The US did not have a civilian engineering school for a few decades after the founding. West Point was the only institution creating engineers. Given they had responsibility for port defenses the civil engineering of waterways was an easy addition.
IBM no longer has fabs (spun off as Globalfoundries and later sold), and no longer manufactures PCs (sold to Lenovo?), but it does make mainframes I guess?
I am still amazed that IBM is pushing their POWER processors forwards for things like their System Z Mainframes. From what I have heard they are still really fast with I/O and general shifting of data but I'm not sure how much better than is than the alternatives.
Wouldn't be surprised if that finally gets sunset in the next few years.
POWER still exists? That's kind of neat. I had a POWER 1 rs6k way back. Almost wish I'd had room to keep it just as a sort of museum piece. The processor was several chips on one or two large PCBs IIRC.
I know, they are up to the POWER 11 spec now. It is the definition of a brilliant architecture that was simply out run by others (x86) that could push their mediocre setups far better than they could.
Precisely. IBM paid them to take their fabs away (yes, they paid them, not the opposite, they were so obsolete that it was basically a waste disposal operation)
was there some regulation preventing them from just shutting the plants down and selling off the real estate and equipment? severance payments too high?
IIRC they had an agreement that Globalfoundries were to take the fabs and further develop them to shrink to better nodes. I think it was less than a "take this crap off of us" and more of a "we still need fabs, so here's some money and please continue running them for a while". GloFo then utterly failed at competing with TSMC, Samsung and Intel which was quite a problem for IBM. In general if you have a certain design you can't immediately port it to a different fab, you need to engineer it around the constraints of the fab node and process
Doesn't actually work that well. Browsers hate this, the hardware isn't actually difficult for bots to access, and privacy story is bad. There are solutions being worked on.
There is a meme going around of a screenshot of a vet textbook: "Do not fight the cat. It has sharper claws, faster, and no code of ethics. Use your brain. Use drugs"
Do your applications not expect any network hiccup to cause them to block indefinitely in a system call making them effectively unkillable and making the filesystem unmountable?
Dylan going electric was not about instrument choices. It was about abandoning the radical folk music tradition that Seeger, Guthrie, etc. had revived.
Bingo. The problem with this take is that the people pissing and moaning in the early '70s were right. Early Dylan sounds good. The texture of an acoustic guitar draws focus to songcraft and away from objectively bad execution. Dylan's vocals were always bad but they went from charmingly bad to just-plain-bad with the transition to electric. The bigger sound was not flattering for him. With 60 years of hindsight, folk still remains a largely acoustic genre because the sound is flattering to the rest of the genre too. That isn't to say that all folk should be acoustic, it's just that you have to come correct otherwise. I find later Dylan annoying despite loving his early records, and I was born 30 years after everyone stopped caring.
The only consensus among serious music fans is that there is no consensus among serious music fans. Source: me, serious music fan.
A lot of things about Dylan got empirically better throughout the '70s, I'll give you that. Deeper concepts, more challenging structure, yada yada yada.
The problem is that I don't decide what I listen to based on anything empirical. If I'm standing around thinking "man, I want to listen to Bob Dylan today," I'm thinking of Freewheelin'. You could say "well that's just you," but we both know it isn't. A third group probably thinks of Highway 61 or something.
Same thing goes for a lot of artists. Master of Puppets is the best Metallica album empirically, but if I'm thinking "gee I want to listen to Metallica today," I'm playing Ride the Lightning, or And Justice for All.
In any case, I think all of this subjectivity might suggest that Dylan going electric was a bad comparison for AI generated art, lol.
I can't tell someone not to listen to their favourite Dylan, but in reality we serious music fans often do decide based on empirical factors, we just don't think about it. The "Deeper concepts, more challenging structure, yada yada yada" are all things that go into making the music more interesting and satisfying for your brain, and that's why we keep going to them.
Some people appreciate simplicity more, or folk more than rock, but many people with Dylan, just like the social commentary more than the music itself.
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