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Comment Re: Who Needs Price Tags (Score 1) 108

Running a disorganised cut price shop seems counter-intuitive as you'll just drive customers away.

And they'll go where? The other "disorganized cut price shop" two blocks over? Until the economy (or at least their personal finances) the average dollar store shopper shops there out of necessity, not choice. If they could go somewhere else they would.

Mentioned two already, Aldi and Lidl.

There's a reason Aldi and Lidl are growing so fast in so many countries.

They've been particularly successful in penetrating countries that have traditionally suffered from a lack of competition, like Australia.

Comment Re:College education is still worth it (Score 1) 142

If anything, the Internet has revolutionized and democratized education to an extent undreamed of in human history.

Yeah, go ahead and put "Didn't attend college, but I spent a lot of time reading Wikipedia, Reddit, and getting tutored by ChatGPT." on your resume and see how far that gets you. /s

To be fair, once you've a few years of experience in a profession, almost no-one gives a crap about your education. Being able to demonstrate you can do a good job becomes more important. Certs become more important and that's mainly because some licensing agreements give the company discounts if they can maintain X number of certified professionals. Obvious exceptions excluded, like being a pilot for example.

Not that I disagree with your point mind you, and to add to it the over-commercialisation of education has been detrimental to it's quality.

Comment Re:Call me when... (Score 1) 41

Xbox has been dying for 20 years now.

I know hating on Xbox is the approved take, but Microsoft isn't going to walk away from their cut of the console market in your lifetime.

Nope, Microsoft is going to let it wither and die a slow, undignified death as they drain every penny they can out of it.

It's been the strategy with their gaming software for years now. Buy up a successful studio, kill anything that made it successful, release half arsed sequels that are DLC'd, P2W'd and generally geared to maximise profit over enjoyment and when that is no longer working, sack any remaining staff and shelve the studio. Case in point, Bethesda.

They've already said they have no interest in making hardware but they still want branded hardware out there. So what they want is someone else to have the expense of designing, building and supporting the hardware whilst they control the brand.

It would be a mercy if they Old Yeller'd the Xbox right now, but they won't as there's still blood to drain from it and lets face it, the fanboys will keep paying because they're too invested, financially and emotionally to stop now.

The Playstation has the same problem with a few notable exceptions, Sony still does some decent games, they are still willing to piss huge sums up the wall and the Japanese government will never let Sony fail no matter how much they piss up the wall.

Comment Re:If you have access to a MSFT store account... (Score 1) 27

Ok, I'll be that guy, and probably be down voted as flame bait, but why worry about the cost? If you want to save money then Libre Office is free and for most users does everything that 365 does. For those niche user that have a specific need to use 365 what is to say that feature will exist next year? Buy 5 years worth only to find the feature that forced you to use 365 is removed or replaced a sub standard AI version next year?

Disclaimer: I haven't used Microsoft Office since around 2014 and I'm biased against Microsoft.

Libre office is fine for personal use, it's improved in leaps and bounds in the last 10 odd years. I'd recommend it to anyone regardless of skill or experience to get them off the MSFT merry-go-round.

The problem isn't for the home users, they've always been on the "bend over and take it" track when it comes to MS, it's just that now they've got some real viable options which will end up hurting MS but I digress... the issue is business users. For business users the problem isn't the software for the end user (word, excel, et al) it's not even the issues with supporting FOSS, it's mostly the back end. The costs of running an on-site MS Exchange setup is stupendous and not to mention that it's a huge vector for cyber attacks let alone the costs of running an equivalent platform, not even Google really competes with Exch/Office and that's just the tip of the iceberg (OK, a large enough tip on its own), it's really on the back end where MS has businesses by the short and curlies. Whilst I agree businesses should be better protecting themselves against predatory vendors, it's not such a simple thing to do in practice.

I really think we need another serious probe into Microsoft, in fact the entire licensing industry. Shine a huge light onto it and we'll be horrified at what we find.

Comment Re:You're addressing a very important detail (Score 2) 110

Nuclear Fission isn't cost effective ... _unless_ you price in the full eco-balance of electricity production. Then the numbers look significantly different and fission could just be a real thing once again. At least until renewables and energy storage have gained significant portions of the energy mix.

No. This is nonsense. Nuclear fuel production has a massive ecological impact. Nuclear only looks good when compared to coal. Stop doing that.

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