Industrial systems rarely use voltage for sending analogue signals, and digital signals are typically dry contact / high impedance. Yes you need to think about how to do this, but it's not an insurmountable issue.

How would you know? You weren't here from the start. /j

I've never seen someone so angry at something that can simply be ignored.

Not really. Many cities have upgraded their systems over time. As to the train signaling, that doesn't run directly on the machines in question. Rather they run on dedicated highly reliable certified controllers. The hardware behind it can be upgraded on the run and while operating systems in parallel without downtime. The more important issue is ... such an upgrade doesn't generate any profit or reduce any costs. EoL upgrades to control systems are universally blocked on financial constraints, not practical or safety ones.

I actually know the systems in use VicTrack, and have upgraded similar systems (though one generation newer - where the control interface ran on a DX4-100) in a chemical plant on the fly before. It was an engineering and coordination effort, but it was doable and we maintained 100% uptime in the process.

Taxes are levied on profits (assuming no tax dodging). Expenses such as R&D are deducted prior to profits being reported. This stuff is literally not subject to tax.

Congrats. I'm dual booting Windows and Linux on my gaming machine, and I get better performance in Windows. Games are actually the only reason I still have Windows.

Horseshit. The link provided is talking about improvement numbers that are equivalent of spending many hundreds of dollars on a new generation GPU. If you could get that performance for "free" (as in beer) then there'd be not a gamer in the world who would let a Windows pre-install stand in their way.

"Different" is not a why or how. It's a "what". Try some coffee, your brain may work differently thanks to chemistry. Will it work? Well you don't know that do you, because all you know is "different" and that's where you ceased taking an interest. Please stop with the low-IQ approach to science.

Risk due to obsolescence is a sign of something that is broken. Spare parts are a finite resource. The idea works well until you're out of spare parts. Someone managing this risk will do a Weibull analysis to determine *when* (not if) the system will stop functioning given the current spare capacity, and plan accordingly. Waiting until the spares run out is the worst possible strategy as some systems take many years to upgrade.

Also spares aren't the only issue. You run into capability problems as well. Do you still have people who know how to use and maintain the old system? Can the vendor even help with that even if it is running? I ran into this with Motorola. We had a perfectly functioning LMR system with 16 repeaters, and an additional 4 in the closet including a spare controller. When the controller died our system was down for a week instead of the anticipated couple of hours because no one at Motorola had a clue how to install and configure the software on this very early 90s era controller. Heck they wasted hours just trying to get a laptop that could run the installation software over RS232.

A "backup" ceases being useful when it serves as a distraction to the primary system or limits the primary system. Think for example a backup that needs to be done daily in a way that consumes an hour of an IT person's time, while also not being physically large enough to handle the primary system. That's the IT analogy here.

Paper strips may be computer fault proof, but they are also manual and limit the amount of air traffic a system can handle. Your choice is to keep it, or digitise it away. Running both systems in parallel as a backup serves not just to eliminate the benefit of digitising, but actively further reduces the handling capacity as you now have two systems to run in parallel.

Now there is a question of how much of an improvement digitising will bring. There's been good and bad examples of every digitising effort, and those which have worked well have resulted in increase in air traffic handling - e.g. London's air traffic control system was digitised 7 years ago to cope with increasing number of flights. It had teething issues, but overall worked well. France on the other hand had 2 failed rollouts of digitising CDG's air traffic control and are still on paper now. But that paper based system is now the bottleneck of the airport.

Probably, but then you absolutely should be angry about this.

Well the corporation that screwed up AfriNIc'd deserve to be shown all the Goatses.
Besides the Goatse is part of the culture of this website. I wouldn't be surprised if that group turned out to be employees of whichever company owns this place.

Errr no one said it was a programming language. The term "design language" has been used in the creative industries long before the invention of the computer. Infact Ngram viewer shows the phrase started gaining popularity in the 60s, and used to be really popular in the 80s, going back it was even referenced in the 1800s.

The term "language" is nothing more than a system of communication, it is completely appropriate to use this term. The only thing bullshit would be to sit here and call something bullshit rather than acknowledge that you learnt something new.

UI elements have used hardware acceleration since the days of Windows XP and got fancy with Vista. Even the original iPhone had a fully hardware accellerated UI. Applying a different shader doesn't make something necessarily more complex or slower, it just makes it different. I doubt this uses any more processing power than any other UI we've created in the past 18 years.

Please don't confuse the human race with advertisers not wanting anything morally vague associated with their product. The human race will be just fine, and largely trigger free.

Why would the concept go? Isn't a business's job to meet the needs of the customer? The advertisers are the customer. You on the other hand are just a product. Why would anyone care what you think? How much did you pay Youtube last month?