It's across a river, but not directly across.

It's equivalent to going from the suburbs in northern NJ to Manhattan. A viable but unpleasant commute. The kind of commute that lots of people do, but find absolutely miserable.

Except they don't circulate. They're so worthless now that people don't carry them around and use them. People get change, then stick it in a jar somewhere and it just sits there. Maybe eventually when the jar fills up, they take it to the bank to deposit. Or maybe they start another jar.

We make a ton of pennies so that cashiers can make change, and that change doesn't get used. So we make more pennies so they can make change again.

Other countries solved this problem by creating laws on how to round change so that you don't need pennies.

TNG got a big budget increase for season 3, and I think some changes to the production staff. That's when it all clicked. Season 2 was also rough because there was a writer's strike, which resulted in a bunch of rushed episodes.

DS9 production staff argued over episodic stories vs long term arc. After season 2, the people that preferred strictly episodic stories left to create Voyager. The people that preferred long term arcs took over. And that's when DS9 started to thrive.

I think everyone involved hated that. There were rumors the show might get cancelled, so the showrunner did that basically gambling that the network wouldn't cancel the show on a crazy cliffhanger.

It worked and got them another season. And they changed showrunners, so the previous one didn't have to worry about it. The new showrunner didn't like the story and just tried to wrap it up quick.

Did you watch Walking Dead at all?

Very few characters survived the entire show. Several that did left for a while and came back. Most characters came, stayed a few seasons, and were killed off.

The first 5 seasons were basically on the move all the time, rarely staying long in a place. Locations generally lasted longer after that, but even the more stable ones were destroyed and eventually rebuilt.

That's about as far from "perma status quo" as you can get. Most people's big gripe about the show was they kept killing off the characters after you got attached to them.

Apple is going all out on performance and battery life, and sacrificing upgradability and the ability to fix things yourself to get it.

They integrated the RAM into the CPU because it allows them to run the RAM at significantly faster speeds than they could if it was on the motherboard. That was a huge performance win.

They have gone all out on maximizing the battery and that's a key part of their marketing. The approach they chose was to go with a LOT of small batteries instead of one big one. They put small batteries in every bit of free space within the laptops. They're packed extremely tight, and not easy to work with as a result.

The tradeoff in Apple's design is you're just not supposed to go inside the computer, and if you do, you can't do much yourself. You definitely can't upgrade anything, and you probably can't repair anything either.

The way Windows reports memory usage changed between Windows XP and Windows 7. I don't know the specifics, but I believe they now count memory shared between processes in each individual process, whereas before it only reported unique memory. If you ran the same versions of software on Windows 7 and Windows XP, you'd see much higher memory usage reported on Windows 7. My explanation probably isn't quite right, but there was a very clear change in the reporting. That's some of the usage, but not all of it.

Another part is in the early 2000s a 1024x768 monitor was considered high resolution, but nowadays 1920x1080 is low end. All the visuals are now much higher resolution and often higher color depths as well.

Another big difference is how the GUI is composed. Back in the early 2000s, Windows just redrew the entire window whenever the visible portion changed. Rendering was CPU driven. Starting with Windows 7 everything is GPU driven. We now render to a texture and save it, only redrawing if needed. It gives us a much faster and smoother GUI, at the expense of more memory used.

(Everything I"m saying about Windows 7 was probably true about Vista as well, but no one used that)

Doom ran on a 386, which released in 1985. There's not much value in mass producing chips weaker than that today.

Because it's generally better to go the other way. If the cable is loose, it detaches easily if you trip on it. Then the cable falls to the floor. If you make it secure, the device falls to the floor.

I'd much rather have my charging cable come out and fall to the floor than have my laptop drop onto the floor.

That full speed/high speed stuff wasn't obfuscation. That was pretty clearly a case of the standard evolving to do things they never intended it to do.

USB 1.x had low speed and high speed. Low speed was for things like keyboards and mice that needed very little bandwidth, and high speed was relatively fast. But once people realized how useful USB could be, they wanted much faster speeds. The full speed name was just a tech thing, and never publicly marketed. You didn't know the terms "full speed" and "high speed" unless you were researching how the tech worked. As far as the public was concerned, it was USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 (USB didn't take off until 1.1 was out, so pretty much no one ever used 1.0).

Anything after 3.0 is just a confusing mess I can't begin to explain. It probably was a mix of well meaning people doing a bad job of naming things and people that wanted confusion.

USB C in particular is a nightmare - it's a whole bunch of different standards combined into one cable, but support for most of the standards is optional. That's just too many people having a say in what happens.

Except you've got things completely backwards.

College used to be cheap because it was heavily government subsidized. We've steadily been decreasing the amount of government funding to college for decades and replacing it with loans. Now it's almost entirely paid for by the students.

It's expensive because we're treating education like a business run by market forces instead of as a public service.

An interesting take. I never tried Win95 with 4 MB, but I hated it with 8 MB. I'm not sure at what point I considered it usable... 16 or 32? Memory capacity went up fast in those days.

You completely missed every point being made here.

This is obvious to most people, but not all, so getting this out of the way first. Some jobs are all about having a body covering specific hours. We're not talking about those jobs.

We're talking about the type of jobs that are about getting the work done. The exact hours worked are irrelevant in these jobs, as long as the work is done on time. Most office jobs fall into this category. A large portion of these jobs are salary, not hourly, specifically because we acknowledge that the job is based around getting the tasks done, not around the hours worked.

Most people don't have 40 hours of productivity in them in a week. Those that do generally don't pull it off in the long run, just in ideal scenarios or crunch bursts. There's a ton of wasted time in the work day for most people.

There's been a ton of studies that show reducing hours makes people more productive and happier. It's really, really easy to measure if it's working or not. These jobs were always evaluated in terms of "Is the work getting done correctly and on time?" Your metrics don't change at all if your reduce the hours. If things are still getting done, it's a success. If they're not, it's a failure.

As to your concept of fairness - why is it fair that the salaried workers are generally expected to stay past 40 hours when necessary, but aren't allowed to leave early when 40 hours aren't necessary?

And if you paid any attention to the article posted, you'd notice cutting hours *saved* taxpayer money. The workers accepted a reduction in hours instead of a raise. The work still got done on time. Workers were happier. It cost less than keeping the workers at 40 hours. Everyone won.

All of this is really, really obvious to basically anyone that's ever worked an office job.

The empty areas with no people are growing at a faster rate than the full areas!

If you fill a large chunk of land with low density housing, you still have a trivial number of people compared to a high density area.

When you're in kernel space, things often have to be aligned to match hardware requirements. You don't want the compiler re-organizing the fields in your page table or your GPU command list.

You also don't want it re-organizing things when you're writing code that gets called from other languages.

Most of the use cases for C nowadays are cases where you really need things to be exactly how you specified.