xioxox

I'm not forced to take vacations in Germany by my employer (large research institution). They roll over for a year, but then expire.

I've encountered multiple compiler bugs in gfortran. The code wasn't very complex either - just a set of nested data structures.

See the ELF rpath, which can be set by the linker. This can be modified after using patchelf.

It certainly was much colder at my public sector employer in Germany. My hands turned blue in my office and I had to wear fingerless gloves some of the time.

There are things called Government Savings Banks. The UK has National Savings and Investments (NS&I [1]), which allows individuals to save money with unlimited protection (though I think their accounts typically allow maximum amounts of a few million pounds). The UK government uses this as a form of raising money. I believe other countries have similar schemes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Savings_and_Investmen...

There are also freepost addresses, where you can write "Freepost CompanyName" with no postage. I've found one on google which is just "Freepost OAL".

It works really well if you avoid threads, and I've found it pretty easy to avoid them in my code.

Just in case someone is interested, I've written a simple fork-based module for processing jobs for Python: https://github.com/jeremysanders/forkqueue

This has the advantage of allowing work done inside a nested function, allowing large initial datasets to be shared and not have to be passed over pickle.

Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest you were claiming it was discovered by you. It was more on giving some background and a different name for it.

This byte reordering trick has also been done elsewhere. For example, the HDF5 file format supports a "shuffle" filter which reorders the bytes.

I believe you can set the power limit in the BIOS, so you can get most of the performance without so much heat.

Are there any idle power measurements in that article? For 95%+ of the time my home computer isn't doing a lot (text editing, simple browsing, playing radio or music).

The 6502-based BBC Micro had this in the 80s as the Tube. This could run a Z80 and other processors.

The interface was initially used in the development of the Arm processor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_(BBC_Micro)

You can read the report about the infamous Oracle-produced CAPSA financial system which had terrible problems twenty years ago at the University of Cambridge: https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2001-02/weekly/5861/1.h...

A nice journey back to starting programming for me. On my PCW Amstrad computer, I wanted something a bit faster than the Mallard BASIC and Logo that came with it. I tried some Pascal compiler that only compiled to slow interpreted P-code. FTL Modula 2 was much faster and had quite a nice programming environment. I also did some Z80 assembly programming, but that was time consuming for a full program. Later I ported my Modula 2 code a MSDOS compiler when I moved to a 386SX PC.

What do you mean by risky here? DKB is owned by the Bayerische Landesbank (mostly owned by the state of Bavaria). Their online security measures seem at least as good as my Sparkasse account, too. I use a physical TAN machine to authenticate transactions for both.

Motorola produce virtually no software updates. You'll typically only get security updates for two years after the phone is started to be sold.

Your app is also great to help get to sleep. I find if my thoughts are too active when I'm trying to sleep, then having some soothing sound like rain to focus on is a great help. It also has a stop timer so it won't go on all night.

There were other Modula-2 compilers for CP/M. I used Hisoft FTL Modula-2 quite a bit on my Amstrad PCW to get a speedup from Mallard Basic.

I've read lots of Irish people currently complaining about the housing situation there. Perhaps it's not as bad as Berlin, though of course it depends on one's wages. However, I live in Munich where prices for buying accommodation are absolutely ludicrous compared to wages.

One suggestion is the Isle of Man. It has very mild winters. It has very low tax. There are some tech jobs. If you don't mind living on a quiet small island without much to do, with a lot of grey skies, it could be an interesting possibility. The one disadvantage is that housing is relatively expensive.

I think the existing support more like "function overloading" in C++ - you make some subroutine/function name which calls the appropriate subroutine/function with the correct argument types.

Unfortunately the existing support isn't like proper generics. In my Fortran code I use C macros (#include) to avoid repeating big blocks of generic code for each data type. For example, I needed to do this for a sort routine which could act on different data types. This is very clumsy, so any proper generics will be welcome. Hopefully there will be a STL-like library which could be based around these generics.

I certainly like instant coffee and prefer it over many other types I have tried. It took a few tries to find a good one, however. Perhaps it's because I mostly like coffee quite milky, which might cover over any quality issues.

Developing a taste for good coffee (or wine, etc) doesn't seem attractive to me. You end up needing more and more equipment. You need expensive high quality beans. It's typically messy, time consuming, takes up valuable kitchen space and expensive. I'd rather something ok, which is quick, cheap and convenient.

ps can also get a prize with its incompatible mixture of BSD (non-hyphenated) and UNIX (hyphenated) options. The letters chosen appear pretty random, too.

Fake celebrity endorsements are often used on these scams. Well-known UK finance media guy Martin Lewis constantly has to try to shut down ads using his image.

There's this: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/scotland-blog/2016/may/1...

Short-sightedness is the eye problem in British English: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/short-sightedness/ We also use long-sightedness.

Are you sure? I see values of $1.7M or so for Berkley [1]. In Munich it's around 10k Euros per square metre. There are many properties with prices around the Berkley value [2], although flats will be cheaper.

[1] https://www.zillow.com/berkeley-ca/home-values/ [2] https://www.immowelt.de/liste/muenchen/haeuser/kaufen?sort=r...

Does anyone know why box fans are so hard to get hold of in Europe? In Germany they seem very rare and expensive.

Astronomy usually writes coordinates in this order, for example: Right ascension [RA], declination [Dec] in the equatorial coordinate system (corresponding to Long, Lat), or Galactic sky coordinates l (Galactic longitude) and b (Galactic latitude).

It also has crazy things like taxation on energy produced by your solar panels that you use yourself.