I'm certain those numbers for cost of installing fiber are related to rural areas and not the high-density HOAs that are all too common now. 30 homes in a 4 acre plot, that's ~$1000 per month for those homes at just under $35/mo. By my calculations, a 4 acre loop should cost $2000 to run, they would break even in 2 months!!! And I understand that my numbers are ignoring the cost of providing the service, but we all know that they over provision anyhow.

I'm not so sure the shop should be allowed to choose what agent the user employs. You wouldn't like it if they banned particular web browsers and said you had to use Chrome or Edge. The browser is the User-Agent, a program that acts on behalf of the user and shows the user the results. It might also filter those results in a way the retailer doesn't like, for example removing advertisements or popups, but that's between the user and their browser.

itâ(TM)s literally the only site I can think of that canâ(TM)t properly display text.

There, fixed it for you.

But for a zoomable world map, the Mercator projection isn't too bad. Most of the time you are not opening Google Maps to see a view of the whole planet. You will zoom in to a smallish area, and within that area, the shape and relative sizes are preserved. OK, zoom level 5 in Iceland is a different magnification from zoom level 5 in Colombia. That doesn't matter much, as you just zoom to whatever level shows the area you want.

By contrast if you pick a projection like Equal Earth, it's great for a whole-planet view, but anywhere away from the central meridian is skewed. Your city map of Vancouver will show roads that run due north pointing diagonally up and to the right -- while east-west roads are still horizontal, so you can't just rotate. The fact that your zoom level shows the same magnification as someone in Madagascar viewing the same zoom level is irrelevant.

At the time, Apple promised that the AI features would be available on the iPhone 15 Pro and higher models. (They weren't going to be on the plain iPhone 15, I guess because it has an older CPU.)

Sure, you don't want to pay full sticker price, because that's the sucker price. You have to waste a day of your life haggling with the dealer so that he can charge different prices to different customers. If you buy straight from the manufacturer under a no-haggle system, they have to offer the same price to everybody. So it's likely to be quite a lot less than the sticker price of a dealership-sold car. The manufacturer still wants to segment the market and milk more money out of less price-sensitive customers, but they have to do it by selling more luxurious trim levels.

I meant, you get a stream straight from the studio master, not ripped from an audio CD.

I thought the "high res" thing was to sell you music straight from the 48KHz master -- not jankily downscaled to 44.1KHz, clipped because of loudness wars, and then lossily compressed. Am I out of date?

I still want to use iTunes on my phone to replace my CD collection (or let me put the CDs in the basement while still listening to them). Sadly Apple has crippled it in another way. Songs disappear from iTunes on the phone if they would not be able to stream in your region, even though you ripped them from your own disc.

He kind of has a point though. Many websites force a fixed column layout. You have a choice between stupidly large text size or big borders either side, if your display is landscape orientation.

Yes, I saw crisp text on my 1024x768 LCD display a quarter century ago. But you missed the next part of the sentence, "even at small sizes". As text gets smaller you reach a point where it is no longer clear. On an 8k display even the smallest sizes are pin sharp. They are a bit fuzzy on 4k (as I use at work) and would be headache-inducing mush if you tried to show such tiny text on a 1920x1080 display.

Back in the day there were hand-created bitmap fonts for crisp display at small sizes. Nowadays, for better or worse almost every application uses outline fonts, which look a bit jaggy if rendered without anti-aliasing ("font smoothing") and a bit fuzzy with it. Only on a very high DPI display is this completely unnoticeable. My laptop is 4k and I am very happy with it, but to make best use of a 32 inch screen a higher pixel density is better.

I'm posting this from my home PC with Dell's 8k monitor. It's nice to see completely crisp text, even at small sizes, and certainly a noticeable quality improvement from 4k. But that's because I am sitting a few inches away. I recently bought a new television, and while I was tempted to pick up a cheap used 8k model, in practice it would make no difference when viewing it from the sofa.

Even Dell seems to have retreated from 8k, however. Their newer top-end monitor has a roughly 6k horizontal resolution.

Actually, in the case of HotMail, it brought their failure to the forefront.

Yeah, this was my first thought too.

I remember this. The end result of this was that Windows (moreso IIS) couldn't handle the traffic and Microsoft quietly moved back to the FreeBSD servers, but with a "faked" IIS identification. I recall some people validating that they were running BSD by exploiting an Apache flaw where you could download the BSD commands. Rumor has it that HotMail ran on those FreeBSD systems for 20 years under Microsoft.

The good thing I see with this is Linux will run on Azure, so they aren't likely to fall on their face in a similar fashion.

I use the Feedbro Firefox plugin to track podcasts - an amazing number of worthwhile podcasts still advertise new contend by RSS. So I don't need to use any privacy-invading audio services or apps.

A sampling of podcasts of interest to me with RSS: No Such Thing As A Fish, Cory Doctorow, Gastropod, Hackaday, Science With Sabine, Guardian Science Weekly

Vik :v)