The odd looking circular example shown is not solar PV. It is the Ivanpah solar thermal generating station, and those are mirrors rather than solar panels, or modules.
> Solar thermal can't really compete economically with photovoltaics.
PV is cheap up front and maintains cost advantage in the time scale of a few decades, and obviously scale down much better than solar towers. PV also wins by being viable in more places, and not requiring local specialized labor. Once you extend the timescale to a hundred years or so, solar towers end up quite a bit cheaper (where they're actually viable).
Batteries, inverters, and the propensity for solar fields to completely rebuild themselves long before the panels die really compounds running-costs. This isn't apparent until you expand the time scales, and only once we're looking at solar fields with parity to a solar tower (60+MW). We're talking hundreds of acres of panels, and a massive battery farm. Even though solar towers require more motors, more regular cleaning, and complex refurbishment, they also produce a very large amount of power relative to their size.
Rebuilding a PV field costs a lot more than refurbishing a solar tower obviously. If solar plants ever get over rebuilding themselves from scratch every 20 years, or if battery tech ever gets better longevity, this might no longer hold.
I think they are shutting it down. It had the nasty habit of frying birds that ventured too close to it. And that particular valley actually is far more cloudy then what you would expect for the desert near Las Vegas.
I was curious since this is a different link than the main SilverBullet site (silverbullet.md). Looks like it's built by the same developer, but as a closed-source wrapping of the MIT licensed open source core of that project, as a desktop application.
It's definitely interesting. Though SilverBullet itself never stuck strongly with me - not enough to replace Obsidian anyways - I still run an instance because it's handy for quick notes. And doesn't rely on anything more than signing into a web site from whatever computer I happen to be using.
It could be a very nice addition to the personal notes space, though macOS only (at least for now) is very limiting.
It was a good compromise, including for Amazon. DRM is immoral when you're "selling" books, because that means I don't own the actual book. I still bought plenty of them when I could easily strip the DRM. But now I'm done, never buying another DRM encrusted book from Amazon.
Right? Kinda weird; I wonder what tiny pie it is that they think they're fighting over, and what makes any of these individual projects think that they're powerful enough over the others (not saying they might not be)
Am I missing something? This piece starts out with a discussion of how weather is hard to predict and highly variable (true, though our powers of forecasting are far better than they used to be). Then it quotes a couple developers of apps I am not familiar with, then it describes some of the weather sources used.
That's great, but it certainly doesn't address "why you hate your weather app." And "sometimes the forecast isn't perfect" is not a reason I've ever had. Poor behavior, ad bombardment, poor design, bad visibility, and more are all reasons I've had in the past, but never "the forecast isn't perfect."
I got fed up with several things in Apple Weather but they appeared to be lack of care and attention to design, rather than underlying data sources. One was the lock screen widget not showing current conditions and showing "severe weather" instead. The severe weather was air quality alerts. Less than useless. Another was NWS alerts coming up with generic data rather than the actual information, so I often got recommendations along the line of "execute a pre-planned activity". Useless again.
Perhaps that is because I work in renewable energy and am very familiar with the weather data models and sources and experienced with the variability, but surely we've all experienced weather's unpredictability before.
By the way, I like my current weather app, Breezy[1], which uses a number of sources including Open Meteo[2].
This is vague lip service with little substance, as far as I can tell. That is unsurprising consider it's from Microsoft and it's about Windows. It addresses (in cheap words) a few real pain points, but completely fails to address the dozens of either incredibly painful and stupid decisions MS has made.
On the subject of what they address, I have thoughts and many doubts.
> Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus
Just don't, bro. Don't do it. I don't want copilot icons in all the system apps. None.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions
This feels like it's too little, too late. They redesigned the UI in yet another toolkit and in the process broke something had worked for decades. Perhaps they could add a 147th different UI toolkit with a different look instead, just to change things up.
> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates
Would be welcome, but I have my doubts. MS has shown clearly they don't care.
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer
See comment on task bar above.
> More control over widgets and feed experiences
Get out of it. If I see one more stock ticker on a screen share from someone I know does NOT track the stock market I'll know you for the lying liars you are. Don't promise "more control" just stop being so invasive and annoying.
On the subjects they didn't address, I have feedback:
- Remove advertising from the start menu, the system, apps, everywhere. Just remove it forever.
- Remove invasive telemetry. Again, forever.
- Respect user choice. Stop trying to force things to open in Edge, ignoring my default browser. I am a Firefox/Zen user, keep a single (other) chromium-based browser around for sites that don't work right (another rant for another time), and try not to touch Edge if I can help it.
- Stop turning the bundled native apps into crappy web apps. "New Outlook" is a real tire fire.
- Make the default Edge page ANYTHING but the advertising and nasty "news" summary that shows up. Why not a simple search page, like when Google was new.
- Stop making start menu searches return web results instead of local apps
- Make start menu searching actually search in a useful way. Why does QGIS not show up when I type GIS? Because it doesn't start with Q? That's garbage. Make it work how users would expect it to work.
- Let people say no, fully and completely, to OneDrive. You can make adding it later easy at user discretion, but don't ask to set it up automatically. Don't use fear mongering like "your files are not backed up" to try to trick people into signing up for it.
- Local accounts should be easy, not a nasty workaround with a moving target for instructions.
As is tradition, HN has downvoted your legit comments to the twilight realm. I agree with everything you say. Onedrive should be flagged as a virus. Why do they get a pass for things any other app would be blocked for doing?
I think the real issue is that MS doesn't view Windows primarily as an OS that should be invisible, out of the way -- with minimal "innovation" geared to sell MS products. The problem is that MS views Windows as a sales/marketing channel for their ads/apps/services.
I'm using it on my gaming laptop because it's the only distro I tried that handled the hybrid NVIDIA/AMD graphics out of the box without user configuration beyond occasionally explicitly setting which GPU to use. Normally I run Fedora.
I'm familiar with Arch at least so system management is fine. So far 3 months in it seems great.
Presumably this is a joke, based on the "Success Reports" and the footer, among other things.
"This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."
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