And that’s about it, I’d say! I find that everything else is really, really bad. It creaks, it wobbles, it warps, and it did so from day 1. The fan is loud and kicks in quite early. Well maybe the X200 isn’t as bad, but the X220 certainly is. And even after 14 years, it still smells when it gets hot.
Sorry for the rant. I really want to love it, but I just can’t.
Quality also went down while with later models - back in 2014 I was laptop shopping, based on the X2xx series reputation I tested an X240 and it was crap, even the keyboard was super bad, I ended up getting a Dell xps13 whose keyboard was miles better and it still works today.
Well "use it" is a bit of a stretch. I’m a bit of a device hoarder. It's one of my experimentation platforms for Linux stuff, currently running Fedora Kinoite (with Universal Blue).
My daily driver (of sorts, don’t really need a laptop anymore) is a MacBook Pro Late 2013, with NixOS. It’s so much better in every regard, it’s not even funny. It also still has its original battery.
Oh yeah, PDF. In a past project I created a monster solution:
* Scriban to fill in templates (LaTeX)
* Custom Angular SSR to reuse frontend components (charts etc)
* Playwright to convert SSR output to PDF
* LuaLaTeX to convert LaTeX document + stuff to PDF
Super slow, but very high quality results. Do not try this at home!
We already did the slipping. Sony sued Quad9 to have them block The Pirate Bay. They only lost after a lengthy legal exchange.
There's also voluntary censorship, so without any real due process, in some countries. Mostly at ISP level, but all the other entities you mentioned could also implement it. They may be forced to, as a means of dodging liability. There's all kinds of nefarious schemes.
What you describe is, at least from my perspective, entirely different from "full integration" (of AI in browsers). Instead, you want to replace computers entirely, with a voice assistant somewhat like Alexa, backed by SOTA STT, TTS and AI (possibly LLM agents).
eventually, but that's going to take a decade at this rate... no one has a voice assistant that can actually do anything worthwhile beyond than flip some light switches
right now we could get a browser that understands what's on the website and can execute a task for me, that's completely possible... every bill I get shouldn't require me to navigate some labyrinth of some 20 year old's idea of a slick user experience
I shouldn't have to learn a new interface for every single thing I do, but that's the reality we're living in... I'd rather AI handle it
I’m confused. I thought Expand and Contract was about mutating an existing schema, adding columns and tables, not creating a full replacement schema. But maybe I misunderstood?
What’s in the article, I know as the Strangler Fig Pattern.
> For column-level changes, this often means adding new columns to a table that have the characteristics you want while leaving the current columns as-is.
I think what makes it confusing is that their diagrams depict a completely separate schema, but what they describe is really just altering the existing schema.
> What’s in the article, I know as the Strangler Fig Pattern.
Strangler fig pattern is mostly concerned with migrating from an old software to a new software, from example from a monolith to microservices. But I guess you can also apply it to database schemas.
Unfortunately, having a landline capable of DSL is no longer the default in Germany.
Some apartment buildings exlusively offer DOCSIS via a single provider (as there's never been any unbundling of the DOCSIS "local loop"; presumably under the assumption that a landline will always be available anyway?).
If that one provider is oversubscribed, you're pretty much out of luck.
High speed internet is a market not just internet access. Email might not care that your on a DSL connection but a streamer can’t generally use DSL as a substitute.
The big difference here is that you're almost never forced to use Deutsche Telekom for wired internet (there are many DSL resellers, and many of them actually provide routing themselves), but in some buildings, there is literally only Vodafone, with no choice of any alternative service provider on top.
They're entrenched. They have Telekom-branded stores (resellers) in every other town. They operate the network and hence have the best ability for trouble shooting. Non-technical users don't know what peering means, they just pay for Internet like they pay for water or power.
So for the "commoners" it seems a solid choice, while we, the Lords & Ladies of tech, are cursing in our basement home labs ;-)
Also, and that's why I'm stuck with them, for some reason they're the only one who offer combined DSL with 5G "boost". Our line is limited to ~45 MBit/s, and we get another 100 MBit/s over 5G. Doing this yourself with multiple links is of course an option, but costs a magnitude more than the 5€ extra I'm paying now; and the day only has so many hours to take care of such private deployments.
But the "walled garden" on mobile (iOS mostly, but now also Android) isn't really about trusted computing at all. Trusted computing (locked bootloaders) is but a small part of it.
Trusted computing and even remote attestation have legitimate use cases. It's good, great even, that they exist. But just like everything, they can be used against you.
In fact most digital goods that are sold in large numbers via download, are, as far as I'm aware, sold with some form of DRM. Like films and video games. Otherwise piracy would be just too easy. MP3s don't have DRMs, and are still sold (e.g. by Amazon), but those now seem to be largely replaced by music subscription services.
And this might be a reaction to the fact that music piracy is quite easy; if it wasn't, perhaps there would be no Spotify where you get basically All The Music in existence for peanuts. (Note that no equivalent subscription service exists with regards to movies or games: Netflix and Xbox Game Pass have only a limited selection of content included in their subscription.)
The second is a real problem even with completely unique applications. If they have UI portions that have lookalikes, you will get flagged. At work, I created an application with a sign-in popup. Because it's for internal use only, the form in the popup is very basic, just username and password and a button. Safe Browsing continues to block this application to this day, despite multiple appeals.
Sorry for the rant. I really want to love it, but I just can’t.
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