The Apple II’s big selling point, compared to the other two big brands introduced in 1977 (the Radio Shack TRS-80 and Commodore PET) was colour.

But it was a weird and colour scheme that took advantage of clever Wozniak hacks to make it viable on a cheap machine. Good video hardware, and enough memory for the colour display, were spendy. That’s why even into the 1980s you’d have machines like the ZX Spectrum with limitations like “every 8x8 block can only have 2 colours” which used less memory, and 40-column screens that were readable on TVs instead of dedicated high-res monitors…

Fujifilm successfully repositioned towards other chemistry. I know there’s that Eastman spinoff but why wasn’t it as successful?

ARM has a high probability of blowing a tire.

They have a complex relationship with their licensees which may try to cause self-sabotage trying to pull more of the money home. See the various licensing fights.

If you don’t want or need x86, what does ARM have to offer-- in the long term-- over RISC-V, which is much less coupled to a single firm’s caprice? We can assume the gap in performance will continue to shrink ovrr time.

“Ten Bits” seems viable, although nobody cares much about the Spanish real anymore.

My objections:

1. It doesn’t adequately indicate “confidence”. It could return “foo” or “!foo” just as easily, and if that’s one term in a nested structure, you could spend hours chasing it.
2. So many hallucinations-- inventing methods and fields from nowhere, even in an IDE where they’re tagged and searchable.

Instead of writing the code now, you end up having to review and debug it, which is more work IMO.

Not to mention the Xbox Box, and the shipping cintainer full of 'em, the Xbox Box Box

I always figured BSD should lean into the daemon imagery with a full heavy-metal branding: a suite of wallpapers with decidedly less cuddly daemons, a succubus OS-tan character… make it the go-to Edgelord Desktop.

Then FreeBSD introduced that stupid sphere logo. No sense of branding. :P

Or that there’s a huge amount of legit demand for mature node chips and it makes sense to own the supply for it.

The 5000 microcontrollers you inyeract with each day, by and large, do not need 5nm processes.

We saw a few years ago how relatively cheap, commodity-grade, low-complexity chips suddenly become vital when you can’t get them and they have unfinished cars piling up at the assembly plant.

I never realized the tattoos were photoshopped.

I assumed they used a random stock photo that had a convenient pose to add the shirt onto, that happened to have a tattoo.

Of course, I also figured using a photo with too much ink would 1) distract from the merchandise and 2) make the stock photo model too recognizable. (Oh, they clearly used Getty #8675309, “Fat White Guy With Mediocre Barbed Wire Tattoo”), but plenty of the pics are identifiable enough to use for a police report.

I suspect Intel has a broader product range than AMD to justify the headcount, but I’m not sure where the extra resources should go.

Their networking chipsets were gold-standard in the 100M and Gigabit era, but their 2.5G stuff is spotty to the point Realtek is considered legit.

They’ve pulled back from flash, SSDs and Optane.

There must be some other rich product lines that they do and AMD doesn’t

It can also throw things against the wall with no concern for fitness-to=purpose. See “None pizza, left beef”.

So thry’re saying they have plenty of licenses for the use case, but somehow people are still pirating?

Maybe their license management paradigm is just garbage. This could be the vendor, but also poor IT policy if the users can’t requisition what they need.

As usual, service problem.

So much licensing fuckery-- dealing with floating or reissuing licenses, users needing to move to different machines-- could be solved via affordable site licensing. But that might leave dollars on the table if users don’t overbuy.

They’ve got a guy at work whose job title is basically AI Evangelist. This is terrifying in that it’s a financial tech firm handling twelve figures a year of business-- the last place where people will put up with “plausible bullshit” in their products.

I grudgingly installed the Copilot plugin, but I’m not sure what it can do for me better than a snippet library.

I asked it to generate a test suite for a function, as a rudimentary exercise, so it was able to identify “yes, there are n return values, so write n test cases” and “You’re going to actually have to CALL the function under test”, but was unable to figure out how to build the object being fed in to trigger any of those cases; to do so would require grokking much of the code base. I didn’t need to burn half a barrel of oil for that.

I’d be hesitant to trust it with “summarize this obtuse spec document” when half the time said documents are self-contradictory or downright wrong. Again, plausible bullshit isn’t suitable.

Maybe the problem is that I’m too close to the specific problem. AI tooling might be better for open-ended or free-association “why not try glue on pizza” type discussions, but when you already know “send exactly 4-7-Q-unicorn emoji in this field or the transaction is converted from USD to KPW” having to coax the machine to come to that conclusion 100% of the time is harder than just doing it yourself.

I can see the marketing and sales people love it, maybe customer service too, click one button and take one coherent “here’s why it’s broken” sentence and turn it into 500 words of flowery says-nothing prose, but I demand better from my machine overlords.

Tell me when Stable Diffusion figures out that “Carrying battleaxe” doesn’t mean “katana randomly jutting out from forearms”, maybe at that point AI will be good enough for code.

MTP is awfully slow on my Nokia G20 at least. OTOH, it has a uSD slot so I could just pop it out and transfer that way.

$150 phones are better than $1500 ones.

With American comics, it’s not even the shattered continuity, it’s that availability is a mess because some of the franchises are so ancient and collectible.

If I want to read through One Piece from the 1997 start, my library probably has/can inter-library loan all 105 volumes, or I can go to mainstream retailers and get any I’m missing without a huge fracas.

If I want to read Batman from the 1940 start, I’d better hope some of the rarer issues come up at auction in the near future AND that I can mortgage my house to afford them.

I’m amazed they never put out a DVD-ROM collection that’s “Everything Marvel/DC did prior to, say, 1990, as PDF scans” just so mere mortals have a chance to enjoy the experience of completionism.

After wrecking some JIS screws on a vintage reciever, I bought a nice Vessel-brand JIS driver set, and use it for all my crosshead needs.

Source?

I’m more willing to forgive not getting Baizhu for the promise of unlimited cheap energy…

I guess I was startled when I went for my go-to desktop (fvwm) and it wasn’t in the main repo, but the AUR.

It feels like it means they’re not actually maintaining a lot of their package pool, just tossing it off on third parties.

I started with some UMSDOS-based “full X11 desktop in 5 floppies” distro on a 486, then went through Slackware, RedHat 5 with glibc breakage, actually bought a SuSE boxed set in the 7.x era, mostly stuck with Slackware unril I realized I wanted stuff like Steam and perhaps some degree of dependency resolution is nice. Bounced off of Arch (the AUR is a terrible concept IMO) and ended up on Void, which gives me Slackware-like vibes, but a little more built for broadband instead of CD images. Been trying Debian Sid latrly, just because I put it on my new laptop and I figured I’d go consistent, but I’m not sure I’m sold. Everything works, but even for an “unstable”, the packages are dated and I dislike systemd on principle.

Is United Express actually United? I thought those tended to be a regional carrier using the name under license.

I’d expect the labour friction to be still worse; I was peripherally involved with such a firm 20 years ago and know they had terrible problems with staff retention, mostly because they wouldn’t pay enough to retain people after they got fed up with the free-standby-flight privileges.