Posts by ChrisC 1466 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jul 2009
Given how many laptops come preconfigured to enter sleep/hibernation mode when the lid is closed whilst not docked/running on external power, and how many IT departments now ensure this is at the very least the default setup, if not the *only possible* setup, applied to the systems they're responsible for, is it really that unreasonable for an end user to do exactly as described here, if they haven't been warned not to do so by their IT team?
The problem here is that the ships can be away from port for extended periods of time regardless of the global threat level, so unless the oven manufacturers are willing to have technicians flown out to the carriers whilst they're "somewhere in the Indian Ocean" to do onsite repairs, then the idea that repairs might have to wait until the ship has docked back at its home (or at least somewhere in the US) port is utterly ludicrous. Especially so in cases like this where, for whatever reason, the *majority* of the ovens are now out of action, such that any further failures could result in the loss of all ability to serve up anything that can't be eaten directly out of the box/packet.
If the ship was in a combat scenario, then I'm fairly sure copious quantities of blind-eye-turning would be utilised, potentially with some behind the scenes arm-twisting of the manufacturers legal team to remind them (politely or otherwise) not to cross swords with the USN whilst it's involved in combat operations. As we've seen countless times during periods of war, when the bullets start flying, red tape, onerous processes etc. become things that are quite easy to ignore, with people being left to get on and do what needs to be done, no questions asked and no comebacks after it all quietens down again.
"It's easier to just buy more media"
That rather depends on how much spare cash you had to splurge on media, and also whether the limiting factor was merely how much data you were trying to store in total, or how much you wanted to get onto each individual disc (e.g. to reduce disc swapping whilst playing a multi-disc game).
Easy to forget just how different things were back then storage-wise, but my mid-teen Amiga owning self was *very* happy at being able to essentially get 20% more out of a box of discs than my PC/ST owning counterparts, and that was before you then got into things like PowerPacker, LhA etc. to *really* help make the most of every last available byte...
Which speaks volumes as to the utter crapfest that now passes for UI design at Microsoft. Windows, Office, whatever other products are still current in their portfolio - it's pretty much a given that if they've succumbed to the push to provide a "modern" UI, it'll make finding things within the UI harder than it ever used to be in the good old days, such that increasingly people are having to rely on search engines (whether embedded within the product itself, or third party via their favourite browser) just to be able to find things...
MS (and indeed every other company keen to embrace this modernist approach to UI design), the instant you start to formulate the merest notion that it might be a good idea to create an AI assistant to help users find settings, should be the moment in time when you force your entire UI design department to take a giant step backwards from their keyboards/drawing tablets/etc, bang their heads together, and understand that the very essence of a good UI is one that makes it easier for users to interface with your products (the clue is in the name, after all). If their proposed UI designs can't achieve that without adding in crutches like AI search/guidance, then they need to go off and come up with a better design that can achieve it.
And those reasonable expectations will be met - they aren't going to wake up on the day after W10 support ends and discover their PC is now unuseable - it'll still boot up the same as it did the day before, it'll still run all their software the same, and other than the lack of ongoing updates (which some might even see as a significant benefit...), their PC won't be any less useable over the remainder of its physical lifespan than it's been up til now.
And bear in mind that W11 was released getting on for 4 years ago now, so even those people who were amongst the last to buy a PC with W10 preinstalled (at least in the general consumer marketplace you seem to be talking about, as opposed to the business/enthusiast sectors where buyers might have continued to adopt 10 for some time beyond 11's introduction) will still have had a pretty decent amount of fully supported lifespan out of their systems, and will now be at the point where if their PCs continue to remain useable for another couple of years, they'll have surpassed the point at which any reasonable consumer-focussed legal system would offer them any sort of protection against design defects, build quality issues etc.
I feel somewhat weird supporting MS here, given how often I've been only too happy to criticise them over the years, but it really does feel like you're making a mountain out of a molehill here, and implying that PCs across the world literally will stop working as soon as MS pull the plug on W10 support, which simply isn't the case.
Bricking implies devices become useless, so unless MS are going to be even more user-hostile than they've ever been, and push out one final W10 update which genuinely does render the PC useless, then ending support for W10 is going to be no more of an issue than it was when MS withdrew support for earlier versions.
Anyone who *needs* to be using a current OS with active security update support will have to move on, upgrading their hardware if required, but for those users without such constraints, they'll still be able to happily (for some Windows-specific definition of the word "happily", at least) continue using W10 until the PC itself wears out, just as there remain quite a few of us continuing to quite happily (that word again...) run W7, XP etc. systems without any real issues.
And before (IIRC) that, there was the demo of a rippling Union Jack that basically used the same rendering technique as the landscape in Lander/Zarch - despite it not even being a playable proof of concept like Lander, even that blew my socks off compared against the 3D capabilities of the average home computer at the time.
Meanwhile, back on the gaming across a rolling landscape theme, honorable mention has to go to Conqueror - beautifully simple concept, nicely implemented, and capable of delivering some truly unforgettable gaming moments.
Yup, it's been around almost as long as those of us currently filling the roles of wise old greybeards at our respective employers, which doesn't make me suddenly feel old at all...
One of my best mates at school got an Archimedes A310 more or less as soon as they became available, and a few years later I also had access to an A3000 via the school where my mum worked, and it was obvious from playing around with them just how special a machine it was. Little did I realise at the time how much of that was down to the ARM at its core, or how utterly indispensable that processor architecture would then become to the modern world. Having then gone on to earn a comfortable living as an embedded systems developer, much of which has been spent working on one or another flavour of ARM-based microcontrollers, I now find myself thinking back to those childhood times with a sense of nostalgia even warmer and fuzzier than usual.
So a very well deserved hats off to all involved in its development - despite being a Spectrum and Amiga fan back then, I always had a soft spot for Acorn's offerings and consider myself exceedingly fortunate to have been in a position to get so much hands on experience with them at the time.
The OP may well have been attempting to make an entirely valid and unbiased point here. If that was the case, then the problem is that so many *other* people have been only too willing to post varying levels of tripe about how bad any forms of working other than traditional 9 to 5, 5 days a week at the office/factory/coalface/etc, is for the economy, for the country, for the individuals concerned, and also how dashed unfair it is anyway given that some people can't work like that, so everyone else ought to suffer increasingly archaic working practices rather than adopting improved practices as and when possible to do so.
As such, given how often articles that are in any way positive about adoption of alternate working practices get jumped on by such people desperate to try and persuade us all that the article is completely wrong and we need to be demanding a return to the bad old days, it's not unreasonable that the next time someone posts a comment which has the merest whiff of being anything other than a genuine attempt to kickstart a reasoned discussion of the subject, it gets a response such as this one.
Poor system design if it genuinely wasn't bothering to return any stats just because it wasn't generating anything - at least return a regular update to say it's still not generating anything.
Also poor system design if it was at least returning regular readings to indicate a lack of power output, but not *also* readings of the local windspeed measurements, turbine RPMs, blade angles etc. to help explain exactly *why* the power output was flatlined.
Also also poor system design if the windfarm *was* returning all of this data, but the control centre setup wasn't able to process/visualise it appropriately to the user to make it clear there was no need to press the big red alert button.
"In the US it would be illegal to sell these cars. The crash-test rating isn't high enough."
You don't need something the size of a small moon on wheels to pass crash test requirements - the fact that so many foreign manufacturers are able to either import or locally produce vehicles that absolutely would not look out of place on European roads (because other than the obvious changes - e.g. colour of certain external lights - they ARE essentially the same vehicles you see over here) is proof of that.
If you're happy for a nation to rely solely on its population being replenished either by the few who genuinely can afford to do so, or by being able to import younger citizens from the rest of the world, then fair enough. Some of us may however prefer nations to take a slightly more proactive role in encouraging a level of stability in their population makeup, so as to reduce the risk of low birth rates/lack of inward migration leading to very real problems in the years/decades to come.
I've always had a soft spot for ME, for the very specific to me reason that having suffered endless stability issues with 98 on my homebuilt PC of the day (which weren't resolved via the nuke and reinstall from scratch approach), I decided to take a gamble on ME and, as per your second example, it turned that PC into a rock solid system that served me very well until XP came along.
Was never able to work out what it was about that PC which made it so flakey running 98, or why it took so well to ME when so many other people were having obvious problems with it, but the more I hear about ME, the more I become convinced that the M actually stands for Marmite, because it really does come across as a piece of software that people either love or hate, with none of the usual more nuanced levels of meh-ness inbetween.
Autorun wasn't just a security issue, it was a pain in the arse merely having the OS decide on your behalf what it was going to try doing every time you inserted a CD, until you found the option to tame that behaviour and have Windows simply preparing the disc ready for you to access it at a time of your choosing.
Their early Intellimice were, IMO, THE best mice you could buy back in the day - the perfect combination of physical shape, tactile feel, weight, and ease of glide over your mousepad - just as many of us will these days wax lyrical about Logitech rodents that we've been using for years without any hiccups, I was one of those who'd prior to this have been similarly waxing lyrical about our equally long-lived Microsoft rodents.
ORLY? If you'd limited yourself to writing off the past decade (note singular) of their deliverables then I'd have been less inclined to respond, but as decades (plural) means at least two of them then you've dismissed Windows 7, and if you meant anything more than two then XP, 2000, NT4 etc. would also be on your list.
And that's just Windows. I'd argue that MS's efforts in other areas, particularly gaming, have been somewhat more worthwhile in more recent years, and really don't deserve to be tarred with the same brush that many of us are only too willing to make use of when it comes to recent versions of Windows.
I mean yeah, it's always been rather fashionable to bash MS, and some of the decisions they've made with Windows since 7 have been genuinely worthy of scorn and derision, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily fair or reasonable to dismiss *everything* they do quite so glibly.
Similarly, the section of Apollo 13 audio covering the first few hours of the problem, and the Apollo 12 launch audio (SCE to aux!) have a regular place in my playlist - utterly fascinating to hear the actual words spoken at the time, and get a feel for how they worked through their procedures.
On a more sombre note, the audio from the Challenger launch and the Colombia re-entry are also something worth listening to at least once.
Why bother writing emulators for classic systems when you can just buy the real thing?
There are still businesses out there reliant on being able to run older Windows software and hardware, so if a project like this has the potential to give them an alternative to needing to keep increasingly ageing hardware running in order to then keep an equally ageing original Windows installation running, I suspect there'll be a fair bit of interest.
And even if there isn't, so what? Is it YOUR time that's being wasted by the existence of this project? If someone gets genuine satisfaction from writing their own code that replicates something someone else has done, then let them get on with it. I can guarantee you that many, MANY, readers of el Reg will, at some point in their lives, have done EXACTLY this same thing - writing some code that literally does exactly the same as something else they've seen, just for the pleasure of being able to say that THEY were able to replicate the functionality and perhaps gain a better understanding/appreciation of the original coder. I'm one of them...
The sad thing isn't so much how far Musk has fallen, but the way it affects our perceptions of the companies (and all of their hard working employees) he's now associated with.
Your opening line sums this up perfectly - you *used* to rave about how amazing SpaceX *was* - and whether or not you intended this to indicate that you no longer do, others definitely will now be less inclined to talk positively about Musk-associated companies, yet the companies themselves haven't changed, so we should be raving about how amazing they *still are*...
If it's definitely just a plain, entirely passive, ink/toner cartridge with absolutely zero ability to directly sense what's being printed (i.e. it doesn't *also* incorporate a print head/toner drum), and which sits in a location within the printer from where it wouldn't be able to use any embedded sensors within the cart to independently sense what's being printed, then yup.
If not, the question then becomes just how much do you think someone out there might want to be able to access the information you're printing, and how far might they be prepared to go to achieve it?
That said however, if you're working in an environment where you think someone *would* go to those lengths to steal your data, then even using OEM supplies isn't in itself a guarantee of security, because unless you've got your own security team watching every inch of the manufacturing and delivery process to ensure that the supplies you're using cannot contain anything other than what the OEM says they should contain, then how do you *know* for certain they don't contain something?
It's also a perfectly decent language for embedded development where your system is so resource-constrained that you still need the efficiency offered by C. I've just passed my 27th anniversary as an embedded systems engineer, and other than a bit of asm in the early years, every line of firmware I've written has been C, and for the forseeable future that isn't likely to change much if at all.
Having been in the last year group at uni to be taught Pascal rather than C in the early 90s, and having then spent a few years using Turbo Pascal, when I first heard of Delphi I was very keen to try it out, and as soon as Borland started giving away versions on coverdiscs (late 90s?) I was a convert. Continued using it through into the mid 2000's at my first two employers, but then following a change of jobs I lost access to the paid for versions I'd had previously, and by then IIRC the licencing rules had changed to make using them within a commercial setting questionable at least, and so forced to look around for alternatives, I learned about the existence of FPC/Lazarus, which has now had a constant presence on both my work and personal PCs for the past 16 years.
Unless you were a power Delphi user and needed access to some of the Delphi-specific stuff not replicated in FPC/Lazarus, then it really will feel very much like you're slipping into a familiar old pair of shoes, and before you know where you are you'll be bashing out code just like the good old days - I'd definitely recommend giving it a try.
Depends what sort of systems you're designing - in the world of commercial/industrial electronics, where stuff might be expected to keep on working for a decade or more with little or no maintenance, there's still a fair bit of emphasis placed on trying to predict ways in which things could break and designing ways to mitigate against them. And that's on top of any of the fault protection stuff we HAVE to design into the products in order to simply achieve compliance with whatever standards are applicable.
Ugh, I detested those things when I was at uni - all the other Unix-based systems we had ran about as reliably as you'd expect from a Unix-based system, whereas those HP/UX boxes seemed to want to lock-up if you so much as looked at them funny. And don't get me started on the ergonomic disaster that passed for their mouse - now I think about it, perhaps the instability of the OS makes sense, in that it protected you from being able to spend too much time suffering the effects of the mouse before being forced into taking a much needed break...
Except that using this approach to rooting out *potential/presumed/otherwise not yet actually PROVEN* waste/inefficiencies/corruption/other reasons why it costs more than it might need to, is somewhat less reasonable when, in the time it takes those genuine fund recipients to make enough noise to be heard by an administration which, so far, has presented itself as being rather less inclined to listen with a sympathetic ear to anyone complaining about their funding being cut, and have said funding restored, the lives of literally millions of people could have been adversely affected by even a few days delay in continuing the work being funded by this money.
Combine this total lack of empathy with the misunderstanding (or deliberately mis-stated, in order to rile up the faithful into believing DOGE are doing a splendid job here) of how the money is actually being spent, and is it any real surprise that many of us feel utterly aghast at the way the US is behaving right now? We knew things were going to be bad under Trump 2.0, I just don't think any of us were expecting it to get this bad this quickly. But hey, we should all just shut up and let them get on with it, right? Let DOGE burn everything the US has built up so far to the ground, in order that it can be rebuilt exactly as Trump/Musk so desire it to be, and who cares who gets harmed in the process...
And that's before you start to consider what the US used to get in return for all of this spending, and what they risk losing by buggering around with it in such a childish, mindless, manner. If countries currently receiving aid from the US start to lose faith that the US will continue to provide, then they'll start looking elsewhere for aid, and whoever steps up to the plate to provide it will, in return, start to gain the loyalty/allegiance of those being aided. How long will it be before things don't go quite the way the US expects them to, the next time they need to temporarily base troops overseas, or vote for/against something in the UN, or any other occasion when they NEED the backing of other countries?
"There are many single shot photos of many leaders with their arms in similar positions that no one accused of being Hitler."
The problem here is that in Musk's case, it wasn't merely a particularly well (or ill) timed snapshot, it was the entire sequence leading up to and past that specific moment in time. Because sure, you can dredge up any number of photos of people *appearing* to be making a Nazi salute, but how many videos would you be able to find showing those same people making the full gesture as opposed to simply moving their arms in a way which, at that one specific point in time, allowed that photo to be taken...
I mean, if you were to jump off a cliff and someone took a photo of you a split second later, it might *look* as if you'd discovered the secret of levitation, anti-gravity, or human flight. Doesn't make you a scientific genius or a bird person though, does it... If, on the other hand, there was a fairly lengthy video showing you jumping off the cliff and then not immediately plummeting to your demise, then that would raise some genuine questions over how you'd managed it. That's the difference here - a single photo can easily be taken out of context, the video sequence from which it was taken isn't so easy to mistake as something it isn't, yet it's that exact simplified argument you and so many Musk supporters are using to deflect criticism of the way he behaved at that event, and of the wider issues a growing number of us are having with the way he's behaving in general.
Ah yes, directly from the White House. The *Trump* White House. That utterly trustworthy institution. Don't make me laugh, or cry, or both...
I mean, when you start reading that page, and are almost immediately struck at the very obviously Trumpian language used to write the opening few lines, the warning bells inside your mind should be ringing loud and clear that the contents of said page probably aren't quite as unbiased as you might want them to be, and therefore if they support your personal beliefs in the matter then that's not necessarily the proof you need that you're right and the rest of us are wrong, it can just as easily be taken as proof that Trump, Musk and anyone involved in coming up with this crap is wrong, but as they're now the ones able to wield the big sticks of power, it's their views, no matter how batshit insane they might actually be, which now get published as official US government guidance on the matter.
And, quite frankly, that scares the shit out of me, as it should do any right-thinking individual on the planet. Because whilst I'm not a US citizen and therefore not directly impacted by the idiocy that's now descended on Washington, as a citizen of the Earth I am unfortunately at least somewhat impacted by anything the US does due to its significant influence over the rest of us. The world (at least those parts of it not intent on destroying the world and rebuilding it in their own image - Moscow, Tehran etc...) needs a stable and mature leadership in the White House, otherwise bad things WILL happen to us all sooner or later, and based on what we've seen so far in these first few weeks of his presidency, the remainder of his 4 years are likely going to be long and painful for everyone.
And yes, that includes those who currently support him, because unless you've accrued enough personal wealth/influence to be part of his inner circle (and also to be able to ride out whatever impact his policies have on the world) then it's only a matter of time before he does something which impacts you in a way you aren't going to like. By then the rest of us will probably have suffered enough such that we can't even summon up the energy to say "we told you so", but just take it as read that this is very much what we'll be thinking about you and everyone else who enabled the orange buffoon to regain the seat of power.
But also entirely useable in Lynx... Boy, those were the days, when you could knock up an entire website using just a basic text editor in an afternoon, and have it all fit comfortably on a single floppy disc because it wasn't so dependent on all the MBs of non-HTML content that now seems to be utterly essential for even the simplest of pages to load.
Yup, it's not so much that (m)any of us need a constant gigabit+ connection to the rest of the world, rather that it's very nice to have a fast link for the times when you're trying to send/receive a large chunk of data and would prefer not to have to wait at that specific moment. Because yeah, for some stuff we could just go back to the old ways of doing things - i.e. queueing up a load of transfers and leaving them to chunter along overnight while we sleep, or during the day whilst we're out at the office/shops/etc - but that's not viable for everything these days.
Do I *need* a gigabit connection at home? No. But if VM are willing to continue giving it to me for a reasonable price (which, following a bit of contract renewal negotiation, they are...), then why would I look to save just a few quid a month in order to drop down to whichever of the lower speed tiers would suffice given my *average* transfer rates, when I genuinely can justify the small incremental cost based on the number of times having that extra bandwidth genuinely does come in handy on a *per transfer* basis.
IMO it's useful to seperate the EV drivetrain side of Tesla from the car manufacturing side - the former is something I've always had a lot of respect for, to the point where I'd love to see them simply abandon any pretence of trying to be a car manufacturer at all and simply focus on the stuff they DO do well by becoming a drivetrain supplier to the rest of the world.
Their ability to come up with decent packaging for their drivetrains however is something I've almost never been impressed with - of their present range of cars, the only one I'd even consider having sat on my driveway is a Model S, because that's the only one that IMO comes anywhere close to providing the *complete* package and matching what you'd get from even a mid-spec European car these days, let alone one with a comparable pricetag to the S.
So no, I don't have any difficulty in understanding why some Tesla owners/fans/supporters would still be suggesting they're still the leader in EV tech, *if* you take them literally and assume they're referring just to those things where Tesla is still ahead of the competition. If however they're just claiming that Tesla remains in the lead in terms of EVs generally - i.e. the complete package point above - then that's where I'd struggle to believe them.
Over the past 40-odd years in which I've had an active interest in UK politics, I've seen and continue to see more than enough evidence to suggest that your idyllic belief in our ability to get along without being filled with hatred towards our elected representatives would have been a difficult one to sell at any point over that period, and continues to be wide of the mark.
The level of hatred that was and in some places continues to be hurled at Thatcher, is perhaps the most obvious counter to your belief, but you can also look to more recent times and the level of hate hurled at Khan in London for another immediately obvious example. And let's not overlook that, in some people, their level of discontent with establishment figures has led to them doing more than merely uttering hateful words - the USA isn't the only place where politicians have paid the ultimate price.
It's not nothing though, as your closing comment in that opening paragraph suggests - forget about the comparison with batteries, and focus on how this could benefit products which presently use capacitors (in some cases a significant number of them) either in terms of being able to deliver higher levels of capacitance within the same physical footprint, or in being able to deliver the same levels in smaller footprints, or potentially even in being able to deliver capacitance in places where you had no chance of getting it at all.
Is it a revolutionary leap forwards, no. Is it a useful, and by the sounds of it, something that actually does stand a good chance of making it into production, evolutionary step forwards in the continual improvements those of us faced with trying to come up with ever more efficient product designs very much like to see from component suppliers? Oh yes.
Polling can be more efficient if you know the task you're presently doing can't block for longer than the maximum period you can ignore the event that would otherwise have raised an interrupt, as it means you don't have to spend any time saving/restoring your present task context - you just let that conclude naturally and then run the code that would otherwise have been executed mid-task via the ISR.
What puzzled me a bit though was "By reducing the number of interrupt requests, or IRQs, the host CPU can spend more time crunching numbers and less time waiting on packets that aren't ready to process.", because why would you be raising IRQs if there's nothing for the system to handle?
Overall though, reading this article just made me turn a wry smile, because optimisations like this are merely par for the course in the world I inhabit of embedded systems development, and IMO it's long overdue that coders on t'other side of the fence in the world of desktop/server/other big system development start to re-discover some of the techniques their predecessors *had* to be aware of due to the lack of system resources, because simply continuing to throw system resources (CPU cycles, RAM etc) at a problem to cope with increasingly bloated code isn't sustainable.
Was fortunate enough to tick Concorde off my personal bucket list back in the 90's when it used to participate in the International Air Tattoo - departing mid-show to go do one of its "out and back" flights over the Bay of Biscay. Whilst the passenger cabin was full, and the galleys stocked to bursting point with food and drink so that we'd be able to experience the full in-flight service, the lack of any hold baggage made the take off performance even more sprightly than she was capable of - the relentless acceleration along the runway is unlike anything I've ever experienced on any other airliner, and once we started the climb, the combination of the continued acceleration and the angle of climb made it feel like I was lying flat on my back in the seat.
After that, the bulk of the flight was notable mainly for just how un-notable it all felt - there we were cruising along serenely, munching down on a rather nice lunch, washed down with some rather nice champagne, with only the bulkhead indicator providing any clue that we were doing all of this at a speed faster than most people will ever get to travel at. That high up, with so little turbulence to contend with, and with the noisy bits of the engines so far towards the rear of the fuselage, it was a genuinely far smoother and quieter ride than I've had on anything other than perhaps a Dreamliner.
So whilst I've never been in the sort of position work-wise or personally to have been able to manage anything more exotic than premium cattle class flights in terms of journeys where I was trying to get from A to B, and would therefore almost certainly never have flown Concorde on its normal routes even if it were still flying today, I count myself very fortunate to have joined the relatively exclusive ranks of people who did get to experience what it was like to fly the big white bird, and almost 30 years later it remains utterly unforgettable.
"If it wasn't for being born into a rich family, Trump would be one of those guys hawking fake Rolexes in Times Square."
Given some of the cheap and nasty tat (watch included) he's happy to flog, at anything but cheap and cheerful pricing of course, to his faithful, he's skirting dangerously close to actually being one of those guys already...
Yup, which is why, as a postgrad, I dug into my own pocket to buy a copy of OS/2 Warp, *specifically* so that I could pre-emptively multitask the Windows versions of Matlab and Office, both of which I was using quite heavily for my research work. Having Matlab turn Win3.1 into a completely unresponsive brick for an hour at a time whilst it went and churned through the latest set of calculations, with me then having to twiddle my thumbs instead of being able to continue working on something else in the meantime, was enough of an embuggerance that the one-off hit to my finances in buying Warp (combined with the ongoing hit to my sanity of maintaining the damn thing) felt like an entirely acceptable thing to do...
Even today, W11 will sometimes get itself into a complete tizzy over *something* and decide that pre-emptive multitasking is simply too much bother for it - just this morning my work PC decided to ignore all user input for a couple of minutes whilst Outlook had a think about something during its startup process, and I sat there wondering how much longer I might need to give it before the three finger salute was called into action - wouldn't mind *as much* if such periods of UI inattentiveness were at least accompanied by *some* degree of feedback to let me know, even if it's just to the same level of accuracy as the Explorer "time to complete" estimates when copying a load of files around, but when the entire UI without warning suddenly adopts a persona of near total lifelessness, with only the mouse pointer still being able to move around to show that the OS hasn't *completely* frozen solid, I really wonder at just how much crap there still lurks beneath the surface in these later versions of Windows, and why it is that despite the decades of supposed improvements in the OS combined with the clear improvements in hardware specs, we're still faced with systems that can still end up being less responsive to their users than a mid-80's spec Amiga.
"It wasn't a failure, any more than Blue Origin failed earlier in the day. Both comprise of stunning achievements and an opportunity to gather data to make the next test flights better."
Quite. To anyone outside the world of engineering, this might indeed be seen as a public and embarrasing failure. To those within that world, it's merely business as usual when you're still very much in the development stages of a project, and it's often only by having failures that you truly learn how to make your designs a success.
e.g. I'd be *far* more concerned about, say, taking a flight on a new aircraft if it'd never suffered *any* sorts of failures, no matter how trivial they might have been, during its development, because it's an absolute certainty that anything designed by a human WILL have errors, so the more of those you catch before you release it for general use, the less likely you are to later on have a genuinely embarrassing failure with potentially far more catastrophic consequences.
So as you say, every flight made by Falcon SH and Starship, regardless of the outcomes, is a golden opportunity to gather more real world data, and engineers will rarely, if ever, say no to having such an opportunity. And yes, seeing just how serenely the booster docked with the tower, bearing in mind how few previous examples of this we've seen so far, was just another thing to add to the list of genuinely impressive outcomes SpaceX have given us - I thought seeing a single Falcon landing safely was impressive, then they trumped that with the near simultaneous landings of a pair of Falcons, and now this...
Whilst, up to about 10 years ago, I'd have agreed with your assessment of the ability of a HDD to give you at least some level of warning of failure, since then my own experiences of HDD failures suggests the damn things now are *so* reliable that they either just keep on working forever without any issues, or drop dead without any warnings whatsoever, such that they're now no better than SSDs in terms of giving users a chance to transfer data off the drive before it becomes unreadable.
The key part of that first sentence isn't the "without going into the office" bit, it's the "you can do your" bit...
Because MY being able to do MY job from home effectively proves only that I can do MY job effectively. Replace me with someone else, and there's a more than reasonable chance that, even if they tick all of the same technical competency boxes as I do, they'll struggle like crazy trying to replicate what I can do, because no-one else on the planet has my specific combination of technical ability *and* experience working with this particular employer, with their product range, their internal processes, their suppliers, customers etc. Basically, all of the *other* stuff you actually need to know in order to use your general technical abilities to any useful effect in a specific role, but which all too often goes unrecognised by manglement until the point you walk out the door for the last time and only then do they start to understand how valuable you genuinely were to the company.
So yes, some hard of thinking residents of the manglement suite might think that they can just replace their existing WFH'er workforce with a bunch of similarly remote workers in some cheaper part of the world. And as they'll sooner or later discover, just as many of their counterparts in other companies who've *already* tried this before have discovered to their cost, it really isn't as simple as that.
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