The big energy companies are looking at their business shrinking significantly. Solar and batteries are cheap and getting cheaper, and more than that they are a great investment with a better return than pretty much anything else. The UK is mandating solar on new builds, and other places will follow.

If they don't go along with it, it will just push more and more people to stop relying on the grid entirely, or creating their own micro grids.

If they have tracking panels then the peak output can be much longer.

I have a flat roof and was sort of wondering if I could get motorized panels on there. Hobby project, probably not really worth the investment and maintenance, but the kits from China have been getting decent reviews. A simpler option is manually adjustable stands that you can switch a couple of times a year to take advantage of the lower winter sun.

I would say 8 years from end of sales of machines that are not compatible with Windows 11 is reasonable.

8 years seems like a reasonable support period for hardware. In line with things like car and phone support/warranty periods.

Thank you for watching it. I think it's really important to preserve these memories.

It's actually a problem for some keyboard layouts. Japanese keyboards already have a fairly small spacebar because they need some extra language keys down there. Adding yet another key is going to make the average spacebar about 3 units wide (as wide as 3 normal size keys). Less if Microsoft insists on CoPilot being a 1.5 unit key.

"Worked" is a bit of an exaggeration. It rapidly filled up with crap and many users ignored it, just keeping icons on their desktop instead. Finding stuff was made harder because companies started putting apps in folders named after themselves, so you had to remember not only the app name but who made it too.

Any attempt to organize was tedious and usually undone when the app updated and re-created its default Start Menu shortcuts.

Search is better, but needs tags. Instead of searching for Libreoffice... I think the spreadsheet is called Calc... You should just be able to enter "spreadsheet" and have it come up. Enter "browser" and see all installed browsers.

The Chinese government just announced that its industry will be obliged to buy renewable energy. It's already the cheapest, but now there is an obligation to adapt to variable availability and storage too. They clearly don't think that it's going to tank their economy - quite the opposite, in fact.

It's being touted as a boost to industry. A reason to build and buy more.

In the UK commercial operators have things like time-of-use pricing and power factor pricing. They are strongly motivated to time shift, to improve the power factor (a major cost for energy suppliers) of their operation, and to reduce consumption. The bigger ones even get into buying their own power.

There are reasons to think that. Private companies are vulnerable to being taken over by asset strippers, as happened repeatedly in the UK.

Private utilities, even heavily regulated ones, always want to make a profit too. And pay out big C level bonuses. There will always be some extra cost to the consumer to fund that, compared to a government owned non-profit. It can be run like any other business, just put any excess cash back into upgrades or investments, not shareholder pockets.

Except that's not my line of arguing. If I were Microsoft's lawyer against you I could probably say literally anything and not lose given how you respond to arguments and invoke completely different things (the stop killing games movement is fundamentally different from Windows 10 which ... will still work fine next year, or even next decade).

Please put a bit of thought into your posts, especially if you're going to invite people to argue with you. It'll save some embarrasment.

I've tried ChatGPT and Google's Bard/Gemini, and they often make really stupid mistakes. In one example I was trying to device which seat to book on a long haul flight, so I asked for the pros and cons. ChatGPT started told me one of the benefits of a window seat is easy access to the toilets, but also that you don't get disturbed by people passing down the aisle.

These things don't think in any meaningful way, or understand the world at any more than a superficial level.

I'm sure many of these stories are people who had some of these ideas before and just needed AI to confirm them. Most AI seems far too keen to please, even if it means making up nonsense.

Systems which have active users are not mission critical systems. Systems which are mission critical and can't handle a reboot are not mission critical. A service setup in a way that it can't handle rebooting a server also isn't mission critical.

Stop applying late 80s computer practices to your mission critical systems.

Indeed which is why it was moved away. I mean were you trying to argue against my point? You made it for me. You even acknowledged that things have been significantly more stable since the Vista days. We're in 2025. Please talk about 2025 systems and stop living in the 90s.

The crew probably wouldn't be convicted anyway, as they likely had little idea what the consequences of their actions would be. It was the first time an atomic bomb was dropped on a city full of people.

The people who made the decision to drop it on a city though, that's another matter.

NHK recently covered a new VR experience based on the experiences of a survivor who was 11 at the time. Even this short news report is a hard watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I've been to Hiroshima. I would urge anyone to go, it's a profound experience. Regardless of what you think of the rights and wrongs of the bombing, understanding what it did to people will change your perspective.

There's nothing arbitrary about it. Especially considering this case rests on the idea that security is a flaw. Well hardware security is the reason the system upgrade is blocked. It's a legally circular argument.

Also Microsoft extended support to all its own first party hardware. There's no requirement for a vendor to ensure your 3rd party hardware works. They offered an upgrade path, that you can't do it is your problem. And claiming the hardware is defective is also not a legit claim since you can install Linux and by GOD I hope they invoke this argument in court. It would make Slashdotters minds explode.

A marketing claim made to investors does not enact either a legally binding contract to a consumer nor invoke any retail law, so in that we are in agreement. That's not how any of this works. You may as well say Windows 10 was claimed to be the last version to try and get out of a speeding fine. It's an irrelevant law you're invoking.