VelesDude

Yeah that part is weird. He did clarify later on that it wasnt meant to just be them but more of an example of over socialisation.

27 years in the slammer to clear up some ideas means there is A LOT of additional reading material from him in form of letters, essays and books.

It seems the longer he thought about it the more he could not find a path to stop technology progress but figured we just need to ride through it until collapse, if that happens.

A great example. Chromebooks also managed to also take the better ideas of Netbooks and go with them.

Donald Rumsfeld — 'You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.'

In that context; Android is mediocre but I don't mean that in a nasty way. It might not be the best design or the most dynamic but it is the one that we have today that is powerful and easy enough to do what is needed.

If I was to build a portable, whatever, as much as I would love to start from a blank slate, that alone could mean being years behind just to get off the ground floor. Building a base OS isn't easy even if you know what you are doing, having something that is 100% free to launch off is wonderful.

It is such a simple thing but it works so well.

BeOS/Haiku are surprisingly modern considering their age. They made a lot of technology choices at the time that short term were limiting (multi threading everywhere) but long term were very nice. It was just that the short term issues was one of many anchors of them when they needed everything to go their way.

Haiku is the closest of these to being daily runner ready but like a lot of systems, lack of driver support prevents it from that lofty goal. It is pretty much the only reason that Linux has been able to go so far.

The NC is one of those things that feels like it was simply to far ahead of where the technology and the mind set of users was. Nowadays it would have much more traction thanks to SaaS.

In tech, one step ahead is an innovator. Two step ahead is a martyr.

Old joke but - Two engineers can do in two months what one engineer can do in one month.

But this sort of goes with the African proverb, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

I haven't had Windows in the home for a good 10-ish years now. While that is good for my personal use. It is bad when others need help with their computers and my skill set of windows support has atrophied.

My experience of Windows is via the very locked down work place and it is not great.

Yep, the meaning AI of is always changing. Search used to be considered AI because it could interpret human input.

That is the core of it, the spirit of the communication made it out as thought this was entirely the work of Sora.

I mean technically rasterization means taking any vector data and plotting it in a 2D space... so I guess it is correct.

But yes, I know what you are getting at. This would normally be done via a software/shader pipeline rather than a GPU's polygonal process.

To that last note, it is always astounding just how costly subway systems are. I am amazed any of them make it to completion simply because the up front cost is so high. But once they are in, the improvement to transport standards in the system is wonderful.

for example , in my home town we are currently spending $9-11 billion to make a 9KM - 5 station tunnel link. A big investment but a good long term solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Tunnel

Mint is one of those distros that have walked the middle way between ease and power remarkably well. They have proven that they can be restrained in a manner that makes for great results.

To fork these things and make them fit in more with the entire Mint ecosystem could be a good thing, lets just hope they aren't biting off too much.

Mint is one of those distros that basically took the usability essence of Windows XP and just continued that into the future. No whacky concepts or bold plans for radical change based on a hunch, just subtle and measured improvements one after another. Arguably they took the hardest path forward and nailed it.

Yeah, that would also be pretty cool.

Or Steve Gibson...

https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-195.htm

Steve Gibson: Well, man about Starbucks.

Leo: Man about Starbucks. Yeah, that's a good...

Steve: I don't really get out on the town. I'm pretty much at Starbucks. In fact, today I was only there for five hours this morning. As I was walking out at 10:00, Jackie, who opened the store at 5:00, and I helped unlock the front door because I'm always there at opening, she said, "You're leaving early."

Leo: So wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You go there at 5:00 a.m.?

Steve: Yeah, every morning I'm there at opening at 5:00 a.m.

Leo: And that's breakfast for you.

Steve: Well, it gets me up and going. And my new deal now I'm so excited about is I've got my Northgate OmniKey 102 keyboard that I have under my other arm. And I've been spending 10 to 11 hours a day there.

Leo: What? Oh, so you're programming there instead of at home.

Steve: Yeah, yeah. In fact..."

Yeah but I do like that Nintendo for the most part lives that philosophy. Recent example I came across was Mario Odyssey. It is 7 years old, never had a patch because it was just considered done. Very cool to see.

There is a Russian saying "There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution."

I suspect that the marketplace still has a little bit of an inherent cost. That said it is in a weird sort of zombie state nowadays. Demos for games you cannot buy, loads of apps that have had their API's move on many years ago. Internet Explorer! No with out of date SSL certs. A lot of title no longer available due to licensing issues.

For both Xbox 360 and Ps3 I suspect a decent business move would be to have a one time deal. A $100 (or whatever) one time payment that ensures that the core system will remain online for a decade. Doesn't mean any additional purchases but means that match making and friends lists will stay running until 2034. That would have given these systems a 26-27 year life time. Sony is still releasing system updates once a year to keep the Blu-ray keys up to date.

I have suspected for a little while now that starting this year we are going to start moving from a state of raising prices to keep margins up and share holders appeased to dropping prices to ensure their is still customers willing to buy.

Profit makes way for survival.

Depending on what you are going for in terms of gameplay experience, that can be a reasonable trade off. Say an RPG where you page in/out assets as needed but doesn't break the flow is probably going to be a bigger issue on gameplay styles that need more compute to achieve.

In the manufacturing industry we called Frozen and Canned vegetables "Fresher than fresh". Because they are essentially processed within a few hours of the harvest, where are the stuff we usually get at super markets are a few days at the least and up to a few months old at worst.

While there is some processing, they typically aren't removing huge amount of material or being ground up into another form.

The closest modern example of round displays would be smart watches.

The area I feel this difference the most is when you use software that didn't fall into this trap. Things like MYOB EXO/CRM, SAP ERP systems have code bases stretching back decades that innovate at a glacial pace. As such it is basically 2000's tech that we are forced to still use and that has turned into its big advantage.

It is always fun to put up the task managed on these to see them using 20-30MB of RAM with a large part of that being the current data base loaded in.

VLC & Blender are other examples of this.

Both Japan and China's economy has going to implode worse than anyone else for the last 20-30 years.

Q. What do you call an economist that makes a prediction? A. Wrong.

Years back I remember Trump saying something like "Amount of money and debt doesn't matter so long as folks still buy oil is US dollars". And I can't really disagree with him on that. The issue is when that golden goose flys then it will be all hell as the system balances back out.

My daily runner is a T400 Laptop with 4GB RAM on a fairly slim Linux distro. But in the last 6-12 months it is starting to feel a little tight when it comes to anything web browsing. Even things like Thunderbird are getting very bulky in keeping up with web rendering standards.

I pulled down an Audiobook player the other day, once all dependencies were meet, it need 1.3GB to function! At least VLC is still slim.

I am based in Australia. I am not sure if it is the quantity has increased, but their size definitely has. I usually have to scroll a full screen down before I start seeing non-paid results. I am on a desktop machine, mobile has been absolutely fine.

Also didn't know you could turn them off. I don't mind ads to support businesses when it is reasonable and DDG is a decent business. I just hope you folks don't try to keep up with the giants by playing their game. ;)

And that is a beautiful thing to watch from a far. :D

I routinely speak with said creator of website). I have let him know this thread is here to appreciate the wide conversation on here.

I do genuinely love that I write 13,000 words on issues with AI on the site to little response. But some of the more silly stuff like this is the higher traction stuff on the site. Just glad to see said author is getting the attention he deserves.

This was something that was always seen as inspiration in Apple, while they were small. Once a company of that nature gets to a certain size, it becomes far to powerful as any movement in the core business, intentional or otherwise, can influence multiple industries simultaneously.

This is why big companies like this end up with governments defending them, they aren't too big to fail, they are too big for others to let them fail.