Additionally even the build-up costs to ISPs to get to these residences is per-capita small, because multitenant housing means that even if only a minority of units subscribe to the service, the costs to reach the premises is still spread out among multiple customers.

Granted, most of the carrier-integration I worked with was either metro optical ethernet or much older frame-relay connecting to points-of-presence where OC3s interconnected those points-of-presence, but in either case it was set up where the service provider came into a service-entrance room, and cabling left the service provider's equipment for some kind of physical demarcation point that acted as the official split between the service provider's responsibility and the on-premises tenant or property owner's responsibility. In our few multitenant buildings the service provider would do some on-premises work and actually place that demarc in the customer's own suite. This was not generally seen as being all that big a deal to do.

I would expect that large apartment complexes would already have a dedicated room for headend equipment, and that the service provider would use some other medium besides coaxial cable to get from that headend back to the central office, and between that headend equipment and the customer cablemodem would be normal coaxial cable run within the complex. Absolutely it is not a sure-thing that there would be sufficient customers to make this profitable, but that's a business risk that the provider should accept on getting into this line of business. We're not obligated to make their business model work for them, that's their responsibility to figure out.

I kind of get why it was buried, it came out a full two and a half years after the Macintosh was released, and basically three and a half years after the Lisa, which was itself arguably the same development track as the later Macintosh. It was also given a skinned GUI that looked a lot like the Macintosh Finder. There had also been several product iterations beyond the original Lisa and Macintosh that added external hard disk support and other useful features.

The only places I've seen Apple IIGS computers "in the wild" were when I was a kid in school. I expect that this was partly to allow the school district to continue using the educational/edutainment software that it had invested-in for the prior Apple II models. After all, the original Apple II debuted in 1977 and the IIGS the better part of a decade later in late 1986, and was produced until something like 1993. An organization that had a ton of software from their late-seventies or early-eighties Apple II computers might want to buy more Apple II models as legacy products. Even if there were some additional advances in the platform itself, the company behind that platform had already started to move on, and likely saw the Apple II line as having few development paths left going forward while still maintaining backward compatibility.

We saw the same sort of thing when Jobs returned to Apple and brought the legacy of NeXT with him, but because computer hardware had managed to become a lot more commoditized, general purpose, it was not as much a hardware issue as a software/OS issue. They maintained a virtual machine environment to run classic System within OSX to again allow those with investments in software for System to be able to continue using it (and to allow it to be used when there wasn't a version written for OSX specifically yet) but they certainly weren't looking to perpetuate the original Macintosh line once the models running OSX had supplanted them.

Don't mistake me, I'm not one to particularly celebrate Steve Jobs, and I've never been an Apple fanboy either, but it's not surprising that a company would discontinue one product line, even one that had been successful, when another product line with a lot more potential has come out and seen widespread adoption.

I'm not sure I completely understand you.

I would really like to see the catalog operators be held responsible for the new products that are sold through their publications, even if those are third-party sellers.

Yes, I am aware that this would cause a lot of headache for a whole lot of people. Frankly at this point I don't really care. These catalogs are not performing due diligence on what they're offering, and while it costs money to actually perform testing to ensure good products and it limits the number of function-alike competing products or badge-engineered products, what we're seeing now is an illusion of choice coupled to a race to the bottom quality-wise. If the catalogs for new products are held to account for what they sell then they may sell less crap and actually comparing between products would be easier for the consumer.

And that might be the crux of the problem. Bad enough to shill for Tesla given Musk, worse with the recent situation with ABC bowing to pressure on Jimmy Kimmel. Remember, that suspension was literally only three weeks ago. Those who canceled subscriptions are unlikely to go see it, it would come as no surprise if even those who weren't prepared to cancel subscriptions would simply shrug off purposely going to it, and given the extremely long time between movies it's not like they're particularly fresh in the minds of the audience anyway.

I have fond memories of the 1982 movie, even though as a child I was too young to have seen it in the theater and had to wait for it to be out on home video. I had low expectations for the 2010 sequel and frankly those low expectations were disappointingly met. I had no specific plans to ever see another sequel, and to top it off I'm not enamored with Disney at all right now as a final nail in the coffin.

Perhaps I am projecting here, but if the bulk of the potential audience doesn't care about the franchise and the company behind it has made itself undesirable then it's no surprise if it's not getting the sort of box office returns that they predicted.

grok? old enough to remember when grok was just a chess program.

Unfortunately it also requires the backers having similar views. Backers looking for a quick bump by playing the stock price quarter by quarter regardless of all other performance metrics hurt businesses because they compel short-term thinking.

For what it's worth I don't look upon the proposed end of quarterly reports by businesses as a cure either, I look at those sorts of reports as a way of assessing what could be going wrong with an eye on trying to correct it. I just don't think it's wise to use those as the main metric of success like the short-term traders would use them for.

NRA Accidentally Forgets To Rise Up Against Tyrannical Government.

Just from the summary it sounds like their production was scattered all over the world. It's difficult and expensive to keep good tabs on what's actually going on, particularly if much of that manufacturing is outsourced and it's someone else's factory producing parts to-spec but without direct firsthand oversight.

If they didn't downsize their American workforce it's probably because consolidating their production from overseas factories to one factory that is subject to close scrutiny meant that the job-losses happened overseas, not at home. It also sounds like their manufacturing is very heavily automated, meaning that the same number of employees doing things the old, less efficient way were able to take on the extra production capacity when the company switched to the more efficient way while closing those overseas factories.

Sharpie products have had pretty consistent and reasonable quality over the years, and they seem to be the most common standard by which permanent markers are judged, so they seem to be doing something right. Good on them if they were able to find a way to do it domestically and profitably.

And unfortunately usury seems to be the most widely accepted solution.

I've only faced financial security once in my life, I was young (was I even 21 yet?), I had just been laid-off as the doctom bubble burst, and that weekend my vehicle was stolen and per my folks' advice I only had liability coverage. Filing for unemployment covered my rent, my lack of vehicle meant I could cancel my auto insurance since obviously I didn't need it anymore, and my parents loaned me a car and covered food and utilities until I was able to find work within a few months.

I was lucky that I had access to a family safety-net, because sure as hell unemployment insurance payouts from the state-run fund only barely covered rent. It probably would have been difficult to get official food assistance since it's not oriented toward single men (I am not advocating that it be taken away from women, families, and kids, just stating the observation of current situation) and it probably would have taken time to even be rejected. But there are food banks that don't require being on food assistance.

I would personally love to see the system improved, to provide more coverage, and to better audit. There are always complaints about abuse of such systems, and while abuse happens, wouldn't it be possible to find and stamp-out individual examples of such abuse? The system does help people, it could help more, and the abuses could be curtailed if there was some will to actually investigate those abuses rather than just using them as pretexts to try to get rid of such systems.

Mmmhmm. There's a meme about an illegal money laundering medium, illegal hotel, and illegal taxi company, and probably another one that slips my mind. I'd argue that in many of these the goal is to privatize profits and push the burdens to operate onto the public.

I have no objection to businesses being forced to treat their workers well, and businesses being forced to go all-in when they are trying to do something, ie, structure to do it right and to give the development team the time and resources to do it, or don't do it.

We value companies weirder than that.

We value companies for short-term gains based on what we perceive of a long-term potential. We want to see long term profit potential but we live by expecting strong numbers quarter-by-quarter, so company management ends up doing things for the short-term to make themselves look good at the expense of the long-term (like eliminating their research & development institutions) and then get mad later when those companies fade into relative irrelevance compared to their prior market positions.

We want it all. But it's a lot easier to have it now, than it is to wait to have it later. So far too many companies operate in small thinking and far too many investors eat it up.

Sounds like it's time to switch to a mouse with a ball.

I was just going to compare it to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, where technology is developed to a barely minimal working standard and then augmented stupidly, like the teeny tiny CRT displays with fresnel lenses sitting in front of them, connected to typewriters repurposed into electronic data entry keyboards.

Unfortunately while as zany as Gilliam's movie, it's not nearly as hilarious.

Not literature, simply fiction.