Probably Nico Borie

Edit: Oh, goddamnit. My dyslexic ass read that as Michael Langdon. I’m gonna leave this up for a laugh at my expense but disregard.

I’m not ready for it to end (even though I knew it was coming and is still a year and a half or more away) 😥

Nedry was literally a computer scientist and systems designer / programmer from Cambridge. Arnold was a theme park engineer (designing rides and control systems; some programming involved but a whole different paradigm than developing large systems).

Source: Have read the novel 50+ times.

Arnold was an engineer, though. He was competent in using the system and not totally lost when poking around the code, but he’s no computer scientist. Basically, he was a power user / sysadmin rather than a developer.

I am not a gamer these days and am unfamiliar with Arc Raiders, but if there’s any way to incorporate the Klingon death ritual when one of your squad goes down, that would probably be pretty epic

I can’t even do “vacation” Klingon lol. All I know is Qapla’ means “success!” and you call someone a petaQ when you want to insult them.

Not sure if ADHD specific or a symptom of being “on the spectrum” or a bit of both (have never been diagnosed either way but show all the signs), but I have a very low capacity “social battery” and am very sensitive to noise. The end result is I crave (relative) solitude and quiet or else I’m useless at getting anything done.

An unmanaged switch is just a single plane where all ports are equal. All ports share OSI layers 1 and 2. Anything you plug into port 24 can always reach anything you have plugged into port 3.

Managed switches (also sometimes known as “smart” switches) provide additional features on top of that. The most useful is VLANs (virtual LANs) which let you segregate traffic. Two ports on different VLANs share the same physical layer (layer 1) but are separated at the data link layer (layer 2). This lets you create up to 4096 different networks on the same switch; each network is isolated from the other. If port 24 and port 3 are on different VLANs, then they will not be able to communicate unless they can reach a common router at layer 3.

Additionally, managed switches let you do things like disable/enable ports (for security, power savings, etc), enable port mirroring, and combine multiple ports into an aggregation group (e.g. bond four 1 Gb links into one 4 Gb link).

The available features on a managed/smart switch vary by manufacturer and, often, by the license level (sadly common in enterprise gear). VLANs, port control, mirroring, and LAGs are usually common “baseline” features, though.

Or, you know, we could just quit it with this generational shaming nonsense. It’s not like human beings are complex creatures or anything.

Which begs the question why not magnets at the top of the building to help pull the electricity up?

Guess it depends on the height, but yeah. Otherwise, we manage to pump a town’s worth of water to the top of a tower well enough. From there, gravity can do the rest.

But there’s probably a point where cost for that vs height becomes prohibitive.

If the costs of engineering a tower is more than just buying more land, then why build taller?

Figured it’d be something like that. Explains why they get built out in the middle of nowhere since land is cheap.

Tall data centers do exist in cities where land is expensive.

Probably a bit of “hiding in plain sight” that way, too. There are a few big datacenters relatively near me, and they’re massive compounds in the middle of even more massive corn fields. Kind of stick out like a sore thumb when you’re driving by.

Who approved this?!

Laptop-style speakers may be just enough. It would be tight and maybe the badge would have to be enlarged slightly to accommodate it, though.

I did a deep clean of my laptop not long ago and was surprised at how tiny and flat the speakers actually were. They won’t fill a room, but they’re enough for light music or a Teams call at arm’s length. Granted, it might not be good in a noisy area, but that would be a problem for the mic as well (not to mention public speakerphone use is kind of frowned on lol).

Would love to have one of those. Guess I’ll have to settle for 3D printing one and hacking up a Bluetooth headset/speaker to make it work.

I saw that, but it’s November 19 already. So they’ve either not restocked or have sold out already.

I clicked a few of the “Where to buy” links from the bottom, but only the non-Bluetooth ones were available.

I have an old rotary phone / bluetooth “headset”! Though it’s only technically portable.

It’s a 50’s wall-mount model that the phone company would have hardwired (no RJ-11). I’ve got it hooked to a Bluetooth -> POTS adapter that will decode the pulse coding. It rings when my cell rings, you can answer/place calls from it, and you can dial 0 to engage the voice assistant. Technically speaking, I can absolutely text people from a rotary phone.

Is it practical? No. Do I use it? Rarely. It’s mostly decorative, but if I’m going to have retro tech as decorations, I like to make it work. Next “wish list” is an old payphone.

not amazing as a Bluetooth device. Microphone didn’t pick up super-well

That’s disappointing. Seemed to work well in that video, though it was quiet; I did wonder how it would fare in the real world, though.

A Bluetooth version of the TMP communicators might have better success albeit at the cost of having to hold your arm up for the whole conversation.

I’ve used smart watches for phone calls like that, and it was pretty annoying after not very long at all.

I could probably easily make a Bluetooth TOS communicator, but that would be two roughly phone-sized things to carry around, so not really practical.

OTOH: