The last time this comet came around was the Stone Age. To give an idea of how old the planet is, this comet has had time to visit Earth over 90,000 times!

I don't know if it was actually orbiting at all that far back, but that's the time scale. This uses the Wikipedia quoted age of Earth at 4.543Bn years.

I've had trouble with Zoom the several times I've tried it. Sometimes it worked ok for a little while, but then the camera would get laggy, or the sound would get choppy, or it would crash, or it wouldn't be able to find the camera, or some other weird misbehavior. Granted, it's been a while since I've tried it, because I hate having problems during meetings, so maybe they've worked some of this out. Also, I've now got pipewire instead of pulse, so maybe that'll make a difference. The point is that it just works on my Mac, and I don't have to think about it. I've already thought about it more in this post than I have the entire time I've used it on my Mac. Maybe I'll try it again for some low-risk meetings and see how it goes.

When I say "office" tasks, that's just "generally office stuff required by my company." Nowadays, a lot of that is web-based, but for a long time, I had a lot of mucking about with VPNs, or they required an antivirus to be installed to connect, or we used some software that wasn't available for linux, or a dozen other little things that just made Mac a lesser hassle. Now with Google Docs and Office 365, a lot of the required apps, like Outlook, are web-based, and perfectly accessible from Linux, but it's still nice to have the app installed in some cases. Linux has Teams packaged up on Electron, but I don't think any of the other apps are similarly available.

Point is, you have to choose your battles and pick your tools. I've found that the types of problems that I don't want to have are exactly the ones the Mac does absolutely flawlessly and without a second consideration. 0 brain cells dedicated. That said, I much prefer Linux for my development activities for the exact same reason. I tend to have to screw with things a bit on Mac to get them working, where on Linux they just work most of the time. So I do the tasks on the platforms that make them no-brainers. I've got enough problems.

I've been using Linux since the late 90s. It's amazing, and it's been my bread and butter my entire career. That said, I also really like Apple's stuff for some really pragmatic reasons.

* Macs are the closest "mainstream" thing to Linux. For the first half of my career, I wrote most of my Linux-targeted code in Windows because my companies wouldn't even consider anything else for corporate desktops. Talk about frustrating!! Over time, they became convinced (begrudgingly at first) to allow Macs, which at least is unixy enough to make life a lot easier. Non-tech people just like 'em more, cuz they're pretty and easier to use. Once they had the foot in the door, lots of people wanted them, and they became pretty standard.

* While my main developer workstation is a kickass Linux workstation, I do still keep a kickass Mac on my desk as well. I find that it just does some things better: Media, "office" tasks, Zoom, proprietary software that doesn't support Linux, and development tasks for projects where the usual workflow/scripts assume you're on a Mac. When I'm not using it, it makes a nice jukebox. :)

* The hardware lasts *forever*. When it starts getting long in the tooth for MacOS, you install Linux on it. I'm still using 2012 Mac Minis running Ubuntu as a Kubernetes cluster. My 2015 Macbook Pro runs Linux Mint like a champ after a simple battery replacement several years ago. Seriously, I almost never throw the stuff out. So what do I do? I buy high-spec'ed hardware when I get it, and spend the money on it, because I know I can reasonably expect to still be using it in ten years. I upgrade my high-touch machines every 3-5 years, and the existing machines go to family members or my server cluster for a second life.

I know MS has changed their stripes somewhat over the last decade, but as an old timer who saw their antics under Ballmer and Gates, I still struggle with considering Windows or its ecosystem for anything at all. It might be better in some ways, but old habits and prejudices die hard, I guess, so, for me, it's not even in the running.

I tend to work for startups and SMBs, most of which do not have the attitudes and drives many people here seem to assume. They don't have these fabled real estate portfolios, and they tend to be pretty light on management. They've almost all not only embraced work from home for current staff, but they've been hiring remote-only workers in states (and countries!) where they have no presence at all.

The place I work now is a truly distributed company with tech workers spread across the world, and very few people going to offices. We have offices in a couple major cities, and some people who live in those cities do go there if they choose, but they sit at their desk on Zoom for most of their meetings anyway, talking to their team mates all over the planet.

This distributed nature was often the case in the huge companies I've worked at too. Seemed like most of our meetings were video conferences anyway, with people sitting in other offices.

Working from home is just an extension of the way most companies were already operating in an increasingly globalized and distributed environment. It's not some new thing, it's just the next step.

There are several episodes in TNG where they illustrate an actual continuity of consciousness during transport.

There was a Barclay-focused episode (Realm of Fear) where he saw "monsters" (missing crew members) who were living in the matter stream, and which actually managed to interact with him, and he with them. He speaks with other crew members, who confirm that they sometimes see things in there too during transport, but everything is weird and blown out of proportion, so it's nothing to worry about. Or words to that effect.

I don't remember the other episode by name, but I remember a comment made that they "felt like they were stuck inside the wall" for a moment, due to a stop-and-go transport (which seemed unnecessary anyway, but I digress.)

So, in at least these two episodes that spring to my mind, you don't "black out" and re-appear as a new person at the other end. You are the same, fully conscious person during the entire process.

Are you arguing against hunting or gardens? People do both for the same reasons -- enjoyment, connectedness with nature, knowing what's actually *in* their food, even tradition. Just because you don't see a reason doesn't mean there aren't any.

Besides, the domain name makes sense from a different context: the viewer's. When a viewer in his district goes there, it would be ostensibly be *their* congressman. It's like "MyFreeCreditReport.com" or "MyCorporation.com" or whatever. They're not claiming ownership -- they're offering service for the viewer, with a name relative to the viewer.

Should we sue Intuit because they're claiming ownership of corporations created at mycorporation.com?

My wife sang the same song as a child growing up in Ecuador, and a variation on the English version was even a theme song for the Canadian kids' show The Elephant Show with Sharon, Lois and Bram. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon,_Lois_&_Bram)

Pretty popular song, apparently.

to get a good but affordable Rational Database system,

"Relational." "Rational" isn't a word that's often applied to MySQL.

Damn, they ARE doing well. They made 211% of their income in 2007, WITHOUT counting XP/Vista or Office! I bet if they include those, it'd be a zillion.

Ahmm. You mean the land we paid $15M for after we'd won the war? How often do you see that happen? If it were anyone else, the land would simply have been taken, tough luck, so sorry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Cession

Face it, Hater. The United States have always been gracious winners.

The place I work has taken it a step further in that the machines have unofficial names that aren't in DNS. The machines actually have names like (dept)(purpose)(location)(number)(product), which is admittedly hard to remember, let alone call out. Unfortunately, our two QA boxes were dubbed "Laurel" and "Hardy" in a casual conversation about their "personalities," and the names stuck for people who were privy to the conversation. Of course, this was before I started working there, so I was confused as hell when someone told me to log into Laurel, which isn't an actual server name. WTF?

You have no idea how right you are:

http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2008/12/02/2008-12-02_it_took_90_minutes_for_daily_news_to_ste.html

No biggie. Just reminded me of that skit is all. :)