Why does it hurt performance?
and actually break the one thing X does well (network transparency was dropped sometime around when they added Direct Rendering Manager to try and fix the X performance issues).
This is complete bullshit. X network transparency works perfectly fine still today. I use it every day. Yes, you cannot use direct rendering over the network. 99% of all applications do not care.
Where does all the FUD come from?
No, there is no advantage to that. I use the networking support of X every day. That it does not work anymore anyway is just FUD.
There is certainly some advantage in getting rid old rendering APIs, font management and stuff like that, but breaking decades of compatibility just for that is just a very bad trade-off IMHO.
Nonsense. There is no bottleneck. Wayland has exactly the same design as X. The only advantage is that it can drop some old stuff which is not used by modern clients. But this comes at a really high cost: broken backwards/forwards compatibility.
Not really. DC is actually better for transmission - especially under water which I guess a link between Norway and Germany would be. Also I think Norway is not part of the synchronized continental European grid, and HVDC might also be advantageous when connecting different AC grids.
Actually, you are absolutely right. Still, I think it was a major loss for Linux overall that this was done as a default upgrade to Gnome 2 - and not simply offered as an additional alternative (which even could have been the default for new installs).
"The biggest thing any program can do is not the technical details of the program itself; it’s how useful the program is to users. So any time any program (like the kernel or any other project), breaks the user experience, to me, that’s the absolute worst failure that a software project can make." (Linus Torvalds)
Yeah right because the kernel doesn't break its ABI/API on each release...
I am not sure what you mean... I can't remember that I ever had a single problem with compatibility related to the kernel. Nor did I ever have a problem at the libc level. Everything above which was UI related, lots of regular breakage.
I can't agree more. It is not that they are not free to develop whatever they want or that they are not free to stop working on Gnome 2.. The issue is that they misused the trust people put into Gnome 2 to switch people over to their completely incompatible and different Gnome 3 - breaking user experience.
Compare that with the philosophy of the Linux kernel:
"The biggest thing any program can do is not the technical details of the program itself; it’s how useful the program is to users. So any time any program (like the kernel or any other project), breaks the user experience, to me, that’s the absolute worst failure that a software project can make." (Linus Torvalds)
Seems I misunderstood what you wanted to say with "underutilized". If you want to say: we have more storage and more power from pumped storage then we actually use, yes. That is exactly the point of it, otherwise it would be risky to run the grid.
The sources you gave are irrelevant.
Your refusal to look at actual data or provide sources for your statements is annoying and makes all discussion with you pointless.
Linux with something as gnome3 as UI (and yes I tried), binary log files, and no network transparency (I use it every day and it works perfectly) and - even worse - broken backwards compatibility, indeed as no appeal to me anymore.
Now, I am not complaining that people develop such stuff - they are - of course - free to develop whatever they want. The problem I people have is that it is forced down on us on a regular upgrade path - instead of offered as an option. I also hate the lying and FUD (e.g. the network transparency is broken already bullshit).
In the end, this will just cause a split in the Linux community. The dumbed-down version with binary-logiles, fancy mobile-inspired UI, and no network transparency for people who just want a free alternative to windows and a version with backwards compatibility, and powerful command-line tools, and network transparency. And yes, I think this split might be a good thing.
Ofc power of pumped storage does not come close to 10GW, that is precisely the reason, we "only" have slightly under 10GW installed, more is not needed :)
Not coming close to the installed capacity is the definition of underutilized. My point is exactly that Germany currently has more than enough pumped storage, so what are you trying to tell me?
Pumped-storage definitely is also not profitable at the moment because solar reduced peak power prices ...
That is nonsense in several dimensions.
Hey, I gave a source. Although I admit I should have said: building more pumped storage is currently not profitable. Maybe the old ones can still be operated in a profitable way, but considering the low utilization I somehow doubt it.
'Peak' power prices are high, and solar profits from that, there is no real decrease in prices around peak times due to solar power.
Peak power prices in Germany are *not* high anymore:
"The spread in Day-Ahead prices between peak and baseload hours reached an all time low of 4.36 €/MWh in 2013, the maximum spread was
2006 with 13.85 €/MWh (inflation adjusted in prices of 2010)." (fraunhofer)
Next is: "peak" does not mean what you think it does. That is why I put it in quotes.
You are not making sense. What is you definition of peak?
Third, pumped storage is not used for 'power production', it is a storage, hence the name.
Yes - again - I know this - why are you telling me this?
Finally: pumped storage plants are the most profitable plants in germany.
Interesting, that is why most projects have been put on hold?
“Currently, such systems are not economical to operate, but we expect a realisation for our project in the next ten years, this means not before 2023-2024,” said a Stadtwerke Mainz spokesman." (From the link I posted.)
They buy energy for negative prices, they not only get it 'for free' but get 'profit' on top of it.
Negative prices exist occasionally and only for short amount of time. They can make a profit at that time but not much because it does not last long. In the past they could make a lot of profit by buying cheap electricity in the night and selling it at peak time. This is much less profitable now because the difference between peak and base prices is much less.
Their comtribution to the grid is huge.
No.
They are the primary contributors to 'primary reserve energy' (seconds reserve, seconds as in time) and also important for 'secundary reserve energy' (minute reserve, minute as in time).
I don't doubt that pumped storage can be useful in providing balancing power. But the market for balancing power is not big enough to make them profitable right now.
The actual numbers (a bit outsated) about how much pumped storage germany has installed, you can find on wikipedia.
I know how much there is installed, thank you. This discussion is not about how much is installed, but how much is actually used.
And: pumped storage plants work both ways: they artificially increase demand to fit the current power production _and_ they are the prime contributor to fix sudden surges in demand and keep the grid frequency stable. .that is what they are build for: demand shaping (that is what power companies call 'peak').
Power companies call demand shaping 'peak'? I don't know what you are trying to say....
Could we use more of them? Yes in 10 to 30 years when we are primarily renewable, but right now we have - 'typicaly german' - more than twice the amount we need to keep the grid(s) stable.
Thank you. This was exactly my point: There is more than enough pumped storage right now in Germany - despite the already high amount of intermittent power sources such as wind and solar. For 80% or 100% renewables more could be useful.
Pumped storage is certainly not underutilized in Germany.
You can look up the actual use of pumped storage here:
http://www.agora-energiewende....
Power from pump storage never even comes close to 10GW. Does look pretty underutilized to me. But if you have better data, please share.
Pumped-storage definitely is also not profitable at the moment because solar reduced peak power prices:
http://www.icis.com/resources/...
Pumped storage does not show up on 'renewable' charts as it is a zero sum game, you get the same energy out of it you pumped up first.
Ofcourse, why are you telling me this?
If you had a clue how power grids work you would not make such brain dead comments.
Well, if you would be able to present actual numbers, you would not have to resort to insults.
Germany has roughly 10GW pumped storage power and roughly 50GWh storage as work/energy.
This sounds about right, but this is installed capacity, not what is actually used.
Afaik in percentage of daily power production we are world leader.
This. Solar nicely produces at peak times. Pumped storage is currently under-utilized in Germany.
On the other hand, it might equally well be price discrimination where they turn off perfectly working features just to be able to sell the same product to different people for a different price. Who knows?
Does it matter? The product is different, whether the inaccessible bits are working or not is irrelevant. It isn't price discrimination because the product is different.
The real questions are: Should the consumer (or some reselller?) be allowed to turn the working features back on? Is it OK if NVIDIA tries to prevent this with code signing? If the features are actually broken, than these questions are of less relevance.
On the other hand, it might equally well be price discrimination
So what you're saying is, if you sold a computer on ebay and said "This computers CPU fan is bad - you MUST replace the CPU fan before use!!!" you are admitting to criminal fraud simply because I should somehow expect a working CPU fan?!
How on earth does that even make sense?
How does you reply even make sense? This has nothing to do with what I wrote.
They could be open and sell each chip at its fair market price for its level of functionality. Chips sold at the wrong price level can only happen if they *do* price discrimination. On the other hand, if product binning were the only reason as claimed by some posters this could not happen - there would be no chips sold at the wrong price.
Mod parent up.
There also better solutions than code signing if it were only about preventing people from getting silicon with broken cores sold as fully functional: Just publish the test result with the serial number.
On the other hand, it might equally well be price discrimination where they turn off perfectly working features just to be able to sell the same product to different people for a different price. Who knows?
In the context about dhcp, there was a very similar problem before and people added some sanitation:
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/c...
So yes, people are aware that having an attacker control parts of the environment is a bad idea and this needs to be restriced. But for some reason this fix to dhcp does not cover all possibilties..
No, it seems that any command is run using the user's shell which might be bash.
The question is, what language would they write good code in?
If Linus is right, C++ attracks bad programmers. So another language would not help. Personally, I stick to C. It is not the perfect language, but all others I tried are worse..
FWIW, C++ has many features that are strong improvements over C.
Well C++ has many features. They are meant to be improvements. But they are basically *all* broken.
Class encapsulation,
This is just syntactic sugar. But even this is broken: You have to put the complete class definition in the header - including private implementation details. How stupid is this? You can actually have much better encapsulation in C by putting an incomplete struct in the header and define the struct in the C file.
e.g. OTOH, it's also full of things that are only worthwhile if you are really interested in run-time optimization.
I am not sure what you mean by this... C++ is good if you want to do compile-time optimizations and you don't trust the compiler to do it for you, so you write your own program transformations using templates which run at compile time and generate super efficient code. Some interesting math libraries are written this way. But ofcourse, templates as a compile time language are just horrible and you would be much better off to write code generators in a proper programming language instead.
Yes. This only works if the user has an account. But he might be able to break out of a locked-down account which only runs a specific command.
I once started to add a feature to firefox in my spare time and still haven't finished it because of it took much time... This C++ mess was certainly part of the reason, layers on top of layers... and horrible long compile times. I know very few people who write good C++ code.
Sorry for the sarcastic reply.
I sympathize with the idea that scientist should try to explain their ideas to the general public, but I do not
agree with the idea that scientific findings should only be taken serious if it is explained so well that I can be
understood by the general public. Some things are just too difficult to be easily explained - and even if this is possible
in some cases, it might take too much time and effort to explain it well. So yes, I think political decisions must
sometimes be based on the authoritative advice from certain scientific insitutions.
True. Feynman is great.
But it is a long time since I read that book, and I think that while it explains the key ideas very well I would be surprized if it enables an average person to do actual computations in quantum field theory to verify some of its predictions on their own. For this, you have to dive into the math on a much deeper level. So the point still stands.