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Ah, yes, apologies. KWh should have been MWh, I'll edit the comment above. Thanks for the correction.

I'd be more inclined to sympathize if it had actually worked. As it stands it is a perfect example of how little knowledge of what goes on under the hood is present with the current generation of programmers. That's sad, because even if you never use that knowledge in your 'day job' I think that such knowledge does make you a better programmer.

If you write a blog post about something like this at least finish the damn thing rather than to leave a bunch of obviously wrong snippets laying around to confuse whoever lands on that page.

There are plenty of good pages on introductory assembler on the web, this isn't one of those and I'm really surprised to see it this high on the homepage. Maybe it shows how much the HN crowd would like to get a little bit of insight of what actually powers their computers, the error is mine in assuming that such knowledge would be commonplace here.

> No details about the planned solar panel array or its potential power output are known at this time

Taking the 171 acre figure we can compute at least the limits of what it could do.

171 acres is about 700,000 square meters. At a solar incidence of about 1 KW / square meter and an efficiency of 23% that's 161 MW peak power and an average of 4.7 sun hours per day will give about 750 MWh of usable electricity every day.

This calculation ignores shading effects and assumes that the panels will be stationary rather than tracking, you could probably easily deduct another 50% to account for those effects, so say 375 MWh give or take and 80 MW peak. Likely these figures are still very high, think of it as the maximum amount of solar power that you could extract at that location from incident sunlight without further accounting for conversion losses (solar panels produce DC, you'll need inverters if you want AC power, some data center equipment can run on 48V DC but you'd still need a conversion step for that) and so on.

I wonder how big a chunk of the total power requirements for a datacenter that size will be covered by this PV system, to be 100% effective it would have to be sized at least 6 times larger than the total power consumption of the DC, using the grid as a storage system.

Very large numbers of Amazon servers are used for something else than cranking out HTTP pages. Expect a lot of them to be crunching numbers for bio-informatics problems, physics simulations and so on. That's why there is a CUDA enabled instance.

Rendering web pages is actually one of the worst use cases for Amazon from a bang-for-the-buck perspective, especially when you factor in bandwidth.

At a guess, then you'll mail your daemon to fetch the page, to be mailed back by the daemon?

You don't hire a missionary with a vision to pat yourself or your audience on the back.

That's like expecting Sylvester Stallone to do higher mathematics or Mother Theresa to do an arms deal for you.

Some people are what they are and their environment/audience will have to accept them as they are.

The problem lies squarely with the person that hired him, the abstract of the speeches listed should have adequately explained what they were going to get. That's exactly what that rider exists for in the first place, to avoid misunderstandings like that.

I highly doubt if RMS could even tailor his speech to the occasion, he must know it by heart by now except for the Q&A part.

What I found interesting on reading the 'rider' is that he still refers to the GNU operating system as though it is in daily use. I've yet to see a HURD based system do anything useful in production but half the world wide web seems to run on Linux these days. Of course linux is 'merely a kernel'.

But if you write free software the you also give away the right to name that software, after all, a fork is under no obligation to be named after the parent. So RMS holding on to insisting to call Linux GNU/Linux looks to be against the self-imposed freedoms.

But you do remember the talk and you are still willing to promote it, so from his point of view that's mission accomplished.

You either have a maid or you are a maid. Even some of the maids have maids, go figure.

So, 3 years ago you'd have called it revolutionary.

Technology moves so fast these days that if you don't place the bar for your product sufficiently high you won't be able to get happy customers even if you give it away.

One of the most tiring responses to a comment is 'did you read the article'. Yes, of course I read the article.

I thought of doing a 'point by point' because that seems to be the only way to respond a pile of nonsense like this without getting that particular response.

I choose not to because that would be overlong and it would not add anything.

The only thing this article shows is that if you use your creativity that you can stretch any term to mean anything. The only other party that I'm aware of that plays word and mindgames like this with its audience is scientology.

If you don't want to be a part of society you're free to opt-out, or to organize politically in order to effect change that makes society into what you want it to be.

No slave ever had that option, and no modern day slave has that option.

The author makes it seem as though we are all part of some gigantic mechanism that enslaves us all, and that we collectively would be better off by following his 4 step plan to 'independence', but he fails to notice that his 4 step plan simply leads to a much higher level of dependency but on different entities (aka customers).

Society is built on those dependencies, we enter into them voluntarily and there is absolutely nothing wrong with them.

Bad choices lead to feeling bad, so think before you commit to something, including starting a business.

Fast forward 4 years and we'll be seeing blog posts about 'how I'm going to free myself from being a slave of my customers'.

Slavery has absolutely nothing to do with it, not even in spirit or peripherally. Entanglement is a meaningless term, we already have a word that fits perfectly well: citizenship, which happens to have the opposite meaning of being a slave.

They didn't have much choice in the matter. For a few months now there is a torrent floating around with most of this stuff in it.

That first referenced paper is very much in 'don't try this at home' territory.