The golden age was arguably when Netflix had the streaming monopoly and everyone licensed their stuff to them, which ended long, long ago.

Only because cable was still competition.

These days, if you believe Netflix wouldn't be just another cable company when they're the only streaming game in town, I've got a bridge to sell you.

They're still the market movers - ever notice Netflix jacks up their price, then all the other streaming services follow? Or how Netflix stops password sharing, then the others follow?

A garage door opener, thermostat, dishwasher, surveillance camera, vacuum cleaner -- or whatever other home appliance you care to name ABSOLUTELY NEEDS a cloud connection... really?
Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy, but christ alive .. getting really sick of this ad-fueled fuckery.

Depends, Maybe you are receiving a package and would like the delivery person to leave it in the garage where it will sit until you get home rather than on the patio. This would require you to be able to remotely open the garage and then close it again.

Thermostat you might want to control with an app and it needs cloud if you want to remotely access it (think normal user here).

Heck, sometimes you have HVAC and hot water systems that need to be remotely controlled as part of load management. Most utilities have found that such devices generally are no longer reachable after a year to the point my old company made a product for utility companies to use that didn't depend on the user having WiFi - it stuck to the meter box and provided WiFi for those devices. If the customer switched ISPs it didn't matter since the utility retained control.

That was because the original QuickTime codecs were proprietary. It was the Sorensen video codec developed by Sorensen and licensed exclusively to Apple.

You have to remember QuickTime refers to many things - the MOV container format, the video playback architecture of MacOS, the video codec itself, and more.

The MP4 container file format is a subset of the original MOV QuickTime format - Apple submitted it as part of the MPEG4 standard. If you've used cellphones for a long time, you might remember 3gp as well - which is an even smaller subset of QuickTime. Any player capable of opening MOV files can open MP4 and 3GP files as they are upwardly compatible.

Sorensen was retired as QuickTime started to adopt more "standard" video and audio codecs turning it into a proper media framework.

Microsoft wanted to kill it because they were introducing Video4Windows (V4W), a framework to compete for Windows. But since QuickTime was popular and available sooner, Apple ported it to Windows. One should note that Apple's Windows ports are really ports of Mac to Windows, so early QuickTime For Windows were really containing ports of MacOS libraries. The continued on with iTunes containing a good chunk of OS X libraries and runtimes when running on Windows.

These days, Video4Windows is pretty much dead - it was replaced by DirectShow which is the media playback architecture in use today on Windows. The QuickTime media framwork is now just macOS only while the format is something the industry pretty much has standardized on for everything. I don't think Sorensen video even plays on anything now, FFMPEG being the only thing having support nowadays.

This was the era of DOGE. Half of Elon's "elite" team were of questionable origin having criminal records that basically would disqualify them for government work.

Heck, maybe they were DOGE bros - the chaos of what was happening basically let it happen. Even Musk's elite team were copying data off sensitive servers and putting them on on publicly accessible clouds.

The real reason is these guys somehow must've insulated Musk or Trump because they likely could've gotten away with it like DOGE did of slurping up the databases.

First, h.264 has been around for close to 20 years now, and hardware support for at least 15 years of that. The licensing for it is stupidly cheap and easy and to stream it even more so. That's why it retains the status as default codec.

h.265 was supposed to be licensed the same way as h.264, but many patent holders disagreed and broke off forming their own licensing group. Arguably, they saw the success of h.264 as leaving money on the table because of how it's the de-facto standard and they don't wan to do that again. Hence with licensing a mess, only one product uses h.265, and that's physical media because it was baked into the standard.

AV1 was created as a protest against the greed being expressed by h.265 patent holders but it was only standardized just before the pandemic hit. It takes 2-3 years for silicon makers to incorporate it into their products, so it started appearing in chips around 2022-2023 and devices in 2023. The devices supporting it are all newer smartphones, smart TVs and media boxes using the later SOCs with it built in. Luckily a flood of cheap streaming boxes from the likes of Amazon and Walmart (Onn) mean support is baked in, and devices with programmable GPUs like nVidia Shield and VideoCore (Broadcom) added it as a firmware update because decoding video is one of those things GPU hardware is really good at.

It's such a great movie, and predicted so much. Short news updates that trivialize important events, decades before Tik Tok, for example.

Many people don't realize that Verhoeven is a brilliant director and his movies are all about social commentary. RoboCop is one, as is Starship Troopers. They're social commentary dressed up as other films.

RoboCop is about corporate takeover of government, the militarization of police and juxtaposed with what life is like - the SUX 6000 representing the crass consumerism. He was arguing that the world would turn into that if nothing was done.

Of course, if you take it at face value, it's also a really good action movie, interspersed with funny interstitials. That is Verhoeven's craft - a movie with real subtext, without the overbearing nature of it - or how to be "woke" without being "woke". It's why he refused to do the sequels and why the sequels are lacking something.

Verhoeven's work is enjoyable on many levels - you can take it at the surface and it's a great movie (well, maybe Starship Troopers suffers somewhat, because budget didn't allow for a lot of things to be done), but there's a lot of deeper meaning to it all - namely how the military starts taking over life and the jingoism involved.

Fact is, his work is just enjoyable at the same time carrying satire, social commentary and much more. Though I think he was also hoping the world of RoboCop wouldn't actually come out the way it has.

I can't speak for Europe / England and their repair laws, but everything in America is required to be approved by the FAA for use in aviation, and usually you can't change things after the aircraft is certified

In theory, you are correct.

However, in practice, you are completely wrong. Uncertified parts are everywhere and in the 70s/80s, a huge scandal arose because counterfeit parts were found all the way into Air Force One - the aircraft part supply chain was full of counterfeit or uncertified components that it made its way onto the most secure aircraft in the world. The FAA cracked down heavily, but it happens more often than you'd think.

NorthridgeFix has a series of videos where they repaired a Cessna icing controller circuit board, and they got a visit from the FAA. The FAA said everything he did was legit, but they wanted to look into his customer to make sure they were properly certifying parts because people still put cheaper counterfeit (uncertified) parts in. The circuit board he fixed may cost only $300 or so in parts, but after certification and documentation it's probably at least $10,000.

And the FAA notes there are exceptions to the rules - privately operated aircraft well, they have far less oversight. Even the FAA admits it. It's only when transactions happen do they start getting involved (i.e., you sell an aircraft with uncertified parts in it).

Finally, there is also the homebuilt exception - not all aircraft are certified. You can certainly build your own aircraft, and the rules are really lax in that regard - as in, you are pretty much free to do whatever you want.

Design language is a thing and has been since an industrial designer was an occupation. It encompasses the looks of something - like how John Deere equipment is green and yellow in particular ways. Apple had several design languages - anyone in the 90s is familiar with the Platinum design that encompassed the colors of the computers as well as the lines on the case.

It's also how you can tell a ThinkPad laptop even though they've been through different owners and many generations of computers.

It plays a much bigger part than you might imagine. Though for some things, like say, TVs, monitors and phones, it's fallen by the wayside because the functional bit has pretty much consumed all visible bits of it so there's no real need for a design of something that is just a screen.

So are scars, but people still skateboard or rock climb or whatever. If you care that much about what you might think about it in 10 years then a tattoo is probably not for you. It's an imprint left by a decision that past you made on current you. It's just a little more intentional than that time you decided to dive for a fly ball and landed on a broken bottle or whatever.

Yeah, current you might not align 100% with past you's choices, but that's life. You integrate them into your identity as best you can and mostly you don't think about it, and when you do it's a nice reminder of where you were in a certain point in your life. Or it's just a pretty decoration that you got because you like the art.

With scars they happened because the person getting them were enjoying the activity that generated them. If you enjoy rock climbing, and you get scars from it, it's a mark you got doing something you enjoy.

Meanwhile, getting a tattoo of say, your girlfriend might seem like a good idea now, but in 5 years when you break up not so much. Unlike a scar, which you might consider a battle wound from when you enjoyed rock climbing but no longer do so, the tattoo now gives you bad memories and removing it is expensive and painful.

So yes, I don't have a tattoo, because there's nothing I can think of that I'd want forever.

There weren't even that many good ones for Latin languages, until Google started releasing some under free licences.

Microsoft actually released a set of "Core Fonts for the Web" back in 1996, which while proprietary was available for free distribution with certain caveats.

Linux systems all had a way to get them - they often consist of a script to download the original font packages and then extracted them for use on Linux desktops. This greatly improved the typography so it was popular on Linux systems to install them. But you had to do it as the end user and the license restricted providers from pre-installing them.

They're not longer readily available but have been archived so many times there are many sites still hosting them. Apple licensed the fonts from Microsoft so Macs have them installed by default.

Google however was the first to make a bunch of open-source fonts.

It's only recently did tattoos go from underground shame to acceptance by most of the public. Probably started around the 90s, and from there the popularity of them took off.

Before that, usually a person with a tattoo was someone mixed up in bad dealings you wanted to avoid.

But since general perception has changed, they've gotten a lot more accepted and more people get them in places that are a lot more visible (people who got them usually had them hidden under clothing). In more conservative circles, this is still the norm and most hide it under clothing for work.

The real problem with tattoos is they're permanent, and I can't really tell you anything I liked 10 years ago I still like today, which means "forever" is kind of reserved for something I'm not quite sure what yet. Sure you can get tattoos removed, but that's often far more painful and far less effective than not getting it in the first place.

Then there's the body issue - well, a Navy sailor who get a ship tattooed on their body puts on a few pounds and the tattoo they got when they were young and fit looks gross and distorted once they are in their 40s and has a beer belly. Or as someone wrote, "A ship with a bulbous bow, now has only grown more bulbous over the years".

It's just something I haven't gotten because "forever" is a long time. And I'm sure tattoo artists have lots of stories of girlfriends now enemies they had to alter.

Only mediocre U2 albums.

That wasn't preloaded. Apple just added it to everyone's account back then.

It only got loaded because you sync your phone or iPod and because it was new, it automatically transferred over.

Last time I got a new phone, the very first time I opened the App Store it asked if I wanted to load on a bunch of apps as they were included but not pre-loaded. The last time Apple was asked to pre-load apps, that's what they did - they waited until the user clicked on App Store then presented them with the option to install the app (or not).

Nothing was pre-loaded, just if you had a certain model of phone they asked you (just once) if you wanted to add those apps to your phone. If you said no, you could always manually install them later.

Well, that'd be one way to increase IPv6 adoption!

That's always been a curiosity to me - why haven't the big industries pushed for IPv6 adoption? I mean they lost their cases because of NAT hiding families or more behind a single IP address (mobile users are hidden behind CGNAT).

You would think they would push for the rapid adoption of a technology that would let them individually identify a device which would let them for the most part identify a single user. (Sure some people still have shared computers - the poor, for instance, but the kind of people the RIAA and MPAA go after are generally single device used by a single person).

Especially after some ISPs even turn their routers into "guest WiFi protals" so they can provide a blanket of WiFi coverage.

It's always been strange they aren't pushing technology that would let them resume suing people again.

Red Bull is at least $3/can.

A trailer full of Red Bull is about 70,000 cans. That's around $200K.

Sell for 1/3rd value and you have a good year's tax-free salary from one truckload.

They're $3/can retail. The store pays at most $2 each. Most likely $1.50 from Red Bull but there are many variables. So a trailer full of cans is around $140k if it's $2/can.

Grocery store margins are thin - the $1 margin is used to pay for transport, storage, store operations (utilities/etectricity, staff wages, etc), so the actual profit per can will fall down to 25 cents or so.

.... and that would seem to indicate that IPv6 is currently handling around half of Internet traffic.

Question is, is it actually making it out on the Internet or just being used to tunnel IPv4 through it?

It's a serious question because LTE and 5G networks only handle IPv6 data - all data packets are IPv6. IPv4 traffic must be tunnelled through the mobile IPv6 network. (This is because obviously there are too many mobile devices). It's why CGNAT exists - to provide the IPv4 gateway to the Internet from the IPv6 only LTE and 5G networks

So yes, technically IPv6 is used for your cellphone data traffic, but it's just carrying IPv4 inside of it.