Yes, I totally agree, you have to pick a reasonable length of time for depreciation. Three years is clearly too short for a lot of devices now, although I wouldn't suggest 18 years is appropriate either!

Indeed. I learnt recently that one of our GitLab VM hosts for Linux build runners is is hardware from 2012. The dev team discovered this when a vendor sent us an updated library that dropped SSE4.2 support and required AVX2, causing our smoke tests to fail and thus fail the builds. Why throw away hardware that is still working and performant?

The baseline profile of MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC) (ISO/IEC 23094-1) is supposed to be the modern MPEG codec that only uses tools made public 20 years ago or have been declared royalty free. It hasn't really gathered traction though either because there's not enough incentive for the stakeholders or because nobody wants to invest in adding another codec to their pipeline that doesn't improve enough beyond HEVC.

Not regardless of any size. An old XDCAM will produce MPEG-2 streams that look better than anything streaming from Amazon Video.

The recent stories of laptops having their decoders removed because of patent frees are infuriating.

Maybe you're referring to this story:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fgadget...

It says:
Per a breakdown from patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance, royalty rates for HEVC for over 100,001 units are increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the United States ... "This is pretty ridiculous, given these systems are $800+ a machine, are part of a 'Pro' line (jabs at branding names are warranted â" HEVC is used professionally) ..."

It's such a small percentage of the price yet some bean counter has decided to make user experience shit. Moral of the story for me is to not buy the cheapest shit on the market.

Indeed. The Germans started strategic bombing of civilian areas about 88 years ago, and in fact, the German president was just in Guernica paying his respects to the victims of that attack: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fwo....

We haven't stopped strategic bombing of civilian areas just because they don't work, it's also because it amounts to war crimes. Britain bombed Germany like that as a response to Germany doing it to Britain and that being the only response Britain could muster at the time, but RAF Bomber Command has always been down played because of the perception that it was wrong; they didn't even get a memorial until 2012.

Russia is behaving like it's still the 1940s. 27 Russian soldiers dead for every square kilometre of Ukraine they've taken. They don't value their own lives, and so they certainly don't value those from other countries.

How long have Airbus known about it? When were the airlines notified versus this report in the media?

Right, and it can improve foreign investment, although exchange rates also tend to reflect the health of the economy and not always about the government actively trying to achieve this. Undervaluation can lead to some problems though, such as loss of productivity due to weaker competition or higher inflation.

Google docs that changes the language of the user interface when you go to another country. WTF?

You left during a recent high point in the currency. I remember well it unexpectedly climbing from 62c to to the USD in 2003 to parity by 2008 because I was living in Ontario and working 1099MISC since 1999 for a Californian company and watched my USD pay diminishing in value. Letâ(TM)s be honest, the exchange rate is back where the historical trend was taking it.

Yes, along with copy and paste and other Continuity features.

Kyiv, not Kiev.

Itâ(TM)s definitely about the law requiring pricing to show the final price. I get it that tax rates are variable based on locality in the US, even within a state or a city. Thereâ(TM)s much less variability here in the UK (VAT is the same rate everywhere and only varies if certain goods are deemed worthy of a discount). No reason why taxed and tax free prices canâ(TM)t both be shown in the US. This is also common in some places here, especially where businesses will be buying items with a VAT exemption.

The only time I come in contact with Edge is in my Windows VMs or remote servers and I want to download something directly in to the VM on to the server, or I accidentally click on some Microsoft crap that opens the default browser. My annoyances:

• * It eventually forgets what my open tabs were from the last session. It does this frequently. I have tabs in Safari I've had open for for years, and that's the way I like. You fail Microsoft.
• * Configuring Edge is a headache. Default choices are shit and changing that involves going through too many steps.
• * Whatever the browser core, for decades now, Microsoft defaults to a busy noisy page. Their product manager must have been introduced to browsers in the late '90s when everybody had to have a portal. Most of my Windows access is to remote servers, so the last thing I want is it opening an animated page that kills the performance of the remote connection. Sure, it's not as bad as it was 20 years ago when latency was higher and bandwidth was lower, but still annoys the shit of me. Just give me a minimal page by default.
• * It's not even an independent product anymore. Using it means supporting Google. No thanks.

They couldn't make their browser successful when they developed it in-house. They had to make and cuts opted to wrap somebody else's browser, and even now, that can't make that successful.

Good luck getting FFmpeg running on a console from 1996!

Actually, at Demuxed 2025 recently, somebody did make a presentation detailing how they got a Sega Genesis (Megadrive) to stream and playback video. What an awesome hack!! Itâ(TM)s here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fjoeyparrish...