thyristan

Depends on the location, but around here solar for heating is completely useless.

In Germany (which is farther south than the nordics and gets far more sunlight), solar panels are already insufficient for heating half of the year. On a typical single-family home, you will get at most 10kW peak power solar on the roof, which you can reach in the summer months when there are no clouds. In winter, those 10kWp will generate at most 5kWh of energy per day. Which is a factor of 4 to 5 below the 20 to 30kWh per average day for heating (with generous insulation). The farther north you go, the worse this gets. Half of the nordics get essentially no sun at all in winter, and are quite a bit colder than Germany.

So you need something other than the sun to heat your home in winter. A heat pump can double, maybe triple the solar energy you might get on sunny winter days, but that doesn't usually cut it. So you need grid electricity, wood or fossil fuels. And when electricity prices are as low as in the nordics (around or below 20ct/kWh), heat pumps are totally viable.

Adding solar can be sensible for cooling in the summer months, and maybe a bit of hot water, and heating in late spring, early autumn. But for winter? Totally useless.

And while you could do long-term storage, that will cost you several arms and legs, tons of space and a huge maintenance hassle. And if anything should go wrong with your storage, you have no heat all winter and better have an emergency plan...

It is true that the heat can be used if it is there anyways. But usually not in a big city-wide network. Instead a more localized, larger consumer is far better, because running the hot water network is far too expensive. For example, large producers of heat like data centers, dairy processing or chemical plants around here deliver their heat to public swimming pools, schools or greenhouses that are intentionally built nearby.

Even the grandparent's article says so if you read carefully: "A large portion of the town’s own buildings, including the municipal school, town hall, and library, are connected to the district heating network.". They didn't even attach all of the public buildings. Not to mention about the rest of the town.

Steam and hot water pipes are extremely expensive to install, far worse than electricity, fibre, water or sewage.

You need to be more leak-proof than cold water pipes, because loss of pressure with steam and hot water is much more of a problem than with cold water and cannot easily be solved by just adding more cheap water. Pipe materials have to be more resistant to corrosion because higher temperatures and pressures make them corrode so much faster than with cold water. Closed hot water/steam circuits also mean that there won't be a protective limescale coating on the inside. You need insulation that you can bury and which will last for at least 40 years, which is even more expensive than the pipes. And the insulation will double the pipe diameter. And the insulated pipes have a larger keepout area that needs to be kept free of rocks, other pipes and mechanical strain because the insulation is soft and sensitive to those things. Since usually the pipes aren't operated in summer, and since generally thermal variance is far higher than with cold water, thermal expansion needs to be taken into account, so you need expansion corners, sliding sections, different valve constructions that are tight in all temperatures, etc.

And even with perfect insulation, you will loose approximately 30 to 40% of heat in your piping. So all of this is only viable if you don't care about the cost of the heat, your consumers can (be forced to or persuaded to) accept at least 30% higher prices per kWh compared to their local boiler, not to mention the capital cost.

There are only some areas in Europe even, where those kinds of installations take place: Densely packed inner cities with largely rented-out flats in appartment buildings. There, the landlords/owners avoid the cost and risk of a local boiler and don't care about the running cost of heat, because they don't pay for it. In smaller towns, like in the example, mostly public buildings like schools use those kinds of district heating systems, because the municipality doesn't care as much about cost of the heat, and more about cost of maintenance of a hundred local boilers vs. one centralized system. And in the end, it's taxpayers' money, so they don't actually care that much, headlines and opening ceremonies are more important than that.

Individual home owners usually do have their local systems, which can be run cheaper than what district heating will charge you. And since city density is lower and home ownership is more widespread in the US, district heating is even less competitive there.

Because for timing-sensitive code, those are important. If a variable is really a register, cache-based timing attacks just don't happen, because there is no cache in between.

Nonetheless, you are expecting other people to know the manpage and read it for you. That is a game you may be able to play with paid support, but usually not even there: They will be more wordy and polite, but in essence tell you to RTFM as well.

Bugs in Perl modules that are documentation related are normal bugreports and patches in the normal patch flow because documentation is embedded as POD within the source code.

Your example is very specific and weird (and maybe not even Perl-related). From which you deduce that it is OK to waste the time of volunteers because once one manpage failed you and you decided to never read any manpages again. You only seem to care about your own time, not anyone else's. That is not how anything works on this planet, either you deal with volunteers, where you have to make them care about your query by being considerate, friendly and respect their time as well as you would like yours respected. Or you are dealing with paid support, in which case you have to make them care by paying them for their time by the hour.

Only locally, only for you, and only short term. You are wasting the time of the person you are asking, and you are learning absolutely nothing about the context of the answer. When the next question arises, you won't even know where to look, you will only continue wasting other peoples' time.

You don't need to turn off STP, usually it's enough to set the forward delay to a very small value ("port fast" in cisco commands). If there is a loop, the port will usually still detect it, you at the most get a handful of multiplied packets.

And all the "http boot" firmware I've seen either always ignores certificate errors or doesn't do TLS anyways.

Yes, but then you need to select the proper menu option at boot time. Sometimes just moving the hardware stack one to the left and swapping the cables is quicker.

There is a blender addon called Bonsai for this:

https://bonsaibim.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXRpDka6gLI

Strong plus is that you can render views of the finished room in Blender. Big problem is that you first have to learn to use Blender.

SMS and MMS followed that flow, yes.

But since all the networks since 4G, there is no more low-level network support for things like SMS. Everything, including voice and messages, is IP- and packet-based. So the only thing the carrier does anymore is to authenticate that IP connection through your SIM card and bind your identity to the phone number. It actually doesn't really matter if messages are "network native" or through a third-party app, there is no more guaranteed timeslot and reliable delivery that SMS used to have.

And nowadays, RCS is also outsourced to Google by basically every carrier.

So RCS is the same as WhatsApp et al., only that the app you are using doesn't tell you that Google will monitor all your communications in addition to the monitoring your carrier does...

Git ergonomics were far far better than the rest because of one reason that all the supposedly more ergonomic projects like Bazaar, Mercurial, SVN, ClearCase and lots of others failed miserably at:

Performance.

Since the CVS days, Version Control Systems got slower and slower. Centralized servers worsened the problem by doing everything in a synchronous manner, making people wait for locks, wait for checkouts, wait for diffs, wait for everything. But even the distributed ones like bzr or hg were slow as hell. What git enabled was the far superior ergonomics of not having to get a coffee while running a "git diff" on a project the size of the Linux kernel, X.org or LibreOffice. All the whining about inconsistent command line options and weird subcommand naming is totally secondary to this.

Nowadays, many of the aforementioned competitors either died out or worked on their performance problems. Nonetheless, git is still unmatched in this regard.

Yes, of course. But you usually don't put your important webserver doing bazillions of requests per short interval on dynamic IPs. Especially if you need to avoid any downtimes.

Traditional non-cloud, non-weird DNS providers have sufficiently long TTLs, not the "60 seconds and then it's broken" crap that clouds do to facilitate some of their services.

Something like TTL 86400 gets you over a lot of outages just because all the caches will still have your entries.

It might not be as bad as it sounds. A few comments over someone had a preliminary permit application which described the technical details.

The gist of it is, the reactor is a 500MW pressurized water reactor, Gen3/3+. Not any fancy new Gen4 thing that you usually hear about when talking about small modular reactors. No molten salt, no high temperature gas cooling, no weird moderators, no heap of crumbling carbon/uranium spheres, no liquid lead/bismuth/natrium, no thorium.

So I guess it could actually be possible to keep that timetable, because it is actually old, boring and proven technology, just a little smaller and maybe more prefabricated than the usual 1GW to 1.5GW PWRs that were built in the last 4 decades.

The reactor is still to be developed by Rolls Royce, which is hidden in mid article. The don't have plans, not even a working prototype yet, so expect delays to at least the mid 2040s.

I've used Ceph together with Proxmox VE excessively. No problems whatsoever.

And in related news, Proxmox VE is often probably a more sensible thing to use for a private cloud environment, because it is far more flexible and easier to use than Kubernetes.

struct packing also isn't guaranteed by the C standard, everything around that is implementation defined, as it is with bitfield packing. __attribute__((packed)) is however implemented in any sensible C compiler implementation, and things around structure layout and memory layout of data types are specified in the compiler's manual. C would be useless without those implementation-specified guarantees, because most of the appeal of C for low-level-programming comes from the ease of deserialisation through something like

char * input = receive_data();

struct deserialized * decoded = (struct deserialized *)input; // zero cost deserialization

Of course this can only work if an implementation tells you exactly what the memory layout of 'struct deserialized' and all the data types in it are.

Btw, ordering is somewhat more defined than packing, in that the usual forward/reverse/little/big-endian shenanigans are OK. But relative ordering of each field is always preserved by the C standard.

> This stuck out to me as rude.

Very much so, and I'm German ;)

In my experience, and in my feeling as someone reading such things, you need to tone-match. The resignation message was somewhat formal, structured and serious in tone. Replying in such an informal tone means that you are not taking things seriously, which is insulting. Even more so because that informal answer is public.

I'm tone-deaf by culture and by personality. I often make those kinds of mistakes. But a public resignation like this is a brightly flashing warning light saying: "this needs a serious formal answer".

I've been a typical IT person for a very long time. In the last few years, I got into contact with salespeople, by being basically a sales engineer.

And I've learned that there is a reason to make a call besides the publicity aspect: A call (and I mean call with voice and possibly video) forces immediacy. It puts both parties on the spot. Or rather just the party being called, because hopefully the caller did prepare for the call. Also, this immediacy enables rash and uninformed decisions, whereas asynchronous communications enable more deliberation and research. In sales, you don't want deliberation. You want to get this over quick and easy. And if you've dealt with a long long email chain that goes back and forth quibbling over minutiae, a call can reduce this kind of indecisiveness and inhibition.

So I see this whole thing as insulting in even more ways: A "quick" call means that it is an unprepared one. Also emphasized by the lack of real topic or agenda beyond what the original post already stated. No way forward for the other party that is possible to prepare for. No prior chain of communications, so if the call is really the first reaction in the first short email, this means "you are unimportant, I don't want to waste time, let's get this over with".

Also, in many cultures (I've only had to deal with European ones, so no idea if this really applies to the rest of the world), setting a stage is important. There is a cultural meaning to CC-ing a manager, to inviting more people than necessary to a meeting, or to do things publically or in private. A bigger stage formalizes things, gives importance, emphasizes seriousness. A smaller, private stage can mean the opposite: you might want the other party so safe face, because what you are going to tell more informally them is that they fucked up. You might want to get them to agree to something they could not easily agree to in public. Announcing publically, that there should be a private meeting is the worst of all kinds: Basically, this signals to the public that this person fucked up and is getting scolded, more serious than a totally private scolding, less serious than a totally public one. Why else would you widely announce a private meeting invite?

I don't know if the resignation in the original article is really a final resignation or rather some kind of cultural signal. I've seen that kind of drama used as means to an end, just think of the stereotypical italian lovers' discussion where both are short of throwing each other off the balcony, just to get very friendly a minute later. But in any case, whether it is deliberate drama or a genuine resignation, the necessary reaction has to be similar: You need to treat it as if it were a real resignation publically and respond with all the usual platitudes that they are very valuable, you are so sorry to see them go and you'd do almost anything to keep them. Then you privately meet in private and find out which one it is, and maybe fix things. It is a dance, and you have to do the right steps. If you don't know the right ones, at least think hard (you have the time, it is email) on how not to step on any toes. The Mozilla people failed in that...

Any website implementing a form for data entry is expected by any sane user to autofocus the first form element.

DIV isn't a button with features disabled. DIV is something else entirely, and you have to emulate most of the features in Javascript, badly. As the original article explains...

> The proper way of dealing with this is a "Skip to Main Content" element: > > https://webaim.org/techniques/skipnav/

No, it isn't the proper way. That only works if you can see the skip link and know to press enter. Otherwise you will tab straight into the navigation. So possibly useful for screen readers, but completely useless for most keyboard users. Yet another stupid webdev workaround for a selfimposed problem.

What you should do is autofocus the first form element (if there is a form), give it tabindex=1 and number the other form elements in a sensible ascending tabindex order. Otherwise, proper semantic markup is sufficient, even for screen readers.

That is correct. From your link: "tabindex="0" means that the element should be focusable in sequential keyboard navigation, after any positive tabindex values. The focus navigation order of these elements is defined by their order in the document source. "

> That's the same behavior as a <button> without tabindex, like the author is proposing.

Yes, but often you have elements with taborder > 0.

> It's generally advised not to set tabindex to anything but 0 or -1 and let the document order dictate tab order.

Only if document order is sane. Usually with modern websites it isn't, document order is a broken notion if you can position elements at will and e.g. put navigation at the bottom of a document but move it to the top by CSS. Which is actually a recommendation that some people make for acessibility...

What you usually want to do is assign a sensible taborder > 0 to the one form element that the user is probably currently using. Otherwise, he will pointlessly tab through search, menus, cookie bars and a ton of other pointless stuff first.

> - tabindex=0 doesn’t affect ordering, does it?

Of course it does. tabindex=0 doesn't sort naturally into the automatic tabindex order, it sorts AFTER everything. So you are jumping through all the other tabindex elements, then you are jumping back to all tabindex=0.

> They should focus on streamlining actual workflow of actual people.

If you streamline a shitty process, you will have diarrhea...

Unfortunately, most processes suck and need improvement. It isn't actually IT's job to improve processes. But almost always, IT is the only department that is able to change those processes nowadays since they are usually tied to some combination of lore, traditions, spreadsheets and misused third-party software.

If you just streamline what is there, you are cementing those broken processes.

Calc is far better than Excel.

CSV import in Excel sucks. LibreOffice Calc is far better there.

Best feature of all in LibreOffice Calc: highlight current row/column, so you have a cross-like cursor.

Easier and better embedding of Python and other languages, not the "Python in the Cloud" crap that Excel does.

Less crappy conversions like "oh, that surely looks like a date, let's mess up your data"...

Maybe I'm too old, but are there people that really didn't know that any ssh access is sufficient for using git?

If you want your own hardware to be OPEX, just do leasing. Every enterprise hardware seller will make you an offer for that.

Maybe. But it was, as i've understood and answered it, a question about /my/ needs, not what my guess about the majority is.