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Comment Re:No! But Greed Is. (Score 1) 56

Also infrastructure dollars spent on data centers are not spent on more useful projects.

It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game but it is. It is extremely hard to get the billionaires to allow us to spend any money on infrastructure. They do it begrudgingly and in exchange for huge amounts of free money. The last major push for infrastructure in America was in the mid 1980s when the Democrat party compromised with Ronald Reagan giving Reagan all the military spending he wanted in exchange for 1 trillion dollars worth of infrastructure spending to build out much needed cities. If you're over 50 that's why and how you are able to afford to buy a house.

I think one of the things that confuses economists is that the economy shouldn't be a zero-sum game and you're taught that it's not but in practice because of the bizarre political realities it is.

Comment Re:"Windows is evolving into an agentic OS," (Score 1) 27

I just really wish that the world could just pick one distro and go with it.

I get that techies like the ability to pick their favorite distro and I get that Ubuntu is gotten close to being the default but in practice it's not.

There really needs to be a consistent way to install and deploy software and a consistent set of tools and libraries for accessing things like audio and video and for programming things like basic UI components.

If Linux could just settle on one distro and maybe two or three desktops (a light one, the heavy one for mainline desktops and maybe one for mobile and tablet) I think it could capture a lot more market share. Sort of like how stuff like ruby on rails and a lot of frameworks get popular because while they might not do things the best they just pick a way to do something and go with it.

Choice paralysis combined with diluting the developer pool creates all sorts of problems at this junction.

And I really really want a good competitor for Windows. Because holy crap Windows 11 is terrible. It is the most user hostile software I have ever seen in my life.

Comment Re:Need a prescription. (Score 1) 35

With the way lobbying works you just can't do that. Especially with the droughts driving up the cost of beef through the roof.

One thing you could do is single-payer healthcare especially in america. Back when I used to work really shitty call center jobs I need people that would take their antibiotics until they felt better and stop because they were saving them for the next time. That was because they couldn't afford to see a doctor.

There's an old saying, it's cheaper to be a good person.

Comment Re:You are not an engineer. (Score 1) 78

Legally speaking, you can not call yourself an engineer of any sort without belonging to an actual engineering license credential system (since there are things like civil engineers, computer engineers, mechanical engineers, etc, in the same way you can not call yourself Esquire unless you hold a lawyer license. You can not practice law without a license, but that doesn't stop you defending yourself in a court.

For all that matters, you can call yourself an engineer to other people if you are simply making stuff yourself and not marketing yourself as a licensed one. Nobody can stop you. But you are not getting hired to build/design anything by any company that will be liable for that product.

To circle back to the story itself, Yes C# will overtake Java because C# is primarily used in game development... and cheating tools for games. Java is used by exactly one game. Minecraft. No other game out there is built in Java that has survived the constant breaking of the Java API by Oracle. C# is equally as brittle, but unlike Java, you are not required to recode your game in a newer C# unless the underlying engine (eg Unity) does.

But people should still learn C before they ever learn any other software development language because every single language in use to day either follows C syntax (Javascript, PHP) or C++ object models (Java, Javascript, PHP, Python, etc) so if you learn at the minimum C, you can pick up all other programming languages quite easily. C is the Latin to C++'s Italian and Java's French.

Comment Re:I see one problem (Score 1) 43

That's because the advanced privacy features aren't in the current builds yet. It's very new stuff that they were using to prevent the kind of fingerprinting that is used to track people.

And it probably will not affect you because even after they roll out the new privacy features you are probably in a database somewhere of existing customers or something like that. The problem is going to be brand new customers getting flagged by mistake.

So the old farts floating around here are probably never going to see the effect, although as I mentioned on another thread I've been flagged before by Sony and was unable to buy anything on their game stores for ages.

It's more likely to affect somebody just starting out. Somebody who doesn't have purchasing history with a company.

Comment Re:I see one problem (Score 1) 43

This doesn't break the website it prevents you from completing a purchase. Generally speaking if you get flagged for fraud you won't be told. It just shows up as a decline. I had it happen to me trying to buy games for my PS3 from Sony back in the day. I would have to go to Amazon and buy a gift card and then load it because Sony had decided I was an evil Mastermind or something and they would not approve me for purchases no matter what. The card had a zero balance and I have an 800-point credit score.

Comment Re:I see one problem (Score 1) 43

You haven't seen it because Firefox isn't really doing all that much to prevent fingerprinting yet. They have a bunch of stuff in the nightly builds that will be in production build soon and it's going to be a problem.

How much of a problem will probably vary. Us old farts are probably in a database somewhere already that will allow us to get through. But if you're in your twenties and just starting out then when you go to make purchases it's going to be an issue.

Most consumers won't know what the hell is going on and they will just try it in another browser like Chrome or edge and it'll work and that'll be that. And they will never think about Firefox again.

Comment I see one problem (Score 3, Insightful) 43

So you disable all the tracking and that's cool and all but a lot of businesses use that tracking to decide whether or not you're committing fraud or not.

So you use Firefox and they can't track you but then they won't let you make purchases on their website...

As a regular user then you go to Chrome because you find it if you use Firefox you can't buy stuff but if you use Chrome you can.

It's a problem that Firefox is seemingly unaware of and probably needs to find a solution for. Basically we need to find a middle ground of some kind.

I guess you could say the companies shouldn't do that because they shouldn't be tracking users but it's often the only effective way to catch fraud.

Comment America's electricy prices compared to whose? (Score 0) 56

So far no mention of the Chinese elephant in the room? Also curious about the European situation. Or should I report on the increasingly bleak Japanese situation as regards electricity supplies?

One thing about renewable power like solar and wind is that you may have "free" excess capacity just because the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. For a lot of the AI training stuff, that can be scheduled when the power is available and thus lower the electricity demand from the data centers for AI training... You don't need to worry about storing the electricity if you have some lower-priority stuff scheduled to use it immediately.

Comment Re:Do your research (Score 3, Interesting) 9

It's not just about the packages and whether they are malicious or not. These, so far at least, are not - AFAICT they don't even *claim* do anything at all that is functionally useful to a coder so they are never going to get downloaded; their sole purpose is to earn the uploader some of these TEA tokens which, when amalgamated across a few hundred thousand packages, is presumably worth something to them, or why bother? Now that the jig is up, the people that do like to peddle such malware are probably not looking too kindly on whoever pulled this off.

That's the secondary issue here ; like many similar things, whoever came up with this TEA token either didn't consider, or didn't care about, human nature. Anyone with half a clue, or the slightest care about the integrity of such a scheme, should be well aware by now that if you can earn something of value (which need not be monetary) by doing some online clicks, likes, shares, uploads, or whatever then some asshat is going to try and exploit the system so they can get all the benefits without the effort. If your system isn't baking in countermeasures against that kind of abuse, then it's a PoS that should never have left the drawing board but, all too often, human nature rears its head again and says "ship it anyway!" and the enshitification continues.

Comment Re:It has here (Score 1) 74

“China was going to hit us with rare earth,” he said. “Now, everybody says, ‘What does that mean?’ Magnets. If China refused to give magnets because they have a monopoly on magnets because they were allowed to — it happened over a 32-year period — there wouldn’t be a car made in the entire world, there wouldn’t be a radio, there wouldn’t be a television, there wouldn’t be internet, there wouldn’t be anything because magnets are such a part — Now, nobody knows what magnets are, and not overly sophisticated, but to build a magnet system would take two years.”

--Donald Trump 2025

Pretty good idea posting as the middle card you are. A non-sequitur irrelevant to the matter we're discussing.

Aren't you a little old to be crying when you can't find your binky? P.S. all bold is the same thing as all caps - a clueless person with a rageboner.

Comment Tesla is so funny! (Score 1) 108

Why funny? Because I think it would be funny if someone made a special version of the Tesla logo. Look close and you'd see it's actually a starving child with extended arms. One version could be a plastic logo cover for the hood ornament on Tesla cars.

I also considered the option of a little note to stick under the wiper of a parked Tesla: "Are you pro-life? If so, why do you drive a car linked with starving innocent children to death?"

Of course I'm just joking and I'd never actually do such a thing. Or maybe I'm not joking and I just believe that no insurance company would cover a Tesla unless the owner has a parking place with surveillance cameras? But I don't think you could pay me enough to support any Musk enterprise now. No joke.

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