Probably better than MS-Windows does in-place upgrades, though
I have no knowledge of that, for which I'm happy. But... Windows 10 was released in 2015 and will apparently be supported through late 2027. Outside of RHEL no Linux distro comes close.
And they could be up to date for many, many, many years if Linux was installed on those, instead.
Well, if by "many, many, many" you mean "about five". Red Hat provides longer support terms, but not for free.
And then after those years shift from a "update" path to an "upgrade" path and have many years more.
True, sort of. Assuming the upgrade works, which it often does... but not always.
I'm no Windows fanboy, in fact the last version of Windows I used was Windows 2000. I switched to Linux completely by mid-2001 and I've never looked back. But it's really not as rosy as you paint it. The commercial OSes (Windows and OS X) actually do a much better job of delivering long-term support and (in the case of OS X) upgrades. I don't personally care about that for my machines, because I have no problem managing them, and even debugging the occasional update or upgrade failure. But I'm actually glad most of my relatives use Windows, because I would not enjoy having to help them do the same.
You seem to have completely missed the point, which is that what Biden *should* have done -- while his party held both houses -- is changed the law, rather than issuing an order that broke the law. Trump has been far, far worse about this, but it's clear that part of Trump's goal (or the goal of someone with his ear, since I'm not sure he is capable of making and pursuing goals over longer time periods than a few days) is to establish that the president doesn't need Congress.
Nothing worse than having that data in the hands of Elon Musk.
What do you think he's going to do with it?
I have seen satellite dishes at the base of isolated cell towers, though I have no idea what they were being used for.
One big drawback for satellite networking is the delay it adds to the transmissions, to travel up to the satellite and get sent back down to a ground station. This delay probably wouldn't be tolerated by a cell phone user, especially if they were talking to another cell phone which would double the delay a second time.
There's also a bandwidth issue at the satellite, if you want to do that with hundreds of thousands of towers there's just no way to have that amount of bandwidth even from a cluster of satellites. The bandwidth problem isn't one of data rate, its one of needing to be able to communicate with the ground on so many different channels because of all the towers, and having satellites at many different geostationary locations. (that's what Musk is trying to do with launching this absurd number of starlink satellites)
Tesla is already in trouble due to profound incompetence.
High data rate meshing requires directional antennas pointed at other nodes, unlike the more broad-beamed bay antennas the towers use for cellular access. Adding several dishes and a bunch of expensive hardware to each tower would dramatically increase tower cost and maintenance.
It's much cheaper to just run a network drop off a nearby pole or trench a line to the nearest fiber vault. Even the towers out along the open highways tend to get fiber trenched to them rather than dishes networking them together over the air.
Here in the USA anyway, cellular service has been considered "critical infrastructure" for quite some time now, mostly due to the decline of landlines. 9-1-1 having high availability has been legally required for a long time, and those requirements shifted to the cellular network as people ditched their land-lines for cell phones at home. So all the towers have short-term (15+ minute) UPS's and a gas generator that auto starts, with requirements to run periodic tests.
The other part of it though is the towers nowadays require internet access to function. We had a massive storm system move through the area a few years ago with close to tornado-speed "straight-line winds" that took out a huge amount of above-ground internet infrastructure, rendering cell towers functionally disabled despite giving out full bars. There were a few lines still up but everyone's home internet was either down or spotty, and it was hard to get a cell call to connect. Was llke that for 2-3 weeks, really annoying.
So, power's not the only thing that needs to be protected to keep cellular service working.
I'm happy you enjoy your Mac, but let's not pretend that AMD or Intel hardware is some how "not good enough" because it really is perfectly fine for the same tasks as Mac and possibly more tasks.
I didn't say PC hardware isn't good enough, I said there's no point buying compromise hardware that's not what you really wanted, because in the long run it's all pretty damn affordable. If an Intel or AMD box is what you prefer, by all means buy one and enjoy!
One thing I want out of my hardware is the ability to run my OS of choice without a lot of hassle, and since my OS of choice is MacOS, that kind of narrows down the field for me.
How is gaming in Mac land?
I imagine it's pretty mediocre, but I don't know and I don't particularly care, because I don't spend much time playing video games anymore. If I was a gamer I'd likely buy a different machine for that.
I agree carbon capture and sequestration is important but I haven't seen anything that looks good at scale yet.
And there won't be unless we motivate research into it.
When there is a decent solution it would be ideal at times of surplus generation when power is otherwise unable to be used
Indeed! This is an ideal use for overprovisioned capacity.
At the small scale I have an issue where in summer my solar surplus is more that my rural grid connection can handle so when my hot water is heated and the house and car are charged I end up with the solar inverters derating
Wow. I generate way more than I use in the summer, but my (also rural) grid connection can absolutely take it just fine. I have 200A service with a 150A breaker (so, about 37 kW), but my generation peaks at about 20 kW. My bigger problem is that if I try to charge my house batteries (20 kW) and my car (12kW) and run my AC (4 kW) and the steam generator (9 kW) and run basic house loads (2 kW) and run my welder (10 kW) that's 57 kW or about 235A. In practice I don't ever do all of those things at the same time (and rarely charge batteries from the grid), so I've never actually tripped the main breaker, but I could do it easily if I tried. I imagine it will happen someday. I could swap the breaker, but the wiring from the main panel isn't big enough to have the proper safety margin at 200A. Running new wiring would be... a big project, likely involving tearing up and replacing a big chunk of my driveway. So, 150A will have to do.
I have not found a good use for such surplus power yet, but carbon capture would be ideal.
Me neither. I ran the math on doing some BTC mining (I think BTC is a scourge on the planet, but I'm happy to take money) but it didn't pencil out. Free power is great for mining, but the cost of the rigs is high enough that you really need to keep them humming 24x7, and I don't have enough battery capacity for that.
I agree carbon capture and sequestration is important but I haven't seen anything that looks good at scale yet.
And there won't be unless we motivate research into it.
When there is a decent solution it would be ideal at times of surplus generation when power is otherwise unable to be used
Indeed! This is an ideal use for overprovisioned capacity.
At the small scale I have an issue where in summer my solar surplus is more that my rural grid connection can handle so when my hot water is heated and the house and car are charged I end up with the solar inverters derating
Wow. I generate way more than I use in the summer, but my (also rural) grid connection can absolutely take it just fine. I have 200A service with a 150A breaker (so, about 37 kW), but my generation peaks at about 20 kW. My bigger problem is that if I try to charge my house batteries (20 kW) and my car (12kW) and run my AC (4 kW) and the steam generator (9 kW) and run basic house loads (2 kW) and run my welder (10 kW) that's 57 kW or about 235A. In practice I don't ever do all of those things at the same time (and rarely charge batteries from the grid), so I've never actually tripped the main breaker, but I could do it easily if I tried. I imagine it will happen someday.
I could swap the breaker, but the wiring from the main panel isn't big enough to have the proper safety margin at 200A. Running new wiring would be... a big project, likely involving tearing up and replacing a big chunk of my driveway. So, 150A will have to do.
I have not found a good use for such surplus power yet, but carbon capture would be ideal.
Me neither. I ran the math on doing some BTC mining (I think BTC is a scourge on the planet, but I'm happy to take money) but it didn't pencil out. Free power is great for mining, but the cost of the rigs is high enough that you really need to keep them humming 24x7, and I don't have enough battery capacity for that.
Are computer purchases not consensual? Nobody is forcing you to buy overpriced RAM if you don't want to, so the rape analogy doesn't work.
I'm an Apple fan; I'm typing this on a 2018 Mac Mini that I spent roughly $2K on -- but it's 2026 and that Mac is still running just great. That works out to an amortized cost of about 68 cents per day -- which is to say, negligible compared to my other expenses.
Trying to save money by buying cheap computer hardware is like trying to save money by buying single-ply toilet paper -- you can do it, sure, but why make your life noticeably worse when the amount of money you'll save is trivial?
Am I taking crazy pills here? They were suing Apple. The entire lawsuit was against Apple, not Google.
They sued both over the same issue.
Apple won, Google lost, in spite of the fact that Google had the more open ecosystem and the better case.
"One day I woke up and discovered that I was in love with tripe." -- Tom Anderson
