It's just a Pink Floyd quote. Calm your tits, man.

I mean, look at who is... Oh, nevermind.

Like so many other things, people slap a magnet on the back of their minivan to Raise Awareness, and then pretend they've done something. You being all alarmed or convinced or otherwise aware of the problem after seeing the movie, doesn't actually accomplish anything. DO SOMETHING. Plant a tree. Plant a thousand trees. Install solar panels. Change your light bulbs over to LED. Turn down the thermostat. Properly inflate your tires. Get a job closer to home. DO SOMETHING.

I've planted around 10,000 trees, and installed around 10KW of solar panels. The solar panels are on a 4-5 year schedule to pay back the money spent on them, after which it's pure profit. AND, all the CO2 emissions that have been avoided by having them producing energy. I changed jobs to reduce my drive by an hour a day. We even gave tree seedlings to our wedding reception guests. Maybe I don't have a magnet on the back of my car, but, to me, actually doing something about it is more important than "raising awareness".

Solar is a great way to do something, and, have a great investment. Where else can you put your money and get a ~5 year ROI?

So, it's like a teapot when it gets boiling?

Purple? Newb...it's red. No, green. Wait, I'll come in again.

Exactly. Us Cupcake owners financed his team's development of the Thing-O-Matic. We were fine with that, we welcomed it as the next release of an open-source success story. And then Bre abandoned us Cupcake owners, 3 months afther the ToM was live, with a tacit "fuck you, buy the new stuff" message. Out of stock for months is a passive-aggressive approach to abandoning your supporters. Not cool, Bre.

Bre has abandoned the people who gave him his start. Sorry, but abandoning the first-gen "Cupcake" bot, 3 MONTHS after the next bot came out, and doing the same to the Thing-O-Matic folks, is a slap in the face to the open-source community who gave him his start. He's nothing other than a money-seeking whore, who betrayed his early supporters for the Almighty Buck. Even today's software updates, which have nothing different from the Whatzitplicator mark 1 and 2 other than a volumetric envelope setting, Makerbot Industries have abandoned the ones who gave them their start and turned into the entity that they pretended to not be part of. I wonder how many months before Bre adds some DRM crap to his supplies so you can only print stuff on Makerbot printers if you buy their own branded, DRM'd, overpriced filaments. And to think that I supported you, Bre. What an idiot I was. You seemed so sincere.

This isn't complicated. They stay with old unsupported crap because they know that the people who set it up are gone, and they aren't sure how to make it work again. They lost the recipe. They would rather saddle their support organizations with bugs that were fixed years ago, than to risk the unknown. The pathetic part of this is, that they miss out on years of bug fixes and performance improvements, because they think they're saving money by laying off the people who built their critical infrastructure. Intangible costs are intangible. ...but, they make it hard to retain support staff...

Laboratory samples don't count until I can buy them in 1000 piece quantities. Right now, I can buy 17% efficient solar panels all day, every day, at $1.25 per watt. Until the other options improve on that, they're just a waste of investment.

Nitpicking, my ass. The difference between 10% and 17% is huge. Wake me when someone finds a mass-producable solar cell that has better than that efficiency, and decades of life at that output. Current (heh...) silicon PV cells have reached the point of a 6 year payback on investment, and where the rails to mount them on cost more than the panels they hold. Until someone finds a hypothetical breakthrough, anything less than this efficiency is a waste of time and money other than for pure research.

Support contracts have to be paid, or that's the answer you get.

So, Sun support sucked because your employer didn't pay for a support contract, and you wanted the benefits of one (the downloading of patches) without paying for it? I'm guessing it's not even worth discussing threading models at this point.

See, it's a mat with conclusions on it. And then you jump to them.

No, pendantic is right, he's hanging around making comments.