I showed up at Convergent just out of school, and the AWS was the newest release. We went on to develop the NGEN, the GWS, the Megaframe before I moved on to other pastures.
Those were pretty incredible machines. You were early for Sun’s slogan “the network is the computer”. I’ve seen the B-21 (or was it the 25?) at Unisys well after it was discontinued. It sold relatively well with financial institutions.
We need more articles on how they worked and reports on how they were used.
It’s a shame business-oriented machines tended to be scrapped and recycled more responsibly than home computers. I’d love to have one of these to play with.
I actually had a cabinet full of them. Sent them off to the guy in the OP, and he was glad to see them! Somebody got some fun out of them anyway. And I got some of the files off of the old defunct disk drive. He's a nice guy that way.
" 58 preservatives on some 105,000 people who were free of cancer in 2009 and were followed for up to 14 years. Only those who completed frequent 24-hour, brand-specific food questionnaires were included."
It's hard to get someone to fill out a questionnaire about food over a whole weekend. Are we to believe, these participants kept it up for 14 years? There's a lot not said in this article.
It's more complex than that. When I'm not looking to sell, I certainly don't want the assessed value of my house to increase. That just means, higher property tax bill for me.
Also, houses get older every day. Tastes change - ranch, open-plan, multi-story, multi family get more or less valued as time goes on. Not just 'fewer houses means better resale value'. In fact, a shortage may not change housing prices at all - sometimes it just makes them sell faster.
It's easy to take a complex picture, connect a dot or two and draw a line from someplace to some conclusion. But it's always a trickier picture than that. You gotta consider more dots and connect them all.
I think too many people jump to the easy-to-understand "owners want to get richer" conclusion without actually engaging with what people are saying and voting for. Often the results of the voting may be related to property staying somewhat scarce, but (in my experience) the vast majority of people don't really care about the value of their house as long as it doesn't go substantially down.
Assessed value raises (and drops) shouldn't directly affect property tax assuming the whole area raises and falls (in most areas) because of how the tax is apportioned.
The reality that people don't want to deal with is that it's personal and it is slow - there is no SimCity-style bulldozing and redeveloping without pouring in tremendous amounts of money, because people like living where they do and it's hard to get them to move involuntarily.
Is it cultural, to slant reports to management in an effort to produce the result they desire? Something about not daring to contradict your superiors? Is it really more prevalent in Asia, or is that just my bias.
I wonder if Britain is under-supporting infrastructure? Energy is frequently of concern to their economy. It could have a strangling effect on the whole of their national productivity.
There often seems to be something fundamental missing from powerful tools. This one fills that void a bit.
I've always wanted an editor that takes database schema specs and auto-generates pages to edit and relate data, informed and enforced by the bounds and rules explicit in the schema.
What else?
A formal API webpage generator, to let me exercise my RESTful APIs without all the boilerplate.
Happens all the time - a tool takes 90% of the effort out of part of an effort. They say Its a productivity miracle!
But the thing is, that was one step in a larger process.
For instance. It used to take hours to lay out your software widget controls - dialogs with checkboxes and pulldowns and whatever. They invented tools that let you do it in 10 minutes. CAD saves software!
But reality check: that part of the project was a whole six hours saved, out of a schedule stretching over months. The savings disappear into insignificance.
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