Okay, smartarse.

You have a lab microscope that costs £100,000. It's been working for 10 years and does exactly what you need. Attached to it is a PC to do image processing. That PC is supplied as part of the machine and includes one-off software to operate the microscope.

Now you say, of course, just ask how much it costs to get the equivalent software for 7, eh? Simple. But the microscope manufacturer hasn't sold anything to you in ten years. So they'll sell you a Windows 7 version. They'll charge you £90,000 for it. Or for £95,000 they'll sell you it attached to a new microscope worth £90,000 on it's own.

What do you do?

Well, actually you work for the NHS. Which had fuck-all money as it pisses it away on management consultants. So instead of either option, you get fuck-all. Now when the attached PC dies, you need to hope your IT guys have an image. When your IT guys move to Windows 7 for the central system, you better hope it can connect to it to store the images. You can't virtualise it because the DRM on the interface cost the manufacturer at least £10,000 to implement to stop you doing precisely that.

Now you're screwed. You can't put your lab slides into the national health system without a lot of manual pissing about. You can't justify buying just the Windows 7 version of the software / drivers (because you might as well just buy a new microscope, and that would come under buildings budget or medical equipment, not IT upgrades). You can't negotiate them down anywhere near sense. You can't replace the machine and - eventually - it's going to die.

And every year the microscope manufacturer puts up their prices by £10,000.

Now multiply by every hospital in the country.
Now multiply by every piece of large equipment (genetics machines, blood samplers, X-Ray machines, ECG's, MRI's, etc.).

Soon, it just becomes better to leave it the fuck alone and wait until you NEED to do something. Then you can justify it, now that it's broken and you need it. And then you can get the government to step in and negotiate a deal. That's what's happened. And the government have said "For fuck's sake!" and gone to MICROSOFT rather than the multitude of equipment manufacturers.

Think I'm exaggerating? My girlfriend is a geneticist in an NHS hospital. The machine she works on is 15 years old, dog-slow compared to the state of the art, and runs off Windows XP embedded. When it dies, the IT team has to track down an old IDE hard drive to fit into it and image it back. And she has to manually transfer images to the "real" integrated system to put them on patient records.

And the NHS haven't even BEGUN to get off Windows XP on the desktop where she works. Precisely because of, and a contributing factor to, this shit.

Great. So what's it like as a fucking fire alarm? Because the point of this article is that they are near damn useless.

Personally, anything that is even capable of throwing up a 404 when it should be waking me the fuck up is not something I'd spend any kind of money on. And that's basically the problem behind the recall - wave your arms (e.g. yawning when going to bed) and it just turns itself off and stops detecting for a while. There's no evidence at all that this thing has been designed to life-critical standards (which I would accept for a complex electronic device because, well, air-bags, commercial airplanes, etc. already have that stuff but it's DAMN expensive to do that). As such, it's a pretty toy that you're betting your life on.

Sorry, but there's a reason that some things are just simple. Fuses. Earth cables. Emergency Exit signs. Door handles (at least when trying to exit). Fire alarms.

I put batteries in you. You beep like fuck when you think there's a fire (where the decision is simple and consistent and physical, not an actual "decision" at all - either optical obscurement from smoke or voltage detection in the difference in radiation or however the Americium ones work).

If you want to get REALLY advanced, give me a button to shut you up for 5 minutes for, say, when I've burnt toast and know it and manually activate that mode voluntarily. And you beep like mad and piss me off when your battery is running out so I can't miss the fact (and, no, I don't want them to be mains-wired necessarily as in my country that means I won't buy extra smoke alarms as they would cost a bomb to legally install, plus then you never know that the battery in the thing is actually dead through being charged for ten years constantly).

I'm a geek. I'm very techy. But not everything is improved by adding more technology to it. In fact, quite often the opposite.

Let's not even get into the fact that you basically have a Google-controlled device connected to your internal network with remotely-flashable firmware that you have no control over and no interface in which you can see what it's doing sitting above your head in the living room and able to monitor your body movements. I'm not a conspiracy theorist paranoiac but, fuck, you do have to wonder quite how long it would take for a company that WAS evil to misuse that shit. It just reminds of me of the I, Robot movie (not true to the books, I know) with the sensor-strips.

You can replace "cloud service" with "service".

Just about any business, service, or product you use you have to consider what happens if the company goes bankrupt. "But they'll never go bankrupt" is not an answer. You need to know what you'll do if they just go offline, now, today, and you never get your data back ever.

If you haven't been working like that in your business since day one, you really need to consider your options. Whether it's a mobile phone provider, some VoIP service, your operating system vendor, your cloud services or - hell - your cleaners, your electrician or anything else, you owe it to yourself and your customers to have enough information to just carry on. Maybe with a blip. Maybe not 100% smooth and instant. But at least for business continuity purposes.

Cloud is no different in this regard. I know of a bursar at a private school who questioned even things like in-house library services, window-cleaning companies (with long-term contracts) and IT support contracts on the basis of "What if you go bankrupt today?" It's a sensible question to ask - of them and of yourself - and vital for business continuity in anything the smaller of outfits.

They will not tell you if they are going bankrupt until it's too late. Hell, we had an AV vendor go into administration. They didn't say a word and we only found out when it had been a while since our last signature update and went to their website.

Never got it to work anyway.

I opened every port, changed every setting, fiddled with everything I could, never got even a lobby or anything going at all on the Gamespy games I have installed.

Really weird because ANYTHING non-Gamespy just worked - whether Steam, Windows Live, some company-specific online lobby or - indeed - any TCP/IP based service whatsoever.

Never got to the bottom of it, so just treated all Gamespy-based games as being offline games.

Really wanted to play silly things like Age of Booty online but just never got the chance. It won't be missed.

So.... all that Metro shit that you forced on us, and we said was shit, turns out it's no good after all, then?

Sorry, but I always feel a pang of embarrassment on MS's behalf whenever some free utility actually does a BETTER job than the "official Microsoft way".

"You're car shutting off going around a bend will cause loss of control."

No. It will cause loss of power. It does not stop brakes / steering from being operational. And if you're going fast enough to do the corner with all this tech, but not without, it's DRIVER ERROR.

"Sure, driving down a strait road, on a sunny day, with no one within a few car lengths and this wont be a problem."

Driving properly.

"Also, the air bags stop functioning; which is a problem when you loose most of your control from your vehicle."

"Your" control.

"Ever have an engine just turn off while driving? it's startling, so people hit the breaks used to ABS will lock them up and end up in a slide, with surprising difficult steering."

Yes. And I didn't. And I was a "new" driver at the time (but older than most beginners). The car shut off, I let it drift and steered gently. It had ABS. It had power-steering. I hadn't driven a car without them. I still didn't even veer out of lane except in a controlled maneouvure to pull to the side of the road. I've also had my brake pads fail jam a wheel (so like putting the brakes on, but lop-sided) while on a motorway.

But all that is besides the point. If you're a driver, and you panic, that's the worst thing you can do. And is also, again, driver error.

"Nope. It means no such thing. How about you drive 65 miles an hour around a curve in traffic and have someone else tuun off the ignition? whats that? you won't do it? clearly there is something wrong with your driving."

Not really. You still have full steering and your speed will decrease. You might lose power-steering but at those speed it has little effect - you are steering literally fractions of a degree around the steering arc.

And 65 mph around a curve in traffic? Maybe that's your problem? The only curve you'd do that on is a motorway curve. Which has lanes and distances set so that you never have to steer more than a fraction of a degree of the arc.

Again - like the "sledgehammer to the server" redundancy test, or the "let's restore from backup" data test. If you're NOT prepared to do them, it's because you KNOW you're not doing things correctly. But you wouldn't do them "just because" because it could, potentially, possibly, maybe, be slightly dangerous and you don't do things like that when you're driving.

Powersteering/ABS in the third para, obviously.

Yep.

Let's assume the engine stalled or had a random mechanical failure. Then the engine will cut out just the same, and take the same systems down.

Sure, your steering will get heavier once the ABS goes off but if that's a problem then you were driving RELYING on the ABS to ALWAYS work perfectly (which, in every scenario I can imagine, means you weren't driving safely).

The brakes? Still function the same as ever. And you have two of them. And loss of power is what supposedly caused the crash, so you could just coast to a halt.

The steering lock? Not an issue in this case (presumably the lock doesn't come on with the key still in the ignition, like ALL steering locks).

The loss of power? Then you were driving assuming that your car will always run at 100% efficiency and driving, by the word of UK law at least, dangerous. Loss of power should never cause a problem. Burst of power, YES. But not loss.

What else?

The article says "When the ignition failed, she lost control, skidded and was hit on the passenger side by another car."

So she actually lost control and skidded. How do you do that when the power to your car just went OFF? It means you were going too fast. Or relying on the ABS / traction control to save you. Or, just plain panicked and steered off the road.

Sorry, there's just too much unsaid here. Yeah, sure, there's a manufacturing defect. But saying it was the car's fault rather than (almost 100% of the time) the driver's is ludicrous. Fact is, either the car was roadworthy with a minor unknown fault, and the driver fucked up, or it wasn't roadworthy at all.

I should be able to reach over and switch your ignition off while you're driving. NOT take the key out, but switch it off. Sure, the car won't perform the same but that's what you have to deal with as the driver. If you're NOT confident on someone doing this AT ANY TIME you're ever driving the vehicle then, like the "sledgehammer to the critical server" or the "test restore from backup tape" test, it means you were doing something wrong in the way you were driving. And if you're not confident in that, maybe you should take a couple of courses or just go into a car park / other private land and try it out and see in a safe environment before you carry on driving to work.

"We've already ramped up emissions by millions upon millions of times, and it's literally causing DNA and brain injuries, preventing curing of cancer, causing species decline and extinction, and other problems. The Schumann resonance which the earth produces and all life is dependent on is literally being over powered by microwaves and other EMF causing all these different phenomena, including conditions like anxiety and schizophrenia."

No.

It's not.

Please put your white-coat back on (in either sense - lunatic, or go and actually work in a science lab and prove it to yourself).

In a prolonged emergency, your phone is not the weakest link. Hell, once of those "emergency chargers" (a plug and a pack of AA batteries, basically) can be put next to your fusebox quite easily.

The problem is the cells. If your mobile phone is powered up by the local cell is flooded / offline / out of power then you're fucked.

I don't think landlines have much life left, to be honest. They are fast being replaced by wireless technology and are getting obsolete. And yes, while I have made phone calls on landlines in powercuts, the same can be said for mobile phones when the landline has also gone off.

The problem you're wishing to solve - long-term powerless - is much more of a problem all around and not one that either technology solves.

But then, generally, after a few days in anything catastrophic, calling from your house is likely to be not as important as you think. You either won't be there any more (and will be relocated somehow), or there'll be some other way of keeping in contact made available to you.

If you're that paranoid, keep a pair of cheap walkie-talkies charged. Worst that happens, you give one to a potential rescuer or use them to call in help yourself.

Sorry, but CSS isn't a copy protection technology of any kind. It's easily defeated within a matter of seconds on any modern PC. Legally, sure, but then if you're allowed to make an archive copy, that's your legal "right" and the industry would have to take you to court to decide which wins, and it will be expensive and (potentially) catastrophic for them to try it.

What pisses me off ten times more is the "unreadable sectors" copy protection. It means that I've never watched a DVD on my laptop as all the ones I've tried have that shit and even with properly licensed DVD playing software and a DVD compliant drive, I can't watch it.

So what do I do? I run it through one of the programs that just sucks the data off and ignore the errors, which leaves me with only "CSS" to defeat and half the time it's not worth the bother - leave it on, let the player worry about it and 99% of the time I only ever play from European region anyway so it doesn't hinder things to use something set in European region for CSS decryption.

To be honest the things that piss me off go in the order:

- Unreadable sectors
- Blocked UOPS
- Too much shit on the beginning of the movie (sometimes MINUTES before you can even get to the main menu).
- The law about making a backup of a product I have in my hands for my own, personal, reasonable usage (so I don't wear my discs out and have easy access to the content).
- CSS

Yeah, cos that never happens with petrol cars. Never at all. Not even once.

Sorry, I'm not a Tesla nut. I hate current generations of electric cars. We had milk-delivery "floats" since the 1960's in my country that used lead-acid batteries and were entirely electric, they were great for what they were. The top-end models are now viable all-electric cars. And cost ridiculous prices. And have some serious flaws (limited range, etc. that can't even come close to competing with my 15-year-old cheap second-hand petrol car).

But we haven't saved the planet. In fact, we've probably broke it a little more (lithium, power generation infrastructure, etc.).

So, no, I'm not a Tesla fan by any stretch of the imagination. The closest I get is that I once priced up an all-electric moped now that my job is ten minutes away rather than 2 hours. But even that was only because I already have a 32A charging socket on the outside of my house (for a kiln), could plug it into a 13A socket and - just in my lunch hour -charge it enough to get home. And I get free road tax. And no congestion charge. And cheaper insurance. And even then, I can't really justify the purchase price compared to an old clunker of a huge second hand petrol car that I can put a 12ft shed in (plus a complete replacement once a year or so).

But, actually, electric cars are just the same as petrol cars here. When you have something of that energy density contained in a metal box, that's tinkered with by random garages and amateur enthusiasts, that's parked up by the side of the road or driving over speed bumps at 50mph... eventually, statistically, enough of them will blow to provide a news story or two. And the automotive testing and recall process has been in place for decades now and you can be pretty sure that it's hard to get such products through the testing, especially with new technologies, if they are really that dangerous.

Fact is, you can cherry-pick any story you like and fudge the statistics as much as you want... an electric battery of just about any kind of this power is safer than the equivalent of sloshy, leaky, fumey explosive that your ordinary cars run off at the moment. In fact, it's one of the reasons that fuel cells just haven't taken off... as soon as you get back to putting sloshy leaky explosive stuff in a can, people go "No, thanks, I'll use a battery".

Civilised society doesn't work like that.

If someone breaks a rule, and you punish them for it, you cannot them go off and break the same rule for them.

If someone steals something, it's not "justice" to steal something of theirs. That makes you just as bad as they are. And leads to "he did it to me first!" kind of baby-crap.

You show that you are an advanced, modern, civilised country by not breaking your own rules. Not carrying out "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" (where does that come from? Possibly the WORST example of literary fairness/justice there is. Mankind bad? I'll just drown the fucking lot of you in a flood....). And having nobody be above the law, not even courts, judges, or the leader of the country.

It doesn't mean you have to pussyfoot around. It doesn't mean you have to give prisoners playstations and compassionate leave and halve their sentences for good behaviour. It means you have to abide by the same rules that you are punishing others for breaking.

Also, if a populous gets a whiff of "one rule for me, another rule for them" being the actual greater truth of things (rather than an occasional spurious claim), then all the rules can soon become useless anyway and you descend into anarchy.

Unfortunately, this is lost on many "modern" countries.

Revenge is for five-year-olds who had their toy smashed. It invariably ends in tears and nobody having any toys.

Are you intending to write an antique DOS system in assembler that uses some really, really primitive version of FAT - by the looks of it? Then probably best not to look.

The other 99.99999% of the planet, however, might find it interesting.

Personally, I find anything still written in assembler to be totally worthless. If you wanted that, you could have run it through a disassembler at the time of it's release and it's not-much-more work to get to something just as readable.

Like the original Prince of Persia code dump - only useful for historical reference and to find out how data and data structures were processed in terms of file compatibility etc. (so, long-dead OS and filesystems are pretty worthless, especially when we know almost everything about them already).

And honestly, from a first glance, it's SUCH basic code that if you were to program any kind of DOS, and needed to be MS-compatible, the only obvious way to do so would be a basically word-for-word re-writing of what they have. There's almost zero room for "invention" or "interpretation" here, so it's mostly uncopyrightable except as a collection of code. Most functions are literally a handful of lines of assembler on well-known data structures that do one quite obvious thing and the necessary - and prescribed by the way the OS works - register / stack shuffling to make it happen.

If I were on the FreeDOS team, yeah, I wouldn't want to read it. But honestly, the chances are I wouldn't bother - I'd have a much nicer, more modern, easier-to-read, collaboratively-written project that does an awful lot more than these antique DOS's could ever do sitting right in front of me, already written. There's nothing "useful" here, but it buys MS some "open-source" lip-service.

I can't speak from experience but the things keeping me OFF 3D printers at the moment are:

- Too much faffing about to build the things (or too much cost to acquire them pre-built).
- Too much faffing about having to calibrate, adjust, tinker and play with them to get good results.
- Too fragile (i.e. you can't throw them about, take them to a friend's house).
- Too reliant on a small set of manufacturers (for the source materials, software, etc.)
- Still no established 3D printing "standard" in an OS. Sure, there are lots of "almost-standards" but I'd rather avoid another mess of things not being compatible - non-compatible printers just puts us back into the range of "I have to buy the same printer/manufacturer again because I don't want to change all my setup / software / source material" but in an era where it's too expensive to perform the current "Sod it, throw it away, buy the cheapest one again, suffer the time lost" scenario we have with 2D printers.
- 3D models are just that much harder to make and print reliably. The two examples of software you point out? Both licensed only for home use. Google Sketchup is the same. As soon as you say 3D, you have to pay for software (and driver integration, or learning-curve) so we've jumped back 20 years again). Then every home-built printer will have different tolerances and results.

3D printing needs to become a consumer-level tech. It's not. It's still up there with all the existing methods of plastics / wood / metal construction from a computer model. In the range of a trained person with expensive hardware in, say, a school for a specialised project. But not for the amateur home user unless they are prepared to spend as much time tinkering with the system as getting results out of it.

To be honest, I will look at 3D printing seriously, even for personal hobbyist use, when someone like HP or Epson or a big name (hell, doesn't even need to be a printer manufacturer, Dyson, Samsung, whoever) produce a small black box. From that I put in up-to-but-no-more-than four materials / colours / dyes in a standardised package. I get a free bit of software with a few thousand models and - critically - import of any 3D model and/or conformity to a standardised 3D printing protocol so I can use other software. And it just works. Every time. I print, it comes out exactly as it is on the screen. WYSIWYG 3D printing. I don't even mind if it costs as much as a really decent 2D printer with more expensive consumables. But the hurdle to jump is the simplicity, repeatability, the hands-off method of printing, the automatic calibration and error detection (why can't we combine with something Kindle-like to detect when the print job is going wrong and have the printer slice off the last layer and start it again?), the single-black-box that is available complete, without assembly, from Amazon, tested and ready to go.

Until then, it's nothing better than a hobbyist electronics kit, or someone building a high-end overclocking rig, or one of those RPi racks... the domain of someone who has so much time on their hands that they don't actually need the printer in the first place.