mschaef

24 ms·

211.
by mschaef 6y ago
Scheme
212.
by mschaef 6y ago
Nit-picking here, but language is important. Not sure I like the idea that a "feature request" can be "fixed". It's a feature, not a bug. It's a request, not some sort of obligation of the development team. Sti
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by mschaef 6y ago
The counterargument is that a bug is enough a function of its context that the older they get, the less likely they are to still be relevant or accurately documented. Having a bug on the list isn't enough - it needs to be periodically
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by mschaef 6y ago
> Not everything they did worked, but when it did, they created history. This reminds me of Seymour Cray... he had his share of setbacks, many due to ambitious designs, but when he succeeded, it was historic. (CDC6600, 7600, and Cray 1 c
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by mschaef 6y ago
> if the grid collapses completely it will take place in a short period of wild frequency fluctuations as generators trip out, demand swings wildly and so on, so you could get very large frequency distortions very quickly, perhaps too q
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by mschaef 6y ago
> Offhand I am not quite sure what the damage from off-nominal frequency operation I can think of at least a couple potential issues: * If the grid frequency is lower than the frequency the machine is trying to turn, it's possible f
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by mschaef 6y ago
> strongly implies ERCOT had absolutely no working plan Another way of looking at it is that they implemented phase 3 of this plan: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/current_guides/53525/04-030... &quo
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by mschaef 6y ago
> Imagine hitting your car accelerator to the floor in neutral - things blow up when spun too fast. The problem here is the opposite - put your car in top gear, drive up a steep hill, and watch the thing lag and lag behind as it tries to
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by mschaef 6y ago
Given that there are no great ways to store large amounts of power at utility scale, the first thing to know is that demand and supply have to always match. (There's mechanical inertia in the grid, pumped storage, and batteries, but th
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by mschaef 6y ago
Following up on this, I checked ERCOT status this morning and none of the DC ties are moving energy (at a moment when you might expect they'd really like to): http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_ti
221.
by mschaef 6y ago
The DC ties represent <1.7% of current load. About the size of a single large generating station. ERCOT, by policy (to avoid certain federal regulations), keeps it that way. I guess you're technically right that they can import powe
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by mschaef 6y ago
So you're saying we shouldn't worry about it - the planners will take care of it all while we wait for large scale investments in renewable power and soon to be invented load smoothing and battery technologies? I hope you're
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by mschaef 6y ago
> It doesn't actually matter what that number is. ... There may be some floor which is always supplied by fossil fuels, but that floor isn't relevant to the goal of drastically reducing carbon dioxide output. The number matte
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by mschaef 6y ago
> There is hydro and bio energy on the renewable side to handle baseloads. I take your point, but hydroelectric power depends on geography and doesn't work remotely close to everywhere. (Same thing with Iceland's geothermal. N
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by mschaef 6y ago
This is interesting, but the number I'd be equally interested to see is the amount of non-renewable generation that needs to be available to serve the load reliably. Renewable power is great and all, but people expect the lights to tur
226.
by mschaef 6y ago
A couple thoughts come to mind, the first of which is that this seems like an unfortunate head start on the next burn season. To the extent these are still burning as things warm up and thaw, I assume they start to significantly spread and
227.
by mschaef 6y ago
I didn't use it as much, but my recollection is of Delphi being a much more coherent product than VB ever was. This probably stems naturally from the way the two products came into being. Delphi evolved from a compiler with full access
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by mschaef 6y ago
> Example: How many login forms have I seen, which will not show their input fields, if I do not allow their shitty scripts to run? ... They don't know the noscript tag or something? This is often less about the developers not knowi
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by mschaef 6y ago
> FWIW classic VB is a sort of in-between because you are editing the actual forms and state you'd see running VB could be a little weird in that respect. This screenshot of 1.0 has a clue about why: https://winworldpc.c
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by mschaef 6y ago
> won't bother to change the wallpaper on their desktop. I use OSX and enjoy the fact that the wallpapers are dynamic with the time of day. Any photos I'd use myself don't do that, and I don't see much of the backgrou
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by mschaef 6y ago
> RISC OS ... allowed users to define the system palette LUT arbitrarily For 8-bpp LUT graphics, Windows 3.x had a palette negotiation mechanism in the API that reserved 20 color entries to the OS and let the focused app control the rema
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by mschaef 6y ago
> they haven't gotten any of that value. Agreed... and I think it's even more the case in that part of the value of that car is the price tag itself and the exclusivity it brings to your purchase. The used car doesn't have
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by mschaef 6y ago
> A year-old Bentley for $30k? The day might come as long as you are willing to be one of the ICE dinosaurs! The depreciation curves aren't quite that steep, but there are still some startlingly low prices on ICE cars that used to b
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by mschaef 6y ago
> What about the 286 protected mode support. Did that come later? Yeah... Protected mode came to Windows in fits and starts. Windows/386 introduced it via the V86 multitasker. The Windows VMM layer ran in protected mode, but all t
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by mschaef 6y ago
pavlov is right. Early versions of Windows all ran in real mode. Multiple Windows programs were loaded into the same real mode address space (no protection) and co-operatively multitasked based on the GUI's messaging infrastructure. (A
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by mschaef 6y ago
Around this time there was another significant CPU architecture in play at Intel, the iAPX 432. The 432 was the intentional follow on to the 8-bit series (8080) and suffered from a number of the usual second system effects - it was big, co
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by mschaef 6y ago
> But why does emacs have that functionality? GNU Emacs is a 36 year old tool that's been targeted at programmers its entire life, is built on an interactive Lisp environment, and actively encourages external improvements and contri
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by mschaef 6y ago
> and based on a review it’s horrible to drive: Not really a surprise. The design of the car is close to 40 years old, even before you take into account the age of the car itself and all the junk piled on for the purpose of looking good
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by mschaef 6y ago
> You could - with extreme effort - make an Atari ST multitask. And of course with the Amiga it was built in. ... So why did we throw that away and go backwards to DOS Mine is a US-centric perspective, it but always seemed like Commodore
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by mschaef 6y ago
> The older I get, the more our devotion to the CLI feels like gatekeeping. Nah... you can't take one of the handful of major styles of interaction with computing devices and diminish adherence to that style as just 'gatekeepin

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