hakfoo

42 ms·

691.
by hakfoo 3y ago
My mum had a 2004 Sonata and it got T-boned with like 3,000km on the odometer. It was like a $17k car brand new, with and they put like $15k of body work (and then hiring a loaner car for a month while doing it) into it. Ran fine for anot
692.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Killing off Ghadaffi was perhaps the worst blow to any broader denuclearization efforts. As long as Libya pursued weapons of mass destruction, but the leadership was more or less unmolested. Sanctions and sabre rattling don't actually
693.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I was thinking more specifically like https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Always-Reserve-1MB Note that this was apparently a decision made in 2001. If you tried this in 1988, when 2Mb was an enormous machine, and yo
694.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Part of the reason that few 8-bit platforms successfully went 16-bit is because they filled up the address space too early. If you were writing code for a Commodore 64 or Atari 800XL, you largely didn't have to think about designing yo
695.
by hakfoo 3y ago
One thing I've noticed is that the bottom of the standalone scanner market completely disappeared. You used to be able to easily find parallel-port flatbed scanners for $50 or less, and they eventually shifted to USB. I suspect it was
696.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Aside from the Max/MCAS fiasco, my remaining respect for Boeing went out the window because I live near one of their plants. Middle of the pandemic, they had employees protesting about mask and vaccine mandates out front, for weeks on
697.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Entry level Thinkpads are not particularly impressive. I have an E585 (bought it with the 2700U and 1080p screen upgrades, but added my own SSD and extra RAM because Lenovo charged the moon) and it replaced an X230 Tablet. Even though it&#x
698.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I wonder how much of that was each one being largely one-vendor operations. Even high-margin markets like servers and HPC can't compete with selling a billion cheap chips for white-boxes. If there had been an "Alpha Inc" aki
699.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Part of the reason that developing-world investment has traditionally been hard is because it likely requires a longer perspective than most investors have. Build a decent rail network in Laos and it might take 75 years for them to leverag
700.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Bimetallic currencies were a hairball for every major economy for decades. If you tie a currency to gold or silver alone, and the other a sort of token sense, it generally works. When you try to do both, you end up with situations where th
701.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I've built the same keyboard four times over the last three years. Version 1 used a Teensy++ and Box Pale Blue switches. Version 2 used a Teensy++ and Matias Click switches, and added a bodged-on OLED. This required a completely new P
702.
by hakfoo 3y ago
> it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU I'd say that 250-350 watt PSUs were very common in white-box/home-built PCs in the P4/Athlon XP era. 400W and ab
703.
by hakfoo 3y ago
The problem is that, while the RasPi may be 3x as fast, it doesn't necessarily have the software ecosystem you want. If all you have is a closed-source Win32 program that barely runs on XP, at best, you can emulate the P4, thus likely
704.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Maybe it's not immortality, but just getting off the pyramid scheme of untenable growth. For a developing nation with a questionable future, one-child-per-family seemed a viable way to solve the problem of finite resources, particularl
705.
by hakfoo 3y ago
At this point, isn't consent compliance a solved problem? That they can't find a canned solution to suit their needs is eyebrow-raising.
706.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Is it an improvement? It seems like it adds a significant all-but-guaranteed-to-fail-over-time point, for the benefit of...?
707.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I always found it interesting that in other countries, they trade under "National"-- an even more perfectly English sounding word. I have a radio that I suspect originally game from the German market with a "National Panason
708.
by hakfoo 3y ago
One consequence of giving everything a discrete price is that it drives customers to consume all services they pay for completely. If you say "I can take two checked bags, it's included in the fare", I'll probably only t
709.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I suspect in the end, the financial component of any business has the highest margins, so business seeks it like a plant growing towards the sun. To do the "actually send passengers from LAX to ORD" part of running an airline you
710.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I suspect it might have been a timing/market positioning thing. By 1984, "boots to BASIC" was reserved for low-end kit: C64, Atari XL, and increasingly Apple II. The IBM PC and clones were rapidly defining what a high-end pe
711.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I couldn't have put it more clearly. I look at the local dismal state lottery; it takes months to tick up from $1 million prize to $2 million, and think "even if I won, I couldn't even really quit my job." After taxes,
712.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Let's go proactive. In exchange for the legal conveniences that being a limited-liability/stock company offers, you must issue to the state a class of shares that are nontradeable/zero-dividend (and thus do not dilute valuati
713.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I'd expect that they tend to extract a lot of concessions, especially from the lower-tier stops. * Were the quaint little towns, the ones adjacent to a natural feature, the fishing villages or historically relevant cities, ready to sup
714.
by hakfoo 3y ago
It's a huge business, but it feels like it's much more of a commodity business. Changing out the ad network is probably a matter of a fairly simple swap out of highly componentized components. I'm sure devs bounce from netwo
715.
by hakfoo 3y ago
There's a frustrating trend across the software industry-- chasing that hypothetical "next billion" users by removing customization, complicating discovery, and nerfing advanced features. I'm sure Windows 11 works perfec
716.
by hakfoo 3y ago
"Tightly integrated" can mean "We designed A and B to fit together well. We built them side by side and tested them together" That's perfectly acceptable and can make a fair direct case to the customer. What'
717.
by hakfoo 3y ago
Part of it is the time dimension. Electricity infrastructure used to be defined by the factories that run from (say) 9AM to 5PM. The grid has to be sized mostly for their needs, and baseload power (fossil, atomic, hydro) are sized for it,
718.
by hakfoo 3y ago
At my last job, we never had employer-supplied care; it was too small a firm to get into anything unless he bought into a cooperative, which I think was a word with about three too many syllables for the CEO to grasp. I ended up buying mark
719.
by hakfoo 3y ago
I can understand why there wouldn't be a "no ads" box from a business standpoint. Ad-supported sites could say "we currently have no better business model than advertising, but we could make the ads less terrible if you
720.
by hakfoo 3y ago
The problem is a complete trust breakdown. If browsers had a "provide us some preferences to customize advertising" flow in their onboarding, users would feel in control, and the data might be of high quality. Ideally, you'd

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