This is exactly the thing. In UK electricity price is set by the cost of generating it from natural gas. After losses, etc, you get about 1/3 of power in electricity compared to heat in the gas. And the heat pump has an efficiency factor of about 3. So you get back to unity.
While electricity is priced off gas, current heat pumps do not have a strong economic case.
Would be interesting to read how the Austrian project was contracted out? It seems in the UK the big construction companies have got very good in extracting a lot of money from customers, wonder if things were different in Austria with this project.
Interesting. In UK, I think the big construction companies would hire these bean-counters then use them to out-manoeuvre the ones that are hired to replace them. Quickly nobody knows what a reasonable price is, and the govmnt has to go with choice of one out of two overpriced bids. (I have no direct experience, this is just what it looks like from an observers perspective)
Many comments here focusing on secrets and problems. But here is another way to look at this:
Environment variables are the "indefinite scope and dynamic extent" variable bindings to make structured programs out of Unix processes. To compare them to a text file is like writing that a program needs no variables because it can read all the values it needs from an input data file when it needs them.
Environment variables are precisely to be used in situation where sub-processes need to be passed information in a way that is not necessarily affecting subsequent calls to that subprocess from another section of a program. Sometime the subprocesses are sequences of nested shells, and sometimes other more complex programs, but the same idea applies.
Yes, and it was a huge thing at the time. The social effects of all this time coordination and time tabling are one of the underlying themes of Stoker's novel Dracula.
And it's still a huge thing that shifted with the Internet too.
Prior to it, yes, there was international phone lines, but those were still expensive enough you might ignore them.
Before then, I'd say around start of the 90's in Europe, you did not represent yourself being in sync with someone, anyone abroad (but perhaps that started to become conceivable for people who could afford frequent international calls or travel).
And that conditioned how you perceived your own time, the time of others, the events here and over there, and the effort you took into communicating long distance, through letters.
I was recently a guest staying at an elderly woman's large house.
The room I slept in was full of junk, but what caught my eye were envelopes with stamps from the 1950s/1960s. The "From" name was the woman's late husband, and they were all from two African countries that were then part of the British Empire.
I had heard her talk about when her husband was working in Africa, but until I saw the big pile of letters I hadn't considered that this was the only way the young couple could keep in contact when someone's work required long periods of international travel.
No need to go as far as Africa. Basic landline telephones spread into poorer/more rural parts of Europe only in 1980s and 1990s. Until then it was either taking the bus to see people in person, or sending a letter....
Exactly this. But you don't really want to bundle straight away -- think about the exact problem you have and then solve exactly that problem. After you've sorted a few problems like this think if a bundled platform is useful.
“studying the Coherence theory with some applications to the propagation of electromagnetic waves through turbulent atmosphere… a humble and down-to-earth type of problem.” -> Ended up being a very important (and largerly solvable!) problem in ground-based astronomy
I agree. And the cost of ebooks is often very reasonable, Amazon are selling lots (more than one can read in a lifetime) of superb stuff in the $1-$4 range. (Makes things really difficult for the modern authors though).
Also a paper book you'd carry every day with you for a year will look in much worse state than a Kindle.
To be pedantic, Amazon sells you a license to read the book but you don’t actually own the book like you would a real book. They can remove the book anytime and there is nothing you can do about it. They’ve already done it in the past, the book just vanished.
Yep. I don't mind paying authors and published for ebooks, but I draw the line at Amazon controlling my library. It seems like one solution might be to buy the ebook via whatever platform the author says is best for them, and then acquire a copy you control via other means.
The famous example is the removal of George Orwell's 1984. Note that Bezos called it all kinds of things, but did not revert the change according to the article [0]
I didn't know about that, would have been right that Amazon pays damages to the copyright holder. But they did at least refund the price paid, so the readers were no worse off than at start.
Generally not a big fan of Amazon-world, but if you don't mind reading older books kindle is good value I think. My 30pence copy of Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" was very good value, and has not yet mysteriously disappeared from my Kindles!
Humans generate decisions / text information at rates of ~bytes per second at most. There is barely enough humans around to generate 21GB/s of information even if all they did was make financial decisions!
So 21 GB/s would be solely algos talking to algos... Given all the investment in the algos, surely they don't need to be exchanging CSV around?
Standards (whether official or de facto) often aren't the best in isolation, but they're the best in reality because they're widely used.
Imagine you want to replace CSV for this purpose. From a purely technical view, this makes total sense. So you investigate, come up with a better standard, make sure it has all the capabilities everyone needs from the existing stuff, write a reference implementation, and go off to get it adopted.
First place you talk to asks you two questions: "Which of my partner institutions accept this?" "What are the practical benefits of switching to this?"
Your answer to the first is going to be "none of them" and the answer to the second is going to be vague hand-wavey stuff around maintainability and making programmers happier, with maybe a little bit of "this properly handles it when your clients' names have accent marks."
Next place asks the same questions, and since the first place wasn't interested, you have the same answers....
Replacing existing standards that are Good Enough is really, really hard.
CSV is a questionable choice for a dataset that size. It's not very efficient in terms of size (real numbers take more bytes to store as text than as binary), it's not the fastest to parse (due to escaping) and a single delimiter or escape out of place corrupts everything afterwards. That not to mention all the issues around encoding, different delimiters etc.
Its great for when people need to be in the loop, looking at the data, maybe loading in Excel etc. (I use it myself...). But not enough humans around for 21 GB/s
> (real numbers take more bytes to store as text than as binary)
Depends on the distribution of numbeds in the sataset. It's quite common to have small numbers. For these text is a more efficient representation compared to binary, especially compared to 64-bit or larger binary encodings.
The only real example I can think of is the US options market feed. It is up to something like 50 GiB/s now, and is open 6.5 hours per day. Even a small subset of the feed that someone may be working on for data analysis could be huge. I agree CSV shouldn't even be used here but I am sure it is.
> Humans generate decisions / text information at rates of ~bytes per second at most
Yes, but the consequences of these decisions are worth much more. You attach an ID to the user, and an ID to the transaction. You store the location and time where it was made. Ect.
Why are you theoretising? I can tell you from out there its used massively, and its not going away in contrary. Even rather small banks can end up generating various reports etc. which can easily become huge.
The speed of human decision has basically 0 role here, as it doesn't with messaging generally, there is way more to companies than just direct keyboard-to-output link.
