I have literally no idea what an algorithm-free newsfeed or homepage would look like. Just blank? Something needs to decide what to show you. Even if you list every piece of content alphabetically by title, that's an algorithm.

Live sports is the one thing keeping the "cable bundle" alive.

IBM has used Notes since just after the acquisition of Lotus. I was actually working there during the time when they were transitioning e-mail from the system/390 to Notes. Not many people loved Notes, but it was an upgrade IMO.

In 2018, IBM was already the largest Notes user by far... I'm not really sure why anyone would want to buy it without getting IBM as a customer. Selling Notes and then forcing a transition was probably not the best idea. They should have written in the ability to fork it for internal use into the sales contract to at least buy whatever time was needed.

Ever been to a zoom party? Most depressing thing in the world.

I'm with you. My job used to involve interacting with people in real life. Now I do low quality (frustrating and exhausting) zoom calls all day.

I would say it's time to rise GrokLaw back from the ashes , but this is just too stupid to waste PJs time.

I've been to the majority of Fry's in the Bay Area. Back in the day (Early 2000s) they were a great place to go for computing hardware and electronics in general. Yes they had some quirks (different prices for the same product, very similar products at opposite ends of the store, and re-packaged returns), but hey, you could go in and buy an OEM-packaged CPU, some RAM, a few CDs, the latest copy of WIRED, a coffee and a sandwich and maybe a game or two. Those were the days. Best Buy wasn't even in the same league. RIP Frys. The old Frys.

Theaters are going through a long "slimming" process. This has been slowly happening since the invention of the TV, but has really picked up the pace since the introduction of HD, the flat screen TV, and streaming. COVID-19 only accelerated this process. The quality you can get at home is mostly better than the theater experience anyway. Watching a movie in the theater is becoming less about quality and enjoing the movie and more about a "shared experience". I don't think that "shared experience" is going away, but I find it unlikely that theaters will ever recover to the level they were in the 90s. My prediction is that there will be fewer and fewer of them, but there will always be a few around.

> if the spinning-metal-disk industry was not facing extermination.

Is it though? Seems logical that SSD/Flash technology would take over because it's better in lots of ways, but the price per storage unit of a spinning rust drive is persistently tough to beat at the high end of the range. I would have thought that SSDs would have taken over by 2020, but I just bought a couple of spinning rust drives for my NAS. They were just far cheaper per TB than SSD solutions.

Totally. I generally prefer AMD (and have for years) due to their being more system-builder friendly (longer-lived sockets). That said I couldn't bring myself to buy bulldozer. I went right from Athlon II to Ryzen. That was quite an improvement.

No point porting MS Office anywhere, when the money is in SAAS. They want a foothold in the Linux desktop space, so they can more easily sell SAAS products. What is the biggest Linux based UI platform? Android. But a close second is the Chromebook. A distant third is Linux on PCs. This may really be about the chromebook or MS' clone of such a concept.

You say "finally" like someone is waiting for it...

>I can not remember one time in my entire career where anyone came up with some impromptu great idea because they bumped into someone in the hall.

I can. Many times. It's often not some insanely great idea, it's just alignment of your stuff with someone else's stuff. That's really valuable for a medium to large shop.

Yes "coding" is best done alone. However, figuring out what to code and making it all work together as a whole is much harder than that.

Modern fault tolerant cluster computing systems are also tolerant across data centers and geographies as well. And if your cluster is set up right, you really can pull the power from an entire data center and not experience any downtime. Not knocking the mainframe, but for certain applications, it's just better to throw cluster computing at it rather than vertical scaling.

It's very hard to do any kind of equivalency between commodity x86 hardware and mainframe hardware unless you specify the workload and specify the mainframe model. Mainframes were (and are) optimized for I/O bound OLTP workloads, and they really do excel at that. You would need a large oracle cluster fronted by a fairly large application server cluster to get the same throughput as a single (large) modern system Z. At the same time, for a CPU bound workload, you're likely going to get far better performance from a cluster of X86 machines. But again, the specifics matter a lot.