How much would the nearest ISP quote to run a cable out to his cottage?

Pretty sure it would be an astronomically huge number.

Far too many times I've been in the middle of editing a text field on a web form when for some unknown reason my press of the backspace key was misinterpreted and instead of delete previous character I typed, it was "exit to previous page and discard all the stuff user spent the last five minutes filling out".

As an aside, it seems like a lot of pages are sending every keystroke back to update as you are typing stuff in, and whenever there is a hiccup in ping speed the user experience goes to crap. I wonder if the webpage devs ever even consider the impact of a crappy connection, just or assume everyone else is physically 50 feet and one network switch away from the server. It seems to have been happening a lot these days, what with all the DDOS attacks and outages going on.

One thing I've notice that been steadily rising the past decade, and really has taken off this year, is people, usually using bots, to buy up any sort of limited quantity product that they think there will be a resale market for, and then turn around to sell it on eBay, etc a huge markup.

New Game Consoles, Concert Tickets, New release Video Cards, pretty much anything they imagine has a profit potential. And it's not just consumer goods, I saw a lot of attempted rent seeking/arbitrage in local real estate when the market was so hot the past few years. I ran into people renting multiple apartments and turning them all around on AirBnB, etc.

At least for me, I've had to take a hard-line on not buying something marked up second hand (that shouldn't be), and just 'letting it go' rather than know that I am contributing to this behavior.

I really would like to see some sort of tech solution to allow people the same chances as everyone else to purchase limited and new items, but I can figure out any scheme that can't be gamed.

> But if you're a normal worker, just save a lot early on, keep saving at a decent pace, and cash out early if you can.

Not everyone can. Two groups of 'best laid plains' derailing people quickly come to mind:

Many of my co-workers, and myself included, got divorced in their 40s and set back financially 10 to 20 years. It doesn't matter than in the vast majority of cases I personally witnessed their spouses were unfaithful, wanted to try for someone new, or were just tired of being a parent and wanted 'to be free' - as the main breadwinner for their families they usually wound up on the short end of custody and the big end of paying out support for years.

Additionally, financial black-swan events, like losing one's job during the 2008 crisis followed by extended unemployment, caused many people to have to 'cash out' their retirement savings in order to survive financially and not lose their homes, etc. Not only did they have to sell their retirement account assets at fire-sale prices, they got to pay the extra tax penalty for doing so. Many who fell into this camp were also set back decades financially.

My point is, even when individuals "do everything right" financially - working hard for years and years, diligently saving for retirement while trying to live life, raise a family, and generally trying to do a little more than just exist for their employers - their financial world can be upended and they find themselves looking at retirement before 70 not even being a possibility. And what 'safety net' do we have for them? none.

Quite possibly... very little to none.

The Crew Dragon Capsule has 8 different abort modes and splashdown locations and is capable of aborting at any point during launch. If the Falcon 9 booster explodes, the automatic systems should be capable of getting the capsule clear and safely get it back in nearly all scenarios.

Imagine a near repeat of the Challenger disaster, with the first stage exploding between 60 and 90 seconds after launch, and the astronauts being yanked clear and safely recovered instead of conscious until impact with the ocean. The impact on the perception of SpaceX and NASA would be far better as people would first be horrified but then quickly overjoyed and relieved. SpaceX would get huge accolades and positivity for making such an event survivable.

Clearly the problem is that the web pages need to be more "Mobile friendly" and support features like one item per screen and continuous loading.

That will fix everything and make PDFs obsolete and we will sing their praises ...or so my UX/UI design teams tells me...

> Are you able to share details on the backstory?

An awful lot of it, probably not without incurring the wrath of the IP holders. And it's always worth remembering that everyone has a different perspective on any given thing.

I suppose I can say that in the beginning, it took years of trying to find someone at Microsoft interested in a digital re-release. For the HD edition, no one at Microsoft really thought there would be much demand for it - a 2D game from the 1990s. This was before remasters and 'HD editions' of older games was a common thing, and the traditional RTS genre had fallen out of favor with MOBA, etc being the new hotness. Once it was clear there was an audience and demand for it, well.. remember the old proverb: "Success has a thousand fathers" and all that involvement led to Age 4 being on the way among other things.

> A good chunk of why AoE2 is even still around is due to:

There's a whole lot more to the story than will ever be told... (I ought to know)

| You, sir, are an asshole.....

No, I think he works for Boeing....

> when SIP got released a few years ago, they simply refused to update their software and instead chose to simply disable SIP.

Could it be that they don't see the reason to update their software to a newer version every single year, especially when the work they do involves multi-year projects and they don't want to have to constant stop and re-learn every time the UI / UX changes because some "designer" needs to justify their job by changing it?

No matter - the movement to make all software subscription based and require a persistent internet connection will fix that - soon they will get buggy updates all the time without any warning or ability to opt-out.

> There was Borland Delphi which did everything better than VB and also was a better language.

But Delphi didn't come out until 1995, while Visual Basic was released in 1991. While both had the advantage of being a continuation of DOS-based programming language products, that 4 year gap kept them from truly going head-to-head.

Shortly after the release of Delphi, Borland released C++ Builder, which was basically Delphi, but using C++ instead of Pascal as the underlying language.

Many people don't know that after languishing for several years in the early-mid 2000s, both of Borland's RAD language products (Delphi & C++ Builder) traded hands and experienced something of a renaissance, and have been back in full development and support for a decade or so now. Keeping up with the latest in language standards, using Clang/LLVM, having bi-annual releases and roadmaps, and providing cross-platform development among Windows, OSX, iOS and Android. There's actually quite an ecosystem of stuff for them.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi Current Delphi product page

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder Current C++ Builder product page

Apparently that's a feature for Intel & Microsoft, etc and not a bug.

Imagine the horror if everyone kept their current PC and OS twice as long .. maybe even as much as 1/5th the lifespan of a good toaster .. Quarterly revenue growth would be devastated and shareholders and the market would revolt. Can't have that now, can we?

Apple wouldn't leave a lot 'money on table' with more expensive NAND so lets say they did 3 different sets of NAND flash: 512, 1TB and 2TB and fused off access to make 128 and 256GB configurations.

That's still 3 x 3 x 2 or 18 different main board variations, which is more than the 2014 Mini, which had 9 motherboard versions (the most for a Mini to that point in time). So not that likely.

I'm guessing Apples bigger plans regarding the T2 Chip and security trumped the streamlining of manufacturing issues and costs enough to make them choose this path.

Now I wonder which of the 28 variations will be the rarest.

Based on the teardown, and fiddling with Apple's online purchase configuration, it looks like they must have 28 different versions of the 201 Mac Mini mainboard.

Options for components soldered onto the mainboard:

3 different CPUs (i3, i5 and i7)

5, 4 and 5 SSD options (128, 256, 512, 1TB and 2TB) depending on the CPU. i5 can't be equipped with 128GB, but i7 can as CPU upgrade from i3

2 different Ethernet NICs ( Gigabit and 10GB )

So ( 5 + 4 + 5 ) * 2 = 28 different sets of components soldered to the mainboard.

Even for Apple, that's a lot of variations. I'm somewhat surprised they didn't go with docketed storage, which would reduced the Mac Mini to 6 different mainboard configurations.