Some of the bad HP's non consumer stuff, like Z workstations, aren't that bad. They can't peddle rubbish to IT departments as easily as they do to customers in places like PC World.

In the case of this, the experiment will be done. If it works well, better ones will come along. This one looks like it has a terrible keyboard: unlike Thinkpad T's, which are lovely, this thing doesn't look like a keyboard I'd like to do much with. So I'd plug another keyboard into it to work, which is silly. But that's kind of the story with HP's elite stuff, like Dell's office stuff. And anything marketed to your average consumer is always rubbish anyway.

It's not beyond them to add the missing OO stuff to Rust, or at least their fork of it.

KDE isn't so bloated that it doesn't run on a 2010 laptop with a first gen i5 and 4GB RAM. Sure that laptop struggles with Chrome and heavy websites, but that is an issue with modern websites, not KDE. I do think there's plenty of room for improvement but when on Windows or Mac, I miss the various KDE and Linux niceties and customisations I'm used to.

An interesting experiment I did on a Lenovo T450 (4th gen i5, 16GB RAM) was to disable all but one core and throttle that core to 800Mhz. Still usable, if a little sluggish. Overall KDE is a nice balance when it comes to features and bloat.

I have KDE under Wayland (kubuntu) on this laptop, and KDE under X11 on others. I barely notice the difference (the main one being that this is KDE 6 whereas the X11 ones are using KDE 5).

I did most of my window manager hopping in the late 90s. Before KDE got the point where I jumped to it, I daily drove Windows and only ran Windows on server machines. Then about 3 years ago I gave KDE another spin and things rapidly changed. Now I only use Windows for creative apps for music and graphics which don't exist on Linux.

I'm no economist. But the way I see it, companies making 100m's out of such trading are extracting 100m's of realisable value from the economy while contributing nothing materially back to it. What does society gain in return for the 100m's these traders make from trading?

Previously you had to engage image mode to do an image search. Now you can Ctrl-V an image into the normal search box.

One thing in favour of Windows 10 adoption was how badly Windows 8 sucked. I mean, people were buying PC's with a license to downgrade to Windows 7. Windows 10 doesn't suck as badly as Windows 8, and arguably doesn't suck as badly as Windows 11 either.

Imagine a headline: "Car driven by human hits dog, igniting safety concerns over allowing humans to drive cars."

It's silly. You'd laugh. It is equally silly to talk of 'self driving car hits dog' in the same way.
The question that matters is whether or not a self-driving car is less likely to hit a dog than a human driven car.
Improving standards of self-driving car software and hardware is in the same bucket as improving driver discipline.
And there are many drivers with poor discipline who are more likely to hit a dog than a self-driving car.

Companies more interested in their own profit than the defence or their country. What a shining example of loyalty, and asking 'not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country'. Corporate greed will be the death of America.

Presumably you mean the syntactic sugar we see in Perl and Javascript. Just something less cumbersome than preg_match('/pattern/',$input,$matches,$limit,$flags). And perhaps a regex compile facility like python has, though
PHP I imagine already optimises the case where the pattern is a literal string, so it knows it only has to compile it once
during parsing.

To learn maths properly, you have to enjoy it, love it even.
You need to be stimulated by the curiosity of the unknown,
and the challenge of problem solving. You need to know
the hit your brain gets when you manage something.
It is like this with music: if you want to learn an instrument
over the years to a high degree of skill, you need to love
the instrument and enjoy the many hours of practice it takes.

Remove that positive reward-driven learning, and replace
it by fear-of-failure-driven learning, and as soon as the opportunities
to fail dry up, so does the motivation. So you get the people who
passed maths at 16 and then promptly forgot it all and never
touched it again.

Fixing that fear-of-failure problem by just removing the
fear-of-failure doesn't fix it. If the positive connection isn't
there, and there is no fear of failure, the student simply
won't be motivated to learn.

It's not rocket science. It's simple psychology.
But the people running the education system are
as inept at doing that, and understanding the psychology
of learning, as the kids are getting inept at doing
maths because it's being forced in the wrong way.

In an industry obsessed West, we want the school
system to reliably manufacture units of educated
teenagers who can be put to use by industries
that can't be done by robots and AI. This is tragic.

Rust has a complex and powerful algebraic type system. If used wisely, it can make invalid states impossible to express in the language. Part of the power is the capacity to use the language to make various classes of bugs hard, if not impossible to write. It's not a perfect fit for everything, but I think the 'Rust experiment' is going to happen and we'll see if memory safety and algebraic types are an overall improvement.

Because Jeff needs the money to buy another superyacht, and perhaps a few hypercars with the change.

On my 4K Sony TV: Going from SD to 720p makes a noticeable improvement in sharpness; going from 720p to 1080p makes a noticeable improvement in sharpness. I can make out when I am watching 4K, but it is so slight, and 1080p is fine, so my media player (a mac mini) is set to 1080p.

Proved you have the means to readily verify the correctness of what AI suggests, it's fine to use it, and can be quicker. The trouble happens when lazy people forget the need to verify what AI tells you. Then AI turns into a magic genie with a twisted sense of humour.