justin66

I'm pretty sure if you've seen figures in the 100 year range, that's something that was largely aspirational, put out after the 100 year anniversary of the armistice. Some of the experts in France still say over 500 years at the current rate of remediation.

Do they want to let Russia keep Ukrainian land, kids, etc?

> Actually there is a budget cap so small teams have the same resources of big teams.

Not really. The budget cap does not include the salaries of active drivers and the three highest paid non-driver employees, as well as some other odds and ends.

You and Jamie sure landed on opposite sides of the AI debate.

Why would anyone buy a Pi when they could simply burgle the home of a friend or neighbor and steal their computer?

> One thing I'm seeing which irritates me is people are starting to call backing singers backup singers.

Rolling Stone magazine has been using the phrase "backup singer" for a genuinely long time.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/dylan-gets-gos...

Examine everything wrong with the analogy you just made and you'll understand why nobody else is making that comparison.

Building a machine that can travel at speeds exceeding Mach 3 for a brief period of time is probably well within aeronautical engineering's current capabilities, with today's engines, yes. The innovation with the SR-71 was that it could fly at those speeds for an hour and a half, thanks in part to that JP-7 fuel with its high flash point.

Either way it's unclear why NASA, with its decreasing budget, might feel like they need to be taking this on as a research project.

Little known fact (but not a secret): the F-117 is still flown today, even though they were "retired" in 2008.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZFwOGfhRZ8

I gather they serve mostly as aggressors and test aircraft - certainly one wouldn't fly that plane into combat. They were never ruinously expensive to operate. The SR-71 on the other hand...

> The Air Force and NASA destroyed a $600 million supply of spare parts for the Blackbird fleet in 2007. The move came long after it seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that an SR-71A would return to operational service.

There's also the issue of converting a tanker back so it can carry the SR-71's unique fuel again. And for that matter, making a supply of JP-7 again. No other planes today use JP-7.

"It's not my money!"

> If it didn't come with such a high karma risk, I would have mentioned it myself.

What worst case scenario are you envisioning that would somehow justify censoring yourself? The text of one of your comments will turn grey?

I have no idea why somebody flagged his last few comments or why "vouch" doesn't work. Frustrating.

Interestingly, there are a few places that will sell you a warrantied and new desktop or rackmount PC with a Windows NT 4.0 license. I imagine buyers of their systems are often in similar predicaments, not sure who else would buy these.

https://nixsys.com/products/nx370-t90

There are some things I don't understand about the OP's constraints (are you sure you can't run that Amiga VM on a newer version of Windows, or better yet, run that Amiga-based software on one of the currently supported Amiga VMs?). But they can probably pretty easily keep going as they're going with this software until some other, more significant thing in that plant becomes fully obsolete and the place is shut down.

To me the funny part of this story is that they used to show you this warning as part of the EULA when installing Windows NT 4, which I remember joking about:

NOTE ON JAVA SUPPORT. THE PRODUCT MAY CONTAIN SUPPORT FOR PROGRAMS WRITTEN IN JAVA. JAVA TECHNOLOGY IS NOT FAULT TOLERANT AND IS NOT DESIGNED, MANUFACTURED, OR INTENDED FOR USE OR RESALE AS ONLINE CONTROL EQUIPMENT IN HAZARDOUS ENVIRONMENTS REQUIRING FAIL-SAFE PERFORMANCE, SUCH AS IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, DIRECT LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES, OR WEAPONS SYSTEMS, IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF JAVA TECHNOLOGY COULD LEAD DIRECTLY TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE. Sun Microsystems, Inc. has contractually obligated Microsoft to make this disclaimer.

Also:

The machine's purpose was to report status of the control rods that mitigate nuclear reactions. Basically, "are the rods inserted, and if so, how many / how far?". I want to emphasize that this was reporting only, NOT control.

It would take a whole lot more context to make this somehow comforting. :D

Yeesh. I get 44 mpg in a much heavier Toyota hybrid. But it probably depends on what percentage of your driving is in the city, vs highway.

With the benefit of perfect hindsight, which is a bit silly?

Open source Solaris as early as possible.

Really compete with MIPS, ARM, Motorola, etc. in the embedded space. Don't even try to make it a huge financial win, just get the SPARC architecture and dev tools out there with good Linux support.

Consistently support Solaris x86 and frequently release new generations of Intel and AMD workstation-class hardware.

Partner with TSMC for SPARC production a lot earlier.

Since we're just having fun here: acquire Nvidia in 1999, at which time it was pretty obvious workstation graphics was going to be commodified, and Sun could have bought them with their pocket change.

Where could I buy one? That's interesting.

I'm reluctant to call anyone out. I liked Sun a lot, as well as the people I've encountered who worked there. There was a thread between a couple of ex-Sun guys here on hn years ago - I can't find it right now - which made me feel there was a humorous and very human pattern in Sun postmortem comments: "man, that other team really killed Sun, we were doomed after that thing they did." I was pretty curious what the people on that other team (the SPARC microprocessor designers, in the case of that comment thread) might have said in their own defense, where they might have spread some of the blame, and so on.

(perhaps it doesn't do your rather full blog post justice to compare it to something considerably less complete like a comment thread)

> Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome

I emphatically agree. Maybe it goes without saying but with Sun, multiple generations of leadership, I think.

Having read a lot of these things from ex-Sun employees, I dearly want to read one with the topic my department is the one that fucked up Sun. I don't think I have seen a topic like that yet.

Preventing counterfeit boards with janky memory upgrades, or something, from getting out onto the market seems like a potentially worthwhile thing, but also probably a reaction to an imaginary problem. Preventing end users from doing what they want seems like a bad thing, but given how few users are actually capable of doing this upgrade, also probably an imaginary problem.

Given the state of the world I'm a little amazed anyone can muster any outrage about this.

> At one camp, where there even was an event on photography, someone I met almost went into a rage every time he saw a camera.

If people feel obligated to be spazzy around cameras why would they go near an event on photography...

Hey now. We turn against each other, too.

> The "worst" RCP8.5 / SSP5-8.5-style futures (coal-dominated, ~4.4–4.9 °C) are no longer treated as plausible

That's a strange way of structuring such a comment. The temperature increase and concomitant catastrophes are still on the table, what was considered the plausible worst-case scenario with regard to how early that particular milestone might be reached has (apparently) been pushed back.

Lazily researched comment. Pretty much anyone who isn't in sales can have "engineer" in their title. I'm sure there were plenty of "support engineers" in the Shopify number you cited, and I'm sure there were zero in the GTA and Chrome numbers you cited.

As a practical matter, I'm not sure the Mansfield amendment affected all agencies equally. My impression is that it affected ARPA (later DARPA) most profoundly. (pretty much everything I've read about this was in the context of ARPA and XEROX Parc so my perception might be a little skewed)

I'd speculate the Navy had perhaps more discretion over how it spent its research funding. For example, they funded polywell fusion research for years.

> In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people.

There's no "seem" about it, what you're saying is true, and it was because of changes in federal law. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield#Mansfield_Amend...

Nobody is running i386 in production, I would think. It’s fun to imagine someone actually might be…

They tell you it's a diagnostic procedure but if they see a sense of humor in there they just zap it.

Yeah, but which one?

Also, real businesses use -CURRENT, everybody knows that.