DDG just isn't very good at finding things compared to Google.

I disagree - that has not been my experience.

Seconded. I have DDG as my default search engine for many years and I cannot remember the last time I found DDG results not satisfactory and need to use Google.

Thirded. To be honest, I go to Google probably 1-in-100 of my searches because I'm not satisfied with the results I got for something obscure, but typically in those cases Google doesn't really do a better job, just a different job.

I see no reason NOT to use DDG as your default search engine.

Portal is one of the best games ever - I'm disappointed that I can't run it on a modern OSX anymore since it is stuck in 32-bit.

VALVE: could you PLEASE modernize the binary??

While I am strongly opposed to any computer-based tool used by schools sending data about kids to the "big data companies" (if you want to call them that), I will point out that many school districts are using Google Classroom as a platform. So hopefully the study did account for "legit" data sent to Google in this regard versus just raising hell that a Google IP address was a target at some point.

That being said, I have never read the license of GC but hope it was in the spirit of the "don't be evil" side of things, especially since I believe districts do pay for the service.

Now as far as Facebook getting data from these education sites? That is stepping over the line, bud..

To be honest, the schools were a little haphazard buying into the online services once COVID hit and frankly kids in K-12 need less screen time, not more. If your kid's school is leveraging online services as supplemental learning, question the principal about it - many of these sites are poorly written, poorly secured, and frankly make promises by people with hardly any education experience whereas your school's teacher who has a degree in education and spends all day with the kids and thinking about how best to teach them definitely knows a lot better than the staff behind i-teech-your-kids-gud.com.

Hopefully there is more they're fixing.. I recently posted on StackExchange (with no answer yet) that I have a very large iTunes collection from years of collecting and ripping CDs. In the past, "Get Album Artwork" usually did a decent job, but not always. If I look back about 10 years, there was an old script called 'FetchArt' which plugged into iTunes and did a great job of filling in the gaps that iTunes couldn't on its own, but I think it has gone way-stale at this point.

When I upgraded the library to Catalina's Music.app (because iTunes was removed during the upgrade), Music.app spent quite some time going through my library and attempting to "fix" all my album art. Unfortunately, it seems to have done a horrible job at that in that all albums by a few artists that I checked seem to now have a adopted a single album cover from one album (e.g. all Iron Maiden art is now "Piece of Mind", all Peter Gabriel is "So", Red Hot Chili Peppers "Californication" has picked up a greatest hits album cover, and so on).

I'm just generally upset with Apple now because their bad coding/algorithms undid lots of automatic and manual work that I did over the years to get the right album art attached to the right songs in my collection. If it wasn't for the fact that I have about 50,000 songs in my library (yes - they're all legit believe it or not) I'd just go about it manually, but this is overwhelming and upsetting. With a company as cash strong as Apple, you'd think they'd throw a few bucks at the QA department? >sigh

I think they're saying if your recycle bin is 80% amazon boxes that could have been recycled, but then also 20% greasy pizza boxes and unwashed cottage cheese tubs that spill out - the whole bin is now 100% trash.

A little grease on a pizza box is just some vegetable oil absorbed into loblow pine - that is nothing for a digester at a paper plant to deal with. Honestly, if it isn't paper that you can practically see through, the paper recycling plant is not going to have any trouble with it.

The problem is that people are too confused or just don't care. I've known people who won't recycle a perfectly clean brown paper bag with the printer & newspaper because it literally isn't printer or newspaper. The reality is that paper engineering can make paper out of anything except metal, and a little natural contamination (read: oil) isn't anything to the process.

The Pentium D offered two Pentium IV cores in a single package, and I think it predated the Core2 families.

The D did predate the Core/Core2, but the major difference is that the D was hardly more than two Pentium 4 cores in the same package. If you look at the actual silicon, it was a technical equivalent of sticking two of them on the same die with some hot glue and scotch tape to hold them together. The two cores did not have any direct paths to work with each other.

The first time that Intel (IMHO) made a true multi-core chip was with the Core/Core2 line. At that point, they had done more integration between the CPU components and it was less of a hack; the two cores could work together through a proper inter-core bus. That being said, they did pull the same tricks again with the Core2 quad chips (even the Xeon Harpertown and thereabouts) in that two of the cores communicated with the other two cores in the same package by going out of the high speed core area to the slower front side bus (FSB). It worked, but hardly the same integration found on later i5/i7 chips where the multiple cores are more truly wired together.

The games will appear alongside current fare as a new programming genre -- similar to what Netflix did with documentaries or stand-up specials.

So how will that work? Even if it's a server-generated-streaming-style audio/video setup, how will input be handled? Can all Netflix-compatible boxes/TVs accept gamepad-style input? I know the latest Apple TV boxes can work with Xbox/Playstation gamepads, but what about other hardware such as a Fire TV or Google Chromecast?

Somewhere in the last few years Netflix introduced the ability to have interactive content; the only one I'm aware of is a Captain Underpants episode where you can "choose your own adventure" or something along those lines. I discovered it in 2020 when my kids watched every episode on an AppleTV 3rd gen and then were disappointed that they couldn't watch this one because the ATV3 lacked the ability to do interactive. Newer ATVs and my 2019 Vizio TV seem capable of doing this feature, however.

So I'd imagine it might be leveraging this feature to some extent, though obviously more complicated games do have a larger payload to execute.

I think the best feature of the Wii U is that it lets you keep the GameCube and Wii generation viable in the HDMI era. The Wii support is out-of-the-box and trivial, but you have to do some relatively simple software/procedure hacks to get the GameCube emulation (plus an SD card to hold the ISO images).

Not as powerful as the Switch, but I'm happy that at least I don't have to deal with HDMI upscalers of varying quality to get my old GameCube and Wii software working on a modern TV.

Finance.yahoo.com is still the best for stock market research. I usually have about 20 tabs open.

Not sure I would say it is the best for stock market research, but there are two things that I can note:

1. 1. The web services API for Yahoo Finance is open and very widely used. I think Google shut theirs down at some point, but Yahoo is an open and relatively cheap solution.
2. 2. Apple's stock programs (desktop and mobile) use Yahoo Finance, so that's billions of devices right there whether they realize they're hitting it or not.

...it requires their old HFS+ file system to work, and all current Macs use APFS.

Yes, it does still require HFS+ for the Time Machine storage volume, but lets not create confusion here. First, the service doesn't care that you're backing up an APFS or HFS+ volume. Second, when Time Machine creates a backup repository on your backup drive, it creates an HFS+ Sparse Bundle. That could live on an APFS volume happy as a clam. So in other words, Time Machine does use HFS+, but does not care what filesystem you have as long as it can create the sparse bundle on it.

(FWIW, I have Time Machine running on an APFS system and the backup is on an APFS disk as well, so I know this works!)

As a customer of Amazon, I like the idea that I have a more-or-less direct path to complain about a product that didn't meet specifications. I've had two purchases this year that I had to raise issues about, one being that the seller sent the wrong product (sent 'hot purple' instead of blue for a boy's toy) and the other being advertised to last 25,000 hours with a year guarantee but it ended up only lasting about 5% of that.

If I went through other retailers, I would most likely have no way to dispute let alone get a message to the seller in a way that they would actually listen. At least with Amazon, you and the seller know that if they don't do right by you then it could hurt their future sales. You say they're too customer centric like it's a bad thing; I say it's helping keep the sellers honest and responsible for the product I'm giving them my hard earned money for.

But that is just my opinion, YMMV...

In regards to the Michael Jackson solo, it is interesting that EVH didn't take any royalties for it. He didn't think it was that big a deal. However, it is estimated that he would have made MORE in royalties from that song than he made his entire career with Van Halen.

I figure they were just trying to preserve as much information as possible. VHS will have lost a lot already.

This is what I do, at least. I haven't uploaded anything to archive.org, but when I've ripped my VHS tapes I've left them in whatever maximal format so that if some day there is a tool to algorithmically enhance them I wouldn't have lost any additional information. These are the archive copies of home made videos; I wouldn't bother with store bought stuff.

Now that being said, when I've published them to my home's media system, I do convert them down to DVD MP4 to save space and streaming bandwidth.

This is touching on the point here, IMHO. Licensing. Microsoft is in control of how much it costs for Windows and thus how much it costs for workloads to run on servers whether on-prem or in the cloud. You don't pay much for a server license on Azure but any other cloud provider is getting charged quite a bit more.

There are ways to get around this with AWS, but you need to talk to someone from Amazon. I'd imagine the reason is that these companies in the survey aren't off of Windows and thus are kind of stuck on Azure for now because Microsoft is telling them that as long as they're running Windows, they'll provide the best experience and cost. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear they have the best reliability and service set, so its a trade-off.

Why are fares $2.75? I don't know if it is fair to compare it to taxi rides and bottled water, though that would be a economics 101 approach. Saying a $0.25 increase is nothing is disregarding the historical cost increase.

I think the main issue is that there are a lot of people living in the 5 boroughs who have been there all their life and are not the transient population that moved there for their 20s or even 30s who most likely are on the wealthier end of the spectrum (i.e. they appear fine to spend ridiculous amounts of money on rent and it is only increasing). The "lifers" of NYC have observed the cost of a 30-day metrocard go from $65 (circa 1998) to nearly double at $121 today. When you live in NYC, most people don't drive and completely rely on the bus/subway system MTA provides and thus is a necessity to get to work or school (yes, your high school might not be within walking distance or even the same borough and there is no school bus like the suburbs).

Subway ridership has increased over 35% in the same time frame of 1998-2018. During this time the MTA has mostly refreshed its rolling stock while doing some infrastructure improvements, which is good and obviously expensive. However, they've also reignited the 2nd Ave line work which is a major cost to the city and I suspect is the main financial drain and somewhat why it hasn't been explored in many decades. I can only imagine that it was started up again because someone ran a spreadsheet which showed that if they build this, they'll increase property values on the east side which means they can increase property taxes which means more revenue for the city. But how much of that is going back to the MTA?

I don't know the answers to this but I get the sense that budgets are somewhat getting driven by greed and the desire to further gentrify the boroughs rather than provide the best service for the people who have lived their all their lives. Simply saying "keep increasing the fare" is ignoring the needs of the majority of people that live in the city and won't move away after their few years of their "city living" experience.

(rant finished)