Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Captura (Score 1) 70

There's an American company, Captura, that is doing that, except their process is built around using up abundant solar power and electrodialysis to create the acid/base. https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/items/episode-62-transcript%3A-draining-the-tub%3A-using-the-ocean-to-capture-carbon

Comment Re: Well, one large step for a company, one small (Score 1) 94

They were able to drive 300 miles without stopping to charge the vehicle.

So?

It's at least 300 miles from a 40kWh battery on real American highways, which is pretty nice. Many other EVs get less range with batteries twice as large. The solar power is just icing on top. For some people, they would not need to ever plug one in because their daily commute is less than the solar gain. That was obviously never going to be the case for long distance travel.

Comment Nix? (Score 1) 202

I thought there'd be more Nix fans, particularly for the remote IT support.

I don't use it as a daily driver either, but the concept is nice.

Comment Re:Just don't see this as commercially viable (Score 1) 122

I don’t see what makes the Aptera good for commuting. As you say, the average European car is driven about 20 miles a day.

Most solar on a car will give the car at most 6 miles a day (Prius Prime). It's nice, but not life changing. But up to 40 miles a day is way more than 20. The average driver would never need to plug it in, ever, which is quite the difference. That is also true for Americans. According to the 2021 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), the national average driving distance is 19.9 miles per day.

It’s not like the Aptera has a small footprint, either, so an Ami or Zoe or Mini or Inster will be better in urban settings.

True. It is definitely not a great city car, where the city is Manhattan or Boston. San Diego, though? Las Vegas? Phoenix? The vast suburbia?

And ultimately, of course, mass transit or public vehicles makes the most sense for day to day travel.

Comment Don't (Score 1) 112

As somebody who retired and saw somebody else work on my old style php code, the new High IQ programmer immediately attempted to cram hundreds of small individual .php files used by a JS frontend, callbacks, and cron jobs into an MVC pattern, and only afterwards noticed things like that most of it returns json (which was somehow a huge problem) or that various directories all have different permissions models, or that the sql statements actually do more than CRUD and thus didn't fit neatly into his Models.

There are now 2 programmers there, and I don't think either of them wrote a completely new function in 2 years, nor had they completed the conversion. I don't think they are (entirely) stupid, rather that they have been working hard on the wrong thing in the name of an ideological purity. It wasn't even an actual framework! He built it himself.

Comment Substantially faster (Score 1) 66

It's not like VSCode on the M1 Air was super-pokey before, but the first time I launched the ARM version was ridiculous. 2 windows for 2 large projects, too many tabs, a bunch of extensions, multiple languages, and it was all just there, immediately.

One note: the self-update did not get me an ARM version. I had to download the ARM specific version.

Comment metric time (Score 1) 408

.beats or metric time has an advantage over UTC in that it is equally weird and annoying for everyone, and saying you are available from .700 to .200 means exactly that to everyone, no matter if that means you start at dawn, noon, or dusk in your local time zone. Nobody has an emotional reaction as with changing the clocks. This is a new number just to coordinate international meetings.
Either that or smarter software to convert every time you see into your local time, and every time you create, everywhere and in any form, to UTC.

I lived with a metric clock for a while. It wasn't any harder that a normal clock, and easier than not have a clock at all.

Comment I have one (Score 1) 197

I made myself a guaranteed income. It's more than basic, but also not enough to live the high life in NYC or SF. It has removed financial worry and the need to work or starve, which is nice after the damage from the cancer. I'm still working part time, but I could retire if the nerve damage gets any worse. I don't need to move to find a job. I'd move to find some place cheaper or nicer to live, and make a job there. If climate change floods this region, and it will, I can afford to walk away from this house. That's going to hurt, but I won't ever be homeless.
One might criticize Yang as unrealistic, but this plan at least has empathy.

Comment Re:A "Trial period" is standard in Germany (Score 1) 397

I have done this with 2 week contracts. I generally know how they'll do after they complete the setup guide. There's a step missing: if they blow past it because they didn't need it, great. If they notice a problem and ask, OK. If they waste an entire day (or week in one case) trying to figure it out, not good. It's a real world task free of the artificial nature of the interview, and at worst I still get somebody trying hard for a week.

Comment All 1st Gen reactors should be banned, but (Score 1) 583

Like Donald Rumsfeld saying "you go to war with the army you have" when he had been instrumental in creating that army, saying a 50 year old 1st generation reactor design has problems is true but overlooks the role the NRC has had in blocking research and deployment of everything else.
Fukushima might not have happened even to a 2nd generation reactor, and a modern reactor would have shut itself down, or not even been damaged at all.

Slashdot Top Deals

Anything free is worth what you pay for it.

Working...