Good! F Microsoft! They already F'ed up Skype to the point where it's borderline useless garbage. I don't want them messing up my favorite chat tool!

Can't say I'm thrilled with Discord going public though because you KNOW that means a rush to monetize and that likely will mean either monthly fees, tons of advertising (or worse, BOTH).

Sure, right up until they invade Taiwan, take all the foundry's there and the expertise that goes with them, and the rest of us are holding the steaming bag of Poo...

And no, the USA could NOT stop China from taking the island... not even close... Too far away, too long of logistics lines. China has the US by the nuts in that conflict every time...

Great, so they can ruin yet another great tool...

Skype prior to MS purchasing them - great tool... Post acquisition - utter POS!

Go watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?... or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Use of resources yes, although I would argue for good purpose given the amazing trickle down effects in terms of technology and economic benefits... Horrible for the environment? Not so much so...

Actually, for a lot of Amigas, that IS the part that has died... The A1200, 500+, 2000, 3000 and 4000 all had NiCd batteries in them to power the real time clock. Many machines were stored away in the mid 90's without this battery being removed, which subsequently leaked battery acid all over the MB destroying traces and ruining the board.

So yes, the boards ARE the parts that have often died, but the chips are perfectly good...

There are dozens of Amiga related things happening these days...

Just off the top of my head:

The A314 project that allows you to hook a Raspberry Pi into the A500's internal memory port to provide both the expanded RAM to the Amiga, but also acts as an accelerated co-processor board to offload high performance code to, and it even allows the Pi access to the shared Chip memory as well as a few other tricks...

There's the Vampire accelerator boards to speed up the A1200, 500/1000/2000 systems that give it a 68080 (yes 080) processor, a ton more ram than these machines normally can take, IDE interfaces and even options for ethernet add-ons.

There's the zz9000 RTG graphics board for the 2000/3000/4000 that give retargetable graphics, and ARM processor to offload some processing, Ethernet, and even some USB capabilities.

There's the new RGB2HDMI project which lets you make use of a Raspberry Pi zero as a video passthrough to output the RGB video out to the PI's HDMI port so it can be easily used on modern LCD monitors (just installed one of these yesterday and it's great!)

There's a number of projects for replacing the motherboard with new boards (again, requiring donor parts from an original board)...

There's are at least 3 other new accelerator projects I can think of...

A new version of the classic 68k OS just came out a year or so ago (3.1.4) and 3.2 is expected sometime this year...

Of course, there's still a ton of legal hassles going on - Cloanto bought up all the licenses but Hyperion came out with the 3.1.4 OS claiming that they had the license for OS 3.x, so of course there's a lawsuit going on, which has been yet another useless distraction. Hopefully they'll work it out soon.

So, yeah it's FAR from a dead platform.... No, not a huge commercially successful one anymore, but it still has an active community and following, and is still being developed and expanded.

Excuse me, but if the idea is to get away from plastic, why can't we go back to glass bottles?

Easily recyclable/reusable.

Well known characteristics

Don't require any special new materials to be created...

Guess that would make too much sense? I realize glass is heavy and thus increases shipping costs, but I would think all the other factors would totally be in glass's favor...

Except you willingly have given it to EVERY other entry on that list as well, whom you seem to trust blindly with no idea who the hell they even are!

The second you hit "Update" you provided their consent to update the machine. That's life. Deal with it... Or go write your own personal OS and software if you want 100% perfect control. Because that's the ONLY way you're ever going to be able to 100% trust everything running on your machine.

Um, seriously....? SO WHAT?

So MS knows you have a Pi running... Big deal? They can do exactly WHAT with that information?

Geez, some people get so up in arms over nonsense.

I've been doing iRacing for about 5 years now. I had heard about the service back when they were first getting started 10+ years ago, but at the time it seemed too expensive and too immature for me to pull the trigger. Then in 2015 I went to Vegas for a family vacation and got the chance to drive a Ferrari on the small road course at LV Motor Speedway with Dream Racing. They had you first spend about 45 minutes driving the track in a simulator and turns out it was iRacing they were using. After doing the sim and then being out on the real track I just KNEW I had to get it when I got back home. Been doing it ever since and have dropped well over $12K between subscriptions, tracks and cars, mid-high end controllers, a high-end PC, VR, and just recently a 3-axis motion rig. Each step has added to the immersion and realism.

Yes I could have gotten a junker car and gone to the local short track for that. BUT:

1) I could never have run anywhere near as many races as I have in the sim
2) I know jack squat about repairing cars, and don't have a garage to either store or work on such cars
3) there's no way I could ever race on Suzuka, LeMans, Daytona, Laguna Seca and Motegi all on the same day, let alone do so in all sorts of different types of cars.
4) I've actually had interactions on the simulated track with actual professional drivers who's names I recognized - an experience that VERY few could ever have a hope of doing in the real world.

Real life racing series have been having a real problem over the last 10 years or so of a "graying out" of their fanbase - younger generations don't have the same love affair with the car the way kids of the 40s-80's did. I know some kids who hit 16, were old enough to get their license but never bothered - no interest whatsoever (where as I was chomping at the bit to get mine at 16 in the late 80's) Current kids also (don't ask me why) LOVE watching people play video games for hours. I guess it's no different than us older folks watching other sports on TV - it's the love of observing the competition, the drama of competition. No different than the Romans watching the Gladiators in the Colosseum... Anyhow, if watching sim-racing gets them interested in becoming fans of the real thing, it's only going to help real-world racing survive in this next decade, where previously projections were looking increasingly bleak.

Whether those viewers turn into consumers of advertiser's/sponsor's products - that's yet to be seen. But more eyes on product never is a bad thing!

Some of my friends and co-workers have shown my racing rig and racing streams to their kids and the kids DROOL and beg their parents for such a setup. The parents use it as a carrot - "Well, he's my age and he worked hard, got good grades, went to college, got a good paying career and is smart with his money. If you do the same then you can afford such things when you're older too."