I'm sure this doesn't align with Microsoft's long-term agenda. They're trying to eliminate on-premises and private infrastructure in favor of everyone running their workloads in their cloud. If I were switching from VMware, I'd be really cautious about switching to Hyper-V as well. What is stopping Microsoft from pulling the same style licensing switcheroo with Hyper-V in the future?

You're actually closer than you think. VMware's tagline of late is "bringing the cloud on premises". As in you use their tools to bring the cloud in-house. That's the completely opposite for Microsoft which wants to push you into the cloud and not on-prem.

They're basically working opposite ends of the spectrum - VMWare to sell you stuff to bring the cloud in-house via expensive subscriptions. And Microsoft to bring your stuff to the cloud via subscriptions.

Help me understand this math, how does 3 computers value out to $46,855? That's more than 15k per computer, which TBH, I've never seen a normal computer cost that much. Servers? yea, I've racked servers that have cost a quarter of a million... but not normal computers. What are these students working on?

Back in the day, Sun workstations were popular because they were relatively cheap - after all $20,000 would get you a fairly nice workstation (in an era where a kick-ass PC would be running around $5000). Most other workstations would start at $20K for the base model, and go over $100K easily. Of course, universities were often the target and got pretty nice educational discounts plus grants from those companies so students could easily have access to machines that would've cost the downpayment of a house.

These days, an AI chip like the H200 go for $40,000 or so. Lower end units can probably be had for $10K or so. A few National Instruments cards in a computer can easily cost $20K or more.

Depending on your area of research, you might be sitting on what is commercially very expensive high end pieces of equipment that get donated

Also makes the assumption that people are on social media. I mean, I have a Facebook account, and the past 5 years I posted 0 times on it. I have a Twitter account, and the past 5 years all I have are tweets like "Enter now for your change to win a free iPad from MacRumors!"

That's really the only reason I have any social media accounts - if I want more entries in some draw I have to post a message on my Twitter feed. Last I checked, I was followed by a couple of bots and my total follower count are those bots.

Beyond this, X has the resources to keep Operation Bluebird in court longer than Operation Bluebird can afford legal representation.

That comes later. They're trying to get the trademark cancelled - which is made easier with public statements saying Twitter is dead, and Musk posting that it's not Twitter, but X and to stop referring it as such.

Once the trademark is cancelled, they are free to then register it and then maybe X would be able to sue.

At best, X could contest the cancellation and registration request with the USPTO, but it's again going to be hard as X/Musk have done a lot of disavow Twitter.

Except they are. I think SiFive accomplished a lot of their speed by implementing their own extensions to get around issues with the RISC-V ISA w.r.t. addressing mode. They are sufficiently popular that compilers do support those extensions as the code runs faster.

Qualcomm has also made RISC-V moves, as has nVidia and Western Digital.

But given Qualcomm bought Arduino, it woiuld not surprise me if they were going to release a bunch of RISC-V variants that require a compiler that can handle the Qualcomm extensions.

Funny thing - you don't need to license HDMI. You need it if you want to use the logo and advertise it as a HDMI port. But the port connector and such are freely available.

There are tons of devices with "HDMI" ports that aren't certified devices. Maybe you have a few of them plugged in right now without you knowing.

All certification gets you is a few extra things. But it isn't needed to ship a product. You could call it "Digital Video Output Port" or even "HDMI compatible digital port".

Of course, without certification you run the risk of incompatibiliti8es and people blaming your thing for not being compatible, but it's nothing new.

There is no requirement that the port must be certified to sell it.

Well, the big problem is many employers are the ones forcing taxpayers to subsidize their employees. Most SNAP recipients work full time - Walmart is a famous employer who helps employees apply for benefits upon employment. In other words, SNAP benefits are going to Walmart - Walmart gets to mooch off taxpayers by not paying employees enough and relying on taxpayer programs to make up the savings in payroll.

Now consider what happens when those benefits were cut.

Western companies only interested in creating jobs overseas, and helping other nations with tax payers.

What happened to "America first"? :(

Effect of tariffs. If you're making a widget, you can make it in China and make it in the US. Because of US tariffs, making it in China is no longer an option. So you create jobs making the widget in the US. But what about worldwide demand? You could export it from the US, but because the US tariffs cause reciprocal tariffs, it's not cost effective to ship US made widgets to other countries. It's cheaper to retain your Chinese factory making widgets to sell to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the US customers pay for the US made version. It would be cheaper than the Chinese made part plus tariffs, but probably also more expensive than the Chinese made part before the whole trade war began.

Meanwhile US exporters are hurt because reciprocal tariffs but also by the fact that their customers may seek alternative suppliers for the product, which hurts the US company more because now their customers are choosing the competition. And those customers once lost, may never return having found an alternative.

it's why US tourism operators are worried because tourists are going everywhere but the US, and they may find somewhere else to be their holiday tradition.

Trade wars are not easy and there are a ton of unintended consequences "America First" sure, but that may also mean "Everyone but America" for everyone else.

Is anyone finding that the quality of Indian IT resources is getting even close to being comparable to US resources? My experience is abysmal.

Depends. The good ones don't tend to stay in India but emigrate to other countries. All the US did was basically chase them out of the US, and now they get re-hired outside of the US.

That's in character, sure; but what's the paper-thin excuse for that being a cogent policy idea?

The same excuses to impose tariffs because "DRUGS!" while pardoning drug kingpins. Or sinking boats because "DRUG BOATS" while again, pardoning drug kingpins and smugglers.

The excuse is that its pay to play. Those drug king[ins paid Trump for pardons. China pays Trump for chips. As long as you're paying Trump, you're good.

Keeping people employed just because is probably the reason the USPS is having the issues it already has. Cutting the workforce and cutting every other day of delivery could make a HUGE impact to their bottom line. Likely the same mail trucks could carry and deliver two days of mail every other day without needing to put more trucks on the road.

No, the USPS is having to fully fund pensions for people not born yet is what's causing the problems. If you look at the profitability graph it nosedives around year 2000 or so purely because Bush Jr and the GOP were trying to kill it by forcing it to fully fund pensions for the next 75 years or so, which includes funding pensions for people not born nor employed by the USPS.

Most companies aren't doing this which means if they go under, there goes all the pension funds. USPS pensions being fully funded means those people keep their funds when USPS goes under.

It's basically been a way to kill the USPS without killing the USPS directly.

Before this ruling came out, the USPS was really quite profitable, and those profits could've been used to fund the pensions until the obligation was met rather than force them to pay for pensions fully by going into debt.

The other problem with biodiesel is there isn't enough of it. The only reason it works right now is few people are converting used oils to biodiesel for their own private purposes. If you're doing it at an industrial level there just isn't enough feed stock available.

And it doesn't work too well in cold environments - you have to start the engine using regular diesel because biodiesel when cold is basically a cold gloopy fat blob and needs regular diesel to be thinned out.

Hardly. There's no memory manufacturers in any way restricting production to "manufacture this shortage". They may be price fixing (they have a history of that) but right now they are producing memory at full tilt.

And if you ask why they didn't invest years ago, can you please tell me tonight's winning lotto numbers since you are so good at predicting the future?

They are also not increasing production - because the past decade they've done so and gotten screwed over - prices spike, they increase production and then demand collapses, leaving a huge oversupply of RAM and them having to dump it for low prices. So they aren't producing anymore memory than they normally could.

Instead they're switching production to things like HBM needed for the AI chips and such.

Big screen and big sound. Maybe it doesn't mean much because you have a house in the suburbs, but if you're in an apartment (either because you don't want to commute, you want to live in a city, or it's all you can afford for housing), TV speakers are pretty much it because anything more will get you noise complaints.

Depending on your income and housing costs, you may be limited on how big a TV you can have as well.

So a theatre is pretty much the only place if you want that sort of thing.

Granted, I don't go out to theatres much anymore either - and I spent $35 on the ticket (one, for myself), mostly because I want the big screen IMAX, but it's a far drive. And the local theatres are regular screens which aren't great. I pretty much limit myself to one movie a year or so tops.

I believe part of the reason is the year 2038 issue. A while ago I remember seeing posts about the issues FreeBSD has/had with getting around 2038 on their system. IIRC, it was a huge effort.

*EVERY* UNIX and UNIX-like system has to deal with the problem. But it's got nothing to do with 32-bit systems, because OpenBSD and NetBSD have it working since 2012 on 32-bit systems. Linux since 2020 (Linux supported 64-bit time_t on 64-bit platforms already, but 2020 is when 32-bit systems supported it).

It's not a simple solution, but it's been done before on other systems. It's also why Linux has a bunch of system calls that are merely using 64-bit versions.