Seems like their homemade ones were working pretty well at a fraction of the cost.

Three

Any consumer electronics is difficult to get into. Certainly the auto industry. Railroads. It’s difficult to start an ISP, even a non profit one. I think the list goes on.

Ok. Same reason firefighters are not supposed to let their kids wear their helmet while selling lemonade. They are supposed to be impartial.

For the same reason police shouldn’t be allowed to participate in white power marches in their uniforms. They are supposed to be neutral.

Or people stop speeding.

Hopefully this change will alleviate that problem.

People don’t speed because they are distracted. People speed because they think they are better than average drivers; every damn one of them.

It’s pretty much the only place left to operate. Protectionism has stopped innovation everywhere else.

Down votes for you being an anti-witchhuntist?

Right now I use all/new as I build my subscribe and block list. Eventually I will use subscribed/scaled

You will need to watch the next one to see how a transistor works. It to, is very simple and very clever. I do know how these guys figured it out.

If you have questions I am very happy to try and help. Someone did it for me decades ago.

I had to find this. This explains on an atomic level how semiconductors work. For me this was important for me to gain an intrinsic understanding of what is going on in computers.

https://youtu.be/33vbFFFn04k?si=5W_ymFgYJByXf3sR

It is simple and fascinating and brilliantly clever.

I think you’re asking all the right questions and I think knowledge of these things makes you much more capable.

I think a good answer that you will understand is too long for this format. I gave a brief answer but then I went off looking for better information. Sorry to offend you.

I think this course from Ben eater on how he built his own CPU from logic gates might explain a lot.

I think it also covers how transistors work which is fundamental to how gates work.

https://eater.net/8bit

1. Flashing code to a chip doesn’t really involve light.

2. you used switches on the front panel to load code into the computer by setting individual bits high or low. Typically you toggled in the bootstrap loader, which was a program that read a sequence of number directly into a spot in memory. The first program loaded by the bootstrap loader was usually the absolute loader. This was another program that loaded data from some peripheral, similar to the bootstrap loader, but it could do error checking and also load to non- sequential locations.

3-the Internet isn’t light. It’s electricity. On fiber the bits may be temporarily encoded as light, but overall it is electric.

4- You can understand it all if you want. It depends on the depth to which you want to understand it. You can understand a mouse has a plastic shell. You need some organic chemistry and chemical engineering to understand how to design plastic.

5- I recommend Ben Eaters YouTube channel to get a good overview of the basics.

I would be very selective on where I used battery power, if at all. At the moment I think I would use grid power instead. For air conditioning I would get the house as cold as I could while the sun was shining then coast throughout the night. Same for the refrigerator. I would run the table saw on dc directly from the solar panels.

Much of the existing grid’s issues could be fixed with reconductorting. Changing the design of renewable interconnect for half-cycle ride-through and power-factor compensation would have been interesting but now there is so much capacity this is practically inconsequential.

As DC interconnects becomes more common the grid becomes more resilient and flexible. Most of these are paid for with private investor money.

Seems like a great opportunity for grid-issolated solar cooling.

I think you are correct. I think it is mostly FUD by large generators. Not that the grid doesn’t need updating but it’s not due to distributed generation yet.

If I were going to do solar today I would do grid isolated with automatic transfer switches. The panels are much cheaper, you get power when the grid is down, and you have more granular control over how you use power.

I think you are correct. Also isolated solar for cooling could reduce loads.

The problem, which I think is overstated by grid operators is when distributed generation exceeds nearby usage since the infrastructure isn’t designed for flow upstream.