GCC is adding cool new languages too!

They just recently added COBOL and Modula-2. Algol 68 is coming in GCC 16.

All that sounds like “I would live for my family”. That is not what was said.

If you make the 1st Amendment illegal, the rest of the Constitution cannot be far behind.

I am ok if Europe wants to send troops to Canada to defend against the real enemy—the United States.

Have we forgotten that Trump has no power in Ukraine. All this means is that Europe has to provide a bit more funding.

Honestly, not even that much.

Keep fighting Russia without the US. Tell Trump to pound sand.

I read this on my 2013 MacBook Air 2013 running EndeavourOS. It runs amazingly well including video meetings.

Jellyfin has been rock solid for me, especially since the move to .NET 8. Looking forward to this release.

It is hard to tell is that article is written to obscure or misrepresent facts accidentally or on purpose.

It says stuff like hydro “normally represents 60%” of the power generation without saying what it is now. It for sure doss not tell you if hydro generates more or less electricity now vs the past.

The closest we get to a fact that illustrates the narrative is that Quebec hydro exports are down 18% in 2023 from 2022. Again, it does not say how much was generated. Obviously there is still enough hydro power available as they are still exporting a lot of it. Does the drop have anything at all to do with caapacity?

It says that BC “imported” almost 20% of its power but does not tell us how much it exported. This tell us absolutely nothing. Why? Because of how BC uses power.

Unlike most other sources, hydro power is easily turned on or off whenever you want. You cannot control when the sun shines or wind blows. Turning coal or nuclear plants on or off is expensive.

Electricity is deregulated in the US which means that prices spike when demand is high ( daytime ) and drop when it is low ( night ). BC generates excess hydro power during the day and sells it to the US grid. At night, when prices drop, BC buys power back from the US grid ( or Alberta ) and lets the reservoirs fill back up. How much BC imports has more to do with market price than anything else.

Saying BC buys 20% of its electricity tells us nothing as a fact on its own.

The article shares important truths but does it in a biased and misleading way. I do not trust the narrative.

The most important truth is likely the mushrooming demand. The world ( not just Canada ) is requiring more and more electricity every year. It is quite likely that existing hydro power in Canada will have to be increasingly used to meet domestic demand and that new sources of electricity will need to be identified.

As a global phenomenon, we are creating much more “green” electricity than we expected to. However that has mostly gone to new demand and older power plants ( like coal ) have not always been decommissioned as planned. As a planet, we are using more fossil fuel than ever despite all the green progress made. That does not mean somehow that green power generation has not worked out or is somehow a failure. It at least we are not building coal plants to meet all the demand. I bet we are still building natural gas plants though. Still better, but still.

The “lakes drying up” story is also real and not just in Canada. I am not really debating that as a backdrop. However, in the absence of actual head to head facts showing otherwise, I call BS that hydro power plants in Canada have had to turn off or that production has materially dropped. Also, places like BC have certainly not been building coal plants and are not going to. If I did not know any better, that article would have left me with a profound misunderstanding of what is actually going on.

I am a pretty big fan of Open Source and have used Linux myself since the early 90’s. Most governments are not going to save money switching to Open Source. At least not within say the term of a politician or an election cycle. Probably the opposite.

This kind of significant shift costs money. Training costs. Consultants. Perhaps hardware. It would not be at all surprising if there are custom software solutions in place that need to be replaced. The dependencies and complexities may be significant.

There are quite likely to be savings over the longer term. The payback may take longer than you think though.

I DO believe governments should adopt Open Source. Not just for cost through. One reason is control and a reduction of influence ( corruption ). Another is so that public investment results in a public good. Custom solutions could more often be community contributions.

The greatest savings over time may actually be a reduction in forced upgrades on vendor driven timelines. Open Source solutions that are working do not always need investment. The investment could be in keeping it compatible longer. At the same time, it is also more economic to keep Open Source up to date. Again, it is more about control.

Where there may be significant cost savings is a reduction in the high costs of “everything as a service” product models.

Much more important than Open Source ( for government ) are open formats. First, if the government uses proprietary software, they expect the public to use it as well and that should not be a requirement. Closed formats can lead to restrictions on what can be built on top of these formats and these restrictions need to be eliminated as well. Finally, open formats are much, much more likely to be usable in the future. There is no guarantee that anything held in any closed format can be retrieved in the future, even if the companies that produced them still exist. Can even Microsoft read MultiPlan documents these days? How far back can PageMaker files be read? Some government somewhere is sitting on multimedia CD projects that can no longer be decoded.

What about in-house systems that were written in proprietary languages or on top of proprietary databases? What about audio or video in a proprietary format? Even if the original software is available, it may not run on a modern OS. Perhaps the OS needed is no longer available. Maybe you have the OS too but licenses cannot be purchased.

Content and information in the public record has to remain available to the public.

The most important step is demanding LibreOffice ( or other open ) formats, AV1, Opus, and AVIF. For any custom software, it needs to be possible to build it with open compilers and tools. Web pages need to follow open standards. Archival and compression formats need to be open.

After all that, Open Source software ( including the OS ) would be nice. It bothers me less though. At that lobby, it is more about ROI and Total Cost of Ownership. Sometimes, proprietary software will still make sense.

Most proprietary suppliers actually do stuff for the fees they charge. Are governments going to be able to support their Open Source solutions? Do they have the expertise? Can they manage the risks? Consultants and integrators may be more available, better skilled, amd less expensive on proprietary systems. Even the hiring process can be more difficult as local colleges and other employers are producing employees with expertise in proprietary solutions but maybe not the Open Source alternatives. There is a cost for governments to take a different path from private enterprise. How do you quantify those costs?

Anyway, the path to Open Source may not be as obvious, easy, or inexpensive as you think. It is a good longer term goal though and we should be making progress towards it.

An amazing accomplishment and a real feather in the cap for Rust.

When are we going to see this incorporated into the mainline kernel?

Manjaro because it is a bait and switch trap. Seems really polished and user friendly. You will find out eventually it is a system destroying time-bomb and a poorly managed project.

Ubuntu because snaps.

The rest are all pros and cons that are different strokes for different folks.

Except that they are not expecting to merge this into RHEL. They are sending it to CentOS Stream.