I'll find out in mid January, lol - it's en route on the Ever Acme, with a transfer at Rotterdam. ;) But given our high local prices, it's the same cost to me of like 60kg of local filament, so so long as the odds of it being good are better than 1 in 8, I come out ahead, and I like those odds ;)

That said, I have no reason to think that it won't be. Yasin isn't a well known brand, but a lot of other brands (for example Hatchbox) often use white-label Yasin as their own. And everything I've seen about their op looks quite professional.

You needed a handbook for that?

Anyone who ever went to a business meeting could've told you that.

By my experience, it takes only 4 things to make a meeting productive: a) someone is in charge of the meeting and moderation, b) that someone had time to prepare, c) everyone in the meeting has received an agenda with enough lead time to have read it and (if necessary) prepare their part, at least a bit and finally d) there is at least a simple protocol of the meeting for those who couldn't attend, those who dozed off in the middle, and those who claim next week that something else was agreed on.

Uh oh, someone poked a panda bear.

Correct.

Big screen and big sound. Maybe it doesn't mean much because you have a house in the suburbs, but if you're in an apartment (either because you don't want to commute, you want to live in a city, or it's all you can afford for housing), TV speakers are pretty much it because anything more will get you noise complaints.

Depending on your income and housing costs, you may be limited on how big a TV you can have as well.

So a theatre is pretty much the only place if you want that sort of thing.

Granted, I don't go out to theatres much anymore either - and I spent $35 on the ticket (one, for myself), mostly because I want the big screen IMAX, but it's a far drive. And the local theatres are regular screens which aren't great. I pretty much limit myself to one movie a year or so tops.

I believe part of the reason is the year 2038 issue. A while ago I remember seeing posts about the issues FreeBSD has/had with getting around 2038 on their system. IIRC, it was a huge effort.

*EVERY* UNIX and UNIX-like system has to deal with the problem. But it's got nothing to do with 32-bit systems, because OpenBSD and NetBSD have it working since 2012 on 32-bit systems. Linux since 2020 (Linux supported 64-bit time_t on 64-bit platforms already, but 2020 is when 32-bit systems supported it).

It's not a simple solution, but it's been done before on other systems. It's also why Linux has a bunch of system calls that are merely using 64-bit versions.

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.

It’s like seeing service dogs in the USA, which aren’t service dogs, just rich people who want to take their dogs on holidays.

In the 70's and 80's I grew up in an automated home. My father, and electronics engineer, designed a custom PLC that controlled items throughout the house. You would hear automated vents throughout the duct work doing their thing as heat was transferred around the house on winter days. The system would switch over to a large battery bank when power would go out, fire up the generator in the shed, and then switch over to the generator when warmed up (that saved our bacon during the blizzard of '78). When more automation was needed my father would simply build another card and plug it into a free S-100 looking slot in his custom PLC. Home Assistant is the modern version of this. Keep everything local and under your control. The only thing I didn't like about it was if you tried to take a shower longer than 15 minutes the alarm would go off at the control center in the kitchen warning that water was running too long some where, LOL.

seriously, slashdot? It's 2025 and you still can't do the Euro sign?

Even so the prices are excessive. If I want to upgrade the SSD in the current MBP from 512 GB to 2 TB that's +750 â

Meanwhile, a Western Digital Red SN700 with 2 TB I can get for a bit over 200 â.
A Samsung 990 PRO 2 - 245 â (was just rated the best M.2 SSD on the market by Tom's Hardware).

Whatever exact chips Apple is using, they're not 3x as expensive as other high-quality SSDs.

Even if "locked in place" is your underlying assumption, anyone who's even heard of the real world from their mom who has a friend whose father once visited it should know that there is no rule without exceptions and even if that is perfectly true, a small number of those particles will not be locked in perfectly.

Windows NT used to give you a whole bunch of details when it hit a BSoD - NT4 bluescreens were wildly informative, but to the average user, completely useless. It was just a bunch of numbers that had no meaning to them or provide them with any pointer to what the problem was. It didn't help that many drivers adopted the 8.3 naming convention making it even more obscure.

Also completely useless because the screenful of information was there but you couldn't do anything with it - you couldn't print it or anything. Windows 2000 simplified it a lot but was still mostly useless - now instead of a screenful, it just showed the stop code with parameters and the module that triggered it. But again, mostly useless information.

The information was contained in the kernel core dumps = the critical bits in the minidumps that it creates that could be loaded into a debugger, or a full dump file. These were much more useful because you could do a post-mortem examination using a debugger with full symbols. (The data for the dump files was written to the swapfile - since the BSoD meant the kernel could not be trusted you couldn't trust the filesystem or disk block driver stack to be working, so the BSoD code would write the core dump to the known blocks of swapfile using direct disk access - it's why there are "text mode" drivers). The next reboot when the kernel starts and initializes the filesystem, before it starts swapfile it checks the swapfile for the dump and if it's there copies it to a new file.

But there were a lot of stop codes that were completely odd but the cause was hardware. There was one that basically said you had bad RAM, another one that would tell you your CPU was overheating. a third that would happen if your disk was dying, and some of the odder ones caused when your GPU was dying and causing PCI bus errors.

It was straightaway - if you see this error, replace RAM. If you see this error, check the heatsink. This error means your disk is dying. You never saw the errors for anything else.

as suggested by me from 2007: "Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
        https://patapata.sourceforge.n...
        "... Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case"
based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
          But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change. ...
          That is not all technology has been asked to do in schools. It has been invited into the classroom in other ways, including educational simulations, Lego/Logo, web browsing, robotics, and computer-linked data collection from sensors. But assessment is mostly what technology does in schools that *matters*, where the other uses of it have been marginalized for various reasons. These "learning on demand" or "hands on learning" activities have been kept in their boxes so to speak (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally). Or to recall from my own pre-computer elementary school experiences in the 1960s, there was a big fancy expensive "science kit" in the classroom closet -- but there was little time to use it or explore it -- we were too busy sitting at our desks. ...
        Essentially, the conventional notion is that the compulsory schooling approach is working, it just needs more money and effort. Thus a push for higher standards and pay and promotion related to performance to those standards. Most of the technology then should be used to ensure those standards. That "work harder" and "test harder" approach has been tried now for more than twenty years in various ways, and not much has changed. Why is that? Could it be that schools were designed to produce exactly the results they do? [as John Taylor Gatto has suggested] And that more of the same by more hard work will only produce more of the same results? Perhaps schools are not failing to do what they were designed; perhaps in producing people fit only to work in highly structured environments doing repetitive work, they are actually succeeding at doing what they were designed for? Perhaps digging harder and faster and longer just makes a deeper pit? ...
        However, over the past 150 years or so the world has changed, and we have entered a post-industrial information age, with cheaply copied songs and perhaps soon cheaply copied material goods in nanotech replicators. ...
        Industry still matters of course, but only now in the sense that agricultural still matters, where an ever smaller part of the population is concerned directly with it, as innovation after innovation makes people in those fields ever more productive. If only a small percent of the people in the economy produce food, and now only an ever shrinking part of the population produces material goods, what is left for the rest to do? ...
        So, [as Dr. David Goodstein, Vice Provost of Caltech pointed out] employment in conventional research is closed for most people [even with PhDs, due to funding issues]. Still, if you look at, say, the field of biology, there are endless opportunities for people to research millions of species of organisms and their biochemistry, ecology, and history. If you look at astrophysics, there are endless stars and solar systems to study. If you look at medicine, there is a vast amount we do not know, especially for chronic diseases of poor people. If you look at music, there are endless opportunities for people to make songs about their specific lives and families. If you look at writing, endless novels yet to be written. And if you look at programming, there is even a vast enjoyment to be had reinventing the wheel -- another programming language, another operating system, another application -- just for the fun of doing it for its own sake. The world wide web -- from blogs to you tube to garage bands -- is full of content people made and published just because they wanted to. It is an infinite universe we live in, and would take an infinite time to fill it up. However, there is practically no one willing to pay for those activities, so they are for the most part hobbies, or at best, "loss leaders" or "training" in business. And, as always, there is the endless demands of essentially volunteer parenting to invest in a future generation. And there are huge demands for community service to help less fortunate neighbors. So there are plenty of things that need doing -- even if they do not mesh well with our current economic system based around "work" performed within a bureaucracy, carefully reduced to measurable numbers (parts produced, lines of code generated, number of words written) producing rewards based on ration units (dollars).
        But then, with so much produced for so little effort, perhaps the very notion of work itself needs to change? Maybe most people don't need to "work" in any conventional way (outside of home or community activities)? ...
        But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a "hole in the wall"...
        Granted if people want to send kids to a prison-like facility each day for security or babysitting, then the "free school" model makes a lot of sense for that ... and is much more compatible with democratic traditions than compulsory schools (and is even cheaper to run). And the kids and teachers are generally happier in "free schools" where they have to show up but can otherwise then spend their time as they like; and such schools also do well with "discipline problem" type kids. Just ask any teacher how much happier they would be if only the kids in their classes were the ones who wanted to be there. However, there are alternatives to "free schools" as well, but requiring more parental involvement [like unschooling]...
        So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. ...

We run a medium size business and I’ve not seen a cheque in the last 5 years and prob 2 in the last 10.
Australia has a national system called BPAY and now PayID and will formally end the use of cheques by 2030.
USA has a much more fragmented financial system making change much slower and more painful.