per unit analyzer - Slashdot User

Comment HTML? (Score 4, Insightful) 111

by per unit analyzer on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @05:38PM (#56255133) Attached to: Developers Love Trendy New Languages, But Earn More With Functional Programming: Stack Overflow's Annual Survey

I call BS on any survey or programmer that considers HTML a programming language.

Submission + - Home Improvement Chains Accused of False Advertising Over Lumber Dimensions (consumerist.com) 1

Submitted by per unit analyzer on Thursday June 22, 2017 @05:00PM

per unit analyzer writes: Accordimg to Consumerist, an attorney has filed a class-action lawsuit charging Home Depot and Menards with deceptive advertising practices by selling "lumber products that were falsely advertised and labeled as having product dimensions that were not the actual dimensions of the products sold." Now granted, this may be news to the novice DIYer, but overall most folks who are purchasing lumber at home improvement stores know that the so-called trade sizes don't match the actual dimensions of the lumber. Do retailers need to educate naive consumers about every aspect of the items they sell? (Especially industry quirks such as this...) Furthermore, as the article notes, it's hard to see how the plantiffs have been damaged when these building materials are compatible with the construction of the purchaser's existing buildings. i.e., An "actual" 2X4 would not fit in a wall previously built with standard 2X4s — selling the something as advertised would actually cause the purchaser more trouble in many cases.

Comment Nothing new... (Score 1) 193

by per unit analyzer on Monday June 19, 2017 @05:13PM (#54650335) Attached to: 'The Unwillingness To Foresee The Future'

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." --Western Union internal memo, 1876

Comment Switching technology was not there yet either (Score 1) 263

by per unit analyzer on Thursday June 15, 2017 @06:06PM (#54629205) Attached to: We Could Have Had Cellphones Four Decades Earlier

Lots of folks have rightly pointed out that the electronics for cellular telephones wasn't ready in 1947 but neither was the switching infrastructure. The first customer-dialed long distance telephone call wasn't placed until 1951 and it took at least the better part of a decade for that technology to be widely available across the US. Telephone switching was largely electromechanical until the early 1970s with the first Electronic Switching System having been deployed in 1965. But even at that time, the #1 ESS didn't have the sophistication or compute power to keep track of phones and perform handoffs as they moved from cell to cell. (The first true cell phone networks were built on the 1A ESS that came over 10 years later.) Having said that, AT&T did demonstrate the cellular concept with a pay phone service on the Metroliner train service between New York City and Washington DC in the late 1960s. The pay phones used land mobile radio channels and would switch from channel to channel with a reuse pattern up and down the Northeast Corridor. There was a lot of work that had to be done and technology that had to be developed to get to that point - it took them a good 20 years to build this proof of concept, which they did prior to the FCC allocating what ultimately would become cellular spectrum. In fact, the Metroliner payphone system was a key milestone in opening up the conversation to get UHF TV channels 70-83 allocated for cellular. TFA would have been more accurate if it had focused on 1970s as lost time for cellular development, but I think it was only a marginal effect. Much of the technology was still being developed (like Marty Cooper's handheld cell phone) while the lawyers and lobbyists haggled over the spectrum. By the point, it was pretty clear cellular was going to happen, it was just the regulatory details that had to be worked out.

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