I might buy that when SoC is required due to how goddamn small the device is for things like phones, but laptops are orders of magnitude bigger than phones.

It's a little wrong to comment that XPS were upgradable, my XPS-13 is not upgradable. So I bought the max RAM when I purchased it so that I wouldn't have as much of a problem with inadequate memory later. I wish it was upgradable but it was my experience shopping for small computers that vendors simply weren't doing that unfortunately.

And why again are we unable as a species to organize to put solar on our rooftops in a way that is beneficial to the property owners rather than breaking new ground?

Hell, even farmers are experimenting with solar panels as fencing, and they're finding that east-west orientation for panels that can generate electricity from either side are working out well. Seems like there's a whole lot of infill possibilities available to us without tearing up a bunch of pristine (as in untouched) land in the process.

Wind, yeah, that's going to likely require breaking ground, since most people don't want the risk of living near a wind turbine given the occasional RUD.

At least on laptops I've bought since 2016, there's been a metal flap on the underside that the sticker is behind. The flap could theoretically be torn off I suppose, but it's held with a magnet and is recessed enough to make that reasonably unlikely.

My guess is that manufacturers will just add an initial-setup subroutine that won't allow setup to proceed until the default password is changed by the person doing the work.

One issue with requiring each and every bit of hardware to have a unique password will be more e-waste if these devices are less useful on the secondary market. A common technique to work with old hardware is to perform a factory reset on the bench before reconfiguring it for one's own purposes.

Then again, since most devices, even cheap devices, have their MAC addresses printed on them, it wouldn't be all that difficult to populate the same table used for that with the factory unique password in the printing system, and to then include that unique password on the label. It would still be a good idea to force the user to change the password, but if they don't then it would at least require someone to have gained physical access to the device in order to get that password. I suppose a dictionary attack could be used if the vendor password list leaked to the Internet as well, but that's a whole new level of failure.

Heh. I was in the cablemodem pilot neighborhood in the mid-nineties, and somehow managed to convince Dad to sign up for it. A few months later COX called trying to upsell, they got down as low as something like $1.50 more per month for cable TV on top of our Internet service and he still said no.

It was probably a good thing really, we already watched too much TV and that would have only compounded the problem, but I couldn't help but be amazed at how cheap he was being at that particular moment.

DOS4 is Windows ME.

I can't speak for DesScorp, but typically if IBM has agreed to a support contract then they will provide support.

I've always believed in using separate components for my home entertainment system to the greatest extent possible, and while not specifically for this particular scenario I still maintain that it makes sense to keep the system modular.

If nothing else, it means that if one part of the modular system becomes obsolete, only that module has to be replaced. And with the heightened pace of obsolescence of cloud-connected personal electronics these days it even makes sense from an e-waste perspective. It's a lot less wasteful to dispose of something the size of a Roku box or a Fire TV stick than to dispose of a whole TV. Plus it means from a security point of view that if one does need to protect one's accounts, even physically destroying the small object is a lot less wasteful or polluting.

Past discussion has stated that basically every large PRC Chinese company operates under a charter that allows the government to basically influence or take over the company at will.

Stop thinking of China as a Communist state. Start thinking of it as one giant company where the Politburo is the board of directors and the Inner Party are shareholders, and all of the people in China vary somewhere between employee and liability.

...need to be brought against both the principal studios and against the subcontractors. They're not supposed to allow this to occur. If their own supply-chains are so poorly documented that this occurs on any sort of large scale then it's reasonable to pursue penalties on even if on simple negligence.

Here's a llama there's a llama,
and another little llama,
Fuzzy llama, Funny llama,
llama, llama, Duck.

My guess is that the rise of the cell phone has helped a bit, it has meant that developers were getting used to writing for lower-powered devices again and not everything was simple bloatware.

I still have sitting on a shelf a first-generation 64 bit AMD laptop running Windows XP Media Center Edition with a beautiful screen and keyboard, that has only 1.5GB RAM because that is all that it supports at the chipset level. I had 1.5GB RAM on a desktop computer first in 1999 or so and that the first 64 bit intel-compatible units couldn't do more than that was an insult, but I needed a new laptop when I bought it and it didn't occur to me that it was going to be a problem only a short time later. Oh well.

If you look at it from an e-waste point of view, it's not a half-bad idea to have minimum standards for the new device in a given market so that it will last a long time before going functionally obsolete and ending up being disposed of.

I've always been a fan of buying as much capability for the soldered-on components as I can. At one point that was just processor and things like the screen (ie don't buy the 800x600 passive-matrix when the 1024x768 active matrix was available) but lately it's transitioned into RAM. Anything under 32GB on a new device is simply not in the cards for me, spending the extra $50 will mean a couple of years of extra service-life out of the laptop. We end up using our devices for the better part of a decade, so to me that actually matters.

This was part of the reason why I stopped even considering Apple several years ago, I had to give up hardware features that I felt were important in order to get other hardware features that I felt were important. Things like an actual physical escape key. And doing away with both USB-A and SD or even MicroSD at the same time was a dealbreaker for the sorts of devices that I use, like digital cameras. You'd have to go back almost fifteen years to find an Apple laptop that has anything close to the combination of features that would have worked.

Sounds like the computer did the audience a favor.

I couldn't tell you exactly what kids use computers for, but I spent 20 years in IT for a K-12, and spreadsheets were not part of the curriculum for K-8 grades. High school students used spreadsheets for proper spreadsheet things (ie, not as a glorified database flat-file) as a primary function only in business-applications classes.

It would be difficult to type a term paper on a device without a keyboard, but we've already seen keyboard dock solutions for other tablet devices including those that don't run Windows or Apple's OSes.