Naively, I don't think this approach would work well. Why? Storage devices work with fixed-length blocks of data at given locations. The problem with compression is that the compressed size is variable: A text file compresses well, but media, like video and audio files, are usually already compressed.

I could see an operating system working with hardware-assisted compression, but honestly, given the tradeoffs, I suspect that a bigger drive is probably cheaper and faster in the long run.

Wouldn't a solar panel and a battery be more effective?

I've gotten to the point where I take caffeine pills and drink decaf. Much more predictable.

It reminds me of when I used to go around the Valley telling people I was running a business selling vibrating toilet seats. I used to claim that "they vibrated at the brown note" and that I "crowd-sourced funding from little old ladies who didn't like eating prunes."

You'd be shocked at how many people believed me.

I gave up on noise canceling headphones years ago. Recently, I bought some good ear muffs for hearing protection while I mow the lawn. They just happened to include a bluetooth headset, which happened to have excellent quality.

They're so good, I use them when I fly, and even when I'm in an office situation. A lot of people will start talking to me, and I can't hear them at all if the music is at a normal volume. It's surprising that a $50 ear protection can outperform a high-priced set of bluetooth noise canceling headphones, but sometimes simpler is better.

A few years ago, I wrote software to compare lossy to lossless, and determined that lossy compression was only useful when listening through cheap speakers. Because I use high quality speakers, I decided to subscribe to Tidal: https://andrewrondeau.com/blog...

After about two years, I started having problems. Tidal would go into a mode where I had to restart the application in order for it to stream. Sometimes it wouldn't work for hours. Their support would ignore me, or claim it was a problem with my internet connection. (It wasn't.)

Ultimately, I switched to Google Music because I can upload music that's missing from the service. I hope Amazon offers the same feature, because that would get me to switch to Amazon.

20khz is a truism: It's an average. Some people can hear a little higher than 20khz, and some people can't. There's data that shows some people can hear up to about 28khz. (Which is still less than half of an octave above 20khz, not much.)

A lot of data savings comes from lossy formats trimming the high end down a bit, somewhere between 15-18 khz. Again, this is "good enough" in many cases: Cheap speakers, low volumes, older ears.

I ran a study about what lossy trims out, with graphs that show where the loss happens: https://andrewrondeau.com/blog.... In summary, if you're listening through a good system, lossless is critical.

God bless Lili St. Cyr!

Serious? No. I don't seriously expect really safe speed limits to be set up by any democracy that has so many motorists in it. But I do think that's what we ought to do. As a civilisation, we are killing our own children at an appalling rate, just so that motorists can catch up to the back of the next long line of stationary traffic a few seconds faster. In town, slow down.

Look at the scenario you described. A car doing the speed limit towards a marked crosswalk... it's such a familiar scenario that we forget to be horrified. Think about what we're doing here. We have footpaths across the street specifically for people to walk across. And then we have motorists driving straight at those footpaths, at such speed that it would literally be a crime to go any faster at all, at such speed that they couldn't possibly stop should anyone suddenly walk out on the path. These motorists expect everyone else in the world to pay attention, to stay out of their way. God forbid they themselves should slow down! They're 'doing the limit' and that makes it OK.

That limit is obviously much too high. It should come down. Twenty is plenty.

Then let's redesign those footpaths. At the moment there are raised paths either side of the street, and when the path runs across the middle of the street it is lowered. For the convenience of motorists, of course; otherwise they might have to slow down. Well, let them slow down! The path across the street is a pedestrian walkway just like the paths either side, so let's have it at the same height, for the convenience of people using wheelchairs, people pushing infants in prams, people with mobility issues. We'll put a gentle slope to either side of the path so that it isn't a nasty bump for motor traffic. Well, I mean - so that it isn't a nasty bump if the motor traffic is moving at a safe speed.

Yeah, speed limits are definitely way too high, you're right about that. 20mph in cities is plenty. Then you have a lot longer in which to notice people walking across the road, your brakes have much less work to do in order to bring the vehicle safely to a stop, and if you still fail to respond in time you'll do much less bodily harm to somebody.

In my team, it's much easier to hire overseas contractors. It's not about internal office politics; it's that we work with a contracting firm that makes a big effort to screen candidates well. I find that American recruiters are so focused on being salesmen that it's very hard to pre-screen candidates. They work hard to convince us that a candidate is awesome, when in fact the candidate is a poor match. In contrast, when our contracting firms present a candidate, there's a good chance it's a good candidate.

AMD should simply go to i11.

And here I was hoping that Microsoft taking over the market for 'Slack' would mean that those guys would go back to working for Tiny Speck and they would bring Glitch back online.

Do it, Stoot!

I have a Max IIci in my collection. It's also chock full of National Instruments data acq. cards and the original version of LabView.

Apple has never been capable of a clean rewrite. The culture there isn't capable of 'inventing' something that big, and NIH is the holy gospel. They tried to write a new preemptive multitasking OS to replace the hoary old pascal-based MacOS when MacOS 9 was growing long in the tooth. Pink/Taligent was a disaster. They failed so badly that Jobs had to come back and take over with the Unix derived workalike from NeXT, which notably was developed OUTSIDE the Apple fogzone.

It's really a pity they didn't go with BeOS instead. That was some fresh new design, again from people who had escaped the Apple fogzone.