It's also probably better if the phone is still powered on and doing its thing sitting at home, as the phone going offline for a few hours could look suspicious. Maybe you could claim the battery died, but that's something they could plausibly be tracking.
If you wanted to have a phone with you in case of an emergency or something I'd just get a second burner phone, and don't actually turn it on and use it unless you absolutely need it.
I tried it actually, and it doesn't work. I didn't dig too deep, but it appears the problem is that Google forces everything to https, and IE6 doesn't know how to handle the type of encryption Google is using. Google Maps, however, did work just fine in Firefox 8.0.1.
Note that this on a Windows XP SP1 machine, you may have more like on a more updated version of IE6.
The iPod classic topped out at 160 GB, so the "smartphone type devices" you are complaining about with 256 GB are already larger than the largest iPod Apple ever made. Furthermore, most any decent portable music player that isn't made by a company that uses a piece of fruit as its logo has a micro-SD slot allowing you to add another 400GB of storage, or approximately another 2.5 iPod classics worth of music you can have at your fingertips (and potentially a whole lot more if you didn't mind swapping out micro-SD cards).
Of course, the whole reason this market is a shadow of its former self is most people use their smart phone as their media player. Even if I was in the market for a dedicate portable media player I would give serious consideration to just using a smartphone that accepts a micro-SD card, which once again rules out anything made by a company that uses a piece of fruit as its logo.
1993 is about when refrigerators started to become pretty efficient. There has been gains since then, but they aren't as dramatic as the difference between a 1968 refrigerator and a 1993 refrigerator.
My refrigerator is from 1995 and I put a Kill-a-watt on it. Based upon its actual energy usage versus the ratings of equivalent new models, I estimated about $40-$50/year savings in electricity. Given what I have seen in terms of reliability with newer appliances, I seriously doubt any replacement is going to last the 23 years this one has so far, and would be pretty lucky if I broke even before it dies. Eventually it's going to need to replacement, but I've concluded that it's best to just run the one I have until something non-trivial goes wrong with it.
Of course, you may want to check just how old that fridge is. If it's much older the replacement may easily pay for itself even if it craps out after 7-9 years which seems to be the engineered lifespan of all recent major appliances.
Actually, the newest Zumwalt-class destroyers have a larger displacement and are slightly longer than the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, so the largest non-Carrier Navy warship is actually a destroyer, though the Ticonderoga-class is still larger than the pre-Zumwalt destroyers that are still in service.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Ticonderoga-class are the last cruisers that serve in the Navy so it's possible the Navy will want keep them around a while. Though it's also likely that they will be used no different than how the Navy uses their destroyers today, so when their time comes the Navy could just replace them with destoyers and carry on.
Exactly this. That scientists browse Wikipedia is not surprising to me. And when they need to cite something, they're going to go to the primary sources that are cited in the Wikipedia article.
The term "abandoned" is often used when there is no clear copyright owner. So if you want to make a copy, you don't even know who to go to ask permission. That's different from your book example, where it's clear who the copyright owner is (you, or your kids), so it's not really abandoned even if the answer is "no".
Since there's no clear copyright owner, there's no one who can give you permission to make a copy. On the other hand, that also means there's really no one to object to you making copies either. Hence, it's a bit of a grey area, though the most strict interpretation is that the work is still under copyright, and if you can't get permission to make a copy then you can not just start making copies.
Compared to books, this really is a bigger problem for games. Books are typically written by a person listed as the author who is clearly identified so it's usually pretty clear who to go to find out about the copyrights. Games are typically created by a company, and many of those old companies don't exist any more and it's unclear what happened to them and where the IP ultimately ended up.
Another difference is a well stored book can outlast even today's absurd copyright lengths, whereas the original digital media for a game has about a zero chance without a copy being made at some point, which is why there is a push to be able to make copies to preserve old games. Some old movies have some of the same problems as games, with defunct studios long gone, no clear owner of the IP, and the few original cellulose film copies left are literally turning into dust.
I've run Vista on period hardware (32-bit P4's), and it ran fine, but that was with 1GB of ram. By the time Vista came out, most decent new hardware had 1GB of ram. True, the very low-end machines were still being sold with 512 MB and those should have never been sold, but most any machine sold in the past few years was fine with a ram upgrade, as the CPU was usually enough.
XP was pretty similar. New PCs had 256 MB of ram, which enough at the time, or maybe 128 MB on the low end which was a bit low but usable. But typical PC's people already had running Windows 98 or ME usually had something like 64 MB of ram, so they really needed an upgrade if they want to run XP on the hardware.
Also, in Vista you wouldn't get UAC prompts from applications all the time. If the application did something that required administrator rights and it didn't have it, Vista would either just outright deny it, or redirect the access to the "VirtualStore" (basically a sandbox for the application where Windows would pretend to allow the application to write to restricted places, but it reality it was some place in the user's profile) which either worked completely transparently, or just blew things up in a different way. But you wouldn't get an UAC prompt. The alternative would be to start the application with administrator rights, in which case you would get a single UAC prompt when it started (the same as Windows 7). I actually looked into whether you could elevate an already running process in Windows, and you really can't, which means that a process that needs administrator rights must start with them to begin with and cannot be elevated after the fact by UAC. So at most you would normally only see a single UAC prompt when the application is launched, and that's it.
The big difference in Vista vs. Windows 7 is that they relaxed a bunch of other rules that a user formerly cannot do, hence less UAC prompts for general Windows stuff, though its debatable, for example, if a user should be allowed to change the system clock. Really, once I had Vista set up, I didn't really see many UAC prompts from just normal, daily use.
Windows 3.1 ran on a wide variety of hardware. System requirements are fairly modest. It will even run on a 286, though you really need a 386 to make the most of it.
Windows NT was the one with somewhat high requirements back in the day. 32MB was a considerable amount of ram when it debuted, and driver support wasn't as universal which limited it to what you could run it. Compatibility with programs from the dos-based Windows was also always an issue, though by Windows XP that was mostly solved.
Windows XP really needed 256 MB to run decently. It would okay on 128 MB, and would even run on 64 MB but wasn't happy about it. That's assuming no anti-virus. Some crazy guys determined that it would boot in as little as 20 MB but was basically unusable.
Vista really just started enforcing the security rules that had been in place in Windows NT all along, but didn't really matter because everyone ran as administrator. If the program followed those rules (in other words, it worked fine in XP running as non-admin account) the software generally worked perfectly fine in Vista too. Of course, a lot programs did not, including some of Microsoft's own applications. By the time Windows 7 came out, most vendors had fixed their stuff, which is why people had a lot less trouble in Windows 7 than Windows Vista, even though the two OS's are a lot more similar than different. Of course, 64-bit compatibility was another issue, though the vast majority of Vista systems I saw were still on 32-bit, despite running on 64-bit capable hardware.
The problem with the CD singles is that they were like $4-$7, when the album was like $12-$15. So naturally they didn't sell well. I've got a few of them though, mostly because they had no real resale value, so I could get them for $1 or less at the second-hand store.
It's interesting in the sense that it's a question that is more likely to trip you up the more you know. If you don't really think about it and just add the numbers together you'll get it correct. But if you know something about astronomy adding the temperatures makes no sense as that's a meaningless number so there's no reason to ever do that. Which will lead you down the path of "maybe they actually mean something else" which would be not be the answer they are looking for.
Actually, the iPad and Android tablet markets are taking a beating too. More and more people are just using a smartphone (mostly Android, but also iPhone) to access the internet at home.
Personally I don't understand it, as accessing the internet through a small screen on a touch device through crippled mobile apps really kind of sucks compared to a full blown PC, but that's what people seem to like.
I wouldn't count on it. Once software stops targeting Windows 7 as the minimum version, they'll probably just go right to Windows 10 as the minimum version completely skipping Windows 8.1. So in about 3-4 years when Windows 7 numbers [likely] really start to dwindle, more and more new software will stop running on Windows 8.1 too. Kind of like Vista, which was still under extended support until last year, but a lot of new stuff stopped supporting Vista before that once they had decided to kill off XP support.
And heck, the whole article is about Microsoft dropping support for Windows 7 and 8.1 at the same time for Office.
Capitalism says that you should keep making the software if customers are still paying for it. There are companies that will support twenty year old software still, as long as the checks clear.
Well, not really. You could end up like the place I worked, where consider time and resources were spent supporting old products despite those products not even having a large customer base. Their main competition was our other product lines, so all it ended up doing was cannibalizing sales of more profitable products. Yet management wouldn't kill off those old products. We described it as having to chase after those dollars, no matter what the cost.
I'm sure Microsoft realize the situation for what it is. Sure, they can continue to sell Office 2016 alongside 2019. But Microsoft effectively has a monopoly on Office. If you need Office, sure you might buy 2016 if it's available, but if it's not you're going to buy 2019 anyway, so why still sell the old version?
Windows 10 LSTB is only available with the Enterprise version and its associated licensing. So for any small shops or home users, you are effectively locked out of using the LTSB branch (unless you pirate it).
I end up working on a few friend's/family member's computers, so I've seen my fair share of dead and dying Seagate drives.
However, my anecdote is I bought no less than four of the infamous Seagate 1.5 TB drives back when they first came out. I still have all four, and despite being nearly a decade old, they all still work and have never given me a lick of trouble. I don't use them for anything important anymore, but I'm still using them.
You must be thinking of the EV1. They only made a few thousand of those, and sold none of them - they were only leased. At the end of the lease, GM famously took all the cars back and crushed virtually all of them. Being from the 90's they initially used lead-acid batteries, and later NiMH, so the range wasn't that great.
GM also made an electric version of the S10 back in the 1990's. They made less than a 1000 total, and almost all went to fleets. Unlike the EV1, they could actually be purchased so there a handful are still driving around. However, like the EV1 though, the trucks that were leased (which was most of them) were crushed by GM at the end of the lease.
Honda is popular in the US - that's basically the market where they make most of their sales and that's what is keeping them alive. They probably aren't selling well in a lot of other regions because they basically design their cars for the US market now.
Toyota seems to have taken an interest in Subaru, so I kind of expect them to hang around. They seem popular enough around certain parts of the US, but I was surprised recently to learn that their sales aren't really much higher than Mazda's.
Mitsubishi may still be around, but it wouldn't surprise me if they pull out of the US market soon. Their sales here are tiny, most of their models are several years old and desperately need to be updated and instead of updating them, Mitsubishi seems to have been slowly killing them off. Many people are surprised to learn that Mitsubishi even still sells cars in the US. Their medium-duty trucks may still hang around since those seem reasonably popular and well-built.
The faster you go, the higher the wind resistance is. And it's brutal too, as it goes up as the cube of your speed. The reason why gasoline cars are most efficient traveling at a decent (but not really fast) speed is because the engine is not efficient at low speeds, so it's advantageous to get moving fast enough so you're in the engine's most efficient band.
Electric cars really don't have this problem, which is why that even when the battery goes "dead" in a Tesla, you can still drive around in limp mode (basically idle speed) until you get bored with the energy that's still in the battery.
Or a piece of electrical over the screen to chop part of the 7 off to make it a 1. Purposely underexpose so you can't see it. Given it's a Polaroid it would be relatively easy (by 1982 standards) to try different angles, lighting in the room, etc. until you got it right.
Actually, if the goal is to know whether they were in there, the ballpoint pin trick would be easy to defeat - just zip tie the the zipper to something like a handle so they can't move it without cutting the zip tie.
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It's also probably better if the phone is still powered on and doing its thing sitting at home, as the phone going offline for a few hours could look suspicious. Maybe you could claim the battery died, but that's something they could plausibly be tracking.
If you wanted to have a phone with you in case of an emergency or something I'd just get a second burner phone, and don't actually turn it on and use it unless you absolutely need it.
I tried it actually, and it doesn't work. I didn't dig too deep, but it appears the problem is that Google forces everything to https, and IE6 doesn't know how to handle the type of encryption Google is using. Google Maps, however, did work just fine in Firefox 8.0.1.
Note that this on a Windows XP SP1 machine, you may have more like on a more updated version of IE6.
The iPod classic topped out at 160 GB, so the "smartphone type devices" you are complaining about with 256 GB are already larger than the largest iPod Apple ever made. Furthermore, most any decent portable music player that isn't made by a company that uses a piece of fruit as its logo has a micro-SD slot allowing you to add another 400GB of storage, or approximately another 2.5 iPod classics worth of music you can have at your fingertips (and potentially a whole lot more if you didn't mind swapping out micro-SD cards).
Of course, the whole reason this market is a shadow of its former self is most people use their smart phone as their media player. Even if I was in the market for a dedicate portable media player I would give serious consideration to just using a smartphone that accepts a micro-SD card, which once again rules out anything made by a company that uses a piece of fruit as its logo.
1993 is about when refrigerators started to become pretty efficient. There has been gains since then, but they aren't as dramatic as the difference between a 1968 refrigerator and a 1993 refrigerator.
My refrigerator is from 1995 and I put a Kill-a-watt on it. Based upon its actual energy usage versus the ratings of equivalent new models, I estimated about $40-$50/year savings in electricity. Given what I have seen in terms of reliability with newer appliances, I seriously doubt any replacement is going to last the 23 years this one has so far, and would be pretty lucky if I broke even before it dies. Eventually it's going to need to replacement, but I've concluded that it's best to just run the one I have until something non-trivial goes wrong with it.
Of course, you may want to check just how old that fridge is. If it's much older the replacement may easily pay for itself even if it craps out after 7-9 years which seems to be the engineered lifespan of all recent major appliances.
Actually, the newest Zumwalt-class destroyers have a larger displacement and are slightly longer than the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, so the largest non-Carrier Navy warship is actually a destroyer, though the Ticonderoga-class is still larger than the pre-Zumwalt destroyers that are still in service.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Ticonderoga-class are the last cruisers that serve in the Navy so it's possible the Navy will want keep them around a while. Though it's also likely that they will be used no different than how the Navy uses their destroyers today, so when their time comes the Navy could just replace them with destoyers and carry on.
Exactly this. That scientists browse Wikipedia is not surprising to me. And when they need to cite something, they're going to go to the primary sources that are cited in the Wikipedia article.
The term "abandoned" is often used when there is no clear copyright owner. So if you want to make a copy, you don't even know who to go to ask permission. That's different from your book example, where it's clear who the copyright owner is (you, or your kids), so it's not really abandoned even if the answer is "no".
Since there's no clear copyright owner, there's no one who can give you permission to make a copy. On the other hand, that also means there's really no one to object to you making copies either. Hence, it's a bit of a grey area, though the most strict interpretation is that the work is still under copyright, and if you can't get permission to make a copy then you can not just start making copies.
Compared to books, this really is a bigger problem for games. Books are typically written by a person listed as the author who is clearly identified so it's usually pretty clear who to go to find out about the copyrights. Games are typically created by a company, and many of those old companies don't exist any more and it's unclear what happened to them and where the IP ultimately ended up.
Another difference is a well stored book can outlast even today's absurd copyright lengths, whereas the original digital media for a game has about a zero chance without a copy being made at some point, which is why there is a push to be able to make copies to preserve old games. Some old movies have some of the same problems as games, with defunct studios long gone, no clear owner of the IP, and the few original cellulose film copies left are literally turning into dust.
I've run Vista on period hardware (32-bit P4's), and it ran fine, but that was with 1GB of ram. By the time Vista came out, most decent new hardware had 1GB of ram. True, the very low-end machines were still being sold with 512 MB and those should have never been sold, but most any machine sold in the past few years was fine with a ram upgrade, as the CPU was usually enough.
XP was pretty similar. New PCs had 256 MB of ram, which enough at the time, or maybe 128 MB on the low end which was a bit low but usable. But typical PC's people already had running Windows 98 or ME usually had something like 64 MB of ram, so they really needed an upgrade if they want to run XP on the hardware.
Also, in Vista you wouldn't get UAC prompts from applications all the time. If the application did something that required administrator rights and it didn't have it, Vista would either just outright deny it, or redirect the access to the "VirtualStore" (basically a sandbox for the application where Windows would pretend to allow the application to write to restricted places, but it reality it was some place in the user's profile) which either worked completely transparently, or just blew things up in a different way. But you wouldn't get an UAC prompt. The alternative would be to start the application with administrator rights, in which case you would get a single UAC prompt when it started (the same as Windows 7). I actually looked into whether you could elevate an already running process in Windows, and you really can't, which means that a process that needs administrator rights must start with them to begin with and cannot be elevated after the fact by UAC. So at most you would normally only see a single UAC prompt when the application is launched, and that's it.
The big difference in Vista vs. Windows 7 is that they relaxed a bunch of other rules that a user formerly cannot do, hence less UAC prompts for general Windows stuff, though its debatable, for example, if a user should be allowed to change the system clock. Really, once I had Vista set up, I didn't really see many UAC prompts from just normal, daily use.
Windows 3.1 ran on a wide variety of hardware. System requirements are fairly modest. It will even run on a 286, though you really need a 386 to make the most of it.
Windows NT was the one with somewhat high requirements back in the day. 32MB was a considerable amount of ram when it debuted, and driver support wasn't as universal which limited it to what you could run it. Compatibility with programs from the dos-based Windows was also always an issue, though by Windows XP that was mostly solved.
Windows XP really needed 256 MB to run decently. It would okay on 128 MB, and would even run on 64 MB but wasn't happy about it. That's assuming no anti-virus. Some crazy guys determined that it would boot in as little as 20 MB but was basically unusable.
Vista really just started enforcing the security rules that had been in place in Windows NT all along, but didn't really matter because everyone ran as administrator. If the program followed those rules (in other words, it worked fine in XP running as non-admin account) the software generally worked perfectly fine in Vista too. Of course, a lot programs did not, including some of Microsoft's own applications. By the time Windows 7 came out, most vendors had fixed their stuff, which is why people had a lot less trouble in Windows 7 than Windows Vista, even though the two OS's are a lot more similar than different. Of course, 64-bit compatibility was another issue, though the vast majority of Vista systems I saw were still on 32-bit, despite running on 64-bit capable hardware.
That may be true, but if it's cheaper to have your car drive two full commutes every day [or it's the only legal option], people are going to do it.
The problem with the CD singles is that they were like $4-$7, when the album was like $12-$15. So naturally they didn't sell well. I've got a few of them though, mostly because they had no real resale value, so I could get them for $1 or less at the second-hand store.
It's interesting in the sense that it's a question that is more likely to trip you up the more you know. If you don't really think about it and just add the numbers together you'll get it correct. But if you know something about astronomy adding the temperatures makes no sense as that's a meaningless number so there's no reason to ever do that. Which will lead you down the path of "maybe they actually mean something else" which would be not be the answer they are looking for.
Actually, the iPad and Android tablet markets are taking a beating too. More and more people are just using a smartphone (mostly Android, but also iPhone) to access the internet at home.
Personally I don't understand it, as accessing the internet through a small screen on a touch device through crippled mobile apps really kind of sucks compared to a full blown PC, but that's what people seem to like.
I wouldn't count on it. Once software stops targeting Windows 7 as the minimum version, they'll probably just go right to Windows 10 as the minimum version completely skipping Windows 8.1. So in about 3-4 years when Windows 7 numbers [likely] really start to dwindle, more and more new software will stop running on Windows 8.1 too. Kind of like Vista, which was still under extended support until last year, but a lot of new stuff stopped supporting Vista before that once they had decided to kill off XP support.
And heck, the whole article is about Microsoft dropping support for Windows 7 and 8.1 at the same time for Office.
Well, not really. You could end up like the place I worked, where consider time and resources were spent supporting old products despite those products not even having a large customer base. Their main competition was our other product lines, so all it ended up doing was cannibalizing sales of more profitable products. Yet management wouldn't kill off those old products. We described it as having to chase after those dollars, no matter what the cost.
I'm sure Microsoft realize the situation for what it is. Sure, they can continue to sell Office 2016 alongside 2019. But Microsoft effectively has a monopoly on Office. If you need Office, sure you might buy 2016 if it's available, but if it's not you're going to buy 2019 anyway, so why still sell the old version?
Windows 10 LSTB is only available with the Enterprise version and its associated licensing. So for any small shops or home users, you are effectively locked out of using the LTSB branch (unless you pirate it).
I end up working on a few friend's/family member's computers, so I've seen my fair share of dead and dying Seagate drives.
However, my anecdote is I bought no less than four of the infamous Seagate 1.5 TB drives back when they first came out. I still have all four, and despite being nearly a decade old, they all still work and have never given me a lick of trouble. I don't use them for anything important anymore, but I'm still using them.
Google did a long time ago, though unlike BackBlaze they didn't call out who made the drives.
You must be thinking of the EV1. They only made a few thousand of those, and sold none of them - they were only leased. At the end of the lease, GM famously took all the cars back and crushed virtually all of them. Being from the 90's they initially used lead-acid batteries, and later NiMH, so the range wasn't that great.
GM also made an electric version of the S10 back in the 1990's. They made less than a 1000 total, and almost all went to fleets. Unlike the EV1, they could actually be purchased so there a handful are still driving around. However, like the EV1 though, the trucks that were leased (which was most of them) were crushed by GM at the end of the lease.
Honda is popular in the US - that's basically the market where they make most of their sales and that's what is keeping them alive. They probably aren't selling well in a lot of other regions because they basically design their cars for the US market now.
Toyota seems to have taken an interest in Subaru, so I kind of expect them to hang around. They seem popular enough around certain parts of the US, but I was surprised recently to learn that their sales aren't really much higher than Mazda's.
Mitsubishi may still be around, but it wouldn't surprise me if they pull out of the US market soon. Their sales here are tiny, most of their models are several years old and desperately need to be updated and instead of updating them, Mitsubishi seems to have been slowly killing them off. Many people are surprised to learn that Mitsubishi even still sells cars in the US. Their medium-duty trucks may still hang around since those seem reasonably popular and well-built.
The faster you go, the higher the wind resistance is. And it's brutal too, as it goes up as the cube of your speed. The reason why gasoline cars are most efficient traveling at a decent (but not really fast) speed is because the engine is not efficient at low speeds, so it's advantageous to get moving fast enough so you're in the engine's most efficient band.
Electric cars really don't have this problem, which is why that even when the battery goes "dead" in a Tesla, you can still drive around in limp mode (basically idle speed) until you get bored with the energy that's still in the battery.
Or a piece of electrical over the screen to chop part of the 7 off to make it a 1. Purposely underexpose so you can't see it. Given it's a Polaroid it would be relatively easy (by 1982 standards) to try different angles, lighting in the room, etc. until you got it right.
You joke, but I'm actually amazed that the original battery backup still works in the majority of my SNES cartridges that have one.
Actually, if the goal is to know whether they were in there, the ballpoint pin trick would be easy to defeat - just zip tie the the zipper to something like a handle so they can't move it without cutting the zip tie.