We need to build all forms of renewable energy and stop falling into the trap of "Build X not Y" where X and Y are one of solar/wind/hydro/nuclear. One form is insufficient.
Nothing will get accomplished with this climate 'whataboutism' type of argument. (I'm making a comparison to whataboutism, I recognize the difference)
What makes you think this is a one solution problem? Very few things in life are black & white. Life comes in shades of gray and problems with multiple solutions(more or less optimal for the time when the decision is taken).
Every type of energy comes with downsides:
-Solar - storage and delivery infrastructure costs
-Wind - same as above
-Hydro - same as above + if you build many/too big you change the center of mass leading to changes in the planets rotation speed
-Coal/gas/any fuel burned to produce energy - Usually cheaper than other to buil but produces a lot of pollution
-Nuclear - Build cost + waste disposal
Any kind of energy storage you use for any of the above will need to be recycled at some point. I would count this as a downside for any solution that requires storage to handle peak usage and can't be ramped up.
Edit:Some typos(most likely missed some) and formatting
> What makes you think this is a one solution problem?
I don't think that. I think Solar + Wind complement each other nicely. I think hydro can be good if the circumstances allow it. I think we'll need to explore a variety of storage technologies, better grids and demand side management to complement wind+solar.
I just don't think that an extra expensive technology with plenty of problems is contributing anything.
All intermittent sources dependent on weather is not a diverse energy mix.
Also, hydro is not only scarce but awful for the local habitat and extremely dangerous. An improper or unplanned decommissioning could kill millions of people.
> a lot of HN readers don't like this, but the debate is over. [...] Get over it.
Very dismissive, but I recognize your name as a German journalist, which explains a thing or two. (We share an acquaintance actually and I generally like your work in the security sphere.) I'm also living in Germany and the political environment is exactly like that: there's no point trying to change the public opinion which is wayyyyy negative about nuclear (to the point where many restaurants had stickers on the door "shut down <insert name of nearest plant>!" without being afraid of losing customers). But not everyone in the world is that level of misinformed. There is still a chance to save some emissions elsewhere in the world, even if it's administratively difficult because governments are usually elected for periods shorter than it takes to build, let alone operate and turn a profit on, one of these power plants. Doesn't mean that, with enough information about safety and proper cost calculations, some countries are still likely to vote a government into power that continues to permit the operation of a nuclear power plant within their borders. Let's not give up just yet. Or if you're personally against it, then just say so and bring real arguments instead of pretending everyone except HN is already against it.
Our current battery technology is just completely incapable of transitioning us to a %100 renewable grid at current costs and densities. Closing down nuclear plants and replacing them with a mix of renewables and lignite coal plants as we've seen in Germany has been both an ecological and economic disaster. Nuclear fission is a proven baseload power today, whereas getting renewables to cover baseload power globally requires technologies we haven't even invented yet, let alone mass manufactured.
"A cost-optimal wind-solar mix with storage reaches cost-competitiveness with a nuclear fission plant providing baseload electricity at a cost of $0.075/kWh27 at an energy storage capacity cost of $10-20/kWh. To reach cost-competitiveness with a peaker natural gas plant at $0.077/kWh, energy storage capacity costs must instead fall below $5/kWh."
"The largest announced storage system, comprising more than 18,000 Li-ion batteries, is being built in Long Beach for Southern California Edison by AES Corp. When it’s completed, in 2021, it will be capable of running at 100 megawatts for 4 hours. But that energy total of 400 megawatt-hours is still two orders of magnitude lower than what a large Asian city would need if deprived of its intermittent supply. For example, just 2 GW for two days comes to 96 gigawatt-hours.
We have to scale up storage, but how? Sodium-sulfur batteries have higher energy density than Li-ion ones, but hot liquid metal is a most inconvenient electrolyte. Flow batteries, which store energy directly in the electrolyte, are still in an early stage of deployment. Supercapacitors can’t provide electricity over a long enough time. And compressed air and flywheels, the perennial favorites of popular journalism, have made it into only a dozen or so small and midsize installations. We could use solar electricity to electrolyze water and store the hydrogen, but still, a hydrogen-based economy is not imminent.
And so when going big we must still rely on a technology introduced in the 1890s: pumped storage. You build one reservoir high up, link it with pipes to another one lower down and use cheaper, nighttime electricity to pump water uphill so that it can turn turbines during times of peak demand. Pumped storage accounts for more than 99 percent of the world’s storage capacity, but inevitably, it entails energy loss on the order of 25 percent. Many installations have short-term capacities in excess of 1 GW—the largest one is about 3 GW—and more than one would be needed for a megacity completely dependent on solar and wind generation.
But most megacities are nowhere near the steep escarpments or deep-cut mountain valleys you’d need for pumped storage. Many, including Shanghai, Kolkata, and Karachi, are on coastal plains. They could rely on pumped storage only if it were provided through long-distance transmission. The need for more compact, more flexible, larger-scale, less costly electricity storage is self-evident. But the miracle has been slow in coming."
"Given the magnitude of the battery material demand growth across all scenarios, global production capacity for Li, Co, and Ni (black lines in Fig. 3) will have to increase drastically (see Supplementary Tables 9 and 10). For Li and Co, demand could outgrow current production capacities even before 2025. For Ni, the situation appears to be less dramatic, although by 2040 EV batteries alone could consume as much as the global primary Ni production in 2019. Other battery materials could be supplied without exceeding existing production capacities (Supplementary Tables 9 and 10), although supplies may still have to increase to meet demands from other sectors5,9. The known reserves for Li, Ni, and Co (black lines in Fig. 4) could be depleted before 2050 in the SD scenario and for Co also in the STEP scenario. For all other materials known reserves exceed demand from EV batteries until 2050 (Supplementary Table 5). In 2019 around 64% of natural graphite and 64% of Si are produced in China32, which could create vulnerabilities to supply reliability."
I was downvoted too. For promoting multiple types of renewable energy over a single one. My guess is it's just the anti-nuclear ones that are doing the "build only x, not y"
> Adair said he’s fielded dozens of calls today from state and local government agencies that have identified the backdoors in their Exchange servers and are pleading for help.
I can imagine they are sending an email to support@microsoft.com pleading for help. A future attacker would be well served to deny email to be sent to any mailbox @microsoft.com
EDIT: I'm now realizing that this follows the Microsoft-angle of the Solarwinds' attack. These customers are not going to be happy with $MS
At most companies, a small percentage of employees will still need Excel for really complex/large spreadsheets, or Word for complex formatting destined for publication. But for 95% of people Google's good enough or better.
Year after year, Google keeps stealing more of Microsoft's customers, and it's extremely common for new companies to adopt Google rather than Microsoft.
It seems MS is winning in the Education space - the existing mindshare for MS Office means it's hard to accept free Google Workspace and the learning curve that might come from that vs. M365 with the free desktop Office licenses they give out to every student and teacher.
I’d agree, as it is one step closer to the labor market, and Enterprise is the goose with the golden eggs. But is Microsoft really dominant in tertiary?
That's a great point, and when I think about it I can only remember using google docs. Even if I could have afforded excel (I'm sure they give it to students for free), google docs was way easier for working on a team.
And nowadays, I use excel (in part because I don't really work in a cloud-friendly industry).
You'll see that collapse when Google faces a few more privacy lawsuits and schools realize forcing their students into Google's system likely isn't legal. There are already a few cases in process about it.
I’ve been using Linux for work and personal for 4 years. Almost everything used in the enterprise today has a web app/electron version or runs natively. Including MS products themselves. I laugh maniacally every time I’m working in Word online... muahahaha
Apple hardware have some downsides though. One big advantage of HP, Dell, etc is their support. Apple repairs takes weeks (especially here in New Zealand) as they expect devices to be sent long distances to wherever they repair them. HP, Dell, etc can do on-site repairs in <24 hours in many cases. If it's just your personal device then a few weeks may be an inconvenience. But for businesses it can cost them enough that getting a support contract from HP, Dell, et al can be worth it.
That's bollocks. Time Machine performance over network is atrocious.
With a HP/Dell Enterprise line model all you need is a decent set of screwdrivers (and if you're touching anything that requires taking off heat pipes, skme thermal paste) and you can literally replace any part in a hour or two from a spare laptop - or you just swap the disk in a spare.
With Apple's newest shit you can't even do that since everything is soldered.
I'm a die-hard Apple fan, but for large shops professional machines are lower in maintenance cost.
It's been awhile since I was in a big org, but when I was, no one was replacing laptop parts. The deals we had with Dell/HP were basically overnight replacements (this was different from servers where we had 4 hour on-site support). Then we would send them broken machines that would eventually come back fixed.
So do big orgs actually have people internally swapping random parts in a laptop to see if they can fix it?
Doesn't change the point that Apple was more expensive, but mainly because Dell/HP prices go way down at volume.
Go look at the source, IBM. They started a pilot program, with power users, and converted them to Macs, and then a year in said that Macs need less support and cost less over their 3 year lifecycle.
See the problems? They couldn't know a year in about 3 costs over 3 years, and taking power users that demand Macs and saying they don't need support is obvious. That's a bullshit and obviously wrong "statistic" and source to use.
Typing this on a late 2012 iMac which remains my main workhorse. I'm considering a new M1 iMac when they come out, but really no need at the moment, now I've fitted a a 2TB SSD
Hm.. I find it funny that organizations use MS products and stay in business. The amount of downtime and ridiculous failures I saw regularly as a consultant were astounding.
My coworkers used Macs which really don't cost anything given hardware lasts 8+ years now. Most companies using Windows have a large budget for laptop IT that costs more than replacing expensive machines often if that were necessary.
I've found Macs don't really last that much longer. The previous Mac I had, I actually begged for it to be replaced as it had a spinny HDD and recent versions of macOS run very poorly on these. Luckily it turned out it was close to being sent back to the leasing company. $EMPLOYER policy (as often is the case in larger employers) don't allow me to replace the HDD with the SSD. The newer one I now have which has a SSD is now performing poorly so I am already looking forward to a replacement already and it's still under the 3 years window. My colleagues with PCs (as we are issued PC or Macs depending on the location we work at at the time) seem to be happy with even the older PCs. I had a oldish temp PC for a while when my Mac needed repairs and it ran Windows fairly well. I used to be a big advocate for Macs but not any more.
The HDD macs work very well with an SSD swap (hard in a corporate setting,) or just an external SSD (easy in a corporate setting.) But should have maximum RAM (hard to change in a corporate setting.)
I'm not at all fond of the newer more disposable Macs. Still, they should perform pretty well. One of my coworkers installed browser themes that seemed to be crypto mining or something equally ridiculous once. You may want to create a fresh user without any personalization and see if problems go away. I find Mac users and PC users tend never to do a wipe/install and almost everyone tends to port their problems with them by bringing their home directory even to new machines of the same OS.
If a place's main problem with their laptops is what type of hardware they selected they are doing extraordinarily well in my book. It's usually the 10,000 lbs of bullshit apps in the standard image and grossly inefficient means of dealing with users issues that create the performance issues or drive up department costs in the long run. Few workers really have much of a local performance need that they wouldn't notice if a raspberry pi came in as long as it was well maintained and behaved the same functionality wise.
At my previous employer they started to allow Macs and people were clamoring for them because they ran GREAT but after the first few thousand went out they started building up the amount of BS loaded approached being equal to the Windows ones and suddenly the satisfaction levels started to even out with the standard build. Chromebooks actually became very popular because they were even harder to be loaded with crap than Macs.
It's not a guarantee but I'll trust Google for application security over Microsoft every time.
That said, it's not the question. The question is if a company wanted to switch away from Microsoft here, what is their option? It's not an inherent statement that one is actually better, but that there is an option if one feels burned by Microsoft here.
I’d trust them marginally better, but certainly not orders of magnitude more. We don’t know if Google would do significantly better if they operated at the same scale as MS in Enterprise. Google operates some consumer properties at an even larger scale, but I get the feeling that Enterprise is particularly attractive to hackers for the potential rewards.
Last week Firebase sent me a notification that several of my properties (some of them enterprise apps) had lost domain name verification. The panel in the console was clearly glitched when I inspected it. Two days later they sent a correction saying that this had been a mistake. No big deal, but it goes on to show that Google is not perfect.
I'm not sure what scale would affect this that Google hasn't already hit? I've already had GSuite for my high school, my college, and my work. What additional scale would open up massive security holes? This seems like it's very much just horizontally scaling the same product.
Not to mention that GSuite already has 6M different customers/tenants. They're already at a comparable scale, and that doesn't mention that the free versions have the same application security model, with zero incidents (knock on wood). "but scale" feels like it's ignoring the already existing track record and scale and just making excuses for Microsoft.
That's 6 million, vs. the 260 million that Office 365 has.
And that's individual licenses. I can't easily fetch the number of medium to large companies on Microsoft Office vs GSuite but I wouldn't be surprised if it was significantly larger than 50x.
My original contention is that hackers may be particularly interested in that dimension, rather than in the number of individual licenses (which MS also dominates by an order of magnitude).
There just isn't much you really need e.g. Word or Excel for. If your corporate application doesn't run with a useful web interface, you probably have other issues too.
Word is an application that puts looks, thousands of mostly useless features and pixel-pushing up front. Excel at least really enables normal people to do some advanced calculations on data but the former still applies. Both are very complex tools mostly hindering any kind of value-added thinking and creativity but give you enough foot-guns and are really "fun" to support if you count Outlook in as well. I mean, how do you program an application that regularly crashes and corrupts the email database? LibreOffice is the same kind of thinking, because it mostly is a copy of the ideas in Word, Excel etc. Actually, when we are at it, Google Docs is more or less as problematic as the other tools.
Actually, just opening any of these applications seems a bit overwhelming. Why should you care that the readable font is 11 or 12 px big (it actually isn't that comfortable to read, but ok)? Why should you care that the default font is called Calibri or whatever? This is information and complexity that is shown by default that usually adds exactly nothing to your business. The same is with colours. Why should you want to have the option to select custom colours with two clicks or so when most people choose colours badly? The default colours offered are really not that great either.
You mean the industries, that are liable for most of the initial suffering during the 1930s, 2000s and so on? A case could be made that some of it lead more or less directly to wars.
Accounting and finance should know much, much better to use something actually auditable. Pretty much all software in any way associated with those industries that I have seen is at best average by enterprise software quality standards but most is barely useable. In that sense, Excel is probably the better choice. :-)
Spreadsheets are insanely versatile and useful. I think if you were to redesign a lot of the things they do as custom apps, you’d end up with poorer version of a spreadsheet, like you’re saying.
I’ve experienced this first-hand when building custom business apps. You’re building your UI in React or whatever only to conclude: “Fuck, this is a spreadsheet.”
Actually, at OrgPad.com my colleague Pavel (~Paul) is writing a collaborative editor in ClojureScript + re-frame/ Reagent/ React. There is even a very rough video about it (in Czech though) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkFJ1zcRjQY where you can see the current state of work, including the debugger Pavel has written. We will have some basic tables/ spreadsheets in the final version and we plan on having some very cool table calculation abilities later. ;-) So yeah, we thought about it.
That people use something and maybe even extract some business value from doing so doesn't necessarily mean the product or the ideas around it are great and cannot be improved upon in various substantial ways. People used to ride horses and cows, people used slaves for manual work instead of inventing and using the steam engine at scale much earlier e.g. in ancient Greece or Rome.
I don't mind rich text and I know a bit of typography to avoid some common mistakes but I don't think most users really appreciate a full scale of sizes in pixels for a font or other information not relevant to the content they are producing. Most would be much better of using normal, small, large, very large for presentation or posters or something like that. The absolute values could be set in settings or overwritten somewhere maybe but Word isn't actually meant for designing websites or posters. It does all of those things to some degree but it very much isn't the right tool for the job in those areas and shouldn't be treated like one.
Btw. nobody can tell, if the businesses wouldn't be better of using something more robust than Excel even when that would mean actually training people to use a different tool. Most companies probably never train Excel, so even using that is very certainly inefficient. You know, there isn't much business value in Excel macros with viruses in them or macros nobody understands - so maybe what they calculate isn't even correct in some or all cases.
Excel is great for some things, but for many things it is used in practise it is actually quite bad. E.g. some people write working hours in Excel. There are much better apps just for that. You could have Google or Microsoft Forms, that are much easier and more robust. The data can then be used as well in a spreadsheet or imported into a DB. Unfortunately, Word and Excel (and Outlook) have developed their own gravity field in many industries and so the (very low) local maxima cannot be escaped (somewhat easily).
Having a government use anything as a stamp of approval does it a bit of disservice. If we would rely on current governments for innovation, we could just as well return to the caves directly.
More seriously, if by collaboration you mean sending people word documents by email named final-assessment-v2-final.doc (because docx hasn't really arrived in many places and people suck at useable version control) then I am with you. Everyone else (including you probably) just writes the text into the email directly or uses something actually collaborative (for example Google Docs). The real final version is produced, after a consensus has been reached using more efficient communication channels.
The state of affairs is the market for pretty much everything currently is in a bubble. The US governments debt is more than twice the total amount of gold mined during the whole of human history (https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-...) if a tonne of gold is roughly worth 60 Mio. USD. We haven't improved the working efficiency since the end of 90s much if you are frank. I wouldn't be so sure the market is a good measure of a products absolute quality actually.
This is similar to the plain text argument, but the main thing about standard ms office apps is that they are accessible and easy to use. I can use excel to open a spreadsheet made in the last 20 years.
I know everyone who has worked in an office setting can at least open and read a spreadsheet. I don’t know about an ms form or an access DB. The default (and sometimes only) ways most people can process text files on their machine is notepad or word. Word is way better than notepad for text processing.
If I send out a docx file, I know the formatting will be consistent when they open it. We can track changes easily without having non-technical people figuring out git or some other repo, and it will be compatible and easily viewable if we acquire any companies or are acquired.
The MS apps have basically become the standard applications to process plain text.
Lastly, I understand the value of some applications for data processing over excel. But when you’ve got to train up a new marketing or sales person every 6 months in R, that will get old very quickly. You can at least expect they know Excel and should be able to understand a spreadsheet.
Actually, Microsoft Office apps (others are not much better if at all) are not objectively easy to use for everyone. Just sit down a kid in the 2. or 3. grade and let them write about what they like with some structure, include pictures, print it out. You can go further: can they share a Word or Excel document on social media and will it generate a preview or do people have to download the whole document first and have some app that understands office documents installed? Ok, now sit them down in front of a brand new computer with Windows. How long will it take until they can edit a document in Microsoft Word, when they have to buy and install Office first?
Not very hard tasks to me - because I have done all of them hundreds of times. Other, even more advanced tools by Microsoft of course would fare much worse even with people like you and me, otherwise quite proficient with digital tools, if we haven't learned to use the one tool beforehand.
Yeah, Word is better than Notepad if what you want is to write rich text, but is it actually much better than WordPad from the usability perspective?
You have other problems, when your environment is so unstable that you have to hire new people every 6 months. Nowadays, you cannot expect any knowledge really unless the people can show a certification. Even a diploma in CS from a university doesn't mean the people know how to program useful stuff.
I’m not saying they are easy to use, but they are the standard. I’m also not saying I like that they are the standards, but everyone with 3+ years experience at a large company out of college can use Word to edit text in a document. Or should be expected to.
A new trainee every six months for a sales or marketing department isn’t crazy - it could be growing or a team of 6 people rotating out every ~3 years. I’ve bounced between WYSIWG and plain text, but there is a hard and steep learning curve when you ask people to use plain text.
Word also has spell-check and other features we take for granted.
As far as I can tell, the legal world still runs completely on Word redlining/track changes. Also, Excel almost literally runs many businesses.
As long as those are true, I'm not sure you can say "there just isn't much you really need eg. Word for", unless you're never on the business side. If you deal with the people who use them, you probably also want to use them to avoid headaches. Network effects are a bitch.
If you're only ever slinging code, sure, congrats, you may never need to use either.
Everyone only uses 10 features from Excel, the problem is that those 10 features are different for every user. Anytime someone says users don't need Excel or it can be easily replicated by some other tool, they likely haven't spent much time with Excel or users.
Well, I have used Excel extensively so I know its warts very well. You can use Excel right but in my experience anytime I have seen even quite capable people working with Excel, nobody in that work setting would exactly describe it as fun. I know at least one person, who really uses Excel very proficiently and maybe even have something approaching fun while doing it. But he is literally teaching Excel to other people. I have done 30 hours in his course and learned quite a bit.
You'd be shocked how dependent office staff can be on obscure MS Office features that I, a systems engineer, has literally never heard of and couldn't imagine someone needed.
Heck, this year I watched someone struggle to find and license a third party add-on just to do a mail merge on Google Workspace.
I know, I have seen it first hand. It was lots of wasted time for very little value pretty much every time I have seen it. I hope you have a better experience.
Most of the time, actually stepping back a bit and thinking about the problem at hand for a minute can save many hours of tedious work. E.g. keeping track of hours worked - probably just use Toggl and export a CSV at the end of a month or something - much better UX overall than a form in Excel that you have to print out. Doing project planing in anything from Excel, over SharePoint, OneNote, Outlook Calendar etc. was always extra hassle in my experience. Everything kind of works but not really, you avoid doing changes, because it is very tedious.
I have seen all the enterprise "Export to Excel" web interfaces that are usually so bad, you cannot get anything done without the Export/ Import feature. I mean, Export/ Import is great but maybe you should just have na API and/or a useable web interface. There of course, Excel/ Spreadsheet is a temporary saviour but you should think about why do you have to use such a bad software system at all!
Nothing will get accomplished with this climate 'whataboutism' type of argument. (I'm making a comparison to whataboutism, I recognize the difference)