The announcement of a new Perfect Dark has reminded me of a good story from my time at ATI. It was 2005 and I was in the 3D Application Research Group. The team which included @shaderwrangler @ChrisOat @mirror2mask @pixelmaven was working on the "Ruby: The Assassin" demo for

I got a Toshiba T1200, which has a bad screen, and a dead CMOS battery, and I thought the hard drive was broken too...

but I rebooted it and heard a KTHUNK and a really loud spin-up noise and holy shit, the hard drive works!

and it still has files on it. the newest date is January 1994.

It's a 21mb hard drive, with ~37k of bad sectors.

This fucker is never going to spin up again, so I better go find some serial cables and copy shit off now.

The backlight is fucked so I'm shining a flashlight on it.
without it, it looks like this.

X : Our executive team is concerned that we need to up our game in order to out innovate Amazon.
Me : Do you map?
X : Yes
Me : Like this?
X : No. What's that?
Me : A map of a tea shop.

X : Why is that a map?
Me : Long story, all to do with how space has meaning. To keep it short, maps help people to focus on user needs, the components involved, to communicate missing components and scenario play ideas like staff becoming robots.

Me : They’re also good for measuring and managing capital flow, making investment decisions, removing bias and getting rid of duplication.
X : I don’t see how that helps with innovation?

Me : Well, innovation is a tricky word because we use it to describe many things. If you’re talking about differentiation with the adjacent unexplored then you’re experimenting in the “uncharted” space e.g. immortality with magic provided by the special custom built kettle.

X : That sounds like nonsense.
Me : A lot of what people think will be the next great innovation is nonsense. Actually, most of it is. That’s the nature of the uncharted space, it’s experimental, high risk and generally results in failure.
X : We need more reliable innovation.

EV Battery overview
Batteries are the key differentiator between the various EV manufacturers. The amount of energy stored in the battery determines the range of the EV, thought to be a major limitation on EV sales.

Consumers tend to worry that an EV with a range of 80 to 250 miles on a single charge would be inconvenient for long trips due to the time it takes to recharge the battery. Commercial batteries need to ensure there is quick recharge and less time between charges

The lithium-ion battery is important because it makes EVs expensive than ICEs. Battery costs per kilowatt-hour (kWh) declined from roughly $1,000 per kWh in 2010 to $227 in 2016

Lithium-ion batteries made up 70 percent of the rechargeable battery market in 2016
BNEF projects that global production capacity for lithium-ion batteries will increase from 103 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in the first quarter of 2017 to 273 GWh by 2021.

The battery manufacturing supply chain has three main parts:

cell manufacturing,

module manufacturing, and

pack assembly.

So is Apple's anti-theft security a wonderful boon to users?

Or is it just another evil corporation strengthening it's monopoly power?

I had the misfortune of buying a 2018 Mac Mini on ebay a few days ago. Unfortunately, it had not been wiped, and it's security defaults had never been changed.

This essentially turns it into a very shiny paperweight.

And this is where everybody jumps to blame the victim. "But everybody knows you have to make sure the seller wipes the Mac."

My how the corporate overlords have trained us to be their apologists.

To be clear, I'm a software engineer. Part of my job is supporting Mac users. Where I work, people hold on to their computers for several years generally, and the T2 chips are only a couple of years old, so I hadn't run into this situation at work.

Of course, I'd read about them, but I was confident that whatever condition the computer arrived in, I'd likely be able to deal with it.

Unfortunately I hadn't read up enough to be an expert on their T2 chip and Activation lock.