Under Windows it's very rare to have trouble to running software. When you have trouble it's usually due to some security considerations or because you're using something which has roots in other operating systems.
MacOS & Linux are nothing like this. You can run most software, as most of the basis for modern software on those stacks is available in source form and can be maintained. Software which isn't breaks.
Apple/Google with their mobile OSes take that a step further, most older software is broken on those platforms.
The way they've kept compatibility within Windows is something I really love about the platform.. but it I keep wondering if there's a way to get the best of both worlds. Can you keep the compatibility layer as an adhoc thing, running under emulation, so that the core OS can be rationalised?
In fairness, closed source software is a very very tiny minority of the software available on Linux, which is why ABI backwards-compatibility hasn't been much of a concern. In that respect, it's essentially the polar opposite of Windows and even MacOS.
However, it'd be very nice if it did become more of a focus (especially in the glibc/audio/glx areas), especially now that gaming has become very popular on Linux.
Trying to get old, closed-source games like Unreal Tournament to work on Linux can be a real chore.
I'm not so sure, I like the Linux model of 99.999% of the code you'll run being available in source form. The result is that we have that code running everywhere.
It's a crying shame that we didn't build out nuclear in the 1980s as we would have been in an excellent position had we done that. Instead we have the Chinese taking 30 years to build our new reactor.
The French buildout was very definitely a reaction to the oil crisis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ki... describes a similar process of thinking in the UK, which was abandoned in favor of privatizing the industry, and the PWRs were never built apart from Sizewell B.
I suspect the arrival of North Sea oil and gas eased the energy concerns in the 1980s.
> Instead we have the Chinese taking 30 years to build our new reactor.
It's still owned by the same company that operates all the French nuclear reactors, EDF, and I suspect that most of the people doing the actual work on site are British. China can certainly build new reactors in China. I wonder if it's same the general disease of Western project management which causes high speed rail to get more and more expensive and less feasible.
One of Labour's more important policies is to repair the damage that the Tories did to the energy production system. The UK has a huge amount of potential wind energy just from off-shoring. Hopefully they'll start building onshore too and closing more of these ugly and polluting biomass plants.
The electricity system has done most of its decarbonising under either the coalition or Conservative governments, they used quite a lot of the machinery (the CfDs, capacity market, etc) setup at the end of the last Labour government but it has been the subsequent governments that have chose the annual budgets for the auctions as well as setting up the carbon budget system.
There have been only two things that I would regard as material mistakes in this time:
First, not adjusting the max strike price for offshore wind in AR5.
Second, changing the planning rules to make it very hard to build onshore wind.
Everything else, including things like the offshore bootstraps / HND which are now receiving FID (like EGL2 which was just approved), the upcoming decision on zonal pricing, and most of all the massive buildout of solar and offshore wind generation and battery storage has happened under previous governments.
It's arguably the only area of policy which has gone quite well over the last decade, so I'm intrigued which damage you have in mind.
Are there that many biomass plants? Or is it just Drax? Which is something of an asterisk in the "no coal" story, in that the UK's largest coal burner is still running, just on imported wood pellets. Supposedly from sawmill waste in the US and Canada. I'm not sure how "green" that really is.
I once did a back of the envelope calculation that if you tried to run Drax on domestic timber only you would consume every tree in the country within a year.
> Hopefully they'll start building onshore too and closing more of these ugly and polluting biomass plants
What's the issue with these? Biomass plants take the energy from biologically degradable farm and food waste that would otherwise decompose and degrade, releasing its energy as methane and other byproducts into the atmosphere, on either farm fields (where it contributes to overfertilization of fields and water bodies by runoff) or on dung piles/compost heaps.
Modern farming, particularly livestock farming, produces an awful lot of such waste that needs to be taken care of, and small but livestock-intensive countries such as Denmark or the Netherlands have to ship the biowaste across the EU because by EU regulations and practicality they cannot dispose of it domestically.
Biomass reactors make the process a whole lot easier. They take the biowaste, extract all energy they can by having bacteria and fungi break it down, burn the gas for electricity and district/local heating, and the solid remainder can then be landfilled safely.
There are biowaste plants, I think there is one in thetford, but they are dirty and produce more CO2 per kwhr than gas (from what I recall, do check that first.) The thetford one is an incinerator, so requires a lot of processing to remove water.
> Netherlands have to ship the biowaste
thats because its really high in nitrates, and will kill waterlife should it run off.
> Biomass reactors make the process a whole lot easier.
not at scale. They are dirty, difficult to run and are dangerous at large scale. They often need to be heated. They also use a lot of water.
You can use it to generate low grade heat though. but needs to be mixed with something like straw so that the balance of sloppy to twiggy is right (not a technical term...)
> In 2020, the Boris Johnson-led government decided to permit onshore wind power, and since December 2021 onshore wind developers have been able to compete in subsidy auctions with solar power and offshore wind.
Adding my reply that explains why your claim that there hasn't been a ban since 2021 is only technically correct while actually misleading as to the real effects (to this comment that's in a more prominent thread).
Yes, there hasn't technically been a universal ban since a few years ago, but until this year legislation basically allowed NIMBY's to veto any new onshore wind farms with no way for local authorities to force approval through, which is why less than ten new onshore wind projects were approved England in 2021-23 compared to hundreds in Scotland.
So sure, not officially a ban but it was effectively a ban.
Nuclear plants are essentially identical levels of ugly to coal: from the outside both are concrete cuboids with cooling towers.
Aesthetics are not a reason either way, or the UK wouldn't have had brutalism.
Actual reason is that nuclear is expensive, while wind is much cheaper even after adding costs for storage etc.
Also that the UK can't cross-subsidise the power plants from the military because they no longer have a big enough military to justify the nuclear weapons they already have, let alone a big enough militarily to justify the capability to breed more plutonium.
I've been using .Net since 2002, as my main framework since 2007 and have always stayed on the edge (as part of alt.net, the part of the community who pushed .net core and basically the entire .net team nowadays).
So for the last 6 months I've been using golang. I really like it. Fast, simple, native.... but it's like using tonka toys compared to .net core. It's slower for webservices and everything is just more work. Yes being a wizard with .net and only decently productive in golang is a difference but that's not it. It's just nowhere near as mature as a language or ecosystem.
And it is moving so much faster in runtime/compiler improvements. Implementation wise, it outdoes the Go at things Go is renown for.
The only last, and most critical piece of the puzzle that's missing is laser focus on simplicity of implementation. It is improving, but if you use generic composition and very terse writing style ala Rust traits and impl., pass data by `ref T`, occasionally manually manage the memory, you soon enough have people up in arms about this kind of unorthodox approach in the sphere of line of business applications (even when it tolerates that in other lower-level or just more limited languages, everything has to be abstracted away and very wordy).
Exactly, if I'd have started this project then I would have used .Net. We don't need to support native / cgo. Without that C# is better in every way.
I'd like there to be some kind of profile / compiler level support so we can do full manual memory management (stealing from Rust as you say) but also to be easily able to forbid that within our own projects. I don't want my frontend developers doing silly things :-)
It's that golden hour where AU/NZ are up, Californian nerds are up and chilling and EU/UK are getting their first (or second) dose of caffeine. Just missing our East-Coast buddies :-)
Reading the original post, wouldn't be a super cool idea to make a little ESP or RPI based system which acted as a controller for the airco and a network bridge? Then literally anything could interface with it. You wouldn't even need to wire it up. No need to install some shitty app from a company who are quite clearly c*ts.
I'm sure that they made things more difficult by employing proprietary hardware wherever they can (also to discourage competition), but yes, there are a bunch of sensors and actuators in there and any board with the appropriate i/o capabilities should be able to interface to them, however writing a working firmware would be next to a nightmare: how do you find developers who want to spend months reverse engineering an AC and also know enough about ACs to put together something that works?
Replacing household appliances brains with open counterparts would be a heck of a business opportunity to revive or prolong the life of dead/obsolete products, however I guess finding people who are interested enough to do that with FOSS, essentially selling only hardware and installation services would be really hard.
It's just a pin out interface controlled via software to turn things on or off. Its trivial. Get a raspberry pie, lookup the pinout docs stuffed away in your home manuals drawer, and write the measly logic required. The most difficult part is whipping up a UI and building the scheduling logic, if want/need it.
I think they mean splitting the "Number" [0] type into an integer type and a decimal type.
Currently the "Number" type is used for every number and it gets stored as a double, and can "only" represent "integers" safely in the range of ±(2^53 -1).
Though there is a "BigInt" [1] type.
* Integer types of various sizes (for efficiency) and so you don't have to constantly do floating point comparisons (i.e. equal within a small delta) and generally have better compatibility with other languages.
* Decimal floating point type so you can work in base-10 and don't have rounding issues.
Plus all of the error checking you get for free if you're using typescript instead of raw-dogging it with plain javascript or coffee-script :-)
I feel bad for the people blindly defending him, many of his videos are wrong [1] and his viewers end up incorrectly learning a lot technical stuff, especially when there're actual knowledgeable youtubers out there.
He is fairly accurate about topics I have expertise on - modding of the PS1 / PS2 / GC / Xbox / Wii - and has his explanations of videos he made on 8/16-bit generations have been accurate.
I can't say much about his videos linked in another post (about PS1 shimmering) as I haven't touched graphics programming / APIs (beyond coding a very basic 3d rendering engine which ran on the CPU).
After reading some of the linked discussions - yes he does appear to have posted some bullshit. That doesn't make all of his content bullshit though, and doesn't make him "non technical". The fact that he has shipped several games on constrained platforms is proof that he is technical.
He does now go into the same box as I put 99.9% of content creators in - entertaining but don't trust them on the details.
I do not believe for a second that < 50% of Roblox users are > 13. Two of my three kids all have their ages set to 13+ because they decided to combine the age-related features you do want (limited chat, no tracking etc) with the content lock. I'm happy for my kids to play "Tree-house of Horrors" style games but not to be groomed by older player. Yet Roblox has no option for it.
@decremental nah I used it to teach them, I also regularly check their messages in game. Most of the problems they have are other kids screaming racist things or swearing.
MacOS & Linux are nothing like this. You can run most software, as most of the basis for modern software on those stacks is available in source form and can be maintained. Software which isn't breaks.
Apple/Google with their mobile OSes take that a step further, most older software is broken on those platforms.
The way they've kept compatibility within Windows is something I really love about the platform.. but it I keep wondering if there's a way to get the best of both worlds. Can you keep the compatibility layer as an adhoc thing, running under emulation, so that the core OS can be rationalised?
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