Currently, PopOS although I’m not really that enthusiastic about it.

What? Why would you choose that over Baptist Church of Missouri SynodOS, you heretic?

Supporting data from The Economist:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/09/05/what-to-do-about-americas-killer-cars

Certainly, but Apple was comparing itself to other computer companies with international reach, not to the white box PCs coming out of the Floppy Wizard store in the strip center.

The interaction between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and Woz (Seth Rogen) pretty much sums up the Apple ][ era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fweZsmH4Tw

So, I lived through that time, and I supported computers professionally during that time. I started working at a university help desk in 1989.

It’s easy to go back and look at Apple products and white-box PCs of the era (or quasi-legit clones like Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc) and say, “oh, on specs, the Apples were MASSIVELY overpriced – you can get a much better deal with the PC”.

The problem was that PCs were nowhere near on par, functionally, with Macintosh.

• Networking. We were running building-wide Appletalk networks – with TCP/IP gateways – over existing phone wires YEARS before anybody figured out how to get coax or 10base-T installed. We were playing NETWORK GAMES (Bolo, anyone) on Mac in the late 80s.

• And when they did… what do you do with networking in DOS? Unless you ran a completely canned network OS (remember Banyan, Novell, etc. ad infinitum?) and canned apps specifically designed to work with it, you were SOL. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke compared to System 7.

I configured PCs and Macs for the freshman class in 1995. For the Mac? You plug the ethernet port in and the OS does the rest. For the PC… find a DOS-compatible packet driver that works with your network card, get it running, then run Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1, then… then… it was a goddamned nightmare. We had to have special clinics just to get people’s PCs up and running with a web browser, and even then, there were about 10% of machines we just had to say “nope”. Can’t find a working driver, can’t get anything working right. Your IRQs are busted? Who fuckin’ knows. I ran the “Ethernet Clinic” until the late 90s, when Windows 98 finally properly integrated the TCP/IP layer in the OS.

• Useful software on the Mac had a pretty consistent look & feel. On the PC? Even in Windows 3.1, it was all over the map. You might have a Windows native program, you might have a DOS program that launches in a console window, you might have a completely different graphical interface embedded in the software (Delphi apps, anyone?). Games were using DOS into the mid 90s because getting anything working right in Windows 3.1 was a total fuckin crap shoot.

Windows 95 started to fix things, finally. And Windows XP would finally bring an OS with stability comparable to Mac (arguably WIndows 2000 as well, but it was never really offered on non-corporate PCs).

The short version is: that $3000 Mac could do a lot more than that $1800 PC, even if the specs said that the CPU was faster on the PC.

Well, that button probably dates from the late 80s or early 90s, when Apple was comparing Macs to branded IBM PS/2s and such that were sold to schools and enterprises.

And they weren’t wrong, at the time. Those PS/2s were fuckin’ expensive.

Then they would have to remove the various hooks in the Settings app that actually call and open the Control Panel.

How many are there? I can think of several (advanced mouse settings, advanced network settings, printer properties, date & time has a callout back to the old panel…)

Windows 10 came out nine years ago, so they don’t seem in any particular rush.

“Main Quest”. What does that even mean? That’s nonsense.

The idea that anyone finishes a game of Civilization is a myth.

What, is this a Canadian assassin?

Yeah I’m not excusing the driver parking it like a jackass.

It depends on the use case, though. If that driver’s main concern is getting in and out of muddy work sites safely, maybe carrying cargo is less important than 4WD cred.

FYI, Fortnine is based in Canada.

Increases or decreases in the frequency of pedestrian-driver fatalities is affected by lots of things, although I suggest that poor road design and traffic laws might have a positive feedback effect when combined with limited forward visibility (e.g. a truck with poor forward visibility isn’t a huge liability in Canadian road designs might be a larger liability in typical US road designs).

Unfortunately I don’t know if we collect the right accident statistics. Perhaps the more relevant question is: are pickup trucks over-represented in pedestrian fatalities as a result of vehicle collision compared to other vehicles, and has that representation grown as truck grill heights have grown? I found a doc on Canadian pedestrian fatalities, but it classified all passenger vehicles as a single class – and unfortunately that doesn’t tell us much since most 4-wheel pickups are classified as passenger vehicles.

Fortnine has an excellent video about this issue.

I don’t pretend to know what professional landscape contractors need for their job.

I’m all for f*ck cars but people who have actual jobs that involve moving stuff like gravel and sod probably have different needs than I do, I assume?

Yeah, but ISPs are rich and VPN providers are not. The most recent numbers I can find for Cox (2020) show $12.6 billion in revenue.

So you get to charge your expensive Tesla with a giant battery for hours and block the charger and eat up 80+ Kilowatt-hours, but I plug in my base model Nissan Leaf and get cut off at 45 kWh?

Options:

• Build more chargers

• Raise the price

• Charge for time at the charger, not watt-hours delivered

• Tell EV owners to blame each other

Three of these will work. One of them won’t.

What is a sport? Why does it exist?

It exists because people come together to play it. And maybe because some people are willing to pay for tickets to watch it, or sometimes because powerful people want it (to sell product, to train people in national defense, etc).

If you’re not engaged with any of those stakeholders, you can’t change the sport. Ideas about the limited women’s class of sport will only change if the players & organizers want it to change – or in the rarer case, because the ticket buyers demand change. But many of these sports are not driven by ticket sales, so there is limited opportunity to win hearts and minds.