I ran Minix around 1991 on my Amiga computer. Minix had a smaller attack surface and isolation provided by its microkernel vs. Linux's monolithic kernel. I had the Minix textbook, and it was easier to think about it because of the split along modules. I personally think Minix vs. Linux was very similar to Betamax vs. VHS. Betamax was technically superior, but the market picked VHS. I may run Minix again on my old Lenovo T430u from 2012. I was amazed that some of the code to Minix was in the appendix of the book, sort of like the magazines with pages of code to hand type in games or toy programs. I guess I liked MS-DOS for the same reason: tinkering, from my PEEK and POKE back in my Commodore PET 2001 (1977) and Vic-20 days...
Betamax had better picture quality but only had 1 hour of capacity. VHS had 2 hours. Consumers preferred not having to switch tapes to higher picture quality.
Convenience is a technical advantage. That's why streaming later beat Blu-ray despite a regression in picture quality.
Surely you'd just make the tape/cassette larger? Remember laserdisc?
I remember watching something on Betamax, possibly Star Wars but have no recollection of changing tape. My dad was a teacher and had access to a VT player on my birthday. On other occasions he would bring home a BBC Microcomputer. Quite a treat when we couldn't afford to buy our own TV even.
> Surely you'd just make the tape/cassette larger?
Originally, Betamax increased physical tape length, but cutting tape speed (like how vinyls can play at different RPMs) was a more economical way of cramming more hours onto the same tape by cutting quality.
Both VHS and Betamax went through multiple phases of this. Eventually VHS won by being cheaper.
I thought this was true for a while, but it seems to be a side effect of Betamax being more expensive in general.
The counterexamples that convinced me were Grok and Steam VR aren't taking significant marketshare from ChatGPT and Oculus despite having better support for adult content.
Originally, I thought this would kill Oculus given that's the most popular use of VR, but nope.
Porn tech usage is driven by solving some problem from the previous generation.
Videotape solved the "can't watch film porn at home" problem. Online payments and delivery solved the "need to risk going to the store to buy porn" problem.
What does VR porn solve over just watching standard porn on your monitor/TV?
And because of the resolution limitations, aren't VR headsets actually worse for watching porn than modern 4K monitors?
Well, interactivity was solved by OnlyFans, no? And OnlyFans seems to butcher video quality pretty badly yet it doesn't seem to dissuade people very much.
Yes - VHS had limited luma bandwidth that was about 50% of broadcast TV, and extremely limited chroma bandwidth (the equivalent of about 40 pixels per line). There's a reason laserdisc existed.
Spot on...as I recall, you really couldn't tell the difference between VHS and Betamax unless you had a studio-grade CRT. Well...that's probably unfair...you could tell an difference, but not an enormous difference. It wasn't like going from 480i->1080p; not even to 720i. On our old analog TV there wasn't remotely enough 'wow' to justify the price difference and other limits, so dad took back the BM player and got a VHS.
A delta of 3 bpm on sauna days corresponds to around 4% delta if the baseline is 72 bpm. I've gone from a resting heart rate over a 7-day average of 64 bpm to 58 bpm by jumping 15 min. of rope a day, 4 times a week. I've lost weight, body fat, and I feel like my body is more efficient with corresponding lower heart rates throughout my active day. I like saunas for recovery and aches, they put me in a relaxed state after, and I believe the dilation is flushing my system. Like anything else, moderation. Perhaps I will add sauna to my weekly routine 1x per week or less.
PSA: if you like saunas but don't have easy access to one, those IR sauna bags you can buy online work great.
Some people find it gross to basically sweat inside a powered sleeping bag, but if you don't mind that you can get the same effects of a sauna while lying on your (covered) couch and watching YouTube.
Wow, they look really quite dangerous. I wouldn’t want to pass out in one. Yeah you can pass out in a sauna too, but it feels easier to lurch for the door than to fight with a sleeping bag.
There's a timer shutoff. I know I can sit in mine for the full hour at the highest setting, so it's not anything my body can't handle. You can set it for less time at a lower heat setting, too.
Since it's not a battery storage setup, the energy being sent into your home circuit alleviates demand by a small amount. Where did they come up with 10 to 25% savings? Factors such as an optimal view of the sun for as much as possible, south-facing or biased East or West, would be the max. payoff. Night would be a zero net gain. At a savings of $7 a month, the panel would pay for itself in maybe 10 years not factoring in government subsidies. You need to keep it clean as well for it to maintain its potential output.
Stuff like your fridge can use a fair chunk of power continuously and a small solar setup can offset that when the sun is out. Same with routers, chargers, standby devices, TVs, etc.
For a 800W setup, 4–5 kWh on a very good summer day is plausible. Over a full year, it's going to be something like 600–900 kWh depending on orientation, shading, and location. So in strong summer months you might get something like 80–120 kWh. But you won't be able to use all of that unless you have a battery.
However, A typical apartment in Germany is not using that much electricity. Roughly speaking, a one-person place might use around 160 kWh a month and a two-person place around 270 kWh. Finding a use for 20–30 kWh a month during sunny periods. That's how you get to 10%. 25% might be harder but doable if you could somehow have a battery soak up the excess power. I don't think there are a lot of plug and play solutions for that yet. But it should not be that hard to do technically.
Power in Germany is relatively expensive 160*0.40 is about 80/month for me. I pay a bit less than that because I use less power somehow. But still, that's is close to 1000 euro per year. Saving 100 per year means the whole setup would earn itself back in 2-4 years (most plug and play setups you find on amazon are between 200 and 400 euro). And depending on where you live you can actually get some of that back via subsidy. But it basically pays for itself even if you don't. Unless like me your balcony faces east and you only get a few hours of sunlight in the morning.
Wow, 160 kWh/month! My family of four uses as much as 790 kWh/month in the high-heat or very cold season, with an annual average of 650 to 700 kWh/month. We pay around 0.13 USD/kWh, however, when you add the taxes and supply charges, it actually averages out to 0.28 USD/kWh...Granted I have two younger children at home, and my wife cooks fresh meals all the time - fresh-baked breads, etc., so we don't eat out much at all. We have an electric oven, electric washing machine and dryer, and electric cooling and heating (split unit HVAC).
I did really rough math and a hypothetical 200W panel getting 100% sun for 5 hours per day (1 kW/hr) would net you a whopping ~$9.30 in savings per month. We're paying something like $0.31 per kW/hr in NYC and it's a lot of money right now.
Did your calculations account for the suboptimal angle of the panels in most balcony solar setups? Most calculators assume the panels are at an optimal angle or on a roof pitch, not vertical like the image in the article.
A setup like the image in the article is going to get much lower than optimal efficiency because the panel is mounted vertically. She could be netting closer to $2-3 dollars per month or even less depending on which way she’s facing.
Yes, and I think it's important to highlight that Iverson would write APL on chalkboards and paper when working on math at times. I am sure some people here can hand write a program, but it seems so much more akin to writing math. I am in J daily, APL once in a while, Uiua more frequently, but J is the only one I actually write in my journal and then try it on my J phone app or when I open up my laptop. The intro books for J are great for working through math and learning J - Concrete Math for Computing in J; Easy J; Calculus; Arithmetic - https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Books
Yes, a strong argument, and staying in a line of PLs: F# for high-level, and F* <-> Low* for theorem proving and low-level coding. I am evaluating F/Low for verified code on Cortex M processor that I am currently trying to write SPARK2014. The Cortex A processor is running seL4 for less safety-critical tasks. I did look at Lean4 as a scratch for my Idris2 itch use cases.
Looks great! Nice work.
I am steeped in CAD for my work flow, so I used to program AutoCAD in AutoLISP, Rhino in Rhinoscript, now F#, and FreeCAD in Python as well as Blender. They have the geometry engines built-in and tested over decades. I think this is good for the maker with a 3D printer to do parts that are relatively simple (not discounting parametric code to make complex shapes here). Industry needs integration of CAD, BIM, CAM, Viz, etc. Take a look at this now older (2014) project where Rhino and F# were used to design and manufacture complex geometry for a real world build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY-bvZZZZnE
Agreed. When you zoom in, even the normal life stuff can give you concern. I showed my kids what creatures live on their and others' bodies. You have millions of microscopic arachnids called Demodex mites living in your hair follicles and sebaceous glands, particularly on your face. My wife gave me an evil look as I showed my children this fact in online vids and pics. Granted these are symbiotic/parasitic relationships of life, but still, the closer you look, the more you see!
Correct, not millions of Demodex mites, which are usually in the hundreds to thousands on a typical, non-infested human. The millions should be the general amount of mites and other symbiotic/parasitic on and in your body. Thanks!
I have loved math since I was a child, and I think it depends on when you grew up and how steeped you are in reality vs. the virtual or the computer world, and how much of an abstract vs. concrete thinker you are. I was always making things in modeling clay, that greasy grey-green stuff, and so my scale was what I could make out of one brick of such stuff. I bought my first computer in 1977 (Commodore PET 2001), and the CBM ASCII set had some graphics, but nothing compared with today's graphics. My first encounter with visualization and scale was writing a program to let me know which of the four moons of Jupiter I was seeing in the sky that night. Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa's orbits are almost edge-on to our view from earth, so I made Jupiter a capital O, and the moons were lowercase letters. I printed this out on a thermal printer (like a wide receipt). Cosmos was the rage on TV and I had read Einstein's Universe by Nigel Calder. I had a telescope and a microscope, so the micro and macro were very real to me. I suspect if you grew up on tablets and only built things on a 3D printer scale, you don't have that unbridled sense of the small and large except on very abstract terms. However, not a donut, not a universe-scale torus, but rather a pool donut comes to mind when I first hear torus!
I built an XYZ router table in the early 2000s out of old stepper motors. It was 8'x4', and I built stitch-and-glue wooden kayaks from the panels I cut on it. These would wind up being 16 to 22 foot long kayaks to go into the real world and have fun!
Some related good books I have been studying the past few years or so. The Spark book is written by people who've worked on Cube sats:
* Logical Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems
* Building High Integrity Applications with SPARK
* Analysable Real-Time Systems: Programmed in Ada
* Control Systems Safety Evaluation and Reliability (William M. Goble)
I am developing a high-integrity controls system for a prototype hoist to be certified for overhead hoisting with the highest safety standards and targeting aerospace, construction, entertainment, and defense.
I am teaching myself Arm assembly for the M-series of processors, M-4 for now. I have been playing and using J (jsoftware.com) since 2010, and I have to say that as much as the higher abstracted languages and programs become, I still love the atoms and terseness of array languages and writing close to the metal. I started with Factor, gforth, and retro years ago. Something magical happens when you immerse yourself in it. Right now, I am working with KlongPy, which using the PyTorch backend along with the Klong language is amazing. I used to write assembly code for my Vic-20 back in the day and then bought the VIC FORTH cartridge for like $30 in 1982. I programmed my 1977 PET 2001 in the Commodore Basic 1.0 it came with, but there was a sys instruction for machine code! I used to write my code on an index card before typing it in and saving to the cassette recorder. Magazines had code to hand type in, so my coding was learned with reading and writing it first. I accidentally bought a hardcover book on PDP-11 programming and read the whole book before I bought my PET in 1977. Machine language.
I miss the early days of computing before the internet or Genie Online, but Echo in NYC was a blast - thanks, Stacy!!
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