Fine, you're going to be a jackass on the subject. Good. I like it that way. It means I don't have to even pretend to take any of your stupid ideas seriously. I can instead focus all energy on just making sure you have no influence what so ever.
We must have a space program. This is non-negotiable. You can get the f' out of the way or get steamrolled. I'd actually prefer you try to stop it. It will make me laugh.
If we're about corporate globalism then why would we pay any attention to these idiots?
The simple fact that the environmental movement is relevant in these matters renders your whole argument void.
Again... I don't want to argue with you or the environmentalists... You can have the earth. Keep it in good health.
Just let me leave. It might take another 10,000 years to get there... who knows. But we're leaving this mud ball and you're f'ing welcome to it. Do what you want so long as at the end of it all my descendants don't have to listen to your descents bleat on about more stupid shit.
It's people like this that make me want to leave this planet. If you want the whole planet treated like some big national park then we can do that. Just let the portion of humanity that doesn't want to live like Luddites leave the planet.
It might take us awhile... but f'ing with us at this stage is not helping.
In all seriousness, if putting this facility in Texas isn't feasible where exactly on planet earth can we put it?
A8%l+$mr is a terrible password. The security experts like passwords like that but they're stupid. It's impossible to remember.
The convention I follow and what I think most people should follow is "JustTypingASentenceOutMinusSpaces". That is very easy to remember. You can do cool things like quote a line from a play, song, poem, or movie that you like. What's the likelihood a dictionary attack is going to crack "hastalavistababy!"...
Humans are very good at remembering sentences. It works into our neumonic memory. Many people that couch study habits encourage students to turn complex study concepts into such phrases. And why? Because we don't forget them.
Stupid lines like "I before e but not after c."... regardless of whether that's grammatically correct, I'll never forget that stupid little rhyme. It's in my head... forever.
That is how people should make passwords. Not their children's birthdays plus the name of their dog with a pound sign at the end. "ToBeOrNotToBeThatIsTheQuestion" is a great password. It's long but you'll never forget it.
I know what some people are saying. What about those *** that block out what you're typing making it so you have to retype everything if you make a mistake? Well, how often are those even required? They're pretty stupid. 99 percent of the time I'm typing in a password no one is there is to see it. And even if there were someone just ask him to stare at his feet for two seconds.
Using this system we could all have dozens of uncrackable passwords that we never had to write down.
Off an online ad supported alternative and you'll get a lot of those pirates back.
The studios are too fixated on people paying. We got free music on the radio. We got free television and movies... We just had the ads.
Put some ads up and offer it free. At no point has the industry tested this idea. Hulu is the closest they've come to it and it's a starved wreck. It has a very small selection of mostly old content. Give me a break. Put it all up. the hosting costs are ZERO. I believe youtube has offered to host their complete library for nothing or so close to nothing as to not matter.
Just try it before you bitch about it. We're not going back to dvds and cds. The future is digital. Get over it.
We've been saying for years the feds need to be very careful about increasing power over the internet because it gives legitimacy to all these international groups that want to do the same thing.
The only way to keep the internet free is for the US to focus it's efforts to keep other powers from taking control.
By listening to the copyright trolls they've jeopardized the whole stability of the internet.
Well, I've been reading your posts and you haven't been reading mine.
So we're done. You have nothing to meaningful to contribute to any conversation where you read nothing the other people say and go out of your way to be insulting.
Kick the internet connection out of the wall and find a less annoying hobby.
Small child, I actually did read beyond the insult which was probably a mistake since needless rude people are typically maladjusted idiots.
As to the first line, you blamed Enron. And you clearly didn't read the rest of my post where I pointed out that this was an issue long before Enron even existed. You know less about our situation then you believe.
As to your infantile need to cast pathetic little insults for no apparent reason, you're unlikely to gain anyone's respect that way. You say you're not America? Possibly in your culture people demonstrate their status by acting like jackasses. We have some people like that in the US as well... Regardless of their own personal delusions it rarely gains them any respect. You're basically quoting from the Donald Trump hand book on how to make an impression. Suggestions might include getting a comical toupee, painting everything gold, and then calling it "classy" without irony.
In any case, you have nothing to contribute to this discussion. You're an intellectual void as well as boring.
If you're going to virtualize something that gets a lot of traffic then it makes sense to scale up the server and environment.
If you're talking about virtualizing an enterprise scale server/server farm then you'll want a solution that is designed to handle that sort of situation.
As some people said, shared disk doesn't make I/O happy. That's a key point which is dealt with in enterprise scale virtualization by spreading the load across many different systems. So the hit of shared load is mitigated by access to multiple systems with redundant information. There are some very cool products that do this sort of thing very well.
But generally it's a bad idea to shoe horn an enterprise system into a limited virtualized environment where performance will suffer.
You don't want to virtualize unless you're consolidating servers. The costs just don't make sense. Where you save the money is when you get three servers to do the work of 10... or 10 to do the work of 100.
It's true that most businesses label IT as a cost and in the process ignore how much money IT saves the company every day. The man power they'd have to hire if they couldn't use these systems would be staggering. And instead of acknowledging that point they simply cite the only institution that allows them to make those savings as a cost. What do they want? They want it for free?
IT doesn't cost money. It saves money. Most cost cutting on IT tends to be penny wise and pound foolish in the long run.
That isn't to say you can just blindly dump cash down the hole and expect things to remain efficient. But business managers make a mistake when they label IT as costing money.
The cloud isn't terminal services. That's a totally different concept.
You say you don't like the term but you're not apparently aware what it means.
Remoting into a virtual machine is not the same thing as the cloud. The cloud amongst other things is almost always a web service. Google documents would be an example.
Windows terminal services is not the same thing.
And terminal services doesn't get rid of your IT department. They're just not as worried about individual systems and stick to the server room more. But you absolutely still need a very competent IT department or the terminal system won't work.
The city of Los Angeles consumes about 6000 MWh every day.
So to meet that demand you'd need about 6 million square meters of solar cells to meet the demand for los angeles. That is six square kilometers of solar cells. Probably a good idea to increase that by about 40 percent just because the cells aren't going to be RIGHT next to each other and there's likely to be wasted space. Additionally, the DWP has over 7000 MWh on tap at any given time so ideally you'd want at least that plus whatever extra is required during winter, bad weather, etc.
Lets call it eight square kilometers of solar cells. When you consider that the city is about 750sq km you're looking at roughly 1 percent of the total city area. That's assuming I haven't screwed the math up somewhere. I'm being sloppy here so I might be off by a magnitude or two.
Anyway, most of the cheap solar panels can hit efficiencies of 20 percent. So multiply the area required by five and you'll be able to roughly supply all the energy demand of the whole city.
Solar will be the future when the cost of cells comes down or if we can get efficiency a lot higher. Either way it is the future. It's just not ready yet.
But for security reasons there are some good things about closed source.
Lets be real here, we're talking about root financial systems. Neither individuals nor most corporations have any interest in this software. This is the prevue of nations and huge trade alliances.
Keeping the code secret makes it more secure. Yes, it can't be used as the only level of security. It must be on TOP of everything else. I don't think giving the chinese access to our treasury accounting software is going to make the world a better place.
As to solar, I think the best solution is a two part system.
This assumes the technology is ready and I don't think it is yet. But use low efficency, cheap, and robust solar cells in deserts or other unpopulated areas with good sun. This should provide the bulk of our power needs. On top of that, put higher efficiency solar cells on top of roofs throughout urban areas. These should probably be owned by the power utility. By all means, let people buy them but most people simply can't finance it or justify the expense. So do it through the utility. Roll it out slowly.
If you do that... when the technology is ready... we should be able to provide nearly all our electrical needs with solar. Obviously we need systems to store power. But there are some very simple ways to do it. One way I like is reverse hydro electric. That is you have two reservoirs at different elevations and you pump water from the lower one to the higher one to store power and then pour water through a hydro electric generator on the way down to generate power. The capacity of the "battery" is determined by the size of the reservoirs. Technically it should be possible for one such facility to store the majority of the electrical demand for a large city. This won't work in flat areas. And of course evaporation eats into your storage. But as a means to store power collected during the day for use at night, probably pretty good.
Alternatively, people have been talking about large liquid metal batteries. Basically you take a giant tank and fill it with chemicals that separate based on density into different layers. Those layers serve as the regions in municipal scale battery. The whole thing basically self assembles. Energy density would be low by modern battery standards but the scale would be such that it wouldn't matter. The system really only needs to store a couple days of power.
Oh no I'm sorry small child (kid? really?), you've missed the point as to who was responsible for the problem. It was the state government's fault. The system would have failed regardless what the power companies did. The conditions on the contracts were unreasonable.
As to what thieves are supposed to be able to do, thank you captain obvious for you brilliant observation. Genius. How many years of graduate work did it take before you gained the level of education capable of concluding that the system shouldn't allow theft. Absolutely genius.
As to using examples, you've completely missed the point. These systems didn't just screw up around Enron. They've been screwing up since the 1970s. Do you know how many governments we've had since then?
You see this all over the country.
Think California is alone? We've been pineering green energy projects in the US since the 1960s. Everything you're dealing with we dealt with when your parents were still learning to shave... Kid. And the promises of green energy are always the same and the results are always the same. We have abandoned green energy projects all over the country. Ruins. Dead wind mills. Dead solar power plants... Everywhere there is sun and wind we have at least one in the state.
They work great for a couple years, then maintenance costs come, the money dries up, people figure they don't want to pay a higher energy price FOREVER, and the projects are cut. They fail so completely that there isn't even money left over to decommission the facilities. They just sit there like ruins rotting in the sun.
Enron has nothing to do with this. This was happening before enron, after enron, and in places enron never did business at all.
Think you'll magically escape it? The UK is already going through the exact same process. What is happening to their wind project. Ex-fucking-actly. Every single f'ing god damn time. I'm tired of wasting money on bullshit programs for bullshit technologies that have no business trying to supply municipal power. Possibly we could get Geo-thermal working but our last geothermal project was shut down by the same group of environmentalists that shut down everything. They said the geo thermal causes earthquakes. And they shut down the last solar power plant because it endangered the habitat of a tortoise in the middle of the god damn desert.
I'm beyond fed up with this crap. When the tech is ready, great... till then - sit down.
If you know anything, you know that's nonsense. For one thing, most companies require services not offered by the cloud. Beyond that, never under estimate the user's ability to not be able to find the O.N. button or otherwise screw up a foolproof system.
The IT situation is going to change. It always does. But abstracting it all to the cloud isn't possible unless you have a custom database designed for the amazon cloud or something and even then you've got the whole IT department that manages that.
Beyond that you have local files. Telling businesses that they can't get access to anything if the internet drops isn't going to work.
There are just so many serious fatal problems with this idea.
You say "by that logic" but fail to explain how any of that is true.
I could as easily respond: By that logic, we should all wear purple squids on our heads and dance slowly to Italian pop songs.
You have to explain why that argument is true and not simply read off your conclusion.
Large companies have advantages and disadvantages.
Where I live there are four grocery stores all within about five miles. I have a Ralphs which is a big national super market chain... it's the equal of Ralph's though rarely does anyone raise a stink about it because they're unionized. Which is the only reason Walmart ever gets in the media. If walmart joined the national labor unions tomorrow most of the negative walmart press would disappear and your small mom and pop shops would still be out of business. No one cares about those stores. It's a ploy. Anyway, we have a Ralph's which typically has the lowest prices. But they don't have the best quality or selection. They are however open 24 hours a day. So pros and cons.
We also have a whole foods. Generally better produce, prices are about 20 percent higher, and they don't carry a lot of products I like.
Then there is a local mom and pop market that competes just fine with everyone. They have prices that are about 20 percent more then the Ralphs and about the same to the Whole Foods. They have produce that is just as good as the whole foods, carry the common items that whole foods doesn't, and they have a REAL butcher. So if you want a special cut of meat they can make it for you.
Finally there is a very a high end grocery store that is about 40 percent more then Ralphs. Most of what they have is just the exact same thing at an inflated price. But they do have very nice meat and some specialty items you won't find anywhere else.
What's the point I'm making here? All of these stores co-exist by finding a nitch. All the stores cater to different needs and sensibilities.
The people that want the lowest prices are going to go to a Ralphs or Vons. They're the cheapest. But there are other reasons to shop at a place besides price. There is quality. For all the reasons Ralph's is cheap they also aren't the best quality. The whole foods is catering to the healthfood people. They have at least two full isles with nothing but vitemin supplements and practically everything says "organic" on the side. The local mom and pop place could give a good god damn about organic. They care about quality and try to focus on things that sell well in their store. Big national chains often will stock things that sell badly in a given store because they sell well in another store. Local stores don't have that forest for the trees problem. They're totally focused on their one store and so they focus on things that matter to their customers. We have a large Jewish community in the area for example, and so this market stocks a lot of products that serve that cuisine.
Etc.
What you're doing is giving up. You're saying if anyone comes into to compete with you then you're just going to give up. Well, die then. Seriously. Just get it over with.
We have lots of coffee shops competing with starbucks all over my city and they have lots of business. You can't get a frapachino in any of them. You can get excellent coffee and MAYBE a cookie but probably just coffee. And for that, they're quiet good. And again, they haven't been wiped out by starbucks despite there being a starbucks on just about ever single corner.
We have lots of places that serve cheap lunches. We have national chains, state chains, and one offs by single proprietors. They all co-exist and don't lack for people that want a burger, a taco, or sushi.
Am I talking about a big city as compared to some rural town that can't sustain that level of diversity? Yes. And I'm well aware of the difference. However, walmart doesn't do everything. And there are a lot of things walmart probably does badly.
Rather then giving up, take it as a challenge. These big companies tend to have ba
It was a political struggle. There is a huge struggle between public and private sector in my country. Anything the public sector has it doesn't want to give up. It involves power political blocks, money, power, unions, etc.
The system wasn't set up that way because the companies wanted it that way. it was set up that way because that was the law.
Most of the problems came from the state insisting that power be bought on a day to day basis. Power utilities don't like that. They charge very high rates for daily contracts and have much more reasonable rates for five year contracts. Prices spiked largely because much of the grid was forced to buy power daily.
I live within the confines of the DWP though and that was not a problem we had to deal with. As a public entity the DWP didn't have to follow the same rules and could make long term contracts unlike the private entities that were forced to buy it daily. As a result, my power remained cheap and reliable while much of the state was having black out problems.
The whole thing was used as evidence that power distribution should be a public responsibility.
In any case, the screwed up politics don't really matter. The tech isn't ready. If you want to waste your money on half baked projects then that's your business. God knows my own peers are always keen to follow up one mistake with another. I just wish they'd do it with their own money instead of everyone's and clean up their messes when they inevitably shut down.
Offering lower prices then your competitor isn't predatory pricing. They're making a profit at those prices.
Why should I pay you more for something when I can pay them less for the same thing? What right do you have to force me to buy from you?
See? You're trying to force me to buy from one person rather then another. That is force. The corporation isn't forcing anyone. People CHOOSE to shop there. If no one wanted to shop at the walmart then it wouldn't stay there. It would shut down.
It thrives because the consumers would rather pay less.
Does that harm local businesses that can't compete? Yes. But not all businesses compete with walmart and the clerks in both establishments are going to get paid the same either way.
Furthermore, businesses go out of business all the time for good reasons. Really the companies threatened our being put down by walmart need to reevalute their business model.
My uncle owns a coin and collectibles shop for example. He's had to totally redesign his business because he started it long before the internet was relevant. Today, I think he does more business through ebay then he does through his store and he's very successful.
It isn't tyranny or serfdom if someone does your job better then you do.
Please, lets not get into a big stupid ideological struggle. Those are boring. Please offer logical proposals with the end goal of having a prosperous society. You will find that most people share that goal.
Depends entirely on the surface area. The point with solar is to make it work you need to be able to cover a HUGE surface area. If you covered the whole state of Nevada with solar cells we could probably feed total US electrical demand and then some. But short of that it's a waste of time.
If we can make it cheap then we can put it on every roof and at least reduce everyone's energy demand. But the price has to be very very low or it won't make any sense. It's not just the cost of the cells it's the installation, maintenance, and infrastructure.
You would think, but our deserts are littered with the ruins of a many such projects over the decades. Google "Abandoned California solar" or wind...
care to add another failure to the pile? We have a lot of power plants that produce a lot of power. None of them are "green"... when it comes to depending on whether the lights will actually come on, you need to use dependable technology.
The alternative is importing power from other states or even mexico. And what sort of power plants do they use there? Coal, gas, natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric... If your concern is global warming you might as well just cut your losses and do it in state. It isn't any better for the biosphere to have the Mexicans do it and then import the power at an inflated cost
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Fine, you're going to be a jackass on the subject. Good. I like it that way. It means I don't have to even pretend to take any of your stupid ideas seriously. I can instead focus all energy on just making sure you have no influence what so ever.
We must have a space program. This is non-negotiable. You can get the f' out of the way or get steamrolled. I'd actually prefer you try to stop it. It will make me laugh.
Since they're never for anything but always against things I don't see how they're constructive to anything.
Your argument is self contradictory.
If we're about corporate globalism then why would we pay any attention to these idiots?
The simple fact that the environmental movement is relevant in these matters renders your whole argument void.
Again... I don't want to argue with you or the environmentalists... You can have the earth. Keep it in good health.
Just let me leave. It might take another 10,000 years to get there... who knows. But we're leaving this mud ball and you're f'ing welcome to it. Do what you want so long as at the end of it all my descendants don't have to listen to your descents bleat on about more stupid shit.
Sorry if this is rude... I'm fed up.
"IThinkTechnicallyThisIsAStrongerPassword."
It's people like this that make me want to leave this planet. If you want the whole planet treated like some big national park then we can do that. Just let the portion of humanity that doesn't want to live like Luddites leave the planet.
It might take us awhile... but f'ing with us at this stage is not helping.
In all seriousness, if putting this facility in Texas isn't feasible where exactly on planet earth can we put it?
Oh I know... china.
I f'ing hate these people.
A8%l+$mr is a terrible password. The security experts like passwords like that but they're stupid. It's impossible to remember.
The convention I follow and what I think most people should follow is "JustTypingASentenceOutMinusSpaces". That is very easy to remember. You can do cool things like quote a line from a play, song, poem, or movie that you like. What's the likelihood a dictionary attack is going to crack "hastalavistababy!"...
Humans are very good at remembering sentences. It works into our neumonic memory. Many people that couch study habits encourage students to turn complex study concepts into such phrases. And why? Because we don't forget them.
Stupid lines like "I before e but not after c."... regardless of whether that's grammatically correct, I'll never forget that stupid little rhyme. It's in my head... forever.
That is how people should make passwords. Not their children's birthdays plus the name of their dog with a pound sign at the end. "ToBeOrNotToBeThatIsTheQuestion" is a great password. It's long but you'll never forget it.
I know what some people are saying. What about those *** that block out what you're typing making it so you have to retype everything if you make a mistake? Well, how often are those even required? They're pretty stupid. 99 percent of the time I'm typing in a password no one is there is to see it. And even if there were someone just ask him to stare at his feet for two seconds.
Using this system we could all have dozens of uncrackable passwords that we never had to write down.
Off an online ad supported alternative and you'll get a lot of those pirates back.
The studios are too fixated on people paying. We got free music on the radio. We got free television and movies... We just had the ads.
Put some ads up and offer it free. At no point has the industry tested this idea. Hulu is the closest they've come to it and it's a starved wreck. It has a very small selection of mostly old content. Give me a break. Put it all up. the hosting costs are ZERO. I believe youtube has offered to host their complete library for nothing or so close to nothing as to not matter.
Just try it before you bitch about it. We're not going back to dvds and cds. The future is digital. Get over it.
We've been saying for years the feds need to be very careful about increasing power over the internet because it gives legitimacy to all these international groups that want to do the same thing.
The only way to keep the internet free is for the US to focus it's efforts to keep other powers from taking control.
By listening to the copyright trolls they've jeopardized the whole stability of the internet.
Well, I've been reading your posts and you haven't been reading mine.
So we're done. You have nothing to meaningful to contribute to any conversation where you read nothing the other people say and go out of your way to be insulting.
Kick the internet connection out of the wall and find a less annoying hobby.
Small child, I actually did read beyond the insult which was probably a mistake since needless rude people are typically maladjusted idiots.
As to the first line, you blamed Enron. And you clearly didn't read the rest of my post where I pointed out that this was an issue long before Enron even existed. You know less about our situation then you believe.
As to your infantile need to cast pathetic little insults for no apparent reason, you're unlikely to gain anyone's respect that way. You say you're not America? Possibly in your culture people demonstrate their status by acting like jackasses. We have some people like that in the US as well... Regardless of their own personal delusions it rarely gains them any respect. You're basically quoting from the Donald Trump hand book on how to make an impression. Suggestions might include getting a comical toupee, painting everything gold, and then calling it "classy" without irony.
In any case, you have nothing to contribute to this discussion. You're an intellectual void as well as boring.
Good day, sir.
If you're going to virtualize something that gets a lot of traffic then it makes sense to scale up the server and environment.
If you're talking about virtualizing an enterprise scale server/server farm then you'll want a solution that is designed to handle that sort of situation.
As some people said, shared disk doesn't make I/O happy. That's a key point which is dealt with in enterprise scale virtualization by spreading the load across many different systems. So the hit of shared load is mitigated by access to multiple systems with redundant information. There are some very cool products that do this sort of thing very well.
But generally it's a bad idea to shoe horn an enterprise system into a limited virtualized environment where performance will suffer.
You don't want to virtualize unless you're consolidating servers. The costs just don't make sense. Where you save the money is when you get three servers to do the work of 10... or 10 to do the work of 100.
It's true that most businesses label IT as a cost and in the process ignore how much money IT saves the company every day. The man power they'd have to hire if they couldn't use these systems would be staggering. And instead of acknowledging that point they simply cite the only institution that allows them to make those savings as a cost. What do they want? They want it for free?
IT doesn't cost money. It saves money. Most cost cutting on IT tends to be penny wise and pound foolish in the long run.
That isn't to say you can just blindly dump cash down the hole and expect things to remain efficient. But business managers make a mistake when they label IT as costing money.
The cloud isn't terminal services. That's a totally different concept.
You say you don't like the term but you're not apparently aware what it means.
Remoting into a virtual machine is not the same thing as the cloud. The cloud amongst other things is almost always a web service. Google documents would be an example.
Windows terminal services is not the same thing.
And terminal services doesn't get rid of your IT department. They're just not as worried about individual systems and stick to the server room more. But you absolutely still need a very competent IT department or the terminal system won't work.
roughly 1 kWh at sea level per square meter.
The city of Los Angeles consumes about 6000 MWh every day.
So to meet that demand you'd need about 6 million square meters of solar cells to meet the demand for los angeles. That is six square kilometers of solar cells. Probably a good idea to increase that by about 40 percent just because the cells aren't going to be RIGHT next to each other and there's likely to be wasted space. Additionally, the DWP has over 7000 MWh on tap at any given time so ideally you'd want at least that plus whatever extra is required during winter, bad weather, etc.
Lets call it eight square kilometers of solar cells. When you consider that the city is about 750sq km you're looking at roughly 1 percent of the total city area. That's assuming I haven't screwed the math up somewhere. I'm being sloppy here so I might be off by a magnitude or two.
Anyway, most of the cheap solar panels can hit efficiencies of 20 percent. So multiply the area required by five and you'll be able to roughly supply all the energy demand of the whole city.
Solar will be the future when the cost of cells comes down or if we can get efficiency a lot higher. Either way it is the future. It's just not ready yet.
I understand their complaint and it's reasonable. Just use a pretty box.
But for security reasons there are some good things about closed source.
Lets be real here, we're talking about root financial systems. Neither individuals nor most corporations have any interest in this software. This is the prevue of nations and huge trade alliances.
Keeping the code secret makes it more secure. Yes, it can't be used as the only level of security. It must be on TOP of everything else. I don't think giving the chinese access to our treasury accounting software is going to make the world a better place.
Green belts have been around for ages...
As to solar, I think the best solution is a two part system.
This assumes the technology is ready and I don't think it is yet. But use low efficency, cheap, and robust solar cells in deserts or other unpopulated areas with good sun. This should provide the bulk of our power needs. On top of that, put higher efficiency solar cells on top of roofs throughout urban areas. These should probably be owned by the power utility. By all means, let people buy them but most people simply can't finance it or justify the expense. So do it through the utility. Roll it out slowly.
If you do that... when the technology is ready... we should be able to provide nearly all our electrical needs with solar. Obviously we need systems to store power. But there are some very simple ways to do it. One way I like is reverse hydro electric. That is you have two reservoirs at different elevations and you pump water from the lower one to the higher one to store power and then pour water through a hydro electric generator on the way down to generate power. The capacity of the "battery" is determined by the size of the reservoirs. Technically it should be possible for one such facility to store the majority of the electrical demand for a large city. This won't work in flat areas. And of course evaporation eats into your storage. But as a means to store power collected during the day for use at night, probably pretty good.
Alternatively, people have been talking about large liquid metal batteries. Basically you take a giant tank and fill it with chemicals that separate based on density into different layers. Those layers serve as the regions in municipal scale battery. The whole thing basically self assembles. Energy density would be low by modern battery standards but the scale would be such that it wouldn't matter. The system really only needs to store a couple days of power.
Oh no I'm sorry small child (kid? really?), you've missed the point as to who was responsible for the problem. It was the state government's fault. The system would have failed regardless what the power companies did. The conditions on the contracts were unreasonable.
As to what thieves are supposed to be able to do, thank you captain obvious for you brilliant observation. Genius. How many years of graduate work did it take before you gained the level of education capable of concluding that the system shouldn't allow theft. Absolutely genius.
As to using examples, you've completely missed the point. These systems didn't just screw up around Enron. They've been screwing up since the 1970s. Do you know how many governments we've had since then?
You see this all over the country.
Think California is alone? We've been pineering green energy projects in the US since the 1960s. Everything you're dealing with we dealt with when your parents were still learning to shave... Kid. And the promises of green energy are always the same and the results are always the same. We have abandoned green energy projects all over the country. Ruins. Dead wind mills. Dead solar power plants... Everywhere there is sun and wind we have at least one in the state.
They work great for a couple years, then maintenance costs come, the money dries up, people figure they don't want to pay a higher energy price FOREVER, and the projects are cut. They fail so completely that there isn't even money left over to decommission the facilities. They just sit there like ruins rotting in the sun.
Enron has nothing to do with this. This was happening before enron, after enron, and in places enron never did business at all.
Think you'll magically escape it? The UK is already going through the exact same process. What is happening to their wind project. Ex-fucking-actly. Every single f'ing god damn time. I'm tired of wasting money on bullshit programs for bullshit technologies that have no business trying to supply municipal power. Possibly we could get Geo-thermal working but our last geothermal project was shut down by the same group of environmentalists that shut down everything. They said the geo thermal causes earthquakes. And they shut down the last solar power plant because it endangered the habitat of a tortoise in the middle of the god damn desert.
I'm beyond fed up with this crap. When the tech is ready, great... till then - sit down.
you asked a question... questions aren't points... ;-)
If you know anything, you know that's nonsense. For one thing, most companies require services not offered by the cloud. Beyond that, never under estimate the user's ability to not be able to find the O.N. button or otherwise screw up a foolproof system.
The IT situation is going to change. It always does. But abstracting it all to the cloud isn't possible unless you have a custom database designed for the amazon cloud or something and even then you've got the whole IT department that manages that.
Beyond that you have local files. Telling businesses that they can't get access to anything if the internet drops isn't going to work.
There are just so many serious fatal problems with this idea.
This funny little video touches on a few:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4EbCkotKPU
Yes yes... evil M$... insert hiss and boo... but we're talking about end user business software. Have fun clawing Excel out of their cold dead hands.
You say "by that logic" but fail to explain how any of that is true.
I could as easily respond: By that logic, we should all wear purple squids on our heads and dance slowly to Italian pop songs.
You have to explain why that argument is true and not simply read off your conclusion.
Large companies have advantages and disadvantages.
Where I live there are four grocery stores all within about five miles. I have a Ralphs which is a big national super market chain... it's the equal of Ralph's though rarely does anyone raise a stink about it because they're unionized. Which is the only reason Walmart ever gets in the media. If walmart joined the national labor unions tomorrow most of the negative walmart press would disappear and your small mom and pop shops would still be out of business. No one cares about those stores. It's a ploy. Anyway, we have a Ralph's which typically has the lowest prices. But they don't have the best quality or selection. They are however open 24 hours a day. So pros and cons.
We also have a whole foods. Generally better produce, prices are about 20 percent higher, and they don't carry a lot of products I like.
Then there is a local mom and pop market that competes just fine with everyone. They have prices that are about 20 percent more then the Ralphs and about the same to the Whole Foods. They have produce that is just as good as the whole foods, carry the common items that whole foods doesn't, and they have a REAL butcher. So if you want a special cut of meat they can make it for you.
Finally there is a very a high end grocery store that is about 40 percent more then Ralphs. Most of what they have is just the exact same thing at an inflated price. But they do have very nice meat and some specialty items you won't find anywhere else.
What's the point I'm making here? All of these stores co-exist by finding a nitch. All the stores cater to different needs and sensibilities.
The people that want the lowest prices are going to go to a Ralphs or Vons. They're the cheapest. But there are other reasons to shop at a place besides price. There is quality. For all the reasons Ralph's is cheap they also aren't the best quality. The whole foods is catering to the healthfood people. They have at least two full isles with nothing but vitemin supplements and practically everything says "organic" on the side. The local mom and pop place could give a good god damn about organic. They care about quality and try to focus on things that sell well in their store. Big national chains often will stock things that sell badly in a given store because they sell well in another store. Local stores don't have that forest for the trees problem. They're totally focused on their one store and so they focus on things that matter to their customers. We have a large Jewish community in the area for example, and so this market stocks a lot of products that serve that cuisine.
Etc.
What you're doing is giving up. You're saying if anyone comes into to compete with you then you're just going to give up. Well, die then. Seriously. Just get it over with.
We have lots of coffee shops competing with starbucks all over my city and they have lots of business. You can't get a frapachino in any of them. You can get excellent coffee and MAYBE a cookie but probably just coffee. And for that, they're quiet good. And again, they haven't been wiped out by starbucks despite there being a starbucks on just about ever single corner.
We have lots of places that serve cheap lunches. We have national chains, state chains, and one offs by single proprietors. They all co-exist and don't lack for people that want a burger, a taco, or sushi.
Am I talking about a big city as compared to some rural town that can't sustain that level of diversity? Yes. And I'm well aware of the difference. However, walmart doesn't do everything. And there are a lot of things walmart probably does badly.
Rather then giving up, take it as a challenge. These big companies tend to have ba
The Enron system was set up to fail on purpose.
It was a political struggle. There is a huge struggle between public and private sector in my country. Anything the public sector has it doesn't want to give up. It involves power political blocks, money, power, unions, etc.
The system wasn't set up that way because the companies wanted it that way. it was set up that way because that was the law.
Most of the problems came from the state insisting that power be bought on a day to day basis. Power utilities don't like that. They charge very high rates for daily contracts and have much more reasonable rates for five year contracts. Prices spiked largely because much of the grid was forced to buy power daily.
I live within the confines of the DWP though and that was not a problem we had to deal with. As a public entity the DWP didn't have to follow the same rules and could make long term contracts unlike the private entities that were forced to buy it daily. As a result, my power remained cheap and reliable while much of the state was having black out problems.
The whole thing was used as evidence that power distribution should be a public responsibility.
In any case, the screwed up politics don't really matter. The tech isn't ready. If you want to waste your money on half baked projects then that's your business. God knows my own peers are always keen to follow up one mistake with another. I just wish they'd do it with their own money instead of everyone's and clean up their messes when they inevitably shut down.
Offering lower prices then your competitor isn't predatory pricing. They're making a profit at those prices.
Why should I pay you more for something when I can pay them less for the same thing? What right do you have to force me to buy from you?
See? You're trying to force me to buy from one person rather then another. That is force. The corporation isn't forcing anyone. People CHOOSE to shop there. If no one wanted to shop at the walmart then it wouldn't stay there. It would shut down.
It thrives because the consumers would rather pay less.
Does that harm local businesses that can't compete? Yes. But not all businesses compete with walmart and the clerks in both establishments are going to get paid the same either way.
Furthermore, businesses go out of business all the time for good reasons. Really the companies threatened our being put down by walmart need to reevalute their business model.
My uncle owns a coin and collectibles shop for example. He's had to totally redesign his business because he started it long before the internet was relevant. Today, I think he does more business through ebay then he does through his store and he's very successful.
It isn't tyranny or serfdom if someone does your job better then you do.
Please, lets not get into a big stupid ideological struggle. Those are boring. Please offer logical proposals with the end goal of having a prosperous society. You will find that most people share that goal.
Depends entirely on the surface area. The point with solar is to make it work you need to be able to cover a HUGE surface area. If you covered the whole state of Nevada with solar cells we could probably feed total US electrical demand and then some. But short of that it's a waste of time.
If we can make it cheap then we can put it on every roof and at least reduce everyone's energy demand. But the price has to be very very low or it won't make any sense. It's not just the cost of the cells it's the installation, maintenance, and infrastructure.
You would think, but our deserts are littered with the ruins of a many such projects over the decades. Google "Abandoned California solar" or wind...
care to add another failure to the pile? We have a lot of power plants that produce a lot of power. None of them are "green"... when it comes to depending on whether the lights will actually come on, you need to use dependable technology.
The alternative is importing power from other states or even mexico. And what sort of power plants do they use there? Coal, gas, natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric... If your concern is global warming you might as well just cut your losses and do it in state. It isn't any better for the biosphere to have the Mexicans do it and then import the power at an inflated cost