Beyond that, their enterprise gear is actually quite good. For people who've only ever used Dell's consumer crap this may come as a bit of a surprise.
Which is why it's often worth getting their reconditioned stuff if you're not after the latest tech. There's no market for buy-back and refurb on individual units, so all their refurbs are solidly built enterprise laptops. My parents bought a couple dead cheap for browsing, email and word processing; and the only downside for them was the lack of HDMI.
I've got Firefox on Linux Mint, and I don't have any Flash at all. It's pot luck which videos will even play. A lot of new ones cause a message about HTML5 video to pop up...
So Shatner is looking for charitable donations to provide water to one of the richest regions on the face of the planet? Seriously? Is he going to back this campaign with a video of slow-mo shots of people suffering in the OC because their lawn is looking a little brown and the water level in their swimming pools is slightly lower than they'd like. "The people of Beverly Hills are slightly uncomfortable -- let's make their lives better."
Yes, but that's a different issue -- too much electricity in a local zone, rather than too much electricity overall.
Let's take water as our analogy. Water flows to meet demand in the form of open taps. But very few of those taps are strictly regulating, and the outflow is a function of how far the tap is opened and the pressure in the system. Put more water into the mains and the pressure goes up, therefore more water is delivered at the tap. If your house has pressure regulating valves, you won't see this, but the pressure is then further increased at someone else's house.
Put power into the grid, and it *will* be delivered somewhere. If nowhere else will accept the load, it ends up being delivered as heat in the transformer in your local substation. How do you prevent substation fires? Fuses/breakers on the transformers... but that just kills one part of the circuit, and the power ends up getting delivered to another transformer. This sort of rolling blow-out used to be a problem -- one substation blows, leading to another blowing and another blowing and so on, and various power companies the world over have put a lot of time, energy and money into developing systems to prevent it happening.
Have the Germans found a way to eliminate the need to "dump" electricity? Last I knew, every country in the developed world needed to connect their circuits to earth (en_US: ground) in order to bleed off the excess when demand suddenly fell (eg right after the advert break in a popular soap -- lots of kettles go on suddenly, and within three minutes everyone's back in front of the TV).
Well I'd certainly say it's the grid's responsibility to improve the infrastructure to a level on a par with the systems already in place in other countries. But setting that aside the claim that the installed infrastructure can't cope is technically true.
Ah, then you're talking about things that aren't part of a circuit, which is irrelevant. Damage from oversupply is caused to electrical items that are part of the circuit and end up receiving too much electricity from the grid.
Nuclear plants need months to cycle up or cycle down. Traditional thermal plants take days to cycle up or down. Modern plants for flexible demand cycle up and down in a matter of hours. In all of these cases, the flexibility relies on predictability. Power cycles that fluctuate from minute to minute are impossible to predict.
This would be more impressive of an argument if utilities weren't practically shitting themselves getting nat-gas into operation, because they could be spun on demand, rather than fixed load generators.
Erm... that's like arguing that the bus is dead because people are investing in taxis. Turbine systems of this sort are expensive and inefficient, but they're a necessity because of supply and demand patterns. Utilities are "shitting themselves" for a least-worst option here, as the current load issues put physical strain on the whole infrastructure. Making the supply side of the equation less predictable only makes this more of a problem.
Keep in mind with no viable storage method, we are basically asking the utilities to keep the same number of power plants open...in case of clouds...while getting a massive drop off in income
No, you don't need that. This is a/. myth.
Under clouds a PV solar plant easily still produces 50% of its maximum yield.
Yes, but you still need to have variable, reactive supply to deal with that 50% variance. Reactive supply is less efficient than constant supply, so there's no net gain....
Besides, unless I'm misremembering my basic electronics, having extra power available is usually not a problem unless there is someone to consume it (*). I can hook up one side of a 110 volt outlet to a piece of aluminum foil, and until someone is stupid enough to touch it, it won't burn up. Overloads are caused by demand exceeding the available supply as it passes through some resistance (the wiring, for example).
You've got most of the right answers in there, but a little mixed up. The aluminium foil survives because it has low resistance, so little power is delivered over it. Electrical power is distributed across a circuit in proportion to resistance : P = I^2 * R. Low-resistance components (eg wires, and your foil is just a flat wire) are therefore less susceptible to oversupply. But put more power into the system, and more power will be delivered to all components, and some of them will fail and catch fire. Don't believe me? Get a 3V filament bulb and connect a 12V battery to it -- it will pop because too much power is delivered across the resistive filament.
Upgrade the grid?? This article is ridiculous. They are saying they can't measure power output of solar generation on homes? Almost every single solar installation out there has a data stream with this info. I think they are just too lazy to collect it.
Ridiculous? Not at all. This was a known issue when my parents were getting an extension built in the 80s and wanted a wind turbine. It wasn't possible to connect it to the grid at all back then due to the risk of substation fires, and the technology available wouldn't have powered anything useful, so they didn't get one. Since then, a lot of money has gone into improving the grid here and developing smart controllers to prevent problems, but many parts of the world still have networks that are physically incapable of dealing with micro-generation.
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Well you can come back when you've got a battery in that box (other than the RTC battery).
Beyond that, their enterprise gear is actually quite good. For people who've only ever used Dell's consumer crap this may come as a bit of a surprise.
Which is why it's often worth getting their reconditioned stuff if you're not after the latest tech. There's no market for buy-back and refurb on individual units, so all their refurbs are solidly built enterprise laptops. My parents bought a couple dead cheap for browsing, email and word processing; and the only downside for them was the lack of HDMI.
It's on already. The problem's an ideologoical one -- the Firefox team only include "open" codecs in the base install.
I've got Firefox on Linux Mint, and I don't have any Flash at all. It's pot luck which videos will even play. A lot of new ones cause a message about HTML5 video to pop up...
But the 4 AA batteries would end upheating up more due to power delivery due to internal resistance.
They'd probably commute from elsewhere, seeing as there wouldn't like, you know, be any houses for them there...?
So Shatner is looking for charitable donations to provide water to one of the richest regions on the face of the planet? Seriously? Is he going to back this campaign with a video of slow-mo shots of people suffering in the OC because their lawn is looking a little brown and the water level in their swimming pools is slightly lower than they'd like. "The people of Beverly Hills are slightly uncomfortable -- let's make their lives better."
Yes, but that's a different issue -- too much electricity in a local zone, rather than too much electricity overall.
Let's take water as our analogy. Water flows to meet demand in the form of open taps. But very few of those taps are strictly regulating, and the outflow is a function of how far the tap is opened and the pressure in the system. Put more water into the mains and the pressure goes up, therefore more water is delivered at the tap. If your house has pressure regulating valves, you won't see this, but the pressure is then further increased at someone else's house.
Put power into the grid, and it *will* be delivered somewhere. If nowhere else will accept the load, it ends up being delivered as heat in the transformer in your local substation. How do you prevent substation fires? Fuses/breakers on the transformers... but that just kills one part of the circuit, and the power ends up getting delivered to another transformer. This sort of rolling blow-out used to be a problem -- one substation blows, leading to another blowing and another blowing and so on, and various power companies the world over have put a lot of time, energy and money into developing systems to prevent it happening.
Have the Germans found a way to eliminate the need to "dump" electricity? Last I knew, every country in the developed world needed to connect their circuits to earth (en_US: ground) in order to bleed off the excess when demand suddenly fell (eg right after the advert break in a popular soap -- lots of kettles go on suddenly, and within three minutes everyone's back in front of the TV).
Well I'd certainly say it's the grid's responsibility to improve the infrastructure to a level on a par with the systems already in place in other countries. But setting that aside the claim that the installed infrastructure can't cope is technically true.
Except that if it was a free market, there'd be a film studio there already...
42!! (Oops.. wrong geeky sci-fi.)
There were plenty of games on the C64 with good graphics but shitty gameplay. They were usually also crippled by a horrendous multiload.
What I don't get is why you need dice for a computer game....
We'd get a different /. every year, and many of the existing assets would be incompatible with the new engine. John Maddening /. 2015.
In reality it looks like this.
That's "game engine" footage, not "in-game". The final release won't have the same rich colour-depth.
You shouldn't separate your vocative from the main clause with a full-stop, you idiot.
Ah, then you're talking about things that aren't part of a circuit, which is irrelevant. Damage from oversupply is caused to electrical items that are part of the circuit and end up receiving too much electricity from the grid.
That is really the way it should be. There is no reason to meter electricity anymore.
If electricity was "free", people would be less likely to switch stuff off. Metering manipulates demand.
Nuclear plants need months to cycle up or cycle down. Traditional thermal plants take days to cycle up or down. Modern plants for flexible demand cycle up and down in a matter of hours. In all of these cases, the flexibility relies on predictability. Power cycles that fluctuate from minute to minute are impossible to predict.
This would be more impressive of an argument if utilities weren't practically shitting themselves getting nat-gas into operation, because they could be spun on demand, rather than fixed load generators.
Erm... that's like arguing that the bus is dead because people are investing in taxis. Turbine systems of this sort are expensive and inefficient, but they're a necessity because of supply and demand patterns. Utilities are "shitting themselves" for a least-worst option here, as the current load issues put physical strain on the whole infrastructure. Making the supply side of the equation less predictable only makes this more of a problem.
Keep in mind with no viable storage method, we are basically asking the utilities to keep the same number of power plants open...in case of clouds...while getting a massive drop off in income No, you don't need that. This is a /. myth.
Under clouds a PV solar plant easily still produces 50% of its maximum yield.
Yes, but you still need to have variable, reactive supply to deal with that 50% variance. Reactive supply is less efficient than constant supply, so there's no net gain....
I disagree in there really isn't such a thing as too much grid power,
Thousands of electrical fires say you're wrong.
Besides, unless I'm misremembering my basic electronics, having extra power available is usually not a problem unless there is someone to consume it (*). I can hook up one side of a 110 volt outlet to a piece of aluminum foil, and until someone is stupid enough to touch it, it won't burn up. Overloads are caused by demand exceeding the available supply as it passes through some resistance (the wiring, for example).
You've got most of the right answers in there, but a little mixed up. The aluminium foil survives because it has low resistance, so little power is delivered over it. Electrical power is distributed across a circuit in proportion to resistance : P = I^2 * R. Low-resistance components (eg wires, and your foil is just a flat wire) are therefore less susceptible to oversupply. But put more power into the system, and more power will be delivered to all components, and some of them will fail and catch fire. Don't believe me? Get a 3V filament bulb and connect a 12V battery to it -- it will pop because too much power is delivered across the resistive filament.
Upgrade the grid?? This article is ridiculous. They are saying they can't measure power output of solar generation on homes? Almost every single solar installation out there has a data stream with this info. I think they are just too lazy to collect it.
Ridiculous? Not at all. This was a known issue when my parents were getting an extension built in the 80s and wanted a wind turbine. It wasn't possible to connect it to the grid at all back then due to the risk of substation fires, and the technology available wouldn't have powered anything useful, so they didn't get one. Since then, a lot of money has gone into improving the grid here and developing smart controllers to prevent problems, but many parts of the world still have networks that are physically incapable of dealing with micro-generation.