You're designing a game with no knowledge of it's popularity
No knowledge of the popularity of the game of Chess? Or online gaming in general, especially when combined with a game as popular as Chess? In 2005?
or expected use
I expect that one of the first places some looking for information on the game of Chess will look is chess.com and, if I put my game there, it will probably be pretty damn popular.
But, even if it's not, it wouldn't have killed me to use 64-bit INTs just in case.
And clearly I, as the developer in a hypothetical situation, knew this as I chose a database field type that cold hold those values.
I think the AC you replied to is indicative of a major problem in the software industry. There's this drive behind the younger developers, telling them that newer always means better, and it's going to come back to bite a lot of them in the ass eventually.
When it does, those of us who leaned more toward the "tested and stable" side will just kick back in our comfy chairs and laugh as we watch the young'ns scramble to put out the fires, just as we did when we were too dumb to prefer stability.
... I type ironically on my day-one Ryzen build...
I mean, yes, someone has to use these things, someone has to test them, someone has to prove or disprove their usefullness, reliability, and stability. That someone, however, shouldn't be using them in production until they've been proven. But I've drifted off topic...
This website started in 2005, so unless they saw Nokia brick phones as the way of the future, I really doubt they thought they'd get anywhere close to that many games.
You mean to say they expected to fail before 2 billion games had been played?
Matter of fact, you can blame all (32 and 64) smart phones for this because no one ever seems to close out of their apps.
Why? Does the app continuously play games by itself if you leave it open, thereby artificially inflating the number of games played? No, I don't think it does. And we're talking about the number of games played, ever, not the number of games currently being played, or the number of app instances currently open. Whether people close out their apps or not has absolutely nothing to do with this.
The popular consensus is that most of chess playing traffic comes from old-school Linux users anyway.
Right. So are you saying that their games don't count toward the total number of games played? Because that's what got pushed over 2 billion.
They could just have games close and delete automatically after a period of time.
They could, sure. But, unless they want to deal with data integrity issues, the IDs would continue growing, and it's the ID being too high that is causing the problem. Well, I misspoke there, it's too small of an INT type being used that caused the problem, but that INT is storing the game ID, so it was the ID being too high that revealed the problem.
And, two billion people are never going to be on Chess.com at the same time.
Of course not, but two billion games will eventually have been played, as evident by the fact that this has happened.
But let's say they are, then just use multiple servers.
And the same number of games would have been played, still.
Don't blame the bits for this because the main audience is upgrading anytime soon.
I don't think anybody (except the developer) did this, actually. The fault lies squarely with the developer who used an architecture-dependent INT type rather than forcing a 64-bit INT.
Just keep showing me how much you don't know about things, Hayden. Oh, and good luck in August; let me know if you need a ride.
Of course, and I was actually going to cite that famous example, but that was more a case of application developers believing their software would no longer be in use, rather than believing the platforms it ran on would have been retired.
Still a salient example of shortsightedness and selling short one's own work, though. Both of those very common activities are extreme dangers of software development.
I'm sure they knew there would eventually be over 2 billion games played; they most likely thought the older 32-bit devices would have fallen out of support and no longer be in use before that happened.
Genuinely curious, is "had to leave" code for "got fired" or are you actually one of the few responsible employees who recognizes when their talents would be put to better use elsewhere?
Aside from the "providing his 'publicly released' traffic engineering calculations to the sheriff of the county where he advised changes in traffic signals", which was not work done professionally or for hire, what "engineering work", as defined by the law quoted in that very document you linked to, was he doing? Which of the prohibited titles ("professional engineer" and "registered professional engineer") did he use?
The law clearly states (and this is in your document, as well):
OAR 820-010-073 0 provides, in pertinent part:
(1) A person who is not registered in Oregon as a professional engineer, but holds a substantially equivalent unexpired certificate of registration in another state, territory or possession of the United States, the District of Columbia, or a foreign country, may use the title, "engineer," "professional engineer," "registered professional engineer," or any of its derivations provided that the jurisdiction(s) in which they are registered is written/printed after the title so as not to mislead the public regarding their credentials.
Now, he refers to himself as a "Swedish engineer", which is true; he holds an engineering degree in Sweden, a degree is a type of certificate, degrees do not expire, and an engineering degree is all the certification required to be considered an engineer in Sweden. We're dealing with a matter of semantics, as he wrote the jurisdiction before the title, rather than after. When your case is built on semantics, you have no case at all. Even more so, he didn't use "engineer" as a title; he didn't call himself "Mats Jarlstrom, Engineer" or "Mats Jarlstrom, Swedish Engineer", either of which would have been in violation of the above-quoted law (incidentally, "Mats Jarlstrom, Engineer (Sweden)" would be the correct use of the title), he used it in a manner consistent with the reality of him holding an engineering degree. The law is very clearly intended to protect the use of the title, not simply the word itself; it even literally says "title" right in its text, not just in the bit I quoted here, but throughout. Other uses of the word "engineer" not as a title are not subject to this law.
And OP is correct, by the way. If you apply the law, so absurdly, to consider even engineering opinions not done for hire in the state of Oregon to be "work", you place every engineering student in Oregon on the wrong side of the law. In the course of earning their degree and preparing to become licensed, every engineering student must do mock engineering "work", which is all Jarlstrom did here. If engineering students in Oregon aren't in violation of the law, neither is Jarlstrom.
And if they are... well... Oregon needs to reconsider their laws.
But, since they're not all being sued by the state, I'm leaning toward you being wrong and them (and Jarlstrom) being right. At the end of the day, it was simply cheaper for Jarlstrom to pay the $500 fine than it would have been to defend himself so, being a pragmatic and educated engineer, that's exactly what he did.
No, you should read more carefully, as OP also said:
Look, obviously I'm engaging in reductio ad absurdum.
In other words, he was saying "Take lightly what I have written above, for it is absurd and should hold no weight." He, then, even goes on to explain:
Because this entire case is just that. This was not a court case, where a person who is being called as an expert witness needs to present some evidence of that expertise. It isn't a case of an engineer practicing their profession without a license. It is just a person offering their opinion, and perhaps their worst offense is that they are arguing from authority.
Further, he explains:
Which is probably what pissed off the powers that be, that someone disagreed with them, and tried to present a bona fide.
He, then, ends his post on one of the most serious notes I have ever encountered:
I am Groot.
In short, you took seriously the obviously (and intentionally) absurd portion of the post and ignored the remainder of the post, which explained why the portion you paid attention to was absurd.
Reductio ad absurdum is, for reference:
a form of argument which attempts either to disprove a statement by showing it inevitably leads to a ridiculous, absurd, or impractical conclusion, or to prove one by showing that if it were not true, the result would be absurd or impossible.
In this case, OP was attempting to show that the train of thought being used here ultimately leads to the conclusion in his first statement. You, sir, missed the point, as you typically seem to do here.
If you only have one workstation you're probably not that serious about your editing work. If you have more than one, you move to another.
And either way, you spend more time waiting for rendering than you'll lose to the occasional bad update which, by the way, I've experienced on macOS as well... as recently as yesterday on a barely 6 month old 5k iMac. On the up side, my wife probably won't complain about the strict backup policy I enforce on company-owned machines anymore.
When you go on calling people evil, consider why they want you dead and not how they might do it. And no, that's not a threat, my body count will remain at 0, because I'm so evil.
You really have no idea what you're talking about, do you? Learn what a ghost gun is, where and how they're made, and hoe many of them end up in the US on a given day, thank come talk to me.
As someone with ties to law enforcement, I can tell you that the reality is far from what the media would have you believe. When you've actually had a beer with someone who stopped a trunk-full of hand made Colt 1911 clones from illegally crossing the border, then you can talk to me about how many illegal guns enter the country legally.
You're working form an ignorant viewpoint and quoting media-approved statistics while I have firsthand knowledge.
Furthermore, you're trying to claim we can "make [guns] inaccessible" while admitting that some number of guns enter the country illegally. You can't have it both ways. You can make guns less accessible, but as long as they exist they'll be accessible to anyone sufficiently motivated.
Beyond that, have you stopped for one moment to think there's a reason we kill each other in this country and that guns have nothing at all to do with it? The kinds of guns people of your ilk most often try to remove from circulation (black rifles) account for fewer deaths than knives (which you seem to be fine with), blunt objects (basically every solid object without a blade falls into this category and you seem to be fine with that), or *gasp*fists and feet.
In 2014 (the most recent data I can find), that's 248 rifle deaths. That's all rifles, not just the scary black ones, so the number is even smaller for those, but the FBI doesn't differentiate so I'll be generous and give you all of those. Compare that to 1756 knife deaths, 435 blunt objects, and a whopping 660 people killed with fists or feet. Hell, on that last point I'll add in all other non-pistol firearms: 262 shotgun deaths and 93 "other gun" deaths. That brings the non-handgun firearm total (where the type of firearm was known) up to a whopping 613, still fewer than fists and feet. If we divvy up the "type not stated" category proportionally, we can add 29 rifle deaths, 84 shotgun deaths, and 78 "other gun" deaths, for a total of 804 non-handgun firearm deaths. Finally, we've stretched the numbers so that non-handgun guns kill more people than fists and feet, though the number still pales in comparison to knives.
That's not to say guns don't account for most murders in this country; they certainly do when you also consider handguns, but nobody is calling for those to be banned.
That's right, the simple handgun accounts for more than half of this country's murder rate; yet, I can more easily get a handgun than a black rifle. Why is that?
Also, I am reminded of our previous argument, where I pointed out that, per capita, "gun-free" Francs has more gun violence than the US. Yes, the US has higher overall numbers; we also have a higher overall population; if our population was the size of France, or vise-versa, they would very much outrank us in terms of overall numbers.
But that reality makes you uncomfortable, so you refuse to face it.
It's not my fault you never learn and can't face reality.
Here's a fun exercise: Look at this data (source) and tell me where you, if murdered, are most likely to have been murdered by a gun. The answer is Liechtenstein, followed closely by Puerto Rico, but they've got incomplete data, so we'll have to look at #3, which is Sierra Leone, ranked #164 worldwide in gun ownership with 0.6 firearms per capita and 128 annual homicides by firearm. That's 2.28 per 100,000, to the US' 2.97, where the US has 88.8 guns per capit
And yet all you've proven is that you and I hold different opinions, I can back mine up, and you don't have any better idea how to achieve what you propose than I do. None of that makes me wrong.
I've actually heard a few proposals along the lines that you suggest, but none of them account for guns illegally smuggled across the border or stolen from law enforcement and military personnel, or how we defend ourselves against nations with guns if we take guns out of the hands of our military and law enforcement in order to solve the latter half of that. As I'm sure you're aware, the majority of guns used in violent crimes (by a very large margin) are not legally owned; meanwhile, the majority of guns in this country are legally owned, by an even larger margin. To add to that, most guns used in violent crimes are imported illegally, rather than being stolen. In other words, getting rid of legally owned guns wouldn't make a dent in gun crime. I'll grant that it would probably cut down on gun theft, but that's really not what we're discussing, is it?
So, no, you don't have to be right to prove me wrong, but it would help your cause if I hadn't already checked my facts. Someone else can (and, in your case, often does) do the job of being right, but it is on you to find and present them.
I've looked, for the 34 years of my life during which I did not own a gun (I'm 35, mind you), I looked for an answer, I sought out anyone who purported to have an answer, or even an inkling of an answer, and the best I ever found was "well, if it was possible to get make guns disappear tomorrow" and I actually agree with that.
Which leads me to wonder. A couple years ago, I upgraded memory on my personal mid 2011 iMac.
I discovered my Apple had a terrible flaw. I removed two screws on a plate at the bottom of the computer. I then -with my bare hands, popped out the memory that was already there, and installed new RAM.
Apple had forgotten to solder the RAM in place! And it was a dumb design anyhow, since both the new and old RAM hac connector like tabs on them, instead of the DIP or SIP RAM that any other PC company would use if they were going to solder it in.
But I had to get some work done, so I took a chance, popped the new RAM in and miraculously, it worked despite Apple having only soldered in RAM. I put in connector RAM, and it worked. GO figure!
Why, certainly that would be because they didn't start soldering RAM in until 2012.
Howso? You don't pay an ongoing fee to use your Mac once you buy it; if Microsoft starts charging a subscription fee for Windows, a PC will eventually (and quickly) become more expensive than a Mac. Hell, within a handful of years, while a top-end Mac might still be useful, a $300 bottom-of-the-barrel PC might end up costing more.
And that's precisely why I'm fairly certain Windows will never become a subscription "service".
MS is aiming for a model where everyone pays for the upgrade and then pays daily/weekly/annually for updates and patches. Software rental is alive and kicking.
Well, that will certainly shut the "Macs cost more" crowd right the hell up, won't it?
Slashdot Mirror
You're designing a game with no knowledge of it's popularity
No knowledge of the popularity of the game of Chess? Or online gaming in general, especially when combined with a game as popular as Chess? In 2005?
or expected use
I expect that one of the first places some looking for information on the game of Chess will look is chess.com and, if I put my game there, it will probably be pretty damn popular.
But, even if it's not, it wouldn't have killed me to use 64-bit INTs just in case.
And clearly I, as the developer in a hypothetical situation, knew this as I chose a database field type that cold hold those values.
I think the AC you replied to is indicative of a major problem in the software industry. There's this drive behind the younger developers, telling them that newer always means better, and it's going to come back to bite a lot of them in the ass eventually.
... I type ironically on my day-one Ryzen build ...
When it does, those of us who leaned more toward the "tested and stable" side will just kick back in our comfy chairs and laugh as we watch the young'ns scramble to put out the fires, just as we did when we were too dumb to prefer stability.
I mean, yes, someone has to use these things, someone has to test them, someone has to prove or disprove their usefullness, reliability, and stability. That someone, however, shouldn't be using them in production until they've been proven. But I've drifted off topic...
That's absolutely true, and damaging to the software industry as a whole. It's something I strive to avoid in my own hiring practices.
This website started in 2005, so unless they saw Nokia brick phones as the way of the future, I really doubt they thought they'd get anywhere close to that many games.
You mean to say they expected to fail before 2 billion games had been played?
Matter of fact, you can blame all (32 and 64) smart phones for this because no one ever seems to close out of their apps.
Why? Does the app continuously play games by itself if you leave it open, thereby artificially inflating the number of games played? No, I don't think it does. And we're talking about the number of games played, ever, not the number of games currently being played, or the number of app instances currently open. Whether people close out their apps or not has absolutely nothing to do with this.
The popular consensus is that most of chess playing traffic comes from old-school Linux users anyway.
Right. So are you saying that their games don't count toward the total number of games played? Because that's what got pushed over 2 billion.
They could just have games close and delete automatically after a period of time.
They could, sure. But, unless they want to deal with data integrity issues, the IDs would continue growing, and it's the ID being too high that is causing the problem. Well, I misspoke there, it's too small of an INT type being used that caused the problem, but that INT is storing the game ID, so it was the ID being too high that revealed the problem.
And, two billion people are never going to be on Chess.com at the same time.
Of course not, but two billion games will eventually have been played, as evident by the fact that this has happened.
But let's say they are, then just use multiple servers.
And the same number of games would have been played, still.
Don't blame the bits for this because the main audience is upgrading anytime soon.
I don't think anybody (except the developer) did this, actually. The fault lies squarely with the developer who used an architecture-dependent INT type rather than forcing a 64-bit INT.
Just keep showing me how much you don't know about things, Hayden. Oh, and good luck in August; let me know if you need a ride.
Of course, and I was actually going to cite that famous example, but that was more a case of application developers believing their software would no longer be in use, rather than believing the platforms it ran on would have been retired.
Still a salient example of shortsightedness and selling short one's own work, though. Both of those very common activities are extreme dangers of software development.
I'm sure they knew there would eventually be over 2 billion games played; they most likely thought the older 32-bit devices would have fallen out of support and no longer be in use before that happened.
Genuinely curious, is "had to leave" code for "got fired" or are you actually one of the few responsible employees who recognizes when their talents would be put to better use elsewhere?
The law clearly states (and this is in your document, as well):
OAR 820-010-073 0 provides, in pertinent part:
(1) A person who is not registered in Oregon as a professional engineer, but holds a substantially equivalent unexpired certificate of registration in another state, territory or possession of the United States, the District of Columbia, or a foreign country, may use the title, "engineer," "professional engineer," "registered professional engineer," or any of its derivations provided that the jurisdiction(s) in which they are registered is written/printed after the title so as not to mislead the public regarding their credentials.
Now, he refers to himself as a "Swedish engineer", which is true; he holds an engineering degree in Sweden, a degree is a type of certificate, degrees do not expire, and an engineering degree is all the certification required to be considered an engineer in Sweden. We're dealing with a matter of semantics, as he wrote the jurisdiction before the title, rather than after. When your case is built on semantics, you have no case at all. Even more so, he didn't use "engineer" as a title; he didn't call himself "Mats Jarlstrom, Engineer" or "Mats Jarlstrom, Swedish Engineer", either of which would have been in violation of the above-quoted law (incidentally, "Mats Jarlstrom, Engineer (Sweden)" would be the correct use of the title), he used it in a manner consistent with the reality of him holding an engineering degree. The law is very clearly intended to protect the use of the title, not simply the word itself; it even literally says "title" right in its text, not just in the bit I quoted here, but throughout. Other uses of the word "engineer" not as a title are not subject to this law.
And OP is correct, by the way. If you apply the law, so absurdly, to consider even engineering opinions not done for hire in the state of Oregon to be "work", you place every engineering student in Oregon on the wrong side of the law. In the course of earning their degree and preparing to become licensed, every engineering student must do mock engineering "work", which is all Jarlstrom did here. If engineering students in Oregon aren't in violation of the law, neither is Jarlstrom.
And if they are... well... Oregon needs to reconsider their laws.
But, since they're not all being sued by the state, I'm leaning toward you being wrong and them (and Jarlstrom) being right. At the end of the day, it was simply cheaper for Jarlstrom to pay the $500 fine than it would have been to defend himself so, being a pragmatic and educated engineer, that's exactly what he did.
You really think Microsoft only wants $20/yr from Windows users? You're a funny guy, buddy.
Look, obviously I'm engaging in reductio ad absurdum.
In other words, he was saying "Take lightly what I have written above, for it is absurd and should hold no weight." He, then, even goes on to explain:
Because this entire case is just that. This was not a court case, where a person who is being called as an expert witness needs to present some evidence of that expertise. It isn't a case of an engineer practicing their profession without a license. It is just a person offering their opinion, and perhaps their worst offense is that they are arguing from authority.
Further, he explains:
Which is probably what pissed off the powers that be, that someone disagreed with them, and tried to present a bona fide.
He, then, ends his post on one of the most serious notes I have ever encountered:
I am Groot.
In short, you took seriously the obviously (and intentionally) absurd portion of the post and ignored the remainder of the post, which explained why the portion you paid attention to was absurd.
Reductio ad absurdum is, for reference:
a form of argument which attempts either to disprove a statement by showing it inevitably leads to a ridiculous, absurd, or impractical conclusion, or to prove one by showing that if it were not true, the result would be absurd or impossible.
In this case, OP was attempting to show that the train of thought being used here ultimately leads to the conclusion in his first statement. You, sir, missed the point, as you typically seem to do here.
Rules, guidelines, whatever... why do you even care? Nothing better to do?
I can make exceptions to my own rules... Also, you seem to be following me around lately, do you like me or something? Sorry, not interested.
I would imagine you could do the same with a Bash script instead of PowerShell, but no, this implementation uses PowerShell, which is a Windows thing.
Microsoft Office is trying to be emacs now?
If you only have one workstation you're probably not that serious about your editing work. If you have more than one, you move to another.
And either way, you spend more time waiting for rendering than you'll lose to the occasional bad update which, by the way, I've experienced on macOS as well... as recently as yesterday on a barely 6 month old 5k iMac. On the up side, my wife probably won't complain about the strict backup policy I enforce on company-owned machines anymore.
When you go on calling people evil, consider why they want you dead and not how they might do it. And no, that's not a threat, my body count will remain at 0, because I'm so evil.
You really have no idea what you're talking about, do you? Learn what a ghost gun is, where and how they're made, and hoe many of them end up in the US on a given day, thank come talk to me.
As someone with ties to law enforcement, I can tell you that the reality is far from what the media would have you believe. When you've actually had a beer with someone who stopped a trunk-full of hand made Colt 1911 clones from illegally crossing the border, then you can talk to me about how many illegal guns enter the country legally.
You're working form an ignorant viewpoint and quoting media-approved statistics while I have firsthand knowledge.
Furthermore, you're trying to claim we can "make [guns] inaccessible" while admitting that some number of guns enter the country illegally. You can't have it both ways. You can make guns less accessible, but as long as they exist they'll be accessible to anyone sufficiently motivated.
Beyond that, have you stopped for one moment to think there's a reason we kill each other in this country and that guns have nothing at all to do with it? The kinds of guns people of your ilk most often try to remove from circulation (black rifles) account for fewer deaths than knives (which you seem to be fine with), blunt objects (basically every solid object without a blade falls into this category and you seem to be fine with that), or *gasp* fists and feet.
In 2014 (the most recent data I can find), that's 248 rifle deaths. That's all rifles, not just the scary black ones, so the number is even smaller for those, but the FBI doesn't differentiate so I'll be generous and give you all of those. Compare that to 1756 knife deaths, 435 blunt objects, and a whopping 660 people killed with fists or feet. Hell, on that last point I'll add in all other non-pistol firearms: 262 shotgun deaths and 93 "other gun" deaths. That brings the non-handgun firearm total (where the type of firearm was known) up to a whopping 613, still fewer than fists and feet. If we divvy up the "type not stated" category proportionally, we can add 29 rifle deaths, 84 shotgun deaths, and 78 "other gun" deaths, for a total of 804 non-handgun firearm deaths. Finally, we've stretched the numbers so that non-handgun guns kill more people than fists and feet, though the number still pales in comparison to knives.
That's not to say guns don't account for most murders in this country; they certainly do when you also consider handguns, but nobody is calling for those to be banned.
That's right, the simple handgun accounts for more than half of this country's murder rate; yet, I can more easily get a handgun than a black rifle. Why is that?
Also, I am reminded of our previous argument, where I pointed out that, per capita, "gun-free" Francs has more gun violence than the US. Yes, the US has higher overall numbers; we also have a higher overall population; if our population was the size of France, or vise-versa, they would very much outrank us in terms of overall numbers.
But that reality makes you uncomfortable, so you refuse to face it.
It's not my fault you never learn and can't face reality.
Here's a fun exercise: Look at this data (source) and tell me where you, if murdered, are most likely to have been murdered by a gun. The answer is Liechtenstein, followed closely by Puerto Rico, but they've got incomplete data, so we'll have to look at #3, which is Sierra Leone, ranked #164 worldwide in gun ownership with 0.6 firearms per capita and 128 annual homicides by firearm. That's 2.28 per 100,000, to the US' 2.97, where the US has 88.8 guns per capit
And yet all you've proven is that you and I hold different opinions, I can back mine up, and you don't have any better idea how to achieve what you propose than I do. None of that makes me wrong.
I've actually heard a few proposals along the lines that you suggest, but none of them account for guns illegally smuggled across the border or stolen from law enforcement and military personnel, or how we defend ourselves against nations with guns if we take guns out of the hands of our military and law enforcement in order to solve the latter half of that. As I'm sure you're aware, the majority of guns used in violent crimes (by a very large margin) are not legally owned; meanwhile, the majority of guns in this country are legally owned, by an even larger margin. To add to that, most guns used in violent crimes are imported illegally, rather than being stolen. In other words, getting rid of legally owned guns wouldn't make a dent in gun crime. I'll grant that it would probably cut down on gun theft, but that's really not what we're discussing, is it?
So, no, you don't have to be right to prove me wrong, but it would help your cause if I hadn't already checked my facts. Someone else can (and, in your case, often does) do the job of being right, but it is on you to find and present them.
I've looked, for the 34 years of my life during which I did not own a gun (I'm 35, mind you), I looked for an answer, I sought out anyone who purported to have an answer, or even an inkling of an answer, and the best I ever found was "well, if it was possible to get make guns disappear tomorrow" and I actually agree with that.
But we can't do that. Prove me wrong.
That wasn't my question because I haven't heard a single viable proposal for how to do so. You must have one, so let's hear it.
Okay, fine, make all guns completely illegal, no exceptions, tomorrow. Think things will get better?
Fucking millennial dumbass.
This right here is the shit that keeps me coming back.
Rendering...
Which leads me to wonder. A couple years ago, I upgraded memory on my personal mid 2011 iMac.
I discovered my Apple had a terrible flaw. I removed two screws on a plate at the bottom of the computer. I then -with my bare hands, popped out the memory that was already there, and installed new RAM.
Apple had forgotten to solder the RAM in place! And it was a dumb design anyhow, since both the new and old RAM hac connector like tabs on them, instead of the DIP or SIP RAM that any other PC company would use if they were going to solder it in.
But I had to get some work done, so I took a chance, popped the new RAM in and miraculously, it worked despite Apple having only soldered in RAM. I put in connector RAM, and it worked. GO figure!
Why, certainly that would be because they didn't start soldering RAM in until 2012.
Howso? You don't pay an ongoing fee to use your Mac once you buy it; if Microsoft starts charging a subscription fee for Windows, a PC will eventually (and quickly) become more expensive than a Mac. Hell, within a handful of years, while a top-end Mac might still be useful, a $300 bottom-of-the-barrel PC might end up costing more.
And that's precisely why I'm fairly certain Windows will never become a subscription "service".
MS is aiming for a model where everyone pays for the upgrade and then pays daily/weekly/annually for updates and patches. Software rental is alive and kicking.
Well, that will certainly shut the "Macs cost more" crowd right the hell up, won't it?