Yes, it's still a thing. Still works on modern Windows. You'll have infinitely more problems getting the things to run than you will do accessing the original CD's.
But, to be honest, there's a plethora of one-click installs of any game you can mention, legit and dubious, out there - complete with emulation and fixes for modern OS.
There's also zero point archiving something that people have ever heard of. DOOM isn't going to drop off the face of the earth but, say, some ancient obscure title that you downloaded from a random FTP site (back when that just meant "online" not "pirated") or wrote yourself - that might be worth archiving.
I find, when it comes to archiving, 50% of the stuff is absolute crap that you'll never, ever refer to again. 40% of it is mainstream titles that everyone has and that never "disappear" entirely anyway. And the 10% is family photos and stuff that only you care about (probably not even your kids will care enough to want to store them all).
Sure, if you're famous one day, maybe someone will pay for that code listing you dig out from a 20-year-old archive, but otherwise forget it.
And this is coming from someone who - in their current mail account - has email going back prior to 1997, from when I got my very first email account.
I'm skinny. Everyone comments on it. At 35 you can put your fingers around the widest parts of arms without difficulty.
I basically live on sugar. I drink Coca-Cola endlessly (do not drink hot drinks, tend to have sugar in them when I do). I pig out on high-fat, high-sugar food and lived off fast food for many years. I eat sweets like a child and have to curb my appetite for sweets only because I work in a school and they are banned there for the kdis themselves (so I have to hide them, etc.). I also don't really exercise. At all. Ever. Never been to a gym in my life.
Yes, I have a "health" problem that's going to catch up with me in the end. Until then, I enjoy my food. And sweets. And crisps. And everything I feel like eating.
And people in work keep asking how I stay so skinny. How I have so much energy. I'm still the guy work colleagues ask to move heavy cabinets etc. when they need moving.
Blanket rules curb the average, but it does not mean there's an instant 1:1 relationship with every person's metabolism and diet. I'm sure my cholesterol and blood sugar are off the scale at points in the day. But my health, generally speaking, is pretty damn good.
I've been to doctors about 3-4 times in the last TEN YEARS. Once to have a toenail removed. Once to be diagnosed with swine flu (but had 5% of the symptoms of everyone else who had it, I just needed it confirmed as I work in schools and had to be certified off-work - I've probably had less than 5 sick days in the last five years). Three times to register with new doctors (so not medically-related, just administration). Who all take my BP, quiz me, and then never mention a thing about my health - probably because I look thin.
I live in a country with free healthcare, so I'm certainly not self-medicating here - in fact I don't medicate... people know I'm really bad if I ask for a paracetamol as I just don't take ANYTHING generally speaking (not some hippy-drive, just don't take pills for things unnecessarily and the rare headache I have will go in the same amount of time, pills or not).
The problem is not the general availability of high-sugar, high-fat foods. The problem is that humans are NOT all the same and BMI, in particular, is a REALLY bad measure (technically I'm underweight so advice would be to eat more of the bad stuff....). The focus on a metric rather than the person is part of the modern medical degeneration of personal contact. "I don't care who you are, you're over this number, eat less."
I trust doctors implicitly. I consult them when required. I regard them as qualified experts in their field who don't need me bothering them for a sniffle but will trust my life to them any time. However, I also have not been to doctors in years, and also have had to go with friends to doctors and tell THEM what the problem is (and then had it confirmed by GP, consultant specialist, etc.).
Health != skinny. Health != fat. Health != a number. It's a statistic and thus, as a mathematician, almost certainly a lie chosen to suit the intended outcome.
Don't ban sugar, or tax it. Start with a health system that has time for patients and to listen, and go from there. People are adults who can make their own choices and who can understand the consequences in seconds if they want to. Regulating sugar - of all things - is the ultimate nanny-state.
The Microsoft education licensing I deal with in the UK is tied to your staff FTE, on an annually recurring base.
What you install / do above that is up to you, but the base license certainly isn't free even if you can have any number of students / workstations for no extra.
Google Apps for Education is Google Apps for Domains, rebranded and with more controls.
You can't even tell externally that it's Google if you do it right. It uses your mail domain and your logo and nobody is any the wiser.
The only tell-tale... if you go to GMail.com and use your school address, it logs you straight in.
By what I've seen, the Google Accounts for Education are not "normal" accounts either - you can lock them down the same as on your domain - and even prevent user X sharing their drive with user Y, control email settings, etc.
They are a managed, rebrandable service provided by Google. It's not "just a Google Account"... there are a lot more controls and customisability that basically removes all mention of Google except for to the administrators.
To the rest of the work, "school" means something that only children go to.
There, parents do have to supervise their homework schedule. They do have to be hand-held into completing assignments. They are managed by teachers who can barely login (so a plain HTML page is out of the question).
What Google has broken into is the VLE market - a growing, required trend in UK education sector, for example. And, yes, Google Apps for Education is available over here too - I know, I deployed it in an independent (private) primary school (kids up to age 11).
Just because it doesn't fit your usage, doesn't mean that someone, somewhere wouldn't be extremely glad of having this. Most schools in the UK pay £1000+ a year to their VLE provider to give them this sort of functionality. That's one of the reasons I put an entire school on Google Apps for Domains - no Exchange Server required, free office suite available outside school too, free cloud storage with UK-DPA compatible controls, free calendaring and email, no ads, device control over Android tablets, and no end of other stuff like this.
Google just upped the ante and targeted lower-age schools with a free product backed by one of the world's largest Internet names.
The Microsoft solution is "do it in Sharepoint / Exchange". They are clearly targeting business-only. And though education discounts are good, they aren't free by a long shot. The home-brew method is beyond just about every school that doesn't have a full-time team of people.
P.S. I'm working in an independent school now. There was definitely a feeling of having missed the boat when I described what Google Apps for Education does for free, after they'd paid for several years worth of services from their suppliers.
I was always of the opinion that this is just perception - it feels longer because more is happening.
That was until I was driving through unknown roads, at night, in horrendous driving rain on my own. I passed through a small town, and was way under the speed limit as I could see there was a pub (hence drunken people getting home in the rain was my thought) and yet the rain on my windscreen hindered my vision slightly even with the wipers on full. I was crawling along.
So I poodled through the town, out the other side, and up a tarmac incline. It was at this point, driving along, that my brain decided to supply me with information. I'd just passed a road sign on a pole, stuck at the bottom of the incline. It wasn't a usual one. I can remember in my head clearly debating whether I'd seen it correctly, and what it could mean. The debate went on for a while, foot still gently resting on the accelerator.
The sign was a red circle, inside which was a picture of a car, tipping over an edge into some wiggly lines. It's not one that I have cause to see very often. And I swear, in my head, for several tens of seconds, I was pondering the sign while the car was still moving.
It is, of course, a "harbour ahead" warning telling that you are about to plunge into the water. The ramp I was going up was not an incline, but a ramp into where (presumably) a ferry or similar would normally dock. Except there was no ferry.
I slammed my brakes on and was left with my headlights beaming out and catching only the top few feet of blue waves. And the waves must have been 15 feet high, and went on forever - they disappeared into absolute darkness as, obviously, there was no light ahead of me but the projected by my headlights. But I was that close on the incline that I could actually project light and see the waves ahead of me, sitting on the sheer vertical drop that would go into the water.
I cannot swim in a pool, I certainly cannot swim in a sea like that, from a car, in that amount of surprise. It was late at night, pitch black and I was actually outside the village. Any splash I made would be inaudible against the rain (in fact, nobody heard my screech of tyres at all). I was out on a drive after my wife and I had split but were still living together and she'd brought her parents around to visit, in order to disconnect for a while. To say that I would probably not have survived, and that people weren't likely to hunt too hard, and certainly not immediately, is an understatement.
In my rear view mirror, the view hadn't moved far enough to see the sign that had made me stop - that was still alongside my rear passenger window. Hence my braking distance in those "several tens of seconds" was approximately 6 feet, if that. In the wet. So I was poodling along, but still, the ramp was barely 10-15 feet long itself.
After what was, literally, ten minutes or so of very heavy breathing and watching the waves in front of me, I reversed the car slowly back (I remember having difficulty seeing as I hadn't put my rear wiper on), parked up, and got out into the torrential rain to look around. There was only one sign. The one I'd seen. There was no warning, no hint that there was even water nearby, no nautical theme at all in the whole village. Driving home, I kept my eye out for signs I might have missed in the rain, there were none, except for the one that made me stop.
But I swear, I can remember my entire thought process of - at one point - thinking how the sign must be wrong and someone was playing silly beggars, my highway code, all sorts, until the realisation hit me of what it was. It was then an awful long time before my brain supplied the notion "Well, stop then, you stupid bugger". In reality, my car would have been on the bottom of the ocean by the time I'd had all those thoughts if they'd happened as I remember them - and also how I remember thinking of them immediately afterwards.
My life didn't flash before my eyes, but there was time too. My brain mu
The first car I ever bought, like all the cars I've ever bought, was an old banger. Some kid had abused it for 10+ years and sold it on. Eventually it ended up a few years from permanent scrapping but was still roadworthy enough for me to buy.
It had "push-start" ignition. A previous owner had had the steering smashed in a theft and obviously just replaced the ignition with a push-button. You had to have the Ford electronic key touching the ignition slot so it could do the one-wire communications to the immobiliser, but it was "push-button start".
It worked. The car did 100,000 miles just while I had it.
By contrast, a car that a family member hired in Scotland had such a complicated "modern" ignition that you had to have this big plug-block of an ignition key (that had no metal connectors so was presumably RF-based), shove that into a cassette-shaped hole on the dash (that was entirely plastic), then hold down the brake pedal (with no indication of that being necessary or why, and it was a manual car), pressing a button on the control stalk to actually start the car. I once tried to move it for them and 30+ minutes later gave up and told them to do it themselves because I couldn't get the fucking car to start with all the proper "keys".
The problem is not push-button ignition. That's easy. The problem is drive-by-wire systems that think they know better than the driver and crap, untested designs. I'll happily take a car without an ignition key, or with RFID ignition or similar. Hell, I open my car with RFID (the first car above actually had IR-based remote central locking), starting it with the same is no big deal. What I won't take is a car that will cut off the engine while it's running without my express instruction to do so, or one that pisses about when I have all the keys and I can't figure out how to start it in a hurry with the given instructions.
Push-button ignitions are the toys of the 90's boy racer. There's nothing special there. The tech that people hate is the crap where you take vital mechanical and electrical interfaces away from the driver and replace them with indirect interfaces that rely on everything working perfectly.
The ignition key connects 12V to the starter motor, and a few other systems. One relay can do that. One button / RFID reader / whatever can initiate that. What's more important is to make it as direct as possible, without some computer deciding to override it just because there's been a buffer overflow in its handling of a DAB radio station, or whatever.
Something NOT EXISTING does not mean that something else hasn't won... in fact, pretty much the definition of winning is that there's nobody else around to compete.
And there are almost certainly alternative libraries out there, especially on Unix systems. It's just the OpenGL is the de facto standard, and DirectX (all the associated technologies, not just 3D) doesn't even exist on Linux.
On Windows, OpenGL already competes with DirectX. Especially with the indie-game revolution of the last 10 years.
On Linux, OpenGL wins 100% complete, hands-down. Because DirectX can't even run, let alone come close on performance.
On Mac, OpenGL wins 100% complete, hands-down. Unless you count boot-camp, which is really just Windows.
You can try to paint a different picture all you like - fact is that OpenGL is not only "the same" as DirectX when you're on Windows, but also runs in a ton of other places. That fact that it has slightly less performance than the ideal scenario on one of those (it has to be said) more obscure platforms is pretty inconsequential (and now fixed). I haven't seen anyone complain about the OpenGL performance on those millions of smartphones that run it. I haven't heard much about DirectX on smartphones, however.
Cherry-picking the battlefield for a comparison is no worse than cheating because you know you're going to lose.
The power generation isn't one billionth as hard as - how the hell do you get that energy (presumably electrical) to the device in the first place in a usable format? You can alway just build a nuclear fusion plant, then another, then another, then another, then another, in close proximity.
But somewhere, somehow, you have to transport or convert that amount of energy in a non-light way, which is going to involve some humungously gigantic amount of heat on a physical component, or some monstrously huge device to attempt to dissipate the heat.
The problems of generation are solveable - we just need a way to harness something like a Sun (e.g. Dyson spheres). The problem you really have is how do you concentrate that energy onto a point such that it generates a laser?
Let's say that one pay-per-view cost, say, $32 (for ease of the maths).
Let's say that a thousand people downloaded it (likely MUCH more). That is a direct loss of $32,000 to the content creator (without even needing to fabricate things, because that content was pay-per-view).
Let's say he did a thousand torrents (likely not much less). That's $32,000,000. Direct, provable, accountable loss. Without any form of exaggeration.
The fact is that he won't end up paying $32m. If he is asked to, he'll have to declare himself bankrupt after paying the court what he can prove he can reasonably afford. He's destroyed his credit-line, and cost himself a lot of money and luxuries.
But he's not going to lose his freedom, or be mentally scarred for life, or be likely to go out and murder because he has been punished so harshly that his life isn't worth living etc. or be stopped from getting most jobs, or anything else.
I think it's proportionate to be honest, and almost certainly he'll get off lighter than I'd expect him to.
That person almost certainly agreed to a contract when they agreed to receive the copyright content into their devices that they subscribe to.
Thus, breach of contract is EASY, and the contract will be written (or at the very least, legally enforceable - e.g. an online purchase contract).
Additionally, if you are doing things in the contract to misrepresent yourself (e.g. a business rather than a personal, rebroadcasting rather than personal use), or even just modifying cable / satellite systems to illegally receive channels (and thus receiving contracted content WITHOUT a contract), then you could easily see fraud-related charges too.
Don't fuck with the lawyers, because you'll be caught coming AND going, and that's what they've gone for. When between a rock and a hard place like that, the copyright infringement is almost a given, and the extras are going to get you whichever way things happen to go (you did have a contract, or you didn't), even if one of them happens to be dropped later.
To be honest, if the case is as stated, the guy knew EXACTLY what he was doing - it's hard to record and then upload thousands of videos to a torrent site accidentally - it's just now a question of the lawyers not letting him escape on a technicality, hence the extra charges.
I've always said that the time to stop using a company is when they do things that aren't in your interests - or indeed the interests of any logic.
Companies that "rebrand". Companies that give poor customer service. Companies that gobble-up and retire old, famous brands. Companies that force you to move to their "new" interface / app / whatever (take note, Slashdot!)
These things achieve nothing that a customer would want them to achieve and actually hint at lots of poor, cyclical management decisions in order to justify someone's job (Let's outsource! Let's bring in-house! Let's outsource!)
I stopped using Hotmail when they forced a new interface on me that was worse and never got fixed (and I was a paying customer back-in-the-day).
I stopped using Geocities when I had to convert it to a Yahoo Account.
I stopped using a Yahoo account (entirely separate to the above) when they started to hinder me getting to my email.
I've stayed on GMail because I learned my lesson and no longer rely on any web interface to stay static. You piss about, I'll use IMAP into my favourite webmail / browser. Done.
With free services, brand loyalty is lost incredibly quickly. When MySpace *went out of fashion* everyone jumped on alternatives.
Let's get this straight - you want me to view adverts? Make it as painless as possible and put something I WANT TO USE behind the adverts. And, you know what? I will.
Ironically, my laptop cost a lot more than my car.
The analogy isn't really fair, though. Your car doesn't get pulled abut and poked and investigated by random wandering people throughout the entire day looking for a vulnerability. Even in a crime-ridden area. Your car isn't a guardian on the front line between all your financial, personal and secret information and the public Internet (whether you have a firewall or not, the OS is still the guardian of your data here).
And, still, cars get recalled, discontinued, or just taken off the road no matter their age. If it's not a "vintage" car, good luck as it gets older getting it to pass whatever your local roadworthiness test is, especially with shrinking emission limits and tightened safety requirements.
I speak as someone whose car is 15 years old - I wouldn't touch a PC over 4-years-old for my own use unless it was incredibly well-managed (and, yes, I manage networks for a living and have managed much older PC's adequately - I'm only two years past a XP->Windows 8, Office 2003->2013, Server 2003->Server 2012R2 upgrade, precisely because it worked and it was managed adequately, but we still couldn't carry it forever). I speak as someone who buys an "old banger" of a car every time my one won't pass the next test or starts edging out of roadworthiness, and never pays more than the cheapest of new laptops for the next one.
XP is dead. Kill it. Stop dragging it. It was good and fun while it lasted, but 7 or even 8 (with some tweaks) isn't that much of a loss at all. And I've yet to see a decent reason for a program you are using not to be updated to run on 7 (and, sorry, that matters more than anything else - the OS is irrespective if you're putting all your trust, money and maybe even life / business into an app that people can't be bothered to maintain once a decade or so).
I've put people on Ubuntu in the in-between. I've pulled Windows 8 into a system people can recognise and get along with. I've needed to support the most dumb, and the most eager, and the most knowledgeable users simultaneously.
But XP is dead. The fact that I acknowledge it is extremely telling. I never kill anything without a purpose. It's tricky to even install the fucking thing on anything approaching modern hardware (a lot of BIOS do not support legacy IDE any more, and SATA installs can be a minefield of AHCI drivers in XP).
You want to keep it? Install Linux and virtualise it. But, for fuck's sake, stop running it as the primary barrier between your personal files, local network and the Internet (no Internet firewall in the world can stop you getting infected and spewing your data OUT of the network, especially in the consumer/home use price ranges).
The full announcement tells you that a load of things had to be converted to unsigned 32-bit because that's all you could do.
And they can conceivably affect things in your children's lifetimes (if not before, with long date calculations like mortgages etc.).
Fact is, however, that system support for 64-bit time only means your taskbar clock will go up that far. It means nothing in terms of your application actually supporting and calculating things correctly once we get anywhere near 2038.
Conceivably, those places offering 30-year mortgages etc. were handling those dates several years ago. They involve a lot of money so likely they are okay.
But whether your we get everything like your phone, satnav, car, embedded devices etc. all onto full 64-bit time OS and 64-bit time applications BEFORE they're predicted-end-of-life would go through 2038 - that's a different question entirely.
I can't express how relieved I am at the majority of responses here. Most of the comments on anything that suggest people should drive the damn car and not do other things, or stay under the speed limit, or otherwise drive safely are other leapt upon like some kind of weakness is present in those expressing them.
It's quite refreshing to see the majority of people say exactly what I was thinking - drive the fucking car, ignore the fucking phone. If you can't trust yourself, turn the fucking phone off.
Stop relying on computers and fucking apps to limit your own, personal, adult, behaviour. Like those people who rely on the Amazon Fire's "time limits" for their kids, or similar methods of parental control, it just makes me think that you're too stupid to be allowed to use those devices / have a kid / drive a car in the first place.
I'm the only person I know who will not answer a phone in a moving car. I actually have difficulty EXPLAINING to people why that is. They are incredulous and don't understand it. And they still ring me while I'm driving to meet them. How hard is it? I do not answer the phone while driving, nor will I phone to tell you I'm late unless I'm literally at a complete stop AND am late enough that you need to know.
I do use my phone as a sat-nav. It's not in my line-of-sight, even, it's down by the gearstick. I don't need to look at it (especially with turn-by-turn voice) unless I've stopped and am looking for the particular house I need - I can always just keep driving, turn around, go around the block or circle a roundabout if I miss a turning.
I do not answer it while driving. Anything that might be important, you'll ring back. Anything that is important will be enough to bother me and that will make me pull over and give my attention to your message. And if I find out that you've done that knowing I'm driving just to "see where I am", you'll be put on a silent ringtone on my phone forever more.
The phone is already the rudest device in human existence (ANSWER ME NOW, ANSWER ME NOW, ANSWER ME NOW, I'LL KEEP RINGING UNTIL YOU ANSWER ME NOW, I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU'RE DOING ANSWER ME NOW!). It's fast becoming the most dangerous device because of idiots like you.
Drive the fucking car. Switch the phone off. Enjoy the silence, or your music, and a legally-prescribed requirement to be excused from ignoring all those work calls that inevitably happen just as you leave.
NO PHONE CALL / EMAIL / TEXT is that important. If you're mother's dead in hospital, people will call back, and it will never be an emergency that requires your presence at the expense of every innocent driver and passenger on the road.
Been serving us well for 40+ years, don't see why we should throw that away when - for instance - there still isn't a "break" in modern such encryption to leverage.
EC will be trusted when it's been around for 30+ years AND certified for military usage. PKE took at least 20 to get established in mainstream usage even without any real competition. By comparison, EC looks like a pimply teenager.
What you describe is infinitely more about the grid getting it's own way. When demand is "too much", they can turn off the least-profitable areas to concentrate on the most. Without their consent. And when demand is too low, they can allow your devices to ramp up without question.
It's about stripping the grid to the barebones to chase profits, and then - when the bare bones can't cope - turning off the demand at the source. Sure, you'll be annoyed that your power just went off, but at least the shop next to you that's part of a chain that gives them a lot of money wasn't affected, eh?
And what you end up with is NOT a stable grid. You end up with - to the home owner - an unpredictable one. Which means you have to put money into alternates if you want stability. And any kind of partitioning plan of the kind "this is my life-support, don't turn it off" / "this is the pond pump, you can switch it off when you like" is not only ripe for misuse, but also incredibly privacy-intruding too.
Fact is, they are keeping up with demand. They pretty much always have. The profits from the energy industry (note profit = AFTER investment in the network) are obscene. This isn't about coping for the future, or paying lip service to the latest political demand of sticking some money into rival products that - if successful - would kill your own industry overnight, or maintaining a stable network.
It's about cutting off Joe Bloggs' heating right in the middle of winter because he's only on the basic electricity tier, and hasn't yet upgraded to "Enegy Prime" and it's extra monthly subscription that ensures he won't get cut off.
Stop supporting single-vendor qualifications. And especially those qualifications RUN BY those vendors. I don't really know of another industry where the qualifications are run by a particular vendor and nobody else.
But, above and beyond that, I'm employed generally because I can learn anything quickly. Throw me in front of Linux, or Mac, or old Windows, or weird Windows configurations, or tell me you want the cutting-edge stuff just out of MS, and I'll get it done for you. I won't steer you towards what I'm more familiar with just because I'm more familiar with it.
The day I'm no longer able to learn, I'll be useless. Fortunately, science says that the more you learn, are forced to learn, and continue to learn, the easier learning is and the longer you continue to learn.
Compare to someone who took one of those "memory test" courses that changes every year so they can get another few thousand out of you, and who has never had to sit, think and research "How the hell do I do that?".
I find that invention, and compensation for problems, and improvisation is much more valuable than paying a vendor a few thousand in order to memorise their latest arrangement of menus.
As the article hints at, it's almost certainly legally unenforceable anyway.
And if you're that worried, use another place and TELL THEM WHY. Because they are requiring you to sign an unfair contract, which is unenforceable anyway, and they lost your custom because of it.
But the fact is, you can't sign many such things away. Even if you sign it. Even if you agree with it. Even if you wanted to.
Just because someone puts something in a contract, and even if you "agree" to it by signing it (or even ACTUALLY agree with that line of the contract, which is something else entirely), it does NOT mean that it's automatically legally enforceable.
Some rights cannot be signed away. Ever. Even if you want to. If you've ever read "This does not affect your statutory rights", it's an acknowledgement of this (and, in fact, they don't even need to say that - because not saying it wouldn't affect those rights either!).
And "Can not sue" clauses generally don't exist in a vast majority of jurisdictions around the world. Because firstly, they are stupid. Secondly, they are unfair. And thirdly, they are not (generally) legally enforceable anyway.
If you ever thought otherwise, just replace whatever line with "I agree to be killed". Just because you sign it, just because you want it to happen, does NOT mean that the other party in the contract is able to do it to you.
It doesn't mean that nothing is enforceable, but stupid shit like this has nothing to do with the company "backing down"... they just asked a lawyer and realised that they couldn't actually enforce that clause anyway, and they risk large swathes of the same contract being revoked because of such unfair clauses that might come under similar scrutiny.
Don't be stupid and sign away your rights, but equally don't assume that you CAN sign away such rights either. Especially where "like" on Facebook means you can't sue... sorry, ABSOLUTE BOLLOCKS, and would be thrown out of any court.
But now we hit the crucial point of electric cars. At some point, you have to pay a fortune and destroy the environment in order to put another, unrepairable, battery back into them.
This is the point at which two things can happen, if batteries are too expensive: People bin the cars and get a new one. People bin the cars and buy something else.
It's not like an iPad or something where this is a throwaway expense and the device goes out of fashion before it's required and replacement can be done on the cheap. WE HAVE NO CHEAP BATTERIES suitable for electric cars. It doesn't matter how huge your factory is, you just can't make the batteries that cheap. If you could, you wouldn't even need to make an electric car yourself, you could just make a living from the batteries alone and could have done many years ago before you sold the cars.
And the problem is there for all manufacturers, all end-users, all producers. We just don't have that kind of energy capacity that cheap yet. Except, possibly, in liquid form.
When these batteries start dying, the cars won't even get as far as the second-hand market. Nobody will touch them. They will be destroyed (recycled) rather than sold on. Now factor the cost of that battery over 8 years... chances are it comes in at about the same (with charging costs) as just using petrol all that time ($40k buys a LOT of petrol...). We honestly haven't saved anything. But done so at great expense.
And, historically, even battery "breakthrough" that I ever heard of resulted in pretty much zero commercial success (mainly because they never achieved anywhere near as much as they promised they would). And every battery "breakthrough" that I did witness as successful was done literally overnight without almost any fancy scientists telling us how great they'd be - laptops just started to come with NiMH, and then Li-Ion batteries - and then I saw a LiPo battery in a product - and at the time you'd never even heard of them. Even back in the early days of rechargeable batteries, they just appeared on the market out of nowhere and then stayed there for years while dozens, if not hundreds, of alternate ideas were given air-time and resulted in nothing because their improvements never actually materialised.
I'm not saying there's not something on the horizon. But the amount of battery chemistry changes that have commercialised successfully can, literally, be counted on your fingers. And the amount of "battery research" that resulted in nothing, where we were told they'd be the next big thing in 5-10 years time? Innumerable. I can remember being told that aerogels were the future of batteries... have yet to see one.
This is, as far as I can see, a face-saving exercise. Nobody has managed to build a better battery. Many of the electric cars of the last decade literally use laptop cells to do so - just stacked differently. And yet we've had proven commercially-viable electric vehicles since the 60's at least (anyone over 30 in the UK knows the sound of the milk-float).
They bet the whole show on someone, somewhere, building a better battery and - pretty much - selling at a loss hoping it would arrive if they just sold enough cars. And now that bubble is starting to collapse in on itself. Nothing has really changed in battery technology. Nothing looks likely to in the immediate future. So all they can do is ramp up production and hope there's enough lithium to use it.
And who gets the bum end of the deal - the first adopters who, to be honest, I have little sympathy for as they made the same predictions / gamble on batteries as Tesla have. Give it a couple of years and they will have a very expensive paperweight that can't even get them down the road and it'll be cheaper to buy something else entirely.
I'm not completely anti-electric. Hell, I was pricing up all-electric scooters/mopeds/motorbikes only the other day. They are viable. In the time it would take me to kill them, I would save enough in petrol to buy them all ove
That someone bothered to answer the question at all worries me. That kind of thing shouldn't even warrant an answer at this stage... literally, who cares?
The code has been a collection of driftwood for many years and ONLY when there's a major, major, major problem (one big enough for an awful lot of people to say "Fuck using that again"), do we then get any kind of code cleanup. Literally people never bothered to go through and clean up ancient crap that shouldn't even be in there any more.
And nobody bothered to lay a simple API over this heap-of-shit (yes, I've used it - yes, I've spent most of the time copy/pasting others and the "official" examples because there's so little useful documentation that it's the only way to get vaguely working code... and even then you have to "hypothesise" any number of corner cases for yourself on even the simplest of code and hope that (or make) the examples complete).
To me, this is nothing more than reactionary cleanup. If the problem hadn't happened, we'd still be running this crappy code on production hardware for decades to come (and may still be yet!). That's not at all reassuring. And, to my eyes, such cleanup stinks more of "Fuck, look at the state of this code, we can't even begin to fix this, we have to clean it up first" more than anything.
Sorry, but OpenSSL (and, by extension, the OpenBSD team) have lost an incredible amount of respect from me. Enough that I may not bother to touch their code again if I can help it. I thought it was just that the security of the code was so high that you weren't supposed to fuck with it without knowing it inside out, but it turns out that it was just antique obfuscation caused by code-rot and no suitable documentation.
It's going to take more than an overly-verbose reasoning as to why they won't rename it to get that kind of respect back. And it also makes me query deeper issues with other code they write too.
Slashdot Mirror
You could have googled it.
Yes, it's still a thing. Still works on modern Windows. You'll have infinitely more problems getting the things to run than you will do accessing the original CD's.
But, to be honest, there's a plethora of one-click installs of any game you can mention, legit and dubious, out there - complete with emulation and fixes for modern OS.
There's also zero point archiving something that people have ever heard of. DOOM isn't going to drop off the face of the earth but, say, some ancient obscure title that you downloaded from a random FTP site (back when that just meant "online" not "pirated") or wrote yourself - that might be worth archiving.
I find, when it comes to archiving, 50% of the stuff is absolute crap that you'll never, ever refer to again. 40% of it is mainstream titles that everyone has and that never "disappear" entirely anyway. And the 10% is family photos and stuff that only you care about (probably not even your kids will care enough to want to store them all).
Sure, if you're famous one day, maybe someone will pay for that code listing you dig out from a 20-year-old archive, but otherwise forget it.
And this is coming from someone who - in their current mail account - has email going back prior to 1997, from when I got my very first email account.
Because next time there's a fire in the transponder circuits, the victim's families will be demanding it be put back in at great expense.
I'm skinny. Everyone comments on it. At 35 you can put your fingers around the widest parts of arms without difficulty.
I basically live on sugar. I drink Coca-Cola endlessly (do not drink hot drinks, tend to have sugar in them when I do). I pig out on high-fat, high-sugar food and lived off fast food for many years. I eat sweets like a child and have to curb my appetite for sweets only because I work in a school and they are banned there for the kdis themselves (so I have to hide them, etc.). I also don't really exercise. At all. Ever. Never been to a gym in my life.
Yes, I have a "health" problem that's going to catch up with me in the end. Until then, I enjoy my food. And sweets. And crisps. And everything I feel like eating.
And people in work keep asking how I stay so skinny. How I have so much energy. I'm still the guy work colleagues ask to move heavy cabinets etc. when they need moving.
Blanket rules curb the average, but it does not mean there's an instant 1:1 relationship with every person's metabolism and diet. I'm sure my cholesterol and blood sugar are off the scale at points in the day. But my health, generally speaking, is pretty damn good.
I've been to doctors about 3-4 times in the last TEN YEARS. Once to have a toenail removed. Once to be diagnosed with swine flu (but had 5% of the symptoms of everyone else who had it, I just needed it confirmed as I work in schools and had to be certified off-work - I've probably had less than 5 sick days in the last five years). Three times to register with new doctors (so not medically-related, just administration). Who all take my BP, quiz me, and then never mention a thing about my health - probably because I look thin.
I live in a country with free healthcare, so I'm certainly not self-medicating here - in fact I don't medicate... people know I'm really bad if I ask for a paracetamol as I just don't take ANYTHING generally speaking (not some hippy-drive, just don't take pills for things unnecessarily and the rare headache I have will go in the same amount of time, pills or not).
The problem is not the general availability of high-sugar, high-fat foods. The problem is that humans are NOT all the same and BMI, in particular, is a REALLY bad measure (technically I'm underweight so advice would be to eat more of the bad stuff....). The focus on a metric rather than the person is part of the modern medical degeneration of personal contact. "I don't care who you are, you're over this number, eat less."
I trust doctors implicitly. I consult them when required. I regard them as qualified experts in their field who don't need me bothering them for a sniffle but will trust my life to them any time. However, I also have not been to doctors in years, and also have had to go with friends to doctors and tell THEM what the problem is (and then had it confirmed by GP, consultant specialist, etc.).
Health != skinny. Health != fat. Health != a number. It's a statistic and thus, as a mathematician, almost certainly a lie chosen to suit the intended outcome.
Don't ban sugar, or tax it. Start with a health system that has time for patients and to listen, and go from there. People are adults who can make their own choices and who can understand the consequences in seconds if they want to. Regulating sugar - of all things - is the ultimate nanny-state.
The Microsoft education licensing I deal with in the UK is tied to your staff FTE, on an annually recurring base.
What you install / do above that is up to you, but the base license certainly isn't free even if you can have any number of students / workstations for no extra.
Google Apps for Education is Google Apps for Domains, rebranded and with more controls.
You can't even tell externally that it's Google if you do it right. It uses your mail domain and your logo and nobody is any the wiser.
The only tell-tale... if you go to GMail.com and use your school address, it logs you straight in.
By what I've seen, the Google Accounts for Education are not "normal" accounts either - you can lock them down the same as on your domain - and even prevent user X sharing their drive with user Y, control email settings, etc.
They are a managed, rebrandable service provided by Google. It's not "just a Google Account"... there are a lot more controls and customisability that basically removes all mention of Google except for to the administrators.
Because not all education is to young-adults.
To the rest of the work, "school" means something that only children go to.
There, parents do have to supervise their homework schedule. They do have to be hand-held into completing assignments. They are managed by teachers who can barely login (so a plain HTML page is out of the question).
What Google has broken into is the VLE market - a growing, required trend in UK education sector, for example. And, yes, Google Apps for Education is available over here too - I know, I deployed it in an independent (private) primary school (kids up to age 11).
Just because it doesn't fit your usage, doesn't mean that someone, somewhere wouldn't be extremely glad of having this. Most schools in the UK pay £1000+ a year to their VLE provider to give them this sort of functionality. That's one of the reasons I put an entire school on Google Apps for Domains - no Exchange Server required, free office suite available outside school too, free cloud storage with UK-DPA compatible controls, free calendaring and email, no ads, device control over Android tablets, and no end of other stuff like this.
Google just upped the ante and targeted lower-age schools with a free product backed by one of the world's largest Internet names.
The Microsoft solution is "do it in Sharepoint / Exchange". They are clearly targeting business-only. And though education discounts are good, they aren't free by a long shot. The home-brew method is beyond just about every school that doesn't have a full-time team of people.
P.S. I'm working in an independent school now. There was definitely a feeling of having missed the boat when I described what Google Apps for Education does for free, after they'd paid for several years worth of services from their suppliers.
I was always of the opinion that this is just perception - it feels longer because more is happening.
That was until I was driving through unknown roads, at night, in horrendous driving rain on my own. I passed through a small town, and was way under the speed limit as I could see there was a pub (hence drunken people getting home in the rain was my thought) and yet the rain on my windscreen hindered my vision slightly even with the wipers on full. I was crawling along.
So I poodled through the town, out the other side, and up a tarmac incline. It was at this point, driving along, that my brain decided to supply me with information. I'd just passed a road sign on a pole, stuck at the bottom of the incline. It wasn't a usual one. I can remember in my head clearly debating whether I'd seen it correctly, and what it could mean. The debate went on for a while, foot still gently resting on the accelerator.
The sign was a red circle, inside which was a picture of a car, tipping over an edge into some wiggly lines. It's not one that I have cause to see very often. And I swear, in my head, for several tens of seconds, I was pondering the sign while the car was still moving.
It is, of course, a "harbour ahead" warning telling that you are about to plunge into the water. The ramp I was going up was not an incline, but a ramp into where (presumably) a ferry or similar would normally dock. Except there was no ferry.
I slammed my brakes on and was left with my headlights beaming out and catching only the top few feet of blue waves. And the waves must have been 15 feet high, and went on forever - they disappeared into absolute darkness as, obviously, there was no light ahead of me but the projected by my headlights. But I was that close on the incline that I could actually project light and see the waves ahead of me, sitting on the sheer vertical drop that would go into the water.
I cannot swim in a pool, I certainly cannot swim in a sea like that, from a car, in that amount of surprise. It was late at night, pitch black and I was actually outside the village. Any splash I made would be inaudible against the rain (in fact, nobody heard my screech of tyres at all). I was out on a drive after my wife and I had split but were still living together and she'd brought her parents around to visit, in order to disconnect for a while. To say that I would probably not have survived, and that people weren't likely to hunt too hard, and certainly not immediately, is an understatement.
In my rear view mirror, the view hadn't moved far enough to see the sign that had made me stop - that was still alongside my rear passenger window. Hence my braking distance in those "several tens of seconds" was approximately 6 feet, if that. In the wet. So I was poodling along, but still, the ramp was barely 10-15 feet long itself.
After what was, literally, ten minutes or so of very heavy breathing and watching the waves in front of me, I reversed the car slowly back (I remember having difficulty seeing as I hadn't put my rear wiper on), parked up, and got out into the torrential rain to look around. There was only one sign. The one I'd seen. There was no warning, no hint that there was even water nearby, no nautical theme at all in the whole village. Driving home, I kept my eye out for signs I might have missed in the rain, there were none, except for the one that made me stop.
But I swear, I can remember my entire thought process of - at one point - thinking how the sign must be wrong and someone was playing silly beggars, my highway code, all sorts, until the realisation hit me of what it was. It was then an awful long time before my brain supplied the notion "Well, stop then, you stupid bugger". In reality, my car would have been on the bottom of the ocean by the time I'd had all those thoughts if they'd happened as I remember them - and also how I remember thinking of them immediately afterwards.
My life didn't flash before my eyes, but there was time too. My brain mu
The first car I ever bought, like all the cars I've ever bought, was an old banger. Some kid had abused it for 10+ years and sold it on. Eventually it ended up a few years from permanent scrapping but was still roadworthy enough for me to buy.
It had "push-start" ignition. A previous owner had had the steering smashed in a theft and obviously just replaced the ignition with a push-button. You had to have the Ford electronic key touching the ignition slot so it could do the one-wire communications to the immobiliser, but it was "push-button start".
It worked. The car did 100,000 miles just while I had it.
By contrast, a car that a family member hired in Scotland had such a complicated "modern" ignition that you had to have this big plug-block of an ignition key (that had no metal connectors so was presumably RF-based), shove that into a cassette-shaped hole on the dash (that was entirely plastic), then hold down the brake pedal (with no indication of that being necessary or why, and it was a manual car), pressing a button on the control stalk to actually start the car. I once tried to move it for them and 30+ minutes later gave up and told them to do it themselves because I couldn't get the fucking car to start with all the proper "keys".
The problem is not push-button ignition. That's easy. The problem is drive-by-wire systems that think they know better than the driver and crap, untested designs. I'll happily take a car without an ignition key, or with RFID ignition or similar. Hell, I open my car with RFID (the first car above actually had IR-based remote central locking), starting it with the same is no big deal. What I won't take is a car that will cut off the engine while it's running without my express instruction to do so, or one that pisses about when I have all the keys and I can't figure out how to start it in a hurry with the given instructions.
Push-button ignitions are the toys of the 90's boy racer. There's nothing special there. The tech that people hate is the crap where you take vital mechanical and electrical interfaces away from the driver and replace them with indirect interfaces that rely on everything working perfectly.
The ignition key connects 12V to the starter motor, and a few other systems. One relay can do that. One button / RFID reader / whatever can initiate that. What's more important is to make it as direct as possible, without some computer deciding to override it just because there's been a buffer overflow in its handling of a DAB radio station, or whatever.
Don't be stupid.
Who makes the best space shuttle?
SpaceX or Nintendo?
Who makes the best video games console?
Nintendo or SpaceX?
Something NOT EXISTING does not mean that something else hasn't won... in fact, pretty much the definition of winning is that there's nobody else around to compete.
And there are almost certainly alternative libraries out there, especially on Unix systems. It's just the OpenGL is the de facto standard, and DirectX (all the associated technologies, not just 3D) doesn't even exist on Linux.
S3TC is part of OpenGL, not Valve-software specifically.
As such, if you want to support OpenGL, you're pretty much going to have to pay for the patent and/or workaround it.
I think you miss something:
On Windows, OpenGL already competes with DirectX. Especially with the indie-game revolution of the last 10 years.
On Linux, OpenGL wins 100% complete, hands-down. Because DirectX can't even run, let alone come close on performance.
On Mac, OpenGL wins 100% complete, hands-down. Unless you count boot-camp, which is really just Windows.
You can try to paint a different picture all you like - fact is that OpenGL is not only "the same" as DirectX when you're on Windows, but also runs in a ton of other places. That fact that it has slightly less performance than the ideal scenario on one of those (it has to be said) more obscure platforms is pretty inconsequential (and now fixed). I haven't seen anyone complain about the OpenGL performance on those millions of smartphones that run it. I haven't heard much about DirectX on smartphones, however.
Cherry-picking the battlefield for a comparison is no worse than cheating because you know you're going to lose.
The power generation isn't one billionth as hard as - how the hell do you get that energy (presumably electrical) to the device in the first place in a usable format? You can alway just build a nuclear fusion plant, then another, then another, then another, then another, in close proximity.
But somewhere, somehow, you have to transport or convert that amount of energy in a non-light way, which is going to involve some humungously gigantic amount of heat on a physical component, or some monstrously huge device to attempt to dissipate the heat.
The problems of generation are solveable - we just need a way to harness something like a Sun (e.g. Dyson spheres). The problem you really have is how do you concentrate that energy onto a point such that it generates a laser?
Let's say that one pay-per-view cost, say, $32 (for ease of the maths).
Let's say that a thousand people downloaded it (likely MUCH more). That is a direct loss of $32,000 to the content creator (without even needing to fabricate things, because that content was pay-per-view).
Let's say he did a thousand torrents (likely not much less). That's $32,000,000. Direct, provable, accountable loss. Without any form of exaggeration.
The fact is that he won't end up paying $32m. If he is asked to, he'll have to declare himself bankrupt after paying the court what he can prove he can reasonably afford. He's destroyed his credit-line, and cost himself a lot of money and luxuries.
But he's not going to lose his freedom, or be mentally scarred for life, or be likely to go out and murder because he has been punished so harshly that his life isn't worth living etc. or be stopped from getting most jobs, or anything else.
I think it's proportionate to be honest, and almost certainly he'll get off lighter than I'd expect him to.
That person almost certainly agreed to a contract when they agreed to receive the copyright content into their devices that they subscribe to.
Thus, breach of contract is EASY, and the contract will be written (or at the very least, legally enforceable - e.g. an online purchase contract).
Additionally, if you are doing things in the contract to misrepresent yourself (e.g. a business rather than a personal, rebroadcasting rather than personal use), or even just modifying cable / satellite systems to illegally receive channels (and thus receiving contracted content WITHOUT a contract), then you could easily see fraud-related charges too.
Don't fuck with the lawyers, because you'll be caught coming AND going, and that's what they've gone for. When between a rock and a hard place like that, the copyright infringement is almost a given, and the extras are going to get you whichever way things happen to go (you did have a contract, or you didn't), even if one of them happens to be dropped later.
To be honest, if the case is as stated, the guy knew EXACTLY what he was doing - it's hard to record and then upload thousands of videos to a torrent site accidentally - it's just now a question of the lawyers not letting him escape on a technicality, hence the extra charges.
I've always said that the time to stop using a company is when they do things that aren't in your interests - or indeed the interests of any logic.
Companies that "rebrand".
Companies that give poor customer service.
Companies that gobble-up and retire old, famous brands.
Companies that force you to move to their "new" interface / app / whatever (take note, Slashdot!)
These things achieve nothing that a customer would want them to achieve and actually hint at lots of poor, cyclical management decisions in order to justify someone's job (Let's outsource! Let's bring in-house! Let's outsource!)
I stopped using Hotmail when they forced a new interface on me that was worse and never got fixed (and I was a paying customer back-in-the-day).
I stopped using Geocities when I had to convert it to a Yahoo Account.
I stopped using a Yahoo account (entirely separate to the above) when they started to hinder me getting to my email.
I've stayed on GMail because I learned my lesson and no longer rely on any web interface to stay static. You piss about, I'll use IMAP into my favourite webmail / browser. Done.
With free services, brand loyalty is lost incredibly quickly. When MySpace *went out of fashion* everyone jumped on alternatives.
Let's get this straight - you want me to view adverts? Make it as painless as possible and put something I WANT TO USE behind the adverts. And, you know what? I will.
Ironically, my laptop cost a lot more than my car.
The analogy isn't really fair, though. Your car doesn't get pulled abut and poked and investigated by random wandering people throughout the entire day looking for a vulnerability. Even in a crime-ridden area. Your car isn't a guardian on the front line between all your financial, personal and secret information and the public Internet (whether you have a firewall or not, the OS is still the guardian of your data here).
And, still, cars get recalled, discontinued, or just taken off the road no matter their age. If it's not a "vintage" car, good luck as it gets older getting it to pass whatever your local roadworthiness test is, especially with shrinking emission limits and tightened safety requirements.
I speak as someone whose car is 15 years old - I wouldn't touch a PC over 4-years-old for my own use unless it was incredibly well-managed (and, yes, I manage networks for a living and have managed much older PC's adequately - I'm only two years past a XP->Windows 8, Office 2003->2013, Server 2003->Server 2012R2 upgrade, precisely because it worked and it was managed adequately, but we still couldn't carry it forever). I speak as someone who buys an "old banger" of a car every time my one won't pass the next test or starts edging out of roadworthiness, and never pays more than the cheapest of new laptops for the next one.
XP is dead. Kill it. Stop dragging it. It was good and fun while it lasted, but 7 or even 8 (with some tweaks) isn't that much of a loss at all. And I've yet to see a decent reason for a program you are using not to be updated to run on 7 (and, sorry, that matters more than anything else - the OS is irrespective if you're putting all your trust, money and maybe even life / business into an app that people can't be bothered to maintain once a decade or so).
I've put people on Ubuntu in the in-between. I've pulled Windows 8 into a system people can recognise and get along with. I've needed to support the most dumb, and the most eager, and the most knowledgeable users simultaneously.
But XP is dead. The fact that I acknowledge it is extremely telling. I never kill anything without a purpose. It's tricky to even install the fucking thing on anything approaching modern hardware (a lot of BIOS do not support legacy IDE any more, and SATA installs can be a minefield of AHCI drivers in XP).
You want to keep it? Install Linux and virtualise it. But, for fuck's sake, stop running it as the primary barrier between your personal files, local network and the Internet (no Internet firewall in the world can stop you getting infected and spewing your data OUT of the network, especially in the consumer/home use price ranges).
Except we're not on 64-bit.
The full announcement tells you that a load of things had to be converted to unsigned 32-bit because that's all you could do.
And they can conceivably affect things in your children's lifetimes (if not before, with long date calculations like mortgages etc.).
Fact is, however, that system support for 64-bit time only means your taskbar clock will go up that far. It means nothing in terms of your application actually supporting and calculating things correctly once we get anywhere near 2038.
Conceivably, those places offering 30-year mortgages etc. were handling those dates several years ago. They involve a lot of money so likely they are okay.
But whether your we get everything like your phone, satnav, car, embedded devices etc. all onto full 64-bit time OS and 64-bit time applications BEFORE they're predicted-end-of-life would go through 2038 - that's a different question entirely.
I can't express how relieved I am at the majority of responses here. Most of the comments on anything that suggest people should drive the damn car and not do other things, or stay under the speed limit, or otherwise drive safely are other leapt upon like some kind of weakness is present in those expressing them.
It's quite refreshing to see the majority of people say exactly what I was thinking - drive the fucking car, ignore the fucking phone. If you can't trust yourself, turn the fucking phone off.
Stop relying on computers and fucking apps to limit your own, personal, adult, behaviour. Like those people who rely on the Amazon Fire's "time limits" for their kids, or similar methods of parental control, it just makes me think that you're too stupid to be allowed to use those devices / have a kid / drive a car in the first place.
I'm the only person I know who will not answer a phone in a moving car. I actually have difficulty EXPLAINING to people why that is. They are incredulous and don't understand it. And they still ring me while I'm driving to meet them. How hard is it? I do not answer the phone while driving, nor will I phone to tell you I'm late unless I'm literally at a complete stop AND am late enough that you need to know.
I do use my phone as a sat-nav. It's not in my line-of-sight, even, it's down by the gearstick. I don't need to look at it (especially with turn-by-turn voice) unless I've stopped and am looking for the particular house I need - I can always just keep driving, turn around, go around the block or circle a roundabout if I miss a turning.
I do not answer it while driving. Anything that might be important, you'll ring back. Anything that is important will be enough to bother me and that will make me pull over and give my attention to your message. And if I find out that you've done that knowing I'm driving just to "see where I am", you'll be put on a silent ringtone on my phone forever more.
The phone is already the rudest device in human existence (ANSWER ME NOW, ANSWER ME NOW, ANSWER ME NOW, I'LL KEEP RINGING UNTIL YOU ANSWER ME NOW, I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU'RE DOING ANSWER ME NOW!). It's fast becoming the most dangerous device because of idiots like you.
Drive the fucking car. Switch the phone off. Enjoy the silence, or your music, and a legally-prescribed requirement to be excused from ignoring all those work calls that inevitably happen just as you leave.
NO PHONE CALL / EMAIL / TEXT is that important. If you're mother's dead in hospital, people will call back, and it will never be an emergency that requires your presence at the expense of every innocent driver and passenger on the road.
Been serving us well for 40+ years, don't see why we should throw that away when - for instance - there still isn't a "break" in modern such encryption to leverage.
EC will be trusted when it's been around for 30+ years AND certified for military usage. PKE took at least 20 to get established in mainstream usage even without any real competition. By comparison, EC looks like a pimply teenager.
This isn't about snooping, per se.
What you describe is infinitely more about the grid getting it's own way. When demand is "too much", they can turn off the least-profitable areas to concentrate on the most. Without their consent. And when demand is too low, they can allow your devices to ramp up without question.
It's about stripping the grid to the barebones to chase profits, and then - when the bare bones can't cope - turning off the demand at the source. Sure, you'll be annoyed that your power just went off, but at least the shop next to you that's part of a chain that gives them a lot of money wasn't affected, eh?
And what you end up with is NOT a stable grid. You end up with - to the home owner - an unpredictable one. Which means you have to put money into alternates if you want stability. And any kind of partitioning plan of the kind "this is my life-support, don't turn it off" / "this is the pond pump, you can switch it off when you like" is not only ripe for misuse, but also incredibly privacy-intruding too.
Fact is, they are keeping up with demand. They pretty much always have. The profits from the energy industry (note profit = AFTER investment in the network) are obscene. This isn't about coping for the future, or paying lip service to the latest political demand of sticking some money into rival products that - if successful - would kill your own industry overnight, or maintaining a stable network.
It's about cutting off Joe Bloggs' heating right in the middle of winter because he's only on the basic electricity tier, and hasn't yet upgraded to "Enegy Prime" and it's extra monthly subscription that ensures he won't get cut off.
I'd extend your argument further than that.
Stop supporting single-vendor qualifications. And especially those qualifications RUN BY those vendors. I don't really know of another industry where the qualifications are run by a particular vendor and nobody else.
But, above and beyond that, I'm employed generally because I can learn anything quickly. Throw me in front of Linux, or Mac, or old Windows, or weird Windows configurations, or tell me you want the cutting-edge stuff just out of MS, and I'll get it done for you. I won't steer you towards what I'm more familiar with just because I'm more familiar with it.
The day I'm no longer able to learn, I'll be useless. Fortunately, science says that the more you learn, are forced to learn, and continue to learn, the easier learning is and the longer you continue to learn.
Compare to someone who took one of those "memory test" courses that changes every year so they can get another few thousand out of you, and who has never had to sit, think and research "How the hell do I do that?".
I find that invention, and compensation for problems, and improvisation is much more valuable than paying a vendor a few thousand in order to memorise their latest arrangement of menus.
You don't need to.
You can't sign away many such rights.
As the article hints at, it's almost certainly legally unenforceable anyway.
And if you're that worried, use another place and TELL THEM WHY. Because they are requiring you to sign an unfair contract, which is unenforceable anyway, and they lost your custom because of it.
But the fact is, you can't sign many such things away. Even if you sign it. Even if you agree with it. Even if you wanted to.
Just because someone puts something in a contract, and even if you "agree" to it by signing it (or even ACTUALLY agree with that line of the contract, which is something else entirely), it does NOT mean that it's automatically legally enforceable.
Some rights cannot be signed away. Ever. Even if you want to. If you've ever read "This does not affect your statutory rights", it's an acknowledgement of this (and, in fact, they don't even need to say that - because not saying it wouldn't affect those rights either!).
And "Can not sue" clauses generally don't exist in a vast majority of jurisdictions around the world. Because firstly, they are stupid. Secondly, they are unfair. And thirdly, they are not (generally) legally enforceable anyway.
If you ever thought otherwise, just replace whatever line with "I agree to be killed". Just because you sign it, just because you want it to happen, does NOT mean that the other party in the contract is able to do it to you.
It doesn't mean that nothing is enforceable, but stupid shit like this has nothing to do with the company "backing down"... they just asked a lawyer and realised that they couldn't actually enforce that clause anyway, and they risk large swathes of the same contract being revoked because of such unfair clauses that might come under similar scrutiny.
Don't be stupid and sign away your rights, but equally don't assume that you CAN sign away such rights either. Especially where "like" on Facebook means you can't sue... sorry, ABSOLUTE BOLLOCKS, and would be thrown out of any court.
But now we hit the crucial point of electric cars. At some point, you have to pay a fortune and destroy the environment in order to put another, unrepairable, battery back into them.
This is the point at which two things can happen, if batteries are too expensive: People bin the cars and get a new one. People bin the cars and buy something else.
It's not like an iPad or something where this is a throwaway expense and the device goes out of fashion before it's required and replacement can be done on the cheap. WE HAVE NO CHEAP BATTERIES suitable for electric cars. It doesn't matter how huge your factory is, you just can't make the batteries that cheap. If you could, you wouldn't even need to make an electric car yourself, you could just make a living from the batteries alone and could have done many years ago before you sold the cars.
And the problem is there for all manufacturers, all end-users, all producers. We just don't have that kind of energy capacity that cheap yet. Except, possibly, in liquid form.
When these batteries start dying, the cars won't even get as far as the second-hand market. Nobody will touch them. They will be destroyed (recycled) rather than sold on. Now factor the cost of that battery over 8 years... chances are it comes in at about the same (with charging costs) as just using petrol all that time ($40k buys a LOT of petrol...). We honestly haven't saved anything. But done so at great expense.
And, historically, even battery "breakthrough" that I ever heard of resulted in pretty much zero commercial success (mainly because they never achieved anywhere near as much as they promised they would). And every battery "breakthrough" that I did witness as successful was done literally overnight without almost any fancy scientists telling us how great they'd be - laptops just started to come with NiMH, and then Li-Ion batteries - and then I saw a LiPo battery in a product - and at the time you'd never even heard of them. Even back in the early days of rechargeable batteries, they just appeared on the market out of nowhere and then stayed there for years while dozens, if not hundreds, of alternate ideas were given air-time and resulted in nothing because their improvements never actually materialised.
I'm not saying there's not something on the horizon. But the amount of battery chemistry changes that have commercialised successfully can, literally, be counted on your fingers. And the amount of "battery research" that resulted in nothing, where we were told they'd be the next big thing in 5-10 years time? Innumerable. I can remember being told that aerogels were the future of batteries... have yet to see one.
This is, as far as I can see, a face-saving exercise. Nobody has managed to build a better battery. Many of the electric cars of the last decade literally use laptop cells to do so - just stacked differently. And yet we've had proven commercially-viable electric vehicles since the 60's at least (anyone over 30 in the UK knows the sound of the milk-float).
They bet the whole show on someone, somewhere, building a better battery and - pretty much - selling at a loss hoping it would arrive if they just sold enough cars. And now that bubble is starting to collapse in on itself. Nothing has really changed in battery technology. Nothing looks likely to in the immediate future. So all they can do is ramp up production and hope there's enough lithium to use it.
And who gets the bum end of the deal - the first adopters who, to be honest, I have little sympathy for as they made the same predictions / gamble on batteries as Tesla have. Give it a couple of years and they will have a very expensive paperweight that can't even get them down the road and it'll be cheaper to buy something else entirely.
I'm not completely anti-electric. Hell, I was pricing up all-electric scooters/mopeds/motorbikes only the other day. They are viable. In the time it would take me to kill them, I would save enough in petrol to buy them all ove
That someone bothered to answer the question at all worries me. That kind of thing shouldn't even warrant an answer at this stage... literally, who cares?
The code has been a collection of driftwood for many years and ONLY when there's a major, major, major problem (one big enough for an awful lot of people to say "Fuck using that again"), do we then get any kind of code cleanup. Literally people never bothered to go through and clean up ancient crap that shouldn't even be in there any more.
And nobody bothered to lay a simple API over this heap-of-shit (yes, I've used it - yes, I've spent most of the time copy/pasting others and the "official" examples because there's so little useful documentation that it's the only way to get vaguely working code... and even then you have to "hypothesise" any number of corner cases for yourself on even the simplest of code and hope that (or make) the examples complete).
To me, this is nothing more than reactionary cleanup. If the problem hadn't happened, we'd still be running this crappy code on production hardware for decades to come (and may still be yet!). That's not at all reassuring. And, to my eyes, such cleanup stinks more of "Fuck, look at the state of this code, we can't even begin to fix this, we have to clean it up first" more than anything.
Sorry, but OpenSSL (and, by extension, the OpenBSD team) have lost an incredible amount of respect from me. Enough that I may not bother to touch their code again if I can help it. I thought it was just that the security of the code was so high that you weren't supposed to fuck with it without knowing it inside out, but it turns out that it was just antique obfuscation caused by code-rot and no suitable documentation.
It's going to take more than an overly-verbose reasoning as to why they won't rename it to get that kind of respect back. And it also makes me query deeper issues with other code they write too.