Here in British Columbia we just changed our clocks for the last time and will remain on UTC-7 indefinitely. Parts of B.C. (the northeast part) have been UTC-7 all year for a long time. The southeast part has been Mountain time (UTC-7/UTC-6) for a long time. Neither are changing how they do time.

I applaud losing the time change but I'm not crazy about permanent DST. People obviously haven't thought this through, what it's going to feel like come November.

...laura

Near-lifelong B.C. resident here...

People have grumbled about time changes as long as I can remember. Pick one. Stick to it. Just do it.

I can't say I agree with their choice. Not so much the crazy late sunset in the summer - we're used to that - but the very late sunrise in the winter. The sun will still set by 5 in December and January. So what?

...laura

"Please" and "thank you" are relics of a bygone age to most people.

The one that pisses me off is the habit of customer service people addressing men respectfully ("sir"), but not addressing women with respect ("ma'am" or equivalent). This isn't an issue in places like Texas, but it's very much an issue here in Canada.

...laura

It's a bit of a moot point. Systems that aren't receiving general OS updates wouldn't receive updated bootloaders anyhow. So they wouldn't need the updated certificates that allow for bootloaders signed after June 2026.

It gets a bit tautological, but only systems that are getting updates need updates.

When I first saw 4k I was startled by the picture quality. I also winced at the price tag, and shook my head at the lack of native 4k content. I now own a 4k TV, stream lots of 4k content on line, and generally like what I see. I shoot my own YouTube videos in 4k.

Is 8K just not that much better? Lack of content? Or just bad timing, people would rather spend money on food than a new toy?

...laura

It lacks an appropriate number of ports and doesn't support DisplayPort.

USB DisplayPort alt mode says hello. Every rear USB-C port on the Mac Mini is also a DisplayPort. Just as it is on all of Apple's laptops.

Thunderbolt is a garbage, proprietary Apple standard.

Thunderbolt is an Intel standard. And in the case of Thunderbolt 4, it's just an additional set of feature requirements over base USB4, where those features are optional. In other words, TB4 is a superset of USB4.

Thank you for calling this out.

The fact that these one-liner installers are becoming an increasingly common method of installing software is utterly insane - and even more dangerous.

The solution (probably) isn't to lock down OSes to prevent this. But at a minimum, developers need to be tapped with a pitchfork for trying to officially distribute their software in this fashion. Doing so is normalizing bad habits.

One of many examples: the official installation instructions for the Deno JS runtime are one-liners for all three OSes: Linux, Windows, and macOS. It's equally stupid on all of them.

Does this mean the Martian Council of Elders has finally figured out how to disable our satellites in orbit?

Will our gelsacs be safe?!

Subaru do a lot of things well - they're masters of all-wheel drive - but this is nuts.

I bought a VW Taos earlier this year with the usual trial subscription to Sirius XM. I was going to pull the plug when it expired but Sirius XM offered me a steep discount if I re-upped, so I did. They did it so readily that I wonder how many people are paying full price...

The bulk of my listening is two channels, Hits One and The Pulse.

...laura

Yes, there are corridors and city pairs in the U.S. where high-speed rail could get people from one city to another quickly and efficiently. But what do they do when they get there? How do they get around?

...laura

Too much money for not enough content.

When I had my morning toast and coffee earlier today I chose between three YouTube videos. An analysis of a high-performance motorcycle engine, a review of an off-road vehicle and troubleshooting a hybrid car. All cable ever has these days is reality shows.

...laura

The company standard for servers is RedHat 10. RedHat 10 does not support 32 bit applications.

The legacy app is running happily on RedHat 9.

...laura

I support a legacy app that was written back in the 1990s. It originally ran under VxWorks with custom hardware, variously 68k and PowerPC.

The first port I did was to Solaris. No byte-order issues and I kept the 32 bit ABI. It worked well.

When the Powers That Be decided to ditch Sun hardware and Solaris in favour of x86 and Linux I ported it to Linux. Parts of the code weren't byte-order clean, but I worked through them. The code is heavily 32 bit dependent and I never did create a viable 64 bit version (I tried, believe me...), so it runs on our last 32 bit server in the data center. The service it supports is slowly dying so there's no business case to spend any more time or money on it. If the business case existed I'd apply what I've learned in the meantime and rewrite it from scratch anyway.

The Linux port was initially unstable. It would run for a random time, hours to weeks, then two threads would deadlock. After a couple of years of letting it run and watching it crash I traced the deadlock to an "optimization" that didn't actually do anything, with an if statement that had about a one in a trillion chance of going the wrong way. I removed the optimization and the application has been running fine ever since.

...laura

If I were going to buy one so that I can play this game, which is the better choice? Which one is newer?

Out of the box, the Xbox Series X is slightly better hardware than the regular PS5. it's not really enough to matter, especially on a mutliplatform game, but since you asked...

That said, Sony offers the PS5 Pro, a higher spec version of the console that Microsoft does not offer an equivalent of. So if price is no object, the PS5 Pro is expected to be the best platform to play it on.

The issue is not that the climate has changed - it has, and it will continue to do so - but what we're going to do about it. No matter what the crisis, the solution always seems to be greater government control. Usually at the cost of our way of life.

What part of NO do you not understand?

...laura