My bad, I thought you were making a joke about Pika saying “planned obsidence” instead of “planned obsolescence.” I did not realize you were making a genuine inquiry.

Planned obsolescence is when businesses intentionally design a product to become useless after a period of time.

For example, imagine a high end camera company that also sells replacement parts. They change their lens shape every model, and only keep the most recent models’ lenses in production. When an older model’s lens inevitably breaks, the customer cannot buy a replacement, and thus has pressure to buy s new camera, and the company hopes that most customers will buy from them again.

We see this in tech with smartphone companies only giving OS updates for a few years, causing older phones to go end of life, so even if the phone is fully functional it needs to be replaced. Again, the company hopes the customer will again buy from them rather than going to a competitor (who is likely running the same scheme.)

OP suggests Microsoft’s TPM requirement is there to force new computer sales, which will include a purchase of a Windows 11 OEM license bundled with the PC.

The planned obstinance lawsuit.

Seriously, I’ve had way more printer issues on Windows than linux.

My fond memory of that scene was finding the head crab immediately, and smirking as I started killing them. I ran out of ammo, No worries, all I had to do was reach into my backpack and… oh shit, the flashlight is on my wrist!

Is that the instrumental? If so, yeah, it was good.

I actually haven’t listened to any other Zappa albums, but probably will at some point.

I love the titular track, so I was excited to listen to the whole thing, but I think I found it 30 years too late. I get he was trying to go Reefer Madness style with his Central Scrutinizer telling a parable of how rock music leads to self-destruction, but the jokes just fell flat for me.

Obviously the nice girl who ended up having to do wet t-shirt contests to get home, the gay prison sex, the robot sex, saying Africans don’t have record players, etc. were all supposed to be absurd, but it’s very 70s humor that nowadays feels more denigrating than biting satire. I also didn’t really get him corpsing in the voiceovers: I’m guessing it was supposed to be a reminder not to take the story seriously, but I personally found it distracting.

I did find it cool that he mixed solos from his live shows into his songs, but it wasn’t enough to save it for me. It’s like when you go back and watch older movies or tv shows, and suddenly something just blatantly racist or sexist just pops up and immediately dates it way more than the technical aspects do.

In short, it feels like Zappa is trying way too hard to be edgy, and it sucked the life out of the album for me. The opening song still slaps, though.

Joe’s Garage by Frank Zappa

Ok Computer by Radiohead

I’m still not sure if I liked Tommy by The Who or not.

Congrats on coming out!

My wife’s mom still insists on deadnaming her over a decade after her transition, and refuses to recognize her gender. Sucks because she could be in our lives but instead just gets a phone call at Christmas, and I’ve never even talked to her. Some parents just make that choice, sucks that your mom is one of them.

I’ve always taken it as they’re tabulating the gifts:

“Wow, today he gave me three french hens! Plus I have the two turtle doves from yesterday and the partridge in a pear tree from Christmas day!”

The Senate does not have a filibuster-proof majority. They could potentially end the filibuster, but given that it’s the Republicans’ favorite tactic, there’s a decent chance they might not. Especially since the less extreme Republicans can use it as an excuse to let bills they don’t like die without having to vote against the.

The House margin is likely to be thin enough that the moderate Republicans will vote down the crazies. So even if the Senate ends the filibuster, the most egregiously stupid laws should still be stoppable.

Trump still has the ability to do a lot of damage, and he probably will. But if the Republicans piss off people too quickly, they’re likely to tank in 2026, with there being a decent chance to turn both the House and Senate blue and lame duck Trump for the rest of his presidency.

It’s going to be rough, but do not abandon hope.

“Enrolled PCs will continue to receive Critical and Important security updates for Windows 10; however, new features, bug fixes, and technical support will no longer be available from Microsoft,” explains Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft.

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

Started using it today, it recommended Green Onions. Very nice album and I likely wouldn’t have listened to it otherwise.

Kerbal Space Program (with mods) and Assassins Creed Mirage.

What lies were people fed about Tuxcart?

Trump inherited a booming economy from Obama and it was starting to decline in 2019 even before COVID hit. Often the president’s policies have an indirect effect at best, but economists generally agree that Trump’s policies were accelerating the decline in 2019. Obviously, the pandemic muddled everything in 2020, but the short answer is “no:” Trump took a good economy and was slowly killing it.

80 years of economic data has shown that Republican economic policies simply don’t work:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_presidential_party

No, redundancy is fine. It’s the proprietary backend and Ubuntu forcing it on users that people don’t like.

LLM completely whiffed on this one:

• It’s not a poorly implemented app. It’s a well-implemented app that in the early stages is not monetized
• The issue is not that limitations and costs are becoming apparent. The issue is that after the honeymoon period ends, developers seeking return on investment start locking features critical for business behind a paywall, and charge a very high premium fee for services that used to be free.
• It’s not the restrictive nature of freemium software that becomes the issue. It’s the increasing enshittification of platforms to squeeze business customers for as much as they can before the platform collapses, betting on the established dependency making it too costly to switch to another platform.

Yes, and they’re encouraging people to throw it out. At least some users think to sell on the secondary market, but third party buyers can only get so much out of EOL Windows machines and there are only so many linux users with an interest in buying up old hardware.

I myself have a couple of used laptops, but don’t need any more hardware for a while, so it’s not like I’m able to buy up any. I fear much of it will rot in a landfill.

Big company recommends users turn functional hardware into e-waste so they can boost quarterly profits.

Luckily between Amazon and ESPN+ I can meet most of my sportsball needs. For those not on the apps, there are websites that can assist.