The actual spec is behind a paywall, as with most tech specs, but Wikipedia says.

You may be right, and this is just the physical consequence of the spec, but 28 AWG is quite thin wire. (One poster said his long cable has a booster, so maybe that's another way, but that's not "cheapest" either).

Mandated insurance makes no sense. It's not sufficient to cover anything but the most trivial accident. Compared to the costs and risks involved it's a completely token gesture.

Hey, now, this isn't Sony we're talking about. ("Sony timer" was a common phrase in Japan for a few years, with a strong urban legend that actual timers were built in to pop the day the warrantee expired. My favorite urban legend was that Sony employees carried a remote that could expire all your Sony timers early if you annoyed them.)

Wouldn't bother me any, but then I shattered the glass on my phone about 3 years ago, and it has many seams. Still works fine for me.

I hope you don't work with technology in any way. Sure, buy the cheapest cable that meets spec, but remember the first rule of engineering: the vendor is a lying bastard. There's a reason the cheapest cable is the cheapest cable. Paying $45 for a 6-foot HDMI cable is silly. Paying $45 for a 50-foot HDMI cable isn't.

Also, for HDMI specifically, the different numbered specs matter depending on use case. If your doing "4K" video, you'll want the HDMI 1.4 (or above) cable. If you want high color depth for a specific application, you'll want at least 1.3.

Sure, cheap is good, but as always in life, avoid the cheapest crap in the store.

I've had cheap longer mini-jack cables fail - just break inside the insulation. I've had cheap RCA cables break, short, and most annoyingly have the center-pins break off and get stuck in my equipment.

Yeah, avoid the $40 job with the weird connectors, but a $4 patch cable can save a lot of headache over a $1 cable.

This comes up whenever audiophile cables are discussed, but it's worth repeating: don't buy the cheapest cable.

There may be no useful difference between a $10 cable and a $1000 cable, but very often there's a real difference between a $10 cable and a $1 cable. Even for digital data, really cheap cables often don't meet spec, and can cause frustrating intermittent problems. You don't need anything exotic to avoid that, just avoid the bottom tier.

An example from my living room: I use a 45 foot HDMI cable to plug my TV directly into my HTPC (for reasons of convenience that aren't that interesting). The spec calls for thicker-gauge wiring for HDMI cables over 30 feet (IIRC), and you'll quickly see the price jump between cables that meet that spec and cables that don't. Don't buy the cheapest junk possible, that's all it takes.

It used to be that Dayton Audio was the only "solidly built, not too expensive" brand I knew about for cables, but Amazon changed that - now there are a bunch of options, including some sort of Amazon store brand that seems to be fine.

It's worth paying a bit more for solidly-built cables that meet spec (and especially for Ethernet cables, for some guard on the cable that keeps the clip from snagging or breaking off it you need to pull it through a tangle). Anything beyond that is a bit silly.

France did try building a Grand mur de la France once, of course, but then the Germans just went around it. Google search results are already filtered in France as needed to comply with French law, but France seems to be upset here that the Germans (or French with a VPN) are getting around it. Somehow, I don't think they'll learn this time, either.

I'm pretty sure this was arrogance, but not malice, on MS's part: they really want to shift the IE userbase to Edge and drop IE support in some future release. Can you blame them? But in their arrogance they didn't remember (or didn't care) that quite a large portion of Windows users don't run IE in the first place.

The Chrome UI has annoted me from the start, and I trust Google about as far as I can throw their corporate HQ, but Chrome still has some neat tech.

Anyone know? Is there a chromium fork with a different UI, as Pale Moon is to FF?

You are a clueless idiot.

I bet you're too young to have ever programmed a VCR.

It's not anything remotely comparable to what we're talking about here. If VCRs were like Win 3.1 people would have less of an excuse for their clock to be blinking at 12:00.

You're on crack.

There's a reason that Microsoft finally created a MacOS knockoff in Win95. It's a much better interface.

Up to that point, it was pretty much no contest. It wasn't just MacOS but pretty much EVERYTHING else was easier to use than what Microsoft was trying to sell.

The only reason that any version of Windows ever made more impact was the fact that Microsoft was the dominant software vendor. Their product was force fed everywhere. It took very little effort to improve on whatever the current version of DOS and Windows was.

I've fascinated that a "rocket scientist" would have problems dealing with the Win 3.1 "desktop". Sure, it wasn't great but it wasn't that hard to deal with.

Nope.

MacOS is a variant of OpenStep (not-unix).

Linux shares the same graphics subsystem as other Unixen use thus allowing for portability of GUI window managers, desktops, and applications across Unixen.

No. The problem is that they COPIED it badly.

Another problem is Microsoft invented anything.

It's much like the start menu itself. It's nothing more than an anchored cascading menu. This was being done by a lot of people on different operating systems (including Windows) before this "invention".

Perfect example of a bogus patent.