I means Google clearly doesn't think it's likely they'll need that level of power in the near future... but they cannot tell their investors that, since that would sound like they are quitting out of the AI race.

So the obvious solution is to make contracts with a company that will, most likely, never provide a service economically. Nobody has ever operated a nuclear power plant without heavy subsidies, and using old equipment that's long out of its desired life-span doesn't make it more economical. On the other side there are now a lot cheaper and simpler alternatives like solar, wind and battery storage. Look at the prices for solar panels, look at the prices for batteries. Nuclear will most likely never be able to come close to the economics of renewables. That ship has sailed in the last decade or so.

So in a few years, when the hype has died down, and we need much less data centers, Google will just be able to quietly back out, since Constellation Energy will most likely, not have delivered on their promise. Everyone is happy then, and the amount of money wasted is minimal.

Memory now is expensive now, and fewer people shell out for the gigabytes of memory a typical Linux system needs. So people will likely just stick to Windows and DOS games as those run fine on 64 Megabytes of RAM.

I mean, as the numbers show, few people played games on workstation class machines anyhow. Why waste hundreds of dollars or euros on a Linux workstation, when you can rescue a Windows box from scrap.

Yeah, but you could just put everything you'd put into a satellite into a small shed and plop that somewhere. There's extemely little to be gained by going into space for such things, particularly considering the effort.

The promise of "new space" startups like SpaceX is, that they will somehow be able to reduce the costs of bringing up something into space by multiple orders of magnitude. That's what they promise, if people stop believing that they can do that eventually, they will just implode.

Bringing electronics into space has it's problems, but it's essentially proven technology. We have had space stations converting many kilowatts for decades now. We can do that, we know how to do that. We know where to get the energy from (storage and batteries) we know how to cool that. We know how to do high-speed data links. A Terabit to a LEO satellite is just a regular engineering problem.

So why don't we just put data centers in orbit? The answer is that putting anything into orbit is prohibitively expensive. We can have most of the advantages of the technology also without putting stuff into space. You can run data centers by solar and wind, heck it's hard to find a hosting company in Germany, for example, that does not do that.

Claiming that data centers in space have a future is claiming that "new space" companies are likely to achieve their goal. I don't know how much investment Google has in "new space", but if it's a billion, spending some pocket money on such an experiment seems like a sensible investment to strengthen that investment.

The market for fashion-statement laptops is already crowded. You can buy hundreds of different "to thin to be useful" laptops, that barely work under real life conditions.

There would be a market for easy to maintain laptops that are thick enough to not only provide essential ports (Framework failed on this), but also provide the ability to have battery packs of meaningful size. (e.g. >100Wh)

Why do programming languages keep repeating the same mistake of side-stepping established ways to provide libraries (e.g. the OS distribution systems) and run some self-service systems where anybody can just upload their malware with nobody looking over it?

It's one of those ideas that immediately sound like a bad idea. We have made so much progress in memory safety with languages like Rust and Go, only for those security advanced to be eliminated by a system that downloads dependencies from a random server. Dependencies that often would be better suited for the standard library.

I mean we already have sources of trustable code, they are called distributions and provide working, yet a bit stale, versions of popular software packages. Even the fact that they are not "bleeding edge" already makes them more secure since they had a bit of a "shake down period". It's not like a developer commit will make it straight into deployment.

That is one of the most reputable newspapers in Germany.

... see the US as the "Ass of Canada"?
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.der-postillon.com%2F...

Just how do you propose the issue of it spinning round? Anybody inside would, at best, get dizzy, at worst squashed by centripedal forces.

Well what's holding that back is the lack of a "standard PC", a common platform where you can just boot up your OS image and have a basic way to enumerate the hardware so you can actually boot. Essentially that's what the IBM-PC brought the world.

SoCs typically are highly proprietary as every manufacturer wants to do their own thing to keep their customers from switching.

like there's an article in the magazine "mc" about universities ditching MS-DOS and Windows for that new "Public-Domain-Unix" Linux.... ... but that was in the issue 6/94, from 1994.

Windows, in the real world, has been on a steady decline since then, only propped up by OEM sales and it's lower use of ad-blockers boosting up statistics based on that data.

Yeah, but there has been an intense concentration on one thing alone, cars. And that industry is failing. Other industries were killed off deliberately. (think of the wind turbine industry or the solar industry)

Adding to that the current breed of politicians often is post-WWII, people who haven't learned that gift that the constitution is. For them values like Democracy are not as important.

It's getting harder and harder not to.

There's the CDU which has one part that's just corrupt and the other part that wants to erect a pseudo Christian God-state. The differences in opinion to the right-most party are actually very small.

Minister of economy Reiche does her best to to stop the move to renevable spouting nonsense like "'the sun doesn't charge money' is nonsense". The same party essentially killed the wind industry in Germany some years back.

It may not yet be that they shoot civilians on the street like in the US, but it's still rather right-wing.