You should look up the NTPC chairman's explanation for why average PLF runs below 75%.
Apparently, the transmission & distribution network for evacuation is overburdened already. This results in plants running below their rated capacities.
That's not true. As anyone in the power industry will tell you, Indian coal, tho voluminous in availability, has a relatively very low calorific content and relatively much higher Ash content. As a result, disposal of ash is far more expensive than project economics can sustain. As a result, imported coal IS the standard, domestic coal may be used as a supplement, and long term supply contracts from local traders who import from sites in Indonesia, et al. is commonplace.
Also, you're absolutely wrong about imported coal plants being rare. I don't know of any critical or super critical plants that could use 100% domestic coal without having to blatantly lie on their EIA study about ash disposal. It's just not viable.
Don't know what your sources are but see this article based on coal ministry data which suggest coal imports are a small fraction of India consumption and rapidly coming down. Specifically to your point - "Goyal added that no power producer has approached CIL for supply of imported coal this year."
Dell's focus on selling cheaper laptops has resulted in treating the consumer as fungible; and that's the reason for their absolutely appalling customer service.
You're starting to see this across industries where their products and services are commoditized. Quite surprisingly, when the service / product turns into a commodity (due to competition), so does the customer (due to budgetary constraints)
I understand why this school bought the laptops they did, but I have to point out: The support costs of the requested help for these laptops outweigh the actual laptops themselves value, and certainly Dell's profit in it. Cheap laptops include cheap support.
If the school had purchased business-line PCs which are more suited to large organization use, they'd likely A. have gotten much better laptops, and B. gotten drastically better, on-site next day repairs.
But that costs about five times what they paid. So while I acknowledge, this situation sucks for the school, I kinda feel like we need to point out that they got what they paid for.
They paid for the warranty assigned to whatever cheap laptop Dell sold them. It's now up to Dell to honor that warranty in a reasonable manner. It's not the customer's fault if Dell miscalculated the cost of providing the unit. That's Dell's calculation to make.
That would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that they got blamed for being the cause of the faulty equipment when in fact it had nothing to do with them!
Just wondering: would refurbished core-duo Thinkpads with something like neverware's ChromeOS on them be a better way forward for a cash strapped school?
Cheap to buy, the machines have survived N years so by a Darwinian process any clunkers have been removed from the pool and they are built to a decent standard to start with. ChromeOS would imply cloud storage so students don't lose work &c. Depends on the use cases I imagine.
kinda describes what's going on in developing countries too. The lack of innovation in developing country might have almost nothing to do with the previously popular and highly peddled concept of "inferior races"
Humans are wired for scarcity, but scarcity thinking is bad economics. We need to realize and own our power and start thinking in positive sum race to the top terms instead of fear based austerity terms.
I started off disagreeing with your statement but as I read further, I became a believer. In fact, "gotcha" and other trick questions are the worst, but understanding CS fundamentals shows that you were paying attention in class and are probably interested (if not passionate) about CS.
If not, there are hundreds of other openings that the candidate can apply to.
I actually used a tool from CMU (link below) to convert the names to their pronunciations, represented as a series of phonemes or sounds. I then simply compare the similarities in the sound representation of the different names. It's an extremely simple algorithm, but it works pretty well.
I loved this article. Not just the term "AI", I've seen startups abuse the terms "machine learning" and "big data" to such an extent that it literally makes me cringe when I hear them.
How many times have you seen a TechCrunch article where the writer parrots the buzzwords the founder has thrown at them such as "x uses machine learning to sync your contacts with the cloud".
Apparently, the transmission & distribution network for evacuation is overburdened already. This results in plants running below their rated capacities.