Name names! Some companies make complete junk products, others don't.
Lights of America make complete and utter junk.
Cree (in addition to being huge in the actual LED elements) makes bulbs in a very nice form factor, and they do put off a very nice color (for emulating incandescent) and I think a comparable amount of light. Unfortunately they seem to be the golden child of tech reviews that circle jerk about how great they are. Downsides? I see higher than average failures from real-world reports, yes they have a 10 year warranty, but you have to pay shipping, and they buzz like a mofo on a dimmer.
Phillips. I still have a Phillips CFL from 15 years ago (with three arch tubes) that hasn't died yet. Well I doubt their new product line has the same longevity, I'm reasonably satisfied with them as a brand. The Philips "SlimStyle" seems to be a good low end LED light. It looks strange but has decent light distribution, OK color, fewer failures than Cree from field reports, and a good price. Downside is they buzz in dimmers too (though not as bad as the Cree), but seem silent in normal lamps.
There use to be Sirius satellite radio, and XM satellite radio. Both flirted with bankruptcy. They combined to form Sirius XM, with identical programming, though there are two different satellite networks and protocols to broadcast this identical programming.
However, they made a lot of marketing mistakes during the launch of BB10. One of these was not trying hard enough (or at all) to actually tell people that BB10 was not BBOS. As a result, many of the valid criticisms against ancient BBOS were frequently flung like poo into any discussion of modern BB10.
They were also delayed, and late to the market with BB10. That was the biggest marketing mistake. Kind of like how they released iPhone and Android BBM clients long after they were relevant.
I don't understand the groupthink "Why does BB10/Windows Phone exist? They should just use Android"
Having an iOS and Android only ecosystem is bad for the consumer. Choice is good, and modern iterations of Windows Phone and BB10 are solid OSes. BB10 was good in having an Android compatibility layer of any nature.
The bells and whistles in some cars become obsolete very quickly. Built in satellite radio service, for a service that became defunct before the auto was less than a year old... An iPhone connector but you decided to get an Android instead. Better for the auto to have some generic common or standardized connectors, then attach your own navigation system, radio system, media player, etc.
Surprisingly Satellite radio has remained unchanged for years.
I've rarely seen an "iPhone connector", but I have seen a USB port which can be used for an iPhone, an Android, a flash drive, or just to charge.
Most cars these days will do Aux in, and Bluetooth, which are "generic common or standardized"
Lastly, the Common Dialogs DLL is upgraded with every version of Windows. Take an application written in 1995 and run it on Windows 10. It still works. It uses the Windows 10 UI for opening/saving files, instead of the old clunky Common Dialog UI for 1995.
This is not completely true. Here's some comparisons of common dialog UI The Windows 3.1 application still has the same panes it always had, though you get lower case letters... as long as it's not a long filename, in which case you get ~1.
The Windows 9x era common save dialog still has squared off buttons, and doesn't have the navigation junk that Windows 7 or 10 offer in their native dialogs. However you get icon styles of the native OS, and copy / paste work, and sometimes you get the enormous Windows 7 icons that isn't possible in Windows 9x. Aside from visual styles, the dialogs are very similar between Windows 7 and 10, so I suspect applications use the same API calls and they will look identical.
AVG and Avast have a combination of bloat, or nags that try to scare you into upgrading to a pay version. MSE, whether or not it's the top in the charts on detection, is a very good option for "set and forget" when dealing with distant relatives.
What I've seen is an inability of people to handle multiple lanes in a roundabout. So if new lanes start in the middle, while lanes spiral off to outside exits, people will be oblivious to the line markings. As well you can have people on an inner lane, that abruptly exit without checking if there is a car continuing past the exit in an outer lane.
Also just a general lack of use of Turn signals. More than normal.
It's the chasses (and not even engines) that are the main things shared in projects like that
Ford and Mazda did share engine technology. For the longest time Mazda V6 engines were Ford designs, and ford I4 engines were Mazda designs. Not 100%, but certain parts, eg: Mazda block and Ford heads. In fact quite a number of Mazda 3 owners, when their 2.3L gave them problems, bought a more inexpensive Ford 2.5L from the junkyard, and put their Mazda head on it.
Then you have the Mazda Tribute / Ford Escape that shared a lot, and the Mazda B2000 / Ford Ranger that were just badge engineered.
Ford Festiva / Mazda 121 were also badge engineered.
The early version of PST files has a file limit of something like 2GB, at which point the whole database has a risk of becoming corrupt. So it is worth breaking it down into bitesize chunks (yearly?) that are easier to manage and archive.
I go through >10 year old emails all the time. "Hey, I remember talking to a professor about this algorithm." "Where did I go camping that year?" "What was my order number for that game I bought ages and ages ago, since they accept them for free copies of the remake?" "I'm trying to gather information on something, but the person I talked to has long since died and their site isn't on archive.org." It's only going to happen more and more often for older and older stuff.
Agree. Or I'm like "What was the flight I took last year from JFK to LAX? It worked good with my connections". Even recently for work I noticed that when I ordered software from one supplier, I got an email, copied to the local vendor, with the serial number. I had another package we bought from them (by someone else that since left) where I could track down the PO, but not the serial number. I emailed the guy copied on my email, and he could dig up the copy he was CC'd on.
Email is also really convenient for backing up work that's under the ten megabyte range...manuscripts, source code, etc. If someone doesn't have a proper backup system or it's not easy to use from the system they're on at the moment, emailing something to themselves is quick and easy.
Critical University term end reports I remember regularly emailing copies to myself. If my computer exploded, or I accidentally overwrote everything and hit save, I could restore to a known good copy.
Old work gets rescued from floppies all the time, and surely there's some fascinating, ancient projects backed up in emails that people have long since forgotten about.
I'm surprised about work getting rescued from floppies. Back when floppies were a thing, I was shocked at how many people relied on them to hold ALL their school work. Given they were the most unreliable storage format ever invented (and at the time, '99 or so, hard drives were relatively reliable), very frequently people would lose an entire term's worth of work. I remember once I was able to recover the auto-save copy off a nearly corrupt floppy of someone's large term end project. They were almost in tears.
My moving window for keeping all e-mails from all e-mail accounts is 10 years, however, I also have some mails dating back as far as '95. Thing is, you can never know when and what you could need, and given the almost 0 long term cost of storing those e-mails, it's better to have them than not to have them.
While the long term cost is low, I think it's important to make a clear mark as to what's active, and what's archived. I use calendar years, and early in the year, archive digital photos, "my documents", etc from the previous year. That way I know the "2014" data set is fixed, and is the same on all backups. Then I only need to worry about stuff active in the current year. If I need to dig back to find old information I can, but it's not cluttering up my current workspace / hard drive / etc.
Most work places I've been at have had 3 months before automatic forced deletion of email.
We have one of those. A big PITA. 1 year would be much more manageable. I backup the local sync'd cache every three months. If I need to dig back in old emails, I go offline, restore the old cache, and retrieve what I need. On more that one occasion I've had to ask customers or suppliers "Do you remember x many months or years ago we talked about y? Do you still have that email?"
Luckily they are as much of a pack rat and can produce the email.
And here we are today with most small piston aircraft still using almost identical engines, still burning leaded gasoline. So called "100LL" (low lead) contains more lead than car gas ever did.
Remember when a story on this site would bring down servers? I'll bet that C|Net article barely tweaks the bandwidth meter.
That says as much about the march of progress as it does about the decline of slashdot. Even if slashdot were at it's peak, times 2, the capacity of the hardware and the internet has grown many times that, plus dynamic loadbalancing and scaling and content delivery networks...
These days even trending on facebook and twitter won't bring anybody significant down.
Granted it was 5 years ago, but Gizmodo buying a stolen iPhone 4 prototype, and then blackmailing Steve Jobs, created a news article trending so much that Gizmodo (and maybe all of Gawker) reverted to a very basic page layout, free of excess Javascript.
That's more because Windows RT is essentially Windows for ARM CPUs, and basically no Windows software is compiled for ARM CPUs. There are ways of dealing with that, such as what Apple did when they changed CPU architecture from PowerPC to Intel - a compatibility layer that's essentially PowerPC emulation. That's not such a realistic option for running x86 software on ARM - not if you want reasonable speeds, anyway.
Windows NT had versions running on DEC's Alpha processors. DEC released an emulation layer called FX!32 to allow x86 programs to run on Alpha NT machines*.
While such an emulation layer wouldn't provide great performance on a WindowsRT machine, a lot of programs are not that processor intensive. Any amount of backwards compatibility could increase interest in the WindowsRT platform. With more interest, it might persuade more developers to cross-compile to ARM versions of Windows.
Unfortunately Microsoft was trying to shove their Metro App store down everyone's throats, and discouraged even native ARM desktop applications. Few enough people developed for Metro on x86, let alone ARM. Microsoft also made the mistake of not requiring all apps in the app store to be cross compiled for WindowsRT and Windows8/8.1. Plus they made the mistake of not requiring it to be cross-compiled with their phones. One thing Android and iOS has is that the same apps can work on a phone and a tablet.
Tablets are already dying off, the iPad sales plateau is proof of that. Why tablets are dying is a more interesting question.
Tablets aren't dying. Tablet sales are falling off because the people willing to buy one now have one. Tablets will stick around for the foreseeable future.
Agreed. Much like PC's / Laptops, Tablets (and smartphones) are starting to reach a mature, saturation point. A 3 year old model is still plenty useful. For some reason the tech industry feels that double digit growth is sustainable, and the only indication of success. That means if you sold 1 million units last year, you are a failure for selling 1.05 million this year, you need at least 1.1 million.
For real, genuine work, it's hard to beat a PC (any OS) with dual screens, and a keyboard and mouse. However a tablet is hard to beat to leave on the coffee table and open up for a quick web search, or to watch downloaded movies on a flight (though I usually download the movies on a PC). More and more when I travel I leave my laptop at home, and rely on my tablet.
A phone can run the same applications as the tablet, but on a more compact screen. Great to have always on you web access, mapping access, email access, mediocre camera, the ability to fireup Netflix for Chromecast, or even slightly more sophisticated apps, like having a graphing calculator on you at all times.
At one time there were "home computers". These were basically appliances. You inserted the cartridge or diskette for the program you wanted, turned it on, and you were ready to go. Android and iOS better recreate this experience for home users than full blown OS's (Windows, Desktop Linux like Ubuntu or RedHat, and even OS X). For grandma, you really are better off giving her an iPad than a Desktop, but at an office, not so much.
In Canada I had a Bell mobility Nokia 1x CDMA phone 9 years ago. It could fall back on AMPS (or be forced) for no extra charge. I remember using it once at an outdoor concert. Even the temporary cell sites that were set up were overwhelmed, but I could force the phone to AMPS and make a call.
I also remember them still selling analog StarTacs and Nokia 918's in the early 2000's.
Of course none of them had the range of a 3W car phone.
On Fords "Max AC" is actually AC with recirc turned on. With this the air going over the evaporator coil (inside coil) is recirculated inside air, and not hotter outside air. So the system runs more efficient than normal AC (though all you are breathing is recycled farts).
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but as industrial automation moves from proprietary networks to Ethernet based networks, it's very common to find devices with HTTP based configuration and status pages (even think of consumer routers). Assuming no proprietary plugins (Java, Flash) are used, it may be the closest to a "modern" equivalent.
Though there's still something nice and simple about an RS-232 terminal interface, and the relative ease it can be implemented.
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Name names! Some companies make complete junk products, others don't.
Lights of America make complete and utter junk.
Cree (in addition to being huge in the actual LED elements) makes bulbs in a very nice form factor, and they do put off a very nice color (for emulating incandescent) and I think a comparable amount of light. Unfortunately they seem to be the golden child of tech reviews that circle jerk about how great they are. Downsides? I see higher than average failures from real-world reports, yes they have a 10 year warranty, but you have to pay shipping, and they buzz like a mofo on a dimmer.
Phillips. I still have a Phillips CFL from 15 years ago (with three arch tubes) that hasn't died yet. Well I doubt their new product line has the same longevity, I'm reasonably satisfied with them as a brand. The Philips "SlimStyle" seems to be a good low end LED light. It looks strange but has decent light distribution, OK color, fewer failures than Cree from field reports, and a good price. Downside is they buzz in dimmers too (though not as bad as the Cree), but seem silent in normal lamps.
There use to be Sirius satellite radio, and XM satellite radio. Both flirted with bankruptcy. They combined to form Sirius XM, with identical programming, though there are two different satellite networks and protocols to broadcast this identical programming.
However, they made a lot of marketing mistakes during the launch of BB10. One of these was not trying hard enough (or at all) to actually tell people that BB10 was not BBOS. As a result, many of the valid criticisms against ancient BBOS were frequently flung like poo into any discussion of modern BB10.
They were also delayed, and late to the market with BB10. That was the biggest marketing mistake. Kind of like how they released iPhone and Android BBM clients long after they were relevant.
I don't understand the groupthink "Why does BB10/Windows Phone exist? They should just use Android"
Having an iOS and Android only ecosystem is bad for the consumer. Choice is good, and modern iterations of Windows Phone and BB10 are solid OSes. BB10 was good in having an Android compatibility layer of any nature.
I've been happy with the Videostream Chrome extension, and the Android companion app.
The bells and whistles in some cars become obsolete very quickly. Built in satellite radio service, for a service that became defunct before the auto was less than a year old... An iPhone connector but you decided to get an Android instead. Better for the auto to have some generic common or standardized connectors, then attach your own navigation system, radio system, media player, etc.
Surprisingly Satellite radio has remained unchanged for years.
I've rarely seen an "iPhone connector", but I have seen a USB port which can be used for an iPhone, an Android, a flash drive, or just to charge.
Most cars these days will do Aux in, and Bluetooth, which are "generic common or standardized"
I believe that's more of a sticking point of the "Free" (as in in GPL), versus open source as in BSD that may be more likely to make it happen.
Lastly, the Common Dialogs DLL is upgraded with every version of Windows. Take an application written in 1995 and run it on Windows 10. It still works. It uses the Windows 10 UI for opening/saving files, instead of the old clunky Common Dialog UI for 1995.
This is not completely true. Here's some comparisons of common dialog UI The Windows 3.1 application still has the same panes it always had, though you get lower case letters... as long as it's not a long filename, in which case you get ~1.
The Windows 9x era common save dialog still has squared off buttons, and doesn't have the navigation junk that Windows 7 or 10 offer in their native dialogs. However you get icon styles of the native OS, and copy / paste work, and sometimes you get the enormous Windows 7 icons that isn't possible in Windows 9x. Aside from visual styles, the dialogs are very similar between Windows 7 and 10, so I suspect applications use the same API calls and they will look identical.
AVG and Avast have a combination of bloat, or nags that try to scare you into upgrading to a pay version. MSE, whether or not it's the top in the charts on detection, is a very good option for "set and forget" when dealing with distant relatives.
What I've seen is an inability of people to handle multiple lanes in a roundabout. So if new lanes start in the middle, while lanes spiral off to outside exits, people will be oblivious to the line markings. As well you can have people on an inner lane, that abruptly exit without checking if there is a car continuing past the exit in an outer lane.
Also just a general lack of use of Turn signals. More than normal.
It's the chasses (and not even engines) that are the main things shared in projects like that
Ford and Mazda did share engine technology. For the longest time Mazda V6 engines were Ford designs, and ford I4 engines were Mazda designs. Not 100%, but certain parts, eg: Mazda block and Ford heads. In fact quite a number of Mazda 3 owners, when their 2.3L gave them problems, bought a more inexpensive Ford 2.5L from the junkyard, and put their Mazda head on it.
Then you have the Mazda Tribute / Ford Escape that shared a lot, and the Mazda B2000 / Ford Ranger that were just badge engineered.
Ford Festiva / Mazda 121 were also badge engineered.
The early version of PST files has a file limit of something like 2GB, at which point the whole database has a risk of becoming corrupt. So it is worth breaking it down into bitesize chunks (yearly?) that are easier to manage and archive.
I go through >10 year old emails all the time. "Hey, I remember talking to a professor about this algorithm." "Where did I go camping that year?" "What was my order number for that game I bought ages and ages ago, since they accept them for free copies of the remake?" "I'm trying to gather information on something, but the person I talked to has long since died and their site isn't on archive.org." It's only going to happen more and more often for older and older stuff.
Agree. Or I'm like "What was the flight I took last year from JFK to LAX? It worked good with my connections". Even recently for work I noticed that when I ordered software from one supplier, I got an email, copied to the local vendor, with the serial number. I had another package we bought from them (by someone else that since left) where I could track down the PO, but not the serial number. I emailed the guy copied on my email, and he could dig up the copy he was CC'd on.
Email is also really convenient for backing up work that's under the ten megabyte range...manuscripts, source code, etc. If someone doesn't have a proper backup system or it's not easy to use from the system they're on at the moment, emailing something to themselves is quick and easy.
Critical University term end reports I remember regularly emailing copies to myself. If my computer exploded, or I accidentally overwrote everything and hit save, I could restore to a known good copy.
Old work gets rescued from floppies all the time, and surely there's some fascinating, ancient projects backed up in emails that people have long since forgotten about.
I'm surprised about work getting rescued from floppies. Back when floppies were a thing, I was shocked at how many people relied on them to hold ALL their school work. Given they were the most unreliable storage format ever invented (and at the time, '99 or so, hard drives were relatively reliable), very frequently people would lose an entire term's worth of work. I remember once I was able to recover the auto-save copy off a nearly corrupt floppy of someone's large term end project. They were almost in tears.
My moving window for keeping all e-mails from all e-mail accounts is 10 years, however, I also have some mails dating back as far as '95. Thing is, you can never know when and what you could need, and given the almost 0 long term cost of storing those e-mails, it's better to have them than not to have them.
While the long term cost is low, I think it's important to make a clear mark as to what's active, and what's archived. I use calendar years, and early in the year, archive digital photos, "my documents", etc from the previous year. That way I know the "2014" data set is fixed, and is the same on all backups. Then I only need to worry about stuff active in the current year. If I need to dig back to find old information I can, but it's not cluttering up my current workspace / hard drive / etc.
Most work places I've been at have had 3 months before automatic forced deletion of email.
We have one of those. A big PITA. 1 year would be much more manageable. I backup the local sync'd cache every three months. If I need to dig back in old emails, I go offline, restore the old cache, and retrieve what I need. On more that one occasion I've had to ask customers or suppliers "Do you remember x many months or years ago we talked about y? Do you still have that email?"
Luckily they are as much of a pack rat and can produce the email.
And here we are today with most small piston aircraft still using almost identical engines, still burning leaded gasoline. So called "100LL" (low lead) contains more lead than car gas ever did.
Remember when a story on this site would bring down servers? I'll bet that C|Net article barely tweaks the bandwidth meter.
That says as much about the march of progress as it does about the decline of slashdot. Even if slashdot were at it's peak, times 2, the capacity of the hardware and the internet has grown many times that, plus dynamic loadbalancing and scaling and content delivery networks...
These days even trending on facebook and twitter won't bring anybody significant down.
Granted it was 5 years ago, but Gizmodo buying a stolen iPhone 4 prototype, and then blackmailing Steve Jobs, created a news article trending so much that Gizmodo (and maybe all of Gawker) reverted to a very basic page layout, free of excess Javascript.
That's more because Windows RT is essentially Windows for ARM CPUs, and basically no Windows software is compiled for ARM CPUs. There are ways of dealing with that, such as what Apple did when they changed CPU architecture from PowerPC to Intel - a compatibility layer that's essentially PowerPC emulation. That's not such a realistic option for running x86 software on ARM - not if you want reasonable speeds, anyway.
Windows NT had versions running on DEC's Alpha processors. DEC released an emulation layer called FX!32 to allow x86 programs to run on Alpha NT machines*.
While such an emulation layer wouldn't provide great performance on a WindowsRT machine, a lot of programs are not that processor intensive. Any amount of backwards compatibility could increase interest in the WindowsRT platform. With more interest, it might persuade more developers to cross-compile to ARM versions of Windows.
Unfortunately Microsoft was trying to shove their Metro App store down everyone's throats, and discouraged even native ARM desktop applications. Few enough people developed for Metro on x86, let alone ARM. Microsoft also made the mistake of not requiring all apps in the app store to be cross compiled for WindowsRT and Windows8/8.1. Plus they made the mistake of not requiring it to be cross-compiled with their phones. One thing Android and iOS has is that the same apps can work on a phone and a tablet.
*Ironically, now there's software to emulate DEC's Alpha platform on Windows (or Linux) based PCs to allow businesses to run their critical Alpha software.
I can open a SPICE, VNC, or RDP session to someplace relevant and use it very much like a real computer.
Eg: The real computers at the other end of the line are still important.
I thought it was going to be about Photo Radar bots issuing speeding / red light tickets.
Tablets are already dying off, the iPad sales plateau is proof of that.
Why tablets are dying is a more interesting question.
Tablets aren't dying. Tablet sales are falling off because the people willing to buy one now have one. Tablets will stick around for the foreseeable future.
Agreed. Much like PC's / Laptops, Tablets (and smartphones) are starting to reach a mature, saturation point. A 3 year old model is still plenty useful. For some reason the tech industry feels that double digit growth is sustainable, and the only indication of success. That means if you sold 1 million units last year, you are a failure for selling 1.05 million this year, you need at least 1.1 million.
For real, genuine work, it's hard to beat a PC (any OS) with dual screens, and a keyboard and mouse. However a tablet is hard to beat to leave on the coffee table and open up for a quick web search, or to watch downloaded movies on a flight (though I usually download the movies on a PC). More and more when I travel I leave my laptop at home, and rely on my tablet.
A phone can run the same applications as the tablet, but on a more compact screen. Great to have always on you web access, mapping access, email access, mediocre camera, the ability to fireup Netflix for Chromecast, or even slightly more sophisticated apps, like having a graphing calculator on you at all times.
At one time there were "home computers". These were basically appliances. You inserted the cartridge or diskette for the program you wanted, turned it on, and you were ready to go. Android and iOS better recreate this experience for home users than full blown OS's (Windows, Desktop Linux like Ubuntu or RedHat, and even OS X). For grandma, you really are better off giving her an iPad than a Desktop, but at an office, not so much.
The reality distortion field generator is on the fritz. The yearly upgrade cycle business model is failing.
The Reality Distortion field has been on the fritz since his holiness, The Steve, croaked.
Steve was insistent on the 10" iPad, and 3.5" iPhone for maximum usability for their form factors.
Now you have the iPad mini and iPhone 6 Plus competing to be the same size.
In Canada I had a Bell mobility Nokia 1x CDMA phone 9 years ago. It could fall back on AMPS (or be forced) for no extra charge. I remember using it once at an outdoor concert. Even the temporary cell sites that were set up were overwhelmed, but I could force the phone to AMPS and make a call.
I also remember them still selling analog StarTacs and Nokia 918's in the early 2000's.
Of course none of them had the range of a 3W car phone.
On Fords "Max AC" is actually AC with recirc turned on. With this the air going over the evaporator coil (inside coil) is recirculated inside air, and not hotter outside air. So the system runs more efficient than normal AC (though all you are breathing is recycled farts).
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but as industrial automation moves from proprietary networks to Ethernet based networks, it's very common to find devices with HTTP based configuration and status pages (even think of consumer routers). Assuming no proprietary plugins (Java, Flash) are used, it may be the closest to a "modern" equivalent.
Though there's still something nice and simple about an RS-232 terminal interface, and the relative ease it can be implemented.
I think modern diesels are less forgiving on the type and quality of fuel used.