Actually, I'd say a lot of new cars are getting harder to drive. Or maybe harder to operate would be more correct. Things that beep at you, lights flashing at you, messages that pop up on various screens demanding your attention which all serve to distract you from the main task at hand. Stuff like operating touch screen interfaces and navigating though menus using buttons takes your eyes off the road. "Infotainment" systems are a disaster and a major distraction, and seem overall to be poorly designed in most every car so equipped. Even basic things that should be simple have been made complex like the gear shifter, requiring extra attention to operate it correctly and to make sure its in the right mode.
In comparison, my 20 year old car seems to be designed around the idea that the car needs to keep distractions to a minimum. It subscribes to the "dark and quiet" philosophy - in other words in normal operation the dashboard stays dark and the car doesn't make noise - if you start getting lights or the car starts beeping at you, it's only because something is seriously wrong and needs immediate attention. The gauges are laid out simply and easy to read. The gear shifter is a simple intuitive lever that you can operate without looking or thinking about it. The controls are designed to be operated by touch with various nubs and shapes on the buttons so you can identify them by feel without looking at them. Every button and switch only does one thing so you always know what it will do when you use it. Systems like the climate control are automated - granted the automatic climate control is kind of brain-dead, but it's good enough that I can just set it and let it do its thing and not have to fiddle with it at all for weeks at a time.
I find it's really quite different going between my car and a newer car. With the newer car it's almost information overload at times as I'm constantly having to give attention to various things inside the car demanding attention, and constantly having to process what is important and what's not important. Whereas my older car stays out of my way and lets me focus entirely on what's outside the car and driving.
Personally I consider OTA a bad idea, as it would the foster the "ship it now, fix it later" attitude towards cars that has completely taken over with just about anything else that can connect to the internet.
I want my car's brakes to work properly coming right from the factory right from day one. If screwing this up means a costly and embarrassing recall, that means the manufacturer has a pretty big incentive to get it right the first time.
Last time I played with it, it doesn't disable completely but basically acts like a copy that Microsoft has decided has been pirated. Since you don't actually have a license at that point I guess to Microsoft it's basically one and the same.
Also, even if you do get a license, you couldn't just reactivate your old trial install - you have to a fresh reinstall. Don't know if that's the same either.
The way I remember it was WIndows 95 OSR2 would do its install and then upon the first bootup, it would immediately launch the installer for IE4 and gave you no option to cancel or decline it. Microsoft did a pretty good job of keeping you from getting out of the installer, but there was nothing they could do about the reset switch. After booting back up, the forced IE4 installer was gone and the OS was perfectly functional (as Windows 95 goes) without it. I think you may have been stuck with IE3 doing this but I don't remember now.
I kind of doubt this car with its manufacturing defect will ever hold any significant value. It's quite likely that even if you decide you're going to keep it, the VIN will be invalidated in the system meaning that you will not be able to license and insure it, so forget about driving it on public roads.
As recalled vehicles go, a more interesting example would be the late 80's Nissan Van. After Nissan recalled the van several times and failed to correct the tendency of the vans to overheat and self-immolate, Nissan gave up trying to fix them and attempted to buy back every single example at above market value and sent them all to the crusher. However, Nissan couldn't actually force anyone to sell their van. So despite all of this, a handful of owners decided to keep their vans anyway, making surviving examples extremely rare today. However, rare doesn't mean valuable, and it seems that the van is considered more of an oddity or a curiosity rather than something collectable.
I've noticed that with SSDs too. Used to be that developers had to be mindful that the hard drive was slow when creating an application. Now I assume they all have SSDs and don't care, and the end result is newer software that has no optimizations around disk access at all. Still runs fine if you have a SSD, but load it onto a system with a hard drive and it's absolutely painfully slow.
Well, for a while it seemed that all those off-the-shelf consumer wireless routers AP's were crap. Your options were either to put up with it, keep trying different ones randomly until you lucked out with a good one, cough up the money for enterprise-level gear, or roll your own (what I did). Given that, it's not surprising that people would just buy the cheapest thing out there fully knowing it's crap, because the one that costs a bit more is also crap so why spend the money? You could do your research, but even that wasn't reliable as the manufacturers will completely change the product on a whim and just re-use the model number so you never really know what you're actually buying until you take it home and take it apart.
Eventually it seemed that things have gotten better and you can buy a cheap consumer router at Microcenter and it will likely "just work". Though the old PC I'm using as a router also just works so I can't be bothered to replace it.
Wow, you were lucky to get three years out of them. I bought a pair of Rockports walking shoes a couple of years ago, and the sole was completely worn out in about 4 months. Even crappy Walmart sneakers last longer than that, though granted the Rockports were more comfortable.
That car is an outlier. I doubt that the Volvo P1800 that has the second-most number of kilometers is even half of what that has logged. And while that is a lot of distance on a passenger car, it isn't unusual for over the road (long haul) trucks to accumulate that kind of mileage.
Besides, from what I've seen from scrapyards, the majority of vehicles there that weren't wrecked are there for something that's relatively trivial, easily fixed, or often just minor cosmetic damage because they were in a minor accident and insurance totalled them out. There's often cars there that literally have nothing wrong with them at all - they were traded in or donated, ended up being wholesaled, and at the auction no one wanted them so the scrapyard that put in a couple hundred dollars scrap value bid ends up winning it.
Actually, it would make more sense for them to not have to go to school in the dark, since that's when all the groggy drivers will be out.
Though as someone else pointed out, days in the winter are short enough that you don't really have a choice in the matter. They either go to school in the dark, come home in the dark, or you can try and straddle it so they'd be coming home and going in during twilight.
On the other hand, Chrome is shovelware that's bundled in with a lot of other installers, so it's not like Google isn't evil either. If Microsoft wanted to do something actually useful, they could have thrown up a warning along the lines of "It looks like installer is also trying to install Chrome. Are you sure you meant to do that?".
My understanding is the fatal flaw is that there was no inexpensive and good way to encode quadrophonic sound using the technology of the day. You had either vinyl, which while being relatively easy to encode 2 channels into a groove - there was no good way to do 4 channels. You could do it by playing various tricks, but you ended up with a lot of crosstalk and bleedover between the channels. Or you could use tape which already didn't sound as good (ignoring stuff like professional-level reel to reel), and make it more complicated and expensive with multiple heads. And you either had to make the tape wider, or suffer more noise and a hit in quality if instead you made the tracks narrower.
The eventual solution would be to use CD's as you would digitally store all the channels separately in perfect clarity. But even then, all other things equal, a CD that can hold 70 minutes of stereo sound could only hold 35 minutes of quadrophonic audio, which is not quite enough for most albums.
The solution is exactly what you listed. There's 8 major planets. And then a bunch of other minor planets. Most people would only bother with knowing the major planets. Textbooks for schoolkids are only going to teach the 8 major planets.
Same thing with moons. There's 4 Galilean moons around Jupiter which are the ones people know, and a bunch of others that I know about but would have to look up if I needed to know more about them. But I don't see people trying to redefine "moon" so that Jupiter would only have 4 moons.
Google doesn't need W3C's blessing, they can just throw their weight around. They can just implement it in Chrome, and tell websites to either use it or get ranked lower in Google search. The other browsers will either have to implement it or lose more marketshare when significant portions of the web no longer work with them.
Don't believe me? Look at AMP. That's not a W3C standard either.
Handhelds have 8 cores because those ARM cores are slow as shit. For most workloads, you're actually better much better off with fewer, faster cores, than a more slower cores. I'd much rather have a dual 4 GHz than a quad 2 GHz, all other things equal.
The problem is that browsers now are so large, complicated, and have to do so much that you have to be a pretty large entity if you want to create your own modern browser from scratch. Otherwise, you either have to implement a small subset like Netsurf or Dillo, or just fork/re-package someone else's browser like Opera and Waterfox.
I have a Core 2 Duo machine with 3 GB of RAM running Windows 10. It has a SSD, and overall runs Windows 10 fairly well. Except Windows update, which can take hours.
Granted this is an older machine, but well above the minimum specifications for Windows 10. The strange part is a lot of the time the machine appears to be doing nothing. Minimal drive activity, CPU basically idle, no network activity.... acts like something is hung, but the solution is to just let it sit and eventually it get back to work and finish. And then there's the long periods of time of 100% CPU but otherwise minimal drive activity and no network activity. And of course if I manually tell it to go ahead and do updates (because I don't want it to do them later) it usually sits an hour or so doing nothing before it even starts to download the update. If I'm lucky it will the download everything and proceed, but decent chances it will get to something like 93% and sit there doing nothing obvious for a while before continuing again. What it is doing... really have no idea.
Once updates are done, machine is perfectly fine. Luckily I don't really use the machine for much, so if I know I'm going to need it I can just turn it on and let sit for a day while Windows update does its thing.
Clearly you've never used Windows 10, because it actually works fairly well. In the sense that eventually you'll run into an update that will fail on your machine, and Windows will try to install the update again, roll back to a restore point, try to install it again, roll back to a restore point, try to install it again, roll back to a restore point....basically forever.
Also seen on Windows 7 after Microsoft fucked up Windows update on Windows 7 a few years back, but at least on Windows 7 you can block that update and break the cycle.
You should pay more attention to Subaru, as they don't sell a single wagon in the US. Sure, they used to sell wagons, but about 15 years ago, they jacked them all up so that they would classify as "light trucks" and not cars, so they could sell them under the different rules for "light trucks". So those are all SUVs/CUVs now. Same thing with Volvo too. You mention Volvo and everyone thinks of those square, brick-like wagons they used to make, but Volvo doesn't sell a single wagon in the US either - all "light trucks" now.
The whole CUV craze is all about selling cars that have been jacked up just enough to sell them under the rules for "light trucks". And since they compete under different rules, they're effectively driving all the regular cars out of the market, save for a handful of sports cars.
Most cars nowadays don't have bumpers in the way that people think about them. Yeah, I know they really have internal bumpers, but nothing you can visually see without peeking under the car. 20 years ago you got a piece of plastic that stuck out that would be the first thing that would come into contact without whatever you hit. Sure, it didn't provide much protection compared to the metal bumpers of previous decades, but it provided some protection for low speed collisions like in a parking lot. With today's cars, that is gone so if you hit anything at all you're going to smash a light or the grill.
I figure it's just planned obsolesce. They know fixing that overstyled and overly fragile front end will be expensive. So once the car is a few years old and inevitably ends up in a minor accident, it's going to be much more likely to be totaled out and scrapped.
I could see the Home version of Windows becoming free, or at least free for the typical home user, as Microsoft tries to remain a player in that market.
The Professional version of Windows? I agree. That's one of their cash cows.
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Actually, I'd say a lot of new cars are getting harder to drive. Or maybe harder to operate would be more correct. Things that beep at you, lights flashing at you, messages that pop up on various screens demanding your attention which all serve to distract you from the main task at hand. Stuff like operating touch screen interfaces and navigating though menus using buttons takes your eyes off the road. "Infotainment" systems are a disaster and a major distraction, and seem overall to be poorly designed in most every car so equipped. Even basic things that should be simple have been made complex like the gear shifter, requiring extra attention to operate it correctly and to make sure its in the right mode.
In comparison, my 20 year old car seems to be designed around the idea that the car needs to keep distractions to a minimum. It subscribes to the "dark and quiet" philosophy - in other words in normal operation the dashboard stays dark and the car doesn't make noise - if you start getting lights or the car starts beeping at you, it's only because something is seriously wrong and needs immediate attention. The gauges are laid out simply and easy to read. The gear shifter is a simple intuitive lever that you can operate without looking or thinking about it. The controls are designed to be operated by touch with various nubs and shapes on the buttons so you can identify them by feel without looking at them. Every button and switch only does one thing so you always know what it will do when you use it. Systems like the climate control are automated - granted the automatic climate control is kind of brain-dead, but it's good enough that I can just set it and let it do its thing and not have to fiddle with it at all for weeks at a time.
I find it's really quite different going between my car and a newer car. With the newer car it's almost information overload at times as I'm constantly having to give attention to various things inside the car demanding attention, and constantly having to process what is important and what's not important. Whereas my older car stays out of my way and lets me focus entirely on what's outside the car and driving.
Personally I consider OTA a bad idea, as it would the foster the "ship it now, fix it later" attitude towards cars that has completely taken over with just about anything else that can connect to the internet.
I want my car's brakes to work properly coming right from the factory right from day one. If screwing this up means a costly and embarrassing recall, that means the manufacturer has a pretty big incentive to get it right the first time.
Last time I played with it, it doesn't disable completely but basically acts like a copy that Microsoft has decided has been pirated. Since you don't actually have a license at that point I guess to Microsoft it's basically one and the same.
Also, even if you do get a license, you couldn't just reactivate your old trial install - you have to a fresh reinstall. Don't know if that's the same either.
The way I remember it was WIndows 95 OSR2 would do its install and then upon the first bootup, it would immediately launch the installer for IE4 and gave you no option to cancel or decline it. Microsoft did a pretty good job of keeping you from getting out of the installer, but there was nothing they could do about the reset switch. After booting back up, the forced IE4 installer was gone and the OS was perfectly functional (as Windows 95 goes) without it. I think you may have been stuck with IE3 doing this but I don't remember now.
I kind of doubt this car with its manufacturing defect will ever hold any significant value. It's quite likely that even if you decide you're going to keep it, the VIN will be invalidated in the system meaning that you will not be able to license and insure it, so forget about driving it on public roads.
As recalled vehicles go, a more interesting example would be the late 80's Nissan Van. After Nissan recalled the van several times and failed to correct the tendency of the vans to overheat and self-immolate, Nissan gave up trying to fix them and attempted to buy back every single example at above market value and sent them all to the crusher. However, Nissan couldn't actually force anyone to sell their van. So despite all of this, a handful of owners decided to keep their vans anyway, making surviving examples extremely rare today. However, rare doesn't mean valuable, and it seems that the van is considered more of an oddity or a curiosity rather than something collectable.
I've noticed that with SSDs too. Used to be that developers had to be mindful that the hard drive was slow when creating an application. Now I assume they all have SSDs and don't care, and the end result is newer software that has no optimizations around disk access at all. Still runs fine if you have a SSD, but load it onto a system with a hard drive and it's absolutely painfully slow.
Well, for a while it seemed that all those off-the-shelf consumer wireless routers AP's were crap. Your options were either to put up with it, keep trying different ones randomly until you lucked out with a good one, cough up the money for enterprise-level gear, or roll your own (what I did). Given that, it's not surprising that people would just buy the cheapest thing out there fully knowing it's crap, because the one that costs a bit more is also crap so why spend the money? You could do your research, but even that wasn't reliable as the manufacturers will completely change the product on a whim and just re-use the model number so you never really know what you're actually buying until you take it home and take it apart.
Eventually it seemed that things have gotten better and you can buy a cheap consumer router at Microcenter and it will likely "just work". Though the old PC I'm using as a router also just works so I can't be bothered to replace it.
Wow, you were lucky to get three years out of them. I bought a pair of Rockports walking shoes a couple of years ago, and the sole was completely worn out in about 4 months. Even crappy Walmart sneakers last longer than that, though granted the Rockports were more comfortable.
That car is an outlier. I doubt that the Volvo P1800 that has the second-most number of kilometers is even half of what that has logged. And while that is a lot of distance on a passenger car, it isn't unusual for over the road (long haul) trucks to accumulate that kind of mileage.
Besides, from what I've seen from scrapyards, the majority of vehicles there that weren't wrecked are there for something that's relatively trivial, easily fixed, or often just minor cosmetic damage because they were in a minor accident and insurance totalled them out. There's often cars there that literally have nothing wrong with them at all - they were traded in or donated, ended up being wholesaled, and at the auction no one wanted them so the scrapyard that put in a couple hundred dollars scrap value bid ends up winning it.
Actually, it would make more sense for them to not have to go to school in the dark, since that's when all the groggy drivers will be out.
Though as someone else pointed out, days in the winter are short enough that you don't really have a choice in the matter. They either go to school in the dark, come home in the dark, or you can try and straddle it so they'd be coming home and going in during twilight.
On the other hand, Chrome is shovelware that's bundled in with a lot of other installers, so it's not like Google isn't evil either. If Microsoft wanted to do something actually useful, they could have thrown up a warning along the lines of "It looks like installer is also trying to install Chrome. Are you sure you meant to do that?".
And even better off buying a brand new Android phone at half that price.
My understanding is the fatal flaw is that there was no inexpensive and good way to encode quadrophonic sound using the technology of the day. You had either vinyl, which while being relatively easy to encode 2 channels into a groove - there was no good way to do 4 channels. You could do it by playing various tricks, but you ended up with a lot of crosstalk and bleedover between the channels. Or you could use tape which already didn't sound as good (ignoring stuff like professional-level reel to reel), and make it more complicated and expensive with multiple heads. And you either had to make the tape wider, or suffer more noise and a hit in quality if instead you made the tracks narrower.
The eventual solution would be to use CD's as you would digitally store all the channels separately in perfect clarity. But even then, all other things equal, a CD that can hold 70 minutes of stereo sound could only hold 35 minutes of quadrophonic audio, which is not quite enough for most albums.
The solution is exactly what you listed. There's 8 major planets. And then a bunch of other minor planets. Most people would only bother with knowing the major planets. Textbooks for schoolkids are only going to teach the 8 major planets.
Same thing with moons. There's 4 Galilean moons around Jupiter which are the ones people know, and a bunch of others that I know about but would have to look up if I needed to know more about them. But I don't see people trying to redefine "moon" so that Jupiter would only have 4 moons.
Google doesn't need W3C's blessing, they can just throw their weight around. They can just implement it in Chrome, and tell websites to either use it or get ranked lower in Google search. The other browsers will either have to implement it or lose more marketshare when significant portions of the web no longer work with them.
Don't believe me? Look at AMP. That's not a W3C standard either.
You could get more range by popping off the plastic cover over the LEDs too.
Handhelds have 8 cores because those ARM cores are slow as shit. For most workloads, you're actually better much better off with fewer, faster cores, than a more slower cores. I'd much rather have a dual 4 GHz than a quad 2 GHz, all other things equal.
Inexpensive, yes. Decent? No way. VIA's stuff is garbage.
I won't even deal with VIA anymore. If I find/get an old PC and it has a VIA chipset, I just scrap it for parts. Not worth the hassle.
The problem is that browsers now are so large, complicated, and have to do so much that you have to be a pretty large entity if you want to create your own modern browser from scratch. Otherwise, you either have to implement a small subset like Netsurf or Dillo, or just fork/re-package someone else's browser like Opera and Waterfox.
I have a Core 2 Duo machine with 3 GB of RAM running Windows 10. It has a SSD, and overall runs Windows 10 fairly well. Except Windows update, which can take hours.
Granted this is an older machine, but well above the minimum specifications for Windows 10. The strange part is a lot of the time the machine appears to be doing nothing. Minimal drive activity, CPU basically idle, no network activity.... acts like something is hung, but the solution is to just let it sit and eventually it get back to work and finish. And then there's the long periods of time of 100% CPU but otherwise minimal drive activity and no network activity. And of course if I manually tell it to go ahead and do updates (because I don't want it to do them later) it usually sits an hour or so doing nothing before it even starts to download the update. If I'm lucky it will the download everything and proceed, but decent chances it will get to something like 93% and sit there doing nothing obvious for a while before continuing again. What it is doing... really have no idea.
Once updates are done, machine is perfectly fine. Luckily I don't really use the machine for much, so if I know I'm going to need it I can just turn it on and let sit for a day while Windows update does its thing.
Clearly you've never used Windows 10, because it actually works fairly well. In the sense that eventually you'll run into an update that will fail on your machine, and Windows will try to install the update again, roll back to a restore point, try to install it again, roll back to a restore point, try to install it again, roll back to a restore point....basically forever.
Also seen on Windows 7 after Microsoft fucked up Windows update on Windows 7 a few years back, but at least on Windows 7 you can block that update and break the cycle.
You should pay more attention to Subaru, as they don't sell a single wagon in the US. Sure, they used to sell wagons, but about 15 years ago, they jacked them all up so that they would classify as "light trucks" and not cars, so they could sell them under the different rules for "light trucks". So those are all SUVs/CUVs now. Same thing with Volvo too. You mention Volvo and everyone thinks of those square, brick-like wagons they used to make, but Volvo doesn't sell a single wagon in the US either - all "light trucks" now.
The whole CUV craze is all about selling cars that have been jacked up just enough to sell them under the rules for "light trucks". And since they compete under different rules, they're effectively driving all the regular cars out of the market, save for a handful of sports cars.
Most cars nowadays don't have bumpers in the way that people think about them. Yeah, I know they really have internal bumpers, but nothing you can visually see without peeking under the car. 20 years ago you got a piece of plastic that stuck out that would be the first thing that would come into contact without whatever you hit. Sure, it didn't provide much protection compared to the metal bumpers of previous decades, but it provided some protection for low speed collisions like in a parking lot. With today's cars, that is gone so if you hit anything at all you're going to smash a light or the grill.
I figure it's just planned obsolesce. They know fixing that overstyled and overly fragile front end will be expensive. So once the car is a few years old and inevitably ends up in a minor accident, it's going to be much more likely to be totaled out and scrapped.
Most people never see a BSOD because by default, Windows is set to reboot when a BSOD happens.
The vast majority of the very few I see are from graphics card drivers, which may be the actual hardware too.
I could see the Home version of Windows becoming free, or at least free for the typical home user, as Microsoft tries to remain a player in that market.
The Professional version of Windows? I agree. That's one of their cash cows.