Oh look, whoever you are. Nobody knows you.

And American cars were still shit. If you RTFA I linked you'll see that the best of the 90s and 2000s were not what was destroyed.

Now go off to cry to someone else about your tiny penis, you will not be missed.

We never finished the first one. The losers were allowed to keep their flags and their guns. Instead of trying to be one big happy country we should have freed all the Africans and enslaved the Southerners, since they love slavery so much. Then we could have them picking fruit right now.

Mostly too rich. There are potential problems we don't want to deal with, and will pay to avoid it.

They can probably get local character set equipped key caps from China.

Shouldn't that make Windows unacceptable? /s

Unfortunately, there is another possible explanation for the emphasis on TPM that is much more sinister. It's possible that Microsoft and its allies are making a concerted effort to lock down desktop clients in the same way that the two major mobile ecosystems are locked down, to kill off general purpose computing and reduce the desktop PC to a machine that can only run approved apps and consume approved content. It already happens with things like banking apps that you can't run if you choose to root your phone to arrange the privacy and security according to your wishes instead of the vendor's or OS developer's. It already happens on open source desktops, where streaming services will deliberately downgrade the quality of the content they serve you when on the same plan you're already paying for they'd serve higher quality streams to approved (read: more DRM-friendly) devices, and where a few games won't run because their anti-cheat software behaves like malware and the free platforms treat it accordingly.

I am worried that we may be entering a make-or-break period for the survival of general purpose computing with the artificial demise of Windows 10. If the slow transition to Windows 11 as people replace their hardware in the coming years means almost everyone ends up running Windows or macOS on desktops and Android or iOS on mobile devices, there won't be enough incentive for developers of apps and creative content to support any other platform, and all the older versions that didn't have as much built-in junk and all the free alternatives will be reduced to irrelevant background noise because they won't support things that users want to do any more. Your own devices will force updates, ads, reboots, AI-driven "help", covert monitoring and telemetry, any other user-hostile junk their true masters wish upon you, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Governments should be intervening on behalf of their people at this point because the whole system is blatantly anti-competitive and user-hostile, but most of the Western nations are either relying on the absurd valuations in the tech sector to prop up their otherwise precarious economies or watching with envy while their more economically successful allies do that. So our best hope is probably for the legacy platforms to hold out long enough for some free platform(s) to reach critical mass. And frankly, there aren't many realistic paths to get there. Our best hope might be for Valve/Steam to show that many of those Windows 10 boxes in people's homes can now play most of the same games if they shift to Linux and possibly run some of them better than on Windows as well.

People can and do service their own transmissions, in particular doing a fluid and filter change is generally a pretty easy job. There are also modifications and upgrades to transmissions. You can buy "built" transmissions which include heavy duty parts which can handle larger power, torque, and/or shock loads than stock ones. There are "kits" of aftermarket parts which either address wear over time or even correct design deficiencies like either lazy or excessive engagement of clutches.

What's the measurement? If it's "GDP" then sure, the economy is booming. But GDP is itself meaningless to sustainability, which is the most important thing to measure in anything you hope to keep doing. If you want to keep having an economy, for example, you have to keep having consumers who have money so they can participate in it...

Hardware, yes. But what will you do with it? It's only really good for a few types of task. Where it's GPU-based, as all the Nvidia stuff is, you could use it for lots of different types of tasks. But Services? Energy needs to get a lot cheaper for that to be feasible, because providing services on this hardware is predicated upon using a lot of energy.

A bubble is "a good or fortunate situation that is isolated from reality or unlikely to last". What's good about it, profit for those who are profiting. Why's it isolated from reality, all three of those reasons. Why's it unlikely to last, reality is inexorable, no amount of ignoring it will cause it to change.

One bubble, at least three reasons why it's bubbling. Probably we could identify a bunch more, like nerd fantasy. One of the consequences of techbros being in a position to decide what society does with itself is that they will send us on tech-related wild goose chases.

The goal of making ourselves obsolete is typically self-defeating when we can't even agree to let humans have free time when they don't need to be working.

Been watching the news lately? "Never" is a long time.

C4C destroyed mostly old shitpiles with poor efficiency, so it was effective in reducing hydrocarbon emissions.

I suspect a lot of these machines will go to the third world and get refurb'd into PCs there, so people will benefit anyway. In fact, a significant percentage of them will probably get Windows 11 installed on them using the bypasses...

Microsoft put the same telemetry they put into 10 into 7 and 8 via updates. Some of those were "updates" that included nothing but telemetry, sometimes they bundled the telemetry with actual updates so if you wanted one you had to have the other. There are scripts and other tools to remove those updates, but if you are not using those and you have been doing updates, they all spy on you.

[To answer your question, the figures typically come from CDNs and major websites doing browser data analysis so, while there's quite a bit of wiggle room, they are going to at least be in the ballpark and definiltely not orders of magnitude out.] Personally, I think people are being too simplistic about the stats and likely outcomes and, arguably, focusing too much on entirely the wrong issue.

I totally agree on your main point; 7-8 years is a good run for a specific major release of an OS, or any other software application. You might not like the decision, but Microsoft announced the end of official support some years ago and that we're now approaching that deadline is just BAU and not something anyone should really have an issue with. They're not taking Windows 10 off you (yet?), but they are making it clear that if you continue to run it you're doing so at your own risk from next month. Pretty much everyone, including the FOSS community, does this with older versions at some point. It's been done countless times before, and will be done countless times in the future - in that light, singling out this one specific example isn't a particularly sound argument, is it?

Whatever the percentage of Win10 holdouts is (I've seen recent figures closer to 50%), it's highly unlikely to be entirely down to "lack of TPM". Windows 11 is a privacy raping UI/UX nightmare, so I suspect a large majority of those Windows 10 holdouts have hardware that actually could run Windows 11 just fine, but are actively choosing not to do so. When many of them inevitably get compromised (which they will), it's going to be interesting to see who gets the blame for that - and the fallout from whatever the resulting botnets are used for - in the media, but that's another topic for another day. There will also be another fraction who simply don't know or don't care; the OS is part of the hardware purchase, and if the hardware is working fine then there's no reason to change anything, and they'll only upgrade when things break (likely due to overworked fans packing up after the CPU has been running flat out for several months as part of some botnet or other). Given most users performance needs have hit a plateau, that could be quite a large fraction, and will naturally decline over time. Finally, you'll have the fraction that understand the issue and have legacy hardware, but can't / won't upgrade because of other user-specific reasons - e.g. they just can't afford it right now.

Key point: none of the people in those groups - probably the majority of that 40-50% - are going to be sending their old PCs to landfill any time soon, and certainly not all in one go on October 14th.

The real issue here is that Microsoft has arbitrarily decided - for the financial benefit of themselves and their hardware/advertising partners - to try and force an unnecessary hardware and OS/"telemetry" upgrade, rather than simply put a banner in the setup process starting with something along the lines of "This hardware lacks critical security functionality and your data may be at increased risk...". We know beyond a doubt that this is an entirely arbitrary hardware requirement decision because of all the workarounds posted online showing how to get Windows 11 running on hardware it supposedly doesn't support. That is pretty much textbook abuse of a monopolistic position in the market, and that's the tack PIRG (and the likes of the DoJ, FTC, EU, etc.) probably should be taking; force Microsoft to remove the arbitrary restriction but make it clear that if you don't have TPM 2.0, that's on you. If you understand what TPM actually does, then you probably also have at least a basic clue about PC/network security and will realise that is pretty much zero additional risk outside of some corporate environments.

Yes, there will still be holdouts, just as there still are on even older software releases and Windows version, but at that point it's entirely on them. They've either chosen the Windows 11 path, with all that entails, or they've chosen some other option (trying to secure a Windows version <11, Linux, Mac, whatever) with all that entails. As long as is not a monoculture with a common failure mode, we should be fine with that.

You oversimplify. I despise Rust, but it does address real problems. (I'm not sure how well, because I won't use it.) I'm thinking of thinks like deadlock, livelock, etc. As someone above pointed out, there are lots of applications that don't need to deal with that, and subsets can work for them. (The above poster worked in a domain where all memory could be pre-allocated.)

Rust felt like programming with one hand tied behind my back. So I dropped it. Only one reference to a given item it just too restrictive. Perhaps it is really Turing complete, but so is a Turing machine. But multi-threaded programs really do need a better approach. (My real beef with C++ (and C) though is their handling of unicode. So I'm currently experimenting with D [ https://dlang.org/ ], which seems pretty good for the current application (though honestly since it's I/O bound Python would be quite acceptable). )

Pretty much everything not big-name-brand that's on Walmart or Amazon is marked up 25% or more from the Aliexpress price for exactly the same product. If you're willing to wait for it to come from China, you can get the same crap for less. I've just placed an order for an item that's $200 on Amazon and was $150. I expect it to take maybe an extra week.