"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

Like the old MacWeek and other trade journals. All liars poker. If you wanted a subscription, you just claimed to control $1m+/yr purchasing decisions because that got you the subscription.

The publisher didn't care, never checked, and never wanted to check because it made the reach numbers they presented to advertisers look better. I'm sure that the advertisers knew the numbers had a large BS constant multiplied in, too. But it worked because they were reaching people who were interested, even if they didn't have the clout they claimed.

FB has plenty of bots, but they are also losing flesh and blood users, like the one sitting behind my keyboard. Deleted my acct mid September. Got tired of sitting by the ringside to see which of my friends would get into a fight next. As another friend said after I left, "they optimize for engagement, and argument is engagement"

All software is shit. Everyone suffers.

Three weeks ago, a Win10 machine installed some updates and started running at 10% speed. Nobody could figure out why. Last night, my wife handed me her Ubuntu laptop with a grub prompt and said "It wanted me to install some updates now it won't boot"

The "average" user is completely at the mercy of both camps, and it always falls to "their friend who knows about computers" to dig them out of whatever hole they are in. In this respect, Chromebooks and phones have been the winner, since they are so locked down that folks like us mostly don't get roped into the drama.

Quite right, it is simply ludicrous to expect them to pick up anything useful with a mere 100m antenna over 24000 miles away! Why, we can barely pick up a 1watt transmission with a 70m antenna at 11 billion miles distance! https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0...

Is there nobody left who remembers the InterNIC? Domains used to be free, but you needed to request them from the InterNIC and submit who, what, and why details to justify them. The namespace was well managed because how could a squatter justify "all of the three letter .com domains" in their request?

When the net was made "commercial", Network Solutions (now part of Verisign) was given the exclusive contract to run all that and started slapping everyone with a $50/year fee for each domain. Went on for quite a few years too until the other registrars got established. I'm sure they look back at their balance sheets from the 90s fondly.

Thanks for that. I get annoyed by the lack of flying cars, but occasionally something like this reminds me that we really *are* living in the future.

... because this is how you get necromancers. Honestly, don't these folks ever watch any movies? I think the film record speaks pretty clearly that this sort of thing is a BAD IDEA.

"Great, now that we have his voice, what should we make him say?"

"I don't know, how about something from this ancient book, bound in human skin and inked in blood?"

"Great idea!!"

Amen! What is missing from the whole discussion is that hard problems take time to solve, which outlives the trend of the moment. I've worked on the same codebase for thirty years. We started trendy, with Brad Cox's new hotness Objective-C, and a couple of years later ported to the Bjarne's new hotness C++ (cfront 1.2, 9-track from ATT).

At the time, C++ didn't even have multiple inheritance. Templates? Distant dream. We did it all with macros and name2 token pasting. But it worked, and has been commercially used for about 25 years by folks who don't appreciate change for change sake. It is also at the lowest layers of about 2M lines of code that we have built up in the ensuing years to solve bigger problems.

All projects start with the best tools available at the time, but the ones that last outlive the trends of the moment. Perpetually trendy is only possible with ephemeral code.

I completely agree with you from a technical perspective, however from a business perspective, they need to quickly reach parity with the wide variety of things already available for iOS and Android. Most of those apps already have a plain web version that uses HTML 5. Now, can they make it work well enough on low end hardware? My experience says not yet, but I still recognize it as a rational choice.

I recently experienced KaiOS in the form of an Alcatel GO Flip, which I used to replace an old LG flip phone.

It looked pretty, but my day-to-day experience was terrible. For example, open the phone to check the time and wait 2-3 sec for the display to come on and update the time from what it was when you last opened the phone (?!?!) As a longtime flip phone user, I enjoyed my week-long gaps between charges, but this thing barely went a day and a half.

The interface had many features, like custom ring tones for particular callers, which never actually worked. The thing that drove me absolutely nuts though, was bluetooth pairing. I paired it to my car so that I could answer calls. Whenever I got in the car, it popped up a screen asking whether the car could access the phone contacts. Every. single. time. That screen would persist until I clicked yes or no, and you couldn't do anything until you did so. Used the car a couple hours ago? Want to check the time now? Click through that damn screen.

I have come to understand that they settled on HTML 5 for all of the UI stuff on the phone. Makes sense, but seems to be a high fixed cost for small things. Overall, I wanted to like it, and it has a lot of promise, but shows how crucial UX work is for mass market things.

This fellow disagrees with you, and min/maxed his way to a 9+million person city.

https://youtu.be/NTJQTc-TqpU

“what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it? And is it not necessary for this end to destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless?" -- Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872

AI though?!? Really, a company that deals in spice should know the Butlerian prohibition on thinking machines.

Shot for 1960's TV but on 35mm film by total pro's using excellent Mitchell cameras. Just like the original Star Trek, which was shot on the soundstage next door, on occasion with the same physical cameras. Dye fading and such could be an issue, but they should have plenty to go on, plus they don't have to rebuild all of the SFX as they did with TOS.

At least a much better chance that ten years newer, when everything had shifted to videotape.

Always nine there are: The Master and the Apprentice, Gilligan, the Skipper, the Millionaire and his wife, the Movie star, the Professor and Mary Anne.

At least that is how I learned it in school. "My Angry Grandmother Serves Many Waffle Meals Per Month"