move /var/log to a RAMDISK

Take Kathmandu in Nepal: (I've been there twice - both by road in the '70s). Then Swayambhu was a 20 minute walk through paddy fields from the centre of Kathmandhu and to took as bus to Braktapur, at the east end of the Kathmandhu Valley. Now Kathmandu occupies virtually the while damn valley.

Some serious population reduction would be a good idea. Worldwide, but maybe climate change will solve that problem Real Soon Now

Teach people some limits too: the world was a much nicer place in the '70s with the population on the 2 Billion region and the number of megacities could still be counted on one hand.

Besides, the non-thinking multitude won't allow them to be built.

Yes: I've known about flow batteries for at least 20 years and they seem like an ideal power source, so why aren't they in widespread use already?

Yep, and I'm not holding my breath for fusion to arrive any time soon.

It is only quite recently that there have been electrodes that don't either degrade quickly, poison the main reaction, have too many unwanted side reactions, need regular difficult maintenance or are otherwise unusable commercially.

The principle is easy but the details are fiddly.

Currently there are only two good electrode designs both subject to commercial patent and involving fairly complex chemistry and construction. Both are in commercial use.

One works with a vanadium based electrolyte and is rated to run for twenty years before it degrades too much and another that works with ferric chloride as the electrolyte that apparently does not degrade at all, IIRC the manufacturers provide a 30 year guarantee of no performance loss. The vanadium electrolyte has a much higher energy density (around 200Wh/l IIRC) while ferric chloride is only good for about 50Wh/l.

Both companies are actively selling into the grid storage market with products that start at four forty foot containers and go up to as many acres as is wanted. Their current market is the minutes to hours storage sector which can be very profitable for the battery owners - lithium apparently works best in the seconds to minutes sector but gets unreasonably expensive for longer term storage.

There are a bunch of startups in early stages of funding and product development going for the domestic market with the vanadium chemistry. Their products look pretty but seem too small to me.

They believe that nook-yoo-lur is EEEvil, and can't conceive that some of the alternatives are far worse.

Thomas Malthus got a lot of it right over 200 years ago - but back then there were still few enough of us that people could get away with believing that the planet's space and resources were infinite.

What's really going to destroy us is the belief by many - especially our ruling classes - that our population can and must increase indefinitely. People cannot allow themselves to realize that there are hard limits - for example, the entire planet being converted into people, crawling over each other like a swarm of bees. If our population continues to double every 40 years, we'll reach that point in 1800 years. A more realistic limit - one person for every square meter of dry land on the planet - will be reached in only 600 years. But anyone with any sense will realize that the crash will happen much sooner than that.

Oh, we don't want to bruise their precious egos.

ALGOL was originally a "demo", "proof of concept", not intended for the real world. I seem to remember that the initial version didn't even have I/O. I've got a compiler for the "next version" but haven't had the time to mess around with it much. However it's STILL kind of complex, a lot of work to emulate what's done so neatly these days.

Well, sort of "new concept" ... they had to cast it in more conventional terms. A couple of images would have made it MUCH more clear. Guess those were too expensive :-) Nothing more useless than an attempted TEXT DESCRIPTION of something best suited for a VISUAL description. (Hmm ... some Linux man pages still bring back that nightmare).

Alas, back then, there WERE serious limits to recursion and stacks because there was so little MEMORY. You COULD shove the stack onto a mass-storage device .. but SLOW !!!

'C' was (and is) Da Boss !

Early back in the IBM/PC era there was a company that was selling "un-copyable" floppy disks. Turned out the trick was a tiny laser hole in the medium. Phillipe Khan ("Borland") offered a BOUNTY for anyone who could find a work-around. I seem to remember it was just a couple of days. The disk-makers went out of biz.

Having someone involved in making the Atom would have made it something of a dream job.

Cool. Of course the quality of the CHESS must have also figured-in ...

Yep. Would have been very visually impressive !

Bean-counters ruin all .......

Serious chess people tend to run in "higher" circles, meaning more $$$. If you'd had a "beautiful" product they WOULD have paid for it. Lower volume but higher margins.

A right move ... but doesn't entirely solve the SD-wear problem. System apps you're using a lot really MUST be moved to RAMdisk. A certain amount of the OS does wind up on its own RAMdisk, but it might not be what YOU are using a lot.

Hey, Raspbian might be 2gb image on the SD card but yer Pi, depending on model, might not have much more RAM (or even LESS if it's a Pi-1/2). As such the WHOLE OS cannot be put into RAM. All the parts that can't, well, they get read over and over from the SD.

SD's are GREAT - but on PI's and such you've gotta THINK about it.

The compiler-writers have become VERY VERY good. Stuff I commonly wrote in ASM on u-controllers is actually smaller/faster now using 'C'. That's just IMPRESSIVE.

The old 'Dilbert' narrow-tie people WERE damned good. Modern hardware with a lot more resources kind of made them obsolete - any 10-year-old could write adequate code then.

I went to 'C' and PASCAL early on. ASM became only for a handful of very weird things neither did well at the time.

S*it though ... I remember a job where I had to work the (newfangled) 8087 math co-proc from BASIC - that code being copied/translated from older FORTRAN statistical routines. What a huge pain in the ass. DATA statements galore ! The '87 was NOT like normal CPUs, very odd register sets and procedures to make it work and get data back FROM the damned thing. Still, made the code run about 25x faster ...

Indeed it was - and Algol 68 was a computer scientist wet dream.

There was another reason - there were a lot of machines that didn't have stacks so the design did not force an implementation. That's a trick many designers never seem to learn.

Ah the ancient lament - "Oh for a muse of fire ..." - Shakespeare pining for a 21st century special effects department!

Sounds not too dissimilar to some of the later DVD copy prevention tricks, trigger the error handling and ...

Figures, there was a guy I was at college with in 1978 who would have made short work of that - he broke copy protection for a living!

It sat in the window playing demo games - every so often someone would break step, stop dead and stare for a while.

Precisely - and for them the record and replay feature would have been far more interesting than the machine opponent.

I wish I shared your optimism.

Remember I ran the accounts as well as the technical sections of my companies. There is not enough space for renewable ebergy AND humans AND farming AND the as yet to be identified storage. The whole heath robinsn arrangement would uterly destroy the environment, bankrupt the nations attempting it and still not create enough energy to replace itself in twenty years. Today we burn fossil to build renewables. That will not always be the case. Simply put the implementation cost and the EROEI (enetrgy return over energy invested) is so poor for renewables that it only takes one nation to say 'sod this for a game of soldiers' and go 100% nuclear, and that nation will rule the renewable peasants in their grass shacks forever.

I assumed that was Russia's plan, until the moron invaded Ukraine. Fund the anti nuclear and anti-fracking and anti oil brigades, then sell Germany gas on the QT to run the country off while the windmills convinced people they were actually green, and then absorb or control a Germany utterly dependent on Russian gas. And thereby essentially control the EU.

Nope. Despite the costs, nuclear is sadly the only economically viable option if we want to keep civilisation, which it seems many peole do not,

And its a durn sight easier to cost reduce a technology whose main cost in in *bureaucracy*, than it is to build a safe 200GWh storage system that wont go off with the force of an atomic bomb if someone drops a wrench across the terminals...

And 200GWh is only just enough to keep the UK say, going for about 2 sunless flat calm winters days maybe less, if we have abandoned all fossil duel and are 100% electric .

It is equivalent in destructive power to 172 kilotons of TNT or about ten Hiroshima bombs worth.

And that is just the UK.

I'd rather live on the ROOF of a nuclear power station than within ten miles of THAT.

No 'flow battery' even could come close to that sort of storage. That is serious water up a hill. That is all that even has the potential, if you have the water and the hill.

The only other possible storage is heat banks of molten salt, but unless you actually drive them from a nuclear reactor, (see the Natrium concept) they are woefully inefficient, and if you have the reactors, you don't really need much storage.

Nope. Its all green people's wet dreams. A marvellous way to separate the plebs from their cash and put it in the trousers of the virtue signalling renewable energy companies, and leave nothing left to invest in something that *actually works*.

Remember that the batteries on the grid are not there to replace the energy of the stores of coal, oil ,gas or uranium that power the power stations, they are there to simply replace the energy of the spinning mass of all those alternators, that stabilise the grid in the 0-100 second range, giving time to get the pumped storage wound up before the gas turbines can kick in.

Because if they don't, and the frequency falls, the renewable energy disconnects itself and you get a grid scale blackout.

Its been a few years now, since I felt my machines were too slow for the job they were doing.

I accept that people doing video editing or shooting up 3D aliens in unlikely scenarios may need more, but I don't.

I am more replacing now to lower power consumption, although even that is not 100% wasted as the computers heat this room in winter.

Cf 'Stand on Zanzibar; et al.

There is a massive dichotomy, that the ruling elite cannot bridge. On the one hand the indigenous European populations is in fact shrinking, because people simply don't want so many children and modern medicine ensures they don't need to have them either. On the other, masses of essentially less or uncivilised people are flooding in and breeding like rabbits, as their cultural background does not include a phenomenally low infant mortality rate, nor thin gs like old age pensions. A big family is a support system

Now one view is that a falling population would bring far greater wealth per individual, since the GDP of a nation is not particularly linked to human endeavour, but more to what resources - land, sea, minerals etc - it has legally defensible access to. Plus in a hi tech age, the quality of its education to turn out not an unending stream of entitled self absorbed ArtStudents™ , but a smaller stream of intenbselyt well qualified and able people who are able to create wealth by dint of technical innovation, or good risk assessment in the financial areas.

Such a society would inevitably be extremely productive high earning and individually wealth, but the GDP would not markedly increase. And that is the 'n' word in the woodpile, because the mechanics of the massive debt incurred by all the western nations is conditional for being even able to be *serviced*, let alone repaid, by a continuous process of expanding population and inflations. Consider the effect on house prices of a falling population. You wouldn't be able to give away the cheapest houses. they would remain empty. An asset price crash of epic proportions would set in as all the things that are rare by dint of having too many people wanting them would lose their value.

The banks would all fail. And that is the elephant in the room, both in the USA and in the Eurozone, there is and has been for 20 years a looming debt crisis that threatens to crash the entire system of debt.

And that is why, gentlemen, the immigrants are flooding in, to keep house prices up, wage prices down, and burden an even greater number of people with debt and erode the wealth of private capital through inflation.

The banks lent us money, and successive governments instead of investing in assets - railways, nuclear power stations, ports, gas storage, grid upgrades - instead 'invested in people' which is a euphemism for creating a consumer boom with low personal credit rates and large payouts, so that they could essentially buy the votes of the less well heeled. And increase the number of people who are not actually creating wealth, but living off directly or indirectly, taxpayer funding. Now over 50% of GDP in this country circulates through the government in terms of taxes and benefits, public sector wages and contracts to privet companies that are entered into by the apparatus of state, or state industries. Right down to the cleaning company that cleans the council offices or the hospital wards...

The problem is that a falling population makes this house of debt cards unsustainable: the western banking system would collapse. As it nearly did with the sub prime scandal. And with bankrupt governments, 50% of the workforce now loses its jobs. Social security collapses, pension funds crash...we would be left holding what physical assets we owned, and earn whatever we could barter for our skills.

And that is why, gentlemen, the banks are running us into the ground, because if we drop population the whole system of debt will collapse and the consequences - at least to bankers - are simply unthinkable. They are fighting for their very existence, and they play very very dirty indeed, and have no moral scruples whatsoever.

I don't have an answer, either. A collapsed economy and financial system or a third world level of poverty in western countries. Not much of a choice is it?

There are two halves to what I am building. A mains powered server in a box controlling stuff and accepting inputs from remote sensors and running a web server as a user interface for user level information and control, and the sensors themselves which may, and in one case must be, battery powered. Namely thermometers, whose response time will be in tens of minutes at best, and a (battery powered) oil level sensor whose response can be in an hour or two.

So the mains powered server, already has relays switching mains in it, and I have bought a custom 'block' switched mode PSU that should run it ok. The Pi Zero W has its own SMPS internally to generate the 3V3 and

So its (the PICO) fairly ideal for battery power, as long as it spends plenty of time *off*...

The idea is the thermometers won't *need* batteries if there is a handy USB power source available, but the oil sensor is not so lucky. It must be battery powered.

No system apps are in use in the sense that they are being loaded from disk.

The are all memory resident and thats that.

Three daemons, maybe four

Apache web server plus sensor watchdog that wakes up every second, looks at the state of various RAMDISK based files and reads the SD based config files, probably from disk cache 99.99% of the time, and turns stuff on and off, plus an xinetd daemon that accepts input from remote thermometers and writes to ram disk and possibly a similar one for the oil sensor.

And that's it.

I guess the usual cron jobs will run, vut thst so on any Pi running Raspios.

No, they don't. Because huge swathes of the disk image contain programs that are *never run at all*. My pi came with for example, gcc and friends. Thousands of development header files and libraries that will never be invoked once the code is stable. Once running my server is currently only using 60MB of RAM, with 200+MB in use as disk cache. and over 100MB that isn't used at all!

I am running apparently 110 separate processes. But these are all kernel processes for the most part, and use very little RAM or CPU. The load average is simply 'nothing' . In short this little Zero is completely overspecified for the job it does. It wont wear the card out.

Nothing that is in the disk cache need ever be read from the disk. And indeed if it is written to, the OS will only periodically flush its buffers. Those disk caches ARE an effective ram disk protecting the SD card from many reads and writes. And doesn't mind being read, it's writes that screw it, anyway.

Didn't we all? At least, those of us who had companies.

The North Sea gives enough room for the needs of the UK.

It might be uneconomic, it might not, but that space could provide enough power for the UK.

It was my old monitor that heated the room, it used vastly more power than even my old computers. I did mean to buy a new TV, this summer, but haven't, so the old one will heat me another winter.

If you live alone in a big house, buy a fleece onesie.

They are stunningly warm, and comfortable.

You have it backwards - I wish I shared *your* optimism.

You see you're right widespread adoption of nuclear power would make things far easier if it was done well and in a timely fashion.

My problem is that I don't see any chance of the NIMBY brigade being bypassed until long after it is far too late to build more than a tiny fraction of the necessary power stations.

Then of course it will be fast track, crash priority get them built as fast as possible, oh please keep the costs down the budget is tight this year you know there's an election coming up. Why not buy a load of those new dirt cheap plants from <insert fourth world country here> that have just hit the market.

What could possibly go wrong ?

I am reminded of an old story about army quartermasters. When you walk into the quartermasters office with a request he opens a thick book of regulations. One sort of quartermaster is looking for the rule that says you can't have it the other is looking for the way through the maze of rules that lets you have it.

Guess which one has the easier job of searching. I've been watching this for a long time too - until fairly recently it was not looking good at all. Cheap reliable flow batteries really do change the picture of what is possible - you should research the technology, it's pretty cool stuff.

Phasing out oil etc. with what's available off the shelf today is certainly possible but feasibility is dubious the numbers are huge and the logistics daunting. A decade ago it was almost certainly not possible and certainly not even remotely feasible. This is the right direction.

Necessity is the mother of invention - and this is one mother of a necessity. When you were calculating the available space for everything did you consider off shore floating solar power stations covering large areas of open ocean ?

It can only get easier, can it get easy enough soon enough ? Who knows but I'm certain nuclear won't be given the chance until far too late and I really don't like the results of civil engineering being done far too quickly. A few bridges needing bracing and crumbling buildings getting condemned is one thing ...

Not really. the Easterly turbines would all be in the wake of the westerly ones. And the UK doesn't ow all of the north sea. And other people want toiuse it to

Only when the wind was blowing. In times of low wind the whole continent of Europe wouldnt provide enough.

Agreed

If they are cold broke and hungry, and someone offers them cut price electricity and a well paid job in exchange for a nuke down the road, they rapidly change their minds. That's how France did it

Almost nothing. Even the worst ever reactor built - the Chernobyl style, could if managed by competent staff produce safe electriity for years if you didnt f*ck with it, as the chernobyl staff did. # The last reactor at chernobly closed down decades after the accident. people still worked there. People didn't die working there.

"The three other reactors remained operational post-accident maintaining a capacity factor between 60 and 70%. In total, units 1 and 3 had supplied 98 terawatt-hours of electricity each, with unit 2 slightly behind at 75 TWh. In 1991, unit 2 was placed into a permanent shutdown state by the plant's operator due to complications resulting from a turbine fire. This was followed by unit 1 in 1996 and unit 3 in 2000. Their closures were *largely attributed to foreign pressures*.

No they dont. They have neither the capacity nor the discharge rate We need nuclear weapon sized storage. No chemical battery has that. We would be better of sythnesising coal diesel or gas and burnbing that. But its too inefficient

Its not possible on a grid scale at any sort of sustainable cost. The EROEI of the whole network is just too low. And the technology doesn't exist, despite your optimism. We would all love to be powered bu a few offshore windmills and a rooftop solar panel at one tenth the price we pat now, but it aint gonna happen. The only nations who have achieved both low emissions from power generation and low energy cost per unit are restricted to those with extensive hydroelectricity and/or nuclear power. France. Switzerland.Sweden. New Zealand. Norway.

The graph of electricity cost to percentage of (intermittent) renewables is a nice exponential curve.

German which leads the windmill farce, burns more fossil fuel per country, per capita, and per megawatt hour than anyone else in Europe. And it cots three times as much as France.

Of course. The problem is intermittency. You need either massive storage or a huge excess of capacity. Both escalate the costs way beyond the most expensive nuclear reactor, both massively increase negative environmental impact, and massive storage introduces a huge safety hazard - far greater than a nuclear power station.

There is a reason why we like coal and uranium, In large piles neither go bang.

Every single manufacturer in the world is flogging their new small modular reactor designs. Promising build times of sub 5 years sign to grid, and a simple regulatory tick after completion on type approved factory built reactors of up to 450MW, that being the practical limit fora reactor that will be shipped in in a low loader and wont need cooling pumps after a SCRAM.

Given adequate access to coolant, you could pop one of those in a medium sized towns retail park and save on large grid connections from the North sea.

The Natrium concept uses molten salt as a primary working fluid, and intends to store that in a heat bank to allow peak power of far more than the reactors continuous power. Smart idea.

It's all there waiting until - as Churchill once remarked, of the Americans doing the Right Thing - 'every other possible alternative has been exhausted'...

...Basically this stuff will come on stream towards 2030. It should if encouraged rather than obstructed by regulation, be economic at around

Once it does of course you can kiss renewables goodbye. Reliable zero carbon 24x7 electricity on localised grids at one third the price of renewables? A dream for the population, a nightmare for the faux greens who have trillions riding on windmills, flow batteries , fuel cells, the 'hydrogen economy' , heat pumps, electric cars and all the other ecobollox we are bombarded with.

Remember my adage:

"There is nothing a fleet of dispatchable nuclear power plants cannot do that cannot be done worse and more expensively and with higher carbon emissions and more adverse environmental impact than by adding intermittent renewable energy."

Let it fight its corner in a free unsubsidised market, to see if any of it actually works cost effectively,.

Nuclear power is, like democracy, "the worst form of power generation, except for all the others".

I am sure people like you will persist with the renewable chimera until someone in a nuclear power plant puts you out of a job.

Dont say I didn't warn you.

One of the most important things an engineering degree taught me is that whilst it take a lot of calculations and hands on experimentations to get something to work, it only takes about a day and the back of an envelope with a slide rule to determine what simply *won't* work. The reason is simple. To make something work, every problem has to be soluble. To determine something cannot work merely requires a *single* problem to be *insoluble*. Renewable energy has four. Power density, intermittency, no stabilisation and EROEI. These cannot be solved, they can only be ameliorated by bolting on yet more expensive potentially dangerous and environmentally unpleasant technology. All of which takes energy to build and costs serious money

Nuclear has only one currently serious problem. Political will.

No one in the opinion polls gives a tuppeny f*ck about climate change anymore, but they care about the cost of energy.

Nuclear power finesses both. Its zero carbon and its cheaper than renewables. Politicians simply have to accept that the fat green envelopes will have to stop if they are to get re-elected. And hope that some fat uranium coloured ones replace them.

Yes, these 19th century Empires are a bit passé..the end of Russian federation, the European Union, the United states - all are possible and more, or less likely as time moves on.

In an unlikely turn of phrase, in rapidly changing world contexts, they are simply too big to survive.

What suits downtown New York does not suit wilderness Utah. And vice versa.

federalisation at least and possible independence, whilst maintaining overall ties under some NATO and Interpol style pan national organisations would seem to be the way forward

When you have distributed generation and distributed usage then using distributed storage seems rather obvious. A site drawing a megawatt with ten day autonomy at 50Wh/l would need 5000 cubic meters of tanks that's the lowest energy density electrolyte in use commercially at grid scale today and about a quarter of that with the highest energy density competitor.

Possible but unlikely to be feasible - that's where we stand today.