I found a bag full of bricks on a trash sale, for €10. It turned out to contain 90% of a 7745 train, and a lot of other train stuff. The seller rescued it from a container, where a family was cleaning out a deceased's house. They only pulled out 1 of the LEGO bags in the container, on a whim, not wanting to drag more. The seller tought I was an idiot who overpaid. I tought I was lucky to find my childhood dream train.
Very well said, and I'd like to extend the idea much further: Old reddit, Windows debloater, youtube adblock, ... There are plenty of services that turned into customer disrespect, but people do huge efforts to keep them a bit less abusive. Huge kudos to these people, but isn't it time to just let the bad businesses die? If the power users are just as unhappy as everyone else, the exoduses start much faster.
Nobody needs social media of any sort. Everyone should just turn it off and stop making excuses for yourselves to stay addicted. That said, it's easier said than done. Trust me, I know.
I'm not sure I would class Youtube as social media. It can be, but some people just watch it on their TV's and never engage in a social way at all.
We do, just not social media for the sake of extracting maximum ad revenue out of users. We're a widespread society we need large online spaces, but not ones algorithmically designed to addict and derrange users.
I'm really just here because Google is shit and there are only so many alternative ways to find an aggregation of links to potentially interesting tech articles. I'm hoping to find new blogs or sites to follow, in part so I can stop coming here.
I might give up on it soon though, like I've given up on reddit. Too many junk article lately.
As for my commenting, that's because I, like everyone else here, am a bit of an idiot. HN makes it easy enough to comment that it's hard to resist sometimes.
I'd say: Shortages after the world wars, combined with the teething problems of new technology made customers acutely aware and capable of repairability. That lesson is now forgotten.
It also wasn't universally true. E.g. the story of Mad Munz creating TVs that worked only for 90% of the customers (who had good enough reception and needed less signal cleanup). His idea was to capture 90% of the market with a cheaper product, while shafting 10% of the consumers and shamelessly send them to other vendors when they reported their troubles and he already had their money.
80186 Was not IBM PC compatible. It had e.g. a PIC, DMA and timer built-in, and these were incompatible with the chips in a 8086 based IBM PC.
There were a few new instructions, too, mostly closing holes. You could left or right shift with a constant, while the 8086 had only 1 or the CX register. I think mul also gained a constant.
The fact that Intel released a CPU that could not be put in a PC probably indicates how low they estimated the survivability of the PC.
We had an apartment building complex where the inhabitants were fighting the owners over the elevators. The owners claimed the elevators did not always break down. The inhabitants challenged them for a game: go from bottom to top and step out once on every floor. Somehow the local press got invited. Of course, one owner and the press guy got stuck for half an hour, the resulting newspaper article had was written by a very pissed off reporter, and the elevator got finally replaced.
I want Tesla top management getting a similar challenge: Get this broken down tesla off the road. Meanwhile, some first responders do the same to a normal car.
I got an IT consultant looking at our Linux laptops, and his opinion was that the Belgian implementation of the CRA basically made Microsoft security tools obligatory: No other product survives auditors and your company will have to carry the burden of compliance itself. So if we roll that out, and MS now makes Edge the only browser supported, it also becomes obligatory, end users be damned. MS knows how to play legislators very well.
Around here, public toilets have roll holders containing 2 rolls. 2nd is unreachable, but when the 1st is empty, it falls out and 2nd drops in its place. Janitors just fill the 2nd roll if missing.
I am hoping this is normal around the world and nobody throws away slightly used rolls.
A corporation can own another corporation. So if you set up a loop of corporations owning other corporations, and the loop spans multiple countries, you can end up with a corporation ultimately owning itself. I vaguely remember IKEA trying to get this structure.
The king is already mostly ceremonial. He seems mainly a stabilization factor for the country when both halves get a bout of separatism once more: He is the ultimate person every major politician talks to when nobody wants to talk to each other. The king does have some extra rights, but not too much, and the alternative seems worse.
King Albert 2 didn't want to become king but nobody else with enough capability was available. So it's not just a fun job.
But yes, the discussion to king or not pops up once in a while, and the general response seems to be we got much bigger problems.
It's German, not British. When Belgium was founded, the fear was it would immediately try to join France. So when a French noble was offered the throne, he actually said no, quite a blemish for the young nation. A surplus German noble was crowned, which was palatable to the English as it balanced things out a bit.
"The British branch was officially renamed to House of Windsor by British king George V in 1917, during the First World War, amid anti-German sentiment."
It happens.
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