Aloha

I think my takeaway from this is there is no objective standard for good engineering management - whatever counts for good has to be contextualized within the culture and habits of the organization.

I'd be interested in helping, I have a more than passive interest in the 3B-Series and the 5E - I figured by that point it'd be a emulated 3B, not a real 3B21.

Revised URL -https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Documents/DCA26MA024%20P...

Did you end up bringing up the AM and playing around with it?

It's actually an 8 volume History (I have all 8 on my shelf) 3 were just on switching system - you left out the parallel development to Panel, Rotary.

Museum in seattle also has a working 3ESS (likely the only one left in the world), and have recently added a DMS-10 as well.

I have been in ~15 CO's - there is tons of floor space in them, and the only thing telephone switching equipment has done since the 50's is shrink - beyond that, most existing CO buildings had expansions when electronic switching came about, because they couldnt add the new electronic (1/1A/5 ESS) without additional floor space. Cooling is noted by the requirement for NEBS compliant equipment.

a fairly large number - a bigger question is what happens to all the CO buildings once all the copper is turned down.

There is a huge opportunity about 5 years from now for edge datacenters. You have these buildings which have highly reliable power and connectivity, all thats needed is servers which can live in a NEBS environment.

Yes, I remember the INS raids of the early 90's they had tac gear, and AR's and I presume bullet proof vests too.

ICE isnt any more or less militarized than INS was, if anything its a less powerful agency, its just in a more logical place (DHS instead of DOL), while I hate the name for DHS, it was a fundamentally good reorganization of government.

This was my point exactly, ICE isnt fundamentally more powerful than INS (if anything its less).

People are already paying a 7-10% sales tax, you want to raise that to 35%? thats how you end up with revolution.

That was the fundamental weakness in the articles of confederation, the feds were funded by appropriations from the states.

I've always wondered if someone could build a new FPGA based 68k mac, I know this isnt that, but it brings the thought to mind.

I used to look forward to RD in the pre internet times, it was great medium form reading.

Who collects taxes then?

This is the same rationale I hear from the people who are saying "Abolish ICE" - someone must enforce the rules, if we dont like the rules we should change them.

That was just an incredible read.

AS400 in their case

TPF as far as I can tell has never caused an issue with downtime. When delta had their big outage deltamatic/deltaterm was still chugging along, but no one could log into it because all the windows machines were down.

Most are - irony of irony is that when Delta had its big outage due to CrowdStrike, dealtamatic/deltaterm was still running just fine, but no one could get into it because all of their windows machines were locked out.

At the core of most airlines is a customized version of IBM TPF, its very reliable and highly available, its all of the other stuff that breaks down.

We will in time find out what grounded AS, I wouldnt be surprised if its some sort of middleware connecting their iPads to the CRS they use for ticketing operations, but it could also be something as simple as their weight and balance application going offline.

AS is a fairly well run airline (as are DL, AA and UA) with a heterogeneous mix of systems in service, ideally this heterogeneous nature should make for a more resilient system but it also can lead to single points of failure when you have to glue too many different systems together.

What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratus_VOS

It certainly looks mainframe like to me

I wish it was easier to buy a portable radio with one. Though admittedly I tend to use mostly vintage radios - as such I do most of my shortwave listening on a Zenith T-O which is pretty wonderful both in audio quality and capacity to pull in stations.

I have used a synchronous AM detector once in a radio, its a game changer for listening to shortwave.

Component availability mostly, the entire automotive world is designed for 12v systems.

CRT's were better for a long time, LCD's did eventually catch up.

I held on to my 21" Trinitron for a long time into the LCD era, because it had better contrast, resolution and sharpness. Eventually affordable LCD's did catch up.

I attribute to my robust immune system to the amount of dirt I ate as a child, I was a digger in the school yard, and I liked playing in mud - while being a thumb sucker well into elementary school.

I hung on to Netscape 4 until the first versions of Mozilla

I've had an idea for wide format, high density, optically read, punched mylar (or other similar plastic) film - so something like a 5 foot roll of mylar punched at 12-16 dpi. Leading to storage in the 1-2k bytes per linear inch.

Mylar if stored properly could last a very very long time.

I mean.. no?

8"

5 1/4"

3 1/2"

and a couple less standard ones, then you get into sectoring (hard, soft), sidedness and density, plus disk formats on top of that

Jobs was arguably the first product manager in personal computing - meaning he had a clear vision for the consumer and product and worked to carry that out.

I mostly found Vidal to be a smug asshole, charismatic sure - but a little too self assured, a little too smart sounding, a man with too little self doubt.