At least the "Welcome to Gemini!" and "Put Gemini on your Home Screen" spam seems to have slowed down for now.

IIRC, when the Power Macs first came out, there was a similar tool to convert 680x0 binaries to PowerPC. It wasn't cheap, and I don't know if it produced any sort of source code (except disassembly.) Again IIRC, the only program I know of that tried it was a word processor called WriteNow, which was originally written in 680x0 Assembly.

I can't improve on any of that. Of all the companies where I used Agile, not a single one did enough of it to give it a chance of working and were surprised when it didn't. The closest was a team at Microsoft where the Lead didn't know we were trying it informally.

When a process almost always fails and is always blamed by "experts" on not being executed perfectly, people should start to suspect something. Could it be that the easy way is actually too hard?

Agile, code patterns, "modern" C++, etc, all feel like they were invented to get tenure or kick start careers threatened by age or outsourcing, not actually improve anything. Dogbert would be proud.

Found it by accident, circa 1975. An old teletype with a phone cradle modem that could access the PDP-11 at a local college. Two or three people in the school knew how to run the dozen or so games it contained, and a guidance counselor kept a signup list. We could sign up for time during lunch, which I skipped regularly.

I found a book in the library about BASIC. I tried typing a program in to the system (without knowing if it spoke BASIC or could be programmed directly) and it worked! I wrote a quadratic equation solver !!!

The teletype went away, but a friend that I had initiated worked at a diner all summer (84 hours/week; $5/hour; no W-2) and bought a TRS-80. We were both in college in town, and spent several weekends reimplementing Super Star Trek on his (gasp) color monitor, the first either of us had ever seen.

If it would block updates to Windows 11, it might be worth buying an eSCL device and leaving it attached. Could we just get a dongle?

We've heard this soooo many times. Remember VB6? And all the new wonder languages since? How many even still exist?

If we actually had an AI that could do this, I'd be more worried about whether it needed us

Between this and COVID, Australia seems to have gone full Nazi.

I always wanted to visit both Oz and Hong Kong. Looks like I waited too long for both.

Seems like a reasonable move, but will he bring along the lousy engineering, shoddy construction, etc, that BMW gas cars are known for? Are their electric cars better, or do they fall apart in your driveway too?

  I can't get excited about anything connected to BMW. I've never even ridden in an electric, but I recently junked an X5 (the last BMW I will ever touch!) because it wasn't worth fixing anymore and I couldn't bring myself to just pass the curse on to a new victim. Is Apple interested in anything besides the insignia and an excuse for a high price?

Good idea I hadn't thought of. Apple didn't used to need a lot of sales and support types

> At Apple, half of their employees don't have college degrees," reports NBC News.

Back when I would have loved to work at Apple, it took a master's to get in the door as a developer. Lobotomized computers and ever higher prices allow for easier staffing.

College degrees used to have a place, but they're mostly a scam nowadays when "universities" are glorified tech schools and proud of it. Originally it took effort and ability to get into college, and a college education included learning to think, learning about the culture, learning some social skills. Now anyone can get into college, the selection is financial and the results, in many cases, aren't worth it.

Brave New World and 1984 both involved fanciful technology when written: 1984 had the telescreen (which is surpassed easily by a tablet attached to the wall) and Brave New World had all babies grown in bottles (sounds like it could be coming soon.)

In both cases the technologies were used to control populations. And where would we find a government that would go to such lengths to manage its subjects...?

I went there regularly (Seattle area) until a year or two ago when I found empty shelves, shelves full of trashed packages, employees who couldn't figure out what they had, a pickup system that didn't inform the store, on and on. It seemed to happen suddenly here.

One employee that actually helped me go thru a pile of jumbled / boxless gadgets in hopes of finding what I needed told me they were they transitioning to a consignment-type model, where they only provided shelf space and had no actual stock. Guess it didn't work; I never went back after that.

Whether or not there was widespread, unprecedented levels of fraud, the APPEARANCE of it is so overwhelming that the legitimacy of all our future elections is threatened. I recall a few years ago when the UN wanted to send observers to a presidential election. It wasn't because we were a shining example to the rest of the world, and this is far worse than Bush v. Gore was.

The solution is not to maintain that, "Of course nothing happened, every (right thinking) person knows that," and laugh off anyone who disagrees, but to take the thousands of reported problems seriously and investigate them. That, or hope climate change lets us starts planting bananas soon.

In the PNW where Biden was pretty sure of winning anyway, several other ballot measures that no one in their right mind (except the local government) could have supported (like having an appointed rather than an elected Sheriff!) pass by huge majorities. In my home state, like other battleground states, Republicans were well ahead until the early morning hours, when lots of extra votes turned up. Did they pad all the votes to make the important ones less obvious? Did Trump win in a (predicted by everyone but the new media) landslide and they didn't dare add any more than to get over 50%?

Trump was not a great choice, no, but the alternative is a 0-for-3 (senile old man, two strikes for the vice president who is a deal breaker even if one hates Trump.) And if you were one of the 70 million (at least) who wanted Trump to be president, how would you feel if he just rolled over and played dead because a few editors and actors said he should?

...to charge your credit card and send Apple more money?

Actually, it's be nice if they activated all their "features" as in-app purchases. I'd take an iPhone for half price. (DISCLAIMER: Just kidding. I won't touch anything from Apple under any circumstances.)

it's been in a highly precarious environment, reserved to a few selected people (or a very few very rich people, actively opposed by NASA), and not in any sense sustainable without nation state level resources. I'd be more impressed by routine commercial flights for (admittedly wealthy) tourists that were beginning to make the whole thing accessible.

We're still at the T-Model/Wright brothers stage, where things are handmade and not especially reliable or routine. What would it be like at the Toyota Corolla/Boeing 747 stage?