2000UltraDeluxe

Indeed, and large parts of the reason has nothing to do with geography. The same applies to Denmark and the rest of the Nordics.

Obviously solar will be decreasingly useful as you get further to the pole, but the Nordics aren't worse off than Alaska or Canada in that regard, and both do solar to some extent AFAIK.

We have solar in Finland as well, like everyone else. Yes, it's useless in winter. Yes, the expansion has slowed down, because there is no storage and limited export options.

The Nordic power market is a mess, and it's not because solar doesn't work in winter but because the grid needs massive investments on all levels and nobody wants to be left holding the bill for it.

Electrification? Sure, I'll buy an EV when the _local_ grid operator makes sure my lights don't flicker when the neighbor uses an angle grinder. The last update was that they plan to replace the old transformer station from the 60's "when it breaks".

Local generation? Can't get rid of the excess generation if I wanted to.

Is Denmark's power grid expansion still geared at selling Swedish electricity to the Germans?

Sweden? No internal transfer capacity so their consumers have constant high prices while power is exported cheaply.

Norway? Geo-blocked by Sweden.

> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?

In some countries it's not just "unethical", but outright illegal. Laws and rules vary, but all is equal to the spam button and the whims of those wielding it.

"Helping for free" doesn't cut it when dealing with governments. Even if everyone had gone the Linux route 20 years ago we'd still have an entire ecosystem of commercial businesses selling and operating it; imagine what Red Hat would look like with Microsoft actually out of the picture.

We'd have just as many consultancy firms and layers of beuraucracy without Microsoft, and France wouldn't be operating their entire government IT stack, all the way down to individual workstations, that much cheaper than it is now.

30 people managing the hardware? Sure, if you get good deals on the hardware itself, the employees stay healthy, and you have everything so centralised you don't need multiple people on call.

Centralising things to that level and supporting the users of the entire government structure of a country the size of France -- one of the countries the sun _never_ sets on -- while it's transitioning from decades of Microsoft dependency to an open source ecosystem? Heh, no.

That's how you ensure the birth rate stays low.

Finland's fertility rate drove off a cliff in the 60's like in so many other countries. If sauna has an overall effect we wouldn't know as we've nothing to compare with -- going to sauna is rather universal and the tradition is ancient.

> Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal.

Not all power users. Some re-invent the wheel and/or do things inefficiently, and in most cases there's no business incentive to adapt the service to fit the usage patterns of those users, or of other users that deviate from the norm in regards to resource usage.

There is a point to be made about short-sightedness on the manufacturers' part; if the infrastructure needs to be improved then short-term profits should be reduced in order to ensure long-term sustainability.

But yes, at least where I live, there's a major infrastructure problem that nobody -- consumers included -- want to pay for, and for a lot of us EV's aren't an option until said infrastructure has been upgraded.

Give it a week and it will be. By far.

Batteries fail completely too, on occasion especially with cheaper brands or 5+ year-old headphones.

Were there actually Pentium M chipsets that could decode anything but MPEG2?

The CPU will be struggling with most modern video formats including h.264.

Amiga was big in Europe. No doubt they were slow though; most computers of the time were.

There have been firebrands attempting a revival of the Amiga since the mid 90's, and back then it was a question of making a new and modern platform -- not watching demos.

Today is a different matter, of course. Personally, emulation is more than enough for me.

Yeah, the lack of support for off-the-shelf hardware has been the doom of the Amiga revival since day one.

The refusal to port AmigaOS to anything but dead or near-dead architectures has always amazed me -- had the resources been spent on AROS instead, we'd have a usable modern ecosystem by now, rather than multiple different options that fall back on various ways of running 30 year-old binaries.

All I want is a decent modern version of YAM and universal ARexx/datatype support! :(

Lots of tapes more or less being given away here. Check your local flea markets!

It's perfecly legitimate to do stuff simply because you want to. This is a site for tinkering people, so it's kind of expected people tinker with stuff. Quite often that includes old stuff. :)

Waiting for the writeup about the steel wire recorder resurgence now.

Yeah, with high-end vintage decks in good shape, tapes can sound pretty decent, more than enough for day-to-day listening.

A type I tape recorded on a modern player? It'll sound horrible.

But what a quality that was!

The reservoirs in Finland aren't quite at the scale your Explorer Vodka-fuelled Swedish mind believe them to be. Most are small generators hooked up to the local rivers, and are required to prioritize keeping the water from flooding residential areas.

There's a reason we're looking at using old mines for pumped hydro rather than trying to pump water upriver during a spring flood because other power sources have surplus generation.

But where? In Finland, at least, the land is relatively flat when compared with Norway and Sweden, and with a large rural population there aren't really any good locations.

In my local area, we had major flooding this spring because the hydro plant operators were sleeping on the job (or whatever they did instead of regulating water levels). And that was a simple 2m increase in water levels.

NO/SE have some more geographically suitable locations, but last time I checked, flooding them was considered too environmentally destructive too the local environment.

I've seen the same trend. AI neeeds to be everywhere, preferably yesterday, but apart from hooking everything up to an LLM withot regards for the consequences nobody seems to know what the AI is supposed to do.

Until that happens, I think we should assume that solar only isn't a viable option. At the moment Finland would need 60x more solar to cover current needs (during daytime), and it's barely winter yet. Sure, you'd get away with 20x in Germany but remember we _all_ need to scale up for actual winters where you can't just say "whoops" if things don't go to plan.

I'm not sure how I'd manage tbh (in Finland).

I was called a luddite for not wanting to follow the "official" schoool Whatsapp group. Online banking is practicably unusable without the bank's own 2FA app.

Many things can still be done in a web browser, but the rest of society is going the smartphone route and it's increasingly difficult to avoid it.

Any non-digital options are aimed at elderly and handicapped individuals; not people who don't want smartphones.

Downdetector indicates AWS issues as well.

"Norwegian" isn't just one unified language and Norway isn't in the EU.

That being said, the Scandinavian languages all come from old Norse, and modern national constructs aside, most of the people in the those areas descend from the same mix of Germanic tribes. There's no denying that modern-day Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are very similar.

I think that sentence is easily readable for most people who speak at least one Germanic language.

It's mostly true, though, even if it's a somewhat simplified view.

Working with a client that has thousands of customers using this setup. Common? Perhaps not, but definitely not near zero.

Many people are fiercly attached to the Gmail interface, but refuse to pay for Google Workspace, or even manage multiple email accounts in a desktop client.

2G is still required in quite a few areas, but it would probably be a good idea to change the default to 3G/4G only; not being able to use a new phone would be a problem while changing a setting during setup would not.

Last time I checked, the preferred method was to simlify known CSAM material enough that you can hash the result, then repeat in the client end and hope nothing else has the same hash.