Best of the Funny, though the story had many more opportunities.

However if you were trying to persuade a buffoon you didn't get there. That's why buffoons love the YOB so much. They worship their YUGE Orange Buffoon/Baby/Bollocks.

Loyalty over competence.

But I was hoping to see more Funny for the target-rich story.

Okay for the FP branch, but... I wonder if the rude Subject limited the scope of the discussion.

My take is that "love of money" is basically evil and always destroys any philosophic principles that get in the way. Love of money is a fake problem because there is no solution. There is no amount of money that can cure the sick "need" for infinite money. But only people with that sick love can wind up with the kind of sick money the richest people (claim to) have these years.

I do think "pandering" is a better kernel of the analysis, however. That's what destroyed the "Don't be evil" google, though they were initially just trying to pander to the users by providing the "most useful" search results. It took the "profitable" business model of advertising to drive that approach into the cesspool it has reached today. The advertisers CAN handle the truth, by destroying the truth, and the "brand new branded" truth shall make you an addict of whatever snake oil they are pushing. Or dependent on widgets like smartphones if you don't like the drug analogy, though I think chemical addiction is the closest comparison.

Me? Fortunately I seem to be immune to the effects. Like Spock and the purring of the tribbles? My contacts with generative AIs just make me more and more angry--even though I acknowledge they can produce "useful" artifacts. Maybe "time" is more important than "pandering" as the root of the analysis? The real threat might be that whatever they do, the genAIs and LLMs do it so much faster than humans can?

Philosophic tangent time? Naw. Slashdot don't feel worth it no more. I've been turned into a newt and I ain't expecting to get no better. So just give me Funny? But not much Funny to be found these years, even in the depths of Slashdot.

Tried and tested slippery slope argument? On slashdot?

It is psychologically engineered to engage a human's attention. Modern web marketing is shady as hell and there really is no reason to try and defend the practices.

So how about we prohibit shady business practices. There is limited time and space in this world, so let's shutdown the garbage businesses that do us no good and leave more time and space and capital for those offering a legitimate goods and services.

There are 5 Linux laptop at home. None crash. Except the one my wife uses, when she touches the screen. It just goes dark with a few bright pixels on the top line. Nothing in the logs. Last week I changed the inside screen cable... and the problem disappeared. Must have been some kind of short because the cable is twisted in weird ways in the hinges. So I don't think it was an OS problem !!!

The first mistake the user did was open their wallet. They bought a PC with shitty unstable Windows drivers. Microsoft will still sign buggy drivers. And they don't hold vendors accountable for fixing and maintaining drivers, so if all your bugs aren't squashed in a couple of years you will have a computer that is never really going to be stable.

The story on Linux is different. You have to work really hard to hunt down a machine where the hardware is supported. Ideally because the vendor open sourced and upstreamed the support. But frequently because someone reverse engineered it and got the drivers into the official kernel image your chosen distro uses. This at least has some chance of being maintained and fixed for the more egregious crashes over the next several years. Not a 100% guarantee, but given that you paid $0 for Linux, that's still quite a bargain.

Google moving the deadline up and saying "because our own quantum tech is progressing faster than we thought"* sounds like using one of their branches to spin another.

* Paraphrased

I was getting lots of crashes in Linux. I check the logs and it had some machine checks. so I ran memtest86+ (already in my GRUB config) and found a stick with uncorrectable ECC faults. replaced it, and it's running great now.

Mostly it's just an arbitrary game. Like one side wants to attack rich white people (capitalists, industrialists, old money, new money, etc) and the other side wants to scapegoat immigrants or LGBTQ+. Lots of populist appeal with both tactics. And it's all pretty standard practice for politicians to point fingers in any direction except at themselves. For some reason we trucked along like this for the 20th century, most of us openly pointing out that it's a big scam. And then at some point, people decided to start believing politicians. And that's when things really started turning to shit.

I'm pretty old school, regardless of my left/right politics. Hold your representative's feet to the fire. Remember every day that government's moral right comes exclusively through the consent of the governed. That the tax payers and voters can hold the power whenever they are prepared to agree to take it. Peacefully at the ballot box as long as there is a right to vote. Less desirable ways if thing go really astray (if history is any guide)

Shortly after this country realizes the We the People are barely more than government property is when history repeats itself and things really turn bad. Fascism cannot endure, but the human cost of its removal is tremendous. Best to plan ahead and side-step unstable political and social systems that tend to end in terrible violence.

MAGAts is a loser movement. The people on the very bottom of MAGA, the ones who consume the radio and TV and Internet propaganda, were losers before they got political. And I suppose their hope is if their side wins, that they will finally get the respect they feel they deserve. But the problem with conmen is they are not good to their word. MAGA is going to find themselves abandoned, like a rally attendee left behind by the campaign bus at the end of the evening.

Really? That's the only Funny on this rich target? And doesn't even strike me as especially funny. Maybe later?

But now I can't even remember if the real FBI director's passing got a mention on today's Slashdot.

I'm not questioning you. I'd read it just on the author if it was available around here. Rather you should file it as among my personal problems. First, I'm trying to get rid of all of my books, not buy new ones. Second, I choose to live in Japan where the libraries basically treat English books as an afterthought. (By using lots of libraries I'm able to find enough good stuff to read, and I'm reading more and more Japanese books these years.) Third, my second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago...

I tend to agree with the spirit of such comments, but in this case, Apple makes it clear in the TOS that it retains the right to disclose that information if it deems it appropriate. People pay for an anonymity service without reading the fine print :/

CPU performance. Now compare GPU performance against a PC built out with eight GPUs to do parallel 3D rendering.

The trash can was thermally limited by its design, and could never be upgraded to hold newer CPUs or GPUs. Anyone for whom the trash can Mac Pro would work could just as easily use an Apple Studio, give or take, ignoring the lack of ECC (which the Apple Silicon Mac Pro also lacked).

Depends on what you mean by covered. Can they do their work? Yes. Are they negatively impacted by hardware limitations? Also yes. A lot of professionals would be willing to pay extra for ECC. The fact that Apple doesn't offer ECC makes their machines less than ideal for use cases where a crash would be expensive. The fact that a lot of pros put up with crashes doesn't mean they like the situation. It just means that they dislike it less than switching platforms and tools.

But the pro users I was specifically talking about here are the ones doing high-performance computing tasks involving GPUs. Their only real option is to change platforms, because even though the new Apple Silicon CPUs are great in terms of performance per watt, the wattage is really low, so if you genuinely need boatloads of GPU, to the extent that Apple was still in the game without NVIDIA support, they completely dropped out of the game when Apple Silicon dropped support for AMD. At that point, Apple computers became nearly useless for most modern high-performance computing/AI workloads, people doing large-scale 3D video rendering, etc., because they're underpowered as shiped and can't be expanded with more GPUs, and parallelizing work across multiple machines is way more expensive and not always practical.

The historical definition of "pro" is people who are running software beyond what a typical user would run. Web browsers and productivity software (word processors, spreadsheets) are not pro apps; they are business apps. Pro apps are mostly things like high-end photo editing (think Photoshop/Pixelmator, not iPhoto/Capture One), 3D modeling, audio/video production, etc.

Developers at least arguably fall into that category, though they are borderline, because they don't have huge storage requirements or huge compute requirements. Developers can do most of their work on laptops, though Apple's non-Pro laptops are pretty thermally throttled, so they will be miserable. And developers are probably the group who care most about ECC RAM, because they understand enough to know why it matters, but they still often use laptops because they don't want to be tethered to a desk. It's a tradeoff.

No, and they never were. While the users might have professional occupations, their computing requirements are indistinguishable from a high school student. "Pro" in this context doesn't mean "users with money". It means "users with needs that exceed typical requirements". :-)