The US and other western countries have outsourced high-tech manufacturing for decades. If you had a meeting of all the plastic injection molding experts in the US you could probably fit them in a room. Try that in Shenzhen and you'd need a city block or two standing room only. In the UK, back in the 80s when employers still believed that people would work for them for life, there were degree courses sponsored by companies, like British Telecom, that were designed to form a pipeline of engineers for them. If the US were serious about having chip manufacturing (or any manufacturing) it would be wise to develop the pipeline. In this case, TSMC themselves may want to have a 3-year training program where US staff relocate to Taiwan to learn the ropes and then return to the US.

Wrong things on Stack Exchange?

No! That could never happen!

Well, that's what they tried to do. That was three weeks ago. The latest news (what this article is about) is that on their second or third try, the backed nearly all the way down, and are no longer doing that.

The reason I say "nearly" is that they're not trying to de-authorize the OGL 1.0a just for now; they haven't said they won't try to do it again in the future. (And, yes, I would agree with you, as does, for instance, Paizo, that that's not something they can do, and Paizo has said they will defend that in court.)

So, for now, WotC isn't trying to do anything that bad any more. They've gone back on trying to un-open all the gaming content that's been open for 23 years. Slashdot is a few weeks behind on this story. There's been a LOT of very heated response (and fairly one-sided anti-WotC response) on gaming message boards and th elike.

It's always rich when a billionaire complains about excessive employee compensation.

I don't know if this is talked about, but for mere scientists trying to *use* HPC facilities, this is often the truth:

Myth: our CPU/Accelerator performance metrics are meaningful even though our filesystems bog many jobs down to death

This sounds like a feature, not a bug...

I can predict with confidence that we are NOT reaching the end of blowhards making bold and broad pronouncements.

Hooray! More ads! Ads saturating more of what we see in everyday life! More incentive to intrusively mine any bit of data that anybody can find on us to build as complete a profile as possible that will assuredly never be misused, no, definitely not! This is what all of us have been wanting!

A flood of answers that appear superficially correct but that aren't right on closer examination...

...how will that be different from Stack Overflow with human users?

I realized the subtle pro-China propaganda videos popping up in my stream - stay with me! - I'm not a tinfoil hat wearer - but it was incongruent enough to tickle my Spidey-sense. In amongst the dance videos and memes, were videos of normal Chinese people talking about their apartment building, videos by US teenagers living in China raving about how it was more free than the US, and a whole load of what I'd class as "life in the US isn't great" type videos calling out well known US issues like guns, trash, and wage inequality. None of this by itself is wrong but it is definitely pro-Chinese propaganda even if an algorithm picked it. Note that I didn't see any pro-other country propaganda material - just China, which was odd. I am aware that the US has propaganda as well - most of the mass media promotes US values. But it did make me uneasy that the Chinese, who I actually have a lot of respect for, certainly had a hand on the tiller of my video stream and were 100% peppering it with pro-China content. You are what you consume and that goes for that screen you put in front of your face for hours every day. If you don't mind having your thoughts influenced then keep TikTok'ing, but for me, I deleted it.

That's not just a posit... that's mathematically how things actually work.

(Well, until we get to cases where strong gravity is involved. Then, we don't really have a good theory that describes everything.)

It's good to use frameworks and libraries because you don't have to "reinvent the wheel".

The thing is... it's often good to reinvent the wheel so that you get *just a wheel*.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Of course, it's the nature of the open-source world that there will be a bunch of different projects that more or less all function similarly.

Quoting the original article, in the "Linux Mint" section:

"but replaces them with dodgy bits of its own, such as a confusing choice of not one, not two, but three Windows-like desktops,"

This is what led me to say that the article seems to consider having multiple desktops available a flaw.

I have this problem that, unlike what most people seem to think is obvious, I *don't* want my desktop to operate like Mac. I find using a Mac desktop is like using a text editor other than my preferred one (which is increasingly necessary as text editing is moving to being whatever javascript monstrosity is attached to the collaboration or notebook platform you're forced to use); I'm always fighting with it and trying to work around it's little assumptions that are different from what I want.

Lots of the Linux desktops have been moving in directions that are nominally to make them more Mac-like. I think they often don't really do, or they *would* if everybody else did what they thought everybody else should do. But, as a result, I recently went back to FVWM, because I can make it work the way I want to. I used xfce for a number of years, but as time went by, it was getting harder and harder to configure it to do what I want. Giving in to what I find as the extremely annoying trend of "client-side decorations" was the last straw for me.

FVWM's configuration system is *exactly* the sort of thing people point at when they try to say that it makes Linux unusable on the desktop. And, it's exactly what makes it usable for me.

The broader point is: the original article seemed to indicate that having a choice of desktops was a *flaw*. It confuses users, or something. But, from my point of view, having a choice of desktop managers is the killer feature of Linux on the desktop. You aren't stuck with the default assumptions of either Windows or Mac. Yeah, there are still a lot of default assumptions built in, but there's a lot more flexibility than you find in other worlds. The ascendence of GTK (linked with GNOME) and the assumptions it's trying to force on the LInux desktop world are not healthy, in my opinion, as it's going to make it harder and harder for people to configure desktops if they don't like the built-in assumptions of GTK. But, at least for now, you can still get things to work the way you want if what you want doesn't happen to match either the majority, or what somebody has convinced the majority to think they want (or at least accept).