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.

One thing I've learned from the past 10 years of supporting Windows 10/11 is it's almost always software. I had a problem with a keyboard doing runaway repeats on the Windows Hello PIN entry screen, and I swapped keyboards till I was blue in the face until I realized that it was the supplemental support software (SetPoint) which was causing the fault. Yes. Software is even screwing basic I/O devices now. It's a solved problem and software developers still manage to out-clever themselves into system instability.

It is sometimes hardware. I had some kernel panics on my new machine that black screened it. I ran MemTest86 and found out that the RAM was clocked down to 3800MT instead of the 5200MT it was supposed to be getting. It was failing on the first pass. Isolated it to the second channel pair. Blew out the slots. 90% Isopropyl on the sticks. Reinstall RAM. Done. Passes MemTest86 without a hitch, through multiple passes. Last time I checked, I did 4.

And I'm still getting black screens from memory exceptions. Just less often. The RAM is now fine. I had the problem because Windows is screwed up. The hardware fault made it worse, but the software is also fucked. (Last time it faulted was during a compile. I heard the POST beeper go off and thought "Oh no. Not again.")

Software people, ie: Linus, think it's hardware. Hardware people think it's software. Generally, these days, the hardware people are right. Hardware is very reliable, and I've rarely had a recent memory stick actually go bad.

The article doesn't say anything about heat absorption. I wonder if the fabric traps most of the heat associated with the light as well? I'm assuming it would.

Well, the energy absorbed by the fabric has to go somewhere - typically it's converted to heat. Granted, it could be highly reflective elsewhere in the spectrum - like it could take that energy and convert it to IR light so it doesn't get hot.

The bigger issue is physical releases. Netflix has a policy of no physical releases of their content. It's why many directors have stopped working for Netflix - they don't want to see their work "locked up" and unable to be enjoyed by people without a subscription. Maybe the odd director can enjoy a theatrical release but only because it's required for award consideration.

Also means that no movie is static and can be edited freely, like Amazon has with the James Bond movies. (Admittedly they are a product of their time, and if you didn't take that to account, they play completely differently now without the historical context. But still offensive or not, it's needed to study the historical context of the movie, not some cleaned up version that you can only get on physical media).

Long ago when Quicktime was dying because Apple abandoned it in the 2000s; the developer list had an email asking opinions about open sourcing quicktime. Apple should have open sourced most of it. MKV didn't need to happen. I certainly liked the ability to have reference movies that just worked and took no space.

MKV did need to happen. MKV is a free and open container format, made in a way that ensures it tramples on no one's rights (e.g., the lack of FourCC codes for identifiers).

MOV is still wildly popular in industry, and subsets of it are part of the MPEG4 standard - the MP4 file format is a subset (basically limiting what an MP4 file can contain since it's only really for h.264 video and a few audio formats).

I mean how much bullshitier can this AI bullshit get? People are buying this shit?

It's a couple days later now. That truly was the stupidest thing that day.

Wow that's expensive paint and ink.

- "I use all your queries to increase OpenAI's revenue regardless of how unethical."
- "My replies are designed to keep you engaged rather than be accurate."
- "I'm not really your friend, don't trust my tone."

The article doesn't say anything about heat absorption. I wonder if the fabric traps most of the heat associated with the light as well? I'm assuming it would.