...m...

…NCSA mosaic won the web, absolutely; in truth i think it gave a lot of us an excuse to upgrade from terminals and shell accounts…

…i remember going to our computer lab in the early nineties and seeing a flyer about this new protocol called the world wide web, thinking to myself in what way is that better than gopher?..

…my experience before ‘high-efficiency incandescent’ halogens was the same: i have thirty-year-old proper halogen lamps either still going strong or which have been replaced only once over that period…these little A19 halogens, though, have an such absurdly-short duty cycle that they’re viable only by virtue of stocking up dozens of cases for pennies on the dollar when they were phased out a couple of years ago…

…i do hope that we have respectable consumer bulbs available in perhaps five years after those few hundred halogen bulbs are gone, but i’m not optimistic as poor spectra appear inherent to LED technology and the market seems to have settled on ‘good-enough’…proper incandescent bulbs are of course still available for specialty applications, but they’re not easy to get…

…the contractor-grade FEIT incandescents installed when we built our house enjoyed a MTBF of about five years; the FEIT halogens (‘high-efficiency incandescent’) i stocked up to replace them after traditional incandescents phased out are on the order of six months MTBF…

…while i question whether the manufacturing and distribution of ten fourty-watt halogen bulbs really emits less carbon than one sixty-watt incandescent running for the same duration, at least the spectra are unchanged: i’ve yet to find any LEDs which offer acceptable black-body spectra and i specify the things professionally…

…that’s the POWER model: the unit posted above is the consumer version with the SX chip, no math coprocessor and fewer function keys…

…i’m surprised to see DHL rank so highly in that list: what’s their domestic market focus, business-to-business freight logistics?..i seldom see DHL packages and when i do they’re almost exclusively of international origin…

…NeXTstep was built on mach and, although i’m unsure if any antecedents remain in macOS, it was certainly production-ready in its day; i remember a couple of decades ago there were stopgap versions of the HURD built on top of mach instead of their own microkernel but i thought that was only ever intended as a temporary workaround…

…i presume on that basis that sustained developer interest was its greatest hurdle, no pun intended…

edit: …is this the post-mortem you mentioned?..

…i’m absolutely ignorant of its current state, but every time i’ve checked in on progress of GNU/hurd over the past three decades, it still hasn’t matured into a stable production-ready platform: i’m not sure if that’s an artifact of technical viability or developer interest…