I used to wonder, in the early days of the transformation, how much was Drew changing moderation and selection criteria, and how much was becoming popular enough to attract a critical mass of political junkies. It's been a long long time, but my memory says it was a fast transformation, days or weeks rather than months, but not overnight, and could have cut either way. I sent a few emails, never got any response, and quit logging in as often, and soon not at all.

Same here. Fark's only redeeming quality was poking fun at everything and everyone. Then the political junkies swamped it, and I stopped visiting. I'd forgotten all about it til now. Tried my old login. Says the password has expired.

*shrug*

40% of Canada's land area is covered in forests. It is simply impossible to "manage" that much forest, and it's utterly fucking absurd to suggest otherwise. And to try to take climate change out of the equation is just a way of misdirecting away from the actual fucking cause; GHG emissions raising surface temperatures.

When will humans stop buying the most trivially fucking moronic red herrings? What a disreputable idiotic species.

It's almost as if allowing emissions to ramp up with little meaningful effort to control them is having the inevitable consequences predicted decades ago. But let's not deal with that, because it's hard. Instead let's have the President of the United States demand Canada hold back the tides.

I did, once, about 30 years ago, lasted about 4 months before they went belly up from incompetent management in those early internet days. Small outfit, 20 employees, and I remember the day I knew it was doomed. The big honcho took us three programmers to lunch, telling us we were the future of the company, not those old-fashioned parasites manning the phones. The whole thing smelled so bad we immediately asked the phone people, and he had taken them to lunch the day before. They were the backbone of the company, not those incompetent bit pushers.

Fun while it lasted. He turned down two offers to buy him out, and was broke a month later.

If that were what I had said, your comment would be spot-on. However, your comment is wrong, and fits its own definition of being in such a stark world than only two choices are possible: perfect or wrong.

To elucidate: I said I was low in sympathy, not devoid of it.

Please learn to read, then learn to comprehend, and then learn to apply what you have learned to the comment you have typed out before clicking "Preview".

They sold their souls. Now they want them back. I am low on sympathy.

I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.

I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.

At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.

I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.

I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.

I would say that any kind of substantial level of investment in a jurisdiction is a reasonable indicator of an expectation of a return on investment, and thus confidence in the economic growth of at least some industries in that jurisdiction. I'm not sure why people are trying to hand wave away that kind of an indicator, unless the fact of it creates some problem for some narrative they have bought into, creating a level of cognitive dissonance necessitating peculiar denials.

P1?!? Is that you?

Still trying to extort money from IBM after all this time. Nothing like a business model made up entirely of rent seeking.

Frankly, the quality of build, the stability of the operating system, and just the plain reliability and features even in the supporting tools exceed Windows. Take the Preview App. The work I can do on PDFs; signatures, annotations, OCR, right out of the box, and built so that the versions on my iPhone and iPad fully integrate, cannot be easily replicated on Windows. Apple just really has an eye for workflow, and making sure the base system and tools fit well into that.

It's not perfect, to be sure, I wouldn't want to use Pages as my full time word processor, and Apple, like Microsoft and Google, suffer designed interoperation friction, which does suck. But all in all, I'm just more efficient on a Mac, and in subtle ways I never knew were even problems until I picked a MacBook up the first time. Honestly going to Windows right now is just horrible for me, particular Windows 11, which just feels like constant chaos and out of control busy-ness.

Well, yes :-) I was trying to correct the basic error without writing much...