Seriously - how many "large" stores can you just call up and actually not have to wait on hold to talk to someone who is helpful, kind, and knowledgeable?
Mcmaster is great at what they do
Heck, forget the phone, I had an extended job once across the street from the New Jersey McMaster warehouse (Robbinsville Twnship) and you can go in there to get the same treatment. We spent A LOT of money on same day parts.
Shipping is a Hard Problem, especially when dealing with large volume (bigger than UPS, usually strapped to a pallet) objects, and/or very dense objects (cartons of metal nuts and bolts). You still need to call your freight person and get a quote directly from the carrier over the phone. Low density LTL (less than truckload) is a pretty known quantity and delivering to a known business (like Walmart warehouses) with a loading dock is easy. Delivering two pallet loads of high density metal to a single story engineering office in an office park with no facilities to service an 18-wheeler (let alone allow one to enter/maneuver) is another thing entirely.
I know.. I remember lusting over the single T1 we had at work (this was circa 1999 or so, shared between a hundred employees or so) compared to the mere 56k I had at home... 1.5 whole megabits...
I remember chatting with an online friend in the USA using msn messenger who had a T1 line. It seemed so imaginary, 1.5mbs. The 56kb modem that I had averaged around 13kbs due to living out in the middle of nowhere.
Years later (mid 00s) I still had the same connection but all my friends were on 256kbs-2mbs adsl but with ridiculous datacaps. I was so envious of people in the states that had similar connection speeds but could download as much as they wanted like it was some kind of American buffet.
Moving to uni saw me break into the 2 figure mbs club but the datacaps were still there.
Then the NZ govt decided to do something abou it, they "unbundled the local loop" and the market became more competitive, no more 20gb down+up for 60USD a month.
Then realising the internet was the backbone of a strong e-conomy, they started building out a nationwide fibre network.
For around 120USD, you can now get business tier fibre up to 8gbs in your home (or if you don't want the business SLA you can just get the consumer version at the same speed, slightly cheaper).
I hear stories of how bad the internet is in Australia and how far the USA have fallen, to the point a lot of people still can't even get fibre and I feel sad they're not the inspirational places that I imagined as a kid.
I remember as a young kid (11ish) I lived in Rochester, NY, which was one of the first areas to get cable modems. I pleaded the case to my parents and we cancelled the extra phone line we used for the modem and payed the extra $20 towards a cable modem.
This was one of the few moments in my life that felt like ‘the future’ was arriving (the other around this time was my voodoo2 gpu running unreal). A year or so later we moved to Columbus which didn’t have high speed available yet.
What’s the quote, the future is already here it’s just not evenly distributed?
Incidentally I now live in Toledo and my internet is probably about the same speed as it was 25+ years ago… sigh
Fellow Kiwi here, living in Austin, TX. Some crew just went up all the streets in our neighborhood and left a GFBR box buried in our front yard. Things are looking up!
Maybe I’ve got the terminology wrong, so please correct me, I thought unbundling meant you wouldn’t have things like “I can only get Comcast in my neighborhood / building”
1. Cable TV was never unbundled, just telephone/DSL
2. In 2003 FCC ended unbundling of DSL (though unbundling had already had a lot of teeth removed by various court cases and FCC interpretations of the law).
I'm in (roughly) downtown Chicago. My building had no wired Internet when I moved in here last year (!). I called Comcast and they wanted $71,000 to install, and $800/month minimum to wire me up, despite all my neighbors already using them.
I called AT&T. Yes, they can have me hooked up with DSL tomorrow. At 1.5Mbps. O_o
Would it be from a different company outside the major players? I spent weeks trying to find anyone who could wire this building and gave up. I'm on 5G now which is actually 100X more useable than I expected.
My first programming job while in college (circa '98 or so) was at a small custom software dev shop, and they had an ISDN line. I would bring in my personal desktop to play quake online and download updates.
My next job was at a much bigger company who happened to have a data center in my home town. They had something like 70-100 T1s (T3?) coming into the building. Keep in mind they were used for both the phone system and data. I remember the older network people talking about the PITA it was get them all put down and how the local phone company said whatever was there was maxed. We were also spread across 2 buildings separated by a parking lot with a fiber connection between the buildings. The stuff I got to play with was pretty cool. Even though the company had a big parent, the DC was in a smallish town and mostly a free for all for the tech hires. My badge let me into anything. No way would that be allowed today.
I was also a beta tester when Comcast first rolled out cable internet in my town - that changed everything.
The lust for more speed was real (before that it was more RAM lol). Now I have 1gb u/d fiber and never think about link speed.
The highlight of my K-12 sysadmin stint was replacing an $800/mo. T1 with a point to point wireless solution which gave the remote site nearly the same speed as on-site.
Think about that for a second. 45Mbps. It sounded so huge. Even your low tier 25 dollar a month cable modem packages can outdo that. (Now they're nowhere near as stable, and they're definitely not synchronous) But in this age of Gigabit being pretty common, it's fun to remember a time when that was so far out of our reach. Some kid on his dorm room ethernet sharing his entire collection... and me on my brand new ADSL modem downloading song by song, minute by minute.
In fact my home was one of the first home in France to get a DSL connection. The modem could do 8mbit, but the phone company capped it at 500kbit. The problem is that though the connection from the exchange to the home was DSL, the infrastructure behind was the same infrastructure they used for 56k connections. So you ended up with a DSL connection that was about the same speed than a 56k modem...
And now I am complaining about having only 100mbit upload.
Then you might be interested to watch this guy who bought an electromechanical telephone exchange. And then expanded it more and more as he obtained and restored more parts. There are many more videos on this subject on both this channels.
Also check out the Connections Museum, either on YouTube[1] or in person in Seattle if you can! Lots of cool old lost-art telephone hardware and a few volunteers trying to keep it running. Another interesting option is C*NET[2], a VoIP telephone network for connecting collector-owned obsolete telephone hardware together.
Have you seen https://www.descript.com/ it transcribes video and allows you to edit the transcript. Those edits to the transcript are reflected in the video. You can even train it to voices if you have enough content.
The approach deno is taking is very interesting where all packages are sandboxed. I'd be interested to hear the author's thoughts on Deno's approach as a mitigation for supply chain attacks. I understand it won't stop all attacks but it would make them significantly harder.
ref: https://medium.com/deno-the-complete-reference/sandboxing-in...
This is the way. Unfortunately languages like Python will for implementation complexity/backward compatibility reasons never support something like this natively (unless with workarounds/hacks like compiling it to WebAssembly). It's time to phase out languages that don't. The only Python variants that made a foray into this are PyPy[0] and Monte[1]. It's important to make this sandboxing have only a small overhead, and make it work recursively, so external libraries can import partially untrusted external libraries themselves, thus hollowing out the attack surface at every node of the dependency tree.
That's something that WebAssembly can't do well either, even if its boundary is secure. Creating a new sandbox means having to start a new instance "from the outside", the virtual machine doesn't have this capability built in.
This is the access security problem, there is another that almost all programming languages and virtual machines haven't even tried to solve, especially in a platform independent way: resource security. If an untrusted program cannot access anything but its own memory, but can still go in an infinite loop or allocate all memory and bring the whole system to a halt, the security architecture isn't as complete as it could (should) be.
Especially combined with process serialization[2], a system that implemented both of these security aspects correctly would make very interesting programs possible.
> “The approach deno is taking is very interesting where all packages are sandboxed.”
Can anyone clarify this?
My understanding is that packages are not sandboxed, but your entire Deno process is. Meaning that if one part of my app requires full read/write access then any package included in my app also gets it. Is that correct?
Such sandboxing is a secure default, and can help to limit the scope of a supply chain attack, sure, but this doesn’t make packages inherently more secure.
Per-package sandboxing would be cool, although I’m not sure how that would work.
> My understanding is that packages are not sandboxed, but your entire Deno process is. Meaning that if one part of my app requires full read/write access then any package included in my app also gets it. Is that correct?
Yes. There has been a discussion on per dependency permissions several times but the conclusions is that it would be difficult to implement and get right semantically. See https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/171
Yeah I'm fully expecting it to be something like a project management app. There are tons of ideas which you think are unique, but many, many others have them as well, because they run into all the same problems as you in their day to day life.
I remember he at some point had a landing page for a browser that would show you a web page in multiple resolutions, all at once, with hot reload. Not sure if this is the application, he might have had another one.
