Of course, I'm still happily using Outlook 2019 on a bought and paid for standalone office license. I see no reason to 'upgrade'.

Monster sure had a great run convincing everyone otherwise. It became something of a joke in the early 2000s. They definitely took from P.T. Barnum's playbook. A sucker born every minute.

Agree with another commenter, overall system noise becomes more critical at the amplification stage. Most cheap stereos in the 90s had a modicum of white noise in the silence when you turned it way up. But one day a roomate got an -amazing- setup and it was so clean, and had so much dynamic range, it blew my mind. Was just great to put on a well engineered CD and listen to it with your eyes closed. With CDs you had the best possible input for consumer grade audio, and if you fed it through something that kept it clean, it was just pristine and fantastic. I haven't heard anything like it in a long time. These days my Bose noise cancelling headsets deliver really excellent sound, but my hearing isn't what it used to be. Tinnitus and a little bit of high frequency hearing loss all around prevent me from appreciating that last 10% in quality, so for me to pursue a setup like that now would be kind of wasted money. But I'm glad I got to hear it when I could appreciate it.

I own a Mazda with the center console scrollwheel. It is completely awesome. No reaching whatsoever, and very easy to navigate. It should be a model for everyone else. It got high praises when first introduced. Nothing has changed. This sounds like they just want to lower the cost of the car by getting rid of the wheel, button and associated wiring. I'm planning on a replacing my current Mazda with a slightly used one anyhow, which will still have the scroll wheel. Unbelievable. So dissapointed at Mazda.

...that it can mimic a lenticular stereo display? If it can do eye tracking and adjust every other column of pixels to every other eye, it might be able to do that.

Yea I feel like they got super cheap in both build quality and processing. They used to make really nice DVD players (and VHS and S-VHS players for that matter.) At some point they became commodity items and no one wanted to pay a lot of money for them anymore. China ate their lunch.

The very first BRD players, while better build quality, also had awlwful start and load times. They never really got great, but there was a time when the 2nd and 3rd gen machines were OK.

I haven't touched my BRD recorder in years. I used to sell videos I made on BD-R and DVD-R, until I started monetizing my YouTube channel, which brings in far more viewers and income with zero work once the video is uploaded. I used to buy printable BRD discs, jewel cases, print an insert for the jewel case, mail the disc...it was a lot of work for not much return. Late 2000's.

YouTube has democratized the distribution of independent videos. Their revenue split for ads is still the best deal out there. I just don't know how there is enough drive space in the world to accommodate the amount of video that is uploaded every minute to that service. One source says every minute, 500 hours of video is uploaded to YT. I just can't see where that all goes. Are they constantly shipping in truckloads of hard drives? Will the whole thing collapse under its own weight? They don't seem to delete anything except videos that run into policy violations or copyright claims.

Fun story: I was at NAB (The National Association of Broadcaster's conference) in Las Vegas when the winner of the two dueling HD disc formats was picked. It was down to BluRay Disc championed by Sony, and HD-DVD by Toshiba. The studios decided to throw their weight at the BluRay Consortium during that show, and instantly the HD-DVD booth become a rather sad ghost town. BluRay wasn't great for independent producers, there were clauses that stated that for commercial discs you HAD to include encryption, even if you didn't want to, making doing a production run at a disc facility very expensive. It was a licensing scheme designed to make money for the consortium. So I stuck to making BRDs myself as a work around, since my numbers were so small. BRD works for the major labels but it was a terrible format for us small time folk. It was easier to make VHS tapes, you just sent a master to a dupe facility and they cranked them out. Of course, VHS was complete garbage as a format, but it was what we had. Fun times, and now ancient history, thank god.

If you already have the physical book, why would you want to suddenly jump to an audio version of it? I can't see that market being huge. The only scenario I can think of is if you are reading the book, and you want to continue 'listening' to it when you can't read it (driving in a car, etc.) Most people I know (including myself) are kind of one way or another, they either like reading real books, or listening to audio books. I'm a real book person, but I do listen to a number of podcasts by authors of books (The rest is History, Empire, etc.) and the sale of books would at least be good for them as they could have direct-purchase buttons for books they've referenced in their shows, including their own.

Light passenger rail is ideal for batteries. With lightweight trains and low rolling resistance, coupled with regenerative braking, it should be pretty easy on the batteries. The only issue would be the batteries catching fire underground...might be better for surface transport.

I hope it reminds everyone that every interaction they have with non-local AI is logged and available to the next hacker in line. If you're typing anything into an online service of any kind (or into a document stored in the cloud) assume that it could be leaked and behave appropriately. Do you want the thing you are asking about to become public?

No one wanted to be intensely surveilled while shopping? Never would have thought. Sure, grocery stores today have tons of cameras (look up!) but typically they only use the footage when they need it as evidence to convict a shoplifter.

Linux on the desktop continues to be a hobby in and of itself rather than a tool to get other things done. There's no way I'm spending the time and frustration that he did to get basic things running. That cascading failure mode of package dependencies and "it all works great except this one little instance when you combine these two pieces of hardware or software together) is just maddening. I've dabbled in and out of it for years. It takes far less time and frustration to effectively neuter Windows 10 to do your bidding and stop leaking your information. The future is uncertain as M$ attempts to remove local accounts, but as long as there is a way around I will continue to use it. Besides, a lot of the software I use just isn't available for Linux. I wish it was, I truly do. But it seems to be a perpetual chicken and egg problem. Maybe something will tilt that balance away from M$ someday, but it doesn't seem to be happening soon.

When CDDB went away, gnudb stepped up and is now offering it for your favorite ripping software.

https://gnudb.org/

I am using it with CDex with no problems today. I buy a lot of expanded limited release film soundtrack scores from the likes of Intrada and LaLaLand, which are only released on CD so that they can afford the licensing from the studios for a small release. So I still have a great use for it. I've long since ripped the rest of my CD collection, but I buy a new soundtrack CD once every few months.

I wouldn't touch any microsoft-authored player.

Being from the Bay Area, I was an early Craigslist user. Used it to find multiple apartments, furniture and other items as a 20-something in the 90s, and sell a few things here and there that did not make sense on Ebay. It was a really great thing, especially when the only real alternative at that time was newspaper classifieds.

The other day I was looking for an inexpensive musical keyboard, and I was having trouble with Facebook Marketplace listings because most of the sellers didn't respond to inquiries about their ads. (this seemed particular to the type of item I was looking for, I've not generally had trouble with other stuff.) So I thought, "I wonder if anyone still uses craigslist" and sure enough, plenty of listings. I contacted one and went to pick it up later the same day. Reminds me to check there for anything else I am looking for as well.

Unlike just about every other online business today, Craigslist is a completely honest, straightforward business. There is no hidden toll or price (your data) for 'free' (they make revenue elsewhere) and the transaction is straightforward for buyer and seller. No upsells to a paid version. No AI. Unlike many early sites, the founders did not sell out and continued to be satisfied with the existing level of income provided rather than the temptation of a large payout up front, enjoying a first-mover advantage with a lot of good will and brand recognition. Somehow, no one came and ate their lunch. It just kept going, year after year after year. How many sites do you remember becoming enshittified after being sold to a large corporation? Craigslist is a super rare example of what happens when you don't sell out.

It would be fun if an AI and data mining backlash spurred a bunch of new 'old school' sites with honest, straightforward dealings. I guess one can dream...

Has there ever been a successful VR headset that has survived long term after the initial launch frenzy? It just seems like something that people are trying to will into existence, but most people have no interest in it. A niche product for hardcore gamers and a few useful applications in science and medicine. No one's come up with a 'gotta have it' application for them. Most of generative AI is trash, but there are more useful applications for that than for VR headsets.

Anything running an LLM interface as a means of input is not only insecure, it's anti-secure. When you write something that accepts user input, you always sanitize those inputs by dropping special characters,etc to prevent command injections. buffer overflows, etc. Anything that isn't what you are expecting. With input coming through voice to an LLM, How the HELL do you do that? So far in the last few years the only thing that's been proven is no one has come up with a way to properly sanitize inputs. LLMs are a nightmare of garbage both in and out. They can do some amazing tricks, but are still terrible at accuracy and safety.