I was surprised that Google requires a valid credit card number for free songs.

I haven't seen thicknet or thinnet equipment in years. I think that at one point the first company I worked for had a bridge between their thicknet twisted pair networks, but there is little equipment available to talk to thinnet or thicknet today.

In the 1980s, ethernet tended to be over Thinnet or Thicknet. I seem to recall speeds of 1-3Mbps over those technologies. Twisted pair came out somewhere around 1990 at 10Mbps.

Today I mostly use 1Gps, but deal with servers that are 10G.40G and 100G will be standard in datacenters in a few years.

The blurb indicates that Ethernet is the only technology that we are using from 30 years ago. Back then all the machines I used had Memory, cpus, displays, and keyboards. The particualr technology changed - just like Ethernet technology's changes.

My first real job was at Prime. There were some interesting features in the kernel - such as how dynamic libraries worked, but quite a bit was inefficient.

My biggest peeve with Primos was how the filesystem was laid out. Each block was 540 bytes (an odd sector size), with pointers to the next and previous block in the file. This made filesystem corruption fairly easy to recover from, but file deletion was slow for large files - as every block in the file would need to be read and written back to disk.

The 50 series platform demonstrates that many people make faulty assumptions about the size of data types. For example is sizeof(char *) always equal to sizeof(int *)?

Many of the Unix/Linux features were first created in Multix.

The tabs are related... they are all web pages. I have about 25 tabs open in each of 2 Firefox windows. I also have numerous other windows on each of 7 virtual screens on each of 2 physical screens. Before the days of tabs, it was challenging to find the correct window. Now, for a web page I merely look in my browser tab list.

Hmm... maybe I should create a new SELinux sandbox for Firefox for each web page I visit, and avoid tabs.

I bought this book about a month ago. I had my doubts about a book this size, and my doubts were realized.

I learned C from K&R first edition. K&R is about 150 pages (from memory). It covers all of the language succinctly and completely. Actually, it covers most of the language twice - first in tutorial form then in specification form. It is a fine resource.

Why should a book on Python be over 1000 pages? I started reading this book the same way I read K&R - from the beginning. Unlike K&R, after 50 pages I barely got to coding. Within each section the language is quite verbose. I suspect that the authors were paid by the word or the page.

On a positive note, I was able to use this book as a reference book as the index is quite reasonable.

I would recommend this book to those insomniacs who are interested in learning Python.