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Air source heat pumps!

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Air source heat pumps are a very bad news for the grid when they aren’t backed up by natural gas pre-heaters for when the air temperature is below 40 degrees.

That’s why Albany’s All Electric Skyscraper in 2006 – One Commerce Plaza – added gas pre-heaters. The electric pre-heaters were burning megawatts of electricity when it got below 40 degrees, a common condition in Albany during the winter. Except for the gas pre heaters in extreme cold, the building is still all electric as it has been since the 1960s.

Ground source heat pumps don’t have this issue as if you are below the frost line in most of America, it never gets below 40 degrees. Heat pumps don’t require pre-heating when it’s above 40 degrees or so.

Inside The Cyber Weapons Arms Race

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Inside The Cyber Weapons Arms Race

2/10/21 by NPR

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/118980596
Episode: https://play.podtrac.com/npr-381444908/edge1.pod.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2021/02/20210210_fa_fapodweds.mp3?awCollectionId=381444908&awEpisodeId=966360714&orgId=1&d=2922&p=381444908&story=966360714&t=podcast&e=966360714&size=46656462&ft=pod&f=381444908

The world is on the precipice of cyber catastrophe, and everything is vulnerable, including our government, nuclear weapons, elections, power grid, hospitals, and cell phones. ‘New York Times’ cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth explains how the U.S. went from having the world’s strongest cyber arsenal to becoming so vulnerable to cyber attack. “We have to stop leaving gaping holes in software that could be used by adversaries to pull off some of these attacks,” she says. Perlroth’s new book is “This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends.”

No, COBOL Is Not a Dead Language

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No, COBOL Is Not a Dead Language

COBOL, an acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language, is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. First released in 1959, it's designed to be easy to?read by a human, which Seay says makes the language easy for students to grasp.

"COBOL?is not a very difficult language to learn," he said. "It's very linear; it's very self-describing. The verbosity that people criticize it for, I think, is one of its strengths. It tells you what it does."

Microsoft Windows

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The past two laptops I’ve owned, I’ve kept Microsoft Windows installed in it, but I almost never use it. The only time I ever use Windows is to load a product upgrade or run a driver that isn’t working properly in Linux. Like for example, right now I am booted into Windows to read and reformat a memory card that Linux is refusing to see at all because it is corrupted. It seems to work okay.

Every time I’ve loaded Microsoft Windows, I’ve always noticed how truly slow the operating system is compared to the striped down version of Linux I run with the XFCE Window Manager. It also is trying to sell me some kind of new product, that is always free and easily installed in Linux like office software, software updates, and virus protection. Why pay for something that is already free and easier to install?

I agree that some hardware and software requires a bit more fiddling to get working perfectly. But on the other hand, not all Windows programs are easy to install, especially if you have to buy them, download them and run them through an installer — compared with the ease of apt-get. Linux’s powerful command line makes scripting, and basic repetitive tasks much easer to do then doing a lot of clicking. But for more complicated tasks, there are almost always easy to use GUI programs like OpenOffice and QGIS.