It's true hat Germany is still reliant on coal (although with a clear downward trend). The rest of your comment is simply wrong. Germany had net exports of more than 50 TWh in 2016. The phase out is on schedule and I do not have seen any indication of anyone in Germany wanting to change this.
We are working on it. There 16000 academics who promised to boycott elsevier: http://thecostofknowledge.com/. There are 60 major research institutions in Germany who have cancelled their contract with Elsevier to force negotiation of a reasonable contract: https://www.projekt-deal.de/ve... There are similar initiatives in other countries.
I agree, looking at peak is nonsense. So is cherry-picking dates. How about looking at full year actual production? 2016 lignite 150 TWh nuclear 85 TWh coal 112 TWh gas 81 TWh oil 6 TWh renewables 188 TWh (77 TWh wind and 38 TWh solar) others 28 TWh exports -81 TWh imports 27 TWh
188 TWh of actual produced electricity from renewables is an impressive number which clearly shows that the energy transition is highly successful. Especially if you consider that it was 72 TWh in 2006 and 23 TWh in 1996.
Total contribution over the year is still substantial. Renewable contributed 188 TWh from 648 TWh total production in 2016 including 38 TWh solar and 77 TWh wind. You are pretending there is a small contribution only relevant on weekends. This is far from the truth.
2016 Total production in Germany: solar: 38 TWh wind: 77 TWh hydro: 21 TWh biomass: 46 TWh
So solar and wind are huge. And yes, they are intermittent. But fuel saved is fuel saved - this is not difficult to understand. And 38 TWh + 77 TWh = 115 TWh is is a huge a mount of fuel saved. (total production is 650 TWh including net exports 81 TWh - 27 TWh = 54 TWh). By all means, this is a huge success.
CO2 in electricity production was decreasing by %3 in 2016. http://www.ag-energiebilanzen.... Total CO2 was increasing because overall economy increased and due to weather, but this in unrelated to electricity.
Also nuclear is not a solution because it is far too expensive. Of course, shutting down existing (paid for) plants which work fine was a bad decision. But shutting down coal instead would have put so many people out of jobs, that it was political impossible to do.
Electricity costs ~30 eurocents per kWh in Germany now, with prices expected to continue to grow.
The renewable energy surcharge is expected to decrease in the future as the old inefficient solar plants will stop getting a guaranteed feed-in tariff at some point in time. And newer ones build now get a much smaller feed-in tariff due.
The number of interventions to balance the grid skyrockets.
What kind of interventions are you talking about? Anyway, it works nicely. The grid is stable.
It is expected that the grid will be separated into north and south regions to improve stability in a few years.
This is nonsense. The plan is to build power lines from north to south.
At the same time, the CO2 production keeps increasing.
CO2 production for generation of electricity is falling (3% in 2016).
And we haven't even starting shutting down major nuclear plants yet.
We have already shut down eight in 2011 and one in 2015.
Anyone want to tell how it's "working" ?
Can you tell me how you are able to survive while ignoring reality?
Sure, I will. Electric power in Germany is more than twice as expensive as it is in America. That is because the costs of all the subsidies are pushed onto the consumer in what is effectively a regressive tax. Maybe what they are doing has some long term benefits, but considering that more than half of every electric bill goes to subsidise the renewables and the politically driven nuke closures, by many criteria it is "not working".
Household costs are high in Germany, about 0.30 EUR per kWh. But only about 0.07 EUR are subsidies for renewables - not "half of every electric bill". BTW, parts of the industry are exempt from paying this. Of course, the subsidies could have been paid from general taxes as subsidies for nuclear of fossil fuels, but this was a a political decision. The idea is that high prices will promote energy saving.
I guess you use a new definition of "real". In fact, Germany exported more than 50 TWh in 2016 - more than every before. Numbers are here: http://www.ag-energiebilanzen....
Network transparency. X11 has it. Wayland doesn't. Wayland's devs tend to handwave the problem, either claiming it will somehow be implemented once they work on the other laundry list of things they want first, or claiming it's a niche requirement nobody wants or uses.
Well, it is a niche requirement and they simply do not care about the few users - even denying that they exist (I use it everyday and remotely over ssh and it works well for me). The aim of all these efforts in not the desktop anyway, but mobile or embedded devices. For the desktop Wayland will have no advantage. But they still somehow convinced a lot of people who do not understand anything about how that X somehow limits performance of the graphics stack so it must be replaced.
On top of that they're doing the #1 thing you're not supposed to do in development: completely rewriting a working system.
If they would just rewrite something it would be ok with me. The problem is breaking compatibility at the protocol level. This is really stupid.
X11's main flaw is that it's supposed to be inefficient. It might be, but I've never noticed any significant difference between user interface performance on Ubuntu vs Windows or Mac. I think much of it is "This sub-nanosecond operation that is only called once or twice every frame takes THREE TIMES AS LONG under X11 as it should!" type purism.
There is no fundamental benefit with respect to performance as Wayland and modern X clients basically work in the same way when operating locally. Somehow people believe that the old rendering APIs supported by X for backwards compatibility somehow prevent modern clients to do things efficiently. This is completely untrue as X has been extended with modern interfaces. There could be some performance benefit because Wayland basically merges the X Server, window manager, and the compositing manager. Of course, this could be done in X as well without breaking the protocols.
It is a bit arbitrary definition of "major" to include only Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Miles Island. There have been many other major accidents (some more serious than TMI) and many smaller ones. Also "cleanup" costs do certainly not include all costs to society. But anyway, nuclear is not economical anyway. We are just talking about how much less economical it would be, if properly insured.
Birth rates of second generation Turks in Germany are barely higher than the average. This implies that western welfare states actually need a constant influx of immigrants otherwise all the old people will overwhelm the system.
Cost in solar half every ten year (Swanson's law). Nuclear always got more expensive despite huge amount of direct subsidies and support for research. And scaling up nuclear to a level where it really matters would be even more expensive because you need to switch closes fuel cycle and have energy storage.
There are two points I would comment on specifically:
People become rich by two simultaneous decisions: (1) to forego consumption now for future returns, and (2) by investing the money they didn't spend in businesses that yield a good return.
In an ideal world this would be the only way to get rich. In the real world many people also get rich by 1) inheriting 2) pure luck 3) questionable (illegal or unethical) businesses. Many rich people also slowly get even more rich by investing very conservatively (which every idiot can do)
If you take away their wealth and redistribute it,
I have not proposed to "take way their wealth and redistribute it" (nice strawman ).
the primary effect is not to give people a more equal vote in what to consume, the primary effect is to shift the economy from investments in jobs, production, and the future towards consumption, which is generally the wrong direction.
You need both: investments and consumption. If you take away consumption too much, you end up in exactly the situation we are now: People are not primarily investing in things which are useful to average people, but they invest in tools which may make existing businesses slightly more profitable. It is simply not worth investing in a business creating a tech tool useful for an average people if average people do not have money buy it. Instead they invest in a companies which sell tools to other rich people which help them become even more rich (e.g. spying tools for advertisers so that you may be able to sell slightly more products than your competitor by "better" advertisment). Ofcourse, you can now argue that this is somehow the ideal way to spent money for our society, but I do not buy it.
Haha, your post is a great example for "the market is always right and therefor everything is perfect, and perfect is whatever the market does" circular reasoning.
Is there a systematic bias that channels technology workers into more profitable careers?
Indeed there is. In a free society with free citizens, we let individuals decide, and vote for, what they find useful. That kind of "voting" is carried out using money: if you produce something that I find useful, I give you money for it; if you produce crap that I don't want, I don't give you money for it. That way, people who produce useful stuff get rewarded and get the resources to produce more useful stuff, while the people who produce crap get fewer resources allocated to them. Does that answer your question? How else would you like things to work?
Except that not everybody has the same vote. And this exactly explains why so many techs work on stuff which is not really useful to the average person at all: They work to make the people who have most of the money (almost all the votes) even richer. This is the reason why advertisement which has only small usefulness to the overall society is so big and basically defines what the internet and mobile industry is today: a huge spying machine with free but only marginally useful content served with lots of annoying advertisement. If money would be distributed more equally, the free market would certainly create a lot of useful tech which would make life much better for average people.
But some 10 years ago clients started doing client rendering and just sending bitmaps to the display server. Mostly that meant higher bandwidth and fewer round-trips. Whether that is good or bad depends on the clients and the environment.
Actually they started doing that back in the 90s, the X primitives were already very outdated when KDE/Gnome launched in 1998/1999. And this is really the core issue, if you want a modern looking Linux with gradients, transparency, animations, anti-aliasing and various pretty effects you let a graphics toolkit do the job and hand X a bitmap. And they run roughly as bad under remote X as under VNC, because under those circumstances they do pretty much the same thing.
The applications that do work well using remote X are the same applications that shy away from the "render bitmaps" strategy and with their primitives they look... primitive.
The idea that remote graphics works only efficiently when sending line-drawing primitives over the network is a myth. The applications which do currently not work well are those which do have a lot of round-trips. Most of the time for stupid reason because the toolkits stopped caring about remote X. But this has nothing to do with being bitmap-based. In fact, the XRENDER extension was introduced 20 years ago (or so) to make remote X work exactly for this reason. And yes, it works. I have a special-purpose image viewer which works great remotely.
There's actually not a lot of sense in trying to make one system that'll work both for graphics hooked up over a >15GB/s x16 PCIe 3.0 link with nanosecond latency and a system with 1/1000th the bandwidth and 1000x the latency. Applications will tend to work well in just one of those two scenarios no matter what kind of protocol you wrap it in, even if it's theoretically network transparent. If it wasn't being used, it wouldn't be the fastest interlink we have in modern computers.
I also do not think this is true. A discrete GPU on a PCI buys is for all intends and purposes remote to the CPU. The programming model is the same as remote graphics: You send commands over the network/PCI bus. You try to do this in batches/asynchronously to avoid latency overhead and instead of copying data all the time one manages buffers on the remote side.
The N9 came with a nice initial set of third party apps and Meego had a lot of developer interest. And the QT-strategy of moving developers from Symbian to Meego could have worked. At this time the competition (iPhone and Android) wasn't nearly as big.
Slashdot Mirror
> But we have exactly 4 single-reactor failures of of hundreds and hundreds of reactor facilities.
Huh? There have been many more: the sodium reactor experiment, the Lucern accident, Experimental Breeder Reactor I, etc.
There was an accident rated INES 5 in Switzerland.
It's true hat Germany is still reliant on coal (although with a clear downward trend). The rest of your comment is simply wrong. Germany had net exports of more than 50 TWh in 2016. The phase out is on schedule and I do not have seen any indication of anyone in Germany wanting to change this.
We are working on it. There 16000 academics who promised to boycott elsevier: http://thecostofknowledge.com/. There are 60 major research institutions in Germany who have cancelled their contract with Elsevier to force negotiation of a reasonable contract: https://www.projekt-deal.de/ve... There are similar initiatives in other countries.
I agree, but please do not recommend researchgate (just read their wikipedia page).
I agree, looking at peak is nonsense. So is cherry-picking dates.
How about looking at full year actual production?
2016
lignite 150 TWh
nuclear 85 TWh
coal 112 TWh
gas 81 TWh
oil 6 TWh
renewables 188 TWh (77 TWh wind and 38 TWh solar)
others 28 TWh
exports -81 TWh
imports 27 TWh
188 TWh of actual produced electricity from renewables is an impressive number which clearly shows that the energy transition is highly successful. Especially if you consider that it was 72 TWh in 2006 and 23 TWh in 1996.
Source: http://www.ag-energiebilanzen....
Total contribution over the year is still substantial. Renewable contributed 188 TWh from 648 TWh total production in 2016 including 38 TWh solar and 77 TWh wind. You are pretending there is a small contribution only relevant on weekends. This is far from the truth.
Here are some facts.
2016 Total production in Germany:
solar: 38 TWh
wind: 77 TWh
hydro: 21 TWh
biomass: 46 TWh
So solar and wind are huge. And yes, they are intermittent. But fuel saved is fuel saved - this is not difficult to understand. And 38 TWh + 77 TWh = 115 TWh is is a huge a mount of fuel saved. (total production is 650 TWh including net exports 81 TWh - 27 TWh = 54 TWh). By all means, this is a huge success.
CO2 in electricity production was decreasing by %3 in 2016. http://www.ag-energiebilanzen....
Total CO2 was increasing because overall economy increased and due to weather, but this in unrelated to electricity.
Also nuclear is not a solution because it is far too expensive. Of course, shutting down existing (paid for) plants which work fine was a bad decision. But shutting down coal instead would have put so many people out of jobs, that it was political impossible to do.
Electricity costs ~30 eurocents per kWh in Germany now, with prices expected to continue to grow.
The renewable energy surcharge is expected to decrease in the future as the old inefficient solar plants will stop getting a guaranteed feed-in tariff at some point in time. And newer ones build now get a much smaller feed-in tariff due.
The number of interventions to balance the grid skyrockets.
What kind of interventions are you talking about? Anyway, it works nicely. The grid is stable.
It is expected that the grid will be separated into north and south regions to improve stability in a few years.
This is nonsense. The plan is to build power lines from north to south.
At the same time, the CO2 production keeps increasing.
CO2 production for generation of electricity is falling (3% in 2016).
And we haven't even starting shutting down major nuclear plants yet.
We have already shut down eight in 2011 and one in 2015.
Anyone want to tell how it's "working" ?
Can you tell me how you are able to survive while ignoring reality?
Anyone want to complain how it's not working ?
Sure, I will. Electric power in Germany is more than twice as expensive as it is in America. That is because the costs of all the subsidies are pushed onto the consumer in what is effectively a regressive tax. Maybe what they are doing has some long term benefits, but considering that more than half of every electric bill goes to subsidise the renewables and the politically driven nuke closures, by many criteria it is "not working".
Household costs are high in Germany, about 0.30 EUR per kWh. But only about 0.07 EUR are subsidies for renewables - not "half of every electric bill". BTW, parts of the industry are exempt from paying this. Of course, the subsidies could have been paid from general taxes as subsidies for nuclear of fossil fuels, but this was a a political decision. The idea is that high prices will promote energy saving.
I guess you use a new definition of "real". In fact, Germany exported more than 50 TWh in 2016 - more than every before.
Numbers are here: http://www.ag-energiebilanzen....
Network transparency. X11 has it. Wayland doesn't. Wayland's devs tend to handwave the problem, either claiming it will somehow be implemented once they work on the other laundry list of things they want first, or claiming it's a niche requirement nobody wants or uses.
Well, it is a niche requirement and they simply do not care about the few users - even denying that they exist (I use it everyday and remotely over ssh and it works well for me). The aim of all these efforts in not the desktop anyway, but mobile or embedded devices. For the desktop Wayland will have no advantage. But they still somehow convinced a lot of people who do not understand anything about how that X somehow limits performance of the graphics stack so it must be replaced.
On top of that they're doing the #1 thing you're not supposed to do in development: completely rewriting a working system.
If they would just rewrite something it would be ok with me. The problem is breaking compatibility at the protocol level. This is really stupid.
X11's main flaw is that it's supposed to be inefficient. It might be, but I've never noticed any significant difference between user interface performance on Ubuntu vs Windows or Mac. I think much of it is "This sub-nanosecond operation that is only called once or twice every frame takes THREE TIMES AS LONG under X11 as it should!" type purism.
There is no fundamental benefit with respect to performance as Wayland and modern X clients basically work in the same way when operating locally. Somehow people believe that the old rendering APIs supported by X for backwards compatibility somehow prevent modern clients to do things efficiently. This is completely untrue as X has been extended with modern interfaces. There could be some performance benefit because Wayland basically merges the X Server, window manager, and the compositing manager. Of course, this could be done in X as well without breaking the protocols.
As far as I know, the Banqiao Dam was build for flood control.
It is a bit arbitrary definition of "major" to include only Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Miles Island. There have been many other major accidents (some more serious than TMI) and many smaller ones. Also "cleanup" costs do certainly not include all costs to society. But anyway, nuclear is not economical anyway. We are just talking about how much less economical it would be, if properly insured.
Birth rates of second generation Turks in Germany are barely higher than the average. This implies that western welfare states actually need a constant influx of immigrants otherwise all the old people will overwhelm the system.
Germany is definitely moving away from coal. Of course it was stupid to shut down nuclear plants first, but this has to do with local jobs...
An no, nuclear is expensive even compared to most renewables except for solar (but solar is getting cheaper and nuclear always gets more expensive).
Cost in solar half every ten year (Swanson's law). Nuclear always got more expensive despite huge amount of direct subsidies and support for research. And scaling up nuclear to a level where it really matters would be even more expensive because you need to switch closes fuel cycle and have energy storage.
Opposition to nuclear is not what killed it. Cost killed it.
> > Look at Germany - they've got enough solar and wind power to supply _all_ their needs.
Nonsense.
> For two costs: 1) doubled their electricity prices, and 2) having to import major power when solar and wind didn't supply their needs.
Even more nonsense. A typical slashdot discussion: No facts involved. And some idiot mods it insightful.
There are two points I would comment on specifically:
People become rich by two simultaneous decisions: (1) to forego consumption now for future returns, and (2) by investing the money they didn't spend in businesses that yield a good return.
In an ideal world this would be the only way to get rich. In the real world many people also get rich by 1) inheriting 2) pure luck 3) questionable (illegal or unethical) businesses. Many rich people also slowly get even more rich by investing very conservatively (which every idiot can do)
If you take away their wealth and redistribute it,
I have not proposed to "take way their wealth and redistribute it" (nice strawman ) .
the primary effect is not to give people a more equal vote in what to consume, the primary effect is to shift the economy from investments in jobs, production, and the future towards consumption, which is generally the wrong direction.
You need both: investments and consumption. If you take away consumption too much, you end up in exactly the situation we are now: People are not primarily investing in things which are useful to average people, but they invest in tools which may make existing businesses slightly more profitable. It is simply not worth investing in a business creating a tech tool useful for an average people if average people do not have money buy it. Instead they invest in a companies which sell tools to other rich people which help them become even more rich (e.g. spying tools for advertisers so that you may be able to sell slightly more products than your competitor by "better" advertisment). Ofcourse, you can now argue that this is somehow the ideal way to spent money for our society, but I do not buy it.
Haha, your post is a great example for "the market is always right and therefor everything is perfect, and perfect is whatever the market does" circular reasoning.
Indeed there is. In a free society with free citizens, we let individuals decide, and vote for, what they find useful. That kind of "voting" is carried out using money: if you produce something that I find useful, I give you money for it; if you produce crap that I don't want, I don't give you money for it. That way, people who produce useful stuff get rewarded and get the resources to produce more useful stuff, while the people who produce crap get fewer resources allocated to them. Does that answer your question? How else would you like things to work?
Except that not everybody has the same vote. And this exactly explains why so many techs work on stuff which is not really useful to the average person at all: They work to make the people who have most of the money (almost all the votes) even richer. This is the reason why advertisement which has only small usefulness to the overall society is so big and basically defines what the internet and mobile industry is today: a huge spying machine with free but only marginally useful content served with lots of annoying advertisement. If money would be distributed more equally, the free market would certainly create a lot of useful tech which would make life much better for average people.
But some 10 years ago clients started doing client rendering and just sending bitmaps to the display server. Mostly that meant higher bandwidth and fewer round-trips. Whether that is good or bad depends on the clients and the environment.
Actually they started doing that back in the 90s, the X primitives were already very outdated when KDE/Gnome launched in 1998/1999. And this is really the core issue, if you want a modern looking Linux with gradients, transparency, animations, anti-aliasing and various pretty effects you let a graphics toolkit do the job and hand X a bitmap. And they run roughly as bad under remote X as under VNC, because under those circumstances they do pretty much the same thing.
The applications that do work well using remote X are the same applications that shy away from the "render bitmaps" strategy and with their primitives they look... primitive.
The idea that remote graphics works only efficiently when sending line-drawing primitives over the network is a myth. The applications which do currently not work well are those which do have a lot of round-trips. Most of the time for stupid reason because the toolkits stopped caring about remote X. But this has nothing to do with being bitmap-based. In fact, the XRENDER extension was introduced 20 years ago (or so) to make remote X work exactly for this reason. And yes, it works. I have a special-purpose image viewer which works great remotely.
There's actually not a lot of sense in trying to make one system that'll work both for graphics hooked up over a >15GB/s x16 PCIe 3.0 link with nanosecond latency and a system with 1/1000th the bandwidth and 1000x the latency. Applications will tend to work well in just one of those two scenarios no matter what kind of protocol you wrap it in, even if it's theoretically network transparent. If it wasn't being used, it wouldn't be the fastest interlink we have in modern computers.
I also do not think this is true. A discrete GPU on a PCI buys is for all intends and purposes remote to the CPU. The programming model is the same as remote graphics: You send commands over the network/PCI bus. You try to do this in batches/asynchronously to avoid latency overhead and instead of copying data all the time one manages buffers on the remote side.
The N9 came with a nice initial set of third party apps and Meego had a lot of developer interest. And the QT-strategy of moving developers from Symbian to Meego could have worked. At this time the competition (iPhone and Android) wasn't nearly as big.