Yeah that was the real problem with hot swappable discs. The kids who actually physically performed that operation were often too impatient and careless to put the disc somewhere safe from scratching, because they wanted to immediately get back to playing.

Back in 2002? I don’t think they separated generation and delivery for most utilities, at least in the US. In 1996, federal regulators made it mandatory for utilities with delivery infrastructure to accept generators’ electricity on fair/nondiscriminatory terms, and gave them some time to implement policies. Then, the actual generators started negotiating deals, but the early days were a bit chaotic, with issues in California with rolling blackouts, then the Enron bankruptcy, and then generators actually entering long term contracts with some price stability in the early 2000’s.

For a typical residential customer who didn’t go out of their way to look for side deals with generators, they wouldn’t have needed to see their bills be segmented out into generation and delivery, since most of the utilities still already had long term contracts (or owned their own generation facilities) still in effect from before the regulatory reform.

Personally, I didn’t see those numbers separated out on my bill until around 2009. And I remember my electric bill in 2000-2005 being roughly 10 cents per kwh, flat rate.

One real concern I have is that there are now automated tools that can read a patch, and the maintainer’s release notes with a description of a security vulnerability fixed by that patch, and then create a working exploit of the pre-patch vulnerability.

In that particular moment, you know that a vulnerability exists and that it was serious enough to be described in release notes, and you can compare two code versions, one that is secure and one that is not. From there, any AI coding agent is working towards something that definitely exists, with a bunch of description of what it might be.

So that means that the window between when a patch is released and when users actually apply that patch is going to be more important than ever. Downstream maintainers will be under a lot of time pressure to implement changes from upstream, because every new security patch will create a race to create 1-day exploits for everyone using that software.

And the other way, too. The whole reason why Android chose Java was because it was, at the time, one of the better languages and runtimes for creating hardware-agnostic software. Now that a software ecosystem is in place, why should Google be able to control what hardware the already-written software runs on?

MacOS ran out of cats at some point. Android ran out of desserts.

Ubuntu had no problem rolling over with the letters of the alphabet, but I imagine some letters may pose issues at some point when you run out of identifiable animals that start with that letter. Although they were already going with a lot of obscure animals to begin with.

His legal templates are all in Latin, his production code is all in COBOL, etc.

Desktop Linux is seeing higher and higher market share, not just because Linux is growing but also because the desktop mode of computing is shrinking, especially for personal use. There are lots of people who used to own laptops/desktops but don’t anymore.

This one is the same author addressing this specific Mozilla release.

Jevon’s Paradox is that when there’s more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.

More specifically, it’s when an improvement in efficiency cause the underlying resource to be used more, because the efficiency reduces cost and then using that resource becomes even more economically attractive.

So when factories got more efficient at using coal in the 19th century, England saw a huge increase in coal demand, despite using less coal for any given task.