> Free trade has already broken down, what do they have to lose?

The US parking an aircraft carrier nearby so the crew can enjoy a sunny vacation.

Or meddling with elections.

Or both.

I doubt this would work for the better. As we have recently seen when carriers got parked near Iran.

That second one is already happening.

Oh, as somebody who wrote C++/CX code at the time, I was very pissed when they replaced it with WinRT.

Same here, the way it was removed, without tooling parity on Visual Studio, revealed a complete lack of respect for those of us paying licenses.

This was one of the reasons I eventually moved back into distributed systems, and was pissed enough that I keep dismounting the WinUI marketing.

People use Windows because Office runs on Windows, and Windows ran in any shitty cheap beige box. This is the whole story since the 1990's.

On hardware: it's because Windows has a stable kernel ABI and makes it very simple for hardware vendors to write proprietary drivers. Linux kind of forces everybody to upstream their device drivers, which is good and bad at the same time - DKMS is something relatively new.

But yeah, the NT kernel is very nice, the problem with Windows is the userland.

Go to https://models.dev/ and you're going to see plenty of providers.

OpenRouter makes it easy to use them, just add credits to your account.

I thought this was common knowledge to anyone looking to use an inference API, but it seems it isn't. Well, even AWS is in this business with Bedrock.

Employee needs to download Microsoft Remote Desktop (sorry, Windows App) that is only distributed through App Store.

Employee does not trust the company having access to everything else in their personal iCloud account - photos, mails, messages, calendar, reminders, etc.

Employee registers a new Apple ID with company email, as it would be only used for downloading one single app.

Got it. It’s registering with the company email first, not their personal one.

Once I had to use a Mesa3D build for Windows and use the zink driver to render OpenGL to Vulkan, otherwise it would use Windows' software renderer.

I had to use WineD3D's ddraw.dll among another one to run these touch based arcade machine games with card games, Trivial Pursuit, hangman and the like. If not the game made for w98/2k would really lag even under an i3.

The same with some multimedia CD's from its day. Scummvm it's partially implementing Macromedia Director support but the mentioned game had a custom engine. The Scummvm devs would RE in few weeks (it's a simple 2D game bundle, nothing difficult, with virtually no animations, almost everything it's still images) but no one began yet.

> what computers are you buying that are more environmentally friendly?

Any computer that you can upgrade its parts? SSD, RAM, Wifi cards, etc.

The only parts that wear out on a modern laptop are the SSD and the battery. If I replace those, I can use it basically indefinitely, paying the penalty on performance and energy consumption depending on how old the CPU is.

Why would I throw out (or recycle) a perfectly good computer if I could simply fix or upgrade it? If you're not reusing it, then you could pass it down to somebody who would use it.

20+ year old computers are e-waste at this point thanks to software bloating and lack of hardware acceleration for at least h.264.

15 year old computers are very usable, but unfortunately most use SATA for storage which is definitely not optimal for SSDs.

10 year old computers are from when PC tech plateaued, for most use cases the difference in performance is imperceptible, and maybe you lose power efficiency.

nowadays macbook batteries aren't something i'd call "easy to replace" but it's not something a typical repair shop or meticulous individual wouldn't be able to do – most beater windows laptops don't have user-replacable batteries either fwiw

if the ssd is bricked you do need to replace the whole "logic board" tho which sucks

I miss the glowing apple on my white polycarbonate MacBook. What I don't miss is the shitty Intel GMA X3100 iGPU and Apple not releasing a 64 bit driver for it.

Should have spent the money on a MacBook Pro with a real GPU, I would have used that computer way longer than I had.

I miss the glowing logos too, but I guess this would force the screen to be ticker, which is a big no-no for Apple.

I think this April they should announce one with a beige shell, a rainbow logo, and a brown keyboard (with BELL on top of tge G) ;-).

Eh... Prohibiting access to MSN Messenger on school computers was one of the catalysts to me being a highly paid professional today.

Tell children they can't do X, some will find ways around it, tell their friends the workaround and maybe even get a profession out of it. Who knows, maybe one kid will find a text editor and a compiler laying around somewhere...

Fuck, I even tried to learn Russian by myself just to understand those old hacking forums. At least I got proficient in Cyrillic. I don't have children, but definitely I'd direct them to learn reading Chinese.

I have a personal 16 GB M4 Macbook Air and my wife’s work computer is a 24 GB M4 Macbook Pro. My laptop runs circles around her work’s.

Companies install so many invasive shit in the name of security theater and employee control that there is lots of waste going on.