Is COM still a "growth opportunity" technology?

Don't live in California but I've just gotten bitten by this. My apartment complex was sold to a new management company last year and this summer they installed wifi transmitters in all the apartments and then announced that we all now have fiber internet with a whopping 200mb up and down for the low low AND MANDATORY fee of $65/month.

These apartments have DSL and Cable internet providers as well and I've been a customer of both - currently on cable internet with 1gb down and 300mb up!

I can't even opt-out. When I renewed my lease last year they added an addendum that they had the right to charge fees for included utilities. Guess what's a "utility" now? Internet.

There's not even a way to setup a hard connection with ethernet to their transmitters (wifi only) and there's no "cable tv" included (not that I had cable tv but if any of the renters had a combo tv/internet deal they're further boned)

I've got no problem with them offering the service. But this mandatory, no opt-out fee for an OPTIONAL service that's also served by 2 other ISPs is predatory and monopolistic.

Posting pictures of their juice boxes and glazed carrots to their instagram?!

More seriously, was out at a semi-nice place for dinner last week and the number of kids and their parents carrying around pads and tablets to keep the little ones entertained... instead of teaching them how to socialize at dinners just seems sad. And yeah, I was a pre-ipad kid and remember being bored silly but it also encouraged me to try to get involved in the adults conversation.

To a lesser extent we have the same problem as adults with tv monitors showing sports games all over most restaurants these days.

Close. More like "Your balls are already in the vice, would you like to opt-out for a small fee? You can do this 3 times a year."

Um, no...

> Flordia has a population of 23.37 million, they lost 51,240 people to COVID.

That's 219.9 deaths per 100k

> California's population in 2023 was 39 million and had ~100,000 deaths attributed to COVID

That's 256 deaths per 100k

California's population in 2023 was 39 million and had ~100,000 deaths attributed to COVID and California had some of the strictest COVID policies.

What's your point?

Yes - that's the point. I needed to run Windows 11 because I use Windows specific apps. I also have 2 personal macbooks, have an employer provided macbook for my professional job and will probably install some version of Linux on the old system and maybe turn it into a NAS of some sort.

But then that wasn't the point of your reply was it? Because in your rush to play whataboustism and score some internet karma you seemed to have missed the last line of my post - "just so Microsoft, which had declared Windows 10 would be the last Windows ever, could sell a buncha new licenses for forced obsolescence."

That was THE point. I'm well aware of Apple's built-in obsolescence and hate it which is why I still gave the nod to Windows because I USED TO BE ABLE TO RUN NEW WINDOWS VERSIONS ON OLDER HARDWARE. But not anymore because MS has now added forced obsolescence.

uh-huh, behind my desk is an intel computer I built myself 10 years ago - Rampage V edition 10, Intel i7-6950X EXTREME (it runs fast because it has EXTREME in the name...also ran fantastically hot but that was another issue...) quad channel DDR4 that was overclocked and an MSI NVIDIA GTX 790. It STILL runs like a champ and I could do about 80% of what I needed it to including coding, photo and video editing and mid level gaming and all around home server.

And what I thought would be my last build... wasn't... because I was forced to update because... get this... while I could get a TPM module for the motherboard - the CPU ISN'T SUPPORTED.

So this year I forked over a ton of cash and built a whole new rig just so Microsoft, which had declared Windows 10 would be the last Windows ever, could sell a buncha new licenses for forced obsolescence.

Yes - but I don't consider this "social media" as used in the vernacular as I'm not posting my foodie pics here... nor am I seeing any posts about travel pics, dogs and cats, etc;

Now sure, there is the same inane "the world as I see it" type discussions here but that's to be expected in a "discussion forum"!

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.howtogeek.com%2F3032...

I used this so I could keep playing my content during an extended internet outage

I had this feature turned on for a few months with the older iOS' and it worked great... until I got onto a waitlist at a restaurant and then "never" got the text telling my table was ready. There was no notification indication at all which normally is what I would've wanted.

AI filterting would be great for that sort of stuff but then the spammers would immediately jump on that "Your table is ready! respond to me about your inheritance is Uganda!"

Oh if I had the mod points...

Absolutely.

It's kind of ironic because my dad, a boomer, drank the cheap stuff like pabst blue ribbon and old milwaukee, because he probably just wanted the alcohol content cheap. When I came of age and shared a few cans I hated the stuff, even when going to college parties and drinking beer it was still something like Budweiser which I can drink but don't like either.

It wasn't until I moved states to start my career that I went out with some coworkers and they introduced me to Scottish Ale and Guinness' Stout which are far more tastier to me and I LIKE to drink. Though these days not as much as I try to avoid carbs as much as possible!

My 5 year old PC, which is perfectly capable of running current games and productivity software isn't supported by Windows 11 because it doesn't have TPM (or TPS cover sheets... or some other such nonsense) so it's running on Windows 10 and that's where it's going to stay when I build my new PC.

My new laptop came with Windows 11 and, not wanting, copilot, I went in and forcibly blocked Windows 11 updates.

Now I'm probably going to have to update SOMETIME as software and games drop support for older OS but, like Windows 8, I can afford to wait a few years.

I've been using a couple of different AIs integrated with various IDEs for about the past year.

They all, to a T, suck for actual solutions. Yes, they scarily generate code that has my style and naming conventions but for anything more than the most basic/common requests you get AI Hallucinations (a major failing in AI generation that they have to actually NAME IT and hold seminars on how to "fix" it... har har, It's not a bug, it's a feature!).

On the flip side, there's 2 areas where it's actually helped me.

1. Rote/grunt code handling. We had a minor API change in one library but it involved me going through about a dozen files and having to change about a 100 lines to pass parameters by a different naming convention that wasn't easily doable by grep/replace. To its credit, the AI in the IDE figured out the pattern after the third change and started offering it as a solution for code completion for the next 20 changes, even appropriately using different naming schemes when the context changed. I was impressed... But then it "forgot" and wouldn't offer the change... then after I hand fixed another dozen lines it suddenly remembered and started offering up the solution again. Regardless, it's gotten better at this grunt stuff over the last few months and it really helps with the coders block when you don't want to write yet another routine for massaging the data objects from one thing in a set to another format to patch up an API call! and the AI will just do it for you.

2. Error analysis of existing code. This seems to be a new feature as I hadn't observed this yet, but the AI found a configuration error in my code's makefile (not really an error per se but something that could've come back to bite me in the butt someday). The IDE I use is supposed to catch this too but didn't.

TL;DR - I was getting worried for my job as a programmer but then found the emperor had no clothes but that the AI can be helpful in some areas.