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.

I knew someone pushing this shit a few years ago and claiming it was "therapy." She got arrested for dealing (other) drugs and then fled the country after making FALSE accusations at a number of people...

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.

Eh traditionall the big "need many hdmi" tasks was multicamera editing.

I know that at some point Multi Camera support got broken or removed but apparently it came back? Honestly its been a long long time since i've been anything close to knowledable about FCP

As an australian Solar is a genuinely viable solution for energy (like it is in most sunny places), and we do have a lot of it.

But the whole industry is getting a bad rep, largely not of their own making due to the relentless illegal spam phone calls that most australians get a couple of times a day offering "access to the government solar rebate". I've had to completely block phone calls from melbourne (most seem to come from that area code) and inform my melbourne friends to just text me on social media and I'll phone them. And its made people very sus on the industry, despite the fact the vast majority of solar installers are just regular tradesmen honest dealers.

I would hope not. Apple will apple I guess, but they are probably well aware that extensibility is a marketing plus not a negative , particularly with tech crowd, I'd argue in recent times a lot of the lock down has had more to do with manufacturing and performance efficiencies and that it has actually harmed them commercially, and they know it, but the commercial harm is outweighed by the manufacturing savings as well as the general speediness of on-chip memory. That said I *think* the latest mac minis can be storage upgraded, so it seems apple isn't too worried about it.

To be fair, outside of GPUs there really isn't much need for third party cards, and arguably even GPUs aren't a show stopper with third party GPU cages. But really for 99% of the use cases the Apple silicon GPUs are good enough. Nobody sane is buying a mac pro to run games, and for AI thats a whole different complicated set of reasonings (for training you'll always be better off with a datacenter server and abank $15K datacenter GPUs.). For everything else, the Apple silicon GPU seems to punch above its weight class.

Oh I suppose there is also video intake cards. I know my father was consulting on a job (he's an audio and video engineer who designs radio and TV studios) where they had mac pro and some black magic cards that had a whole boatload of hdmi signals coming in, and they've had to migrate to a PC. But I think increasingly there are viable thunderbolt solutions for that.

I suspect its been a while since he's been capable of that.

Most dudes that age are well beyond pecker functionalty, and throw in morbid obesity and a lifetime of poor health choices and yeah, short of viagra, odds are low.

Not gonna lie, I'd take the 100 day hit for the $2-3mil settlement if it was me.

Though I'd probably go metaphorically John Wik on them for losing my dog.

What "excellent film adaptation" are you talking about? There's one old animated adaptation, and that's is. There's also a movie that bears the same title, but it's apparently a coincidence: nothing except the title and names of some of main characters matches, thus I don't see how it could be relevant to Tolkien's books.

Enough with the gate keeping.

You cant make a literal version of LOTR unless you want an extremely boring trilogy of unwatchable 9 hour films.

You know full well that while it deviated from the books in some minor and a couple of major, ways (they did our boy Tom Bombadil wrong) it was largely a fairly close adaption of the *story*, but not the writing.

Your entitled to feel agrieved that a film that was never made and never will be made was not made, but lets not pretend your weird stance is anything other than juvenile gate keeping.