Phones are becoming less and less interesting by the day.

Once they get to the point were all of the options that don’t require incredibly inconvenient sacrifices in functionality to maintain the interesting stuff like a video game console then that will kill interest in the market for me.

If I can’t do anything besides basic smart phone crap I might as well just buy whatever has a good camera once every half decade or so and be done with it. So whatever top end thing Samsung or Apple are putting out.

I’m not sure Google has fully thought through what it means to just be a worse version of what Apple puts out, but with more ads.

Right along with story points.

Not meant to be a measurement of time, but of effort. But everyone ends up using them as a measure of time because that is what the MBA at the end of the tables wants.

Because the know the people that buy it either are stupid or have no choice (in the cases of the few that actually have to eat those kinds of diets for health reasons).

Mine stays on 24/7/365 unless I am going to be out of town.

The fuckery Microsoft has been doing with trying to outright trick people into signing in to the OS with a Microsoft account and using things like OneDrive combined with just how good Proton has gotten pushed me to make the switch full time a year or so ago for my personal usage.

I don’t have any hard numbers, only what I have seen out in the world. But a good number of POS systems, embedded things like MRI machines, tire balancers in mechanics shops and ATMs run some flavor of embedded Windows.

It is not nearly as huge as *nix is, but it is not exactly uncommon either.

Smartphones are actually a good window into what computers in general would have been like had the IBM bios not been reverse engineered and survived a bunch of legal challenges.

All of these types are articles always leave out the calculations of what your time is worth to you and the maintenance costs of spare hard drives and other equipment. The TCO is not just the initial investment in hardware/software alone. Unless you plan to host something unreliably and value your time at nothing. In which case I hope you don’t get friends or family hooked on your stuff or everyone will have a bad time and be back to Google Drive/Docs and Netflix within 5 years.

The reason they leave it out I feel is because once you factor all of that stuff in the $10/month your paying for Google Drive storage or the ~$25 your paying Netflix starts to make a lot more sense when pared with a decent local backup from a Synology NAS for the “I can’t lose this” stuff like baby pictures of your kids. Which blows their entire premise out of the water.

They can try, but it is unlikley to work for long. So my general reaction is:

Everyone that was paying attention to the Microsoft Windows support lifecycle web page back then knew that statement was horse shit.

It is likely because Israel vs. Palestine is a much much more hot button issue than Russia vs. Ukraine.

Some people will assault you for having the wrong opinion in the wrong place about the former, and that is press Google does not want to be able to be associated with their LLM in anyway.

I’m surprised there was no further validation or approval for that kind of money beyond “find the right person and socially engineer them.”

The ever increasing subscription prices and rights holders pulling content have nothing to do with it at all I am sure. /s

And here I thought I had a lot of hdd platter coaster’s.

This sort of thing is what keeps me away from Samsung phones.

Don’t give Ubisoft money for their games and they will change their tune or close up shop soon enough.

If the price was what I deemed acceptable and the method of doing so was decently centralized. I’m not going to sign up to 15 different podcasts with 15 separate transactions every month.

So yes, I would pay for them if they make it attractive to pay for. Ultimately the viability of their business model is not my problem. So even if it is one guy in his garage, it is on him to create something I would be willing to pay for. If they can’t then oh well I can easily do without their podcast.

Podcasts are yet one more thing that ads have more or less ruined for me. I rarely listen to them due to the sponsorships. It is like trying to watch YouTube on my TV through the YouTube app instead of the Smarttube app.

The only sane thing to do in response to this is the same thing that SHOULD have been done when Paramount went all sue happy on folks making unofficial Star Trek stuff.

Creators should stop making things related to their works and consumers should stop consuming and giving Paramount money for the official works.

The lesson being if the rights holder for something wants to keep it all to themselves, let them, forget it exists and starve it out of profitable existence. Spend the time and money with content, creators, and consumers that don’t believe sucking up ever dime that’s not nailed down is, or should be, the ultimate goal.

Hey, mine loves to talk up her blue ball cure.