Furthermore, the wagon is almost extinct, and so is the 2-door (non-sports car) coupe. Even the sedan is an endangered species, though I predict the Toyota Camry will become like the sedan version of the Dodge Caravan, and own it's market once everyone else gives up on it.
XP was a hot mess when it was released. Like most Microsoft products it took a service pack to make it usable. Today we only remember Windows XP as it was at the end.
To be fair, Vista was the same way. They eventually fixed Vista too, but by that time everyone was on Windows 7.
Grandfathering didn't cause the planes to crash, but if there wasn't grandfathering, there wouldn't even be a 737 MAX. The whole reason that Boeing still makes 737's after 50 years is grandfathering - they'd much rather tweak an old design so they can still sell planes under the old rules. If they couldn't grandfather this stuff there would be little advantage to trying to make a 50-year old airframe do things it was never intended to do versus just designing an entirely new airplane. If it wasn't for grandfathering we wouldn't have Boeing trying to mount engines under a wing where they don't physically fit, creating a plane that's unstable in some situations, with a software hack to try to correct for it. And we wouldn't have people killed when the system goes haywire.
The other fun part is once the integrated battery is toast, you may have no way to even power up the device to wipe it anymore. I guess you could argue that the device at that point is junk and destroy it to keep the data safe, but that would preclude you from selling it/giving it away for parts.
I'm still waiting for this to change. I suspect that the main reason people have a phone number nowadays is because it's basically expected that you have one. However, the vast majority of calls I get are junk, to the point where my ringer is permanently off if I'm not expecting a call. Anyone who wants to get a hold of me generally uses other methods to do so. Robocalls, scams, and other garbage have basically broken the phone system to the point where it's no longer a reliable way to get a hold of someone.
The phone companies, if they were smart, would be doing everything they can to put a stop to robocallers. Otherwise if they don't, as soon as it becomes acceptable in society to no longer have a phone number, there's going to be a mass exodus from the traditional phone system.
My guess is the CPU is fine. Those machines are hobbled mostly by slow drives, and lack of ram which a decent portion is gobbled up by the GPU. A lot of those Celerons benchmark similar to Core 2 Duo chips, and a halfway decent Core 2 system can run a current OS perfectly fine and is a usable desktop system.
Depends on the how the computer was built. Not a lot has actually changed since the mid/late-2000's. If I wanted to replace my i7-3770k, I'd have to buy the new CPU (obvious), a new motherboard because the socket has changed, and new ram because I'd be going from DDR3 to DDR4. The new motherboard would still go in my ATX case, the power supply can be reused, the graphics card can be reused, and all the drives would plug right in. Yeah, maybe I might also want to upgrade to a M.2 SSD while I'm at it, but I could just plug in the SATA one and go with it.
Much better situation than 10 years ago. In 2009, a computer from 2002 would have a 20 pin power supply (incompatible), AGP graphics (incompatible), and PATA drives (well, some motherboards would still support you in 2009). Pretty much the only thing you could count on being able to reuse would be the case.
One other option would be install Windows 8.1 and Classic Shell, and use that until 2023 when Microsoft pulls the rug out from under Windows 8. It's a fair bit better than Windows 10, though you still have the telemetry backported to it, though to be fair unless you disabled Windows Update in Windows 7 some time ago, you also have been dealing with telemetry.
It actually wouldn't surprise me if Windows 8.1 sees a minor uptick in users early next year.
The nice thing about a good gaming mouse is that they are expected to take more abuse and are built better. I've been using a Logitech G1 mouse for years now, looks just like the basic $10 Logitech mouse from about when the MX518 first came out, but has held up very well.
Maybe Logitech should put the G1 back into production, but at least I was smart enough to buy a spare which is still in a drawer, unused and waiting.
The problem with the SSN is that it's treated like a unique, personally identifiable piece of information that only I know. For accessing way too many things, the SSN is the equivalent of both a username and a password.
Really, it should be treated like public information and only used for its intended purpose. I shouldn't have to worry about someone knowing my SSN because there should be absolutely nothing they could do with it.
Probably the best thing that could happen is the government saying at some date, say Jan 1st, 2020, the government will publicly post a list of everyone's SSN, which would force everyone that's been using and abusing SSN's to stop treating them as something special and fix their shit.
I've heard that the 747 was designed to be a primarily a freighter. Boeing thought that at the time passenger flights were all going to go supersonic in a few years, and the passenger version of the 747 would be a short-lived variant and after that it would be all freighter sales. That's also why they never went through with creating a full double-decker version of the 747 since they figured the development effort would be wasted because supersonic was right around the corner anyway and a double-decker freighter would be silly.
In a way, they were right about airlines eventually losing interest in the passenger version of the 747, but 20 years later and for entirely different reasons.
I have a G5 and I have to agree that these new phones have little appeal. If anything, the G5 is a bit too large, but no one makes a quality phone in a smaller form factor.
If you want something newer there's always the Moto X4, which is basically a slightly updated version of the G5. However, my phone is working fine and I don't plan on replacing it anytime soon, with a possible exception for the Librem phone as I'd love to dump Google (but certainly not for Apple).
A big part of the lower, wider, and longer thing was not just aesthetics, but because such a thing was finally possible. In the early days, cars had to be built to handle roads that were little more than dirt tracks, because a lot of roads were just dirt tracks. Even into the early 1950's it was still expected that a car would travel significant amounts of miles on dirt and gravel roads. It wasn't until the Interstate system was built that a car could now spend almost all its time on straight, smooth, flat, paved roads. And the result was manufacturers built cars that were designed for cruising all day at highway speed.
Predicting what we have today would mean having to predict the CAFE rules that favor light trucks, which would result in more and more light trucks being sold over cars, and since people generally don't like driving an actual truck, that the end result would be car-like trucks that just truck-like enough to fall under the CAFE rules for light trucks but otherwise are as car-like as possible. Hence the gazillions of cookie-cutter CUVs we seem to be stuck with.
The Aztec's biggest sin really was just being ahead of it's time. It was pretty far out there for 2000, but if it came out today no one would give it a second look among all the other bizarre and ugly designs that are currently being made.
People who know I'm into computers and such are often shocked to find out how old my hardware is (my newest computer is now over 7 years old), mostly because whatever they have is fairly new. At this point, I only retire stuff because I get some perfectly good or easily repairable castoff that's a significant upgrade over one of the machines I'm using.
He obviously is, otherwise how can he manage building products full of custom-made screws? Sure, he messed up this time but you never hear about screw shortages for all those other products that have some weird special snowflake Apple-only screw head. Most of other places could never handle it, which is why they find some common standard screw that they can just buy in bulk from dozens of suppliers and not worry about it.
Actually, from what I can tell, Trump never said anything about getting people "on Mars", he said "to Mars". If you make it a fly-by that would be a hell of a lot easier. You basically need a way to keep people alive in space for an extended period of time, which we have experience with the ISS, and a way to get spacecraft to and back from Mars, which could be challenging due to the size and weight of the craft, but doesn't seem completely impossible. Though if I was to do a fly-by, I'd pick Venus just because the mission would be a few months, whereas Mars would easily be a year in space, probably closer to two.
It's also possible that the first manned mission to Mars might even be a fly-by, just like how we did a fly-by of the moon before landing on it too.
Qui-Gon was actually kind of an interesting character if you read between the lines a bit, in the sense that he's supposedly one of the "good guys" and a light-side user of the Force. But he uses the Force it to appropriate a transport from the Gungans, attempts, and hilariously fails, to use the Force to cheat Watto by making him accept Imperial credits, then later successfully uses the Force to throw a dice game in his favor to cheat Watto in order to free Anakin (arguably this one can be justified, though it does bring up the question of why free Anakin and not his mother which muddies it up a bit).
One of the things that makes the first movie so crappy is that it basically plays this straight when it could have pointed this out to the viewers to show that the Jedi order wasn't so sparklery clean and that rot had settled in, foreshadowing its fall in the later movies. Furthermore, it could have planted a seed in Anakin's head - that there are grey areas where it's still okay to use the Force so long as the end result is good - that could have helped explain his actions in the later movies that cause him to turn to the dark side.
Darth Maul really was a throw-away character, because the real bad guy, Palpatine, had to stay around to become the Emperor later. So they created Darth Maul just to have some one they can kill off at the end of the first movie. How/why he managed to show up later in the Solo movie is still a head scratcher though.
I seriously doubt that plant was in planning in the 1920's. The planning no doubt started sometime in the late 1940's after the war was over, when the Soviet Union caught up to where the US was. So more like 5 years, maybe 8 years max.
In other words, we can certainly build a nuclear power plant in less than 30 years if we wanted to.
I've got a couple of old systems like that, and when I occasionally power them up for some reason I always notice how fast and responsive they are compared to more modern systems with newer operating systems.
The fun part will be the uptick in Windows 8.1 installs from all the people who don't want Windows 10 but want another 3 years of patches from Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, the wagon is almost extinct, and so is the 2-door (non-sports car) coupe. Even the sedan is an endangered species, though I predict the Toyota Camry will become like the sedan version of the Dodge Caravan, and own it's market once everyone else gives up on it.
XP was a hot mess when it was released. Like most Microsoft products it took a service pack to make it usable. Today we only remember Windows XP as it was at the end.
To be fair, Vista was the same way. They eventually fixed Vista too, but by that time everyone was on Windows 7.
Grandfathering didn't cause the planes to crash, but if there wasn't grandfathering, there wouldn't even be a 737 MAX. The whole reason that Boeing still makes 737's after 50 years is grandfathering - they'd much rather tweak an old design so they can still sell planes under the old rules. If they couldn't grandfather this stuff there would be little advantage to trying to make a 50-year old airframe do things it was never intended to do versus just designing an entirely new airplane. If it wasn't for grandfathering we wouldn't have Boeing trying to mount engines under a wing where they don't physically fit, creating a plane that's unstable in some situations, with a software hack to try to correct for it. And we wouldn't have people killed when the system goes haywire.
Depending on how old and outdated it is, you can even get paid to take stuff like that.
The other fun part is once the integrated battery is toast, you may have no way to even power up the device to wipe it anymore. I guess you could argue that the device at that point is junk and destroy it to keep the data safe, but that would preclude you from selling it/giving it away for parts.
I'm still waiting for this to change. I suspect that the main reason people have a phone number nowadays is because it's basically expected that you have one. However, the vast majority of calls I get are junk, to the point where my ringer is permanently off if I'm not expecting a call. Anyone who wants to get a hold of me generally uses other methods to do so. Robocalls, scams, and other garbage have basically broken the phone system to the point where it's no longer a reliable way to get a hold of someone.
The phone companies, if they were smart, would be doing everything they can to put a stop to robocallers. Otherwise if they don't, as soon as it becomes acceptable in society to no longer have a phone number, there's going to be a mass exodus from the traditional phone system.
My guess is the CPU is fine. Those machines are hobbled mostly by slow drives, and lack of ram which a decent portion is gobbled up by the GPU. A lot of those Celerons benchmark similar to Core 2 Duo chips, and a halfway decent Core 2 system can run a current OS perfectly fine and is a usable desktop system.
Depends on the how the computer was built. Not a lot has actually changed since the mid/late-2000's. If I wanted to replace my i7-3770k, I'd have to buy the new CPU (obvious), a new motherboard because the socket has changed, and new ram because I'd be going from DDR3 to DDR4. The new motherboard would still go in my ATX case, the power supply can be reused, the graphics card can be reused, and all the drives would plug right in. Yeah, maybe I might also want to upgrade to a M.2 SSD while I'm at it, but I could just plug in the SATA one and go with it.
Much better situation than 10 years ago. In 2009, a computer from 2002 would have a 20 pin power supply (incompatible), AGP graphics (incompatible), and PATA drives (well, some motherboards would still support you in 2009). Pretty much the only thing you could count on being able to reuse would be the case.
One other option would be install Windows 8.1 and Classic Shell, and use that until 2023 when Microsoft pulls the rug out from under Windows 8. It's a fair bit better than Windows 10, though you still have the telemetry backported to it, though to be fair unless you disabled Windows Update in Windows 7 some time ago, you also have been dealing with telemetry.
It actually wouldn't surprise me if Windows 8.1 sees a minor uptick in users early next year.
The nice thing about a good gaming mouse is that they are expected to take more abuse and are built better. I've been using a Logitech G1 mouse for years now, looks just like the basic $10 Logitech mouse from about when the MX518 first came out, but has held up very well.
Maybe Logitech should put the G1 back into production, but at least I was smart enough to buy a spare which is still in a drawer, unused and waiting.
The problem with the SSN is that it's treated like a unique, personally identifiable piece of information that only I know. For accessing way too many things, the SSN is the equivalent of both a username and a password.
Really, it should be treated like public information and only used for its intended purpose. I shouldn't have to worry about someone knowing my SSN because there should be absolutely nothing they could do with it.
Probably the best thing that could happen is the government saying at some date, say Jan 1st, 2020, the government will publicly post a list of everyone's SSN, which would force everyone that's been using and abusing SSN's to stop treating them as something special and fix their shit.
I've heard that the 747 was designed to be a primarily a freighter. Boeing thought that at the time passenger flights were all going to go supersonic in a few years, and the passenger version of the 747 would be a short-lived variant and after that it would be all freighter sales. That's also why they never went through with creating a full double-decker version of the 747 since they figured the development effort would be wasted because supersonic was right around the corner anyway and a double-decker freighter would be silly.
In a way, they were right about airlines eventually losing interest in the passenger version of the 747, but 20 years later and for entirely different reasons.
I have a G5 and I have to agree that these new phones have little appeal. If anything, the G5 is a bit too large, but no one makes a quality phone in a smaller form factor.
If you want something newer there's always the Moto X4, which is basically a slightly updated version of the G5. However, my phone is working fine and I don't plan on replacing it anytime soon, with a possible exception for the Librem phone as I'd love to dump Google (but certainly not for Apple).
Are you sure that's not because the biggest operator in your country isn't responsible for massive amounts of spam email?
You don't need the internet for that either, a temperature sensor outside will do. Or for that matter, a humidity sensor indoors.
You use electric heaters, and then the electricity can come from anywhere.
A big part of the lower, wider, and longer thing was not just aesthetics, but because such a thing was finally possible. In the early days, cars had to be built to handle roads that were little more than dirt tracks, because a lot of roads were just dirt tracks. Even into the early 1950's it was still expected that a car would travel significant amounts of miles on dirt and gravel roads. It wasn't until the Interstate system was built that a car could now spend almost all its time on straight, smooth, flat, paved roads. And the result was manufacturers built cars that were designed for cruising all day at highway speed.
Predicting what we have today would mean having to predict the CAFE rules that favor light trucks, which would result in more and more light trucks being sold over cars, and since people generally don't like driving an actual truck, that the end result would be car-like trucks that just truck-like enough to fall under the CAFE rules for light trucks but otherwise are as car-like as possible. Hence the gazillions of cookie-cutter CUVs we seem to be stuck with.
The Aztec's biggest sin really was just being ahead of it's time. It was pretty far out there for 2000, but if it came out today no one would give it a second look among all the other bizarre and ugly designs that are currently being made.
People who know I'm into computers and such are often shocked to find out how old my hardware is (my newest computer is now over 7 years old), mostly because whatever they have is fairly new. At this point, I only retire stuff because I get some perfectly good or easily repairable castoff that's a significant upgrade over one of the machines I'm using.
He obviously is, otherwise how can he manage building products full of custom-made screws? Sure, he messed up this time but you never hear about screw shortages for all those other products that have some weird special snowflake Apple-only screw head. Most of other places could never handle it, which is why they find some common standard screw that they can just buy in bulk from dozens of suppliers and not worry about it.
Actually, from what I can tell, Trump never said anything about getting people "on Mars", he said "to Mars". If you make it a fly-by that would be a hell of a lot easier. You basically need a way to keep people alive in space for an extended period of time, which we have experience with the ISS, and a way to get spacecraft to and back from Mars, which could be challenging due to the size and weight of the craft, but doesn't seem completely impossible. Though if I was to do a fly-by, I'd pick Venus just because the mission would be a few months, whereas Mars would easily be a year in space, probably closer to two.
It's also possible that the first manned mission to Mars might even be a fly-by, just like how we did a fly-by of the moon before landing on it too.
Qui-Gon was actually kind of an interesting character if you read between the lines a bit, in the sense that he's supposedly one of the "good guys" and a light-side user of the Force. But he uses the Force it to appropriate a transport from the Gungans, attempts, and hilariously fails, to use the Force to cheat Watto by making him accept Imperial credits, then later successfully uses the Force to throw a dice game in his favor to cheat Watto in order to free Anakin (arguably this one can be justified, though it does bring up the question of why free Anakin and not his mother which muddies it up a bit).
One of the things that makes the first movie so crappy is that it basically plays this straight when it could have pointed this out to the viewers to show that the Jedi order wasn't so sparklery clean and that rot had settled in, foreshadowing its fall in the later movies. Furthermore, it could have planted a seed in Anakin's head - that there are grey areas where it's still okay to use the Force so long as the end result is good - that could have helped explain his actions in the later movies that cause him to turn to the dark side.
Darth Maul really was a throw-away character, because the real bad guy, Palpatine, had to stay around to become the Emperor later. So they created Darth Maul just to have some one they can kill off at the end of the first movie. How/why he managed to show up later in the Solo movie is still a head scratcher though.
I seriously doubt that plant was in planning in the 1920's. The planning no doubt started sometime in the late 1940's after the war was over, when the Soviet Union caught up to where the US was. So more like 5 years, maybe 8 years max.
In other words, we can certainly build a nuclear power plant in less than 30 years if we wanted to.
I've got a couple of old systems like that, and when I occasionally power them up for some reason I always notice how fast and responsive they are compared to more modern systems with newer operating systems.
The fun part will be the uptick in Windows 8.1 installs from all the people who don't want Windows 10 but want another 3 years of patches from Microsoft.