I remember when I was 6 or 7 teaching myself Applesoft BASIC and writing programs with funny (to me) little print statements all through them - when computing was just exploding with possibility.
I wouldn't have had a clue what a Fibonacci sequence was though ;)
After nearly two decades of complaining loudly about deteriorating quality of Google search results and Ad injection, Google puts in AI summaries and provides 1-shot answers to >50% of queries, annihilating the advertising business in the process and TFA is complaining about that?
This is a win! I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts...
I guarantee that the minute enough people wake up and cut their advertising spend with Google, then they'll change tack again.
I wouldn't want to be hanging my career on "SEO marketing" right now..
This! I have the 14-core M4 Macbook Pro with 48GB of RAM, and Word for Mac (Version 16 at this time) runs like absolute molasses on large documents, and pegs a single core between 70 and 90% for most of the time, even when I'm not typing.
I am now starting to wonder how much of it has to do with network access to Sharepoint and telemetry data that most likely didn't exist in the Office 97 dial-up era.
Features-wise - I doubt there is a single feature I use (deliberately) today in Excel or Word that wasn't available in Office 97.
It is 100% about FOMO. The greatest pushback you'll get from anyone when you suggest voluntarily cutting off their social media accounts is that it's their way of keeping in touch/track of friends who they probably never interact with outside of watching their feeds.
Did you interact (like you know, two-way communication) with these people at any time in the last month? In the last year? In the last decade?
_Disabling_ your account, and deleting the app won't stop you from being able to log back in one day in the future if you want to look someone up, but in the mean time, you'll be living a blissful life without an ad-fuelled torment nexus simulating meaningful relationships.
Ah man, I miss the late 90s/early 00s theme of one-off mystery sites, green on black aesthetics and excessive anchor tags :)
Back in 2006 (god I feel old) there was an excellent mini-series on the SyFy channel called The Lost Room[0], which this seems to be drawing some inspiration from.
I'm by no means defending the percentage they take, but I would suggest that it's a percentage because it's simple:
Pick 3 imaginary games for sale priced at $1, $10 and $100. Any one of those games could be a million download a month success, and any one of them could be a complete dud.
What flat rate would you suggest to:
* Pay the developer for their work (ongoing per sale)
* Review each game and ensure it meets store guidelines (once per update)
* Host said game regardless of how popular it is (ongoing)
* Process transactions for the game (ongoing)
The alternative would be pricing based on revenue tiers (similar to what Unreal Engine does now), which aren't known in advance and don't take global variance into account (USD$200 in Eastern Europe might be a month's salary).
Percentage is just simpler. It also means that they'd be taking a loss on every free app or in the case of Free-to-Download In-App purchase apps - until users start transacting.
> If everything goes offline for one hour per year at the same time, then a person is blocked and unproductive for an hour per year.
> On the other hand, if each service experiences the same hour per year of downtime but at different times, then the person is likely to be blocked for closer to 100 hours per year.
Putting Cloudflare in front of a site doesn't mean that site's backend suddenly never goes down. Availability will now be worse - you'll have Cloudflare outages* affecting all the sites they proxy for, along with individual site back-end failures which will of course still happen.
I have had fairly extensive hearing loss in my left ear for about 20-something years and finally decided to investigate options about a year or so ago.
I tried a set of Phonaks for about a fortnight, but I found them tinny-sounding (which I'm told you get used to), and their automatic mode switching (for when you walk into noisy rooms) was incredibly frustrating.
A month later, Apple dropped the Airpods Pro hearing-aid mode software update and I have never looked back. The feedback from my family has been overwhelmingly positive, which more than offsets any qualms I had about them being so visible when you wear them.
My (obviously subjective) view is that the sound quality of the AUD$400 set of Airpod Pro 2s completely smokes the AUD$5,000+ set of Phonaks, and that's before you account for all the UX niceties you get from Apple when you play in their ecosystem (virtually seamless transition between phone, computer and TV (with AppleTV box)).
The fact that you can run an on-demand hearing test on your phone for free, giving you the ability to track any decline yourself without having to front up to an audiologist is just the icing on the cake.
My subsidised 48kWh battery is getting installed in two weeks - and I can't wait.
I have also upgraded to a 20kW inverter (I have ~10kW of panels on the roof) so I can import or export twice as fast and I will be switching to a provider that offers wholesale pricing. Getting a guaranteed 3 hours of free power a day for charging (even in winter) is just going to be the icing on the cake.
Based on back of the envelope calculations, the battery should be paid off in about 5-6 years during which time I will have paid zero for electricity (outside of a $25/month access charge).
"The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed." - William Gibson
Lovely story. I work out of the back seat(s) (Crew Model) of my Ford Transit pretty regularly and can relate.
I'm astonished at how productive I can be while waiting around outside a job site for late deliveries/people or even my kids music lessons for an hour or two, or when sometimes I can sit at my desk and get nothing done in the same time. Maybe it's the constraints of the time/space? I (only half) jokingly wonder if some times I'd be more productive sitting in the van in my own driveway rather than in my home office.
My "truck desk" is the rear parcel shelf/cargo blind out of a Hyundai Accent and the moulded counters fit my laptop and mouse pad perfectly. It also tucks nicely into the void behind the back seats when not in use.
I recently acquired a Vision Pro and am still coming to terms with how incredible it can be sitting in the back of my van parked literally anywhere in the country and having a full ultra-wide desktop experience that packs away into something the size of a lunchbox.
This is the cyberpunk future I dreamed of as a kid.
> The technical information for this thing seems to be light on the ground. What kind of diagnostic stats are provided? How is it figuring out true Rx/Tx power without a light meter?
The programming boxes (Ubiquiti's and others) get the Rx/Tx power from the DDM (Digital Diagnostics Module) built into most SFPs - it exposes the power levels from the receiver and transmitter inside the SFP and dumps it onto an SPI bus in a standardised way which is read by the box.
> Just insert any brand’s SFP or QSFP module, select Copy, and insert any UI module to write the profile.
It's pretty common for SFP rewrite boxes to only allow writing to that particular brand's SFP modules. It's partly a sales tactic, but also often vendor "genuine" optics will ship with a write-protected EEPROM (requiring a passcode) that stops them from being written to.
If you're after something a little more "open", Reveltronics[1] make a barebones version along with software for brute-forcing EEPROM keys.
That might be a misremember - I've been using Juniper for nearly 20 years now and only ever saw a "software bug" in 18.x that broke OEM optics, but that was quickly addressed with a patch shortly after release.
https://streetlibrary.org.au/brisbane/