I managed a lab of them. I _hated them_. They were unreliable, slow, and just absolutely miserable because they created endless complaints.
We were rolling out labs of Windows machines. Except for the lack of terminal, they were better on every single axis for the common university lab use cases - mostly netscape/mosaic and applications..
I also managed NeXT slabs and cubes; they were vastly better than the sun boxes because we had installed HDDs in the cubes and extra memory. The only problem with them was the absolutely terrible, shit behavior when users accidentally browsed the AFS root...
The only positive thing I can say about those Sun boxes is that _one_ behavior was better than NeXT. With NeXT, students would pull the power on them after wating four or five minutes of the beachball due to AFS I/O.
A younger person who only knows the comparative merits of Windows, macOS, and Linux in this decade probably cannot imagine the relief felt by people when they were finally able to move their technical applications off unix boxes onto Windows NT workstations. The situation was so bad, the computers cost so much and worked so poorly, a Dell with a Pentium Pro was like a miracle, at the time.
I don't have any nostalgia for old machines, I understand the 5- or 6-figure price tags were ridiculous, but I'm curious - in what way did Unix machines back then work poorly?
That means nothing when everything it's either RHEL bound, Ubuntu LTS or docker containers among standalone services written in Go which are everywhere.
Serious GUI software will be written in QT5/6 where the jump wasn't as bad as qt4->5. Portability matters and now even more. Software will run in any OS and several times faster than Electron.
I remember a lab with diskless systems where your disk quota was smaller than the kernel panic dump. So basically if you crashed a machine your account was instantly filled up and basically nothing would work. I believe it affected mail as well. Fun times.
In 2000 I worked for a company that was building a mobile telephony and data product. The partner company asked us to help them implement the lawful intercept function, as is required by law, which we did, however they were asking for 5+% LI traffic when the common practice was 2-ish%. Our hardware was exceptional, we could trivially have done 100% at line rate with zero impact. The engineers all stepped aside, and finally: "Fuck those guys. They get their 2%."
It's one of the better ethical moments I've had in my career of working for _mostly_ very ethical companies (so obviously not any social media or crypto).
this principle applies to a lot of things. signaling for example. optical links. oldschool optical links (OC48 timeframe) did not feature scramblers and so a malicious packet could on occasion cause them to de-train and go out of sync since it's extended loss of light.
Exactly - there are things that I would change now to make sure I make thing easier for myself and - more importantly - easier for the people around me.
I think there are many people (myself included) whose plans would change dramatically upon discovery of Alzheimer's, dementia, or some other degenerative disease. I might consider moving to somewhere with more liberal assisted suicide laws for example.
Notarizing any wishes against some medical procedures in case a sudden accident ruins your ability to dissent prevents doctors from being forced to keep your body alive as long as possible.
That doesn't apply to Alzheimer's disease directly though. If you don't want to live when your conscious life is limited to short flashes of awareness among a deeply terrifying melange of visions of the past and hallucinations, DNR laws don't in any way force or even allow doctors to euthanize you. You can persist in this state for many years without ever triggering a DNR check.
My genetics are such I'm more likely to drop dead of a heart attack too young.
If I were likely to develop alzheimer's, I'd make more and more expensive accommodation for power of attorney and trusts to shield assets while I was competent to do so.
Like what? You should already have a will, life insurance, etc. even without the disease. All you're doing by knowing earlier is causing psychological harms to yourself and the people you tell, adding more years of anxiety, grief, and sadness for no gain. Think about the bigger picture.
It wasn't just "permitted." The technology under discussion here was funded by the US the DOE and Intel and deliberately transferred by the US to ASML (and not, for example, a Japanese company or Samsung) as part of a soft power exercise.
It's crazy that Europeans keep citing ASML as a strong example of European innovation.
It is a strong example of European innovation though. It’s a multinational project. I wasn’t casting shade on ASML, I was just pointing out the wording of the article implies some sort of competition between ASML and the US that does not exist.
There is always a risk of things like this. For example, to make my winecap bed, I had to get a bunch of woodchips. There is no way woodchips that one will buy in bulk are not contaminated with the spores of other wood-eating fungus.
What you learn is how to positively identify the mushrooms you intend to produce/eat. It doesn't take long. I've only had alien mushrooms show up once.
On the other hand, the morels that seemed to come with a load of wood chips were great for the year or two we had them.
I tried growing a little wine cap bed once, and it hadn't gone well. Perhaps it was the chickens pecking at it, can't say. I do still get wine caps on occasion, but they have migrated to more far-flung parts of the yard.
> the morels that seemed to come with a load of wood chips were great for the year or two we had them.
You probably already know this, but for anyone reading, there’s a species of mushrooms that looks kind of like morels that is poisonous, potentially fatally so.
Adding poisons (fumigation) is definitely not a good idea. In mushroom plants the compost/humus used to grow mushrooms is often steam boiled to sterilize it, to keep the yields high and the production safe from any dangerous contamination. It is seeded with the spores of the desired species afterwards.
Mushrooms are everywhere. There used to be a subreddit of "weird mushrooms" like growing out of people's couches or in the bathroom, etc. In all cases, this is a sign of rot due to water intrusion.
You can grow mushrooms at home, it is fun. The only risk is that the mushrooms with high spore production are not great to have in a closed residence, especially oyster mushrooms which produce very high spore loads. There are vendors who produce cultures of sporeless oyster which can be used to grow oyster mushrooms indoors.
Outdoors, at least in most temperate areas, you are limited to things like shitake on logs or winecaps. The latter are incredibly easy to grow, and very good taste wise, but they are temperamental and basically grow on their own schedule, infrequently.
How would releasing the prisoners stop the settlers and other issues?
What Israel has been doing for decades at this point is completely unacceptable. Hamas is a bunch of terrorists, but in context they are the inevitable outcome of Israel's continuous mistreatment and ongoing antagonism against all of their neighbors stretching on for fifty years.
You really have to wonder what the hell is wrong with the Israelis that they can't stop being aggressive towards literally everyone around them.
Agreed that Israel could have taken another path the last couple decades, but it's also unreasonable to omit that they are surrounded by neighbors that want to kill them. Iran and their proxies.
We were rolling out labs of Windows machines. Except for the lack of terminal, they were better on every single axis for the common university lab use cases - mostly netscape/mosaic and applications..
I also managed NeXT slabs and cubes; they were vastly better than the sun boxes because we had installed HDDs in the cubes and extra memory. The only problem with them was the absolutely terrible, shit behavior when users accidentally browsed the AFS root...
The only positive thing I can say about those Sun boxes is that _one_ behavior was better than NeXT. With NeXT, students would pull the power on them after wating four or five minutes of the beachball due to AFS I/O.
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