acveilleux

I always thought of BeOS as basically a reboot of the NeXT. Same niche, same promise, same flop ;-(. BeOS was later so they avoided the H/W side-road. A good thing.

Last generation of iBook G3 went through graphics chipsets at an astounding rate. Most of my friends who bought one got all the way through the 3 strikes and you get a replacement machine with them. All of them got a free iBook G4 for their trouble.

At one point, the iBook G3 had a 73% failure rate...

It's likely to add up to the printing cost pretty fast.

It was common in many customer cages. I even saw cages setup in 2000 where a cage contained 500k of sun and cisco hardware still in their box after 8 months. I guess that startup was growing so fast they hadn't gotten around to plugging things in yet /s.

More likely they either ran out of funding or never got the growth they expected. Back then there was often a large disconnect between H/w bought and H/w needed/used. But money was there and hypergrowth was "just around the corner."

Raid 10s or bust. But otherwise correct.

Everyone in SV in 1999 used Sun boxes. Racking Ultra-2 Pizza Boxes was being very Internet Professional and money was flowing freely enough to pay for them.

Symmetrix, two Ms. They were more of a mainframe thing I thought. I never really got to play much with the really big gear, Starfires, Superdome and so on. By the time I got to use a 64-way SMP box (Origin 3800) it was already obsolescent and replaced a few years later with a pair of dual-quad core Xeons.

I still can't believe a top-tier UNIX vendor required an expensive 3rd party software to have halfway decent file-system. Or in the case of HP-UX, partitioning.

I get that Veritas also did logical volume, raid and so on and that was a guenuine value added at the time. But so many box I saw had veritas so they could partition and get a file system that was OK with 36GB+ monster SCSI disks.

That's what I had in mind when I said "boxes with multiple modems in them".

A few decent things I could find online that jive with what I remember:

https://www.patton.com/technotes/build_yourself_an_isp.pdf

http://www.gwi.net/behind-the-scenes-of-a-90s-internet-start...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8352432

The absolute minimum, and representative of the very first dial-up ISPs: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2025

http://www.datamation.com/erp/article.php/615281/My-own-priv...

There used to be a lot of nice material on this subject but a lot of it has been obsolete and rotted away from the web over the last 15-20 years. The larger dial-up ISPs used Cisco AS series boxes (or equivalent) with PRI (i.e.: phone over T1) connections (24 lines/each) to a centralized RADIUS server for authentication. They are/were the last hold outs providing dial up.

Smaller ISPs were more of a '94 to '99 thing. Usually they used cyclades or equivalent serial port cards with up to 16 serial ports per card and an external modem per port. Eventually this morphed into boxes with multiple modems in them and access servers that did the ppp termination and the authentication (to a RADIUS server) as scale increased. US Robotics was probably the best reputed player in the modem space.

So much memories from that era. I saw my first 1TB storage array back then, it was an EMC Clariion fibre channel raid box, it cost nearly 1m$ and it was a full rack of 9GB dual-ported 15k RPM disks.

That's how the FDA works.

The FDA is required to approve the study plan, the pharma (or really, the contract research organization (CRO) acting on its behalf) reports back to the FDA. The FDA decides based on the reported study result (reported to the FDA) whether the drug can be marketed and under what constraints.

Why should tax payer pick up the tab on a clinical trial like this? Over the life time of a modern drug, the clinical trials required can easily approach $1B.

Quite possibly, the 38 licenses was the number deemed necessary, after negotiations, for the purpose of a limited trial. It usually goes something like "OK, we need 20 licenses for the lab, 6 for the devs to use when integrating with XYZ and a further dozen for demos, laptops and some flexibility in testing."

Most small ISVs would deeply discount or otherwise sweeten that deal with the expectation of negotiating a large scale site license once testing is successful. 500k seat would probably be discounted drastically to something like 10m $ / year (BS Contact seems to sell for 300 euros / license.)

There's tons of jobs in Canada that pay better then software jobs in North Dakota... But in pure dollar amount, you're not going to beat a Google or Facebook job in SV. Best you could do is work remotely for an SV company.

That said, remember that if you're an actual american citizen, they will tax your foreign income and a programmer with a lot of experience can hit revenues where they actually have to remit money to the IRS in addition to the cost of compliance (which can itself be significant.)

Maybe arch with variable width pointer types like some embedded platforms?

I would've thought the first question was a big red flag but I guess in Windows and x86 linux int is 32 bit even with 64-bit processors. Not the case in MIPS64 (under IRIX) or on DEC Alpha.

I had my formative C experience in the DOS era with 16-bit compilers and then SGIs with 64-bit compilers (and I had the "fun" of porting grad student written code from SGI to Linux) so you get burned with expectations about int length. Packing makes it even worse as many RISC machines (like MIPS) are word addressed and non-aligned loads require a bunch of bit fiddling or you get a Bus Error (SIGBUS).

Or perhaps you're not a native english speaker?

No, the pretensioner just has to beat the deceleration of the car. The goal is to retain (or even pull in) the passenger in the seat to reduce the impact on the airbags.

Typically the pretensioner will pull in on the order of 10-12cm of webbing, this is done via a pyrotechnic charge. To be fully effective, the pretensioner would then need to deploy about 110-120 milliseconds before the airbags (which will deploy in 40 ms or so.)

So then it falls on the car's sensors and computer to detect with sufficient advance notice the impending crash. With modern radars (like the ones in newer mercedes cars...) they should be able to gain most of that time at least for frontal crashes.

Affordable cars get built because the market for cars is saturated. Where the supply of some key component of cars a limiting factor on the production capability of car manufacturers, expensive cars would be the only ones produced.

One could argue that "affordable" long-term housing is a market who's supply should take precedence on the temporary housing market. Since the two must, by nature, compete with each other for the same real estate.

There are network effects actually.

Bombardier is one of the main anchors around which many major aircraft industry company are located. In turn those suppliers also help explain the Bell Helicopter Textron plant.

I'm thinking of companies like Safran Landing Systems (formerly Messier-Dowty), Pratt-Whitney Canada (one of, if not the, largest producer of turboprops and turboshafts engines), CAE (sims, avionic), Thales (avionic), Héroux-Devtek (landing gears), etc. Plus all the smaller subcontractors.

> At the cost of higher temporary housing costs for people that want to visit. Addressing supply by ripping supply from a different market is a bandaid.

That's not such a bad thing. The market has demonstrated that hotels and similar will be built until supply mostly meets the demand.

No one will build affordable housing when they can build expensive housing instead.

Exactly, the it's the Land, not the structure. If the land is practically worthless, there's a ton of money left over to build on it.

The most telling in the prices you posted is that 758 sq. ft. house for 527k:

> Last sold: Jan 1973 for $25,000

That's $135,939.19 inflation adjusted to 2016 dollars. Where'd the remaining $390k of value come from (assuming house is in same relative shape.)

Not unlike the house I live in in terms of scale though a different style. House I'm in was build ca. 1896-1906, about 1550 square feet with 3 bedrooms upstairs (one of which is quite small and my office.)

The material costs are not directly comparable to modern materials of similar quality and the HVAC and electricals (and probably plumbing) would be lacking.

Still, you could build a house like that for probably 65-85k$ in material (including concrete for foundation, excluding real bricks) depending on where you are in the US (or Canada.) I'm in Canada so we need a bit more insulation then you can get away with in some part of the US.

That material cost does not include the cost of the lot, the cost of utility installation, the road, sewers and so on (those are usually included in builder's prices in new subdivisions) and it doesn't include labor.

By which point you're probably looking at 125-250k$ minimum. The two biggest variables being land costs and labor. If the house was factory built for assembly onsite (closer to that sears house) like "modular homes" than labor will be much cheaper but so will be the overall finishing level, something like this: http://www.kenthomes.com/kent-homes-browse-homes-two-storey-...

I've seen urban tax assessments (in Montreal) where the house was practically worthless compared to the land value. My own tax assessment puts the bare lot as over 50% of the value.

I like the Picasso reference. The line between art and "a bunch of crap put together" is sometime difficult to pin down. And it takes a Picasso to navigate that boundary without stepping over.

How that story goes seem to be a cultural thing depending on the org culture. I've seen places where the loop goes:

1. BizDev and/or Sales identify a feature set that would enable a deal or broaden the market suitability.

2. Dev team tasked with adding feature XYZ.

3. Designer brought in to figure out how to add the feature to the UI with minimal effort.

4. Repeat.

I think this version is much more common in enterprise software and less so in mass consumer stuff. As we all know, enterprise software is unsexy and not worthy of YC/Startup culture. High touch sales also favors fewer deals with more customer leverage and really fat commissions for sales people.

I love Safari's reader mode exactly because it gives me a larger font black text on a white background. I'm not even that old (mid thirties) but years of monitors and glasses have taken their tolls on my vision. Low contrast, small prints strain my eyes. And when encountered and reader mode isn't an option, I usually close the site/page and go elsewhere if at all possible.

No idea about this material in specific but a lot of nanoscale stuff is manufactured using photo lithography, basically the same way we make micro conductors since it's a process we understand well and we can scale (just ask Intel.)

It sounds like this material would have good tolerance for minor imperfections (unlike IC) so yield could be really good.

Those prices are for processing tomatoes. Not the kind of tomatoes you'd find at the grocer, rather the kind that will go into a bottle of heinz ketchup or a can of tomato paste.

They are grown differently and treated differently because appearance basically doesn't matter. They're also not required to be available for retail year round. They'll be processed within days of harvest in the fall.

Greenhouse in the desert can't compete with processing tomatoes. What they can compete is with the green house tomatoes sold in grocery store in the middle of winter.

Backpages, unlike Craigslist, doesn't really have any other business then adulkt ads.