Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well, but what does that guy know? I'm pretty sure my opinion is more valid than their facts..

cries in Asimov

 

[Ryujin]

No, I understand how someone could reach the conclusion you expressed! I believe that I first learned of the nitrocellulose-related exploding billiard ball problem from the original Connections TV show, but here it is in text:

Once Upon a Time, Exploding Billiard Balls Were An Everyday Thing

It was a side effect of no longer making them from ivory

www.smithsonianmag.com

They also note how nitrocellulose was also used in a bunch of other products, where it’s volatile nature was also problematic, including film.

I had forgotten about the billiard ball thing. Thanks for the reminder.

 

[Scribe]

I'm currently reading a book about the history of information industries, and the author notes how there's been a cycle of things going from decentralization (which is disorganized and often lackluster/limited in its service, but highly adaptable and robust due to various redundancies) to centralization (which is more efficient and often has better performance, but is less innovative and more vulnerable to disruption) and back again.

Its pretty wild to watch. It's hit my company in a few ways which is always entertaining on a bloody Friday. Something about "Global IT Outage." just has me laughing my ass off though.

 

[trappedslider]

Or as Snarf puts it, "It works in practice, but not in theory."

I think he uses more than eight words to say that

 

[Ryujin]

I'm currently reading a book about the history of information industries, and the author notes how there's been a cycle of things going from decentralization (which is disorganized and often lackluster/limited in its service, but highly adaptable and robust due to various redundancies) to centralization (which is more efficient and often has better performance, but is less innovative and more vulnerable to disruption) and back again.

Depends on what you mean by "decentralized." The Internet is built on the back of a network that was designed to be able to survive nuclear war. You can take out areas, but the network as a whole is pretty robust. That said, we have few major players who house data. If someone like AWS or Cloudflare has issues, we all know about it pretty quickly. Then again they have multiple data centres, spread out across the world, so you could literally burn one to the ground and you wouldn't even likely notice a drop in performance. The problems, in those cases, come from updates like this. We're sort of centralized decentralized.

 

[overgeeked]

I think he uses more than eight words to say that

It's usually attached to a dissertation or PC-backstory length post, but that's a direct quote. Hence the quotation marks.

 

[overgeeked]

Wow. That's certainly a whole lot of deeply held beliefs and repetitious opinions about something you haven't even watched. Who has time for that?

 

[RealAlHazred]

Wow. That's certainly a whole lot of deeply held beliefs and repetitious opinions about something you haven't even watched. Who has time for that?

Listen, the internet is for rabbit holes and weird sudden interests in the most irrelevant of minutia. As evidence, check out my Jack the Ripper thread, about I topic that held absolutely zero interest for me in the mid- to late-Eighties when Rippermania hit at the 100-year anniversary of the Whitechapel murders.

 

[Maxperson]

Wow. That's certainly a whole lot of deeply held beliefs and repetitious opinions about something you haven't even watched. Who has time for that?

And that surprises you on a site where there are several folks who do that with books they haven't read and/or editions/RPGs that they haven't played?

 

[Saracenus]

And that surprises you on a site where there are several folks who do that with books they haven't read and/or editions/RPGs that they haven't played?

But what 'bout mi hawt take on the subject!