In healthcare, the expectation is 10+ years. In my company, we are actually having to re-instate Windows 2000 support for one of our customers because they do not upgrade OS's on existing, working hardware. I just wonder where they get new, replacement hardware for computers that fail that still comes with drivers for Win2k. I know at least a few pieces of new hardware (motherboards, mainly) that do not support anything older than Vista. On the other hand, the computer recycling business in that country must be huge, and is probably where they get replacements from.
Many recent phones charge via their mini/micro USB sockets, so it is a risk. How do you know that the other end of the cable is connected only to power and not to a PC/laptop, up to no good?
In case you are just being ignorant, it's widely known that the Free Public WiFi access points you see everywhere are actually due to a quirk in Windows XP's wireless networking pre-SP3. Basically, if XP can't connect to any pre-defined access points, it will automatically create an ad-hoc wireless network with the SSID Free Public WiFi. You can't actually connect to it and you can't browse the net with it. You are actually at no risk if you attempt to connect to one of these, although someone could always set up a dummy network using a real AP with the SSID Free Public WiFi to lure you into connecting, and that could be risky if the owner is up to no good. Note that I have never seen this happen though. If you pay attention when you try to connect to one of these, you will even notice it has a computer icon and not an access point icon (when using Windows that is). This "feature" was fixed in SP3 but since many people do not keep their OS up-to-date, it is still widespread.
At least one of the cafe's at Helsinki airport terminal 1 already does this. They have a charging system installed in a few places throughout the cafe. All you need to do is pick up a charging ring, which is basically an inductive coupler, and place it between your phone and the marked surfaces where the chargers are installed in the tabletops. This is a free service. Yes, sometimes services are given away for free, not everyone is a greedy bastard in this world.
I have 5 wristwatches that I regularly wear, only one is digital and that is because it's a dive computer with a dot matrix display. My backup dive watch is good old analog. I remember when digital watches came out in the 70's as a kid. They were black Casio's and a couple other brands, and you had to push a button to light up the red 7-segment LED's to see the time, otherwise they were just a black face. They were sort of cool at the time but not very convenient. I believe there are repro versions of these sold today.
Because only "mutts" go to shelters, right? Purebreds never run away from home or get lost. BS.
There is nothing wrong with getting your pet(s) from a shelter. Take your time and don't jump at the first "puppy eyes" you see. We have adopted our last 3 pets from a shelter, and they have been great pets and good companions. Our last, a kitten, we visited several times a week over the month while he was still in the shelter before taking him home (shelter has minimum age of 12 weeks for adopting kittens, and ours was only 8 weeks when we found him). Any good shelter will keep a record of the behavior and special needs (if any) for all animals in their care.
Seriously, there must be thousands of salivating lawyers out there waiting for this to happen. Your kid got called a bad name online... SUE THE PARENTS! Your kid's grades were posted online by a classmate... SUE THE PARENTS!
With the litigation happy country the US has become, this will never work. But hey, it could give lazy parents one more thing to blame when their kid "fails" in life and doesn't achieve that 7-figure salary within a year of graduating, right?
But here in the good old Magnited States of America, our society has evolved to include strong worker protection laws.
Surely, you must be joking. And I suppose the USA has strong consumer protection laws as well? Both are utter bullshit, although I will agree that many of the unions in the USA have become twisted into some kind of monstrosity. The USA has practically no worker protection, when compared to much of Europe for example. Where I live you cannot just fire someone because you don't like their haircut or don't approve of their leisure time activities. Employers actually need a valid reason to terminate you, unlike the USA where you can be fired on the spot for practically anything. I don't belong to a union per-se, but I also don't need to worry about sudden termination without cause either. I do belong to a white-collar trade organization which works for me to help ensure that my employer gives raises that at least cover cost of living increases plus reasonable salary increases. I pay a tiny annual fee to benefit from this and it also guarantees that I will receive 60% of my salary should I lose my job due to my employer's decision (layoffs for example), for up to 3 years. It is opt-in and there is no pressure to belong to anything, though blue-collar workers are generally automatically covered by a union.
In much of the Western civilized world outside the USA, unions can be useful and actually do protect workers from unfair practices without being used for things they are not meant for. The problem with the unions in the USA is that many of them have or have had close ties to organized crime and have been used for political purposes.
Agree and I would add that one of the single biggest security issues in Windows is the fact that so many apps assume (require?) administrator privileges in order to work correctly. Running many apps as non-admin breaks them so that they are non-functional. This has improved somewhat in the last few years following Vista, which was the first Windows version to encourage you not to use the admin account for everything. In XP, practically everyone logs in as admin except in corp locked down environments, and this is where it's trivially easy to spread malware by drive-by downloads, etc.
Rotting for years is a massive mis-statement. While Symbian has more or less lost the smartphone market, it still dominates the feature phone market, of which Nokia was and still likely is king of. In developing markets they are still leaders with number of devices sold. The problem is that Nokia has traditionally put more money into the hardware and this is leading to the current situation where they are eating too much of their own margin in emerging markets. It used to be that their high-margin smartphone business balanced this out and partially subsidized the feature phone market to some extent, but now that basically everyone has abandoned Nokia's smartphone platforms thanks to the MS deal, it's really hitting them hard.
Don't put it past them, a comeback is still very possible but in the short term they will bleed quite a bit during this transition period.
For a typical American, I'd agree. As someone living in Europe, I'd say 4 is about right over a lifetime. My wife, who was born and grew up in a major European city (~500k people) did not even get her driver's license until she was 40. She had no need for a car or for driving one, we have something called public transportation. I realize this is a hard concept for Americans to understand (sarcasm aside, I am an American... just living abroad for many years). I actually *gasp* lived abroad without a car for ~5 years. Many people I work with do not own or drive a car, and I live and work in a very technically modern EU country.
Should the US be using international trade sanctions to enforce its own laws in other countries?
Too late, the US has been doing this for some time. How do you think the rash of DMCA-like laws have been forced on other countries in recent years? Where I live, file sharing of even of copyrighted works among friends was not illegal (no profit motive) until the US forced DMCA-like laws to be adopted by our government. It was surely not the population who voted this into law and made a large percentage of the population criminal overnight. As an American ex-pat living abroad, this brings me no small amount of shame.
If this passes with the provision to allow the feds un-restricted access without a warrant under the guise of "intelligence" and "terrorism", then all it means is that in the future ALL accesses will be requested under these exceptions. Might as well write them a free pass to usurp whatever data they want now, and get this out into the open. I mean seriously, does anyone believe in this shit anymore?
Absolutely and totally hate glossy screens. Give me a matte anti-glare any day.
I have been looking for a small-ish notebook (12") for some time now with decent battery life, a real processor (no netbooks!), a matte screen with decent resolution and a price that I'm willing to pay (e.g. I'm willing to spend in the $1000 range or a bit more). Obviously, I'm in the minority because I have literally found nothing that meets these requirements. It's either got poor battery life or it's an insanely expensive corporate model north of $2k. I would seriously consider a 13" MacBook Pro or 11.6" MacBook Air, but the unavailability of matte screens is a deal killer for me. I simply will not buy a laptop with a glossy screen. I need to be able to use the laptop outdoors without the whole screen being unreadable due to glare. Even indoors, I do not want every light in the room to be reflected back at me through my monitor.
The sad truth is, glossy screens are a way to use inferior LCD panels and get a brighter display, without actually using better quality LCD panels. Don't even get me started on the proliferation of TN panels and 1080 pixel resolution in consumer displays. We should all have IPS or better technology, not age-old TN. Out of 4 computer displays I have at home, 3 are IPS and only one is a TN, and that's only because the TN is quite old and just hasn't been replaced with something better yet. None of my displays are glossy, and it took some time to find a good 24" IPS that did not have a glossy screen and the dreaded 1080 pixel vertical resolution.
Rosetta is a binary emulator/translator. You are not running non-x86 instructions on x86, they are translated from their native PowerPC instructions to x86 equivalents. Rosetta is far from comprehensive and does not magically work with every PowerPC app, unlike what Apple would like you to believe. Many basic apps which don't do anything complicated generally work, but once you go outside that small area, things fall apart pretty quickly.
It's also rumored to be discontinued in the upcoming OS X Lion.
The credit card size has not been widely used in mobile phones since the mid-90's or so. Are you trying to imply that the most popular mini-SIM size is too large for a modern mobile phone? Practically every other component in a mobile phone is many times larger than the mini-SIM format, think batteries, LCD display, keypad, etc.
There is no real need for a smaller SIM standard, other than planned obsolescence by forcing people to buy new phones if the new card format is not backwards compatible.
If your hardware designers are too dumb or lazy to be able to accommodate the already-small size of either a standard or micro-SIM card, please go play somewhere else and stop interfering with the mobile phone market. There is a reason why SIM's are a standard size, even the micro-SIM was a stupid idea mainly pushed on us by you.
Thanks - - -
I have multiple phones, and switch SIM cards between them. I can also go to any kiosk or corner store and buy pre-paid SIM cards. This is commonplace in Europe, where SIM cards have been used far longer than the US, we've had them in mobile phones in Finland since the early 90's. Making SIM cards smaller makes them incompatible by design with existing phones and creates a false demand for replacing perfectly good, working phones with new ones. I suppose this is part of Apple's strategy anyway, to force people to upgrade their phones yet again to support a new "standard" they create. This is nothing more than planned obsolescence.
I actually do enjoy going back and playing them, because I don't look at the past with rose-tinted glasses. I have a realistic memory of what they were, and many of them are still great and challenging games even today. The graphics may be dated and primitive, but a good game is always a good game. Should we stop playing poker or Monopoly or baseball because they are "old" games? Do they not still have value and provide entertainment for us today?
People collect stuff, and have been doing so for thousands of years. Just because you don't value anything that was not made in the last 5 minutes, doesn't mean it's not useful or enjoyable for someone else.
While I totally agree about keeping the old hardware around, in your case where an old game runs too fast there are fixes out there. I haven't looked for them recently, but there were TSR programs (terminate and stay resident, for the young whippersnappers who don't know of these things) that would insert no-ops into the CPU to bring the game speed under control when run on a faster CPU. These were fairly common in the early 90's when Pentiums started to become popular. Games written for the 286, 386 and early 486's would run way too fast on a new Pentium system, so you would run one of these TSR's to keep the speed under control. I'm sure they are still laying around on some old software websites.
Seconded. I have my so-called "legacy" game system, mainly for pre-Win98 DOS games, plus a few Win9x era games:
200MHz Pentium Pro (yes, a Pro, not a plain Pentium. If you don't know what that means, you're too young) 64MB RAM Some PCI video card (can't recall at the moment what it is) ISA Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 1GB HD 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drives 4x CD-ROM 3Com 10/100 Ethernet card Dual-boot Win98SE / DOS 6.2 Small tower case with 200W PS
A 500GB HD is WAY overkill for such a system. Even if I archived every old pre-2000 game I ever owned, it would all fit in under 1GB. Remember, games in the DOS days came on floppies, both 5.25 and 3.5". Total installed game size was a few megabytes at best, maybe 5-10MB average. A big game might be close to 50MB, but that was already creeping into Win9x days.
Running on "real" hardware beats emulators every time. Besides, how much space does one old box take up anyway? Use a KVM switch and you don't need a separate KVM for your legacy system. Mine, I keep in the closet most of the time, and only haul it out when I want to play Doom or some other old DOS game.
To be honest, I tried DOSbox some time ago, but not recently. It was just simpler to dig up old hardware and throw together my legacy box, rather than tweak DOSbox to get old games running. Maybe emulation has improved over time, but it will likely never match running on real iron.
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In healthcare, the expectation is 10+ years. In my company, we are actually having to re-instate Windows 2000 support for one of our customers because they do not upgrade OS's on existing, working hardware. I just wonder where they get new, replacement hardware for computers that fail that still comes with drivers for Win2k. I know at least a few pieces of new hardware (motherboards, mainly) that do not support anything older than Vista. On the other hand, the computer recycling business in that country must be huge, and is probably where they get replacements from.
... but can it run Crysis?!?
Many recent phones charge via their mini/micro USB sockets, so it is a risk. How do you know that the other end of the cable is connected only to power and not to a PC/laptop, up to no good?
Troll.
In case you are just being ignorant, it's widely known that the Free Public WiFi access points you see everywhere are actually due to a quirk in Windows XP's wireless networking pre-SP3. Basically, if XP can't connect to any pre-defined access points, it will automatically create an ad-hoc wireless network with the SSID Free Public WiFi. You can't actually connect to it and you can't browse the net with it. You are actually at no risk if you attempt to connect to one of these, although someone could always set up a dummy network using a real AP with the SSID Free Public WiFi to lure you into connecting, and that could be risky if the owner is up to no good. Note that I have never seen this happen though. If you pay attention when you try to connect to one of these, you will even notice it has a computer icon and not an access point icon (when using Windows that is). This "feature" was fixed in SP3 but since many people do not keep their OS up-to-date, it is still widespread.
At least one of the cafe's at Helsinki airport terminal 1 already does this. They have a charging system installed in a few places throughout the cafe. All you need to do is pick up a charging ring, which is basically an inductive coupler, and place it between your phone and the marked surfaces where the chargers are installed in the tabletops. This is a free service. Yes, sometimes services are given away for free, not everyone is a greedy bastard in this world.
I have 5 wristwatches that I regularly wear, only one is digital and that is because it's a dive computer with a dot matrix display. My backup dive watch is good old analog. I remember when digital watches came out in the 70's as a kid. They were black Casio's and a couple other brands, and you had to push a button to light up the red 7-segment LED's to see the time, otherwise they were just a black face. They were sort of cool at the time but not very convenient. I believe there are repro versions of these sold today.
Because only "mutts" go to shelters, right? Purebreds never run away from home or get lost. BS.
There is nothing wrong with getting your pet(s) from a shelter. Take your time and don't jump at the first "puppy eyes" you see. We have adopted our last 3 pets from a shelter, and they have been great pets and good companions. Our last, a kitten, we visited several times a week over the month while he was still in the shelter before taking him home (shelter has minimum age of 12 weeks for adopting kittens, and ours was only 8 weeks when we found him). Any good shelter will keep a record of the behavior and special needs (if any) for all animals in their care.
One word: lawyers
Seriously, there must be thousands of salivating lawyers out there waiting for this to happen. Your kid got called a bad name online... SUE THE PARENTS! Your kid's grades were posted online by a classmate... SUE THE PARENTS!
With the litigation happy country the US has become, this will never work. But hey, it could give lazy parents one more thing to blame when their kid "fails" in life and doesn't achieve that 7-figure salary within a year of graduating, right?
But here in the good old Magnited States of America, our society has evolved to include strong worker protection laws.
Surely, you must be joking. And I suppose the USA has strong consumer protection laws as well? Both are utter bullshit, although I will agree that many of the unions in the USA have become twisted into some kind of monstrosity. The USA has practically no worker protection, when compared to much of Europe for example. Where I live you cannot just fire someone because you don't like their haircut or don't approve of their leisure time activities. Employers actually need a valid reason to terminate you, unlike the USA where you can be fired on the spot for practically anything. I don't belong to a union per-se, but I also don't need to worry about sudden termination without cause either. I do belong to a white-collar trade organization which works for me to help ensure that my employer gives raises that at least cover cost of living increases plus reasonable salary increases. I pay a tiny annual fee to benefit from this and it also guarantees that I will receive 60% of my salary should I lose my job due to my employer's decision (layoffs for example), for up to 3 years. It is opt-in and there is no pressure to belong to anything, though blue-collar workers are generally automatically covered by a union.
In much of the Western civilized world outside the USA, unions can be useful and actually do protect workers from unfair practices without being used for things they are not meant for. The problem with the unions in the USA is that many of them have or have had close ties to organized crime and have been used for political purposes.
Agree and I would add that one of the single biggest security issues in Windows is the fact that so many apps assume (require?) administrator privileges in order to work correctly. Running many apps as non-admin breaks them so that they are non-functional. This has improved somewhat in the last few years following Vista, which was the first Windows version to encourage you not to use the admin account for everything. In XP, practically everyone logs in as admin except in corp locked down environments, and this is where it's trivially easy to spread malware by drive-by downloads, etc.
Rotting for years is a massive mis-statement. While Symbian has more or less lost the smartphone market, it still dominates the feature phone market, of which Nokia was and still likely is king of. In developing markets they are still leaders with number of devices sold. The problem is that Nokia has traditionally put more money into the hardware and this is leading to the current situation where they are eating too much of their own margin in emerging markets. It used to be that their high-margin smartphone business balanced this out and partially subsidized the feature phone market to some extent, but now that basically everyone has abandoned Nokia's smartphone platforms thanks to the MS deal, it's really hitting them hard.
Don't put it past them, a comeback is still very possible but in the short term they will bleed quite a bit during this transition period.
For a typical American, I'd agree. As someone living in Europe, I'd say 4 is about right over a lifetime. My wife, who was born and grew up in a major European city (~500k people) did not even get her driver's license until she was 40. She had no need for a car or for driving one, we have something called public transportation. I realize this is a hard concept for Americans to understand (sarcasm aside, I am an American... just living abroad for many years). I actually *gasp* lived abroad without a car for ~5 years. Many people I work with do not own or drive a car, and I live and work in a very technically modern EU country.
Should the US be using international trade sanctions to enforce its own laws in other countries?
Too late, the US has been doing this for some time. How do you think the rash of DMCA-like laws have been forced on other countries in recent years? Where I live, file sharing of even of copyrighted works among friends was not illegal (no profit motive) until the US forced DMCA-like laws to be adopted by our government. It was surely not the population who voted this into law and made a large percentage of the population criminal overnight. As an American ex-pat living abroad, this brings me no small amount of shame.
And so the Coral link is now also slashdotted... :P
Knock, knock. Hello citizen, how are you today? ...
If this passes with the provision to allow the feds un-restricted access without a warrant under the guise of "intelligence" and "terrorism", then all it means is that in the future ALL accesses will be requested under these exceptions. Might as well write them a free pass to usurp whatever data they want now, and get this out into the open. I mean seriously, does anyone believe in this shit anymore?
Absolutely and totally hate glossy screens. Give me a matte anti-glare any day.
I have been looking for a small-ish notebook (12") for some time now with decent battery life, a real processor (no netbooks!), a matte screen with decent resolution and a price that I'm willing to pay (e.g. I'm willing to spend in the $1000 range or a bit more). Obviously, I'm in the minority because I have literally found nothing that meets these requirements. It's either got poor battery life or it's an insanely expensive corporate model north of $2k. I would seriously consider a 13" MacBook Pro or 11.6" MacBook Air, but the unavailability of matte screens is a deal killer for me. I simply will not buy a laptop with a glossy screen. I need to be able to use the laptop outdoors without the whole screen being unreadable due to glare. Even indoors, I do not want every light in the room to be reflected back at me through my monitor.
The sad truth is, glossy screens are a way to use inferior LCD panels and get a brighter display, without actually using better quality LCD panels. Don't even get me started on the proliferation of TN panels and 1080 pixel resolution in consumer displays. We should all have IPS or better technology, not age-old TN. Out of 4 computer displays I have at home, 3 are IPS and only one is a TN, and that's only because the TN is quite old and just hasn't been replaced with something better yet. None of my displays are glossy, and it took some time to find a good 24" IPS that did not have a glossy screen and the dreaded 1080 pixel vertical resolution.
Rosetta is a binary emulator/translator. You are not running non-x86 instructions on x86, they are translated from their native PowerPC instructions to x86 equivalents. Rosetta is far from comprehensive and does not magically work with every PowerPC app, unlike what Apple would like you to believe. Many basic apps which don't do anything complicated generally work, but once you go outside that small area, things fall apart pretty quickly.
It's also rumored to be discontinued in the upcoming OS X Lion.
This just in, x86 and ARM instruction sets are NOT compatible! Everyone panic! Blame MS! No, wait... Sony must have had a hand in this!
File this under no shit, Sherlock.
The credit card size has not been widely used in mobile phones since the mid-90's or so. Are you trying to imply that the most popular mini-SIM size is too large for a modern mobile phone? Practically every other component in a mobile phone is many times larger than the mini-SIM format, think batteries, LCD display, keypad, etc.
There is no real need for a smaller SIM standard, other than planned obsolescence by forcing people to buy new phones if the new card format is not backwards compatible.
Dear Apple,
If your hardware designers are too dumb or lazy to be able to accommodate the already-small size of either a standard or micro-SIM card, please go play somewhere else and stop interfering with the mobile phone market. There is a reason why SIM's are a standard size, even the micro-SIM was a stupid idea mainly pushed on us by you.
Thanks
- - -
I have multiple phones, and switch SIM cards between them. I can also go to any kiosk or corner store and buy pre-paid SIM cards. This is commonplace in Europe, where SIM cards have been used far longer than the US, we've had them in mobile phones in Finland since the early 90's. Making SIM cards smaller makes them incompatible by design with existing phones and creates a false demand for replacing perfectly good, working phones with new ones. I suppose this is part of Apple's strategy anyway, to force people to upgrade their phones yet again to support a new "standard" they create. This is nothing more than planned obsolescence.
I actually do enjoy going back and playing them, because I don't look at the past with rose-tinted glasses. I have a realistic memory of what they were, and many of them are still great and challenging games even today. The graphics may be dated and primitive, but a good game is always a good game. Should we stop playing poker or Monopoly or baseball because they are "old" games? Do they not still have value and provide entertainment for us today?
People collect stuff, and have been doing so for thousands of years. Just because you don't value anything that was not made in the last 5 minutes, doesn't mean it's not useful or enjoyable for someone else.
Now get off my lawn!!!
While I totally agree about keeping the old hardware around, in your case where an old game runs too fast there are fixes out there. I haven't looked for them recently, but there were TSR programs (terminate and stay resident, for the young whippersnappers who don't know of these things) that would insert no-ops into the CPU to bring the game speed under control when run on a faster CPU. These were fairly common in the early 90's when Pentiums started to become popular. Games written for the 286, 386 and early 486's would run way too fast on a new Pentium system, so you would run one of these TSR's to keep the speed under control. I'm sure they are still laying around on some old software websites.
Seconded. I have my so-called "legacy" game system, mainly for pre-Win98 DOS games, plus a few Win9x era games:
200MHz Pentium Pro (yes, a Pro, not a plain Pentium. If you don't know what that means, you're too young)
64MB RAM
Some PCI video card (can't recall at the moment what it is)
ISA Creative Sound Blaster AWE64
1GB HD
5.25 and 3.5 floppy drives
4x CD-ROM
3Com 10/100 Ethernet card
Dual-boot Win98SE / DOS 6.2
Small tower case with 200W PS
A 500GB HD is WAY overkill for such a system. Even if I archived every old pre-2000 game I ever owned, it would all fit in under 1GB. Remember, games in the DOS days came on floppies, both 5.25 and 3.5". Total installed game size was a few megabytes at best, maybe 5-10MB average. A big game might be close to 50MB, but that was already creeping into Win9x days.
Running on "real" hardware beats emulators every time. Besides, how much space does one old box take up anyway? Use a KVM switch and you don't need a separate KVM for your legacy system. Mine, I keep in the closet most of the time, and only haul it out when I want to play Doom or some other old DOS game.
To be honest, I tried DOSbox some time ago, but not recently. It was just simpler to dig up old hardware and throw together my legacy box, rather than tweak DOSbox to get old games running. Maybe emulation has improved over time, but it will likely never match running on real iron.