The first time I ever saw a PC it was running Sopwith. Must have been 1989. I loved the game, but it was this exotic new machine that really interested me. It had 5.25” floppies, probably a 286 and quite an old machine by then.
I had only used Z80/128k machines up to then. My dad had an Amstrad 6128, with those 3” “hard” floppies, sturdy, with a decent thick metal gate.
This PC was a very different beast. I remember being confused about the disks. They seemed weak and unprotected ! you could literally see that delicate magnetic surface through the opening. I had always been told never to touch it, but there it was, just asking to be touched…
Oh but the 3" disks have the window with the gate on the INSIDE of the disk... While it's much harder to break it than on the 3.5", once it does... Big sad.
I remember these disk from my Spectrum +3 . Indeed more hard and resistant that the 3.5" . Sad, that the format was on the losing side and never evolved beyond the 128k (or was 256k?) that could store on a single side.
Is this grid-scale solar ? It can’t be rooftop - there is nobody in the UK who will install a 5kW rooftop system for £2k. The quotes I’ve had recently have been closer to £10k.
> The cost assumptions assume utility-scale solar panels and batteries in large parks. Smaller-scale rooftop solar and home batteries would cost 2-3 times more.
I've installed domestic solar several times. The main cost isn't the panels or the inverters - it's the scaffolding, labour, and wiring improvements in the home. If you have a tall or complicated house, it'll cost more.
They did. I worked in telecommunications from the late 90s until 2016. The death of the landline and dominance of mobile was a genuine surprise to the industry. The iPhone was the knockout blow.
People have been speculating on future returns since forever.
The East India company (an example of capitalism gone very very wrong) was speculatively founded with £4m (in today’s money) and went on to corner half of global trade.
This rose-tinted past of honest capitalism did not exist.
I like your term "honest capitalism". I'm putting that in my back pocket for later.
Capitalism breeds monopolies by rewarding first movers with economic advantages via feedback loop. This is how the system is designed to work, always has been, always will be.
Who else “played a role” in Falcon 9 reducing the cost of mass to orbit, exactly ? I guess some public money went their way ?
Also which jury is still out on starship ? I haven’t read any serious criticism that suggests there are insurmountable technical obstacles to it working. Timelines and the exact final cost-to-orbit are still debatable I guess ?
The achievements of the program so far and the infrastructure currently under construction in Starbase and the cape are seriously impressive. This is no speculative, skunkworks endeavour.
I don't think anyone can say there are insurmountable obstacles, but it's still a hard problem they haven't solved yet. Bits of the rocket are still melting on reentry, and they have to fix that to achieve rapid reusability. Plus they haven't demonstrated a heavy payload yet. We can't be sure they'll actually achieve extreme low cost until they've done both of these things.
For anything beyond Earth orbit, they also need to demonstrate orbital refueling.
I've seen articles raising technical concerns about all of these, but I'm not enough of an expert myself to have an opinion.
> Also which jury is still out on starship ? I haven’t read any serious criticism that suggests there are insurmountable technical obstacles to it working. Timelines and the exact final cost-to-orbit are still debatable I guess ?
There are also other space companies outside of SpaceX who have innovated and reduced the cost of mass to orbit.
Just trying to add the perspective that while yes, SpaceX is impressive, there are also other companies and this hero-like worship of SpaceX (or any other company/person) is not great.
So far everybody's playing catch-up, but there are some innovative rocket companies out there. Blue Origin is finally getting to orbit with partial reusability, Rocket Lab and Relativity Space are doing some cool stuff, and Stoke Space is working on full reusability, evaporative cooling for reentry (using hydrogen fuel for the second stage, which works much better for this than methane), can steer for landing without gimbaling the engines, and has a full flow staged combustion engine like Starship.
If you’ve got even a passing interest in the UK energy market you’d know this is because of the wholesale price of gas, not the actual wholesale cost of solar and wind.
If you really want to pay less for green energy, which is cheap when it’s plentiful (like anything) get on a variable tariff and install some storage.
> In the UK, the marginal unit is almost always a gas-fired power plant. As a result, one widely cited academic analysis found that gas set the price of power 97% of the time in the UK in 2021.
Because nuclear. Which is a great 20th century French achievement !
If the EPR2 doesn’t spiral into costing £17.5bn per unit as the UK-PWR has, perhaps we can get them in to “rustle me up a nuclear power station” or two, in the words of Tony Blair.
The subsidies for the EPR2 fleet is a 10 euro cents per kWh CFD and interest free loans. With the first reactor coming online in 2038 at the earliest.
That sums up towards 20 cents per kWh in total.
It’s an absolutely horrifyingly expensive boondoggle before they have even started, and it won’t deliver any electricity in the relevant timeframes for electrifying industry and society.
On top of this EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for their existing paid off nuclear fleet. Let alone new builds.
And that is France which has been extremely protectionistic shielding their nuclear fleet from renewable
competition, and even then its already leaking in on pure economics.
A 10c€/kWh CfD is not strictly speaking a subsidy, at the government will recover the average market price.
That being said, the total cost per kWh could well reach 20c/kWh, which is ridiculous. It's not only not competitive against renewables, but also not competitive with natural gas (CCGT are probably around 10-15c€/kWh).
The average day ahead price in France in 2025 was 6 cents per kWh.
This is with carbon trading starting to make fossil production very expensive, on top of LNG fossil gas. Which will quickly start to diminish as more renewables and storage comes online.
While the CFD runs for 40 years so into the 2080s for all but the first reactor.
I think you could choose to believe that “the industry’s priorities have fundamentally changed” or you could choose to believe in the economics of supply and demand.
Would there be any obligation to read the bits concerning yourself ?
I see this more as a digital artifact for future generations. I would love to read all about the events in the lives of my ancestors (no matter how detached the narration) going back generations.
Imagine if you could read in detail about your parental ancestors in 1500s, what they worked as, what they liked doing, where they spent their first holiday together…
There are more than 500 years from the 1500s, let's say roughly 500. That makes around 20 generations and about 2^20 = 1048576 ancestors. There are historical records that give you an idea what people similar to you if not your own ancestors were going about but details would be overwhelming to count and sift through. I welcome that details fade away and that we don't need to carry the whole baggage but just some bits that stayed. Things will take their natural course and whatever prominent will preserve if it's worthy.
Good point!
I already write some stuff down that I never intend to read myself but hope would be of some use for future generations. It's not always easy knowing what's worth recording. And sometimes really boring stuff can be interesting 100 years from now, but you wouldn't know.
The one heuristic I try to keep in mind whenever dealing with anyone on the phone is “if they called you, they want something from you”.
Even if this isn’t true, and someone is calling you out of the goodness of their heart, for reasons beneficial to you, if you treat everyone who calls you with the same suspicion you would treat a cold caller on your doorstep, that’s a good way to get yourself in the correct frame of mind to avoid getting scammed.
“There’s a suspected attack or fraud on your account” is unfortunately common from real companies. Half the time it feels exactly like phishing when it’s legit.
I had only used Z80/128k machines up to then. My dad had an Amstrad 6128, with those 3” “hard” floppies, sturdy, with a decent thick metal gate.
This PC was a very different beast. I remember being confused about the disks. They seemed weak and unprotected ! you could literally see that delicate magnetic surface through the opening. I had always been told never to touch it, but there it was, just asking to be touched…
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