Yaztromo @ Yaztromo @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

All coal from the Earth has a radioactive component to it. Burning coal releases more radiation into the atmosphere than a properly functioning nuclear reactor ever does. Fly ash from coal fired power plants contains 100 times more radiation than nuclear power plants emit.

The idiots on here apparently also think that burning coal somehow doesn’t create waste that will last for longer than humanity has existed.

I’m not sure what’s keeping Microsoft and ibm from Open Sourcing all the rest of the DOS versions as well — the 3.x series was very influential, 5 added disk compression, and 6 was the most modern of them all. I can’t remember if Stac’s lawsuit against Microsoft would require them to take out the disk compression parts (although AFAIK the relevant patents are probably long expired now), but even if that’s the case having these available as OSS would also be useful — even if only for a historical context.

To put things into context, IBM didn’t get ripped off in any way (at least not from DOS - the whole IBM/Microsoft OS/2 debacle is a different story). The earliest PCs (IBM PC, IBM PC XT, IBM PC Jr., and associated clones) didn’t really have the hardware capabilities needed to permit a more advanced operating system. There was no flat memory model, no protection rings, and no Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB). The low maximum unpaged memory addressing limit (1MB) made it difficult to run more than one process at a time, and really limits how much OS you can have active on the machine (modern Windows by way of example reserves 1GB of virtual RAM per process just for kernel memory mapping).

These things did exist on mainframe and mini computers of the day — so the ideas and techniques weren’t unknown — but the cheaper IBM PCs had so many limitations that those techniques were mostly detrimental (there were some pre-emptive OSs for 8086/8088 based PCs, but they had a lot of limitations, particularly around memory management and protection), if not outright impossible. Hence the popularity of DOS in its day — it was simple, cheap, didn’t require a lot of resources, and mostly stayed out of the way of application development. It worked reasonably well given the limitations of the platforms it ran on, and the expectations of users.

So IBM did just fine from that deal — it was when they went in with Microsoft to replace DOS with a new OS that did feature pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, and other modern techniques that they got royally screwed over by Microsoft (vis: the history of OS/2 development).

As someone who has done some OS dev, it’s not likely to be of much help. DOS didn’t have much of any of the defining features of most modern OS’s — it barely had a kernel, there was no multitasking, no memory management, no memory protection, no networking, and everything ran at the same privilege level. What little bit of an API was there was purely through a handful of software interrupts — otherwise, it was up to your code to communicate with nearly all the hardware directly (or to communicate with whatever bespoke device driver your hardware required).

This is great for anyone that wants to provide old-school DOS compatibility, and could be useful in the far future to aid in “digital archaeology” (i.e.: being able to run old 80’s and early 90’s software for research and archival purposes on “real DOS”) — but that’s about it. DOS wasn’t even all that modern for its time — we have much better tools to use and learn from for designing OS’s today.

As a sort of historical perspective this is useful, but not likely for anything else.

AWS already had to effectively do this. AWS only exists in two regions in China because they licensed much of the AWS software to be run by a pair of Chinese-government affiliated ISPs inside China (that is, Amazon doesn’t run AWS in either of its China zones — it’s run by a pair of Chinese companies who license AWS’s software).

This is why the China AWS regions are often quite far behind in terms of functionality from every other region (they either haven’t licensed all the functionality, they don’t keep up-to-date at the same cadence as Amazon, or Amazon is holding certain functions back), and why you can’t really access them from the standard AWS console.

So in effect, Amazon did have to give their software to Chinese-government affiliated companies in order to continue operating in China.

Likely well deserved — but still unfortunate. The EV space only benefits from more options and more competition.

Image for a moment how we Computer Scientists feel. We invented the most brilliant tools humanity has ever conceived of, bringing the entire world to nearly anyone’s fingertips — and people use it to design and perpetuate pathetic brain-rot garbage like Gab.ai and anti-science conspiracy theories.

Fucking Eternal September…

Truly “poor people” (to use your words) typically don’t buy a lot of new cars in the first place. People on the lower end of the income scale are the main drivers of the used vehicle market.

Incentivizing EV purchases and infrastructure ultimately helps everyone. It will bring efficiencies to the supply chain, and will drive investment into resources that should help drive prices down. At the same time, within the next 5 years or so you should see growth in the used EV market, which as more stock becomes available and used EVs become more normalized should make them more economical to purchase (as they’re already more economical to run and maintain).

More new EVs now means more used EVs down the road, which will allow people to get into a better car for less money.

Got a T-Mobile eSIM while travelling in the US last year to get around this. The eSIM was a great deal (can’t remember the specifics, but pretty cheap with a decent amount of data). I was making two trips to California and Georgia in the same 30 day window, so it was useful to have.

The only downside was that I couldn’t activate the eSIM before getting to the US, and LAX didn’t appear to have any WiFi while we were there (not sure if that was generally true for the time, or if it was just offline). So I wound up having to roam to get the eSIM, and to get a text message from the shuttle that was picking us up from the airport (as I had to give them that in advance, and didn’t know what my US number would be until I got there).

Still saved us some money, but it was a bit of a PITA to activate with no WiFi available at the airport.

First — stop giving them ideas! 🤣

Second, a small rock and some tape would likely defeat that.

EV charging doesn’t require you to stand around for 5 minutes holding a handle to fuel up. The charging times are longer, but once plugged in your need to stay anywhere near the vehicle is zero. And plugging in usually takes less than 5s.

So even if someone came up with a system whereby they expected you to watch an ad before the power would flow, you could always just plug in and walk away. How are they going to know you’re physically there?

As an EV driver I haven’t been to a gas station since I started driving it, but AFAIK this advertising hasn’t come to Canada — and hopefully it never does.

That stat borders on being somewhat dishonest.

The three most populous Provinces in Canada (Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia) each have over 90% green power generation, either via hydroelectricity or via nuclear power. Manitoba likewise produces 97% of its electricity from hydroelectric sources.

Those four Provinces have a population of roughly 31 million people. Canada has a total population of just over 39 million — meaning “most provinces actually” only accounts for 20% of Canadians. 80% of Canadians get their electricity from 85+% green sources. By total capacity, nearly 70% of all electrical generation in Canada is from green sources, and thus “electric heat” for the vast majority of Canadians is not from coal and natural gas.

Agreed — I think replacing coal with natural gas is just a half-step that mostly benefits those with natural gas to sell, and just delays the overall transition.

But of course the people arguing for natural gas don’t care about that, so it’s easier to challenge them on the fact that they’re also inventing some pipe dream without evidence that if we could get gas to China that they’d suddenly be all for converting (or shutting down) coal fired plants — when there is _no evidence for that anywhere, and where they could be doing that today if they really wanted to.

There is always more that can be done, but the effects of the carbon tax go well beyond it being a “tax on life”.

Take for example Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie Ontario. They’ve been undergoing a major transformation from using constantly-burning coal to an Electric Arc Furnace — and they specifically call out carbon tax savings as one of the projects drivers.

That’s but one story of industry putting the investments into greener technologies to save from having to pay the carbon levy. I wish the media spent more time talking about such projects, because the levy is working.

You know what I love most about the levy? It’s effectively optional. I can’t opt out of making an income (not being born rich and not wanting to live under a vow of poverty), but I can opt out of generating carbon. We’ve been having the carbon discussion for 30 years now (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came out in 1992!), and at least some of us were paying attention and made a plan to decarbonize our lifestyles during the last three decades. And for everyone who has, the Carbon Levy might as well not really exist. If you don’t burn, you don’t pay. Simple as that.

As I mentioned in another post on this topic, that “might” is doing a TON of heavy lifting in Higg’s argument.

AFAIK, no countries have stepped up to say they’d shut down coal fired plants if only they could get hold of more natural gas. China usually comes up in this conversation, but they already have a pipeline with Russia that supplies natural gas, and AFAIK it isn’t even at capacity yet. If China really wanted to replace coal with natural gas, they’d be doing it now with Russian gas, and wouldn’t have to wait the decade-plus it would take to get the infrastructure built to ship Canadian natural gas to them.

If Higgs draws a dick on his forehead I might give him $100. I probably won’t, and have never discussed any plans to do so, but who knows? I might!

I feel like they’re not going to outright kill it, but quill instead let it wither on the vine; aka die the death of a thousands cuts.

There will likely be more new functionality that won’t be backported. Things that work okay now will stop functioning correctly. They’ll just stop maintenance and wait for everyone to leave — when it does get shut down, it will happen with a whimper rather than a bang.

Honestly, I hate these memes. As an old school hacker/programmer who has been doing this for many decades, I can usually just start thinking in code and start dumping out everything I need from my brain through my fingers to the keyboard. I never copy-and-paste code from online for something I’m coding (I don’t count something like copying a script to do a quick shell task of some-sort; for something like Amazon’s directions for installing Corretto I’m not going to type all that out manually; and I don’t really consider that “programming”).

But as a tech manager (and former University comp.sci instructor), I know this happens more often than I’d prefer. But some of the worst code I’ve had to review has been copy-and-paste jobs where the developer didn’t understand the task correctly and jammed in something they found online as a quick solution. I get that I started in a generation where you had to understand the problem and code the solution from scratch (because the Internet crutch wasn’t what it is today) — but the fact that so many younger developers revel in the fact they copy-and-paste code on the regular makes me sad.

Truth being spoken here.

Yes, housing is expensive in Canada. The primary villain here? The Provincial governments. But they’re getting away with it scot-free while idiots blame “Trudope”.

Similar with the Climate levy. The biggest complaining Provinces have had years to put in their own carbon-pricing schemes to get out from under the Federal backstop, but decided to do nothing. Indeed, Alberta and Ontario had their own systems, but scrapped them because apparently they thought it was better to “blame Trudope” than to actually help their constituents by implementing carbon pricing schemes that would work for their needs.

And voters are letting the get away with it. And their lives won’t improve under Pollievre, because their Provincial leaders will keep pulling the same crap, and voters will continue to let them get away with it.

A day later, Higgs and Smith put forward similar ideas — arguing that if Canada exported more natural gas, it might be used to displace dirtier coal power in other countries.

That word might is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting here.

Do we have any actual evidence that China (or anyone else for that matter) would actually offset any coal plants with Canadian Natural Gas, instead of just burning that natural gas in addition to coal? Retrofitting a power plant for natural gas isn’t free, and China can already get lots of natural gas from Russia if they wanted (the Power of Siberia pipeline can handle 61 billion cubic meters per year, but only delivers about 23 bcm/year). Nothing is stopping China from moving from coal to natural gas — but there appears to be no real will to do so.

This argument from the two Prairie Premiers sounds a whole lot more like wishful thinking than actual policy.

To be clear — Mom’s “Depression Dinner” was in fact just greasy fried ground beef poured over mashed potatoes. No spices. I don’t even think she used any salt or pepper. Oily Gerbers would be a perfectly apt description!