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I hear ya there.
And they had the nerve to ask for shipping.
As the aircraft designer said, "Simplicate and add lightness".
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.3.0 JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: SimpleWizardUpdate
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Mike Hankey wrote: And they had the nerve to ask for shipping.
And not even offer a cable...
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Yeah I'd hate to see what they want for a cable.
As the aircraft designer said, "Simplicate and add lightness".
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.3.0 JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: SimpleWizardUpdate
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"May not ship to UK" too. At that price I'd expect them to hand deliver it to anywhere, frankly.
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The phrase "Or best offer" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there. 
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I'd thought about offering $25 just to be ornery.
As the aircraft designer said, "Simplicate and add lightness".
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.3.0 JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: SimpleWizardUpdate
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I noticed they didn't even bother to clean it first.
Then I realize that they probably didn't want to remove the Steve Jobs fingertip DNA.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I hadn't thought of that.
As the aircraft designer said, "Simplicate and add lightness".
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.3.0 JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: SimpleWizardUpdate
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Sure, it looks like a great price, but then you have to throw in shipping and handling and it turns into a rip-off.
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I was not surprised to see this article:
Google Drive users angry over losing months of stored data[^]
I have non-critical and non-personal (no financial data, etc.) in cloud services including OneDrive, but periodically save backups. I've been told I'm paranoid ... my response is that hardware failure is a "when" not an "if" ... and let's not get into human error ...
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I've seen some articles suggesting there's no "error" or "failure" here, and it's all by design, as Google has apparently been sending emails for months warning they'd be doing a massive cleanup of unused accounts. On December 1st, to be exact.
Coincidence? I wouldn't be surprised if the two events were related. Maybe they've started doing it on a small scale before pulling the trigger, and everybody's now finding out it's including stuff that should NOT be deleted (eg, data that is NOT inactive).
IMO: Cloud services claim to sell a solution for the lazy. The reality is that you shouldn't give up on the good old tried and true methods.
As per the subject line - make your own backups, because their EULAs sure don't say they're responsible for anything that happens to your data.
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I doubt that this situation is exactly by design, as the accounts affected are not ones that have been dormant for 2+ years -- it's accounts with recent activity where data was lost. I read an update on Google's plans to terminate dormant accounts just before I read the article I referenced.
Which doesn't mean the two things are not connected -- but if they are, I suspect someone screwed up very badly and did the wrong accounts.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
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BryanFazekas wrote: Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Surely there's some of that here.
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BryanFazekas wrote: I doubt that this situation is exactly by design, as the accounts affected are not ones that have been dormant for 2+ years
There is an old story from the Computing Center at the University of Copenhagen, around 1970 (so, no URL reference to the event  ).
Clocks with battery backup were not common. After a power failure, the operator had to type in the current date and time of day on the system console. It happened that the operator mistyped the year without discovering that he missed by a decade. Before the mistake was discovered, they had run the cleanup program that deleted all files that hadn't been touched for six months.
There is an interesting 'Part 2' to this story: Disk space was terribly expensive in those days, so all large data sets were kept on 1/2" magnetic tape. The cleanup program didn't wipe the tapes. But ... Standard tape formats, used when exchanging data with other installations, contained complete metadata for every file. Even tape was expensive, so Univac (this happed on a Univac 1100 system) had devised a format where only the data blocks were densely packed on the tape, while all metadata was maintained on disk, for fast searching for files. All this metadata was wiped by the cleanup procedure. The 'real data' was still there on tape, but on which tape? Where on that tape? Noone could tell.
Our professor, when telling this story, said that a for a few very important projects, the viable tape wheel candidates had been dissected by hand, and the blocks put together, like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Fortunately, in those days, a lot of research didn't depend completely on the computer, it was more like a calculator that you picked up for specific calculations; that was all.
Imagine the situation today, if the next pandemic doesn't infect humans, but the virus thrive on silicon and is capable of getting through the shields to eat every logical gate of all digital electronics on earth. I have difficulties finding a single (Western) human activity that could continue completely unaffected if that happened.
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trønderen wrote: but the virus thrive on silicon and is capable of getting through the shields
Shields?
Chips have a epoxy package. So silicon is not exposed there. And actually inside is Silicon Dioxide.
And Silicon Dioxide is not very reactive. So I doubt a virus could exist by itself that could do that. It would require a medium as well which means no spread.
Now plastic might be a better candidate for that scenario. I would not be surprised if there are also limitations even with that scenario.
So probably best to just stick with an EMP.
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I guess you didn't get my point.
If, one way or the other (I'm not going to suggest any alternative to a virus; I guess you would start arguing against that as well) all our digital processors stopped working, can you imagine the effect on our culture? It would be devastating. We have made ourselves, both personally and as a society/culture 100% dependent on digital technology.
That is what worries me. Not the probability of some randomly picked, specific threat. It could be something completely different.
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Looks like a book that I most certainly should pick up!
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trønderen wrote: If, one way or the other
Yes. As noted in my reply and in the other post - EMP. That is a high altitude electromagnetic pulse.
A nuclear weapon, high altitude can do this.
But a solar flare can also do it.
There are any number of fictional books that describe those scenarios. Some a bit more factual than others.
The most significant failure is not necessarily 'personal' electronics but rather that the entire electrical system, especially power station transformers, would be fried.
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The actual mechanism for knocking out our electronics is not essential to me. Some may be more sneaking in without our notice until it is too late (such as the virus alternative I suggested), others are more immediate and violent (such as an atomic bomb EMP or a devastating solar storm).
Total loss of electrical power is sufficient. Imagine trying to save yourself, e.g. in a remote mountain cabin together with a gang of teenagers, with no way of charging their smartphones ... And when they find a way to do it, using the solar panels at the cabin roof, they realize that the base station to which their phone tries to connect, has no power ...
That is when you regret that you didn't bring along that pile of adventure books from your grandparents' home, to read out to them for entertainment. (They probably have read too little to read the books by themselves, but anyway: Reading to a group of listeners is a great activity!)
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There is something else that could affect our electronic civilization that has a much higher probability, in fact more than most people think, and we will likely be ill prepared for it just like the last pandemic: Coronal Mass Ejections (CME). Put your backups in a Faraday cage! Which institutions and systems are prepared enough?
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None.
It would knock out the power supply. That alone would kill our culture within 24 hours.
Our homes would turn to ice (right now, my outdoors temperature is 12.4 Celsius below freezing, 10 F).
We couldn't charge our cars.
Our smartphones would go dead within a day or two.
We couldn't charge our portables, and even with a diesel generator to power our desktop PC, the concentrator for our fiber internet connection, or maybe the local ISP itself, is dead from lack of power.
The food in your freezer and fridge would rot - sooner in summertime than in winter, so what would you prefer: Freeze to death, or starve to death?
What about your 'social' contacts, the socalled 'social' media?`
What kind of entertainment would you have available?
Could you read a book in the winter evening? (And: Do you have a book?  )
Your local plant for filtering your drinking water probably depends on a huge amount of electricity. Expect it to close down.
Same with your waste water / sour processing plant. Expect it to close down.
If you want to look at your own electricity dependencies alone, disregarding things such as water supply and wastewater processing: Why don't you tonight, this Friday night, abruptly turn OFF your main electric switch (maybe you don't have a switch but you can unscrew the main fuses) without making any preparations at all. Leave the main switch off (or main fuses unscrewed) until Sunday night 8 days from now, and then tell how well you and your family fared. And how you did it, in which ways you compensated for the lack of electricity.
I don't think very many families would dare to take up this challenge. And I believe that at least half of those who dared to, would ask for at least one day to prepare for it - have all their batteries charged, their gas tanks filled up etc.
Very few of us are anywhere close to prepared for such an event.
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They might be related but it's just a snafu, not a conspiracy.
Paul Sanders.
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal.
Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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You're right, I attribute this to incompetence rather than malice.
But the main point remains...if something's important to you, you can't have the only instance of it existing only on a cloud service.
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Absolutely
Paul Sanders.
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal.
Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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