I don't remember where I read it, but I remember that this was one of the first things Steve Jobs tackled when he returned. There were multiple Mac computers that were the same system under the hood, but marketed with different names and aimed at different customers. He cleaned all of that out and got back to a very simple product line that showed differentiation.

Steve ain't coming back to save Apple again. Of course, in '97, Apple was hanging on the edge. These days, they burn bundles of hundred dollar bills to keep warm. But no company can survive this kind of bad decision making forever.

I have a minor quibble with the ease of use of GPG in modern Thunderbird. Pre-v. 78 Thunderbird with Enigmail was the bees' knees. It was flexible, usable, secure, and worked quite happily with my Yubikey. In v. 115, the new built-in stuff is incredibly limited. As I keep my GPG keys on a Yubikey, I had to flip a bit in about:config to even try to use it. Once I flipped it, I STILL couldn't get it to work. I finally gave up and imported my keys directly into the Thunderbird keystore (which exists completely separately from the built in keystore that GPG uses). Once I did that, I was able to start decrypting emails. A little too well, as a matter of fact - I haven't been prompted for a password since I imported my secret key.

I don't know why Thunderbird chose to take the development path that they did, but the current implementation is only usable in very basic use cases.

I cut my eyeteeth on OpenVMS/DSM in the VA. The VA medical center at which I worked had a cluster of 6 DEC Alphas that ran VistA on DSM, which lived on top of VMS.

In some ways it's still a little odd that nobody even does file versioning the way VMS did it. There were a couple of times that being able to reach back to FILE.TXT;2 after I'd screwed up FILE.TXT;3 was a lifesaver.

But, after a while InterSystems bought up all of the other popular(?) commercial implementations of Mumps, and now we're on top of RHEL in the Amazon cloud instead. So no more VMS.

Well, the good news is that both metallurgy and computer science have progressed markedly since then. If anyone can do it, Elon can.

Typing this on a PineBook Pro.

You're basically spot on. I've seen a lot of complaints about Pine's offerings because they aren't necessarily as fast or as capable overall when compared to Chromebooks or low end x86 machines. The PineBook Pro wasn't designed to compete with Chromebooks - it was designed to be a Raspberry Pi laptop. I suspect that this is the same niche they're going for with the PineTab - a Raspberry Pi tablet with detachable keyboard suitable for light hacking. And they have a surprising amount of aftermarket support. You can go to Pine64's website and buy a replacement for just about anything on a PineBook Pro except for the main logic board.I suspect that the same will apply once the PineTab gets released.

It's not something that I'd use as a primary computer, but if I were still in college, it would make a great laptop to lug from class to class for note taking.

I'm eagerly awaiting a PineBook Pro analog based on some of the RISC-V stuff they're doing.

I don't think I'd say that my post contradicted yours. I agree with you that the feds frequently screw up badly (I no longer work in areas/projects that are actually classified, so thank Heavens I don't have to deal with that bag full of snakes). I just took exception to the way it was written, that it seemed to imply that contract staff would always deliver on time and on budget if the government wasn't so incompetent. I'd say that both sides are equally likely to be at fault.

And as for Yoyodyne, the reason that they kept getting selected is that they knew how to game the system. They're officially a service-connected disabled Veteran owned business, and with that, plus some other incentives that the Feds have thrown out there, their incompetence hasn't ever quite managed to tilt the table against them. And you do make a good point in that there's really no good solution to the problem. A firm fixed-price contract is likely to be abused by both sides, but if you're just paying the contract team to keep writing software until they're done, they'll find an amazing number of reasons to never be done.

From our perspective, we've typically had the best performance out of both FTE and contractors when the development teams consist of roughly equal numbers of both. In addition to better performance, we've got internal assets that are now familiar with what the contractors did for support purposes later.

And contractors aren't all rainbows and unicorn farts. I've seen multiple instances in my career where a contracting organization delivered software that was worse than useless: it ended out being an active danger to human life. The software was delivered, the contractor got their check, and they vanished, leaving the government to either fix it from internal assets or put yet another contract out for bid.

And in at least one instance I can remember, we had a two-stage project where "Yoyodyne Industries" screwed the pooch on the first half and we had to fix it. While we were fixing their problems, the contract award for stage 2 went... right back to Yoyodyne, who spent 3 months flogging us in front of our senior management, complaining that they couldn't be held responsible for contract delays when we wouldn't deliver the stage one product. And they made it stick.

So no, in my experience private sector contractors are at least as responsible for delays and other problems and the Federal government is.

Hat tip!

There's this option if you buy a Purism laptop and Librem Key:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.puri.sm%2FPureBoot%2F...

It's a little tedious to set up, but it uses my own GPG key to sign everything in /boot. If I run an update that adds a new kernel or updates anything there, I'll get a red screen telling me which files have failed their signature check, and that this could be a sign of a system compromise. I'm then offered the opportunity to sign the new files if I know they're legit (like on the first reboot after running an update). If you're not as technical a user (even though the instructions are pretty cookbook), you can even have Purism configure it for you before they ship.

It's a nice system and is as secure as you can make booting a computer. And it doesn't depend on any keys added by Intel.

I'd been an Apple person since they switched from PPC to Intel since about 2007. My first Mac was a 17" MacBookPro with a Core Duo. On that machine, batteries were external and swappable just by unlocking the little sliding lever. Removing one Philips screw would get you into the memory compartment to add RAM. You did have to remove the whole bottom cover to add a new HD, but it was a standard SATA part. The bottom line was that it was no more painful to upgrade an Apple computer of the era than it was to upgrade a Brand X Wintel machine.

Now, my last Mac will probably be the Mac Mini M1 I bought almost 2 years ago. I only have it for the (very rare) instances that I have to do something that I can't do in Linux (mainly dealing with printing: my printer is basically not supported under Linux).

Over the years, I watched Apple slowly but surely make each successive model of computer more difficult to upgrade. Memory started getting soldered onto motherboards instead of staying in DIMMs. Hard drives started getting soldered on motherboards instead of staying either in a 2.5" HD form factor or even going NVME. Batteries are now glued in to a fare-thee-well. Apple wants to talk about how eco-friendly they are and how well they recycle/reuse all of the components in systems that are traded in. The best reuse/recycling you can do is to allow people to upgrade, thus prolonging the amount of useful life in the product.

But Apple doesn't make any money off of that.

In most ways, I agree. I'd bought the Elipsa with the intent that I'd use it as a note-taking device with the bonus of having a really big screen. I still love the really big screen and use it in preference to my Aura One (6.8" screen) except while travelling. I still prefer to read without reading glasses, and having a 10" screen means that I can embiggenate the text enough to read comfortably while still being able to fit more than 10 words on a screen.

As much as I like the size, I was horribly disappointed with the stylus and note-taking functionality in the Elipsa. There's a major lag (no real ability to measure, but feels like .3-.4 sec) between the location of the stylus and the position of the line. It's horribly distracting in use. Contrast with my Apple IPad Pro with Apple Pencil. Even though the IPad screen feels much less like paper than the Elipsa's does, it's much less painful to take notes with the IPad simply because there is zero perceptible lag between line and pen position.

Another "gotcha" mentioned in the fine print is that you cannot annotate non-Kobo epubs in an Elipsa. If you upload a bog standard, regular, non-DRM'ed ePub, the Elipsa will refuse to allow you to annotate it with the stylus.

So for me, I've used the Elipsa's stylus to annotate some programming guides I've bought from Kobo and that's about it.

Bottom line - The Elipsa's a very good ePub/PDF reader with a very poor stylus/handwriting recognition system.

For those of you who haven't encountered his site or blog (or Black Blood of the Earth), Phil Brougton is currently a health physicist who has had a rather... varied career. Including doing work that required having a Q clearance. In December 2011, he wrote a rant about people and their inability to keep their yaps shut on forums, particularly when someone challenged their expertise. A fun read, and it covers the same topic: Someone, somewhere, on the internet is WRONG, and I have the technical data to prove it. Who cares if I have to release classified info to prove it???

Good to see that we don't have a monopoly on bozos here in the US.

In addition to making it less expensive to generate a "chiplet" or whatever Intel (or Apple) is calling their discrete building blocks, it may help with price by limiting the amount you have to throw away if the chip fails QA. With traditional chips, if it fails, the best case scenario is that you can sell it as a down-rated/down-clocked device so you don't lose everything. Or, you may just have to trash the whole chunk of silicon. Here, if they're able to do QA on the chiplets before integration, they don't have to pitch the whole package if one piece fails. Replace that piece and sell the whole thing at the original asking price.

Well, there's been one attached to the ISS for the last 5 1/2 years, with astronauts going in periodically to make sure it's holding up:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

It was originally due to stay on-station for 2 years starting in 2016, but was expanded to something like 4+ years. AFAIK, it's actually still up there and attached.

Everything I've heard is that it's performing to spec.

Don't know how accurate this is, but according to https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.themoscowtimes.com... , it looks like this is primarily an effort to keep the Russian news media from reporting on all the graft and corruption in the Russian space program.