On the topic of accessibility, the contrast of the text in the "up to date" bubbles is very low. I can barely see the yellow one, let alone read it without significant eye strain.
Firefox's dev tools have an Accessibility tab where you can see warnings about low contrast and simulate different forms of color blindness.
There are always creative ways to present data. Dismissing the needs of a minority of people just because we don't share their visual impairment is lazy, and we can do better.
Government websites are often particular bad this way. Nobody cares who the head of the agency is or wants to read their newest blog post. Most people don’t need to know that the new records department opened in Des Moines. They need to know what programs they qualify for and how to get benefits.
My college went all-in on ATM-over-fiber and wired all the dorm rooms with it. It was a PITA. Of course no computers came with ATM support and the cards cost $400+ each so the school had hundreds of cards that they would “lease” them out to students each year. There would be a huge “install depot” at the start of the year where students brought in their (desktop) computers and volunteers would open them up, install the cards, install drivers and configure them for our network.
For Linux heads, it was doubly annoying, as ATM was not directly supported in the kernel. You had to download a separate patch to compile the necessary modules, then install and run three separate system daemons, all with the correct arguments for our network, just to get a working network device. And of course you had to download all the necessary packages with another computer, since you couldn’t get online yet. This was the early 2000s, so WiFi was not really common yet.
Even once you got online, one of the admins would randomly crash every so often and you’d have to restart to get back online. It was such a pain.
What year was that? I could see a college/university network department dominated by old school telecom guys deciding to use ATM to connect buildings, but it's kind of insane to think anyone at any point in time thought it was reasonable to push to individual endpoints
Yep. This was in the mid-nineties. The fiber was already present from the initial effort to wire the campus starting in 1998 [0]. The move to ATM happened later and was in used for 6-7 years before they went to gigabit ethernet [1] (check the comments for more info on the ATM years).
You can read the article and see it's not a tech debt trade off but someone not doing a back of the envelope guesstimate about how much DyanmoDB would cost to run their payments system on it.
That's part of what makes it impressive. "Our country is so advanced and powerful that we can make a giant tower like this just for a glorified art show"
I was not familiar with this term before, had to look it up.
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