I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.

I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.

At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.

I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.

I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.

I would say that any kind of substantial level of investment in a jurisdiction is a reasonable indicator of an expectation of a return on investment, and thus confidence in the economic growth of at least some industries in that jurisdiction. I'm not sure why people are trying to hand wave away that kind of an indicator, unless the fact of it creates some problem for some narrative they have bought into, creating a level of cognitive dissonance necessitating peculiar denials.

Still trying to extort money from IBM after all this time. Nothing like a business model made up entirely of rent seeking.

The use-case for Concorde on trans-Atlantic passage was cemented for me when my uncle explained that every time he flew from NYC to London to talk to investors about his company, the stock price went up far more than the cost of his trip on the Concorde, and he could be back in time to sleep in his own bed the same day.

Seems like a no-brainer to me. I'm pretty sure (as others have pointed out) that if it weren't for the Continental-caused accident, the Concorde would likely have flown an additional decade.

Looking at current travel, there is enough demand to pack planes on BOS/NYC-SFO, SFO-HND, etc. routes that I'm sure there's enough business money to pay for supersonic service.

Frankly, the quality of build, the stability of the operating system, and just the plain reliability and features even in the supporting tools exceed Windows. Take the Preview App. The work I can do on PDFs; signatures, annotations, OCR, right out of the box, and built so that the versions on my iPhone and iPad fully integrate, cannot be easily replicated on Windows. Apple just really has an eye for workflow, and making sure the base system and tools fit well into that.

It's not perfect, to be sure, I wouldn't want to use Pages as my full time word processor, and Apple, like Microsoft and Google, suffer designed interoperation friction, which does suck. But all in all, I'm just more efficient on a Mac, and in subtle ways I never knew were even problems until I picked a MacBook up the first time. Honestly going to Windows right now is just horrible for me, particular Windows 11, which just feels like constant chaos and out of control busy-ness.

oblig: https://xkcd.com/1807/

Remember kids, when you want to understand at a very basic level what an act does, take the name and turn it to its opposite. The Clarity Act is -- without knowing anything else -- much more likely to be about leagalizing obfuscation than any else.

Distributed power means having 2-3 orders of magnitude more power sources than with centralized systems. That increases the likelihood of an accident by the same factor.

In the US, we have already had near-disaster level nuclear accidents with about 100 total plants. Let's be generous and say that only one was really bad, TMI. That's a 1% failure rate where "failure" means the potential for disaster-level accident. If you want to remind yourself of what disaster-level accidents look like, recall what happened in Ukraine at the Chernobyl power plant, which was caused by human error. And recall that TMI was also caused by human error.

With 2-3 orders of magnitude more nuclear plants at 1% failure rate, that means 100-1000 nuclear disasters in the US, unless, somehow, we are able to engineer plants that are 2-3 orders of magnitude safer, and can find operators that make 2-3 orders of magnitude fewer bone-headed mistakes. As an engineer, albeit a non-nuclear one, I find that a daunting challenge. Yes, we as a society are capable of manufacturing at six and seven nines, but that's when we have lots and lots and lots of practice making things. Right now, nuclear plants only have two nines, with most of the relevant design and construction experience aged out. There aren't enough power plants to be made to develop that expertise, and we'll have plenty of disasters along the way as we learn, where disasters have centuries-long consequences.

So distributed nuclear power? No. Frelling. Thank. You.

Exactly. Just because a design is new with shiny gadgets does not mean it is automatically better than what has been previously on sale.

The sooner the newer generations understand this idea is nothing more than pure marketing hype, the sooner we can break away from and reject the enshittification.

Yours is a far more eloquent way of saying what I had intended to: why is this on Slashdot? Is there any relevance at all? I fail to see it.

If these athletes were coached by AI, well... maybe, but that's a stretch. But they're not; they are just taking more extreme measures to performance enhancement than other athletes. And while I know (and employ) some smart jocks, I had the same experience as you in secondary school, because I, too, was not a jock.

I guess we can add a whole new category to the Darwin Awards.

Actually, at the extreme scales, which is the total volume of the observable universe, the universe is quite homogeneous. As I recall, to the order of 1-in-10000 variance. This is why Inflationary cosmology was developed, to explain the distinct lack of lumpiness in the universe, which is what we would expect if the Big Bang alone were responsible.

Only recently has it been anything other than relative ranking.