Most electricity rate payers aren’t interested in paying a “coolness” fee on their power bills. Worse, many are fine with paying less for dirtier sources of electricity than clean ones. Besides hydropower and some geothermal, its only been in the past 20 years or so where the cleaner tech is also the cheaper one in the forms widespread PV solar and wind.
Tech used to be fun and exploratory, now it’s just companies pushing to see how much they can be allowed to exploit you for the least cost.
The fun and exploratory tech still exists, its just not sitting as a single product on a store shelf in a plastic clamshell package. The maker space is where all the exciting exploration is happening. If you have an idea the technology likely exists to make it happen, and the cost of the parts won’t break the bank. Lots of reuse of cast off out-of-date tech can be integrated dropping the costs even more. While there are even better solutions, if you’re just getting started pick up an old Arduino or Raspberry Pi (not the new expensive high end models) for under $30. Grow from there to microcontrollers like the ESP32 where it gets even cheaper for about $5 each. Learn to solder! Learn modeling and 3D printing! Use an operating system that lets you control your system instead of one that you just have to accept what they give you.
It really is an amazing time in tech if you stop accepting a products as they are, and instead what you want them to be with your own modifications.
I mean if you can write shell and some orchistration language you’re golden for anything.
This is part of what I meant by labor costs increasing with alternate solutions. As I’m sure you’re aware lots of folks in our field cannot write shell script to save their lives. You’re a higher skill engineer than many orgs that were running VMware. This isn’t a knock on VMware folks. PowerCLI can do lots of things especially in the hands of a skilled engineer, but a good number of folks never make it out of the vSphere client to do their work and complete their tasks. These folks are cheaper to employ because they can still accomplish the task by using the VMware tools that would otherwise require a bespoke solution written by the engineer.
We had some PCI stuff, I relapsed smoking because of getting through it haha. We were also halfway through getting the Australian government PII/gov contract thing when I left.
I hear ya! It can be pretty brutal, especially if you have an honest and knowledgeable QSA.
Most people suck at passing audit compliance because they try to box tick rather than explain how their tailored systems meet and exceed the requirements.
There are also those orgs that shop for a weak QSA, and pay the price later if the resulting audit is too weak. I agree with you that chasing a checked box isn’t the best approach especially if you’ve got a good solution and can document compensating controls.
How many VMs were you running? How many regions and what level of geographic redundancy were you offering your org? Were you serving any type of organization that had regulatory compliance/audit requirements (FDA, HIPAA, PCI, DoD, SOX, etc)?
have a tank of water painted black sitting on the sand, water vapor pressure pushes turbines,
Water vapor by itself at any temperatures of unconcentrated sunlight would heat, wouldn’t come close to the tempurature needed to turn a steam turbine to generate power. Most steam driven power plants have the steam be at about 500 °C. There is no place on Earth that would get even close to that by just placing a black painted barrel of water in direct sunlight.
You’re not wrong in your general idea, but just the scale. The approach you’re describing is close to how Concentrated solar power works. The idea to get up to those crazy high tempuratures from sunlight is to use mirrors to reflect a huge amount of sunlight on one small space. It looks like this:
There are a number of these built around the world. In fact, the solar thermal energy is so high its heating molten salt, which is later used to heat water to steam to turn a turbine generating power.
While Concentrated Solar Power works in both theory and practice, it has not been found to be more efficent for generating electricity in 2026 than just using a giant amount of Photo Voltaic solar panels instead. Many of the Concentrated Solar Power installations are being shut down because of this.
Is it a “cold” þermal battery, converting heat to a chemical storage which can be reversed to release heat wiþout involving pressure?
Sure, but ammonia can do that right now with 12x the density.
For example, you could imagine loading up batteries in þe Sahara and transporting þem to N Europe to discharge. Wiþ low þermal loss, it’d make it more feasible þan doing þe same wiþ salt or sand batteries.
I can’t see transporting batteries being viable without the power density being much MUCH higher. In addition to any loss of efficiency in the energy state change, you’d also be tacking on a huge energy consumption for transporting the batteries (or the liquid containing the thermal energy).
Different experience then. After finishing university I had to learn a lot in my first job in the exact field university was for.
Apologies, I probably didn’t communicate this point well. University did very little education in my area of expertise. In fact for me, I intetionally got a degree outside of my area of expertise to get greatter educational benefit. I agree with you that a Bachelors degree does not fully prepare a student for immediately executing in that skillset. It does, however, give you a solid basis to start in it. I think this will always be the case because curriculum lags reality. Its nearly impossible to create a curriculum covering a body of knowledge of an industry because the industry evolves simultaneously to the creation of the curriculum.
Strongly disagree, but perhaps your college had special training on this. Mine just gave me material and told me to learn.
I’ll agree there’s usually very little overt hand-holding. There’s an expectation you seek on your own. When you were stuck at that beginning, did you ask your professors how to approach the problem? Advisors? Librarians? Study groups? These are just some of the things that are baked into the college experience that are available to put you on the path. The act of completing the coursework exposes you to the different situations and the school has the resources to let you explore it.
There was nearly no difference in grades between people who worked on their education daily/weekly and those who just marathoned through this on last week before exams. The biggest “effort” in some cases was either getting over 50% attendance or buying book authored by professor. Luckily it was mostly for some niche subjects.
I acknowledge this in my first post. Its certainly possible to skate through without learning, but that’s a choice of the student. A student is only going to college for the grades then they’re robbing themselves of the main benefit of college. If a student just barely passes the classes, but is able to learn and retain the knowledge, that is far more valuable that obtaining a high GPA with zero ability to learn anything.
If those were part of a single college course, it must have lasted for a decade to cover all of that. At which point job market will prefer person with 10 years of experience instead.
Oh that certainly wasn’t one class, it was many. Just to name a few:
I don’t think I can fully understand your position. I neither been a college dropout, neither have I ever wanted to know why company I work for makes specific decisions. I don’t even have ambition and pride necessary to switch from position of expert to position of manager.
None of this to end up in management (if you don’t want to advance that direction).
I assume there are things you want to accomplish professionally in your field? The resources you need to do that are rarely in control of those doing the executing, like yourself. This means that to get your needed resources (or permission), you have to convince others to give it to you. Knowing why they would say “yes” or “no” to your proposal, or say yes to one of your prosposals but not another is understanding what drives them and their goals. Being able to speak at least part of their language means you get what you need to accomplish your professional goals. Without this you have to hope you’re talking to people that will choose to enter deep enough into your field of experise to do the translation for you. I have found those people are exceedingly rare. Without those rare folks, you’ll be told “no”, or worse, lose your job because you’re not properly able to communicate your very real value to the organization.
What I was aiming at is that university often misses tools, frameworks and knowledge that is more up to date with needs of current job market, instead opting to “give a good base” that is also half a decade outdated in most optimistic case.
Oh, I completely agree with your statement here. I touched on it in my response above. A University education will frequently be behind the times vs the state-of-the-art in the working world. This is especially true of technology fields. I experienced this in my college coursework too, studying certain technologies I already knew were out-of-date. However, those were there for the benefit of those that had never been exposed to the technology at all just to give them a working understanding of a version of technology.
I guess my take does not match goal “let’s advance as high as we can in company”.
It doesn’t have to. The approach can be “advance as high as you want to in the company, and be able to stay there at that level for as long as you want”.
There are FOSS hypervisors that are more than adequate for almost everyone’s useage.
While I wish that were true I didn’t find that to be the case.
For home use? Aboslutely. For Small businesses, probably, but labor costs rise noticeably in maintaining those alternate FOSS hypervisors. That can be a dealbreaker for lots of companies which swings the pendulum back to cloud (or Microsoft on-prem hypervisor).
When the Broadcom/VMware apocalypse occurred I looked at all other hypervisor options both FOSS and commercial and found none that were close to VMware’s feature offerings for large enterprises. The best for most orgs would be HyperV only because of existing MS licensing the orgs had would cover most of the new license burden.
I’m all for new technology and approaches, and it looks like this is just at the beginning for this approach so I would assume it could grow in efficiency in the future.
However, as it stands today its pretty far away from a good replacement for existing solutions or approaches.
The new material, called a pyrimidone, can store more than 1.6 megajoules per kilogram. That is almost double the energy density of a conventional lithium-ion battery, which is about 0.9 MJ/kg.
1.6 MJ/kg…that’s…not very dense for a thermal solution for this new material. This is especially true with the likely increase complexity of adding a plumbing system and heat exchanger to extract the energy. With the lithium battery its a pair of wires going in and the same wires coming out to move the stored energy. Further, the lithium battery energy is electrical which certainly can be converted to thermal energy at 100% efficiency with a simple coil of wire (resistor), but it can also be used electrically for all the fun things we use electrical energy for. The new technology solution looks to only be a thermal storage medium.
For reference 1 kg of gasoline has 45 MJ/kg. Keep in mind I’m not saying gasoline is a replacement, I just wanted to offer a scale for reference. Another approach suggested for storing sun energy in chemical form is ammonia which has about 19 MJ/kg. Yet another approach for storing solar thermal energy is sand batteries. A sand battery has a density of .4 to .8 MJ/kg ( 500 °C to 1000 °C respectively). Sand batteries would come with the same burden of a plumbing system and heat exchanger though but without any exotic materials.
None of this is to discourage the basic reseach these folks are doing. They could be onto the “next big thing”, but I just wanted to put it in perspective as to where it is today.
This should be your call to read communist theory. Education should be about learning and creating knowledge, not cramming and being put off from pursuing your passsions!
I had never read Marx’s Communist Manifesto before going to college. It was assigned reading for a class. I don’t necessarily agree with the validity of it all (it depends too much the decency and incorruptibility of humanity of which we have too little of both). Even though I don’t agree with much of it, I very much appreciate being exposed to it so I have a better understanding of the perspective of its origins and those that believe in it more than I do.
That probably wouldn’t have occurred without me going to college.
Most of the university education is also worthless on job market. 90% of knowledge you will be using in a company will be company-specific (processes, rules, tools, people) and thus not possible to gain at the university.
This was my mindset when I dropped out of college after a year. I then entered the working professional world and did that for 10 years. Then, while still working full time professionally, I went back and completed my degree. What I found was that I had been missing a lot that college filled in those gaps. I was much more successful after getting my degree.
Employers require university degree as a proof that you are able to come to the same boring, tedious place and waste your time for eight hours a day, five days a week each week.
That’s part of it, but its more that you have a basic education with the fundamentals of your field. More importantly, college teaches you how to learn. A Bachelors degree will make you no expert. However the effort you undergo to get the degree exposes you to the various resources and bodies of information that exist. It sets up opportunities for critical thinking usually with pretty vast resources at your disposal to research, answer questions, and build something on your own from start to finish.
A degree usually also means you have a passable command of your native language and can put together a report or presentation that is on-topic and not embarrass yourself or your superiors when your work comes under scrutiny from others. I sometimes remember a couple of my myopic proposals I made before my degree and didn’t understand why they were shot down. Today I completely understand. I was out of my depth before, yet I didn’t have the self-awareness to even know that.
For those 10 years prior to my degree, I didn’t understand why the company made decisions that it made. It made, to my eye, wrong/inefficient decisions. What I was missing was understanding of the organization, finances, law, markets, geopolitical impacts, risk management/mitigation, and sometimes even the ethics.
None of this that if you go to college you’ll come away with all of this. If you skate through doing the absolute minimum you might pass with your degree (and debt!) but you’ll have wasted an immense opportunity to learn and better yourself.
Online courses would be better off tied to specific companies rather than to degrees.
While I completely agree that a corporate culture is good to learn to be successful in operating in it, I have doubts a designed curriculum would accurately capture the various “good old boys” or crony decision making processes or those that embrace rules not to end in a good result but just to slow you down from affecting change. Nor would that course explain the simmering resentment of below-average of middle managers that have been passed over again and again as they see their better or more agile peers continue to surpass them and how that can negatively affect your personal productivity or chances of advancement.
Everyone could tell you that once they had your overbuilt shit locked in to their very specific apis and services they had you by the short and curlies and by god were they gonna squeeze for all you were worth.
On-prem solutions don’t necessarily protect companies from this either though. Anyone staring down the barrel of a Broadcom renewal for on-prem VMware licenses knows this pain.
Broadcom’s screwing over of VMware has been the biggest accelerator of migration into the cloud in the last 5 years.
Looks like shakshuka, Eggs in Purgatory, and Eggs in Hell are all names of the same dish.
TIL!
Looks like shakshuka, Eggs in Purgatory, and Eggs in Hell are all names of the same dish.
TIL!
Is this possibly a slight mis-translation of “Eggs in Purgatory”?
Here’s a sneak peek into a management review meeting in the near future:
“Why is our AI browsing porn in the middle of the workday and constantly writing ‘It fucking sucks ass here’ in corporate documents?”
I’d need a reason to use Edge. If it used a different browser engine, that would be a compelling reason.
Thats the description of both Vivaldi and Brave browsers, which also haven’t out-Chromed Chrome. Both are Chrome engine with built in ad blockers.
Hey Microsoft, how about innovating instead? Edge is a Chrome engine browser like dozens of others out there. Why not write a new browser engine to give customers a choice? Or at worst, how about contract with Apple to license Webkit bringing a third solid choice for a browser engine to Windows. You’re not going to out-Chrome Google Chrome browser, so stop trying.
Right, that’s what this new technology is, a liquid thermal battery. There’s not electricity or motion generated by the OP article, just storing heat.