It wasn't. This isn't either. Neither was sampling, which was also called stealing at the time. Or drum machines instead of live drummers. Or synthesizers instead of a string section. Or...


Acting not really my field so I don't know. But for music creation...I get the point, but I don't really fully agree with it. It's another tool to learn.

Brexit, ignoring the politics and looking purely at the market, should be educational here. In the UK there is a spread betting firm, IG Index. All polls all the way through campaigning consistently showed that support was essentially neck and neck, and too close to call. However, for whatever reason, sentiment on the bets on IG Index went purely to Remain.

Banks actually took this as legitimate market data, over the actual polling, and set up their positions accordingly. Everything was in place for a Remain vote, hugely axed towards it. So when the result came through...financial chaos. All because they took spread betting data as a legitimate signal over the actual controlled polls, which never supported a huge axe in either direction.

Be very careful as to the weightings placed on data.

Also zero advantages of a blockchain, no? The whole point is when you don't trust the counterparty and need a record. But if this is fully controlled by a single entity and you know precisely who's settling and who you're trading with...what's the point? Any old database could do that.

I'm in the UK so take this from that perspective - here, from what I see, no spaces have vanished and in fact they've increased.

Plenty of parks here, most places have a relatively easily reachable mall or shopping centre. Pubs still exist, coffee places are new (I'm speaking as someone who was a teen in the 80s, not so much of the coffee-type culture then). Bikes are back and with more infrastructure, gyms are bigger than ever and exist as a space to meet...it's all still around.

What's different is the alternatives to that. You can also talk to people online now, and to some extent that seems to be removing the drive to meet up in person. Not completely obviously, but it's there. Catching up with your friends over gaming groups in Discord, or just group message chat or whatever is completely common. Seems much less common to go round someone's house than it used to be when I was a kid and teen, but again - not exactly zero. It's more expansion of choice than reduction of opportunity.

So I'm aware that NVidia has the edge on AMD in terms of performance right now, so I'm not making that argument. It's more that nvidia are the unwitting drive-by victims of a Copilot shooting for me: one Windows co-pilot ad too far pushed me to move my gaming PC over to Linux, and AMD better supports Linux.

An OS migration on the consumer side also means a manufacturer migration to things that support the new target. Yep, only 3% of the market and I doubt NVidia's board would quake in their boots if they read my post...but it's true.

Old Reddit cloned this site, Slashdot. The founders are on record stating this in a 10th anniversary interview - they were aiming at Slashdot (and largely won). It's essentially a Slashdot clone with the ability to create your own topics, post your articles and the old uncapped karma numbers.

Slashdot limiting karma to 50 was an extremely good move.

There's literally no evidence for what the hell you're talking about. Smog is mostly derived from emissions, assuming you're American your vehicles aren't zero emissions (I'm in the UK, I can tell you ours aren't either by the fact there's an emissions standard test as part of the annual vehicle check, the MOT, which you need to allow your vehicle on the road here), EVs aren't heavier in most cases and EVs aren't worse on tyres than ICE.

It truly is an impressive amount of wrong to come to the right conclusion - better public transport in cities is a good thing, as is walking spaces. But so, so many myths repeated in order to get there.

Information is here:

1. Wheels and tyres
2. High Voltage Drive and Charge
3. 12v battery
4. Locks, Alarms and Immobilisers
5. Electrical and Wiring

Did you read it? Your 'dumb things' is exactly what they would have become and work anyway - aux, hdmi and bluetooth. They weren't bricking the hardware, you could still use them as dumb speakers.

Throw in the open source bit and they're suddenly even more attractive.

'The Frame' is different to a standard TV because it's matt. That's the thing - it truly is designed more for static image than for moving glitz and glamour. I like them, and if it weren't for my distrust of online Samsung these days I'd likely have got one. I fully understand those who have done - it's a nice device that's good at its task.

I do find it confusing, yes. What's the difference between the iPad and the iPad Air? Why is the one with the 'Air' monicker not the lightest and why is the Air not the Mini? What's with the Apple Pencil support being so strange, both in model and functionality? What is a 'Liquid Retina Display' vs an 'Ultra Retina XDR' display?

I believe iPadOS 26 may have sorted this recently, but even within the range when I was looking maybe a year/18 months ago you got different software functionality too, within the same model variation, purely based on screen size. Why could I run Stage Manager on one but not the other? In fact, what the hell is Stage Manager and why can't I just float a window? All this 'amazing' multitasking - yeah, I've been doing this that since the Amiga Workbench days thank you, nothing new except the weird insistence that it's somehow tied to screen layouts.

, As I say, I think iPadOS 26 has cleaned a bit of the functionality side up so some of my complaints on the OS side are now a little out of date, but I was literally standing in the shop with money to burn and I walked out since I was too confused and knew I'd always think I'd missed out somehow. These days I'm not so fussed about one anyway, though I do look in once in a while. I bought the original, iPad 2 and "the new iPad" (ridiculous name). Haven't bought any since, still have my iPad 2 but barely charge it - useful for a few hardware synths I have once in a blue moon.

Agreeing with you and pointing out their worse offender - the iPad range. I have absolutely no idea the differences between their products there, it makes very little sense to me. And I've been using Apple products for 40 years.

Feels like the new Amelio era to me - ship what we've got in the parts bin and call it a strategy. Too many products.

I imagine the Steam situation will get sorted out pretty quickly then.

It might well be the 'partners' themselves that wanted to give up. If they saw no market, then yep - cut the investment. It's been a long long time since the CEO magazines hyped the 'metaverse' every flaming day.

Yep - absolutely agree with you. Just because a devices is locally controllable and has opened up localhost:8080, that doesn't prevent it from also opening a connection to https://badthing.example:9999/ and uploading everything it can find to it. Concepts are orthogonal.