Make no mistake, the oligarchs see the personal computer as a 40-year-old experiment that has failed, or needs to fail. They want their mainframes and CPU/hr billing back. Server hosting for enterprise uses has already gone this way for the most part. Small consumers are next.
As far as I recall, that’s how it went.
I was gonna say this is at least Digg 3.0.
Oooh, rocking an HP? I too like to live dangerously.
But seriously, that’s good to know. Those are probably easier to come by out in the wild. It really looks like Thinkpads go from office deployments straight to refurb companies these days. I never see them at thrift stores, and I’m not brave enough to dumpster-dive at e-waste.
Sometimes, old machines are survivors. Beware of confirmation bias when trash/thrift-picking cheap systems though. IMO, Thinkpads can be tough as a coffin nail. Including work systems, I’m on number 8 at this point with no hardware failures in sight.
That said, I have a very lightweight Acer that’s about a decade old with the worst keyboard and trackpad ever manufactured. It also performs like a slug, even with Linux on it. Still, it refuses to break so I can get rid of it.
This essay is brought to you by Raid: Shadow Legends.
It’s worth adding that, if you are arrested, that phone is a treasure-trove of potential liability that will absolutely get used against you. Also, you’re probably not getting it back, so you’re better off without it. Carry cash, a map if you must, and coordinate rally points and fallback locations with your friends ahead of time.
A proper camera is a good tip, but make sure the camera memory and storage card are wiped ahead of time.
just living your life without a phone is getting harder
This is a bigger problem than most realize. Consider the barrier-to-entry for phones, internet access, and charging. Then add cashless payment on top of that. Combined, it creates a new red-line between economic classes, and a rather ugly one at that. At some point, this mode of commerce is going to get selected not for the convenience it provides, but for whom it excludes.
I’ll also add that getting access to a smartphone with total anonymity is impressively hard to do.
I mean, that happens with CloudWatch all the time. It’s the most plausible part about this.
I haven’t always been a fan of Go. It launched with some iffy design decisions that have since been patched, either by the project maintainers or the community. It’s a much better experience now, which suggests that maybe there’s some long-range vision at work that I wasn’t privy to.
That said, Pike clearly has a lot of good ideas and I’m glad Google funded him to bring those to light.
I’ll also say that after finally wrapping my head around Python and JavaScript async/await, I actually much prefer the Goroutine and channel model for concurrency. I got to those languages after surviving C++, and believe me when I say that it’s a bad time when your software develops a bad case of warts. Better to not contract them in the first place.
The genius of launching an attack of this scale from an address space that is already jam-packed full of hackers, should not be understated. Id say that, if not for doing it live on stage, law enforcement now has a giant haystack of needles to sift through.
I have a USB-bootable thumbdrive with Ubuntu 24 on it. Two home systems down, two to go.
My chief concern is that this wave of enshitifiation will eventually make it to Microsoft’s security support. Historically, at least recently, the weekly updates and response to critical vulnerabilities and virus scanning have been pretty good. But now that they’re attacking their own flagship products - Office and Windows itself - I think it’s only a matter of time before they fumble Windows security in a big way.
I’ll also predict that Non-pro Windows will eventually be “free” (as in beer), but will be useless without a live internet connection and cloud services. So now really is the time to switch. IMO, all the money points in that direction.
The answer is: binary, sometimes with electrical switches.
As late as the very early 1980’s, the PDP-11 could be started by entering a small bootstrap program into memory, using the machine’s front panel:
You toggle the switches to make the binary pattern you want at a specific location in RAM, then hit another button to store it. Repeat until the bootstrap is in RAM, and then press start to run the program from that first address. Said start address is always some hardwired starting location.
And that’s a LATE example. Earlier (programmable) systems had other mechanisms for hard-wired or manual input like this. Go back far enough and you have systems that are so fixed-function in nature that it’s just wired to do one specific job.
Every time.
I have left this as an exercise for the reader.
Fixed:
I cannot overstate the impact the mid-nineties had on GPAs across the board.
This picture doesn’t even show the full depth and breadth of the PC market at the time. Arcades had some strong offerings at this time, too.
But we do have a QA department. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if that’s humane or not.
I’m going to call it like I saw it, a very long time ago.
<rant>
You have a product that is basically purpose built to make data hoarding and piracy practical, yet it requires a login with a central service. I don’t care what justification anyone thinks makes that worthwhile or even a good compromise. Signaling to any corporate entity that you’re in possession of such a thing is a bad idea to begin with. They shouldn’t even know you exist. That information, along with anything else you do with the product is compromising to you and can be sold for money if aggregated with everyone else’s data.
If you find this rant out of place in our modern world, I’d like to point to the concept of shifting baselines. This didn’t used to be normal and nothing short of greed continues the behavior. The technology before this ran/runs without anyone knowing. Consider VLC, or XBMC.
Thank you for your service.