As someone who was working in I.T. well before Y2K (note the 4-digit Slashdot ID) and who worked on actual code and system remediation projects for Y2K, I can assure you that it was NOT a technical scam. We had old billing systems (think: AOS/VS II hosted COBOL, other dusty old crap like that), along with untold Oracle back-ended applications, which were both critical for a multi-million dollar company's billing cycle yet also poorly written enough that they absolutely 100% would have produced incorrect output starting in 2000. All of that had to be gone through with a fine tooth comb and fixed, which we did, and as a result my own Y2K on-call was as boring as hell....precisely because we'd done all that work. Other companies had similar Ancient Horrors lurking on their data center floors, and all those had to be fixed or replaced too. Never doubt the need, or underestimate the work required to get it all done.

Now, all that being said, there WAS an actual Y2K scam, but it wasn't a technical one: Rather, "Y2K Remediation" budgets became the dumping ground for all the bad ideas, lost projects, failed acquisitions, questionable purchases, mistress payments, and other C-level executive idiotic decision making. No shareholder would question the need to fix the actual Y2K problems, especially given the overwrought news cycle around that messaging. As such, C-types took the opportunity to bury all their mistakes in that budget, never to be seen again. I saw it happen with my own eyes, but nobody outside really grasped what all they were doing.

THAT was the real scam of Y2K, not the actual technical issues that needed to be fixed.

The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (Wimbledon Inc.) is utterly missing the point here. The point of Wimbledon was always the visual and social experience of it...the spectacle itself of competition on a ridiculous surface while under a ridiculous dress code. Think about the impractical all-white outfits, the impractical grass surfaces, the (apparently) impractical judges and the possibility of angry arguments with them, the (not at all) impractical strawberries & creme.

If their goal is "maximum accuracy" then why not dig up all that impractical grass and lay down some durable hard courts, get rid of those fussy white uniforms and let the athletes wear something they are more comfortable in while they're at it?

They are damaging their brand here for no good reason.

You are assuming here that us humans will actually attend both movies in equal numbers. I certainly won't, and I strongly suspect others won't as well. They can "save all the money" they want with this, all the way to bankruptcy as far as I am concerned.

They, and other streamers, are risking losing a generation of future consumers - college students - who are likely to get bumped off the service as a result of this. Is it a smart long term business plan by Disney to piss off an entire generation of future parents, who will then remember how they were treated and continue to think ill of their vast array of products going forward? By sticking to some boneheaded 18th century concept of a "household" as one physical building, they're barreling in this direction pretty fast. If you're (even partially) paying for a kid's college expenses, claiming them on taxes, or if they are legally residing at your home (and are even registered to vote there) then they should be allowed to be part of your "household". Period. Figure that out fast Disney, before you completely poison your well....

The other thing that makes switching difficult are platform lock-ins. Ex 1. you have a license to run product A as much as you want with your own on-site compute resources OR the maker of A's own cloud platform, but as soon as you want to use it in any other cloud provider other than A's, that license is no longer valid and you have to relicense / rebuy it again, at the highest possible rates.

Remember 60fps+ "soap-opera mode" on current TVs, which enraged filmmakers and made film-based content look unrealistic and hard to watch. Buddy, just wait for...

“precise pixel-level image analysis, to effectively sharpen objects and backgrounds that may appear blurry.”

... and ...

"fine-tunes brightness and contrast by analyzing variations in brightness where light enters the scene, creating images that look more three-dimensional."

Imagine all those carefully shot shallow depth-of-field shots suddenly turning into a Marvel-esqe flat cartoon landscape behind the main characters? Consider what a hallucinating AI could do to those backgrounds. All that, and your carefully lighted and color balanced images end up as bright and washed out as the perp in the lamplight during interrogation scenes?

Nobody wants this. Hopefully it can be disabled permanently.

I think your first point (layoffs) hits the nail right on the head.

Since we've all been witness for years to how Twitter was done...and now for months how it was undone...it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to assume that a group of reasonably talented developers could recreate its functionality completely independently. Their task would be made even easier if there was already a stable, global, and free platform for them to deploy it on at scale from day zero, along with a gigaton of high-quality data to test with.

Assuming the treatment works, which really does look pretty iffy at this point, do you or anyone else know if they plan to pre-screen recipients (trial or "paid") based on any kind of functional / severity metrics? I'd hate for this to end up as nothing but a huge money grab targeting rich WASP-y parents aiming to smooth some rough edges on their kids on the spectrum, as opposed to a treatment to help those who could legitimately need and benefit from it. Again, if (big "IF") it works. Based on their rosy financial projections it would seem to be more on the "money grab" end of the capitalism spectrum...

Very true. Rare earths are primarily "rare" because apparently they 1) are hard to find in concentrated amounts (as opposed to being physically scarce overall), 2) are a super-duper-pain-in-the-ass to extract and process out, physically and chemically and 3) the processing of them produces all kinds of extremely unpleasant byproducts including some radioactive ones. So the mining, extraction and processing of them tends to happen in areas where environmental controls are....more lax (*cough*China*cough*) because otherwise the price would reflect the actual difficulty of getting them without also ending up with three-eyed fish.

Pretty much this. For my personal data, a fair chunk of it is backed up as it happen to either iCloud or OneDrive, but I have both a local encrypted TimeMachine copy which updates multiple times a day, as well as a simple rsync-based copy that's disconnected from the computer and located off site. That's updated at least quarterly which, in the event of a real disaster, isn't so bad.

There's so much gloomy news in the world right now - this made me happy. Thank you for sharing it!

Exactly what I was thinking! Now if I can just remember all the config.sys syntax I've forgotten in the past few decades....

I'm just impressed that there's anyone still left around here with a lower user# than mine! Congratulations on your innovation and publication!!

I agree about their sales teams - they can be real vultures. That being said, as someone who's worked with Oracle for decades now, I can tell you these two things: 1) They've never won a sale because their customer's love of the sales teams 2) If the sales folks are that universally reviled and they are ~still~ pushing 40% market share, that should tell you something about the capabilities and robustness of the product. Oracle clearly isn't a solution for every problem, and they seem to have totally missed the boat in terms of rapid horizontal scaling capabilities. But for what it does focus on, it has few peers. They've been polishing the code since 1979 after all, which is several eternities in I.T.

Apparently, on The Internet Tubes in general these days, that's not a requirement. That message also seems to have not sunk in very far at all with people interested in that project, given the toxic and increasingly clueless comments on the original article at their site. But it certainly is a good definition of "merit" everywhere else. Heck, the first question I ask my team after we interview someone is "Do we LIKE this person?" If they're an unpleasant individual to work with, I don't really care how good they are - they're not getting on my team. I've hired brilliant-but-difficult types decades in the past...never again. They rapidly destroy the team's productivity and cohesiveness.