"There's little consensus. Some analysts argue that the falling oil price could end the world's slow march towards zero carbon energy. Others say renewables are established enough to see out the storm.
There are good reasons for such uncertainty. The renewable energy industry's fate rests on a number of factors that are very hard to predict."
“Healthy investment in clean energy may surprise some commentators, who have been predicting trouble for renewables as a result of the oil price collapse,” said Michael Liebreich, chairman of the advisory board of the London-based researcher. “Our answer is that 2014 was too early to see any noticeable effect on investment. The impact of cheaper crude will be felt much more in road transport than in electricity generation.”
The capitalisation thing is a piss-take on the tabloid press, eg the Daily Mail and its ilk. In general The Register doesn't take itself very seriously.
No, I don't like the LH anti-CC articles very much, but he seems an OK guy except for that large blind spot!
Disclaimer: I occasionally write for ElReg and indeed hope to get a free lunch out of that writing in a couple of weeks!
And what strain of paranoia makes you think that any of us in this thread want to "silence" you; that is wild talk.
We appear to be having an on-line civil discussion with no gun literally or metaphorically held to your head.
Currently I think that the clear majority of road users and funders don't want motocyclists (or others) with a rather strong sense of self-entitlement going at *unsafe* speeds around us, whatever those speeds are and whether or not they are related to the legal speeds. However, I haven't seen many public roads on which 154mph would be safe other than empty motorways in good visibility.
So go and get the rules changed, but the original question appeared to be in the present tense, and I answered it as such.
Actually, I think that speed limits are bad laws* but I'd still want people dinged for dangerous driving in that shared space whatever vehicle and speed is involved.
Rgds
Damon
*I take the lead from my uncle who was a very senior and placid and respected barrister who as far as I know had never knowingly broken a speed limit, and had immense respect for (most of the rest of) the law of course.
Don't buy in to 'peak' anything if you can avoid it; nicer for you and nicer for (and cheaper for) infrastructure.
I pick my work hours (when I have a day job) so that I avoid peaks since I loathe them even more than getting up early which I then do instead.
And now I'm full time on my start-up I need not generally join the peaks either (nor travel nearly so much nor so regularly).
I disagree similarly with the rest of your assertions as being necessary at all. You assume them to be so, but they are clearly not so for everyone, and probably not so even for you. And we do NOT have to solve the problem for everyone with a single solution anyway.
Yes, same here. If I actually need a car journey I rent. There's even a Zipcar bay very close to me though I've not had reason to use it yet. I save myself the expense and trouble of owning, insuring and maintaining a car. I also have a much cheaper house from not having to pay for parking space nor even being right next to a road; I may have saved as much as £100k on my house purchase in fact, which on top of not paying for a car all that time seems like a huge bargain.
People already DO react to time of use pricing and it is in use in many places round the world at retail level and most places at commercial and industrial level.
One thing to note at the retail level is that typically not even the majority of the retail cost of a unit of electricity is the energy itself; infrastructure costs and so on are folded in too, so the price swings are a lot less dramatic than at the wholesale (or balancing) level which can range from 3:1 to 10:1 in the GB market for example.
The GB's best-known ToU retail tariff (sadly we don't have a national real-time one) is Economy 7, designed originally to soak up power at night from nukes that couldn't be turned down. (It's not only renewables that have stubborn timing problems.) I think the unit price ratio is about 3:1 between day and night. One third of domestic electricity use is on that or closely related tariffs, or 10% of all GB electricity consumption roughly. (The definitive source of this data is DUKES https://www.gov.uk/government/....)
Average UK household use when I last looked ~3,300kWh/y.
Ours, ignoring PV, 1,500kWh/y (family of 4, end of terrace house).
I see a (cheap) solution...
However, we do generate a mean of ~10kWh/d from our PV also, down to ~1kWh/d in the depths of winter. A 4kWh battery would mean that we would not have to import from the electricity grid at all for 9 months of the year, only export. A complete inverter+battery system to cover us would currently cost about GBP8k. If we switched from natural gas heating to heat-pump (doubling our annual electricity demand, primarily in winter) that would still be about 6 months. We'd need a bigger inverter though.
I have my RPi B+ running all my Internet facing services and running off-grid in gloomy London at under 2W, nearer 1.5W when I can fix some transient issues.
I see all the complaining about memory and speed but as someone who grew up with a Z80- and 6502- based set of home computers, then used Sun Workstations with a few MB of RAM and tens of MHz clock, the Arduino/ATMega328P matches the Z80/6502s in performance at a millionth the power and has non-volatile storage built in, and the RPis are and order or two of magnitude better than the workstations and a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper.
I can fit almost all that I need to run with careful use of resources into the RPi/Arduino world and still have lots of elbowroom left over.
Yes, I've worked on big systems for (eg) big banks, but most of us really need GHz and GB on every machine? Some yes (like my MacBook), but most no.
That would be a very good step and eliminate most of the issue with Google, I agree.
However, G also insists on, for example, sending out G Calendar notifications forged with my sign-in email, which is SPF/DMARC protected, and which other systems (and gmail) thus entirely correctly often reject.
But I can't get anyone at G to even acknowledge the issue. (Would be nice if a Googler was reading this and would pass it on.)
And, BTW, G also seems to ignore email other than from the a/c's login address, eg for AdSense/AdWords, which is a Catch-22, and one small reason why I am using them far less.
DMARC would work a lot better if Google for one didn't wrongly try to internally forward as-is *and then bounce* email from DMARC-controlled domains, thus making it impossible for example to get through for many support queries, and causing spurious problems with (say) Google Calendar when the account ID is in a DMARC-controlled domain.
Left hand vs right hand Google? You guys are meant to be smart!
That and randomly chucking email from DMARC-controlled domains in SPAM folders...
Hmm, I hear what you say, but it wasn't generally stand-alone IT that would be much use outside finance, and I was the CTO of the virtual credit card start-up.
But I assure you that there is no gold-filled vault, no not even slightly full of warm lovely glowing metal; nothing to see here, move along.
It's called "contracting" or "consulting"; I have spent the best part of 20 years working in IT in the City of London, none of it permanent.
I have also founded a retail finance start-up. I'm not sure if start-ups count as freelancing; there's matching insecurity and worry and no steady income!
For most things maybe you just shouldn't be paying, at all denying treatment to those who happen not to have spare cash, eg students and young adults in general getting going in their jobs. I couldn't have paid anything much as a teenager for my epilepsy diagnosis and treatment; should I have just rotted before I even got to uni? I had left home, BTW.
(In the UK I do pay for a few things at point of use under the NHS, but often even then fairly small fixed/tiered charges.)
Bingo! I would not have been able to do multiple start-ups and freelance in banking and writing if tied to a job by health insurance given that I have had imperfect health.
Score one for the UK NHS, even though also imperfect, for giving me mobility.
Except that once JIT/Hotspot is involved all or most of the executions *are* of compiled machine code, optimised to the particular CPU on hand and the particular data set for this particular job. So things like dynamic inlining *for this particular job* can allow the JVM to produce *better* machine code which will execute more quickly than statically-compiled code.
The translation takes time, but for long-running tasks that may well be easily amortised away.
So single-threaded Java can beat single-threaded C++.
But I can also bring more CPUs to bear on the code safely with Java for a given level of code complexity (well, now C++ finally has some sensible volatile semantics, that's a little less true).
And there are other factors such as the generally forced synchronous nature of C++ heap handling which can work against it.
I promise you that it was worth saving many MB in the.WAR and associated thumb-twiddling time, plus showing me in the logs which library and other routines were actually being used. I never felt the need to time stuff (since performance was at least not visibly worse). Shame on me!
If I get a chance I'll do as you suggest, though it'll be tricky with all the many things going on concurrently.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually this is a world-wide issue, not just US, though note that /. disclaims in advance that many of its stories are US-centric as /. is.
So, no, the title is fine.
Rgds
Damon
Also this that I just saw:
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blo...
"There's little consensus. Some analysts argue that the falling oil price could end the world's slow march towards zero carbon energy. Others say renewables are established enough to see out the storm.
There are good reasons for such uncertainty. The renewable energy industry's fate rests on a number of factors that are very hard to predict."
Generally we know that we don't really know.
Rgds
Damon
“Healthy investment in clean energy may surprise some commentators, who have been predicting trouble for renewables as a result of the oil price collapse,” said Michael Liebreich, chairman of the advisory board of the London-based researcher. “Our answer is that 2014 was too early to see any noticeable effect on investment. The impact of cheaper crude will be felt much more in road transport than in electricity generation.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
Rgds
Damon
WOOSH!
The capitalisation thing is a piss-take on the tabloid press, eg the Daily Mail and its ilk. In general The Register doesn't take itself very seriously.
No, I don't like the LH anti-CC articles very much, but he seems an OK guy except for that large blind spot!
Disclaimer: I occasionally write for ElReg and indeed hope to get a free lunch out of that writing in a couple of weeks!
Rgds
Damon
And what strain of paranoia makes you think that any of us in this thread want to "silence" you; that is wild talk.
We appear to be having an on-line civil discussion with no gun literally or metaphorically held to your head.
Currently I think that the clear majority of road users and funders don't want motocyclists (or others) with a rather strong sense of self-entitlement going at *unsafe* speeds around us, whatever those speeds are and whether or not they are related to the legal speeds. However, I haven't seen many public roads on which 154mph would be safe other than empty motorways in good visibility.
Rgds
Damon
So go and get the rules changed, but the original question appeared to be in the present tense, and I answered it as such.
Actually, I think that speed limits are bad laws* but I'd still want people dinged for dangerous driving in that shared space whatever vehicle and speed is involved.
Rgds
Damon
*I take the lead from my uncle who was a very senior and placid and respected barrister who as far as I know had never knowingly broken a speed limit, and had immense respect for (most of the rest of) the law of course.
Because you want to use a socially-provided asset, ie the road network, so please respect your co-users and co-funders of it.
What you do on your own land may be a different matter, but is not part of this discussion.
Rgds
Damon
Don't buy in to 'peak' anything if you can avoid it; nicer for you and nicer for (and cheaper for) infrastructure.
I pick my work hours (when I have a day job) so that I avoid peaks since I loathe them even more than getting up early which I then do instead.
And now I'm full time on my start-up I need not generally join the peaks either (nor travel nearly so much nor so regularly).
I disagree similarly with the rest of your assertions as being necessary at all. You assume them to be so, but they are clearly not so for everyone, and probably not so even for you. And we do NOT have to solve the problem for everyone with a single solution anyway.
Rgds
Damon
Yes, same here. If I actually need a car journey I rent. There's even a Zipcar bay very close to me though I've not had reason to use it yet. I save myself the expense and trouble of owning, insuring and maintaining a car. I also have a much cheaper house from not having to pay for parking space nor even being right next to a road; I may have saved as much as £100k on my house purchase in fact, which on top of not paying for a car all that time seems like a huge bargain.
Rgds
Damon
People already DO react to time of use pricing and it is in use in many places round the world at retail level and most places at commercial and industrial level.
One thing to note at the retail level is that typically not even the majority of the retail cost of a unit of electricity is the energy itself; infrastructure costs and so on are folded in too, so the price swings are a lot less dramatic than at the wholesale (or balancing) level which can range from 3:1 to 10:1 in the GB market for example.
The GB's best-known ToU retail tariff (sadly we don't have a national real-time one) is Economy 7, designed originally to soak up power at night from nukes that couldn't be turned down. (It's not only renewables that have stubborn timing problems.) I think the unit price ratio is about 3:1 between day and night. One third of domestic electricity use is on that or closely related tariffs, or 10% of all GB electricity consumption roughly. (The definitive source of this data is DUKES https://www.gov.uk/government/... .)
Rgds
Damon
Average UK household use when I last looked ~3,300kWh/y.
Ours, ignoring PV, 1,500kWh/y (family of 4, end of terrace house).
I see a (cheap) solution...
However, we do generate a mean of ~10kWh/d from our PV also, down to ~1kWh/d in the depths of winter. A 4kWh battery would mean that we would not have to import from the electricity grid at all for 9 months of the year, only export. A complete inverter+battery system to cover us would currently cost about GBP8k. If we switched from natural gas heating to heat-pump (doubling our annual electricity demand, primarily in winter) that would still be about 6 months. We'd need a bigger inverter though.
Rgds
Damon
I have my RPi B+ running all my Internet facing services and running off-grid in gloomy London at under 2W, nearer 1.5W when I can fix some transient issues.
http://www.earth.org.uk/off-gr...
And if I need something lower power I have Arduino-like boards that I run on microwatts, eg for battery-powered remote sensing.
http://www.earth.org.uk/out/ho...
I see all the complaining about memory and speed but as someone who grew up with a Z80- and 6502- based set of home computers, then used Sun Workstations with a few MB of RAM and tens of MHz clock, the Arduino/ATMega328P matches the Z80/6502s in performance at a millionth the power and has non-volatile storage built in, and the RPis are and order or two of magnitude better than the workstations and a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper.
I can fit almost all that I need to run with careful use of resources into the RPi/Arduino world and still have lots of elbowroom left over.
Yes, I've worked on big systems for (eg) big banks, but most of us really need GHz and GB on every machine? Some yes (like my MacBook), but most no.
Rgds
Damon
That would be a very good step and eliminate most of the issue with Google, I agree.
However, G also insists on, for example, sending out G Calendar notifications forged with my sign-in email, which is SPF/DMARC protected, and which other systems (and gmail) thus entirely correctly often reject.
But I can't get anyone at G to even acknowledge the issue. (Would be nice if a Googler was reading this and would pass it on.)
And, BTW, G also seems to ignore email other than from the a/c's login address, eg for AdSense/AdWords, which is a Catch-22, and one small reason why I am using them far less.
Rgds
Damon
DMARC would work a lot better if Google for one didn't wrongly try to internally forward as-is *and then bounce* email from DMARC-controlled domains, thus making it impossible for example to get through for many support queries, and causing spurious problems with (say) Google Calendar when the account ID is in a DMARC-controlled domain.
Left hand vs right hand Google? You guys are meant to be smart!
That and randomly chucking email from DMARC-controlled domains in SPAM folders...
Rgds
Damon
Why, in a supposedly scientific study of warning is the source of warming (ie: the Sun) ignored and/or considered a constant in every study?
It isn't.
Rgds
Damon
The need to worry about *not having proper health cover* as tangled up in any way with changing job would be restrictive.
I have no such issue at all, ie I can change jobs or have no job or do my start-up and it makes no difference to how I access medicine.
Rgds
Damon
Thanks: that was the most level-headed primer that I've seen.
Rgds
Damon
Hmm, I hear what you say, but it wasn't generally stand-alone IT that would be much use outside finance, and I was the CTO of the virtual credit card start-up.
But I assure you that there is no gold-filled vault, no not even slightly full of warm lovely glowing metal; nothing to see here, move along.
Rgds
Damon
It's called "contracting" or "consulting"; I have spent the best part of 20 years working in IT in the City of London, none of it permanent.
I have also founded a retail finance start-up. I'm not sure if start-ups count as freelancing; there's matching insecurity and worry and no steady income!
Rgds
Damon
Yep, it made me the failure that I am today. %-P
Rgds
Damon
For most things maybe you just shouldn't be paying, at all denying treatment to those who happen not to have spare cash, eg students and young adults in general getting going in their jobs. I couldn't have paid anything much as a teenager for my epilepsy diagnosis and treatment; should I have just rotted before I even got to uni? I had left home, BTW.
(In the UK I do pay for a few things at point of use under the NHS, but often even then fairly small fixed/tiered charges.)
Rgds
Damon
Bingo! I would not have been able to do multiple start-ups and freelance in banking and writing if tied to a job by health insurance given that I have had imperfect health.
Score one for the UK NHS, even though also imperfect, for giving me mobility.
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
That is a different and also interesting case, and just by bringing it up you'd pass my test.
No, I meant something like:
public static final String CRITICAL_ID = "whatever"
in a secure API. If I use char[] instead what happens if a miscreant overwrites the content of the array; what BadThings might happen?
Rgds
Damon
Except that once JIT/Hotspot is involved all or most of the executions *are* of compiled machine code, optimised to the particular CPU on hand and the particular data set for this particular job. So things like dynamic inlining *for this particular job* can allow the JVM to produce *better* machine code which will execute more quickly than statically-compiled code.
The translation takes time, but for long-running tasks that may well be easily amortised away.
So single-threaded Java can beat single-threaded C++.
But I can also bring more CPUs to bear on the code safely with Java for a given level of code complexity (well, now C++ finally has some sensible volatile semantics, that's a little less true).
And there are other factors such as the generally forced synchronous nature of C++ heap handling which can work against it.
Rgds
Damon
I promise you that it was worth saving many MB in the .WAR and associated thumb-twiddling time, plus showing me in the logs which library and other routines were actually being used. I never felt the need to time stuff (since performance was at least not visibly worse). Shame on me!
If I get a chance I'll do as you suggest, though it'll be tricky with all the many things going on concurrently.
Rgds
Damon