Next one that comes to the door, I’m telling him he can have $20 if he humanely escorts the Latrodectus Hesperus living in our cupboard out. Let’s see if he has any tricks up his sleeve other than poison.

Chromebooks maybe?

I always figured the browser part mostly falls out of doing the Electron-for-cross-platform thing.

What about Mouser?

Source?

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

Perhaps a lottery scheme would work, like hunting permits. That seems to manage a constrained resource.

I think 2049 is the 100th anniversary of the current PRC, so a reasonable target for ceremonial goals.

No different than saying an American leader said he wanted a Mars landing for the tricentennial in 2076. It’s good symbolism, not necessarily a technical merric.

Silly idea: computer vision for classtoom rollcall. Take a photo and it generates a list of absences.

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.

Yes, although I personally prefer “central planning enthusiast”.

I think we’re approaching the point where the word gets taken back by the community it was used to malign, if not there already. "

OTOH, it is a very effective product distinguisher. They don’t have to deal with the “Apple makes the best touchpad” meme by offering something else.

It makes shopping for laptops either super-easy or super-hard.

I can either get a Thinkpad, or try to find the one or two HP and Dell business laptops with one… and we all know how it ends (looks at stack of X230t, E585, and new L13)

If I’ve learned anything from GTA… just drive the news van around and hit pedestrians until you make budget.

I think there would be more sympathy if Cloudflare pointed to a specific limit breached and proposed ways to get into compliance at their current price plan.

“Service XYZ is now consuming 500% of expected quota. Shut it down or we need to get you on a bigger plan.” is actionable and meaningful, and feels a little less like a shakedown.

I’m sick of “unlimited” services that really mean “there’s a limit but we aren’t going to say what it is.” By that standard, freaking mobile telecoms are far more transparent and good-faith players!

Perhaps this also represents a failing in Cloudflare’s product matrix. Everyone loves the “contact sales for a bespoke enterprise plan” model, but you should be creating a clear road to it, and faux-unlimited isn’t it. Not everyone needs $random_enterprise_feature, so there’s value in a disclosed quota and pay-as-you-scale approach: the customer should be eager to reach out to your sales team because the enterprise plan should offer better value than off-the-rack options at high scale.

I was under the impression thar’s what the mid-grade petrol was for; it had a high-enough octane factor to be non-knocking in engines designed for leaded.

What specific inks are you using?

I’ve gotten surprisingly decent results with dry-erase marker ink on a cheapo 1.5w laser, but the black is by 10x the best colour at adhesion. Would love to expand the palette.

I was hoping it involved a comical plot involving some junior Senators going full Magic Mike in the middle of a Foreign Relations committee meeting. It all goes off the rails when thry can’t sneak the disco lighting in.

I think the appeal is that you probably don’t need a huge CPU for a lot of workloads-- just something to run an OS, handle talking to the outside world, and configure the GPU/NPU complexes.

I could imagine a something like a Quadro card that had a small RISC-V core built in as a freestanding device, no motherboard needed. Even if the CPU ran like a Core 2 Duo, that would be sufficient for purpose, but it will be a lot easier to license an appropriate RISC-V core than an x86 one.

We only got a Wii because it was useful for physical therapy for a family member with motion problems. Thry used one at his PT centre, so we obtained one once they became readily available, and he used it at home for years, at least kong enough that you could use it for Netflix with a specific disc. With the Fit board, it provides some activities with more feedback and interactivity.

The problem is never on the tech end, assuming you wanted to make a good platform. That’s probably a 400-level CS class project, especially if you’re only dealing with a single library system that doesn’t have multi-million-user-scale and five-nines reliability needs.

The pitfalls are 99% about the business relationships and having to pre-enshittify the system to service them-- getting the publishers to trust the platform will enforce DRM and related random shitty deals (i. e. that ebooks have to be retired after n loans, as though they wear out like a paperback). I’d expect there’s virtually no trust for a new player.

What’s needed is mandatory licensing. The libraries and their software dev partners decide what terms they want, they get a standard price card, and the publishers have to eat it.

I wonder if it might be an unreproducible moment in history.

I suspect the Cambrian explosion of X11 window managers came from two things:

• Propriatery and former-propriatery systems with unique look and feel (see, for example, Open Look/olvwm) There was also a tendency to copy any style you could (WindowMaker copied NeXTStep, IceWM mocked OS/2, and when those cute QNX demo discs came out, within days there were lookalike themes). It feels like the last major outside inspirations, MacOS and Win1,1 are converging on almost intrrchangeable insipidness.

• The 1990s/2000s customization era. Machines were finally powerful enough to do mildly nifty things, but still attainable by hobbyists gluing together pixmaps and this bred stuff like Enlightnment E16 or Afterstep

Do these forces still exist in 2024? It seems like Unix Porn today is a bunch of neokvetch windows without even a titlebar to provide a personal statement.