Great! Now let it connect to my own services on my own local network using IP addresses and http without making me jump through stupid hoops.

I've got a working Mac Plus (a 512K upgraded to such) in the basement. I fire it up once a year or so just to prove it still works, although I boot it from an SD card connected via a hard drive emulator. I don't use it regularly, though.

I have a 2008-era PC that originally built as a Hackintosh (just for fun, as I've always had real Macs), but it's been a Linux file server since 2011 or so. As a file server, I'm unsure whether or not to call it a "personal computer," because it's not really personal, if you get my drift.

The oldest machine that I regularly use that isn't some type of server is my work-issued 2019 Macbook Pro. My desktop is my personal iMac, 2020, last of the Intel machines.

So, either I have a really old PC or a really new one as my oldest.

I thought the iPod would fail. Then I thought the iPhone would fail. I was also in that crowd that thought that the iPad was a stupid name, and that it would fail.

Keep in mind I've owned Apple computers since my first Mac SE in 1990 or so. Color Classic, PPC progression, transparent iMac, iMac on a stand, Intel iMacs. I'm an Apple booster. The only thing that seems to suck about Apple are the things that I'm sold on and sticking to, according to the market.

I don't feel positive about a VR headset for $3000, which is probably why it will be a massive hit.

You're obviously not aware of it, but we were talking about experiences in the 1970s and 1980s. So, thanks for interrupting, jerkwad.

Where the hell did you live? Things were different in the midwest. I'm struggling to think of anyone whose mom worked. The only women workers I knew were our teachers (there was only one male at all in my elementary), and unmarried women, including many of my older relatives. I didn't live in some rich enclave; my mother was divorced and we lived on welfare.

Even when my mother did marry in the late 1980's, my step-father bought a house on his own wage as a general laborer. My mother eventually did start working within a couple of years of buying the house, though, but I'm unaware of the economics behind that decision.

I graduated number six in my class, but joined the Army instead of getting into debt for education. I did my time, got the hell out, got a job and bought a house on a single income in 1998. Another in 2004. Another in 2016.

Coastal assholes can joke about us being "flyover country," but that's okay; they can stay away and we'll enjoy a cheap cost of living here in the Great Lakes. I'd have to earn four times my salary to have the same standard of living in San Francisco.

I was born in '71, H.S. class of 1990.

Wait how are they getting IP's all on their own?

I'm considering a similar move, especially now that I have kids that are going to have untrusted devices that can potentially talk to things in my house capable of burning it down. Right now I just leave the TV's and such unconnected, but I'd really like to be able to access their API's internally. I've been letting the Echo Dots connect to the internet, but only because the voice processing is done in the cloud.

A do use Siri on my watch/phone/Macs, to do the same via a HomeBridge server, and had no idea there were local only. I'd love to replace the Echo Dots with a Siri listener, but Apple doesn't make anything comparable (cheap, not ugly, and not way to much freaking focus on music, which I don't listen to at al).

Which is vertical and which is horizontal? That is, is the PS5 a device that's 39cm wide and 10cm high, or 39cm high and 10cm wide? Not knowing this, I have no idea whether or not my PS5 is currently positioned in a vertical or a horizontal position.

I loved my Palm V, but had no reservations about jumping ship to the Sony Clie when it was available. It was cheaper than the Palm 500 series, had these cool "memory sticks," and was in color. And because Palm licensed their OS, it was compatible with nearly everything I'd paid for up to that point.

I kept my Clie limping along until the iPod Touch was released, and then switched to an iPhone once I was hooked and knew that I could jailbreak my phone to work with foreign SIMs.

With both my AdGuard protected Chrome browser on macOS and the Amazon application ("app") on my iPhone, I searched for "dog beds" (just in case the sudden, high influx of searches for "cat bed" is influencing Amazon in some way we don't know about).

In my browser, I do get "Amazon's choice" as the first result, but no sponsored brand header, and no sponsored results.

On the app, there's a huge banner for some little-known brand whose name I won't repeat, and several screenfulls of sponsored ads. The application seems to have endless scrolling instead of pagination, so I'm not sure at what point the real results start to show beyond "several screenfulls."

I also use AdGuard on my phone, so a quick check of the iPhone's built-in Safari browser show me similar results as desktop.

If I turn off my ad blocker and refresh the desktop page, whoah! What's all this garbage? It looks pretty similar to the ad-laden Amazon application. I had no idea my ad blocker was able to block internal-to-Amazon ads. Nice. And now I understand why Amazon always wants me to use their shitty application every time I visit the website in my iOS browser: my system level ad blocker seems to be defeated within their app.

I suppose one should tl;dr: before the wall of text, but I'd suggest that the problem as described in the article largely disappears when one uses a browser instead of a redundant application (I'm assuming we all use ad blockers already). This won't serve to fix the other problems with Amazon's crappy search, but the ad blocker will do as its description suggests, and block ads. So

tl:dr; use a browser instead of a redundant app.

Cleaning can be legitimate, though. If I stay one night, I'd hope that the owner pay for cleaning just as he or she would if I stayed seven nights.

Is this a new Prime Benefit? Or a Music Unlimited benefit? I got the email addressed to me as (trial) Music Unlimited subscriber, and it seemed applicable to Music Unlimited.

Blizzard is constantly pestering me to enable two-factor authentication, and then takes a shit any time I try to use my Google Voice number. It's, like, my forever number. Actual cell phone numbers are freaking fungible; why would I tied any type of authentication to one?

I worked for an American automotive OEM, a big one that you've heard of, in China from 2011 to 2016 (I still work for the company, just not in China). My specialty is manufacturing, in particular, body manufacturing. Robots are always cheaper, because people are expensive. Everyone thinks of hourly rates, and, sure, that's a big part of it, but there are human factors that contribute to headcount, too.

It's not a question of one robot == one person, but one robot equals 20 people in many cases. We can buy a Fanuc robot for $50,000. That's a lot cheaper than Chinese, Thai, Taiwan, and even Indian labor. These are all places that I was directly involved in launching entirely new body shops in. I won't share costs for obvious reasons, but these were all highly automated facilities because it was cheaper than labor.

And if you have someone that knows how to fix one Fanuc robot, you've got someone that can fix all of your Fanuc robots, or direct unskilled people how to fix.

Not just a TRS-80, but the TRS-80 MC-10. It was a Christmas gift, and I loved it until I quickly outgrew it.