Yaztromo

I’m not sure what’s keeping Microsoft and ibm from Open Sourcing all the rest of the DOS versions as well — the 3.x series was very influential, 5 added disk compression, and 6 was the most modern of them all. I can’t remember if Stac’s lawsuit against Microsoft would require them to take out the disk compression parts (although AFAIK the relevant patents are probably long expired now), but even if that’s the case having these available as OSS would also be useful — even if only for a historical context.

To put things into context, IBM didn’t get ripped off in any way (at least not from DOS - the whole IBM/Microsoft OS/2 debacle is a different story). The earliest PCs (IBM PC, IBM PC XT, IBM PC Jr., and associated clones) didn’t really have the hardware capabilities needed to permit a more advanced operating system. There was no flat memory model, no protection rings, and no Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB). The low maximum unpaged memory addressing limit (1MB) made it difficult to run more than one process at a time, and really limits how much OS you can have active on the machine (modern Windows by way of example reserves 1GB of virtual RAM per process just for kernel memory mapping).

These things did exist on mainframe and mini computers of the day — so the ideas and techniques weren’t unknown — but the cheaper IBM PCs had so many limitations that those techniques were mostly detrimental (there were some pre-emptive OSs for 8086/8088 based PCs, but they had a lot of limitations, particularly around memory management and protection), if not outright impossible. Hence the popularity of DOS in its day — it was simple, cheap, didn’t require a lot of resources, and mostly stayed out of the way of application development. It worked reasonably well given the limitations of the platforms it ran on, and the expectations of users.

So IBM did just fine from that deal — it was when they went in with Microsoft to replace DOS with a new OS that did feature pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, and other modern techniques that they got royally screwed over by Microsoft (vis: the history of OS/2 development).

As someone who has done some OS dev, it’s not likely to be of much help. DOS didn’t have much of any of the defining features of most modern OS’s — it barely had a kernel, there was no multitasking, no memory management, no memory protection, no networking, and everything ran at the same privilege level. What little bit of an API was there was purely through a handful of software interrupts — otherwise, it was up to your code to communicate with nearly all the hardware directly (or to communicate with whatever bespoke device driver your hardware required).

This is great for anyone that wants to provide old-school DOS compatibility, and could be useful in the far future to aid in “digital archaeology” (i.e.: being able to run old 80’s and early 90’s software for research and archival purposes on “real DOS”) — but that’s about it. DOS wasn’t even all that modern for its time — we have much better tools to use and learn from for designing OS’s today.

As a sort of historical perspective this is useful, but not likely for anything else.

AWS already had to effectively do this. AWS only exists in two regions in China because they licensed much of the AWS software to be run by a pair of Chinese-government affiliated ISPs inside China (that is, Amazon doesn’t run AWS in either of its China zones — it’s run by a pair of Chinese companies who license AWS’s software).

This is why the China AWS regions are often quite far behind in terms of functionality from every other region (they either haven’t licensed all the functionality, they don’t keep up-to-date at the same cadence as Amazon, or Amazon is holding certain functions back), and why you can’t really access them from the standard AWS console.

So in effect, Amazon did have to give their software to Chinese-government affiliated companies in order to continue operating in China.

Likely well deserved — but still unfortunate. The EV space only benefits from more options and more competition.

An honest review isn’t what’s going to kill their business. Even a bad product in and of itself isn’t necessarily what could cause the death of their business — it’s their not adequately tempering consumer expectations. From the sounds of it, they’ve oversold what the product can actually do, and are charging a price based on this fantasy.

If you’re honest in your marketing as to what your product can actually do, and charge a corresponding price then consumers and reviewers may be more forgiving. Where companies like this one which are doing fairly experimental stuff fail is when they over-promise and under-deliver. And reviewers will always take them to task when they do that.

Image for a moment how we Computer Scientists feel. We invented the most brilliant tools humanity has ever conceived of, bringing the entire world to nearly anyone’s fingertips — and people use it to design and perpetuate pathetic brain-rot garbage like Gab.ai and anti-science conspiracy theories.

Fucking Eternal September…

A big reason for that programme was to try to take some of the most polluting vehicles off the road (either due to age or being in poor repair). There is no need for such a programme in a world of electric vehicles, so I doubt there would be any incentive for a government to run some a programme again.

It’s mostly improved chemistries and manufacturing processes. What we call “lithium ion batteries” aren’t the same today as they were even just in the 2010s. We have newer chemistries (lithium cobalt oxide, lithium manganese oxide, lithium iron phosphate, lithium manganese cobalt, lithium nickel cobalt aluminium oxide, etc.), newer solid state battery technologies, better cell packaging, and overall better manufacturing processes.

Will these cells still have 100% capacity after 15 years? Likely not — but even if they’re only at 80 - 90% of their original capacity that’s still quite a lot of driving capacity for most EVs.

Here is one non-peer reviewed study on Tesla battery deterioration, which shows that at the ~10 year mark, battery capacity loss is at around 17%. However, it’s worth noting that cars that hit the 8 through 10 year marks were more likely using older battery chemistry and construction techniques; newer cars at the 7 year mark only showed a roughly 7% battery capacity loss.

Time will tell, but the situation is significantly less bleak than naysayers (and the oil industry) want you to believe.

The batteries on modern EVs doesn’t wear anywhere near the rate that people think they do. A properly cared for battery (which doesn’t require much care other than keeping it charged properly) will easily last 15+ years — and likely beyond the lifetime of the car they were installed into. Manufacturers already offer 8+ year battery warranties on new EVs, because they know they can easily beat that (barring a manufacturing defect of some kind).

(In Japan, Nissan has been taking cells out of old Leafs that have at least 80% remaining capacity and are making them into home power packs. The Nissan Leaf was one of the first EVs and used an older battery chemistry — and even there, the batteries are typically outliving the cars they were originally installed into).

It’s a little difficult to say with certainty what the lifetime of an EV battery is going to be like right now, as EVs with modern chemistries aren’t yet 15 years old (they’re more like 5 to 7 years old at most). Anecdotally, those I know with EVs in that age range typically have less than 1% capacity loss (and ODB-II reader can typically check this for you, so it’s not difficult to determine).

Now of course it’s possible that someone has abused the hell out of their vehicle in ways that reduce the battery life (like routinely driving it to completely pull-over-to-the-side-of-the-road empty before recharging) — but as mentioned above an ODB-II reader will quickly show what the battery capacity is like. Hopefully used car sellers would check this themselves and provide it to buyers — but if not, ODB-II readers on Amazon aren’t terribly expensive to buy to check for oneself.

Battery wear concerns are going to be more for “classic” EV collectors in 30+ years time, and won’t be for your typical EV driver.

The levers available to the Federal Government in this area are few; the Provinces hold most of the cards when it comes to housing, and it disgusts me that all too many of my fellow Canadians have so little clue as to how the system works that they blame the Federal Government (and/or “Trudope”), while letting their Provincial leaders (the majority of which are Conservatives) off the hook.

Just today we’re seeing the Premiere of Alberta attempting to halt some of the Federal Governments deals with the municipalities to enhance housing supplies — purely because if they let the Feds provide assistance they won’t have a cudgel to hold against them anymore. It’s you don’t do enough to help and we won’t let you!

The only policy solution to the current housing woes is more housing supply. And that’s ultimately in the hands of the Provinces.

Truly “poor people” (to use your words) typically don’t buy a lot of new cars in the first place. People on the lower end of the income scale are the main drivers of the used vehicle market.

Incentivizing EV purchases and infrastructure ultimately helps everyone. It will bring efficiencies to the supply chain, and will drive investment into resources that should help drive prices down. At the same time, within the next 5 years or so you should see growth in the used EV market, which as more stock becomes available and used EVs become more normalized should make them more economical to purchase (as they’re already more economical to run and maintain).

More new EVs now means more used EVs down the road, which will allow people to get into a better car for less money.