An America full of old tech, frozen in time, actually sounds pretty cool. Everybody is running Linux or BSD on a computer cobbled together from parts. People have revived old Sun, Next, and SGI workstations. DEC computers get business use again. Large files are transferred by couriers. It sounds like a paradise for those of us who cut our teeth on the computers of the eighties and nineties.

OpenAI probably shut Sora down so the Sora budget can go somewhere with a better looking future. Every week Altman's plans for data centers full of NVIDIA chips gobbling up incredible amounts of nuclear power get bigger. That money has to come from somewhere.

I find it hard to believe that there were over 1,000 people working on Fortnite to fire. The game has been around for almost a decade, the visuals have the detail of a Dreamcast game, and the sound is nothing to write home about. It does not take 1,000 people to poop out the mediocre advertising that makes up much of the new content in Fortnite. Something else is wrong at Epic and I think that it probably has something to do with the continuing unpopularity of the Epic Games Store.

I gave up on Apple Maps because the directions are often wrong. It once told me that a local office building was located in the middle of a big green public park that has no parking. And when they're correct the routes often meander through out of the way neighborhoods which adds significant amounts of time over Google Maps directions. Putting ads in an app that is already broken is just stupid.

I don't think that most of the execs at Microsoft care about the long term prospects for Windows. Windows was less than five percent of revenues last year. The gaming division actually brought in more revenue. So did LinkedIn. Itâ(TM)s only
going to get worse as businesses, schools, and home users move entirely to mobile and Chromebooks, areas where Microsoft has demonstrated that it cannot compete. Windows is never going to win back the server market. It makes more sense for them to just let Windows wither away with the PC market and focus on growing Azure business in the enterprise market and growing Office use in the developing world.

All I want is Windows 2000 with support for 4K displays and the latest DirectX. Why canâ(TM)t I just have that?

The thoughts and feelings designers come up with are often just plagiarized smoke to blow up a client's ass. Nothing is lost by letting Google see that stuff; they probably already have an algorithm that infers all that stuff from an existing design so it's going to end up in the LLM an hour after it hits the web.

The point of these attacks is to drag the Gulf States into Trump's elective war that those states asked him to not start. In the long term this will push the Gulf States away from the USA and into China's sphere of influence. This does not really benefit Iran, but the Iranian government knows that theyâ(TM)re fucked, so they have to do something to punish the USA on their way out.

So will the make an unrated soft core porn movie like the shows? Or will they tone it down to get an R?

The OpenOffice UI is stuck in the paradigms of the 1990s when Star Division created it. With lots of new icons piled on. Like Photoshop, itâ(TM)s a tool for people who have been working with it for a long time. But there are millions of users who werenâ(TM)t even born in the times when those UI paradigms were current. To those people LibreOffice is a mess of ideas kludged together and it doesnâ(TM)t make sense. I donâ(TM)t think that makes LibreOffice worse than MS Office, because MS Office suffers from the same thing and the ribbon UI is just a way to keep that shit under control. But if LibreOffice wants to be relevant in the 2020s and beyond they should be looking at the stripped down UIs of software like Pages, Numbers, and Glyphs instead of living in the dotcom era.

And most of their content will still suck and everybody will be watching YouTube shows and movies produced by tiny studios with tiny budgets doing their effects with AI. No amount of mergers will make big content viable.

The CCP cares too much about appearances to risk the embarrassment of a manned rocket to the moon blowing up. Itâ(TM)s more likely that the American mission will go wrong due to complexities of working with too many contractors and too many stipulations that Congress writes into funding the program.

Amazon is spending billions of dollars a year to develop its own AI products. And developing chips that allow other companies to host their AI projects on AWS. Why are they investing in a company that competes with them and their customers?

OpenAI is only planning to buy those chips. But first they have to get the money. OpenAI has run out of big investors and Nvidia is getting shaky about round tripping. Now Sam Altman has to convince big banks that Gemini and Claude Code aren't going to turn ChatGPT into a streak in a pair of dirty underpants. I won't be surprised if we see OpenAI dramatically scale back all those big expensive capex plans in the near future.

Itâ(TM)s finally the year of Linux on the desktop. And it will be locked down so tight that it can only install software that someone else thinks users should be allowed to. At least Microsoft allows users to make choices about what software they run. Maybe this will at least convince more people to try Ubuntu.