I worked on X codebase and I know it's shit. It's a patched-over shit, but still. Integer overflows, memory corruption, it has everything.
.What did you work ont?
But even setting this aside, X.org is insecure by design. Any application can just send any events to any other application, so there's no point in trying to make it secure. If you have access to an X connection then you already have full access to the user's data.
Any application on the same host can hijack any other even without X. Ever used a debugger? Wonder how it works? For remote, you have point. There is a solution: Untrusted X Clients. I would need a bit of work, and I would rather prefer people fixing these minor things instead of rewriting everything.
For example, you simply can inject "ctrl-t" into the shell to launch a terminal and then inject any commands you want into it.
You can do this without X.
And about "todays wonder boys" - Wayland is designed and written mostly by the same developers who are working on X.org
Not really, most X developers seem to still work on X and not on Wayland (Packard, Coppersmith,...)
No, it was all about mobile. All the UI rewriting craziness started because people (Ubuntu, Intel, and many others) saw a huge opportunity in building a mobile operating system based on Linux. This is also the reason the interests of its old user base and backwards compatibility were not much of a concern (The reason for the systemd craziness was probably the virtualization I think). Only some clueless fanboys reading phoronix thought it is about making their gaming or desktop experience better and believed all the X is bad propaganda.
You have to understand that any efficient graphics system today has to treat buffers as remote anyway, as they live on the other side of the PCI bus on a discrete GPU. It is also therefor not too surprising that both Wayland and X are in fact very similar in how graphics is done with modern clients. There is no fundamental difference. Wayland just lacks a lot of functionality compared to X and is not backwards compatible.
The idea that X has been abandoned for Wayland by its own developers is a myth. Even a brief look at the relevant mailing lists makes it absolutely clear that this is far from the truth.
The code is actually not bad in my opinion and due to its age, a lot of problems have already been fixed a long time ago. Ilja von Sprundel (just featured in another story on slashdot) did some auditing a couple of years ago and fixed many bugs. He gave a talk about it on the CCC conference and he seemed actually quite fond of X from a security perspective (quotes: "the developer involved actually amazing" and about the core protocol "this code is actually pretty cool (from a security perspective) you can see where the code got patched over (e.g. integer overflow checks)") . In fact, he seriously complained about clients and in particular about Qt/KDE in this talk. This is a much newer code base...
Well, I like to argue differently: It is immoral to propose nuclear power, as it is too costly and pursuing nuclear takes away funding from more efficient solutions and solutions which can be faster deployed.
Storage is really a serious issue only once you have more than 60% renewables. Storage prices are expected to go down significantly. Also demand-side electricity management, large-sale power distribution, over provisioning, and efficiency improvements will also help to reduce the problem. I do not see a fundamental problem going to 100% renewables.
Sure doesn't look great. But 2016 is obviously an outlier. Overall production was below 600 TWh. Usually is is around 630 TWh - 650 TWh, so coal use was unusually low for that time.
Well, most of the taxes and fees are *not* used as subsidies for the renewables. The renewable surcharge was about 7 ct in 2017. But yes, one should look at LCOE. https://www.lazard.com/perspec...
True, but you should compare to 10 years ago: coal 142.0 TWh -> 94.2 TWh lignite 155.1 TWh -> 148.0 TWh nuclear 140.0 TWh -> 75.9 TWh renewables 88.3 TWh -> 216.6 TWh (source: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen...)
This while at the same time reducing imports and increasing exports. I agree that lignite and coal should have been reduced first and not nuclear, but it is clear that renewables are a success and that the trend for lignite and coal is still down and not up as many here incorrectly claim.
You make it sound like it is a big deal, that there are rare days where Germany imports more electricity than it imports. But we are talking about tiny amounts (about on 0.05 TWh net imports compared to a production of 1.6 TWh on Jan 11, which was the worst day). Of course, this amount could have easily be produced in Germany by spinning up some plants. It was just cheaper to import. At the same time, you fail to mention that France was often importing a significant amount of power continuously for weeks at a time in 2017 because it could not fulfill its own demand as too many nuclear plants were down.
Nonsense. Germany imported 28,5 TWh and exported 82,4 TWh in 2017. At no time, Germany has to import power to keep the lights on. There are plenty of plants on stand-by. Also for comparison, ten years ago in 2007 (so long before Fukushima and will all nuclear plants still running) imports were rvrn higher at 44,3 TWh and exports lower at 63,4 TWh. Most of the imported power is actually transit as GP pointed out.
Read a book about the history medicine. Most of modern medicine has been developed by academics on government payroll. In "socialist" Europe, you indeed usually pay nothing as a patient (or a very small co-pay).
Of course, modern drug development is now usually based on commercial companies, this doesn't mean that it couldn't be done directly by the government. In fact, government institutions still do develop a lot. You asked for an example. Here is a relatively recent and important one: NIH researcher developed the hepatitis A vaccine
You are kidding, right? France had historically lots of issues with plants being off line (planned and unplanned).
They have had plants come off line, but it has not historically presented any problems. You are trying to make it out to be some sort of problem.
You apply double standards. If Germany imports a little bit of electricity in the evening after sunset with low wind because this is a bit cheaper than spinning up a conventional plant, this indicates that wind power is a failure. If France relies on imports for most of January and November because the remaining operational plants of its nuclear fleet can not fully fulfill the demand this is "not a problem". Of course, it is not a problem. But only because others have an energy mix not mainly based on nuclear.
You are kidding, right? France had historically lots of issues with plants being off line (planned and unplanned). Most famously, during the major health crisis caused by the heat wave of 2003. Most recently, this year in January and November. It deals with this problems by importing power from elsewhere (e.g. from Germany) but it is generally considered a major issue, especially because it has an aging nuclear fleet and also because heat wave are expected to become more common. If other neighboring countries would rely on nuclear in the same way as France did, there would be a major crisis every two years or so. In contrast, even without wind and sun, Germany has enough plants and does not have to import power at any time. It can produce much more power than it needs at all times. It is only France, which has a very fragile grid in terms of unplanned outages.
The person I originally replied to said Germany depends on nuclear power from France. Yes, there a moments where Germany imports more than it exports. This is rare, for brief periods of time, and never critical (as there are enough plants to create the electricity in Germany, but may be just cheaper to import). In France, this happens more often and for longer times when demand is very high (e.g. due to electric heating in winter) or when many nuclear plants are off-line (e.g. during heat waves in summer or this November due to inspections and outages) and France then often depends on imports.
While France exports a huge amount of electricity, this is mostly cheap surplus electricity at times of low demand. At times of high demand or many plants are down (e.g. during heat wave), it often critically depends on imports. In contrast, in the last years this was never the case for Germany.
But even in total, Germany is about to overtake France as the biggest electricity exporter - especially with all the trouble France had with its nuclear plants this year.
I am talking about the worst case scenario with no light and wind. As for example, in January this year there were several days where this was the case. This is not unusual. But even then - in contrast to what many slashdotters seem to believe - Germany was still able to export (net exports) electricity at all times during January. At no time - even during high demand - was the amount of imports bigger than the exports. The idea that Germany would somehow depend on nuclear power from France is simply a myth (or a lie).
Nuclear is not as straight forward as you say. You also want your fuel to be used evenly, have to take into account the level of fission products in the reactor, etc. Nuclear is also less reliable than solar and wind, so you also have to plan for sudden unplanned loss of power sources. There is also a weather factor for nuclear as nuclear plants depend on water for cooling, so if water levels are too low or it becomes too hot, it does not work. The later is the reason France depends on Germany for power and not vice versa as incorrectly claimed by many here.
You are right that Germany pollutes more than France (but don't judge too quickly: CO2 per capita is still far lower than for the US). It was a mistake to first shut down existing nuclear plants instead of coal. But this does not imply that the energy transition with its push towards renewables has failed. Only the effect on coal and CO2 has been delayed. But in 2017 you can already clearly see how renewables start to cut also into lignite and coal:
Just by looking at the actual numbers, one can easily see how many statements about the energy transition you can find in the internet a completely wrong. I can only recommend to look at actual numbers and build your own opinion.
Not really. Germany has so many plants, it exports still even when it is dark and there is no wind (Dunkelflaute). One could easily shut down some coal plants.
I really start to be annoyed by the stupidity of this argument, because you conveniniently left out a couple of facts:
- This high price is not only due to the energy transition. In fact, the price increase due to the renewables levy is 6.74 Euro Cents in 2017. There are other reasons, why the price of electricity is high in Germany: For example, it maintains one of the most reliable grids. - Other power sources got (and still get) a huge a mount of subsides paid from general taxes. While this did not affect the electricity price as it was hidden in taxes, this is also paid by the population. A fair must take this into account and not only refer to the electricity price. - This is by design. The idea is to encourage saving and this does indeed work.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked on X codebase and I know it's shit. It's a patched-over shit, but still. Integer overflows, memory corruption, it has everything.
.What did you work ont?
But even setting this aside, X.org is insecure by design. Any application can just send any events to any other application, so there's no point in trying to make it secure. If you have access to an X connection then you already have full access to the user's data.
Any application on the same host can hijack any other even without X. Ever used a debugger? Wonder how it works? For remote, you have point. There is a solution: Untrusted X Clients. I would need a bit of work, and I would rather prefer people fixing these minor things instead of rewriting everything.
For example, you simply can inject "ctrl-t" into the shell to launch a terminal and then inject any commands you want into it.
You can do this without X.
And about "todays wonder boys" - Wayland is designed and written mostly by the same developers who are working on X.org
Not really, most X developers seem to still work on X and not on Wayland (Packard, Coppersmith, ...)
No, it was all about mobile. All the UI rewriting craziness started because people (Ubuntu, Intel, and many others) saw a huge opportunity in building a mobile operating system based on Linux. This is also the reason the interests of its old user base and backwards compatibility were not much of a concern (The reason for the systemd craziness was probably the virtualization I think). Only some clueless fanboys reading phoronix thought it is about making their gaming or desktop experience better and believed all the X is bad propaganda.
What is the fundamental problem with remote?
You have to understand that any efficient graphics system today has to treat buffers as remote anyway, as they live on the other side of the PCI bus on a discrete GPU. It is also therefor not too surprising that both Wayland and X are in fact very similar in how graphics is done with modern clients. There is no fundamental difference. Wayland just lacks a lot of functionality compared to X and is not backwards compatible.
The idea that X has been abandoned for Wayland by its own developers is a myth. Even a brief look at the relevant mailing lists makes it absolutely clear that this is far from the truth.
The code is actually not bad in my opinion and due to its age, a lot of problems have already been fixed a long time ago. Ilja von Sprundel (just featured in another story on slashdot) did some auditing a couple of years ago and fixed many bugs. He gave a talk about it on the CCC conference and he seemed actually quite fond of X from a security perspective (quotes: "the developer involved actually amazing" and about the core protocol "this code is actually pretty cool (from a security perspective) you can see where the code got patched over (e.g. integer overflow checks)") . In fact, he seriously complained about clients and in particular about Qt/KDE in this talk. This is a much newer code base...
Well, I like to argue differently: It is immoral to propose nuclear power, as it is too costly and pursuing nuclear takes away funding from more efficient solutions and solutions which can be faster deployed.
Storage is really a serious issue only once you have more than 60% renewables. Storage prices are expected to go down significantly. Also demand-side electricity management, large-sale power distribution, over provisioning, and efficiency improvements will also help to reduce the problem. I do not see a fundamental problem going to 100% renewables.
Of course, I would help a lot with credibility if the molten-salt people do their homework correctly, before making outstanding claims.
https://www.technologyreview.c...
Sure doesn't look great. But 2016 is obviously an outlier. Overall production was below 600 TWh. Usually is is around 630 TWh - 650 TWh, so coal use was unusually low for that time.
Instead, look at actual numbers (2007->2017):
coal: 142.0 TWh -> 94.2 TWh
lignite: 155.1 TWh -> 148.0 TWh
So a substantial reduction of coal and a small reduction of lignite.
Source: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen...
Well, most of the taxes and fees are *not* used as subsidies for the renewables. The renewable surcharge was about 7 ct in 2017. But yes, one should look at LCOE.
https://www.lazard.com/perspec...
True, but you should compare to 10 years ago:
coal 142.0 TWh -> 94.2 TWh
lignite 155.1 TWh -> 148.0 TWh
nuclear 140.0 TWh -> 75.9 TWh
renewables 88.3 TWh -> 216.6 TWh
(source: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen...)
This while at the same time reducing imports and increasing exports.
I agree that lignite and coal should have been reduced first and not nuclear, but it is clear that renewables are a success and that the trend for lignite and coal is still down and not up as many here incorrectly claim.
You make it sound like it is a big deal, that there are rare days where Germany imports more electricity than it imports. But we are talking about tiny amounts (about on 0.05 TWh net imports compared to a production of 1.6 TWh on Jan 11, which was the worst day). Of course, this amount could have easily be produced in Germany by spinning up some plants. It was just cheaper to import. At the same time, you fail to mention that France was often importing a significant amount of power continuously for weeks at a time in 2017 because it could not fulfill its own demand as too many nuclear plants were down.
Nonsense. Germany imported 28,5 TWh and exported 82,4 TWh in 2017. At no time, Germany has to import power to keep the lights on. There are plenty of plants on stand-by. Also for comparison, ten years ago in 2007 (so long before Fukushima and will all nuclear plants still running) imports were rvrn higher at 44,3 TWh and exports lower at 63,4 TWh. Most of the imported power is actually transit as GP pointed out.
https://www.ag-energiebilanzen...
https://www.energy-charts.de/
Read a book about the history medicine. Most of modern medicine has been developed by academics on government payroll. In "socialist" Europe, you indeed usually pay nothing as a patient (or a very small co-pay).
Of course, modern drug development is now usually based on commercial companies, this doesn't mean that it couldn't be done directly by the government. In fact, government institutions still do develop a lot. You asked for an example. Here is a relatively recent and important one: NIH researcher developed the hepatitis A vaccine
You are kidding, right? France had historically lots of issues with plants being off line (planned and unplanned).
They have had plants come off line, but it has not historically presented any problems. You are trying to make it out to be some sort of problem.
You apply double standards. If Germany imports a little bit of electricity in the evening after sunset with low wind because this is a bit cheaper than spinning up a conventional plant, this indicates that wind power is a failure. If France relies on imports for most of January and November because the remaining operational plants of its nuclear fleet can not fully fulfill the demand this is "not a problem". Of course, it is not a problem. But only because others have an energy mix not mainly based on nuclear.
You are kidding, right? France had historically lots of issues with plants being off line (planned and unplanned). Most famously, during the major health crisis caused by the heat wave of 2003. Most recently, this year in January and November. It deals with this problems by importing power from elsewhere (e.g. from Germany) but it is generally considered a major issue, especially because it has an aging nuclear fleet and also because heat wave are expected to become more common. If other neighboring countries would rely on nuclear in the same way as France did, there would be a major crisis every two years or so. In contrast, even without wind and sun, Germany has enough plants and does not have to import power at any time. It can produce much more power than it needs at all times. It is only France, which has a very fragile grid in terms of unplanned outages.
The person I originally replied to said Germany depends on nuclear power from France. Yes, there a moments where Germany imports more than it exports. This is rare, for brief periods of time, and never critical (as there are enough plants to create the electricity in Germany, but may be just cheaper to import). In France, this happens more often and for longer times when demand is very high (e.g. due to electric heating in winter) or when many nuclear plants are off-line (e.g. during heat waves in summer or this November due to inspections and outages) and France then often depends on imports.
France still plans to reduce nuclear to 50% - just not already by 2025 as planned by the old government.
http://www.mining-journal.com/...
While France exports a huge amount of electricity, this is mostly cheap surplus electricity at times of low demand. At times of high demand or many plants are down (e.g. during heat wave), it often critically depends on imports. In contrast, in the last years this was never the case for Germany.
http://energypost.eu/france-ca...
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
But even in total, Germany is about to overtake France as the biggest electricity exporter - especially with all the trouble France had with its nuclear plants this year.
http://www.worldstopexports.co...
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/...
https://www.platts.com/latest-...
I am talking about the worst case scenario with no light and wind. As for example, in January this year there were several days where this was the case. This is not unusual. But even then - in contrast to what many slashdotters seem to believe - Germany was still able to export (net exports) electricity at all times during January. At no time - even during high demand - was the amount of imports bigger than the exports. The idea that Germany would somehow depend on nuclear power from France is simply a myth (or a lie).
Source for the data: https://www.agora-energiewende...
Nuclear is not as straight forward as you say. You also want your fuel to be used evenly, have to take into account the level of fission products in the reactor, etc. Nuclear is also less reliable than solar and wind, so you also have to plan for sudden unplanned loss of power sources. There is also a weather factor for nuclear as nuclear plants depend on water for cooling, so if water levels are too low or it becomes too hot, it does not work. The later is the reason France depends on Germany for power and not vice versa as incorrectly claimed by many here.
You are right that Germany pollutes more than France (but don't judge too quickly: CO2 per capita is still far lower than for the US). It was a mistake to first shut down existing nuclear plants instead of coal. But this does not imply that the energy transition with its push towards renewables has failed. Only the effect on coal and CO2 has been delayed. But in 2017 you can already clearly see how renewables start to cut also into lignite and coal:
lignite 155.1 (2007) 148.0 (2017)
coal 142.0 (2007) 94.2 (2017)
nuclear 140.5 (2007) 75.9 (2017)
renewables 88.3 (2007) 216.6 (2017)
net exports 19.1 (2007) 54.0 (2017)
numbers in TWh, source: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen...
Just by looking at the actual numbers, one can easily see how many statements about the energy transition you can find in the internet a completely wrong. I can only recommend to look at actual numbers and build your own opinion.
Not really. Germany has so many plants, it exports still even when it is dark and there is no wind (Dunkelflaute). One could easily shut down some coal plants.
I really start to be annoyed by the stupidity of this argument, because you conveniniently left out a couple of facts:
- This high price is not only due to the energy transition. In fact, the price increase due to the renewables levy is 6.74 Euro Cents in 2017. There are other reasons, why the price of electricity is high in Germany: For example, it maintains one of the most reliable grids.
- Other power sources got (and still get) a huge a mount of subsides paid from general taxes. While this did not affect the electricity price as it was hidden in taxes, this is also paid by the population. A fair must take this into account and not only refer to the electricity price.
- This is by design. The idea is to encourage saving and this does indeed work.
... "subject to xenon limitations." ...
Not really:
https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/Worl...