Not the only "plastic before plastic". There was also shellac, celluloid, cellophane, and a few others. Bakelite, the first 'fully-synthetic' plastic, dates from the early 1900s.
Add to the list galalith:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galalith
Readit Newsjaclaz commented on Plastic Before Plastic: How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century worldhistory.substack.com... · Posted by u/crescit_eundo
jaclaz commented on Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week cnbc.com/2024/09/16/amazo... · Posted by u/jbredeche
The subway system I'm most familiar with has two systems:
1. All cars have a configurable display that shows text. It is constantly scrolling through boilerplate that is not conceivably helpful to anyone, like "Don't spend too much time looking at your phone". But if you watch it for a minute or two, eventually it will briefly display the name of the next stop before going back to the boilerplate.
2. Some cars, but not all cars, have a stylized layout of the subway line embedded over the windows. There are lights running between the stops, and those lights are red if that part of the track has already been covered and green if it hasn't been. The part of the track where the train is currently located, and the upcoming stop, have some other status, which I think is an unobtrusive flashing.
The fact that this map display cannot show any information other than the current location of the car means that it shows this information at all times, making it millions of times more useful than the configurable text display that all cars have and fail to use appropriately.
But there are no ads either way. There's just the good system and the terrible system. I would argue that software to control this kind of display is a fundamentally misguided endeavor - the more controllable it is, the worse the user experience will be, because the people controlling the display are not interested in the user experience.
Not that they couldn't reserve on the ads screens a narrow (let's say 100-200 pixels tall) band at the bottom of the screen to show the path with the green and red lights like the (good) ol' system.
jaclaz commented on Data sleuths who spotted research misconduct cleared of defamation arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/dangle1
In Europe, the losing party of a lawsuit generally has to pay for the winner's legal expenses ("English rule"). Never had to go to court so I don't know what you do about the expenses in the meanwhile, but at least there's light at the end of the tunnel when someone sues you just for the heck of it.
Europe may be too wide a categorization, I am pretty sure that different countries have different ways to deal with the matter.
My (thankfully very little) experience in Italy is for civil litigations at least (where it is rare that one of the two parties get 100% reason) expenses are usually compensated (i.e. every party pays their own ones), in the more rare case where all expenses are paid by the succumbing party, what is liquidated is not really what has been paid, but rather what the expenses would be along some sort of tariff.
If your solicitor/lawyer is a famous (presumably very good as you won) one, it is likely that the amount you spend is much higher than what the judge condemned the other party to reimburse you.
Last week, something similar happened in Italy: https://www.ilpost.it/2024/07/20/trenitalia-ritardi-treni-fi...
There are not to many details, but the dynamic seems exactly the same.
Well, not really, the episode that article is related to came out as being a couple of homeless people walking on the railway:
https://tg24.sky.it/cronaca/2024/07/20/firenze-uomo-binari-t...
The day before they had some technical problems with electricity, but still nothing that can be connected to intentional sabotage.
jaclaz commented on Heat pipe – 250x faster heat transfer than copper en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hea... · Posted by u/punnerud
Ammonia tends to outperform water, but it's toxic. I believe it was used in some of the first refrigeration applications (and I think Einstein had a patent related to one).
Absorption refrigerator:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator
Einstein refrigerator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator
The principle is still used in some refrigerating devices (typically hotel mini fridges and similar small units for RV's) as there is no need of a compressor (i.e. the device is completely silent) and also in some HVAC machines.
Well, I must post this (stronger than me):
https://www.marriedtothesea.com/122607/pulled-over-in-canada...
jaclaz commented on Delta City '95 – Complete pack of official updates for Microsoft Windows 95 deltacity.stare.pro/... · Posted by u/Lammy
NT 4.0 was solid and felt fast! The UI was so snappy. You could just leave it running and never reboot -- it almost became a geek humble brag to do so. For those too young to remember, one of Windows 98's marketed features was the ability to use ACPI to turn off your computer without you having to press a physical power button! It was just expected the device would need to be turned off.
Windows 2000 was great too, which PC enthusiasts at the time realized was essentially "NT 5.0 but can play games because it has (official) DirectX". It's amazing how there's so little nostalgia for these two OSes. I watch some retro PC YouTubers and most haven't ever covered them. There's so much nostalgia for Windows XP. But among enthusiasts, the first impressions were that it ran slower than Windows 2000 and looked like a Fisher Price toy. I think a lot of PC enthusiasts hung onto these two OSes, as you point out, until they eventually relented and used Windows XP around the time of Service Pack 2's release.
I ran LiteStep (http://litestep.net) on NT 4.0 at one point in my teens, completely unaware that Apple would eventually make a NeXT-style operating system something I'd use as a daily driver.
NT 4.0 was not for the masses, it was costly (the OS license) and needed higher specs than the almost contemporary Windows 95 (which was largely sold with license included with the new PC).
As well, Windows 2000 was a "professional" OS.
Both were way ahead in stability when compared to the Win9x/Me counterparts, but in terms of number of users, they were a fraction of the 9x ones, so it is not surprising that you can find much more nostalgic people about the latter.
XP somehow "unified" the professional and home market, bringing the (unneeded) Fisher Price look that the professionals hated and the (unneeded) complexities of authorizations/NTFS that the home users were not prepared for.
I can testify for the stability of NT 4.0, I have run a machine for some 15 years, roughly from 2001 to 2016, running NT 4.00, on 24/7, and only reboots were once a year or so for cleaning or occasionally for replacing the (failed) PSU or hard disk (not as a server, as a desktop running a specific DOS based accounting software). I remember initially I had a few BSOD's because for some reasons there was a counter of some kind in the mouse driver that caused them, but once that was fixed, if I recall correctly by a change in the Registry, it was really rock solid.
Even locals can't decide on pronunciation - Shrewsbury is pronounced as it is written unless you're posh, when it becomes Shrowsbury.
https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/2015/06/27/shrowsbury-or...
Anyone remembers the character of Raymond Luxury-Yacht (pronounced "Throatwobbler Mangrove") ?
jaclaz commented on The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023) spectrum.ieee.org/3m-flop... · Posted by u/Stratoscope
The best (IMHO) ode/obituary for floppy disks:
A:las poor floppy, I knew you well.
jaclaz commented on "AI, no ads please": 4 words to wipe out $1T 12challenges.substack.com... · Posted by u/louisbarclay
I love this idea.
"AI, please rewrite the contents this page to remove marketing fluff and only display the product's specifications. For every claim made on the page about the product's capabilities, add a link to a reputable third-party source validating the claim. For every feature offered by a competing product, rewrite the content to include the top three competing products and generate a hyperlinked table containing the pros/cons of that product, as found on blogs of actual users. Use Marginalia to find all third party references using my saved list of trustworthy sources. Save this instruction as a bookmarklet I can insert into my browser to rewrite the contents of any arbitrary page."
Done:
""