hakfoo

53 ms·

571.
by hakfoo 3y ago
If there's one thing we've learned from the last 25 years, it's that platforms are fickle, ESPECIALLY ones whose success is defined as "where the cool kids are". Even if you assume there's some magic subliminia
572.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I recall years ago I tried to sell something via Craigslist (it was like a 7" LCD monitor with a serial touchscreen, back before cheap touch devices were everywhere), and someone started sending me all a whole song-and-dance of fake po
573.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I keep hearing the excuse for hydrogen being things like freight trucks that need hundreds of kilometres of range. It seems that for a fraction of the cost of building hydrogen, they could outfit them with pantographs and run trolley wire o
574.
by hakfoo 3y ago
It seemed to me like Loongson was sort of a "compliance" product. There are no doubt plenty of "we want to own the ecosystem end-to-end" forces who have cheque-writing authority within China. They'll bankroll home
575.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Edge has the unique position of being the first browser you have access to on a fresh Windows PC, so if it stands in the way of changing browsers, it's uniquely problematic. The fact that 95% of people are trying to change to Chrome do
576.
by hakfoo 3y ago
The appeal of diversity is to avoid systemic risks. For example, I recall talk about some automakers offering insurance (often as part of an all-inclusive subscription model) You'd have some very distinct systemic risks with that pool.
577.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I wonder if Motorola lost faith in the 68k because of a diminishing number of signature customers. When Apple went for the PowerPC instead of continuing on to the 68060, the remaining audiences for high-end 68k were not going to move anywhe
578.
by hakfoo 3y ago
The thing that confuses me is the wild swings in prices between carriers. You'd think that the underlying underwriting strategies are fairly similar (convergent evolution, regulation, and likely everyone watching everyone else's
579.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Isn't this the classic Wheel-of-Reincarnation cycle? The Amiga's dedicated coprocessors let it do things an IBM AT or Mac 512k couldn't do easily. But the AT evolved into the 386 and 486, and suddenly you no longer needed cop
580.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I'm amazed at this point, given the "subscriptions are a nightmare to cancel" meme, that nobody's turned that into a marketing message. Some of the gym ads say "cancel anytime", but "sure, just bring in t
581.
by hakfoo 3y ago
ISTR there was sort of a love-hate relationship with a lot of nVidia chipsets. nVidia always had the trump card of saying "if you want SLI, you have to buy our chipset." But conversely, a lot of the options weren't great. V
582.
by hakfoo 3y ago
The fascinating thing is how desperate business is to avoid legal precedent. Arbitration doesn't create one. Class action suits inevitably end with a settlement with an explicit "we don't admit wrongdoing but will cut a cheq
583.
by hakfoo 3y ago
The Ghost City concept is actually a great one, but it has the "you opened the bedroom door while someone is dressing" visuals problem. If you can plan and work on a longer term, you can do things like staging multiple phases of d
584.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I always figured the most marginal of taxes would make it economically unviable. If you charged a nickel to complete a call, the Water and Power Department can at worst, slip a $1 fee into a bill to build up a fund to pay for emergency outa
585.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Have you considered a dog? I've always heard that the calculus for a break-in was that even if you had an alarm, they had N minutes to Supermarket Sweep the place before the cops arrived. Conversely, if there's a surly Rottweiler
586.
by hakfoo 3y ago
The Fn key existed at least as early as the PCjr, where you'd use Fn-1 to Fn-0 instead of dedicated function keys. This was also seen on some smaller laptops without room for dedicated function keys. (Other designs used Fn-F1 and Fn-F
587.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I suspect the reason the USA couldn't do that was because of strong land ownership rights. You couldn't "just put cables up" without people getting restraining orders to keep you off their property. I always figured the
588.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Well, I could see plenty of other use cases (i. e. "My machine is kaput, can you tether the hard disc and grab my data") but this one has a legitimate business edge if they intercept it.
589.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I would think the other side of this is "if you try to boot another OS one day, surprise, you didn't know the disc was encrypted and can't access any of your files." That screams anti-competitive behaviour to me-- how ma
590.
by hakfoo 3y ago
A "vocal minority" with a wallet is a market. The question is probably "is the market it represents sufficient to sustain a product line which focuses on it?" There are plenty of niche manufacturers who prove that you ca
591.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I could see two explanations: * They ended up with vaults full of them because domestic banks didn't want them. I understand this was the fate of a fair amount of US 50-cent and $1 coins: they migrated to 'dollarized' econom
592.
by hakfoo 3y ago
The build-or-buy debate makes sense with some context: * There's a meaningful market for the components you buy Does Spirit contract out to Airbus and Tupolev to build THEIR fuselages too? Are there other companies that could reasonab
593.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Space Age is a fun one. If we get far enough, we might have multiple Space Ages-- the original Sputnik-Apollo era, the era when it starts to become viable for ordinary civillians but novel and likely still seeking a killer app, and finally
594.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I always found it fascinating how universal copyright law is. Countries that can't agree on almost anything else have all deigned to give (okay, now that it's 2024, we can't use the rodent anymore, what's the new symb
595.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I was surprised how well it works in a lot of ways on my laptop (Thinkpad E585 with an aftermarket Intel wireless card). I will agree with the slowness, and I have managed to make it freeze once or twice, and fail to suspend properly quite
596.
by hakfoo 3y ago
We have other knobs we could turn. Not every talented engineer is eager for the cut-throat hustle to chase a 600k comp package (which ends up at 70k when the stock implodes). I'd think it might even be slightly less common when you ge
597.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I've heard it presented more as that the merchant isn't on the hook for a chargeback because they did the "best practice" in terms of preventing it.
598.
by hakfoo 3y ago
The reason US manufacturing excellence doesn't make sense is because we let it rot. We don't have cities like Shenzhen, where everything you need to get a product to market is within same-day courier range. I understand this was
599.
by hakfoo 3y ago
My father was an enthusiast. When we moved into their current house (1988), the builder had the option of a three-car garage or enclosing the third-car section, and that was intended as a railway room. He favoured the large German "L
600.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Going to a further degree, one would hope that they are testing to make sure the recordings sound good on middle ground equipment. What good is a record that requires a $50k system to enjoy?

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