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.
Even though I'm not American I do some business in the USA and have an American bank account for that purpose.
I pay bills through the bank's website. They need the payee's name and mailing address.
They print and mail a cheque to whoever I tell them to pay.
When I first got that account it seemed odd since I make the payment through the bank's website, but that's really how they do it. They put a cheque in the mail.
Why don't they outsource? The answer is: Why pay $45 for a job that you can do yourself.
When I had employees I added up their timecards and calculated the payroll and the deductions, and wrote each person a cheque. I knew exactly how much everyone was getting, I immediately saw any irregularities and could investigate them. And it didn't cost me $45.
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.
If you pay online, the confirmation page has a transaction number you can write down if you're worried about needing to prove that you have paid. And if you pay with a credit card, that's recorded on your credit card statement. I don't think I've paid with a cheque in years and there has never been an issue. And (at least in Canada) banks don't send back cancelled personal cheques anyway. All they do is provide an image and give you 90 days to download it. If you actually want the cancelled cheque back, that costs money.
Why wouldn't they just outsource payroll to someone who can do direct deposits? I ran a small business in Canada for about 19 years and I used a company called Ceridian to handle payroll. It handled tax calculations, government remittances, etc. and it only cost me around $45 per pay for 12 employees... a real bargain.
First,mandatory screen time needs to be limited. If they want text books in ebook form, great, but they'll need a way to restrict school issued pads to school work during the school day.
On the flip side, I have more than once heard a parent complaining that homework is being given that requires a computer to complete where a school doesn't allow chromebooks to be taken home. That's equally absurd. Not every family can afford to give each kid a computer, and sometimes computers break. It's not like parents can just grab an extra one at the corner store like they would a pack of pencils or paper. If school work requires a computer and/or internet connection, the school should provide it. If that includes homework, the students must be allowed to take it home.
If the schools don't like that or can't afford it, they can issue text books and homework that can be completed with pencil and paper (yes, that includes accepting hand written essays).
And as for not letting parents view the assignments, that's ridiculous. Of course the parents have a right to see it. If some company wants to claim that to be proprietary information, I guess the school can't use it at all.
It's crazy to complain about students on their screens too much and then have mandatory screen time. It's equally ridiculous to complain that parents need to be more involved and then shut parents out.
/rant
Now, if only we could train the oligarchs to confess to bad behavior, then we'd be getting somewhere...
Unlike some of these other mergers, the Netflix-Warner merger (or a merger of Warner with any other major studio) would require approval from foreign regulators who (generally) can't just be bought off.
Allowing any existing studio (and with all the shows Netflix makes and has made, they are definitely a studio at this point) to merge with Warner Bros is anti-competitive.
Doesn't matter if its Paramount, Disney, Netflix, Sony, Universal, Amazon or anyone else, it should be blocked on competition grounds.
Yes, the real reason why netflix used to have a fantastic catalog at low cost was because at the time, the rights holders didn't take Internet streaming seriously and so cheap deal to Netflix was a low risk easy bit of free money.
Then they took it seriously, didn't get the deals from Netflix they thought they should be able to get and started making their own streaming services instead. Probably the first sign of things was when Starz demanded to be a "premium channel" on Netflix. Frankly if Netflix has accepted that arrangement, they might have been the defacto broker of streaming services in one app, though the user experience suffers, but it suffered anyway.
I can't wait for the AI bubble to pop. The problem is, it will cause huge economic turmoil. On the other hand, if AGI succeeds, we'll all be out of work and it will cause huge economic turmoil. The entire Generative AI industry is a blight on humanity.
There was one Critical Mass in the late 90's that went on I-80 at the San Francisco end of the Bay Bridge.
Neutrinos are into physicists.
