It wouldn't be something that we rely on, just a way to reduce our energy costs. We have some of the more expensive energy in the world because prices are basically set by gas generators, so the less gas we use the cheaper it will get. If Putin does damage the cable, we will have to fall back to fossil fuels or import more from elsewhere, until it is fixed.

There are a few projects like this around the world. There is some risk, nobody knows for sure if they can be protected well enough to be viable, but if they can work then there are huge opportunities.

The UK is wasting huge amounts of money on a couple of nuclear reactors that aren't needed and which only supply extremely expensive electricity. If the investment was going into renewables at the rate it should be going in I'd be okay with this decision, but it seems more likely that it wan cancelled to divert funds to these nuclear projects.

We could have been world leaders in renewables, particularly offshore wind. I think we have already missed that boat though, with other European countries, and of course China, surging ahead. Our steel industry is in trouble yet again, despite there being a huge read-made domestic market for it just waiting to be exploited. Wind turbines are about 60-70% steel.

Windows moved graphics out of the kernel when Vista was released back in 2006.

Even just moving them between my main machine's SSD and archive hard drives is rather slow over gigabit.

And yes, people do edit video off their NAS, it's a fairly common set-up these days. One reason is because Apple shafts you so badly on storage upgrades, and for some reason they like Macs.

Starlink is too price at $120/mo, they're market is people out in the boondocks that can't otherwise get Internet.

But 5g is good enough for most

Don't know since I am not a sys admin. I'm just going off of what the sys admins I know have said. I don't work with virtualization tools for large networks so anything they told me probably would have been Greek. They work with it on a daily basis so I just took their word for it.

From what little I could gather it was things like spinning up and spitting down and rebooting large numbers of machines, and firing up large numbers of machines for scaling.

From what I understand what makes virtualization so desirable is it can really maximize the CPU cycles you're using. Before a large scale virtualization you would often have computers sitting idle that could be running more processes and in a large Data center even a handful of computers running idle Burns a lot of power.

So take this with a grain of salt because I could have misunderstood what I was told, again I don't work with this stuff personally, but if you're in a really really large environment using VMware you can use it to maximize the use of the hardware you bought and so you can have less hardware but more capacity.

It's because they are facing heavy competition from 5G internet. It's enough to stream at 720p, maybe even 1080p and of course it's more than enough to shop. Hell I know people working from home using it as their primary internet just fine.

It's almost as if competition improves the quality of products and their price...

Lawsuits. Very expensive lawsuits. Or the threat of them anyway.

Just about any company is likely to be using some pirated software somewhere if only by accident and the way the laws are written they are completely zero tolerance.

Companies like broadcom know this and they know they can use that to bully people.

As for what's keeping them on VMware from talking to people I know who work with VMS it's the management tools.

Open source alternatives or frankly any alternatives just don't have the management tools you need to run a shit ton of VMs. So unless you are basically Google and can roll your own solutions for anything or small enough to be able to suss out open source solutions you're stuck.

It's the same as Adobe broadcom is figured out exactly how far they can push people and it's just a hell of a lot farther than you would think...

Maybe if we had some good antitrust law enforcement that would attract some competitors but realistically we all know if anyone seriously tries to compete with VMware in their space then broadcom can just drop their pants on pricing for a few years until the competitor collapses and then buy up the bones.

From talking to buddies of mine who work in virtualization adjacent fields there really isn't anything that can replace VMware on a large scale operation.

If you're really freaking huge, like Google or Facebook huge then yeah you can completely roll your own solution for anything and you probably do.

If you're small enough that you're not running that many vms then yeah you can run some open source alternatives.

But if you're anything in between and that's most of the companies broadcom cares about then you don't have the management tools to run the open source alternatives effectively and they know it.

This isn't the 1990s with Atari and Jack tramiel doing dumb shit. Companies nowadays have a lot more information and they know when they can turn the screws and get away with it.

There is also a hell of a lot less competition in the market overall.

Their revenue is tanked by AI summaries?

I'm confused how this would generate more revenue beyond being another plug-in for displaying ads. As far as I can tell the user is still have to browse your website and the whole problem is AI summaries are stopping people before they browse and chat GTP is sometimes keeping them from even getting to Google.

Plus We already know micropayments don't work. We've known that for 30 years now. There's no reliable way to transfer a few pennies and as soon as you get above 25 cents USD or whatever your local equivalent is it's not a micro payment anymore in most people's eyes. I might go as high as 50 cents for the younger set. I'm thinking like an old arcade goer.

Maybe it's different in other countries than America places that have different banking systems.

But this just looks like a really advanced version of the existing Google advertising platforms.

They were already having a tough time before the switch 2 came out. The switch 2 is a problem for both Microsoft and Sony because it's dangerously good enough. I think it's roughly equivalent to the cheaper of the two Xboxes on the market maybe a little bit better because of the better support for dynamic resolution scaling.

It's the same reason why AMD doesn't put out better integrated graphics. At a certain point you are good enough for most players and they're not going to splash out money for a advanced integrated video card.

Sony at least has a healthy number of exclusives but I don't think Microsoft has had an exclusive since Halo. There is Forza I guess but Sony can answer that with Gran Turismo.

So it makes sense that Sony is in a better position too sell The games first as opposed to trying to use them to just get people onto the platform at all

Came out against paper straws. Hilariously one of the president's biggest supporters owned a company that made paper straws and his company is now collapsing. It will likely be out of business by the end of the year.

There is absolutely nothing in this world that is so petty and inconsequential that the right wing cannot create a moral panic out of it.

I just found out my mother, God rest her soul, was an anti-flosser. There are people in this world, and my mother was one of them, who believed that flossing is a dangerous thing and a conspiracy among... Hell I don't know what I never asked her when she was alive and I didn't start flossing until much later. But it's not like she ever went out of her way to tell me not to floss you didn't have to since a kid isn't going to floss unless their parents make them.

But just the fact that the concept of an anti-flosser is a thing boggles my mind. I mean I knew she was a little touched in the head since she was into colloidal silver and what not but still...

This is the level we are at people. So as soon as you try to cut back on plastic somebody's going to make it into a moral panic and we will all be fighting amongst ourselves with half the country going out of its way to waste plastic...

Yeah same deal. It's got the same problem. And I know it's not technically addiction it's just easier to just call it addiction whenever a chemical creates a dependency.

I've got a prescription spray I use and it does work just not as well. But it doesn't have the side effects and it also doesn't wire me out because it's not meth

They hire to meet demand. And if AI starts taking jobs, which every CEO is saying AI is exactly doing that, then there will be fewer people with money to buy things and demand will go down.

That's why high interest rates fight inflation. They basically trigger a recession because most businesses need cheap access to loans to get them through the lean months and if interest rates are high they can't borrow so they start firing and that forces people to spend less money, reducing demand.

Now you could make the argument that those CEOs are lying but the reason I think they aren't, at least not entirely, is that public statements from CEOs have real world impact on the stock market and if they just flat out lie about things then they risk in SEC investigation or a lawsuit from activist shareholders.

CEOs might be overstating the impacts but I think it's naive to believe there are no impacts.

Remember a lot of times when they say AI they just mean automation. Every CEO is going top to bottom their entire org looking for places to automate. Like the old joke about, go away or I will replace you with a very small Perl script.

I suspect we are seeing and will continue to see a lot of technological unemployment just because there's a lot of automation going on because AI convinced CEOs to automate things they were previously hesitant to automate.

And not just a clearing house for cheap overseas labor to be brought in.

AI is going to hit them like a truck because AI is going to automate exactly the kind of jobs that it's their job to replace with cheap labor.

It's not really good for anyone per se. Our civilization is not prepared to have permanent 20% unemployment especially among what were traditionally high income earners.

Remember folks we need those high income white collar workers to employ all those plumbers everybody is so excited about. People making $3 an hour driving Uber don't hire plumbers. They are their fixed shit themselves or they live without water and plumbing.

I think people forget just how bad things were right up until the 1970s. We all like to point to the projects as this horrible thing but compared to where those folks were coming from it was a huge leg up. The only real problem was as it was being built there was a political regime change and the new administration abandon them while also selling drugs in their neighborhoods to fund death squads in South America.

The biggest problem with history is that when you just say what happened nobody wants to believe it because it's so fucking insane and when you say what's going to happen nobody wants to believe it because it's so fucking insane...