Ads? Never saw that many, now I only see ONE on the page at all.

Guess you haven't heard of Brave and are still being tracked all over the internet,then.

Well, that isn't too hot. My kiln, in my barn, was running a firing last night that got just about that hot for cone 6 pottery and it can do cone 10, even hotter.

It'll take more than a furnace that can do what the average potter's kiln can do before it sounds impressive.

Ah - yes, I did misread it. Jobs did push people and created the Reality Distortion Field, but he could not have gotten much going without Woz.

And, yes, I was talking about Woz' accomplishments.

Some of his logic designs were amazing. I was learning digital logic when I got my //e and started studying schematics. (The //e was a generation removed, but had some features from the ][ series and I studied those as well.) For one example, the ][ disk drive. Just as a quick and simple example, he had a 7400 chip needed and used 1 ro 2 of the NAND gates on it. He used the other gates as amplifiers from the disk signal. Not something that was at all standard at that time (don't know if it is now). That's the one I can remember, but he was using ONE gate as an amp instead of at least one, if not three more chips. Things like that kept the costs down more than most would think.

I can't remember other examples, but his habits of having to keep chip counts down, so he could make what he wanted when his family didn't have a lot of money, came through in a number of ways in his designs.

Hmmm...

That's being a little bit harsh.

He sold *new* cars! ;)

They really should be honoring Steve Wozniak instead. He's the one that did the work, did the innovation, made a floppy disk drive work for a price lower than anyone else could imagine by innovating. He's the one who did the designs and made it all possible. But Jobs was more visible and knew how to capture headlines.

Seriously, Jobs and Apple would have been NOTHING without Woz doing the kind of stuff he can do.

Clicked to update my password - now the Plex site login won't work at all. I don't mean it won't take the new PW. I mean you can't get the login page.

Not surprised, really. So freaking many bugs in Plex that never get fixed I've questioned their code quality for a while now.

Guess you never spent time programming the //e or older ][ and ][+. Seriously, you think the gs was slow? Compared to what I started with in college (the //e), the gs was rocking.

Always amazing how people think they're the first generation to deal with or discover things or face issues and have no clue what things were like before them.

I didn't get anything banned, but I left for similar reasons. I think they were going with cheap mods who probably had poor English skills (because they were from whatever country where labor was cheapest by the hour). But in many ways my issue was the opposite: The answers that were getting in the newsletter and getting all the attention and were not getting banned were the ones giving advice that would get people evicted, arrested, or just in court because it would make it easy for the landlord to sue to them or for tenants to sue them as a landlord.

That's been going on for years. It was a problem back when I was active and one of many reasons I left, even though I was a Top Writer (or whatever that title is) in one category. Top Writer? Yeah, still meant not getting much in terms of newsletter mentions when compared to the people giving answers that, if followed, would land people in court, or jail, or out on the street when evicted.

The vast majority of the ones I saw like that were political or dealing with anti-vax or other conspiracy theories.

At one time you could go to Quora for good answers and intelligent discussion on those answers. It's been a good while since that was the case. They've been pushing popular or flame-bait answers for a good while over factual or quality answers. I used to work as a landlord and would work hard to write good answers to questions so I could actually help people. I got thanked for them, but the answers to similar questions that kept showing in my feed, ones that were getting all the views and reactions, were usually inaccurate and often even advised people to do things that they could get sued or sent to jail for. I'd report inaccurate answers or bad advice that could get some arrested for larceny or worse and nothing happened.

Quora hasn't been about answers or helping people or exchanging information for at least several years. If it goes tango-uniform and the bigshots behind it lose their stock equity and get loans called in and lose houses and yachts, it's nothing more than poetic justice.

F*****g magnets! How do they work?

Why do I care about authenticating my job to my online Rolodex service? For longer than I can remember, all I have used LinkedIn for is a semi-self-updating electronic phone book. If I call someone and don't get who I expect, I'll know right away and delete their contact. I expect they would do the same with me. I probably use it to look someone up 3 or 4 times a year, if it is a particularly busy year. I can't be bothered with (and actively avoid) the social media features.

And yet they're providing internet to many who couldn't get it or get a reliable connection through other sources. There are things I can do with a business I've wanted to start for several years that I couldn't do until Starlink came out of beta and I could get it. Considering that employment and income goes up in areas when good internet becomes available and that they're helping groups as well as individuals be a part of something many people have taken for granted for over 20 years now, ignoring their impact on peoples' lives is ignoring most of the story.

Wise County, VA - look it up. Backwater. Rural. For many homes no internet at all, for many others, no reliable internet. Wise County Schools had no reliable connection to use the internet in instruction in classrooms or to help kids learn to use what most kids these days take for granted. Starlink came in and worked with them directly to help them get real internet they could use in their classrooms and for the kids to use for doing homework.

When you can see that the public schools in a rural county like Wise is now able to start catching up to the 21st century that most of the US is in, that kind of makes the concerns about observatories take on a different perspective. I'm not happy that issue is there and, from early on, when they saw it was going to be an issue, they started working out how to de-emphasize it quickly. But when it comes to educating children so they can take part in the 21st century economy and actually use Google and other internet resources, it's worth weighing the gain and loss

Think about those kids who can finally do ANYTHING on the internet next time you sit down and stream any program you take for granted now days.

I spent two years on Viasuck, then 2 1/2 years on cellular internet, and now Starlink. If I ran a business, one of the LAST services I'd trust to confirm credit cards is traditional satellite internet like Viasuck. Approximately 1/2 second latency for any transaction and if there's a serious storm, there's no service. I wouldn't count on it for anything that I need to go through within the next hour. And, having dealt with their CSRs on the phone, and seeing what kind of people they depend on to do installs and so on, I wouldn't count on them for anything that involves data that matters. Even with my records, and their connection records, it took me over an hour to convince them that my connection being dropped every hour (yep, once an hour) was something they needed to look into. I got told, by multiple people, that my modem was on their latest software so I couldn't be having any problems. I said, "Okay, how do you explain hourly outages that last from 2-20 minutes?" The answers to that were either denial (even though it was in their records) or just making shit up.

Traditional does not have a place. While they did, they were hiring incompetent people. Now that there are other options for most of us, their income is going down. That's not going to make improve the knowledge or skill of their employees or their technical operations as a service improve when income drops. Viasuck will survive because they've bought a network that can do more than geostationary internet. Otherwise, they're providing 20th century technology to the 21st century and there isn't a place for that.