Shouldn't this be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer?

Wow, what utter and complete horse shit! I was given a windows cell phone at a prior job and it was the absolute worst piece of electronic crap I ever used! A couple of tin cans and a piece of string would work better.

In 1969 Xerox bought Scientific Data Systems (SDS, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Data_Systems), a maker of relatively inexpensive and extremely powerful 16- and 32-bit computers, and renamed it Xerox Data Systems (XDS). In 1975 Xerox shuttered XDS and deprived the world of the only elegant computers I ever worked on in a 44.5 year career that spanned the range of 8-bit to 64-bit machines.

SDS legacies included its Fortran IV, the most amazing Fortran compiler I ever used; Meta-Symbol, a meta assembler of incredible power and versatility; and UTS and CP-V, which were operating systems for the 32-bit computers.

The astute /. reader will have noticed an ironic article from eight days ago: "50 Years Ago, the Internet Was Born In Room 3420" (https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/29/1557212/50-years-ago-the-internet-was-born-in-room-3420). The experiment that evolved into the Internet began on two SDS computers.

Of the dozen or more machines I programmed in assembler in my career, the SDS/XDS Sigma 5 through Sigma 9 and 5xx series of 32-bit machines were the only machines with an elegant, well thought out instruction set.

H-P beware, you could be the next casualty.

I am a comcast customer. (To say "angry comcast customer" would be redundant.)

I will be following Starlink with exceptional interest.

Guess that 20% still makes it a near tie then, as light travels about 30% slower through fiber than photons through free-space.

FTFY

If Bell Labs wants to do a big event, they should restore the Bell System Technical Journal to their site rather than having turned it over to the money grubbers at IEEE.

Sounds like social justice warriors.

If the goal of high school is to turn out coding monkeys, then allow a computer science class to count as a math credit else disallow it.

It always amuses me when people invoke "cosmic rays" as their stray random radiation event of choice.

I didn't choose "cosmic rays" as my "random radiation event of choice" for two reasons: first, I wrote "cosmic ray burst," the origin of many, many more particles than a single cosmic ray. A physics expert (if there are any in this crowd) may wish to comment on the typical number of particles emanating from a single cosmic ray impacting the atmosphere.

Second, the phrase "cosmic ray burst" came from a Sun document describing the non-ECC cache memory problem.

Otherwise I agree with your posting, to which I add that no one has seen new DRAM memory chips encased within ceramic for quite a while because of the presence of trace amounts of uranium.

Linus should keep in mind that "'Embrace, extend, and extinguish' ... is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)

The Linux community should never, under any circumstances, trust Microsoft.

This led to the infamous ecache parity error kernel panic in the bigger systems.

The lack of error correction on cache in the initial F15 CPU boards meant that a cosmic ray burst could crash a machine or cause various types of memory corruption. This design choice was neither smart nor clever; within a few weeks of two F15 frames going live we had to replace all the non-ECC cache CPU boards.

This meant their CPUs were consistently underperforming but even then platforms like Niagara did well enough.

"Before the ascendancy of 32-bit x86 and later 64-bit x86-64 in the early 2000s, a variety of RISC processor families made up most TOP500 supercomputers, including RISC architectures such as SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, and Alpha." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500) Sun didn't see the on-coming express train of the x86/x86-64 and it crushed them.

I have been ms free since July 4th, 2018. I will remain ms free forever. End of discussion.

You suck, Apple!

They fly on airbus aircraft.

If so, then once only.