Maybe IBM should also make that promise - wait, too late, broke that one last century.

My last "real" laptop was a Thinkpad T480. It was, at the time, the most upgradeable/serviceable machine on the market. RAM, SSD/HD (if you had the right proprietary adapter for M.2) and WiFi (if you didn't run afoul of Lenovo's BIOS "whitelist" restrictions). I'd have continued to use it if I could have bought reputable replacement batteries at a price in that was in the same ballpark as reasonable.

Sadly, you cannot. A set of batteries would have cost more than the machine is worth in any configuration.

So, I bought a "factory seconds" Framework 13, moved my RAM and SSD from the T480, added a $12 Intel WiFI card, and booted up. Running Linux, everything just worked, no new install required. Slightly less battery life (I had the carrier class megabattery), but half the weight. I'll take it.

Best part: $50-$60 batteries once the current one craps out, and upgrades once the AMD mobos get cheap or hit the used market.

I'm a big fan.

One more vote for "nuh uh" - manual surface-mount component work is not for the faint of heart. And yes, most DRAMs are going to be BGA packages. BGAs are chip packages with balls of solder on the back, which are then typically affixed to a circuit board using an oven.

The real problem is _removing_ the old chips. Get it wrong, and you pull up contact pads. And then the circuit board is essentially destroyed (or can only be saved by even more difficult procedures).

You cannot do this with a soldering iron, period - there's nothing to solder. You need something called a "hot air" tool, or as others have said, a rework station. At least a few hundred dollars. Oh, and flux, hand tools, etc.

Maybe it's like saying that vanilla is your favorite ice-cream flavor, but I really like GNOME. It works the way that I do, and I find it intuitive and elegant.

Yes, I've tried most other WMs/DEs, but always come home to GNOME. Sorry, just had to dissent from the GNOME hate.

My CD collection is about 2000 discs; during the last pass, I had two titles that had mysteriously become unreadable. Both were decades old, and no scratches - likely due to oxidation somehow.

You're welcome.

In case I wasn't entirely clear before, I was pissed off about things like (again, SPOILERS abound):

USA has been hit by nukes, and the gov't is in total chaos. In response, Russia refuses multiple calls from the acting gov't (both before and after American missiles fly) because the appointment of a new President hasn't happened yet. What?

A nuke is incoming to the USA's east coast, but the fictitious president keeps on delaying leaving for a secure location. What?

The fictitious Russian president knows that there's a substantial chance that his country will not be destroyed if he doesn't launch on warning, and can still destroy the USA even if he's wrong about where the missiles are heading - his subs, and their "dead man's switch" system ensure this - so he launches on warning, thus insuring the destruction of his country. WHAT?

The Secret Service loses the fictitious American president, because their EMP shielded vehicle doesn't shield from EMP. WHAT?

I mean, you have to accept that the entire scenario starts with North Korea launching strikes for no reason at all, assuming that China doesn't have some say over such an action, and Dear Leader knowing that doing such a thing is suicidal. WOT.

Let's hope that the screenplay is better than the book - it really had me on the seat of my pants, until it went totally stupid.

She absolutely included plot points that would never have been part of any wargame scenario, some of which bordered or ventured into inanity.

It would have been just as gripping a book, and perhaps more believable, had her characters been somewhat logical actors.

I think that time was of some essence, because they didn't know if North Korea would continue to fire missiles or barrage Seoul with artillery fire, but yeah, that would have made the most sense.

I did read the book, and I found Jacobsen's scenario to be problematic for several reasons (spoilers inbound):

• The USA's handling of the conflict was a comedy of errors beyond what was believable. They actually lose the president, and then they spend crucial time arguing about protocol afterwards.
• There was no good reason why the USA's missiles had to fly over Russia. Jacobsen herself makes it clear that the sub fleet would have more than sufficed to reduce all of North Korea to cinder.
• Russia's steadfast refusal to pick up the phone, despite desperate attempts by the USA to explain things and defuse the situation. I'm guessing that flying nukes might make it more likely that someone would have thought to pick up the phone, even just for shits and giggles.
• The Russian president had a choice of either launching on warning, or launching on impact. This was important because the Russian president knew that Russia's detection technology was unreliable, so he couldn't be certain what the target of the missiles was.
• If Russia launched on warning, it'd mean certain destruction, but would allow retaliatory destruction of the USA several times over. No best case here.
• If Russia would have waited for impact, the worst case would still be certain destruction, and would "only" allow retaliatory destruction of the USA without overkill. Best case would have been Russia being largely unscathed, and would have been the actual result.
• Despite this logic, the Russian president inexplicably launches on warning, for some use-it-or-lose-it logical fallacy that no one would have engaged in at that point. It seemed like Jacobsen just wanted to cut to the end.
• What Jacobsen should have gone with was that China would have taken umbrage at their territory being irradiated and damaged in the overkill strike on North Korea, and lobbed something back at the USA, thus further escalating toward total destruction. More believable, if that was her goal.
• Again, more reasonable would have been a more limited, but still horrible scenario, given North Korea's incitement of nuclear war.

Jacobsen's book started strong, but became weak and silly in the end. There was a lot of interesting info in the details of things, such as how the USA's interceptor technology is problematic, or the state of the art of Russia's threat detection systems. Not sure how true either is, but I'll accept them at face value.

I have a Toyota Corolla Hatchback - bought it because it had a shift, and it was cheap :) It'd be horrible with a CVT, but it's a joy with a stick. Even if it is a bit of a pain, sometimes, in NYC traffic.

Get ready to be flooded with regurgitated hamburger content; it will soon be deemed commercially economically unpalatable to create anything that's actually new.

Wonder why Hollywood is so hooked on basing everything on existing IP? Sequels, prequels, etc? Sora will be the AI that they replace the meat objects with, much as Uber/Lyft/UPS/DoorDash/etc. want to replace the meat objects behind the wheel.

Recall that there were rumors that OpenAI had either achieved, or had breakthroughs relating to AGI, back when Altman was fired:

https://www.reuters.com/techno...

Musk is using a lawsuit to do a few things at once, I think, and it'll be obvious whether he's achieved his goals depending upon how the case shakes out.

I predict that they'll settle to avoid discovery; Musk will be made aware of their AGI progress, and X.ai will receive the same access to OpenAI's tech as Microsoft. No benefit to humanity.

I hope I'm wrong, and we all find out if AGI is truly on the horizon, all OpenAI's stuff is open sourced, etc. Not holding my breath.

FYI, the Pentagon, at the time, couldn't identify any harms arising from the leaks.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbn...
"Review of WikiLeaks docs sees no smoking gun"

You need to be very careful using per-capita numbers when measuring relatively rare events like homicides in small cities, because small random fluctuations can cause big per-capita figures. I'm pretty sure I've seen numbers tossed around before where the huge homicide rate is the result of as little as one single homicide.

The kind of "no deindustralisation at all" where there's been a massive decline in industrial output from Germany's energy-intensive industries over the past couple of years? (From what I've seen, a lot of it seems to be moving to the USA which is more or less self sufficient in fossil fuels unlike Europe, though some German companies also seem to be interested in setting up production in China as well.)