Whenever I see the word "spew" in the summary, I know I'm looking at a constructed environmental outrage piece.

Southern spent around 7.5 billion on the Kemper plant (coal gassification) from an initial cost of 2.4 billion. They got the whole thing built, and then it got quiet as they continued to spend billions to get it working. Eventually they gave up, and the gassifier part of it was demolished this year. What's most annoying here is there's been very little information released on why the project failed. They got $270 of DoE funding.. they owe us a report on what went wrong. Sure, projects fail now and then, but if we don't share why, we don't learn anything.

The corporate/business owners can deduct every expense. Individual homeowners can't. (Correct me if wrong there..) Seems like the end result is they'll own everything.

They had a different socket and instruction set, using the address bus to speed things up, vs the data bus only connection for the 386-387 which had about an 18 cycle minimum for any FPU op. More registers and an instruction queue to keep the FPU busy. Software was rare (mostly high end programs) but the socket was fairly common. Would be fun to get a hold of one and see what it could do sometime.

Assuming they mean Z=height, I'm not sure what the summary is talking about; you can most assuredly fall straight down (splat). Usually you aren't in a position to fly straight up, but the mechanics would allow it. You can't look completely straight up and possibly straight down; that is, or used to be common in FPS type games. The summary implies it is Doom-like 2.5D, but its true 3D; you can be at various heights and some maps are very 3 dimensional.
Solo play near impossible? There are spots where its a bad idea, but up to around level 80 its not hard to solo with a merc for most classes. The game has gradually gotten easier, and leveling faster.
As far as being out of date, that is part of the charm of it. They've updated a few zones to be more "modern" and often players like the older versions (Freeport, for example, once a sketchy port shantytown, now its a huge metropolis). Most people who want to play a modern game.. are playing something else.

And whoever made up the summary hit the loaded language mark too - you see "spew" in a lot of pollution stories to let you know which conclusion you should draw before reading the rest.

Better, when will the big operations start dumping cards by the thousands onto Ebay? A plentiful secondhand market + crypto not buying new cards should deepen the effect. I'm fine with used stuff, but do wonder how much life a GPU that has run flat-out 24/7 for a year or two has left.

I saw an "agreement" that stated that if the company did something illegal, and you blew the whistle, and the company broke the whistleblower laws to retaliate, then you agreed not to sue. I'm pretty sure that would go over like a lead balloon with any judge. The companies might as well try putting clauses like in there, because there's no downside for them. Severability lets them put in various unenforceable clauses and let the court system figure it out. In the meantime it discourages the more timid employees from pursuing a case.

It will be interesting to see how much of the ~$7.5 billion is allowed in the rate base. Southern presumably eats the rest. Mississippi power only has about 186,000 customers, so there are not many to spread out the costs. By switching it to a conventional gas plant, it will work, but it will be the most expensive one ever.

If it captures 240 metric tons of CO2 a year, they better have it on a strong foundation. That is going to get really heavy.

Backwards here.. we use the cell phone to call in repair requests for the land line (and give them a required callback number.. ahem).

I found it nice for playing on SPARC32. The Linux distros have dropped sparc32, with Debian Etch being the last one I know of - if there's another I'd love to know about it. The linux kernel still supports sparc32, if you can find a distro to run it in. The NetBSD way of doing things took some adjusting, but its worth it to run modern software on some really old systems - like Sun2/3!

I vaguely remember discussion of some technical issue that was a big deal around the time of Win 3.0, that Alan Cooper solved in the Tripod prototypet.. Something like the "CX/DX register problem" (problem with calling conventions, DLL/OLE stuff maybe?). Might be interesting (ok, to a very, very small number of people) to see it. Maybe somebody else remembers the issue and can describe it better than me. Knowledge is much more widespread now, though, so whatever this was, its probably well known now if there's any value to it.

It's a little early to get worried about it, but when we finally get a hydrogen economy going, I wonder how much water we'll lose due to leaking hydrogen. Billions of devices leaking a little bit over many years would add up. Maybe technology will move on the next step before it's a serious problem.

Here's my experience with MUMPS. About twelve years ago, I interviewed with a shop that used it. One of the interviewers told me, a little smugly, that MUMPs was so powerful, that nobody can be productive in it for at least a year. Then I got a one paragraph description of it and was asked to write some basic programs, using pen and paper, with someone watching. My recollection was it was a bastard child of assembly and LISP. There were lots of parentheses, but only register variables to work with. (That doesn't seem to match the wikipedia description, but it's the description I got at the time.) The place probably didn't have a choice about using it, but they seemed convinced it was the best thing ever. I'm not too broken up over not getting that job.