My best guess is that with the second season of Jury Duty being about a corporate retreat
Occasionally I need reminders as to why I havent owned a television set in 20 years. Yep, shits still brain-damaged out there in TV land
I've been very fond of the "actual money" currency. Its got a much less "fiat" backing than cryptocurrencies, doesnt involve any expensive proof of works and is reliably handled by almost all brokerages.
And you can buy pizza with it. Hell, keep it in paper form, its even anonymous.
There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.
But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.
Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.
Yeah Vista was when I switched over to the mac. Got a new "Made for Vista" Asus laptop that almost immediately started bluescreening and ran like shit. After the computer store refused to let me get a license for XP for free to replace Vista I just returned it as "not fit for purpose" and drove over to the Apple store and told them to give me the "elevator pitch" on why I should switch and they succeeded , and that 2006 mac ran fine till I upgraded to the 2011 which I stuck with till the M1 in 2020, though by the time I got that M1, there was probably zero original components in that 2011 mac, as I had swapped the drive and CD out for a pair of SSDs, replaced a faulty wifi module, replaced the motherboard after frying it in a coffee accident, upgraded the ram, replaced the heyboard and topcase after the keyboard crapped out from another coffee accident, and replaced the screen after a cat accident. Yeah, cant do that with macs no more. And thus why it took me a decade to upgrade.
Have Linux usage numbers gone up dramatically since Win 10 went off-support?
Yes. Linux desktop useage has gion up around 400% since the start of the 2020s
The thing with most countries that aren't america is you cant just unilaterally change a contract even with "30 days notice", you need to get the customer to actively consent, click a button that says "I acknowledge this nonsense" or whatever. Netflix was fined for breaking Italian law, in Italy.
Netflix are absolutely NOT in the right, and that should not be controversial to anyone
Some researchers do think we are actually pretty close to a kessler event from musks increasingly rampant space polution.
With that said, if it happens, it wont be long term. The LEO orbit they take means the sky will mostly clear up in well under a decade with most of the debris having deorbited in around 5 years.
I wont even speculate on the sort of havok Elon musks fantastical and unlikely space datacenters would create.
Next up : Who needs Oracle if you can have PostgreSQL
Fixed that for you
In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.
Yes, Office is still king, although I think that crown is beginning to slip, and it may end up being Excel, with its large list of features, that may last the longest. But it isn't 1990, or even 2000 anymore. Developers have multiple ways of developing portable applications, and while MS may (for the nth time) update or swap out its toolchains, the real question is will developers really care?
In fairness, this is the Kernel we are talking about, and those dudes actually do know what they are doing.
Kernel code is fucking hard. The last kernel coding I ever did was on Minix in the early 1990s for Operating Systems class at University. That was a total brain bender. But heres the thing, Minix was an intentionally simpler kernel designed for teaching and included an extremely comprehensive textbook, that just doesn't exist (I think) for Linux.
The Linux Kernel may well be the most complicated code by some of the most skilled coders on the planet. To claim they "can't code" is frankly, hubris.
Not that I think AI can code either. But it DOES seem to be quite good at finding bugs and code smells. You wouldn't want to rely on it as your everything, but don't be surprised if it finds whoopsies by even Torvalds himself.
Oh I dont know. Some of the scenes at the gas giant in Tau Ceti where pretty spectacular. Was it *Dune* spectacular? No. But I think the immersion of the theatre certainly helps.
Plus it sends a nice signal to the studios saying "more of this please!". Support hard sci-fi, its a frigging rough environment for films in general, and double rough for genre films like this.
Yeah I saw it , and it was actually really good. Gossling is kind of comical at times, but he actually does really well in this, and the comedy is more in service of the premise that he's a competent scientist and not-so-competent unwilling astronaut, and that he's got a weird friendship with the alien.
From a hard sci-fi point of view its really good, good enough that the few places where it does seem to veer off from known science (The solid xenon that the aliens use as a construction material) seems a little jarring.
And as a drama, yeah... it works. You'll definately find yourself rooting for the two main characters (goslings character and "Rocky" (as he dubs the alien)) and I wont spoil where it goes, but it'll get you.
Go watch it. It was easily one of the best films of the year.
While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.
It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.
As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.
Feel disillusioned? I've got some great new illusions, right here!
