jabl

> There were many older models of BMW that had an electric water pump. If that sounds silly, well, it is. And it failed frequently and was again, very difficult to replace.

On the face of it, it's not actually a bad idea. The electric pump can run at an optimal speed regardless of engine rpm. This means the pump can be downsized, because otherwise if it's driven directly from the engine it'd have to be sized for the worst case scenario of low rpm and high load.

Same reason why many vehicles nowadays have electric radiator fans rather than driven directly from the crankshaft like in the "good ol' days". (Of course with transverse mounted engines a crankshaft driven fan doesn't really work either, so that's another big reason to go for an electric fan.)

Now, of course this concept can be badly implemented, just like any other part of the design.

T-hybrid is cool, yes. Ironically the first electric turbocharger hitting the streets just when Formula I is banning them..

As much as I'm gung-ho about the world electrifying transport, I agree with you here. Those Porsche SUV's just look awful, whatever the drivetrain. If I'm gonna splurge on a Porsche, I'll want the real thing. And if I don't want a 911, well there are a lot of other brands making more sensible vehicles.

(Of course, if a lot of other people share my extremist views, that's pretty bad for Porsche the company. They likely can't survive just producing 911's. Oh well, I'm not here for corporate charity anyway.)

Unfortunately children playing in the yard have ample time to get behind the car between you checking it, entering the car, starting it, and reversing.

Yes, in principle one could take whatever other measures necessary to prevent such accidents. In reality, backup cameras save lives. Just like seatbelts, anti-lock brakes, crash safety standards, and other safety features that "Real Manly Drivers" protested against back in the day.

> And if you take into account how China has treated its own people, it’s not much better or worse than the United States. Maybe worst, actually, since Americans do have a legal right to protest.

In "The Great Leap Forward" they killed tens of millions of their own. Granted, that was a long time ago, but while the current leaders may be wiser little suggests they aren't as ruthless.

Might be 90% of current sales. Still a lot of ICE cars on the road.

They seem quite intent on inching their border closer to the Philippines mainland by building military bases on some shoals that belong to the Philippines.

> The writer is always finished before the reader starts in these scenarios. The issue is reads on one machine aren't guaranteed to be ordered after writes on a different machine due to write caching.

In such a case it should be sufficient to rely on NFS close-to-open consistency as explained in the RFC I linked to in the previous message. Closing a file forces a flush of any dirty data to the server, and opening a file forces a revalidation of any cached content.

If that doesn't work, your NFS is broken. ;-)

And if you need 'proper' cache coherency, something like Lustre is an option.

> poor locking support (this sounds like it works better)

File locking on Unix is in general a clusterf*ck. (There was a thread a few days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542247 )

> no manual fence support; a bad but common way of distributing workloads is e.g. to compile a test on one machine (on an NFS mount), and then use SLURM or SGE to run the test on other machines. You use NFS to let the other machines access the data... and this works... except that you either have to disable write caches or have horrible hacks to make the output of the first machine visible to the others. What you really want is a manual fence: "make all changes to this directory visible on the server"

In general, file systems make for poor IPC implementations. But if you need to do it with NFS, the key is to understand the close-to-open consistency model NFS uses, see section 10.3.1 in https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7530#section-10.3 . Of course, you'll also want some mechanism for the writer to notify the reader that it's finished, be it with file locks, or some other entirely different protocol to send signals over the network.

AFAIU the NFSv4 protocol in principle allows implementing unlinking an open file without silly rename, but the Linux client still does the silly rename dance.

Aluminum got a bad rep due to a lot of poor installations made in the 1960 and 70'ies. Subsequently new alloys (AA-8000 series) for wiring, new installation and termination procedures etc. have been developed, and AFAIU the situation today is much better. It's still trickier than copper wiring, so probably not a good option for DIY, but for some industrial installation with competent personnel and where the savings can be substantial it could certainly be an attractive option.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring

As TFA mentions, Unix/POSIX locking is insane.

Note that this page is slightly outdated wrt. flock(). From the manpage (online at https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/flock.2.html):

>

       Since Linux 2.0, flock() is implemented as a system call in its
       own right rather than being emulated in the GNU C library as a
       call to fcntl(2).  With this implementation, there is no
       interaction between the types of lock placed by flock() and
       fcntl(2), and flock() does not detect deadlock.  (Note, however,
       that on some systems, such as the modern BSDs, flock() and
       fcntl(2) locks do interact with one another.)

   CIFS details
       Up to Linux 5.4, flock() is not propagated over SMB.  A file with
       such locks will not appear locked for remote clients.

       Since Linux 5.5, flock() locks are emulated with SMB byte-range
       locks on the entire file.  Similarly to NFS, this means that
       fcntl(2) and flock() locks interact with one another.  Another
       important side-effect is that the locks are not advisory anymore:
       any IO on a locked file will always fail with EACCES when done
       from a separate file descriptor.  This difference originates from
       the design of locks in the SMB protocol, which provides mandatory
       locking semantics.

       Remote and mandatory locking semantics may vary with SMB protocol,
       mount options and server type.  See mount.cifs(8) for additional
       information.

   NFS details
       Up to Linux 2.6.11, flock() does not lock files over NFS (i.e.,
       the scope of locks was limited to the local system).  Instead, one
       could use fcntl(2) byte-range locking, which does work over NFS,
       given a sufficiently recent version of Linux and a server which
       supports locking.

       Since Linux 2.6.12, NFS clients support flock() locks by emulating
       them as fcntl(2) byte-range locks on the entire file.  This means
       that fcntl(2) and flock() locks do interact with one another over
       NFS.  It also means that in order to place an exclusive lock, the
       file must be opened for writing.

       Since Linux 2.6.37, the kernel supports a compatibility mode that
       allows flock() locks (and also fcntl(2) byte region locks) to be
       treated as local; see the discussion of the local_lock option in
       nfs(5).

The cooling effect of SO2 was certainly known when the IMO regulations were decided upon. It was decided that the public health advantages outweighed the climate warming. One can certainly quibble whether this decision was correct or not, but it wasn't done in ignorance.

(My take would have been be to allow high sulphur fuel out on the high seas, where there's very few humans around (or flora and fauna in general). )

Notably, politically the notion of forests as carbon sinks have been a very convenient fig leaf for politicians not wanting to reduce emissions in other parts of society.

How are they gathering data about how much you drive?

In the same vein Pascal was invented by Niklaus Wirth in Switzerland.

Hooray for the Boeing 787 with its electrically powered cabin air compressor rather than using engine bleed air like other contemporary airliners.

The peace price is different, and it's been a bit of a hit and miss at least since Kissinger got it.

And the economics prize, though it's not officially really a Nobel prize.

But the core science prizes, AFAICT, are pretty spot on. Of course there are always many worthy contenders of a prize and one can quibble should this or that person really deserve to get it instead of another person, but I haven't heard of any outright frauds or some trivial advancement getting the prize.

> Germany is not really rich compared to nordics.

(From another post I made in this thread)

Looking at IMF 2025 GDP per capita figures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... ):

Norway: $92k

Denmark: $77k

Sweden: $62k

Germany: $60k

UK: $57k

Finland: $56k

So yeah, Denmark and particularly Norway are a bit richer than the others, but the others are in the same ballpark.

My understanding is that at the moment there's no expansion happening at the Katri Vala plant (the 160MW mentioned in the link above), the 300 MW is the total heat pump capacity spread out over half a dozen locations.

> Sign of a rich and very developed country.

You need to find another reason. Looking at IMF 2025 GDP per capita figures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... ):

Norway: $92k

Denmark: $77k

Sweden: $62k

Germany: $60k

UK: $57k

Finland: $56k

So yeah, Denmark and particularly Norway are a bit richer than the others, but the others are in the same ballpark.

If I had to bring up some particular reason, gas grids are more or less non-existent in the Nordics, and electricity is cheaper than in central Europe or UK.

Interesting. In Helsinki the municipal energy company has a plant with 7 heat pumps which is slightly smaller at 160 MW heat and 100 MW of cooling. https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2023/Waste-heat-plays-a-signifi...

Air-source heat pumps are also somewhat common in retrofits where the remaining expected lifetime of the building isn't big enough to be worth spending some 20-30k€ (?) that installing a ground source heat pump costs. A significant part of the cost being drilling the hole.

Similarly for small houses the cost of the hole drilling might not be worth the reduction in electricity consumption.

> What works for GNOME is useless for KDE, and what works for KDE is useless for XFCE, which is ignored by Sway and so forth.

KDE had their own IPC thingy, DCOP, but it has been replaced with D-Bus.

Yes! Make something built on top of binder, and use something with orders of magnitude more users and developer resources behind it..

> hardened stuff that already exist.

To make it even more hardened(?), Google recently contributed and got merged a Rust implementation of binder for the Linux kernel (and they're apparently planning to eventually remove the old C implementation).

https://lwn.net/Articles/953116/

https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20231101-rust-binder-...

How convenient that refueling also replenishes your missiles.

I believe Google has developed a Rust implementation of the binder driver which was recently merged, and they are apparently planning to remove the original C implementation. Considering binder is essential for Android that would be a major step too.

> Electrification of the economy, which is a thing that at least the US is way behind on, is going to be a massive driver of electricity demand across the world. And a lot of countries are going to benefit from cost savings there. Not having to import expensive oil and gas in favor of cheaply produced solar/wind energy is going to wipe out quite a few billions from the trade balance of countries across the world. China is leading by example here. Their diesel imports are declining sharply already. Investments in renewables are rising accordingly. This is not driven by green washing but by raw economics.

Interesting reading on the topic: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-electrotech-rev...

> Whether the US will be able to adapt to other countries doing things cheaper and better than them remains to be seen.

The US (or at least, fossil fuel interests in the US which seem to have a lot of influence over the current administration) seem determined to become an "energy superpower" by exporting oil and gas. In particular, seems they'd very much like Europe to switch from Russian gas to US LNG. We'll see how that goes. Personally, I find it hard to see how LNG from the other side of the world will remain competitive with ever-reducing costs of solar, wind, and batteries.

Sure. Just like coaling stations and bunker fuel facilities didn't pop into existence with the snap of a finger either. Yet somehow they were built, eventually.

French nuclear submarines run on 7% enriched fuel, so it's certainly possible to build military submarines that don't need HEU.