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I’m kinda sad to see it enshittify, for gamers and for those who find it fits their actual collaboration use case, but I also really hate the number forum-format communities that Discord has displaced or prevented from coalescing. Discoverability on Discord is terrible, as is having help available long term, as well as older advice and other content that helps newbies get the culture of a community. Even where the functionality exists, the general “real time” transitory feel of it reduces the quality of content and encourages people to be dicks, since it will all scroll by or be forgotten (if streaming) in a few moments anyway.

Horses for courses, and my old-ass X-ennial self thinks Discord has been pressed into service on a lot of courses where it’s terrible.

Ha! I used it TWICE!

Also, to OP, that definitely wouldn’t have come OEM on a PC that shipped with Win 98.

This all feels a lot like any low- or mid-range CAD suite that gets acquired by Autodesk, Siemens, or PTC. Promise enough to avoid a revolt, but start eroding with the next release.

The educational licensing for lock-in is also par for the course. It can be done well (Rhino 3D is legendary for letting small-shop designers use their cheap edu license forever, even commercially), but generally it’s just there to maintain the supply of baby drafters and get subscriptions from employers.

Wake me when they REALLY get back to their roots.

Girl on the right probably killed a Spanish swordsmith back in the day.

When you’re trying to get into DPs, the outside can be slippery and the screw part can be tight! Very dangerous for the workplace.

I thought I had NSFW turned off… 🤣

And for the final thing I’ll definetly wanna fix with no clue how, is that the Monitor is oddly Zoomed out. The text is all further back then it should be making for a weird look. Old Burn-in from when this thing was actively used also assures me of that. No clue how one can fix that, any suggestions?

Most CRT displays have potentiometers, adjustable by screw or knob, to control horizontal and vertical size. As always, be careful with flyback transformers, etc., so as not to die.

Burn in is a real and AFAIK permanent thing.

Those arrow keys are confusing, but I can see why the first thought was to place them like that

I’ve seen worse. The Commodore 64 used two arrow keys and Shift. Many 8-bit computers split them onto completely different sides of the keyboard, and nobody agreed on what the layout should be, even if the group was similar. Finally, DEC and then IBM standardized the inverted T, and all was right with the world.

I recall rumors that when it came to version 10 of Mac OS, Apple knew they needed outside help, and the choice came down to BeOS on the one hand, or NeXT (including ol’ Stevie J) on the other.

My B450 motherboard is pretty long in the tooth, but still firmly a “modern” component. I just added a Serial port via its built in header to use an old “Spaceball” for CAD. It only works in a few Windows apps, which is a shame because it’s completely a software issue and it works PERFECTLY in the apps that still support it. Linux as well, though I’ve only tried that via a USB-Serial adapter on my laptop.

I think it’s a nice enough idea, and I hope it sets a reasonable baseline for what enthusiast and workstation laptops will be as the entabletification of the mainstream computing device continues, but right now it’s sort of a solution waiting for its problem. Economically, it doesn’t make much sense for one person to buy one. In an actuarial sense, it’s almost certainly better to buy something you like that’s less modular, and replace it if it breaks or stops being useful for your intended tasks. Of course if no one who wishes them well buys their computers, they won’t last long enough to be relevant.

Strictly speaking, just standardizing and providing the physical specifications ends up making their dongles more like headers on a desktop motherboard, potentially a commodity piece that anyone could replicate. Their other modular components seem to have a similar idea. It all seems elegant enough, and ready to “backscale” into a distributed niche industry if the big companies stop making powerful proprietary machines at the scale that keeps them cheap. As it stands, they sort of ARE de facto proprietary, but I guess the idea is that there will be enough enthusiasts, hardware hackers, and evangelists paying a sizeable, but not crippling, premium to keep them afloat and gain the mindshare to become a new standard (and hopefully halo brand) when people need to build laptops like they build towers now.

Just used it to do a clean install to move my ThinkPad from Ubuntu 22.04 to Kubuntu 23.10. Good tool, and much nicer than constantly “burning” ISOs to the flash drive.

A few stores, in my area it’s particularly clothing discounters, seem to have moved to that model, and as long as you plan your checkout areas even sort of halfway well, it’s a million times better.

And god what a sad death Fry’s had. It went from the bona fide nerd store to a disaster. Eventually the ones in Dallas-Fort Worth were just zombie husks riding out the leases and selling leftovers on consignment from the few manufacturers who couldn’t be bothered to come repossess the inventory after the store failed to pay their invoices.

So, in the linked complaint (not a full lawsuit yet, btw), they cite “breakage” where Starbucks corporate makes an estimate each year as to the amount of banked gift cards they reasonably believe will never be spent. It looks like it has averaged about $185M in the last few years. This can be moved from deferred revenue to actual, and thereby improve the financials. This could theoretically be fucked with on the margins and allow execs to pocket more money, and to some extent it obviously encourages Starbucks to promote gift cards (in the broad sense) over other payment methods.

The whole complaint is odd. Starbucks obviously feels like they have a winner in this scheme, and almost everything alleged in the complaint is kinda fucky, to the point that I think it’s worth pointing out as a consumer protection issue. That said, the individual impact on any one consumer is very small and there are numerous workarounds for a slightly motivated person, and the tone of the complaint comes off kinda like pearl-clutching and paternalistic. Maybe you have to write it that way to make sure it’s taken seriously, but it’s not making for very persuasive reading.

Yup. If they leave some minimal process/app that keeps the headsets working with Steam VR, then nothing of value will be lost. It was an underwhelming tech demo and major annoyance.

Well it’s certainly better looking than the Rivian, which is one of the ugliest production vehicles I’ve ever seen.

To be clear, what’s under discussion is free shipping on returns. And fine, whatever. It will be annoying, but if the price of returning in the same packaging is known at purchase time, I’ll survive and adjust my shopping with that vendor as necessary.

Net change of about 0.7% (64K on about 8.9M total between Sling and Dish) in a quarter. Far from their worst quarter, but the trend is bad for the company.

Yup, 11 is the restructuring one. Very little will happen automatically, but they will try to renegotiate their leases. In a world where big companies are adjusting to WFH being a norm, though no longer the the norm, this has the feeling of pissing on a house fire. When their Chapter 11 restructuring fails, that’s when they’ll file for Chapter 7 (liquidation)