I see dB scale units used without contextual issues in near uniformity. Unfortunately, I have to agree with the OP, that microphone capsule manufactures seem to be an edge case. I'm not sure where dBV/Pa became the standard. I can understand why given 94dBSPL@1000Hz calibration standards, and the measurement equipment of the time, but I've run into my own fair share of datasheets with lines such as 'Sensitivity -45dB' with no units or other call outs for the standard in use. Thankfully, it seems like most modern datasheets use mV/Pa which seems like a much better unit in my book.
Readit Newsvt240 commented on The scientific “unit” we call the decibel lcamtuf.substack.com/p/de... · Posted by u/Ariarule
No mention of AltaVista?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista
PS. Astalavista was also fun :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk
Yeah, I agree that is pretty glaring omission. To myself at least, Altavista was a huge part of that small slice of time, where it seemed instantly, the whole world finally got online with dial-up PPP, opposed to earlier when we might have been accessing the internet through gateways at a BBS, or dialup shell access from the local library or ISP.
I'm sure things seemed quite different if you were on a college campus at the time.
vt240 commented on There are two types of dishwasher people theatlantic.com/family/ar... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
There’s actually a 3rd type that I discovered while house sitting: people who load their knives pointy side up. Absolutely insanity.
This is a mistake you only make once. Lesson learned when I put a boning knife through my arm in the dish rack one day. Cost me a trip in the ambulance. Absolute insanity– correct! I don't even know how it got in there with the rest of the utensils. But I triple check the sink area every time now.
I have a keyboard from my first 386/33 computer. It can be connected to my current Mac through a sequence of adapters: DIN5 -> PS/2 -> USB-A -> USB-C.
I am looking forward to extending my sequence of adapters in the future.
I still had my DEC LK201 hooked up on my main home linux desktop until a few years ago. Haha. I don't know why, but I liked the key layout.
vt240 commented on SharkSQL – The Database Project [pdf] h2860042.stratoserver.net... · Posted by u/vt240
There was a recent update on this [1] at the OpenVMS bootcamp posted to YouTube a couple weeks ago. I thought it was pretty interesting, I'd never heard of the project before, and there are not many new RDBMS trying to break into the enterprise market.
vt240 commented on The subtle art of designing physical controls for cars theturnsignalblog.com/the... · Posted by u/vsdlrd
I don't remember using that one, is it a wheel you can interact with, or does clicking the volume chunks change the volume?
There's no wheel on a one button mouse :P Sorry I am really joking here. We have a number of Avid mixing consoles from the 2010s that have extensive mouse UI wheel controls, yet they shipped with trackball controllers. They're actually much easier to use with a standard three-button scroll-wheel mouse. Haha.
>That's... not true? With light traffic a 4 way stop should have no cars at all at it most of the time, leaving pedestrians with the right of way, whereas with a traffic light there will always be a road with priority until a pedestrian hits the button. Requiring cars to pay attention to the condition of the intersection is the explicit design goal.
>This was laid out very clearly in the article we just read.
<facepalm>
This is what I mean about theory vs reality.
4-way stops don't look like the animation they show you in driver's ed. In practice what happens is that non conflicting traffic tends to parallelize so someone taking a left might start their left while the person across from them is finishing theirs (or one of any other bunch of combinations) so there's a car in motion basically all the time the situational awareness of every driver who's about to get their turn is mostly absorbed in monitoring who's turn it is and who's going where.
So when you're a pedestrian and you don't time it right you could find yourself starting to cross right before someone wants to drive where you're crossing. Usually this is because you started walking before it was their turn and they didn't notice you until it was their turn and they started moving (because they were accounting for the other traffic) until it was their turn at which point they started looking where they were going as well. Normally this results in absolutely nothing, you speed up a little, they don't gas it as hard, everyone goes on their merry way. But the potential for things to go badly if the conflicting driver is inattentive or further distracted is very much there.
Sure, theoretically the rules say they shouldn't do that but that's not how reality works.
There's just so much less potential for conflict if there is a scheduled time when all the cars stop and then the walking happens. Even without a dedicated walk time it's just so much easier to time it when there's a light because you can start walking when all the cars have red and only have to look out for right on red or potential red light runners, it's a much easier problem than the degree of swiveling your head around you need to do to at a busy 4-way.
I tend to agree with you. I regularly walk, sometimes up to 40 miles per month, in the suburban hellscape that is South Hill in Puyallup, WA. This is the land of major 4 lane arterials w/ turn-lanes and hundreds of unprotected two-way and four-way intersections. There’s almost no pedestrians, I’ll rarely meet other people on my way to work, and sometimes go the whole two miles without making eye contact with a single driver.
This article didn’t touch on it, but there’s another even scarier monster lurking out there. They’ve started to replace some of our larger intersections with these “Smart” traffic lights. Most drivers have a pretty well developed feel for the pattern traffic signals follow. These are pretty much random, adjusting the traffic flow based on some metrics. They use yield left turns with single direction flow and other tricks to try and control traffic. Since the light cycle doesn’t really follow any standard pattern, they’re also pretty much random when they’ll insert the protected pedestrian crossing into the cycle. It’s a death trap. There can be people waiting at a yield left turn which will be going to red, it will click on the pedestrian walk, and the opposing traffic will still be in full green, with drivers never coming to a stop. Add to that, if volume is heavy, you can stand there for 5 minutes or more waiting for a protected pedestrian crossing.
vt240 commented on Windows NT for Power Macintosh github.com/Wack0/maciNTos... · Posted by u/TazeTSchnitzel
I still think Solaris/Mac stood a chance; the hardware would have been miles better than anything else.
The best 68k Mac I ever had was MAE in Solaris 9 on my SunBlade 2500. Fully patched up Solaris 9 had all the filesystem and disk i/o improvements, and none of the libc changes that happened in 10 which broke all backwards compatibility.
vt240 commented on Designing a SIMD Algorithm from Scratch mcyoung.xyz/2023/11/27/si... · Posted by u/ingve
Check out the Clang extended vector extension for C, IMHO that's the perfect way to add portable SIMD to a language. Doing it through a library will always be clumsy.
I loved the Intel Cilk Plus project. I was sad to see it was abandoned. It always felt like a very natural syntax at least to me.