mhandley

With a high fraction of renewables, the reverse is probably better in the long run. The larger geographic area you connect, the less you're affected by weather systems, and the wider area you can draw dependable dispatchable power such as hydro from. But that depends on having enough grid capacity to move enough power around, which is currently a problem.

But I wonder from a reliability (or lack of cascading failures) point of view whether synchronous islands interconnected with DC interconnects is more robust than a large synchronous network?

Beck, meaning stream (small river), is one I remember from growing up in the north east.

The micromouse would have been spring 1983 I think. If there were any pictures, they'd probably be in my parents huge pile of unindexed old 35mm slides!

I agree completely about that sense of discovery. No-one around me knew anything about computers and the information available was limited, but somehow figuring things out for myself was a key part of the attraction for me. And it served me very well as the foundation for a lifetime of research too. If you're passing through London and fancy a beer, look me up, and we can reminisce!

I had one of the early Jupiter Aces - the circuit board said something like v1.00 - and it had some added soldered wires on the board, correcting some errors, but it worked well enough. Forth was definitely what attracted me to it - I was frustrated with Basic on my Sinclair XZ81, and Forth seemed like a big step forward. And I think it was.

I was 14 or 15 at the time. The first summer I wrote a whole load of games, mostly in Forth, but sometimes Forth just wasn't fast enough. I got a copy of "Mastering Machine Code on Your ZX81", and learned Z80 machine code. If there was an assembler available, I didn't have it, so this was all hand-assembled. Getting jumps right was a total pain, as was debugging. Generally, it either worked first time, or you started from scratch again. Usually I got there in the end.

I sold those games through a ad in "Your Computer" magazine, and earned back the price of the computer several times. But recording and shipping tapes one at a time got tedious really fast, so I didn't take that any further.

My Ace got modified quite a bit over the next couple of years. An extra 16KB RAM pack was an early addition, taking it to a whopping 19KB. Because Forth was so compact, I never filled that up.

My mother worked for Chubb cash dispensers (ATMs for Americans) at the time, and at some point they scrapped a lot of equipment. She tipped me off, and we went round there one evening and liberated lots of cash dispenser pieces from a skip. Amongst these were several numeric keypads with lovely mechanical keys. I dismantled several keypads to take out all the individual keys and made a proper keyboard to replace the original dead rubber monstrosity.

At school, I was taking O-level Technology, and you had to do a final year project. I'd seen articles in "Your Computer" about competitions where a micro-mouse robot would have to find its way through a maze. That seemed like a cool idea to me, so I decided to make one, despite not really having much idea how. I hadn't done any digital electronics at that time, but my friend Johnny Tombs (who later went on to be a Professor of Electronic Engineering) had decided to make a parallel I/O port for his ZX Spectrum using TTL logic for his Technology project. I'm not sure where Johnny learned about digital electronics, but he knew what he was doing, and designed a nice elegant circuit board and etched it at home. The Ace had the same Z80A CPU as the Spectrum, so I figured his design could be adapted. After a lot of pleading, he gave my his design and spent some time explaining to me how it worked and loaned me his copy of Watford Electronics catalog. A couple of weeks later all the components arrived, and I spent a busy few days soldering up my modified I/O port on veroboard. Compared to Johnny's professional looking version, mine looked like a mess of wires and chips, but it worked!

So then when it wasn't playing games, my Ace rode about on the top of a fairly flaky micromouse, made in the school metalwork shop out of aluminium sheet, some lego motors, and some light sensors to detect maze walls, exploring mazes. It didn't win any prizes but it did get me an A in O-level Technology.

My school was throwing out an old teletype, so I scavenged that. Then I modified the parallel I/O port to output +/- 12V on one pin, and wrote software to bit-bang RS232 at 110 baud. Back before the Internet, just finding the specs for RS232 was not so simple - our local library was a bit limited in that way - but I got there in the end. A lot of guesswork and trial and error. I don't think anyone made a printer for the Ace, so I may have had the only one. Being able to print code listings really helped, even though the teleprinter only printed capital letters.

Somewhere over the years, with my parents moving house multiple times, the Ace disappeared. Many years later, I found one on Ebay, and still have it. But somehow I never fell back in love with it - it just wasn't as good as I remembered my rather non-stock one being at that formative time in my life.

I've been coding for over 40 years at this point. I'm definitely a better programmer than I was - not necessarily faster at pumping out lines of code, but I get the right approach first time more often than I used to. Whole classes of bugs are just easy when you've seen them before, but I'm also better at avoiding them in the first place because I know my weaknesses and where to spend time thinking more carefully.

At the same time, I can't context-switch like I used to. Once I get into the zone, no problem, but interruptions affect me much more than when I was 20 (or even 40). I can almost feel the tape changer in the back of my head switching tapes and slowly streaming the new context into RAM (likely because all the staging disks have been full for years).

As for long coding sessions - I relish them when I get the chance, which isn't as often as I'd like. Once the tapes have finished loading and I'm in the zone, I can stay there half the night. So that hasn't changed with age.

You need the electric equivalent of a glider tug plane to get you up to altitude. It can then return to base taking its drained batteries with it while you continue to your destination with fully charged batteries.

Unless you're prepared to go supersonic. Not easy to do with electric propulsion though.

Worked for me on a 2.5 year old OnePlus Nord 2T, both in Chrome and Firefox. Not a high frame rate, but perfectly usable, even on this pretty old mid-range phone.

There's a good chance this is not an either/or question, but that AI will get us to viable fusion power much earlier. For example:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/23/doe_fusion_ai/

https://openai.com/index/strengthening-americas-ai-leadershi...

Of course the flip side is that nearly-new low-mileage EVs can very good value economically.

There's an element of "Worse is Better" in this debate, as in many real-world systems debates. The original worse-is-better essay even predates the Linux vs Minix debate:

https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

Gabriel was right in 1989, and he's right today, though sometimes the deciding factor is performance (e.g. vs security) rather than implementation simplicity.

Six of the London tube lines have all night service on Friday and Saturday nights, so if you fall asleep on these, you won't be stuck.

https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/tube-improvements/what-we-are-do...

My route home is via commuter rail so I don't have that luxury. I wouldn't possible know what it is like to wake up after a few beers and find myself on the last train of the night, four stations past my stop, but rumour has it that the night bus network is pretty good at getting me^H^Hpeople home, even if the wait can be cold, so long as you've not actually left London. Or Uber.

https://sucs.org/~cmckenna/maps/busspider/2012-14/west-londo...

But if you don't wake up til the end of the line, it's probably pretty much like in Japan, except less clean.

I live in SW London. It's definitely suburbia, but the density is just about perfect, at least as I see it. Since about age 11 my kids were fairly free range - they could hang about outside with their friends (the street is very quiet, and there's a green space opposite), cycle to their friends, or use the frequent buses and trains, though we'd drive and pick them up if they were out late. Most weeks though, my car doesn't move Monday to Friday - I cycle to the station. There's plenty of green space around, and sailing and kayaking on the River Thames. But the good public transport and ability to cycle all around only really works because housing density is high. We have a four floor town house, so plenty of floor area but a fairly small garden. When we moved here, I thought it would be for just a few years, until we could afford somewhere with more land. Living previously in California, Massachusetts and elsewhere in the UK, it wasn't really my image of an ideal place. But we've been here 20 years and although I could afford to move anywhere now, I don't want to. I'm happy here. My neighbours are my friends, everyone knows everyone else, and I feel no need to try and impress anyone with how much land I have. Anyway, my point is that there probably is an optimal density for cities, and some European cities probably come close to that optimal.

Yes, I'm sure, and have the scar on my arm to show for it. Everyone in my school had it. Would have been around 1980.

I think my Polestar 2 does this too. If I haven't driven it recently, I can hear the brakes cleaning the rust off the disks the first time I brake. After that, I think it's using regen most of the time.

Heathwow is 15 miles west as the crow flies from where I was at university in central London. When it took off flying away from us, you could clearly hear it over the London traffic. Amazing aircraft!

Not being from the US, I find it odd that the article didn't mention anything about vaccination. Until 2005, pretty much everyone in the UK received the BCG vaccine. After that the TB rate fell too low to merit routine vaccination, but even today it's still given routinely in a few areas where the rate merits it, or if there's elevated risk of exposure via family from abroad, etc. Has vaccination in general become such a divisive topic in the US that articles about diseases for which we used to routinely vaccinate don't even mention that a vaccine is available and greatly reduces the risk of the most severe forms of TB, such as TB meningitis?

Anything to stop a non-EU resident owning an EU company that owns a Spanish home?

TFL has obviously been aware of his use for 15 years, as the website was widely publicised in 2010. They have not taken any action to defend any trademarks they think he violates in all that time. IANAL, but I would have thought that if he wanted, he probably has a good case to invalidate those trademarks on the grounds that by not defending them for so long, they have become generic. But in the end, it's probably not a good use of his time and money to fight them on this.

Agreed - I've only been programming C for 38 years but I've also never found a legitimate use. However I have used it to illustrate a point when teaching C to beginners - it looks so odd they tend to remember it.

I expect many people know this one, but it's a useful teaching aid when understanding the relationship between arrays and pointers

  int array[10];
  *(array+1) = 56;
  array[2] = 4;
  3[array] = 27;

The first two are obvious, but the third is also legal. It works because array indexing is just sugar for pointer arithmetic, so array[2]=4 is identical in meaning to *(array+2)=4. Therefore 3[array]=27 is identical to *(3+array)=27 and so is legal. But just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Haha, yes, the Pyramid was alien technology, but the cover story was that it was a multiprocessor RISC minicomputer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Technology When I arrived at UCL, there were three PDP 11/44s of which one (?) was shared by all the undergrads. The pyramid replaced those circa 1987 and was a huge improvement.

If I recall correctly, the main workstation lab was B10A, where I spent a lot of time. Then there was a narrow room, B09 I think, that had mission control on the right hand side with a machine room behind it, and a second machine room on the left side. Can't remember which machine room the Pyramid was in.

And yes, Phil is still around.

Peter once told me that in 1973, the only two organizations permitted to do telecommunications were the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense. So to legally connect UCL to the ARPAnet, he needed an exception clause. Somehow he got both the Post Office and the Ministry of Defense to sign off that they were not interested in computer-to-computer communications, in perpetuity, so that UCL could do so instead. He said he never tried to hold them to it later.

I was also in one of those basement labs in the Pearson building in 1988. Not exactly the nicest place to work, but some great equipment. I particularly remember that year coding a graphical application in NeWS (Sun's original network window system, long before it became X/NeWS) on a Sun Workstation there, which was an amazing piece of kit for its time. Also remember the DecStation 3100s we had down there that would periodically catch fire.

UCL was on both the JAnet X.25 network and the Internet when I joined in 1985, and provided a relay service between the two for email and for telnet. Maybe others - not sure. Relaying email required translating the address order as the UK used big-endian "foo@uk.ac.ucl.cs" and the rest of the world used little-endian "foo@cs.ucl.ac.uk". There were a whole set of heuristics to figure out which order the destination should be, which worked fine up until Czechoslovakia joined with their .cs domain. I think it was probably in the early 90s when JAnet fully deployed IP-over-X.25, and all UK universities became IP-reachable, but some would have been reachable before then.

Peter was also responsible for the UK using .uk instead of the ISO country code "gb" which it should have been according to "the rules". But Peter insisted on .uk, as the official name of the country was "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", and he thought GB was not properly inclusive of Northern Ireland. It took until 2021 for UK to replace GB on car number plates (and stickers for travelling abroad).

I worked for Peter Kirstein for many years - he always had wonderful stories to tell.

In the article Peter talks about the temporary import license for the original ARPAnet equipment. The delayed VAT and duty bill for this gear prevented anyone else taking over the UK internet in the early days because the bill would have then become due. But he didn't mention that eventually if the original ARPAnet equipment was ever scrapped, the bill would also become due.

When I was first at UCL in the mid 1980s until well into the 90s, all that equipment was stored disused in the mens toilets in the basement. Eventually Peter decided someone had to do something about it, but he couldn't afford the budget to ship all this gear back to the US. Peter always seemed to delight in finding loopholes, so he pulled some strings. Peter was always very well connected - UCL even ran the .int and nato.int domains for a long time. So, at some point someone from UCL drove a truck full of obsolete ARPAnet gear to some American Air Force base in East Anglia that was technically US territory. Someone from the US air force gave them a receipt, and the gear was officially exported. And there it was left, in the US Air Force garbage. Shame it didn't end up in a museum, but that would have required paying the VAT bill.

I'm British, but had never heard of it until I spent New Year with my wife's family in Denmark a few years ago. Indeed it does seem to be compulsory viewing there, and no-one could believe I didn't know it.

How does that work for identical twins?

The Polestar 2 is pretty good in this regard. All the most important things are on the steering wheel stalks, steering wheel buttons, and a few buttons for things like demist, play/pause and volume control on the centre console. There's still a lot on the touchscreen, including climate control, but it seems to hit a pretty good balance for me (and I'm not a fan on car touchscreens).