Trident TGUI9440 on a VL-bus card. Surprisingly peppy on a 486/66 overclocked to 80.

I was always disappointed that celebrity and character voice packs weren’t a thing for the voice-assistant platforms. I’d pay literal ones of dollars for a voice assistant with a Sebastian Michaelis intonation and theming.

Cortana for Windows Phone came closest, I think they did use the same voice actress as the game character.

I doubt they enjoy having their balls in TSMC’s vice.

Intel is the only option remotely available to leverage against them.

• Starting from zero will cost bajillions and take decades to get competitive
• Samsung’s probably not divisible in a way that makes their fabs buyable
• They can’t buy into any of the 7nm/5nm level players in the PRC and fund their modernization due to sanctions
• Does anyone else have sub-10nm at anything buy lab scales?

I suspect that democracy is a “good times” system. It works well enough when the problems are either low-stakes or widely agreed upon.

When you get into a world of hard choices-- for example, anything where we have to devalue some existing wealth – suddenly there’s going to be both a lack of consensus (likely manufactured) and leaders too afraid of losing the next vote to pull the trigger.

That’s why I expect to see China solve its climate change and housing problems faster than the West. Without the almighty polls lurking in the shadows, they can say “petrol is 100 yuan a litre to discourage its use” or “we’re nationalizing second homes and disbursing them to schoolteachers.”

I figured systemd is a 90s-JRPG boss with multiple phases taking over more and more of the screen.

You hold up a Slackware CD like some sort of vampires-and-faith-objects bit.

Wasn’t that why he loves fast food? It’s easier to target the White House supply chain for a precision poisoning than to try to hit every McDonald’s in a 50km radius and hope to get lucky.

How to Keep a Mummy is sickeningly adorable.

Or As Miss Beelzebub Likes, but then I just want an Azazel of my own…

Yeah. They don’t tell you at all what to do with the 3rd sword.

I put out one of those big plastic storage units with like 30 little drawers recently, figuring although 2 were missing, someone could still use it. I stood it next to the dustbin, on trash day where it would be optimally visible for anyone who wanted to scrounge it.

The bloody HOA took a picture and sent a nastygram.

Discussion: you can have an “extinction event” in any ecosystem-- not just biological ones.

For example, the abandonment of steam locomotives in the mid-20th-century, or the Home Computer crash of the 1980s.

Similar to a biological mass extinction, you have:

• A discernable ecosystem change, either a sudden event (the introduction of reliable, mass-produced diesel locomotives), or a measurable decline of “habitability factors” (as hundreds of firms brought cheap 8-bit computers to market, retail space and overall consumer interest saturated)
• a rapid diversification of new and exotic types to fill the vacated niches (the cabless “B-unit” and flexible “road-switcher” locomotive types didn’t exist in the steam era. The post-crash computer market brought in new entrants like cheap IBM clones, the C128 and Atari 130XE, all chasing a sub-$1000 market that was now free of Sinclair, Coleco, and Texas Instruments)
• followed by a shake out and consolidation of the survivors/winners as they select for fitness in the new world (ALCO was a strong #2 in the diesel locomotive market in 1950, but didn’t make it to 1970. The C128 never became the world-beater its predecessor did.)
• a few niches largely untouched (China was still building steam locomotives into the 1990s. The Apple II series lasted about as long.)

Cute!

I always figured BSD should lean into the daemon imagery with a full heavy-metal branding: a suite of wallpapers with decidedly less cuddly daemons, a succubus OS-tan character… make it the go-to Edgelord Desktop.

Then FreeBSD introduced that stupid sphere logo. No sense of branding. :P

Can we get the politicians to shift from illegal aliens to Sasquatch? Build a wall across Washington state and make Canada pay for it?

On a less deranged take, there’s definitely potential to mend the Sino-Soviet split. Their interests and capabilities dovetail quite a bit, but I suspect unification is wildly impractical for any number of cultural and historic reasons. OTOH, if they presented a Warsaw Pact-style alliance, perhaps using the cudgel of mutually assured economic destruction instead of nuclear destruction, that’s a hell of an act for the West to try to follow.

The mafia has infested law enforcement too.

I accidentally took the wrong streetcar when visiting San Francisco and ended up in the Castro.

They put a boot on my gender and had it towed. Apparently I have to pay $450 plus $85 per day storage to get it out of impound. I said “forget it” and they crushed it into a cube.

STOP GIVING BOEING QUALITY CONTROL IDEAS

So thry’re saying they have plenty of licenses for the use case, but somehow people are still pirating?

Maybe their license management paradigm is just garbage. This could be the vendor, but also poor IT policy if the users can’t requisition what they need.

As usual, service problem.

So much licensing fuckery-- dealing with floating or reissuing licenses, users needing to move to different machines-- could be solved via affordable site licensing. But that might leave dollars on the table if users don’t overbuy.

Once you get to 50k people, you have to set up Harbour Goth, and at 100k, Airport Goth.

I can see the former with merman/maid themes, but not sure how to implement the latter-- black fishnet pilot iniforms?

Wow. You get to remove code? I’d assume you just default it to 0 so the API contract doesn’t change and break 20-year-old code.

I’m also curious about the logic of what items get locked up.

I went in a few shops recently, and all the toothbrushes were locked up. I know personal-care items tend to be the first things in the cages. Yet plenty of other items with higher value and margins are out in the open.

Is there some virtue-agenda in play? Don’t make it too easy to steal your way into healthy or presentable?