Immediately did the Windows 7 recovery which was unattended and smooth, to be fair to MS, but then I got a 1 hours countdown to Windows 10 install once I logged in, took about 4 clicks to navigate away from the "Go ahead and upgrade" buttons that were present at every step but did manage to cancel out.

Changed the Windows Update setting so I no longer do automatic updates on this PC and hid the Windows 10 Update so hopefully it'll stay on Win 7 now.

And while Win 10 seems perfectly usable, I let a spare laptop update itself and have Win 10 Insider running in a VM on another PC I'm old enough to believe in the *Personal* part of Personal Computer and having the Windows User Experience altered without my explicit consent is an absolute no-no, especially as I'm pretty sure Win 10 breaks a game I (still) like playing, Diablo 1 with the IPX over TCP/IP patch for local LAN play on Win 7 / Win Vista.

I've been reading some articles about electricity "demand destruction" from customers deploying rooftop solar, adopting energy efficient lighting and other energy saving systems in the near term and potentially seeing increasing use of home energy storage in the next few years..

Have power companies been working with GM to find ways to accelerate the adoption of electric cars as this might be an area where these companies could spur demand for electricity?

It seems like in the next few years a few car companies, GM, Tesla, Nissan, maybe Ford, are planning to release EV models with ~200 mile range at around the $30K price point, after rebates.

Given that range and price are 2 of the key metrics when most (?sweeping generalisation?) potential EV buyers evaluate an electric car do you think that having a number of models available to buyers with similarly high range and low price points will trigger a big uptick in the number of electric cars on the road?

Well I've developed some pretty powerful apps using vi, cc, dbx, CLI index/search tools and make, on the other hand when doing Java development the IDE I use, Netbeans 3.2, is a big help, partly as jdb is such a lousy debugger, but also as the text editor's integration with the database of classes in the system makes it much easier to look up objects/methods in mid-edit that would be a huge pain to look up using grep/awk, or having to hold several hundred classes in my own memory so this certainly speeds development.

This came home when I was doing some work on a C++ system that I was new to, without IDE or class browser support, and I was surprised how much time I spent in another xterm looking up available methods and how to use them.

Of course even Visual C++ eventually just ends up executing cl.exe and link.exe to compile and link the code you've just typed in in the end and also lets you export nmake files so you can build you projects using command line tools too.

If I was developing a GUI based application from scratch I think I'd prefer to do it all in an IDE, then again using Glade to build the GUI and hacking the callback code in using the older steam driven tools, vim/gcc/gdb/gmake, works pretty well too. This was part of a small test program using CORBA with a C++ and a Java GUI based client/server programs. The Java program was done entirely in the IDE, the C++ in a mix of the glade UI builder and the CLI stuff.

Having said that I have met people who have become dependent on flashy GUI tools, and who measure their worth by the sophistication of the tools they use, as opposed to the quality of the code they write. I've even had to cover for people who've refused to fix bugs on certain platforms just because they didn't have access to a GUI based debugger and would be forced to actually read and understand the code, use dbx/xdb/gdb/ladebug/etc or (horrors !) printf() ...