You missed the #1 gigantic reason that eventually got Microsoft in trouble with antitrust and then they invested in Apple to get out of it. Microsoft made exclusive deals with computer vendors where they could get the OS and later the OS bundled with Word and other products at a huge discount if you didn't sell any competitor's products. I worked for and we sucked at Microsoft's teat. MS is probably half the enemy to consumers Apple is today, but in the 90s, they were the devil. They still have the absolute worst file system. NX isn't horrible, but compared to Linux and Mac offerings, it is a piece of garbage.

I don't hate Microsoft, I think they should win competitively, and in gaming lately, they are losing, from what I've read and seen. When I helped porting some (freeware) games from Windows to Linux and Mac, they were beating the Windows version by 5-6FPS (same as the Linux version). That was DX vs Vulkan. I want to try something with, say, Unreal Engine. This was all custom stuff and maybe we were just better at optimizing.

Won't happen, in fact, Apple was probably given a short timeline to fix it. Why? Because Signal is an approved application for contractors to communicate with government employees, including Secret and Top Secret.calls as long as everyone on the call is approved. I've been on some of these calls. Not that anything that needed to be classifeid was ever discussed.

Yeah, what competitors, lol.

Everyone I know in farming today (and I'm a descendant of farmers) owns John Deere everything. There is no other choice. They pay $200000+ (1 Mil+, I'm giving you low end) for combines because the choice is... that or IH or some other brand that has no presence where they live and zero maintenance or parts. Hey, those farmers sit in the cab and make money doing nothing, my cousin reads books, so it kind of pays for itself - laws require drivers, but everything is automated.

I miss just blaming Bobby Kotick for this...

Worst. Boss. Ever.

Actually, that's not true, I like blaming Bobby, but the dot com bust was worse (after I worked for and left Activision). I kept my job, but I saw 88% collective layoffs (multiple rounds). We joked the floggings would stop when morale improved. The guy that told me that joke was laid off.

And 10 years later I was laid off... and got a job paying more than twice as much. Wish I'd been laid off sooner, lol. No unions involved.

Totally. You have 9000 deprecated functions and 1006067 obsolete functions you need to update (that were installed before I got there). These will be removed in the next 3 days. I didn't f***** create the code, I don't have 9 years to update the goddamn code you deprecate or obsolete as abandonware daily, I need like 15 support people to keep up. I hated Node.js when I first tried it (same issues) and it is 1000x worse now.

I tease people about being anti-nuclear when coal and natural gas pump more radiation into the air than nuclear ever did, even from accidents. I still use natural gas for cooking, and I can't go outside without breathing coal pollution (the nearest power plant is coal). Sometimes I even use a coal grill.

If you look at the game crash of 1983, you notice the same game being released over and over in increasingly bad form due to a bunch of people trying just to make money at it without understanding why people buy the game is career suicide. The game industry has ALWAYS been extremely volatile. I professionally worked in it 3 months. I contracted more like 6ish (off-and-on, that's paid time).

But yeah, when I hear stuff like Sims 5 isn't in developement because they can keep milking Sims 4 despite the game having major flaws that the previous game addressed (but made it unstable), I know the industry isn't listening. I expect another 1983 soon, and another Nintendo.

You're forgetting the heavy dependence on rare earth element mining used in wind and solar (and batteries), 95% of the world's supply comes from China, which requires manufacturing in China and is highly subsidized by the Chinese government. China strip mines the elements and dumps the radioactive waste that comes with rare earth elements into landfills, which the US is required to sort and cask, so China can vastly undercut prices.

The absolute irony here is the largest Rare Earth Element deposit and mine is... in California. The US only uses it for the military because it is cheaper to buy the Chinese subsidized parts, but the military rightly doesn't trust them so uses US manufacturing. The US geological survey has identified 7 more major deposits (last I checked) and potentially 2 more that may be major deposits in the Unites States. Trump's push to secure more REE deposits for the United States is hilarious. The US already has them - subsidize them in the same way China does and people will build roads to those remote deposits and mine them.

In any case, my point is Wind and Solar are not exactly free of problems including waste issues, and they do wear out over time and need to be replaced. You also often need a means of storing the energy. Not in every case, of course - my grandpa's hand built windmill and generator was pumping water before he even got electricity to the house (out in farm country, that was 1950s) and was still running in the late 1980s when he retired.

Some SMRs generating more waste from the parent is nice cherry picking, of course some will be less efficient than conventional reactors, especially any built on conventional designs. The example used is X-Energy, which uses a pebble bed fast reactor cycle that promotes what we call nuclear waste to fissile plutonium and then burns that, so in theory it will have much less waste and be able to operate much longer without refueling (X-Energy thinks 60 years). Like all Gen IV designs, it is required to be passively safe, and yes, the only non-skeptical words from OP that are true is it will require more expensive and higher enriched starter fuel - all fast reactors require this, and Russia and China are the only countries with them right now, which is why they dominate the supply. The US canceled developing one in 1994 on a bunch of false pretenses (really, the only true one was potential proliferation risk).

I'm not entirely sold that SMRs are the right direction, but I do believe fast reactors are, which is the majority of Gen IV designs, if not all of them.

If they'd developed the right type of nuclear, that is not necessarily true. During the MSRE, they actually shut the plant down every night, so yes, you can balance the grid with nuclear power. Germany chose to abandon nuclear based on really bad environmentalist input, though. IMO, it was like asking a fruit farmer for input on how to build a skyscraper.

I was a victim of studio misbehavior during the runup to GOD games changing this behavior. Publishers would force an NDA and no attribution, no credit clause. When you wanted to say I did this, I worked on this, you couldn't. Switched to business software because I was sick of being f***ed up the ass by the game and music industries. Basically, had to go into a job with zero experience with 5 years of experience. Yeah, f*you game industry. On that note, anyone need GLIDE 3D, lol. 3dfx joke, nVidia won that war.

Taiwan is effectively the rebels (Republican Forces) that defied Mao and the cultural revolution and where they fled when defeated. I'm not judging, but I didn't kill the most people ever by starvation of any regime because I hated sparrows. Thanks Mao, you win.

On the one hand, coal is thousands of jobs and voters, on the other, the worst polluting, poorest energy producing and biggest dumping of radioactive waste on consumers of any power. GO BIG COAL GO BIG COAL. MAGA, MAGA. Yeah, f*** that, I skipped pep rallies in high school by hiding in the physics lab for this very reason.

What they're capturing here is that instant coffee can capture the ideal roast-to-brew timing, then dry it out. Drip coffee has so many factors - when the beans were roasted and ground, what type of grinder was used (burr is usually best), water temperature (200F/93C for brewing, give or take), how long it was sitting on a burner after being brewed, etc. Whole beans are usually best within 3 weeks of roasting, ground beans about 3 days from breaking a flavor seal (vacuum packing helps). Try drip coffee like that vs, say, Folger's Crystals a week after opening the can. There should be no natural sourness to it, and when my mom brews ground, canned coffee, it tastes like someone added a lemon.

General AI. The AI I've programmed all had a specific task it was supposed to optimize. It wasn't very good at it, but you know, 1990s tech, lol.

AI would do great following Happy Path for IT. Non-Happy Path with no workaround documentation, ouch, fail. Going by real world experience, We had an engineer figure out a workaround and the AI failed hard. Probably 3-6 months of downtime and $500 million+ dollars of fail, so yeah... There is now a documented fix and bugfixed installer, after we reported it, but it took 6 months.