Gmail killed mailing lists, sadly. The introduction of the now ubiquitous "conversation view" way of displaying emails really made mailing lists awkward and unworkable. Also Gmail would silently delete your own messages that got echoed back from the list so you couldn't ever be sure your message had even reached the list. I still mourn the death of real message threading.

It was also about this time that email in general started to become an ineffective way to communicate. Top posting pretty much indicated and ensured that anyone responding to your email never actually read your email. I blame the downfall of civilization on lazy top posters.

This was my experience too. The forum was full of topics were none of the fanboys had any solutions to the problems and the only posts were other people having the same problem. Crickets from anyone at Apple. I don't think any Apple bug was ever fixed because of a forum post.

An AI chat bot might be more useful than those forums were. At least the chat bot can express empathy for your problems, even if it also has no solution.

Sure. I'll let my nontechie friends and family know just how simple it is to buy a new PC and move their old Linux user account, settings, and documents over with your technique.

Meanwhile Mac users just put their new computer on the desk next to the old one, start it up, and tell it to transfer everything over from the old one. And iPhones too. I hate apple but they got this part right and it keeps their users coming back and upgrading.

I agree. On the other hand they are not wrong about the code being tainted by borrowing from copyrighted code. While you can argue the human brain also taints code in the same way, human wetware injects enough originality and creativity into it that it's not generally considered a problem, except in a few rare cases (for example the contributing to the wine project). AI Llms systematize and automate the tainting on a very large scale.

Yeah I can't think of anyone either. Because it never really worked. I think last time I needed to transfer user data between machines I had to use a third-party shareware program. So embarrassing compared to what Apple has done since MacOS X 10.0 came out.

Linux is also lacking in this kind of utility too. Yes I know you can just rsync on Linux, which I do. Or use a NixOS recipe. But nothing your average person could use.

Yes RH engineers do great work and they deserve to get paid. Of course they also benefiting from the development and testing of the upstream projects, most of whom are doing it for no compensation at all. And RH does support a lot of upstream projects. Meanwhile Alma Linux is not competition for RHEL at all, and they are providing their own value to the community. In fact they contribute back to stream (also with testing) which RH benefits from. I think the Alma Linux/CentOS Stream connection is very healthy and good for everyone, including RH. Plus they are playing by RH's rules, regardless of the controversy over those rules.

I recall an interview with a RH manager on a podcast a couple of years ago when the public RPM spec git repo controversy blew up. He maintained that the RH clones offered nothing of any value to the community. He said that the upstream CentOS Stream system was the public community and that if people want to take from CentOS Stream and create something truly unique and valuable they were free to do so. Alma Linux called his bluff and did just that, and it's worked out great for them. RH is still smarting over it I think.

While it's true RH offers hobbyists free-with-sign-up access to RHEL and its packages (probably how Rocky Linux and Oracle build their distros), for those who want an RHEL-type distro in their home lab, there's zero reason not to use Alma Linux.

This was discussed extensively over the last few years.

Disclaimer: lengthy mansplaning post follows for the one or two slashdotters interested but who haven't followed this long-running controversy.

Until a few years ago, RH had a public git repository of their rpm spec files, and probably also their patch sets (can't quite remember). Fairly abruptly they shut down that public repository saying that the repo and folks using it to build RHEL clones didn't provide anything of value to the community (really passive aggressive). This caught a lot of people by surprise and it really was a poke in the eye of the community.

But going back even further, Red Hat's support contracts have always caused heartburn for free software supporters, particularly with regards to the GPL. A RH support contract grants access to SRPM files for the entire distro to their customers, along with of course the actual RPMS. But the wording of the support contract says you cannot use those files on non-supported installations. Meaning they don't want you to pay for one server and then use the downloaded files to update your whole cluster, even though the source code license, particularly in the case of the GPL, explicitly grants such permission. Many free software advocates have complained that although RH abides by the GPL technically, they are using contract law to end run around it.

So far as I know, no actual customers of RH have ever been threatened with contract cancellations over this, and to this day Rocky Linux and Oracle both use these RH-downloaded SRPMs to build their distros. I'm not sure to what extend RH actively pursues the accounts used to download by Rocky and Oracle.

RH's defense is that the upstream CentOS Stream system is public and free to use by the community to build on. This is what Alma Linux does and it works very well while maintaining compatibility with RHEL. The only downside is it's harder convert an existing install between RHEL and AlmaLinux. Back in the old CentOS days it was easy. I'd bring up a server on CentOS, test it in beta for a few months/year, then before bringing it into production I'd finally roll it over into a supported RHEL instance.

For me they started failing in the 90s with high density 3.5" disks. I don't recall ever having too many problems with 5.25" DD disks failing on me. For some reason I completely skipped 5.25 HD disks. I think in the 90s they started using the same cost-cutting process to make media for both DD and HD disks, and that probably lead to all the 3.5" disks failing.

Side note I remember a shareware program that would format disks to higher capacity (1.7 MB or something). Pretty sure it would just add a couple of tracks to the disk. I think MS had a technique of making 21 sector per track disks, which were more likely to fail.

Yes they can with relatively success. I've had Claude create me several openscad programs in the last year and they were all pretty close to what I wanted.

Courtesy of our new AI editor overlords. My theory is that slashdot is now a completely bot-run system, hosted on forgotten hardware in a data center no one quite knows where it is anymore.

In more esoteric areas, SEO abuse has really made conventional search unworkable. AI search, although taking longer and costing more, does return better information as it can judge the relevance of the information fairly quickly. And your can poke it. I still like to visit the original sources, but Gemini search is far fast better for me than regular Google search and has been for some time.

The question always is, at what point did they realize how biologically harmful these chemicals were? So far the evidence suggests it was very early on but the company covered it up for decades, even until recently. That is criminal behavior that should out at least some executives in prison.

I'm not sure how I feel about the vibe-coded ArtCraft projects, but I guess all power to PhotoCraft, FigCraft, and DesignCraft. Maybe they'll get support for Affinity file types.

There's a SketchUp replacement out there (created by real developers I understand) called IngeTrazdo that has full MCP support so you can indeed use an agent to create an architectural model. I haven't tried it yet myself. Also SolidCraft has MCP support too that apparently does work.

I'm sure the name IngeTrazo is meaningful for Portuguese speakers, but it sure could use a better name if they want to spread word of it. So far it's actually maturing fairly rapidly. It loaded my most complex SketchUp models without noticeable visual issues.