Nobody Cares: Technology-only Edition

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Shameful: Insteon looks dead—just like its users’ smart homes

The app and servers are dead. The CEO scrubbed his LinkedIn page. No one is responding.

arstechnica.com

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

The internet rabbit hole led me to a couple of Computer Chronicles episodes on Unix.

This one is from 85:


If you watch it, you might think that the Mark G Sobell guy had some very insightful things to say. If you run Linux, his name might be familiar from his Linux books, so he's stayed involved in 'nix for decades.


The second was in 89


They show a Next box early on
Then there's a Sun box with Openlook which has a sort of early Mac/Xerox look.
And then they show a SCO Xenix box running Motif.
Then an HP 68030 box running a Motif interface, which doesn't look that different from a Linux box running Windowmaker. Window-moving doesn't show contents!
Then an Mac IIcx runing A/UX with X11.

I think nobody in these videos would have guessed how prevalent Unix and Unix-likes are now. Not just desktops and servers, but embedded devices, media devices, phones, tablets, game systems.

 

[Essence Lumin]

The internet rabbit hole led me to a couple of Computer Chronicles episodes on Unix.

This one is from 85:


If you watch it, you might think that the Mark G Sobell guy had some very insightful things to say. If you run Linux, his name might be familiar from his Linux books, so he's stayed involved in 'nix for decades.

The prediction that Commodore would make a Unix computer didn't pan out.

Mark Sobell, that name sounded familiar. Oh yeah, I referred to this book a lot back in the day.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

The FBI's 83-page guide to internet slang is an absolute rollercoaster

I clicked this FTASB and now I'm ROFLing so hard.

www.inputmag.com

lol

I guess somebody kinda had to write this stuff down because when they make legal cases that include text and chat logs as evidence somebody has to be able to tell the 60+ year-old DA and the 80+ year-old judge what the heck they're reading.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Old stuff: sending humans to the moon.
New hotness: building data centers on the moon!
Bonus: the company behind it is named Lonestar!

Lonestar emerges from stealth with plans for lunar data centers

Lonestar emerges from stealth with plans for lunar data centers

spacenews.com

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Guys, vacuum is an insulator and radiative cooling is super-inefficient.

Edit: Need to build a heat pipe into the regolith and let the moon be your heat-sink.

 

[Free]

Lonestar emerges from stealth with plans for lunar data centers

Lonestar emerges from stealth with plans for lunar data centers

spacenews.com

Who handles rebooting the servers?

 

[Essence Lumin]

Who handles rebooting the servers?

The man in the moon.

 

[Free]

The man in the moon.

 

[Free]

 

[Caete]

Who handles rebooting the servers?

Imagine the cost to go replace failed hardware. Hope they are calculating for the inherit signal lag of 1.3 seconds each way. But that's nothing as if the data center was on Mars it would take 5-40 minutes each way.

I suggest they contract the crack team that is already on the moon to support their data center:

 

[danielravennest]

Guys, vacuum is an insulator and radiative cooling is super-inefficient.

Edit: Need to build a heat pipe into the regolith and let the moon be your heat-sink.

Regolith is various size rock particles separated by vacuum. It is still an excellent insulator. You can still lose a lot of heat to space as long as you keep the sun off your radiators. The Space Station has some along the truss that do that.

 

[bubblesort]

I was just reading over old usenet stuff, because I'm in a nostalgic mood, and I stumbled across the old FAQ and charter for alt.destroy.the.internet, which used to be one of my favorite newsgroups. I love the last point:

VII. Is there any way to _really_ destroy the internet?

There is no practical difference between a network jammed with useless junk and a network that is down. Therefore, the internet _really_ has been destroyed already.

 

[bubblesort]

What deity did Rosedale sacrifice to in order to come up with SL? He's the very definition of a one hit wonder in silicon valley. He took some drugs at Burning Man, dreamt up SL, and after that, he's just perpetually out of good ideas. He has LOTS of bad ideas, though!

 

[Veritable Quandry]

What deity did Rosedale sacrifice to in order to come up with SL? He's the very definition of a one hit wonder in silicon valley. He took some drugs at Burning Man, dreamt up SL, and after that, he's just perpetually out of good ideas. He has LOTS of bad ideas, though!

Neal Stephenson laid out the basics of SL in Snowcrash. Rosedale pitched it to investors and hired some coders to make it work as well as possible with the technology of the time.

 

[Free]

What deity did Rosedale sacrifice to in order to come up with SL?

SHHHHH! The believers will hear you and start invading en masse...

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Rosedale was always down on pseudonyms. But there was a time where if I had to log on SL only as "Argent Stonecutter" I would have jumped ship because of all the customer spam.

 

[Khamon]

Philip wrote compression algorithms for Real Networks to build his credentials and his fortune.

 

[Free]

The latest version of color E Ink brings us closer to the perfect tablet

More color and faster refresh rates.

www.theverge.com

E Ink has a new version of color electronic paper, and while it isn’t as pretty as an OLED or possessing the new tech sheen of stuff like mini- and microLED, E Ink Gallery 3 sure is easy on the eyes. Gallery 3 isn’t quite as fast as the E Ink found in your Kindle, but it has some absolutely stellar upgrades compared to previous versions of the Gallery technology and brings us a whole lot closer to a color E Ink screen that big companies like Amazon might actually risk putting in a tablet.

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Rosedale was always down on pseudonyms. But there was a time where if I had to log on SL only as "Argent Stonecutter" I would have jumped ship because of all the customer spam.

I had a discussion once with another fashionista I wrote a script for. (note, I'm not a scripter...I just figured out how to do something I wanted it to do). The script I had was versatile, and easy to use using chat commands. All it did was rotate a pose-stand on any axis to any degree like this: "/7 z 45" to reset it back just "/7 z 0" Because it used chat commands you could use it zoomed in without having to touch the device itself. Once the other fashionista found out about it, she wanted it and wanted me to make it for a nice SL photo studio she made. She had me make it "dummies simple" to reduce the number of customer service messages. She said the average SL user wouldn't understand my simple easy instructions. Had me set it up to use "clock style" numbers rather than degrees so it basically could only turn in 30 degree increments in the z axis only. And said she'd probably still get customer service IM's from people who couldn't figure it out. I offered to act as CSR and she said no, the version I did for her was custom so she'd handle it.