The BYD Shark petrol-electric hybrid with DMO AWD seems to hold up pretty well in tough Australian conditions. Ironically, it isn't actually available in China. There's no chance of it making it to the US market.

I don't think they're saying it's the only choice. They're saying that if you're using VMware to provide high-availability service with automatic hot failover, etc. then switching to IBM mainframes is cheaper than staying with VMware given Broadcom's new pricing. There are other solutions with their own pros and cons, but given mainframes' reputation for being expensive, this really says something about how much Broadcom is charging for VMware.

I don't know what the AC you replied to is referring to, but Don Ho has occasionally used the release notes (opened automatically after installing an update) and the web site to express anti-PRC opinions. I wouldn't call them "tirades", but some people apparently get very upset if software developers express opinions.

My kids have managed fine without social media, so the ban hasn't affected them at all. There are various services for children to socialise provided by government-affiliated groups if parents aren't involved.

Sydney has PCYC (run by the police) which operates youth centres with sport facilities and various affordable programs. Melbourne has "adventure playgrounds", weekly video game groups run by the social housing providers, free after-school soccer programs run in association with the Melbourne Victory A-League team. There's lots more, that's just a few examples.

If kids aren't socialising, it's either because they don't want to, or their parents are preventing it.

ISDN was pretty popular outside the US. In Germany in particular, it was used for payment terminals at a large proportion of businesses. In Australia, it was the most cost-effective way to connect a small PABX to the phone network (you could get an ISDN connection with 10, 20 or 30 bearer channels, depending on how many simultaneous external calls you wanted to support). In Japan, payphones had ISDN sockets so you could plug in your laptop/palmtop/whatever and check your e-mail or connect to your office network. It's been phased out now, but it used to be pretty important and widely used.

I miss ISDN. Only 20 years ago, all Japanese payphones still had ISDN ports. I wrote software to handle downloading updates over ISDN while cooperating with point-of-sale systems that also needed to use the ISDN lines. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.

I'd argue that nukes have a stabilising effect, because it creates a very strong disincentive for a major conflict between nuclear powers. India/Pakistan without nukes would have been more likely to have an all-out war.

Yeah, I don't see how this is a trade. For example a future contract has something delivered. If I sell you a December steel rebar contract today, I have to deliver that rebar to you in December, and you have to accept the delivery (unless one or both of us offloads the contract to someone else or we liquidate it, but you get the idea). Even cash delivery futures on e.g. a stock market index are more real, as we'd settle for the difference between the price of the future contract trade and the index value on the delivery date (equivalent to trading a basket of index constituent stocks).

These "prediction markets" are just bets. That's all there is to it. There isn't some real product changing hands, it isn't tied to the price of something tradable. It's just betting on some event occurring.

Signal gives you options to show no notification, only notify that a message was received, show the sender's name only, or show the message text. It warns you about security implications. The user has to make a decision to enable this.

Calls/puts are more like insurance than bets. Buying an at-the-money put for a stock you own protects you against downside risk.

I have an original external Zip 100 SCSI which got a bit flaky in the end, but had seen very heavy use in the '90s, a Zip 250 ATA in a PowerMac "Snakebite" dual 450MHz G4 which works fine, and an external USB Zip drive (either 100 or 250, can't remember) that was my girlfriend's, who's now my wife, which also works fine. They really were revolutionary when it came to cost per megabyte and performance.

ExFAT has other useful features for applications that stream data to storage (e.g. recording audio/video). It's a lot more efficient than FAT32 for these applications.

I've got a Lenovo notebook with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X (not even an X Pro or and X2), and it easily beats Intel i5 notebooks in raw performance on plenty of things written in plain C or C++ with no ARM-specific optimisations. But on top of that, it does it without getting hot or needing to spin the fans up. Even when it doesn't come out faster, it's still far more pleasant to use, being running cooler and quieter while being lighter and having better battery life.

They never called the Windows Server operating system edition .NET. You're probably thinking of the cancelled Windows .NET Server product, which was to have been a software bundle including SQL Server, Exchange Server and MSN (a successor to BackOffice server, I guess). Visual Studio got the .NET branding, and Microsoft accounts were called .NET Passport. But the majority of the other things that got .NET branding were actually using the .NET framework, or .NET wrappers for some other API/service (e.g. ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Visual Basic .NET).

"Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." Microsoft is probably using AI to review all the people with signing keys, and it hallucinated a reason to terminate his account. They've been blindly trusting their AI for all sorts of things it can't do properly.