That works... for now. However, IIRC, the first rev of ARM PCs had no ability to disable Secure Boot, and we may find BIOSes in the future which won't have that option, for sake of economy.

Then, there is scale. If one has a ton of Linux machines, be it workstations to servers, having to go in manually to turn off Secure UEFI, or enroll custom boot keys can get tedious.

Tuxera ROM-DOS supports it. $55/copy, and it comes with networking.

Worst case, if they need true realtime functionality, there is QNX, which has predated Linux and is still going. Not sure if it supports 32 bit, but wouldn't be surprised.

I am curious what replaces top notch journalism these days. Will it "merely" be tinted/tainted views of events, or will it just be actual falsehoods and bald face lies, fresh from the LLM slop machine with ragebait, and almost zero useful, if not actionable info? Will we be seeing more creations of events in game engines to show a military victory?

I'm not sure what this means. Upper middle class as in money, or actual buying power. Dollar amounts don't mean much when one sees 3% raises, but tarriffs and fuel costs make goods cost 20% more, or like in 2020, prices hikes were done just because companies felt like it.

Buying power, like we had in the US in the 70s, where the average person could afford a house, car, even an airplane or some other hobbies is well behind us. Stuff that people took for granted back then is virtually unattainable now.

This can result in bad things in the long run, though. For example, if someone finds some new technology that is like DRAM, except doesn't need a refresh signal, something like Optane, but an order of magnitude faster. When you get extreme demand pulls, people will start doing something about it, even make long term projects because they know that the RAM issue may go away short-term, but it will hit them in the future. Or, DRAM will be minimized and Optane-like memory will be used as "swap", similar to how mainframes had internal and external memory. Sounds hackish, but this would change the tune of computing completely.

Or... worst case... and this is a scary thing... developers think about optimizing around hardware resources. We used to be able to have an office suites that could easily fit in 192k, and full-fledged word processors like Word 3.0 on Mac that fit comfortably on two 800k disks.

I'm wondering the same thing. Mainframe CPUs have a niche, and then x86/ARM/RISC-V have them. Unless IBM finds a way to get POWER out there and keep it competitive, it might be something that IBM may wind up doing, transitioning the apps that were on P and i to Z or PC.

Hopefully not, but who knows.

IMHO, this is a good time to throw money at Thunderbird, so we have at least one Outlook alternative, next to Mail.app. Especially in the search arena where Thunderbird's searches have been at times, woefully inadequate. It would be nice if it could create an online index, have it encrypted to the master password, and use that.

Starlink is pretty low in orbit, so that may be a mitigating factor. Now, something higher up would be a problem, especially geosync sats.

When Gmail was invite only, was sent a note for that, so grabbed it. No complaints ever since.

Stuff like this seems to be asking for the result is a beefing up of TOR-like networks. You can't levy tariffs on something you can't show happened, and if streaming is taxed, people will just head to the high seas, perhaps have a connection to a private channel that is brokered by a cloud service, similar to how a lot of remote access systems work. Maybe even something like TailScale, but bigger, where people can get keyed access to tagged servers, with the SDN handling encryption, even routing of packets on top of normal ISP routing.

The entire code is there to view. If worried about a backdoor, feel free to do a clone and go examine it.

I am all for office suite, be it OpenOffice, Libreoffice. I prefer if at least 1-2 would get backing/funding/devs to work on it, preferably more than one, but a F/OSS office suite will be a major gain. Especially if it supported storing documents via various cloud providers, as well as document versioning. Microsoft Word used to allow one to have one document with a ton of versions in it, which made it easy to find an "oops", and go back to it, or go back to a line of thinking before it was erased and changed.

This is important, as an Office app is one of the things used the most on the job.

This is why we should have a stakeholder system, and not shareholders. For stakeholders, layoffs damage a company, because institutional memory and talent is lost. For shareholders, it is just a bunch of faceless schmucks replaced by an offshore group for cheaper, so their gains this quarter are great, although they get surprised when the pace of new products slows or halts.

The big worry is that AI can pump out a lot of slop. At least it took a tiny bit of thought to copy and paste from Stack Overflow. Now, entire projects can be AI slop that have never seen a debug pass. And this stuff winds up going live.

In many companies, the worse the documentation is, the better. If docs are good, the dev gets replaced. If the dev's code can't be fixed and it is critical, he will remain onboard, because it would cost the company more to fire him and get 2-3 cheaper devs.

At previous jobs I've seen devs have two Git servers. Their personal one on their desktop or build box, and the one used for their check-ins. They run an obfuscation script before their pushes that turns variable names into variants of 1, I, 0, O, l. They never were the ones laid off.