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Unfortunately, they left open what happens after dropping DST. If they had clearly written that the EU would return to the standard time, it would have been active back then.

So much confusion about this. There was never a "vote" about it. It was more like a poll, which wasn't advertised across the EU, and on top of it was severely plagued by server failures. To have a binding vote:

- it needs to be properly announced to all eligible voters

- be declared as binding, you can't tell people it isn't a vote and later on declare it is

- the platform for voting needs to work

I don't think this would be a good choice. The current setup of the European time zones works very well, it has been decided upon a long time ago, based on geography, the local connections. All arguments point either to returning to the standard time or keep the clock change twice a year.

We do have multiple time zones in Europe. They have been agreed upon for a practical compromise. It is not clear to me what would be the advantage of calling off that compromise and have a costly rearrangement.

Yes, solar time matters as your biological rhythm depends on it. The most important part of it being able to have daylight when you either rise in the morning or at least have the sun get up quickly after that. Another important point is, that there is plenty of experimental evidence that shows that starting schools before the pupils are really awake is not effective.

It is a misconception, that "noon" is the middle point of your awake time. That was never the case. Our day usage most of the time is asymmetric: start the day and especially the work with the sunlight, spend the evening time off after work after sun set.

Using the high point of the sun as the reference for the daytime is a very practical choice, as this is the one easily observable time point which doesn't move much over the course of the year (a few minutes, but that is symmetric).

Well, actually not. What was voted on was the plan to end the DST shift. The reason it stalled on was, that there was no decision about how exactly to end the shift.

In my personal opinion, the only reasonable decision would be to permanently return to the standard time before the introduction of DST. Because otherwise the whole European timezone would have to be redesigned.

It might point to the simple fact that Apple isn't really launching a new tier of the MacBook line. It is probably an outlier in their lineup leading towards all MB Pros moving to the new screen in the next iteration or two.

Certainly not. But they may be in the market for an entry level Mac laptop quite soon. I don't think Apple plans to limit touch screen to their top model for a long time. It is just how Apple likes to introduce new capabilities. Also, there might be technical reasons why they tied touch to the OLED display. So I do expect a MB Air with OLED and touch some time in the mid-term future.

No, it isn't. It only says a lot about the lack of clear judgement by a lot of party members.

There is no such system as "political permission". Everyone is able to found a party. But of course any party has to act within the law, especially the constitution. Thus, the high court can, in a complex proceeding ban parties which are violating the constitution by their actions or even plan to overthrow the constitution.

So what? One can always fork at any point in time and of course there are plenty Linux forks internationally. Having the Linux Foundation is great, but it could be replaced at any time.

There is the EU as a political entity covering large parts of Europe. But here Europe can easily mean the same as "not the US". There are plenty of Linux forks. Which are maintained independently. In the moment it becomes relevant, any of them could be used in an instant. There is Debian, There is Suse. There is no lack of international Linux variants.

Would you like to elaborate, if you disagree with my statement? Of course it was very shortened, because the point of my post was an entirely different one.

If you want a longer version: open source software under the normal licenses give you irrevocable rights to use it, as it is open source, you can also administrate it. You have full control over it. That was the core of my statement. Additionally, European authors are major contributors to many of this software. So in what exactly do you disagree with me?

May be it is just the matter to compose a few good HOW-TOs. What I gave up on once was creating slabs with rounded edges. Basically imagine a slab which looks like an iPhone icon: you have in the plane of the slab rather a large corner radius, but for rounding the edges of the resulting slab, a much smaller one.

Writing now about it, I think I could do it with a torus, where the radius of its cross section is the small radius, the torus radius is the large one, take two of them, add two cylinders to only keep one quarter edge and then take a quarter of the resulting bevelled disk.

Sure. For practical purposes, the number is infinite. This is why I found the bug and the bug report so amusing: In "normal" language, the sentence is correct, but for a mathematician, especially such a renowned professor, it is an amazing blunder. Bonus points for being the first word in the document.

Sure, but looking at C's age, the language was changed significantly over time. With one of those changes, certain things could have been considered compile errors, not optional tooling.

Or if you turn your argument around: if people depend on workflows and automation (I do of course too), then this is a good reason to standardize the diagnostics and errors of the checking tools to the point where the workflows and automation can depend on them. Otherwise they will remain tools which are completely optional to run, or even worse, are not part of your normal work flow.

Any open source software should be considered "international" and there are a lot of European contributions to that universe.

The topic of "European" programming languages is highly interesting in the sense that there were a lot of highly developments done in Europe, but they are often less noticed than the counterparts popular in the US. The reason to look more into them would not be so much today's independence, but more to resurrect good concepts that kind of got ignored by history.

There is the ISLisp standard, of course the treasure chest of languages and works boy Nikolas Wirth and so much more. Europe has many great universities, their creations usually are free.

Of course, you could call Python an European language and Go heavily draws from the Wirth's language family.

Which, to be provocative, begs the question: why isn't this tooling part of the compiler, that is, why aren't the diagnostics always produced by default, or even considered errors?

Looks cool! Plate solving is an incredibly useful technology for astronomy, putting it into the smartphone makes it available for a lot of "non-smart" setups. Only one question: does it have a polar align feature? This is my biggest challenge, when e.g. setting up a simple star tracker. The app would be very useful for this.

Eventually it might. We don't have any good ideas about what would help without things getting much worse.

What we do need now is finally the determination to fight climate change. We have all the tools at our disposal to eliminate any fossil fuel burning within some years. We should finally take this as the priority it should be.

I think the best explanation, how Lisp macros are different from most other macro system is, that a Lisp macro is a function executed during compilation. It gets fed the parameters passed to it in literal form and then computes the source to actually compile by the compiler.

The power of this is that this function is also written in plain Lisp and it also sees all definition already existing in your Lisp image. Also, it is completely unlimited in power. So while being run, or as it is called "during macro expansion" the function could google for one of the things passed and use the result to create the output. Of course, this is not a practical example, but shows how flexible the system is.

That might be, on the other side, I consider Lisp highly readable, but quite a few modern languages quite unreadable. For example parsing type signatures with a complex syntax.

Any style of writing you are not familiar with will require a lot of training. Try reading anything written in the Greek alphabet for example.

I wonder what the market price of 1.5 TB RAM today would be and if selling that off would pay for the whole Mac Pro :)

A bit, but then, it was sold by Apple and some people saw a need for it. Like having tons of memory and of course, being x86-compatible also has its uses. That is, why Rosetta 2 exists. Applying the 7 year support window, they should support it till 2030. Especially, as it was the most expensive hardware sold.

The comparison with "primary energy" misses the inefficiency of the usage of fossil fuels. If you electrify the main uses of fossil energy, the efficency goes up by like a factor of 3 - electric cars vs. ICE, heat pumps vs. burning fuels.

Yes, it is a long journey until the whole energy consumption is moved to renewables, but running the electric grid of a country like Germany to way over 60% on renewables is an important point on the way there.

Over 40% of the German landmass is currently used to produce food for farm animals. The space requirement for solar is far off from that. And you can use rooftops etc.

Heating with heat pumps is highly efficient and already the cheapest way of heating your home. The grids are ready for it - especially considering the amount of residential solar.

Absolutely. But for many things, denial is easier than fixing. See climate change. We knew about the problem for a long time. At latest after the oil crisis in the early 70ies, it would have been the perfect moment to reduce fossil fuel usage. Of course we know, how this has not happened and so we just entered the next oil crisis last week. And everyone is to blame for that.

The SSDs in the Studio are on modules, you can exchange those. They are in a custom format though.

The latest Mac Pro really didn't make much use of its size, as there were too few useful things to put into. Especially as the GPU is now part of the package anyway. Also, the Mac Studio is the perfect workstation for the desk.

Still, there are a few things which could be improved relative to the current Studio. First, the ability to easily clean the internals from dust. You should be able to just lift the lid and clean the computer. Also, it would be great to have one Mac which you could just plug in a bunch of NVMe disks.

On the other side, they might replace the Mac Pro with a rack mountable machine as the demand for ARM servers in the cloud raises.