• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 21st, 2026

help-circle


  • Ideally you want the OS to be updated, because old OS are vulnerable when the computer is networked. In fact most IT departements require every PC to have an up to date OS.

    It’s not always a matter of bothering - many applications are customized and made for a specific purpose. An application could have been sold to only one company as a one off, or even developed by a long retired employee. Want an update after 20 years? Sure, after paying another invoice, provided that the developing company still exists and is still willing to support such old tech.

    It is just a given that many companies are stuck with some old software somewhere in their process. That explains the policy for Windows.

    Windows: “if we stop shipping this 25 year old library 5% of corporate users will experience problems which will cost us money and reputational damage, so we keep it compatible.”

    Linux distro: “we are going to replace X with Y because it is better. Things will break and it is partially up to the community to solve it.”






  • Europe doesn’t use split phase.

    US split phase uses a special local transformer (with a center tap) to split a phase voltage in half. Thus resulting in 240V and 120V, both derived from the same phase upstream. We don’t have such a complication. We use just the three phases that are transported all the way from the power plant, of course transformed down in voltage but not split.

    The phases are 120⁰ apart. The voltages between the phases is 400V and the voltage from any phase to neutral is 230V (all voltages ± 10%). New buildings get 3 phase connections standard. Single phase is supplied to older houses which limits their power use to around 230V x 40A (current depending on the country) or around 9 kW.

    380V is a decades old standard from the time when different European countries still had minor voltage differences




  • Your explanation is solid but it’s also very dev-centric.
    Wysiwyg has been a solved problem in GUI for over 40 years, when people first started using editors like MacWrite and WordPerfect/Word.

    Web browsers still don’t have a wysiwyg editor built in after decades of development, thereby forcing developers to use js-like solutions. Which obviously suck as you mention.

    So developers resort to a minimalist markup language like markdown (even though html is already a markup language) but then still the implementation is not up to par with what users expect. Most developers aren’t skilled in UX and resort to doing things “the dev way”. That is the explanation why pressing Enter doesn’t always introduce a new line for ordinary users, trying to type a few paragraphs of text on a discussion platform.