No thanks on the light-up Apple logo for me. I think it started with the Powerbook G3 (I had one, it was a great computer) and it was sort of obnoxious even then. I'm not paid to be a light-up billboard everywhere I go.

No thanks on the laptop touchscreen, either. I understand it on something like a Surface tablet -- almost -- but most of the time I used my Surface with a keyboard, like a regular laptop, and never touched the screen. I think ramming touchscreens down everybody's throats was just a gimmick Microsoft came up with, both to A.) convince everybody that Windows 8 worked equally well on laptops and tablets (it sure did); and B.) once again, everybody needed to go out and buy a new laptop, even though their current one worked and served their needs just fine.

I think we should rewrite everything in Rust and then sprinkle unsafe() around like it was glitter to get most things to work, and then claim it's more secure because "Hey, at least we put warning cones out around the dangerous bits!"...

Wow, BIND, though? Do a quick search on "history of BIND vulnerabilities." Sure, people run all these tests on it now, and in the past, and the history has been there's been a lot of causes of concern.

Yeah, that's pretty old-fashioned. In my experience, it's barely done now. Kinda like how nobody writes JavaScript like it's Pascal anymore.

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.

FYI, the original XBox release price back in 2001 is the equivalent of $569.18 today.

So they're still doubling or trebling the price of something that's now commodity, even once you take into account inflation.

"Important for our species" ... how? Trust me, our species ain't going anywhere. There's nowhere to go.

So while everyone seems to agree that building server-side applications with things like Node and Python is wrong, foolish, and that "there are much better options" ... does anyone care to tell me what those options are?

I mean ... aren't a lot of server-side apps basically just playing catch ("I'm tossing you a ball, now you toss me a ball back") and in between there, it interacts with a database? You really don't think you can do that with Node or Python? Does e.g. Java really give you so much more reliability, maintainability, performance, etc?

Well, it wasn't Unix. But it was inspired by Minix, a widely-taught teaching operating system that Torvalds decided to make into a thing you could use every day.

"removes support got SysVInit scripts"

Well... there's an OS I'm not upgrading to.

SystemD STILL needs to absolutely die.

Which means you could have done that all along - you just didn't give a shit. It was more important to you to turn my machines into walking adverts for your products, trying to push everything I own into your cloud, and jump on every fad imaginable, rather than make an OS that would actually allow me to use my machine.

Which is why I don't have any Microsoft OS at home any more.

Oh, and I never had less than 64GB in a Windows machine in the last 8 or so years. But it was still a shitshow.

This sudden "lets make the OS actually work for users" drive is decades too late.

Exactly. And Vmware's calculus is that as long as it has a dozen gigantic clients (governments, huge enterprises) that it can charge whatever it wants, then the small fish aren't worth it.

Tesco's - one of the UK's largest supermarkets - came out a few months ago and said "We've migrated off VMWare because of the licensing". They did it in months. On the major backends running every store in the country.

They had a massive dispute with VMWare and are suing them (they say they bought a perpetual licence, VMWare then cut them off), but while they did that... they just migrated their ENTIRE infrastructure.

Sure, it's a big thing to do. But it's not impossible, doesn't take years and - like Tesco - you don't need to wait to do it. If it's THAT business-critical? All the more reason to have an alternative ready to move to at a moment's notice.

Companies CHOOSE to get tied in, they CHOOSE to only ever run one system, they CHOOSE to make the migration painful, they CHOOSE to hold back on it in the hopes they can negotiate to carry on just as they are. And those are all DUMB from a business-continuity point of view and no substantial organisation should be allowing that to happen.

Pretending that huge organisations paying Broadcom millions are somehow powerless in this is actual complicity in the worthless side of IT where everything is just absent of any redundancy, resiliency, independence, failover, etc. etc. etc.

We have bubonic plague infections every year in the United States. Very, very few, admittedly, but it's not like it's been eradicated. So there's still benefit in studying it.