The NUCs are looking pretty good as well, especially the latest ones. For most tasks, they have enough GPU power for home use, and with a NVMe/M.2 SSD, I/O is less of a bottleneck. Eventually, I may buy one just for a virtualization server.

PCs are just too versatile to be "dead". Take a desktop that is too slow for day to day stuff, toss another OS on it, and it can do other tasks, offloading stuff from the desktop. There becomes a point where it becomes a waste of power, but an average PC bought now has at least a ten year lifespan before it is not worth running even as a background server.

I used Scheme for a class in college, mainly to demonstrate some AI concepts like states.

As for the real world, I see four types of languages used:

1: The mainstream Web languages. PHP, ASP, node.js, etc.
2: The latest language in vogue. Rust and Swift 3 come to mind, because I keep getting E-mails about jobs asking for five years of Swift 3 for minimum required experience.
3: The old standbys, C, C#, C++, VB .Net, Java, Objective-C, assembly, perl, and python. They are not shiny and new, but they are time tested enough that there are enough tools and an installed base to handle what is thrown at them.
4: Specialty languages: Ada, FORTRAN, COBOL, ABAP, and others are still around, and one can make a living knowing them because they are not going away anytime soon.

The PC isn't dead. There are just a bunch of people in marketing divisions which -want- it dead, because they want to replace the commodity priced item with free OS choices and privacy settings that the user can choose with a device that has to be tossed in 1-2 years, dumps telemetry data 24/7 with the user unable to a single thing about it, and requiring all transactions to go through some type of gateway, where they guard it, and do their best to monetize every transaction. This is a damn good deal for the tablet maker. It doesn't do much for the consumer.

This type of lockdown isn't new. About 12-13 years ago when Windows Mobile smartphones were used, Sprint only allowed signed applications on their devices, and one had to pay several thousand dollars to play in their ecosystem.

PCs are not going away anytime soon. I doubt there will be a tablet that has decent GPU performance that can handle two 4k monitors. In the PC world, $350 gets you a card that can easily handle this task.

A friend of mine has a rural Texas cabin that he visits in his campervan. The cabin is small, small enough that the A/C unit can run from the van's generator (a 2500 watt Onan.)

The winds are not great, so all of his stuff is solar. The carport has a roof tilted south and is covered with panels, about 3KW worth. The batteries are Iron Edison (NiFe), about 2000 amp-hours, with a self watering system and box with fans in it that are thermostatically controlled. He also has an inverter, and a battery charger, so if his van's generator is running to run the A/C, it also helps with charging the batteries.

It is pretty cool how much a set of panels can run. If it were not for the need for A/C, the entire cabin could be completely livable all year just from the panels.

Compared to cooling, heating is relatively easy. A stove like a Kimberly or other efficient model can do wonders with very little fuel needed. Of course, for backup, propane heaters work well.

I've been browsing in a VM for a while. This not just limits browser fingerprinting, but also what damage malicious software can do.

In my experience, electric cars are wanted regardless of political tastes. Here in Texas, I know a lot of rural people who would love an electric pickup truck. The two biggest advantages of electric vehicles, which are max torque at 0 RPM and zero noise would help things immensely on the farm. The fact that there are fewer moving parts means upkeep is easier. Plus, on larger ranches, there is plenty of room for solar panels, and wind farms are common in the western side of the states.

Of course, having a high wattage inverter connected to the vehicle's batteries can't hurt either. This would allow one to bring a welder to the back 40 without needing to run a loud, smoky generator.

Because security has no ROI...

Blackberry has had some hardware/software that they sold, in effort to replace CACs/PIVs with their devices, which did a similar thing. Walk off with your phone, the screen locked. Come back, the machine will wake up and ask for your PIN. They were hawking this for about ten years now.

This would benefit both FB and an organization like Snopes. When a story or link is shared, if the text checks out by some fact-checking source that is reputable, the story would get some type of icon showing that it is not pure garbage. If it is text, then it would be cryptographically signed somehow, so changing something in the story would make the icon disappear.

Of course, it is not Hollywood in general (Snopes is obvious on that fact), but if it did happen, it would be one of the best things that ever would happen to the US, culture-wise.

It may not be a dark corner of the web, but I'm finding that I'm getting a lot of value from my YouTube Red subscription. No, you don't get the professionalism of a true cable show, but there are a lot of interesting things to go watch. Amazon Prime Video is another one.

Since Hollywood is supposedly threatening to strike, maybe they should take a few years off. That way, we can see some more indie content that isn't following the same cookie-cutter format in lockstep.

I wouldn't trust Geek Squad anyway. A while back, I bought a tablet at Best Buy, and asked GS to stick a screen protector on it. It took them -hours- to do that, and to boot the job was not really impressive, with obvious globs of dust stuck between the plastic and screen.

If they can't get such a basic thing done, why would I trust them with anything more complicated?

You would be surprised. When I was looking for work a few months ago, knowing the exact tool was a deal breaker. If you didn't know Bamboo, the interview was over, for example. Or, if you GitLab and GHE, but not BitBucket, you were shown the door.

Makes me wonder if in a few years, Agile and SCRUM will be like how TQM was in the 1990s.

In my personal experience, Apple stuff is still widely regarded as high end in a lot of workplaces. Should Apple be able to step into the enterprise, it would definitely be a large market. It isn't like Apple hasn't been there, because with the XSan, Apple was the #2 selling storage vendor for a while (long time ago, but still notable.)

Ideally, Apple should spin the enterprise division off, similar to Filemaker/Claris. That way, the toymaking arm can focus on new shinies while a dedicated company can work on what enterprises need. Heck, take the XServe... it may not have been a hit, but it was a very solid piece of equipment for its time. Done right, Apple could keep a premium price point and compete with things like UCS, but it would take some design (perhaps a hypervisor in the BIOS so machines can be racked/stacked/wired, turned on, and immediately be ready for taking VM or distributed storage loads), but with all the cash in Apple's war chest, they could buy Nutanix or StarWind Software and be in the enterprise game in no time.