The problem is that the vendor (e.g., HP) has control over updates for the OS, but if the browser is just an app, then Google can offer updates independently of the hardware vendor. In most cases, vendors could keep offering updates for years after they choose to stop. We got burned on this when we bought a reasonably decent Chromebook for our kid, and didn't realize that it had been on the market for a couple of years and was about to stop getting updates.

I've found that when Amazon says to order by a certain time to get delivery on a certain date, they're usually right. Of course, the trick is that on many items, Amazon's shipping is so fast that they intentionally add a day into the process before it ships, likely in hopes of combining orders. Or at least it seems that way, as items usually take a day to ship and then a day to deliver.

Thanks for the kind words.

Yes, it's hard to find postings for jobs that match my experience level, so I'm also applying for things with lower requirements. I've had several interviews and a bunch of phone screens, including one interview today that went really well.

I can't comment on what Dell does for employees that it lays off, but I will say that between whatever they may or may not do and my investments, I'm not in any immediate trouble. That's not going to be the case for more junior people.

The article cites Feb 2nd, which happened to be my last day when Dell laid me off. I was in the storage division (formerly EMC), and a number of people were let go. Dell typically does some layoffs every year, but this was more than usual.

That's true. I see Ground News advertising all over the place now. At least what they sell doesn't appear to be exactly the same as a dozen other companies.

Ouch. They sponsored probably half the YouTube videos I watch. They must have dumped a ton of money on those sponsorships. Who's going to fund all those channels now?

(Well, maybe not half, but I did see them mentioned often, though only when watching something just posted, as Sponsor Block skips over those sections most of the time.)

No, I expect the opposite to be the problem. People who have moved to streaming will drop off their old DVD collections, leaving the box overflowing with DVDs people aren't borrowing.

We have a "buy nothing" group in our town, and people are giving away DVDs all the time. The library does monthly book sales of donated books that they aren't adding to their collection, and they also have tons of DVDs.

Also, in areas with good libraries, you can get most movies on DVD or BluRay there.

Yeah, I have trouble seeing how the other companies failing to compete shows that Apple did something wrong. Now if Apple had put pressure on app developers to not support competing platforms, then that would be different, but there's nothing like that in the summary, and I'm too lazy to look up anything more (at least I'm being honest about it).

The only obvious monopolistic issue with the iPhone that I'm aware of is their app store. Not allowing competing stores while charging excessive commissions certainly looks like an anti-competitive practice. If there were real competition with multiple app stores, I would guess that commissions would be driven down from 30% to 10%, which sets out a lot of unfair profit that Apple has made. On the other hand, Google charges the same rates while allowing other app stores, so maybe they can defend that rate as fair.

Yup, they're way off. I'm thinking $1K/month/address not served from the time when service was claimed to when it is established.

The worst part of all of this is that you also hear stories about people spending $30K and up to get fibre service to their homes that are near the service area (and then they offer it at regular rates to everyone else on the street).

I'm guessing that the $10K fine is the most they're allowed to charge under the regulation in question, which is ridiculous.

You connect a USB cable from your phone to a computer. You enable USB debugging in the setup menu. You install 'adb' which is a standard android tool. Just Google "adb android" and the first 32767 hits or so will all be what you want.

You can disable bloatware apps, even ones that don't let you disable them. The trick is to connect with ADB, and then use 'disable-user' for the app, which will disable it for just one user, but you only have one user on the phone, so it's effectively the same. I used that on a Samsung a while back to disable all the Bixby junk, among other things.

Google should really crack down on making it impossible to disable apps. OK, maybe they'll insist you have a web browser, but only block disabling the current default app, so you can kill the preinstalled app once you've switched to another. And if you try to disable an app that you can't, it should say something like, "Sorry, you can't disable Bloat Services because it is required by 'Phone,' which is the default app for receiving phone calls." Once you change that default app and disable the apps that depend on B.S., you would be able to disable it.

A good study of web site bloat would also report on how much bandwidth ad blockers save. And comparing various ad blockers would give a good metric as to how effective they are.

And as someone else suggested, also measure upload data, especially with and without ad blockers.

Nonsense. They knew this wasn't the final design, and they were looking for problems. They found them. That was the point. The booster did every test, even though it failed the last one. That means they got data on every part of the booster's operation. I'm sure there were a good number of suboptimal behaviors we don't know about that they'll also fix.

Starship made it much further than it has before, so again, lots of data on parts of the flight that they didn't have previously, and lots of things to fix for the next flight.

Yes, they're still not ready to try to recover the booster or Starship, but they're a lot closer than they were before this flight. The data was the objective, and they got a ton. Mission successful.

The hard part with AI is training. Once you've trained the neural network, it's relatively easy to run it, but training can take massive clusters that can run into the millions or even cross into billions in extreme cases.

If course, everyone is hyping this now, but there isn't that much out there that people actually want to run on their local computer just yet. Too much is web based where your don't need any new resources, and the companies gathering the data would like to keep it that way.

Standardized tests can include unintended biases. Anytime there is a cultural difference, there will be vocabulary differences including subtle meaning differences that can skew responses in standardized testing. I haven't looked into the details, but it makes sense.

I know there are studies that show what the correlation levels are between college performance and standardized test scores, but I don't know if that data is broken down by different groups; I wouldn't be surprised if the correlation is the strongest among well-to-do white students and the weakest among poor students of color.

Should an admissions office use all the available data to generate the best possible calculation on a potential student's probability of success? That might include standardized scores, grades, data on the school they come from, their economic conditions, and their race and ethnicity.

And then there's the question of whether they want to be completely fair. There's a good argument that minorities are disadvantaged by generations of discrimination, so efforts to reverse that are still needed. Whether college admissions is an appropriate place to work towards that goal or not is a matter of debate.

I'm not sure what the right answers are. Having several years of not using standardized test scores should help give more data on what does and doesn't work in admissions.