Re: Not really a time to be owning a Tesla
> the cars appeared to be attracting the same stereotype as Audis (and before that, BMW's) did - that of being driven by a total wanker.
Ah you noticed that as well?
957 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2007
> problems it solves. Or will solve, when it is viable.
Solutions exist now
1 is a taxi or public transport where it exists (and yes we have 24 hours buses around here in the UK)
2 is an edge case, sound like you need to reorganise your life priorities
3 who the heck drives 1000 miles in one go ? As you may guess I'm in the UK and even Land's End to John o' Groats is quoted at only 846 miles. For that distance I'd take a train/plane and hire a car at the destination unless I had a couple of days to break the journey up.
My view is that most existing drivers would hate being in a car that is driving itself and being expected to take over if its computer craps itself , unless of course you have a level 5 car and they would not have a steering wheel at all.
> By handing that over to an AV, and then getting control back when you leave the motorway then the driver can be fresh for the non motorway leg of long journeys
There is no way that I would be fresh for the non motorway leg of long journeys - instead I would be a nervous wreak always on the edge of taking over. If I have to drive at all I will drive it all or share the driving with the wife which works best as she loves straight roads and I love the bendy up and down ones
> But given some people's 'every other Windows version is good' theory
Yeah it does not quite fit and can cause much discussion bot for me the good ones were 98SE, XP SP3, 2000 and win 7. After that is has been downhill all the way and win10 is only acceptable after a lot of fixing up but why the f**k should I have to do that to make it usable.
Next OS will be Linux based, either Mint or (indrawn breath) a Mac.
> Works for me. Windows 7 Home Premium I have ZeroPatch installed and it did stuff recently.
> The only "malware" I see in this house is the Win10 and Win11 machines
Same here as I type on my win7 machine, all win 10's have ShutUp10 applied and are all local accounts.
Only "malware" the ms defender ever found on win7 are my own programs so I even ditched that!
> Microsoft's share price has gone from @ $150 in 2020 to $350 today. (There was a bit of a trough in 2023) This is not a failed, desperate company.
which is down to market sentiments and bears no reality to how the company is really performing or how much then are worth eg Tesla
> So why should he care about depreciation?
I have never cared about that either as I also run them until the end.
Now retired thinking of the next one which may well also be the last one I ever need as by the time it dies I will probably be handing my licence back by then.
It will cost a bit but less than £20k
Yup same here, new company owners decide that IT equipment needed an upgrade (we were mostly compaq 286/386 machines ranging from DOS (Novell network menu front end) to some NT3.x CAD systems)
Got a job lot of DELL PC's, absolute minimal spec running windows 2000 + word 97, they ran like dogs.
Was asked to look at them and I found the same, non-standard components everywhere, complete scrap. I was not aware of the BG boards in those days!
But they were cheap, shiny and new!
> I am old enough to remember the root cause when the wheels truly fell off.
Yes the late 1980's was the root of this, the main driver for the crazy house price inflation was the ending of the un-married coupled MIRAS when if a couple purchased a house and were un-married then they could each claim a full MIRAS benefit - but they gave a 6 month notification of this as well as relaxing all the credit controls that used to be in place.
Have too many people after houses and add in estate agents behaviour of ringing around to anyone looking at a property that "X" has put a higher bid in - you don't want to loose this do you??? result prices boomed for 6 months, people (me included) got repeatably gazumped and it has been all downhill ever since
>> For that Capital Gains Tax of 80% should be introduced for properties and land on sale. To protect earlier investors, the tax should be calculated as yearly average from before and after the new tax date. The tax will discourage buying property *for investment*.
So you want to penalise those of us who have just a single property that is our "home - somewhere to live in" that we have spend most of our lives and a good chunk of our earnings to pay for ?????
Owning my home was never an investment - it was to have a roof over my head that no shady landlord could yank away at the last moment, and yes it will also benefit the children down the line but we have worked bloody hard to get to this point!!
" There isn't any fear there. Just look at the list of products and ingredients made from petroleum."
I think you meant crude oil rather than petroleum as that is just a by-product, but yes the list is long unless we want to go back to clothes being made from just cotton, leather, horsehair and clogs instead of shoes.
"If you need to test the live system" Nope.
So why then at every place I have worked that there are functional tests done on the production systems after an upgrade over the weekend before production restarted the following Monday? Are you saying that all those people sacrificed their weekends for nothing and that tests on the TEST system were sufficient ????
For some reason they seem to be stuck in the mindset that they simply HAVE to provide some new or updated feature/function with a "security" update.
They simply can't stop tinkering
The old saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" seems to be long dead and buried at M$
I'll keep my Windows 7 until the day it stops working (I do have a window 10 VM for the important stuff)
> Modern prisons have computerised door locks and access controls, yet I've never heard of one having had their computer systems attacked from outside and the prisoners gone running free.
That's because their prime directive is to keep the prisoners locked up, a school on the other hand does not need that level of security.
Also at schools these days the blackboard and chalk are history, instead they have computerised smart boards - lose them and no classroom teaching
> "(very) cheap and cheerful" LaCie NAS device
I had one of them as my first NAS devices at home, it just a single disk device. I discovered the hard way that the OS was on the disk - and the disk only!
So loose the disk on a single disk device and it's toast unless you can manually partition a new disk and somehow get a copy of the OS on it. I think I managed to resurrect it eventually but after that I moved on to Synology where at least the OS is in firmware.
> 'They are all out for their personal selves.'
Maybe governments need to follow the example of the "Isle of Tega" from the David Eddings books of the Tamuli. Here when elected the poor sods entire wealth is confiscated and invested in the state and only returned when they leave office.
If the country (and hence the Government) does well they make a profit, if it does badly then they loose out big time.
> Plus ample evidence that elevated CO2 increases yields and can reduce water requirements
Sadly it also puts the temperatures up which a lot of plants don't like i.e they die, and a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour (which also traps heat - look what happened to Venus from when it had liquid water on the surface) but most importantly it will also rain more which us poor soggy souls in the UK have been experiencing for the last 2 years.
but the wind is always blowing somewhere even if it isn't blowing in a particular locality
Try telling that when a winter high pressure zone is sat over the UK - dead calm for hundreds of miles in all directions
A much better grid so that power can be shifted from where it's being generated to where it's needed
Again in the UK they are trying to upgrade the grid but the NIMBYs are doing everything they can to block them
More storage capacity to smooth out peaks in generation vs peaks in demand
Time to get your calculator out and do some maths. As I am typing (midday Saturday) the UK power demand is 38GW. Gas is providing 20GW of that, Wind 7, solar 1.3 (!). During the week it can reach 45GW demand. The rest is Renewables/Carbon Neutral (whatever they are), Biomass (burning stuff) and inter connectors.
Now work out how many batteries it would take to cover those shortfalls for a foggy, low cloud blocking high pressure over the UK that can last for days. You would have to cover all the countryside with battery farms to do it.
Pumped storage like in Wales can only run for a few hours at most - how many mountains do you want to hollow out?