In the early 2020s, I was driving at night in rural America on a daily basis in a nineties car with pre-LED yellow lights. There were plenty of animals in the road, and I never felt they were hard to see or stop for, even with no street lights.
I really don't know what everyone's talking about when they swear they need all this extra light.
What I will say is with newer cars where the center console had an LCD screen and far more lighting, it did feel genuinely dangerous to drive through these same areas. Any real solution to this should start with all this being adjustable (I assume it actually is in most models?), or even far dimmer in its stock state with your lights on.
I had a cat for a while that seemed surprisingly capable when he was motivated. The most interesting thing I saw him pull off was pushing a heavy bag of cat food off the top of a refrigerator to split it open.
Occasionally, he'd demonstrate the ability to plan too. When he started to get territorial and start fights with neighborhood cats, we started keeping him inside. Naturally, this didn't sit right with him. After watching someone enter the house every day in the evening, eventually, he would perch next to the door in the evening waiting to bolt out the moment the door opened.
Uh, no. As someone that's worked on these switches (and transport gear associated with them), you can still go from one end of the United States to the other without hitting a packet switch. There's still thousands of them out there.
I'm not sure if you can get native DSx/SONET backhaul in Canada from one end of the country to the next, but I know it's a similar situation there with end offices. Bell also operates a pretty extensive network of DMS-250s, so a lot of telecommunications traffic hits circuit switches regardless of its destination.
The one thing I'll say here is age of the language really is and always has been a superficial argument; it's only six years apart from Python, and it's far less controversial of a language choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python .
Either way, it's hard not to draw parallels between all the drama in US politics and the arguments about language choice sometimes; it feels like both sides lack respect for the other, and it makes things unnecessarily tense.
Circuit switched class five offices are still very plentiful though, and DS3-based transit networks are still nationwide. So if you want it, you can absolutely still experience phone networks without voip.
My understanding is there's issues around POWER10 that stopped it from being adopted: https://www.talospace.com/2021/09/its-not-just-omi-thats-tro... . For me personally, having worked enough with embedded POWER chips to get weirdly comfortable with ISA, given the choice, I'd love to have a system like this to write pure ASM stuff on. Not for any practical reason in the slightest; pretty much in the same spirit of souping up a go kart.
On that note, out of curiosity, how do these compare with x86 and ARM chips from that era?
Raptor Systems makes a bunch of ATX compatible POWER motherboards. As to who buys them, it's not entirely clear. If they were a little cheaper, I'd pick one up in a heartbeat. $3,000 for a CPU and motherboard is a bit hard to rationalize for what's effectively just nerding out though: https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html .
For the embedded market, NXP makes a bunch of QorIQ chips based around the POWER ISA - mostly for telecom products. These are actually reasonably common in certain devices, but not really what you'd want in a desktop.
I love working with the POWER ISA, it makes me happy to see they're still making high performance chips. I really wish these were more accessible to the average user though.
This is a video of a huge class 5 phone switch being set up in someone's garage - something not captured in the title. The video does show exactly how big this thing actually is, though. The components in the later generations of this switch are surprisingly modern for what they are, and they continue to be used in the public network to this day.
I wish more people would realize that lithium battery production is still pretty nasty, especially in countries like China with minimal environmental regulations. Not to mention the electrical grid will take some significant investment (hopefully in renewable energy sources for this huge transition to make any sense) to be ready to accommodate such a huge increase in consumption.
A dependency on fossil fuels isn't a good thing, certainly not to the extent that we've developed, but I really don't think the answer is as clear cut as everybody treats it to be.
Circuit switched landline service is still very much alive. It isn't and hasn't been electromechanical for a very long time, but it's non-packetized in a very large part of the US, provided you actually get a service that legally qualifies as a landline (voip is unregulated).
This is a thing now? Is this at least a UK-specific "feature"?