And a lot of them are. There seems to be a quite healthy market for used/refurbed PCs of the Windows 10 generation with people scooping them up to run Jellyfin, Home Assistant, LLMs/agents, and the like. I doubt as many of these are going to the landfill as some may think. It is likely significant boon for Linux usage overall.

Likewise. I just grabbed an 8th gen i7 box to run Frigate and it works great. I expect that machine to have many years of useful life in it yet.

Yet another bad guess. They just keep piling up.

Talk about a perfect case of misapplied mathematics. It's just nonsense. It's like extrapolating your car's fuel economy from the first 100 meters of driving. Briefly mathematically correct but completely wrong in all real ways.

I have a i7 gen 6 system. It's about 10 years old. Its had one memory upgrade, several GPU upgrades, and its HD replaced with a M2 SSD over time. It was a still a perfectly good system for both development and gaming. I am sad I could not upgrade it and continue using it. Last summer I built a i7 gen 14 system for Win11. I absolutely understand the feeling of being forced to prematurely upgrade.

That said, I kind of also see why Microsoft would want a modernized baseline for reasons other than TPS. I can see wanting a minimum generation CPU to guarantee a more modern SIMD implementation, plus other newer instructions. Not only to assure some of the more modern instructions but also better implementations of some instructions. Especially so for gaming related code. But for more general code its also nice to tell the compiler you can optimize for a somewhat recent base architecture.

It's a nice to have for developers. If MS QA said it's a must have for them, I'm not sure I'd argue against them. Having worked at companies that actually rigorously test code, I feel their pain.

My father-in-law in this mid-70's installed Linux Lite, which doesn't use Wayland, and is small, fast, and just works. It's fine to not like Wayland, or Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, System D, KDE, Gnome, etc... but with Linux, you get the choice of what you run, so it's also a non-starter.

Windows is so unstable that rebooting or updating could cause the entire OS to corrupt itself, and then you can quickly become screwed, especially if it was doing a UEFI update and failed part way. There have been other reports of BitLocker activating itself, locking the drive, and then effectively nuking the drive after a UEFI update because it can't understand SecureBoot.

I am quite familiar with the "promise" of many eyes. Part of the sales pitch for open source. Like most sales pitches, there is a kernel of truth in there but it is greatly exaggerated. Reality did not live up to promise. We'll pass on the misrepresentation that access to source code is something unique to open source.

The fact remains, AI scanning as part of a commit or merge process will be beneficial. It gets us closer to what was promised so many decades ago. When the Linux community was far more technically sophisticated than it is today. Many eyes is overwhelmed by the growth in contributors growing so much faster than the growth in those qualified to review. AI helps address this ongoing problem.

I've been a user and Linux developer since the late 90s. I've read all the advocacy and evangelism. There is a different between what open source "allows" and what "actually happens". You focus on the former, I focus on the latter. Reality not the sales pitch.

They really should, there is no reason to require TPM and advanced processor features. If they exist on the machine, and you want to leverage them, excellent, but requiring them is just bad design. My in laws have two computers, that are very acceptable for what they do, neither can run Windows 11. They're not going to replace them, that would be stupid, so really what are their choices? Either stick with Windows 10 and hope it keeps getting extended, or, switch operating systems.

Microsoft should be sued into oblivion for the amount of e-waste it created from perfectly good machines that were not compatible with its latest OS, after it ended official support for its prior OS.

A bunch of Boeing 737 NGs (-6xx, -7xx, -8xx, -9xx) with sketchy "approved" structural parts that were supposed to be CNCed were roughly fabricobbled by Ducommun and hammered into place by Boeing factory workers put the flying public at risk in unknowable ways.

"It's very important and cannot be skipped, but the danger is not imminent" is a perfectly reasonable classification for risk. You used the word "emergency". They did not.

You would be amazed how many things continue to operate in this middle ground. Like an absurd number of bridges in the United States.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...

An estimated 20 million individuals have gained coverage under the ACA. Since open enrollment began in 2013, more than 15 million individuals enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP. In addition, 12.7 million were enrolled in Marketplace plans after the third open enrollment period (not everyone enrolled in Marketplace plans or Medicaid was previously uninsured).

Insurance coverage among Americans has significantly increased since ACA implementation, especially those in Medicaid expansion states and among subpopulations targeted by the law, namely the poor, childless adults, ethnic minorities, and young adults.

https://www.kff.org/affordable...

I mean the data is the data, more people have health insurance now than they did before 2010, the ACA market has like 12m signups per year, even if say half of those would have other insurance options sure but that's still more and if you want to say "Medicaid expansion doesn't count" then sure you can say that but fact is before the ACA less people had access to health insurance.

Can't just say metrics don't exist, this is fairly trivial to measure. Show me your chart.

But you definitely aren't obsessed with race.

To me that's not an adequate solution. In my experience the aftermarket fobs always have a cheaper build. They may not support all the functions. Also, I'm glad you had no problems but you are one person and your mechanic was a competent mechanic. That doesn't speak for everyone else.

I'll bow to your better memory. My main real memory is that

a) we could keep many small documents in useful formats that actual software and operations people could benefit from
b) we could auto generate documentation directly from systems data (e.g. dump the DNS)
c) we could combine those and instantly generate formal systems documentation which was up to date, complete and astoundingly, actually useful

Also we could use sed and similar tools for mass updates, corrections and so on. Something which effectively went away with the change to XML because things that, to that point, just worked, suddenly needed actual programming.

Understanding the way they mange to make their billing into a multidimensional exponential equation is just shocking. I assume that one day someone said "there's no way anyone can be more evil than Larry Ellision" and their finance guy, who happened to be a mathematician by trade, said something to the effect of "hold my beer" and came up with their charging policy.

Woah... Dumb question, but would a wing spar be repairable or replaceable?

Just slap on some Cylon organic resin. Eventually it will infuse itself into the spar and act like cartilage.

Atlassian appears to completely lack understanding of what's actually valuable in their products. Confluence and Jira used to be markdown backed in important places, which would be perfect for the modern world. They deliberately and in brutal ways destroyed that against the wishes of their users. Think how much value that's destroyed from documents that could have easily fit into both AI and modern human tooling.