I don't think Best Buy is competing with Amazon so much as they are competing with advances in technology. People don't buy CDs, or DVDs anymore. And most video/computer games are downloaded. AND...everyone just bought a giant TV in the last ten years (or less), and has no interest in replacing it anytime soon. AND...most of the population has replaced their computer with a smartphone. AND...the people that still use computers regularly aren't upgrading as much as they used to.

So...what does that leave for Best Buy to sell? Not very damn much. Home appliances. Smartphone accessories. Car stereo installations. Those are high-margin items, but they aren't big sellers.

Closing most of their stores makes sense, I think. But it also means that they aren't going to last much longer in any form. They don't sell many things that anybody wants.

The 3D-ish look of buttons and window edges and all that stuff WORKS. It made things easy to see. The Windows 7 UI was pretty good, too, but I always felt that it wasted a lot of pixels on decorative stuff that nobody cares about.

Seriously, the Windows 200 UI was close to perfect the way it was. All it needed was more theme/color options ( a true "dark theme" for it would be great). And, of course, it had TONS of theme/color options compared to Windows 10, which has essentially NONE of those options.

All that said, I have no real issues with the Windows 10 UI. It's not *that* much different. The biggest complaint I have is the same one everyone else has - the "control panel/settings" stuff is a complete and utter mess. Still.

In a way, we *have* invented everything, when it comes to software. Turns out, there aren't any shortcuts to anything, and actual, by-the-book Artificial Intelligence is still a pipe dream.

The advances we have had in the past 10 years, the *real* advances, have all been thanks to doing statistical analysis on ENORMOUS datasets built from user-provided data. We didn't have truly useful voice recognition until Google and Apple started training on huge piles of voice data. Predictive keyboards on your phone are basically the result of the same thing. And, of course, all the facial-recognition stuff that is slowly popping-up everywhere, and freaking everybody out (justifiably so), is thanks to everyone uploading photos/videos all the time.

Those kind of "lets just sample huge piles of data and see if we can make some useful generalizations from it" stuff is the realm of big companies with big pockets. But it ALSO leads to the most interesting developments.

I am fully agree with their privacy policies. They are apparently the ONLY company left on earth that doesn't want to be a data-mining company. And they seem to find the entire idea of advertisers collecting data about people to be evil, which it is.

You're right, of course, but...does it matter? Making it easier to write useful software, even at the expense of efficiency, is a good thing.

And don't forget - the stuff that REALLY needs to be fast still is. Yeah, most websites have horribly inefficient back-ends, but so what? It doesn't matter. Server hardware his cheap, and the latency/speed of the network undoes any efficiencies gained on the back-end anyway.

It's easy to become nostalgic for the "old days" when developers could realistically know *every single thing* about the hardware they were using, and the software they wrote used every resource possible. But it's also easy to forget how limited software used to be. Every piece of software was an island. Communication between different programs was almost non-existent. It was a nightmare. And the reason that nightmare is mostly over is that we have PILES of libraries/frameworks that make all of it possible. It's a mess, but it's a beautiful mess.

Artificial Intelligence doesn't exist.

Quit calling this kind of stuff "AI".

Hyper-V is broken, and it always has been. But it's obvious that Microsoft doesn't really care about it anymore. They want you to run your stuff on Azure.

Which is fine. If you are serious about running VMs on your own hardware, you should be using vSphere anyway. There really is no substitute for it in the enterprise. *Everything* works with vSphere, the management tools are the best, and there is an entire third-party industry built around supporting/extending vSphere.

He does the whole "fake deep" thing. His movies *seem* like they are thoughtful and multi-layered, but they aren't. They're just meandering and poorly-plotted.

If you leave *all* questions unanswered, then you can trick a lot of viewers into thinking their is subtext, even if there isn't.

PayPal takes your money out of your account directly, and holds it in escrow. Their is no "exchange" involved. Essentially, the only service PayPal provides is making it easy to send someone else money quickly. They're pretty-much just like Western Union. We wouldn't have PayPal at all if Western Union had "internet-ified" themselves.

GNU Taler would require banks and merchants to accept it as a valid form of currency. Just like Bitcoin. And while there are some banks that will deal in Bitcoin, there aren't many, and there never will be.

Yes, but that means *nothing*.

Pretty much every "service contract" has the "we don't take any responsibility for anything" clause in it. It's not enforceable in court. It's just there to fool the small percentage of people that believe it *is* enforceable, and keep them from filing a lawsuit.

Actually, EPIC was an attempt to simplify CPUs so they could crank the clock speeds and gain lots of performance. It's easy to forget that, all else being equal, clock speed is the BEST way to improve performance. It always is. A 10GHz single-core i9 would *trounce* the current multi-core i9s on almost every workload.

Modern CPUs spend a lot of time trying to schedule things and eek parallelism out of the code. EPIC was supposed to move all that to the compiler. It was a good idea. A great idea, even. And it probably will happen, eventually.

The problem, of course, is that making a compiler that can do all that is incredibly difficult, for the same reasons that writing code that lends itself to parallelism is difficult.

Give it another 10 years or so, and it will come back. The industry has only very recently realized how important parallelism is to the future of computing performance.

Yeah, I pretty-much agree.

The thing about old PCs vs old Macs, though, is that it's really easy to find parts for PCs, no matter how old they are. If you can't buy a part directly from Newegg or Amazon, then eBay will have it. For next-to-nothing.

For old Apple stuff, parts were never really sold individually. So, like this guy did, you end up having to hunt down an old computer and hope that you can scavenge working parts from it. Obviously eBay sellers will sometimes have old Apple parts for sale, but there isn't that much of it.

The issue is with management.

Management doesn't want to make any decisions that might bite them in the ass. And since *every* decision has the potential to bite them in the ass, they don't make any decisions. Instead, they simply say "That's not what I wanted". They will never tell you *what they want*, only that they don't want what you gave them.

Put another way: Management only wants to take CREDIT. They never want to take BLAME.

Bunch of cowards. Which would be fine, if they stayed out of the way of the people actually making decisions and getting things done. But they can't do that, because then they can't take credit.

The solution? Think of your managers as the enemy. Because they are. Work around them as much as possible.

Welcome to the richest country in the world! With the greatest health care system in the world!

Thanks Trump and the Republicans! See you in hell!

Nobody is buying our stuff, but our board has a lot of friends on boards of other companies that will buy our stuff to temporarily keep our stock price up until we can all cash out.

It was a stupid idea. Augmented reality, *and* virtual reality, just don't work well enough. There are a small number of uses for them in the enterprise, but most of those uses are in the "Boy, this sure looks neat! Our stunted boy-man CEO will love it!" category.