Posts by cuthbertgraak 12 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jan 2022
A friend once interviewed someone for a mainframe development position. The interviewee claimed to be a "petroleum transfer engineer" looking for an IT job. My friend later found out that the interviewee pumped gas at a local gas station.
Needless to say, the interviewee didn't get the job.
Took a look at the linked site, and found that their "installation" procedure consists of
curl https://zed<dot>dev/install.sh | sh
Since when has it been a good idea to fetch an unaudited script off the internet and execute directly?
Sorry, zed.dev, but that installation method just won't cut it; we've had enough backdoors, phishes, malware, spyware, and other bad products installed in exactly that manner. We don't need any more, even if you pinky-swear that your product is nothing like that.
There's an old IT saying (from the times that IT was called "DP") that goes "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a car full of data tapes". The same goes for deliveries.
At 5 lbs maximum delivery quantity and a range of 12 miles, per delivery, a single car and driver could easily replace a fleet of these drones, and satisfy your arguments just as easily.
I'll admit that Alphabet has great technology, and cool toys, but these delivery drones seem to be more of a "concept" than a "real product". Certainly, they are less economically sustainable than the delivery technology that they claim to replace.
As I understand it, "Biosphere 2" ran into difficulties because of an O2 loss that was attributed to the fact that the builders had built the foundations and "rocks" of the biosphere from concrete. The CO2 in the biosphere atmosphere reacted with the concrete to create calcium carbonate, thus sequestering both carbon and oxygen which would otherwise have been reprocessed by the biome into biomass and breathable air.
It's all right there in the Wikipedia article you quoted.
"BROADWAY was originally the code name for an initiative from the X Consortium which was aimed at delivering Web capability to X." (https://web.archive.org/web/20050616080217/http://www.broadwayinfo.com/bwfaq.htm)
Implemented in X11 R6.3, "Broadway" introduced "Low bandwidth X" for slow serial line connections, and a way for web pages to access X11 client applications via a web browser plugin.
The "Broadway" X-over-http and and low-bandwidth-X features were disabled by default in X11 R7.1 and removed in X11 R7.2
"Spooler" is the term we use to refer to a utility that manages the "spool", and "spool" refers to the ancient (for computing) acronym S.P.O.O.L., meaning "Simultaneous Peripheral Operations On Line".
"Spool" is also a play on what a spooler does: it writes a stream of data that gets stored in a fifo buffer (like thread on a spool) to be read out later (unspooled) to a peripheral device. Originally, that "spool" was a physical spool of magnetic tape that one computer would write, and another computer would read and print
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