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Comment Re:Good company (Score 1) 33

I bought a Panasonic plasma TV in 2013 shortly before they ended production. The picture is still gorgeous, and the TV has given me zero problems aside from the fact that the rather dated version of HDMI ARC it supports doesn't play well with even my mid-tier soundbar from last year. For what was on offer for a more premium but not outlandishly expensive TV when I bought it, I couldn't be more pleased.

Comment Re:Of course there isn't a drop in subscribers (Score 1) 100

My wife and I must be the odd ducks. We have Prime primarily for the video content, a little for the music content, and the shipping is a bonus. We generally find more of interest to watch on Prime than on Netflix.

That said, the next time our Prime subscription is up it's going to be that much harder to let it renew. If I wanted ad-supported streaming there's plenty of other options to consider.

Comment Re:Colocation (Score 1) 49

Yeah... But the servers still have to physically exist... Moving to the cloud means you don't own the server anymore... But someone still has to have the server for you to use.

Someone still has to have the virtual machine for you to use. I would imagine many corporate data center machines are running at substantially less than full capacity, as is their storage. Consolidation across many customers at a cloud service should allow for more efficient use of hardware and thus power, running as close to full capacity as possible at any given time, and with cooling systems built out at a larger scale which increases efficiency. This is where the cost savings are to be had.

Comment Re: apple will cut off OS Updates from the older o (Score 1) 96

Until last week I was still using an 6s (released 2015, purchased mid-summer of 2016). I was very impressed that it still received major iOS updates until 2022, and has received bug and security fixes ever since. This was such a refreshing difference compared to the updates for the original Galaxy S and the Nexus 5 I had used prior, whose updates were frustratingly short-lived (3 years in the case of the Nexus 5). When even the Nexus didn't merit any sort of long term support I knew that Android probably wasn't what I wanted to continue to invest in. The factor that finally drove me to upgrade from the 6s was a few critical apps (e.g. banking) that stopped supporting iOS 15 a few months ago.

I don't love the entirety of the walled garden I find myself in, but for my needs it does the job for the least amount of money, long-term.

Comment Still rocking my Panasonic plasma (Score 2) 29

I jumped and bought a Panasonic plasma TV, a TC-P50ST60 when they announced the end of production in late 2013. Nearly 11 years later it's still going strong, with the only real problem being that it only supports ARC, not eARC, so my JBL soundbar produces crappy stereo rather than a presenting a clear centered channel for dialog (easily remedied by sending the HDMI first through the soundbar before reaching the TV -- man do I ever need to get a real sound solution).

If I had to replace I don't know what I'd end up with. Probably OLED, as picture quality is by far the biggest concern -- I don't need eye-searing blinding brightness.

Anyway, I welcome the return of my Panasonic overlord.

Comment Re:Asymetric encryption is (practically) unbreakab (Score 1) 27

If loss of customer data to outside attack was a crime ( pointing at company C-suites ) then very little data-theft would occur. Why are such laws not already in effect ?

Because if this were the case, then nobody in their right mind would willingly become a C-level executive. Without these people there wouldn't be a functioning company, so there would be fewer companies doing fewer useful things. Progress, heck even maintenance of what society has already figured out, would skid to a near-stop. This isn't the way.

A far better way forward is harsh financial penalties against companies for using less than industry best practices. Those penalties can come from either the criminal or civil legal system, or both. All but the biggest companies would purchase malpractice insurance to cover this eventuality, and the insurers would get very good at pricing the policies based on risk analysis and audits of company practices. The biggest companies would self-insure. No matter how it's accomplished, it would be in each company's best self-interest to minimize the financial impact by improving their practices. This wouldn't fix everything, but if the legal system turned the financial pain dial up high enough, it would make these occurrences far less frequent. The trick is finding the right combination of penalties where you don't put a small local in-home pet euthanasia non-profit out of business for accidentally exposing a half-dozen customer records on their web site, but there's enough pain that the biggest of the biggest companies take it serious as hell.

Comment Re:hyper-thread shaming (Score 1) 56

I don't need a laptop to be razor-thin and/or feather-light.

Lunar Lake is intended for a buyer who isn't you.

I can also imagine some people wanting more and be willing to buy a laptop that can support the extra power/cooling needed, so disabling the feature all around seems unwarranted.

It's not like this will be the only laptop CPU that exists. Lunar Lake will be useful to a different type of user than these imaginary "some people" -- they can buy something else. Different products serve different market segments, and are rarely one size fits all; this is a perfect example.

Comment Time to dust off the inertial navigation systems (Score 2) 70

This sort of anti-satellite weaponry will be targetted at three things -- disrupting military communications, disrupting intelligence gathering, and disrupting GPS.

I don't know what you do about those first two. Regarding GPS, though, I wonder if military aircraft still have inertial navigation systemsto reduce dependency on GPS? I have to imagine the Pentagon has been dusting those off and prepping at least some of the fleets for such an eventuality.

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