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Comment Re:Consensus (Score 3, Interesting) 54

there's certainly no concensus on neanderthal and sapiens being the same species, that's very fringy, unless you're stretching out 'same species' to mean anything that can interbreed and if you do that you just cut the number of species on the planet down by 90% or more.

I've read some compelling pieces that modern humans were uniquely able to invent a few things that our cousin's didn't have. maybe enough short term memory to 'imagine' a town or farm, or the ability to imagine years into the future. Our neanderthal cousins were very likely just as 'smart' as us but probably in a bit different way. I question the timelines of our advancement and seeing arcticlues like this make me more confident that the timelines are wrong. I think there's enough evidence that modern humans were into agriculture much sooner. The existence of 20,000+ year old pots suggests basic agriculture or at least placing villages near natural outcroppings of edible plants. The only real purpose for a clay pot is to store plant food. meat doesn't keep in pots and water goes stale in pots. I think it's reasonable to think that maybe we were well ahead of things until the ice age hit and then we mostly started over.

I doubt we'll ever have satisfactory answers to these questions though. time ticks. most of the evidence is fragile.

Comment will of the people? (Score 2) 112

seems like a pretty clear cut case of 'will of the people' overriding government authoritarianism. I'm not arguing that there isn't good reason to ban the fireworks in an area that frequency suffers devastating fires, but this isn't exactly that. People are doing this in the city in substantial numbers, enough that the 'government' should rethink the model. California seems plagued with 'nany state' tendancies.

I just wonder how the people don't vote these people out?

Comment one step forward (Score 1) 71

I don't think that Desktop Linux is going to take over as a result of these things, but I am seeing SOME small movement for people that went looking as soon as the ads started showing up in Windows. A lot of these went to Mac, but a not-insignificant number jumped to Linux on their existing hardware. Not earth-moving numbers, but it's one step closer to a threshold where Windows loses it's 'defacto' status.

Plenty of time for Microsoft to adjust for sure, but I think the ads are enough to turn more serious buyers away or have them consider alternatives. We've already seen a ~5% of market gain for MAC and 2% for linux (which is about a 50% increase on Mac and a 100% increase on Linux) in the last 10 years. If you remove the 'value' end of the market these numbers are more substantial.

Windows is still king and will be for quite some time, but there is some threshold number where the operating system is irrelevant. When we hit that point, and some major players like Adobe make Linux a first-class target, and if game devs make Linux first-class then the dominos will fall.

I suspect the new xbox licensing model is an attempt by Microsoft to keep gaming tied to Windows.

Comment near-peers (Score 1) 44

What vmware has is a product that doesn't have any near-peers at the enterprise level. There are substantially better alternatives at the SMB level and vmware is losing them in droves.

The thing to watch is how the 'SMB' level products are working very hard to bridge the enterprise gap and become near-enough peers to vmware to get the enterprise over.

Now, there are radically different models that are peer-level with vmware, they're just so foreign a design to existing IT staff that it's a difficult migration. Openstack for instance can likely fit right into vmware but it's a wildly different toolkit.

So this is sort of a race to extract maximum profits before enterprises re-tool or another product elevates a bit.

Comment Re:I have been using macs for 15 years now (Score 4, Interesting) 27

it's interesting because I use this feature quite often. airdrop and airplay is a constant for me, and I often use continuity camera for meetings because I can convert from a desktop view to my iphone and show poeple things easier. Similarly taking notes etc I can move it to my ipad and draw on things mid-meeting in a way that is much nicer than using the mouse. imessage and facetime 'continuity' might be what keeps me on mac entirely if not for great battery on my macbook and ipads.

Now, it took a while to remember to use these things and get muscle memory for it, but now that I've done that these are indespensible tools

Comment double edged outrage (Score 2) 99

You might consider how you would behave if someone criticised you. Would you let that person into your home? These are, at least on paper, private facilities.

I think this is a distraction from the real problem. These 'public' like facilities are often built, refurbished, or maintained with public funds. The moment that happens, some public access rules need to be in place. They exist on the backs of taxpayers but get to operate as if they are a private space with no compromises.

Comment Re:now 25% more (Score 1) 82

not semantics. SE was previous gen specs. 6E is modern specs but trimmed down. ie, 6E has the single 48MP camera, skipping the telephoto lens but it's the modern camera. 6E is the modern CPU, just with 1 less GPU core. The SE was 1-2 generations of CPU behind, and not just a single camera, a couple generations out of date camera. SE was like taking a 1-2 generation out of date phone and throwing it in a blastic box and calling it new. The 6E is a current gen phone and features with no frills.

I never considered an SE for my family because it was so cut-rate across the board. The 6E is probably going to be the next upgrade for the parents and the kids. I'm pretty excited for it because despite the price tag, it's a good value in the facetime+icloud ecosystem.

No apple fanboi'ing here, but Apple's got a good lockin with facetime and simple sharing for non-technical people and that wins the war for the 'family' even if i lose out on android tricks.

Comment Re:China is cheaper (Score 1) 102

This is a bit of a dated perspective. Chinese labor isn't especially low in 2025, that's mostly propaganda.

China has 'light touch' regulations and a simpler tax structure. The chinese government would be considered to subsidize these companies by western economics, but mostly they've removed most tax hurdles and through CCP 'integration' into companies reduces the component prices between the companies. 'everything is a comodity' in China and compenents are priced like they were a comodity.

It's a huge mistake to think China is being successful because of slave labor, because it's just false. One of China's challenges is that they have an upward moving workforce and not enough replacement labor. Probably their main problem these days.

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