deadbeeves

I was actually thinking about elastic AWS instances when I wrote that. IIRC they're meant to be spun up and then shut down as a service's demand varies.

VPS providers are already overprovisioned anyway, so they have less idle hardware to begin with.

The most effective way is to be able to dynamically distribute load across a large array of servers, turning some off at times of lower load. Anyone who runs a large datacenter probably already does this or something equivalent, either to save money or to service more customers with the same amount of hardware. It's more effective to optimize the hardware architecture, but it's worth noting that improvements in efficiency usually don't translate to reductions in power consumption. Instead, it causes induced demand and usage increases to fill available capacity.

>Does Time Machine run on a schedule? Add a cron job (whatever the Mac equivalent is) to send a WoL ~1min beforehand?

I believe on x86 the BIOS supports setting a timer for self-wakeup. The OS can tell the BIOS "I'm going to sleep. Pull me out of sleep if the RTC passes this datetime."

Still, TFA is about putting a server on stand-by. A server is not going to run off a battery most of the time, so it's not very relevant if it's drawing 4 W instead of 1 W. Even if it's not running at the absolute minimum power level, by putting it on any stand-by mode it's going to draw an order of magnitude less power than if it's idle.

I thought we were talking about just supporting going to stand-by, not about how much power the device draws while on stand-by.

>Why isn't this the default (or at least a configuration option)?

Because 1) you still need a second machine to wait for incoming requests, 2) in a server there's no general way to check if the server is serving requests or not. Plex happened to provide an API that specifically does what you needed, but you had to resort to a bit of a hack for Time Machine. This is unlike a desktop context, where you can check if the user has moved the mouse or pressed a key in the last N minutes. And 3) because the delay of waiting for the server to wake back up is undesirable.

>Seriously, there is soooo much potential to save energy in IT.

I don't think so. For VPS instances it doesn't matter, and for internal servers it's almost certainly more efficient to virtualize a bunch of services onto a single box, if there's multiple servers idle most of the time.

I've never had any issues with stand-by on Windows.

I'm always conflicted by Brunelle's videos. The skill displayed is certainly impressive, but I think it's wrong to glorify that kind of behavior. Those people are irresponsible fools. If you want to do stunts, don't do it around people who don't want to be involved. And I say this as someone who commutes by road bike daily.

It makes sense, no? If someone wants to ride now, they should know how to do it safely, not have to way until someone makes the road safe enough that they don't have to learn anything.

Nah. Unless you ride in a town where everyone rides and no one drives, you're gonna have to interact with cars at some point. It's just inevitable. You need to know how to ride on a road with other vehicles.

I'm not convinced that the answer is just more infrastructure. IME, most bike paths are just bad. They're some combination of poorly designed, poorly made, or poorly maintained. There's one on the way to my office that has marked loading bays for trucks such that I have to keep getting off onto the car traffic because there's no way I'm passing between a vehicle and the sidewalk. Why would you build something like that there? And of course if you decide that it's just too risky to use the bike path people scream at you because they think they're entitled to that lane that you didn't even ask for.

using and/or finally are things you have to get right every time you instantiate the class, and if you get it wrong you no longer get deterministic destruction. Compare with C++, where RAII is the default policy and you have to take extra steps to get dynamic lifetimes.

AOT maybe. RAII definitely not.

That would imply that it actually finished, which is not obvious to me. The last time I found Python 2 code must have been a few months ago, and I'm not a regular Python user. And that's kind of the problem: old code never just goes away. It lingers until you try to compile it and it fails.

Give me C# with RAII and native AOT compilation and I basically don't need to use C++ again. That's close enough to regular C++ that a lot of programs wouldn't need major redesigns.

Nah, I disagree. Rust fills the void of "natively compiled safe language". If you need something that's "like C++" (whatever that means to you) but safe, Rust may not work for you. And it's certainly not true that no one needs a safe C++. If someone right now starts a new project in C++ and not Rust it's because that's what they think is best all things considered, not because they don't need memory safety.

I'm still developing my opinion of Rust, but

* It's too different. This is to be expected because it was never designed to be like C++. For example, if I have an OOP-heavy application, moving it over to Rust is not a matter of fixing up a few ideas here and there like it might be with, say, Java or C#. It calls for a redesign/rewrite. I don't think a memory safe C++ successor would need to be more like Rust than like C++.

* The language is not substantially simpler than C++. I find traits to be particularly difficult to reason about and to follow, to the point that I find myself just trying to find the right incantation that will appease the compiler. And that complexity shows up at build time just like it does with C++.

That's not going to happen. There's just too much friction to reach consensus on how to move the language in that kind of direction. It's like trying to get a centipede to walk to the food when none of the legs can agree on the best path to take. Before that happens, it's much more likely that some other language that interoperates well with C++ will reach a useful state (with regards to IDE support and other tools) and will be embraced by the community. By "community" I don't just mean hobbyists, but the major members of the C++ committee: Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Intel, etc. That language might be Rust or it might be some other language that's yet to appear. It might not even be a single language, but several. I personally think Rust is not a suitable successor to C++.

It sounds like you're dismissing the arguments purely by what you think it would mean to consider them seriously. "If these arguments are valid, then these conclusions are valid. These conclusions should not be valid. Therefore the arguments are invalid."

Why is it untenable that yes, data is data and it should move freely, and no, children should not be raped and filmed?

This is great. I've been using the Pico W as an automation tool and been controlling over a network connection. Controlling it through a BT keyboard would be much more reliable, I thing.

>Sorry for the pedantry, but if they are flying around in the earth's atmosphere then they are not "spaceships" even if they are being operated by extraterrestrials.

I'll see your pedantry and raise you my own pedantry. The fact that a hypothetical craft flies around in an atmosphere does not imply that it's not a spaceship. A vessel could conceivably be capable of flying through some fluid at one time and through the vacuum of space at another, and would thus be called a spaceship. For example, the Space Shuttle was a spaceship even when it was operating under aerodynamic forces. Since we're talking about alien ships, they would have to be alien spaceships, because otherwise we would have to accept that these aliens have the necessary infrastructure and facilities to land their spaceships somewhere (some kind of alien spaceport on Earth?), disembark, and board their alien aircraft to fly around Earth's atmosphere, which is an even more ridiculous idea.

Fair enough. That is pretty dumb and rather a major oversight IMO.

That sounds kind of worrying. It sounds like if a pilot has a malfunctioning altitude meter they can only check it visually or have a completely independent GPS on hand. I don't see what else the crew or the ATC could have done in that instance, given their equipment. I also don't understand why a radar of all things can't give a more precise measurement of altitude. Even a person with binoculars could probably be more precise than +/- 1 mile.

To me, just saying that it's something "strange" would be a hard sell, because I would have to agree that it's definitely nothing mundane shot such that I can't recognize it for what it is. I could agree that we don't know what some of these things are, as long our degree of ignorance is properly bounded. I don't think there's equal chance that they're, say, bigfoots on hoverboards or birds. "Look, this thing here looks like it might be some kind of secret Chinese UAV because it moves like human aircraft move but is too small to fit a person" is something that I think is worth looking into. "This looks like it could be a tear in spacetime" isn't. Nor is "we have no idea whatsoever what this is".

You're talking about a different interpretation of the word "UFO" than I used above. Ever since those reports came out some years ago of pilots reporting UFOs, the implication has been very strong that "UFO" doesn't just mean "here's something that showed up on the sensors that we don't know what it is".

Yes, the military should investigate all reports of UFOs in the strict sense to see if they've found some new piece of equipment from a foreign nation. I assume they've done that before releasing the footage to the public after figuring out what it is they actually detected.

Isn't it a given that if a plane is requesting a read that they want to check their measurement against a different one, though?

You have to admit, given that resources are finite, the dismissive attitude is warranted. Why is it that alien spaceships (let's call them what people actually think is being discussed, and not just any random flying thing that we don't know what it is) only show up on equipment when you can barely tell what you're looking at, and never clearly and unambiguously from multiple places?

That's amazing. So ATC didn't have the capability to measure the altitude of any plane themselves?

No, sometimes it's in the 0-200 range. I believe the device always reports the maximum and minimum possible values.

>I don’t think the movie’s caste system is realistic, because the role of genes isn’t that deterministic.

When your entire society is structured around covertly filtering out people with the wrong genes, you end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. Natural-born people can't succeed because they've been predicted they won't succeed, and engineered people succeed because they've been predicted they will succeed. I'm not even saying this happens because someone wants it to happen like this to maintain the status quo. It can happen because your peers push you in a direction that aligns with society.

Also, if you think about it, the movie never directly states that engineered people are actually "better". Sure, they're on average taller, with perfect eyesight, and with the lowest chance of developing certain conditions, but they're not necessarily smarter or stronger; they're just as smart or as strong as they could have been given their parents. The space program was filled with "the best", but we don't actually know if it would have operated worse with a mixer personnel, that's just what the administration believed.

The linked study directly states that loss of consciousness occurs after ~7 minutes of exposure to 10% CO2.