Posts by biddibiddibiddibiddi

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

"He was logged into the wrong router – the link to the other building was obviously down, so he'd been shuffled over to the router in the building he was in, without realizing it." -- TO THE ROUTER IN THE BUILDING HE WAS IN.

In the early 2000s, I worked for a large ISP on the US east coast. We worked out of an office in Massachusetts. One of the engineers turned off an interface on a router in Virginia which brought down half of our backbone, and for whatever reason there was no management console remote access. Luckily we had a partner or something in the area that was able to drive there and just rebooted the whole router but it was still down for a couple of hours.

There was also a time when something like that happened, and an engineer had to get on the next flight from MA to another state to reboot a router.

In another instance, we started broadcasting routes over BGP for basically the entire IPv4 address space, which our peers accepted, so traffic for the entire Internet began coming to us and dying, causing outages for multiple other providers' clients on the entire eastern half of the US. Outages that take down large numbers of websites and services are sort of commonplace these days with cloud providers that go down, but that didn't happen often back then. We took it as a badge of honor that we were able to cause that much of an interruption and even made what would now be called a meme that we printed and posted in the office. (Something like "Can your ISP bring down the entire Internet? We can.")

Not sure I believe this one. If he was logged into the router in the building he was in, why did he have to go across the street to console into the router there to restore the connection? Even if they were in a true failover configuration with a single namespace for each pair, it would be obvious which side he was on and which interface was which. If he saw an interface that was in a fault state, why would he issue a command that would take down an interface that was NOT faulted? (I.e., if Serial0/1/0 is down, why would he issue a command to shutdown Serial0/0/0?)

Western Digital wasn't the only one - Windows 24H2 update bluescreens Asus systems

It would only be better spent (from a corporate/shareholder perspective) if their shitty updates actually ever caused a drop in value. But they never do, so they just keep doing things the same way. (Low stock price is for different reasons.)

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Important word

No contract could ever be construed to authorize a provider to make changes that could cripple the client unless there were explicit terms stating such, and no client would ever sign a contract stating such.

Re: Car repairers

But he can't give you an invoice with 30-day payment terms and let you drive the car off, then come tow it away if you haven't paid. It has to go through courts.

Re: Important word

You can't "withdraw a service" that you aren't providing. If the client is paying the provider for provision of Internet access AND renting the device from them (where the provider pays the ISP/telco, not the client) then the provider can disable the router because they haven't been paid for the services provided. If the client owns the device, the provider would have to contact the ISP to disable service, as logging into the device for any purpose other than contracted management on behalf of the client, for the client's benefit, is illegal. In any other case, the provider is breaking the law. They can't have the ISP shut off service (again, that is not performing contracted service on behalf of the client). They can't log in and disable anything as that is denial of service and abuse of power, and extortion to boot. (Yes it's fixable without that provider, but not without significant effort and cost when the client depends on having someone else to do it and is losing money in the meantime.) You can't block someone into their driveway by parking on the public street in front of it or call a tow truck to remove their car from the public street just because they haven't paid you for the detailing you did on it.

Windows 11 24H2 disk space hoarding a 'reporting error'

Re: To be fair, it's always done this

It's usually not quite that egregious, though. I don't know what restrictions have previously resulted in it not being able to delete things, but most likely it's that the tool just reads folder sizes without checking whether the OS is going to prevent removal of things that are "in use" or somehow reserved due to a dependency. Now that it's going to be tens of gigs (eventually), rather than just several hundred MB to maybe 2 gigs, they're realizing they fucked up by not having some way to restrict the tool from displaying amounts that can't be removed. So it is a "reporting error" from that perspective, but it has always been present and has accidentally exposed the downside to Checkpoint Updates.

So they say "in the initial run". Somehow I doubt that none of the people who ran the tool and saw that didn't try just running it again and see that now it shows the space was released, or actually look at their disk usage and see the size reduced by that amount. I wonder if any of them tried a tool like Wiztree that can dig into even protected folders to show how much space is actually being used in folders like System Volume Information or the updates cache.

Microsoft may be claiming it's a "reporting error" but based on the way the new Checkpoint Updates seem to work, the previous updates WILL be retained and using up space because otherwise it would have to redownload them every time a new update is released (the way we had to download a Service Pack plus every update released after that, until the next Service Pack or Cumulative Update that included them all), meaning your updates would take longer and longer to download each time. The only way to avoid that is if they also have a consolidated package that can be downloaded instead, where they've already patched in those binary differentials, for every release, which would increase their own storage usage and effort. If they aren't going to change the Disk Cleanup tool to ignore those cached updates, or perhaps list them as a separate option to be removed with a note about the consequences, their own tools will be eliminating the benefit of Checkpoint Updates AND making updates worse for people.

Of course my Windows 10 system is showing 3.95GB of used space right now, so it's not like hoarding space for no reason is anything new. But my Win11 laptop hasn't been turned on for a couple of weeks, and with all the problem reports I'm afraid to do so unless I disable wireless long enough to disable the update service until I can perform a backup.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Apparently one Winamp is worth one-tenth of one US penny. I'm not even sure if there is such a thing as a Winamp (only this site lists it) but they apparently were trying to do NFTs at one point. Seems like an appropriate price though for one copy of the software.

https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/winamp/usd

Re: which permits forking but prevents distribution of modified versions

I was trying to figure out what the difference is between a fork and a "modified version" and all I can think of is that they have to remove every reference to the name Winamp and then it becomes a fork. But I'm not a programmer of FOSS expert. It does seem like it doesn't matter one whit what their WCL said. They showed that they included GPL2 code so now anybody can do whatever they want with it according to the GPL2 terms (though the other code that Llama legitimately had no right to distribute is probably still off-limits).

If this did get forked/converted to FOSS, it would just end up like most other software of that nature: used by a few technologically-literate people, made ugly and hard to use in the name of giving users complete control and customizability so it can never get anywhere in mainstream use.

Cards Against Humanity campaigns to encourage voting, expose personal data abuse

Re: A Different Kind of Question

Perhaps the popular vote would have been more effective during all those years if the electoral college hadn't been fouling things up. Perhaps more people would have voted if they felt like their votes counted, and maybe one side or the other would have been better represented. In every instance, it was the Democrat who won the popular vote (even carrying vastly more states in 1824) but the Republican won by carrying enough states with more electors. Perhaps things in general would have been very different if even that first time in 1824 the popular vote winner had become President.

But even if it doesn't happen often, the fact that it ever happens is ridiculous. It's just bizarre that the number of people who want a candidate has no direct relation to how many votes that candidate gets, and that they can focus on certain states while basically ignoring others because those states' electoral votes are "locked in" by die-hard voters who may be a majority in that state but not in the country overall, making it literally impossible for the other party's votes to count. If an equal percentage of the registered Democrats and registered Republicans in a big state were to vote, but there were more Republicans living there, that large state's entire contribution to the election is Republican, overshadowing 2 or 3 other smaller states' votes for Democrats even if the total number of people voting Democrat would be higher.

Ranked ordering by direct popular vote is of course superior, with multiple candidates instead of two, allowing more people to get "He's not my most preferred choice but at least he's not the worst one so I'm okay with it". Even if we just eliminated the barriers to multiple parties in elections that would help immensely. But until all the old people die out who are stuck in the past and hoarding power, none of that will happen.

Re: A Different Kind of Question

The world has changed quite a bit since then. Socially, technologically. So many of our institutions are rooted in "traditions" that were established long ago under different circumstances that forced the behavior or just couldn't be fought against, usually because men would just kill anybody that disagreed, and when there were periods of change, it was just very difficult and easier to go back to the old ways. Changing and sticking with it would in many cases be much easier now, when we can communicate across the world with milliseconds of delay, and physically cross the planet in hours. Only human resistance to change, especially resistance from the powerful when those changes would take away that power, stops those things from happening. If we can avoid extending the lives even further of people who accumulated wealth and power and are mired in the old ways and holding us back, maybe the world will improve. Even having King William would probably make a dramatic change despite the lack of true power.

You said no concept of party affiliation. There certainly is party affiliation, and party membership. It just isn't registered in the voting rolls. That may have been your meaning, but it was not what you said, in a grammatical examination. I can't help that I read it literally.

There really should be an update added to this to indicate that it's been taken down, and maybe an attempt to contact CAH to get a statement about why.

Oh wait, journalists don't do things like that these days.

There is no need to explicitly say those words. He is a presidential candidate, so his behavior is held to different legal standards. He was making a campaign stop and handed cash to someone. That is an attempt to buy their vote. Just walking down a street and giving some cash to a panhandler would be okay, until he says "Hi I'm Donald Trump" or has people around him with campaign signs. Again, there are different standards for people in different situations.

And yeah, a lot of the bullshit that the right is pulling to prevent people from voting, like keeping them hydrated while they wait in long lines, are, well, bullshit. Every law that gets pushed through is a blatant attempt to make it harder for people to vote who are more likely to not vote Republican, not to protect the voting process. Handing out water to people standing in the sun for hours is simply being a good person, it's legal to campaign more than 150 away from the polling places, and they handed out water and food regardless of party affiliation or who people were going to vote for so they weren't buying votes. The fact that most Republican organizations are not made up of the type to be humane and generous to others doesn't mean that no one should be allowed to, except in the minds of Republicans who know that the people who would be most affected would probably vote Democrat so it would be good to make them abandon the line.

Re: Anyone but Kamala

That is the most non-sensical reasoning. What you did in the primary has nothing to do with who you vote for in the general. Yes, in some states if you register Democrat you can only vote in the Democratic primary and not the Republican, but you can still vote for Republicans in the general election. Primaries just narrow down who will be the party candidate in the general election and then we choose between the two (or sometimes 3, and legally it could be more, but it's always at least those 2). The fact that you chose to register Democrat and vote in the Democratic primary has nothing to do with voting straight Democrat other than you CHOSE to vote straight Democrat automatically rather than considering each candidate's position and picking the candidate that is best instead of based on party.

And why would you "change back"? You want to vote Republican, but you registered as a Democrat and now feel you're forced to vote straight Democrat by primary laws that are not applicable to the general election? The laws have nothing to do with what you're doing here. You're either very confused or very lazy so you've never made even a cursory review of how this works. Or you're just brainwashed and accepted whatever someone told you without checking for yourself. The laws that prevent you from voting in either primary aren't a horrible thing. Political parties in this country are a weird protected entity and some states just give them the power to exclude voters who might be trying to "spoil" the primary election by voting for a "bad" candidate that they think will lose in the general election. The rules are valid, you're just interpreting them incorrectly.

Re: Link?

I seriously doubt that it's illegal, in an exacting examination of the wording of the law, to pay someone to simply make a statement that they will vote with no enforcement behind it, versus doing something to ensure that they vote. I don't think the DOJ calls up and warns you that you broke the law but it'll be fine if you stop now (not regular people anyway). However other people may have given them the impression that they were going to push the issue which could have caused enough problems that CAH couldn't deal with it. Perhaps they'll bring it back once they get more assurance that it's okay.

Re: A Different Kind of Question

The electoral college doesn't really stop populous states from dominating, certainly not in modern times but maybe long in the past. Each state gets a number of electoral votes based on its Congressional delegation size, which is based on the population of the state. Therefore, more populous states get more votes. Without it, in a purely popular vote, every vote would count equally regardless of the states. The candidates would still focus on particular states, because focusing on a populous state could possibly entice more voters with a single rally or ad or promise, but it would totally eliminate the concept of swing states. The electoral college simply changes which states dominate, because candidates feel like some states are a "lock", and they know they'll get the entire count of votes for that state, so they focus on the swing states where they can nudge the balance just enough to get ALL that state's votes. It makes everyone feel like their vote barely counts because it makes the whole state vote for one candidate when the combined votes from other states could have turned it the other way. With a direct popular vote, at least there's a better chance that your vote could add up with the ones from other states to turn the election to the side you want, instead of taking your vote and turning it to look like you want the same thing that the majority in your state want, and the true preference of the country overall is applied. Even if some large states did dominate more, at least that would mean that more of the population actually wanted that result.

The electoral college is almost a feudal system. It's an outdated system designed for a time when a popular vote was simply impractical in any reasonable amount of time. There was simply no way to tally the votes of every person in every state and then get those tallies to Washington DC without weeks of waiting. There wasn't even really a chance to campaign widely because of travel times. All most people got was some news reports and public letters and stuff (and candidates didn't dedicate an entire year to it back then). Instead they'd just designate a bunch of people in the state and let them chose, using whatever manner that state wanted. For the past 100 years we've had the ability to do it all within a couple of days, aside from a possible final recount with all the ballots brought to a central place. And now with it all done electronically, even on paper ballots, we could manage like 99% complete counts within a few hours of the polls closing, if there weren't inevitable complaints about the counts and required recounts and hand counts, and some groups that will simply delay and delay and delay in the hope that after 7 tries the results will change or they'll find a way to get rid of some votes or "find" some votes. There's simply no real, solid reason for the electoral college now. Just tradition, and fear of change, and the simple fact of some politicians knowing that it makes it far easier for them to push the results their way if they don't have to treat everyone equally. Unfortunately the boomer politicians who have that kind of outlook just keep living on and never getting voted out so it won't change.

You're trying to say the UK doesn't have political parties? Because they certainly do. They just don't have the (basically enforced almost absolutely by law in practice if not in the letter of it, by making other parties highly impractical) two-party system that the US has.

A candidate personally handing cash to people while campaigning is blatantly attempting to buy votes. A campaign giving people money while saying "Mr. Trump sends his regards" would be attempting to buy votes. A governor running for re-election giving cash refunds on taxes because there was a temporary budget surplus but still plenty of debt that could be paid off is, ethically, blatantly attempting to buy votes (and worked in some cases that I am personally aware of, with that being the sole factor in the decision) but apparently not from a legal standpoint. A third-party handing people cash and saying "just say you'll vote at all but not for anyone specifically, and that you don't like this candidate but we're not going to check" is not attempting to buy votes. It's not the widest of differences, but it's also not a thin line between them. A third-party handing out cash to sign a petition and refer someone else to sign it is a complicated way to skirt the law but is even less like attempting to buy votes since it doesn't even mention a candidate or a party directly and just happens to be likely to attract a lot of voters from one party.

In both CAH and Elon's case, there's really nothing to stop people from just taking the money with no intention of voting the way that is hoped by the organizers.

However it seems that CAH has decided to back down from the campaign. The site now just redirects to their page about their lawsuit against Musk about the land that he's destroyed, with a mention at the top that you can buy the special card pack and they'll use the money for the PAC, but only in a generic way to get blue-leaning non-voters to vote. The pledge to pay people for it is gone now. They haven't mentioned that anywhere apparently because I couldn't find any news articles about it and there's nothing on their Twitter account.

Re: Link?

They don't make it obvious, but the big "GET PAID TO APOLOGIZE" is actually a button, as is "GET ELECTION PACK: $7.99". The former is down for maintenance at the moment, which could maybe be permanent if they've gotten into trouble.

Re: Link?

Yes, threatening disinheritance to force someone to vote a particular way would be illegal. You cannot in any way try to MAKE someone vote a particular way, or MAKE them vote at all, or make them publicly support a candidate, through any threat, force, intimidation or coercion including paying them or withholding what they would otherwise get. Of course nobody is legally entitled to you leaving them money in your will, but the moment you say it will be taken away if he doesn't vote or vote a certain way, you've broken the law. (And with enough implication, you don't technically need to SAY it in those exact words for a jury to find you guilty.) And yes, it would be foreign influence, making it even worse.

Also, if you actually proceed through the steps with your son's number, you'd be committing fraud. Just getting the information about him might not be illegal, but by submitting the forms to get the money and promising to vote you'd be claiming to be him. Even putting his number in to see what it reports about him COULD also be fraud, depending on the terms of the form and what information it asks for. If they actually start out with words like "by clicking this button I attest that I am this person", then you are claiming to be that person. Since it's down right now I can't see what it looks like.

The reason this is legal is because they aren't "coercing" anyone to do something they don't want to do (or threatening or forcing or intimidating) by voting. The "don't want to do" is a critical part of the definition of coercion, and while they may be paying you to vote, they aren't using money in a way to make it something you don't have a real choice about. They also aren't telling you that you'll only get paid if you vote for who they want you to vote for, though they are obviously saying who they prefer. And the requirement of posting about Donald Trump is technically a separate action, which you're free to do just to get the money and then publicly say "I only said that to get this money" and still vote for him. (The fact that you voted is public record. WHO you voted for is not.) I can't actually step through the process to see if they might cancel your order/payment if you delete your post or repudiate it, because the function is down for maintenance.

Windows 11 24H2 hoards 8.63 GB of junk you can't delete

Yeah that's true. They started it out with the "Delivery Optimization" for Windows Updates, which would connect to other people's PCs on the Internet to get updates through P2P tech, which was so bizarre, brazen and unethical that they backed down and made it only use machines on your local network by default, where it makes sense.

Requiring your PC to waste storage keeping copies of all the update packages so they can download binary differentials is ridiculous. The concept sounds fine in theory EXCEPT when you realize how much space it will mean being used. That's SO much data! That's bigger than the Windows installer ISO! And the vast majority of people just won't give a fuck about the way updates work. Updates ought to be running during off-hours, but really most people have no idea and how much is being downloaded just doesn't matter to them. And the worst part is that it's not going to actually make updates faster, and sure as hell isn't going to make them less likely to destroy your computer.

BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham

You'd know if it was 404C in England because there wouldn't be any rain.

Scammers in the slammer for years after ripping off Apple with fake iPhone returns

Re: Stealing phones worth 5 million or whatever

Well, even 75% of retail when they cost you virtually nothing (except time and whatever the fake ones cost) is still a nice profit. And flagship phones now really don't come with any accessories even when new, just a short USB cable. A quick search indicates refurb iPhones did in fact come with everything a new one had, in 2017, and in a white box, and a video showed an Apple-Certified Pre-Owned iPhone 12 came in a box that basically looked like a new one other than having those words on it. The criminals in this case could quite easily have just sold them as Apple-Certified Pre-Owned phones for nearly the same price that you'd pay anywhere else. There's no reason to think they were selling them as new. Apple charges almost 80% of new for a refurb, and with no way of knowing that these weren't legitimate refurbs, someone buying them online would have little reason not to pay that amount, and would jump at paying only 75%.

Apple likes to make things unrepairable. After a certain point, it's so much work to disassemble them in a way that won't damage anything that it's more cost effective to just tear it apart roughly to get the larger chunks out then shred it and/or melt it down to get the rest. They might pull out some bigger parts like a battery and screen that are cabled in but the rest is soldered, so it gets trashed. It also probably gets sent by the truck-load to wherever this happens, and may have taken a while to get reported, by which point they may have had difficulty tracking where it all was coming from (if they even record things like individual serial numbers from individual components matched up with what phone they came from in the first place and where that one came from).

Re: Stealing phones worth 5 million or whatever

There are innumerable sites on the Internet, even big ones like eBay and Amazon, with no vetting of sellers, where the average person would be perfectly willing to buy these thinking it was a "reseller" or some such and just think it was a great sale, getting rid of inventory, whatever, not knowing that Apple wouldn't allow them to be sold like that. Grandma looking to buy a phone for a grandkid and all she knows is the word iPhone. Someone just determined that they need an iPhone but not knowing why and not being an "Apple person". And frankly, people have been buying brand new products out of the backs of vans in alleys for decades that "fell off the back of a truck" and not questioning the low price. VCRs used to be HUUUUUGE in that market, and cigarettes still are. (I would bet the phones came with basically all new packaging, too, just maybe labeled differently which not everybody would notice. They aren't just throwing a bare refurb phone into a brown box.)

Re: Stealing phones worth 5 million or whatever

Ah yes. Because the government is so well-known for making sure that the financial punishment fits the financial crime.

So, basically, go ahead and do crimes like this if you don't mind 5 years in jail when you can split a few million dollars in profit afterward. (Or a bit less since they likely sold them cheaper than Apple did. But even at 3/4 or half the price, that's a lot of money for 6000 iPhones.) Kind of the American corporate motto: a million dollars in fines for criminal acts is okay when you made 5 million in profit by it.

Apple would have known exactly what phones were sent out in this scheme, at least most of them. Wouldn't they be able to remotely disable them, justified under "receiving stolen property" laws? Or have service providers block them based on IMEI?

Get ready: US port strike may snarl tech supply chains

Re: Black eye for unions and workers

I'm pro-union for the most part (making it impossible to fire incompetent workers like teachers is bad) and certainly pro-worker in general, but a lot of them misuse their power. Shut down non-essential stuff because executives are getting disproportionate pay while workers get nothing, sure, stop making the movies and TV shows, whatever. Start blocking the streets so that other people can't get to their jobs? Cut off the highways so cargo can't be moved? Stop the ports so the country gets shut down and prices that are already high go even higher and we can't get essential stuff? Stop police/ambulance/hospital services? Fuck no, get your ass to work. There has to be some other way to screw the ones in charge but not screw the rest of us.

Re: "some ILA members can make over $200,000 per year"

I don't think anyone thinks they're coincidences. The more pain that can be caused to the ones in charge, the more the hit to their profits (or their votes, in the case of government workers), the better in looks to the unions and the strikers and protesters because it should mean faster concessions, and fuck all the innocent people just trying to get through one day to the next.

Re: "some ILA members can make over $200,000 per year"

When you're earning that through hard labor, in a position that is looked down upon by a large part of society but is absolutely essential to the world, it doesn't seem like all that much. Much like janitors and schoolteachers, but they make even less. Then they all see the executives whose only job is sitting on their asses and deciding just how little the dockworkers, janitors and schoolteachers should be given, and it makes it even less tolerable.

Re: "some ILA members can make over $200,000 per year"

Business bros think that working 14 hours a day and never seeing your family or friends (or having them) and simply stockpiling cash is the way people should live and is the way to get rich and is what life is all about.

"Time to see if industry learned anything from the last shortage crisis" -- What's the best "bet on anything" site where I can put all of my savings on "they haven't"?

Gadget designers get chunky option as USB 20 Gbps controller arrives

Re: Infomercial

Ah yes, that's what it reminds me of. Not quite a direct press release, but definitely not an independent article.

I think Infineon wrote this "article".

Campaigners claim 'Privacy Preserving Attribution' in Firefox does the opposite

Re: They are trying to do the right thing here

The advertisers do need to know WHICH ads worked, and where. Unfortunately the whole advertising and marketing industry, and how horrible they have become, is just a symptom of late-stage capitalism, and something we needed to put controls on many decades ago and now can't pull back on.

That's not a solution to a problem in Edge. That's a grumpy anti-Edge suggestion that doesn't help anybody who wants or needs to use Edge. Obviously "don't use the product" is an option for any product with a problem, but it's not a solution.

Re: Web Site Advertising Preferences

Disabling the technical data going to Mozilla does disable the WSAP function, which is why it shows that it's off when it's grayed out. It can't send data if you've told the browser to never send data to Mozilla, as it's a complete override. The fact that the about:config setting doesn't get changed to match is just poor design, but is only cosmetic. The only reason to enable telemetry and manually disable the setting then disable telemetry again is paranoia, which isn't necessarily bad, but as long as that option doesn't show it's turned on, you should be safe.

And that has what to do with anything?

Re: So how does one turn it off?

Easily discoverable if you have an inkling that you need to go look for that specific type of setting, and then you still have to actually look at every section for changes. That section didn't even exist until this setting was added. For a browser, it needs to be "hey, before you can proceed, you need to be aware that this setting exists".

Re: So how does one turn it off?

That's interesting, since it's a Mozilla thing, and it's not like Apple is known to be working with them to make Safari match Firefox. I wonder if Safari has it on desktop. Doesn't seem to be in Firefox on Android, either.

Re: Web Site Advertising Preferences

Just for your own sake if you don't like the feature, and because they don't explicitly say anything about it and this is confusing, I would make the assumption that about:config is what is actually happening (and so you should change it to false if you really want to make sure this is disabled). I searched though, and it turns out the option gets grayed out and unchecked if you have "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" unchecked (which makes sense, as WSAP sends data to Mozilla). Theoretically this should mean that the settings page's indicator shows what is actually happening and supposedly that's how Firefox normally works, and you can disregard what about:config says. Having one setting automatically change other settings should also be more clearly indicated (since they added WSAP recently, so someone who had telemetry disabled already would have no idea why WSAP was disabled). Good programming and user interface design would make them match, of course, but consistency and following up on things like that has not been a programming guideline for a long time, at any company.

Re: So how does one turn it off?

So Mozilla realized that if Linux users had an easily-discovered setting for this, they'd say "fuck right off" and disable it? But they still try to claim it's good for users?

AI PCs will dominate shipments by 2026, but not because of demand

Re: History repeats itself

It was funny that until pretty recently, you could still see ATI graphics chips in Device Manager on some new servers. And what really sucked with those older chips like the G200e is that Windows Server 2016 and up (maybe even 2012 R2, I forget) just used the generic SVGA driver for them, so they ran at 800x600 and you couldn't increase it even for a 1280x1024 attached monitor until you installed the driver from the server vendor. They're so old Windows stopped including even a half-decent driver but they're still the most common display chip. Can't even get something designed this millennium/century/decade. There are doctors with full degrees younger than these chips.

If you buy an early AI PC, you won't have anything particularly useful to do with it, and you'll get hardware that just barely meets Microsoft's performance requirements to be called an AI PC. Then if AI stuff really does manage to find a use for common users in several years, that hardware will no longer be high-performance enough to run the tasks well since AI will have evolved significantly by then, and you'll need to replace it anyway. Or we'll go back to being able to just run it on general CPU cores. But more likely the hardware will just never get used at all and the money spent will have been wasted.

AI chatbot gets green light to hallucinate your investment portfolio

Israel Discount Bank. If ever there was a product that I was willing to pay full-price for, it would be money. (With healthcare right up there as well, but not inflated US healthcare.)