That's why, when the drives (or surrounding technology) get old, but before they die, you copy them to more modern media. Just for fun, I might try reading data off one of my old ST-506 drives, but I stopped depending on them for data integrity almost 25 years ago. At some point I'll do the same with data on my current SATA drives.

I stand corrected.

Sidebar: A friend of mine used to work with both armored car companies and the people who processed tollbooth coins in very large volumes, and it was amazing what people got away with tossing in the toll baskets.

What really happened was that when NYC considered a new city income tax law that disproportionately hurt NJ commuters, NJ threatened to make Garden State Parkway tokens (worth 33 cents) identical to the NYC subway tokens ($1.25 IIRC) of the time.

Well, there is the old Hong Kong 1 cent note (worth about $0.0013 US). It was about the size of a small Post-It, only printed on one side, and was legal tender only for amounts less than HK$1, which meant you couldn't pay your rent using a wheelbarrow full of them.

Most vending machines these days take dollar coins. The reason the vending machine industry wants to keep the dollar bill is that it's a lot easier to get a slug past the coin mech than it is to get a counterfeit $1 past the bill acceptor.

More memory is usually just a matter of switching out a chip for a different chip of the same form factor. To double the battery life, you have to double the battery's volume. Inside a tablet there isn't a cubic millimeter that isn't accounted for, which means that the only way to put in a bigger battery is to build a different case, which has a cascading effect throughout the entire parts list. Much harder.

Plus, if you double the battery, some people are bound to complain about the longer charging time, which means they'll have to design around that, too.

One thing nobody's mentioned yet is that big commercial applications can have hundreds of separately ordered bits and pieces. That often affects the installation process, and can add a lot of complexity. The more paranoid vendors won't just have you install the whole thing and then disable what you haven't paid for, for fear you might crack the rest. Sometimes it's not even technically feasible either, given the app's internal dependencies.

We've all dealt with vendors and their licensing departments. Even if the technical side of it works perfectly, if there are enough different things to be licensed, sooner or later someone's bound to give you the wrong magic number.

Reminds me of the charge once brought against Howard Zinn: "failure to quit".

If I had to solve this, I'd buy a modern box and set up a virtual machine on it that runs XP. The virtual hardware will last a lot longer than the physical hardware it emulates.

Oh, and I'd do this long before the last XP machine breaks, so that I'd have plenty of time to port and test legacy apps.

It's not a Sprint thing; they just happen to be the first carrier offering it to consumers. Check out www.startstar.co.

I'm not sure if they were in the 3D Pavilion or in one of the other tents, but I didn't see them--I'd definitely have remembered! If their Kickstarter page is to be believed (and I have no reason to think otherwise), the $2700 theirs will cost buys you a lot better rendering and a lot less shape restriction than any of the "conventional" 3D printers out there. Personally, I'll take a serious look at them after they've been in production for a year. I'm less concerned with the printer itself than whether you're tied forever to their proprietary resin, whether they can make it in other colors (ideally, mixable over a wide gamut), and how well they can produce it in quantity. I'd also like to see a two-color version of it eventually.

I have to admit: I find it exciting just watching this market develop. Reminds me of the late 70's when these newfangled computer thingies came out and nobody was quite sure what they'd be best at.

Since all I looked at were completed objects, I can't say anything about how fast they were produced, how reliable or easy to calibrate the printers are, etc. What I mostly looked for were irregularities. In a 3D printed object, the layers are very visible. If you think of a cylinder, you expect the sides to be as smooth as possible, i.e., no protrusions or indentations. The layers should be completely horizontal, no glitches or waviness that make you think the printhead jiggled or anything. If you think of a sphere, the topmost layers should look like perfect concentric circles, and the top shouldn't look like it's about to cave in.

It was insanely crowded in the 3D Printer Pavilion, so once I decided that a vendor's objects were not the best, I moved on. But there were two noteworthy units: Sorry to say, the new Makerbot 2 was a disappointment, given that it's one of the most expensive units at $2800. The objects they had on display were some of the worst. The surprise winner, and the one I'm recommending to a nonprofit children's museum I'm working with that wants to buy one, was the Tinkerines Ditto. It produced the best objects, and at $900 in kit form or $1400 assembled, it was amazing bang for the buck.

Tinkerines is new to the scene, so they don't yet have a dual-nozzle head, nor do they yet support ABS plastic (the necessary heated base is still being developed), only PLA. But for our application, it's perfect. The people were really nice too, despite the crowds and the cacophony in the tent.

(Disclaimer: I have no connection with any vendor except as a customer or with Maker Faire except as an attendee.)

...Maker Faire was a goldmine. Every major vendor was there, and they all had samples of the classic objects everybody uses for demos, so it was very easy to compare the quality of the output. (That is, presuming that the ones that stood out didn't just print 500 identical objects and bring the one good one.)

I was trying to figure out when I got here. I want to say late 1990s but it might not have been until 2000 or 2001.

EmacsM-^H Firefox would be a great OS if only it had a decent text editorM-^HM-^H web browser.