Windows 8 requires the CPU supports the NX-bit, which rules out almost all of the 32-bit chips (no Socket 478 or Socket A system can run retail Windows 8). That means that the oldest systems that can run Windows 8 date back to late 2003 or so (for the very first Athlon 64 systems) and just about anything past 2006 (when most Intel chips had finally implemented the NX bit) will run Windows 8.
If you assume the machine runs 24x7, uses 100W on average, and electricity is 12 cents/kwh then it costs 0.1 * 24 * 365 *.12 = about $105/year. If they turn the damn thing off or put it to sleep when it's not being used you can knock that down by about 75%. In other words, it's probably not worth it.
According to Memory Alpha, Galaxy class starships have 16(!) holodecks. With just over 1000 crew, each crew member would get about 2.5 hours a week. Now, given that the holodeck was often a social activity, I could see how several crew could pool their time together and spend a day on a holodeck "adventure" together. With that said, at least on TNG, it seemed that anytime any of the main characters wanted to use a holodeck, there was one always immediately available. Though it could just be that the senior officers could always bump someone else off the schedule.
The Simpsons Tapped Out has kind of an interesting model in the sense that they'll give out something for free for a limited time, then later bring it back as a "premium" item. For example, if one was playing for the Christmas 2012 update they would have had the opportunity to get Barney for free, but now he costs 250 donuts (about $20). They recently just did the same thing for Maude Flanders (free during Halloween 2013, now 150 donuts). I guess it can be viewed as either a way of rewarding the long-term players, or making it so that the newer players feel that they have to spend money to catch up.
Maybe I don't interact with the OS enough to notice bugs, but I've never noticed any. What kind of bugs have you found in windows 7?
The only "bugs" I've found is that Windows 7's Explorer is somewhat broken. It'll randomly lose network drives. Network discovery will stop working and you'll no longer be able to find computers on the network or connect to them by name (but IP address will still work). Explorer's thumbnail generator is a slow, buggy pile of crap and crashes often trying to generate thumbnails or otherwise takes ages. Windows Search behaves unpredictably and is useless for finding system files. Though to be fair, most of this behavior was carried over from Vista.
The other problem is that after a while (a few weeks to a few months) Windows 7's whole network stack will randomly just crap itself, and you'll get no networking until you reboot. This is something that was not present in Vista (I've personally had uptimes exceeding a year on Vista).
On some computers, XP mode pretty much crashes constantly. However, on others it's fine. Not sure what the cause is there either, but it seems to be worse the faster the CPU is.
Well, you could always ease into the change by upgrading to Vista, which has Outlook Express and three more years of support. By the time that rolls around, you might be comfortable enough with the new interface that you could then to switch to some other email client on Windows 7.
Actually, they are under no obligation to issue a recall to fix your 1996 model car. They are only required to do so if the car is 10 years old or less.
They could land it in the ocean. It would be tricky, especially in the open ocean, but it would be possible to land the airplane more or less intact. If there was something (or someone) they were interested in, they would have plenty of time to retrieve it/them and transfer it to a boat (or a submarine?) The plane would sink after some time, but since it wouldn't have broken up there would be no debris to be found.
Keep in mind though, that you would have to launch a new "Super Orion" every single day. That's just not realistic. You're going to need something like transwarp beaming to move that many people off the planet.
Headphones are good for blocking out noise, but often can make anxiety problems worse because it makes it a lot easy for people to unintentionally sneak up and startle you while you're trying to work. Which means that you can end up looking over your shoulder constantly to see if someone is behind you. Now, if you can arrange things so that no one can sneak up on you then it can be great, but in an open office plan it's nearly impossible.
You can do that with a mirror y simply making it convex. However, NHTSA has banned manufacturers from selling a car with a convex mirror on the driver's side (passenger side is okay though).
Having illuminated gauges pointing at you will ruin your night vision... wait a minute...
Actually, they do. Which is why I turn the dimmer on mine way down so the light doesn't bother me (but still just bright enough that I can still read them). One of the problems I have with a lot of newer cars is the gauges are excessively bright and don't dim enough at night. I figure it's because the LEDs and CCFLs just don't dim as nicely as the incandescent bulbs in older cars. That, and of course the quickly-becoming-ubiquitous LCD screens.
Well, you would end up with a situation like the early 90's when the NHTSA mandated a passive safety system, but didn't specify what it needed to be. Some manufacturers put in airbags, some had those motorized seatbelts, whereas others (mostly GM) had the seatbelt in the door so that you could, in theory, leave the seatbelt always buckled and slip in and out of the seat when the door was opened. In 1996 they mandated airbags and those other solutions went away.
Of course, the real problem is that the rear visibility of many modern cars is so terrible. With the high beltlines, thick pillars, excessive rear rake, and small rear windows you really do need a back-up camera to back up a lot of new cars safely.
I actually liked how they offed Tasha like that. Usually the death of one of the main characters turns into some horribly overly dramatic thing, but instead they basically offed her like one of the many proverbial redshirts. It was both startling and at the same time a bit refreshing. (though other than that, the whole "Skin of Evil" episode was pretty horrible though).
Also, I don't agree that it was an empty death. She basically died to the line of duty, trying to assist and rescue one of her shipmates. Of course, Star Trek couldn't leave it at that, so instead they brought her back in a time travel/alternate reality episode, had her be captured by the Romulans, turned into concubine of some sort, and ends up being killed trying to escape but not after giving birth to that horrible Sela character. Now that was a stupid death.
One of my favorite parts of the series was in Chain of Command where the Enterprise-D (temporarily) got a new captain who basically told Troi to put on a goddamn uniform. It was also pretty cool that it stuck for the rest of the episodes after that.
How would they do that? If I buy fabric and make clothing out of it, I may get taxed on the fabric purchase, but I don't get taxed on the value I added by making the clothes.
I've seen it happen too, and the time scales are often a lot sooner than 30 years. All it takes is a professor leaving for another school, or in some cases all the grad students who were the actual users graduating. Oftentimes the true ownership of the equipment is confused enough that no one is sure who it technically belongs to, but the threat of an audit from the feds/state/university is enough to keep them from disposing of it, so the equipment just sits.
P4's are pretty much at the bottom of the depreciation curve. Too out of date to be used as general use machines, too new to be retro, and common enough that they're still "just an old computer". In 20 years, the P4's that manage to survive may appreciate in value, kind of like how a 486 in good working order can fetch decent money whereas in the late 90's they were worthless. But then again, maybe not.
My experience is if the capacitors don't fail, 10-15 year old hardware is overall pretty reliable. Even if the capacitors fail, they can be replaced with some patience. True, hard drives that old are kind of a crap-shoot, and by now you've probably replaced all the fans at least once. But otherwise the stuff will keep going. It's certainly more reliable than the newer (2005-2009 or so) stuff that seems to like to randomly die for no apparent reason. I blame the lead-free solder and tin whiskers, but that's only a theory.
I've also never considered the P4 unreliable. Sure, a bit slow, but Intel's chipsets are pretty solid. Now, the contemporary Athlon systems are junk. Not really AMD's fault so much, but the available chipsets, especially VIA which is in the majority of Athlon systems I run across. Unless it's an nForce2 chipset, a 10-15 year old AMD system is pretty much only good for parts.
Your only real issue is that at some point, spare parts for the computer itself may become hard to get, I personally would invest in 1 or 2 spare computers, clone the current one, set them in storage, and have them for backups. It shouldn't cost much, a few hundred dollars, and you'll have backups to the one part that is least likely to get support.
If you do that, also be sure to find the drivers and installation packages for them and store them along with the computers. If you want to get a fresh Windows 98 box running today, it's often harder to track down the proper drivers for Windows 98 for the various pieces of hardware than it is to come up with the 15 year-old parts themselves.
The effect is understandable given how an automatic transmission works, especially before transmissions became computer controlled. What's crazy is this effect is intentionally mimicked in cars that would normally not have this creep. I drove a hybrid (Nissan Altima) that when I released the brake while stopped would kick in the electric motor and start creeping forward, which I thought was nuts. It would do this when the gasoline engine was stopped, so there was no question that it was creeping forward by design. Even the Tesla does this, though to Tesla's credit supposedly it is a setting that can be disabled.
Does it really have a reverse gear, or does it simply reverse the direction of the electric motor? The only reason for a reverse gear in a internal combustion engine powered car is that you can't simply spin the engine the other way to back up, which leads to a bunch of complexity in the transmission. That's not a problem for an electric motor, and I know Toyota took advantage of that in the Prius, as the Prius is electric-only backing up.
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Vista is still supported by security and bug fix patches until sometime in 2017, so to say it was not supported as long as XP is simply false.
Windows 8 requires the CPU supports the NX-bit, which rules out almost all of the 32-bit chips (no Socket 478 or Socket A system can run retail Windows 8). That means that the oldest systems that can run Windows 8 date back to late 2003 or so (for the very first Athlon 64 systems) and just about anything past 2006 (when most Intel chips had finally implemented the NX bit) will run Windows 8.
If you assume the machine runs 24x7, uses 100W on average, and electricity is 12 cents/kwh then it costs 0.1 * 24 * 365 * .12 = about $105/year. If they turn the damn thing off or put it to sleep when it's not being used you can knock that down by about 75%. In other words, it's probably not worth it.
According to Memory Alpha, Galaxy class starships have 16(!) holodecks. With just over 1000 crew, each crew member would get about 2.5 hours a week. Now, given that the holodeck was often a social activity, I could see how several crew could pool their time together and spend a day on a holodeck "adventure" together. With that said, at least on TNG, it seemed that anytime any of the main characters wanted to use a holodeck, there was one always immediately available. Though it could just be that the senior officers could always bump someone else off the schedule.
The Simpsons Tapped Out has kind of an interesting model in the sense that they'll give out something for free for a limited time, then later bring it back as a "premium" item. For example, if one was playing for the Christmas 2012 update they would have had the opportunity to get Barney for free, but now he costs 250 donuts (about $20). They recently just did the same thing for Maude Flanders (free during Halloween 2013, now 150 donuts). I guess it can be viewed as either a way of rewarding the long-term players, or making it so that the newer players feel that they have to spend money to catch up.
Maybe I don't interact with the OS enough to notice bugs, but I've never noticed any.
What kind of bugs have you found in windows 7?
The only "bugs" I've found is that Windows 7's Explorer is somewhat broken. It'll randomly lose network drives. Network discovery will stop working and you'll no longer be able to find computers on the network or connect to them by name (but IP address will still work). Explorer's thumbnail generator is a slow, buggy pile of crap and crashes often trying to generate thumbnails or otherwise takes ages. Windows Search behaves unpredictably and is useless for finding system files. Though to be fair, most of this behavior was carried over from Vista.
The other problem is that after a while (a few weeks to a few months) Windows 7's whole network stack will randomly just crap itself, and you'll get no networking until you reboot. This is something that was not present in Vista (I've personally had uptimes exceeding a year on Vista).
On some computers, XP mode pretty much crashes constantly. However, on others it's fine. Not sure what the cause is there either, but it seems to be worse the faster the CPU is.
Well, you could always ease into the change by upgrading to Vista, which has Outlook Express and three more years of support. By the time that rolls around, you might be comfortable enough with the new interface that you could then to switch to some other email client on Windows 7.
Actually, they are under no obligation to issue a recall to fix your 1996 model car. They are only required to do so if the car is 10 years old or less.
Same experience here. Windows 7 likes at least 2GB, and it will tolerate 1GB. But anything below that and it's really, really unhappy.
They could land it in the ocean. It would be tricky, especially in the open ocean, but it would be possible to land the airplane more or less intact. If there was something (or someone) they were interested in, they would have plenty of time to retrieve it/them and transfer it to a boat (or a submarine?) The plane would sink after some time, but since it wouldn't have broken up there would be no debris to be found.
Keep in mind though, that you would have to launch a new "Super Orion" every single day. That's just not realistic. You're going to need something like transwarp beaming to move that many people off the planet.
Headphones are good for blocking out noise, but often can make anxiety problems worse because it makes it a lot easy for people to unintentionally sneak up and startle you while you're trying to work. Which means that you can end up looking over your shoulder constantly to see if someone is behind you. Now, if you can arrange things so that no one can sneak up on you then it can be great, but in an open office plan it's nearly impossible.
If it's no more than twice a year, there's always the possibility of renting a gas-powered car do do those trips.
You can do that with a mirror y simply making it convex. However, NHTSA has banned manufacturers from selling a car with a convex mirror on the driver's side (passenger side is okay though).
Actually, they do. Which is why I turn the dimmer on mine way down so the light doesn't bother me (but still just bright enough that I can still read them). One of the problems I have with a lot of newer cars is the gauges are excessively bright and don't dim enough at night. I figure it's because the LEDs and CCFLs just don't dim as nicely as the incandescent bulbs in older cars. That, and of course the quickly-becoming-ubiquitous LCD screens.
Well, you would end up with a situation like the early 90's when the NHTSA mandated a passive safety system, but didn't specify what it needed to be. Some manufacturers put in airbags, some had those motorized seatbelts, whereas others (mostly GM) had the seatbelt in the door so that you could, in theory, leave the seatbelt always buckled and slip in and out of the seat when the door was opened. In 1996 they mandated airbags and those other solutions went away.
Of course, the real problem is that the rear visibility of many modern cars is so terrible. With the high beltlines, thick pillars, excessive rear rake, and small rear windows you really do need a back-up camera to back up a lot of new cars safely.
I actually liked how they offed Tasha like that. Usually the death of one of the main characters turns into some horribly overly dramatic thing, but instead they basically offed her like one of the many proverbial redshirts. It was both startling and at the same time a bit refreshing. (though other than that, the whole "Skin of Evil" episode was pretty horrible though).
Also, I don't agree that it was an empty death. She basically died to the line of duty, trying to assist and rescue one of her shipmates. Of course, Star Trek couldn't leave it at that, so instead they brought her back in a time travel/alternate reality episode, had her be captured by the Romulans, turned into concubine of some sort, and ends up being killed trying to escape but not after giving birth to that horrible Sela character. Now that was a stupid death.
One of my favorite parts of the series was in Chain of Command where the Enterprise-D (temporarily) got a new captain who basically told Troi to put on a goddamn uniform. It was also pretty cool that it stuck for the rest of the episodes after that.
How would they do that? If I buy fabric and make clothing out of it, I may get taxed on the fabric purchase, but I don't get taxed on the value I added by making the clothes.
I've seen it happen too, and the time scales are often a lot sooner than 30 years. All it takes is a professor leaving for another school, or in some cases all the grad students who were the actual users graduating. Oftentimes the true ownership of the equipment is confused enough that no one is sure who it technically belongs to, but the threat of an audit from the feds/state/university is enough to keep them from disposing of it, so the equipment just sits.
P4's are pretty much at the bottom of the depreciation curve. Too out of date to be used as general use machines, too new to be retro, and common enough that they're still "just an old computer". In 20 years, the P4's that manage to survive may appreciate in value, kind of like how a 486 in good working order can fetch decent money whereas in the late 90's they were worthless. But then again, maybe not.
My experience is if the capacitors don't fail, 10-15 year old hardware is overall pretty reliable. Even if the capacitors fail, they can be replaced with some patience. True, hard drives that old are kind of a crap-shoot, and by now you've probably replaced all the fans at least once. But otherwise the stuff will keep going. It's certainly more reliable than the newer (2005-2009 or so) stuff that seems to like to randomly die for no apparent reason. I blame the lead-free solder and tin whiskers, but that's only a theory.
I've also never considered the P4 unreliable. Sure, a bit slow, but Intel's chipsets are pretty solid. Now, the contemporary Athlon systems are junk. Not really AMD's fault so much, but the available chipsets, especially VIA which is in the majority of Athlon systems I run across. Unless it's an nForce2 chipset, a 10-15 year old AMD system is pretty much only good for parts.
If you do that, also be sure to find the drivers and installation packages for them and store them along with the computers. If you want to get a fresh Windows 98 box running today, it's often harder to track down the proper drivers for Windows 98 for the various pieces of hardware than it is to come up with the 15 year-old parts themselves.
The effect is understandable given how an automatic transmission works, especially before transmissions became computer controlled. What's crazy is this effect is intentionally mimicked in cars that would normally not have this creep. I drove a hybrid (Nissan Altima) that when I released the brake while stopped would kick in the electric motor and start creeping forward, which I thought was nuts. It would do this when the gasoline engine was stopped, so there was no question that it was creeping forward by design. Even the Tesla does this, though to Tesla's credit supposedly it is a setting that can be disabled.
Does it really have a reverse gear, or does it simply reverse the direction of the electric motor? The only reason for a reverse gear in a internal combustion engine powered car is that you can't simply spin the engine the other way to back up, which leads to a bunch of complexity in the transmission. That's not a problem for an electric motor, and I know Toyota took advantage of that in the Prius, as the Prius is electric-only backing up.