It's less about the repository and more about the whole lifecycle tracking it provides.

It hosts code, but it also provides an environment to report issues, and have those issues tracked through to a commit. It also makes it easy to handle contributions from other people.

If you have a small project, it's no big deal to do it manually. But once a project gets big enough, you really want something to track bugs, support tickets, fixes, releases, pull requests and code reviews.

And "big enough" is basically at the point where you need to have more people.

GitHub, GitLab, etc., are going to do fine - because the main customers are corporations who run their internal self-hosted version (enterprise editions) because it's the exact same issue managing 100+ developers on a codebase.

Linux is special - and they had a whole development methodology set up for large scale distributed development long before things like SourceForge even existed.

Well, to be fair, the memory companies have suffered the past 3-4 times that memory prices skyrocketed, they brought more factories online, and then prices plummet just before the factory comes online so they're selling increased capacity into a surplus market.

It's why a company like Kingston exists - Kingston exists solely to absorb surplus memory. If memory makers make too much RAM, they sell it to Kingston and Kingston makes a bunch of memory modules from it. Likewise if they make too much NAND flash, it goes into USB sticks and SSDs. It's why Kingston RAM and flash products are so variable - they just take the surplus parts and put them into products. You might get Samsung products one day, the next day it's SK Hynix because that's what's coming in the factory.

None of the memory makers are bringing up their timelines of increased RAM production from the late 2020s/2030 because they don't want o bring it online into a market th's flooded.

Great, so Vizio is violating the license and has no right to reproduce the software. I believe the statutory damage limit for each infraction is $150k? That's gotta be a few billion to split amongst the various projects that are having their copyright violated by Vizio.

Times each unit sold.

Anyhow, there's no right to tinker with the TV firmware - it can be as locked down as you want it if the software is all GPLv2 or so. It's why GPLv3 has the "Anti-TiVoization" clause in it. TiVo (which is still around) locked down their Linux based DVR and while they did give you the source code to everything minus the proprietary bits, you couldn't use it on their boxes.

It's why a lot of projects are still GPLv2 - they are used heavily in products. Also why you still have things using SMB1 - Samba went GPLv3 a few months before introducing SMB2 support (Windows Vista) so no product using Samba could use SMB2 without obeying the terms of the GPLv3. Even today many devices still require you to enable SMB1 on Windows just to use their network functionality.

Of course, other companies like Apple, Synology, etc., wrote their own SMB server implementation after ditching Samba. And other projects often have lists of features that have to be disabled to keep the license GPLv2.

Re-pricing the lifetime Plex pass to $250 or so would probably be reasonable and would still get good uptake, but I can understand why they want to move most people onto a subscription model and that does not seem unreasonable for a good product with good support.

Chances are they want to get rid of the lifetime option. They're basically announcing it - it's there, but it's crazy so you're not likely to ever pick it because it would take 10 years to recoup.

But instead of incurring the negative publicity of cancelling lifetime as an option they're keeping it around but making it not make sense to use.

And hey, some people just hate subscriptions they'll take the all-in price.

Well, TIL what HCM stood for. Then realized why the HR system was named that.

All they're doing is moving up the frequency from Ghz to Thz.

Of course. The problem was, Sony thought they were doing Microsoft dirty by buying up Bungie. After all, Bungie propelled Microsoft big into the console market with Halo, and what a coup it would be for Sony to buy Bungie out from Microsoft.

The problem is Sony was trying to get them into a market they themselves have saturated - the Games as a Service - or the market of online team shooters along the gist of Fortnite, Destiny and others. If you look at them, most of them were done by Sony - they had practically all their first party studios working on games like this. And they really should've taken note of Concord which they scrapped after it was released on the market a few months due to poor sales. As in, the market is saturated with those gamese

And now you have Bungie trying to create the same genre of game in an over saturated market - it's not going to do well. The people interested in these kinds of games already have heavily invested in other games. And the people not interested aren't going to start playing because "hey it's from the Halo guys".

The appeal of games with microtransactions is huge, but when the market is tapped out, releasing more won't produce more money.

No, the state of the art was a Sound Canvas. GUS was just for rich folk wanting an incompatible soundcard. The music for DOOM was generally composed using a Sound Canvas, likely an SC-55.

Just like how in the past you'd probably want a MT-32.

Of course, you could also keep Sound Blaster compatibility and just get an AWE series card.

The latest DOSBox staging actually has the Nuked SC-55 emulator incorporated into it (with a warning to remove it if it's part of a commercial distribution due to license issues). But basically everything supports piping the MIDI audio to a real MIDI device or an emulator.

But honestly, 99% of people who played Doom experienced it on an OPL2 or OPL3, or a crappy clone of such. (Imagine my surprise when I realized the IBM ThinkPad my parents got me for University was actually a pretty decent retro gaming machine - having one of the Crystal sound chips that was basically a Sound Blaster Pro on a chip complete with decent OPL3 core. A machine I keep to this day and is basically in mint condition).

Well, not likely. You're right it's not the first speaker to get booed, but the speech for this was probably written months ago, practised for weeks and then given. The fact someone else got booed likely never came up because everyone else was doing same.

Graduation is happening around this time, so a bunch of people will likely be talking about AI. Many of them are likely tech bros who basically are chanting the positive aspects of AI because the benefit of AI goes tot hem. Likely they have been insulated from all the AI induced troubles like people graduating and being unable to get a job, and now people graduating and running into last year's graduates also jobless.

The whole "AI is great" speech works except those graduating have become disillusioned because it's made their job of finding a job so much harder. The whole "let's use ChatGPT to write our essays!" thing wears off pretty quickly when the jobs disappear because "let's use ChatGPT to replace these employees!".

The problem is, it's now too late for many techbros to rewrite their speeches in time for graduation ceremonies.

It's likely because it's stupidly cheap.

A Flock camera is around $2000 installed - and installation is basically sticking a pole in the ground as the cameras are solar powered and use the cellular networks for communication. A neighbourhood HOA can install a bunch for very little cost, which is where they proliferated for a number of years. They were just cheap things to install and use, and many cameras are operated by private companies.

Even the contract the city has likely only cost $100K or less, and likely Flock has them on a service plan where they can install X cameras for that subscription fee. And I believe the police agencies are given access for free for any camera in their network - whether installed by a private company, or city/town/etc.

That's really why they've proliferated. And honestly, they probably would've stayed under the radar save for recent events which revealed less than savory law enforcement groups abusing their access to track people or certain peoples.

One trick that worked in WA state was someone simply filing a FOIA request - it was a properly formatted FOIA request that only requested images from a certain time and place. It went through the courts which decided they were public records, and since it was well formatted and requested and contained they should be turned over. The towns felt that brought up a bunch of questions regarding future FOIA requests and decided to shut down their network to avoid having to answer those questions.

... the World Wide Web. How about just turning JavaScript off? We'd all be the better for it. [Well, except for web developers who can't close an HTML tag to save themselves.]

Then we'd be under attack by CSS viruses.

(CSS is Turing-complete, mind you. It's just a bit arcane to use, but I'm sure AI will let you write the next CSS virus soon enough).

That's only because just before Reagan, companies hired for life. You started as a janitor, and work you way up to CEO. You likewise gave your loyalty to the company - they treat you right, you treat them right.

After Reagan, screwing over the worker became the norm, but people used to the old system didn't change. This affected the boomers and Gen X. Millennials are the first to grow up under the system, learning rapidly that loyalty gets you nowhere and job hopping was the way to go.

Gen Z basically reinforced that, and realizing that companies are going to screw you over, learn to not take crap like working extra hard or overtime to chase after a promotion that likely will never come.

Those lessons are basically filtering down, taught especially during the pandemic.

Some cultures it still exists. Other cultures are seeing it and have movements that basically keep them from being exploited. Japanese workers deemed useless are literally window dressing where they're parked at a desk doing nothing. Chinese youth not wanting to do the 996 crap learned they could just do enough to survive - the cost of living in China is low enough that you don't have to join the rat race - you can get housing relatively cheaply due to oversupply, and food is cheap so you really only need to work a few hours a week.

It'll be a shock to the hardcore MAGA "extreme" folks at X and such who put in lots of hours for DOGE and such and end up basically with nothing to show for it. It's not like Musk would give them anything for working extra hard and extra hours and those political connections will likely be torched or a liability.

What is SQL doing on the list? Everything else is a general purpose procedural language, and then they added in one domain specific query language? If they're going to do that, why not also include HTML, CSS, XML, ...? I bet HTML would be in the top five if they included it.

R is a domain specific language as well - just it's really good for statistics.

The reason SQL is on the list is it's popular and complete. And of what you mention, CSS is Turing-complete and there's many demos of it, including an x86 emulator that can be run completely without JavaScript, or can run a bit more efficiently with it (mostly to provide the clock). (It just needs HTML because Chromium based browsers can't load CSS without it. Firefox can, though).

Python, R and such are big in statistics and math. And both are popular because AI.

If you're looking at the next big web based infection vector, CSS might be one to look out for since not even NoScript will block CSS by default. (It's just arcane).

And for those looking - the x86 CSS emulator is at https://github.com/rebane2001/...

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

Buy the book from an indie bookstore. They exist, and if they don't have it, they can order it from the publisher.

You should know that electronic distribution doesn't save much money - most of the retail price of a book is in the writer, editor, publisher and retailer. The money spent printing it and distributing it is around about 10% of the retail cost in the end. We've made the book supply chain super efficient in that way. Even electronic distribution will only save 10% at most - the costs of the trees, paper, printing, warehousing and transportation.

And Banks is right - his editor deserves quite a bit, but so do people down the line. A writer only produces the text. You need editors to edit the text (depending on the author, this can be significant as it goes through many revisions), typesetters to actually format the text into paragraphs, pages, lists, chapters, and set up the table of contents, indices, etc.If there are illustrations, they need to be drawn and created (writers may sketch the illustration but someone has to make it actually real), etc.

Your local independent bookstore is the best bet for stuff like this, and you may have one closer than you think. They won't have Amazon's selection, but they will have access to be able to order in any book Amazon can get, and many even will ship. You want to support the author? Buy from an indie bookstore. Or get it from a competitor like Barnes & Noble.

And indie bookstores I've found aren't all that more expensive most of the time. Sure sometimes Amazon has a book $20 cheaper off list price so get it there (Amazon is likely taking a loss), but I've seen it where Amazon was more expensive. I'd say 95% of the books I buy come from my local indie bookstore. They know me by name, and the manager even tells me when I show up "I don't think I have anything for you", usually because I choose to place another order with them.

Yeah, we've had grammar checking for nearly 3 decades now. And for the most part it's been mostly useless - tell me if it doesn't complain about anything other than "passive voice" over and over again. Oh, it got better, it gave examples! But it was the same old crap over and over again that I stopped caring about the blue squiggle. I think most programs disable the blue squiggle on grammar errors nowadays.

But I've noticed it in a few places and it doesn't bother telling me what's wrong, but offers me a helpful rewrite to make it better. And it only blue squiggles when it has an actual helpful suggestion on what you can do, offers a potential fix and lets me choose.