The people pushing this don’t care, they will be rich enough for the short term effects to not affect them. After that they will be dead from old age. They just want to extract the max before they leave this place, as is their tradition as the boomer generation.
It’s our children and our children’s children who are in big trouble and they have proven many times not to give a fuck about children.
You can also spot mimics because they breathe, their model gets bigger and smaller on a cycle.
Not only do they want the product to die, they also make it really hard to repair. Not offering spare parts, except through official repair centers which charge so much you might as well buy a new unit. Not providing any kind of documentation or schematics. Using chips with custom firmware you can’t download anywhere, so even if you were to replace the hardware, without the software it’s useless. Locking off communication/programming ports behind passwords and custom programming software.
This is why right to repair is so important. It isn’t just phones, it’s all consumer electronics. With proper care, maintenance and repair, a lot of devices could easily double their lifespan. This reduces e-waste and saves consumers money, it’s like a win for everyone except for the people trying to sell you new shit.
Most search engines have filters for stuff like filetype, limiting the search to a specific site and filters for time and location (when applicable).
Like I said, search engines are way more complicated than one might think. Doing the kinds of things you mention would be hard and only very few people would need something like that. There are tools out there that do meta searching for analysis though, so you can use search results as data in your analysis. Most of those are highly specialized and often paid, but when you need them it’s worth the price.
Remember companies like Google invest millions (if not billions) into their search engine and have huge teams working on them. Anytime someone says: “Why don’t they just…” the answer is probably very long and complicated.
Because search engines are much more complicated than you seem to think. The reason the operators worked back in the day (probably later than 1997 though), was because the search engines actually searched through the contents of the pages they indexed. They used a lot of tricks to make it work, but basically they were matching keywords directly to the index.
Modern search engines are much more complex than that, using a lot more abstraction and interesting techniques to both index and search. The amount of data being indexed has exploded since then, the number of users has exploded and the way people use the internet has changed. To keep costs down and search times low, search engines needed to change drastically. And because most people using search engines won’t know how to use those features, they didn’t get preserved.
I do wonder what kind of search engines you are talking about though. I assume you mean the big ones like Google and Bing (or sites using those engines) and not like a simple product search on a small webshop. Because as frustrating as using Google and Bing have gotten, they are still amazing tech and not bare-bones at all. The reasons for their failings are only partly in their control and not even really their fault. (Except for the AI thing Google tried, that was 100% their fault and just dumb).
I started with Suse 5 when it came out, as something I was interested in fucking about with. I didn’t have internet access at that time, but I did had a couple of books about it (the distro came with a book as well). It was a couple of CDs and a boot floppy disk (booting from CD wasn’t really a thing).
I used it for years for software development and simple tasks like Word processing. Getting my printer working on the thing was a chore, as was basically anything. Especially without internet solving issues was sometimes simply impossible. My scanner simply didn’t work. Getting the desktop environment to run was very hard, I struggled with it for a long time. And once I got it working properly, I got a new videocard and it broke the whole thing again.
The system was very painful to use, it was super cool, but almost nothing ever worked right. And trying to fix shit usually made it worse. But once you did get it working right, it was simply awesome. And the feeling of accomplishment was awesome after finally getting something right. For software development on the terminal it was pretty awesome though. Back then I did almost everything in text mode, as I was used to DOS before that. Going into Windows was something you did only sometimes with Windows 3.11 (and even 95) and I did the same in my Linux environment. The desktop environment used up a lot of memory and was pretty slow, so I preferred the console. It was only later booting into the desktop became the norm (around the Windows 98 era).
I used Suse till version 6.1 (still have that box). I bought version 7 (still have that box as well), but never really used it.
Back then I used Debian to create small internet routers for my friends. I got an old compact computer, put in a floppy with Debian, a couple of network cards and created small NAT boxes like that. This was before NAT routers were the norm, people just had internet on 1 machine, connected directly. But as computers became cheaper, a lot of folk had more than 1 computer in the home. With no real way to share the internet connection between the different computers. Microsoft created the Internet Connection Sharing feature, but that was pretty slow, disconnected often and ate resources on your “main” PC. So my little boxes worked great, I helped people setup a home network, connected my magic box to get every system online. Also helped them setup some port forwarding for the stuff they used.
Because I used Debian a lot, I switched over to Debian for my main rig when Suse 7 released. Used Potato, Woody, Sarge and Etch a lot. Switched around between Debian and Ubuntu in the Lenny and Squeeze era. Have been using Ubuntu ever since, never really had a reason to switch. Debian compared to Suse was so nice, I really liked the way Debian did things. It made a lot more sense for me in my head compared to Suse.
As I fucked around with computers a lot, I always had both Linux and DOS/Windows machines running and even had a couple of dual boot systems. For any kind of gaming DOS/Windows was required back then and I did love to game. I do think Windows 10 will be my last Microsoft OS, since Windows 11 absolutely sucks (use it at work, I hate it). Work stuff has become less and less of an issue to get stuff done on Linux just as well as on Windows. And gaming has come leaps and bounds due to the work on the Steamdeck.
So hope to fully ditch Microsoft in the near future, even though my first ever computer in 1984 ran Microsoft firmware with Microsoft Basic being the default user interface.
I think the Germanic influence of adding land at the end should have been a different color. It’s still based in Latin, but still a significant difference imho.
That’s like saying your boyfriend doesn’t want to hit you, you’ve just not done exactly as he said, so he had to hit you.
I’m sure Putin would be happy if the whole world made him the supreme leader, without a single conflict. But that’s not really the way the world works, his actions can have no other outcome than a world war. It’s up to the rest of us to prevent this in whatever way possible.
Problems with ethanol in gas usually happen over a longer time, not within a single tank of gas. That pump was probably faulty to begin with. I would recommend lower ethanol fuel for older vehicles though, so it’s not bad advice. But it isn’t like pure acid that will dissolve the car within no time.
My favorite series is owned by Bandai Namco… Am I doomed now?
Is Havana Syndrome real? I thought there was like 0 evidence for it and it being a form of hysteria.
Sorry, right wing fascist racist lying assholes have fucked everything up over here and made immigration illegal.
HANS! Wake up Hans, you fell asleep on your organ again.
BWAAAAAAHHHHP
Robots that dress up in a maids uniform, but are actually only used to fuck: Check
To me the best stories are where I don’t agree with the “good” guy, but can understand his point of view. And at the same time I don’t agree with the “bad” guy, but can also understand his point of view.
The more you learn about Fran, the more you have to respect that woman.
Need to get the programming in early to make it stick. Especially developing brains can be put into a completely fictional world and their young brains assume it’s reality. The CIA did some fun stuff on this, but religion has hundreds of years of experience with child abuse in all of its forms.
A 1984 MSX home computer. It was the first computer I had. My grandfather gave it to me in 1985 when he upgraded to a new model. I didn’t have a lot of software for it, but it had Microsoft Basic built-in. With a lot of books from my grandfather, I learned to not only program in Basic, but Z80 assembler as well. I used that thing so much I wore out the keyboard.
I recently picked up a matching color CRT monitor for it. I never had a color monitor for it and only hooked it up to the family TV infrequently. I saw the color monitor locally for cheap and after doing a lot of repairs and fixing it up it looks awesome. Really cool to see how good of an image my old computer could do. Still love the old black and green monitor though, that’s how I remember it.
Computer is still running and with a big memory expansion I even have DOS 2.0 running on it. Somebody hacked FAT16 into that, so I can theoretically access 4GB of data. On a machine that only has 64kb of ram to start with.
It’s probably for the best our dreams aren’t stored in long term memory. We would have a real hard time figuring out what parts of our pasts were real and what parts were dreams. Also imagine getting ptsd from some fucked up fever dream you’ve had.
No joke, about 20 years ago my brother asked me to build a computer for a friend of his. So I selected the hardware based on the available budget, ordered it online (which was a new thing back then). I used tricks to tweak it, to get the most out of the hardware, really did my best to make it a good machine that would proudly serve for years. In the end I felt like I really made a good machine and I put a lot of effort into it.
Then my brother came to pick it up and my room was in the attic on the end of a rather long set of stairs. We went over the machine, I gave him all the info he needed to know and he would take it to his friend. He walked out of the room, I turned away from the door and hear a devastating smash followed by a lot of bangs, some silence and a shudder. As I walked out of my room, my brother was standing on the top of the stairs with a white face.
He had dropped the machine on the top of the stairs and it went tumbling down. The machine was made of steel (as was the fashion at the time) and it took a couple of chunks out of both the stairs and the wall. We went down and retrieved what was left of the computer. But the limited budget had saved it! The chassis was made from steel, but it was the thin kind of steel to save on costs. This meant the chassis had deformed and all the internals were just fine. We took the whole thing apart, reformed the chassis, put it back together and everything worked. After testing, we were amazed how well the thing held up. Keep in mind this was in the spinning piece of metal storage days and with a CD drive that has a thousand moving parts.
My brother ended up taking the machine to his friend. The chassis still showed some damage, but nothing that stood out and it gave the thing character. The friend ended up loving the whole thing and used it for years to come. I even helped with a couple of upgrades along the way to keep the machine running for longer.
I ended up fixing the wall and the stairs. I did a good job on the stairs, but the damage on the wall was still visible if you knew where to look. This reminded me of the incident every day for years and we still sometimes laugh about that moment.