Bill Gates sums up Microsoft's abusive history - <AUTHOR> http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2009/11/04/microsoft-history <comment><USER2> How is this example any different than putting tons of effort into keeping other devices from making use of iTunes to transfer music? Or only allowing your OS to run on the hardware you choose? etc.

I don't agree with any of this of course. But anyway, Microsoft has changed since this time, haven't they? I hope so.

<comment><USER3> Because palm isn't supposed to identify itself as an iPod. And it would actually _take_ effort to support other devices, not the other way around.

As for the OS thing, Apple isn't dominating enough of the market for people to care.

Microsoft has _not_ changed. Read my comment on the xbox. As long as they benefit from proprietarity, they will try to undermine anything not theirs. It's because proprietarity opens up various strategies _besides_ just improving a product, which is usually the hardest way to gain market. It allows you to take advantage of exclusivity and your existing powers (market share).

<comment><USER4> _And it would actually take effort to support other devices_

Except that Apple is expending effort specifically to break efforts at compatibility. It appears to me that they are intentionally preventing competition, and as a long time Apple customer that upsets me.

 _Apple isn't dominating enough of the market for people to care_

Claiming that bad behavior is okay so long as you only hurt a few people is a pretty weak argument. I own three Apple computers, have spent a boatload of money with them and as a customer _I_ care about how they conduct themselves as a company.

<comment><USER3> You're absolutely right. It is anti-competitive and anti-open in this case.

No I don't mean it's okay. I'm simply stating why there isn't a fuss about Apple.

<comment><USER4> Sorry if I misunderstood your argument.

I don't disagree that Apple seems to get away with quite a bit. I imagine it's also because people like to think of them as the scrappy underdog who just does what's necessary to keep up with MS. The shame of it is that it's got to be easier to change ingrained anti-competitive corporate mentality before a company gets big enough that the mass protests start.

<comment><USER3> Like I said, as long as companies are invested in proprietary end-user products, they will try to take advantage of it to some degree.

The only way to fight it is to endorse open source _free_ software but unfortunately on the consumer side it's not really gaining traction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant Looks like an excerpt from the Halloween documents, which, as a whole, are much more incriminating.

<http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/>

<comment><USER5> except that these documents were not written by BG.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I may not understand law very well, but why isn't Apple getting sued for anti- trust, or monopoly type practices? They seem to keep EVERYTHING closed and proprietary.

Why the double standard?

<comment><USER7> Anti-trust is about avoiding the negative consequences of monopolies, not forcing things to be open. Apple isn't anywhere near a monopoly, except maybe once in the iTunes/iPod sphere, but opened up by removing the iTunes DRM.

<comment><USER8> That may be one of the best short and thorough answers I have seen when explaining anti-trust. Thanks for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In their position, you would do the exact same thing: protect your market share.

The burden isn't on Microsoft to play nice; the burden is on you to come up with a better product and unseat them.

Sure, they make it difficult, but I will reference you to the success of Apple and Google alone as indicators that it can be done. Firefox is another example. *sp

</comment><comment><USER10> Its the great American Pastime to throw mud at the big guy - hurray for the common man! Boo to Big Oil, or Big Software or whatever. Remember Bill was one of us. Perhaps his biggest issue is, he didn't change gears when he went from Entrepreneur to The Man. Keep that in mind, Next Big Winner Guy.

<comment><USER11> "Bill was one of us"

No. He was never one of us. I think it is safe to assume folks here have high ethical standards, something he has repeatedly shown to lack. High ethical standards cost money, cost business and market share. It's not easy to keep them, but, I am sure most of us here do it regardless of the cost to the business, for not doing so has a much higher cost in out consciousness.

When you command a group, be it a company, a department or a bunch of kids, people will do what you want them to do and do whatever your behavior and apparent standards enable them to. If you are ruthless and have little regard for law or quality of your products, so will your team. If you are willing to break the law, they will do it for you. Many times out of loyalty.

As a leader, it is nothing but your duty to take full responsibility for the acts of your people for you are the one who enabled them.

<comment><USER10> I think he was. Ruthless in competition, shipping product on time with bugs, commanding loyalty -all laudable when you are a tiny company. Even breaking the law is relative - what Bill does became illegal only when Microsoft became a giant. Its not monopolistic practice unless you dominate the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> They do this with their xbox division too, often buying out exclusivity or paying to _dumb_ down products (so that ps3 version don't get any enhancements) and various other ways to artificially improve their product instead of truly innovating.

<comment><USER12> Sources?

<comment><USER3> GTAIV exclusive content <http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3160380>

They're also paying for CoD4:MW2 exclusives.

<comment><USER13> How is paying for exclusive content any worse or different than first party games in general?

Do you have a source for that 'dumb down' claim? Because that practice would actually support your assertion.

<comment><USER3> Because buying exclusive content is one way to artificially enhance the Xbox's value.

First party games are different from buying exclusive content because making a first party game does _not take additional effort_ to benefit the first party. Buying exclusive content is going out of their way to devalue the competition's product without directly improving their own product.

To be honest I can't find the source of the 'dumb down' claim, so it might be a bad memory. From what I can remember, the memory was associated with GTA IV, but I think it might have just been the Xbox forcing GTA IV to be dumbed down to one disc simply because of the technically inferior capabilities of the Xbox (and not because of Microsoft coercion).

<comment><USER13> Kinda like how the PS2 'forced' GTA III to be dumbed-down to run on its inferior hardware? C'mon. Developers write to the platforms they can sell on. That's not a sign of some malicious intent on the part of the platform owner.

And I'm still not buying your argument about exclusive DLC vs First Party games. Buying and maintaining first-party studios takes a hell of a lot of effort. And the entire goal of those titles is to increase the value of your platform (relatively decreasing the value of your competitors). It's the same thing. The only difference is that buying exclusive content for a multiplatform game is far, far cheaper and much less risky in this day and age.

<comment><USER3> I don't mean to say that the fact that xbox is technically inferior is some evil strategy.

Buying a developer so that they can make something exclusive is no different from buying exclusives. It is somewhat anti-competitive. If Sony does this, I'm pretty sure it's much less than Microsoft.

Buying a company after after they release a hit is different from commissioning a company to make a big hit. The former is not promoting innovation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't want to defend MS, and yes, proprietary formats are evil. But as I remember, every big company did it that way, it was just the understanding at that time.

<comment><USER15> _proprietary formats are evil._

Microsoft's "proprietary" formats are just the in-memory COM/OLE objects representing your document serialized onto the disk. They change in every release because the code changes. It's not a conspiracy (and you have a very odd definition of "evil").

<comment><USER16> It _is_ a conspiracy, as has been proven in court more than once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Keep in mind: this quote is from 10 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER18> Well, at least Billy is helping the poor in third world countries. :-)

</comment><comment><USER19> Try googling "Microsoft" and "theft."

<comment><USER20> Yes, what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> government causes this with laws that allow microsoft to sue people that create workarounds. telling people what they can do with your product after they purchase it is silly. why blame MS for simply following the incentives to make money?

<comment><USER22> Government causes this? Or does government allow this?

To think Microsoft was sitting on a huge pile of money without lobbying with some of it would be naive at best.

<comment><USER23> ...and yet, until the 1990s, Microsoft invested almost nothing in lobbying and political campaigns. Once the antitrust case entered the equation, Microsoft rapidly became interested in influencing government.

<http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000000115>

1996 contributions: $251,474

1998 contributions: $1,364,821

2000 contributions: $4,628,893

<comment><USER22> Props to you good sir for getting concrete numbers.

While 4 million isn't a lot considering how much they made during those years, it certainly shouldn't surprise anyone. Plus, that's the money that went on the books - not the all expenses paid vacations and under the table proverbial hand jobs.

Some would say that lobbying is necessary for the government to know what its people needs - but then again they listen to the LOBBYISTS and not the people who write senators letters. Flawed argument. What a concept.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Project Manager - <AUTHOR>

I am a seasoned IT/Software Project Manager looking for remote work. If you have any or know of any openings then please let me know and I will send my resume to you. Thanks! <comment><USER2> You might want to check out this link - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829042)

Also, a similar link would be setup for the month of July.

All the best!

Edit: Had the wrong link earlier.</comment>


Stop using so many divs An intro to semantic HTML - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/kenbellows/stop-using-so-many-divs-an-intro-to-semantic-html-3i9i <comment><USER2> Nice article, especially how it explains just how you can use said semantic elements for more readable source code.

And yeah, there's no reason not to use semantic HTML now, or to create sites/apps infected with divitis. Things like article, aside, footer, header, nav, section, etc have been supported in almost all browsers for years now, and main has pretty much unanimous support too. Unless you're designing for IE 8 (in which case your app probably won't work anyway), there's no reason to use so many divs.

</comment><comment><USER3> To save some bytes i like to use <i>. It makes any text italic, but that can be fixed with some styling.

<comment><USER4> The html <em> tag is the current best practice for this from my understanding.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/em](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/em)</comment></comment>


A World Without Passwords: Windows Hello in Microosft Edge - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/04/12/a-world-without-passwords-windows-hello-in-microsoft-edge/ <comment><USER2> I went and read a little on the Web Authentication spec[1].

I have a laptop, a smartphone and a tablet. Their 'use cases' section seem to imply that once I register with a site using this new auth system, I _have_ to use the same device to authorise any future login attempts - either on the same device, or on another device over USB/NFC/BLE.

So, if I register on my laptop, basically fuck any chance of being able to make use of the site on my phone/tablet when I'm away from my desk.

If I register on my phone, that means I then have to have my phone on and with me to authenticate.

If I lose/wipe/upgrade my phone, I guess I'm just fucked.

Some might argue the second is the same for 2FA, but that is not the case. The (T|H)OTP spec says nothing about what can be done with the secret that is provided, from which OTP's are generated. Consequently, I can keep a (encrypted) copy of my 2FA config, and even sync it between mobile devices, so as long as I have access to either my tablet or my phone, or a replacement for one of those that I sync the 2FA app db to, I can generate any required 2FA OTP.

If the spec doesn't allow for a user to manage the private key how they see fit (e.g. syncing to other devices they own, and/or to off-device storage) this is honestly worse than the current situation.

[1] [http://w3c.github.io/webauthn/](http://w3c.github.io/webauthn/)</comment>


TheirTube: A YouTube filter bubble simulator by Mozilla - <AUTHOR> https://www.their.tube/ <comment><USER2> Finally the times where I have to search for things to have fun are over. I am totally on board of getting funned 24/7.

Nice site. The critique of aggressive content suggestion is old. Same as with alcohol, everyone knows that it is probably a bad idea before drinking it anyway.</comment>


Charming Python #13  Functional Programming in Python (part 1) - <AUTHOR> http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming/charming_python_13.html

<comment><USER2> Don't try the functional while block at home: Python doesn't handle tail calls efficiently, so you'll take up O(number of iterations) memory, and you'll exceed the allowed maximum recursion in long loops.</comment>


Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jul/06/giant-flywheel-project-in-scotland-could-prevent-uk-blackouts-energy <comment><USER2> > This is the first time a project of this kind will be used anywhere in the > world and ESO believes it could be a "huge step forward" in running a zero- > carbon electricity grid.

I'm trying to find some stats on this, because flywheel UPS aren't a new idea:

[https://www.finning.com/en_IE/products/new/power- systems/ele...](https://www.finning.com/en_IE/products/new/power- systems/electric-power-generation/ups-flywheel/18499752.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_storage_power_system#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_storage_power_system#Power_grid_frequency_control)

<comment><USER3> What is different in this case is it is not really an energy storage system (at least that is not the main intended purpose), but only to provide stability to the grid frequency. A huge flywheel in a vacuum to provide a reference to millions of distributed PLLs. I don't think the idea is to always have it spin at a fixed rate with minimal losses.

In the case where a flywheel is used as a UPS, the rate at which it is spinning will vary in accordance with the stored energy.

<comment><USER4> You can get constant spin rate but variable energy storage / release by adjusting the moment of inertia, e.g. if you have movable weights within the rotor you can move these inboard or outboard, moving it inboard uses energy while increasing the spin rate, and moving it outboard releases energy while slowing the rate. Using this in combination with "conventional" direct axle energy input / release means you can store or release energy from the system as a whole while also keeping a constant rate (within the bounds of the total energy storage capacity of the system).

<comment><USER5> Is this used in practice? It sounds like a rather substantial engineering challenging considering how much energy the wheel is storing. I remember MIT had one of these for sparking the old tokomak, they had to plan for it to fall off, destroy several buildings without killing anyone, and then land in the river... and that was a solid wheel that did nothing but spin.

But isn't the point that it provides inertia towards stabilizing the frequency? I don't think it matters whether you can vary the energy stored if it's just acting as a, well, wheel... if the goal is to give you a bit more time to bring more generation online or take it offline then it seems like a simple system would be fine. It's not storing power, so it can only ever slow the drift to give more flexibility.

<comment><USER4> As you say, I suspect it probably isn't used much in grid scale applications. The device image in the article would imply that it is just a simple damper, i.e. the angular momentum acts to reduce any frequency change, up or down. It doesn't look like it does any storage, but then the article is somewhat content free.

<comment><USER6> What you are describing is essentially a centrifugal governor: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor), I think?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Those things have interesting failure modes. Will they have to be buried underground, or is this somehow a solved problem?

<comment><USER8> What happens if the grid frequency disagrees too much with the rotation frequency of the flywheel, too quickly?

The flywheel disintegrates and turns into a massive spherical weapon of mass distruction?

Like this, but 20x worse?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdcE3VyKv5U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdcE3VyKv5U)

<comment><USER9> The spinning flywheel doesn't just spin on its own. It gets spun up and kept spinning by an electric motor/generator I have to imagine. So you're limited as to how much power can go in or out by the size of that motor/generator.

If it's a 100kw peak electrical machine then it can provide at most 100kw of instantaneous power to the grid while at the same time slowing down by however much is required to deliver that power.

If I understand correctly the idea is a lot like capacitors for DC voltage. The DC voltage has to go down in order for the capacitor to supply current, but the capacitor ensures that the voltage can't go down as quickly as it would otherwise.

<comment><USER7> Thats not the theoretical limit though. This is a physical device with moving parts. What if the bearing fails? What if the weight disintegrates due to a manufacturing fault?

Suddenly all that stored energy wants to go somewhere.

<comment><USER10> The flywheel will have breakers to prevent excessive inflow or outflow of power.

In a conventional plant, the spinning machinery is monitored by vibration sensors. If the vibration exceeds some threshold, a "Turbine Trip" occurs and the offending generator is disconnected from the grid. It then slowly spins down, dissipating energy via it's own friction.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbine_trip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbine_trip)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone have any real information about this project? The Guardian article is essentially the same as the press releases on both GE's and Statkraft's web sites and says nothing about the scale of the project.

<comment><USER12> They say it's a 25M pound budget, and show a model about 2x the height of a person, so it looks like it may just be that single unit. The moment of inertia looks comparable to that of a large steam turbine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This discussion of a test flywheel installation in California seems a lot more interesting than this article.

[https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2019publications/CEC-500-2019-012/...](https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2019publications/CEC-500-2019-012/CEC-500-2019-012.pdf)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the link. It is heartening to see utility-scale storage for a reasonable cost being developed.

20 years ago, there were a couple companies working on flywheel energy storage for mobile applications. They were using carbon-fiber flywheels, which could spin up to 100K RPM, but were expensive to manufacture. I would have predicted (back then) that carbon-fiber would have won out eventually for infrastructure applications as well, but I guess they were not able to get the costs down sufficiently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does it make sense for a flywheel to have a horizontal axis of rotation, as shown in the concept image? Seems like that would be the hard way, from the standpoint of engineering.

<comment><USER15> It's axis must be parallel with the Earth's axis, otherwise the earth's rotation would generate enormous gyroscopic forces.

<comment><USER13> Interesting. Why does every other flywheel on the market have a vertical axis (that is, normal to the surface of the Earth, regardless of the place it is installed)?

I was thinking more about the fatigue of the shaft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a consequence of the UK having little capacity for pumped-storage, i.e. hydro-electric. We don't really have the height, and we have "areas of outstanding natural beauty" that cannot be built in easily, so we need alternatives to store the energy.

The rest of the world just builds a dam, creates a new lake, and moves on.

<comment><USER17> Cofiwch Dryweryn!

<comment><USER18> And people say Hungarian is hard...

<comment><USER19> Lol. Reminds me of The Crown where Price Charles is learning Welsh.

However, at least all the letters are familiar. Asian languages are at least an order of magnitude harder for westerners.

<comment><USER18> In Irish, at least, the letters being familiar doesn't help when they sound totally different.

When I moved here, I arrogantly stated I was going to learn Irish. I'm humbled now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This sounds like a fancy syncon. They have been a thing in power network engineering for a long time.

I can believe it has "new features" but the underlying mechanics of a Syncon are not new. This may just be something good, being over sold by a company with an interest in boosting.

<comment><USER21> This looks like the electrical equivalent of a weir

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> [https://www.goodnewsfinland.com/teraloop-secures- eur-2-4-mil...](https://www.goodnewsfinland.com/teraloop-secures- eur-2-4-million-grant/) \- There's a Finnish company called Teraloop who've been chipping away at a more Sci-Fi version involving maglev and evacuated loops.

Life gets difficult for this model because the heat induced due to current 'turbulence' and maybe skin effect gets 'stuck' inside the chamber. Fun engineering problems.

<comment><USER23> Even more Sci-Fi (I think; I couldn't find definitive figures as to the size Teraloop aims for): [https://www.ecn.nl/news/item/floating-train-at-2000-kmh- set-...](https://www.ecn.nl/news/item/floating-train-at-2000-kmh-set-to- store-10-of-dutch-electricity/). I don't know whether that idea died on the drawing table since 2015, but I guess it could have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why do we care about keeping frequency stable when more and more products simply put the power through a rectifier to turn it to DC? The lamps all have LED "bulbs". The computers have power bricks.

Do we really care if the compressors in the air conditioners and the refrigerators turn at a slightly different rate? Okay, maybe a rapid shift in frequency could be damaging, but a slight drift sounds okay mechanically.

Or am I wrong?

<comment><USER25> In the electrical grid, frequency is proportional to voltage. When the frequency drops, it means that the supplied voltage is also falling. Likewise, if you go over-frequency, then the voltage will rise.

Traditionally, the inertia of thousands of tons of spinning generator turbines across the system provided this inertia, but with more and more nonlinear sources (and also nonlinear loads), that balance is disappearing.

<comment><USER26> Batteries are also becoming popular for the same reason. The more batteries you have the easier it is to deal with fluctuations in supply and demand as you can switch them on and off in milliseconds and they can serve to both supply GW to the grid or absorb it from the grid.

Flywheels are useful because they store a lot of energy and don't require a lot of energy to keep them spinning (i.e. topped up with energy). Simply connecting them to a generator can be done (relatively) quickly and allows them to supply power for a relatively long period of time. It's basically a mechanical battery.

Both have the advantage that they are cheaper to operate than a typical peaker plant, which is increasingly the role of remaining coal plants that are otherwise too expensive by orders of magnitudes to operate continuously. Switching those on is a last resort for energy companies. The more battery they have, the less need they have for those. And the less they get utilized, the more expensive they are to keep around. Gas plants are better but they take a long time to turn off and on again and doing that is also not cheap.

Prices have actually turned negative a couple of times in e.g. the UK in cases where the power companies were literally paying people to use their excess power just so they could avoid having to turn off plants that are expensive to turn back on. Basically, grid storage capacity allows electricity companies to smooth out peaks in demand and supply and respond extremely rapidly by either soaking up or supplying many GW.

<comment><USER27> Also worth noting:

We haven't even burned coal for the purposes of providing power[0] since the 11th of May. That's the longest period without coal being burned since 1882.

[0] Sort of. A couple of coal plants underwent maintenance and had to be fired up and provide power to fully test them. We had a total of around 21 hours of coal plants supplying energy and we're now at day 18 of a coal-free run, and prior to the test we had almost 68 days!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't really know a lot about energy. Is this similar to something like Energy Vault[0] or is stabilizing the frequency different to storing power for later use.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn5AM75AGvw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn5AM75AGvw)

<comment><USER29> This energy vault device will not work for a couple of reasons. Like the astonishingly low energy density of such a structure or the difficulty in running and maintaining the cranes to pull the weights. It is basically a mechanical version of pumped hydroelectric energy storage; just clunky and inefficient.

Flywheels store orders of magnitude more power per ton and have very low reaction times (in the order of milliseconds).

This makes them great for frequency control which just means really short term energy storage.

The power grids frequency is directly co-related with the power throughput. If there is too much demand the frequency will drop.

A flywheel can quite easily buffer very short term demands and flatten the somewhat erratic output of wind turbines or solar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How big and how fast must a flywheel be to perturb Earth's rotation, in a similar method of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_moment_gyroscope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_moment_gyroscope)

<comment><USER31> The rotational energy of the planet is absolutely massive. I don't remember the numbers but you'd need _millions_ of atomic bombs fired at once just to make a dent - and it would still not affect the orbit of this now radioactive fireball at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wasn't aware blackouts were a significant problem in the UK. Great device for moving away from fossil fuels though

<comment><USER33> They aren't particularly, but there was a fairly large one last year, and grid stability is become harder as more and more of its energy comes from renewables (as the article mentions, the grid is favoring fossil fuel power sometimes in order to keep things stable).

<comment><USER16> This might interest you:

[https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2019/12/10/watch-a-power- st...](https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2019/12/10/watch-a-power-station- demolition-2/)

"The power plant was notable for being one of the few that could restart generating electricity without an external power to restart its generators in case of a wide-scale power-outage. This was partly due to cold-war concerns that an attack could take out London power supplies.

To be able to restart the plant, it made use of versions of jet engines based on those used on Concorde to jump start the main generators — and they were used to keep the lights on following the October 1987 storms."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> well, assuming scotland doesn't leave...

<comment><USER18> The United Celtic Republic of Scotland and Ireland (and Wales?) will be more than happy to export angular momentum to its less enlightened neighbors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Feels like friction would eat away a lot of electricity, no?

<comment><USER36> Flywheels (no matter their size) can be operated in near vacuum with magnetic bearings[0]. Friction can be really low. A funny aside is that they have to be aligned with earth's rotation so they don't resist it.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_bearing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_bearing)

<comment><USER35> Thank you for the response.

My thought is that the weight of the flywheel matters. To be able to absorb / release a tremendous amount of power, I imagine this flywheel would need to be very heavy. If so, wouldn't it non-linearly differ in efficiency from the near vacuum & magnetic bearing designs we've built before?

Perhaps the proposal is to build a large array of smaller flywheels that don't have to deal with the problem I imagine?

I'm not familiar with any part of engineering here -- just a curious soul -- sincerely asking!

<comment><USER36> Not that I know much about flywheel engineering. But machines tend to become more efficient the bigger you build them.

With flywheels, I don't see the bearings as difficult. I mean it's sure a challenge to keep a few tons afloat, but nothing unsolved. I'd assume (but don't know) that you can scale magnetic bearings a few orders of magnitude with their properties staying the same.

On the other hand, the faster you spin flywheels, the more energy they store. And here comes the limitation: The material they're made of has to sustain all tearing force. So at some point you'll add mass instead of spinning faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > will not generate electricity or produce carbon emissions

There is still a tonne of carbon used in creation...

<comment><USER38> Certainly less than 1/100 second of daily global emissions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Haven't these been around forever? I went on a tour of a university tokomak in the 80's and they had some giant flywheel for short-burst electrical energy.

</comment><comment><USER40> Framing a flywheel as a "simulation of a turbine" is really bizarre, unless there's something quite weird about this particular flywheel that the article fails to make clear.

<comment><USER3> It is to mimic the spinning turbine generators, which themselves act as flywheels, but in this case without the turbine part. The rotational inertia gives stability in that the frequency cannot suddenly change. I thought that was quite clear from the article?

<comment><USER40> The article isn't unclear, it's just weird. Smoothing out the input power is doubtlessly the most common purpose of a flywheel, second to power storage, and both of those is what this flywheel is for too. Describing a flywheel in terms of a turbine due to turbines acting as flywheels is the part that's weird.

<comment><USER41> As somebody without the domain knowledge, I thought the article did a great job of making it clear what the flywheel is doing (though of course it could be misleading in some way and I wouldn't know). I'm honestly a little confused as to the nature of your objection about which object is described in the context of the other.

<comment><USER40> I'm not 'objecting' to anything and I don't think it's misleading. I just think it's weird to describe a simple machine in terms of a more complex machine by pointing out that in one aspect the more complex machine is doing what the simpler machine does.

It's like describing a light-switch in terms of relays. Not wrong, not even misleading, but normally you'd expect the comparison to be made the other way around; describing relays in terms of light-switches or the rotational inertia of turbines in terms of flywheels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Same article, no registration required. This site touts "Powered by The Guardian" and does not appear to be a scraper:

[http://www.execreview.com/2020/07/giant-flywheel-project- in-...](http://www.execreview.com/2020/07/giant-flywheel-project-in-scotland- could-prevent-uk-blackouts/)

<comment><USER43> Looks like a content-stealing site thinking adding a PNG that credits the original source is enough to keep them away from trouble...

The Guardian's registration nag keeps getting worse and worse, but there is still a button labelled "Not now" to bypass it.

<comment><USER44> It's from the Guardian Open Platform[1], which has a clause in the TOS[2] requiring that that the "Powered By The Guardian" logo be displayed where you display Guardian content

> Include a "Powered by The Guardian" logo (or such other Guardian logo as we > may require from time to time) on the same webpage as any republished OP > Content, or any tool or function that is based on OP Content. Such logo must > be a reproduction of the "Powered By" file found at > [http://www.theguardian.com/open- > platform/logos](http://www.theguardian.com/open-platform/logos), and comply > with any special terms set out by us. The "Powered by The Guardian" logo > must not be used in conjunction with any content other than the OP Content.

[1] [https://open-platform.theguardian.com/](https://open- platform.theguardian.com/)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/open-platform/terms-and- conditio...](https://www.theguardian.com/open-platform/terms-and-conditions)</comment></comment></comment>