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That comparison is fallacious too, I think.

Something burning down is a tragedy, beyond anyone's control. It's also possible to love something for its beauty, and be sad that a globally historic monument suffered such an act of god that the irreplaceable art and craftsmanship is gone forever.

Something closing down, perhaps because there was not enough money to sustain its continued operation, when tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people were using it? That's a perfectly appropriate time to remind folks, "if you like free software, consider donating to help sustain the almost full-time effort it takes to keep packages like this alive."

Op said, "this is sad [because] I've been using this," and the implication is, "I want to keep using this but now I can't because it's gone" and making the connection that "one way to prevent this from happening to other packages you like is to contribute financially."


Alright, take a park closing then. Can you be sad about that if you haven't personally raised money to finance the park?


I pay taxes. I pay for every park in my city. I pay for state and national parks too. I rarely/never use them. I have no choice. That makes me sad. I wish I could direct where my personal tax dollars were spent, but that kind of defeats the point of taxes, which are to fund the things that nobody wants to pay for (or are impractical to pay for, individually).


Ah the "I would pay for firefox but" fallacy


There are parks that are not owned by the govt.


At what point did OP say, "you're only allowed to be sad if you contributed"?

OP pointed out that many people stated they were sad. OP also pointed out it's likely few of those who were sad also contributed money. For a project whose maintainer said, essentially, "I can't keep doing this for free," the connection for most is obvious: "we (individuals and corporations) need to keep paying for the things we use and love if we want to keep the things we use and love."

OP did not say, "don't complain to me if you didn't personally try to save it."


Yes, I can't finance every park. I can feel sad about people suffering throughout the world without personally supporting them all.

I am an active open source contributor.


I can’t finance every single open source project in the world either (I am also an open source contributor but with very small libs).


Well said, accurate framing.


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!

https://tik.sourceforge.net/


There is an open source server that implements the protocols used by AIM including TOC and Oscar. You can run TiK like it’s 2001 again.

https://github.com/mk6i/retro-aim-server/

https://github.com/mk6i/retro-aim-server/blob/main/docs/CLIE...


To summarize the article, I think...

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.


> Note: if you remove the Edit menu and call it Write, MacOs won't add its AI crap to your settings.

Good to know.


> 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.


> What would the American version be? Hamburger patties cooked? Smartphones charged? Highway miles driven?

We tend to use homes powered. Which seems logical enough, until you realise there is a built-in assumption of 4,000 kWh/month homes.


> until you realise there is a built-in assumption of 4,000 kWh/month homes.

No idea where you got that figure - you're off by a factor of four.

https://www.google.com/search?q=US+electic+usage+per+home

For example:

> The U.S. Energy Information Administration notes that the average homeowner used about 914 kWh per month in energy

and https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...

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.


Perhaps they are conflating it with annual electricity consumption, which is about 4000 kwh per capita per year

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49036


> 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.


holy tamole...

I think we use around 700-1000/month most months. who is using 4000/month?


Replying to myself:

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.

EDIT: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit.... This shows the average being 10500 kw/h/year, which seems to be in line with our use case. That average is including all housing types (apartments, detached homes, etc).


1) big houses in the south with lots of AC.

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)


I live in a 1900sqft house of 4 people (and lots of electronics) in FL and we used 2477kwh last billing period. Our low period is about 1370kwh.


Our lowest/highest are 1800/3300 for a 6 adult FL household. Our lower number was 1700 but our winters keep warming.


Standardized Texas A/C hours.


If we're firing shots anyways, go with mobility scooter miles.


Surely in the case of firing shots it would be number of rifles manufactured or rounds produced.


Sure, use round numbers.


Too many holes in this idea.


It's also the British billion which is larger than the American billion.


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.)


True, but the pattern would break down with (the long-scale) definition of trillion in any case.

The long scale makes sense because it is powers of a million -

- one million - 10^6,

- one billion (long scale) - 10^12 - ‘bi’ meaning two, is a million squared,

- one trillion (long scale) - 10^18 - ‘tri’ meaning three is a million cubed,

- one quadrillion (long scale) - 10^24 - ‘quad’ meaning four is a million to the power four.


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.


How does 6lb of gas release 20lbs of CO2?

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...

[1] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...


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.


"Out of thin air" is right :-)

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.


"produce" is probably a better verb than "release" in this case, for the common person to understand what's going on.


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.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/user/Admiral_Cloudberg/posts/?sort=to...

[1] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/



This is important now as schools are working to figure out how to place desks so that each student is 6 feet apart from their peers.


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.


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