None of this surprises me. In an enterprise setting you don't usually screw with something that works and has been working. I guess that's why we still have COBOL around; it's why I worked on a refrigerator-sized unit of a computer which ran our missile system when I served with the U.S. Navy (the Sperry/Univac Mk 152; I believe that same system was being run by some major-city public transit system - I forget which one). Constantly upgrading to the latest and greatest has a cost which goes beyond the initial price tag; constant churn can be disruptive ASF to an organization which relies heavily on uptime. I've seen medical equipment still running WinXP during recent hospital stays; I've heard of OS2/Warp still being used in several enterprises. I think it's the same reason DOGE found government processes still being handled by "outdated" systems. If there is a way to upgrade a system with minimal disruption then you'll see those upgrades. Until then, it seems that the prevailing philosophy is, "if it ain't broke then don't fix it."

You may have a point there. In my 55 years on Earth I've learned at least one thing: one surefire way to anger a man into action is to either mess up his money or his means of feeding himself or his family.

If I still had mod points you'd have some coming your way. I logged on just to say exactly the same thing about Framework laptops. In fact, I'm saving for one now.

Agreed 100%. I used to really, really like Quora - but it's definitely not the same website I joined years ago. Quora has become straight-up TOXIC with all the trolls on there. Getting useful and insightful answers from there has become harder to do with each passing year. Lately I've been thinking of disassociating myself from Quora; I'm not so sure I'd be missing anything.

Wish I still had mod points. I was LMAO for 15 minutes.

I have one real-life use case for a VPN: there's one particular c-store at which I stop on the way to work for a quick breakfast and I like to check my email while I gobble down my meal. Problem is, whomever handles their IT is lazy asf: pretty much ALL IP's which are out-of-country are blocked for some reason - and that includes my email provider (sorry, not a fan of Gmail). The ONLY way I can access the email server while using my notebook is through a VPN, period.

You have NO IDEA of just how correct you are. I'm a long-haul trucker by trade and I am often asked by associates why there are so many sleep-deprived truck drivers. Well, one BIG answer to that is that this isn't a 9-5 type job; there is no set schedule. Your sleep, breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc, is mostly determined by the due date on that load you're dragging down the road; that is to say that your sleep schedule is all over the place. This is a job which will wreak absolute havoc on your circadian rhythm. You could spend a full 8 hours in the sleeper and still be too tired to drive. This may also explain the shorter life expectencies of long-time truckers.

Glad you mentioned this. I'm a trucker and I agree with you: a lot of the hoops we have to jump through just to retain our CDLs are usually not acknowledged by nontruckers simply because no one's ever done anything like that to them. If the rest of the general public had to jump through the same hoops we do now just to keep their licenses (biannual physical exam, annual mandatory random urinalysis, disqualification for insulin-dependent type II diabetes, etc) not only would probably 40% of the public be actually *disqualified* from ever driving but there would be coast-to-coast riots. Welcome to the life of a freight jockey...

Even with that there are still certain subsectors in which the AI proponents will be very much challenged due to the way in which the cargo is routed (if not the very nature of the cargo itself). A great example here is cattle hauling: ever notice how it seems many of these cattle trucks are abso-fscking-lutely SCREAMING down the road? There's a reason for that: most coe haulers are paid by the weight of their load when they get to the slaughterhouse. The problem here is that there are situations in which the weight of that load when it left the ranch/farm/whatever doesn't match up with what shows up across the scales at the destination. Livestock can lose weight during the trip (urination/defecation/whatever) and, in some cases, some of the livestock may not even survive the trip at all (trust me, it happens more often than you'd think). When this occurs it's the hauler who takes the financial hit. Can't do much about livestock going to the restroom in the trrailer, but you can bet your bottom dollar that NOBODY wants to see one solitary bull end up being a carcass BEFORE it's offloaded. Now the question becomes, "how do we change the procedures we use when transporting livestock such that we can avoid this? Especially since the AI won't allow us to do the things we usually do to combat this?"

Speaking as a trucker myself, I think they underestimated the task they were trying to automate and at least some of the investors started to realize that. Allow me to explain: trucking, despite how brain-dead simple everyone thinks it is, isn't some stupid, monolithic field. There are very different sectors of trucking, with very different requirements of its practicioners - and, as a result, one software suite won't rule them all. Allow me to elaborate: I currently haul privately-owned automobiles cross-country for owners who (for whatever reason) either can't or won't make the drive themselves. I pull an 8-car trailer (that is, a trailer with a capacity for 8 standard-sized autos). This means actually I drive the semi to your house or other location; load the car by driving it onto the trailer (it should be obvious how those cars get onto the trailer but, trust me, a lot of people have never even thought about it); securing the vehicle by strapping the tires to the deck; and rearranging the vehicles such that the semi doesn't exceed federally-mandated gross and per-axle weight limits, while still somehow relocating the vehicles so that the first vehicles off are the last loaded. And doing this 7 more times, at 7 more locations within 2 states. And, once loaded, I get to reverse that process 8 times at the other end of the U.S. Driving is actually the easy part of this job. But (and this is the point I'm clumsily trying to make) it's not the only part. Then there's the fuel haulers. The oversize/overdimension freight haulers. And what about hazmat? You really want to share the road with some robot hauling nuclear waste? Trucking is not just some redneck yahoo dragging a box down a four-lane interstate and I believe some people's hubris absolutely blinds them to this fact. There's a lot of things going on that no one's been able to automate (yet), and the only "androids" we have now can only show us Tik Tok videos. Oh yeah, there's also this to chew over: why is it that the only successful tests of these automated trucks seem to be on four-lane highways (or ones with nice, wide shoulders); with clearly-painted lane markings and fog lines; and during fair weather conditions? Ever see one of these tests in lake effect snows? How about during one of these Biblical-level, apocalyptic thunderstorms we commonly get here in Florida during the summer? I'm betting some of these investors eventually started asking themselves these same questions.

Still wanna see some sort of resolution for Elantouch touchpads. Seems like you have to rmmod and lsmod the driver just to get it to (sometimes) work; and, even then, it's sort of wonky - it likes to stick for a second or two before doing anything. I though it was a GPIO issue but the problem persists...

I started off with the Sinclair ZX81. I still remember magazine articles outlining how to build an EEPROM blower for this machine. I later "graduated" to the TRS-80 color computer after driving my dad crazy begging for one. Found a machine language cartridge for cheap (the seller had NO IDEA what he'd gotten himself into and just wanted to get rid of it).

I'm actually quite happy to have come into that generation of computing: there was almost no ready-made software to buy for these things. If you wanted to game or something like that then you had to actually write the damned thing yourself, usually using BASIC, FORTRAN or machine language. Using instructions like PEEK and POKE forced you to learn a little bit about the innards of your OS. It was a little easier to land a position in IT because these conditions turned owning a PC into sort of an IT boot camp. In fact, that's how I ended up working in IT back in the day.

Wish I had mod points, you'd get them all.

I always see this on these, "OMG LInux malware" news items. Some article gets posted about some new malware variant which targets Linux-based servers/OS's and then, buried somewhere deep in the article, you finally see a part of the story which seemingly never makes the headline: for the malware to be effective some epic stupidity has to occur (root login, port 22 open, or, in this case, certain config variables set where they can easily be spotted even before compilation). I should do some investigation and see just who sponsored the article...