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Comment Wrong nation (Score 3, Interesting) 405

Absent an order of magnitude improvement in battery capacity and charging rate, Canada is a terrible country for this.
A good example: the Alaska Highway. "Major" cities and gas stations are very far apart, and the infrastructure to deliver enough power for car (let alone truck) charging does not yet exist.

Key highways to remote areas are much more sparsely populated, and the cold makes matters much worse.

Comment We got what we paid for, and more (Score 5, Interesting) 95

A classmate gave us a bootleg copy of the full version of DOOM (3 diskettes).
My roommates and I installed it, played it for a while... and then called ID Software at the number in the credits.
"Hi, someone gave us a bootleg copy of DOOM, and we want to pay you. Where do we send the check?"
I sent a check.
A few weeks later, a box showed up with an official copy of DOOM and a bunch of DOOM & Castle Wolfenstein swag!

Comment "Late" bloomer (Score 2) 523

I bought my first PC in the fall of '93 at a computer show, knowing very little, guided by my roommate. It had a Cyrix Cx486DX2-66 processor, 8 MB of RAM, and Windows 3.11 on a 250 MB hard drive. No sound card or CD-ROM. Connectivity: a 96/24 modem (9600 baud for faxing, 2400 for everything else).
Most desktops at the show came with 2-4 MB of RAM; my roommate had pushed me to get more.
His first evaluation: "Gawd, this thing's fast."

Comment smart gun owners won't buy them (Score 1) 333

I've done enough carrying, shooting, and training to know. These "smart guns" might attract a few new gun owners, but nobody who is serious about guns will buy one.
It's all about reliability. I carry a Glock because it just works, with an incredibly tiny chance of malfunctions. My ex-wife preferred a huge 8-shot .357 Magnum revolver, because she didn't want to train to clear malfunctions.

Seriously, my carry gun is a Glock 19, my rifle is a M1A, and my shotgun is a Saiga 12... you're not selling me anything less reliable, which any "smart gun" would surely be.

Comment It was suicidal (Score 1) 269

I did desktop support at a company with thousands of Windows 95/98 clients, and I encountered quite a few Windows ME boxes in the mix... so I built a few to mess with them in our work area.

Windows ME would kill itself in three steps:

1) It took forever to shut down, so users would eventually force shutdown.
2) After a forced shutdown, it would run CHKDSK.
3) CHKDSK would eventually decide that the System32 directory was corrupt, and delete most or all of it.

It looked like they were going to use it at one point, so I talked my bosses into deploying a few ME machines to executives "for final acceptance testing."
Within the month, most of them -- and the proposed ME rollout plans -- were dead.

Comment It takes experience to mass-produce cars (Score 1) 152

Major carmakers know how to manufacture parts that fit, in bulk. They know how to design a trunk so that the lid mostly shelters the trunk from rain when open. They know how to run an assembly line. They can support and maintain the supply chains required to build with just-in-time inventory. They understand the engineering economic factors that separate the profitable from the defunct.

Tesla will be making great cars, consistently, in a few years. Meanwhile... don't buy one?

Comment no (Score 3, Insightful) 244

It's not going to be safe to sit in a movie theater until there is an effective vaccine, and most of the population has received it.
October surprise? 2024? 2030? Who knows? Maybe no permanent vaccine is even possible.

By the time this is "over," a lot of people -- myself included -- ain't coming out of quarantine. No cruises, concerts, sporting events... nothing in a crowd, or indoors in large numbers.

Comment We had one here in DE... (Score 3, Funny) 103

...at the most profitable mall in the country, we have an Apple store and (apparently) had a Microsoft store.

I went in there for a MS support issue... I was the only customer in the huge store, and they asked if I had an appointment!
I replied, "If I wanted to need an appointment, I would have bought a Mac. There are two hundred people shopping over at the Apple store, so this is quicker."

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