Notices by Your weary 'net denizen (cstanhope@social.coop), page 4

@roadriverrail I will try to separate my specific experience at InPhase from the larger industry. I think there were large challenges that could not be overcome:

1. Engineering and production challenges.
2. Having enough interested customers.
3. The world does not stand still.

It's hard to take a product from optical table operated by PhDs to a device that can be managed by non-experts.

(I'm going to untag @djsundog here, but he can pop in at this point if he is.)

@roadriverrail It just takes an unknown amount of time and money. I believe all the problems were solvable, but I have no idea if there was ever enough time or money to do so.

You also need customers willing to pay for expensive devices so that you can get to the point where you are making incremental improvements that drop prices and drive broader adoption.

@roadriverrail Unfortunately, this potential customer base ended up being small and conservative, and I am unaware of any products based on this tech that ever successfully reached that point of delivery and incremental improvements.

Finally, the rest of the world does not stand still. Established technologies continued to improve.

@roadriverrail Things that used to matter (physical media and to avoid piracy of said physical media) became less so once companies that distribute media had largely landed on: managed archive "in the cloud" distributed to people always connected to the internet using cryptography to avoid disruption to the business model.

And the demand for individual archives have similarly dried up through the ubiquitous use of clouds and large enough drives. So consumer demand was never going to be a thing.

@roadriverrail Ugh... I didn't make my points as clearly as I wanted to, but hopefully you can fill in the gaps left by my poor, rushed communication. 😆

@roadriverrail @djsundog That was a competitor's product. I worked for InPhase, but I took a quick look at the wikipedia page. The InPhase approach did not include a servo layer on the disc. We were getting servo information from the recovery process itself (which is difficult when your read process is affected by temperature and humidity across multiple parameters). I have no idea how similar the chemistry of their storage medium was to ours, but the overall storage mechanism sounds similar.

@djsundog As somebody who had the good (mis)fortune to work on a prior attempt to replace magnetic tape as the standard for archive, I do wish them luck.

I worked on holographic storage, and I watched that video somebody posted earlier. The technology stack is almost exactly the same except for the medium. It'll be interesting to find out whether we hear anymore about them a decade from now.

@clacke Sounds about right. I have to admit I took our TV broadcast setup for granted since I grew up with it. :)

Geez, every time I want to write it as "everytime". It should be a word already.

Yes! "When the Walls Fell" by the Beverly Crushers.

https://thebeverlycrushers.bandcamp.com/track/when-the-walls-fell

@clacke It's so bizarre (and absolutely distressing) that there are so many people out there being paid to act like Captain Planet villains.

I am frustrated with the way various service companies are pushing to get their hands on my checking account with autopay. They're increasingly offering discounts to do so.

I understand why they're doing it, but the power imbalance bothers me. It was a long time ago, but it is fresh in my mind, I had a natural gas company try to bill me for over $3,000 worth of gas one month. They had absolutely nothing in their system to flag a ridiculous bill like that.

@miah I can't believe I haven't heard of this awesome 80s concept of Dragon Sound, "which consists of an ethnically diverse group of five college students who are best friends. They live together, train Taekwondo together, attend University of Central Florida together, and are all orphans."

At least according to wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Connection

You know, considering just how much of it there is compared to everything else, you'd think dying in the vacuum of space would be a lot more common. :thonking:

@clacke That's a hilarious sentence. "The Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution" also makes me think about the cynical takes of don't sell cures. Sell something that the customer has to keep paying for over and over again. But maybe that's the same as becoming part of the problem. 😆

@clacke This is the best explanation I've seen so far.

https://www.vox.com/culture/23778245/max-disney-paramount-remove-delete-streaming

@clacke That's awesome. I'm over here having a body and feeling the groove right now.

@clacke And Nigel Wright, apparently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Spin

I never heard this back when it was released. I probably would've greatly enjoyed it then, but at least I get to enjoy it now! :)

@silverwizard @millihertz

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/goto

Tricky, tricky... :)

@millihertz Oh geez. That took me a second...