Laforet

The author has some valid points (i.e. people criticise business decisions made to appease shareholders without realising they may be the shareholders in a roundabout way) but chose some rather odd examples as proof.

It seems like they are doing a port based block similar to how residential lines often have their SMTP ports shut off.

That said in this day and age, servers on the public network really ought to use SSH.

A lot of earlier digital timepieces come with arbitrary date range limits and I have always wondered what is the reason behind such limitations.

For example, a lot of camera date backs (used to physically embed time and date on film) could not be set to any date post a certain year, most commonly 2020 but I’ve also seen 2019 and 2029 as cutoffs. Even models that has a 4 digit year format isn’t immune from this issue, and sometimes it’s possible to bypass it by setting the date to Dec 31 2020, let the it roll over naturally to Jan 1 2021 and you will then be free to fast forward the date.

Maybe it’s similar to the YEAR 10000 bug on modern Windows OS where many internal variables could overflow beyond a certain datum so it would make sense to prevent it in the front end.

Scenario C is more likely the culprit. I have seen multiple examples of prebuilt PCs and laptops defaulting to software RAID mode for reasons unknown, and they did not always have a toggle just like in OP’s case.

The only time I have come across scenario B was with a VAIO laptop from around 2011. The machine was advertised to come with “fastest SSD on the market” which turned out to be four (!) off the shelf eMMC modules in RAID 0 through a hardware controller. As janky as it sounds, OS compatibility was never an issue because the controller was a fairly common model with well established driver support rather than some bespoke mystery.

IMO this is still a passive type of security through obfuscation. Active defence would be more like returning zip bombs to known intruders in order to crash the process.

> Given the other context of your comments I doubt this is a confession of contribution of hubristic affluence contributing to our modern disposable society but I feel like this underscores the point I'm trying to make in my reply.

Let me assure you that none of what I said was meant to diminish your point of view which I agree with mostly.

What I was trying to convey was that people’s mindsets were rather different during the last decade of CRT. CRT had been around since the end of WWII, it may have gotten bigger over the years but the form it took on largely remained the same so there was a sense of continuity as people handed down old TVs when they got something nicer.

When cheap LCD TVs came to the market it represented something more akin to a paradigm shift as people with limited space at home could now easily own screens 30 inches and up. My parents are actually rather frugal with my dad borders on being a tech hoarder who insist on keeping every single cell phone and laptop he ever owned somewhere in his garage. However even he was unable to justify the sheer bulk and running cost of CRT TVs back in that period. Even if he were to give it away there would have been very few takers of any.

Therefore it’s not inconceivable that this model could have been sold in the US or even few more places outside Japan. Most of them simply disappeared without a trace because at some point they were probably worth less than the space it occupies, and people were overly eager to embrace the flat panels without realising that they are not getting some of the utilities back.

> everyone I knew either donated theirs and/or moved CRTs into smaller rooms when they replaced a working one.

That might have happened for a while but by 2008-ish CRTs were being dumped left right and center. My city runs a annual kerbside collection program for large appliances and furniture, and I distinctly remember metal scavengers cruising the street gutting old CRTs people have left out for the copper coils, leaving whatever remains to be collected as hazardous e-waste. Around the same time, my parents got rid of a 16:10 CRT IDTV they bought in the 90s and semi-forced me to throw out a 21 inch IBM P275 I had because "it's using too much power".

In any case I doubt any corporate (or rich household) owner of a 47 inch CRT back then would think too much about replacing it with a larger screen that took up less space. After all it's just another piece of asset that has depreciated to zero value on their books.

Yes, I am aware of those arguments and I am inclined to agree with you. Compared to cultural artifacts which are mostly neutral in terms of externalities, relics of the industrial era suffer more from the cobra effect.

Others in this thread have bought up the future of ICEs and classic car preservation. Back in the early 2000s the US government offered people cash incentives to dispose of their fuel inefficient cars, and by disposal they meant running the engine with an abrasive liquid instead of oil until it is totally ruined beyond repair. Mechanics will tell you horror stories of rare car models being destroyed this way so the owners can claim a few hundred bucks from the DOT. I'm sure car collectors had a field day back then but with such a glut in the market they could not save everything that's worth saving.

Shank Mods was able to obtain a copy of the service manual in English from somebody in the US. This fact probably means that the TV was sold on (or imported to) the domestic US market for a while. (Sony have always allowed individuals to order parts through an authorised service centre, and the latter often insist on requesting a repair manual first even if you are 100% sure of the part number) It's very likely that a number of them existed in the US only to be unceremoniously thrown out by their owners when LCD TVs became more popular. I bet nobody batted an eyelid when that happened.

The other parties you mentioned would probably have less motivation to preserve it, let alone restore it to a fully functional state. I find it rather bizarre that many posters here seem to think that it’s morally preferable for the TV set to rot in Japan rather than getting the proper care in the hands of an American collector, all because of some imaginary cultural baggage.

> I love gaming, and I destress by playing games, but it's not worth the now much higher opportunity cost to play the newer (usually worse) stuff.

This appears to be the reason with all the recent remakes of “not so old” games. People like us are much more likely to pay to relive our past joys in 4K resolution.

However a part of me often wonders if video games have got to the point where every viable idea has been attempted and it’s only downhill from here. When I was a teen, I definitely did NOT envision myself still playing Age of Empires 2 PvP with strangers online but scene is still here.

There is a system wide setting that changes all non-Unicode text encoding to another code page e.g CP932 for Shift-JIS. Third party tools are available to do the same conversion on a per application basis.

It’s not as bad as trying to load some really old CJK web pages on mobile devices: few mobile browser has an accessible option to select character encoding and there appears to be none on iOS. The only option is to change the system language and that didn’t always work for more obscure character codes.

Not surprising because only the edges of the back glass are glued for iPhone 15 so most of the surface is just floating there without support. On prior generations the entire panel is glued.

Not sure what the justification for the change would be, if anything it does make changing the back glass much faster as there is no need to scrape or laser blast the entire surface to remove all the adhesive. It would be interesting to see if this is also the case for the 16th gen.