I have a bunch of Sonos Amps for zonal speakers and this really pissed me off too. I read that it has something to do with some upcoming changes to Android, but as a programmer I can't understand how this would be hard to support.

For my amp I bought a WiiM Pro, which is basically a Sonos Port clone (the app and hardware are nearly identical), but with with TOSLINK support, and at 2/5 the price. It still seems to still manage supporting playing local files on my phone. Maybe Android 15 will break this, but for now I'd recommend it to anyone over the Sonos Port, just wish they had an Amp version like Sonos.

They were trying to gain a foothold int he phone/tablet market. They thought C++ and no garbage collection stalls would give them a competitive performance advantage. They thought they could convince developers to create phone/tablet apps by giving them an API that would work on everything. Limiting the API was an initial attempt to add phone/tablet style permissions.

It didn't work because you cannot create compelling desktop applications in UWP. To this day it seems like the premier desktop UI framework for Windows is still WPF. .Net MAUI seems to have many of the same limitations as UWP. But too many applications hacked around the limitations in the WPF API using reflection that they cannot change it without breaking things, so it has stagnated.

So they are now trying to leverage the adoption of the Window API by adding permissions and a compelling UI framework to achieve the same goals they set out to achieve with UWP.

The next generation of consoles all have very fast SSDs. We are about to see a paradigm shift in how games are architected, but it needs to be supported on PC first to convince engine developers to retool their engines. It's not about how fast you can load something into memory, it's about what you could do if you effectively had 60 GB of memory with a 6 GB cache (RAM).

OMG!!! Ponies!!!

The UP 3 sounded really interesting when it was announced. I was on a fitness kick at the time, and my girlfriend ordered one for me for Christmas. At the time, Jawbone was saying it would deliver by December 22. December came and went. We called, and Jawbone gave no reason but said deliveries would be delayed, and that it should be shipping soon January came and went. We called again. Same answer. February, March... the device didn't come until April.

When I had finally received it four months later, I found that the UP 3 had tons of problems. The biggest one was bluetooth syncing. It was supposed to constantly be sending data to the phone through bluetooth. But, the bluetooth connection failed multiple times a day. When it would fail, I would have to repair the band.

Also, the initial marketing for the UP 3 was heavy on the heart rate monitoring feature. It seemed based on the advertising that I could use the band to track my heart rate during the workout. But when the band shipped, it would only track resting heart rate while you slept.

Finally, the band just died. Customer service was terrible. Long waits on the phone, to hear them tell me they weren't authorized to send me a replacement. If that wasn't enough, was that in the midst of all of these UP 3 problems, Jawbone announced the UP 4 shipping soon. No discounts for the UP 3 users dealing with all the crap. On top of that, the UP 4 just seemed silly, with the only new addition being that could be used to make American Express (and only American Express) payments.

So I'm not surprised at all to see them fail. And given the track record with this CEO, I would strongly recommend against investing in any of his future projects.

Thoughtful questions. I think it's probably driven by two things. One, basic survival instinct. Even if it wouldn't affect us personally, it would make sense from an evolutionary point of view for us to have a drive to not just preserve ourselves, but the species as a whole.

Second, I think behind it there's idea driven by hope. That the human species is capable of great deal. That we can be much more than we are now. That we can become something that can do good for ourselves, other life forms, and the places we inhabit.

Agreed. Additionally, I think the "Like" button has done so much to reduce real social connection and intelligent discussion. No need to have meaningful conversations with someone. Instead, you can give them two seconds of your attention by tapping Like as you scroll through and do the same thing for hundreds of other posts. Disagree with someone's opinion? Why bother with a discussion that could help you understand each other? Just block them from your news feed and stay in your bubble.

I'm not on Facebook anymore but I took a look at Facebook's page about Facebook Groups, which was mentioned in the article. I was hoping to find something different. But nothing new here. Same old Facebook, just restricting to certain people in a group.

We're more likely to kill ourselves as a species than we are to be destroyed by some external force. Wherever we go, we will take our problems with us. As the saying goes, "wherever you go, there you are". If we face violence, poverty, hunger, and overpopulation now, we will eventually face the same problems on the moon, Mars, or wherever. Our challenge as a species is going to be working together to solve these internal problems. If we can do this, we can colonize the galaxy as benevolent stewards instead of as a destructive virus.

In conversations like this, a question we should be asking is whether it does more good or harm to bring our species to another place, with our species as it is right now. Is it really right to bring pollution, global warming, and the potential for nuclear destruction with us anywhere? To me it seems very speciesist to look at the problem from only the human point of view. Is it good for the universe for us to carry our problems with us right now?

I'm surprised they're just now replacing the calculators in high schools. I graduated close to twenty years ago, and had a TI-85 and later a TI-89. It made sense back then, because not everybody even had a computer at home. Nowadays you can get a computer for less than the calculator costs, and all the kids have smartphones anyway. The only worry now is preventing students from using a program that is too smart and which does all the work for them.

Does bring back memories. I remember taking apart my TI-85 and taking out a certain resistor, which sped the calculator up a lot. Pretty stupid thing to do actually - I definitely wouldn't have attempted it if I had bought the calculator myself instead of having it come from my parents. My friend wasn't so lucky with the process and ended up bricking his. I did some of my first ever programming in TI-BASIC. Automating calculations for chemistry and physics classes, I think. Fun times.