Yes it was. I was working for a large financial company at the time and we had a bunch of DOS machines running programs to send analytical data to Reuters. We were able to get 2 DOS instances running on an OS/2 box, reducing our hardware requirements in half. We also kept a few DOS machines running for A/B testing and the OS/2 machines ended up being more stable.

Up to now, the whole ransomware scheme has functioned on the premise that if a company pays the ransom, they will get the keys to unlock their data and BlackCat will delete whatever data they have. If BlackCat is cheating their 'partners' who still have access to the data and can still cause problems for the target then future ransomware targets will reconsider paying the ransom. Enough companies refuse to pay and the entire scheme will implode.

I've lived in several apartment buildings and have never experienced or heard of bulk cable pricing. However, I've lived in plenty of places where I wasn't able to get decent cable or internet because some other provider had exclusive distribution rights to the area and had shitty channel selection and horrendously slow internet.

While I DO think visually, I know a lot of people that are not visual thinkers. However, I believe there's a difference between thinking visually and being able to visualize something in detail. While many people should be able to create a fleeting image of something for visualization purposes, most people don't have the ability to form a longer lasting image that can be examined. I know that this is going to sound silly, but in my youth I went through a self-hypnosis / meditation phase where visualization was part of the process. Like, picture a drawing board with nothing drawn on it, and then moving onto simple objects with little detail, like a key or ball. Honestly, it took me a LONG time before I was able to hold any object on my drawing board that didn't morph or fade when I tried to look at it closer. Sadly, I can no longer hold an image for any length of time but I still can visualize objects (sometimes complex) for short periods of time.

Or better yet, stick him with the 100 year sentence and then after the defense can prove that every victim was made whole, drop the sentence to 5 years minimum, minus time served for the 100 year stint.

Based on what I've been reading, the problem with Gemini is NOT the AI in and of itself, apparently the AI is working exactly as designed. The problem is that Google is parsing the input and adding words to the question, an example would be...

Original Question: Show me a founding father.
Reformatted Question: Show me a non binary minority or latino founding father.

Ah NO! - They make a ruling on whether or not THEY INTERPRET something as legal. A perfect example is the republican desire to overturn the Roe V Wade Supreme Court decision from 1973. Obviously a previous Supreme Court had determined the legality of the issue but the current panel had been pretty much hand picked to make sure that they would come to a different conclusion.

There was a time when Vizio was a pretty decent product for the amount of money they cost. Not so much any more, there are better options available at pretty much every price point, especially if you are OK with skipping a new model in favor of a previous model.

However, if Vizio is wholly owned by Walmart, they have the ability to squeeze suppliers a bit and maybe lower the prices across the board, or even live with a smaller profit margin on units sold to get their TVs (or advertisement delivery boxes) into more houses.

I use a few Apple products because of the ease of use and interoperability between devices, but I am in NO way a fanboi.

If the Vision Pro is like many of Apple's other tech products, it's probably more like 'Feature stripped version of yesterday's technology, today'

Apple is probably going to release something that they claim is better than the Tesla on a luxury car platform

Fixed that for you...

Zuck epitomizes the 'right time, right place' adage. He wrote a neat little community bulletin board for his school and it took off, and there is a bit of speculation regarding his real role in the process. What has he really innovated since then? Well, not much. They buy complimentary or competitive products to fatten their core product and are usually a bit behind the curve or way off in left field with many of their 'new and earth shattering products'.

If Zuck wants to be on the leading front of real AGI then he's going to have to either hijack someone else's progress or buy a promising start-up.

Too many higher ups are pouncing on AI as a solution to pretty much every problem, not considering that current AI isn't really very intelligent and is only as good as the data it's trained on. Any ML or LLM system will most likely need some continuous training / tweaking on new data. In situations where the details are important I would hope that there is no real reliance on current AI or at the very least the results are reviewed by someone with a real understanding of the subject.

This is getting ridiculous. There was a time when you could subscribe to a single streaming service, like Netflix, and watch pretty much anything that was available on DVD. Now it seems like every channel / studio is creating their own streaming service and you have to subscribe to THEIR service to watch their content, there's no more licensing deals with other streaming services. It's gotten to the point where I'm considering canceling our Netflix account because of this as well as the fact that geofencing content places further restrictions on content and there is maybe one or two shows / movies per month that I even use Netflix for.

Studios are making it harder and harder (and / or more expensive) for viewers to watch their content and then cry when people torrent movies.

We have cable internet where I live, it's actually OK, decent speeds. There's a fiber line (installed by the phone company) running up our road that provides fiber internet services to a community further up the road but the phone company is still telling us that fiber internet isn't available in our area. This is because of exclusivity deals with the cable provider. This practice is bullshit!

Not ENTIRELY worthless, they are a deterrent to casual car thieves, given the choice a similar car with no steering wheel lock will get pinched instead of yours. But if a thief WANTS your car, they're going to get by pretty much any steering wheel lock, pretty quickly if they have the right tools.