I've seen 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 both be revoked from e-book readers.

well, yes, but that's always been the case.

But the inverse isn't generally true, a pair of boots that will last a lifetime aren't available for $80 in most cases.

K

My retention of physical media is simple. Once I have it, it's a lot harder for publishers or distributors to take it away from me or to otherwise prevent me from using it.

Plus there's something about having to make an intentional choice to watch something rather than the system itself telling me what it thinks I should watch that's helpful, if I can't decide what to watch then perhaps I shouldn't watch anything and should do something else with my time.

yeah. I'd rather have the feature internal. The thing is that the drive itself doesn't need a full cubic-shape of volume, there needs to be enough room for the disc itself and for the read mechanism, but the read mechanism doesn't cover the entire footprint of the disc. It was doable in the past and should well be doable in the future.

I'd be willing to settle for OS support and updates for five years after last sale of a given rev. Microsoft stopped selling Windows 10 on January 31st 2023. I would insist on support through January 31st 2028 in this model.

Ideally I would like to see it go even longer than that.

I obtain a whole lot of my technology secondhand, with college surplus being one of my favorite vectors. If I have to buy new, I tend to buy high-end because I don't physically break my stuff and high-end will usually have the longest service-life. That is, if the software folks don't intentionally abandon it by refusing to support their software or to release new versions that run on the hardware.

The problem is that this attitude has infected mainstream engineering too.

This is so damn obvious that it's not funny.

Technology has been pushed into a rapid lifecycle through a combination of manufacturers insisting upon growth of their businesses, software support becoming nonexistent far too rapidly, and a marketing-push that one has to have the latest. It is further increased by the manufacture of low-end garbage electronics that doesn't last very long but is popular with many buyers because they're only looking at initial purchase price.

If you want to slow this down, compel software support for computers, phones, and other electronics for a mandatory extended period of time after final sale, and don't buy low-end garbage devices that you feel need replacement because they wear out so quickly (aka Terry Pratchett's Boots Theory). Buy reasonably good products and skip the truly cheap stuff.

I would agree with this view if it was a leader in the field like Google doing the mass layoffs in Deep mind. But Meta's AI program is troubled and it really does seem to be just restructuring as a part of integrating the ScaleAI leadership, however misguided that move may be.

Realistically for that school district the construction costs for charging infrastructure would not have been as bad as for say, private entities, the school district as a political subdivision of the state had self-inspection and self-permitting powers on its own properties, and that process was incredibly streamlined. They could have realistically had the grounds underground-located by the utilities using their own records ("Blue stake"), and then had some underground-detection done to confirm specific alignments didn't have unexpected surprises, then bringing in the saw-cutting tools and mini-excavators to make trenches over toward the main electrical service building and transformer room.

The site was shared with a transportation site with vehicle maintenance facilities, so electrical power to the site would probably be adequate for charging vehicles on a schedule. That doesn't mean every vehicle would be capable of being charged from near-zero to 100% on a 50A service, but it might well be possible to provide 20A to vehicles below 50% without risking overload.

But if the vehicles themselves are far too expensive to buy to begin with then they're simply not going to buy them. They even ran their own fuel service, they had their own diesel, gasoline, and even propane fueling stations, so it wasn't like they weren't accustomed to having and maintaining that infrastructure, but their vehicle choices were very closely tied with purchase price.

You're correct, if your route is not predictable then that could be a problem.

But there are loads and loads of applications where this isn't a problem, or where the organization that would use them for their own technicians, mechanics, and other support personnel are geographically constrained to where it would be difficult to even come close to that sort of range anxiety.

At one point I worked for a K-12 school district doing IT support, and that district had hundreds of vans as part of the "white fleet", some cargo, some passenger. The vast majority of these vans were driven within the boundaries of the school district because they were used for all the normal support-staff functions for maintenance, repair, inter-office mail delivery, etc. There were also vans available for teachers to use to take small groups of students on field trips, but again within the municipal group of cities, 150 mile range would have been entirely sufficient.

The problem is that school districts are constrained by purchase rules requiring purchasing the least expensive thing that meets the on-paper requirements. If no one puts in a requirement that the vehicle must be electric, or no one puts in requirements that the total cost of ownership needs to be within a certain amount, then the electric won't be adopted by that fleet even if they keep their vans for more than two decades and even if it would ultimately be less expensive to run.

I expect that other organizations have similar situations, that the initial costs to buy the electrics are high, so they cannot justify the purchase even though over the life of the vehicle it may well be cheaper.

My guess is that this started when they sat down in-committee (not a technical committee, mind you) and thought of ways to control their bed without having to spend the money on a full-featured control panel as part of the bed itself. They settled on the smartphone and decided that it thus had to have cloud connectivity, particularly when it was pointed out that if it uses the cloud, then they can charge for the features as a service instead.

I did software QA testing around 25 years ago. There were around eight developers per one QA tester at this particular small company.

For whatever reason they decided to not take the BSD-licensed POP3 and SMTP implementations and instead rolled their own. I was able to break the POP3 daemon by sending legitimate commands from stale RFCs to it because the implementer wrote to exact current RFC only. He got mad when I demonstrated this because "it isn't part of RFC!" I retorted, "I don't care if it's part of RFC or not, your daemon shouldn't crash when it get invalid input."

I suspect that the ratio of QA testers to implementers is far worse than it used to be, possibly to the point that there aren't even any QA testers anymore at some firms.

You do realize that you've opened yourself up to a response along the lines of, "then your smart bed has never caught you in the act."