You hit on the real reason in your post, even if you didn't realize it. The fact is that wind/solar power is not economically viable right now. It makes little sense for Shell to spend tons of money that it will never recover.
Every project goes through a cost benefit analysis. Shell apparently did the analysis, and the conclusions were that investment in wind and solar are unlikely to pay for themselves, even in the long run. Or, more precisely, investments in wind and solar are unlikely to pay better than investments in oil and gas, even in the long run.
Besides, there's nothing to prevent them from re-entering the market if the economics change.
The 25kW is power delivered by the battery to a load, not power dissipated by the battery. Granted, given the amount of current involved and the inherent internal resistance of the battery, there'll be a fair amount of power dissipated in the battery itself, but it would be a fairly small percentage of the 25kW
I think you are confusing the cost to produce solar panels with the amortized cost of producing power using solar panels. The article is about the cost of manufacturing the solar panels. The.20 Euro you're seeing, I believe is the cost to the customer per kilowatt hour. Those two costs are often used to calculate how long it will take for a solar panel to "pay for itself."
Just in the 90's? Gee, our internet connection got cut last year by a backhoe.
Actually, it doesn't take an anchor per se to cut a cable. If the anchor is tethered by a steel wire cable instead of a chain, the steel cable will chew right through the fiber-optic cable, no matter how many layers of armor it has. The anchor itself doesn't have to do the cutting.
Or, perhaps they could actually cut back on spending. But this is government we're talking about. If times get tough, they don't slim down and become more efficient--they just need to raise taxes instead!
The fact that our school system *is* a social program is a problem in and of itself. If the school system were privatized and funded via a voucher system, we'd all be paying a lot less. The government-run education monopoly has no incentive to compete academically or financially.
Sure, the rich don't pay tax on those investments and savings....at first. As soon as they redeem/withdraw that money and spend it, then they, too pay the 10% tax, both on the original deposit and on any returns. So it's actually a flat tax...eventually. It just seems unfair at first, and since most people don't bother thinking very hard, there's a knee-jerk reaction against it.
The 3.5/4GB issue is inherent with 32-bit systems that use memory-mapped I/O. A portion of the address space is allocated for your I/O devices, including your sound card, video card, etc. That portion of the address space is no longer available to be used to access physical RAM. Typically, the video card is the biggest culprit--if it has 512MB of on-board RAM, that's 512MB of the 4GB address space that the system can't use to access physical RAM.
Please define "in charge". Do you mean the presidency, control of congress, both? And I never said that everything was the Democrats' fault, or that Republicans are staunch advocates of small government. In fact, it's their abandonment of that ideal that has partially led to their problems getting elected lately.
I'd like to answer a few of the issues you raised:
Bailing out banks: As much as I love to see the free market work untouched by the government, the concern was that too many banks were too involved in bad mortgages, and that runs on over-leveraged banks would cause people to panic and run on banks with perfectly healthy balance sheets. Since our economy has come to rely so heavily on borrowed money, with so many banks unable to lend the money, the concern was that it would lead to total economic collapse. On the other hand, if GM folds, it won't bring down Ford or Chrysler.
Those calling Obama a socialist aren't doing it just because he wants to tax the rich (the definition of which has dropped over the course of the past year from $1m to $250k to $200k to $150k), but rather because he wants to tax the rich and give it to the poor who are already not paying taxes.
There's still a lot of manufacturing done in the US. Granted, the proportions of manufacturing vs. services has been steadily moving towards services for some time.
I don't think the problem was with over-regulation or under-regulation, but rather mis-regulation.
I forget who said it, but it's something along the lines of "The internet views censorship as damage, and attempts to circumvent it." An analogy can be drawn to regulation: "Industry views regulation as damage, and attempts to circumvent it." In other words, unless your regulation is air-tight, those who can find an exploit will do so for their own advantage.
There are a whole lot of people to blame, and the politicians are only one party (no pun intended).
People bought more home than they could afford. If you can only afford a home if you get an ARM, you can't afford it.
Banks made bets/took risks they couldn't afford to lose. (CRA is part of this, but not the overwhelming factor as some would argue)
Regulation was poorly set up, or poorly enforced. This can be laid at the feet of both parties.
If any of those things hadn't happened, we would not be in the mess we are now seeing.
But also, paying less taxes doesn't make you richer. if you pay less in taxes, but more in property taxes, mortgages, and gas prices, then where is the savings?
Am I the only one having trouble following this logic? What economic law states that if my (federal income) taxes go down, my (property) taxes and energy expenses go up? You're also making the assumption that you'll get more out of the government for $100 than you could get out of the free market. This seems like a very strange line of thinking.
You need to do some fact checking on that 90% figure. Have you ever looked at a list of votes the Senate takes? An large number of them are for inconsequential things, like "congratulate team X on winning Championship Y." Heck, Obama has voted with President Bush 40% of the time. There's a serious signal-to-noise ratio problem in that 90% figure.
I heard an interesting thing on earmarks yesterday. McCain has never asked for an earmark in all his terms in office. Obama, as a freshman senator, already asked for $1 billion in earmarks.
I didn't watch the whole first debate, but I did see that bit. And I was struck by the same thought--McCain had a plan, drastic as it seems, while Obama kinda talked around the question. A few minutes later, Obama mentioned all the money from the Iraq war while answering a different question.
I like the idea of freezing government spending. Some bureaucrats really need a wake-up call.
I would like to point out that the Democrats were overwhelmingly in favor of the bailout that has led to the government taking over several large financial institutions, while the Republicans generally opposed it. Obama would also like to increase the involvement of government in the healthcare system, while McCain wants to more-or-less leave it intact.
Aside from President Bush's actions, the Republican party generally favors far less government than the Democrats. I think your philosophical reservation against Democrats is still pretty much intact.
I'll be voting for McCain, based on his economic plan. And while polls seem to show that people think Obama is better on the economy, I strongly disagree. Here's why:
Windfall profits tax. It's been tried before (in the 70's), and it failed miserably. I've heard the gas lines were pretty bad. It amounts to an attempt at price fixing, and thus tries to thwart the laws of supply and demand.
Massive new spending on all types and sorts of initiatives, particularly "clean energy". While I'm all in favor of clean energy, the free market is already taking care of it.
Hiking corporate income tax. There's nothing like a tax increase to boost the economy at a time when businesses are having trouble getting money in the first place! Sure, you'll get political points...at least from those people the businesses can still afford to employ.
Punishing the oil companies. Obama and the other Democrats want to go back and change the contracts the government signed with the oil companies years ago, because they don't think the government gets a big enough cut for giving its permission to drill. Never mind the fact that it tosses contract law into the street. Never mind that it'll raise gas prices.
Overall spending going through the roof. If you believe conservative talk show hosts, we're talking about $1 trillion of new spending. The real figure will certainly be a low lower, but it's still a huge amount of money. At the same time, Obama claims that his tax plan will reduce revenue to somewhere "below the levels that prevailed under Ronald Reagan". People like to complain about Bush driving up the deficit, but something about the increased spending and decreased taxes seems...disastrous? to me.
On the other hand, I like what McCain offers:
Cutting corporate income tax, so companies can expand, hire more people, etc.
Ban internet taxes.
Privatizing social security. He's backed away from it, because it sounds bad, but it's a good idea, and he still supports it.
Permanent R&D tax credit.
Besides the economic issues, we really do need a leader who is strong on foreign policy in an increasingly unstable and hostile world, and McCain is the man there. Obama is all about appeasement, and we've all seen how well that works over the past century. Take a couple world wars and a cold war for example. That, to me, is a huge issue. Network Neutrality, as much as I want it, is a tiny speck in comparison.
Yes, Linux does it right. The problem for Microsoft, however, is this: most programs written to run on Linux are written such that they can run without root-level privileges. Most programs written before the advent of Vista assumed that Administrator privileges were available by default.
That assumption is no longer true. Since the number of programs is so enormous (the 775k mentioned in the summary), it's easier to deal with the privilege-escalation by putting in something like UAC than it is to fix every faulty application. Hopefully, developers have now learned to assume least privileges, so new programs won't require elevated privileges.
I don't think anyone will agree that UAC was the best way to handle the situation, but it sure was the easy way out. As an earlier poster said, better sandboxing could handle the issue better, but it's obvious that the investment (money and potential schedule problems) wasn't worth it from MS's point of view.
The flywheel has embedded permanent magnets. Coils surround it in the case, and spin up/down the flywheel in order to inject or extract energy. It's a brushless DC motor, essentially. Once you include magnetic bearings, you end up with something that can be encased in a near-perfect vacuum, eliminating all friction and giving rather impressive efficiency.
Large-scale systems of this sort are actually in use, just not inside vehicles. There are some electric train systems that use it to recapture energy from trains arriving in the station, and then assist trains as they accelerate out of the station.
Back on 2006, when the democrats gained both houses of congress, I heard a business news reporter state that the stock market had made significant gains in the expectation of gridlock. A republican president vs a democrat congress meant that economic policy and regulation were likely to remain largely stable.
Considering the low approval rating of both branches of government, I tend to agree that pitting them against each other would leave the rest of us free to go ahead and grow the economy.
"Asking criminals for legal advice"? Oh, come on now!
I think it's important to remember a few things in relation to CEOs vs. Economists. Firstly, Economists are a bit like sportscasters: they can analyze trends and history, speculate and theorize, and give you reports and opinions. But in the end, their opinion doesn't really account for much. As such, there really isn't much accountability. CEOs, on the other hand, are more like coaches. They're a lot more in the trenches and actually make the decisions that carry significant consequences, good or bad. And while their answers will certainly be biased in the direction of their self interests, it's more likely that their self interest coincides with yours/ours.
I seem to remember some pithy quote about academia and "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." While the characterization is not universal, there's a nugget of truth there: most CEOs are there because they're genuinely good at what they do.
What I don't understand is the name of the software running on it. Why call it "Windows" anything? The idea behind the Windows brand was the whole graphical user interface that it brought to the PC world. Seeing as how this has nothing to do with a desktop, and the GUI (if any, I don't know much about Windows HPC) is practically irrelevant for the application, why call it "Windows" anything, except for the branding?
Honestly, the people who worry about clusters, servers, etc already know about the products out there. The people who would only recognize it as a Microsoft product because it says "Windows" never touch a server or have even heard of a cluster. Or is such branding aimed at the PHB's managing such projects?
I think the GP means to ask "why don't the record companies start distribution on flash cards?" Seriously, it's an interesting proposition. Considering how horribly most music is processed, few people would notice a difference between a CD and a 128kbps MP3. It would be quite cheap to put a CD's worth of music on a 64MB flash card (heck, a lot of CDs would fit on a 32MB card...). Manufacturing costs would not be that much different, I don't think. You'd get a smaller package, which would reduce manufacturing costs and transportation costs.
If the manufacturer also burns a fuse in the chip to prevent overwriting, the number-of-writes issue goes away. Read speeds are plenty fast for playing back music. Heck, it doesn't even need to be flash--it just needs to be some sort of ROM.
There remains the issue of migrating everyone to players that take the new MusicStix(TM) cards, but the idea itself is not bad.
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You hit on the real reason in your post, even if you didn't realize it. The fact is that wind/solar power is not economically viable right now. It makes little sense for Shell to spend tons of money that it will never recover.
Every project goes through a cost benefit analysis. Shell apparently did the analysis, and the conclusions were that investment in wind and solar are unlikely to pay for themselves, even in the long run. Or, more precisely, investments in wind and solar are unlikely to pay better than investments in oil and gas, even in the long run.
Besides, there's nothing to prevent them from re-entering the market if the economics change.
The 25kW is power delivered by the battery to a load, not power dissipated by the battery. Granted, given the amount of current involved and the inherent internal resistance of the battery, there'll be a fair amount of power dissipated in the battery itself, but it would be a fairly small percentage of the 25kW
I think you are confusing the cost to produce solar panels with the amortized cost of producing power using solar panels. The article is about the cost of manufacturing the solar panels. The .20 Euro you're seeing, I believe is the cost to the customer per kilowatt hour. Those two costs are often used to calculate how long it will take for a solar panel to "pay for itself."
Just in the 90's? Gee, our internet connection got cut last year by a backhoe.
Actually, it doesn't take an anchor per se to cut a cable. If the anchor is tethered by a steel wire cable instead of a chain, the steel cable will chew right through the fiber-optic cable, no matter how many layers of armor it has. The anchor itself doesn't have to do the cutting.
Or, perhaps they could actually cut back on spending. But this is government we're talking about. If times get tough, they don't slim down and become more efficient--they just need to raise taxes instead!
The fact that our school system *is* a social program is a problem in and of itself. If the school system were privatized and funded via a voucher system, we'd all be paying a lot less. The government-run education monopoly has no incentive to compete academically or financially.
Sure, the rich don't pay tax on those investments and savings....at first. As soon as they redeem/withdraw that money and spend it, then they, too pay the 10% tax, both on the original deposit and on any returns. So it's actually a flat tax...eventually. It just seems unfair at first, and since most people don't bother thinking very hard, there's a knee-jerk reaction against it.
The 3.5/4GB issue is inherent with 32-bit systems that use memory-mapped I/O. A portion of the address space is allocated for your I/O devices, including your sound card, video card, etc. That portion of the address space is no longer available to be used to access physical RAM. Typically, the video card is the biggest culprit--if it has 512MB of on-board RAM, that's 512MB of the 4GB address space that the system can't use to access physical RAM.
The always-entertaining Daniel Rutter has a good explanation.
Please define "in charge". Do you mean the presidency, control of congress, both? And I never said that everything was the Democrats' fault, or that Republicans are staunch advocates of small government. In fact, it's their abandonment of that ideal that has partially led to their problems getting elected lately.
I'd like to answer a few of the issues you raised:
Bailing out banks: As much as I love to see the free market work untouched by the government, the concern was that too many banks were too involved in bad mortgages, and that runs on over-leveraged banks would cause people to panic and run on banks with perfectly healthy balance sheets. Since our economy has come to rely so heavily on borrowed money, with so many banks unable to lend the money, the concern was that it would lead to total economic collapse. On the other hand, if GM folds, it won't bring down Ford or Chrysler.
Those calling Obama a socialist aren't doing it just because he wants to tax the rich (the definition of which has dropped over the course of the past year from $1m to $250k to $200k to $150k), but rather because he wants to tax the rich and give it to the poor who are already not paying taxes.
There's still a lot of manufacturing done in the US. Granted, the proportions of manufacturing vs. services has been steadily moving towards services for some time.
I haven't heard/seen John McCain say anything about attaching Iran or Syria. Can you provide a reference?
I don't think the problem was with over-regulation or under-regulation, but rather mis-regulation.
I forget who said it, but it's something along the lines of "The internet views censorship as damage, and attempts to circumvent it." An analogy can be drawn to regulation: "Industry views regulation as damage, and attempts to circumvent it." In other words, unless your regulation is air-tight, those who can find an exploit will do so for their own advantage.
There are a whole lot of people to blame, and the politicians are only one party (no pun intended).
People bought more home than they could afford. If you can only afford a home if you get an ARM, you can't afford it.
Banks made bets/took risks they couldn't afford to lose. (CRA is part of this, but not the overwhelming factor as some would argue)
Regulation was poorly set up, or poorly enforced. This can be laid at the feet of both parties.
If any of those things hadn't happened, we would not be in the mess we are now seeing.
But also, paying less taxes doesn't make you richer. if you pay less in taxes, but more in property taxes, mortgages, and gas prices, then where is the savings?
Am I the only one having trouble following this logic? What economic law states that if my (federal income) taxes go down, my (property) taxes and energy expenses go up? You're also making the assumption that you'll get more out of the government for $100 than you could get out of the free market. This seems like a very strange line of thinking.
You need to do some fact checking on that 90% figure. Have you ever looked at a list of votes the Senate takes? An large number of them are for inconsequential things, like "congratulate team X on winning Championship Y." Heck, Obama has voted with President Bush 40% of the time. There's a serious signal-to-noise ratio problem in that 90% figure.
I heard an interesting thing on earmarks yesterday. McCain has never asked for an earmark in all his terms in office. Obama, as a freshman senator, already asked for $1 billion in earmarks.
I didn't watch the whole first debate, but I did see that bit. And I was struck by the same thought--McCain had a plan, drastic as it seems, while Obama kinda talked around the question. A few minutes later, Obama mentioned all the money from the Iraq war while answering a different question.
I like the idea of freezing government spending. Some bureaucrats really need a wake-up call.
I would like to point out that the Democrats were overwhelmingly in favor of the bailout that has led to the government taking over several large financial institutions, while the Republicans generally opposed it. Obama would also like to increase the involvement of government in the healthcare system, while McCain wants to more-or-less leave it intact.
Aside from President Bush's actions, the Republican party generally favors far less government than the Democrats. I think your philosophical reservation against Democrats is still pretty much intact.
On the other hand, I like what McCain offers:
Besides the economic issues, we really do need a leader who is strong on foreign policy in an increasingly unstable and hostile world, and McCain is the man there. Obama is all about appeasement, and we've all seen how well that works over the past century. Take a couple world wars and a cold war for example. That, to me, is a huge issue. Network Neutrality, as much as I want it, is a tiny speck in comparison.
Yes, Linux does it right. The problem for Microsoft, however, is this: most programs written to run on Linux are written such that they can run without root-level privileges. Most programs written before the advent of Vista assumed that Administrator privileges were available by default.
That assumption is no longer true. Since the number of programs is so enormous (the 775k mentioned in the summary), it's easier to deal with the privilege-escalation by putting in something like UAC than it is to fix every faulty application. Hopefully, developers have now learned to assume least privileges, so new programs won't require elevated privileges.
I don't think anyone will agree that UAC was the best way to handle the situation, but it sure was the easy way out. As an earlier poster said, better sandboxing could handle the issue better, but it's obvious that the investment (money and potential schedule problems) wasn't worth it from MS's point of view.
The flywheel has embedded permanent magnets. Coils surround it in the case, and spin up/down the flywheel in order to inject or extract energy. It's a brushless DC motor, essentially. Once you include magnetic bearings, you end up with something that can be encased in a near-perfect vacuum, eliminating all friction and giving rather impressive efficiency.
Large-scale systems of this sort are actually in use, just not inside vehicles. There are some electric train systems that use it to recapture energy from trains arriving in the station, and then assist trains as they accelerate out of the station.
Back on 2006, when the democrats gained both houses of congress, I heard a business news reporter state that the stock market had made significant gains in the expectation of gridlock. A republican president vs a democrat congress meant that economic policy and regulation were likely to remain largely stable.
Considering the low approval rating of both branches of government, I tend to agree that pitting them against each other would leave the rest of us free to go ahead and grow the economy.
"Asking criminals for legal advice"? Oh, come on now!
I think it's important to remember a few things in relation to CEOs vs. Economists. Firstly, Economists are a bit like sportscasters: they can analyze trends and history, speculate and theorize, and give you reports and opinions. But in the end, their opinion doesn't really account for much. As such, there really isn't much accountability. CEOs, on the other hand, are more like coaches. They're a lot more in the trenches and actually make the decisions that carry significant consequences, good or bad. And while their answers will certainly be biased in the direction of their self interests, it's more likely that their self interest coincides with yours/ours.
I seem to remember some pithy quote about academia and "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." While the characterization is not universal, there's a nugget of truth there: most CEOs are there because they're genuinely good at what they do.
What I don't understand is the name of the software running on it. Why call it "Windows" anything? The idea behind the Windows brand was the whole graphical user interface that it brought to the PC world. Seeing as how this has nothing to do with a desktop, and the GUI (if any, I don't know much about Windows HPC) is practically irrelevant for the application, why call it "Windows" anything, except for the branding?
Honestly, the people who worry about clusters, servers, etc already know about the products out there. The people who would only recognize it as a Microsoft product because it says "Windows" never touch a server or have even heard of a cluster. Or is such branding aimed at the PHB's managing such projects?
I think the GP means to ask "why don't the record companies start distribution on flash cards?" Seriously, it's an interesting proposition. Considering how horribly most music is processed, few people would notice a difference between a CD and a 128kbps MP3. It would be quite cheap to put a CD's worth of music on a 64MB flash card (heck, a lot of CDs would fit on a 32MB card...). Manufacturing costs would not be that much different, I don't think. You'd get a smaller package, which would reduce manufacturing costs and transportation costs.
If the manufacturer also burns a fuse in the chip to prevent overwriting, the number-of-writes issue goes away. Read speeds are plenty fast for playing back music. Heck, it doesn't even need to be flash--it just needs to be some sort of ROM.
There remains the issue of migrating everyone to players that take the new MusicStix(TM) cards, but the idea itself is not bad.