> It's a server app, with all the server functionality removed
It's a server app that includes all the functionality anyone running a Mac server would want.
Why would I run DNS on a Mac when I can do it on an RPi for less than the cost of a Mac keyboard?
> The Apache functionality
You run Apache on a Mac?! For god's sake, why?! You can get fully configurable hosted versions for less than the monthly depreciation of a Mac mini, and the free completely automated sandbox/deploy, A/B systems out there remove any barrier on that side.
I type this on a Mac, so I'm not some sort of hater, but honestly, the idea of using my Mac as a server for anything other than Mac related chores simply doesn't make sense. CPU cycles are free, you pay for the GUI, and that doesn't make a lot of difference in the case of a daemon.
> versus how much time it would take to write a *decent* OS entirely from > scratch, you're looking at a 1000000:1 effort.
That is also the ratio of the amount of money one makes in the legal system to the amount one makes selling a Unix-like OS.
Companies exist to make a profit. Any legal way of doing that is acceptable, even if it has nothing to do with your original business plan. Normally we applaud companies that do a "pivot", but here we have one that we hate because they are attacking the sacred cow.
> It took care of one of the biggest 'problems' with most languages now, a GUI
Indeed, and this remains a problem with Swift if one wants up-an-at-em programming. Specifically, I think there were three key ideas in HC that I've seen only so-so implementations of since:
1) a USEFUL forms/GUI editor is the main UI 2) scripts/programming is connected to the GUI item directly 3) all GUI items are connected to a back-end datastore
VB and FMP do (1) for sure, Swift absolutely does not (although it could, if Apple would make a real Form object). VB kinda did 2, in a way that I think actually improves on the HC model (ie, all language for one form is in one file, but you can find the bits related to THIS part of the UI with a click). FMP does 3, VB allows it, Swift only does so with a lot of work.
> Each new version gets bigger and incrementally slower
I certainly haven't seen that. My machine's from 2013, and I haven't seen any sort of slowdown in spite of updating many times. Larger yes, but not slower. Quite the opposite, a few graphics-related tasks got faster, and there's Metal on the gaming side.
> Respect your data. Don't throw away information...he says, while taking 99% of his images on a phone with a 8Mpx sensor behind a dirty fingerprint-smudged 3mm lens.
If you want to respect your data, maybe you should start with the basic laws of physics and ask yourself what it is you're potentially saving?
> I don't think "deus ex machina" means what you think it means
He is using it properly. Although it's typical usage is a system to solve plots, that is not its only use, and today it basically means anything that you pull out of your ass and stick in the story.
> Color me unimpressed. It kicked in a few MW for a short period of time.
You obviously don't work in the power industry.
I assure you, this is *very* impressive. People have been talking about solutions to this problem since I was a kid. When they were still working on Shiva. Before I bought my Atari 400.
> The question is whether Lion batteries can stabilize the South Australian grid for years on end without losing too much capacity
LiIon, like most batteries, loses capacity when you have wild swings in stored energy. Going from 100% to 40% once is orders of magnitude worse than going from 80% to 60% three times, in spite of both examples using the same amount of energy.
For uplift purposes you have rapid cycling around maybe 10% of capacity (the recent example was 1.5% IIRC), so the pack should last until we're all long dead.
> convinced that if one were designing batteries for grid storage that Lithium-ion would be the technology you'd choose
Holy, have you read *anything* about this?!
The batteries in the SA system are NOT the same ones as the cars. They're a completely different chemistry designed specifically for cycling.
> Sodium-Sulfur (NaS) batteries
Ugh.
NaS batteries will not happen. Ever. Its a terrible technology. Boiling sulphur is the description of Hell, not the description of a useful battery chemistry. No one is really working on it, nor ZEBRA, and even the flow batteries that people periodically raise are dead from any practical definition.
This very second, the amount of money being spent on LiIon tech is something like 1000x the amount on all the others put together. There is no way any of those technologies will ever be able to compete.
> Costs you quoted include all the externalities that other sources of energy get to offload to human health, animal health and so on
No, they don't. In fact, the report clearly states:
"does not take into account potential social and environmental externalities"
So, I'm not sure how you came up with that.
> Nuclear is the only one that is required to cover anything that could possibly
Nuclear is the only one that *doesn't*. The government covers the insurance. If they didn't, no one would have ever built one.
Look at Fukishima. Current estimates are that the physical cleanup will be something like $20 billion, while moving all the people out and buying their houses could be anywhere between $200 and $400 billion. Let's take the low side, and note that Japan has 50 reactors, which means that if they had to cover this it would be another $4 billion PER REACTOR, which is *more than the cost of the rector*, by about two times. Had they been required to cover this eventuality, none of them would have been built, they could never cover their costs.
> what do you think of PG&E's molten salt solar plant in the Mojave?
I think it has moving parts. I think that's bad.
There is an inherent problem with these machines in that they depend on Carnot, and thus need to operate as hot as possible. This limits them to places where they get really great sunlight, even a little cloud and your CF dies. Mohave is certainly the right place to try it.
The problem is that you can do PV just about anywhere - from my garage roof to a billion panels in farmers fields. And it's output is pretty linear with insolation, so 10% cloud is 10% less power, not 50% less. Lots of PV means there's a *whole lot* of demand for storage, but in most cases that won't be salt, it will have to be something else.
And that's a deadly combo. On one side we have a tech that only works in a couple of places and costs a lot up front. On the other we have a tech that costs a couple of hundred bucks to start with, works everywhere, and they all want storage. I don't think it's a mystery where this is going...
> a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, for example - would love to disabuse you of the notion that > nuclear power cannot ramp up and down quickly
Sure, which you can do with 95% enrichment. That results in a tiny core, which has fewer problems with hot spots and less reliance on delayed neutrons.
Of course, it also costs so much money to reach that level of enrichment that it's many times greater than the commercial value of the electricity it could produce, so it offers nothing to the civilian fleet.
Surely as someone that professes such expertise on such matters would be aware of this, and mention it for the sake of clarity. Right?
> How fast can you bring up a sanely designed nuclear plant?
From zero takes days and days. From 75% takes about 24 hours, at least for common designs like PWR.
> s of seconds are hydro and batteries. And I have my doubts about the
Don't. There was a recent brownout sequence in Austrailia that just happened to occur days after the Tesla pack went online. It managed to stabilize the frequency in real time.
The entire power industry is talking about this. They're using terms like "game changer" and "never the same again".
> With nuclear, they don't use electrolysis to split water, they use heat
Nope. They've been plans to do this, but the reactors we use can't do it. You need to use something gas cooled, typically CO2 or He, but no one is building them anymore. They suck, economically. Just as the Brits about the AGR.
> replacing it with solar because it is simply so much cheaper
I've seen PPAs in the gulf at 2.2 cents/kWh.
> There's a difference between running solar power plants in the Persian Gulf > and running them near Seattle. It's not a small one.
But there's basically zero difference between Seattle and Mohave. And not that much difference between Mohave and Idaho. And, of course, Seattle's offshore wind resource is amazing.
PV has no moving parts, so there's that. Beyond that, it's also the *number* of moving parts that has an effect; more complex systems are generally more expensive to operate. And as you'll see at that source, this is clearly seen in the data - a NG plant, which basically has two moving parts, costs much less to run that a coal plant, which has many moving parts (the cooling loops) which costs a lot less than a reactor which has both many more parts as well as radiation to deal with.
> Anyone who claims that 'renewables are free after the capital cost' is utterly clueless about the actual costs involved
I have a dozen panels on my roof and worked for a company that did maybe 100 MWp of installs. So Mr Anonymous Coward, why don't you go ahead and tell me why I, and the entire power industry, is "utterly clueless"?
"Subsidies for renewables, which far exceed those of fossil fuels."
That statement is patently false. Renewables receive about 1/10th the annual subsidy of oil and gas alone. Nuclear previously dwarfed even O&G, but that is winding down.
> The incentive to adopt renewable technologies should come from them naturally > being better from an economic standpoint
Absolutely!
> (which they obviously aren't
Renewables are dramatically less better from an economic standpoint without any subsidies.
For PPAs signed today in the US, wind is an average of 4.5 cents/kWh, PV is about the same, and natural gas CS is about 5.5. Nuclear averages about 15 cents, and cola is about 8.5.
> certainly there's nothing in the basics of fission that prevents ramping up heat pretty quickly
No. Read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_neutron
Reactors often get a safety margin by operating slightly below the conditions needed for a chain reaction and then using the extra neutrons provided by fission products to make up the difference. Since these are generated over a period of minutes, there is a slow-following curve which makes it much easier to control. You can operate without this consideration, but then even small transients can make your reactor runaway. Quickly.
Additionally, due to the geometry needed to maintain a chain reaction, you have to load the fuel in a certain way. In most designs, this means there are hot spots in the reactor, typically in the center, because they respond more rapidly to control inputs because their neutron flux is higher. This is what caused Chernobyl to blow. You *can* design around this, but only at the cost of decreased efficiency or requiring more fuel changes, and the economics are far too bad to consider these days.
Slashdot Mirror
> People, generally, are idiots and wikipedia is a reflection of that
Sure, but lots of people aren't idiots and they're the ones writing the wiki.
The idiots are too busy complaining about the wiki on other sites.
"A Bug in Browser Extension Grammarly, Now Patched, Could Have Allowed an Attacker To Read Everything Users Wrote Online"
Good thing the only place I used it was writing Wikipedia articles then.
> Are you seriously claiming that other people playing one of the roughly two hundred and fifty dungeons released in the last ten years
If you think that's why people play on these 3rd party servers then you simply haven't talked to any of the people involved.
They're on those servers to return to the era when the game was played by people who's goal wasn't the collection of stuff and end-game play.
Returning to an earlier version has the primary effect of selecting those players looking for the original, highly collaborative, user base.
> The noise of a throaty engine and smell is as much of the appeal as the speed.
Which is why the sound in question is faked.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/americas-best-selling-cars-and-trucks-are-built-on-lies-the-rise-of-fake-engine-noise/2015/01/21/6db09a10-a0ba-11e4-b146-577832eafcb4_story.html?utm_term=.6cb8e4fb8523
One laments the loss in "quality" between the F-101 and F-22 as well, but luckily they don't buy aircraft on such dumb criterion.
"Otherwise you're shifting the efficiency problem from your engine bay to the grid. I hate smug EV drivers boasting about "clean" driving."
Oh FFS, can't anyone spend even one microsecond looking up their "everyone knows" BS before rolling it onto another web page?
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/
> It's a server app, with all the server functionality removed
It's a server app that includes all the functionality anyone running a Mac server would want.
Why would I run DNS on a Mac when I can do it on an RPi for less than the cost of a Mac keyboard?
> The Apache functionality
You run Apache on a Mac?! For god's sake, why?! You can get fully configurable hosted versions for less than the monthly depreciation of a Mac mini, and the free completely automated sandbox/deploy, A/B systems out there remove any barrier on that side.
I type this on a Mac, so I'm not some sort of hater, but honestly, the idea of using my Mac as a server for anything other than Mac related chores simply doesn't make sense. CPU cycles are free, you pay for the GUI, and that doesn't make a lot of difference in the case of a daemon.
> versus how much time it would take to write a *decent* OS entirely from
> scratch, you're looking at a 1000000:1 effort.
That is also the ratio of the amount of money one makes in the legal system to the amount one makes selling a Unix-like OS.
Companies exist to make a profit. Any legal way of doing that is acceptable, even if it has nothing to do with your original business plan. Normally we applaud companies that do a "pivot", but here we have one that we hate because they are attacking the sacred cow.
Don't worry, they'll loose.
> A serious language would be stable and not have such bloating problems.
So when these are complete this year, it will suddenly be serious? It's not like they don't talk about this:
https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/ABIStabilityManifesto.md
> It took care of one of the biggest 'problems' with most languages now, a GUI
Indeed, and this remains a problem with Swift if one wants up-an-at-em programming. Specifically, I think there were three key ideas in HC that I've seen only so-so implementations of since:
1) a USEFUL forms/GUI editor is the main UI
2) scripts/programming is connected to the GUI item directly
3) all GUI items are connected to a back-end datastore
VB and FMP do (1) for sure, Swift absolutely does not (although it could, if Apple would make a real Form object). VB kinda did 2, in a way that I think actually improves on the HC model (ie, all language for one form is in one file, but you can find the bits related to THIS part of the UI with a click). FMP does 3, VB allows it, Swift only does so with a lot of work.
> Each new version gets bigger and incrementally slower
I certainly haven't seen that. My machine's from 2013, and I haven't seen any sort of slowdown in spite of updating many times. Larger yes, but not slower. Quite the opposite, a few graphics-related tasks got faster, and there's Metal on the gaming side.
> Respect your data. Don't throw away information ...he says, while taking 99% of his images on a phone with a 8Mpx sensor behind a dirty fingerprint-smudged 3mm lens.
If you want to respect your data, maybe you should start with the basic laws of physics and ask yourself what it is you're potentially saving?
> they are still profiting from each battery replacement
At $29 per replacement?
That sounds like break-even to me, at best.
> I don't think "deus ex machina" means what you think it means
He is using it properly. Although it's typical usage is a system to solve plots, that is not its only use, and today it basically means anything that you pull out of your ass and stick in the story.
> What they are is retcon.
I can be more than one thing.
> Color me unimpressed. It kicked in a few MW for a short period of time.
You obviously don't work in the power industry.
I assure you, this is *very* impressive. People have been talking about solutions to this problem since I was a kid. When they were still working on Shiva. Before I bought my Atari 400.
> The question is whether Lion batteries can stabilize the South Australian grid for years on end without losing too much capacity
LiIon, like most batteries, loses capacity when you have wild swings in stored energy. Going from 100% to 40% once is orders of magnitude worse than going from 80% to 60% three times, in spite of both examples using the same amount of energy.
For uplift purposes you have rapid cycling around maybe 10% of capacity (the recent example was 1.5% IIRC), so the pack should last until we're all long dead.
> convinced that if one were designing batteries for grid storage that Lithium-ion would be the technology you'd choose
Holy, have you read *anything* about this?!
The batteries in the SA system are NOT the same ones as the cars. They're a completely different chemistry designed specifically for cycling.
> Sodium-Sulfur (NaS) batteries
Ugh.
NaS batteries will not happen. Ever. Its a terrible technology. Boiling sulphur is the description of Hell, not the description of a useful battery chemistry. No one is really working on it, nor ZEBRA, and even the flow batteries that people periodically raise are dead from any practical definition.
This very second, the amount of money being spent on LiIon tech is something like 1000x the amount on all the others put together. There is no way any of those technologies will ever be able to compete.
> Costs you quoted include all the externalities that other sources of energy get to offload to human health, animal health and so on
No, they don't. In fact, the report clearly states:
"does not take into account potential social and environmental externalities"
So, I'm not sure how you came up with that.
> Nuclear is the only one that is required to cover anything that could possibly
Nuclear is the only one that *doesn't*. The government covers the insurance. If they didn't, no one would have ever built one.
Look at Fukishima. Current estimates are that the physical cleanup will be something like $20 billion, while moving all the people out and buying their houses could be anywhere between $200 and $400 billion. Let's take the low side, and note that Japan has 50 reactors, which means that if they had to cover this it would be another $4 billion PER REACTOR, which is *more than the cost of the rector*, by about two times. Had they been required to cover this eventuality, none of them would have been built, they could never cover their costs.
> Funny that -- after subsidies were lowered
Got a translation?
> what do you think of PG&E's molten salt solar plant in the Mojave?
I think it has moving parts. I think that's bad.
There is an inherent problem with these machines in that they depend on Carnot, and thus need to operate as hot as possible. This limits them to places where they get really great sunlight, even a little cloud and your CF dies. Mohave is certainly the right place to try it.
The problem is that you can do PV just about anywhere - from my garage roof to a billion panels in farmers fields. And it's output is pretty linear with insolation, so 10% cloud is 10% less power, not 50% less. Lots of PV means there's a *whole lot* of demand for storage, but in most cases that won't be salt, it will have to be something else.
And that's a deadly combo. On one side we have a tech that only works in a couple of places and costs a lot up front. On the other we have a tech that costs a couple of hundred bucks to start with, works everywhere, and they all want storage. I don't think it's a mystery where this is going...
> a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, for example - would love to disabuse you of the notion that
> nuclear power cannot ramp up and down quickly
Sure, which you can do with 95% enrichment. That results in a tiny core, which has fewer problems with hot spots and less reliance on delayed neutrons.
Of course, it also costs so much money to reach that level of enrichment that it's many times greater than the commercial value of the electricity it could produce, so it offers nothing to the civilian fleet.
Surely as someone that professes such expertise on such matters would be aware of this, and mention it for the sake of clarity. Right?
> How fast can you bring up a sanely designed nuclear plant?
From zero takes days and days. From 75% takes about 24 hours, at least for common designs like PWR.
> s of seconds are hydro and batteries. And I have my doubts about the
Don't. There was a recent brownout sequence in Austrailia that just happened to occur days after the Tesla pack went online. It managed to stabilize the frequency in real time.
The entire power industry is talking about this. They're using terms like "game changer" and "never the same again".
> With nuclear, they don't use electrolysis to split water, they use heat
Nope. They've been plans to do this, but the reactors we use can't do it. You need to use something gas cooled, typically CO2 or He, but no one is building them anymore. They suck, economically. Just as the Brits about the AGR.
Per-capita electricity use in India is 1,122 kWh/person/year. That's less than 100 per month. So...
> Roughly 30 kWh per month per person. That is practically nothing
It's 30% of everyone's usage. Which is "practically amazing".
> replacing it with solar because it is simply so much cheaper
I've seen PPAs in the gulf at 2.2 cents/kWh.
> There's a difference between running solar power plants in the Persian Gulf
> and running them near Seattle. It's not a small one.
But there's basically zero difference between Seattle and Mohave. And not that much difference between Mohave and Idaho. And, of course, Seattle's offshore wind resource is amazing.
> So-called 'renewables' have serious opex associated with them
They are among the cheapest forms of power in OPEX terms:
http://www.power-technology.com/features/featurepower-plant-om-how-does-the-industry-stack-up-on-cost-4417756/
> Anything with moving parts
PV has no moving parts, so there's that.
Beyond that, it's also the *number* of moving parts that has an effect; more complex systems are generally more expensive to operate. And as you'll see at that source, this is clearly seen in the data - a NG plant, which basically has two moving parts, costs much less to run that a coal plant, which has many moving parts (the cooling loops) which costs a lot less than a reactor which has both many more parts as well as radiation to deal with.
> Anyone who claims that 'renewables are free after the capital cost' is utterly clueless about the actual costs involved
I have a dozen panels on my roof and worked for a company that did maybe 100 MWp of installs. So Mr Anonymous Coward, why don't you go ahead and tell me why I, and the entire power industry, is "utterly clueless"?
> Citation for what renewable energy is profitable without a subsidy or some other form of crutch?
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-2017/
Citation provided. You can find hundreds more by googling "lcoe renewables"
"Subsidies for renewables, which far exceed those of fossil fuels."
That statement is patently false. Renewables receive about 1/10th the annual subsidy of oil and gas alone. Nuclear previously dwarfed even O&G, but that is winding down.
http://i.bnet.com/blogs/dbl_energy_subsidies_paper.pdf
> The incentive to adopt renewable technologies should come from them naturally
> being better from an economic standpoint
Absolutely!
> (which they obviously aren't
Renewables are dramatically less better from an economic standpoint without any subsidies.
For PPAs signed today in the US, wind is an average of 4.5 cents/kWh, PV is about the same, and natural gas CS is about 5.5. Nuclear averages about 15 cents, and cola is about 8.5.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-2017/
So, then, you fully support renewables. Good!
> certainly there's nothing in the basics of fission that prevents ramping up heat pretty quickly
No. Read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_neutron
Reactors often get a safety margin by operating slightly below the conditions needed for a chain reaction and then using the extra neutrons provided by fission products to make up the difference. Since these are generated over a period of minutes, there is a slow-following curve which makes it much easier to control. You can operate without this consideration, but then even small transients can make your reactor runaway. Quickly.
Additionally, due to the geometry needed to maintain a chain reaction, you have to load the fuel in a certain way. In most designs, this means there are hot spots in the reactor, typically in the center, because they respond more rapidly to control inputs because their neutron flux is higher. This is what caused Chernobyl to blow. You *can* design around this, but only at the cost of decreased efficiency or requiring more fuel changes, and the economics are far too bad to consider these days.