Thanks for the reference. I knew this product in the article sounded familiar:
“Literally a piece of e-waste in waiting, Lollipop Stars are suckers with an integrated battery and tiny speaker that, when placed in one's mouth, transmit sound through jaw vibrations, delivering what the brand calls ‘music you can taste.’”
That wasn’t my impression of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. (Assuming that’s the CHM you mention.) I haven’t been in maybe 10 years, though. Have things changed?
I went to both years ago, and did enjoy LCM better. The difference is that LCM was ectremely hands-on. They had all kinds of rare machines out on the floor that you could just...play with. Imagine using an original Lisa running XENIX of all things, then firing up MazeWar on an Imlac.
CHM is very well done but more of a traditional museum with limited, curated interactivity.
The US Smithsonian National Air and Space (NASM) museums are great.
For those that aren’t aware, one of the locations is on the Capitol Mall in Washington, DC and the other - the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center - is near the Dulles Airport in Dulles, VA.
The latter has the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, a Concorde… and the Enola Gay.
The Udvar-Hazy Center is utterly amazing. It’s like someone said “hey, you like planes? Here’s all of them. And they’re just there, you can walk up close to them. I took my family for the first time this summer, when we heard they were going to lose the Space Shuttle, and we all loved it.
Mind you I don't have access to Microsoft code, so this is all indirect, and a lot of this knowledge was when I was fledgling developer.
The Windows NT code was engineered to be portable across many different architectures--not just X86--so it has a hardware abstraction layer. The kernel only ever communicated to the device-driver implementation through this abstraction layer; so the kernel code itself was isolated.
That doesn't mean the device drivers were running in user-land privilege, but it does mean that the kernel code is quite stable and easy to reason about.
When Microsoft decided to compromise on this design, I remember senior engineers--when I first started my career--being abuzz about it for Windows NT 4.0 (or apparently earlier?).
Before spidering the site for offline reading, be aware:
“Rather than secure rights to the recommended papers, we have simply provided links to Google Scholar searches that should help the reader locate the relevant papers.”
1. You do not talk about Sci-Hub.
2. You do NOT talk about Sci-Hub.
3. If a download says "Stop," goes limp,
or taps out, that download is over.
4. Only two tries per mirror.
5. One download at a time.
6. Shirt and shoes optional.
7. Downloads will continue until publicly funded
research is widely distributed.
8. If this is your first time at Sci-Hub, you
have to download something interesting,
actually read at least part of it, learn
something, and then fight ignorance and/or
stupidity with it.
Having very older parents, what an important use case!
Long gone are the days of writing a family update, including physical photos, and putting them in the post.
Fortunately, I’m able to guide
my parents in their tech usage. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be their age and have nobody to do the same. The sheer isolation… It’s horrible to contemplate.
“Literally a piece of e-waste in waiting, Lollipop Stars are suckers with an integrated battery and tiny speaker that, when placed in one's mouth, transmit sound through jaw vibrations, delivering what the brand calls ‘music you can taste.’”
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