zejn

The point is apparently being missed.

There has been a long standing request to split Germany into multiple price zones[1], because Germany as a single zone does not adequately match the underlying network transmission limitations and there have been multiple occasions where power flowed through neighboring zones, which in turn required both network upgrades[2] in the zones neighboring Germany and expensive redispatch[3] in the south Germany. Industry in the south of Germany fights this back as this would mean the energy prices in the south would rise (and drop in the north), as when the transmission lines are congested, the prices start to diverge.

Keeping Germany a single zone is essentially a subsidy to Bavarian industry. The industry fights this so hard that it has basically become an energy insider joke.

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/grid-operators-recommen...

[2] https://www.pse.pl/web/pse-eng/news/news/-/asset_publisher/6...

[3] https://www.ffe.de/en/projects/potential-for-reducing-redisp...

Don't tell the UK they aren't supposed to be getting >15% of grid power via solar panels, because it's more efficient if the panels are in Spain.

similar as in Sweden

-- which has 4 bidding zones.

Ah, that's nice to hear. This also means we won't have to have another type of hardware on grid, since the batteries can make this work.

They could also just split the Germany into multiple bidding zones, then north parts of Germany would have a lot of cheap wind power, similar as in Sweden.

No, these are two different things. One is stability market, where batteries are now king, the other is physics of fault ride-through, where actual physical inertia is a real neccessity, at least for the time being. That is why synchronous condensers are installed.

Every major renewable grid has installed additional intertia to avoid blackouts.

It is, but you have to read it and you need some degree of prior knowledge to understand it correctly, as with everything.

That's some serious cherrypicking.

Where CAL27 low is either limited interconnectors (Nordics and Spain) or major nuclear (France). The other countries have CAL27 over 80 eur.

Ha, yes, a lot of deniers/delayers are going on about how Germany "wasted" billion on renewables, when in fact they had a booming solar industry, which got nuked by politicians, who changed the policies, as can be seen in 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us".

Was the subsidy system which was in effect in 2010's unsustainable? I think so, yeah. But the changed policies resulted in companies producing solar going bust, and the Chinese firms, which were doing fine, were able to buy out the patents and know how.

So, did Germany waste billions? Yes, but by letting the solar producers go bust.

Yeah, if you're buying a new car, electric makes sense if at all possible. But a lot of people are not buying new cars, because new cars are not cheap. There's a saying that a new car loses half of its value the moment it's driven away from the dealership.

But I agree, operational costs of an EV can be much lower, if you can charge at home rates.

They were deregulated on highway for a very long time. Deregulation came to off-highway in 2020 as the loss of demand due to covid made the prices drop. Rusian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent price hikes made the govt regulate the prices again.

Somewhere in between, a feud started between the largest provider Petrol and govt, and govt started regulating the highway prices too for no good reason.

The problem with getting rid of oil is that cars currently in use will be usable even when over 20 years old, replacing them with EVs is expensive, and the good enough and economically accessible EVs are only now starting to get to market.

It's really hard to quickly replace millions of vehicles.

Yes, but it is not enough. It helps a lot when sunny, and weekend mid-day gross market prices for electricity hover just above zero, but there's not enough batteries, flexibility, and other renewables to avoid price spikes in the morning and evening peak, when hydro and gas plants are still covering a lot.

It's not a free market. Off-highway prices are regulated and were adjusted by the executive govt branch on biweekly basis, now switched to weekly. Slovenia is small and "gas tourism" is common since fossil juices in neighboring countries are priced higher.

Why not raise the prices? Sure, but then don't complain about the inflation, revolt, and stoning of elected representatives.

Not true. No new car is cheap, and electricity is now cheaper than gas or diesel.

Don't you ever complain about that regulation which will require [x] on window corner to cancel-close.

Just spraying dust with water will not remove it. Detergent helps, but most of the cleaning effect is done by mechanical agitation, eg. wiping the glass.

Yep, on a mountain.

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1124478_world-s-largest...

Also, there's a similar train in development/roll-out -

https://www.theautopian.com/a-mining-company-built-a-battery...

The problem here begins even before the mathematical issue - it's that web sites that live from listing bookings have an incentive to offer a way to delete reviews that are not in line with what the owner wants to see.

Also, it was a very very different landscape.

You were commonly given a network uplink and a list of public IP addresses you were to set up on your box or boxes. IPMI/BMC were not a given on a server so if you broke it, you needed to have remote hands and probably brains too.

Virtualisation was in the early days and most of the services were co-hosted on the server.

Software defined networks and Open vSwitch were also not a thing back then. There were switches with support for VLANs and you might have had a private network to link together frontend and backend boxes.

Servers today can be configured remotely. They have their own management interfaces so you can access the console and install OS remotely. The network switches can be reconfigured on the fly, making the network topology reconfigurable online. Even storage can be mapped via SAN. The only hands on issue is hardware malfunction.

If I was to compare with today, it was like having a wardrobe of Raspberry Pies on a dumb switch, plugging in cables when changes were needed.

You can't be fired, but you burn through your runway quicker. No matter which option you choose, there is some exothermic oxidative process involved.

Synology does not use vanilla btrfs, they use a modified btrfs that runs over mdraid mirror, which somehow communicates with btrfs layer to supposedly fix errors, when they occur. It's not clear how far behind that fork is.

It's not legally required in terms of law, but it is legally required in the way that the legal department will complain if the banner not there. Checklists and all that. ;)

Handcount in Slovenia, first count done on local polling location, with a recount done by a central election comission and certification of the result. It works.

edit: First results are in within a couple of hours, depending on how many things are on the ballot.

8-bit bytes were not inevitable, but they are definitely not natural and they were designed. Clearly this design outcompeted alternatives.

Your first paragraph implies 8-bit bytes are a coincidence, which is not true. It was a design decision.

A byte in computer is the smallest addressable memory location and this location at that time contained a character. The way characters are encoded is called code. Early computers used 5-bits, which was not enough for alphabetics and numerals, 6 bits was not enough to encode numbers and lower and upper case characters, which eventually lead to ASCII.

ASCII was also designed(!) to make some operations simple, eg. turning text to upper or lower case only meant setting or clearing one bit if the code point was in a given range. This made some text operations much simpler and more performant, that is why pretty much everybody adopted ASCII.

Doing 7-bit ASCII operations with a 6-bit bytes is almost impossible and doing them with 18-bit words is wasteful.

When IBM was deciding on byte size a number of other options were considered, but the most advantageous was the 8-bit byte. Note that already with 8-bit bytes, this was over-provisioning space for character code, as ASCII was 7-bit. The extra bit offered quite some space for extra characters, which gave rise to character encodings. This isn't something I would expect a person living in the USA to know about, but users of other languages used upper 128 bytes for local and language specific characters.

When going with 8-bit byte, they also made the bytes individually addressable, making 32-bit integers actually 4 8-bit bytes. 8-bit byte also allowed to pack two BCD in one byte and you were able to get them out with a relatively simple operation.

Even though 8-bits was more than needed, they were deemed cost effective and "reasonably economical of storage space". And being a power of two allowed addressing a bit in a cost effective way, if a programmer needed to do so.

I think your post discounts and underestimates the amount of performance gain and cost optimisations 8-bit byte gave us at the time it mattered most, at the time computing power was low, and the fact that 8-bit bytes were just "good enough" and we didn't get anything usable from 9, 10, 12, 14 or 16 bit bytes.

On the other hand you overestimate the gains with imaginary problems, such as IPv4, which didn't even exist in 1960s (yes, we ran out of public space quite some time ago, no, not really a problem, even on pure IPv6 one has 6to4 NAT), or negative unix time - how on Earth did you get the idea that someone would use negative unix time stamps to represent historic datings, when most of the time we can't even be sure what year it was?

I think the most scary thing is having and odd-bit bytes; there would be a lot more people raging against the machine, if byte was 9 bits.

If you want to know why 8 bits, this is a good recap - https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/03/06/possible-reasons-8-bit-bytes... - along with the link to the book from the engineers who designed 8-bit bytes.

This is nice, I once did something similar for my SO to chart artworks on timeline by different geographic areas. Time was on x-axis, different geographic areas were different timelines vertically, and different art periods were colour coded.

The hardest thing was mapping approximate date descriptions (think "1st half of 17th century") into years to draw on chart.

I have a few phones that I am afraid to use. They're not that old, but the manufacturers have stopped shipping updates for them. This is a much needed regulatory innovation, since there was very little hope any company wanted to provide OS updates for longer than a few years.

Shipping OS updates to 5 years after the sale of last phone is going to make the phones work longer and lower the amount of stupid and fixable security issues present in all the outdated phones now in the wild. I hope.

This is not the same issue you are talking about.

Cars are repairable, phones are not, this is why this regulation is coming about.

There are modules that need replacement in whole, but same is true for this regulation regarding to phones: display and touchscreen modules are replaced as whole, not per component. Not great, but not too shabby, given the only other choice was to toss it.

The bigger part is manufacturers have to provide OS support for 5 years after the last phone was sold.

I find it amusing how a lot of people immmediately recognize 1000s of old laptop battery cells in a wooden shed a fire risk.

But they were as much of a fire risk (if not more) before being recycled, they were just spread out along the e-waste bins!

Every time I hear of a waste processing plant fire, I wonder if there was a (lithium) battery involved. Maybe from a single use vape, or a child's toy.