My understanding the rail share of freight is relatively low in Japan compared to many other developed countries. Most freight moves by truck or coastal shipping. Looking at a map of Japan, most of the cities are by the coast, so I guess coastal shipping makes a lot of sense.
> China also has nationalized rail systems. The major reason for the failure in the US is that the rail lines are not publicly owned.
The article we're discussing explains that Japan has the best passenger rail system in the world, and which happens to be privatized, along with privately owned track. So which one is it? Go figure.
While I agree with you, their system did not start privatised, and the Shinkansens predate privatisation by some time. I don't have the evidence to justify this, but I suspect that you need national buy-in - both financially and politically - to start a HSR build-out, which could then potentially be privatised at a later stage.
I believe the Japanese private rail companies also own the lines where their traffic is. This would explain a lot. There are other countries (including my native one) where the trains are run by one company and the lines are owned by another. This does.not.work. For what seems like obvious reasons. There's no economic gain for the owner of the infrastructure to spend money, quite the opposite in fact.
Most EU countries have adopted the approach of putting the infrastructure company and the public train company under the same holding company, which is sort-of the minimum that EU regulations demand. In practice, in many countries the previous national rail company (under whatever conglomerate structure it may be operating under today) is fiercely protective of its own turf and tries to prevent new entrants, and digging their heels in implementing EU railway competition regulations. So complying with the letter of the law, but does everything in its powers to not comply with the spirit.
Then again, given the UK experience of going all-in on the "vertical separation" and privatization path, perhaps one shouldn't blame them.
The interesting thing is how the EU railway policy just keeps plowing ahead trying to impose the "vertical separation" approach in the EU, despite the disastrous results from the UK experience (and some EU countries to a somewhat lesser extent, so far the UK seems to be the only example of going all-in on that approach).
Calling Japan Rail privatized is a "ehhh, kinda, in some places, if you squint" kinda thing.
Technically, yes, the JR's are private companies.
But track construction is generally done by a government construction company financed with Japanese sovereign debt. The completed tracks are then long-term leased to the JR's at favorable rates.
Is it really a private company if the key capital outlay is done by the government and given to you with a sweetheart deal? ehhhhhh.... you can call the operator company private, but you're being dishonest if you call the system privatized.
Some years ago I tried to learn CAD by doing some FreeCAD tutorials, and failed. But I hear 1.0 was a big step forward, and the recently released 1.1 is also a big step, and it should be somewhat decent nowadays. Maybe I need to try again one day.
Yeah it's vastly better in 1.0 than it used to be. I still think you might be a bit lost if you aren't familiar with parametric CAD, but it's no harder than Blender for example.
Because the grifters are running the show. The point is not to fly to orbit/moon/mars/whatever, but shovel taxpayer money to politically well connected large aerospace contractors.
I know nothing about IT project management for healthcare, but just the other day over here in the local news there was a mention that the all-singing-all-dancing healthcare application that the region (with ~1M inhabitants) has been spending years and around 800 million euros to get into production has been so poorly received that they're considering starting over from scratch. I'm so happy seeing my tax money well spent...
This is an implementation of something called MUMPS, which is apparently some US system that is very arcane but widely used.
Again, I'm not an expert on this topic, but it indeed seems like standards, API's, file formats and whatnot would be keys to a system where decoupled components can be evolved step-by-step over time instead of the current system which seems to be a humongous monolith.
If you read more carefully it says fsync needs some enhancements to the futex API, called futex2. The original patch that fsync needed called the syscall futex_wait_multiple. Eventually futex2 made it into the mainline kernel, but the syscall is called futex_waitv. Not sure if the wine fsync implementation was updated to support the mainline kernel futex2 implementation.
x86 has decades of knowhow and a zillion transistors to spend on making the memory pipeline, TLB caching & prefetching etc. etc. really really good. They work as well as they do despite the 4k base page size, not because of it.
If you'd start from a clean sheet today you'd probably end up with a somewhat bigger base page size. Not hugely larger though, as that wastes a lot of memory for most applications. Maybe 16k like some ARM chips use?
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