hoherd

It's not. The Honda Super Cub is the top selling motor vehicle in the world, with 60 million produced in 2008 alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Super_Cub

I recently blocked youtube.com on my home network so that my whole family could take a break from it. It broke my work e-mail login, because gmail sends you through youtube.com in order to set login cookies.

I am not who you asked, but lately it has been really frustrating for me that macOS locks portions of the filesystem when the screen is locked, which breaks rsync backups because they cannot read those files. I have been unable to find a way around this.

That being said, the security design that creates this problem is quite impressive, and I think much more tight than most people realize is happening on stock macOS. I just wish that I could unlock my whole home directory from the CLI somehow when I do my non-time-machine backup.

The first time I held an iPhone 5, I thought it was a demo device. It was too light to actually be the real device. That was such a great phone.

Have you ever connected an iPad to an external display, mouse, and keyboard? I agree with you that laptop sales would continue, but I bet they would decline. Apple could do the MS Surface much better than MS did.

Lots of computers have external keyboards, mice, and displays. Why not a powerful computer like the iPhone? Who cares if it's small? Lots of SBCs are small and are quite useful. This one even has a built in UPS.

So true. Whether people need them or not, people will spend the money to buy them.

It's comical how close to the telescreen this whole thing is.

> The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.

In the current season of LLM driven security research, this is even more important. There are a LOT of EOL devices sitting there unpatched, vulnerable to the growing number of vulnerabilities. We can either stick our heads in the sand, we can demand the ability to update the vulnerable software on the hardware we bought, or we can exploit the CVE ourselves (collectively, as a community) and introduce CFW for the vulnerable devices.

The main thing I'm taking away from this LG thing is that I'm going to root my TV as quickly as I can with whatever CFW will get rid of this surveillance capitalism atrocity attached to the wall in my family room.

Oh thank heavens, computing hardware that the AI companies will not buy all of the supply of.

That is an orthogonal problem: popularity. What you're describing happens to proprietary software too. I have a bunch of OSS software that almost nobody cares about and I don't get bothered. The difference seems pedantic, but I bet there is something useful to learn there.

Her opening set for Github Universe 2020 that used Sonic Pi is still so great. https://youtu.be/LaKT3pli5EQ

I have been playing Cyberpunk 2077, and recently I did a side-quest where you can do something that violates an agreement, and when you reveal what you learned during that violation, you can extort somebody. The dialogue option when you extort that person is "Surprise - it's money." If you choose that option, Johnny chastises you for compromising your moral code.

For some reason that phrase "Surprise - it's money" as the obvious signal of extortion really stuck with me.

I got so much networking experience from hosting lan parties with quake and q3. Crimping cables. Installing 10 mbps pci card in people's computers, running dedicated servers with mods and map cycles. Good times...

But the answer to bad science is good science.

This podcast about the history of zaibatsu, hardware, and software comes to mind. https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-forgotten-mistake-that-k...

> Software was not viewed so much as a product, but more like a service, similar to integration, training, and ongoing support and maintenance. It was usually sold on a time-and-materials basis, and sometimes it was just thrown in for free to sweeten the deal. The real money was in the hardware.

> Software development was considered rather low-skill work. It didn’t pay well and was viewed as a kind of clerical work. The job was simply to write software that was close enough to whatever sales had promised the client while they were out drinking last week.

Even with a pseudonym, I worry that spy agencies with AI will have enough information to discover with high confidence who I really am, and that things I said online thinking I was anonymous will come back to bite me in the real world. As somebody who has family overseas and sometimes travels overseas for work, I don't want to end up on a list that will make my travels terrible.

You actually can define custom functions as named templates, but they're definitely not pretty, and would almost certainly push you towards the "just allow us to write code using a normal programming language" side of the argument.

My way of giving my kids access to music without screens was to buy a battery powered mp3 playing radio, then fill an SD card with music and pop it into the player. I put a mix of kids songs, classic songs, and things I enjoy that I'd want them to also enjoy. I have some very cute videos of my daughter skipping through the songs. It was always a bit heartbreaking for her to get to one of my favorites and then skip over it, but it was also adorable to watch her stop on a song unexpectedly and sing along with it. One video in particular that is dear to me is her singing along to If I Fell by The Beatles. Also funny is she'd play All I Ask of You by Skrillex over and over.

lemmings.exe also had an immediate quit without warning on the esc key, iirc.

One of my favorite UX stories is about my first Mac, a 12" g4 mbp. One of the best things about it was that I could open the lid and it would immediately be awake and ready to use. I would use it, do what I needed to do, then close it and put it away. It was great because it consumed so little of my time.

So to your question about the line between good UX and addictive features, at least in some cases, there is an ocean between them, though to your point, it's hard to find that line in the ocean. "Fallacy of the beard" and whatnot.

I was recently raving about how NYC's metro payment system OMNI doesn't require an app, so you can use whatever contactless payment device you already have to get around NYC. That characteristic makes it so easy to just slide into the metro without having to deal with unfamiliar apps and all the mental overhead that comes with them on top of all the mental stress and sensory overload that comes with traveling.

Oh dang, you're right. Mac OS X was my first Mac OS, but it looks like the Drop Box concept existed long before OS X. Here's a reference from 1991 titled "AppleShare Drop Box: Access for System 6 and 7 Clients" https://www.savagetaylor.com/TIL/TIL09033.pdf

I thought it was a reference to the Mac OS X `~/Public/Drop Box` directory, which was a write-only place for people to send files to your user, which has been around since the first OS X beta came out in 2000.

Yeah, I forgot to mention that the pay-to-play even applies to multiplayer within your own LAN. I just verified that nothing had changed since I last played: you are unable to join LAN games unless you buy a monthly xbox pass. Complete BS.

Yeah, "think of the children" is a rhetorical technique but also a logical fallacy.

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

Another thing that is crazy to me (and maybe this is a premonition) is that if you play MS games online on Xbox, you have to have a subscription, but if you play on other platforms you can play for free. They are literally punishing their own users with additional fees. I thought this was just Minecraft, which is why my kids and I always play Minecraft on our iPads instead of on the Xbox, but when I recently bought Forza Horizon 6 I was amazed to see that I could play online with other players for free, whereas on Xbox I had to pay to play online in Forza Horizon 4 and 5. So they are basically saying "you gave us a bunch of money for hardware? Cool, now give us more money every month to use it online!" It's absurd, and it's one of the things that drove me away from Xbox. I also have friends who have been lifelong Xbox fans who have had enough and are leaving for Steam.

Chaining a switch off the gateway is the best way to do it anyway. If you do that, then when you reboot your gateway, your lan devices do not lose their physical link and can continue talking to each other.

It sounds interesting, and surely there would be some awesome things that would come from it, but on the other hand, MS could use this to take control of linux APIs through their "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy, so it would not be without risk.

Just look at what happened last week with linux distros needing to update their secure boot keys with a new MS signed certificate. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/expiration-secure-boot-signin...

And look at what MS did with their old version of Office for Mac, where they decided not to simply renew a certificate that would keep the software functioning. https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-office/yo...

We already have companies like Nvidia and Broadcom shipping binary blobs to support common hardware. Do we really want a corporation like MS getting in on that kind of thing? If MS wrote some really great desktop linux software, it would be hard for the broader linux community to resist being lured into using MS controlled APIs, and handing over part of their control to Linux's most notable rival.

Adobe did this with their perpetually licensed software. If you install Lightroom 6 today, the face detection and maps features do not work because they didn't pay for perpetual licenses for the libraries they used.