> All new motor vehicles, including cars, vans, trucks, and buses now need to integrate intelligent speed assistance solutions, cameras, or sensors for reversing detection, attention warnings in case of driver drowsiness, as well as emergency stop signals. In addition, cars and vans should now be equipped with lane keeping and automated braking systems and event data recorders. To prevent bus or truck collisions with pedestrians or cyclists, these vehicles now require technologies for better recognising possible blind spots and integrate warning systems, as well as have specific tyre pressure monitoring systems.
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.
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.
Depends where you are. In the UK, decommissioning of the PSTN has started and will be completed in the last few places by the end of next year. There will still be a "phone service" for those that want an equivalent service to their old landline, but it will be provided by a VoIP box.
I doubt that very much. Pretty much no telco has used circuit switching in decades. Everyone moved to packet switched network a long long time ago. Even if you have a Real Landline, it's just plugged into a VoIP box at your nearest telco branch.
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.
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.
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?
What's funny about all this is, back when the Raptor Blackbird MicroATX board dropped in 2018, you could cobble together one of those with a quad core POWER9 CPU for a reasonable $1200 out the door. Prices went up exponentially after the pandemic due to sourcing issues and some channels used for parts drying up. A shame, really.
I used to own one of these systems before I sold it to my dad, and I'm eagerly awaiting a next generation offering, if it ever comes out.
What are the use cases for the second hand market such that prices can rise exponentially? Just hacking and perhaps at home testing for open source projects that need to run on the widest array of ISAs? Or is it just a scarcity thing?
It's primarily scarcity. Unless you're in the know and are a special kind of computer geek (see Cameron Kaiser of Floodgap Gopher fame) - most folks aren't really going to know about Raptor's offerings. Very few folks are buying them new, thus very few make it on to the second-hand market.
I really want IBM's Power ISA to have more mindshare, as I think it's a cleaner design and more straightforward than the likes of ARM or RISC-V. Unfortunately, IBM is more concerned with wringing out every last dollar from their contracts instead of pushing the ISA out as much as they can. OpenPOWER was supposed to be this initiative, but it has seemingly fizzled out to a large extent, such that NVidia and Google no longer are Platinum members and hardly anyone talks about it anymore.
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.
Allegedly, Raptor Computing Systems (RCS) is working with another outfit called Solid Silicon to produce a Power ISA CPU that is more accessible to mere mortals.
Though based on what I've read so far, it all feels like vaporware.
This is a thing now? Is this at least a UK-specific "feature"?