A few hours are sometimes enough to start generators when renewable energy supply decreases. Obviously, the more capacity the better, but costs will increase linearly with capacity in most cases.
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity - where it is feasible - is the only kind of energy storage close to "months".
You can store energy for months pretty easily as chemical energy. Just get some hydrogen, then join it to something else, maybe carbon, in the right proportion so it's a liquid at room temperature making it nice and easy to both store and transport.
The thing is, that there is really no or only little commercial incentive to study the effects of products that cannot be patented.
That is also one of the reasons why the study of e.g. cannabis for treating epileptic patients, or as anesthesia, has taken such a long time, because once the study is done, you cannot always attribute those effects to your own product, so few will go ahead and sponsor it.
It would be nice to have a decentralized recipe database with feedback and grading. I mean decentralized in a non-profit way, where cash flow does not matter.
Unfortunately that's very true and sad. Moreover, if you find that non-patentable thing is better than your product you spent that much time and money to develop, that's some nightmare scenario. I use some, more natural products which work way better than their "researched" counterparts, which is funny.
What I'm happy about letting cannabis free is the long tail research done on their effects after recreational use. Putting a finger on its negative effects will allow us to understand it better and promote more responsible use of it.
Maybe we can slow down the "capitalist, line shall go up" machine and be more in peace with the nature itself, and can make better drugs and substances for our needs which are not as expensive and dangerous. One man can dream, I guess...
FN: While it's not about drugs, leaded-gas used lead because it was patentable. However ethanol was cheaper, much safer and easier to produce. Albeit, it was unpatentable hence lacked shareholder value (https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/thomas-midgley-and-t...).
Generally you are correct, but just remember that we never adviced against diving in sea water with eyes open. Don't think black tea should be a problem, considering that the water has been thoroughly heated before.
Yes, you can take my comment as nitpicking I suppose, since you do not have to drop anything in your eyes to be supposedly effective. I have no idea because I have not tried it myself but I do not see why I would not give this easy, cheap, and convenient method a try were I to have this issue.
We have a lot of "folk medicine" around this neck of the woods, too, and many of them do work great.
There are tons of companies researching methods to increase life expectancy and rejuvenation. There is not much controversial about it yet.
It is not that it is hard because it is a controversial subject. It is hard because it is not one problem. To develop rejuvenation you would need to tackle hundreds of very difficult problems, both physiological and neurological, which individually, would represent solutions to critical conditions today (diabetes, dementia, ataxia, arthritis, many types of cancers etc etc).
Denmark’s immigration policies are not nearly as tough as their reputation nor to credit them as the source of economic prosperity.
Denmark’s economic prosperity comes from investment in free higher education for all, generally healthy lifestyles and the flexicurity-model, which provides a flexible labour market and promotes risk-taking.
Which western countries have "stricter" immigration policies? Even the US now doesn't treat refugees like Denmark did a few years ago (mass, wholesale expulsion to a country that was still at war, with very little exceptions). I get the reasoning behind it but the Danes are not the most welcoming of peoples, with regards to immigration.
Alone the fact that Oracle was hosting their login gateway on a product with a known vulnerability from 2021 with a CVSS score of 9.8 is quite disturbing.
we pay millions to Oracle. We hit a bug and it took 6months for them to reproduce and acknowledge there is a bug. they now seem to be on the lookout for someone being able to produce a fix: sales and indian after-sales can't do that... curious!
Oracle seems just a moneygrabbing shell company at this point and I suppose the whole hyperscaler-cloud is developing towards that point with the leaders of those corporations repeating exactly the same talking points...
From my anecdotal experience: no. It is arcane, user hostile and buggy. And performance for many workloads is roughly in line with open source databases.
Some of the tooling around it is nice and it has some nice features but I would not recommend it even if it was free.
Edit: unless the great database is MySQL, they are actually decent stewards of it and while I still strongly prefer PostgreSQL MySQL is pretty good these days.
It's possible it has redeeming features but seems more common to be just legacy. Multiple apps accessing the same DB leading to a gridlock from migration POV. (Plus career oracle DBAs etc in the org).
As Oracle is so expensive it skews the architecture decisions towards multiple apps accessing the same DB.
Even worse. It skews the architecture decisions towards few large physical database servers instead of many small VMs, because licensing cost is per core in the whole VM cluster, so totally unaffordable. So you get reduced availability, higher risk, reduced separation, reduced security, higher datacenter cost, and they bill you an arm and a leg on top...
This often isn't related to a monolith vs microservice comparison. Large enterprises and institutions tend to run a lot of completely separate applications, which then end up sharing database infrastructure unnecessarily. Think of universities, for example.
Oracle extends the problem to the opposite end of microservices, by encouraging monolith DB consolidation, with unrelated monolith applications on the same db cluster for purely budgetary reasons.
> unrelated monolith applications on the same db cluster
If your "db cluster" is split into containers on one VM as you would do in any other cloud (because VMs are expensive), then you would have the same problem.
> encouraging monolith DB consolidation
Does it? I don't think so. I've worked with Oracle's stuff and the only real difference between Oracle Cloud and other clouds is that Oracle cloud is more expensive overall. There's nothing stopping you from running virtual machines and kubernetes in the same way you'd run it in any other cloud.
Yep. And then when the DBs are already on the same servers, when there's a need to connect previously unrelated apps to some master data, a shortcut presents itself. The DBA thinks: After all, why not? Why shouldn't I take it?
If you handle large amounts of geographical data you'll need to invest quite a bit to move to Postgres. It's possible but you're going to need to touch a lot of existing code and figure out new performance characteristics and so on. A lot of it will be hard for an average organisation, not because it's very sophisticated and complex but because it will be large amounts of boring rote work that many developers don't see how they could do programmatically.
Rumour has it the same holds for some other types of data as well but I lack immediate experience in other areas.
With Oracle you also have a rather robust, exhaustive documentation of error messages and even obscure stuff is likely to be figured out in some forum thread by someone and an indian guy. Postgres isn't exactly bad in this area but you can run into things where you need to go deep in debugging yourself and figure out minutiae of your specific version.
Containers also remove most of the issues with running several instances in development and CI environments.
I still don't recommend anyone to pick Oracle for greenfield stuff, instead you should work around shortcomings in other database engines, but for a large organisation with certain demands that already has buyin it makes sense.
PostGIS seems leaps better to me (like the PG DX in other aspects). Eg in Oracle you don't have 2d points. Adding a geo index can fail in the middle and leave the table in a unusable state that requires DBA magic to untangle. Etc.
This is just on top of the general technical inferiority (eg there are no transactional schema changes, so you don't get the safe go/no-go in those when applying those as part of app deploys with a migration tool)
SDO_POINT(x, y, 0) or SDO_POINT(x, y, NULL) ought to do what you want. Index corruption can be a nasty problem on Postgres too.
You need to decide if and how to perform a rollback, similar to how you would define a down() procedure in migration files. A schema change might imply changes to data, and in that case you might turn off client writes, copy the table, change it, validate, do rename dance, turn on client writes again. If it doesn't it might be much cheaper to operate on a single copy. How does Postgres decide on such strategies automatically?
Many moons ago when I was green and my skin was a lot smoother I pointed out to my then boss that we could relatively easily (a few weeks of work) move our product from Oracle to Postgres and save n x $1000 for each installation we shipped to a customer.
My personal goal was to avoid becoming an Oracle expert. (Why? Because even as someone who passed advanced Oracle training easily it was still extremely painful. One mistake towards the end of an installation could easily result in 2 days extra work to clear it out.)
Stupid as I was I said nothing about all the work we went through and only mention all the money we could save.
The response was something I learned a lot from.
It was mild and friendly and something along the lines of "here's what you don't get young lad: the customer pays for the Oracle license on top of our original price and we get a 10% cut. Changing to Postgres will effectively cost us money. Also for <this industry> when we say it is based on Oracle they feel safe."
I'm back at Oracle today after a decade of less painful options and Oracle is still painful but these days I'm not the DBA thankfully and only have to deal with connectionstrings that makes every other database look easy, different SQL syntax etc.
EPM products were originally built on SQLServer (or on nothing, like Essbase), and then adapted to run on Oracle. So it's more like "the products commercially forced to run on Oracle, like EPM".
Not that it matters that much - there are better EPM/CPM products now available, like OneStream ;)
- institutional inertia
- some weird consultant style people in key roles (this happens around cloudy stuff too)
- the DBA-team
- "we can't move everything!"
- "we just migrated off solaris!"
however every new project with sane leadership seems to decide against oracle.
Fun fact: Oracle has like 6+ LDAP/directory products, OAM is just one. Theres ODS, OIM, OID, OUD, OVD, NIS leftovers from Sun, and probably more honestly
OAM and OIM aren’t “LDAP/directory products” per se.
OAM is an access management product, used to implement stuff like SSO (single sign-on). So, for example, it comes with a module you can install in Apache which will intercept HTTP requests and redirect them to OAM’s login page - which may potentially talk to an LDAP to authenticate you. Or you can do stuff like define some URL patterns in an app as sensitive so they require a more secure authentication mechanism (such as 2FA or smart card), other URL patterns as less sensitive so password-only login is sufficient
OIM is basically about provisioning accounts from a source system into target systems. Those systems could be LDAPs from various vendors, but can also be HR systems (Oracle’s various offerings and SAP too), IBM mainframes (RACF, TopSecret, ACF2), Unix/Linux hosts, database tables, custom apps… also lets you do things like setup workflows to approve system access requests, you can configure it to require reapproval of high risk access requests by management every X months or else they get revoked (used for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance), etc
Source: I used to work for Oracle Engineering, in a team which handled escalations for these products-especially OIM, but I stuck my fingers in most of them. When I left (back in 2017, so a while ago now) they were putting a lot of effort into their cloud offering (IDCS, more recently replaced by OCI IAM), but I’m sure the on-premise offerings are going to stick around for a long time, especially because they have some customers (e.g. in the national security space) for which cloud is unlikely to be a viable solution any time soon
Plenty of companies have Public Affairs departments that work essentially as lobbyist, but no bribery neither to the MEP nor the Political Party is involved.
Many lobbyists work "simply" by producing reports and collecting data that works in favor or their proposals, publishing them to opinion pieces in newspapers etc.
There is no explicit bribery, but there are plenty of examples where a government bureaucrat leaves to join a company they were "regulating" on a fat pay cheque.
This does not make sense to me. I question how much you have worked for the EU.
1. EU is the most aggressive when it comes to legislation far exceeding the US in terms of privacy law, competition law and setting strict minimums for labor conditions etc.
2. Being a candidate to run for Member of European Parliament is considered to be available only to the Member of National Parliaments with the most personal votes and/or most influential. It is definitely not a job given to the low-performers, particularly because only a few seats are available per country.
I don't know where you are from, but at least in Slovenia if you see someone running for EU parliament you know he is basically retiring from politics.
EU parliament has no actual power, EU is basically ran by EC and ECB.
There has been plenty of movement between the EU parliament and the national parliament in Finland.
As an institution, the EU parliament has real power. It's just that citizens are not particularly interested in what it does, and the media consequently does not report that much about it.
The core issue is that being a MEP looks like a career dead end to an invididual politician. While national MPs have less power, they enjoy more media attention. And if you are an MP for a major party, you have a real chance of becoming a minister. The same pathway does not work in the EU parliament, because commissioners are nominated by national governments rather than selected from MEPs.
I don't know why people expect EU to be some kind of strong do-it-all central government. Maybe it's a side effect of looking from far away like we look at China. But it was always a loose confederation with members retaining most of the power.
In the UK, before we (sadly) left, being an MEP was a bit of a joke, where being an MP was a much bigger deal. Maybe other countries are different, but nobody who wanted to rise through the ranks in the UK would opt to be an MEP over an MP, and I suspect that’s very similar in many other member countries.
> 1. EU is the most aggressive when it comes to legislation far exceeding the US in terms of privacy law, competition law and setting strict minimums for labor conditions etc.
The problem is in practice those big law and regulations end up benefiting the biggest actors with "Star Destroyers" type legal departments and lobbying.
I have witnessed it, 10 years ago GDPR pushed most European companies in one of the hyperscaler cloud. Exactly the opposite of what we were naively expecting.
The EU Cyber resilience act is finishing up the job.
Funny how now just because Trump was elected, some European are waking up wondering why they are in this mess and welcome more EU regulation to get them out of there...
Solar and wind energy has a problem, which is storage. We have not yet developed a competitive solution to store energy on commercial scale that works everywhere.
Nuclear energy is stable but generally quite costly per kWh compared to renewable energy.
Nuclear energy and renewables in combination balances out disadvantages. Nuclear energy reduces the need for energy storage solutions in renewables by providing a base load, while renewables would enable cost-efficiency in even quite energy demanding uses (e.g. carbon capture, generating methane etc.).
Yeah when it comes to these discussions, I think most people are unaware just how much the cost of solar & BESS (at the large scale) has fallen in the past couple years.
The battery installed along solar farms is usually on the order of hours of energy delivery though. Like 5 hours. It’s fine, but not everyone will be able to ornaffors to buy electricity on when it is cloudy and still for a few days.
Not just does the US no longer want to support Ukraine, it is basically siding with Russia by not taking a stand and criticising Ukraine. It’s neglecting the interests of it’s ally by only including Russia in negotiations.
On top of it all, it’s extorting Ukraine into giving up it’s minerals while giving no assurances in return.
And finally, most important for long term, it’s a complete policy reversal to its NATO allies, which will have a long term impact on US transatlantic relations for decades to come. Before, US was the only country to invoke Article 5. Now its recognising a weak moments for its allies and is exploiting that opportunity.
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity - where it is feasible - is the only kind of energy storage close to "months".