In a past life I led UAT/QA testing teams, and I mostly blame poor fail state handling with a fair amount of positive-result-only testing. A lot of bits are coded such that they really only handle "correct" data, and anything else doesn't get handled properly or at all. On top of that, plenty of test case scenarios either only test that things work properly when used properly, or for things that include fail states that they still only really test "correct" usage. I used to get teased a fair amount for doing things like pasting huge amounts of data in fields (just for bugs like this one), or uploading images to csv-expecting text-based importers, or clicking buttons as fast as I could when it was only expecting a single click, but I found all kinds of weird bugs that way. My favorite, and relevant to this, was when I discovered that entering in a massive block of text on the customer account management site's Add Email Mailbox wizard would crash the entire customer management site systemwide. That one got fixed pretty quickly.
I've seen a few of them, but they're pretty rare. I avoid them because usually the boot does more harm than good - getting stuck under the tab, sliding to the side and making it hard to push the tab, getting stuck next to the jack/port, especially if it's slightly recessed like you might find in an IP phone. And, apparently, breaking Cisco switches. Something like This would probably do it.
Incidentally, I'm not really a Cisco guy, but I have helped recover a couple secondhand switches for friends and I'm pretty sure there are several more steps required than just holding the mode button. If you were to get it stuck pushed and the switch ever power cycled it'd likely end up stuck at a boot prompt until the cable was unplugged and it was rebooted again, but it shouldn't be the disaster implied.
I... think you just proved my point? You could connect (the original) Windows 95 to The Internet just fine. Install TCP/IP, install Dial-Up Networking or a Network Card, and dial up/connect. All built in. It did not include a Web Browser in the original version, so there was a limit to what you could do without extra software, but that in no way precluded access to the Internet. From there you could install Netscape, Opera, a version of IE you got from elsewhere, etc. Or use the built-in ftp and telnet if you'd rather; at the time just plain telnet was somewhat useful.
The Plus! pack only added an early version of Internet Explorer, it didn't impact access to the Internet itself. You didn't have to buy the Plus! pack to get access to the internet. OSR2 only added various versions of Internet Explorer. The underlying TCP/IP and ethernet/DUN didn't change.
Unless by "include" you're meaning "free access", which of course it didn't.
I sometimes wonder if I'm the only person that had very little trouble multitasking Windows 3.1 just fine. I'd regularly be running Word working on a school paper, maybe a graphics program editing some image for it, listening to a CD with a cd player program, plus maybe a DOS terminal program in a window for BBSing and generally have no problems. We were also early adopters of the Internet and I had no problems adding Netscape in '94 or '95 or so into that mix. Netscape started to be more of a problem in the 4.x versions once the web started passing it by, but in general I don't really remember having that much trouble with 3.1.
You're confusing Internet for the web. It did have TCP/IP, which is a bigger deal than people today realize. Before Windows 95, people generally had to use one of several third party TCP/IP implementations. Trumpet Winsock for Windows, MacTCP for Mac (was not free originally), several commercial applications shipped along with their own stacks. Microsoft did release a version for Windows for Workgroups 3.11, but it came along pretty late and would have required someone getting ahold of it separately as it didn't come with it. Not to mention WFW was mostly aimed at businesses rather than home users. This was the first time (on Windows) there was a standard TCP/IP package available that could be guaranteed to be there (more or less... I worked for an ISP in 1999-2002 and you'd think people intentionally lost their Windows discs...).
Moneycost varieties aside, it was generally pretty easy to grab an ISP install disc (or even floppy set) even as early as 1995-1996 that had some 32-bit version of a browser on it, often for free at kiosks at checkouts. Most ISPs also sent out install packages with software when you signed up, so it's not like there was a huge barrier of entry even for people who bought the original Windows 95.
If you held down shift while doing a Restart from the shutdown menu, rather than going through a whole reboot cycle it did the equivalent of dropping to DOS and reloading win.com. It could be a great shortcut for application installs and such. In the days of motherboards that insisted on slowly counting up your RAM, and then himem.sys testing it again, it could shave a good minute or so off boot times.
Granted everyone has different expectations and patience when it comes to computers and OSes, but this hasn't been my experience at all. I keep around a Dell Latitude D620 (released 2006, I think) for some uses where I need a real serial port that handled Windows 8 just fine, and still runs 10 pretty well. Bootup takes a little longer than might be ideal on its crappy slow hard drive, but it's completely usable and faster than 8 in most things. I also ran 7 and 8 on a Compaq Presario C700 laptop (was my previous laptop, released 2007) though I've stolen some parts from it so I haven't upgraded it to 10. Then I have a relatively new Thinkpad T430 as my "real" laptop, and it runs 10 brilliantly (i5, 16gb of RAM).
Yeah, I know, anecdotes, opinion, etc, but I have no complaints. I also generally have no reason to try to resell computers, so resale value isn't a concern to me. In general, Windows has gone faster and improved performance for each version past Vista for me, on the same hardware usually.
You're looking at carrier-subsidized prices. The "free" phone you get for signing up for accounts still costs some amount, often a non-trivial amount. I picked up a $10 Coolpad Arise myself for testing some things, and even though there's technically no contract involved it's still been subsidized by the carrier expecting you to then pay them for service. The $50 smartphone is $50 retail, out the door, full cost nothing added or removed, direct from the vendor.
This is a bigger deal for developing countries who don't have carrier subsidization, old phone clearances, etc.
I can't disagree with this more. Once you reach a certain point, being unemployed for long is very rare. I've experienced this first-hand - I was working for a company who discovered the CFO had been cooking the books very, very badly. It wasn't quite illegal; there weren't criminal charges involved, but it led to about 15 people (including me) losing our jobs, and the remaining 20 employees taking a serious pay cut with a questionable future for the company. While I (and the others) getting let go were still in the meeting where they'd informed us of what happened, some of the other higher-ups were talking with us about possible business ideas that could turn the business back around and lead to us being rehired, and they mentioned approaching the now-ex CFO guy for investment (but *only* investment, no controlling interest, just to be clear). So we have a case where a guy has just cost 15 people their jobs through blatant chicanery, had just been fired from the company for it, and the other higher ups are still interested in dealing with him for funding. Money talks, and once you have a certain amount of it you'll have a hard time staying down for long unless you've committed some crime serious enough for jail time.
This gets into the arms race thing again. Right now some sites/ad networks are doing things like setting cookies, parameters, checking logs, etc to make sure that you've hit the ad server. Alternatively, sometimes they'll use annoying NOSCRIPT code (or just rely on ad scripts to do something to the main page content) to blow up the website somehow if the ad scripts aren't loaded. There are any number of ways to detect whether adblockers are running or not.
Right now, most websites are still feeling like bad press and lost market share generated by turning away visitors with adblockers aren't worth it, so you'll usually see something fairly unobtrusive asking to unblock the site. At some point, especially if adblocking reaches a tipping point, more and more sites might actually start blocking content if ads are blocked. If this happens, adblockers will have to come up with a way to convince the networks that the ads are loaded, even when they aren't. Sadly this might require going back to the way adblocking used to be done whereby the whole page was loaded, and then ads were removed. This will hurt the bandwidth savings since all that will have to be downloaded anyway, and may also open up some attack vectors since scripts will have to execute somewhere.
Just the nature of the arms race. Probably the best-case scenario is that most mainstream websites will never want to risk alienating visitors and completely wall off their content to adblockers. We may start seeing more paywalls and microtransaction requirements though.
A way around this might be to have "spectator goggles" that would allow people watching to flip among the racers. That might increase the appeal a bit. Or maybe a few TVs displaying the view. I expect that'd be somewhat more exciting than just watching them from the outside. I don't disagree though, it'll be a hard thing to gain a lot of spectators unless people start racing drones big enough to see well in stadiums or something. I've never been able to enjoy esports too much myself.
+1 also to the dogfights. We've done some "wrestling" with drones here at the office that just sort of involve trying to knock them out of the sky either physically or using the downwash, and it's been interesting. Actual weapons would be cool.
I use SoundCloud from the browser fine, no problem. It does occasionally show a bar offering to install the app, but it works fine from the browser without even using Desktop mode.
Depends on what level of x86 you're wanting to emulate. I have a copy of RealPC Classic (or maybe it's SoftPC Classic? I can never keep it straight), which emulates a 8088-level PC on a Macintosh Classic. I've successfully run Windows 3.0 in real mode on it, for certain values of run. There are also versions of SoftWindows that run on 68k; I'm pretty sure I got Windows 3.1 going on one once but can't remember. It's been a long time.
Probably the craziest thing I've done recently is get Mac OS X running on a 68k Mac via PearPC running in 68k Linux. Took literally days to boot.
Plenty of boxes and retail stores still use "PC" to mean Windows. I haven't paid attention in-store lately to check, but if you go to Walmart's website they do. Plenty of game boxes still say "PC CDROM" or "PC DVD" on them as well. Even fairly new stuff like SimCity. Many of them also specifically say "WIN" or "MAC" though. Might just have to pay more attention next time you're out;)
I'm not arguing the other posters' points that strictly speaking, PC means "Personal Computer" and should be generic, but "PC Compatible" has been an industry term for decades at this point and trying to argue otherwise is pedantic, and somewhat more recently it also implies Windows. I'm old enough to remember when it implied DOS, too.
I stumbled across some of these myself recently, while googling on a random obscure Windows dll I thought was broken on a box - I found a bunch of Windows installations backed up on these. I suspect it may have something to do with upnp or port triggering. These Western Digital backup devices seem to have FTP access, but they also allow setting it up completely open. I have to assume people are enabling this option to allow internal usage and backing up without realizing it's making it public. I really doubt it's their actual intent. I suppose it's also possible they have one of the newer routers with a USB port for a mass storage device to allow similar functions.
This isn't really anything new. I remember when I was a teenager in the late 90s and early 2000s doing netbios scans and having no problems finding dozens of public, open Windows shares and printers. Technology has changed but it still makes it easy to screw up permissions if you don't understand it.
It's a little difficult to prove direct correlation, as is the usual case with Apple product releases, but if you recall the original announcements for iPhone specifically called for it to run only Web 2.0 applications through Safari. For example. It wasn't until after the first jailbreaks and unofficial third party apps that the App Store came along after weathering objections from Jobs. It's hard to conclusively say whether it was directly in response to jailbreakers or not, but it's likely it sped up their plans.
The closest to bad I can think of was the time they produced keyboards in the Natural line with the cursor keys in a + instead of inverted T. Had one at work many years ago and hated it enough to buy my own different one.
Fun Fact: Susan Kare also designed many of the icons used in early versions of OS/2, as well as Windows 3.0. Basically the entirety of popular early GUI computing was designed by her.
So also did the graphic design of Solitaire that was included with Windows through XP (though I think XP redesigned the card backs), so her work might be the most seen graphic design in computing history.
Windows has had the ctrl-alt-del to log in/unlock since literally the first version of Windows NT, 3.1, in 1993. That's a long time to have feature envy, though I suppose it's possible. I generally wonder if the average user is clever enough to understand the implication anyway - if you put up a fake login dialog on Windows just past the ctrl-alt-del, I bet most users would just fill it out and go with it rather than think they're under attack.
It depends on the part and the popularity of the model. For things like Mustangs, Camaros, Firebirds, etc there's lots of aftermarket options for all sorts of things. Fenders, door panels, door skins, bumper covers... you could probably build a whole vintage Mustang from the frame up with non-Ford-OEM parts. Likewise with parts that are widely shared across models and are generally considered consumable - brake pads, clutches, alternators, etc. Readily available third party. On the other hand, if you need something random like a bit of interior molding or a random knob or door panel for, say, a 1991 Toyota MR2 you're going to have a harder time avoiding dealer parts or a couple expensive specialist makers. Body parts will almost certainly be OEM if they're even available at all, outside of something like custom carbon fiber. There's been some experimentation done in the MR2 community to 3D print a replacement for a little plastic slider that often breaks, leaving the climate control temperature slider hard to use or inoperative all together. Durability and tolerances have been problems so far, but it's the perfect example of the kind of little thing that 3D printing could open up for very cheap that would otherwise require a $100+ entire new climate control head unit.
They got the supply part of it, but they needed the knowledge and price competitiveness of it. I got into doing some Arduino stuff awhile ago, and when I was a noob I stopped by just to look at their various shields and options. One of the employees asked if I needed help and I asked a couple questions about the compatibility and features and he had no idea about any of it. If they'd prepared their employees to answer at least basic questions about them, and not had them priced 30-40% higher than online, it might have worked better. Not everyone in the maker movement is an expert; being able to get someone nudged in the right direction could have made a bigger impact and been a driver to the store.
I'm 34 and even I can only count the numbers of times I've actually used a typewriter for something other than messing with with on one hand. Granted my family was an early adopter of computers - I'm pretty sure I was the only fourth grader in my school turning in computer printed things instead of typewriter things, but still. I keep thinking it'd be fun to pick up an old manual typewriter, and they show up in thrift stores reasonably often, I just don't know what I'd do with the thing. I already have enough random computer stuff sitting around taking up space. Exposure in movies and media is completely different than actually using something and understanding its operation, so I could understand someone 24 being unaware of the details.
I picked up the HTC One M7 when it was new, and the Sense 5.0 is a drastic, drastic improvement over the previous iterations. Plus more recent updates (up to 6.0 now, I think) you can even disable Blinkfeed completely and the like, giving it a feel very close to stock. I've been fairly happy with it. The only thing really making me consider upgrading now is the terrible camera.
Here's a real answer for you - Naval ships are generally designed and built as a unit. The base hull, the systems involved, propulsion, electrical, power generation, etc all are tailored for one another. Once you have all this together, making wholesale changes to it can be tricky without basically redesigning the whole thing anyway. New technology, new efficiency-improving designs, better designs based on things learned can really only be done with new designs. It's like a car chassis - at some point, you have to redesign the underpinnings to make a more efficient and better car. You can't take a 1957 Chevy and tear it down to the chassis and rebuild it with modern technology and have it be as safe, efficient, or whatnot as a car designed and built from the ground up with the new technology, and certainly not at a price point close to a new car. To say nothing of issues like metal fatigue, corrosion, brittleness from age, etc. Likewise, even though it's somewhat counter-intuitive, it's often more economical to build a modern ship from the keel up than to, say, gut a carrier and retrofit new tech in.
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In a past life I led UAT/QA testing teams, and I mostly blame poor fail state handling with a fair amount of positive-result-only testing. A lot of bits are coded such that they really only handle "correct" data, and anything else doesn't get handled properly or at all. On top of that, plenty of test case scenarios either only test that things work properly when used properly, or for things that include fail states that they still only really test "correct" usage. I used to get teased a fair amount for doing things like pasting huge amounts of data in fields (just for bugs like this one), or uploading images to csv-expecting text-based importers, or clicking buttons as fast as I could when it was only expecting a single click, but I found all kinds of weird bugs that way. My favorite, and relevant to this, was when I discovered that entering in a massive block of text on the customer account management site's Add Email Mailbox wizard would crash the entire customer management site systemwide. That one got fixed pretty quickly.
I've seen a few of them, but they're pretty rare. I avoid them because usually the boot does more harm than good - getting stuck under the tab, sliding to the side and making it hard to push the tab, getting stuck next to the jack/port, especially if it's slightly recessed like you might find in an IP phone. And, apparently, breaking Cisco switches. Something like This would probably do it.
Incidentally, I'm not really a Cisco guy, but I have helped recover a couple secondhand switches for friends and I'm pretty sure there are several more steps required than just holding the mode button. If you were to get it stuck pushed and the switch ever power cycled it'd likely end up stuck at a boot prompt until the cable was unplugged and it was rebooted again, but it shouldn't be the disaster implied.
I... think you just proved my point? You could connect (the original) Windows 95 to The Internet just fine. Install TCP/IP, install Dial-Up Networking or a Network Card, and dial up/connect. All built in. It did not include a Web Browser in the original version, so there was a limit to what you could do without extra software, but that in no way precluded access to the Internet. From there you could install Netscape, Opera, a version of IE you got from elsewhere, etc. Or use the built-in ftp and telnet if you'd rather; at the time just plain telnet was somewhat useful.
The Plus! pack only added an early version of Internet Explorer, it didn't impact access to the Internet itself. You didn't have to buy the Plus! pack to get access to the internet. OSR2 only added various versions of Internet Explorer. The underlying TCP/IP and ethernet/DUN didn't change.
Unless by "include" you're meaning "free access", which of course it didn't.
I sometimes wonder if I'm the only person that had very little trouble multitasking Windows 3.1 just fine. I'd regularly be running Word working on a school paper, maybe a graphics program editing some image for it, listening to a CD with a cd player program, plus maybe a DOS terminal program in a window for BBSing and generally have no problems. We were also early adopters of the Internet and I had no problems adding Netscape in '94 or '95 or so into that mix. Netscape started to be more of a problem in the 4.x versions once the web started passing it by, but in general I don't really remember having that much trouble with 3.1.
You're confusing Internet for the web. It did have TCP/IP, which is a bigger deal than people today realize. Before Windows 95, people generally had to use one of several third party TCP/IP implementations. Trumpet Winsock for Windows, MacTCP for Mac (was not free originally), several commercial applications shipped along with their own stacks. Microsoft did release a version for Windows for Workgroups 3.11, but it came along pretty late and would have required someone getting ahold of it separately as it didn't come with it. Not to mention WFW was mostly aimed at businesses rather than home users. This was the first time (on Windows) there was a standard TCP/IP package available that could be guaranteed to be there (more or less... I worked for an ISP in 1999-2002 and you'd think people intentionally lost their Windows discs...).
Moneycost varieties aside, it was generally pretty easy to grab an ISP install disc (or even floppy set) even as early as 1995-1996 that had some 32-bit version of a browser on it, often for free at kiosks at checkouts. Most ISPs also sent out install packages with software when you signed up, so it's not like there was a huge barrier of entry even for people who bought the original Windows 95.
If you held down shift while doing a Restart from the shutdown menu, rather than going through a whole reboot cycle it did the equivalent of dropping to DOS and reloading win.com. It could be a great shortcut for application installs and such. In the days of motherboards that insisted on slowly counting up your RAM, and then himem.sys testing it again, it could shave a good minute or so off boot times.
Granted everyone has different expectations and patience when it comes to computers and OSes, but this hasn't been my experience at all. I keep around a Dell Latitude D620 (released 2006, I think) for some uses where I need a real serial port that handled Windows 8 just fine, and still runs 10 pretty well. Bootup takes a little longer than might be ideal on its crappy slow hard drive, but it's completely usable and faster than 8 in most things. I also ran 7 and 8 on a Compaq Presario C700 laptop (was my previous laptop, released 2007) though I've stolen some parts from it so I haven't upgraded it to 10. Then I have a relatively new Thinkpad T430 as my "real" laptop, and it runs 10 brilliantly (i5, 16gb of RAM).
Yeah, I know, anecdotes, opinion, etc, but I have no complaints. I also generally have no reason to try to resell computers, so resale value isn't a concern to me. In general, Windows has gone faster and improved performance for each version past Vista for me, on the same hardware usually.
You're looking at carrier-subsidized prices. The "free" phone you get for signing up for accounts still costs some amount, often a non-trivial amount. I picked up a $10 Coolpad Arise myself for testing some things, and even though there's technically no contract involved it's still been subsidized by the carrier expecting you to then pay them for service. The $50 smartphone is $50 retail, out the door, full cost nothing added or removed, direct from the vendor.
This is a bigger deal for developing countries who don't have carrier subsidization, old phone clearances, etc.
I can't disagree with this more. Once you reach a certain point, being unemployed for long is very rare. I've experienced this first-hand - I was working for a company who discovered the CFO had been cooking the books very, very badly. It wasn't quite illegal; there weren't criminal charges involved, but it led to about 15 people (including me) losing our jobs, and the remaining 20 employees taking a serious pay cut with a questionable future for the company. While I (and the others) getting let go were still in the meeting where they'd informed us of what happened, some of the other higher-ups were talking with us about possible business ideas that could turn the business back around and lead to us being rehired, and they mentioned approaching the now-ex CFO guy for investment (but *only* investment, no controlling interest, just to be clear). So we have a case where a guy has just cost 15 people their jobs through blatant chicanery, had just been fired from the company for it, and the other higher ups are still interested in dealing with him for funding. Money talks, and once you have a certain amount of it you'll have a hard time staying down for long unless you've committed some crime serious enough for jail time.
This gets into the arms race thing again. Right now some sites/ad networks are doing things like setting cookies, parameters, checking logs, etc to make sure that you've hit the ad server. Alternatively, sometimes they'll use annoying NOSCRIPT code (or just rely on ad scripts to do something to the main page content) to blow up the website somehow if the ad scripts aren't loaded. There are any number of ways to detect whether adblockers are running or not.
Right now, most websites are still feeling like bad press and lost market share generated by turning away visitors with adblockers aren't worth it, so you'll usually see something fairly unobtrusive asking to unblock the site. At some point, especially if adblocking reaches a tipping point, more and more sites might actually start blocking content if ads are blocked. If this happens, adblockers will have to come up with a way to convince the networks that the ads are loaded, even when they aren't. Sadly this might require going back to the way adblocking used to be done whereby the whole page was loaded, and then ads were removed. This will hurt the bandwidth savings since all that will have to be downloaded anyway, and may also open up some attack vectors since scripts will have to execute somewhere.
Just the nature of the arms race. Probably the best-case scenario is that most mainstream websites will never want to risk alienating visitors and completely wall off their content to adblockers. We may start seeing more paywalls and microtransaction requirements though.
A way around this might be to have "spectator goggles" that would allow people watching to flip among the racers. That might increase the appeal a bit. Or maybe a few TVs displaying the view. I expect that'd be somewhat more exciting than just watching them from the outside. I don't disagree though, it'll be a hard thing to gain a lot of spectators unless people start racing drones big enough to see well in stadiums or something. I've never been able to enjoy esports too much myself.
+1 also to the dogfights. We've done some "wrestling" with drones here at the office that just sort of involve trying to knock them out of the sky either physically or using the downwash, and it's been interesting. Actual weapons would be cool.
I guess this would explain Windows 2000 (or was it XP?) still running on a garbage bin in Firefly, set sometime in the 2500s.
I use SoundCloud from the browser fine, no problem. It does occasionally show a bar offering to install the app, but it works fine from the browser without even using Desktop mode.
Depends on what level of x86 you're wanting to emulate. I have a copy of RealPC Classic (or maybe it's SoftPC Classic? I can never keep it straight), which emulates a 8088-level PC on a Macintosh Classic. I've successfully run Windows 3.0 in real mode on it, for certain values of run. There are also versions of SoftWindows that run on 68k; I'm pretty sure I got Windows 3.1 going on one once but can't remember. It's been a long time.
Probably the craziest thing I've done recently is get Mac OS X running on a 68k Mac via PearPC running in 68k Linux. Took literally days to boot.
Plenty of boxes and retail stores still use "PC" to mean Windows. I haven't paid attention in-store lately to check, but if you go to Walmart's website they do. Plenty of game boxes still say "PC CDROM" or "PC DVD" on them as well. Even fairly new stuff like SimCity. Many of them also specifically say "WIN" or "MAC" though. Might just have to pay more attention next time you're out ;)
I'm not arguing the other posters' points that strictly speaking, PC means "Personal Computer" and should be generic, but "PC Compatible" has been an industry term for decades at this point and trying to argue otherwise is pedantic, and somewhat more recently it also implies Windows. I'm old enough to remember when it implied DOS, too.
I stumbled across some of these myself recently, while googling on a random obscure Windows dll I thought was broken on a box - I found a bunch of Windows installations backed up on these. I suspect it may have something to do with upnp or port triggering. These Western Digital backup devices seem to have FTP access, but they also allow setting it up completely open. I have to assume people are enabling this option to allow internal usage and backing up without realizing it's making it public. I really doubt it's their actual intent. I suppose it's also possible they have one of the newer routers with a USB port for a mass storage device to allow similar functions.
This isn't really anything new. I remember when I was a teenager in the late 90s and early 2000s doing netbios scans and having no problems finding dozens of public, open Windows shares and printers. Technology has changed but it still makes it easy to screw up permissions if you don't understand it.
It's a little difficult to prove direct correlation, as is the usual case with Apple product releases, but if you recall the original announcements for iPhone specifically called for it to run only Web 2.0 applications through Safari. For example. It wasn't until after the first jailbreaks and unofficial third party apps that the App Store came along after weathering objections from Jobs. It's hard to conclusively say whether it was directly in response to jailbreakers or not, but it's likely it sped up their plans.
The closest to bad I can think of was the time they produced keyboards in the Natural line with the cursor keys in a + instead of inverted T. Had one at work many years ago and hated it enough to buy my own different one.
Fun Fact: Susan Kare also designed many of the icons used in early versions of OS/2, as well as Windows 3.0. Basically the entirety of popular early GUI computing was designed by her.
So also did the graphic design of Solitaire that was included with Windows through XP (though I think XP redesigned the card backs), so her work might be the most seen graphic design in computing history.
Windows has had the ctrl-alt-del to log in/unlock since literally the first version of Windows NT, 3.1, in 1993. That's a long time to have feature envy, though I suppose it's possible. I generally wonder if the average user is clever enough to understand the implication anyway - if you put up a fake login dialog on Windows just past the ctrl-alt-del, I bet most users would just fill it out and go with it rather than think they're under attack.
It depends on the part and the popularity of the model. For things like Mustangs, Camaros, Firebirds, etc there's lots of aftermarket options for all sorts of things. Fenders, door panels, door skins, bumper covers... you could probably build a whole vintage Mustang from the frame up with non-Ford-OEM parts. Likewise with parts that are widely shared across models and are generally considered consumable - brake pads, clutches, alternators, etc. Readily available third party. On the other hand, if you need something random like a bit of interior molding or a random knob or door panel for, say, a 1991 Toyota MR2 you're going to have a harder time avoiding dealer parts or a couple expensive specialist makers. Body parts will almost certainly be OEM if they're even available at all, outside of something like custom carbon fiber. There's been some experimentation done in the MR2 community to 3D print a replacement for a little plastic slider that often breaks, leaving the climate control temperature slider hard to use or inoperative all together. Durability and tolerances have been problems so far, but it's the perfect example of the kind of little thing that 3D printing could open up for very cheap that would otherwise require a $100+ entire new climate control head unit.
They got the supply part of it, but they needed the knowledge and price competitiveness of it. I got into doing some Arduino stuff awhile ago, and when I was a noob I stopped by just to look at their various shields and options. One of the employees asked if I needed help and I asked a couple questions about the compatibility and features and he had no idea about any of it. If they'd prepared their employees to answer at least basic questions about them, and not had them priced 30-40% higher than online, it might have worked better. Not everyone in the maker movement is an expert; being able to get someone nudged in the right direction could have made a bigger impact and been a driver to the store.
I'm 34 and even I can only count the numbers of times I've actually used a typewriter for something other than messing with with on one hand. Granted my family was an early adopter of computers - I'm pretty sure I was the only fourth grader in my school turning in computer printed things instead of typewriter things, but still. I keep thinking it'd be fun to pick up an old manual typewriter, and they show up in thrift stores reasonably often, I just don't know what I'd do with the thing. I already have enough random computer stuff sitting around taking up space. Exposure in movies and media is completely different than actually using something and understanding its operation, so I could understand someone 24 being unaware of the details.
I picked up the HTC One M7 when it was new, and the Sense 5.0 is a drastic, drastic improvement over the previous iterations. Plus more recent updates (up to 6.0 now, I think) you can even disable Blinkfeed completely and the like, giving it a feel very close to stock. I've been fairly happy with it. The only thing really making me consider upgrading now is the terrible camera.
Here's a real answer for you - Naval ships are generally designed and built as a unit. The base hull, the systems involved, propulsion, electrical, power generation, etc all are tailored for one another. Once you have all this together, making wholesale changes to it can be tricky without basically redesigning the whole thing anyway. New technology, new efficiency-improving designs, better designs based on things learned can really only be done with new designs. It's like a car chassis - at some point, you have to redesign the underpinnings to make a more efficient and better car. You can't take a 1957 Chevy and tear it down to the chassis and rebuild it with modern technology and have it be as safe, efficient, or whatnot as a car designed and built from the ground up with the new technology, and certainly not at a price point close to a new car. To say nothing of issues like metal fatigue, corrosion, brittleness from age, etc. Likewise, even though it's somewhat counter-intuitive, it's often more economical to build a modern ship from the keel up than to, say, gut a carrier and retrofit new tech in.