My issue with e-ink price tags is that they make it possible for stores to set different prices for different customers. Numerous stores already track you via your phone's Bluetooth signal. It's theoretically possible that they somehow tie that data to a digital profile with your income and spending habits and dynamically change the price on the e-ink tags in your immediate vicinity. At checkout, they can generate those same prices for any products you're purchasing based on your proximity to the register. It may sound far-fetched to some people today, but upcoming technology often sounds far-fetched all the way up to the point it becomes commonplace.

As of the time of this writing, 10 out of the 64 comments on this article are yours and almost all of your comments are negative. You seem to be pretty invested in controlling the narrative about Home Assistant.

The Win95/98/ME could run for long time without ever accessing particular physical memory chips.

This is surprising to me. Back in those days I had a pretty expensive custom PC with 32MB RAM, which was a lot for that time, and that RAM was constantly full. And when the 1.6GB hard disk started to fill, the OS stability really went to hell. Also, back in those days it wasn't just BSODs that you had to worry about - the OS would frequently lock up as well.

Windows NT didn't have this problem, but on the other hand WinNT and successors also had better isolation so if a driver crashed due to memory issue, it recovered better (This applies really to WinNT 3.5 and perhaps 4, back when it was still going with the Dave Cutler's VMS-derived approach - WinNT 3.5 is almost a microkernel).

I guess "better" is relative. I had a 3D character animation class in which we used Maya on high-end workstations and it was rare to get in half an hour of continuous work before encountering a BSOD. Everyone in the lab suffered from this issue and it almost became a game to guess whose workstation would crash next.

Which is unusual since you'd think you'd want to know at least something about people who were convicted by juries of their peers before you put them back into society - especially when you claim you're with the party of "law and order". Perhaps he was confusing the Republican platform with a fan group of the TV show.

So they're abandoning their long-term customer base to support a new (and likely transient) player in the market. "It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see it if pays off for 'em".

The bubble will burst when there's no one left who is willing to "buy the dip". Unfortunately, it's not easy to predict when the optimists will go extinct.

I can't help but think that Google's decision to abandon JPEG XL was based, at least in part, on the development of their own image format: WebP. I can only assume that their reversal on JPEG XL means that their plans for WebP haven't been as successful as they had hoped. In any event, this is good for competition among image formats.

Anybody who has been around long enough knows that once Microsoft developers have had a bit more time to fine-tune the software and Microsoft marketers have had enough time to soften the blowback of this anti-feature, Microsoft will enable it by default. And while you'll be able to disable it, a future Windows update will silently re-enable it or it will be discovered that it still collects and silently leaks information back to Microsoft to help train their algorithms. Microsoft has been disrepecting Windows users' wishes for decades now, and while some users take pride in spending lots of time to figure out clever workarounds to get Windows to behave the way they actually want, at a certain point you'll realize that if you have to work that hard to get your computer to do what you want, it's not really your computer.

Real nerds run Linux From Scratch. And serious nerds write their own.

I don't think that attempting to coerce people into your preferred forms of socializing is going to make them more receptive to the idea of enrolling their children in public schools. If anything, they'll perceive the coercion as reinforcement of their beliefs that public schools intend to indoctrinate their children.

I need an OS that I can plug a sound card into, start up my machine and it installs the driver and starts working

That's weird because these days I find that Ubuntu does that way better than Windows. If I just plug in some random device, it won't provide all of the bells and whistles but I often get the basic functionality with zero clicks. For many devices, that's enough for me.

I need my system administration routine down around 30 minutes per month

That's possible with Windows Update? I've seen Windows machines take nearly that amount of time just to install one feature update. My Linux maintenance is usually around 2 mins per month, but maybe that's just because I've been using it for so long and know how to optimize the workflow.

I want GUIs for all common tasks and I want it intuitive enough the I'm not spending hours looking up which command line options to use or installing package managers to install drivers to install features to install programs.

This is especially curious. My job requires me to assist Windows users sometimes and I've been amazed at how many times the solution requires firing up Powershell and asking a completely non-technical user to execute commands. It's one of the most frustrating parts of my job.

I'll try Linux, but it has failed me in this respect several times in the past, despite the insistence among lovers of Linux that it's actually just as low-maintenance as Windows.

There's this notion that Linux is difficult because it takes so much effort to get everything initially running and that Windows is superior in that regard. After well over a decade of not using Windows, I decided to install it on my desktop and I was blown away by how much effort it took to get even basic things working. What I learned is that installing Windows from Microsoft's default image isn't easy and that the reason Windows seems easy is because most people are using a version of Windows that was highly customized for their hardware by the manufacturer. Therefore, since you're probably using such a version and you're already comfortable with that, it may not make sense to switch unless you're really motivated for some reason. But once you get your Linux system running the way you like it (and that's easier now than ever), you'll likely spend far less time on maintenance in the long-term.

It really shouldn't be a political stance. Psychologists (and common sense) show that children *need* contact with other children

I don't contest that, but your statement heavily implies that socialization must be done in a public school. School consumes half of the day and the other half can be full of social activities with many children from public and private schools. With sports, music, playgrounds, after-school library programs, martial arts, dance classes, etc there are plenty of opportunities to socialize that aren't inextricably connected with education.

I think the problem is that you're expecting Windows or macOS to conform to you. Microsoft and Apple are Big Deals and users like us are just lucky they let us play in their waters.

Homeschooling should be illegal

I'm a leftist, but holy fuck! In your world, should private schools also be outlawed? Also, I hope you realize that the threat of forced participation only feeds into the fears parents have that public schools intend to indoctrinate their children.

Do you think there would be so many young nazi and evangelists if everyone was going to public school ?!?

Do you have any proof of causation between Naziism and homeschooling?

Homeschooling is used to control how kids think and act

Ah yes, the horror of parents instilling values into their children! You don't have to look very far to find the horrific consequences of parents not doing that.