Now that Nomadland, which examined our mobile living subculture, has won the Best Picture Oscar, maybe we will see van conversions that function as personal private offices, with a desk, comfy chair, file cabinet, laptop dock, extra monitor, printer, a small fridge, space for a second chair, etc, so one can sit in the company parking lot or garage and get work done, only going inside the building for meetings and bathroom breaks. A heat pump could provide efficient heating and cooling. A directional wi-fi antenna on the roof could access the corporate network. Power could come from the hybrid vehicle battery or EV charging hookup. On a nice day with no meetings scheduled you could park at the beach, or a scenic overlook. Replace work from home with work from anywhere. Possible tax deduction? It has to happen.

Perhaps Dr. Stallmanâ(TM)s success comes in part from his being willing to say what he believes without regard for whether the time is right.

If Texas wants to rely on the free market and not regulation, they should make sure that the power companies and grid operator are fully liable for the damage done by foreseeable and avoidable power outages. That would get some action.

You can do that now with the latest AppleTV 4K and one or two (for stereo) HomePods. See https://support.apple.com/en-u... I haven't done it because I have the older model, but the possibility may get me to upgrade. Apple TVs are cheap enough and I can use the old one somewhere else.

One advantage of this concept is that its electric power use can be turned on and off easily, so it can be off during peak power periods, typically early evening, or when there is a short term dip in production due to varying wind and sunlight. That makes these farm pods very attractive loads to the utility companies, which would offer correspondingly low rates.

What OS does Apple currently run in their own extensive server farms? Likely some flavor of Linux. Presumably they would run the same stuff on their own silicon. Apple can easily make that happen if they want. Apple has a large internal need for cloud computing, where they can shake out any problems. If they can keep their edge on performance per watt, they could be quite competitive with other players. Given their size, they need a new high growth market like cloud.

How many loads in Apple's service portfolio need ECC? Serving music, videos, exercise apps, Siri? GPUs and AI acceleration could be relevant to what they do. And any supporting software development is orthogonal to their core products, so it is easy to do in other countries. Remember, we are talking about essentially free processing silicon, graded out from their Mac production. Of course the higher end silicon the parent article refers to would be even more suitable for servers.

No one seems to mention Apple silicon's potential impact on the server market. They could start with internal consumption. Right now they are selling binned M1 chips with one non-functioning GPU core on their low end Macs. Given the way yields work, they must have many more reject M1s with, say two bad GPU cores, or some bad neural engines, etc. They could slap these essentially-free, low-power processors on simple circuit boards and stuff large numbers into open-server racks to satisfy the growing cloud computing needs of their services business. They could eventually sell a server product or just compete with AWS and the like. There is nothing stopping them from becoming a cloud powerhouse.

I find it hard to believe that US offices in hostile countries are not equipped with a basic radio spectrum scanner that would detect even weak microwave beams directed at the building. In the past, such signals were used to power listening devices.

âoe The L shaped enter key, is becoming less common than before. It use to be a Big key, because Type Writers use to have a lot more extra mechanism behind it. Latching a spring, to return the carriage to the beginning, and fancier typewriters that would advance the rollers down a step. It just took more force to activate those levers than the normal keys.â Um, no. Manual typewriters did not have a key for this. There was a lever at the end of the carriage that let you push it back to the left margin stop (hence âoecarriage returnâ). Continuing to apply pressure to that lever advanced the page in the same operation. All manual typewriters did this, even the cheapest. There was usually a separate control that let you select single, one and a half or double spacing. I donâ(TM)t recall any electric typewriters requiring extra force on the return key either.

The $59 HiFive1 Rev B competes more with the Pi. The potential win is in the security of open hardware. Price/performance isnâ(TM)t there yet.

Living in rural areas and working remotely has many cost advantages, dramatically lower home prices, no commuting and often lower taxes. A major barrier though is lack of a good Internet connection. Viewed this way, $100 per month is dirt cheat. Companies will save enough in office space to subsidize connectivity. Starlink could change the rural urban dynamic and the smart move may be investing in real estate that is hard to connect otherwise. With reusable rockets and mass produced satellites, Musk has already proven he can do it.

That this is apparently the first malware that slipped through Apple's approval process, after who knows how many attempts, only emphasizes the value of living inside Apple's walled garden. Note that Apple has the ability to revoke approvals, as the article says "Apple revoked the notarized payloads after Wardle reached out, preventing the malware from running on Macs in the future."

The trick would be to get consensus on a single Linux Distro for the elderly. It might then develop enough critical mass to be well supported, perhaps with older tech veterans helping to keep it safe and usable for refugees from Windows 7 and the like. Fragmentation = failure.

Wouldn't it be faster and cheaper to build a robotic lab on Mars to analyze the samples? The lab could be added to over the years with more capabilities and replacements for broken components. Aerial drones could collect samples and bring them to the lab. What can we do in labs on Earth that could not be done on Mars?