Tcl/Tk was used by the first open source project I ever contributed to 25 years ago – a client for AOL Instant Messenger called TiK. It was such a thrill to be able to hack on the client, see the changes in almost real time, and share with others. It's great to see Tcl still around and kicking!
A will was rediscovered that was written by Shakespeare's granddaughter's husband, who never owned the home, stating that his cousin should get the house.
The husband died first, the granddaughter (who actually owned the house) remarried, and the cousin never got the house. The granddaughter later died, and the home was demolished shortly thereafter, almost 350 years ago, and at least 200 years before this legal document was last in the news.
> During its lifetime, Ratcliffe - commissioned in 1967 - has generated enough power to make more than a billion cups of tea every day.
The most British unit of energy measurement possible. What would the American version be? Hamburger patties cooked? Smartphones charged? Highway miles driven?
While that's very British, you forget the obvious: The BTU is the British Thermal Unit.
Can't get any more British than something with British in its name. Not to mention it's very widely used in practice, though it's up there with pounds, gallons, and miles.
Spoken like a true American. Despite the name, the BTU is an American customary unit, used almost exclusively in America for measuring the power of air conditioners. In practice, it's not quite extinct in the UK as gallons are, but it's on the way.
The other weird unit for measuring air conditioning is "tons". One ton of air conditioning has nothing to do with the weight of the air conditioner. Instead, it means the air conditioner provides cooling equivalent to one ton of ice per day. One ton is almost exactly 12,000 BTU/h; curiously, the round number is a coincidence.
I think it might be more extinct than gallons, tbh. People still talk about miles per gallon a bit (note that, for extra confusion, a UK gallon isn’t the same as a US one) but _very_ few people would have reason to think about BTUs these days, I’d have thought.
The American version would be number of football fields smoked.
But you have to further specify whether you're using Carolina freedom units or Texas freedom units, because the two groups can't agree on whether it includes the end zones or not.
It should be noted that the average for an apartment unit in most of the country is half that, and a substantial portion (40%) of the US population lives in apartments.
> No idea where you got that figure - you're off by a factor of four
From facts, yes. Forgot where I recently saw it, but it was in the amount of energy a datacentre in the South burns. Work backwards from the PR stats, and you get a moderately-large American house’s energy footprint.
I guess... there's only two adults in the house here, and a 2000 sq ft house with two heating/cooling units (up/down) and relatively modern windows/sealing.
I think this month will be 1200, and I think we'll have a couple more 1000-1200 kw/h months up ahead.
2) at least one house in Pittsburgh that runs a few GPU servers for its owner's startup. ;) (not quite 4000, but over 3000 this month including our normal use and ac)
It's probably not, unless you've calculated that it is? It's not at all common any more, led by financial interoperability I think.
(Unfortunately in my opinion: it seems more logical than the American/standard billion. We go up to nine until we run out of units and start on tens, until we run out at nine tens and nine and start on hundreds, until we run out at nine hundreds and nine tens and nine and start on thousands, until we run out at nine hundred and nine tens and nine thousand and nine hundreds and nine tens and nine and start on millions. Why then only go to nine hundred and nine tens and nine million (...)? It breaks the pattern of using all the expressable numbers until you run out and have to start a new word.)
In each step of the American system, you go up by a factor of 1000 each time. There is no discontinuity.
The problem was that there were once two billions, the short billion and the long billion. The English world decided to use the short billion and the French world decided to use the long billion.
Long-scale billions are essentially never used in English, and for official purposes the UK switched to short-scale billions in 1973. So, er, probably not.
I found this[1] link from the EPA with a number similar to yours, 8.8kg per gallon of gas, but they say it "creates" rather than "emits." I'm still struggling with this creation of mass out of thin air...
It's because the majority of the mass of CO2 comes from the oxygen from the air used to burn the carbon. So in this case, it's quite literally creating mass out of thin air.
Specifically, the atomic mass of carbon is 12 and oxygen is 16. So for CO2, 12/44 of the mass is carbon, or about 27%. So of that 20 pounds of CO2, about 5 1/2 pounds are carbon, the other 15 pounds is oxygen sucked out of the atmosphere.
The CO2 contains mass from the atmospheric oxygen consumed during combustion. 12 grams of carbon becomes roughly 44 grams of carbon dioxide when it burns.
I have had a 43" monitor at work and at home for a while, and the solution I've used throughout the pandemic has been to share only a region of the screen, or to share a single application or window, which I often shrink down to a "laptop" size" in order to share my screen with colleagues. That still leaves plenty of real estate around the "shared" window that is not visible to others, but is useful to me.
If you enjoyed reading this story, u/Admiral_Cloudberg has been writing these kinds of well-researched post-mortems on air collisions and accidents on Reddit[0] for several years, and has recently expanded to Medium[1]. The posts are always interesting, even for someone with no background in aviation, and often come with photographs, diagrams, or video.
The article mentions their increasing focus on Azure.
I'm amazed by the number of people we're talking about. If you follow the links in the article back a few years, it appears Microsoft has laid off close to 30-40,000 people in the last 4 years, less than half of which were from Nokia. But with a global workforce in the range of 120,000 people, I guess that's not completely out of proportion.
If that number doesn't include the new layoffs. Then I dont know, ~20K lay offs excluding Nokia and including this new one does seem like a lot for 120K employees. Over 15% in 4-5 years.
Presumably OP is referring to the walled garden of CompuServe, Prodigy, and others where you could only talk to other CompuServe customers on their proprietary message boards. If you wanted to talk with someone else, it was impossible (until later) because the systems didn't interoperate. CompuServe controlled the message boards, and could control which ones were created (or not created) and thus controlled the message. Not maliciously, just as the nature of their product and the state of technology at the time.
I used AOL and Compuserve, but after they had both expanded to allowing access to everything. What drove the expansion? It seems like the market worked as expected in this case...
The existence of the open internet made it beneficial to interoperate; lack of it would mean that the expected market interest would require them to not interoperate.
For many markets, the natural consequence of unregulated free market conditions is to aggregate towards a monopolistic or oligopolistic market, which isn't a free market any more. The idealized economic free market isn't a stable equilibrium - it's a good position for society, but it doesn't stay there on it's own, it needs to be kept free by preventing it from devolving into the monopolistic optimum.
While the internet as such existed, at the heyday of AOL&Compuserve residental users were not able to get a connection to internet as such at reasonable prices.
By the 'open internet' I mean the arrival of ISPs who offered consumers direct connectivity with all the internet, competing with AOL who offered connectivity to, well, AOL.
The fact that the consumer was more nimble and capable of exploring and creating value in this space allowed them the chance to beat the entrenched players.
Today those entrenched players have finally turned around and are using their legacy power, connections and money, to make it an unfair playing field.
When the web came along the walled gardens were immediately obsolete. By the time you joined they were trying to stay relevant by becoming portals to the web. Some people were actually fooled into thinking AOL was the web for over a decade afterwards.
Not a valid analogy. AOL, Compuserve, et. al. didn't own the wires entering your house. Comcast, Verizon, et. al. do. The barrier to entry to start an ISP in the days of dialup was much lower.
No. More like if you are on Comcast, you can't access Twitter. If you're on AT&T, you can't access Facebook. When you sign up for your ISP, you get to choose between Amazon and Netflix, and you can't change your mind without paying someone to come out and lay new line if you're even one of the tiny few lucky enough to have more than one ISP that serves your home.
https://tik.sourceforge.net/