NOTE: if you lead with or must include "LOL" in everything you type, you're kind of an idiot. LOL.

If ZIP had been more reliable, or more affordable, they would have simply replaced Floppy drives until CD/RW or USB drives of decent capacity came along. But they pretty early gained a reputation for being unreliable and expensive, and so everyone at the time really just bit the bullet and waited.

We are still using (re-)writeable 120mm shinny plastic disks for back up of certain things, long term storage, and as media interchange.
We are still using Winchester type disks to store bulk data, but mostly in NAS boxen nowadays (I have one 5mts from me as I write this), akin to Novell Netware or WindowsNT NOS Boxes.
We have that in common with the 90s. ;-) ;-P

If you are a theater owner, you have to pay iMax periodicaly for naming rights, and other stuff. The equipment (that you also had to pay) is sunk cost already.

If Disney can Provide "A Name/Brand" 90% as strong as iMax at 60% of recurring costs, and convince theater owners that is really the case, be certain that many a theater owner will jump ship in a heartbeat.

Competition is good, and a Duopoly is better than a monopoly any day.

On a personal note, there are no iMaxs in my country (Venezuela), and I almost do not go to cinema, but still go from time to time (like once or twice per annum), either for the social aspect, or because there is a movie I REALLY like to see "the way it was meant to be seen". So, I have no beef in this fight, just seeing it from a bussiness perspective.

Every time an article on Amazon comes out, I realize I'm glad I don't use Amazon.
Anecdotally, I have a friend who used to sell products through amazon, they got tired of the constant price increases and weird rules for everything, and changed to a different method of selling.
Amazon is just awful. And it's been easy to see it going that way for years.

Ubuntu is based on Debian Experimental instead of Debian Stable. Ubuntu does a lot of vetting of pachages, selection and such, and Mint benefits from that.

Even in the fully debian derived branch, a lot of pre-requisite work was done by Ubuntu, and LM derives information from those choices when building their Debian Editions.

If debian dies (which can happen, for example because right now they are having problems getting new members in the community), Ubuntu will have to sort the mess out, but they have the money to do it, so LM is safe. If Ubuntu dies or becomes untennable (or, pulls a RedHat, as it were), LM can go directly to Debian and sort the mess.

If Deban dies AND Ubuntu becomes untenable in around the same timeframe, only then LM is screwed, base-distro-wise.

Security isn't convenient.

Security isn't easy, but it isn't hard either.

Assume you're' a target (because you are) and make it so that you're hardened. Don't be the easy target. Criminals are lazy.

In the very late '90s and most of the '00s, Automated Fuzzing tools were ivented. That led to a massive increase of vulnerability discovery and reports, increasing significantly the workload of maintainers. Also, bad actors started to use said tools to discover vulns before the maintainers could discover and patch them.

If you search tech websites of the era (including slashdot) you will see the same set nad tone of articles. Maintainers complaining of the increased workload. The sky is falling. Security-pocalypse...

In the end, the big corpos steped up giving tooling and compute capacity for free to run the new tools against the existing codebases, both for project important to their infrastructure, as well as projects that would earn them good PR points.

Also, the maintainers were able to adapt their procedures, tooling and community to the "new normal" increased workload, and the software world kept turning without the sky falling off.

This shall also pass.

Yes, not all projects will survive, and of those which survive, not all wil get through unskaved, but stresses like this help separate the grain from the chaf

Instead of fearing AI, use it to secure software and make it better.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

... A tutor for the superior school and university interns.

The programmers will assume the role of the tutor who assings tasks to the interns, the interns being the AI. Sometimes the AI will give back results conmensurate with what a TSU (Tecnico Superior Universitario - University Level Tecnician) student would produce. other times the result will be more aligned with what an engineering student would produce (slightly better)

In both cases, the tutor is the one who doles out tasks, specifying how to do them. And it whould be very irresponsible from the tutor to let loose the interns' code without grading and correcting it first

I think the term "babysit" was chosen to induce rage, as in ragebait

It's not difficult to post to every resource under the sun. They're just peacocking to fit in. Not exactly sure to what.

Yeah, the privacy aspect of EFF doesn't align with social media in general IMHO.

Are they trying to "earn" some $ from social media? That's a silly goal, but might be a nice side benefit.

It's worse than that, because with proper skill, it isn't even a copy/pasta. It is one app that posts to everything all at once. Even the social media places that didn't make the list.

  Buffer, Hootsuite, Metricool, Robopost or Later ... just off the top of my head.

One could probably tweak posts for each platform with AI effectively.

Here is the list they are staying with ...

  Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube

So, where did the audience go? It didn't go to the existing places from 20-8 years ago. And I doubt it went to the two new kids.

What this tells me is that their audience is aging/dying off, and the younger generations aren't there in numbers. This requires little to no political inferences to understand. It is easy to mistake one for the other.

Yes, I am a Boomer. I don't rely upon AI to tell me what to think. I am also a Libertarian and interested in Privacy and been a long time proponent of Open Source. Maybe figure out what intersections to the younger generations align and go there.