As much as I would have loved to get out in sooner than six years, I tend to agree. In hindsight, if I'd treated it like a job and just done the coding and writing necessary to get the projects I published out the door, I could have done it in three, maybe two. But that would have missed the whole point.
IPv6 is arguably a good example of what happens when you don't do the simplest thing possible. What we really needed was a bigger IP address space. What we got was a whole bunch of other crap. If we had literally expanded IPv4 by a couple of octets at the end (with compatible routing), would we be there now?
We could really take a page from this style for teaching advanced computing. We try to imagine that architectures just kind of come out of nowhere. Starting with mechanical computing and unit record equipment makes so much make more sense.
They're in the process of doing this for alums @hmc.edu too. Google baited us into moving the whole infrastructure into the cloud and now are switching us to something the alumni association can't afford.
Meanwhile, the self-hosted mail server for the CS department @cs.hmc.edu still hosts accounts for all the alumni and will for the foreseeable eternity. I can still SSH into the current department cluster and read two decade old (or two second old) emails using mutt. If their cluster somehow ever runs out of disks, I'm happy to donate a terabytes worth, but like hell I'm giving money to big-G for cloud storage.
I'm always amazed by Crispix. It's not a heterogeneous material, it's not a poured mixture of two parts, it's not a coated material, it's an assembly. And you can eat it by the handful.
By comparison, if you steal as an infant, you get off easy. If you steal as an adult, you don't. Screwing up parallel parking is a mistake, plagiarism is not.
My first real "server hardware" was a Sparcstation 5 I bought under a bridge at the Dallas first Saturday swap meet. I was maybe... 15? Before that, it was Linux on whatever commodity PC my dad had passed down to me. Running Linux on that Microchannel-based PS/2 was a bitch and a half for a 5th grader.
I had _absolutely_ no idea what I was doing, but I feel like my general comfort with diving into things where I still have no idea what I'm doing started then and there.
No, but what is it? Not your lawyer, not legal advice, but it's not a trade secret, they've given it to researchers. It's not a trademark because it's not an origin identifier. The structure might be patentable, but the weights won't be. It's certainly not a mask work.
It might have been a contract violation for the guy who redistributed it, but I'm not a party to that contract.
The 737 has also been around a lot longer. The 737NG has a rate of 0.07 compared to the A32x's 0.09. The A330 is 0.19 while the 777 is 0.18. But even this is kind of misleading. All but three of the fatalities (total fatalities, not accidents) due to the 777 come down to intentional acts that would have destroyed any aircraft.
There's a middle ground between "hardware store crap" and "custom." The aviation industry has plenty of standard interior lighting and environmental control system that's known not to light people on fire or short out or otherwise fail and kill somebody.