niftich's comments

archive.org has many results for "Shareware Breakthrough", look through them to find the right one.

Carr also made Pirate Battles and Treasure Island, at least one of which I remembered from my childhood, whereas I've never played Capture the Flag.

The sprites used in the shareware game I played remained etched in my memory, along with the red and blue colors for the teams, the top-down view with vibrant colors, the Windows 95 GUI, and keywords like "trapper" and "scout" (the other game apparently had "digger") but I had forgotten the name over the years and took me a lot of searching to find it again.

There are some communities like Reddit's tipofmyjoystick that are geared towards locating games by description, and the process inspired me to contribute to curation/catalog sites for games. Abandonware sites fulfill much of that latter niche now, but these are not abandonware!

After I found the game's name, I found that there were very few Google search results for "shareware pirate battles carrsoft" or "shareware treasure island carrsoft". There's room for more shareware catalogs and searchable, browseable thematic directories.

He still sells a bundle of his games at carrsoft.com and I bought them recently. Highly recommend!

Perhaps it's a terminology issue. No one in the visible map frames of the Charlotte links would consider themselves to live in a 'rural' area. Sure, their neighborhood might be pleasant and quiet, and there's abundant tree cover, but the mapped path is alongside houses the entire time. The linear density is high. In a rural area, there exist lots with generous road frontage that interrupt the linear sea of homes.

This is a nearby area that those residents would agree is rural: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.3612637,-80.3818699,5696m/da...

Norfolk / Virginia Beach, VA:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/36.7727569,-76.0409875/Harri...

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/36.7651538,-75.9875131/ALDI,...

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/36.695792,-76.2014209/Harris...

Charlotte, NC:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/35.1699757,-80.7776553/Publi...

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/35.3178445,-80.8026925/Food+...

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/35.1256141,-80.764483/Harris...

Oklahoma City:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/35.5530786,-97.5514845/Walma...

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/35.4038959,-97.5743727/Cash+...

Las Vegas:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/36.2812358,-115.1554982/Smit...

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/35.9958535,-115.1523847/Walm...

There are several digital encoding schemes that add enhancement layers on top of an older, established base layer. It's a key concept of backwards compatibility. Not including cases where additional channels or domains of information are added (e.g. surround sound, 3D video), and only looking at cases where the perceptual quality of the existing channels or domains is improved (e.g. HDR, resolution), here are some examples:

* Progressive JPEG (1992)

* Spectral Band Replication (2001) in aacPlus -> HE-AACv1 (2003), mp3PRO (2001), WMA 10 Pro (2006)

* JPEG XT (2015) - enhancements on top of 1992 JPEG.

* Scalable Video Coding (2004? 2007?) (search for "SVC Annex G")

(Keep in mind that software patents aren't about ideas, but specific techniques being used together to achieve an effect, so this isn't intended to be a list of prior art, but rather a list of the same concept being used elsewhere.)

Fijivillage.com reports: "All websites and apps hosted in Fiji with the dotcom.fj suffix are currently down and this has also affected Vodafone’s M-PAiSA services.

This is due to an outage in the University of the South Pacific hosted dotcom.fj domain." [1][2]

[1] https://www.fijivillage.com/news/All-websites--apps-in-Fiji-...

[2] https://twitter.com/fijivillage/status/1501070675691278339

The tech is neat but the reasons this isn't already in use has to do a lot more with railroading company culture (operational familiarity, risk of losing business to a competitor) than with any particular shortcomings of the technology.

Right now, no one has to chaperone individual railcars (or bogies!), because trains of many railcars travel as a unit. This also makes track control / impact avoidance easier, regardless of the level of train control deployed on the track.

This may see more use in the EU, where EU-wide regulations are mandating all member states to separate ownership of their rail network from ownership of rail operators. Then, an adventurous operator may decide to trial this technology. But nonetheless, this is fairly unlikely, as rail slots are essentially priced by time occupied for the block, so it makes more sense to pack a train's worth of cargo into the reservation you paid for.

BNSF Railway has a major classification yard in Galesburg. Just like other railroads, they use their Chicago yard for intermodal traffic (loading containers from the trains onto trucks and vice versa), and use a nearby yard outside of Chicago to manage general traffic.

According to the Knox County Area Partnership [1], the largest employers in Knox County (of which Galesburg is the urban center) are BNSF, the hospital, the schools, Knox College, Blick Art Materials, Gates Corporation, the local government, and the prison.

It's fairly common for small US towns to have the local health system, local school system, and Walmart (or the local grocery store) as the largest employers. Galesburg is more fortunate and is more like a typical midwest town, with a handful of manufacturers and warehousing-type jobs that exceed the standard rural fare, and a college also.

[1] https://www.knoxpartnership.com/top-employers/

Business travelers take taxis from their arrival airport to their destination and then get reimbursed by their company later.

They are among the least price-sensitive travelers and are the ones least inconvenienced by the last-mile problem, so their decision-making differs from those traveling for other reasons. (On average, they are less constrained by price and switching of modes, but are more constrained by idiosyncratic company procedures around travel.)

In my comparison of HSR vs. cars for <300 mile travel, the rail being 'drastically less flexible' means that it's subject to the same last-mile problem as planes are, whereas cars do not have this problem. Therefore the advantages of cars for trips like this are difficult for HSR to overcome.

As for buses, the article's author diminishes the significance of intercity buses in Europe by making it sound like private intra-national intercity bus service isn't competitive with HSR on travel time, as if HSR were widespread. HSR is only present along a dozen or so corridors in Europe, and while within France such premium bus services are a relatively new phenomenon, that isn't true elsewhere on the continent; so across the whole of Europe intercity buses are both much more common than he initially suggests, and much more competitive vs. rail than he suggests. After this, he does say buses thrive in the gaps between the train network, complement it, and have historically been important for international travel because of rail fare structures, and on those points I agree.

My wording of 'buses are flexible' does refer to the ease of introducing new routes (i.e. not having to build lots of rail), as a sibling comment correctly identified.

Despite several flaws and uncharitable misrepresentations in his policy analysis, I actually agree with most of O'Toole's conclusions.

I post a lot on here about rail, and I disagree with a lot of output from the Cato Institute, but the infrastructure cost of long-distance High Speed Rail in the US would be immense, and the geography of settlement and commuting patterns in the country are too car-oriented to take advantage of passenger-only HSR. Americans already do most travel by car and long-distance travel by air, so High Speed Rail would be a slower and costlier substitute for long-distance flights, and a maybe-faster but drastically less flexible alternative to <300 mile travel.

It's no accident France runs the TGV like an airline, because they work the same way: you get to your destination station, and now what? You need to hop on public transit or rent a car like you would at an airport. But in Europe, a big town is far more likely to have public transit of acceptable quality, frequency, and coverage to solve the last mile problem; all but the most transit-webbed US cities do not.

This article exposes some of the flaws and misrepresentations in his analysis, but then contributes its own flaws in turn. One example: in truth intercity buses are very widespread in Europe, and not only do they fill in gaps left by the rail system, but thanks to expressways on some routes they be as fast as "moderate-speed trains" too. Truly High Speed Rail only runs in a dozen corridors in Europe, and the rest of the passenger rail on the continent runs the gamut from decent to atrocious. Buses are flexible, because they can go where the roads already go.

One way to get around the last-mile problem is to ensure your destination is likely to be transit-webbed town, or your destination station is very close the location to which you actually want to go. This sounds a lot like commuter rail -- the speed depends on how much you want to spend on infrastructure. In the US, this would mean that lines radiate out from NYC, Boston, DC, Philly, Chicago, Atlanta, LA, SF, Miami, Seattle, Portland... but not any further than an hour or two of travel. The Northeast Corridor is a lucky exception because you have some of the most interconnected cities in the US all in a convenient line.

What's most frustrating is that many of both the opponents and supporters of HSR in the US miss the point: the point is to both invest in and subsidize infrastructure and programs that are societally useful and unlock productivity and opportunities. The Cato Institute would prefer a world without subsidies, but that's not appropriate for the sorts of high-cost functions that offer a major benefit to society. Pedestrian Observations would prefer more mobility and transit, but sometimes that transit actually looks like an airplane or bus or subsidized taxis, because it's what makes most immediate use out of the current infrastructure in a way that balances opex with capex.

The line from Spokane to Fargo hosts the Empire Builder, which is Amtrak's highest-ridership long distance train service [1].

[1] http://media.amtrak.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FY19-Year...

I see why you'd say that, but the difference between (a) commuter rail lines between the urban core and every suburban edge city [1] vs. (b) high-speed intercity rail between high-population city-pairs ~300 miles apart [2] is one of scale.

The commuter rail operates on the scale of the primary city's own metropolitan area, encouraging activity nodes around those stations that are better placed than others. The idealized role of commuter rail is to provide reliability, predictability, and throughput, so that travelers want to concentrate their trips to the same transportation modes and nodes.

Meanwhile, intercity rail must balance its need to compete with air travel [3] with its desire to serve larger towns along the line. If it opts to serve fewer intermediate stops, it can deliver a better value proposition for long-distance city-to-city travelers, assuming there's transit or car rental options on the other end, like airports have today.

But if it opts to serve more stops along the route, those towns may turn into far-flung exurbs themselves, since they offer quick access to much larger job market. If that happens, you will get sprawl anyway [4]-- the spread of low-rise development on greenfield land as a "cheaper now, don't think about later" response to increased housing demand -- but you'll get the kind of sprawl that's typical of a bedroom community, instead of the kind typical of a mixed-used edge city. This is because the rail will out-range the reach of personal cars from the commuting zone, so the economic integration of the town into the adjacent metropolitan area will be be partial and asymmetric.

In California, the decision to route the SF-LA high speed rail through the Central Valley was a sensible one, because the terrain in the Central Valley is more conducive to high speed rail than up the coast through Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, and the Valley has significantly larger metropolitan areas than the locales along the coast. Both options require multiple challenging mountain range crossings. It's the SF-LA link itself that's tenuous to justify, because there's perfectly fine airports available today to anyone who wants to hop between the two.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_city

[2] The approximate distance of Chicago-Detroit, Chicago-St Louis, Chicago-Cincinnati.

[3] Air travel is the most direct competitor of intercity rail, because both will discharge you at your destination with no car, and compared to a commuter scenario, the intended destinations of passengers will vary greatly within the broader geographical area.

[4] Sprawl spreads because cheap greenfield land exists at the momentary edge of all but the most geographically-constrained areas, many developers prefer these these cheap-to-build sites, and many people do prefer low-rise single-family homes with yards. Sprawl will always spread if housing demand outpaces supply unless you forbid it by law or ordinance, because new construction on greenfield land confers tangible benefits to those who can afford it.

People who think the US needs high-quality commuter rail much more so than fast long-distance rail have the right idea.

Long-distance intercity rail is for the incidental traveler who travels occasionally, and this traveler has many competing choices for their journey.

Meanwhile, the typical commuter rail passenger will ride day after day, both ways, and often their only alternative is an arduous commute in a car -- or moving closer to their job, where their cost of housing would be higher.

Most commuter rail systems in the US suffer from the lack of agency-owned dedicated passenger tracks, and from poor integration into the metropolitan area's cohesive transportation fabric (of which both personal cars and downtown public transit are an inseparable part).

Much success could be achieved by (1) increasing the average speed of commuter transit, (2) investing in reliability, predictability, and frequency of service, (3) investing in Park-and-Ride hubs near certain stations, (4) looking for synergy with freeways and exits, (5) promoting transit-oriented development by both developer incentives and by land purchase and direct investment. The resulting changes would create a culture of transit use for commuting, which will go on to enable the eventual connection of the rail transit networks of neighboring city-pairs.

As for California, an Altamont Pass segment to their High Speed Rail project ought to have been one of first things built. A faster 'Altamont Corridor Express' would have created a ~1-hour link between Stockton and the Bay, integrating the corridor's economy further beyond its current role as an overlong exurban commute. It would've also provided for an alternate rail routing between Sacramento and the Bay that'd be competitive with the Capitol Corridor.

After the initial push towards a 'Super ACE', Altamont lost in the planning to Pacheco Pass; this increased linearity and reduced distance in the SF-SJ-Fresno axis, but in my opinion it was the wrong move. Fresno's accession to the economic continuum of the Bay is far less likely than that of Stockton or Modesto, and the increased linearity doesn't confer a meaningful benefit. Travelers are far more likely to travel between SJ and SF than between SJ and Fresno (or any point further south), so there's little operational benefit to having both SJ and Fresno accessible from San Francisco with no transfers from the same Fresno-bound train. The choice of the Pacheco Pass route is one of the several facepalm-worthy decisions made by CAHSR or by others early on in the process, like an extremely sweeping curve on a long, expensive viaduct just outside of Fresno station [1], or the barely-realistic journey times written into legislation that drive up cost.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16172313

Though it's a buzzword now, the idea behind 'digital twins' was that you not only have a detailed and faithful model (of an item, or process, or system, or network, etc.) whose granularity is congruent with the level of granularity that interests you about the real thing, but you also have bi-directional movement of data between the 'real' thing and its model.

So you can have sensor and measurement data from the real thing be streamed to the model in (ideally) real-time, you can make decisions off of the state of the model, and have those decisions be sent back out into the real world to make a change happen.

The specific wording of digital twins originated from a report discussing innovations in manufacturing, but I find that railway systems and operations make for some of the best examples to explain the concept, because they manage a diverse set of physical assets over which they have partial direct control, and apply conceptual processes on top of them.

Here's three assorted writings [1][2][3] that explain how railways would benefit from this.

[1] https://www.anylogic.com/digital-twin-of-rail-network-for-tr...

[2] https://www.railwayage.com/analytics/how-digital-twins-suppo...

[3] https://www.railwayage.com/analytics/realizing-the-potential...

Note that the article is about innovation and performance gains in general-purpose processors slowing, and about the increasing shift onto specialized computing engines by those who seek further performance gains for specific workloads.

This was foreshadowed with the Netburst not being able break 4 GHz in 2004-2005, and CPUs having to shift to multi-core. This bought "classic" CPUs more time, but CUDA showed up in 2007 and GPUs went from strictly specialized computing engines to general-purpose (in research, if not yet in the home). CPUs have also been steadily gaining SIMD extensions.

Now GPUs are showing promise for NN workloads, but in environments where the stack is tightly controlled, NN co-processors are showing up. This is because tightly controlling the stack has the benefits of being able to optimize and harmonize software and hardware, and interop outside of the stack (and in some cases, stack longevity) is not a factor.

The article isn't truly about how more and more computing environments tightly control their stack, but that mechanism does play a part in the design choices that result.

The study cannot (and does not attempt to) distinguish whether the milk proteins found within the dental calculus of these thousands-of-years-old remains were as a result of drinking raw milk or consuming fermented milk products. Even the article admits this, but the headline's use of the word 'drink' is misleading and unfortunate.

Fermented milk products are often consumed among populations that cannot digest lactose, because they contain less lactose per weight, or occasionally contain lactase enzyme themselves.

They're a conduit to consuming the calories from milk products without the discomfort and the rapid unhygienic fluid loss that can result from the inability to digest lactose.

Big Macs don't hold up well, because the sauce goes best with a warm burger and is no longer palatable when it's been sitting on top of a cold patty. The shredded lettuce is already sad when fresh, and will inevitably get everywhere. Big Macs are not the item to buy.

Instead, their basic cheeseburgers and their double versions are far cheaper and more versatile, and provided you can peel them apart, they can be partially revitalized with some ketchup from a packet. If you skip the cheese, you will lose some flavor but greatly increase the chance that you'll be able to uncover one side of the patty to add ketchup later.

Their beef burgers with the bigger patty aren't worth buying if you're not going to eat them fresh. This is more true now that they've started cooking them from refrigerated patties, instead of frozen ones, although I don't know if that applies to airport locations also. (But if you know you'll have access to a microwave, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese microwaves the best out of all their beef items.)

But if you're going to be buying food from them knowing it will get cold, consider their chicken items. Nearly all of them will taste good and hold up better than the beef items.

Actual cuts of chicken that have been breaded and fried taste fine cold, so their premium breaded chicken sandwiches are good choice. Pair them with some barbecue sauce.

For even more flexibility, their chicken nuggets are fine cold, you don't have to eat them in one go, and they go well with the barbecue or sweet and sour sauce. In my opinion, their cheap chicken sandwiches have an unpleasant aftertaste that the similarly-constituted nuggets do not, so the nuggets are the superior choice among their cheaper chicken items.

The line "I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a capella voice", a quote from MP3 author Karlheinz Brandenburg, first appeared in the article 'Ich Bin Ein Paradigm Shifter' [1] by Hilmar Schmundt, published June 2000 in the magazine eCompany Now, a year before that magazine merged with its rival Business 2.0.

(The Wikipedia article on Tom's Diner says anachronistically that the quote appeared in Business 2.0 magazine. This has been present on the page since the very first revision [2].)

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20001003052745/http://www.ecompan...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tom%27s_Diner&old...

The yearly price to store 45 GB in Backblaze B2 is $2.10. After 12 years, your cost of storage-at-rest would total to $25.20.

Then, it would cost you $0.44 to download all 45 GB on the same day.

For $25.64 total (over 12 years), they store your data with significantly more redundancy than you when you put one copy of your dataset on one hard drive.

I chose B2 in this example because they're cheaper than blob storage from the main clouds, you're unlikely to get banned for an unrelated reason (cf. Google), and their pricing model is simple to understand.

Assuming ~120 MiB per compressed CD album, and ignoring the futzing about SI and Binary units, you can store at least 8 CDs worth of ~192 kbps music (~1 GB) in B2 for $0.005/month, and since the first 10 GB/month is free, your first 80 albums are stored for free. Then, each additional group of 8 albums is another $0.06/year.

If you're still unconvinced, and prefer the particular characteristics of control, convenience, and no direct monetary opex costs that personal self-managed storage affords, then consider that for an extra $25.64 over 12 years ($2.10 for storage-at-rest, yearly), you can have another copy of your 45 GB in the cloud, which significantly reduces the likelihood that your dataset is damaged.

You can even think of it as insurance, but with the extremely desirable property that you get your actual data back, and not just some other kind of compensation.