kloch

I love Ken's blog posts and this one is right up my alley.

> introduced in 1973, Ethernet is the predominant way of wiring computers together.

That sentence does not really convey how hard it was for Ethernet to win the network L1/L2 protocol wars. It was fairly popular right from the start because it worked well enough (better than it should) and was very simple to understand, configure, and operate. It also kept evolving with new media.

But there were other systems it had to compete with, in some use cases (ISP's) well into the late 1990's/early 2000's.

Engineering workstations (Sun/SGI/IBM/HP) were early adopters but often had to integrate with mainframe/minicomputers running things like:

  - Token Ring: IBM was the 800lb gorilla at the time
  - FDDI: supported 100mbps over MMF!
  - DEC LAT

In the PC sector

  - Novell/IPX: was very popular in the 80's and persisted well into the 1990's. Most DOS games like Doom *only* supported Novell/IPX
  - Macintosh: AppleTalk
  - There were many other proprietary PC/DOS protocols but they were not memorable

In the ISP sector

  - Ethernet was very popular but consistently lagged in supporting the fastest link speeds that ISP's needed. The industry rapidly shifted to 1G (1999) and 10G (2003) Ethernet once they became widely available.
  - FDDI: 100mbps over MMF. The MAE-EAST peering exchange in the mid 1990's used DEC Gigaswitches with unique switched FDDI 100mbps Full-Duplex mode where each port was it's own separate FDDI domain.
  - ATM: Telco types last gasp at optimizing for circuit switched networks (phone calls) at the expense of packet switched networks like TCP/IP. ATM over Sonet/SDH however supported much faster link speeds initially.
  - Packet over Sonet/SDH: Allows the use full-size TCP/IP packets over high speed fiber (Sonet/SDH) links without ATM segmentation. This is what many OC3-OC48 ISP circuits were running before 1GE/10GE took over.

There were probably many dozens of other competitors that even I'm too young to remember. Some of these were later modified to run over Ethernet as you can see here:

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

It's tempting to blame the inexperienced first officers, their training, or the CRM failures on this flight, but the blame for this crash has to land squarely on the atrociously bad UX of the Airbus cockpit.

Sensory overload and no clear readout of what is actually broken (pitot tube icing in this case) is bad but the fly-by-wire joystick configuration is what really doomed this flight. In Boeing airliners and many other types of aircraft the control sticks are mechanically linked together: you can physically feel if the other pilot is fighting your inputs:

> “Controls to the left,” Robert said, still worried about their bank angle. Pressing the priority button on his side stick, he took control and locked out Bonin, but Bonin immediately pressed his own priority button and assumed control again.

If the controls were mechanically linked Robert would have recognized his inputs were being overridden and would have been able to save the plane.

Capacitors do have a different discharge curve than batteries and this requires more sophisticated power management electronics but nothing too difficult. You basically need a power supply/regulator that can start with much less than rated input current and increase current draw as voltage drops to deliver a constant power output.

ICC Profile w/annotated source: https://bsrender.io/rec2100pq-experimental.zip

Standards document: https://www.color.org/specification/ICC.1-2022-05.pdf

Sample renderings (first four at top of page): https://bsrender.io

They will only be rendered in HDR on supported viewers/platforms, currently only known working is Chrome browser on M1/M2 mac. On unsupported viewers the HDR images will appear very washed out/fuzzy.

> the vast majority of people use on a day-to-day basis rather than plugging in.

For last 100 feet yes, but for the entire rest of the network it's either fiber or copper. Notably, Ethernet framing sometimes with additional encapsulation is used everywhere along the path.

If you want to see a bunch of these classic steam gauges in action this is a great video (starts right before spool up):

https://youtu.be/JSKYoqVPtWw?t=86

Here's a video of a 747-100 from 2001 that has run through of the flight engineers console but low-def:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x00ta8xC4oc

Then there is this amazing video that captures the sound of the 747 classic "buzzsaw" sound better than any other (due to microphone placement and the 747SP having engines closer to the cockpit):

https://youtu.be/3lhHwKK-6ms?t=313

> QWERTY users naturally wander around and have their hands leave the home row and I'm not entirely convinced it's actually wrong.

I think you are learning it wrong. It's not hard at all to learn QWERTY with the proper training technique.

I took touch typing in High School, back in the 1980's. Even back then I knew I was going to be doing a lot of work with computers so it made sense to take it. It turned out to be the most useful class I ever took in school by a wide margin since I've used that skill all day every day for 35 years.

It was a loooong time ago but I remember it started with lots of simple repetition. We were all using IBM selectrics and the instructor would call out "J-J-J Space, K-K-K Space, L-L-L space, sem sem sem space" etc. in a pattern around the keyboard while and we were told to avoid looking at the keyboard at all times. Eventually we would start copying simple and then longer, more complicated text, again without ever looking at the keyboard.

In the late 1990's I was curating a project to scan in every LEGO instruction and catalog booklet. One big problem was Moiré patterns. 300dpi seemed to maximize the artifacts and higher dpi resulted in images that were too large to use on typical displays of the time (not to mention most users were on 28-56kbps modems!) I settled on recommending 100-150dpi which eliminated most of the artifacts but still gave usable image size/detail.

Then there were concerns about what LEGO (lawyers) would think about it. Because of this it originally didn't have thumbnails or any html on that part of the site. Just images in a directory structure exposed by mod_autoindex which give it a very utilitarian, non-commercial feel. Those fears were soon put to rest when I learned that LEGO customer service was referring people to the site when customers called in to request replacements for lost instructions.

That archive lives on today at http://www.peeron.com/ (not my site)

Classic SGI demo video from 1985: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk

I remember when my dad brought a VHS copy of this home. I couldn't believe the high-res smooth color graphics.

Might as well just call this the "Stackoverflow problem", although it is really a family of problems where either the requestor or (typically) the responses are less than helpful.

As a third party searcher looking for answers to a specific problem, I would prefer to see a direct solution to the stated question first, even if it is followed by admonitions that "you probably don't want to do that" or "this other thing is a better approach".

This is why I prefer "loosely scripted vacations". I might have one or two destinations/activities planned in advance but always try to leave some days/times open if possible to explore the unknown. Sometimes this means not even booking a hotel for some nights and deciding where to go/stay the same day.

Wikipedia is an amazing resource that I use all the time, and currently the best (or least worst) model for curating such a massive knowledge base. For these reasons I have $100/mo recurring donation set up. $240M is less than two years of expenses but I do think they could do a much better job explaining their budget/expense growth.

I tend to view math/science pages most of the time and it's rare to see any non-neutroal POV issues on most of those kinds of pages.

Even for topics that are contentious today, the system should converge towards neutrality over long time frames. It's just unrealistic to expect that hot/political topics would be perfectly NPOV in the short run.

Life/partner changes required switching from owning a home to renting an apartment, at least for now. I have a strong preference for high altitude/views so ended up in a high-rise apartment.

I recently moved from a forested mountain to the center if a very small city. Even though there is a freeway 1/2 mile away road noise isn't bad as this area still has significant WFH %.

It did take me 6 months to adapt to the very frequent emergency sirens, mostly fire/ambulance. It was jarring at first but now I've mostly tuned that out.

Then there's garbage trucks with their very loud backup beeps several mornings per week, and construction noise that starts every morning at 5am.

The worst are people who double honk every time they go around a corner in a parking garage, even at 11pm. That's not really a thing in this area so I'm assuming they learned that habit elsewhere.

Dryer static charges are probably a few keV at most so yeah that shouldn't make it through a metal envelope.

However, I wonder how well shielded the electronics are. In a poor quality design even the static charge fields themselves might trigger a false hit.

Apparently there are a lot of amazing papers about to come out https://twitter.com/andrasgaspar/status/1658914819100098560?...

> but they are highly sensitive to beta

I’m not familiar with Geiger counter design/specs but would the considerable static electricity send some electrons into the detector and cause a false positive beta hit?

This makes perfect sense from the perspective of a language designer/computer scientist who is trying to keep their design clean and consistent.

It makes no sense to an end user that expects an argument you pass to BigFloat to be treated as a BigFloat. As an end-user I would rather have a warning or even error than to have my argument silently treated as a double.

I've just started getting into Julia for one of it's best use cases: It's super easy to do arbitrary precision math. But you have to be very careful when using string literals with BigInt or BigFloat:

  julia> setprecision(1024)
  julia> a=BigFloat(1.0E-300)
  1.000000000000000025059091835208759685696146807703705249925342319900466043184051484676302812181950100894962306270278254148910311464998804130812246091606190182719426627934584275510414782787015070222639260603793613924359775094030143866141479125513590882591017341692222921220404918621822029155619541859418525883262e-300

Notice without quotes on the literal you only get ~15 decimal digits of precision because the parser treats the literal as a double and then passes that to the BigFloat variable.

  julia> a=BigFloat("1.0E-300")
  9.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999988e-301

With quotes we get the full ~308 decimal digits of precision for the configured 1024-bit binary precision.

Now we can add it to 1.0 to validate the precision of a calculation and use the @printf macro for C-style formatting to round the output to 308 decimal digits:

  julia> b=BigFloat("1.0")
  julia> using Printf
  julia> @printf("%.308f\n", (a+b))
  1.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000100000000

I'm not sure why this is the default behavior, it seems like a really easy way for people to screw up their calculations, especially scientists that don't do a lot of programming.

The first web browser that integrated text and graphic (Mosaic) was two years old but it was Netscape that really kicked things off with the general public.

Netscape was only a few months old at this point.

Another essential component was real IP access by the end user. Up to this point your options for home use were sandboxed "on-line" services, telnet/shell accounts, or static SLIP service for power users. It was dynamic PPP and the emergence of dial-up ISP's that made browsers like Netscape usable by the masses. This started to happen on a wide scale around 1994-1995.

RFC1661 (PPP) was not formalized until July 1994.

Here's a great comment on another video linked in the comments of this video:

  Me in 1995: I can't wait to see what fantastic technology we'll have 25 years from now!
  Me in 2020: watching videos of people buying computers in 1995

The linked video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHgBSpKV51g

Not Germany but here's another one showing very calm shoppers, even during Christmas season:

Raw footage inside Sears with Atari 800 and 2600 (1982) [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282081

I just want to say this was one of the most enjoyable articles I have read in a long time. It's informative, respectful to critics, and exudes a "confident but restrained" tone that is so rare in public discourse these days.

This implies the outage was affecting their Pilot's ability to get accurate weight/balance data.

> Since fast.com is a Netflix ip

Technically the website fast.com resolves to an Akamai IP, but the speed test it loads uses a Netflix owned IP.

Working (!) source code should absolutely be required BUT there should also be a requirement that it not be unnecessarily complicated or obfuscated. Otherwise malicious compliance would be common.

Yes. Their design reminds me of WIRED magazine from the 1990's, not at all like web pages from the 1990's.

The crash itself isn't usually that loud but airbag deployment can be 170 db which is very dangerous to hearing.

This was true in the early 1990's but I rarely hear a car alarm these days.

There was one particularly annoying car alarm that was popular in the 1990's that had a sequence of "police/ambulance siren" sounds.

Bieww Bieww Bieww Bieww, oooo eeee oooo eeee, rrr rrr rrr rrr, ee oo ee oo, booooooooup booooooooup booooooooup booooooooup, oooooooo eeeeeeee oooooooo eeeeeeee <repeat>

Or something like that.

Trivia:

There is a street named after him (Rodger Bacon Dr.) in Reston, VA.

Right across from it is Isaac Newton Sq, where the lab that discovered the Reston Ebola Virus was located. Around the corner is Michael Faraday Dr.