I miss the days of Eudora, Thunderbird, and bring-your-own email client. However, without IMAP/IMAPs, it can be daunting. It would be nice to see a third party client that can handle all the stuff that Outlook does, and work with not just MS, but Apple, Google, Yahoo, Proton, and other major providers. Not just mail, but calendaring, contacts, reminders... all the stuff that is needed for the PHB role.

As a bonus, store mail in a format that is usable. mbox is okay, maildir is cool on a filesystem that doesn't use inodes, or maybe even SQLite with the option of SQLCipher for encrypting it. SQLite can handle some big files. From there, offer some Bog standard backup format, something that can compress and deduplicate.

Of course, basic sanity when it comes do displaying email. When in doubt, don't run or display it.

I was thinking the same thing. They send a return + bill, but if someone has deductions, they can send a return showing them. Worst that happens is they get denied.

Ironically, we had "free" college... the GI Bill and the Army College Fund, but because of the university price hikes, those can't really cover anything.

The military takes a lot of know-how and people skills. Piss off the wrong NCO or officer, and they can make your life a living hell... or effectively end any meaning your life has.

What we need are more trades. IMHO, IT should be a trade with a self-regulating body, like plumbing, electrical, HVAC, or even law.

I'm surprised this isn't done already, where someone just types in, "give me another sequel in the Vomitron series with the Bring-Me-the-Bucket guy surviving", letting some AI do the work from there, rendering the video in 8k, then shipping it to theaters.

As others have mentioned, the blockbuster is what Hollywood is about. They can't survive on movies that do well or cult classics. They have to have something that goes well in theaters around the world.

The problem is that those days are gone. Hollywood isn't making any new IP like they did recently. Which means that they are not really getting any new market share or new stuff happening. Then, there is the fact that countries are starting to push out Hollywood for their own culture. France requires theaters to have a percentage of domestic movies. Other countries are wanting to give the middle finger to the US, and don't want American culture "tainting" theirs. The days of a certain soda brand being a universal symbol worldwide may just be coming to an end.

Don't forget the recession and COVID. Theaters are just not making it, and there isn't really a network available to allow for smaller/indie films to make it nationwide without a big studio, perhaps due to exclusive contracts. People just don't have the $$$ for it, and most will just catch it when it hits their streaming subscription, or perhaps when it floats by on the high seas.

Hollywood needs to majorly rethink things, as the handwriting is on the wall for their current model.

The US is about to fall behind China in $WHATEVER.

Started in the 2000s with steel making, then factories, then engineers, then getting an actual man on the moon with a flag that isn't going to fade.

Want to know where to place the blame? The fact that our STEM people are tossed like last night's condoms in the trash can, so younger people see that and are don't want to go into anything like that. Law, there is no such thing as an unemployed lawyer. Finance, the bookkeeper will be around forever and unless they do something felony or third-rail level (sexual harassment in public), they will keep employed.

Easy fix: Provide a career path, even if it is a civilian corps for these educated, experienced people so they are not beholden to the whims of whatever things hit CEO magazine. That, or just cede dominance to China, like how Australia has ceded Holden and their car industry offshore.

A Mom and Pop 20 nm fab wouldn't be too bad. It would have a relatively high yield rate, and would be more than enough for all but core CPU, GPU, and AI stuff. A fab like this would be able to handle all the ECUs and MCUs that are needed, so we don't see a 25% price hike on cars due to "lack of chips". To boot, going to older technologies likely means less environmentally offensive processes. The less we need to throw on silicon on the less than 5nm fabs, the better.

I would say that insulation is a major thing as well. Making stuff like aerogel insulation or stuff with high R-value which isn't insanely toxic or itchy would help things. Running an IR scan of a house can help here, as well as going to triple pane windows.

That is the ironic thing. When refrigeration was first invented, a major ice house grabbed the patent and sat it on it for 20 years to ensure that no refrigeration could happen under it until that expired.

There is an old video on YouTube about using a combination of phase changes and desiccant to get the COP (Coefficient of performance) up there, or at least be able to have energy available from a different source (like solar concentrators) to power the refrigerant cycle.

A/Cs have economies of scale. Perhaps consider water chilling, which allows two (for redundancy) coolers to be used for an entire campus, as opposed to A/C units for everything. Couple that with CRACs, so 2n+1 redundancy is maintained, and this can help greatly with energy costs.

Then, perhaps passive means. White rooftops or solar panels can do a lot to deal with heat. Solar panels, assuming the ones that are using a frame, have some dead air space between the panel and the roof, so the only way it can conduct heat is via the mounts, IIRC, lowering temperatures by ~5 degrees.

Solid state refrigerants are useful as well, just because it means fewer moving parts.

Overall, there are a lot of technologies waiting in the wings to make A/C a lot less energy demanding, it just needs people with deep pockets to finance it.

It would be nice if this had support for RDP servers so this appliance can be used for local stuff, as opposed to just a cloud terminal. Perhaps even allow stuff like xrdp to work, so I can use it like an X-station and allow users to connect to a Linux based virtual desktop server.

Overall, I like the idea of thin/zero clients, and I'm not sure if this is more of a zero client than a thin client. However, in my experience, thin clients can get pricy. Very pricy, just because there is always proprietary stuff involved, and VDI isn't cheap. One company, Quest Software, had a product called vWorkspace, which was promptly killed when Dell/VMWare bought them out. However, these days, for VDI, one either goes Citrix, VMWare Horizon, or a cloud solution like AWS WorkSpaces, Oracle OCI, AVD (which this thin client doesn't work with), or Windows 365. The thin client only works with one of these.

I can see a market for this. If I had a company with a relatively low-latency pipe, redundant ISPs, and I was callous enough to do a domestic call center where the call center was staffed by contractors with a high turnover rate, something like this might be useful, because it means that the only tech people needed on site would be some L1 people that physically unplug equipment and change it out for something else.

However, for most office stuff, the latency may be too high, and throwing it in the cloud is definitely more expensive over the long haul than just getting a decent desktop for everyone, an E3/E5 subscription for each user, and doing everything via Intune, with OneDrive or a local file server.

For large purchases, one might consider personal loans, which have interest rates significantly lower than that. For example, replacing my A/C unit, most of it will be paid in cash from savings, but a bit will be done via a personal loan at well under 20%, which will get paid off fairly quickly. When interest rates go back to lower levels, I'll refinance, and if any balance of that loan outstanding, I'll just fold that into the mortgage.

Depends. Merchants still get dinged a few percentage of each sale when someone uses a card, so the credit card companies are not exactly going to go out of business if someone pays their stuff on time. Then there are all the fees like chargebacks and such.

Of course, from what I know, it can be an "annoyance". I wonder if one of the reasons that the current underwriters of the Apple Card are wanting to get out from it is because often the card tends to be used for stuff, and paid off immediately, as opposed to a monthly balance being left.

Even if AI wrote 99% of the code, that is all well and good... but there is always that 1% which will be a show stopper.

This isn't new. People have been copying/pasting stuff from Stack Overflow for years. I've used AI for code, and for something mainstream, it can work okay, but have anything that isn't 100% mainstream, and that is where things can break down, as the AI code can confidently make garbage or try to invoke methods which never even exist.

Sometimes AI can happily write a page of code... and debugging it winds up taking more time than just writing it from scratch. It all really depends.

I've seen this with RVs. However, people get used to stuff like a 12 volt battery bank with 1200 Ah is something that can power an air conditioner for 8-12 hours, depending on the BTUs of the A/C [1]. Switching that to 14400 watt-hours or 14kWh makes sense, but people don't really like that change.

[1]: BTUs, tons (1 ton being 12,000 BTU), etc... IMHO, it would be nice to just do that with watts. Same with horsepower. However, I'd be tarred and feathered saying that someone's 300 hp engine is 223 kW.

Its not just slinging the slop, but also grabbing that prized analytic data and vacuuming that up to sell. The problem is that companies don't really care that they may make more for an ad-free TV... they just want that cash regardless.

In the past, it used to be that just using the TV in "dumb" mode and having everything come in through HDMI was good enough. Now, I'm reading about TVs that don't even function unless plugged into Ethernet, or Wi-Fi to download "security updates", even though a TV should never need a "security update", and if it does, it should be done an offline USB method.