retrac

20 ms·

271.
by retrac 2y ago
Given the cost of an LTE modem these days I wouldn't be surprised if they start coming with integrated mobile service as a "feature" to ensure the ads and surveillance data always flow.
272.
by retrac 2y ago
There almost certainly is a distant relationship. Almost all writing systems in Eurasia are derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphics through the Phoenician script, which gave us the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Hebrew, Arabic, and the Brahmi scr
273.
by retrac 2y ago
We don't just model ourselves to attract a mate. Men often wish to appear more masculine so as to intimidate other men, for example. This effect is absent from most discussions about preferences and self-image.
274.
by retrac 2y ago
Digitization started quite early (1960s) but it did not finish until decades later. The first transatlantic fibre optic cable was only laid in 1988. Before that communication between North America and Europe was analog. The Internet and ot
275.
by retrac 2y ago
Plenty of long distance circuits remained analog into the 90s, particularly the microwave relay tower networks in rural areas. They used all sorts of techniques to produce rather good results. As an example, one game phone phreaks in the 7
276.
by retrac 2y ago
> a generation of people is growing who got used to watching digitally compressed audio and video It is unfortunate how today phone calls are often heavily compressed. Back in the 80s, 90s, 00s the digital phone network would stream unc
277.
by retrac 2y ago
It's a sad state of affairs, but anyone serious about security ought to consider the common ISP WiFi router to be a potentially hostile device and class it as part of the public side of the Internet. The usual advice is to put a firew
278.
by retrac 2y ago
Bit of an aside but I wonder how far tube technology might have advanced, without semiconductors intervening. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, GE, IBM, and RCA, probably other companies, were working on "integrated tubes" with
279.
by retrac 2y ago
> reading this, you would not know that most of those DOS machines were running Windows and that they were far, far more numerous Why not include the microcontroller in microwaves, too? Because those aren't real computers. (All in
280.
by retrac 2y ago
Thanks to the retroactive extension here in Canada, nothing.
281.
by retrac 2y ago
There's a section of rail line between Senneterre, QC and Cochrane, ON in north-central Canada constructed as part of a quixotic federal project a century ago to link the grain-growing praries with an Atlantic port. It was barely ever
282.
by retrac 2y ago
I've looked hard for details and specs on the computers for the Voyagers and it's just not online, beyond high-level descriptions. Almost nothing when compared to Apollo (which has assembly source code for the software, and circu
283.
by retrac 2y ago
There was remarkably little in the way of security for early satellites (or space probes). I recently encountered here on HN the suggestion that, the main reason you can't find particularly in-depth details on the Voyager space probes,
284.
by retrac 2y ago
Bit of a false dichotomy: some people survive a heart attack without intervention, but suffer crippling injuries as a result. It's entirely possible to develop arrhythmia, fall into a low-oxygen state where you get brain damage, and t
285.
by retrac 2y ago
Some forms of life can tolerate remarkable levels of ionizing radiation, though I doubt anything terrestrial would survive a pass through Jupiter's radiation belts unshielded. It has been suggested that some fungi can extract useful en
286.
by retrac 2y ago
Many people can scan pages at the rate of a few seconds per page to pull out keywords. They are relying on the same ability to fuzzy-match the structure of a sentence, looking for the topic, beginning of a dependent clause, Personal Names,
287.
by retrac 2y ago
Reminds me of one of the big open secrets of North America: northern Ontario and northwestern Quebec are fertile. There is a 250,000 sq. km clay belt that spans almost from Winnipeg to Ottawa. The growing season is short but sufficient fo
288.
by retrac 2y ago
"Vocation" has undergone a similar shift; originally it meant a calling, or a summons.
289.
by retrac 2y ago
Are we including the program itself as graph-like data? A well-structured program is usually a directed graph. Blocks are the vertices, control flow the edges.
290.
by retrac 2y ago
C is basically Algol with curly braces and pointers. The sentiment expressed there is probably equally applicable to C, or maybe Pascal. Those are often held up today as a minimal example in contrast to Lisp. There is a sort of sparse, w
291.
by retrac 2y ago
Piano music is mostly written by right-handers for right-handers. I'm strongly left-hand dominant. For music that's intended to be easy to play, the primary voice is almost always on the right hand. Where the music wants the mo
292.
by retrac 2y ago
Japan is somewhat a world of its own when it comes to open source projects. (And also commercial software, I suppose.) Mostly due to the language barrier. There's some wonderful stuff out there that's unfortunately only documente
293.
by retrac 2y ago
The original MacPaint had "Fatbits" which allowed zooming in to edit specific pixels: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/staff... I think it's the first time that was imple
294.
by retrac 2y ago
Even if it's inert many explosives decompose into toxic compounds. Other explosives use mercury compounds for detonators, which at the worst can make the soil itself toxic to the touch. There are also gas shells, some of which had ar
295.
by retrac 2y ago
When watching German films with subtitles, I will sporadically understand phrases. When it happens it doesn't sound like German; it's some very strange English dialect. Ich habe das gestern Abend gesungen. I have that yester e
296.
by retrac 2y ago
> Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin That's the % in the dictionary. More than half of Japanese vocabulary in the dictionary is based on Chinese but no one argues Japanese is a Chinese creole. I forget by
297.
by retrac 2y ago
I moved twice in the last few years. Immediately after moving I was completely unable to sleep. Too bright. Too loud. What are these noises? What is that vibration? For me, it fades after a few weeks. The train can be rumbling by wit
298.
by retrac 2y ago
About half of English words are one syllable long and most of the rest are two. If it's stressed, it's probably a word. Stress placement on disyllabic words works at a grammatical level, not just a phonetic one. "To record&
299.
by retrac 2y ago
2.x BSD was also ported to MIPS and some other archs a while back: https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd I have periodically wondered why we didn't see more of that. It's a small monolithic Unix with the comp
300.
by retrac 2y ago
> in the order they'd be input into the machine That is the usual why for little endian. Same reason why little endian byte ordering is used on the 8008 and successors. The processor needs the lower byte first, to calculate the ca

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