It was the Electron for me. Bought it new for the equivalent of less than #100 when Acorn discontinued it, the only computer I could afford from my allowance. Incidentally it also forced me to learn German and English as a kid, to be able to read the manuals and Acorn Magazine.
Second to learning to read, that machine probably had the largest influence on my career
Isn't that obvious? It's to strengthen Germany's resolve. The temptation to surrender and get the gas turned back on is going to be enormous this coming winter.
Germany and several other countries have made plans to shut down parts of heavy industry to save gas for heating. This is more than likely to put increasing pressure on governments to give in to Russia's demands. Now they can't, even if they want to, so that pressure is gone.
It could be a warning from the Kremlin; a false flag operation; internecine warfare; interference by the U.S., Gulf or private actors in Norway; or a pipeline built by the same corruption that shipped cardboard armour [1] doing what Russian-involved infrastructure does.
I like to shit on Russia as much as the next guy but keep in mind there is propaganda on both side and Ukraine is infinitely better at it than Russia, these aren't egg cartons, they're meant to be there:
> these aren't egg cartons, they're meant to be there
Egg cartons in place of tank reactive armour may be on a schematic. That makes it no less useless. To say the Russian military is operating with top kit denies the battlefield reality.
The "egg cartons" are spacers between explosive reactive armor places. The interesting part isn't that there are egg cartons but that there's only egg cartons - the ERA plates are missing.
My favorite story of Russians and armor plates was the dead Russian soldier who was found with his armor vest plate replaced by a stolen MacBook.
> To say the Russian military is operating with top kit denies the battlefield reality.
Yes, but where did I say the opposite ? There are dozens of reports showing it's running on fumes, there is no need to ridicule ourselves by propagating factually wrong infos
Saying "X fact" about russia is wrong doesn't mean someone supports their action. We all know their army is shit and any semblance of proper troops they had died in the first few weeks of the invasion
Nothing. Don’t need to. Whether designers put useless armour on the tank or a factory worker messed with a well-designed tank is irrelevant. The tanks were kitted with worthless armour.
"Do you know US soldiers have literal plates as body armor ? it's even ceramic plates, just like the one you eat from. AHA how dumb can they be, ceramic armor aha "
Why do my plates shatter when I drop them then ?! if they can't withstand my floor how could they possibly deflect bullets ?!
> Cardboard doesn’t block or deflect threats to tanks in any form
Well then good thing there is no cardboard in their tanks. You really take a random pic from twitter as the absolute truth even though you were presented alternatives ?
It might be outdated, it might be shitty compared to western version, it's not cardboard and it is supposed to be like that.
But ok let's all dial down our IQ to 56 and pretend Oligarchs sold egg cartons to their army to pay their yacht, that's a nicer story to tell on TV news. "aha look at them funny corrupt russians and their egg cartons, russia dumb"
I’ve seen claims that this is for structural reinforcement of sandbags, which makes no sense on multiple levels. (Even if the tank armour can’t resist bullets, a premise which raises its own host of questions, there is better light armour. And even if one insists on sand, a requirement which raises its own host of questions, civil engineering has better solved the problem of immobilising sand.) Those claims also have zero history before photos of the egg cartons emerged, which isn’t unexpected for military kit, but suspect given Moscow’s tendency for ham-fisted retconning.
The broader point is, whether designed that way or not, it’s evidence of incompetence. If the people doing that built a pipe part, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it fail. (Though based on German comments, there is reason to suspect foul play.)
> The broader point is, whether designed that way or not, it’s evidence of incompetence.
Yet you went for the "aha funny egg cartons how can they be so dumb" narrative instead of the "look they have a shitty army"
> Those claims also have zero history before photos of the egg cartons emerged,
Besides the literal tank specs and the tweets/websites I linked to from 2017 which was like 5 years before the picture emerged.
It's free to admit you were wrong and propagating false information, I'm not attacking you personally you don't have to be so triggered: they have a decrepit army: yes, they have egg carton tanks: no, as simple as that
Fair enough, I didn't mean to be misleading. The egg cartons aren't literally cardboard. But while nobody can agree on what they were supposed to be doing (encasing missing reactive armor? doing something with sand? voodoo?), there is broad agreement on what it didn't do: serve a useful purpose.
Really ? How naive can you be ? It's a communication war as much as a regular war
It's never all black or all white, if you can't understand that I feel sorry for you. The reality is bad enough, we don't need to swallow every bit of info coming out of Ukraine.
If you believe Russian tanks are filled with egg cartons because you saw a blurry pic on twitter I don't even know what to tell you. Once again, russia's army is rotten enough that you don't have to make up lies to make it look bad, there are dozens of reports that are _true_ and equally bad
Russia's propaganda barely even work inside of its own border while Ukraine's conquered the west, even on this platform smart individual believe random tweets without even questioning it
I'm not even saying it's bad, it just is, I have a hard time understanding how people can't see it. Is it because "propaganda" as a bad connotation and nothing bad can be linked to Ukraine ?
Not the person you replied to, but let's test the theory this way: Can you list out some of the US/Ukraine propaganda? If not, do you think it's because the US/Ukraine isn't using propaganda or because they're better at it and you don't realize it's propaganda?
There's another option, which I think is more likely than Ukraine being better at it. Because we are supportive of Ukraine, we want Ukrainian propaganda to be true.
There really isn't anywhere close to something like a median voter wanting to get the gas flowing from Russia again in Germany - now or in the winter. A government giving in to the more fringy hard right/hard left asking for that would not survive. The German-Russian relationship has been damaged for decades to come now.
well, wait for the winter ... Germans aren't used to hardship and many more are critical for compromising comfort for Ukraine than Tagesschau and heute journal would like to make you believe.
I strongly disagree. People in Germany couldn't care less about Ukraine because it is far away. Most assume that Putin will win this war anyways. However, they care strongly about cheap Gas because it directly influences their lives.
For now maybe (I wouldn't believe those polls sponsored by state media for a second btw.). Even the strongest anti-Putin propaganda campaign will go up in flames as soon as people have sit in the cold and lose their jobs at the same time. Then it's a very convenient situation for politicians that the pipelines can't easily be switched on again because they got "somehow damaged". Therefore it was most probably an inside job.
You forgot the part about vast land in Ukraine (the biggest country in Europe) since the fighting is on the other (Eastern) end. Heck west of Ukraine is hardly affected by war in daily life, why do you think Western politicians visit even Kiev if there is such horrible "war" ongoing, why is McDonald's operating, toyshops etc. Odd war if you ask me if it's business as usual in most of the country, feels more like theater to pump those dumb Western Europeans for their money by infamously most corrupt gov in Europe. Yes, there is fighting in east of Europe, yes lot of people die there, but this isn't affecting even most of the Ukraine so playing the BS card about some war in EU is just wet dream of war mongers.
What an ignorant comment. What do you expect, that there's fighting everywhere? People looting at night and society near anarchy? We have two state actors with roughly equal capabilities. It's not US&Allies vs Iraq.
Western ukraine is not "hardly affected", it is affected. There are many refugees, probably everyone knows someone fighting in the east. You might look to fight in the east as well if you're in the right age bracket! Economy is shit and people are training to rotate to the front. Putin is waging a brutal war, killing and torturing ukrainians. There are air raid warning in kyiv, kyiv pride happened underground! Yes the government is corrupt, but we have to help them fight this monster.
It's also not an odd war, industrial societies maintain industrial capabilities to wage industrial war. WW1 was fought on the west in mostly static battles. Neither Berlin or Paris were affected by bombs, less than easter ukraine for sure! And they fought for years. Even in WW2 society largely functioned until the end in germany (if it was not bombed to shit!). It's interesting to see the logistics of everyday life near the end of WW2 in germany, you expect everything to end up in total chaos but everyone with a job just continued doing their job. Why not? dairy farmers still produced milk and shipped it off, and quite a lot of the railways worked.
We see ukrainian flags here in a small town in germany, recently they celebrated something in public (maybe their independence?) and we got into a converstantion, we have refugees starting to study here etc. Heating prices are through the roof and I can't really afford to heat my room, al because of this stupid fu*ing war. War affects you even if you don't have bombs falling onto your head! In whole WW2 only like two or three bombs were thrown onto the small city (~80k) I am currently living in. War doesn't mean everything is blowing up all the time.
This is not correct. Nordstream II is fully functional and can carry far more gas.
This "accident" allows Russia to turn up the pressure on Germany without formally exiting it's contract. It creates plausible deniability for when they pressure Germany to pressure Ukraine to accept a ceasefire.
I just heard energy analyst krutikhin explain on the news that Gazprom could have blown them up using so called "pigs", maintenance drones that move through the pipes.
I know RPG did that. I can't tell you if all programs do that, probably not today, but that was the origin. Keep in mind that at the time, all your data was on tape, punch cards or disk, you only had a few kb of RAM.
IBM still churns out new releases of the programming language, where they keep tacking on support for all the things programmers of today want to do.
The problem with this article is the same as with every article about COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG, Mainframes etc:
The assumption that it is only 50+ year old legacy code running on dependable
but obsolete hardware, untouched by human hands in decades is wrong.
In reality, much of it is new. COBOL shops still develop new software. IBM still makes brand new mainframes. The developers are not all old men in suits, they look pretty much like C++ or Java (or any other established tech) programmers: all ages. That may look old to you because you're biased to think of programmers as males aged 20 to 35.
By the way, I'm not saying it doesn't suck. It's not something I ever intend to do in my life again.
Ages ago, I had a colleague who was deeply into hacking of his mTOR pathway. Among other things, this included a permanent calorie deficit and removal of all protein from his diet.
I don't know if he's still alive. Maybe it was working a bit too well, I recall he looked like an extremely tall 13 year old with anorexia.
The oligarchs didn't swoop in and ruin everything. The Russian government did not want their resources and industry controlled by foreign share holders, so they were dead set on privatizing the economy by selling to Russians only.
With this constraint, the handful of Russians who were able to raise capital in such a short time, without foreign counter bids, got the privatized businesses far below market prices as a result. This is what made them billionaires, and turned them into the oligarchs.
Not only that, it would have been highly inappropriate for the US to intervene in another country's domestic affairs uninvited.
The assumption everything bad is always our fault is just the other side of the coin of the narcissistic belief that we're the greatest of all time at everything and therefor always right.
Specifically, automatics accounted for around 10 percent of Ford Europe sales volume in 2017. That figure has climbed to over 31 percent in the first month of the 2020 calendar year.
Github Copilot won't give students anything they couldn't already google.
It seems to be a natural part of aging, to start to complain about education and kids these days because it's not the same as when we were in school.
I try not to do that, because I never forgot how my parents generation said the exact same about us when we were in school, and I guarantee my grandparents generation complained when my parents were in school.
Second to learning to read, that machine probably had the largest influence on my career