> This allows for reduced thickness and reduced cost, which is what most people want

Reduced thickness? No, I think pretty much everyone agrees laptops are as thin as they need to be. Any thinner and they'll slip when you're typing on them, and we want some thickness to keep them robust.

Which also raises another problem with the "thinness" fetish promoted only by laptop marketdroids and the morons who work as reviewers for so-called "tech" websites like Engadget et al: the keyboards on most modern laptops are literally unusable. They're worse than ZX Spectrum+ and maybe on a part with the older rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum. They. Are. Fucking. Awful. And keyboards are one of the major reasons you use a computer rather than a tablet. So what the fuck is the point with these things?

People talk about how sales of laptops are declining and tablets increasing, but maybe if you actually cripple the major advantage a laptop has over a tablet, that's inevitable?

Cheaper, sure, but how much does it cost to add two dimm slots and to use mass produced commodity DIMMs? It's not even as if there isn't a cost to designing a motherboard so it only works with specific memory chips.

I hate this timeline. It's all going to shit.

Outside of a very small community (of which I am a member) this won't even register as a problem, let alone motivate a sizeable number of people to do anything about it. Our species lacks the will to even stop literally poisoning ourselves.

Liberals are fairly consistent in defending people's right to their faith while speaking out against people who want to impose their faith on others.

They're not.

Liberals defend mainstream Muslims from attacks on their freedom of religion and from smears related to their religion. Because conservatives do not understand nuance they decide this means Liberals love Islam and think its the best and want to marry it, despite those same liberals doing the same for pretty much any religious group that's under attack, as Muslims were after 9/11. See also Gaza where RWNJs assume all liberals hate Jews and worship Allah, or think Hamas is great, because they don't want to see innocent Palestinians killed.

I've only come across one "liberal woman" who actually suggested life might be better, in some limited ways, in countries like Iran, and she was a nutcase, not representative of liberals in general.

You need to get out more and realize there's more to life than cheering or booing every identifiable group of people like a fucking football team.

The context of this is Microsoft changing software the person has already bought. It was something wanted and needed in its original form, it's not wanted in its modified form.

Did you mean to write "free"? I'm pretty sure it's included in the cost, rather than free in any meaningful sense. Perhaps you meant to write "Unwanted", or "forced"?

Which is unreliable in many situations. I worked on several projects that had issues involving intermittent data loss on a DB9 port, and every time the culprit turned out to be a USB/DB9 adapter. When we'd install dedicated RS232 cards, the problem went away.

For laptops, the answer to this kind of thing should be a standard space where a customer can specify what ports he wants... you get X number of standard ports, and then you can choose what goes into one or two available spaces. But you're just not going to see that happen with manufacturers, even if the customer is willing to pay a greater cost.

Except that I spent some years growing up in dense, street-centric areas, and kids simply played in the streets. Every day. Our substitute for baseball (so as not to damage cars or windows) was "whiffle ball", with hollow plastic balls and bats. In the summers especially, we spent literally all day outside. In the streets. For kids who did this too much, the criticism was literally that "you let your kids run the streets".

Being car-centric has nothing to do with kids activity. The spread of video games and Internet connected culture had everything to do with the modern dearth of outdoor activity by kids. All of my youngest's friends are online in distant places. There are other kids in the neighborhood, but very few of them play outside that I can see. Online is where all the action is. Maybe the answer is for parents to literally kick kids out of the house, they way they used to do ("out, and I don't want to see you back inside until lunch" was a common summer refrain from parents). Maybe if all the kids are turned out, they'll start doing the natural thing, and make their own fun, which is all "outside" is.

Every other player in the room is doing this now because they saw that there was little or no repercussions for Facebook. Yeah, a $725 million fine is some penalty, but that's peanuts to them for what they got out of it.

Well the point was more "We're not talking random access media here where seek times are really really important."

With a tape, even right now with some of the faster seek time devices, you wouldn't use it as random access media. That's not what it's good for. The fastest tapes with non-trivial storage capacities (ie not talking about stringy floppy or Sinclair microdrive type systems) still have a seek time poorer than the slowest floppy drives.

That narrows the scope of what concerns we should have. If it takes winding through tape for 60 minutes to get to the back-up, does anyone care?

They do, but I'm pretty sure you can write more than a thousand times to an SSD, so 1000T isn't going to be enough storage for a lifetime write log for a 1T SSD alas if it's based upon the media lifetime. What I've read is that modern SSDs tend to be rated for 100,000 writes per sector. That's a little more than 36Pb, but it's not unreasonable.

OTOH the point you raise suggests a combination approach might work pretty well, just write changed sectors but perhaps delay the write to deal with the inevitable "Update the sector at the end of a file" and "Create temporary file, delete it" stuff that goes on all the time and possibly makes up the bulk of writes in a file system. That would easily extend the capacity for backing up a 36Pb system could have.

That's terrific, but probably not something you should brag about on a tech website.

Not all of us watch videos only if we're watching some ad-infested cloud based service.

Why am I not surprised?

Overheard in an office at RedHat:

"OK, we've been working on Wayland for 15 years and it still doesn't work. What should we do?"

"Well, it is better than X11?"

"Not even slightly. It's even slower, and critical functionality is missing."

"Hmm, OK, well why don't we just force it on everyone? We'll claim X11 is "inefficient" because of issues that were literally fixed in 1991, and claim it doesn't have key functionality and is insecure because of issues we could have spent the last 15 years fixing instead. Then everyone will rewrite their programs to run under Wayland, which they'll do because of the propaganda we'll drop."

"OK, but what if someone who likes X11 points out all of our justifications are outright lies?"

"Well, we'll say we're the experts, because we're the people currently in charge of Xorg. Just like RFK Jr is an expert in health because he's the head of the US Department of Health."

"Brilliant!"

Tipping is great in good service jobs. You tend to make good money in mid-to-nicer restaurants as a waiter or waitress. Where tipping sucks is when you work in cheap joints with cheap customers. Or delivering pizza, like you did in college, where your customers tend to be either poor or cheapskates. Poor people can't afford to tip, and cheapskates simply won't. And then there are the groups that simply refuse to tip because they don't see labor or service as a value at all. "If I can't hold it in my hand, I ain't payin' for it".

Nobody's talking about it as a random access media. LTO, which is what AmiMojo referred to, is a common standard tape back-up system. You'd use this kind of media to back up data.

At those kinds of capacities, if priced cheaply enough, it'd be possible to create a sealed, permanently installed, box that periodically snapshots your PC, allowing you to go back in history to any point and retrieve files from that date. 36 petabytes could snapshot 1Tb of uncompressed hard disk space once a day for 100 years. Yes, eventually larger capacity random access storage (eg SSDs/HDDs) might become common in home PCs, but even a 20 fold increase would mean it'd last more than the lifetime of a regular PC, and SSDs/HDDs installed into new PCs aren't really growing in size that quickly.

(Cue people who'll miss the point and say "Well this'll be useless for me as I have a 100Tb NAS!" - you're not the typical user I'm talking about, and a 100Tb NAS isn't the storage in your PC anyway...)