dfrage

That find in the dark feature was available in the 1970s, substituting a neon bulb for a LED.

I've read its story is inherently bad for working on graphs, which is a huge area for C++.

All depends on how desperate Oracle gets; already we hear of a lot of high priority migrations to PostgreSQL starting after a visit from the Oracle Police.

How good is all that off the Window ecosystem, and for how long has that been the case?

Microsoft institutionally had a "does not play well with others" attitude to the point of stark figurative murderousness as we saw in SCO v. The World during the Ballmer years ... and as for "robustness", the one signal failing of Nadella is quality.... I could make a case it's as risky an option in the medium and long term as these other ones, and confidently state it will take at least a decades before a lot of us maybe trust Microsoft's good will outside its Windows ecosystem, hindering wider adaptation.

An entirely valid concern, but languages and their ecosystems can get big enough that a or the major supporter can drop out without killing or necessarily even significantly harming them in the medium term. I currently guess that Go is there, while Rust is not quite yet vis-à-vis Mozilla.

Microsoft's focus on developers from its founding gives us a great deal of confidence about a respectable level of support for C#/.Net, although their movement from closed source is too new to depend on quite yet.

Whereas Oracle's acquisition of "Java" has prompted a lot of people including myself to step smartly back from its ecosystem due to the demonstrated risks of that malevolent company. See only the latest thing I've learned about it withholding a TCK (test suite) license to AdoptOpenJDK: https://adoptopenjdk.net/quality.html

Xerox and the personal computer at the level of what became engineering workstations. The book Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer covers this fairly well as I remember.

There are a few details Gosling left out: Sun trusted those chips enough to omit parity or ECC that would have smoked out the problem early, Sun reversed whatever growing trust it had been earning in enterprise space by blaming the customer and for some time making them sign NDAs to work on the problem, and Sun had engineered their sales so that they only did direct for enterprise sized purchases.

They had really good x86 hardware at a time when the post-dot.com crash wave of companies was getting started, but the sales channels were what you could charge on a credit card on their site, and VARs and the like which usually wouldn't sell to startups. Dell got a great deal of that business because they actually wanted to sell, and by the time these companies' hardware fleets got big enough for enterprise sized orders they'd long mastered how to run Dell or whatever systems to provide a reliable service.

True, but it's also kind of cool, and it's not trivial to wrap your head around what a "cloud" is. This could be quite useful in selling the concept of doing something on any cloud provider's service to others, especially higher ups who aren't techies. For example, making it clear what points of presence, availability zones and regions mean, and what you get when you pay to take advantage of them.

Oracle is not letting them test builds with the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_Compatibility_Kit), which under Sun probably killed the Apache Harmony project. There are alternatives like Amazon's Corretto and Azul's Zulu.

How much of Acorn even having a chance is consistent with your correct as far as I know history of the British economy, with socialism only being (partly) rolled back by Thatcher? I'd also note that Apple et. al. were also subject to similar macroeconomic headwinds, although our inflation rate's peak was "only" 15%.

Bad luck indeed, although looking at the details of e.g. the Acorn Electron which had that production bottleneck doesn't suggest they had significantly stronger technology at the time, pretty much all 6502 based stuff like their competition except for e.g. the also local Sinclair Research with its Z80 based systems. In the US market there was also the Z80 based and monstrously successful Tandy TRS-80, per Wikipedia significantly outselling the Apple II for a long period.

Tandy also had a huge retail network to sell its wares, it's Radio Shack stores were the place to buy random basic electronic stuff all over the USA. Per Wikipedia, in 1982 4,300 company stores and 2,000 independent franchises in towns not big enough for a company store. One reason I mention this is to ask, how big was it in the U.K. post-WWII until Thatcher? It became a very big thing the US in the 1950s, combining local capital and market focus with centralized and bulk product planning, technology, marketing, and often purchasing.

Hmmmm, Tandy also did a Motorola 6809 based "Color Computer" of some note, but its expensive/superior CPU prompted them to forgo things that made competing 6502 systems more popular, like built in sound and graphics for e.g. games. There was also a very American cottage industry style market in Z80 CP/M systems built around the S-100 bus.

That's not reflected by the historical record of the U.K.'s post war pioneering computers, which I provided just one link to.

Per Wikipedia Tommy Flowers couldn't get a bank loan because he couldn't cite his cryptoanalysis machines as proof he could do what he claimed he could do. "False concerns of military secrecy" when we were in an existential cold war with international socialism? That put so much of Europe under Soviet occupation?

Or the cited severe lack of funding mechanisms and other things necessary for commercial success, going all the way to the concept of doing stuff outside the aegis of the government which included the public University of Manchester? The latter could and did make numerous record breaking computers, going at least as far as the early 1960s Atlas, a competitive microsecond cycle supercomputer that was the first to page. But this didn't translate into commercial success.

Exiting WWII Britain was fully competitive in computer technology, look particularly at the University of Manchester, home of the Williams Tube and many pioneering computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_computers which Ferranti was barely able to move the needle in commercializing.

Bankruptcy comes in different flavors, and rather than a Chapter 7 liquidation, it's a "pre-packaged" Chapter 11 reorganization, according to Wikipedia's introduction "Remington exited bankruptcy in May 2018, less than two months after filing for protection under Ch. 11 laws. Remington's quick exit from bankruptcy was due to a pre-approved restructuring plan that was supported by 97% of its creditors."

All part of the game that got them into this mess in the first place.

It is undisputed that there are a great many legitimate "defensive gun uses" per year.

How many is of great dispute, getting into minutiae all the way down to survey question branching due to an unbridgeable cultural gap, but please don't deny even the lowest estimates of tens of thousands.

Your fear has not come to pass. From 1980 to 2016, the last year the CDC has statistics for accidental gun deaths, they went from 800 to 500. At the same time the population increased by roughly 50%, and the rate of gun ownership increased dramatically as, for example, shall issue or better concealed carry swept the nation and made gun ownership a lot more useful for most of the people in most of the states.

.22 ammunition uses rimfire priming, which requires unique machinery which as I recall no US company dared to buy more of, as mentioned in the Wikipedia article you linked to. Existing US 3 billion rounds per year + foreign imports couldn't keep up with the demand, which also seems to have included a lot of new gun owners, buying .22 models like their main guns or conversion kits for cheaper practice.

Perhaps related to this scam, I don't remember any company other than Remington building out a major increase in capacity, that article mentions their $32 million plant expansion. Companies were reluctant since they didn't know when demand and supply would get back in sync, I would also wonder if smokeless powder capacity was a factor, there aren't very many companies that make it.

And in the other direction, fewer states are requiring a permit, so no doubt some people are not bothering to renew their permits.

You're recalling a very old guess; an analysis since then https://web.archive.org/web/20190121202815/http://weaponsman... puts the number anywhere from 412 to 660 million.

The old estimates are bad, for example, 275 million new in to the market guns were counted by a system the BATFE introduced in 1999 for high volume manufacturers, importers and wholesalers, a total of 66 FFLs, that no academic had previously used in an estimate.

Netflix has long been open about the fact that their costs for content dwarf their IT costs, and encoding is a bursty CPU demand that perfectly fits cloud economics.

Note I'm not including their networking costs to get to the last mile, where they place a lot of their own boxes in ISP facilities pretty close to users, that would be about the same however they were doing core IT.

In part due to Spectre and Meltdown, in general starting prior to their being revealed out of paranoia I think is entirely justified, I do financial transactions in a separate browser instance, which is started for each site and exited after finishing, and runs no extensions like ad blockers. I don't get see ReCaptcha while doing this, so if running an ad blocker or other defensive extensions are the cause of your problem you might want to try it.

> & plenty of talent.

Unconstrained by non-competes?

The theory is that the Bay area has a huge liquid pool of talent, and that not being able to hire critical talent at all is even less "economical", in that you're less likely to be able deliver your product or service to market.

Two conflicting thoughts on that:

- If the big wholesale Xeon buyers and users qualify AMD chips and start buying a lot of them, Intel will find that landscape a lot more competitive, this is a more "sticky" market than OEM products for consumers.

- They could be betting that AMD will lose the plot again, as they've done throughout their corporate history, e.g. after the 486, and after K8. The OEM consumer market is less sticky and will trivially move back to Intel if they have competitive offerings.

That works if you have a low data rate, last ditch omnidirectional antenna fall back. Otherwise for deep space satellites you've got to run quite a bit of stuff to get and perhaps keep the antenna pointed at a transmitter, which for a satellite includes station keeping functionality.

The best rumors I know of, from SemiAccurate, are that Intel is running 10nm in only one fab to debug processes that will be used in their 7nm node. While they're at it they might as well sell the output, but that's still in the undetermined future.

Here's the article https://semiaccurate.com/2019/01/25/why-semiaccurate-called-... which claims of the 4 fabs initially slated to do 10nm 2 are installing EUV equipment characteristic for 7nm, and 1 has "backported" to 14nm, a node which is capacity limited, Intel is leaving money on the table.

One day old, 4 comment HN discussion of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19714073

Using stack ranking to fire 10-15% of their employees every year selects for people who have political talents. Aren't they now comprehensively failing in every area except microarchitectures, with the next Ice Lake one being held up by the 10 nm node debacle?

I assume part of that is part of $1 billion total, it gets a bit complicated since they bought a going concern, and T-Mobile forced them to finish satisfying the requirements in the contact they assumed.

Which was part of why the Kin was so late, they moved every Danger employee they retained who was working on the Hiptop line to the Kin, then had to pull a bunch back to finish 2 more versions. Who could have guessed that Deutsche Telekom could pose a serious threat to Microsoft?

> I believe there was a $2b writedown on the Surface RT, as well as $7b + on the botched Nokia acquisition. Those are failures you can attribute actual dollar figures to.

You can add $1 billion for the discontinued in 48 days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin Kin social networking phone, in which they also scored an own goal against their cloud offerings by trashing the database running their purchased userbase: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_data_loss_2009

The total losses, official or not, have got to run into the tens of millions.

Two day old HN discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19627885

Yesterday's HN discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19646035

Thanks for the tip! I use uMatrix with aggressive defaults including no Javascript, somehow this trick didn't occur to me.

Although my general rule is that if Javascript is required to read a site's content, it's probably not worth it. With the storied NoScript being released for Chrome (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19650731), I suspect I'll have more and more company as the new web gets more abusive and dangerous.