Fuck Apple.

But also, but Epic too.

Apple needs to get their bitch ass slapped back to the stone age and has for a very long time now.

But it's not like Epic is some bastion of perfection. They have the moral high ground only because Apple cedes it at every opportunity.

...is fleecing its customers in various ways, be it this sort of thing, or somehow convincing everyone their products are perfect. They are fantastic at it, you'll never hear me say differently, and it's made them the richest company on the planet. But they're doing it at the expense of a horde of zombie sucker customers, and this is just more of the same.

It's 0118 999 881 999 119 725 ... 3

...I have 64Tb of space in my home server currently, spread across 8 8Tb hard drives. Jumping over to Microcenter.com, the cheapest 8Tb spinner I can currently get is $150, while the cheapest 8Tb SSD I can get is $500.

So, $1,200 versus $4,000.

I'd LOVE to switch to all SSDs, but not with that price disparity... and especially in today's economic climate, I don't think businesses are going to want to do it either (setting aside those that NEED SSDs for speed reasons).

I know this guy is talking about 5 years from now, and the price disparity IS shrinking over time, but I just can't believe it's going to shrink THAT much in just 5 years. I don't doubt that he's right with the basic point about no more hard drives, but I think his time horizon is off by probably 5 years.

Hey, thanks for that! It's the first time I've ever seen it outright stated what the issue was (though now that I know what to search for I found plenty of places - figures). Makes sense now. And knowing what the emulation performance hit would be I definitely would choose not to upgrade even if given the choice... though I still think I'd like to be GIVEN the (informed) choice. Good to finally have a concrete answer though, so thanks again!

...then it would probably have larger take-up.

But no, MS decided my Dell XPS 9560 with 32Gb RAM can't run it. No, not because I don't have a TPM - I do - but because the CPU, for some reason that has never been adequately explained, isn't supported. It's more than adequate to run Win11 well, but for some reason they decided that no, they wouldn't support it.
  And sure, I can force-install anyway, but then I gotta worry about not getting updates? Not an option.

Nobody is complaining about RAM requirements, those have always been in place. No one WOULD be complaining about CPU requirements if you supported more than you do AND articulated why others aren't supported, because again, CPU requirements have always been a thing. SSD/free space? Obviously okay. TPM? Well, you should absolutely provide a software emulation version, so a hardware TPM isn't a hard requirement (totally okay to flash a big, red "this is gonna suck" message if it has to go that route though).

In fact, that's really what SHOULD have happened right from the start: allow an update on any machine that CAN technically run it, but throw up warnings about why it might not be a good idea to do so, and let users decide. If someone knows they are going to get a slow, crippled experience and still chooses to upgrade, then go ahead, let 'em, and continue to support them. You know, like MS has pretty much always done?

But no, instead, MS artificially limited the pool of users. I don't know what the adoption rate would be if they had done this from the word go, but it would for sure be higher than it is now. And yes, some people argue that sometimes you have to leave legacy behind to move the state-of-the-art forward, and that's true, but let's be honest: what Win11 offers is NOT sufficiently ahead of Win10 to warrant leaving so many behind.

They shot themselves in the foot, and now all they can do is wait for peoples' machines to age out and they get them on the next purchase. I won't even get into the obvious sustainability arguments there because even if we have a whole other planet to dump our waste on, that would still be a shitty thing to do to cusotmers.

It has file MANAGEMENT, yes, but it does NOT have a file MANAGER, because it does not expose a proper file system to user land, which is what people want. This is a purposeful design choice by Apple, and we can debate whether it's a good one or not, but it is what it is, and you'll never have a PROPER file manager as a result, you'll always have some kneecapped app.

And when you say it can run Office, photo edit software and sound/movie production, that's true in a general sense, but again, it's not what people mean. They mean it can't run the FULL desktop versions of this stuff, and that's true. You're not running a FULL version of Office, for example, you're still running a trimmed-down "mobile" version. You're not running a FULL version of Photoshop, or Cubase, or Final Cut, you're running trimmed-down versions. And, again, we can debate whether this is good or bad, whether they have 99% of what most people need 99% of the time and therefore could effectively be considered "full", but it again is what it is by design.

You say that like it's not true.

It always amazes me when I see people who aren't technical people that have to look at our old COBOL-based system to understand some business logic and they can follow the code just fine. Try that with C++ or Python or Java or any of the modern "good" languages and you'd have a very different experience (well, I'm throwing Python under the bus a little there because the rewrite of the system is largely Python-based and they seem to handle that pretty well for the most part too, so maybe that one is unfair... but the basic point still stands).

If you're not dialing into a BBS at 300 baud to download library files after posting a few stupid forum posts just to get enough credits for that likely fake copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook then I don't know what you're doing.

...a smartphone that fully services ALL our compute needs. I'm talking about a smartphone I can drop in a docking station, connected to a big-ass monitor, mouse, keyboard and other peripherals, and it runs a full desktop OS and all my desktop software.

We've been slowing but surely moving towards that and there's of course been a few attempts to make it literally true already, with varying degrees of success. None have completely managed it though, and there are of course pretty good technical reasons why not.

But I really believe it's the next step, the next big innovation, the next thing that will get people to buy a new smartphone (and, incidentally, something that the manufacturers will be happy about because they'll likely be able to charge quite a bit more for it). That's not to say everyone needs this, wants this or will buy this, just that I think it's the next logical step and the next thing that will spur on sales.

I know for sure it's the thing I've been waiting on. I had a Surface Pro 3 for a long time as my primary desktop machine and I think we're not too far off the point where they can cram that into a (large) smartphone form factor and have it work well enough to be viable. Maybe another 2-3 years would be my guess. That power is likely sufficient for most users' needs and I know I'd be very happy to have only a single device for everything.

So yeah, that's my bet.

Oh, be careful, friend! I made the grave mistake of suggesting on Reddit that we've kinda/sorta/maybe become too enamored of CLIs and that just MAYBE a GUI MIGHT have prevented this, and I got hammered mercilessly.

You don't want to say anything that doesn't equate to worship at the feet of the almighty, great and awesome CLI around the wrong people.

Yeah, you'd laugh... right up until the point where you realize that you've now got a far more powerful and abusive monopoly than you EVER had with MS.

Does the term "cut off your nose to spite your face" ring a bell? 'Cause that's what that would be, big-time.

One could make a very strong argument that gun owners played a big part in getting Trump elected.

The Democrats continue to yammer on about gun control despite a HUGE portion of the population being against gun control (yep, I said it - the polls the liberals like to say showing the opposite are BS, plain and simple, and it wouldn't be at all surprising to find out a majority are actually NOT on their side). Most people think guns cost the Democrats control of Congress after the AWB was passed and most gun owners very likely went for Trump, and not because they legitimately thought he was a good candidate, I bet many in fact did not think that, but because they knew how bad Clinton would be for gun rights, and that matters a great deal to them. Gun owners are a highly mobilized voting block, possibly larger and more reliable than any other block, and a bigger one than the left seems to think, and so it could very well be that guns played a large part in this result.

I'd say that's a meaningful change at least, though whether it's for the better is debatable.

You've got a cavity. Inside you pump some energy. The energy is nominally trapped and bounces around. Eventually, some of it finds its way out in a coherent way. Seems like the paper is describing a similar explanation as to how LASERs work, roughly-speaking. Sounds plausible for sure.

"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."