I only searched the web for 10 seconds and came up with this.

Obviously, we need storage for conventional power uses. But desalination that runs on sporadic power? That would be fine.

Let's not kid ourselves that fossil fuel exploration and production doesn't also have tremendous tax credits and subsidies, and that nuclear did not also have this when the plants were being constructed. If you want to take away one, you have to take away the other too. I'm also not at all clear that California municipalities are forced to contract with a specific indeprndent solar provider like Alta power.

And backups are not an issue for desalinization. You only need to desalinate when there is power

We can't really pretend that nuclear plants for economically effective any longer. Pretty much all of the oil-fired plants constructed in the 1950s and 60s in California, and about half of the natural-gas-fired ones are no longer economically feasible for operation, and despite the fact that nuclear plants theoretically should be cheaper to operate than the fossil-fuel ones, they haven't been. Cross your fingers and hope for effective fusion, but we're not seeing that so far either.

So it happens that solar and wind crossed the line of being less expensive to sell to California municipalities than fossil-fuel-based power over the past several years. And the perovskite-based cells are looking very promising, and approaching 30% efficiency for tandem perovskite and silicon cells.

Of course desalinization does not have the storage problem that home power does. If you've got more solar power in the daytime, only desalinate in the daytime. And we have lots of desert in which to make that power.

So yes, there is desalinization in the future. I think the real problem, though, is that California has both more people, and more acres farmed, than it can support.

I always found it odd that Trump, and I guess rightists or republicans or sonething, found it offensive that rivers run to the sea.

You will wish you had used dark mode your whole life, instead of starting just last week :-). Truthfully, though, white backgrounds push a lot of light directly into your eyes and face, and having sat in front of CRTs ever since I was around 12 years old, I learned fairly quickly that I could pull much longer stints in front of displays that weren't blaring bright white pixels at me (well, bright green pixels way back then) 24x7.

I thank that insight now that I'm over 50.

My personal preference... a dark (but not black) background with modest (but not excessive) contrast and minimal bleeding:

xterm*background: #100010000000
xterm*foreground: #7FFFDFFFDFFF

-Matt

This assumes that the device with the microphone is sensitive to frequencies above the hearing range. Most devices have a low-pass filter for the purpose of avoiding any input above 1/2 the sample rate of the DAC, since these will create artifacts, aliasing, and distortion. Even in the case that current devices have left out the low-pass filter, it costs pennies to add.

The signal does not have to go through an A/D converter at all. Most competently designed microphone systems have a low-pass filter before the A/D, to prevent aliasing and artifacts, and no signal whatsoever will reach the A/D.

I take it you have never lived in the mountains ? During certain parts of the year on clear nights the day-v-night temperature delta can be as much as 80F. A 50F delta is more typical, though. But its still a lot.

-Matt

The duck curve was a worry a decade ago, but only because researchers thought there might be problems stabilizing the grid without base load. It turned out to be a non-problem... the (for example) CA grid is actually more stable now with less base load than at any time in the past.

The reason is that DC inverters used with solar and battery systems can react to changes in voltage and frequency on the grid in mere milliseconds, even microseconds, whereas traditional base-load sources actually take on the order of hours and even NG peaking plants take 30 minutes if they are cold and 5 minutes if they are hot.

The problem now is how to deal with the situation where renewables generation is able to take 100% of the load at certain times during the day. In California, this happens in the spring and fall (lots of sun, very little air conditioning needed). At the moment CA is forced to load-shed the solar a little during these periods in order to allow less-agile generation sources to continue operating.

-Matt

It actually doesn't, because the ambient temperature of the air will keep it 'warm' relative to the near absolute zero of space that it is radiating into.

But again, we are not talking very much power generation here. Only a few watts per meter squared at night, at best.

-Matt

At best it can take away a few watts per meter squared and during the day you have roughly 1000W/m^2 hitting the panel. So as a cooling mechanism for the panel in the daytime its a big fail.

-Matt

The only way to do this is to radiate at frequencies that punch through the atmosphere, which is precisely what these radiative panels do. With careful selection of the frequency, the panel is basically 'seeing' the near absolute zero temperature of space and can thus radiate into it.

However, the efficiency of this mechanism is quite low. We're talking, at best, a few watts per meter squared (verses one to two orders of magnitude more energy when operating normally as a solar panel during the day).

So in terms of power generation at night, not so much. But it isn't a total loss. The radiative mechanism works 24x7 so on a 24x7 basis it can add around 10-15% more energy production to normal operation. And at night even though the power generation is very low, its high enough to provide voltage and frequency services to the grid.

-Matt

I don't know the answer to that (which compiler they are using), but it almost doesn't matter. Modern CPUs do such a good job optimizing the instruction stream that is handed to them that vendor-specific micro-optimizations don't really do a whole lot these days. Over the years we have removed most of them because they just don't do anything any more.

I can think of only one micro-optimization that is vendor-specific, and that's Intel's optimization of stosb and movsb which is designed to support generic memcpy() and memset() operations. But it won't matter on a machine with this little memory.

All other optimizations are relatively agnostic and apply to both CPU vendors. Just common sense, really. Doing things like avoiding certain pushq/popq sequences (which has to manipulate %rsp) in favor of pre-adjusting %rsp and doing normal movq's, aligning code and certain branch targets, collapsing call/ret sequences, linker-based inlining, and so forth.

-Matt

Virtually guaranteed to be the case. You could probably make any linux distro match it just with a little cache-tuning for low-memory. Lots of bits and pieces of the Phoronix test suite are going to give skewed results based on available ram due to filesystem caching and other effects.

-Matt

So what youâ(TM)re telling me is that employees might have different political interests than their senior executives?

Wow we ought to write that down or something.