My banks site won't work in Firefox. Oddly it says it does, I have not tried on Windows. Maybe it would on Windows but I don't know why that should make a difference.

Yeah,

I kinda like Disney+, my family and I do watch quite a bit of content on it. It has gone down hill some though. I don't really pay for the ad tier it is bundled with my wife's mobile plan (so yes I do pay for it) but that bundle includes other features/services/tethering rules we want and is still the most economic to get them, at least without completely switching carriers.

I don't think I'd be a subscriber if we had to pay 'full rate'

$20 for ad free
$15 for w/ads

Would free be
$0 w/MOAR Ads!

Or would it be a limited selection of content, stuff comes out first on the paid subs levels?

Something even more aggravating and dickish like the first 8 episodes of whatever free, but oh look you have to subscribe to get episodes 9 and 10?

Regardless of what youtube and Tubi etc might be doing there is psychology in play here that I expect is going to leave either subscribers or would-be subscribers feeling resentful about the model.

They are counting some combination of legitimate risk, FUD, and protectionism to ultimately protect them from the Chinese models.

The reality is at some point in the not to distant future it will be cheaper to put enough AI accelerator hardware in workstations to give most folks using Claude/Claude code and similar a perfectly acceptable degree of performance. It always goes this way - it is never cheaper put hardware behind the glass when it can go under the desk long term. The only reasons to do it usual boil down to management and wanting to do something more bleeding edge that hasnt filtered to commodity hardware yet.

Of course for online applications that need to scale, and for complex engineering or very large data volume tasks, sure "Cloud AI" and certainly for anyone who needs to train a model. However the idea these guys are going to get individuals and business to keep paying $200 for tokens to use some desktop AI assistant is unrealistic, and down goes the datacenter volume requirements along with that.

Again I am not saying there isnt a new industry / space here or that it is all a bubble but the current Anthropic/OpenAI/Grok business model persisting for a whole lot longer does not appear to me anyway to that it fits the patter of the last 25 years of White-Collar-targeted IT systems.

Let me caveat that I also think the sorts of people making big investments in Data Centers are not stupid and at least see this as a likely outcome as well, presumably they believe they can sell the space/capacity to other users for other applications. If so why not charge the Anthropics of the world with the VC money huge premiums to rush build outs while you can get them? As long the assets are still marketable after that business drops off, it is a win!

As much as I want to say, it might be useful to have Web Based E-mail interface that will work in a basic / legacy browser, I don't know this is really true.

Not much of the web works at all if you try to use it with anything not Chromium or Apple-Webkit from less than five years ago. YMMV with recent Mozilla engines.

The few places where I can see someone maybe wanting to use this are the very places that people definitely should be isolating from all things Internet, especially not exposing it to e-mail content, which even if restricted to being from the local domain could still contain something malicious accidentally forwarded.

I can certainly understand why people would want / maybe just like or prefer a range of other legacy mail client. I mean if you handle a lot of mail and have been using Pegasus or something for the last 30 years and its all muscle memory, sure I get it. Moving from OWA-lite to OWA though probably isnt much bother for most people. At some point it makes sense to drop software likely very few folks are using.

Exactly my concern here.

There is enough wiggle room from them to mark arguments like 'oh well software tools sure we trust our company stores to hold on to them but um trade secrets we can't leave that stuff with just anyone with a set a wrenches and coveralls'

So they ship and require to ship back some 300lbs of server equipment and the fee is $800 every time.. Force any independent shops to go back to court.. Will Deere lose again probably, but in the mean time they still lock out anyone not willing to fight about it, and still have any owner who needs his tractor fixed yesterday (which for commercial farmers all of them) by the short ones.

It will be interesting to see how impactful this judgement really is in practice. Which ultimately will probably come down to the judges own relative apathy or aversion to corporate BS.

The constant broken record....

Dude their isn't going to be a bunch of 'competition' in spaces like DRAM. The upfront capital costs to make top drawer parts is simply to high. It isnt collusion, its natural monopolies.

Nobody is going to make or finance the investment required to build high capacity world class chip fabs, to not enjoy the prime mover advantage because the risk that as soon as they do something like magnetic-IC memory gets a commercially viable implementation and leaves them bag holding a bunch of capital that now produces chips people only want to use in cheap embedded applications for which there is plenty of other processes that 'good enough' already and higher yield for most applications. If you are producing DDR5 and suddenly having to market it to people that want to put in smart-bulbs you're in for a world of financial pain.

yeah nobody likes paying more for DRAM, but the answer is prices are not high enough, to actual justify new fabs and if they were the demand would not actually be there. Its also true that DDR4 is more than fast enough from PCs and gaming. While it would push CPU prices a bit and maybe hold clock speeds down some it isn't like wider bank interleaving support and even bigger (probably 3d caches) could not be added to spread reads and writes over more modules. It won't help minimum latency for a single byte cache miss much but again for applications that are not hosting/training AI models we really are 'good enough' for what people need at home.

100% of the Criticism can be levied at both parties. You're only mad because it isn't "your guy" this time.

STFU

I have not read the book but the argument sounds it could only come from a borderline retard.

What nation in all of history, under any political or economic system of organization has been immune to outside forces?

If you want to make the argument the US has been an aggressor, you're wrong communism was expansionist and we were reacting, you can but that isn't relevant.

I mean I could argue that 18th century monarchies failed because they were oerverthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized and otherwise challenged by Republican movements too! The fact they fell suggests one social system is BETTER than the other!

Chernobyl, HIV, in addition to waste and fraud destroyed the Soviet Union, could it, would it have lasted much longer without Western Pressure - doubtless but it was going to collapse anyway. Just like every other communist society ever.

China has survived by most abandoning anything resembling Marxism in favor of Oligarchy mixed with a healthy doese of Fascism, what saved China was being old and dying in time for them to pivot.

For sure, Chinese chip making success or failure will be the real story.

A bunch of people are going to jump in now and say "derp see sanctions and tariffs ... have driven them toward domestic development"

No, this is not the case. The CCP wants a mono-polar world where they enjoy total hegemony. They have had their eye on the prize for two decades at least now. If you look at PRC history as far as 'friend factories' and collaborative efforts with soviet-bloc nations, and other technology transfer partnerships they have set the their sights on manufacturing industries ag, machine tools, aircraft, etc they see as critical and found someone willing to sell them some kind of on-the-job training that then enables them to develop independent domestic capabilities. They dump a ton of second-rate but useful product into the market place until they can grow enough domestic capacity and then they expand into the higher end of the market for their own domestic consumption.

Its like DRAM, China has been building out the capability to manufacture top-draw memory products for more than just the last two years, but they are getting their now, and its going to pay off big if we are dumb enough to let it.

China is going to develop a leading edge process chips industry period. Short of bombing them nothing will stop that..

Which of course brings us to the legitimate capitol of China (Taiwan) and our own dangerous dependence on them for those very same products. Either we need to be making damn sure we have domestic replacement or we need to be making a lot more aggressive/realistic plans for not just preventing an invasion but keeping the trade routes open.

It used to be, maybe still is in some cases, the merchant contract forbid them from charging a different price to non-card customers. So if you wanted to accept cards at all you could NOT offer a lower cash/debit price.

The other reality is cash handling is actually expensive for retailers. I used to work retail finance decade ago so some of this is out of date info, but generally speaking on an activity based cost analysis, the merchant fees were lower than cash handling costs. At least in the later 90s and early oughts, with modern-ish fully electronic card processing.

but essentially no you the card user are not paying for those credit card rewards, mostly everyone using cash and debit cards was.

Right there are plenty of ways to uniquely identify modern PCs. For good or ill most of us have hardware that is serialized in electronically readable way, as well as other things like GUID partitions, UUID for dbus, etc. In those latter cases on an open platform they are documented and I *CAN* change them, with reasonable assurance the former values are not easily recoverable. In the former cases I can inspect the open platform and understand what might send hardware identifiers outside the system, or I could run a VM and present only virtual devices where i frequently rotate serials, but again can't run Windows if you do that because it will think it is unregistered again.

I think anyone given all that has come out over the past decade that thinks they have any privacy at all (from Microsoft anyway) while running Windows 10/11 needs their heads examined. Quite honestly if you are in any kind of high security environment, I don't believe you take opsec seriously if you run Windows and it is not air gaped.

Windows IS SPYWARE that is abundantly clear

Woha! a tech firm overstated their position on privacy and spied on users! I guess it is a day ending in 'y'

People's expectation have shifted a lot too. Having a cookout with another family be it in your own back yard or at the park on one of those nice grills the park service dutifully spends our tax dollars maintaining but (sadly) I hardly see family use much these days.

It works for all ages depending on the people involved you might need to add $6 bottle of wine, or $3 beach ball or package of water guns; but all told you can still have pretty nice little party for 6-8 people for $60 between you.

A lot of it is people just don't want too, and yeah maybe because they think they'd rather stream another movie. I don't know.

Maybe...

However the previous generation certainly could have a novel in their back pocket, a magazine, a comic book, flipped the radio on, etc. It is not like Apple invented personal entertainment in 2007.

Something IS different about they way interact with smart phone and related technologies. Centuries, of anthropological study says humans are social animals. It is hard just go whoops they must have all been wrong, turns out we just did not have good enough portable video games and mobiles, and people just spent time together because they hadn't anything better to do!

Obviously the only answer is we will have to do the science somehow ultimately. Still I find a hypothesis that we just did not have something more stimulating than talking to uncle Marty about old dodge pickup grandad "forced" him to drive in high-school is the reason we did not previously tend to all retire to our own corner as readily.

It sure seems like we are getting 'something' out of these connected devices that meeting or making us feel our needs are being meet.