How do you know the accuracy of the location information on that site?

I love the joke. But here, let me ruin it. Stroopwafels are flat. I think itâ(TM)s actually known as a saucijzenbroodje. Both quite tasty.

People hand themselves over to Apple in toto. People hand themselves over to some "cloud" or other, in toto.

Why?

Why would any presumably sane person ever do such a thing?

It's already plenty more than bad enough to give away such little as I'm giving away here and now with this comment.

But to hand it all over?

How can people possibly bring themselves to believe things like this could ever end well for them?

I cannot fathom the least of it. It is beyond senseless. It is beyond imagining.

And yet people do it. Every day. In droves.

The ones with actual users ...

These are the sort of self-generating monopolies I've seen in the past 25 years of the internet.

Effectively, everyone goes there because everyone goes there.

A bit more than herd mentality, but makes any startup something which requires large amounts of energy to succeed and then keep going. Never stop.

Twitter has self-inflicted wounds, thanks Elon, but continues to limp along. I find myself less likely to visit because -- not everyone is there any more.

Not all Venture Capital are angels, some come in and kill the fledgling company and take it's IP, others wring it dry over months or years while skimming money off the top. Never occurs to some investors a company could be the next Alphabet or Meta.

Getting a chip made IS the big hurdle. Soldering the chip is trivial by comparison.

Read every single comment, all the way down to -1.

Nobody has addressed " What I'd really like to see more of are more non-technical contributors. I mean, yes, we can always benefit from more packagers and coders and engineers, but I think what we really need desperately are writers, designers, artists, videographers, communicators, organizers and planners. ".

Linux has a HUGE communication problem.

Linux not only has a huge communication problem, it steadfastly refuses to even entertain the possibility that communication is even something that requires any kind of serious and polished attention in the first place.

And it fails horribly, with the general populace, right there.

Linux fails to accept that there are "iron laws" of communication, and in so doing, breaks all of them, and in so doing, loses the general populace, who will never in their lives sit still for being talked to, will never sit still for being communicated with, be it linguistically, be it visually, or be it any other way, in the manner in which Linux everlastingly insists in attempting to communicate with them, and then goes off scratching its head, wondering why people "don't get it."

The problem is Linux, not the people.

And by "Linux" I mean the entire community of people who design, build, and implement it.

A minority of which, being so vanishingly small as to not even show up when you're actually looking for them, who actually can communicate, but who exist in numbers so small, and constitute a fraction of the total body of people who design, build, and implement, which is so small that it disappears altogether from sensible view.

An example of one of the “iron laws” of communication, for all the hard-heads out there who double down on their refusal to accept or accede to such things.

If they’re not laughing, then it’s not funny.

Period.

It does not matter if you think it’s funny. Keep it to yourself, if you think it’s funny. Fine and dandy. No worries, mate. But the instant you open your mouth and communicate it to someone else, it had better damn well cause them to laugh or it’s not funny.

Period.

And right here is where Linux fails so horribly as to cause people, normal people, members of the general populace, to cringe deeply, and recoil from Linux as if it was something with a disease that they fear catching if they stay too close to it for too long.

And don’t forget, hard-heads, that I’m not just talking about humor. I’m only using my example of The Iron Law of Humor in an effort to simplify things to the point where even hard-heads can figure it out.

The failures of Linux to communicate, the failures of Linux to engage successfully with the general populace, the failures of Linux to abide by The Iron Laws of Communication, are so vast in scope as to defy enumerating them all.

All the little in-groups in Linux have all their little in-group ways, and inside the group, it’s all so very wonderful, and everything is seen through rose-colored glasses.

But nobody ever seems to want to step outside and find out what the general populace might be thinking about it.

Which is unfortunate to an extreme, because the general populace is having none of it.

The general populace despises all the “cutsey” crap that Linux insists in wrapping itself up in, all of which is clearly (as seen by the general populace) the creation of lamers, social misfits, and tone-deaf idiots, from one end to the other, without exception.

Another example.

“GNU's Not Unix.”

GNU’s not funny, either.

And recursive acronyms constitute felony assault against any attempt to engage with, bond with, or even communicate with the general populace.

And the lameness of the logo that’s associated with GNU is enough to take your breath away. People. Think. It’s. Lame.

And it is.

And that’s only a single example.

It’s only a single egregious faux pas in attempting to communicate with the general populace, among too many to count.

And the penguin is lame, sitting there on it’s ass, feet stuck out in front of it in a posture no real penguin will ever be seen sitting in, with a blank look of deep stupidity on it’s face.

And you people have bonded with it.

You people have bonded with the very thing that causes everybody else in the world to view you with contempt.

To view you as lamers and losers.

And this is the first thing that people see when they’re introduced to Lunux.

And that fox-thing, or dog-thing, or whateverthehellitis-thing that’s plastered across a program that’s called “GIMP”? GIMP ???

No

We’re not even going to be talking about a thing which is that lame.

People hate that crap. They HATE it.

And Linux hates that it’s hated, right back, and right there, all communication with the general populace is ended, and all chance of integrating with the general populace is destroyed.

You like your little cutesy naming conventions.

You like your little cutesy visuals.

You like your incomprehensibly-opaque lingo with little in-group hooks and jokes buried inside of it.

You like all of it.

Ok.

Fine.

Whatever you want. It’s all good.

Just don’t be coming out here with it, attempting to shove it in our faces, expecting that we are going to be liking it too, because we don’t.

You wanna come out here and engage with us, then you’ll do it on our terms, or you won’t do it at all.

You’ll learn how to be engaging on our terms, or you won’t be engaging at all.

And if you want to learn how to be engaging, then the first thing you’ll do is to recognize the seriousness of it all, and stop giving a bunch of amateurs and lamers total control over it.

Hand that kind of work over to the kind of people who know the discipline, and who know how to implement it, in the exact same way you hand coding over to the kind of people who know the discipline and who know how to implement it.

No difference.

None at all.

The exterior surface of Linux, the part that the general populace sees, is the ugliest, and least-engaging, and most impossible to understand, part of the entire operation.

The part that people see FIRST.

WHY?

Why insist on a thing like that?

If you’re going to communicate well then communicate.

Nothing less will do.

Nothing less will ever stand a chance of working.

Obey the Iron Laws of Communication, or go back inside where you came from and quit bemoaning the fact that the rest of us out here are never going to be signing on for your whatever it is that you’re doing, because whatever it is, it’s very definitely not communication.

This would then block the future as depicted in Minority Report.

"Hi there! Would you like to buy another [highly personal and embarrassing item]?"

There's a relief.

I visited Activision in the mid 1980s, when it was a shoe-string operation. Games for the C64 were coming along and quite impressive, including Little Computer People, which was running on a desk over a weekend to check for stability.

Seems it's all about IP these days.

They're coming for the upper bands which were available to Ham Radio enthusiasts. FCC doesn't care about us anymore.

Such a useless post and reflecting lack of actual knowledge of Fry's.

20 some years ago I bought my first laptop (still have it) at Fry's in Sunnyvale. It was still in the little grocery location, the shelves (and even former refrigerated goods) aisles has resistor and capacitor models sticking out of the floor. It's long since become some health club or other business after Fry's moved to a big store a couple blocks away.

In the hey day of the stores on E. Arques, E. Brokaw and E. Hamilton had about 40 or 60 cashiers, the queue moved pretty swiftly and they didn't take American Express. I tried to buy my first digital camera there and found that out. Went over to Wolf Camera to pick it up. Anyway, over the past few years I've visited the number of cashiers has dwindled down to only a handful. Few floor walkers, where once they were all over you, asking if you needed any help. Last visit I didn't see one at all.

At the end Fry's probably only had a dozen people working in each of their giant stores, a far cry from the hundreds they employed a decade or two before. The downsizing has been happening over time. Weep not for droves of employees losing their jobs, weep for the few who worked in desolate stores, with unstocked shelves who knew the writing was on the wall. They've been circling the drain for years.

The main hurt here is losing a chain which once carried just about everything the home hobbyist/maniac could ever want. That's been going on with the closure of Weird Stuff and Halted Specialties. I'll have to look to see if there's anyone left who sells components, wire, cable, solder, special tools, etc. I'd say they failed to plan well and we've known the eventual source of stuff is going to be our mailbox.

But I mean sure you could just start immediately telling somebody with a four-digit user number that starts with the digit 1 how this computer stuff works, instead of performing your own due diligence in advance, and maybe stop to take a look around, and then maybe figure out where you are, and who you're dealing with, and then start spouting FUD with a sarcastic tone of voice if that suits you.

There's no relation, but I'd happily do anything the song describes

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/p...

Ok, Boeing.