AFAIK, the S3 86c911 was the first PC video chip that had a single hardware sprite.
I originally thought the Tseng ET4000 had sprites, but if it did, I've never seen it documented anywhere (the ET4000/w32 DID have a single sprite, but that came much later).
The sad thing is, VGA actually DID allow software-defined fonts you could modify on the fly, but the only two apps of that era known to have actually USED that feature were the file manager in MS/DOS 6 and Protracker (*). From what I recall, there was a *huge* cultural taboo back then against manipulating VGA registers directly (vs using BIOS calls). As in, on a scale from 0 (ok) to 9 (forbidden & taboo), it was "10";-)
(*) They used 9 of the 16-available custom characters in a 3x3 grid centered on the mouse pointer, defined them to look like the 'actual' characters they replaced, then Xor'ed the mouse pointer into them.
The Amiga could scroll a "screen" vertically with zero tearing (and very little effort), because it was just updating a memory pointer during a horizontal retrace interval. Ditto, for updating the mouse pointer (it was just a sprite). Both worked even when the app (or OS) died because it was serviced semi-independently of the OS as a whole during the vertical retrace interrupt.
Intuition-rendered windows were another matter entirely... I think window gadgets & outlines were rendered in the vertical retrace interrupt, but contents & outside-erasures depended on the app and/or os running properly.
Likewise, the mouse pointer was only robust when it was a 320x200/400 sprite... apps like DeluxePaint & WordPerfect (which needed more precision on a 640x200/400 screen than sprites could provide) that used XOR'ed software-rendered overlays could still crash (though if you clicked outside of the crashed app's window, the sprite-rendered pointer returned)
AmigaDOS was groundbreaking, but it still had some serious issues of its own. Like an event queue that used single-bit flags, allowing users to click BOTH 'ok' AND 'cancel' if the app stalled/crashed with a dialog on-screen.
There's also the matter that until somewhat recently, most lower-end GPUs were designed to accelerate lower resolution and/or shallower bit depths than the max the card could use for Windows. For example, the card might have allowed up to 2560x1600 @ 24/32bpp, but only supported hardware 3D acceleration up to 1280x800@15/16bpp. Even when resolution finally caught up, bit depth w/acceleration was stuck at 16bpp until well into the Windows 7 era. This is why so many computers with semi-ok gaming specs still couldn't do Aero Glass transparency when Windows 7 came out... they couldn't hardware-accelerate 32-bit color.
The problem still semi-persists among many phones & tablets. If an Android device seems to get blurry for a moment during transitions, it's not your imagination... Android is dropping to lower-res/fewer colors to accelerate the transition, then going back to high-res/color dumb framebuffer mode when it's done (and text suddenly becomes sharp & clear a moment later)
If Microsoft had anything to do with it, it was probably something stupid, like deciding to rewrite all the back-end software to use asp.net instead of whatever it was written in originally (probably Java or PHP).
The only problem with Unicomp is the pointer stick... not quite a genuine Trackpoint (springier w/more travel than the original M2), but with the same flawed pointer-stick button design that wears out in a few years & eventually dies.
I actually own two genuine Model M2 keyboards (a M, with pointer stick). The keyboards are fine, but the Trackpoint buttons died years ago... and apparently, it's NOT an easy repair.
Actually, re-capping motherboards was somewhat common ~10 years ago, because bad capacitors were common, replacements were cheap, and they were usually through-hole & easy to solder (an ATX motherboard with lots of slot had lots of surface area relative to actual components).
The problem is that NOW, manufacturers are increasingly making design decisions that literally render the device irreparable when expected-to-fail components (like batteries) do, simply as a way to exercise control over the way consumers are allowed to use the device going forward. Like gluing in batteries to make them almost impossible to remove without destroying the rest of the phone.
My AP Physics teacher got in trouble for pointing out the irony that teachers were tasked with instilling appreciation for American freedom and liberty in a soul-crushingly & ruthlessly authoritarian environment (high school).
The main problem now is that line-leasing only works for slow (~3mbps or less) ADSL. VDSL2 only gets 10+mbps speeds under a half mile or so, and 50mbps+ maxes out around 500-1200 feet. So with VDSL2, meaningful competition in single-family areas would require having the LEC provide local loop to its remote DSLAM, then VPN the traffic of other companies to some more-distant exchange point for hand-off to the other ISP. Which I believe is how it's done in Britain & many other parts of the world.
I grew up in Florida. My senior year, my English teacher let us watch "Full Metal Jacket" IN CLASS. And to think we went through almost the entire year without realizing how cool she secretly was.
The most twisted part is that if any member of the public had found out and complained, their primary objection would have probably been the film's antiwar sentiment and implied criticism of America and its military (that same year, my American History teacher admitted point blank that he was EXPLICITLY prohibited from saying anything about either Watergate or the Vietnam War because the Principal deemed both topics to be "too controversial").
Unless the relative humidity is 99%. Then you just stew in your own broth. 118 degrees of breezy, dry, desert heat feels like a bad 80-degree day in Miami. If it ever got to 120 degrees in Miami, people stuck outdoors would start to literally drop dead from heat.
In many/most western states (specifically, Colorado & Utah, but I think a few others, too, including Oregon), it's actually *illegal* to collect rainwater, under the bizarre legal theory that someone further "downstream" already owns that water. In theory, if someone 200 miles away could convince a jury that your act of paving a formerly-vacant lot deprived them of $22,719 worth of water by causing it to evaporate instead of permeating into the ground, they could probably sue you *and* press charges for grand theft.
I suspect that laws like those still exist because the current owners of that water have paid so much to buy those rights, any state that tried changing the law would get bankrupted by inverse-condemnation lawsuits arguing diminished value. So ancient laws written 150 years ago enforce absurd rules today that nobody can actually un-do and fix.
IMHO, this is yet another sad example of Microsoft solving the problem backwards.
Take the way it handles program installation. If the.msi installer goes to create a new directory in c:\program files, c:\program files(x86), or somewhere else, Windows throws up all kinds of warnings. But if the installer simply goes to MODIFY an already-existing.exe file, it'll silently allow it without complaint once you've swatted away the UAC prompt. Which, IMHO, is fucking STUPID. Almost BY DEFINITION, if I launch a.msi installer, I'm installing something new, so the creation of a new directory in one of those two directories is normal and expected... but if a launched.msi installer wants to write into an EXISTING directory, or alter an EXISTING.exe/.dll/other-strategic-file (let's say, any existing file whose first two bytes are the ASCII value of "MZ"), THAT is ABSOLUTELY an unusual activity, and Windows should pull out all the stops to make sure you're aware of what's about to happen and its implications.
An even better solution would be for Windows to allow the.msi installer to run, but to "stage" all the files & changes to some intermediate location, then allow you to review all of its proposed changes to the filesystem and registry AFTER the installer has run, but BEFORE those changes actually get applied. Instead, UAC acts more like a EULA or disclaimer.... going through the motions to let Microsoft argue that they gave you legally-sufficient warning, without actually giving you any real details to make an informed decision.
Another example: the fact that there are certain paths you can access from a.bat file, powershell script, or from a C program... but not from a dotnet program or Windows Explorer, or sometimes (but not always) within Office extensions. Or one case I remember from about 3 years ago, a Windows update that changed the path-specification rules for legacy Office extensions so you HAD to use "extended UNC" notation instead of regular UNC or the letter mapped to a network share, or it would fail with an error code whose plain text in the log gave a TOTALLY misleading impression of what the actual problem was (it reported the error as "file not found", even though I could access the file just fine using the exact same path in a command prompt. A genuinely USEFUL error message would have been something like, "NotAllowedAnymoreException" ("the script attempted to do something that was allowed prior to KBxxxxxx, but is now prohibited").
There's an even easier way Microsoft could solve the problem that already exists and has probably 99% of the work already done for them: Volume Shadow Copy Service.
Set aside 100 gigs of a 500+ gig hard drive, and designate one or more folders for protection.
Any changes to files in the protected folders get journaled to that 100-gig area.
If the journal fills up, the hard drive gets write-protected, with the exception of a 1-2 gig area where the user can create and save NEW files, but can't overwrite/delete existing files (so there will always be somewhere to save open files if the rest of the drive gets write-locked).
Add some extra logic to warn the user as the journal reaches certain milestone sizes. Allow users to override the limits... but treat it like the safes used for change at convenience stores... you can override the limit NOW, but it won't take effect for 24 hours (and maybe up to a week, with warnings leading up to its execution, for more radical overrides).
Need to write lots of temp files? Do it to a directory that's not protected. Or get a bigger hard drive, and make policy changes (that have to either be set at installation time, or get delayed by a period of time to give adequate advance warning).
The only real difference between how it's used now would be the setting of hard thresholds that couldn't be exceeded without write-protecting the drive to give the user time to take action. It would probably create some new denial of service opportunities (some, accidental rather than malicious), but it would be a fairly effective safeguard against the current #1 mode of action used by ransomware (mass-encryption in the background of files over a short period of time).
I didn't say *I* had 9 storage units and a house. It was an analogy.
The metaphorical "storage units" are my USB 2.0 hard drives, and the tarballs ON those drives are kind of like "storage units in another city that can only be visited once in a while, for a limited amount of time". They're so slow (relative to the sheer number of files on them), and some of their contained archive files are so huge (one has more than a hundred sliced tarballs, each of which has about 2GB worth of files and a current size averaging about 1.2gb) that it would take literally DAYS to extract them from the USB drive to my laptop's second hard drive. Assuming tar didn't crap out along the way, and Windows didn't find reasons to prevent it from writing the restored files to the target drive.
The metaphorical "house piled floor to ceiling" is my HTPC (running Windows 7 pro and Windows Media Center), which does double-duty as my "lan file server". It has about 7TB spread across 9 hard drives... ~1tb is used by WMC to record TV shows and for windows itself, about 2tb is older TV shows I moved from the main record drive when it got full, and the remaining 4TB is an agglomeration of all my old hard drives (250gb or larger) into a big JBOD RAID array.
The metaphorical "neat condo" is my laptop. Both of its drives (1tb mSATA SSD, 2tb 2.5") are about half full... mostly, thanks to the 2tb drive I added last summer (which allowed me to offload half the stuff from my previously-jam-packed SSD).
The best solution I've found so far is using Windows 7 backup (hidden in Windows 10, but there if you know where to look for it) to create.vhd images, because those.vhd images can later be mounted as virtual hard drives. This is significant, because it allows data files from the previous installation of Windows that are usable directly (.jpeg files, documents, etc) to be literally MOVED from the.vhd drive to the new drive, leaving a much smaller subset of old files to store in perpetuity after the restoration.
But that does no good for the terabytes of old backups from 2010 and earlier... especially the clusterfuck caused by my OCZ SSD and Velociraptor... the Velociraptor (my "bulk data" drive at the time) died without warning in June, and my OCZ SSD had been committing data-suicide every 4-7 weeks since I got it the previous Black Friday. I was in the middle of recovering from a SSD-corruption when the 'raptor died, and ended up in TOTAL panic because at that point, I had some unknown subset of data that I had literally one remaining copy of. In the aftermath of that incident, my data duplication problem exploded... I was so afraid of losing my only remaining copy, I bought drive after drive to make additional copies (the fact that my SSD kept crapping out every few weeks just made matters worse). And because the SSD kept dying before I even finished recovering from the PREVIOUS incident (I finally threw in the towel, swore off SSDs temporarily, got a hybrid SSHD in October, and never used that total-piece-of-shit OCZ SSD again), the number of redundant copies exploded. Hard drive space increased exponentially and got cheaper, but the ACCESS & TRANSFER TIME didn't keep up with the amount of data, so I rapidly got into a position where I knew 90% of the files were redundant, but had SO MANY it was impossible to actually sift through them in any reasonable amount of time.
The catch is, then you're either stuck paying monthly fees for several terabytes of cloud storage in perpetuity (and dealing with a multi-day, multi-terabyte upload for that first backup that effectively makes the computer and your internet connectivity unusable until it completes), or have to use local storage that itself is vulnerable to ransomware.
Yes, I'll admit it. I'm a data-hoarder (my laptop ALONE has a 1TB SSD and a 2TB hard drive, with an additional 6 1-3TB (mostly full) hard drives in the closet)... and I'm now metaphorically in the same position as a crazy cat lady with 9 storage units, a house that's packed floor-to-ceiling, and a neat, tidy condo that's kept neurotically decluttered (because everything that WOULD clutter it goes into one of the storage units or uninhabitable house for storage in perpetuity).
We're talking about SO MANY FILES, just doing something like "dir/s g:" on one of the older USB2.0 drives can take almost a day to finish running. And 2 of THOSE drives basically contain the entire contents of a MOUNTAIN of even older 20-500GB hard drives (at USB 1.1 speeds, just COPYING them to the new drives ended up soaking up most of my free time for about 3 weeks).
Every time I try to deduplicate and clean up the files, I end up making things even worse:
1. Make complete backup onto new hard drive big enough to hold all the existing files. Usually, with compression, since it's the only way to keep the backup down to a manageable size.
2. Start cleaning out the original files.
3. Something goes badly wrong.
4. Now, I have a complete backup that can't be directly compared to the remaining files (because it's compressed and/or in some proprietary format) that can't ever get rid of (because of the unknown files corrupted in step 3 that are safely backed up, even if I don't know which files they are), AND I have almost as many original files as I started with. So the next time I try doing this, I'll have twice as many files to deal with.
It's the zipfiles of image backups in tarballs of tarballs from past attempts that cripple me the worst... too many to scrutinize by hand, but ALSO too many to risk losing forever by doing any kind of in-place automated action when something will inevitably go wrong.
I was a hardcore, staunch Republican in high school and college (90s/early 00s). As in, I sincerely believed Democrats were all closet communists who wanted to destroy America. In my early 30s (Bush #2), I started to have misgivings... Clinton ended up being -- at worst -- "mostly harmless", and Bush (#2) and the Republicans in Congress just couldn't seem to do anything right. In 2008, I was horrified by the prospect of Obama winning, but less than a year later, the Republicans in the House & Senate managed to change my mind & convince me *their* agenda was naive at best, and probably was actively-harmful.
By 2016 (now in my 40s), I was within an inch of changing parties since I hadn't voted for a Republican for at least 4-6 years, and could count the number of Republicans I still respected on one hand. I wasn't exactly thrilled by Hillary, but saw her as infinitely less harmful than Trump.
Then Trump won, and the Democrats in Congress proved they could be every bit as petty, vindictive, and self-mutilating as Republicans. Now, I'm just disgusted with both parties.
The Democrats were all set to become the new party of middle-class America & about to skim off all but the most rabid-right from the Republican party in the most radical political re-alignment since Reagan... then they totally fucked it up. The Democrats could have TOTALLY hijacked Trump, played his ego into their own hands, & formed a working alliance with moderate Republicans, but got so caught up in Trump's misogyny/racism/* that it derailed the whole thing.
My theory: Democrats (as voters) were drifting rightward, and the party itself was drifting rightward as former Republicans switched, but at its core, its leaders still fantasized about being overgrown campus leftists. They decided they'd rather be marginalized, hysterical leftists than the new centrist majority party, and realized that by going nuts over misogyny, racism, and Mother Earth(tm), they could fend off the increasingly-rightwing n00b-Democrats and keep the party firmly on the left.
End result: disillusioned by both parties. Still nominally-Republican, but usually vote for Democrats. I think the best scenario would be a schism within the Republican party that skims off enough extremists to give Democrats a shaky majority, then sends the more conservative Democrats running towards a newly-centrist Republican party. Ideally, Congress would be ~5% hard-right, 47% Republicans, and 48% Democrats. The Republicans could ally with the right if Democrats got too loopy, but the Democrats could get enough Republican support to pass most sane legislation if the Republican leadership got too dogmatic.
I believe Otis actually has a design for a system that uses linear induction motors & tracks for vertical and horizontal travel, but ALSO has the ability to grab onto one or more counterweighted cables for part or all of a trip (so they still get the partial benefit of counterweights). So an upward-bound elevator could grab onto a cable with a counterweight near the top of the building, then let go of the counterweight (which would then anchor itself in place until the next elevator grabbed onto it) if it needed to move horizontally or the weight reached the bottom of its shaft.
Years ago, I had similar thoughts about PalmOS 6. Instead of flailing around trying to convince US carriers to offer a phone of unknown value running PalmOS 6, they should have worked with HTC to make it available as a consumer-reflashable guerrilla update for the HTC PPC-6700 (Sprint)/XV6700 (Verizon) (and whatever the GSM cousin of that particular model happened to be). I'm not sure about AT&T/T-Mobile/GSM-land, but I remember that the 6700 was one of the most popular "PDA Phones" *ever* offered by Sprint & Verizon. They would have probably lost money for that *year* & would have probably had to pay HTC a serious amount of money and offer them perpetual best-deal licensing rights for PalmOS going forward, but it would have given them a real shot at jumpstarting the PalmOS developer and software ecosystem (which had been languishing badly for about a year at that point).
Hardware-wise, the 6700 wasn't much of a step down from the next year's phones... the next year's models were thinner & had more flash, but from what I recall, the RAM and CPU speed were basically the same.They definitely had bluetooth, wifi, and a camera, and I'm pretty sure they had the hardware onboard to do real GPS, too (never officially supported, but existing as a latent [albeit buggy and poorly-working] ability on the circuit board that HTC just ignored... from what I read, the GPS radio got overloaded by the CDMA/GSM modem when it polled the tower, HTC's engineers came up with a firmware fix that basically had the user manually trigger location updates that took the radio modem offline for up to a minute, but HTC's management nixed it because they decided no GPS at all was preferable to flaky GPS that only worked under specific & fairly ideal conditions). Worst-case, they would have had to put most of PalmOS on a miniSD card & required that the card remain inserted (or unceremoniously crash, if the user removed it anyway).
Another problem with Ubuntu's phone OS: its UI bought into the militantly-fashionable idea of eliminating all physical buttons & reducing the phone to a touchscreen for literally everything UI-related. From what I recall (circa summer 2013, at least), it didn't just ignore things like volume buttons for the OS's UI... it didn't even have an API for thirdparty APPS to read their state or react to button-state changes. It was insane.
It's the same reason why Android & IOS (and Windows Mobile & PalmOS before them) never became popular alternatives to universal remote controls, even though everyone has a drawer full of old ones begging for some meaningful repurposed use at this point. A well-designed remote allows you to grope blindly, pick it up, and (at the bare minimum) raise & lower the volume, toggle mute, and pause/play/skip by feeling the shape of the buttons alone. An app that forces you to divert your full attention to its UI egregiously violates user expectations, and basically sucks to use. It's also why so many people have bought a Roku or Kindle Fire instead of a (slightly-cheaper) Chromecast... having touchscreen-control as an OPTION might be nice, but having it rammed down your throat as the ONLY way to control a device results in a miserable use experience.
I love Thinkpads, but from what I recall, their Linux-compatibility was basically "hopeless" about 20 years ago (mainly due to the integrated modem+audio), and has been "mediocre" for the past 10 or so (usually, one major deal-breaking problem, and a few seriously-annoying ones for anybody who could live with the big one). I recall, even my T61p threw enough random headaches at me to say 'fuck it' & run Linux in a VM under Windows. One particular "pain point" I remember was its inability to do hardware-accelerated mpeg-2 or h.264 under Linux, which made things like YouTube almost unusable (stuttering, tearing, dropped frames, blocky scaling, horrific interlacing artifacts, etc). Though in its partial defense, even *Windows* seemed to have issues playing HD videos on it in 'full screen' mode... you could maximize a desktop window & play 1080i60 just fine, but if you went "full-screen", it forgot how to use hardware acceleration & looked as bad as Linux).
1970: Turn on a typical state of the art "solid-state" color TV. Sound output almost instantly, semi-watchable video 1-2 seconds later, and stabilized video with reasonably proper colors within 2-10 seconds (depending upon how long the TV had been "off" prior to turning it on).
1985: Turn on a typical mid-priced color TV. Sound output before you had time to lift your finger from the power button on the remote, watchable video within a second, stable video & proper colors within a second or two. We don't realize it at the time, but this is the best it will ever be.
2017: Turn on a typical mid-priced color TV. Wait. Stare at the EnergyStar logo for several seconds, possibly followed by the manufacturer's logo for another second or two. Wait. Wait. Wait. Finally see OTA video from the internal tuner appear about 7-10 seconds after pressing the power button on the remote (if it's displaying the output from a cable/satellite box, add another 3-5 seconds for HDCP handshaking... and a few more seconds if the box itself went into power-saving mode).
The same courts that blocked quite a few executive orders from Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and every president before them.
Executive orders are just a way for Congress to humor the current president to do things they approve of, but don't want to personally support themselves. All that's changed in recent years is the willingness of Presidents to push their luck, and the willingness of courts to support plaintiffs' assertions that the President is overstepping his bounds (basically telling Congress, "have the balls to make this an explicit law so the President *can* do it, or get out of the way and let this action of questionable merit die").
Executive Orders aren't some magical power. If the President issues an EO to which Congress objects, the law that implicitly authorized that EO will be changed within days or weeks... and Congress' *own* actions to revoke/change such a law can itself justify a court putting an immediate hold on such an order pending the outcome in Congress.
Democracy is NOT synonymous with "gotcha, I found a loophole today that I can exploit in the 3 weeks it'll take you to notice & fix it! Na, na, na, na, na!". It's part of the reason why so many actions in American democracy require supermajorities, and why so few things can be authoritatively decided by a first-past-the-post plurality... it was part of the founding fathers' strategy for constraining future tyranny and mob rule.
I don't hate my *ISP* (U-verse), I just hate the crippled modem they force me to use. It has no true 'bridge' mode, just a flaky "DMZ" mode that screws up streaming video & causes it to stutter, even with 50mbps service. Apparently, it's that way due to a hardware design flaw (the RG has too little RAM, and the braindead firmware always allocates most of it to their IPTV service, even if you only use them for internet, so the *slightest* bit of LAN traffic causes incoming data to overflow. Youtube's player app interprets this as 'poor connectivity' and turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy (the CW app is even worse... Netflix, Hulu, and HBO generally work ok).
Their NEW RG fixes the problem, but they won't allow you to exchange the older model (with design flaw) for a new one unless the old one *literally* breaks. Their excuse is that it would require a truck roll, because they have no process for mailing a new gateway directly to the customer with a working gateway to swap out & call them (then return the old one). Literally, they can only order a truck roll to deliver a new gateway after deactivating the 'broken' one. The rigidity of their workflow and procedures is mind-blowing.
AT&T blames Youtube for dealing poorly with an error condition that's rarely a problem with any other service, and Youtube blames AT&T for having flaky router firmware. Xbox live seems to have the same problem as Youtube.
Shariah law could only *ever* exist in the context of family law, and only if both parties agree to it. In other words, divorce/custody proceedings. EVEN *IF* voters in some city overwhelmingly voted to impose "Shariah Law" on residents, it would never pass court muster, any more than a city with a majority of Orthodox Jews could make it a crime to violate Shabbat, or a city run by Evangelicals could criminalize consensual sex by unmarried adults.
A law might end up on the books, but it would be overturned almost instantly, for the same reason why a high school that insisted upon public prayer before football games would eventually have to tolerate invocations by Mormons, Scientologists, Satanists, Hindus, Buddhists, and Pastafarians (just to name a few diverse religious sects). The evangelicals who push for those prayers can barely even grudgingly tolerate an occasional Rabbi or Catholic Priest. You could get the friendliest American Imam who's a die-hard midwestern football fan to give a prayer for the local team to crush its opponents on the field, and they'd still go into convulsions if they heard the word, "Allah".
My experience with homeowners' insurance is that once the deductible is met, the amount paid per item is usually *way* more than the amount you could have conceivably sold it for on eBay. You might not walk away with a brand new item for free (if the item is more than a year old), but unless you're broke & living paycheck to paycheck, you'll walk away from the transaction feeling like you got an even better deal than the thief.
After Hurricane Wilma, there was *unbelievable* large-scale de-hoarding of old/broken electronic gear once people realized they could use it as an excuse to cash in on ancient hardware by claiming it as a storm loss (hardware that was almost zero-value to begin with by virtue of BEING in a box in the garage/shed/back porch, but collectively worth thousands as an insurance claim... and that's not even *counting* the outright fraud that occurred (things that magically ended up in the 'damaged' pile, despite surviving the storm just fine). Or things that had NEGATIVE value, like a half-dozen non-HD CRT TVs and monitors piled on a back porch when the storm hit that ended up getting the homeowner $200-500 apiece.
The one area where insurance will really fuck you is with new cars (since most cars instantly lose 25% of their value the INSTANT you take ownership). The smart thing to do with new cars is to take advantage of zero-down low-interest financing, then drag your feet after the accident until the insurance agrees to pay off the entire loan balance. Eventually, they WILL, because every day you delay costs them a hundred bucks for storage, administration, and your rental car... eventually, they'll give in just to close your case. By extension, the worst thing you can possibly do is buy a brand-new car with a large down-payment... if you get into an accident within a year, they'll totally fuck you over. Insurers LOVE to declare any accident where airbags deploy as a 'total loss', because the scrap value of its remaining parts is more than they'd otherwise have to spend on repair. In many cases, the aggregate value of your destroyed car's parts to a scrapyard *exceeds* the amount the insurance will offer to pay you.
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AFAIK, the S3 86c911 was the first PC video chip that had a single hardware sprite.
I originally thought the Tseng ET4000 had sprites, but if it did, I've never seen it documented anywhere (the ET4000/w32 DID have a single sprite, but that came much later).
The sad thing is, VGA actually DID allow software-defined fonts you could modify on the fly, but the only two apps of that era known to have actually USED that feature were the file manager in MS/DOS 6 and Protracker (*). From what I recall, there was a *huge* cultural taboo back then against manipulating VGA registers directly (vs using BIOS calls). As in, on a scale from 0 (ok) to 9 (forbidden & taboo), it was "10" ;-)
(*) They used 9 of the 16-available custom characters in a 3x3 grid centered on the mouse pointer, defined them to look like the 'actual' characters they replaced, then Xor'ed the mouse pointer into them.
The Amiga could scroll a "screen" vertically with zero tearing (and very little effort), because it was just updating a memory pointer during a horizontal retrace interval. Ditto, for updating the mouse pointer (it was just a sprite). Both worked even when the app (or OS) died because it was serviced semi-independently of the OS as a whole during the vertical retrace interrupt.
Intuition-rendered windows were another matter entirely... I think window gadgets & outlines were rendered in the vertical retrace interrupt, but contents & outside-erasures depended on the app and/or os running properly.
Likewise, the mouse pointer was only robust when it was a 320x200/400 sprite... apps like DeluxePaint & WordPerfect (which needed more precision on a 640x200/400 screen than sprites could provide) that used XOR'ed software-rendered overlays could still crash (though if you clicked outside of the crashed app's window, the sprite-rendered pointer returned)
AmigaDOS was groundbreaking, but it still had some serious issues of its own. Like an event queue that used single-bit flags, allowing users to click BOTH 'ok' AND 'cancel' if the app stalled/crashed with a dialog on-screen.
There's also the matter that until somewhat recently, most lower-end GPUs were designed to accelerate lower resolution and/or shallower bit depths than the max the card could use for Windows. For example, the card might have allowed up to 2560x1600 @ 24/32bpp, but only supported hardware 3D acceleration up to 1280x800@15/16bpp. Even when resolution finally caught up, bit depth w/acceleration was stuck at 16bpp until well into the Windows 7 era. This is why so many computers with semi-ok gaming specs still couldn't do Aero Glass transparency when Windows 7 came out... they couldn't hardware-accelerate 32-bit color.
The problem still semi-persists among many phones & tablets. If an Android device seems to get blurry for a moment during transitions, it's not your imagination... Android is dropping to lower-res/fewer colors to accelerate the transition, then going back to high-res/color dumb framebuffer mode when it's done (and text suddenly becomes sharp & clear a moment later)
> Why did they have to reinvent the wheel and
> not iterate on the already established tech?
If Microsoft had anything to do with it, it was probably something stupid, like deciding to rewrite all the back-end software to use asp.net instead of whatever it was written in originally (probably Java or PHP).
The only problem with Unicomp is the pointer stick... not quite a genuine Trackpoint (springier w/more travel than the original M2), but with the same flawed pointer-stick button design that wears out in a few years & eventually dies.
I actually own two genuine Model M2 keyboards (a M, with pointer stick). The keyboards are fine, but the Trackpoint buttons died years ago... and apparently, it's NOT an easy repair.
Actually, re-capping motherboards was somewhat common ~10 years ago, because bad capacitors were common, replacements were cheap, and they were usually through-hole & easy to solder (an ATX motherboard with lots of slot had lots of surface area relative to actual components).
The problem is that NOW, manufacturers are increasingly making design decisions that literally render the device irreparable when expected-to-fail components (like batteries) do, simply as a way to exercise control over the way consumers are allowed to use the device going forward. Like gluing in batteries to make them almost impossible to remove without destroying the rest of the phone.
For what it's worth, my American History teacher was actually a staunch Republican. Our principal was just an ass who only cared about grooming his resumé and suppressing controversy.
My AP Physics teacher got in trouble for pointing out the irony that teachers were tasked with instilling appreciation for American freedom and liberty in a soul-crushingly & ruthlessly authoritarian environment (high school).
The main problem now is that line-leasing only works for slow (~3mbps or less) ADSL. VDSL2 only gets 10+mbps speeds under a half mile or so, and 50mbps+ maxes out around 500-1200 feet. So with VDSL2, meaningful competition in single-family areas would require having the LEC provide local loop to its remote DSLAM, then VPN the traffic of other companies to some more-distant exchange point for hand-off to the other ISP. Which I believe is how it's done in Britain & many other parts of the world.
I grew up in Florida. My senior year, my English teacher let us watch "Full Metal Jacket" IN CLASS. And to think we went through almost the entire year without realizing how cool she secretly was.
The most twisted part is that if any member of the public had found out and complained, their primary objection would have probably been the film's antiwar sentiment and implied criticism of America and its military (that same year, my American History teacher admitted point blank that he was EXPLICITLY prohibited from saying anything about either Watergate or the Vietnam War because the Principal deemed both topics to be "too controversial").
Unless the relative humidity is 99%. Then you just stew in your own broth. 118 degrees of breezy, dry, desert heat feels like a bad 80-degree day in Miami. If it ever got to 120 degrees in Miami, people stuck outdoors would start to literally drop dead from heat.
In many/most western states (specifically, Colorado & Utah, but I think a few others, too, including Oregon), it's actually *illegal* to collect rainwater, under the bizarre legal theory that someone further "downstream" already owns that water. In theory, if someone 200 miles away could convince a jury that your act of paving a formerly-vacant lot deprived them of $22,719 worth of water by causing it to evaporate instead of permeating into the ground, they could probably sue you *and* press charges for grand theft.
I suspect that laws like those still exist because the current owners of that water have paid so much to buy those rights, any state that tried changing the law would get bankrupted by inverse-condemnation lawsuits arguing diminished value. So ancient laws written 150 years ago enforce absurd rules today that nobody can actually un-do and fix.
IMHO, this is yet another sad example of Microsoft solving the problem backwards.
Take the way it handles program installation. If the .msi installer goes to create a new directory in c:\program files, c:\program files(x86), or somewhere else, Windows throws up all kinds of warnings. But if the installer simply goes to MODIFY an already-existing .exe file, it'll silently allow it without complaint once you've swatted away the UAC prompt. Which, IMHO, is fucking STUPID. Almost BY DEFINITION, if I launch a .msi installer, I'm installing something new, so the creation of a new directory in one of those two directories is normal and expected... but if a launched .msi installer wants to write into an EXISTING directory, or alter an EXISTING .exe/.dll/other-strategic-file (let's say, any existing file whose first two bytes are the ASCII value of "MZ"), THAT is ABSOLUTELY an unusual activity, and Windows should pull out all the stops to make sure you're aware of what's about to happen and its implications.
An even better solution would be for Windows to allow the .msi installer to run, but to "stage" all the files & changes to some intermediate location, then allow you to review all of its proposed changes to the filesystem and registry AFTER the installer has run, but BEFORE those changes actually get applied. Instead, UAC acts more like a EULA or disclaimer.... going through the motions to let Microsoft argue that they gave you legally-sufficient warning, without actually giving you any real details to make an informed decision.
Another example: the fact that there are certain paths you can access from a .bat file, powershell script, or from a C program... but not from a dotnet program or Windows Explorer, or sometimes (but not always) within Office extensions. Or one case I remember from about 3 years ago, a Windows update that changed the path-specification rules for legacy Office extensions so you HAD to use "extended UNC" notation instead of regular UNC or the letter mapped to a network share, or it would fail with an error code whose plain text in the log gave a TOTALLY misleading impression of what the actual problem was (it reported the error as "file not found", even though I could access the file just fine using the exact same path in a command prompt. A genuinely USEFUL error message would have been something like, "NotAllowedAnymoreException" ("the script attempted to do something that was allowed prior to KBxxxxxx, but is now prohibited").
There's an even easier way Microsoft could solve the problem that already exists and has probably 99% of the work already done for them: Volume Shadow Copy Service.
Set aside 100 gigs of a 500+ gig hard drive, and designate one or more folders for protection.
Any changes to files in the protected folders get journaled to that 100-gig area.
If the journal fills up, the hard drive gets write-protected, with the exception of a 1-2 gig area where the user can create and save NEW files, but can't overwrite/delete existing files (so there will always be somewhere to save open files if the rest of the drive gets write-locked).
Add some extra logic to warn the user as the journal reaches certain milestone sizes. Allow users to override the limits... but treat it like the safes used for change at convenience stores... you can override the limit NOW, but it won't take effect for 24 hours (and maybe up to a week, with warnings leading up to its execution, for more radical overrides).
Need to write lots of temp files? Do it to a directory that's not protected. Or get a bigger hard drive, and make policy changes (that have to either be set at installation time, or get delayed by a period of time to give adequate advance warning).
The only real difference between how it's used now would be the setting of hard thresholds that couldn't be exceeded without write-protecting the drive to give the user time to take action. It would probably create some new denial of service opportunities (some, accidental rather than malicious), but it would be a fairly effective safeguard against the current #1 mode of action used by ransomware (mass-encryption in the background of files over a short period of time).
I didn't say *I* had 9 storage units and a house. It was an analogy.
The metaphorical "storage units" are my USB 2.0 hard drives, and the tarballs ON those drives are kind of like "storage units in another city that can only be visited once in a while, for a limited amount of time". They're so slow (relative to the sheer number of files on them), and some of their contained archive files are so huge (one has more than a hundred sliced tarballs, each of which has about 2GB worth of files and a current size averaging about 1.2gb) that it would take literally DAYS to extract them from the USB drive to my laptop's second hard drive. Assuming tar didn't crap out along the way, and Windows didn't find reasons to prevent it from writing the restored files to the target drive.
The metaphorical "house piled floor to ceiling" is my HTPC (running Windows 7 pro and Windows Media Center), which does double-duty as my "lan file server". It has about 7TB spread across 9 hard drives... ~1tb is used by WMC to record TV shows and for windows itself, about 2tb is older TV shows I moved from the main record drive when it got full, and the remaining 4TB is an agglomeration of all my old hard drives (250gb or larger) into a big JBOD RAID array.
The metaphorical "neat condo" is my laptop. Both of its drives (1tb mSATA SSD, 2tb 2.5") are about half full... mostly, thanks to the 2tb drive I added last summer (which allowed me to offload half the stuff from my previously-jam-packed SSD).
The best solution I've found so far is using Windows 7 backup (hidden in Windows 10, but there if you know where to look for it) to create .vhd images, because those .vhd images can later be mounted as virtual hard drives. This is significant, because it allows data files from the previous installation of Windows that are usable directly (.jpeg files, documents, etc) to be literally MOVED from the .vhd drive to the new drive, leaving a much smaller subset of old files to store in perpetuity after the restoration.
But that does no good for the terabytes of old backups from 2010 and earlier... especially the clusterfuck caused by my OCZ SSD and Velociraptor... the Velociraptor (my "bulk data" drive at the time) died without warning in June, and my OCZ SSD had been committing data-suicide every 4-7 weeks since I got it the previous Black Friday. I was in the middle of recovering from a SSD-corruption when the 'raptor died, and ended up in TOTAL panic because at that point, I had some unknown subset of data that I had literally one remaining copy of. In the aftermath of that incident, my data duplication problem exploded... I was so afraid of losing my only remaining copy, I bought drive after drive to make additional copies (the fact that my SSD kept crapping out every few weeks just made matters worse). And because the SSD kept dying before I even finished recovering from the PREVIOUS incident (I finally threw in the towel, swore off SSDs temporarily, got a hybrid SSHD in October, and never used that total-piece-of-shit OCZ SSD again), the number of redundant copies exploded. Hard drive space increased exponentially and got cheaper, but the ACCESS & TRANSFER TIME didn't keep up with the amount of data, so I rapidly got into a position where I knew 90% of the files were redundant, but had SO MANY it was impossible to actually sift through them in any reasonable amount of time.
The catch is, then you're either stuck paying monthly fees for several terabytes of cloud storage in perpetuity (and dealing with a multi-day, multi-terabyte upload for that first backup that effectively makes the computer and your internet connectivity unusable until it completes), or have to use local storage that itself is vulnerable to ransomware.
Yes, I'll admit it. I'm a data-hoarder (my laptop ALONE has a 1TB SSD and a 2TB hard drive, with an additional 6 1-3TB (mostly full) hard drives in the closet)... and I'm now metaphorically in the same position as a crazy cat lady with 9 storage units, a house that's packed floor-to-ceiling, and a neat, tidy condo that's kept neurotically decluttered (because everything that WOULD clutter it goes into one of the storage units or uninhabitable house for storage in perpetuity).
We're talking about SO MANY FILES, just doing something like "dir/s g:" on one of the older USB2.0 drives can take almost a day to finish running. And 2 of THOSE drives basically contain the entire contents of a MOUNTAIN of even older 20-500GB hard drives (at USB 1.1 speeds, just COPYING them to the new drives ended up soaking up most of my free time for about 3 weeks).
Every time I try to deduplicate and clean up the files, I end up making things even worse:
1. Make complete backup onto new hard drive big enough to hold all the existing files. Usually, with compression, since it's the only way to keep the backup down to a manageable size.
2. Start cleaning out the original files.
3. Something goes badly wrong.
4. Now, I have a complete backup that can't be directly compared to the remaining files (because it's compressed and/or in some proprietary format) that can't ever get rid of (because of the unknown files corrupted in step 3 that are safely backed up, even if I don't know which files they are), AND I have almost as many original files as I started with. So the next time I try doing this, I'll have twice as many files to deal with.
It's the zipfiles of image backups in tarballs of tarballs from past attempts that cripple me the worst... too many to scrutinize by hand, but ALSO too many to risk losing forever by doing any kind of in-place automated action when something will inevitably go wrong.
I was a hardcore, staunch Republican in high school and college (90s/early 00s). As in, I sincerely believed Democrats were all closet communists who wanted to destroy America. In my early 30s (Bush #2), I started to have misgivings... Clinton ended up being -- at worst -- "mostly harmless", and Bush (#2) and the Republicans in Congress just couldn't seem to do anything right. In 2008, I was horrified by the prospect of Obama winning, but less than a year later, the Republicans in the House & Senate managed to change my mind & convince me *their* agenda was naive at best, and probably was actively-harmful.
By 2016 (now in my 40s), I was within an inch of changing parties since I hadn't voted for a Republican for at least 4-6 years, and could count the number of Republicans I still respected on one hand. I wasn't exactly thrilled by Hillary, but saw her as infinitely less harmful than Trump.
Then Trump won, and the Democrats in Congress proved they could be every bit as petty, vindictive, and self-mutilating as Republicans. Now, I'm just disgusted with both parties.
The Democrats were all set to become the new party of middle-class America & about to skim off all but the most rabid-right from the Republican party in the most radical political re-alignment since Reagan... then they totally fucked it up. The Democrats could have TOTALLY hijacked Trump, played his ego into their own hands, & formed a working alliance with moderate Republicans, but got so caught up in Trump's misogyny/racism/* that it derailed the whole thing.
My theory: Democrats (as voters) were drifting rightward, and the party itself was drifting rightward as former Republicans switched, but at its core, its leaders still fantasized about being overgrown campus leftists. They decided they'd rather be marginalized, hysterical leftists than the new centrist majority party, and realized that by going nuts over misogyny, racism, and Mother Earth(tm), they could fend off the increasingly-rightwing n00b-Democrats and keep the party firmly on the left.
End result: disillusioned by both parties. Still nominally-Republican, but usually vote for Democrats. I think the best scenario would be a schism within the Republican party that skims off enough extremists to give Democrats a shaky majority, then sends the more conservative Democrats running towards a newly-centrist Republican party. Ideally, Congress would be ~5% hard-right, 47% Republicans, and 48% Democrats. The Republicans could ally with the right if Democrats got too loopy, but the Democrats could get enough Republican support to pass most sane legislation if the Republican leadership got too dogmatic.
I believe Otis actually has a design for a system that uses linear induction motors & tracks for vertical and horizontal travel, but ALSO has the ability to grab onto one or more counterweighted cables for part or all of a trip (so they still get the partial benefit of counterweights). So an upward-bound elevator could grab onto a cable with a counterweight near the top of the building, then let go of the counterweight (which would then anchor itself in place until the next elevator grabbed onto it) if it needed to move horizontally or the weight reached the bottom of its shaft.
Years ago, I had similar thoughts about PalmOS 6. Instead of flailing around trying to convince US carriers to offer a phone of unknown value running PalmOS 6, they should have worked with HTC to make it available as a consumer-reflashable guerrilla update for the HTC PPC-6700 (Sprint)/XV6700 (Verizon) (and whatever the GSM cousin of that particular model happened to be). I'm not sure about AT&T/T-Mobile/GSM-land, but I remember that the 6700 was one of the most popular "PDA Phones" *ever* offered by Sprint & Verizon. They would have probably lost money for that *year* & would have probably had to pay HTC a serious amount of money and offer them perpetual best-deal licensing rights for PalmOS going forward, but it would have given them a real shot at jumpstarting the PalmOS developer and software ecosystem (which had been languishing badly for about a year at that point).
Hardware-wise, the 6700 wasn't much of a step down from the next year's phones... the next year's models were thinner & had more flash, but from what I recall, the RAM and CPU speed were basically the same.They definitely had bluetooth, wifi, and a camera, and I'm pretty sure they had the hardware onboard to do real GPS, too (never officially supported, but existing as a latent [albeit buggy and poorly-working] ability on the circuit board that HTC just ignored... from what I read, the GPS radio got overloaded by the CDMA/GSM modem when it polled the tower, HTC's engineers came up with a firmware fix that basically had the user manually trigger location updates that took the radio modem offline for up to a minute, but HTC's management nixed it because they decided no GPS at all was preferable to flaky GPS that only worked under specific & fairly ideal conditions). Worst-case, they would have had to put most of PalmOS on a miniSD card & required that the card remain inserted (or unceremoniously crash, if the user removed it anyway).
Another problem with Ubuntu's phone OS: its UI bought into the militantly-fashionable idea of eliminating all physical buttons & reducing the phone to a touchscreen for literally everything UI-related. From what I recall (circa summer 2013, at least), it didn't just ignore things like volume buttons for the OS's UI... it didn't even have an API for thirdparty APPS to read their state or react to button-state changes. It was insane.
It's the same reason why Android & IOS (and Windows Mobile & PalmOS before them) never became popular alternatives to universal remote controls, even though everyone has a drawer full of old ones begging for some meaningful repurposed use at this point. A well-designed remote allows you to grope blindly, pick it up, and (at the bare minimum) raise & lower the volume, toggle mute, and pause/play/skip by feeling the shape of the buttons alone. An app that forces you to divert your full attention to its UI egregiously violates user expectations, and basically sucks to use. It's also why so many people have bought a Roku or Kindle Fire instead of a (slightly-cheaper) Chromecast... having touchscreen-control as an OPTION might be nice, but having it rammed down your throat as the ONLY way to control a device results in a miserable use experience.
I love Thinkpads, but from what I recall, their Linux-compatibility was basically "hopeless" about 20 years ago (mainly due to the integrated modem+audio), and has been "mediocre" for the past 10 or so (usually, one major deal-breaking problem, and a few seriously-annoying ones for anybody who could live with the big one). I recall, even my T61p threw enough random headaches at me to say 'fuck it' & run Linux in a VM under Windows. One particular "pain point" I remember was its inability to do hardware-accelerated mpeg-2 or h.264 under Linux, which made things like YouTube almost unusable (stuttering, tearing, dropped frames, blocky scaling, horrific interlacing artifacts, etc). Though in its partial defense, even *Windows* seemed to have issues playing HD videos on it in 'full screen' mode... you could maximize a desktop window & play 1080i60 just fine, but if you went "full-screen", it forgot how to use hardware acceleration & looked as bad as Linux).
1970: Turn on a typical state of the art "solid-state" color TV. Sound output almost instantly, semi-watchable video 1-2 seconds later, and stabilized video with reasonably proper colors within 2-10 seconds (depending upon how long the TV had been "off" prior to turning it on).
1985: Turn on a typical mid-priced color TV. Sound output before you had time to lift your finger from the power button on the remote, watchable video within a second, stable video & proper colors within a second or two. We don't realize it at the time, but this is the best it will ever be.
2017: Turn on a typical mid-priced color TV. Wait. Stare at the EnergyStar logo for several seconds, possibly followed by the manufacturer's logo for another second or two. Wait. Wait. Wait. Finally see OTA video from the internal tuner appear about 7-10 seconds after pressing the power button on the remote (if it's displaying the output from a cable/satellite box, add another 3-5 seconds for HDCP handshaking... and a few more seconds if the box itself went into power-saving mode).
The same courts that blocked quite a few executive orders from Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and every president before them.
Executive orders are just a way for Congress to humor the current president to do things they approve of, but don't want to personally support themselves. All that's changed in recent years is the willingness of Presidents to push their luck, and the willingness of courts to support plaintiffs' assertions that the President is overstepping his bounds (basically telling Congress, "have the balls to make this an explicit law so the President *can* do it, or get out of the way and let this action of questionable merit die").
Executive Orders aren't some magical power. If the President issues an EO to which Congress objects, the law that implicitly authorized that EO will be changed within days or weeks... and Congress' *own* actions to revoke/change such a law can itself justify a court putting an immediate hold on such an order pending the outcome in Congress.
Democracy is NOT synonymous with "gotcha, I found a loophole today that I can exploit in the 3 weeks it'll take you to notice & fix it! Na, na, na, na, na!". It's part of the reason why so many actions in American democracy require supermajorities, and why so few things can be authoritatively decided by a first-past-the-post plurality... it was part of the founding fathers' strategy for constraining future tyranny and mob rule.
I don't hate my *ISP* (U-verse), I just hate the crippled modem they force me to use. It has no true 'bridge' mode, just a flaky "DMZ" mode that screws up streaming video & causes it to stutter, even with 50mbps service. Apparently, it's that way due to a hardware design flaw (the RG has too little RAM, and the braindead firmware always allocates most of it to their IPTV service, even if you only use them for internet, so the *slightest* bit of LAN traffic causes incoming data to overflow. Youtube's player app interprets this as 'poor connectivity' and turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy (the CW app is even worse... Netflix, Hulu, and HBO generally work ok).
Their NEW RG fixes the problem, but they won't allow you to exchange the older model (with design flaw) for a new one unless the old one *literally* breaks. Their excuse is that it would require a truck roll, because they have no process for mailing a new gateway directly to the customer with a working gateway to swap out & call them (then return the old one). Literally, they can only order a truck roll to deliver a new gateway after deactivating the 'broken' one. The rigidity of their workflow and procedures is mind-blowing.
AT&T blames Youtube for dealing poorly with an error condition that's rarely a problem with any other service, and Youtube blames AT&T for having flaky router firmware. Xbox live seems to have the same problem as Youtube.
Shariah law could only *ever* exist in the context of family law, and only if both parties agree to it. In other words, divorce/custody proceedings. EVEN *IF* voters in some city overwhelmingly voted to impose "Shariah Law" on residents, it would never pass court muster, any more than a city with a majority of Orthodox Jews could make it a crime to violate Shabbat, or a city run by Evangelicals could criminalize consensual sex by unmarried adults.
A law might end up on the books, but it would be overturned almost instantly, for the same reason why a high school that insisted upon public prayer before football games would eventually have to tolerate invocations by Mormons, Scientologists, Satanists, Hindus, Buddhists, and Pastafarians (just to name a few diverse religious sects). The evangelicals who push for those prayers can barely even grudgingly tolerate an occasional Rabbi or Catholic Priest. You could get the friendliest American Imam who's a die-hard midwestern football fan to give a prayer for the local team to crush its opponents on the field, and they'd still go into convulsions if they heard the word, "Allah".
My experience with homeowners' insurance is that once the deductible is met, the amount paid per item is usually *way* more than the amount you could have conceivably sold it for on eBay. You might not walk away with a brand new item for free (if the item is more than a year old), but unless you're broke & living paycheck to paycheck, you'll walk away from the transaction feeling like you got an even better deal than the thief.
After Hurricane Wilma, there was *unbelievable* large-scale de-hoarding of old/broken electronic gear once people realized they could use it as an excuse to cash in on ancient hardware by claiming it as a storm loss (hardware that was almost zero-value to begin with by virtue of BEING in a box in the garage/shed/back porch, but collectively worth thousands as an insurance claim... and that's not even *counting* the outright fraud that occurred (things that magically ended up in the 'damaged' pile, despite surviving the storm just fine). Or things that had NEGATIVE value, like a half-dozen non-HD CRT TVs and monitors piled on a back porch when the storm hit that ended up getting the homeowner $200-500 apiece.
The one area where insurance will really fuck you is with new cars (since most cars instantly lose 25% of their value the INSTANT you take ownership). The smart thing to do with new cars is to take advantage of zero-down low-interest financing, then drag your feet after the accident until the insurance agrees to pay off the entire loan balance. Eventually, they WILL, because every day you delay costs them a hundred bucks for storage, administration, and your rental car... eventually, they'll give in just to close your case. By extension, the worst thing you can possibly do is buy a brand-new car with a large down-payment... if you get into an accident within a year, they'll totally fuck you over. Insurers LOVE to declare any accident where airbags deploy as a 'total loss', because the scrap value of its remaining parts is more than they'd otherwise have to spend on repair. In many cases, the aggregate value of your destroyed car's parts to a scrapyard *exceeds* the amount the insurance will offer to pay you.