OS/2 was withdrawn from sale and ended support in 2006.

Sorta.

Sadly, I have a high capacity 8-bit ISA XMS memory expansion card for which driver support ended with MS-DOS.

My Voodoo3 3500TV also only only worked up through XP, but has no analog signals to receive now anyway; except I'd like to use it to digitize old VHS tapes. ...which, while all true, is more-or-less meritless. Nothing stops you (or me) from having an old XP box in the corner, securely disconnected from the network (or just properly firewalled), just in case you want to use some cherished old hardware.

Computers move on. This isn't a new trend. XP is twelve years old. You know what also doesn't work on modern OSs? My Diamond Speedstar 24x video card. (Oh, the humanity!)

And whose fault is this? It's not MSFT's -- they didn't write the drivers to begin with. In the case of the XMS card, I can blame Intel. For the Voodoo3 3500TV, I can blame a mixture of 3dfx and nVidia.

That all said, USB 2.0 NTSC input devices can be very cheap, indeed. Modern scanners tend produce very high-quality output for very few dollars.

I think a fire alarm is an instance where I'd like something to have as simple and foolproof a mechanism as possible. I suppose a smart alarm could perhaps call the emergency services or something... but I'd still probably combine it with a bog standard fire alarm.

Because what I have in my kitchen is oh-so-much better.

I have a photosensitive smoke alarm that goes off every time I cook on my stove (and no, not because my food is on fire). My immediate response is to dismount the smoke detector, put it somewhere whereabout it could never go off, and continue cooking.

Sometime later, I have to re-install the smoke alarm until the next time. If I remember. Which, sometimes (I am human) takes a day or two.

I'd love to wave at the thing, and say "This is -intentional- smoke/steam/whatever," and keep it installed. I would pay extra for that. But apparently that's no longer an option.

Thanks, liability!

A Type-C cable with100W racing through it sounds like a fire hazard to me.

Since you're a physicist, you should be perfectly able to apply everything you just wrote to the notion that the potential is not necessarily 5 volts. There could be more potential than that in later iterations; TFS doesn't say.

(I, for one, have never been satisfied with the notion that USB @ 5V is all that useful as a means of powering devices.)

When I said "most," I meant what I said: Most.

Most small-ish generators are the type you see on construction sites or at harbor freight. They are loud. They do not have oil filters. Why "most"? Because they're the most available, and they're the cheapest.

This trend is not unique to generators, but extends to all manner of tools that consumers buy. Everyone should want a Simplicity mower, but most buy MTD. Everyone should want a Stihl saw, but most buy Poulon, HF, or other cheap tool.

The generator I was using was brand new, as in bought retail and unboxed on the first day of the blackout. It had a very loud Briggs & Stratton engine. It had a stated requirement for a fresh quart of oil every 30 hours. An oil filter would certainly extend that dramatically, but it was not equipped with one. Most aren't.

I realize that you're fond of telling people that they're wrong. But neither my observation, nor my anecdote, are wrong.

I think the marketing people who sell them to us are full of shit, just as marketing people tend to be.

If I could converse with the engineers directly, my opinions may be different...but all I've got to work with is marketing fluff and speed benchmarks -- only the latter of which is useful.

SSDs haven't always been reliable. And brand name hasn't has much to do with it, either.

I mean, I expected the early SSD failures from OCZ. But Intel? Sheesh. (I presume from the 640k suffix on your moniker that you've been around plenty long enough to remember these debacles.)

In terms of Samsung in particular, they've somewhat-recently crossed the bridge wherein a single bit of flash can have more than two states. It's awesome tech. It's also entirely unproven.

And anecdotally, if I were to trust a company to build durable goods, I would not have had to replace two power supply caps in my 52" Samsung LCD TV. Capacitors are not wear-items in well-designed circuits, and inherently unreliable caps are inexcusable. The new caps (all $2 worth of them) have now been working longer than the original caps lived for. (Last I checked, there are lawsuits involved between consumers and Samsung related to these particular capacitors.)

Nevermind the well-vetted and wildly popular Xbox 360, most of the early units of which suffered a terminal Red Ring of Death...which itself was due entirely to an unfamiliarity with the properties of lead-free solder and bad engineering. (Yes, a failure of that sort is bad engineering. Engineers are not infallible.)

We do ourselves a disservice if we blindly trust that all of these things have already been figured out on our behalf, especially if a marketer is the person telling us that it's a good and durable design. Because time and time again, we get lousy products which aren't durable at all -- no matter what any marketing fluff might say, or a user's expectation might be.

That said, if you have any citation of a Samsung engineer talking freely about their latest flash technology, I'm all ears.

Meanwhile, I'm standing firm: We don't know how durable it is. You don't know, and I don't know. We do not have enough data at this time to make such a determination.

Aren't we at the point where we just ignore "speed" and look at what's inside them that's going to make them last a long time and keep our data safe?

Only if you've got a verifiable test for durability, and enough time to implement it.

Over here in reality, we have zero real data about how each new generation of SSD actually ages as time marches on. We can postulate and we can theorize, but we're ultimately full of shit when it comes to finding an new SSD to "last a long time and keep our data safe."

So, yeah: I'll take speed benchmarks. Some data is always better than bullshit.

^this, it's amazing how few people actually understand that most writes on modern systems are buffered either in the kernel cache or in the disk cache without any form of protection. Disable those volatile caches and your OS with it's resource hog apps will behave as slowly has a 386 on floppy disks. At least, the laptop battery can act has a giant capacitor and your exposition to data loss due to power failure on a laptop should be very very small.

^ !english, it's charming to watch people write such comparisons when it is plain that they've never run a 386 from floppy disks...none of which, generally, had any write caching at all. (And, no, BUFFERS in config.sys doesn't count.)

And batteries acting as capacitors? Why can't the battery just be the battery that it is? Why diminish the perfectly cromulent role of a battery to that of a capacitor? What are you gaining from writing such nonsense, other than perhaps a good feeling because you got to use more words instead of fewer words?

I do like your idea of a data loss exposition, though. Where can I buy tickets?

Also, I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

For playback on the BFT, I've got a few options. I can use the PS3 (ideal -- the scaler is awesome), the Xbox 360 (meh), a modified Wii (has other issues), an old laptop with a barely-supported video card (similar issues to the Wii), or a Krell DVD-Standard (only issue is lack of HDMI/DVI output, and physical wear and tear on an $8,000.00 device).

For Cinavia-tainted backups (which both the PS3 and 360 puke on), I've found that the best option (as in: the option with the least fuckery) for me is to use AVStoDVD (free, OSS, zero bullshit, technical enough for tweak-mongers, always works, fairly fast, awesome output) to burn a proper DVD and play it on the Krell.

Yeah, it's 480p. But it's a beautiful 480p, devoid of meaningful artifacts. Playback, once the media is on a DVD, is simple: Select appropriate inputs, insert DVD, adjust volume, do nothing else, and enjoy the film.

I could do the same with any cheap bog-standard pre-Cinavia DVD player, but my bog-standrard DVD player just happens to be a ridiculously-expensive Krell.

And so I guess this is my point: Cheap DVD players really are -cheap-, easily-replaced, and essentially universal. My backup will play nicely in anything from the Krell to a Chrysler minivan: I can lend it to others and as long as their player is not infected with Cinavia, they'll have zero issues playing it. And DVD+/-R media is cheap/fast enough that that it is both disposable and versatile (unlike thumbdrives, or Internet connectivity).

It doesn't take a Raspberry Pi and fuckery to play this stuff: All it takes is $20 and a trip to the dollar store or pawn shop.

(And data loss? Don't scratch the disc, and be sure to store it in the dark. Done. Really.)

We were without power here for over a week after the Derecho a few years ago...this led to some fun (and very hot) experimentation. Some results:

- Most small-ish generators are loud, a bitch to maintain (a synthetic oil change every 30 hours? if you insist...), loud, expensive to fuel, loud, and difficult to fuel at first until (some) gas stations had proper gensets brought in from out-of-state, and loud.

- Cell service never blinked. Whatever they were doing for backup power, be it regular fuel delivery or natural gas, was working fine.

- That with a cheap (less-than-$20) unregulated solar panel from Lowes and the car charger for my Android phone (which accepts up to 24VDC according to its label), I was able to keep more than one phone going continuously even on a mostly-cloudy day just by putting the solar panel in an unshaded window. They charged normally (ie: in an hour or so), and the charge lasted about as long as it normally would (24 hours or so). (I learned all of this because of generators being loud and sleep being useful.)

- Our VDSL line never dropped. It never even thought about it, according to its accumulated stats. The modem/router/gateway/whatever-widget has a perfectly reasonable battery in its external DC power supply, which would get opportunistically charged whenever the generator was running (usually a just few hours/day to charge batteries for lights and make ice to keep the beer cold, though there was some running of dishwashers and window ACs as well). (Interestingly, the only reason it has its own battery is because we initially ordered it with a VOIP phone line. If we'd ordered just Internet, it would have died as soon as the power did.)

Our provider (Deathstar) had gensets at each VRAD cabinet, humming away quietly 24/7. Most of these were VERY shiny trailer-mounted rigs, but I did spot a couple of smaller portable ones. And I did my part, too, by opening up my AP and renaming it to "Free Wifi for Storm Victims" -- which actually served a fairly big area, since the 2.4GHz spectrum was remarkably interference-free. ;)

By extension of all of this, I can quite safely assume that if I still had POTS, I'd have had a functional dialtone during that entire time: The CO plainly had power (and was built to withstand a war), and the VRAD cabinets (which also terminate some POTS lines these days) had power, and everything was proven to have connectivity....despite most of the telephone pairs and backbone fiber being overhead in these parts, and -lots- of trees down everywhere.

I got through that storm with multiple forms of uninterrupted communication just fine, just by using crap that I had laying around. I'd have done it just as well without a generator (which itself was just a lucky break), between the cheap solar panel and multiple vehicles and an inverter and charged SLAs and CFL lights that can run from them directly, full-conversion sinewave UPSs, and other stuff that I've accumulated just because I'm a geek.

And that, I guess, is the point: Even if one form of communication failed (multiple cell tower failure, OR VDSL failure), I'd still have been a happy camper without power. Me. Just me.

I have thus demonstrated that I, myself, don't need POTS. In my neighborhood.

But then, this is /., and I am therefore not normal. I also live in in a small city in mostly-rural Ohio where I have a fair variety of communication options and just enough density that a little bit of work on a provider's part will light up hundreds/thousands of people instead of dozens...or 1.

A 15-minute drive will take me to areas that are not so-blessed, and these folks still need POTS: The local loops are tens-of-miles long and can't support *DSL, there is no cable, cellular service (while normally quite good) is often served by a singular tower with redundant zero overlap, and any notion of "bandwidth" comes from an 802.11-based WISP which also has zero redundancy.

These folks are expensive to provide service to, and are (if it's still around) subsidized by the Universal Service Fund. This is a Good Thing.

And if were of poor health or were taking care of someone who were, you can bet your ass I'd pony up monthly for POTS in addition to whatever else I might happen to have...even if I had zero intent to actually use it for anything.

But again, I don't need POTS. And you're probably geeky enough that you don't need POTS.

Meanwhile, the US still needs universal POTS -- at any expense. All safety and redundancy issues aside and if for no other reason than there's a LOT more bandwidth in an ancient 500-pair cable than anything that is RF-based. The neighbors who I saw sitting in lawn chairs with laptops in their front yard soaking up my bandwidth, their food rotting in their warm fridge and stopping by to recharge cell phones? They -NEED- POTS availability, too.

Whether they take advantage of it or not is their problem. It's my problem to make sure they've got options, not to tell them what to do with them. :)

So I'm good with POTS. Because it generally just works and provides (it turns out) a very flexible cable plant that can be used for a huge number of different things, and folks need options.

There is no need to abandon ICEs to achieve carbon neutrality. The answer is biofuels.

Agreed.

We already know how to make 1:1 replacements for both diesel and gasoline out of any organic material.

But can we do it efficiently? Last I looked in on the subject, ethanol in the US (which is a biofuel that you didn't mention, which is OK) barely breaks even (at best) once corn subsidies and other agricultural props are accounted for.

The benefits of growing ethanol as a fuel are drowned by the farm/transportation/refining/transportation (yes, twice -- at least twice) equipment which powered by fossils.

But our government is literally complicit in oil company conspiracies to prevent us from having them.

Is that "literally" in the "literal" sense, or "literally" in way in which "literally" literally means virtually?

Either way, [[citation needed]].

Making biodiesel in a carbon-neutral (actually carbon-negative) way depends on being permitted to use BLM lands, which you can do for coal or oil but just try getting green energy permits

Carbon-negative? The only "carbon negative" processes I'm aware of involve the cutting of trees, and lashing them to the ocean floor, or the moral equivalent thereof ....and even -that- is time-limited (albeit on a grand scale).

Can you explain?

Butanol is a 1:1 replacement for gasoline that we've known how to make since the 1800s, which we could buy right now if not for lawsuits by Butamax, a shell company owned by BP and DuPont.

Interesting. I've never heard of either Butanol or Butamax. Further research is required on my part on these latter subjects.

Cars must move on from fossil fuels, all of them. And yet, nothing need be lost but oil company profits.

Eek. My opinion here is something that is tempered by my stated lack of knowledge of Butanol, but: It occurs to me immediately that there are still some ICEs which require fossil fuels to operate properly, just as there are historic engines that require TEL gasoline to perform properly.

(Case in point: An antique fire engine that I've seen, and talked to the people who maintain it.. It is used only for parades and publicity and never for fighting fires, in a small town in Ohio. It has never seen any real engine work, and indeed has very low operating hours. It lives in a spotless, dedicated, newly-built, and well-lit garage all to itself at a volunteer fire department there. They fill it with aviation gas (with lead!) from a nearby airport, because that's the closest thing to the fuel that it was made for that they can get their hands on easily. No, it's not a "useful" vehicle, but it is living history which ought to be preserved in functional state for even more future generations.)

In other news, soylentnews.org is up and running!

And 4-digit UIDs are still available!

The company I work for the IT folks keep a complete list of usernames and passwords in a text file, stored on a machine open to the Internet (including FTP!) which is, itself, is "protected" by those same passwords.

Oh, but it's OK, they told me once: It's in a password-protected zip file, so it's safe.

I'm sure that the unencrypted plaintext is scattered all over the temp directory of every machine they've ever used to view this file.

I'm (very) glad I don't get paid to care about that network anymore.

TMobile has sold the Windows-based Nokia Lumia 521 for $100 (non contract) for half a year or a year now.

So you're telling me that I can walk into a T-Mobile store and walk out with a completely paid-for Nokia Lumia 521, for $100, cash and carry?

Because if I can't do that, then it's not a $100 device.

Doesn't that violate the basic theory of "software cannot cause hardware problems"?

Drivers can be changed. Operating systems get reinstalled or change completely.

And then we're back to warranty SNAFU....