I've run NextCloud for quite some time, and my frustration with it has more to do with the project not seeming interested in pursuing some of the things that could really increase its adoption and usefulness.

I'm not denying they need to find a workable solution for an open-source Office suite that integrates with it. Don't really care if they move to LibreOffice or they settle this dispute w/OpenOffice instead.

But why can't they support message boards? If you think about it, NextCloud has all the other pieces to work like a computer bulletin board system for the Internet era (as opposed to the modem dial-up days). But with no public message forums integrated, where you could control people's access by security level? It's just a non-starter.

The thing is though? The money going into any retirement plans of theirs is still money they had to earn first. The ones who "lose everything and have nothing left to retire on" aren't going to just vanish because you prevented them from investing in crypto or in some private equity firm.

These are, by and large, going to be the people who never put much into a retirement fund to begin with because they felt they needed all they could get from each paycheck for their current expenses. They opted out of the 401K plan they were offered, etc.

I don't see why I care about government trying to protect people from themselves with this one? I would never invest in crypto and very likely not private equity funds as part of a retirement plan. But that doesn't mean other people wouldn't want to. If you've got enough money already saved up in retirement funds and you believe you've found a window where it makes sense to risk, say, 20% of what you've got on something like crypto? It might double that money for you practically overnight. It also might just cause you to lose it all. But maybe 80% of your total was all you really needed to save in the first place?

ClipChump is the worst.... Many corporations stick people with that as the only (free and included w/Win 11) tool they've got to work with the occasional need to edit video. It feels like it's cloud-enabled for no reason except to say it "uses the cloud"!

It feels like a poor attempt to imitate Apple's iMovie except crippled with less functionality and a huge performance hit because some of the features only work via the cloud, plus it insists of storing files/folders in a personal OneDrive that syncs to the cloud. It acts like the audio portion of a clip is an afterthought, too. You can mute the existing audio or remove it from a clip, but it has zero for EQ'ing it. It doesn't even allow grabbing a still frame and putting it in the video for X number of seconds!

Maybe the legal experts could sit down and work out how to modify licenses (including the GPL/LGPL) to be for non-commercial use only? As long as an entity wasn't making money using FOSS, it could use it just like now. Individuals and non-commercial projects wouldn't be affected. But if you're a business making money using FOSS? Not without paying for it you're not. Yes, this would go against the free-software principles. But principles don't pay the bills every month, and none of these changes would prevent anyone from staying with the existing licenses if they wanted to.

The first thing I think of as a problem would be a company setting up a separate entity that wouldn't make money, just make services available to the company using FOSS to get around the fees. The trick to preventing this would be to phrase the terms so that that entity truly had to pay it's own bills without having the company using it's services pay anything either directly or indirectly. Not even by doing things like providing hosting "free". I'd have to sit down with a bunch of rules lawyers and game out all the ways to funnel money into that entity and how to block them, but what's life without a little challenge?

Definitely not “nobody”, but for sure “not enough to build a business on it”, the more surprising conclusion is “not really enough people to make expensive configurations of something that is basically an existing system”, at least not if you are Apple blunts the surprise a bit.

Apple discontinues a lot of things that other companies could survive on as a sole product. The iPod mini when the nano came out, the iPod Touchok, maybe just products with the name “iPod” in them. Oh! Also a whole line of 802.11 bas stations including one with a backup disk in itand the iPhone mini, and a bunch of other iPhone variants that sold less then the other iPhones but still better then the majority of Android phones.

Big configuration desktops do sell, just not a lot. I mean back pre-COVID I worked for a company that bought and handed out $16k iMac Pro configurations like they were candy! Granted that was mostly for the large memory config and doesn’t need the MacPro to keep existing! I assume the current Mac Studio is filling that role for them now, and obviously as they were iMac Pros when I was there if Apple makes a big iMac configuration they could be iMac Pros again (although I hope if Apple brings back the iMac Pro they have a target display mode for them!)

People keep asking why bother submitting apps for iOS if Apple can just de-list or reject anything they like, at any time.

The obvious answer is that you stand to make a lot of profit and considerable brand recognition if your app is listed there and becomes popular.

The reality is, Apple isn't just going around, randomly kicking apps or app developers out of their store, though. They have actual reasons. People usually just happen to disagree with them.

I'm not familiar with this Musi app, but from the Slashdot description at least? It sounds like another useless "front end" app that just pulled from YouTube and regurgitated their audio content to users. I'd put it under "apps nobody needed". Their own web site says. "Discover Musi, the free app that allows you to stream and organize the music that you want. With unlimited playlists, crossfade, equalizer and more".

Honestly, that's nonsense. You can organize your YouTube streams using their own app. I know people who paid for YouTube Red (ad free) who listen to custom playlists all the time from it. Maybe there's no built-in cross-fade option but would you *really* install another app just to hear your tracks cross-fade between each one when you stream them? You can set a global EQ for what you listen to from your iOS device too. If you feel a need to keep messing with it for various songs you're streaming? You probably just need to find better sources for those streams! Low resolution digital sampling of the original content is your likely culprit.

EVs require a different paradigm for charging than filling a tank with gas for a traditional vehicle.

The main advantage with an EV is that an owner gets to charge it overnight while they sleep, so it has a "full tank of energy" each day, ready to use.

Nobody is interested in having to stop and charge one all the time at a service station or other charging station around town. That would take a good 20-60 minutes (depending on the vehicle and charge level). That's tolerable but not ideal for long road trips, but not for daily driving/commutes.

I think Toyota and Honda are two auto-makers that have stood out for their excellence in building hybrid vehicles that are truly reliable, at reasonable price-points.

Full EVs don't necessarily seem like they're so relevant for them to build, even if both have dabbled in it a bit.

Right now in America? The reality is, apartment and condo dwellers typically have no good option to charge an EV at home. Some may make do with a workplace that provides EV charging in their parking lot or garage. But even that probably feels like a gamble to someone who has no certainty they'll stay employed with the same company for as long as they own the vehicle.

Another reality is that EVs don't really have a stellar track record of not having issues with early battery failures and charging system issues. I've been driving an EV as my daily driver for 5-6 years now and our family currently owns 2 of them. So I'm far from "anti EV adoption"! But the more you read, the more you learn about the details the manufacturers would prefer you were blissfully unaware of. The Tesla Model Y 2021 model year, for example, has a pretty high rate of battery failures. Quite a few reports out there are of people who got one replaced under the 120,000 mile warranty, but came close to going over it. Those cars are still too new and too costly to be having battery issues around the 100,000 mile mark. A regular gasoline engine vehicle from the likes of Honda or Toyota would easily be expected to go 2x that distance if not more. The Chevy Bolt was a much more well publicized fiasco. I'd say almost ALL of them from the start of production through at least the 2020 model year needed early battery replacements from GM. The early ones were even catching on fire here and there. Volvo had all kinds of electrical issues plaguing their first EV model, too. And Nissan's Leaf is categorically poor with battery range/life - largely because in the interest of cost-cutting, they don't even actively heat/cool the battery pack.

I don't see a need for any auto maker to rush to try to build more EVs just for the sake of change? The market forces will dictate the real demand, and the people with the best quality offerings at fair prices will get the lion's share of those sales.

I'm an early 50's Gen-Xer and one of my big issues with Hollywood is simply that they're not very focused on telling stories my generation wants to hear. By that, I mean, there's a lot of the cheesy horror or sight-gag comedy stuff out there that I'm not very entertained by. And stories about the relationships or struggles of people young enough to be my kids? I'm simply not the target market for that content.

It feels like when they do pay attention to people in my age group, it's just a money-grab with a retro throw-back. Think "Top Gun: Maverick" as a prime example. Everyone I know went because we remember what a big deal Top Gun was in the 80's. But it was such a low effort re-hash of the original. It just didn't really need to be made at all.

And this might be a more minor quibble, but with the popular superhero genre? I've found it a little odd/weird that they almost never seem to have a supposedly physically strong woman who has any real muscles or bulk to her. I mean, quite a few of the women who starred in the old "American Gladiators" campy TV series looked like far better candidates than the actresses they select for these roles. I know the comic books drew the women that way originally (She Hulk or Wonder Woman, for example) ... but Hollywood reinvents other aspects of those stories all the time. Look how much they changed the Spiderman story around. Aunt May isn't at all the same as in the comics, these days! People are always complaining that Hollywood is "too woke" -- but they sure do seem to be selective! The female lead characters are perpetually the cookie-cutter stereotypes of what Hollywood thinks guys want to see.

The people saying it's just "a glorified Chromebook" are missing the point, IMO. Yeah, as Apple products go, it's underpowered and has limited ports. But it runs MacOS at a price point that was unreachable before without buying someone's older, used Mac.

Chromebooks suck, by and large, because they're designed to run Google's web software suite for use in a classroom. People wanting an all-purpose laptop at a low price point find out they got the low price point but not much else.

A Macbook Neo will come with official Apple support (including things like ability to walk into any retail Apple Store world-wide and make appointments to get some free help or training on using the machine and Apple's software apps). And recent versions of MacOS seem to be pretty optimized to run apps well inside an 8GB RAM limitation. (Remember that Apple was trying to trim the entry level price point on other machines of theirs like the Macbook Air for years by skimping on RAM. They had to make sure their OS could actually do useful things inside that memory footprint.)

Honestly, arena rock is practically a dead genre already.

I mean, Taylor Swift is an anomaly at this point. The last traditional "rock band" I know of who did the large arena tours was Nickelback, and it's well known how much of a butt of jokes they've become for how "lame" they supposedly are.

I suppose you might find a few others to point to like Imagine Dragons? But my point is, the high ticket prices and even the ability for the music industry to "group think" large enough segments of the population into listening to a given band at the same time has diminished the interest.

Now, you have the combination of a lot of smaller tours/events and then the big festivals for everyone else so one ticket lets you see a dozen bands over a weekend.

I have to agree with another comment here that today's video game production is more like movie production than traditional software coding.

Just look at the credits for any of these "Triple A" games, today, and you see a long list of people involved in everything from music composition or voice actors to artwork or consultants over aspects of the gameplay. It's no longer all about the coders.

In Hollywood, the unions/guilds help protect the rights of the people involved in the productions, because ultimately? Most of them don't get hired at all as full-time employees. They're only paid for projects. Once a film is done? They say goodbye to everyone involved in making it and they're effective unemployed until they can find a new project to get picked to work on.

Software companies like EA still pretend they cling to a traditional model of hiring software developers on staff to develop and maintain their releases. But reality is much more like Hollywood. Either you get severely short-changed to stay permanently employed or kept on as a contractor, or you're let go as soon as what you helped create is finished and their profits from sales start coming in.

No, it's really inefficient. In order to be useful for power generation, the three square mile circle it illuminates would have to be completely full of solar panels in order to capture all the energy being reflected. And it it's as bright as the moon, that's about one half millionth as bright as the sun. So those solar panels, assuming no cloud cover, will be operating at one millionth the efficiency of daytime.

Meanwhile, battery technology, particularly for terrestrial power storage, keeps getting better and better. This has zero potential to offset CO2. Which is deeply sad for the science fiction geek in us all, but honestly, right now solar generation technology is starting to feel pretty science-fictiony, so maybe that's okay.

That's something I've said for a long time. And unlike permanent DST, going to permanent standard time doesn't require Congressional approval. Any state can do it any time by just passing a law.