Having six weeks of supplies and knowing a delivery is coming in the next five days is fine.

Having six weeks of supplies and knowing that no tanker is on its way and it might be weeks before one is even on its way - that's an entirely different situation.

The world has relied on "Just in Time" delivery or maintaining minimal backups to cover brief weather interruptions for many years as globalisation became the norm.

Loving this map! I can see the interconnector flows between the UK and neighbouring nations!

Good luck getting planning permission in our national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty!

Highly unlikely that will be possible in the UK - most of the best locations are quite far away from dense populations as well.

Might be viable for other countries though?

We're not blessed with areas we can develop for pumped hydro for grid-scale storage. (Planning would be a nightmare as most suitable areas are national parks or similar)

Batteries are very quick - but don't quite give us the "thousands of homes for 12 hours" level of supply that we will need.

The UK is blessed with lots of wind... and we're adding at least another 10GW of generation in the next decade. When storms cross the UK we will increasingly have to turn off wind farms to protect the grid. No good for wind farms or us!

Prices have occasionally gone negative as a result, but there's not enough smart hot water tanks and cars on the grid to absorb this extra supply yet. Certainly not in the GW range which we will soon encounter.

I see this as really useful for the cases where an overnight weather system causes high supply when there's low demand. Use the free or negative priced electricity to "charge" these up when there's excess supply. Then use the power to help supply during the 4pm-7pm peak. This smoothes the demand on fossil fuel/nuclear, reducing the cost of peaker plants.

Compact, scalable, understandable tech. Easy to place geographically where required. It could really become a significant part of the UK's infrastructure.

I'l not having used Inkscape for years, so I imagine stablity/features/performance have improved. It was always slightly clunky on Windows for me.

I'm happy for the open source application's achievement, but in exchange for a couple of hour's earnings per application (I've bought licenses for all three apps during sales) the Affinity suite gives you raster, vector and layout applications. I've got rapid workflows that save me far more than the cost of the software.

While Affinity are not matching Adobe on features yet, their rate of innovation is fast.

Yes, it looks similar in scope. I marvel at countries like Estonia where they've been using such services for years. Most people file tax returns online now, and it works pretty smoothly to its credit.

One of the "funniest" parts of the documentary was seeing all the story cards on a 20 metre long wall. One of them read:

"Pay people the right amount, on time"

Project MD's comment: "we've been trying to do that for 30 years"

Yes there is a point where the economics change, unfortunately it's not just a hardware change. In the time that has elapsed politics and requirements change a lot as well, so it's no longer a re-implemenation - it's a new system and migration.

In the UK we have been replacing several "uneconomical" benefit systems (health, housing, employment etc) into one system: "Universal Credit" that helps people see their benefit records online.

It's already several years late, with a budget that has ballooned from £2.2 billion to £15.8 billion. Nowhere near the target number have been moved over yet. Assumptions that were too simplistic, difficulties with legacy systems, edge cases (the system will have over 5,000,000 users - all with varying needs and demographics) and such have all shown it to be much harder than imagined.

It will save money (eventually)... as I senior lead for the project said in a TV interview: once this is done it will run for 30 years and nobody will question whether it was worth it.

There will be no paper forms, no scanning or posting. It will all be managed digitally and will integrate with tax records and other government systems with up-to-the-minute accurate reporting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

For anyone using Laravel (which uses substantial parts of the Symfony framework) the answer is undoubtedly yes. I have an easy to install, excellently documented framework with lots of features out of the box. It's on par with Rails (largely because founder Taylor Otwell takes the Rails as part inspiration).

Package management: Composer packages through packagist are readily available. All of AWS covered, most major SaaS companies (HubSpot, Pipedrive etc) have SDKs for PHP. Admittedly some packages are of poor quality or lacking in updates... but I don't think that's a language specific issue.

Testing: PHPUnit is the major one, but there are others with their own strengths. Writing tested code is becoming more commonplace, with Laravel having tests and many packages doing the same.

Performance: speed was roughly doubled and memory consumption halved between 5.6 and 7.0, each 7.x release has improved by 5 to 10% depending on benchmark.

Standards: PHP-FIG covers coding standards, auto-loading, caching, phpdoc and logging interfaces and more.

IDE Support: PHPStorm, VS Code, Sublime Text etc, all have excellent PHP syntax support

HOWEVER: I will admit that the language is still a bit of a mess - inconsistent function names being the worst of them. Recent versions have removed/deprecated some inconsistencies in syntax declarations, it's not a quick fix, but I hope they will get there one day.

I don't see PHP going away any time soon, I think it could grow further.

Watched all three parts last night. There was far more to this than the typical "how did he get to where he is now" documentaries:

Insights into his relationship with Paul Allen and not reconciling their differences. Seeing Melinda laugh out loud when asked "what it's like inside Bill's mind?"! How his mother prompted him to meet Warren Buffet.

His voracious appetite for diving deep into subject matter is astounding. I knew he was well read, but it looks like he devours 2–10 books a week depending on travel/commitments (with strong retention). He doesn't just fund the foundation's research/engineering - he seems to have a firm grasp on the whole field of energy, vaccination and sanitation, often reading some of the **driest** textbooks and technical papers to gain a complete picture of an issue and all the surrounding issues.

He came across as far more human than I imagined for the uber-geek the press always labelled him as.

It was never going to be shipped first.
The 57K model is reckoned to have a 20-25% profit margin by external observers. Elon has stated they are working on these to guarantee a healthy cash flow while they increase production volume before bringing in the lower priced specification model 3.

25% of 35K gives less margin for slower production affecting costs and Tesla would be foolish to not know that the first production line can handle a steady 5,000–6,000 a week before committing to a lower profit (by magnitude) car.

https://electrek.co/2018/05/21...

Considering that they are topping the table for car-ownership satisfaction rates, I don't think it's such a big issue. https://www.consumerreports.or...

Here's a great video that explains a lot of the cost factors in rail:

tl;dr highlights

Staff - rail has more people involved (on train, at stations, maintenance)
Usage - trains have to accommodate peak usage, but spend a lot of time way below capacity.
Land acquisition - land has to be bought initially
Trains and carriages (or cargo trolleys) are expensive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

After trying an Apple keyboard at work I bought one for home as well.

I've adopted the @/" switch (Even the "British English" keyboard has the US layout) - it does help when writing PHP! I have a keyboard remapper so that ## is turned into £. There's a bit of funkiness with the F-keys as ALT positioning as well, but I've soon adapted. Overall my speed on general typing/coding has improved A LOT. Main benefits are:

1) I'm faster, with less travel in distance between the keys I can move my fingers faster.
2) Perceived effort - they keys are so responsive that hands relax a lot more and it feels like my hands are "dancing" over the keyboard, my old 40-50wpm is closer to 60-70 again.
3) It's no bigger than the "compact" keyboards and yet is as close to the standard IBM layout as you are likely to get. I've looked at a lot in this price range and there are some very small arrow keys on some, or odd home/end/pg up/pg dn arrangements.

For under £50, it's an amazing piece of kit.

P.S. I plan to switch to a Mac of some sort later this year - yes, I know I'm doing this in a back-to-front way :-)

"Facebook's plan breaks new ground."

Not really, Bournville (home of the makers of Cadburys Chocolate) was constructed by it's Quaker founders. They built affordable housing for the workers, a swimming baths, parks, and made sure that their workers lived in good surroundings for their own health and welfare. No pubs though, Quakers are not too fond of alcohol!

Other wealthy Victorian companies did the same in the cotton industries and other areas of extreme expansion.

It didn't last forever though, those companies either no longer exist today, or have far fewer profits to lavish on the workers.

Technical skills can be obtained but they are something that anyone can get.

The soft skills are important too. I have managed Exchange in the past and I'm currently training for my first SQL Server qualification after a year of optimising and improving the maintenance of some business critical databases. (About 10 years of SQL/Access experience from before that)

Both require the ability to maintain uptime, schedule appropriate and timely maintenance and the ability to fall back should your "easy" upgrade go completely wrong. (This is often not your fault!). Have you set up WSUS to roll out Windows Updates to computers for you? Do you vet updates and roll them out to small subset of PCs before allowing the update to go out across the network to make sure that there isn't an issue? One rogue update can cause a day of grief if you have to manually uninstall it.

Do you maintain backups? Do you test them regularly?

Do you produce good, well written documentation? You may be replacing somebody who has been sacked as something has gone wrong and their documentation consists of post-its on servers saying "reboot me every Thursday at 5pm, managers in a meeting then.".

Things like this are probably more encouraging to an employer who has critical services (and all services become critical if they go offline!). Eager people can learn fast, they can also make critical mistakes very quickly if they make quick assumptions.

I have only recently started with the SQL Server books and—to my surprise Microsoft—I have been pleasantly surprised. They acknowledge that they cannot teach a fixed solution. The books teach that "X, Y and Z are solutions", but also ask you know the reasons WHY you would pick one above another in a given situation.

I second the idea of helping a voluntary organisation as well then are often in need of expertise and going into a real world scenario and being able to fix issues and improve systems is valuable experience.