I've been pondering the same thought recently but applied to analog cameras. Analog cameras have evolved over time, approximately according to the following:
- fully mechanical
- mechanical shutter with light meter
- electronic control of shutter, mechanical advance
- fully electronic shutter and advance
Broadly, what I'm finding after digging in to restoring some cameras is that most of the cameras from the first stage can still be fixed and made to perform close to when they were new. The second still work, but the light meter can die (simpler light meters may be repairable, later ones not so much). The third and fourth stages - once they die, there's no repairing them. And when you look at digital cameras, there'll be very, very few of these that last long into the future.
This bears out the 'Lindy Effect' mentioned in the article.
The second category is my personal favorite - bought a used and slightly beat up Nikon FM2n when I was in college for cheap and the thing is still trucking with no maintenance done 15 years later. Shutter speeds seem at least reasonably accurate and it only requires a battery for the light meter. All mechanical otherwise.
Or if you want to get fancy the Nikon FM3a gives you sort of the best of all worlds (all mechanical internals or battery powered auto exposure with the flip of a dial)
Yeah - big fan of the FM / FM2n (I've also got the latter)
The FM3a always really appealed, but the more I think about it the less it appeals. Although it's a mechanical shutter, the electronics are still pretty complex and if they die, there's so few of them that there's very little way of repairing it with salvaged parts. I've also heard that because they are not as reliable as the previous FM / FM2 iterations
One of the nicest data through sound implementations I came across was in a kid's toy (often the best source of innovation)
It was a "Bob the Builder" play set and when you wheeled around a digger, etc the main base would play a matching sound. I immediately started investigating and was impressed to see no batteries in the movable vehicles. I realised that each vehicle made a clicking sound as you moved it and the ID was encoded into this which the base station picked up. Pretty impressive to do this regardless of how fast the vehicle was moved by the child.
Not cheap, but you can get a Leica that doesn't even have a screen, it's all manual and just treats the sensor as though it were film stock. One of the things I like about the Leica digitals is that they are still rangefinder cameras so your experience of using them is still through the viewfinder and much more akin to an analog experience because of the manual focus / exposure / speed control. Now I just need to save up :-)
As others have said, the Nikon Zf is a nice manual feeling digital option too.
I think the most famous/beloved/notorious version of this is the guy in Star Wars running around with a completely unaltered off the shelf ice cream maker.
I just found that link through Google, but that is apparently a whole subreddit devoted to this type of use of modern objects getting repurposed as some fantastical movie/TV props.
Sure looks like an electric ice cream maker but it's not the exact model pictured. Look at the pattern of vents on top of the motor, how far the "arms" overhang the pot, and the thickness of the pot lip for example. ;)
My favorite example is in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, where one of Captain Pike's hobbies is cooking. Real cooking with fresh ingredients, not replicated food.
Pike grew up on a ranch in Montana, where his family used Lodge cast iron pans. Cast iron isn't perfect for cooking - the heat distribution is mediocre - but one thing you can say about it is that it will outlive you.
Even if it gets rusty from neglect, you can sand it down, re-season it, and it will be as good as new!
I don't know if they make it explicit in the show, but I have a feeling that Captain Pike's pans were handed down from generation to generation, so naturally he brought his family's old cast iron pans with him on the Enterprise.
My mother-in-law (from Alabama) recently gifted me all _her_ grandmother's cast iron (my wife can't cook). I hope they get passed down for a few more generations!
This is the dream, cast iron pans well seasoned and looked after will last practically forever and are a joy to cook with. Heck, even poorly looked after pans can usually be brought back to a long and delicious life. I envy you!
IIRC, the doctor grows the fresh ingredients for Pike. There's a recent episode where he goes to meet the doctor (for other reasons I think) and he gives Pike some fresh greens. So essentially many tiny green houses.
The Galactica miniseries had a scene near the beginning with a futuristic looking alarm clock on a nightstand. I had that exact same alarm clock, as it was given as a cheapo christmas present to all the student employees in my department at the university.
FWIW Star Wars is set a long time ago, not in the future ;)
I've always liked to imagine any similarities between Star Wars and humanity on Earth is because Star Wars is set so indeterminately long ago that it seems 'plausible' that Star Wars is all really true, and if we build the right telescope and point it at the right galaxy, perhaps we can watch the Rebels fight the Empire IRL!
Maybe it depicts a part of this galaxy history. I like to believe that work of art that touches us, stay in our memory, has some truth into it that fascinate us.
We are strongly led to believe we are alone in the universe, and that we are the first human like specie in the whole universe and our solar system to ever have existed. Believing otherwise is pure heresy. What is left for us to contact part of the world that we know exist but that "can't be real because that would be heresy" ?
In The Expanse, a painted Ikea "washcloth hanger" that looks like an octopus is actually a game for special childrens. Also a 3d connexion space mouse is used to control the rocci. I kind of hate spotting them tho.
The Expanse used a ton of off-the-shelf props; most of them were used cleverly enough that they didn't stand out too badly. My personal favorite was a couple of laptop coolers used as "vents" in a maintenance passage: https://i.redd.it/rn2iac41t8h51.jpg
One of the real skills of commercial model and prop making is know all the corners you can cut, and things you can reuse.
To take an example from Aliens, the ship is only seen from one side, so the model only has one finished painted side, and the interior sets scavenge loads of bits and pieces from computer cases and whatever.
You also shouldn’t underestimate the tradition of hiding Easter eggs in models and sets.
> Also a 3d connexion space mouse is used to control the rocci.
Did you know that the SpaceMouse got developed by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) as DLR SpaceMouse for controlling robot arms in space?
I like the principle of this and have kind of done it myself previously, however I'm currently finding it's a _lot_ harder to consider blowing up your life when you have kids that are old enough to care. I think the resentment having your life blown up for you makes this considerably less appealing...
I've had the displeasure of re-implementing some awful systems written in a no-code platform.
If you're using low-code, you're still writing software, and good software is more than a bunch of if statements and function calls, it's a well-considered and understandable architecture too (or it should be)
Low-code makes it easy for non-programmers to write systems, but there's no reason you would expect these non-programmers to understand how to architect these sytems well. This (IMO) is why systems written in low-code tools often become unmaintainable piles of mush.
We've been using trivy [1] to audit the container builds we've been producing for a relatively security focussed project. As well as scanning for OS package level vulnerabilities it also scans for reported vulnerabilities in NPM packages. Works well for us.
But the other complementary approach is to lock down other things - so for example, if you're running in a container, make sure that container can only talk to the proxy in front of it. That way, even if there was some kind of malicious code running in one of the modules, there's no way for any data to get in or out (unless it finds a way of injecting into any web input/output, but then you need to be scanning for that too)
It is also useful to keep track of entries in a vulnerability database for some of the more "enterprisy" dependencies https://nvd.nist.gov/
Running a pen test against web apps can also be educational and amusing. ZAP is highly customizable, so you can extend it to cover particular areas of concern. https://www.zaproxy.org/getting-started/
Having big flashbacks to the switch from PPC to x86 here. Rosetta worked relatively smoothly during that transition so fingers crossed it will be ok here too.
Though with Docker support on the mac already being a second class citizen to running on Linux I wonder if a lot of devs will stop using macs for dev
Highly unlikely Apple would cede the software engineering market for a competitor to step in. Almost everyone in my company would prefer to have a MacBook vs a Thinkpad/Dell/etc if given the choice.
Highly unlikely Apple would cede the software engineering market for a competitor to step in.
If you're not specifically developing for iOS or macOS, Apple doesn't care about you. They'll take your money if you want to write Unix or web software, but they'll drop support in a heartbeat if that makes it easier to support their mobile and consumer segments.
Speaking solely for myself, I do not intend to go with this experiment after using Macs for 16 years and change. I have found that with a few rough edges, Windows 10 and WSL fulfills my dev needs, and except for the Apple apps Logic and Final Cut Pro, virtually all my software is cross platform. Besides, I can use Ableton and Adobe Premiere which I also already "own."
People weren't running PowerPC VMs (besides Classic which was dropped in 10.5) so they didn't notice the loss of that functionality. Many people are running x86 VMs today which won't work on ARM.
I'm a happy Postgres user and recently did some work with a government agency using Oracle - the thing that shocked me most about Oracle was the lack of transactional DDL operations which was something I'd just taken for granted in the Postgres world.
Coming from MySQL to Postgres a few years back the transactional DDL statements were a joy to work with - I've had to claw a legacy into the modern era and utilizing them has allowed me to execute live migrations from legacy into shims and then from shims into modern.
I also really appreciate the transactional TRUNCATE - I pretty much never use it but at least in Postgres I never have to worry about someone else trying to run one and wiping state unexpectedly.
> I also really appreciate the transactional TRUNCATE - I pretty much never use it but at least in Postgres I never have to worry about someone else trying to run one and wiping state unexpectedly.
as long as auto commit is not enabled.
These goodies are possible, because of PostgreSQL's MVCC which requires running vacuum. Nothing is for free unfortunately.
Interestingly even though MSSQL server uses an extremely different implementation of MVCC, it internally has a vacuum equivalent. (Which is required even when all MVCC support is disabled! It is used to enable efficient implementation of deletes, without having to use absurdly coarse locks).
MSSQL just handles doing that cleanup silently in the background while exposing basically no no configuration except a trace flag that can turn it off.
I don't think undo vs. heap based MVCC choice has any big impact with regards to transactional truncate, nor transactional DDL in general. You are likely to see proof of that within a couple of years.
- fully mechanical
- mechanical shutter with light meter
- electronic control of shutter, mechanical advance
- fully electronic shutter and advance
Broadly, what I'm finding after digging in to restoring some cameras is that most of the cameras from the first stage can still be fixed and made to perform close to when they were new. The second still work, but the light meter can die (simpler light meters may be repairable, later ones not so much). The third and fourth stages - once they die, there's no repairing them. And when you look at digital cameras, there'll be very, very few of these that last long into the future.
This bears out the 'Lindy Effect' mentioned in the article.