It means nothing until it has been re-reviewed and re-repeated, and people have had 5 years to mull it over and think of alternative explanations.

Science is brutal, and doesn't follow the media cycle.

I think we should call it Plutosaurus Rex!

You shouldn't think of Smallville and Metropolis as fictional cities distinct from real ones. They are variable placeholders, designed to let the reader substitute their own local town and nearest large city. In other words, it's really $SMALLVILLE, and $METROPOLIS in Perl notation...

When these comics were first invented, it was common in literature to use placeholders even for people, eg "Johnny Everyman". It's an outdated practice, but DC is stuck with the naming of those cities.

You'll hear more about them soon. They're the new Avengers:)

The sticky plastic can be cleaned with methylated spirits on a paper towel. You have to scrub a bit, until the matte top layer disappears. You'll be left with a shiny hard plastic shell, which doesn't stick, and a lot of black gunk on the paper towels. Works for any plastic that's designed be "soft", the heat/UV degradation causes the plastic to become sticky after a few years.My personal bugbear: umbrella handles.

IBM's target demographic for ThinkPads was road-warriors. Excel users who flew on airplanes a lot. The road-warriors cared about weight , but didn't want to compromise on battery life. A fairly difficult circle to square in those days.

In those days all laptops were thick....

I got one at the time, and put OS/2 Warp on it. Was pretty happy with the small and light form factor. Of course we all know how Microsoft double crossed IBM on OS/2, so I didn't end up using it as much as I had imagined.

Because the laptop was small, you needed to keep an external CDROM drive attached via a flimsy cable, at least that's what I vaguely remember. The cable didn't inspire confidence.

Most popular laptops in the market ended up having a built-in CD/DVD drive and a larger spinning HDD, I'm guessing that was the minimal size bottleneck that also implied optimizing keyboards for size was meaningless: it could be as big as two drive bays side by side.

With laptops stuck at that larger size, the more complex and expensive engineering of the butterfly keyboard wouldn't make economic or practical sense to anyone.

But it was super cool though:)

I think KDE's safe for now until maybe it redesigns itself to be "lickable"

Nooo! You must care correctly, pleeeeeeease!!!!

Would you like "kill-me-now-as-a-service"?

For a small monthly fee we can offer a range of personal trespassing solutions individually tailored to your needs. The basic package kills you (and only you) on Mondays and Thursdays during business hours, national holidays excepted. If you would like the premium lifetime offer, you will be killed 5 days per week (1) and your preferred undertaker will be kept on speed dial (2). Sign up now during the promotion period and if you're not happily chopped up into little pieces repeatedly in the first 14 days, our friendly receptionist will organize a refund (3) on the spot.

(1) that's one extra day for free!

(2) minimum contract length is 7 years.

(3) includes non-disclosure agreement.

Not an insult at all.

The issue of optimizations is difficult to solve globally, due to the large variation in hardware out there. A distro like Debian (hence all derivatives) or SUSE (etc) has the task of running unchanged on a lowest common denominator architecture. That prevents the binary packages from being compiled with full optimizations. Otherwise, there will be users who can't run the binaries.

The best solution is probably what Gentoo does, compiling everything on the box, but this is unacceptable for a lot people, not least because it can take a long time to compile everything.

So I don't think that highly optimized binary distros will be more than a niche for a while yet.

Sure. Got a new PC last month to play with (simulations/computations). Thought I would try a Linux optimized for modern hardware, instead of trusty old Debian (which I normally use).

Clear Linux was attractive because it's stateless and container friendly, and the system libraries are (were!) tuned with high performance compiler flags.

I'm a user of math, so I care about BLAS, MKL, AVX instructions etc, not so much games and desktop bling.

I had literally just learned to use it and set it up with my favourite software configuration... Oh well:)

I've been a Debian user for 25+ years, never had complaints (except for the systemd switcheroo, which still bugs me, and the fact that the distro incremental upgrades fail every 10 years or so, requiring a complete reinstall).

I'm with you on low power minipcs, I like to leave them headless running 24/7 and login using chromebooks. Keeps the system clean for simulations and calculations which is what I mainly care about. The Chromebooks are just ultra cheap and convenient web browsing appliances for me, I have one in each room so I don't have to go hunting:)

Not sure what I'm going to do now for the new AMD mini I got last month. I wanted something optimized and minimal for scientific apps, mainly jupyterlab and Julia. Trying Arch/CachyOS next, to see if I like it.

Sorry for your loss:)

I liked the stateless design though. It's always a pain to remember the changes to the system config files that accumulate over the years.