BAAH I meant FOSS not OOS

Seriously, the more enshittified Google and Alexa and even HomeKit stuff gets (and as much as I like to bash on Apple, they've been some of the least enshittified to a point if you are willing to drink their Kool-aid)

but yeah the more enshittified they get the more it becomes clear that with Thread/Matter devices and the improving FOSS voice assistant that the only smart move for a smart home is going to be away from commercial offerings.

Yeah, I know not for everyone... a lot of folks want stuff that "just works" but when vendors feel they have you locked in and start jacking up prices, when digital libraries can just decide "that content you 'bought' is no longer available" the more they abuse their customers the more willing to look into the open source alternatives people will be.

maybe. I suppose never underestimate folks willingness to not have to think about it... /sigh

On the other hand I used my ZX Spectrum to write out my "I must not..." punishment lines,1,000 times, with a for loop and a ZX printer. Why I wasn't absolutely castigated for being a smart arse I will to this day never know. Instead I was commended and asked to write something for an Egypt project we were doing at the time, because the ZX thermal printer was narrow enough it could look like a newspaper article. Heh.

Thinking of all those AI images with "writing" or extra fingers or weird anatomy... all those "hallucinations" like entirely confabulating non existent case law

so I am terrified of the idea of AI mapping..

Remember when Apple was routing people into the ocean?

They managed to do that without LLMs and stable diffusion mucking about - I am just terrified by what kind of Seussian dystopia maps are going to enter if they let "AI" have at them..

Can we please just let some new thing of the week displace all the AI hype.. All this so called AI stuff is interesting but businesses putting it in place and relying on it this early in the game is a recipe for disaster

The problem with Fallout76 is that you can "use up" the interesting content fairly quickly - and then the "keep playing" incentive is just repetitive multiplayer stuff

The story arc and quest line/side quests are interesting enough if you go through hem once, but grindy enough that unlike Fallout 3, and 4, I had no interest in replaying fully from scratch a bunch...

So, I completed all the main and side quests in the game and was basically left with just grind/repeat for their season progress which had very little in the way of interesting rewards.

Yeah you can collect a bunch of junk to scrap to build CAMPs and some folks make meta games out of doing so - building neat houses/ collecting patterns etc.. but it's not enough to keep the interest

TL;DR: you can get the game play thorough it, get quiet a few hours out of it and then unless you like the gridy/repetitive mission stuff just walk away having gotten your moneys worth out of the base game (probably)

I dunno maybe you'd even enjoy replaying the content a few times - some of the quest lines felt too grindy for me to want to redo them ... instead, I'd rather go back to Fallout 4 and make a noob nd say "hmm this game, I'm only using pistols" or something for a challenge (scaling sucks on FO4 without mods to scale enemies)

point is I do think now that the price tag is lower get it on steam sale and play through - you can treat it mostly like a single player game and ignore the MMO aspect if you like - it's got a few fun quests etc.. but the MMO side with incentives to collect stuff for your builds / patterns / clothes - I dunno I never found that super appealing and yeah if you are worried they might turn it off and take that away - I get the point, but like .. there's certainly entertainment value in playing - it's a game and you can get fun from it but I also get what you mean - In theory I can still fire up HalfLife or Portal or Deus Ex... though the graphics really are kind of crappy unless you get one of the remastered versions - the nostalgia is weird - I fondly remember many games that if I go back now I'm like OMG did they always look that chonky?

I'm rambling, sorry.

TL:DR: There's value for the money even if yo don't "buy" a copy as we used to - not dismissing your concerns just think there's value and entertainment to be had

Yes - I made reference to that. Amiga-the-machine beat the more expensive Macs, and cheaper STs, by some distance. But Workbench itself wasn't really that friendly - it was to a tech audience (I was one at the time), but not to the non-tech people.

I used to share a house with two Amiga owners while I had an ST (see post below), and also worked a weekend/summer job selling 16 bit computers and computer games. The Amigas were clearly the machines to beat. They weren't necessarily the friendliest option though, unless you wanted to dig into them at which point yes - the ST and Mac limitations would have been much more constraining than Workbench (you pick 2.0 - I'd say Workbench 3 was the "yeah, that's about right" version but honestly that's a small difference of opinion here).

I had the ST 520STFM, upgraded to 1Mb and running Spectre GCR. I also had a Vortex AT emulator fitted to it, which emulated an 8Mhz 286. Was excellent, and took me through most of University. MIDI work on it too, with a self-built 5Mb hard drive and the unreasonably good SM124 'paperwhite' mono monitor. Taught myself C on it, DTP/text processing (Signum was awesome), graphics...was great.

Despite that, I eventually got a Mac LC at the tail end of System 6, although mostly I spent my time on System 7. The native applications on it were just more focused on what I wanted to do (honourable exception: MIDI apps were better on the ST), the quality of the hardware was better particularly with the separate keyboard and integrated HD. I still think the LC pizza box design is one of the best they did - flip open the top, easy access to HD upgrades, RAM, expansion slot etc...

Switched again when the 486 DX66 with Win95 combination came out. Multitasking was superior to the Mac too - protected, pre-emptive not cooperative, and the idea of manually guessing RAM allocations when setting up your apps (on the Mac) felt very old.

Switched again when OS X came out. Unix with a pretty front end? Yes please. By that point I'd been running various Linux distros for a while too alongside Windows NT4. OS X's fast pace of integration with other devices (remember iSync? Was the best bluetooth phone integration out there) was superb. Lots of window manager innovation then too. Now? I mean, I still love the integration but it's within a more closed set of devices. I want my colour back in the interface, Lion's drab nonsense still infects their design ideas. But the most surprising to me is the hardware innovation - I have an M2 Pro 14" MBP, and it is superb. Battery life, lack of constant fans, lessons learned from bad keyboards on previous MBPs, ports back...love it.

Workbench itself was never great. MacOS from an interface point of view had it beat. Arguably even GEM had it beaten as a friendly environment.
br> As a system operation tool and functionality of the machine, the Amiga had the Mac beaten. A lot of the "20 years since/30 years since/40 years since..."-style articles completely miss the reality on the ground at that time. It wasn't a battle between IBM and Apple, Apple were completely outsold by Commodore and took to simply lying about sales figures. But Commodore isn't around any more to claim its rightful credit.

I never owned an Amiga, but shared a house with two people who did. I owned an ST and later a Mac LC. I have no qualms at all accepting that the Amiga was the more powerful beast of that crowd.

From the /. summary you'd think the article was saying web sites are gone and it's al doom

TFA is saying what my own experience says:

There are plenty of web sites out there but yes, it's true there's a vast amount of content being generated for and within a smaller number of big social media/aggregators

For instance, lets use Slashdot as an example - how many years have /.ers complained that folks just read the summary/respond to the summary and not TFA? (Oh look how meta, I'm doing it)

Someone could point to Shalshdot and say "oh it's a shame there are no sites anymore",... yet most every article here is pointing at a news or tech site or blog or whatever the source is -

Yes Youtube and Tic-Toc are hosting the content and folks create FOR Them - TWITx and similar are a mix of "content for that site" with links to outside but there are if anything, more sites than ever out there.

TFA mentions that we've kind of offloaded our curation/discovery to the social media sites and algorithms... and it's got a point.. The Internet is a bit of a firehose... it can be hard to drink from it. Social media algorithms do offer to help with that but of course they're optimized not so much to help us discover and delight but to drive revenue...

However I think a bigger issue is that search (yes google I'm talking about you most specifically, but other big players too) has been so co-opted by pay for play placing and also by aggressive SEO and junk content farms spitting out low effort crap designed to abuse and tickle the algorithm that you have to be actively looking for the quality to get it.

It means likely using a meta search engine like SearxNG or similar and likely sticking to desktop rather than mobile ... I know I could not tolerate the current state of the Interwebz without Firefox running NoScript and uBlock Origin.

ok babbling on

TL;DR: no there are plenty of sites - TFA says it well, the summary here not so much.

Agree with everything you said. I had a weekend and summer job selling computers and computer games. Could not believe the amount people were willing to pay for PCs, that did far, far less than the Amigas or STs for literally an order of magnitude more.

Also agree with Apple and OS X. I had a Mac LC but left when the holy triumvirate of Windows 95/486 DX66/Doom made them good enough to go for. Didn't return until OS X Jaguar and the fantastic Powerbook G4. System 7 still having to manually assign amounts of RAM to an application and hope the programmer (often me) called yield(), when Win 95 was doing pre-emptive mode multitasking was just...yeah.

That's a somewhat fascinating take on history. It's not correct though...

The 6502 was dated as you said, but the cheapness was the point. Chuck Peddle deserves a lot more credit than he gets for kickstarting widely available microcomputing in general through the price of this. Next up - the IBM PC. IBM has little to do with the success of the PC standard. That would be Compaq, who reverse engineered the original BIOS and made a clean-room compatible one. The idea of an open PC 'clone' was certainly not IBMs - Compaq brought those into existence. Microsoft saw the opportunity that created, and the rest is history. When IBM tried to assert authority with their Microchannel standard, they failed.

Also - the Mac as failure? Seriously? Apple's 'great success' came from putting their machines in schools. History is written by the winners - at the time, they were massively outcompeted and outsold by Commodore and just lied about being number 1 (see: Commodore: A Company On The Edge for more details.

Replying to undo accidental moderation.

They aren't. Apple TV does it too, it's just that some providers (alright - I mean Netflix...) don't want to appear on it and so don't integrate.

Bah, got EV link wrong. Here's the link I meant.

Not quite. Buicks have a passable market in China, and you can clearly see them losing that from the link I sent over. China is a) the world's largest car market and b) forging ahead on EV sales>. This is likely the reason for the all-electric Buick range, not the US.

I'm in the UK, we don't get Buicks here anyway (I don't think). But the market they're targeting with the Buick is China, not the US.