It's been a bit of a shock to see that buildings in real disasters tend to fall apart just like some of the cheap and nasty models in some old low budget Japanese disaster movies. Something that initially looked very fake turned out to look just like real footage of earthquake and tsunami destruction.
I don't have to ask about cranking the phone because when I was young my dad pulled an old phone out of a box and said - "hold these two wires while I turn this handle".
One thing that fucks it up is that it is a source of serious funds for the city so there is an immediate conflict of interest. Ensuring that there is a service present becomes secondary.
Per MW/h over the life of a plant those pollution controls are actually very cheap, it's bubbling through water and electrostatic precipitation where electricity is at it's cheapest after all. Modern plants with decent pollution controls run cheaper than older ones without since other savings from recent technology make up the difference with plenty left over. However the initial capital outlay and land usage requirements (great big ash dam) are a bit of cost to face up front. China has been moving to bag filters (from the 1990s onward!) and scrubbers (for the NOx and SOx) over the last couple of decades as part of their infrastructure drive.
how the British economy pays to import those resources
Bit of a downside to changing from a manufacturing economy to a service economy and telling the Scots to go fuck themselves isn't it? The legacy of Thatcher still has not been repaired.
Sequestration really only was considered because it was already in use for oil extraction, only not with CO2. It was a convenient straw to grasp to pretend that a solution was gaing worked on.
As far as I know there's only one carbon capture operation running
There's a few around the world, one in my state is at a tiny 30MW unit from the 1960s.
A massive effort to plant hedges to break up airflow on large plains and deter tornadoes would tie up far more CO2 than sequestration ever would, as would other things that are probably less silly.
Maybe the problem is in the way the questions are asked? Maybe a better approach would be to show that a coal fired plant can be retrofitted to release no more emissions than a natural gas fired plant for 1/4 the cost.
Chemistry gets in the way. There's a lot more CO and CO2 from burning coal and stopping that getting into the air has not been cheap so far so the "retrofitting" has not yet turned out to be cheaper than new gas turbines.
Finally someone stated the obvious. Monocultures in power generation are a very bad idea. I've run into that even with a power station sited next to a large coal mine - those things still need a lot of available water for cooling and a drought resulted in having to get a water pipeline built quickly before the dam ran dry. With no hydro, wind or anything else to fall back on the state would have been down a couple of GW in the middle of summer with no adequate connection at the time to the national grid (or even another part of the state grid).
Actually they are because the things are old to start with so adding another decade quite a few are going to be falling apart to the extent where it's going to take very major rebuilds to keep them going. It's a very cheap promise and is effectively the "do nothing" option.
the easiest zero-CO2 replacement for a coal plant is a nuclear power plant
Except it isn't. While well managed nuclear at scale with current technology holds a lot of promise it requires a large amount of capital and quite a bit of infrastructure. The will to do that does not currently exist so whether we like it or not we'll have to wait for 1950s style prosperity before it is going to be given serious consideration - as China did recently. To boil things right down, a windmill or two requires little effort or action on the part of people in politics while nukes would require actual work. Are you getting the picture now? The question - "where is my network of power stations with GenIV reactors" can be filed with "where is my flying car" for now. Pretence that it is easy is going to be met with various levels of disbelief by anyone with a clue.
Since many-way opterons with a lot of cores a bit slower than the leading edge still win that metric I very much doubt it. You ignored my numbers before so why should I state them again - just look a little back in the thread and you'll see a couple of examples of why capital cost is considered before running costs in this case. There is normally a pile of other things that get considered as well before flops/watt gets a say.
I think it's been five years since we last bought one
Most likely because single threaded performance is being considered far ahead of flops/watt. Why don't you ask the person that made the decision instead of guessing and insultingly acting to us as if you are the one that made the decision?
With respect Mr gut feeling your ramblings are what is known as secondary considerations, as you would know if you did a bit more than guessing and going with the first thing that sounds right.
Xeons became really popular once they started beating Opterons in performance per Watt
They are already popular despite that not happening yet. Wrong guess. Maybe try something other than a guess next time?
So please explain why Transmeta didn't take off despite aiming directly for that metric and why there are so many power hungry Xeons out there. You can't explain it? You don't know?
Note to posters - please do not counter specific examples with a gut feeling - it makes you look like an idiot.
My favourite thing along those lines is the CO2 is not a problem if we use it to make limestone - but all the precursors release a lot of CO2 while being produced. So the answer is cheap energy, which we actually have, but unfortunately it's oil and coal!
Not really since the patent was based on a working prototype. Commercial applications had to wait for desperation driving a search for a solution to potentially congested airwaves. See also the current "cable tv" appliances that have IPv6 addresses only due to a rollout larger than the remaining unallocated continuous IPv4 address space.
Frequently, a single multiprocessor-unaware application will hog an entire core, getting it hot
While that is very annoying at least the OS switches it over to another core every now and again to avoid overheating, as a process monitor like "gkrellm" with show you.
Get the programmers to write MPA software
Give them a break, developers are only just getting their teeth into 64 bit and you want them to write stuff as if it's 1999? Please give them at least twenty years to get used to the hardware:)
That was what Transmeta thought but their customers didn't. FLOP/$ is what matters more (sometimes) since the power bill over a lifetime is going to be less than the difference in price between a mid range AMD system (64 cores ~$10k) and a top end Intel system (80 faster hyperthreading cores ~$80k).
Heaps of x86 based supercomputers, but these are a bit bandwith limited by the bus they are plugged into and how chatty these things are. For applications when a working dataset is small enough that you can fit it on these cards they are apparently very good. If you need to shift a lot of stuff in from main memory on frequent occasions they are not and the AMD systems hooked together with infiniband look a lot better. For things that benefit from a huge amount of shared memory (2TB plus onboard and 160 cores or more) Intel Xeons on IBM boards interconnected look better.
Due to being on the pcie bus these things compete directly with the nvidia stuff despite being x86.
You are missing the point. Leaving a central city to support itself meant that it had to rely on what it had and try to get a lot of money out of the people on it's turf - so after being preyed upon they moved out to the suburbs that owed their existence to the resources expended by the central city in the first place. A desperate central city then tried a lot of things that now look utterly stupid in hindsight to try to claw it's way back. Monorail? Casino? Weird social engineering games to try to bring in rich white people as if it was 1970s South Africa, resulting in an obvious backlash? Taxing the shit out of any business that looked productive? All kinds of desperate get rich quick stuff due to being a CBD and thus not many residents to pay tax.
Have you seen how broken most 'inner city' governments are.
That is my point - the US model of small local governments and all of them having to fend for themselves is very fragile, so there are plenty of "broken" communities. Utterly ridiculous wealth within a few minutes drive of something that looks like immediate post-Katrina New Orleans simply due to arbitrary political boundaries. There's nothing wrong with the utterly ridiculous wealth, what's wrong is the taxes collected on it are spent on a tiny area that doesn't need that much revenue and especially doesn't need a flock of expensive politicians paid as if they are in Washington. Why does a suburb of 22,000 need an entire city council full of elected officials paid a fortune each? Due to such fragmentation what used to be the fifth largest city in the USA is an international shame. Maybe I should point Detroit out to any Libertarians that get a bit loud. There is plenty in that place that should be a bit of a reality check for their ideas if they think about it seriously. "Every man for himself" kind of sucks as a way to run a city.
That's one thing that has truly amazed me about the USA, with an extreme being Detroit. Having a tiny in world standards area administered by local government results in a starved city surrounded by "I'm all right Jack" prosperous suburbs, as well as a shitload of unnecessary politicians fattening on taxpayers money in charge of postage stamp sized suburbs. Once the decline got going businesses moved out, tax revenue fell, services dropped, more businesses moved out etc. Removing the idiocy of a CBD not being able to support itself from the taxes of the people who work there would prevent such an obvious fuckup - plus governing over a larger area means less petty fiefdoms with pretend lords fattening themselves on the public purse while responsible for less territory than a single public park in some cities.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been a bit of a shock to see that buildings in real disasters tend to fall apart just like some of the cheap and nasty models in some old low budget Japanese disaster movies. Something that initially looked very fake turned out to look just like real footage of earthquake and tsunami destruction.
I don't have to ask about cranking the phone because when I was young my dad pulled an old phone out of a box and said - "hold these two wires while I turn this handle".
One thing that fucks it up is that it is a source of serious funds for the city so there is an immediate conflict of interest. Ensuring that there is a service present becomes secondary.
Are they allowed to take the easy way out or are they tightly regulated while Uber is not?
Per MW/h over the life of a plant those pollution controls are actually very cheap, it's bubbling through water and electrostatic precipitation where electricity is at it's cheapest after all. Modern plants with decent pollution controls run cheaper than older ones without since other savings from recent technology make up the difference with plenty left over. However the initial capital outlay and land usage requirements (great big ash dam) are a bit of cost to face up front.
China has been moving to bag filters (from the 1990s onward!) and scrubbers (for the NOx and SOx) over the last couple of decades as part of their infrastructure drive.
Bit of a downside to changing from a manufacturing economy to a service economy and telling the Scots to go fuck themselves isn't it? The legacy of Thatcher still has not been repaired.
There's a few around the world, one in my state is at a tiny 30MW unit from the 1960s.
A massive effort to plant hedges to break up airflow on large plains and deter tornadoes would tie up far more CO2 than sequestration ever would, as would other things that are probably less silly.
Chemistry gets in the way. There's a lot more CO and CO2 from burning coal and stopping that getting into the air has not been cheap so far so the "retrofitting" has not yet turned out to be cheaper than new gas turbines.
Finally someone stated the obvious.
Monocultures in power generation are a very bad idea.
I've run into that even with a power station sited next to a large coal mine - those things still need a lot of available water for cooling and a drought resulted in having to get a water pipeline built quickly before the dam ran dry. With no hydro, wind or anything else to fall back on the state would have been down a couple of GW in the middle of summer with no adequate connection at the time to the national grid (or even another part of the state grid).
Actually they are because the things are old to start with so adding another decade quite a few are going to be falling apart to the extent where it's going to take very major rebuilds to keep them going. It's a very cheap promise and is effectively the "do nothing" option.
Except it isn't. While well managed nuclear at scale with current technology holds a lot of promise it requires a large amount of capital and quite a bit of infrastructure. The will to do that does not currently exist so whether we like it or not we'll have to wait for 1950s style prosperity before it is going to be given serious consideration - as China did recently.
To boil things right down, a windmill or two requires little effort or action on the part of people in politics while nukes would require actual work.
Are you getting the picture now? The question - "where is my network of power stations with GenIV reactors" can be filed with "where is my flying car" for now.
Pretence that it is easy is going to be met with various levels of disbelief by anyone with a clue.
The summary mentions new plants running on gas.
Since many-way opterons with a lot of cores a bit slower than the leading edge still win that metric I very much doubt it.
You ignored my numbers before so why should I state them again - just look a little back in the thread and you'll see a couple of examples of why capital cost is considered before running costs in this case. There is normally a pile of other things that get considered as well before flops/watt gets a say.
Most likely because single threaded performance is being considered far ahead of flops/watt. Why don't you ask the person that made the decision instead of guessing and insultingly acting to us as if you are the one that made the decision?
I'm not sure what your point is since the patent dates to less than ten years before solid state transistors were commercially available.
They are already popular despite that not happening yet. Wrong guess. Maybe try something other than a guess next time?
So please explain why Transmeta didn't take off despite aiming directly for that metric and why there are so many power hungry Xeons out there.
You can't explain it?
You don't know?
Note to posters - please do not counter specific examples with a gut feeling - it makes you look like an idiot.
My favourite thing along those lines is the CO2 is not a problem if we use it to make limestone - but all the precursors release a lot of CO2 while being produced. So the answer is cheap energy, which we actually have, but unfortunately it's oil and coal!
Not really since the patent was based on a working prototype. Commercial applications had to wait for desperation driving a search for a solution to potentially congested airwaves. See also the current "cable tv" appliances that have IPv6 addresses only due to a rollout larger than the remaining unallocated continuous IPv4 address space.
While that is very annoying at least the OS switches it over to another core every now and again to avoid overheating, as a process monitor like "gkrellm" with show you.
Give them a break, developers are only just getting their teeth into 64 bit and you want them to write stuff as if it's 1999? Please give them at least twenty years to get used to the hardware :)
That was what Transmeta thought but their customers didn't. FLOP/$ is what matters more (sometimes) since the power bill over a lifetime is going to be less than the difference in price between a mid range AMD system (64 cores ~$10k) and a top end Intel system (80 faster hyperthreading cores ~$80k).
Heaps of x86 based supercomputers, but these are a bit bandwith limited by the bus they are plugged into and how chatty these things are.
For applications when a working dataset is small enough that you can fit it on these cards they are apparently very good. If you need to shift a lot of stuff in from main memory on frequent occasions they are not and the AMD systems hooked together with infiniband look a lot better. For things that benefit from a huge amount of shared memory (2TB plus onboard and 160 cores or more) Intel Xeons on IBM boards interconnected look better.
Due to being on the pcie bus these things compete directly with the nvidia stuff despite being x86.
That is my point - the US model of small local governments and all of them having to fend for themselves is very fragile, so there are plenty of "broken" communities. Utterly ridiculous wealth within a few minutes drive of something that looks like immediate post-Katrina New Orleans simply due to arbitrary political boundaries. There's nothing wrong with the utterly ridiculous wealth, what's wrong is the taxes collected on it are spent on a tiny area that doesn't need that much revenue and especially doesn't need a flock of expensive politicians paid as if they are in Washington. Why does a suburb of 22,000 need an entire city council full of elected officials paid a fortune each? Due to such fragmentation what used to be the fifth largest city in the USA is an international shame.
Maybe I should point Detroit out to any Libertarians that get a bit loud. There is plenty in that place that should be a bit of a reality check for their ideas if they think about it seriously. "Every man for himself" kind of sucks as a way to run a city.
That's one thing that has truly amazed me about the USA, with an extreme being Detroit. Having a tiny in world standards area administered by local government results in a starved city surrounded by "I'm all right Jack" prosperous suburbs, as well as a shitload of unnecessary politicians fattening on taxpayers money in charge of postage stamp sized suburbs.
Once the decline got going businesses moved out, tax revenue fell, services dropped, more businesses moved out etc.
Removing the idiocy of a CBD not being able to support itself from the taxes of the people who work there would prevent such an obvious fuckup - plus governing over a larger area means less petty fiefdoms with pretend lords fattening themselves on the public purse while responsible for less territory than a single public park in some cities.
Really?
Those ones that run up bills in the hundreds at normal rates?
They did in 1990. Oh wait, that subject was run by an electrical engineering department so it may take a while for others to catch up.