That's because of incredibly cheap natural gas flooding the market as a byproduct of the oil boom in North Dakota. Now that the oil industry in North Dakota is seriously hurting, I'd be curious to see how the price of natural gas is going to change.
If you expand it out to more general fossil fuels, you have another couple big ones that are also hard to handle. The first is plastics, which are everywhere nowadays, though arguably plastics aren't actually a large consumer of oil. The other big one that is very hard to replace is fertilizer, which consumes a lot of fossil fuels, and nowadays there's no way we could sustain the current population without fossil fuel based fertilizers.
I doubt many trucks would get converted. The average of a semi truck is something like 6 years (passenger cars are at about double that). Semis can rack up hundreds of thousands of miles in a year, so they tend to get used up pretty quickly. They won't get converted, they'd just replace them. If the trucking companies decide to go all-electric, and just phase them in by replacing the diesels with electrics as they wear out, the fleet would be mostly electric in only a few years.
Now, if diesel goes to $25 a gallon, and the manufacturers can't build electric trucks fast enough, then maybe you'd start seeing conversion kits pop up.
That would be Generation X, since they actually grew up with MTV back in the 80's and early 90's. The Millennials are too young for that, only really knowing MTV as just another cable channel full of low-budget reality TV (if they even watch TV at all). I bet a lot of them don't even know that MTV once stood for Music TeleVision.
The population is growing, so the economy has to add a certain number of jobs every month just to keep up with the young people entering the workforce (minus the number that retire). It's about 125k a month, so any month where the economy doesn't add that number of jobs, we're actually falling behind. Something to keep in mind whenever you're looking at those jobs reports.
Supposedly Chromium is dropping support for XP and Vista too. Though it's open source so you should, in theory, be able to go in and make it work. Now, there's a bunch of changes with the Windows API between XP and Vista, so my guess is that Chromium is using parts of the API that are just not available on XP. On the other hand, there isn't a whole lot of difference between Vista and 7, so if it runs on Windows 7 I would expect it to run on Vista without too much difficulty.
The bump that Vista got around the XP end-of-life was kind of amusing, when everyone decided that with XP being dead they might as well use that Vista sticker on the side of their computer. The place I was at had more Vista machines running in 2014 than it did in 2009.
Windows is the only operating system on the planet that insisted on going it's own way for basic OS fundamentals, making it fundamentally incompatible with literally else out there.
Really? Not to defend Microsoft, but the way Windows works goes all the way back to MS-DOS over 30 years ago, and MS-DOS is based heavily on CP/M from the 1970's. In the same time frame, Apple had the Apple II, Mac OS, and OS X, all of which are completely different and pretty much incompatible with each other too. And if you want to see an operating system that insisted on going its own way as much as possible, you're not going to get much worse than the original Mac OS. It's true that it most everything now is either Windows or Unix-like, but that's because most everything else has fallen by the wayside.
Electric furnaces are expensive to run, at least any place that gets cold. Electricity is expensive, and they aren't very efficient. On the upside they are simple, low maintenance, and run clean (at the point where the heat is generated). But there's a reason why almost everyone here uses natural gas or propane for heat.
I would have probably gotten a heat pump myself if natural gas/propane wasn't feasible.
Except there's definitely a concerted effort to convince the non-union people that the union people have it too good and that they need to be taken down a few levels. So instead of the non-union employees fighting for better pay and benefits to match the unions, they instead fight to take pay and benefits away from the unions and drag everyone down.
The joke I've heard is: There's a CEO, a union guy, and a non-union guy standing around a table with a dozen cookies. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, stuffs them all in his mouth, and says to the non-union guy, "Hey, that union guy is gonna take your cookie!". I don't get why people keep falling for it.
Yeah, but who else are you going to vote for? At this point, the best candidate left is an idealist and self-proclaimed Socialist. The biggest problem I see is that with the current political climate in this country, anyone who might be a good president also wants nothing to do with it.
I don't remember Firefox making a bunch of non-standard browser extensions like webkit does, then force other browsers to either adopt or be called broken when they don't implement them. That's a page out of Microsoft's playbook.
To be fair, Netscape did a bunch of that too which is why you see a bunch of Mozilla stuff like in user agents, but that was all way before Firefox and open-sourced Gecko. Really, of the major browsers, Firefox (and its derivatives) are the most standards-compliant browsers. Unfortunately this also makes them broken in a lot of people's eyes.
Some sound cards can do this. Plug in a device and it'll even ask you what you plugged in. This is mostly used to reduce the number of 3.5 mm jacks on the sound card. Surround sound setups may use the mic/line in jack to drive some of the surround speakers, especially one you start going past 5.1 set ups. Some laptops will combine the headphone out and mic/line in so that they can only put one jack on the computer.
Yeap, I've experienced a Linux laptop that didn't care one bit about that switch. Wifi worked either way. Is more of a curiosity as I pretty much leave that switch set ON at all times. I like the idea of a blinder that physically moves in front of the camera, but it'll probably add.1 mm to the thickness and that makes it a total no-go nowadays.
It proves that the person can commit to doing a task that will take several years to complete and following through with it. I've always thought that's one of the reasons a lot businesses are more willing to hire college graduates even if they don't really care what the degree is.
One loophole I've seen is flash drives that present themselves as USB optical drives, then use that to autorun some crappy USB drive management software from some company who thinks they are too good to just make standard USB mass storage devices. But there is no reason it couldn't also be used to launch some malware.
Firewire is (was?) similar since it had DMA access, so in theory a malicious firewire device could completely own the host if it was plugged in. Though in firewire's case, I never saw anything do that besides a few proofs of concept.
This message predated USB for quite a while, and the old PS/2 ports are not hot pluggable. So it used to be see message... plug in keyboard... push reset* button.
Any spammer with some smarts (granted, that'll weed out a fair number of them) would just go through their list and remove the + and whatever came after it, therefore spamming the 'base' address and you'd have no idea where they got your email from.
The problem is that the device depends on a internet-hosted service to function. Shut down the service, and the device stops working. They aren't doing anything to the actual devices themselves.
The options are either to hack firmware, or reverse-engineer the protocol it uses and redirect its traffic so it thinks it's still calling home. If the latter, I suggest getting your packet sniffers out to capture some traffic while you still can.
I've never had a light switch bricked by the manufacturer, because my light switches in my house are about the simplest electronic device you can make.
My main worry is that like with TVs and cars, we'll reach a point where you won't be able to get a product with high-end features without the "smart" features also. Want a whisper quiet, energy efficient fridge with an ice-maker? Sorry, the only fridges without smart features are the low-end, noisy models that don't have ice-makers.
If you ask me, this is the actual case. Most people are just getting into these kind of devices. They don't know to ask questions like this, and the products they do have are pretty new and the services they depend on still work. My prediction is that in a few years when they get burned by devices they have suddenly getting shut off, they'll start taking a different look at these kind of products.
It's a problem because what we have now doesn't resemble what we had 15-20 years ago at all. When they removed all the glitzy effects, they also removed all the other cues that existed previously which helped you navigate around. So while we don't need transparency or flashy animations, we do need to know what's a button that can be clicked on, and what isn't. That's the big difference between something like Windows 10 and Windows 2000.
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That's because of incredibly cheap natural gas flooding the market as a byproduct of the oil boom in North Dakota. Now that the oil industry in North Dakota is seriously hurting, I'd be curious to see how the price of natural gas is going to change.
If you expand it out to more general fossil fuels, you have another couple big ones that are also hard to handle. The first is plastics, which are everywhere nowadays, though arguably plastics aren't actually a large consumer of oil. The other big one that is very hard to replace is fertilizer, which consumes a lot of fossil fuels, and nowadays there's no way we could sustain the current population without fossil fuel based fertilizers.
I doubt many trucks would get converted. The average of a semi truck is something like 6 years (passenger cars are at about double that). Semis can rack up hundreds of thousands of miles in a year, so they tend to get used up pretty quickly. They won't get converted, they'd just replace them. If the trucking companies decide to go all-electric, and just phase them in by replacing the diesels with electrics as they wear out, the fleet would be mostly electric in only a few years.
Now, if diesel goes to $25 a gallon, and the manufacturers can't build electric trucks fast enough, then maybe you'd start seeing conversion kits pop up.
That would be Generation X, since they actually grew up with MTV back in the 80's and early 90's. The Millennials are too young for that, only really knowing MTV as just another cable channel full of low-budget reality TV (if they even watch TV at all). I bet a lot of them don't even know that MTV once stood for Music TeleVision.
How old is your system? I don't think I've installed Quicktime (or any of Apple's shoddy Windows software) since the Windows 98 days...
The population is growing, so the economy has to add a certain number of jobs every month just to keep up with the young people entering the workforce (minus the number that retire). It's about 125k a month, so any month where the economy doesn't add that number of jobs, we're actually falling behind. Something to keep in mind whenever you're looking at those jobs reports.
Supposedly Chromium is dropping support for XP and Vista too. Though it's open source so you should, in theory, be able to go in and make it work. Now, there's a bunch of changes with the Windows API between XP and Vista, so my guess is that Chromium is using parts of the API that are just not available on XP. On the other hand, there isn't a whole lot of difference between Vista and 7, so if it runs on Windows 7 I would expect it to run on Vista without too much difficulty.
The bump that Vista got around the XP end-of-life was kind of amusing, when everyone decided that with XP being dead they might as well use that Vista sticker on the side of their computer. The place I was at had more Vista machines running in 2014 than it did in 2009.
Really? Not to defend Microsoft, but the way Windows works goes all the way back to MS-DOS over 30 years ago, and MS-DOS is based heavily on CP/M from the 1970's. In the same time frame, Apple had the Apple II, Mac OS, and OS X, all of which are completely different and pretty much incompatible with each other too. And if you want to see an operating system that insisted on going its own way as much as possible, you're not going to get much worse than the original Mac OS. It's true that it most everything now is either Windows or Unix-like, but that's because most everything else has fallen by the wayside.
Electric furnaces are expensive to run, at least any place that gets cold. Electricity is expensive, and they aren't very efficient. On the upside they are simple, low maintenance, and run clean (at the point where the heat is generated). But there's a reason why almost everyone here uses natural gas or propane for heat.
I would have probably gotten a heat pump myself if natural gas/propane wasn't feasible.
Except there's definitely a concerted effort to convince the non-union people that the union people have it too good and that they need to be taken down a few levels. So instead of the non-union employees fighting for better pay and benefits to match the unions, they instead fight to take pay and benefits away from the unions and drag everyone down.
The joke I've heard is:
There's a CEO, a union guy, and a non-union guy standing around a table with a dozen cookies. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, stuffs them all in his mouth, and says to the non-union guy, "Hey, that union guy is gonna take your cookie!".
I don't get why people keep falling for it.
Yeah, but who else are you going to vote for? At this point, the best candidate left is an idealist and self-proclaimed Socialist. The biggest problem I see is that with the current political climate in this country, anyone who might be a good president also wants nothing to do with it.
I don't remember Firefox making a bunch of non-standard browser extensions like webkit does, then force other browsers to either adopt or be called broken when they don't implement them. That's a page out of Microsoft's playbook.
To be fair, Netscape did a bunch of that too which is why you see a bunch of Mozilla stuff like in user agents, but that was all way before Firefox and open-sourced Gecko. Really, of the major browsers, Firefox (and its derivatives) are the most standards-compliant browsers. Unfortunately this also makes them broken in a lot of people's eyes.
Some sound cards can do this. Plug in a device and it'll even ask you what you plugged in. This is mostly used to reduce the number of 3.5 mm jacks on the sound card. Surround sound setups may use the mic/line in jack to drive some of the surround speakers, especially one you start going past 5.1 set ups. Some laptops will combine the headphone out and mic/line in so that they can only put one jack on the computer.
Yeap, I've experienced a Linux laptop that didn't care one bit about that switch. Wifi worked either way. Is more of a curiosity as I pretty much leave that switch set ON at all times. I like the idea of a blinder that physically moves in front of the camera, but it'll probably add .1 mm to the thickness and that makes it a total no-go nowadays.
It proves that the person can commit to doing a task that will take several years to complete and following through with it. I've always thought that's one of the reasons a lot businesses are more willing to hire college graduates even if they don't really care what the degree is.
One loophole I've seen is flash drives that present themselves as USB optical drives, then use that to autorun some crappy USB drive management software from some company who thinks they are too good to just make standard USB mass storage devices. But there is no reason it couldn't also be used to launch some malware.
Firewire is (was?) similar since it had DMA access, so in theory a malicious firewire device could completely own the host if it was plugged in. Though in firewire's case, I never saw anything do that besides a few proofs of concept.
This message predated USB for quite a while, and the old PS/2 ports are not hot pluggable. So it used to be see message... plug in keyboard... push reset* button.
*Remember those?
Any spammer with some smarts (granted, that'll weed out a fair number of them) would just go through their list and remove the + and whatever came after it, therefore spamming the 'base' address and you'd have no idea where they got your email from.
The problem is that the device depends on a internet-hosted service to function. Shut down the service, and the device stops working. They aren't doing anything to the actual devices themselves.
The options are either to hack firmware, or reverse-engineer the protocol it uses and redirect its traffic so it thinks it's still calling home. If the latter, I suggest getting your packet sniffers out to capture some traffic while you still can.
I've never had a light switch bricked by the manufacturer, because my light switches in my house are about the simplest electronic device you can make.
My main worry is that like with TVs and cars, we'll reach a point where you won't be able to get a product with high-end features without the "smart" features also. Want a whisper quiet, energy efficient fridge with an ice-maker? Sorry, the only fridges without smart features are the low-end, noisy models that don't have ice-makers.
If you ask me, this is the actual case. Most people are just getting into these kind of devices. They don't know to ask questions like this, and the products they do have are pretty new and the services they depend on still work. My prediction is that in a few years when they get burned by devices they have suddenly getting shut off, they'll start taking a different look at these kind of products.
It's a problem because what we have now doesn't resemble what we had 15-20 years ago at all. When they removed all the glitzy effects, they also removed all the other cues that existed previously which helped you navigate around. So while we don't need transparency or flashy animations, we do need to know what's a button that can be clicked on, and what isn't. That's the big difference between something like Windows 10 and Windows 2000.
It's too bad that HP kept the calculators division. Agilent/Keysight might have done something more interesting with them.