Square pixels were certainly not an innovation of the Macintosh. The earliest raster scan workstation I'm aware of is the Alto, released in 1973. It and the ones that came after it like the Star and Dorado all had square pixels. So did the early 1980s engineering workstations like Apollo and Sun, which also came out before Macintosh.
I think the Amiga is the most well-known example of what OP means. Older home computers which could be connected to TVs generally had resolutions up to 320x200 (or x240 for PAL) and square pixels. The Amiga could double that on both axes to 640x400/480, but because of the interlaced display of typical TVs/TV-based monitors, that would flicker so bad that it made productive working impossible. So the default resolution used by AmigaOS was 640x200/240, and the fonts were optimized for that.
Even in the PC world, the most common resolution in for CGA, EGA, and VGA remained 320x200 for many years. With square pixels, this would be 16:10, but the usual case was that this resolution was displayed fullscreen on a 4:3 display, so individual pixels would have an aspect ratio of 5:6.
Most DOS-era games took this into account, so e.g. if the artist wanted to draw a circle 20 pixels tall, they'd make it 24 pixels wide. Textmode followed this pattern as well, so when rendered on a modern square-pixel display without aspect correction, will look vertically squashed compared to their original appearance.
California imports a third of its electricity, and that's expensive. It gets almost another third from natural gas. They've been changing rapidly from fossil fuels and nuclear to renewables and that's pretty capital intensive. And there have been some huge costs associated with the wildfires.
There's a bit more technical info on California battery storage here:
Yeah I don’t understand why the first priority of any policy maker isn’t to make the cost of electricity as low as possible. We certainly have the technology to do this.
In general, imports are cheaper than the alternative, because if you have local gas plants that aren't maxed out, then you'd use those rather than pay more to import.
Some quick googling suggests this holds in California too.
The problem with renewables I have is that "what's good for the earth" and capitalism simply don't mix.
Solar was fundamentally supposed to be almost-free electricity. You put a bunch of panels up and free energy from the nearest star. The stark reality though is that the people and institutions in control of solar equipment (this includes manufacturers, tariffs, etc.) reprice their stuff to match the price of the dirty electricity. And then they reprice their stuff again to assume that everyone loves to borrow money. At that point it becomes not worth it at all.
No, I don't want a solar installation to pay for itself in 15 years. I want equipment that gives me free electricity starting next month. If it costs less than a months' worth of electricity and I won't have an electricity bill starting next month, I'm interested. If not, it's outside my budget and planning horizon.
How do you explain that solar got 50% less expensive in the last 10 years?
Why would people and institutions in control of solar equipment reprice their stuff to match the price of dirty electricity? You think there is no competition? Or you confuse it with the system that has been put in place where the price of electricity in the grid is set up by the most expensive producer at the time (which does make sense although you can argue against it).
Solar installation should pay for itself in less than 15 years in most cases, half the time according to that article: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/10/03/average-u-s-residenti... (and residential solar is much less cost-effective than large-scale solar farms).
But can it pay itself in a month or two? That's the bar. I cannot financially plan for even one year later. Too many unknowns.
A really good coffee machine that can do lattes costs maybe $200. If lattes at coffee shops cost $8 including stupid high CA taxes and the stupid puppy face guilt tips, it pays for itself after ~35 lattes including supply costs, or just over a month. That's the bar for pretty much anything.
Figure out how to sell me $500 in solar panels that generates $500 worth of electricity over the next month and make it tax deductible with no income limits. That is how you cover the country in clean energy. FAST. Until politicians can get their act together, slam the hammer and make exactly this happen, we're going to be on dirty electricity for a long time.
That should especially be the bar for clean energy. Clean energy shouldn't be a luxury for the wealthy.
Well first of all TFA is not talking about individuals buying solar or anything, so do we at least agree that renewables make sense for countries/state?
It seems like you have set an impossible bar for renewables so I don't know what to say to you. I do not think you'll be able to put a mini nuclear station, gas or coal one in your garden for less than the monthly electricity fee, so it's unclear to me what you are comparing it to.
The problem with giving money to individuals for their rooftop solar is that rooftop solar is not cost effective compared to large scale solar, if you really care about the planet and money is limited you should maximise the bang for your buck and help solar farms instead.
But it's no secret that the current US administration is loudly anti-renewable and not keen on helping either of them.
I'm just saying what needs to happen in order for people to be lining up for solar in hordes and convert the country to renewable overnight.
The IRS needs to say: "We value clean energy in our country, we can live without nickel-and-diming people on the income used to make their solar purchase"
The Fed needs to say: "We value clean energy in our country, we can lend money to businesses at 0% interest, for the sake of supporting our country's clean future. Heck, -10% interest if you deploy today!"
The president needs to say: "We value clean energy in our country, we want solar as fast as possible, we will impose 0% tariffs on panels regardless of wherever they came from"
Wall Street needs to say: "We value clean energy in our country, it is saving the country from a multi-trillion dollar climate disaster, therefore we value solar companies at 100X their current valuations because that's what they are truly worth"
Solar companies need to say: "We aren't here to optimize profits; our only KPI is deploy solar as fast as possible"
The government needs to say to solar companies: "Do it! And don't worry if you're unprofitable, we value averting a 10 trillion climate crisis and will subsidize your losses from that 10 trillion loss that we averted"
Yeah, I know, it sounds impossible. Humans are shits, and they won't do the above. That's why the climate disaster is happening.
One thing that gets neglected by policymakers is that our top priority for energy policy should be resiliency. That means distributed systems with varied generation sources, without dependence on foreign suppliers.
This requires regulation unfortunately as it is inherently less efficient and cost optimized than the 1-2 solutions the market will coalesce around.
Solar + batteries are great but if the panels and cells all come from China we can’t base our energy future on that. We’d just be trading the Strait of Hormuz for the Taiwan Strait.
I know the USA can build forests of wind turbines that stretch from horizon to horizon. I’ve seen it in central Indiana. But can we do the same with solar cells and batteries?
The break even for home solar is too long for me also. Every now and again I look at it, and even with subsidies it's gonna be about 12 to 15 years before I see any cost saving.
I drive an electric. It doesn't save money because the car itself is more expensive by exactly as much as you would save over the life of the car. And then the $700/year registration fees because you don't pay the fuel tax. Again, stupid capitalism.
Let me translate that four people who don’t speak “capitalism BAD”: Why don’t other people work for free for me? Why don’t Chinese and African miners work for free so I can get free minerals from the earth? Why don’t workers in refineries work for free so that I can get free metals and free silicon of highest purity? Why don’t all the companies that produce solar cells from raw materials, construct modules from the cells, install the modules on roofs, do the electrical wiring, stabilize the grid, provide electrical storage… WHY DON’T THEY WORK FOR FREE EVEN THOUGH I’VE CRITICISED CAPITALISM?
Children too. My own hearing extended to about 23 kHz until I was in my early 20s, and I don't think I was exceptional. There was a jewelry store in my town that I couldn't go in to because the "ultrasonic" motion detector was so painfully loud. But I doubt these devices would be a problem for children or pets because the pulse is so short.
My hearing is still keen enough that when I'm biking around, I avoid certain streets because those houses have anti-rodent ultrasonic systems that hurt my ears.
Yes. This was more than 50 years ago. The store owner let me examine the device. It was wired into his alarm system. It even had the frequency listed on the label.
I mean, TV. Kids were definitely a market for it, throughout its history, but until the flat panel era nobody cared that the flyback transformer in most CRTs made a deafening whine in the 20khz range. I could walk into a house and hear a soundless TV three rooms away, and I know I wasn’t alone in that.
Yeah I could too(not know though...). Trying to sleep, and knowing your parents are watching TV in the living room few doors away isn't the best experience.
That’s what that was? I had no idea. I just knew I could hear muted TVs whine. I asked my parents about it. They couldn’t hear it. So I wasn’t sure if it was real.
Sorry, humans cannot hear up to 23kHz. Our hearing ends at 20kHz. Point.
After a decade on earth your loss is already at 18kHz or less. (Loss means not: you hear nothing but you do not hear as good as when you where born).
There were several proprietary systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The one I remember was DSEE from Apollo Computer. It was integrated with the file system such that commits and branches worked like zfs snapshots. You could just "cd" to whatever tag, branch, or individual commit you wanted. No checkouts required. Very cool, I wish we still had that today. DSEE was spun off as Clearcase, acquired by IBM, then I don't know what happened to it after that.
That sounds awesome. A bit like plan9 philosophy "everything is a file". I wonder whether one could implement something like this with fuse+git (gitfs doesnt allow this, cf https://gitfs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/mount_options/)
That would be very easy to do with FUSE. I would be amazed if it hasn't been done.
I doubt it's really that useful though - it would be difficult to make the filesystem mutable, which means anything that puts caches or build files in the tree (which is most things) wouldn't work.
With a thin layer of tooling, you could probably build a zfs CVS very easily. There's zfs send and each version is available under .zfs so you could use the patch/diff tool to see different versions and restore to older versions.
ClearCase is wonderful for users when it's working, but I've never seen a CC repo that didn't have a dedicated admin working full-time to keep it from falling over.
Sorry I was a bit short. I meant the way “cd”-ing was described in the comment sounds a lot like how I use “jj edit” of JJ VCS. Not the same thing, but maybe it’s close to the ideal VCS user experience you were describing?
Seattle is crazy. I used to live on 1st Ave N, which is the same physical street as 1st Ave and 1st Ave S, but don't confuse them because they all have their own numbers and some of them overlap. It is however completely different from 1st Ave NE, which is way on the other side of town. And this isn't an aberration, most of the streets work the same way.
I knew her in Ann Arbor. By then she had stopped performing but I heard her play a couple of times at my uncle's house. I now wish I'd paid closer attention, I was just a stupid teenager at the time.
That's an amazing experience even if you couldn't recognize it at the time. That's legitimately cool, and you can say you were in the room with genuine once in a lifetime talent. Not everybody has that experience.
I saw Dave Matthews play a very small show (like 30 people were there maybe) when I was younger while we waited for change to make a phone call. I didn't really pay attention, but remember thinking that this guy was really weird and really different and really really good. I wish I had stayed for the entire thing and maybe talked to him. But, at least the memory is there.
Fascinating! Did her music feel different from other musicians at the time? Listening to some of her songs now, it's hard not to feel like she was way ahead of her time. Though that could just be hindsight talking.
That's why I wish I'd paid closer attention. If she played her own compositions, I wasn't aware of it. My aunt and uncle were both serious amateur musicians and often had people over to play music. It's more likely they played popular or folk songs that the other musicians would have known. To answer your question, no, she was just another musician in my uncle's circle. I remember her because they worked together, not because of her music.
It's a specific technique where you deliberately modulate the signal so as to interfere with the color subcarrier. This can be used to produce colors that are otherwise not available.
Engineering notebooks were required at my first job in the 1970s, for patent reasons. The notebook pages are numbered and it has a real sewn binding, making it harder to remove or insert a page without being noticed. We were required to date and sign each page and start a new page every day.
By the time I retired I think I was the only one at my company using one. I had to special order to get a proper one with the quad ruling, numbered pages, and sewn binding.
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