I'm not pretending that Apple hardware specs aren't shitty these days but I've gotta stick up for their build quality. I have a 2010 13" MBP and a 2012 15" one. Both are still rock solid. Literally, in fact; I once dropped the 15" one and made a nice little hole in the carpet. Still runs like a champ. Unibody MBPs are essentially indestructible.

I have had an MBP fail spectacularly on me; it was the 2007 model. It died of the Geforce 8600M GT bug - essentially, Nvidia had fucked up their chip design, causing all 8600M GT chips in the world to slowly self-destruct. The 2007 MBP used the 8600M GT. Apple tried doing a free repair program but the replacement logic boards had the same GPU so they weren't long for this world either.

I'm actually kinda sad that everything Apple has released after 2002 has shit specs and ridiculously expensive purchase-time-only upgrades. I really like the build quality but with the crap Apple keeps putting out my next laptop will come from someone else.

OTOH, trying to compete with USB would've made the new standard the next FireWire: Technically better in every regard but too expensive and not ubiquitous enough. It would've found niche use and would've died at some point because everyone would've stuck with USB.

I mean, what would NewStandard-C have offered? Small plugs? Micro-USB. Faster charging? Qualcomm Quick Charge and similar standards. Support for displays? HDMI and (mini-)DisplayPort already fill the need perfectly. Faster speeds? Not interesting enough for the majority of users to warrant switching until USB comes out with the next revision that offers roughly what NewStandard-C offers, just five years later and with more overhead.

Its virtually impossible to compete with USB because it's ubiquitous and Good Enough(TM).

Exactly. It's not that the article on electroweak interaction is too hard; it's that the article is incomplete. The graphene article is chock-full of highly technical information that only concerns experts in the field but it also has plenty of information digestible by and interesting to the general public. The electroweak interaction article is an introduction and then just bare formulas.

Imagine if the Wikipedia article on object-oriented programming consisted entirely of the overview and a few code examples. No discussion of what OOP tries to achieve and how it attempts to do so. Just the bare code. It wouldn't be a terribly useful article to most people.

Speaking as an outsider, these days it feels as if all discourse in the USA exists only within the narrative of Red Team vs. Blue Team –and it doesn't actually matter what those teams represent or what they do. Even things like the well-being of the country are secondary to the question of which team "wins". That is deeply troubling –especially since the USA have nuclear weapons and a propensity to project their power wherever they want. An unstable USA is in nobody's interest.

Eh, it'll never catch on.

Nobody uses Reddit's code because Reddit's code is terrible. It's a jumble of Python that relies on some very specific (and long-deprecated) Python packages, which means that you can only run it on one specific version of Python on Ubuntu 14.04. Trying to run it anywhere else (even Ubuntu 14.10) will typically end in failure.

We're in full agreement about them dropping open source sucking, though.

Unfortunately, some features will simply die. Tab groups are one such feature. I like having many tabs open, grouped by areas of current interest to me. If, for example, I'm setting up a new home server I open a "home server" group once I start planning and it stays open until the server runs smoothly. It's a killer feature for me, first provided by the TabGroups Manager addon, then by Firefox's own Panorama feature... then by TabGroups Manager again as Mozilla decided that Panorama was not important enough for them to maintain. With Firefox 57 tab groups will be completely dead.

Note that technically WebExtensions should provide the necessary APIs to support tab groups as having a third-party addon that provides tree-style tabs in a sidebar is a goal of Fx 57. However, there are a few unresolved bugs, including some marked as "some day, something might happen here to allow this to happen" and my preferred method of having a tab group bar above the tabs won't work unless they give WebExtensions the ability to add toolbars. Plus, there's the fact that a few developers of such addons have since abandoned their addons out of frustration.

I get the feeling that Mozilla should've started the transition earlier (or, alternatively, should switch over later). Right now they're still trying to figure out how the WebExtension API should look and how powerful it should be. It's probably going to take another year before they have all the features the developers actually need in there. Until then whole classes of addons will die out and many won't come back as the developers will have moved on.

Depends on the manufacturer. I have a BQ and I have no issues with a lack of updates. (The Zuk Z1 before that was a different story altogether, admittedly. To be fair, though, that was because Zuk made the mistake of partnering with Cyanogen Inc.)

Unfortunate as it is, the presence or lack of a solid update scheme is a distinguishing feature between manufacturers - one you won't find in a feature matrix. Looking into it can help you avoid making mistakes.

Time. Chances are that Intel will have on-CPU TB3 out at least one generation ahead of AMD because they probably had a head start on the integration work. This might be part of Intel's response to Zen turning out much better than AMD's last few architectures. Zen has USB 3.1 so Core having TB3 might be a reasonable answer to that.

Some people distinguish betwen "soft-bricked" (the device stops working but can still be revived with user-available measures going beyond normal configuration*), "hard-bricked" (the device stops working and can only be revived with tools unavailable to an ordinary user**) and "broken" (the device is dead and can only be replaced***). In this case the routers appear to have been hard-bricked as they stopped working and had to be physically accessed by the vendor in order to restore functionality.

* E.g. using Fastboot to flash a new firmware to an Android phone.
** E.g. using JTAG to flash a new bootloader as the device can't even go into Fastboot mode anymore.
*** E.g. my Zuk Z1.

Are you a screenwriter? Just because things work that way in your industry and region doesn't mean they work that way everywhere.

I mean, we all know how companies are desperately trying to hire even mediocre workers, right? It's practically impossible to not get a decent job; even casually mentioning a hobby to a stranger on the street can net you a job offer. So why are there unemployed people? Because what I said only applies to IT workers in Karlsruhe, Germany, and most people don't fall into that category.

I'd wager that the screenwriting industry is rather unlike yours. For instance, you're probably not paid on a unit-of-work basis with a hard limit on how many projects you can do per year and ever-shrinking project lengths.

It's not like the writers are making less in terms of studio accounting. They get paid the same amount of money per episode as before. It's just that a few years ago they got paid for 20+ episodes and now they get 10 and their contracts often forbid simply working on two or more shows per season. From the producers' perspective everything is hunky-dory; they still produce vaguely the same amount of content (spread out over more shows) and pay vaguely the same amount of money to writers per season.

From an individual writer's perspective they're getting paid much less per season. I can see how they might want to take action there.

Also remember that the entertainment industry is rather famous for its use of creative accounting to keep royalty payments low. These people are not exactly known to be generous when it comes to monetary compensation.

I'm not sure whether MSOOXML compatibility is terribly important, though. I very rarely see .docx files in the wild; pretty much everyone is still using .doc - and LO's Office 97/2003 compatibility is rock solid, at least for the documents I've encountered so far.

The document format where you absolutely must have the proprietary software package would be PDF these days - while you can open most PDFs in any old PDF reader, some places will send you documents as interactive, heavily scripted PDF files that (badly) try to reinvent Excel. Good luck trying to deal with those without an up-to-date version of Adobe Reader.

Oh, VS is not free of error. I've seen crashes and freezes beore and currently I have to deal with no longer being able to create new WPF views and windows, only custom controls. (Yes, creating a custom control and changing the parent class works perfectly fine but it's annoying.)

It is fairly stable but it does screw up occasionally. Sill not "on a whim", though, I agree on that.

The KeePass database format is documented and a de-facto standard. There are independent implementations for non-Windows platforms such as KeePassX. The KeePass download page links to a whole bunch of them.

Nice keyboard/trackpad arrangement, though. One thing that bugs me about most Linux laptop vendors is that they insist on putting numpads on their laptops. That just wastes space and pushes the space bar to the left, taking the trackpad with it. I hate it when a whole bunch of vertical space is reserved for a trackpad that is then strongly off-center because of a numpad I don't want. Still not something I'd pay 4000 bucks for, though. (Note that I'm perfectly fine with the option of having a numpad but for some reason Linux laptops are mostly divided into thin executive-style ones with little power and reasonable ones suitable for work that always include built-in numpads. Apparently entering numeric data is such an important feature for all developers but me that using a USB numpad just wouldn't cut it.)