Posts by toejam++ 115 publicly visible posts • joined 4 May 2021
Another option would be to transport the vehicles with a small capacity sodium-ion battery that is swapped out with the lithium-ion battery at the final destination, with those li-ion batteries being shipped using more fire containing means. But given the additional costs, I only see that happening if the shipping industry and its insurers really jack up the shipping and insurance costs.
One of the reasons I love my 16:10 aspect monitors is that I can have a large taskbar with two rows of quick launch icons. I rarely have to go into my start menu (which is running Open Shell, BTW) or Win+S or Win+R programs.
There are third party utilities that restore the quick launch functionality under Windows 11, which is good. But on the one personal laptop I have running W11, I find that those utilities break every time Microsoft updates explorer.exe, which is now done quite frequently compared to prior versions of Windows, which is bad. And zero chance that corporate will authorize those utilities for use on my work laptop, which is worse.
Looking at the enshittification going on with Windows 11, I really am dreading the day when Windows 10 goes completely out of support.
I'm curious if the knowledge base will be limited to items in the settings manager or if it'll also include items in the administrative tools panel, control panel, group policy editor, and so on. I admit that when I fire up gpedit.msc, it is usually only after reading instructions on Stack Overflow on how to change some obscure setting.
"America (and Canada, Greenland, and the rest of the free world) cringes and just hopes the next 1,361 days pass swiftly"
Trouble is, what happens on day 1,362? There are so many systemic flaws in the American media and election system that Republicans are almost guaranteed to retain enough power in Congress to stifle any Democratic president that replaces Trump. Problems will fester, blame will shift to the new administration, and memories will fade. So in eight years, there is a good chance that the USA could elect another far right populist to the presidency.
The world knows this risk, which is a big reason why they're writing the USA off.
I rather enjoyed using Windows XP Professional x64 edition, which was based on Server 2003. It was faster and more stable than XP 32-bit, supported GPT partitions, supported more RAM, and was generally more polished than the older 32-bit version. It was a brute on my old i7-930 + X58 system. It was also the last edition of Windows I used where home network sharing was dead simple to setup and troubleshoot. I feel like later versions of Windows required more fighting to make that (and most everything else) work right. I miss that aspect of XP x64.
As a downside, 64-bit driver support was rather limited at the time. And that was the first version of Windows to ditch support for Win16 executables, so I had to spin up a Windows 98SE virtual machine for a few old games. But the trade-offs were worth it, IMO.
"Whether users actually want the operating system is another matter. Windows 11 offers few compelling features that justify an upgrade and no killer application."
Worse, Windows 11 is just a worse experience than Windows 10. And that's before you start tweaking Windows 10 with third-party apps like OpenShell, 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, Ultimate Windows Tweaker, and more.
Yes, many of those apps have been ported to Windows 11. But they never broke during OS updates with such frequency under Windows 10 as they have for me under Windows 11. Nothing like having some random Windows Explorer update pushed upon you that breaks those apps for a few weeks until the authors push out an update.
Short journeys tend to consume very little battery power, especially if they're low speed. Takes very little time to recoup that amount of power even with a slow L2 home or office charger.
Where really fast charging tends to be most useful is for long trips on high speed roads where the battery drains quickly and you don't want to wait long to top it back up. I'm fine with stops lasting 15 to 25 minutes every couple hours, but some people just can't be inconvenienced like that, so 8 to 10 minutes is about their limit.
I've noticed that most small gadgets with rechargeable batteries tend to favor cost, simplicity, and capacity over longevity. So they likely have simple charging profiles, basic thermal management, no ability to charge to less than 100% (while using cell chemistry that is sensitive to degradation), and little more than passive heat radiation. And being small gadgets, there is likely some level of planned obsolescence baked in to drive profits.
Meanwhile, electric vehicles tend to have very robust charging systems, thermal management, and cooling systems. Increasingly, they're using cell chemistry (LiFePO4) that sacrifices a bit of energy density for longevity, especially when charged to 100%. And since vehicles are often kept in service longer than many small gadgets and since many jurisdictions have rules mandating minimum warranties for EV battery life, there is pressure on manufacturers to take it all very seriously.
There have been a few articles that have investigated why charger deployment under NEVI has been so slow.
One reason is because all charger deployments, with and without NEVI funds, have been slow. Every physical site has unique requirements. Utilities are slow to bring in new power feeds. Equipment vendors have long backlogs. State and local regs are a patchwork that also drive site-specific requirements.
On top of those issues, NEVI brings in ever more hassles. NEVI requires that chargers be manufactured in the US. The reimbursement process is one of the most complex systems that state transportation departments have ever worked with. And NEVI has minimum requirements for charger count and power.
States have a formula for determining where new stations need to be located based on NEVI requirements. States then send out requests for bids to build those stations from the private sector. Sometimes, sites don't receive any bids. Other times, the bids don't meet guidelines.
TL;DR: what looks easy on paper is extremely complicated in action
> The morons that voted for him can reap the tragic consequences and I hope they come away from the experience completely fucked-over.
While I will experience a great deal of schadenfreude over the next four years as their decisions come back to haunt them, the bigger question is if the harm will result in them reevaluating their decisions.
I suspect that they will not. Because their decisions are no longer rational. It is all about hurting the other side, which they have been manipulated into prioritizing above all else by decades of conservative propaganda. Day in and day out, they are told about the war between the Left and the Right so that they don't notice the class war that they are very much losing. And those propaganda outlets aren't going anywhere now that Trump is in charge.
Nothing short of economic destruction on par with the Great Depression or a de-Nazification program as the Allies enacted after WWII will reverse things.
> Right, what's currently going on has nothing to do at all with "move fast and break things", but more with a mobster's motto: "break things so they no longer can move"
Exactly. American conservatives have been trying to destroy government oversight for fun and profit since the 1950s. Now that they own all three branches of government, they're going after it from all directions.
The U.S. Supreme Court weakened oversight when it invalidated the Chevron doctrine. Now it is poised to invalidate the nondelegation doctrine, which has been in place since the Great Depression. And there is a good chance that they will turn a blind eye to Trump axing departments without Congressional approval. Which he can do because there is zero chance that Republicans in charge of Congress will impeach him.
BTW, USAID was likely the first target because it was investigating Musk over Starlink contracts in Ukraine. And he's going after the FAA because of their investigation into SpaceX. And the FCC because they rejected Starlink from a rural broadband program back in 2022. He has grievances and he's out for revenge.
> Many see the problem is that Win11 is pointlessly rearranging the furniture and breaking things people use
This is precisely why I downgraded my new laptop from Windows 11 to 10. They introduced numerous changes to the UI and settings control, but the changes just made things worse. Annoyingly, there was no way to choose an older theme, as you could sorta do with XP thru W7.
I tried some third party utilities that restored aspects of Windows 10, but the constant upgrades constantly broke them. I've never seen Windows updates break such apps so often before Windows 11, so I took that as a bad sign.
"However, a great deal of it was to do with the cost of RAM. Protected mode OS are more memory hungry. It was cheaper to run DOS programs which ran in upwards of 640Kb, or Windows 2.x which ran 'OK' on a 286 with as little as 1MB memory. When I first started using OS/2 2.1 in 1993 I had 8MB which was very unusual for a consumer, and quite expensive. 8MB was still at the lowest reasonable limit of acceptability for OS/2, and NT 3.x reasonably needed 12MB+."
Was OS/2 2.0 purely 32-bit? I recall one of the benefits of Windows 3.x and 95 being a mix of 32-bit and 16-bit code is that it helped keep memory requirements down. My first PC clone was a 486/66 with 4MB of memory and it ran Windows 3.1 moderately well. I also recall most apps still being Win16 during the time, not Win32s or Win32, which also helped keep memory requirements down.
And speaking of cost, weren't 386 systems prohibitively expensive those first few years? I wonder if IBM thought that it had more time before it needed to make the transition to 386 code.
Commodore BASIC 2.0 (introduced in '79) wasn't just lacking commands for graphics and sound. It also lacked commands for managing filesystems. That's why you had to use weird LOAD/LIST commands for displaying directories and third party tools for copying and deleting files.
Commodore BASIC 4.0 (introduced in '80 with the PET 4000) included 18 new commands (vs 2.0), mostly for managing filesystems. The Commodore Super Expander cartridge for the VIC20 (introduced in '81) included 17 new commands for graphics, sound, and input. The Super Expander cart for the C64 increased it to 32 new commands. Commodore BASIC 3.5 (introduced in '84 with the C16 and Plus4) included 37 new commands, mostly taken from BASIC 4.0 and Super Expander.
So, why didn't the C64 either use something like BASIC 3.5 or at least the Super Expander extensions, since they were available at the time? My guess is cost. BASIC 2.0 was 8KB, BASIC 4.0 was 12KB, BASIC 3.5 was 16KB, and the Super Expander 64 cart was 9KB. Tramel was a notorious cheapskate. So, BASIC 2.0 was what we received.
But even with BASIC 7.0 in the C128, Commodore BASIC was still lacking when it came to array and string manipulation and structured programming control. That's where Simons' BASIC really shined.
"But that C64 basic....... my god what a bad implementation on such a capable machine. 67 poke commands to define and move one screen sprite.... no wonder everyone hated it and moved straight into 6502 assembly helll, even the Zx81's basic was more advanced and capable than the C64.... and thats saying something"
What is especially frustrating is that Commodore opted to use BASIC 2.0 in the C64 instead of the more capable BASIC 4.0 that was released with the CBM-II. Nor did they include any of the graphics or sounds extensions for BASIC 2.0 that were included in the Super Expander cartridge for the VIC-20. All because Jack Tramel was a cheap SOB and didn't want to use a larger ROM.
Commodore did release a Super Expander cartridge for the C64, but I don't recall it being very popular. I do recall a number of people with Simons' BASIC, which was powerful enough to write games with. And Simons' BASIC 2 was even more powerful, and fully supported structured programming, IIRC.
They make excellent city/commuter cars if you have reliable charging at home or work. I get around 320 to 370 Km (depending on the weather) out of an 80% charge in my midsize BEV. Meanwhile, my daily commute is only 48 Km, round trip. So I only charge it once or twice a week using my home L2 charger.
Since I only charge to 80% and almost never fast charge it, range should only decrease 10%-12% over 200,000 Km. The battery has a 160,000 Km warranty. If it dies after that period, I expect that a fair greater number of refurbishment companies will be in operation by then, so the replacement cost shouldn't be terrible, assuming the rest of the car is still in good enough condition to warrant the work.
If you don't have reliable access to a charger at home or work, then no, I wouldn't recommend one. You could use public fast DC chargers, but they tend to be expensive and hard on the battery. Stick with a hybrid and wait until more curbside charging gets rolled out.
Some residential customers in parts of the US with cheap hydro power are starting to see their electricity costs rise as datacenter demand has risen, slurping up local capacity and forcing local utilities to turn to more expensive power imports. Folks are bringing their concerns to local planning boards, but money talks, and the datacenter operators have plenty of it.
And in addition to generative AI growth, you also have growth in cryptocurrency mining. Given the recent spike in cryptocurrency prices due to the election of Trump, expect those operations to expand as well.
> The progress of automation is the same as it ever was: gradual and costly and not always the right fit.
Same could be said about mechanization. For either case, that progress may be slow, but is also persistent. Over the course of a decade or two, it can be significant. In a generation, it can be revolutionary.
Just go ask coal workers about it. Instead of tens of thousands of miners running through tunnels with hand-held tools, mining companies now have giant mechanized drills that can do the work of 50 men. Or they just come by and scrape entire mountains down with massive diggers and haul it all away for processing. How long until the trucks are driving themselves from the pit to the dump site?
The Electoral College and the US Senate exist because the USA's founders opted to give small, low population states greater representation at the federal level than their population should afford. Those small states were afraid that their voices would be drowned out by their larger, more populous counterparts, so they threw a wrench into deliberations to get their way. That thumb on the scale of democracy carries forward today because those low population states have a vested interest in keeping the status quo and the requirement to change things is too great.
V86 Mode Extension support has been broken in AMD processors since Zen 1. If I try to boot Windows 9x or ME in a hypervisor on my Zen 3 processor, it'll throw a slew of errors unless I use patched versions of the OS. So folks like me have already turned to emulation to run old apps that refuse to work on any other OS.
1977: First fork of 1BSD from Unix v6.
1983: Release of SunOS 1.0, the first stand-alone OS based on BSD (pre-1.0 was based on Unix v7)
1991: Initial release of Linux kernel.
1992: Initial release of 386BSD, the first free stand-alone OS based on BSD
1993: Initial releases of NetBSD and FreeBSD
If anything, Windows 11 actually does things worse for me than when using Windows 10. The functionality of the settings panel is inferior to that of the control panel, the constant stream of notifications for monetization is distracting, and minor upgrades are breaking my third-party utilities at a rate I've never seen before.
One less than ideal solution would be a policy against freeing copies of a pointer. Have something in the variable name to indicate that it is a copy and smack any programmer that violates the policy when you grep for "free" and "also_" in your source files.
Another solution I've seen is to use a structure with the heap pointer as the first member and a pointer to an "in use" flag as the second member. Since you're dealing with a pointer to your flag, copies don't get out of sync. You can even check the flag before writing to memory if you're especially paranoid.
> Laptops. They could have made thinner lighter more powerful longer-lasting cooler-running laptops than anyone else in the late 1990s.
If only the DEC StrongARM had been on the market when Apple was looking to replace the Motorola 680x0 with a RISC processor.
In the early 1990s when Apple was deciding between ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and SPARC, the ARM processor was very under-powered in comparison. Laptops weren't nearly as popular then as they are now, so desktop usage was the primary consideration. Going with ARM would have hindered their desktop series' performance. And adopting ARM just for laptops later in the decade wouldn't have made sense from a software library standpoint.
Just to give some insight into how Apple viewed ARM at the time, here is a clip from Allen Baum who worked at Apple:
And then, while Newton was going on, some people from DEC came to visit, and they said, "Hey, we were looking at doing a low power Alpha and decided that just couldn’t be done, and then looked at the ARM. We think we can make an ARM which is really low power, really high performance, really tiny, and cheap, and we can do it in a year. Would you use that in your Newton?" Cause, you know, we were using ARMs in the Newton, and we all kind of went, "Phhht, yeah. You can’t do it, but, yeah, if you could we’d use it." That was the basis of StrongARM, which became a very successful business for DEC.
If you live in a region where public charging infrastructure is too questionable for the routes you take, one solution is to go with a plug-in hybrid. Charge at home using your electrical mains for daily driving and refill at petrol stations while away.
My family has a PHEV and we've cut our petrol consumption by over 95% while around town. For the occasional trip out of town, we can stop off at any regular petrol station and skip the chargers. It is a great compromise.
> Which, I suppose, one could argue makes the C65 not a product of management, but of the lack of it(!) and one which means nothing either way about the C128.
I vaguely recall a Usenet post from David Haynie that suggested that the folks who designed the C65 were mostly doing it on their own.
> The C128 does seem like an odd idea in hindsight.
Commodore was really struggling to mitigate its productivity sector weakness with the rise of the IBM PC (and clones). Big problem was, there wasn't much cohesion in their strategy. The Plus/4, the C128, and the C900 were trying to solve the problem in different (and mostly ineffective) ways. IMO, the C900 running Coherent (a clone of Version 7 Unix) on a Zilog Z8001 was probably their best idea, but it was canceled when Commodore purchased Amiga.
I was always disappointed that the C128 wasn't a little bit more like the Apple IIgs. Imagine a C128 with a CPU similar to the 65816 and a VIC chip with a 121 color palette (like the C16), 8+ sprites, and able to display 640x200x2, 320x200x4, and 160x200x8 graphics. Along with a proper CLI shell like ProDOS, CP/M, or MS-DOS had. I would have jumped on something like that in a heartbeat as a teen.
>> Instead it wasted millions on the C16 and +4.
> These were supposed to be cheap and compete with the Spectrum and make people want to upgrade to the C64, but once Tramiel was gone everyone else who didn't know how to do anything took over and the price was raised so instead of competing with the Spectrum they competed with the C64. Foot-gun moment.
Supposedly the C16 and C116 were supposed to be a replacement for the VIC20 on the low-end. Unfortunately, Commodore omitted backwards compatibility with the VIC20's software library. Software publishers never took much interest in the platform, so it languished. They were turds even before Tramiel took off.
The Plus/4 suffered from the same issue as the C128... it would have been better to have released the enhancements as an optional cartridge instead of building a new model around it.
I was a field installation tech for a network appliance company back around the century mark. The boxes I installed were just fancy PCs running an embedded version of *nix. And they used standard ATX power supplies.
I fly down to an install one day for a customer and I'm presented with computer racks with PDUs with C13 connectors. First question I ask is: what voltage are these? The on-site guys start to look at each other in a panic. Nobody is sure. One guy suspects that it is 120V. So I leave the voltage switch on the PSU in the 120V position and plug it in. *POP*
I do not want to spend the night while a replacement unit is shipped overnight since I didn't bring a change of clothes. So I call the boss up and explain the situation. I then ask if it is okay if these guys drive me to the nearest Fry's Electronics so I can pick up a replacement PSU. I'm given the okay and an hour later the box is fixed, voltage selector is set to 240V, and it is humming along swimmingly.
After that, I brought along a simple voltage tester that would indicate 120V or 240V. Well, at least until the 9/11 attacks. The TSA viewed the tester as a potential stabbing weapon, so into the trash it went when I didn't feel like checking-in my laptop case. Luckily, the company moved to auto-sensing PSUs shortly after.
You need a hook up in kernel-space, but the rest of it can run in user-space. There are some performance drawbacks going that route, but it does lend additional stability to the system.
On a side note, Minix is a good example of an OS that runs as few things in kernel-space as possible.
Given that Airbus has an assembly plant in Mobile, Alabama, it now qualifies as being a US civilian airline manufacturer. It just needs to get better at bribing, errr, strategically contributing to the campaigns of our most honorable members of Congress, just as Boeing, Lockheed, Orbital, and other US aerospace companies do.
Chinese subsidies are granted only to state-owned firms, IIRC, and do not exclude exported vehicles. That's why European and North American automakers are in such an uproar.
Meanwhile, likely to comply with WTO rules, this DOE program is open to automakers based in any country with facilities in the US, not just domestic automakers. Following the link to the DOE, I see both Volvo Group (the non-Geely Volvo) and FCA (Stellantis) listed as grant recipients. So European firms are receiving some cheddar as well.
I second this thought. Both my car and my wife's car include optical speed limit detection systems and they are both wrong about 1% of the time. That doesn't seem like much, but over the course of a week it adds up.
If vehicles are going to become judgemental and critique your driving, they better be spot on when doing it.
Given that the Tesla charging standard is now in the hands of SAE, who is now tasked with its further development, the automakers and charging networks who adopted the SAE J3400 standard will be fine in the end.
Also, before worrying about the state of Tesla's own charging network, we may want to wait to see if Tesla soon announces the grand opening of a new division based in China that picks up where the axed division left off.
The original MOS 6502 definitely wasn't orthogonal. The WDC 65C02 was better, but there were still many shortcomings. The Synertek SY6516 was probably as close as you were going to get, but I don't believe it ever made it beyond development.
As a final project for one of my university comp-sci classes, I wrote an emulator for a 6502-like processor that was as orthogonal as possible. But it required the use of an extend byte so I had room to fit all of my indirect, stack relative, and index register ops that couldn't fit within the first 255 op codes. Some folks considered that heresy, though.
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