That was the reliable way to run the DX50, because VLB was unreliable at 50MHz. You were lucky to be able to afford something so kick-ass back then!

I bet you ran DOOM at 60FPS! ;)

The VLB card connector was really long and would sometimes make a poor connection or start to pop out. Hot glue was a common hack to make sure the card stayed in, and it was reversible (just heat the glue and pop it out).

It truly was a dark age. But we all loved it. :)

I remember VIP 486 boards. VESA-LB, ISA and PCI in one motherboard. Very awesome if you had a really expensive VLB video card that you didn't want to part with quite yet, but wanted to upgrade to a system with PCI. :)

Precisely. Those that choose not to constantly be barely profitable will hopefully sell off their equipment to cut their losses, and do so in such a way that those whose costs are lower and thus they are more likely to be profitable will scoop up the equipment.

Very good point that I unintentionally omitted :-\

The be-all-end-all of pricing is mining profitability. Bitcoin's difficulty to meant to adjust according to mining activity. If there isn't enough mining going on to produce the mining rewards that should be awarded daily, the difficulty will quarter every two weeks until the rewards are enough to incentivize miners to continue doing so. So, mining operations might have to stop or turn down the heat in order to stay profitable at the current difficulty, and await the approximately bi-weekly adjustment of difficulty before resuming. However, that next adjustment might not be sufficient to restore profitability, so the stoppage or reduction might have to continue through multiple difficulty adjustments.

If mining farm operators didn't plan for this possibility, then they didn't think through the inevitabilities of Bitcoin enough to maintain their business and they are destined to flood the market with their mining hardware, thereby redistributing the mining hardware and decentralizing mining, as it arguably should be.

This has been the case for years. For ages and ages I've seen home routers with crappy firmware that results in bad connectivity. NAT table entries timing out too soon, inability to handle VPN traffic, crashes, lock-ups, performance slowdowns, the works.

This is why for years I've been running a full blown Linux machine as a router. Plenty of performance and memory, never any issues. It makes me wonder why more router manufacturers don't use Linux or BSD derivatives for their firmware instead of writing garbage in-house.

If the phrase "Your mom's first child node is not a text node", then you probably know AXL and I probably worked with you at some point in the last six years.

Are you telling me that PC vendors these days ship systems without a way to recover them from bare metal? That's... insane. Utterly stark raving mad.

Even Macs, which don't ship with install media, can do a bare metal restore downloading the operating system from the Internet. This is common sense shit!

With older (PPC?) based Macs, to update the firmware you had to power off the machine, then turn it on by holding the power button until you got an extra beep or sound. This would physically un-write-protect the firmware EPROM so that it could be updated by open firmware.

In their quest to make everything as "user friendly" as possible, they took out this hardware security feature, allowing the update to just happen without any physical action.

Bad Apple, no donut.

Hotels will make you pay just to use an electrical outlet in a meeting room.

They charge for every little tiny thing, simply because business execs will just sign off on all of it and not care about a "paltry" $100 "outlet usage" fee.

Meanwhile, these fees can be big problems for smaller budget conventions, such as fandom cons. The artist alley at half the furry cons I've been to have a policy keeping artists from plugging in their stuff to charge because the con gets dinged hundreds of dollars in penalties by the hotel.

It truly is a non-customer-friendly business if you're not a big company flush with cash.

We have a load control transponder here which allows the power company to temporarily shut off the air conditioner and/or water heater, basically creating a "rolling blackout" of just those devices when demand for power exceeds supply.

The fact that they deploy such devices suggests utilities would be happy to shed some load, especially during the brightest time of day when solar works best and air conditioners are working hardest.

So what's the deal? They want us to use more power after all?

Lead acid batteries last longest when they are fully charged and kept that way, and discharged infrequently. This makes them excellent for use in standby power situations, where they are almost always topped up ready for the power to go out.

Li-Ion batteries last longest when they are actively used. Keeping a Li-Ion battery fully charged all the time is bad for its longevity; the battery structure breaks down faster at a high state of charge. This is why it is recommended to store Li-Ion batteries half-charged in a cold environment, and why cars like the Tesla Model S normally only charge up to 80% unless you require a "full-range charge" for a road trip. Not topping off to 100% extends battery life.

Maybe Facebook intends to keep the batteries at 80%, but it's hard to believe the economics are going to work in their favor.

Not to mention that lead-acid batteries are mostly water and non-combustible sulfuric acid. A Li-Ion battery fire is 50 times nastier than a lead-acid battery fire, and produces a hell of a lot more noxious gases.

The original twin towers DID use robotic window washers. They were built in 1971.

This problem has already been resolved, but they didn't design the new building in a way that robotic window washers could be implemented easily.

Oops.

Drones are so much fun and you can get so many cool photos and video from them.

Yet these morons flying drones near airports are going to ruin it for everyone. Expect to see them heavily regulated or banned soon.

This is why we can't have nice things. :(