Posts by Peter Jacobs 5 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Oct 2007
The whole scheme is a mess, in my experience. We agreed to have smart meters fitted 18 months ago. Engineer turned up, only to discover our gas system couldn't be purged in a legal manner. So we ended up with a smart electric meter and a traditional gas one.
Last month we changed energy supplier. New one can't use the old one's smart meters, so we're back to having both read manually.
Ho hum ...
(Oh, and our electricity usage didn't change one jot).
The total energy flux from the sun, geothermal, and nuclear is still a finite number.
There's a misconception here. Energy != currency. Economic growth, as measured by currency flow, is potentially infinite. The processing of quadrillion dollar transactions instead of mere billion dollar ones would consume less energy than in a baby's fart. Economic activity however, if measured by energy flow, is constrained. Each babies bottle represents an 'investment' equivalent to millions of baby farts.
(In practice, currencies would be rebased, if only to prevent the construction of an infinitely large computer.)
>> I'd not have put reliability on the NoSQL list.
Depends on the complexity and temporality of the data. SQL is all too often a golden hammer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hammer). Massively distributed message-oriented systems, such as Spine2 appears to be, can make ACID impossible (for a given level of performance, anyway).
All design is compromise. Software design is doubly so. (Apologies to Douglas Adams)
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