A laboratory accident with a laser more than 30 years ago served as the unlikely first step in the development of an entire industry that has helped more than 30 million people overcome vision problems.
DR DOS was a great product. It was superior to other DOS versions in many ways, and it is certainly possible that it could have been more successful were it not for Microsoft Windows having been so wildly successful. Starting with Windows 95, the majority of computer users simply didn’t much care about which DOS loaded Windows so long as it worked. There’s quite a bit of lore regarding legal battles and copyrights surrounding CP/M and DOS involving Microsoft and Digital Research. This has been covered in previous articles to some extent, but I am not really certain how much would have changed had Microsoft and Digital Research got on. Gates and Kildall had been quite friendly at one point, and we know that the two mutually chose not to work together due to differences in business practices and beliefs. Kildall chose to be quite a bit more friendly and less competitive while Gates very much chose to be competitive and at times a bit ruthless. Additionally, Kildall sold DRI rather than continue the fight, and DRI had never really attempted to combine DR DOS with GEM as a cohesive product to fight Windows before Windows became the ultimate ruler of the OS market following Windows 3.1’s release. Still, it was an absolutely brilliant product and part of me will always feel that it ought to have won.
The Architecture Behind A One-Person Tech Startup
Toyota has since developed a new generation of smaller engines with a unique design using shorter pistons that promises higher fuel efficiency when used alongside batteries in hybrid vehicles. The engines can run on diesel and petrol as well as carbon-neutral fuels such as hydrogen or so-called e-fuel. The world’s largest carmaker by sales is betting that the continued investment in the profitable fuel-based technology will pay off at a time when consumers are choosing hybrids rather than fully electric vehicles due to concerns about cost and driving range. But industry executives and analysts remain divided on whether the Japanese group is underestimating the scale of the electric transition that is increasingly being led by its Chinese rivals and whether its bullish bet on engines could become costly in the long run.
A century after George Mallory’s disappearance on Everest, why do his words, “Because it’s there,” remain an indelible explanation for the human obsession with high places?
Besides this being wrong – it’s not a story of which country is fast tracking aircraft. This isn’t how certifying safe commercial aircraft works or should ever work.
Aggressive refinancings that rearrange collateral packages have become the norm in the syndicated bank loan market used to finance mega leveraged buyouts.
Censorship and the Connecticut bar.
At its European Group Meeting in Bristol, U.K., Epic leaders and customers showcased new AI products and collaboration. In May, two hospitals in the Netherlands became among the first to deploy the AI-enabled Patient Summaries technology, which distills years’ worth of clinical notes into a short summary for clinician review.
The U.S.-led campaign against Iran-backed Houthi rebels has turned into the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II. That’s what its leaders and experts tell The Associated Press, whose journalists visited U.S. ships off Yemen in recent days.
The retired USN admiral James Stavridis sums it up nicely for Boot: “We are at an absolute pivot point in maritime warfare,” he told me in an email. “Big surface ships are highly at risk to air, surface, and sub-surface drones. The sooner great-power navies like that of the United States understand that, the more likely they are to survive in major combat in this turbulent 21st century. Like the battleship row destroyed at Pearl Harbor, carriers are at the twilight of their days. It is absolutely time to move the rheostat of procurement away from manned warships and toward more numerous and far less expensive unmanned vessels.”
Call center agents who have to deal with angry or perplexed customers all day tend to have through-the-roof stress levels and a high turnover rate as a result. About 53% of U.S. contact center agents who describe their stress level at work as high say they will probably leave their organization within the next six months, according to CMP Research’s 2023-2024 Customer Contact Executive Benchmarking Report. Some think this is a problem artificial intelligence can fix. A well-designed algorithm could detect the signs that a call center rep is losing it and do something about it, such as send the rep a relaxing video montage of photos of their family set to music.
Nine years ago, sitting in a hotel room in Budapest, my girlfriend of just a couple weeks found out she was pregnant.
“They sued him previously, and I think they are disappointed with the outcome of that settlement and how he has responded to it … They are putting in the extra work to see if they can get a stronger case here.”
Canvassers from all major political parties have been warned about how careful they must be while knocking on doors. One campaign manager went as far as warning staff that they were being recorded at all times, in order to avoid the type of controversy that enveloped a Tory caught removing opposition leaflets from a home in May.
Happy 6 year anniversary to Greta Thunberg saying we’d all be dead in 5 years.
Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin joined us at The Recombobulation Area. We sat down for a roughly 35-minute interview, discussing a range of topics. In case you missed it, I wrote a little bit about the interview here.
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) It’s been about nine years since Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records about a CIA asset and FBI informant who helped fund the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as for records about a neo-Nazi bank-robbery gang also involved in the attack.
Sam Loyd published The Patch Quilt Puzzle. A square quilt made of 169 square patches of the same size is to be divided into the smallest number of square pieces by cutting along lattice lines. The answer, which is unique
Boeing Sent Two Astronauts Into Space. Now It Needs to Get Them Home.
In a recent teardown of the Apple iPad Pro 11-inch, TechInsights revealed details of Apple’s latest silicon: the Apple M4 SoC, codenamed TMRV93, built on TSMC’s advanced N3E process. This surprise release demonstrates Apple’s agility in adopting cutting-edge semiconductor technologies ahead of schedule.
Pilot project shows Navy can move terabytes of data daily from the U.S.S Abraham Lincoln to the cloud
A century later, the tribe and Burlington Northern Railroad Company reached an agreement allowing one eastbound and one westbound oil train to roll through the reservation daily. Under that 1990 agreement, Burlington Northern also paid the Swinomish Tribe $125,000 as “payment in full for all rent, damages, and compensation of any sort, due for past occupancy of the right-of-way from date of construction in 1889 until January 1, 1989.”
The Deadly Mining Complex Powering the EV Revolution
Program and optimize a drone to automate a farm and watch it do the work for you. Collect resources to unlock better technology and become the most efficient farmer in the world. Improve your problem solving and coding skills.
What are some iconic comments on HN?
Replacing two 50-car trains with a single 100-car train increases the odds of derailment by 11 percent, according to a new risk analysis
Later in the article, a clue emerges: “Today, about 85% to 95% of customer calls that First Horizon fields are handled in a self-service manner within the interactive voice response,” according to one of the bank’s executives. Aha! This tells us that however many years ago, the management at First Horizon Bank was sold on an another automation technology, interactive voice response (IVR), that is now used to field the vast majority of its incoming calls. So, like most of its peers, First Horizon Bank was able to replace many of its call center workers with an IVR system, or to allows its call volume to balloon without hiring more of them, until most calls were not being answered by people at all, but IVR. The problem is, everybody absolutely hates IVR.
Your news tells you Biden is cognitively fine. We all see he isn’t.
How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism? The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.
WashingtonTimes: Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.
A big part of the problem is the piling on to any government program a host of progressive wish-list items including:
Using a Trump-era authority, the US Commerce Department has banned the sale of Kaspersky’s antivirus tools to new customers in the US, citing alleged threats to national security.
These estimates reflect the combination of five kinds of support: nationally approved buyer rebates, exemption from the 10% sales tax, government funding for infrastructure (primarily charging poles), R&D programs for EV makers, and government procurement of EVs. The buyer’s rebate and sales tax exemption have accounted for the vast majority of support for the industry (see Figure 2). That said, because of the high cost and desire to winnow the field of producers, the central government reduced the buyer’s rebate in 2022 and eliminated it beginning in 2023.
After his testimony before the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee around Thanksgiving of 1934, the New York Times ran a front-page story with a two-column headline: “Gen. Butler Bares ‘Fascist Plot’ To Seize Government by Force.” But most of the article was full of denials and outright ridicule from some of the bigwigs that he’d implicated, while the meat of Smedley’s charges got buried on an inside page. Time magazine followed up with a piece headlined “Plot without Plotters,” complete with a cartoon of Butler riding a white horse and asking veterans to follow him. “No military officer of the United States since the late tempestuous George Custer has succeeded in publicly floundering in so much hot water as Smedley Darlington Butler,” the article said. Doesn’t seem like the big media have changed their spots much over the last eighty years, does it?
The Post Office has apologised after it published the names and addresses of 555 postmasters it pursued during the Horizon scandal. The company confirmed personal details had been shared in a document on its website and said it had referred itself to data watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Reid Hoffman overlooked several major issues under the Biden administration, including the worst inflation in 40 years, the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the War in the Red Sea, and the entry of 10 million illegal immigrants into the country…
SVG, short for “scalable vector graphics” is a format for, well, scalable vector graphics. In this article I summarize my opinion of the format, what its problems are and suggest what could be done to improve things.
On April 3, 1897, a letter was put forth to the Kunstlerhaus announcing the formation of a new group with Klimt as president and Rudolf von Alt as honorary president. Of a total of 40 members on the list, 23 were members of the Kuntslerhaus, including Klimt, Joseph Olbrich and Koloman Moser. The group had in fact intended to stay in the Kunstlerhaus, but on May 22nd the board of directors put forth a motion of censure against the new group during their assembly forcing Klimt and the group to leave the meeting in silence. Two days later, an official letter of resignation was sent to the Kunstlerhaus announcing the resignation of twelve member artists including Stor, Olbrich, Moser, Carl Moll, and Felician von Myrbach. More resignations followed over the course of the next two years, including Hoffmann, Kurzweil and ending with Otto Wagner on October 11, 1899.
The advantage now enjoyed by small aerial drones on battlefields including in Ukraine is but “a moment in history,” French Army Chief of Staff Gen. Pierre Schill said at the Eurosatory defense show in Paris. While anti-drone systems are lagging and “leave the sky open to things that are cobbled together but which are extremely fragile,” countermeasures are being developed, Schill told reporters during a tour of the French Army stand at the show June 19. Already today, 75% of drones on the battlefield in Ukraine are lost to electronic warfare, the general said.
Chomsky continued, “Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to i all the time as an unprovoked invasion. By now, censorship in the United States has reached such a level beyond anything in my lifetime. Such a level that you are not permitted to read the Russian position.
Literally. Americans are not allowed to know what the Russians are saying. Except, selected things. So, if Putin makes a speech to Russians with all kinds of outlandish claims about Peter the Great and so on, then, you see it on the front pages. If the Russians make an offer for a negotiation, you can’t find it. That’s suppressed. You’re not allowed to know what they are saying. I have never seen a level of censorship like this.”
In this essay, I will talk about my experience riding Waymos, predict the impacts that self-driving vehicles will have on our society, sketch out Waymo’s unit economics and discuss its competitive positioning vis-a-vis Uber and others, and finally argue that Waymos will totally overhaul how we think of public transit — offering a rare technological “leapfrog” opportunity to urban America.