They came out here first, at a time when they were still useful. CDRWs were very expensive and/or slow. Most of the old ones were SCSI, and most people didn't have a SCSI interface in their PC. As I was a nerd with a Unix and Unixlike background I did, and my employer kicked down a Philips CDD521 with the 2x upgrade that they had been using to write masters and had only recently obsoleted with a 4x Plextor. This is sometimes said to have been the first CD writer, but I think I read somewhere that there was a Sony drive first that came only in a rack mount case.

Minidisc is a true Magneto-Optical drive and is very very cool technology, but unfortunately Sony really strangled the shit out of it in the name of copyright enforcement. There were a couple of models of PC interface, but you couldn't do audio with them. The audio devices didn't allow doing high speed copies, and would respect the copyright bit. If you were a nerd you could get the decoder and encoder chips and just not connect that pin (srsly) and strip out protection but you couldn't just buy a device like that off the now ubiquitous usual suspects^Wservices because they didn't yet exist :)

Needing to unmount was a property shared with other operating systems, but early Unixlikes used to have silly problems. For SCO Xenix I was advised (by a SCO employee) to shut down using the following formula:

sync
sync
haltsys

The second sync didn't do anything the first sync didn't, it was because on that platform sync returned immediately instead of blocking until the unwritten blocks had all been written, and it was there to slow you down. You didn't want to halt too soon...

I was used to doing something before shutting down on DOS though, because my first PCs had ST-506 interface disks and those usually didn't park themselves. You had to send them a command to ask them to do it, which most people did with PARK.COM. ATA interface disks would generally self-park. Some earlier SCSI disks would not, but of course eventually they all did. Almost no MFM/RLL disks would park themselves.

Before iomega's Zip there were the Bernoulli and SyQuest drives.

Bernoulli drives inflated under spin and the head made an air cushion to push that inflated package away from it to avoid crashes. If the disc spun down, then the media moved away from the head. I have no experience with these so I don't know how well this worked in practice.

SyQuest was just a removable HDD platter. It had pretty poor read and write times because the head couldn't be as close to the disc as in a real HDD. They were however very reliable. They had 44 and then 88MB versions in a 5.25" cartridge, and then 135MB and 230MB in 3.5". Then I think some other larger capacity as well before the market chose iomega because it was cheaper, then rejected it because zip drivers were flaky, and went to CD-R which was also becoming cheap.

This is reminiscent of Sega v. Accolade. Do they have published requirements for the use of their logo? In which case this license requirement would be an attempt to graft those terms onto the AGPL?

It's not news that fructose is believed to be more of a devil in your diet than sucrose. But they commonly appear together. Here's a table I found of the ratio in some fruits. Then there's "HFCS" or High Fructose Corn Syrup, which typically has either 42% or 55% fructose, the rest being glucose (and about a quarter water.) As there are a number of fruits with a higher percentage of fructose than HFCS, the problem isn't really the percentage, it's the quantity.

The biggest problem with HFCS isn't that it's used to make things sweet, although regular corn syrup is mostly glucose which is easier to metabolize, it's that it's used to make ultraprocessed foods shelf stable by replacing some of the fats in them with HFCS and citric acid. HFCS doesn't go rancid.

Slashdot is recently at an all-time high in bootlicking for not at all mysterious but trite and depressing reasons

Slashdot is a place for nerds to argue about stories that somehow make it to the front page through a) the storm of shit which is submitted and b) the process of piquing the interest of the editors. It is a waste of time by definition, my friend, and it always has been. We don't come here to be constructive.

I don't think that a driving actor is what's needed here. In illustration I point to the AI-generated psuedo-George Carlin special "I'm Glad I'm Dead". It is not the equal to or a substitute for a genuine Carlin performance, but it is an effective rendition of one of Carlin's styles. Normally he'd have bits in several different signature styles in a given special, and over the years he came to favor rants and lectures. The fake special does in my opinion a fairly convincing job of providing an emulation of this style only.

If a director were involved in the process of producing the content at a level nearer than 40,000 feet, they could direct the AI team to produce performances with emulations of specific emotions. But somewhere in the mix there's got to be people who understand how to ask the computer for what the director wants, and it's grossly underappreciated how uncommon this is in general. Most people aren't good even at coming up with search terms, let alone AI prompts. Especially with everyone thinking they should guess what the user wants instead of listening to them, tricking software into giving you a useful search result has become its own field.

I'm not here to apologize for the AI slop, I think it's a naked money grab with no artistic value, both overall and also in this case.

That said: Having no artistic value doesn't separate it in any way even from some artistic projects that people tried hard on, let alone your average mass-market focus group-driven cynical schlock.

I think you alluded to this in there somewhere, but my point is that you can't look to the mass market for artistic value. Sometimes some of it makes it in there somehow because that makes it more salable, but expected ROI is really the only thing that determines what hits the big screen whether it's slopped out by AI or committee.

Indeed, LS120 was unreliable and therefore worthless except that you got a 2x or 4x speed floppy drive. If you had a lot of floppies to image, that was a nice feature. Only a few of the late models read floppies at 4x speed.

I had just about every kind of Zip 100 drive. The original dark purple external parallel and SCSI versions, the internal ATA and SCSI, translucent USB... They all get the same click of death problem eventually. I also had a SyQuest 135 (and the 44 before it, both in SCSI) and never had any problems with that. All the printers had both so they could take people's files, and I don't mean printer like a box on your counter, I mean like a "print house" but nobody in publishing calls them that.

Now you can stick your old SATA SSD in a $3 USB3 dongle... I have such attached to my router for downloads. I don't miss the removable spinning media stuff even a little bit. What a fucking hassle.

Unfortunately, it was all of our responsibility to make sure our neighbors didn't turn out to be uneducated assholes, and we collectively failed. As it turns out, abdicating that responsibility to a department of education in a far-away land didn't actually satisfy the need.

So say we all.

Apple is its own thing. It is not fully inconceivable that the feds (and therefore everyone else) would switch to MacOS if Windows became [even more] unsupportable, but I doubt Microsoft can provide Office at even the sad level it achieves on Windows and it would take Apple time to ramp up supply.

Linux is an easy sell unless people are hooked on some application or game that doesn't run on it, then it's hard. The interface is familiar enough now (especially with KDE, but there are some other basically credible options) that they won't have a lot of room to complain so long as they don't have problems. That part is going to depend on the hardware, and IME they will have the fewest problems with AMD CPU and GPU now. If they have Intel it might or might not be OK; if they've got Nvidia they're likely to have a bad time at least sometimes.

Business is increasingly using web-based tools for everything, which is not itselft a bad thing- if only more of them were self-hosted. But either way, this decreases the dependence on Windows. I've worked where there's a few Windows machines for clerical staff, or where there's a Mac for the graphics department. That can be Windows' fate again.