Will the tabs crash less often?

We penciled it out as best we could with our usage patterns, and we kept running into range and charge time problems. Hybrid solves both.

Turn off updates.

All known things, just sayin', all the places where AT&T has the exclusive rights are going to be using telephone wires until the end of time. The only chance people have of getting decent broadband is to live in an area they don't currently service.

And AT&T's customers in California remain on 1.2 Mbps DSL...

AT&T doesn't seem to be able to create new fiber customers, only buy existing ones.

Even before AI bots, surveys only ever measured the opinions of people who answer surveys.

I did not cover that, but you're right. One significant downturn was when outsourcing became a fad. When the wave hit, I managed to stay on by migrating to business intelligence, which bought me a couple more years. Until they too were replaced by a swarm of low paid, 70 hour a week green cards. But yeah, for a while there, all the suits became convinced that the road to riches was to transition IT offshore to workers being paid fifty paises a day working on card tables over sketchy VOIP, because IT was a job that "anyone could do". (After all, "it was just pressing buttons".)

I also remember how that wrecked the company I was working for. Transition was on Friday, and by Monday BES went down and STAYED down. There was a panicked transition from Blackberry to Windows Mobile, oops MISTAKE, then to a combination of Treo and early Android. Later, Apple.

Helpdesk response was ghastly. In a company meeting, department heads BEGGED upper management not to make them call the helpdesk. The network ran on inertia for a few months, then things started crashing in huge wads of infrastructure. In a panic, the company brought in a second vendor to take over managing the network, eventually hired back some of the administrators, and after a year or so, the only part the original vendor still managed was, against all reason, the helpdesk, which nobody used. Little pools of unauthorized resources developed, fed by hidden budgets, because life finds a way. Over the long term, I strongly suspect they ended up spending more money, not less.

In the meantime, the company lost market share and was eventually acquired by a competitor. My conclusion from the whole debacle was that the easiest way to eliminate a competitor is to insert a manager into their organization that preaches offshoring, then acquire them when they botch it.

Sorry, working in the tech industry was NEVER about job security. It has huge ups and downs, more I think that most other industries. There are times when the money pours in (early nineties, dot com boom, and again about ten years ago) and everyone enjoys champagne at company meetings, board games set up in meeting areas, foosball everywhere, free high end lunches, beer, wine, kombucha at the snack bar, totally flex hours.

But it always, always comes to an end. Being in the tech industry for long periods of time means enduring the down cycles as much as enjoying the up cycles. Smart people will live an average lifestyle, socking away money or investments during the peaks and living off that during the periods of unemployment. Less smart people will assume that this will go on forever, buy a huge house in a gated community that they will have to give back to the bank when the inevitable downturn happens.

I got into IT in the early eighties, and I've lost count of the times I've been unemployed. I'm not even surprised anymore when the 1-1 zoom call suddenly includes an HR representative. Oh well, time to spruce up the resume again. Fortunately, IT pays enough during the peaks that some careful management can see you through the valleys. Although I have to admit, the two year gap during dot com bust was tough. I was 45 days from jingle mail when a job landed.

I personally think IT is currently in the first stages of a downturn. I've been putting discretionary income into home repairs and savings against the day when we have to hunker down and ride it out. But you do you.

I could do with a couple well scrubbed high end servers. Will have to keep an eye on ebay in six months or so.

"Comet". Thanks for the advanced warning. Yeesh.

...what happens manually in real life?

Who besides high end gamers are paying $800 for a laptop?

I had just re-read the novel before seeing the film, and was surprised at how much of the novel was on screen.

I'd be all for Moonraker as a period piece. I think it could work very well.

In fact, with the Bond franchise in current disarray, maybe it's time to go back and do all the Fleming novels, in chronological order, in the time period they were originally set.

That may be a factor, but with Windows laptops starting at $120 I don't see it as being a huge impediment. More likely, Fred and Ethyl won't see the need and don't want to bother moving their stuff.