I assumed his main point was the sudden change in the rate of how fast the temperature is changing rather than the absolute numbers. That is what is unprecedented (except for perhaps events like Chicxulub), and going back further isn't going to change that. Also I doubt the data we have past 20000BC is that granular anyway.
Keep in mind that from your boss's perspective of covering his own ass, he's almost certainly best off following the "best practices". That way, should anything happen, he can just shrug and say he was following best practices and that would be the end of it. The last thing he wants to do is defend some non-standard password policy he signed off on no matter how much better it actually is.
The E-series is basically one of Lenovo's non-Thinkpad computers with a different case and rebranded as a Thinkpad. It's not a terrible machine, but the T-series is a bit better built.
I would say they are not as good. Sad thing is they still manage to be some of the best new laptops you can buy. Lenovo could have done much worse of course, but pretty much all they really needed to do is take the IBM designs they initially had, and keep updating the internals. There really wasn't much of a reason to screw around with the keyboards or the other changes they have made.
I'm hoping the rumored ThinkPad "retro" that is supposedly out in a few months is a step in the right direction.
I've done it a few times. In 2005 my early Athlon XP was feeling a bit sluggish, so I grabbed one of the Barton Semprons for cheap and threw it in there, which actually got all the way to 2009 when I decided to finally replace it - much longer than I ever expected that system to last, to be honest.
I upgraded a AMD Phenom II X2 to a Phenom II X6, which was a considerable improvement. I eventually stuck the old X2 back in there when I gave the system to my mom because she had no need for 6 cores and the X2 ran much cooler.
I've also upgraded the CPU on many older systems when they reach the point where I'm getting compatible hardware for free (dumpsters, etc.). My Thinkpad has a Core 2 Due T7400 because of this, a CPU that model was never actually sold with. Same deal with my server, originally a Pentium D but the first generation Core 2 chips work in the same motherboard, which is an all-around improvement. My current computer also has a free Ivy Bridge i7 in it, when I originally built it with a Sandy Bridge CPU. I would say Ivy Bridge computers from the dumpster would be an exception, but I've got two more Ivy Bridge CPUs in the parts bin (an i5 and a Pentium) from the same source...
While the whole slot thing didn't work out, they introduced it with the Pentium II and kept the same pin-out with the Pentium III. Even after they switched over to Socket 370 they kept making Slot 1 CPU's all the way to the end of the Coppermine generation (past 1 GHz), with only the final generation Tualatin CPU's being Socket 370 only. Though I would argue that in many ways the P2 and P3 really could have been considered one generation.
A real fiasco would be the following short-lived Socket 423, the almost forgotten first generation of Pentium 4. Introduced with the 1.4 GHz P4, the fastest CPU was 2.0 GHz before they switched to Socket 478, only compatible with Rambus memory, barely faster than the previous Pentium 3's...
The main problem isn't all the buttons and dials and knobs, it's that cars are increasingly designed with form over function nowadays. The primary focus seems to be to make the dashboard look cool with lots of "gee-whiz" features (light up cupholders anyone?). It doesn't seem like much thought is given to usability, especially when actually driving the car. My guess is part of it is also a desire from the manufacturers to make the car feel dated after few years to keep you buying the latest models. The sad thing is that Audi is actually one of the more restrained manufacturers.
There's really no reason why cars couldn't be designed to be more usable with easy to use, logical control layouts. Perhaps if the Model 3 is a success, it will drive other manufacturers to clean up their designs and make them more usable, though I'm hoping those designs will be a bit more traditional and not just a giant touchscreen in the middle of the dashboard.
The problem with that is it's all to easy to adopt the "ship it now, we'll fix it later" attitude which means it becomes increasingly likely you'll end up with something half-baked. And once you've got it, they've already got your money, so there's less of an incentive to actually provide that update, especially once that model is no longer being sold. I'd much rather have a feature-complete car the day I buy it rather than have to depend on updates which will almost certainly dry up after a couple of years if I get any at all. I tend to keep my cars a long time so I'm not terribly excited about these "infotainment" systems found in pretty much every new car now.
Though it might be a bit challenging to get Windows 95 going on modern hardware. If I remember right there's a bug that will BSOD Windows 95 on boot once you get past about 400-500 MHz or so with clock speed. There's a patch, but you have to apply the patch from within Windows...
Sounds more like grade inflation to me. I doubt there are any colleges anywhere with programs with an average GPA in the low 2's, and probably not even that many with a GPA that's less than 3.0.
Probably the network. Photoshop nowadays has to call home before it will start. Back when the Pentium 133 was king, Adobe could only dream of DRM like that.
This is GM you are talking about. They may stop designing new gasoline cars, but if it's profitable they'll keep stamping out copies of already existing designs for as long as they can with minimal changes, which they are already somewhat famous for doing. So in 2039 you might have a choice of a new EV, or a "new" 10-15 year old gasoline car in terms of design and technology. The gasoline car will likely be pretty cheap as the R&D and tooling costs will have long since been amortized. These bans could actually hurt emissions a bit in the short term because the auto manufacturers are going to stop developing new technologies for making gasoline-powered cars cleaner and more efficient so long as the current technology is perceived to be "good enough" until the ban hits.
The only manufacturers I know doing this is GM, DaimlerChrysler (now split up, but both Daimler and Chrysler use the technology developed together), and Honda. And this is a relatively recent development, only in the last 10 years or so - not counting failed attempts like the infamous Cadillac 8-6-4 system from the 80's. So chances are that V8 engine really is still firing on all cylinders, especially if it's an old belching relic of one.
That must be the average salary, I expect the median salary to be much lower. Most players are lucky to get $1 million a year. Of course, there are the exceptions (the players everyone knows about) which pushes the average way up.
Newegg also the same problem as Amazon where they allow third parties to sell in their "marketplace", you have to be somewhat diligent if you want to make sure you're buying from Newegg proper and not some other (often sketchy) seller. The other big problem with this is they let the third party sellers create their own listings so they've basically spammed the shit out of Newegg's once totally awesome search with pages of garbage results, eliminating one of the big draws to going to Newegg in the first place. Nowadays, if I need something tech I'll go to B&H, who very often will carry it. Or if I want to take my chances buying out of someone's garage or some shipper out of China I'll just go to eBay.
The interesting thing if it's really that old is that it's highly unlikely that a 10 year old Mac virus would be able to infect newer versions of OSX, simply because backwards compatibility is not important in the Mac world. The article didn't say, but if it's been around 10 years and hasn't been updated, then those 400 computers are some pretty old computers (an eternity in Mac years) that have hung around for some reason, thus the infection must have been much more widespread back in the day.
Well, another option is just use a hard drive and something like Smallwall (basically a m0n0wall fork) that can spin down the HDD when it's not needed (which is >99% of the time). Of course, you run the risk of the drive crapping out, but it's easy to have a spare drive or two ready.
The other advantage is you don't need a lot of CPU either. I run mine through a P3, which are pretty efficient (some of the processors are under 10W). Of course, the age the hardware is a concern, but I've not had any problems with reliability on the box I've been using since a P3 wasn't really considered that old.
It's basically DLL hell all over again, where some application/script needs a certain version of a library, which requires a certain version of Python, and you have another application/script that needs a newer version of Python which that library won't work with, and needs a certain version of some other library, which breaks some of application/script, and so on. If you're on Windows then you may also run into 32bit/64bit issues (like for example, if you want to use Python in Matlab, then you need 64-bit, but something else still only works with 32-bit... luckily this seems to be mostly a Windows issue). Then there's the whole Python 2.x/3.x divide, which is a gigantic clusterfuck.
Because of this, most places seem to standardize on a certain version and set of libraries and versions. These tend to be old already, and since new code is being written against them it only makes it harder to move from them. Huge amounts of code is still being written for Python 2.x despite Python 3.x coming out in 2008 and Python 2.x's EOL coming up in a few years.
The solution seems to be virtualenv, where you can set up multiple versions of Python, complete with different libraries, and switch between these environments easily. Which actually isn't that different from how Microsoft solved the DLL hell issue.
It's especially ironic that Firefox's installer and footprint is larger than Seamonkey, which is the modern equivalent of the old Netscape Communicator.
With Apple you can't really refuse an upgrade to iOS. But as long as you don't mind hitting "Later" every day or so when Apple nags you yet again, you can post-pone it indefinitely. So it's a similar game as Microsoft, except with Windows 10 Microsoft eventually will just say "Fuck You" and install the updates anyway.
It's not just CPU's, Apple has set a clock speed limit and anything below that clock speed gets denied their latest OS. This is despite the OS supporting the that exact model of CPU with the exact same feature set. The only difference is clock speed.
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I assumed his main point was the sudden change in the rate of how fast the temperature is changing rather than the absolute numbers. That is what is unprecedented (except for perhaps events like Chicxulub), and going back further isn't going to change that. Also I doubt the data we have past 20000BC is that granular anyway.
Keep in mind that from your boss's perspective of covering his own ass, he's almost certainly best off following the "best practices". That way, should anything happen, he can just shrug and say he was following best practices and that would be the end of it. The last thing he wants to do is defend some non-standard password policy he signed off on no matter how much better it actually is.
The E-series is basically one of Lenovo's non-Thinkpad computers with a different case and rebranded as a Thinkpad. It's not a terrible machine, but the T-series is a bit better built.
I would say they are not as good. Sad thing is they still manage to be some of the best new laptops you can buy. Lenovo could have done much worse of course, but pretty much all they really needed to do is take the IBM designs they initially had, and keep updating the internals. There really wasn't much of a reason to screw around with the keyboards or the other changes they have made.
I'm hoping the rumored ThinkPad "retro" that is supposedly out in a few months is a step in the right direction.
The funny thing is I always considered 939 to be kind of long lived, after the very short dead end known as Socket 754.
I will give them Socket A and AM2, both relatively long lived, and Socket AM2 had some compatibility with the later AM2+ and AM3 sockets.
I've done it a few times. In 2005 my early Athlon XP was feeling a bit sluggish, so I grabbed one of the Barton Semprons for cheap and threw it in there, which actually got all the way to 2009 when I decided to finally replace it - much longer than I ever expected that system to last, to be honest.
I upgraded a AMD Phenom II X2 to a Phenom II X6, which was a considerable improvement. I eventually stuck the old X2 back in there when I gave the system to my mom because she had no need for 6 cores and the X2 ran much cooler.
I've also upgraded the CPU on many older systems when they reach the point where I'm getting compatible hardware for free (dumpsters, etc.). My Thinkpad has a Core 2 Due T7400 because of this, a CPU that model was never actually sold with. Same deal with my server, originally a Pentium D but the first generation Core 2 chips work in the same motherboard, which is an all-around improvement. My current computer also has a free Ivy Bridge i7 in it, when I originally built it with a Sandy Bridge CPU. I would say Ivy Bridge computers from the dumpster would be an exception, but I've got two more Ivy Bridge CPUs in the parts bin (an i5 and a Pentium) from the same source...
While the whole slot thing didn't work out, they introduced it with the Pentium II and kept the same pin-out with the Pentium III. Even after they switched over to Socket 370 they kept making Slot 1 CPU's all the way to the end of the Coppermine generation (past 1 GHz), with only the final generation Tualatin CPU's being Socket 370 only. Though I would argue that in many ways the P2 and P3 really could have been considered one generation.
A real fiasco would be the following short-lived Socket 423, the almost forgotten first generation of Pentium 4. Introduced with the 1.4 GHz P4, the fastest CPU was 2.0 GHz before they switched to Socket 478, only compatible with Rambus memory, barely faster than the previous Pentium 3's...
The main problem isn't all the buttons and dials and knobs, it's that cars are increasingly designed with form over function nowadays. The primary focus seems to be to make the dashboard look cool with lots of "gee-whiz" features (light up cupholders anyone?). It doesn't seem like much thought is given to usability, especially when actually driving the car. My guess is part of it is also a desire from the manufacturers to make the car feel dated after few years to keep you buying the latest models. The sad thing is that Audi is actually one of the more restrained manufacturers.
There's really no reason why cars couldn't be designed to be more usable with easy to use, logical control layouts. Perhaps if the Model 3 is a success, it will drive other manufacturers to clean up their designs and make them more usable, though I'm hoping those designs will be a bit more traditional and not just a giant touchscreen in the middle of the dashboard.
The problem with that is it's all to easy to adopt the "ship it now, we'll fix it later" attitude which means it becomes increasingly likely you'll end up with something half-baked. And once you've got it, they've already got your money, so there's less of an incentive to actually provide that update, especially once that model is no longer being sold. I'd much rather have a feature-complete car the day I buy it rather than have to depend on updates which will almost certainly dry up after a couple of years if I get any at all. I tend to keep my cars a long time so I'm not terribly excited about these "infotainment" systems found in pretty much every new car now.
Well, it's not totally immune to the problem the parent described, but I can handle having to click twice to get some videos to play.
There's a fork of an older Seamonkey release that supports HTML5 and runs on Windows 95.
http://toastytech.com/files/95browsing.html
Though it might be a bit challenging to get Windows 95 going on modern hardware. If I remember right there's a bug that will BSOD Windows 95 on boot once you get past about 400-500 MHz or so with clock speed. There's a patch, but you have to apply the patch from within Windows...
Sounds more like grade inflation to me. I doubt there are any colleges anywhere with programs with an average GPA in the low 2's, and probably not even that many with a GPA that's less than 3.0.
Probably the network. Photoshop nowadays has to call home before it will start. Back when the Pentium 133 was king, Adobe could only dream of DRM like that.
This is GM you are talking about. They may stop designing new gasoline cars, but if it's profitable they'll keep stamping out copies of already existing designs for as long as they can with minimal changes, which they are already somewhat famous for doing. So in 2039 you might have a choice of a new EV, or a "new" 10-15 year old gasoline car in terms of design and technology. The gasoline car will likely be pretty cheap as the R&D and tooling costs will have long since been amortized. These bans could actually hurt emissions a bit in the short term because the auto manufacturers are going to stop developing new technologies for making gasoline-powered cars cleaner and more efficient so long as the current technology is perceived to be "good enough" until the ban hits.
The only manufacturers I know doing this is GM, DaimlerChrysler (now split up, but both Daimler and Chrysler use the technology developed together), and Honda. And this is a relatively recent development, only in the last 10 years or so - not counting failed attempts like the infamous Cadillac 8-6-4 system from the 80's. So chances are that V8 engine really is still firing on all cylinders, especially if it's an old belching relic of one.
That must be the average salary, I expect the median salary to be much lower. Most players are lucky to get $1 million a year. Of course, there are the exceptions (the players everyone knows about) which pushes the average way up.
Newegg also the same problem as Amazon where they allow third parties to sell in their "marketplace", you have to be somewhat diligent if you want to make sure you're buying from Newegg proper and not some other (often sketchy) seller. The other big problem with this is they let the third party sellers create their own listings so they've basically spammed the shit out of Newegg's once totally awesome search with pages of garbage results, eliminating one of the big draws to going to Newegg in the first place. Nowadays, if I need something tech I'll go to B&H, who very often will carry it. Or if I want to take my chances buying out of someone's garage or some shipper out of China I'll just go to eBay.
The interesting thing if it's really that old is that it's highly unlikely that a 10 year old Mac virus would be able to infect newer versions of OSX, simply because backwards compatibility is not important in the Mac world. The article didn't say, but if it's been around 10 years and hasn't been updated, then those 400 computers are some pretty old computers (an eternity in Mac years) that have hung around for some reason, thus the infection must have been much more widespread back in the day.
Well, another option is just use a hard drive and something like Smallwall (basically a m0n0wall fork) that can spin down the HDD when it's not needed (which is >99% of the time). Of course, you run the risk of the drive crapping out, but it's easy to have a spare drive or two ready.
The other advantage is you don't need a lot of CPU either. I run mine through a P3, which are pretty efficient (some of the processors are under 10W). Of course, the age the hardware is a concern, but I've not had any problems with reliability on the box I've been using since a P3 wasn't really considered that old.
It's basically DLL hell all over again, where some application/script needs a certain version of a library, which requires a certain version of Python, and you have another application/script that needs a newer version of Python which that library won't work with, and needs a certain version of some other library, which breaks some of application/script, and so on. If you're on Windows then you may also run into 32bit/64bit issues (like for example, if you want to use Python in Matlab, then you need 64-bit, but something else still only works with 32-bit... luckily this seems to be mostly a Windows issue). Then there's the whole Python 2.x/3.x divide, which is a gigantic clusterfuck.
Because of this, most places seem to standardize on a certain version and set of libraries and versions. These tend to be old already, and since new code is being written against them it only makes it harder to move from them. Huge amounts of code is still being written for Python 2.x despite Python 3.x coming out in 2008 and Python 2.x's EOL coming up in a few years.
The solution seems to be virtualenv, where you can set up multiple versions of Python, complete with different libraries, and switch between these environments easily. Which actually isn't that different from how Microsoft solved the DLL hell issue.
Errr.... Chrome uses Microsoft's certificate store on Windows.
It's especially ironic that Firefox's installer and footprint is larger than Seamonkey, which is the modern equivalent of the old Netscape Communicator.
With Apple you can't really refuse an upgrade to iOS. But as long as you don't mind hitting "Later" every day or so when Apple nags you yet again, you can post-pone it indefinitely. So it's a similar game as Microsoft, except with Windows 10 Microsoft eventually will just say "Fuck You" and install the updates anyway.
Actually, Linux has the same problem that Windows has - poor driver support for the shitty integrated PowerVR graphics chipset.
It's not just CPU's, Apple has set a clock speed limit and anything below that clock speed gets denied their latest OS. This is despite the OS supporting the that exact model of CPU with the exact same feature set. The only difference is clock speed.