Was it displayed at the Civic Center or did Autodesk have an office location in Sausalito? I had never heard of this Bay Model and believe to only have seen a model at the (new location) of the Exploratorium - this was over a decade ago so don't quite recall
I work for a little company called Boeing and all our PCs (desktops and laptops) are Dell and our IT center will upgrade SSD, memory, and even do repairs like swapping out motherboards.
Probably helps the IT center folks are actually employees of Dell and this service is part of the deal Boeing has with Dell. Lots of big companies have similar deals with their hardware vendors.
Interesting. I’ve worked for company’s that were all Dell shops as well and were similarly large and they had no such deal. You got whatever PC was available (like two options, one large and one small) and no choice beyond that. If you were special and could adequately plead your case, you maybe got a desktop for the extra RAM which was special order.
Why would you even want a SSD or memory upgrade? By the time you’re out of memory, the cpu upgrade is typically worth it.
> Why would you even want a SSD or memory upgrade? By the time you’re out of memory, the cpu upgrade is typically worth it.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the default laptop sizing comes with a standard usage in mind but more space and ram is justified for other roles. Sure you could have different laptop models but if you are fine with just more ram and disk space why not?
Normally I wouldn't think the American public would be so shallow.
But just tonight, while getting gas just outside St. Louis, a young woman was having an absolute meltdown outside her car about the price of gas being $3.65 a gallon. Wild.
So, yeah, perhaps the price of gas is high enough that the public would tolerate some heavy collateral damage at this point.
My RAM truck with the Cummins diesel engine has the engine computer mounted on the engine block. You'd think the heat and exposure to the elements would make that a bad idea, but I suppose Cummins knows what they're doing.
Yes they do. They can tolerate engine bay heat, but not exhaust heat. They are usually shielded from getting soaked.
Some Mazdas put the metal-cased engine computer in a plastic air box that feeds cold air from the front, to help ensure the engine computer stays cool enough.
In general, I believe the cooling airflow from the frontal air and the cooling fans keeps engine bay in check.
Yeah, on the Cummins the ECU is mounted on the intake side of the engine away from the exhaust and turbo and toward the front right under the fuel injection pump so it gets lots of cooling air.
This thread is interesting to me 'cause I'm also a software guy and recently took a job dealing with building fighter jets and the amount of engineering going into the wiring and computers on those things is insane. It's been a very interesting learning experience.
Sounds alright until you realize after spilling a bunch of flower vases in the trunk (hatchback) that the computer has literally no case on it and immediately shorts out while driving. Or a passenger spills a drink in the rear seat cup holder.
There is now a recall notice to pull the back seat out to install a $5 plastic cover over the thing.
And yep, it’s the main computer for the car which controls the electronic transmission etc. Immediate full on engine-shuts-off at speed on the freeway and you require a flatbed to tow it away level of broken. I’m sure the engine ECU is in the engine bay, but holy hell what a surprise!
I had a car with an all wheel drive computer in a similar spot in the late 2000s.
I had a small crack in the rubber seal around my sunroof from parking outside in the elements. When it rained, water seeped in, made its way down the a-pillar, pooled under the seat, and fried the computer.
Expensive fix but I was able to drive it to the shop.
Hehe I was thinking about FCA/Stellantis vehicles when I wrote that. I know it works and there are components made to work in that environment but it always felt intuitively wrong to me. Especially when the other side of the firewall is a much better environment and not far away
It’s because when placed inside the engine bay, the large wiring harness is shorter, which is not only cheaper, but also shorter wiring helps with the consistency of electrical timing and reduces noise.
Just use plain text files. Anything backed by a service is going to hurt over a long enough time frame. And it seems that time frame gets shorter every year.
I still use email drafts for a lot of notes. Looking at my email draft folder the oldest one I have is from 2002 and I can still access it just fine, even on mobile.
I wrote a ton of AutoLISP back in the day to do similar things to generate well logs for environmental and geotechnical reports. Fun stuff.
In 1990 I went to work at Autodesk and got to work on all kinds of stuff over the next decade -- AutoLISP was the bridge that got me into tech as a profession over the geology field work I was doing. It's been a wild ride.
This was previously the location of an Alcoa aluminum smelter which used something around 1000+ MW. And that's why the crypto farm is there -- it already had sufficient electrical capacity to the site.
Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing complain about at the moment so here we are.
Where is the upside here? An alu plant probably provided more jobs and produced something of actual utility. This is burning power for no benefit to society.
It's burning less power than before, but it's not producing anything of value.
The world cannot reasonbly run without alu, it got along better without crypto currencies.
Oh, I agree. I lived nearby (working for ERCOT; the Texas Power Grid operator) when Alcoa was still there and was planning the shutdown. It seems about half the people in Rockdale worked for either Alcoa, the nearby coal power plant, or the nearby coal mine that fed the power plant.
I remember the local press going on about the crypto mining operation and how folks were going get high-tech jobs in this rural area of Texas. Of course it didn't go that way.
Aluminum smelting is an incredibly energy intensive operation. A lot of places in the US that used to host aluminum smelters now host large datacenters, include the Google data center in The Dalles, Oregon on the Columbia river near a hydro dam. It's a shame that Rockdale didn't get something useful like these other places.
As far as Al smelting in the US; I don't know. I'd imagine it produces a lot of air pollution by itself and uses huge amounts of power that is usually generated by cheap methods like burning rocks (coal) or large hydro operations nearby to minimize transmission costs. Then you gotta get ore to the site. The only Al smelter I recall being left in the US is up near Puget Sound in Bellingham, WA and I think it's currently shutdown.
> I remember the local press going on about the crypto mining operation and how folks were going get high-tech jobs in this rural area of Texas. Of course it didn't go that way.
That's a disappointingly common crypto industry lie. Cryptocurrency mining involves very little labor beyond initial construction; it's certainly not a major source of permanent employment.
Not to mention the aluminum plant was making something actually useful to society at large. What is there now is a giant space heater used to scam people.
A mercury refining plant or uranium enrichment facility would also be worse neighbors, but that has nothing to do with the benefits and costs of the crypto farm.
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The idea that the surface of the earth consists of a bunch of rock "rafts" floating around on a hidden mantle, occasionally running into each other -- with some falling and others rising -- seems rather crazy. It took a lot of data to convince folks it was real.
Still, the 1960s feels very late for something that has become so foundational to our understanding of geology. One obvious analogy is the Copernican revolution where the crazy idea that the entire Earth is spinning on a daily basis was recognized centuries ago.
With plate tectonics there was the major clue with how the outline of South America fits so neatly into Africa, and I assume that it was known that the rocks were similar on each side of the ocean.
Nevertheless, if the idea remained speculative till the sea-floor spreading was observed then I suppose it had to wait till we had robust enough subs to get down there to see it.
> Still, the 1960s feels very late for something that has become so foundational to our understanding of geology. One obvious analogy is the Copernican revolution where the crazy idea that the entire Earth is spinning on a daily basis was recognized centuries ago.
The Gregorian calendar is really the problem because it amplifies relative numbers. The agricultural evolution that started modern humans as a culture was 10,000 years ago. If we think of the current year as 12,025 ME and Copperncian revolution as 11,514 ME I think it puts in a proper scope as all relatively recent and contemporary event.
Gregorian calendar is like standing too close to a Monet or pointillist painting, you lose the scope of the big picture.
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Back in the 90's the Autodesk tech office was next door to the Bay Model and we'd occasionally pop over for lunch and tour the place.
Great to see it still around and open to the public.
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