I bought a new wireless router earlier this year. I didn't even consider checking for IPv6 support. I just assumed no networking component today would be shipping without it. I mean, we've been reading "running out of IPv4 - switch to v6!" for what, a decade now? And we've been messing about with NAT and port forwarding due to limited IPs for even longer. It's not like they didn't know this was coming.

Needless to say, mentioned router did not include IPv6. But at least there's unofficial firmware for it that does. And, one never knows, the manufacturer might by some miracle decide to support the product even...

I seem to recall there being scientists back then arguing "CFC or no CFC, this will fix itself given a few decades, no reason to panic". By your logic, should we now believe whatever those people state?

The point I'm trying to make, as others have: correlation != causality.

Funky, one case in which the summary is more accurate than TFA. Never thought I'd see the say.

Space.com goofed its article title. Rather obviously just a goof though, since the article content itself doesn't make the same mistake.

It doesn't state the theory has been confirmed, it says two of the predictions made by the theory has been confirmed.

The last time we went to the moon, it took around twelve years of R&D, using tech that's positively antiquated by modern standards, and with no precedent whatsoever to show that it was even possible to send a person to the moon and bring them back alive.

There was also political and public will to see the project through, even with its high price tag. I believe this is a fairly major point.

If we assume political and public acceptance, and take money issues out of the picture, I agree 20 years would be pessimistic. But it is what it is.

The article summary read "Spotify has unveiled a pair of major new features: the ability to synchronise Spotify playlists with iPods, and the option to buy MP3 files to own". Which is the point I posted my correction on.

This is a thread pertaining to new functionality in Spotify. Do I really need to spell out that I am talking about functionality in Spotify when correcting the article's listing of old Spotify functionality as new Spotify functionality?

I guess so. Let me rephrase then.

Being able to purchase MP3s IN SPOTIFY is nothing new. Being able to buy an entire playlist IN SPOTIFY, instead of one tune at a time IN SPOTIFY, is though. Just to clarify. In Spotify.

Being able to buy an entire playlist, instead of one tune at a time, is though. Just to clarify.

The durability you quote for S3 (99.99%) is for the reduced redundancy option. The standard storage lists 99.999999999% durability.

I guess in your case it boils down to cost/benefit then. If you're spending significant time abroad, and iPhone development is your living, buying an unlocked iPhone while abroad should make good business sense. $700 doesn't translate into that many billable hours for a consultant.

Isn't it also possible to pay AT&T extra to unlock? I don't know how it is in the US, but here the lock-in is basically to ensure you stick with them long enough to finish paying for the phone. If you choose you can pay your way out of it.

$0.29/minute? Heck, it's more expensive being a European in Europe in that case. I'd pay almost three times that to call home from Romania while roaming, and I live in Europe.

I don't believe it's your home operator robbing you by the way, but rather the roaming partner in the country you are visiting.

Of course, your point about the phone being operator locked is a valid one. I don't think I'd ever consider buying an operator locked phone; the market here is very different from the US. But nothing should be stopping you from buying a cheap unlocked phone for use with locally bought pre-paid cards to work around the issue?

That _what_ is far more common? That banks use teenagers to tweak 20 year old legacy systems? I'm fine with a discussion, but make your points in relevance to what you're responding to.

The discussion, or the part of it that I involved myself in, was whether OSS/FOSS was "better" than closed systems like XP when it came to maintenance one or two decades in. I maintain that for the vast majority of people and companies, it isn't. The specific sentence I really reacted to was "it would cost one heck of a lot more to update a legacy application than to pay some kid to apply a patch for you".

This may cost more than a new Windows licence, but what do you do if your old 16-bit legacy application won't run on Vista or 7? It could cost one heck of a lot more to update a legacy application than to pay some kid to apply a patch for you...

That depends on the application, doesn't it. There are free applications today that do much more than a several thousand dollar app in the same segment did a decade or two ago.

Apart from that, this sounds like a very constructed problem. 1) A legacy app that has no modern equivalent, 2) that cannot be kept running inside an emulator or on existing hardware, 3) that you cannot live without, 4) that you'd trust a teenager or a recompile to keep working perfectly on a system it was never designed for...

I do see some rare cases of the first 3 (banks come to mind), but those are most definitely not compatible with #4 being a fix.

One issue with legacy applications, is precisely that companies cling to them for too long. Yes, it costs money to keep migrating to new systems or versions, but compare that to being stuck with something so old the people and machinery capable of migrating you away from it has died of old age or rust, and the cost skyrockets.

Let's look at Red Hat then. The closest I could find to XP (late 2001) time-wise, is Red Hat 6.2 (early 2000). Granted, this is a 2 minute googling job here, but a year give or take doesn't really matter as it turns out.

The latest patch I can find for that is from 2002. How much would Red Hat charge you to keep supporting a 13 year old distribution? Probably a helluva lot more than the XP license cost. Actually, it seems they don't maintain beyond 10 years, regardless of how much cash you might be willing to throw at them. And after 4 years the level of support starts diminishing. Not saying there's anything wrong with that, I find it perfectly reasonable.

Of course, one can argue that you can always hire a developer, if source code is available. Sure. But a decent developer would've charged you more than a new Windows license virtually before turning on their monitors.

The parent isn't spouting FUD, they're stating reality. Unless you created the piece of software yourself, you're always depending on the creator to maintain it. Even if the source code is available, the cost of picking up maintenance on it will usually be prohibitively high. Unless you think your time is worth nothing, this is still true even if you do it yourself.

How the hell is a company choosing, after _13 years_, to no longer support a piece of software "abuse of power"?

Nobody's forcing you to uninstall XP. You'll just have to come to terms with the reality that at some point it will no longer be supported.