jabl

I tried to repurpose an old laptop I had lying around as a "lie on the couch and surf the web or watch youtube" machine. It was one of the last 32-bit only cpus (pentium m), so I installed Debian bookworm (12) on it. Unfortunately it turned out it couldn't even play youtube videos at 144p without stuttering. So I E-wasted the machine.

I suppose as some kind of headless home server it could still have been useful. OTOH for something that runs 24/7 a RPi would use a fraction of the electricity and still be a lot more powerful.

So yes, beyond nostalgia and some embedded/industrial usecases, it's hard to see a use for a 32-bit only PC these days.

RISC-V being an open source ISA does not imply that devices using that ISA won't be locked down.

An open ecosystem in the way that historically emerged around the PC platform seems to be a completely orthogonal issue.

There's "driverless" printing in the form of Mopria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mopria_Alliance

(known as "IPP Everywhere" in the Linux universe)

The history of China is perhaps not the history of AN empire, but rather a bunch of states/kingdoms, some of which every now and then managed to subjugate their neighbors and build an empire, for a while.

For all the faults of the NRC (real or imaginary), this still strikes me as an extremely bad idea.

> I used to make the ww2 models as a teenager and loved painting them with the oil paints (you need the right brand but I can’t remember the name).

I had a conversion chart for Revell, Humbrol, and Tamiya colors (which were the ones around when I was building models as a kid). It was good enough for me. Perhaps if you were really good or picky about the exact color it wouldn't do.

Yes, but that comes from the telecom world. Hence thanks to NIH, that wheel must be reinvented.

> In most of the world, railroads (and other roads) are government owned because it's hard to make that kind of business competitive plus there are natsec issues to address. The privatization trend is recent.

In many parts of the world, railroads were originally private enterprises. The US is perhaps exceptional here in that they never nationalized theirs.

There are some good theoretical arguments for such a structure, but OTOH experience trying to apply it on railroads hasn't been exactly positive. UK probably being the prominent example.

Looking at the diagram on the web page, seems the key is the water. When expanding, use heat stored in the water to heat the gas. Likewise when compressing CO2 into liquid, use the water to store the excess heat generated?

I would say the big issue would be the size and cost of the gas dome. For storing a substantial amount of gaseous CO2 that will be humongous.

I agree with you, but still, 5y is better than nothing.

Personally, I have several decent headphones with 3.5mm connectors. Having to buy a separate pair of headphones for phone use is dumb.

I remember in high school chemistry (or physics?) we had a wooden model of the benzene ring with the ground state molecular orbitals. Diameter about 30cm.

Isn't sf6 on the way out due to it being an extremely potent GHG?

Not sure what the alternative would be for really high voltages? Vacuum insulated switchgear seems to be a hot topic at the moment, but not sure how it'd work with such extreme voltages?

How does this generally work wrt brakes needing to be used occasionally to not rust shut? Even with an ICE car if you don't drive a lot, and drive in a fuel efficient way (e.g. coasting towards red lights) this can be an issue resulting in an expensive surprise when you need to replace disks long before they are worn out.

There is an additive called 6PPD added to tires to prevent them from degrading in the atmosphere, and it has been found that when this thing reacts with ozone in the air it forms another compound 6PPD-quinone which is highly toxic to some fishes. Weirdly enough it's highly toxic to some species of salmon but not to other salmon species.

Presumably there's work ongoing to find an less damaging replacement, but I haven't heard of any.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6PPD

> This being said, I’ve noticed that many a “big EV” driver will take off from red lights like they’re driving a dragster.

That would be my guess. Occasionally looking at specs from EV's coming on market, they seem to have very powerful engines, and of course the torque curve of electric motors is fantastic. So if you have such a car, and a heavy foot, I can well imagine you going through tires at a decent clip.

The kilogram is no longer defined by a physical artifact, fwiw.

Anyway, the point is the inconsistency in the system due to the kilogram being the base unit. So derived units are defined in terms of kilogram rather than gram. Say, the unit of force, Newton (N), is defined as kgm/s^2 and not gm/s^2). Or pressure, Pascal (Pa) which is N/m^2 which inherits N being defined in terms of the kilogram). And so on. Anyway, an annoying inconsistency maybe but doesn't really affect usage of the system once you get used to it.

Sorry, I was being imprecise. Rebuilds per se are no problem, as both MOFED and Lustre provide sources, and DKMS nicely automates rebuilding when installing a new kernel image. The actual problem is that RHEL minor releases would also break kernel internal API's, and thus building the kernel modules would fail.

Perhaps the cure is worse than the disease? There are several reasons to stay with a distro kernel:

- Lustre releases target distro kernels, upstream would likely break.

- Distro stays on top of CVE's etc. and provide updates when needed.

- HW likely certified for a few supported distros only, use anything else and you're on your own.

Yes, and yes.

The kernel parts of MOFED are largely backports of the latest and greatest upstream kernel drivers to the various distro kernels their customers actually run. (The non-kernel parts of MOFED is mostly open source but does contain some proprietary special sauce on top, like IIRC SHARP support isn't available in FOSS.). The HPC community does tend to want to use the latest RDMA drivers as those are critical for at scale performance.

For Lustre, the client driver was upstreamed into staging, where it sat AFAIU largely unused for a few years until it was ripped out again. The problem was that Lustre developers didn't adopt an upstream-first development approach, and thus the in-kernel driver was basically a throw over the fence fork that nobody cared about. I think there is an effort to try again and hopefully adopt an upstream-first approach, remains to be seen whether it'll succeed.

As I mentioned in another comment on this thread:

> As an aside, that kABI guarantee only goes so far. I work in HPC/AI, and the out-of-tree drivers we use like MOFED and Lustre drivers would break with EVERY SINGLE RHEL minor update (like RHEL X.Y -> X.(Y+1) ). Using past form here because I haven't been using RHEL for this purpose for the past ~5 years, so maybe it has changed since although I doubt it.

I'm not sure what the underlying problem here is, is the kABI guarantee worthless generally or is it just that MOFED and Lustre drivers need to use features not covered by some kind of "kABI stability guarantee"?

> The version and ABI guarantee is not for everyone.

As an aside, that kABI guarantee only goes so far. I work in HPC/AI, and the out-of-tree drivers we use like MOFED and Lustre drivers would break with EVERY SINGLE RHEL minor update (like RHEL X.Y -> X.(Y+1) ). Using past form here because I haven't been using RHEL for this purpose for the past ~5 years, so maybe it has changed since although I doubt it.

The x86 platform uses a plethora of platforms services under different names like UEFI/ACPI/PCI/(ISA plug-n-play back in the day)/APIC (programmable interrupt controller and evolved variants thereof)/etc. that allows the generic kernel to discover what's available when it boots and load the correct drivers.

ARM servers do the same with SBSA (a spec that mandates things like UEFI, ACPI etc. support) etc. I think there's some effort in RISC-V land to do the same, also using UEFI and ACPI.

> Did Britain start out with the same gauge as India?

No. There was some small lines in Scotland using the same gauge as India, but Britain had a bunch of different gauges and eventually standardized on 1435mm ("standard gauge") as that was the most common one.

I don't recall where I read it, but IIRC there was some motivation that they wanted a broader gauge for India because they were afraid cars would topple over during storms. Or something like that.

> Also, what's going on in Australia?

Each territory built its own railway, with no thought about eventually building a cohesive continental network. In some cases narrow gauge was chosen because it was thought to be marginally cheaper than standard gauge.

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

> As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe. One reason for this is that in Europe many lines are congested with passenger traffic, leaving few slots for freight trains to operate - except late at night.

It's also that rail tends to be more competitive for long haul traffic, and the US operators have big trans-continental freight networks well suited to that. In Europe there's a sharp drop off in modal share as freight crosses borders. Each national railway operator is in practice fiercely protective of its own turf, and there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. So in practice cross-border freight is largely done with trucks instead.

Despite the EU commission wanting to get some competition going on the rails and better interoperability requirements etc etc. for at least the past 30 years, the operators are still in the "discussion about preparing to setup a committee to discuss interoperability" phase.

> I'm not sure whether the loading gauge (allowed size of train to fit under bridges) etc. is also standardized

It sure is standardized; the problem is that there are so many standards to choose from!

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loading_gauge for an overview.

Britain is a bit special, in that as the first country to have extensive rail infrastructure, it also has the smallest loading gauges around. Later built railway networks tend to have bigger loading gauges.

Why invest in forklifts, container infrastructure etc. if your military has a near-endless supply of uneducated conscripts you can order to shuffle around shells and other items?

(Of course a more thorough analysis would probably come to the conclusion that better logistics is worth it. There's still an opportunity cost for those conscripts who could do something else instead, like dying in zerg rushes on the Ukrainian front. And even though those conscripts are 'free' they still require chow and a place to sleep etc.)

There's enough tolerance that you can run 1520mm rolling stock on 1524mm track and vice versa.