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Comment Re:The value - and cost - of being first to market (Score 1) 179

Something can be 'technically superior' but still not the 'best' solution, because 'solution' includes a lot of factors beyond 'technological superiority.'

100%. If the superior solution always won, Microsoft Windows would have been relegated to the dustbin long before Windows 95 existed (and we wouldn't be dealing with the disaster pile that is Windows 11 today). Similarly if the superior solution always won we'd have high speed rail in the US connecting all our major cities, but that hasn't happened either.

'solution' includes a lot of factors beyond 'technological superiority.'

Including whose wheels you're willing to grease to get your inferior solution a leg up on the ones that are better.

Comment The value - and cost - of being first to market (Score 1) 179

The ZIP won out over a superior technology - Imation Superdisk - because it was first to market. Iomega's ZIP disc was proprietary and more expensive per megabyte, while also almost never being bootable. Imation solved those problems with the Superdisk, which could also read 1.44mb floppies in the same drive. However by the time Imation released theirs, Iomega had a huge headstart and few people paid attention.

Later on though Iomega's reliance on their being first to (mass) market ended up killing off their product. They weren't able to hit a cost per mb that was even remotely close to CD-R, let alone USB flash drives - nor could they get anywhere near the speed of USB flash drives. If they had taken the time to innovate further we would probably be talking about new ZIP-related technologies in the 10s of GBs (or larger), instead they are in the dustbin.

Comment Re:My home network is nearly pure IPv6 (Score 1) 73

To me the hoops that smoothbrains will jump through to avoid IPv6 and stay on legacy IPv4, especially when hosting, is pathetic. NAT, port forwarding, tunnels, blah blah blah blah.

I have something like ~1.2 trillion times the number of routable addresses that the entire IPv4 space has. Not all are reachable, of course, just the services that need incoming access and they're each on their own isolated DMZ.

Comment My home network is nearly pure IPv6 (Score 1) 73

Started the move about 18 months ago when I decided to get off my lazy ass. My ISP gives out a /56 prefix, so that lets me run 256 /64 subnets/VLANs in the house, currently there are ~10 in use. Everything get a GUA through SLAAC and I use RAs (Router Advertisements) to give ULAs to everything. Any external facing services get their own VLAN and /64 for the system(s) as needed. Firewall blocks all incoming as they usually do by default and I punch a hole for the external-facing systems. They can't reach back into the network, they only answer the phone. All the systems update DNS dynamically if the prefix or full address ever change.

I have an SSH bastion set up. In all this time there has not been a single SSH attempt from the internet. On IPv4 it was constant background noice.
For those legacy IPv4-only systems on the internet, I set up NAT64. I have an IoT VLAN and IoT 2.4 GHz wireless network that are only IPv4 because a lot of IoT network stacks are junk.

I'm still farting around with it, but man oh man, there's no way I'd go back to IPv4. It was one of the best moves I've done in ages.
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Journal Journal: Trump Republicans 1

There are still people alive, TODAY, who can talk and walk and pass as everyday normal people, but who still think of Republicans as conservative!

Comment Re:AP spin (Score 4, Informative) 27

In other words, we are toast. Sad because AP was once one of the original newspapers/sites with journalists rather than editorialists but that ship has sailed for most if not all of those outfits. It's hard keeping up with the Kardashians/Jones, whatever.

You're missing the point of the AP, and it's actual composition. I worked at a daily newspaper most of my way through undergrad and knew the ins and outs of the AP better than most.

The main use of the AP was to get international news to outlets who couldn't afford to place staff in places further away from their own location. A great example is any international war, though even big national events (9/11 being a great example) are also places where AP stories are valuable.

The AP carries very little editorial content. Yes there are a few editorial writers who publish there but the volume from them is minimal compared to the objective news reporting. Some people like to claim otherwise but that is from those who aren't actually looking at the body of work on ap.org.

Unfortunately the newspaper model is indeed dying. Many of us are lamenting it and we're not sure what solution could bring it back. Printed news was supported by advertising, both display ads and classified ads. In the 90s your local daily paper likely had 4-8 pages of classified ads, every day. Now the majority of that is on craigslist or facebook. On Sundays your paper had full color printed advertising inserts from over a dozen retailers; many of those retails have since gone out of business and many of the ones who remain don't advertise that way anymore. Online subscriptions can offset a small part of this, but only a small part. Online advertisements are blocked by most readers' browsers, so that isn't productive for newspapers in many cases either.

The tabloid and editorial "journalism" you refer to is successful because it does a better job of selling crap to its audience. Don't confuse it with the professionals at the AP.

Comment Re:Five years old (Score 1) 203

I had just turned five years old when the Apollo 17 mission happened. Never in my wildest dreams would I have believed that I would be 58 years old when humans finally decided to go back, but here we are. Makes me sad.

When the moon was blown out of orbit in 1999, taking the Alphans with it, it also created a rupture in space-time here on Earth, which is why we are all living the alternate version where we never returned to the moon.

Comment Re:Silly politcal granstanding all around (Score 1) 255

Yeah. I wish that were true. Trump was elected by a majority. And his current support numbers are still around 38%.

A couple things to consider on that:

  • Once again the percentage of eligible voters who bothered to vote at all in the presidential election was small
  • As in the other elections where Trump ran, many people were casting votes against someone as much as they were casting them for someone. In 2016 Trump won largely because of the avalanche of anti-Clinton sentiment that came from Republican regulars who very much did not agree with his platform. In 2020 Biden won in no small part in response to the disaster that Trump created in his first term. Then in 2024 the quick switch that the democrats pulled to change their endorsed candidate caused a large number of otherwise reliable democrats to not bother showing up at all.

    I would much rather go nearly anywhere in Europe.

    If we were to go back to the topic of the IgNobels themselves it would be interesting to know how many people actually traveled internationally the last several years to attend in person. I've read about them regularly but never considered going in person; I'm not sure I even knew before reading this that they were previously hosted in the US.

Comment Re:How long can this system last? (Score 1) 40

Honestly, arena rock is practically a dead genre already.

That might depend on how widely we define "arena rock". Yeah there aren't a lot of "rock" acts - by the traditional definition - that are selling out huge stadiums but there are plenty of other acts that are. Between various pop princesses, nostalgic rockers from the past, comedians, and even politicians we have plenty of non-sporting events selling out the hockey, basketball, baseball, and football arenas.

That said, while the tours pay the artists better than media / streaming revenue - and by a huge margin - the artists get but a small fraction of the ticket price. Prices keep going up, and at some point the fans won't pay it. Ticketmaster doesn't seem to have a plan for this, they seem to exist in an alternative reality where all fans have unlimited funds to see their favorite artists.

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