niftich

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.

This is a good article about the weaknesses of the trust models of navigation on the web. The author uses a password manager that also fulfills the role of a personal 'have I seen this site before?' database, which helps them associate a URL to its conceptual entity, in their quest to determine if the site they visited was the site they intended to visit.

In this exact form, this is a feature that's absent from mainstream browsers today. Because browsers do not have this, people instead turn to all sorts of other signals to judge the site's identity, but each one of those signals is designed for another purpose, and ought to not to be used directly by the user to make such determination. But no other signals are available, so they get used nonetheless.

Some people look at the URL before clicking it, or the URL bar in the browser after they've already navigated to the site, and try to judge from the URL whether the site belongs to the entity they intended to visit. This is fallible for a bunch of reasons, including: (1) people often read visually instead of comparing codepoint-by-codepoint, so reading errors or homoglyph attacks are possible, and browsers can only meaningfully mitigate against the latter; (2) very few people keep a computerized allow-list, so they check against expectations in their head; and (3) some organizations will make use of domain names that greatly differ from their own name, which works contrary to the instinct of a URL-judging user who consider themselves 'cautious', and it's difficult to stay aware of all this.

Some people look at the TLS certificate, and try to judge from the information displayed by the browser about the cert whether the site belongs to the entity they intended to visit. This is fallible for a bunch of reasons, including (1) DV certs only prove that someone (i.e. anyone) had control of the domain at the time near the cert's issuance, so its value as a trust signal to the user ought to be zero and immediately reduce to the prior case of mentally validating the URL by its character content; (2) EV certs validate against a legal entity in some jurisdiction, but as the 'stripe.ian.sh' stunt has demonstrated, jurisdiction-by-juristiction registries of legal entities are a tool for a different use-case and were never intended to collectively ensure globally unique Organization names; and (3) in their rush to ensure widespread TLS deployment on all sites, and their involvement with efforts to bring short-lived cost-free DV certs to everyone, browser-makers began de-emphasizing the UI distinctions between DV certs and EV certs some time before the true shortcomings of EV as a user-facing trust signal were widely demonstrated.

Some people look for the visual design of the website. This is trivial to fake.

Some people will rely on browser-resident bookmarks, browser history, or 'top sites' tiles to navigate to common sites they've visited before (or to sites the browser-maker pre-loaded into the listing). This is a great way to preserve the trust chain and reduce the likelihood that the user arrives at an unintended site by mistake. But these features do not directly address the case of a person navigating to a URL they were linked or provided from an arbitrary source, such as the example raised in the article.

Building blocks exist today that could be used by publishers and browser-makers to aid users in judging URLs. Some of these will require past UX decisions to be undone.

For example, top sites could become their own Root Certificate Authorities [1] and be listed in browser trust stores; these companies would be expected to issue certs for sites associated to themselves. This would eventually reshape the cert landscape so that a parent-child relationship between issuer and subject could be meaningfully distinguished from a 'provider and customer' relationship. Companies that provide services to others, such as payment processors, could also become root CAs and sign for their customers. These changes, and a browser UX that once again shows the cert issuer, would go a long way towards reducing the likelihood that users are fooled by sites trying to impersonate top sites.

If this were to come to pass, other CAs would be expected to pivot to minting certs that play the role of a trustmark, by conferring a degree of ongoing assurance that's useful to the user (which, in fairness, was the original point behind EV certs). They would do this by establishing strong brands around their trustmark, issue certs for a short lifetime, and monitor the site on an ongoing basis to see if it's still deserving of their trustmark. This would result in a business model similar to those of EV certs, but a trust model that's based on the user's trust in the CA's exercise of good judgment befitting their brand.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13495262

AVIF is a format that puts an AV1 bitstream into a HEIF container. You're thinking about what AOM said about AV1 [6], not AVIF; they should not (and in fact do not) make that claim for AVIF -- which builds on HEIF that isn't their work -- though you ought to judge the situation for yourself [7].

I am not a lawyer, and I realize there's a fine line between genuine concern and spreading FUD, but in the spring of 2019 I looked into the patent situation around the HEIF container itself [1] -- the container upon which AVIF builds -- and skimmed through the 5 US patents I found, which cover some techniques that can be used in the format. Most of them can probably be avoided for the purposes of an AVIF file, but patent US20160232939A1 [2] in my reading seems to be about in-container signalling to express relationships between a "static media item" and "one or more entities" that together "form a group", and "indicating, in the file, a grouping type for the group". The patent appears to be written in a way to allow this definition to encompass, say, a thumbnail and a bunch of frames thereafter, or, say a master image and a set of pictures derived from it, or alternate camera angles of the same thing. Some of these techniques sound like stuff we've seen before, but as is common in patents, the precise wording of claims is often key, and this is where patent lawyers come in.

A thorough look of the AVIF specification [3] and the patents registered with the MPEG LA about this format [1] is likely wise before any widespread deployment that makes use of advanced features of the HEIF container; using it to hold exactly 1 'one-layer' still-image is probably fine.

Additionally, in my reading [5], the HEIF reference software released by Nokia [4] includes a patent grant for non-commercial evaluation, testing and academic research only.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19874321 [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160232939A1/ [3] https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/ [4] https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19874368 [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=AV1&oldid=9976507... [7] https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/av1-avif/issues/2

Nucor steel mills in the US are set up to melt scrap with electric arc furnaces. A varying amount of semi-processed iron (pig iron or direct reduced iron) is added to a batch; they get this iron by shipment instead of producing it on site.

As of time of writing they have one facility in the US that makes direct reduced iron from iron ore and natgas; this plant is in Louisiana at (30.08, -90.86).

AIR was wildly popular for making games and cross-platform applications around 2010. These could even be submitted to mobile apps stores, even for iOS.

But AIR produces packaged applications you need to install, and not the embedded-in-a-webpage experience that Flash was.

You can blame the lack of uptake of MPEG-2 in the personal computing space on the license terms set by the MPEG LA, which charged patent licensees an amount based on the number of encoders and/or decoders they wanted to ship [2], and because DCT codecs were too slow to decode on CPUs until the mid-1990s. There were competitive proprietary codecs that could be licensed more favorably and performed better. These got built into codec-agile platform media stacks like QuickTime, Video for Windows, and later, Real and Flash, and these stacks would gain support for newer codecs as the technology progressed.

It wasn't until 1999 with MPEG-4 that the licensing situation made MPEG codecs an option for desktops again, by which point other proprietary DCT codecs were widely deployed. Both Microsoft and Real dabbled with tech that came out MPEG-4, but it wasn't until that H.264 became decodable by mainstream computers that everyone finally settled down around an MPEG codec. Then, Google bought On2. (But that's a long story for a different thread [1].)

Here's some more detail for this thread:

H.261 pre-dates MPEG-1 by a bit. H.261 was compiled by the ITU-T chiefly to support video telephony, because the predecessor codec H.120 was conceptually neat, but practically garbage. H.261's design choices and JPEG's design choices factored heavily into MPEG-1 Video, and while the MPEG-1 standard also delivered a program stream and 3 techniques of audio compression, it was hardly broadcast-ready: it was missing a transport stream for unreliable media, and it was missing support for interlaced video. These deficiencies were rectified by MPEG-2 in 1996.

In the early 1990s, DCT-based video like MPEG-1 was too slow on contemporary mainstream desktop hardware, so people developed vector quantization codecs that would allow realtime playback: Cinepak, Indeo, MS Video 1, Smacker, and TrueMotion S. Some of these saw a lot of use in video games, and some were picked up by OS and platform-based stacks for multimedia, like QuickTime, Video for Windows, and then later, Real and Flash. Those platform stacks were designed with codec agility so that more advanced codecs could be switched in as developments came along. But correspondingly, good candidate codec needed to have a favorable IP situation for widespread deployment, so codecs were often homegrown from skimming contemporary sources (including standards), or licensed from smaller companies instead of the alternative: paying the MPEG LA for a license per decoder deployment, and then still having to procure decoder software.

Later, processors became more powerful and you could decode DCT in real time. In 1996, H.263 came out as an improvement over MPEG-2/H.262 at low bitrates. Other codecs followed suit and we ended up with RealVideo, Sorenson Spark in Flash Video, and VP3. The importance of OS-delivered or runtime-delivered media stacks rose; Real, QuickTime, Video for Windows, and Flash. These platforms would go on to dictate the containers, the video codecs, and audio codecs that were supported, so they had a dominating influence on multimedia on personal computers for the next decade.

MPEG-4 came out in 1999, which brought both MPEG-4 Part 2 (-> SP, ASP, DivX, Xvid) and H.264/AVC. The former was a bit of an improvement over H.263, while the latter had great potential but mainstream processors were too slow once again. Microsoft cribbed MPEG-4 Part 2 to make a version of a Windows Media Video codec, RealVideo did the same, and DivX and later Xvid rose to prominence in the early 2000s. The latter two gained notoriety for being used for DVD rips and filesharing; one could convincingly compress a 480p main title from a DVD in MPEG-4 Part 2 to ~700-1000 MiB, 700 MiB would fit on a CD.

Right around this time, Microsoft was showing off their latest WMV to prove you can have HD movies on a DVD. But content owners wanted bigger disks with better DRM, in part to make filesharing more of a hassle, and were leaning towards H.264 as the codec, so Microsoft got their latest VMV standardized as VC-1, and based their marketing on easier decoding, interlacing support, and a favorable patent situation. They got their VC-1 written into the HD-DVD and Blu-ray standards alongside H.264 and the aging MPEG-2. But it turned out there are patents on VC-1 after all and a patent pool was set up by the MPEG LA just the same; and then hardware finally caught up to decode H.264, so everyone settled on an MPEG codec at last. Briefly.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15845114 [2] https://www.mpegla.com/programs/mpeg-2/license-agreement/

Hydrogen allows energy to be stored and moved in bulk, in physical space, and at the point of final consumption it will not produce carbon emissions. These are desirable properties for a country that imports most of its energy from far away, and for a producer that's awash in energy but has limited options in exporting it out.

In the short term, this also greenwashes Japan's energy situation at a glance, by shifting more of the emissions to Australia away from Japan compared to simply shipping solid coal around. It also keeps Australia's fossil fuel extraction sector going. Critics of hydrogen are right to point out that some of the most vocal proponents of hydrogen are fossil fuel producers, and that an overwhelming majority of today's hydrogen is produced from fossil carbon fuels.

In the long term, those who built out hydrogen infrastructure will be at an advantage if hydrogen production from electricity ever becomes economical, for two reasons:

First, if electricity is abundant, electricity will consequently capture a larger share of total energy consumption, leaving only those uses where electricity is impractical (e.g. airplanes, hypermobile vehicles, off-the-grid storage, long-distance transfer, open flames). Hydrogen presents a useful answer to many of the applications where electricity won't work well.

Second, momentary surplus electricity should be consumed in an electricity storage mechanism from which a portion of the input can be recovered, but most other electricity storage mechanisms are stationary installations that can only time-shift, but not space-shift. Hydrogen storage can be used to time-shift like any other, or space-shift to move it out of the source grid entirely.

Okay, sure, but Costco's real strength isn't people's abstract trust in the quality of the Kirkland brand, but the fact that there's (1) heavy curation, leaving very little selection, which limits consumer indecision and raises the stakes for suppliers; and (2) an extremely accommodating return policy, so you can truly rest assured that you're made whole.

Lots of other stores have a money-back guarantee on their private label stuff, but are you really going to return a bag of $2 chips to a grocery store? But you've probably returned some big-price item to Costco before, so you likely have experience with the process. And when your purchase is closer to fifteen bucks instead of $2, you're a lot more likely to want the satisfaction guarantee. Costco gives you that, and you know in your heart that you're likely to actually use it if the item really doesn't work for you.

As for curation and selection, there's no more than two choices at Costco for every product category. Instead of buyers checking every shelf and variety and sizing of 6 different brands of the same thing before they buy, they make only two binary choices: Do I need this? Do I want the cheaper one?

Conversely, this means that your manufacturer's coupons, your rotating sales, your TV spots are all practically useless for tipping this market segment your way. As a producer, only way in to this near-captive market is to already be the leader, or to agree to make the Kirkland. Wouldn't you rather try than to be shut out?

The traffic in the Greater Bay Area is so bad, the effect of chokepoints so profound, and the geographic concentration of jobs is so strong, that the Park-and-Ride model actually works there, and isn't just wishful thinking. This means that the exact placement of stations in the exurbs is much less relevant.

The viability of P+R makes the Benicia station worthwhile to pursue, despite the challenging site. It's clear that transit-oriented development won't happen there, but in terms of transportation geography, it's a chokepoint at the Solano side of one of the few crossings of the Strait.

The newly-opened Travis station is as close to the base as they could've cheaply made it, being completely greenfield and not clashing with any existing land use. If the base really wanted to, they could arrange a traffic-avoiding shuttle between the station and the base, through a new, dedicated northwest gate. But it's worth remembering that any threat Travis makes about encroachment is likely tough talk to keep the neighboring towns from getting too clever, because Travis encroaches just as well on itself: half of the base is housing, there's elementary schools...

I admire the author's passion: I'm the same way, poring over GIS and aerial photos, reading draft plans, EIS documents, and public comments. But the author perhaps overestimates the county's appetite for well-placed rail stations next to which a higher density of construction becomes worthwhile. Just look at the Suisun-Fairfield station, which is nearly as well-placed as the one in Davis. If a midrange suburban hotel, a two-story office building, some offramps, and some underutilized public space the most the two cities can offer for this key gateway, what hope is there for a site where Vacaville's sprawl gives way to farms on its eastern edge?

The web has evolved because:

(1) some operators only care about a handful of the URLs under their domain;

(2) hardly anyone uses link relations, so most links are devoid of semantic metadata and are essentially context-free, requiring a human to read the page and try to guess the purpose of the link;

(3) so many 'resources' are now entire applications, and the operators of these applications sometimes find it undesirable to encode application state into the URI, so for these you can only get to the entry point -- everything else is ephemeral state inside the browser's script context.

But I disagree with the statement that "the reason for the eventual demise of the URL will simply be the fact that the concept of 'resource' will just not be sufficient enough to describe every future class of application or abstract behavior that the web will enable."

URIs are a sufficient abstraction to accomodate any future use-case. It's a string where the part before the first colon tells you how to interpret the rest of it. It'd be hard to get more generic, yet more expressive.

The demise of URLs, if it ever comes to pass, will be due to politics or fashion: e.g. browser vendors not implementing support for certain schemes, lack of interoperability around length limits, concerns about readability and gleanability, and vertical integration around content discovery.

URN namespace registrations are maintained by IANA [1].

One well-known example is the ISBN namespace [2], where the namespace-specific string is an ISBN [3].

The term 'URI' emerged as somewhat of an abstraction over URLs and URNs [4]. People were also catching onto the fact that URNs are conceptually useful, but you can't click on them in a mainstream browser, making its out-of-the-box usability poor.

DOI is an example of a newer scheme that considered these factors extensively [5] and ultimately chose locatable URIs (=URLs) as their identifiers.

[1] https://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces/urn-namespac... [2] https://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-formal/isbn [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Nu... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier#Hi... [5] https://www.doi.org/factsheets/DOIIdentifierSpecs.html