My father used to work at RCA (computers and aerospace) and tells this story of how RCA lost its way in TVs. The background of RCA is that they were the premier high-end TV maker during the 60s and into the 70s. They were riding high and then lost it all.

Step one: RCA signs a contract with Sears to make RCA black-and-white TVs under the "Sears" name

Step two: Sony, then a scrappy little company, goes to RCA and offers to sell to RCA the TVs for the Sears contract for less than RCA can build them. Note that RCA is not the first high-end manufacturer that is unable to stay up to date when making low-cost devices. RCA accepts this offer.

Step three: Sony goes to Sears and grabs the previously lucrative contract from RCA. It's a "curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal" kind of deal.

Did you miss the critical word "renew"?

IMHO, this does nothing but good stuff for me. My refill is kind of a no-brainer (the medicine I take works great for me with no side effects and completely "cures" my problem). The problem is that if I miss seeing my specialist doctor and the prescription goes out of date, the specialty pharmacy cuts me off right away, causes me to miss doses until I can see the specialist again.

And like any good specialist, the wait time to see them can be months.

The only fly in the ointment is the " first 250 prescriptions issued in each medication class". AFAICT, there's only like 300 people with what I have in my state :-)

Back when I did email protocols in the Windows division, we learned a weird thing about POP3: it was super popular in Japan.

Why? Because a bunch of email providers would only support fancier protocols like IMAP for the paid accounts. The free accounts were relegated to the POP3 protocol for fetching email.

Per the linkedin post: the persons goal is to replace c/c++ with rust. That's not a plan; it's the team's north star. The headlines don't reflect what the person wrote, and it pisses me off. Slashdot should be better than that.

Here's my bet for the reality: Microsoft wants to have a agile, easily updated code base with a team of motivated programmers.

But the actual code base is giant and old. I've worked with two different teams where the people were younger than some of the code they touched. The code supports a bunch of features that aren't relevant to the world any more (for example: we still have code to work with corporate servers for regional dial-up connections. That's not a thing any more, and hasn't been a thing for decades).

Worse, the code base, being old, has old code patterns that strongly resemble security issues, and the teams spend a bunch of time chasing down bugs filed by the automated security analysis tools. It's a drain on the teams, and reduces morale.

So management spins up a team to try out AI on large code bases. It's a risky bet with a big payoff. The worst case is that some code gets rewritten. And the best case is that Microsoft gets a nice new billion-dollar business in "rewriting old code".

https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Fire-Manage-Computer-Systems/dp/1718501188

Kill it with Fire has notes from Marianne Bellotti, a person who's managed the conversions of multiple legacy systems with recommendations on how to keep the conversions momentum going, biggest killers of projects, how to manage your people, and more.

Hot take: it's never news when a substantially more expensive computer is faster than a cheaper one.

The Orange 5 is not an alternative to the Pi. It's an alternative to other $100+ SBCs.

"The Ford F250 is so much more powerful than the Ranger!" isn't news -- it's a more expensive pickup, and of course it's bigger and has a bigger engine.

In Washington, it's not just "highly regulated" -- the dams and hydro is owned by us, the people living there. Every watt of cheap power that's wasted by the bitcoin miners has to be replaced by expensive fossil-fuel generators.

As a user of the Acer Jade Primo Windows phone that had the same feature: IMHO, a chunk of the problem can be traced to convenience and apps.

On the Acer, the phone comes with a case and a dock. When the phone is in the case, it doesn't fit into the dock. And regardless, the connecter was a really tight fit, so it's always awkward to pop it in.

And ⦠the Netflix app didn't run in full screen when docked. If it had worked, it would have been worth it for that feature.

Hey, stupid fucking racist asshole.

If you're offended, that's _your_ problem to solve.

I worked for one of the many "3D on the web" companies. Step one, of course, is to make the basics actually work reasonably effectively. Step two is to figure out what kind of content would be embraced by users.

And there was the sticking point. We tried interactive fiction, maps, greeting cards, office-style output, music players and games. Of those, high-performance video for maps was valuable (we sold off all our patents on that), and games were enthusiastically embraced by users.

Everything else was "nice", but not nice enough to be worthwhile authoring the content.

(I made a super nice interactive globe powered by an entire cheap-o pipeline from Project Gutenberg. You could point and click on a country the rotating globe, and it could give you a list of books that mentioned that country.)

There's also a question about specific technology. Of them, we explicitly decided that VRML was just plain horrible to work with: it was super hard for anyone who wasn't deep in the field to grasp and it had too big a focus on "being cool" and not enough of a focus on "being fast".

Can I also suggest riding on National Forest roads? Out west there are thousands and thousands of miles of them, winding to a ton of very pretty forests and mountains. The forest service roads tend to be pretty beat-up gravel roads which are no fun in a car, but are plenty of fun on an e-bike!

That depends entirely on the tire. I have a RadPower Mini folding e-bike; as shipped it came with very knobbly tires. I recently replaced them with more urban-type tires, and the noise level dropped considerably.

(on the forest-service gravel roads that I ride on, I haven't noticed an important difference in traction, so from my POV it's a total win.)