kloch

Wasn't one of the key purposes of Patents to catalog inventions (not just to encourage their creation)?

Today we have Wikipedia and other free open databases for that.

> Speaking as someone who was actually using Unix systems when this happened, the "ssh" command was replacing the rsh command,

A different data point: I was also a Unix sysadmin at the time (thought just out of school) and for me ssh replaced telnet and ftp. I never used rsh, rlogin, and rcp except when testing exploits.

Quaternions are hard to get right, and impossible to get right the first time.

https://twitter.com/grapefrukt/status/1618517709767016450

I'm trying to discourage others from breaking things with blanket IP bans.

When clicking on the link from my office (which happens to be in a data center) I get this:

> whoa there, pardner! Your request has been blocked due to a network policy. Try logging in or creating an account here to get back to browsing. If you're running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternate User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block.

These kinds of blanket bans on data center IP's ignore the fact that real humans do use them. As for user-agent, I'm using Firefox on OSX with no user-agent obsfucation plugins.

> it would be enormously expensive for Boeing to design a replacement for the 737 Max from scratch

Boeing has spent enough on stock buybacks for three or four clean-sheet 737 redesigns:

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/boeing-safety-stock-buy...

> Boeing is a world leader in stock buybacks. Between 1998 and 2018, the plane manufacturer also manufactured a whopping $61.0 billion in stock buybacks, amounting to 81.8 percent of its profits.

> So, where are the bolts? Probably sitting forgotten and unlabeled (because there is no formal record number to label them with) on a work-in-progress bench, unless someone already tossed them in the scrap bin to tidy up.

So this is like when I would take apart and re-assemble everything when I was a little kid. Sometimes I would have several screws left over. It's a good thing I wasn't making airplanes!

For hacker customers, yes. For the company selling it was an unmitigated disaster.

I agree, Mosaic was groundbreaking but when Netscape 0.9 launched in the fall of 1994 was like waking up in another century.

Or we could go back to 1991 with IRC, Archie+FTP, and Telnet BBS's on Wyse terminals or SparcStations. I'm very nostalgic for that era.

IMO Netscape 3.04g was the peak browser experience - and by far peak performance.

I remember when a friend who ran a business out of his basement got a T1 installed in 1997. Myself and several other friends were there the day Verizon hooked up the local loop. I did the first test on a desktop windows95 machine with Netscape 3. I typed "cnn.com", hit enter and BAM! the entire page loaded and rendered instantly before you could blink an eye. I fell out of my chair. On dialup it would take about almost a minute to download all the images.

Once Netscape 4 hit it was a slow downhill path of bloat. I have not been able to replicate that instant rendering experience since then.

Very good collection but I was surprised to not see the i-Opener on there

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener

Indeed many (most?) technology breakthroughs and great products start as "garage" experiments.

- Aviation didn't start with someone rolling out a 747, it started with the Wright Flyer - something that barely flew with just the right winds.

- Apple, Inc. literally started in a garage with an 8-bit computer with 8k ram and you had to provide your own case and power supply, monitor, and keyboard.

- The early stages of modern rocket technology looked not much different than this experiment: Here's a video of Goddard testing at his Aunt's farm:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/a/...

> "The neighbors complained"

In case anyone is confused, the $500 ARIN fee is per transaction, not per IP.

$48 x 1024 (IPv4 /22) = $49,152. For that transaction the ARIN fee is effectively 1%, considerably lower than the commissions charged by the brokers (which also comes out of the seller's proceeds).

The ARIN fee covers their staff time to review the transfer - specifically the history of the legal entities involved, which as anyone who has dealt with ARIN knows is extremely thorough.

Articles talking about the reproducibility crisis focus on soft science where it is more likely to occur but there is at least one major hard science (physics) reproducibility crisis:

We are unable to reproduce measurements of the Gravitational constant.

Reproducibility - distinct from the claimed uncertainty by the experiments - has not advanced at all since the 1940's. This is unlike any other physical constant where precision and reproducibility has consistently progressed along with our technology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant

> Published values of G derived from high-precision measurements since the 1950s have remained compatible with Heyl (1930), but within the relative uncertainty of about 0.1% (or 1,000 ppm) have varied rather broadly, and it is not entirely clear if the uncertainty has been reduced at all since the 1942 measurement. Some measurements published in the 1980s to 2000s were, in fact, mutually exclusive.[7][30] Establishing a standard value for G with a standard uncertainty better than 0.1% has therefore remained rather speculative.

If you don't have a good use for them then you can sell them. There is a market for IPv4 and 3,4,5-digit ASN's.

ARIN does not frown on this marketplace, in fact they encourage it and even endorse specific brokers.

There is a massive disconnect between the attitudes toward EV's of people who have owned EV's and those who have not. Range anxiety tends to dissipate after a short time of real world driving experience.

You're just not going to rent EV's to many non-owners, even if they are going to be driving less than 100 miles (typical business trip where you fly then rent a car).

It's so cool to see someone actually try to build their silly daydream.

When I was about 12, in the early 1980's when consumer VCR's were hot "new" tech, I imagined building a giant purely mechanical (except for I/O) VCR. The thing I imagined was huge - it was about 50ft wide x 100ft long x 50ft tall and would have used tape about 6 feet wide. The size was apparently due to the limitations of mechanical modulation of permanent magnets used to record and the bandwidth required to record video. Don't ask me how playback was supposed to work with passive magnets but I think the idea was very sensitive paramagnetic heads amplified mechanically by some absurd degree. There was lots of mechanical differential signal processing in this idea.

This wasn't some passing daydream. Over at least six months I became increasingly obsessed with the idea of figuring out if it was even possible to build though I never had any intentions of actually building it. What I was obsessed with is figuring out how or if you could build such an outrageously impractical device.

Today I prefer the Pilot G-2 0.7mm. The construction is plastic but decent quality for a disposable pen. The clicker and screw joint have excellent fidget properties. The ergonomics are good except for the injection nub on the rubber grip, and the ink is the best I've found in a cheap disposable today.

In the 1980's I preferred Uniball pens. Back then they had unreasonably high construction quality for a disposable pen with precision fitting parts and a stainless steel clip. The roller and ink were also very high end for a disposable of the time. Unfortunately it doesn't look like they build them like that anymore.

Pascal was the second language I learned after Fortran. I didn't particularly like Fortran but Pascal really hit home and motivated me to learn C.

This seems dangerously close to spawning a new busy beaver type inefficient resource utilization game

I love Julia language for the seamless arbitrary precision math support and not much else. If we could get that in C I would be all set.

What is old is new again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus

> Power supplied on the bus is bulk unregulated +8 Volt DC and ±16 Volt DC, designed to be regulated on the cards to +5 V (used by TTL ICs), -5 V and +12 V for Intel 8080 CPU IC, ±12 V RS-232 line driver ICs, +12 V for disk drive motors. The onboard voltage regulation is typically performed by devices of the 78xx family (for example, a 7805 device to produce +5 volts). These were linear regulators which are commonly mounted on heat sinks.

> And, in Julia’s defense, this is all spelled out in the documentation, immediately accessible from the REPL. I just never read it carefully enough.

My concern is most physicists won't read that either and may not even notice the loss of precision until it's too late (after a paper has been published).

This comes up from time to time with photons. It's usually the result of confusion over the difference between phase velocity and group velocity.

General Relativity has identical solutions for forward and reverse time.

The Schwarzschild metric for example is expressed in terms of time squared so time itself can take positive or negative values and give the same result. It also allows negative mass but those solutions are not symmetric with positive mass - the rs term that contains mass is not quadratic.

One consequence of this combination is if you consider "negative mass" to be just positive mass operating in reverse time (to avoid having to accept the ugly idea of negative mass in positive time), you end up with asymmetric effects.

Physics (and more generally numerical simulations) is the killer app for Julia Language. No other language makes it as easy to work with arbitrary precision math. Whatever precision you need/want, just call setprecision(), Initialize variables/constants as BigInt/BitFloat, then do all your math just like you would in C.

Just remember to put the value in quotes when initializing:

BigFloat("1.0") NOT BigFloat(1.0). Without quotes it's silently initialized as double precision (!)

The ultimate example of this is solar eclipses. If you are fortunate to experience one in person, don't distract yourself with camera equipment or trying to take pics with your phone - unless you already make a living doing that.

Just. Experience. It.

"18 Billion Trillion" is the approximation I use when referring to the absurdly large "standard" subnet size of /64 in IPv6

I always thought it was weird and unnecessary to use EIRP power limits on 60m vs transmitter output power (before feedline losses and antenna gain) as on every other band.

The TX power limits were primarily driven by builder/operator safety - higher power requires higher amplifier voltages. If there is a lower requirement for a band to avoid interference with shared uses, why not just specify a lower power level? Why add a requirement that involves antenna and near-field environment modeling?

Analysis of PRNG's is difficult and very important:

https://www.pcg-random.org/posts/does-it-beat-the-minimal-st...

NTSC colors were bad - really bad - but wideband bayer filters + sRGB are the source of the mediocre colors we see today.

We could have beautiful Kodachrome quality colors If we used narrow-band RGB filters and a wide gamut (Rec.2020, or Rec.2100PQ) colorspace. If you look at the spectral sensitivity specs of Kodachrome film they are fairly narrow-band and closely matched the perceptual sensitivity of human vision (CIE 1931).

If you display an sRGB encoded image with Rec.2020 gamut (without colorspace conversion) the colors will appear very washed out. If you display a Rec.2020 encoded image on sRGB (without colorspace conversion) it will appear oversaturated. Separately, narrower and/or more widely spaced bandpass filters will increase color saturation. It turns out that narrow-band filters approximating the CIE1931 curves are a natural match for the Rec.2020 colorspace. Since CIE1931 approximates how humans perceive color the colors are also more accurate.

It was a "lucky" accident that the properties of CRT phosphors, from which sRGB is derived were a good match for the wideband color filters used in color video cameras.