mattdotc

Point taken. I'd still maintain that the stock buybacks are egregious and need to stop.

Not sure where your 6% figure comes from, but you can easily find the 2023 Annual Report which states the following:

Adjusted operating profit margin (adjusted operating profit expressed as a percentage of revenues) increased to 16.1% in 2023, compared with 15.1% in 2022.

You might also look into the NYT's recent history of stock buybacks while denying raises to their lowest-paid employees. The money is there.

Watch for public statements from the union. A striking unit will generally inform the general public if they are looking for any show of support. No need to assume that a boycott is desired!

unhoused people were never prospective clients of the real estate industry, but of course this is irrelevant when you can just twist and contort someone else's argument to make it easier to dismiss.

your arrogance is surpassed only by your foolishness.

You were complaining about being inaccurately quoted in press releases. Press releases are written by comms dept within a business, so if you have a complaint with how they're written, that's something to take up with your internal teams, not with external journalists.

Corporate communications is not journalism, so what's your point?

Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place.

Or we run our own media streaming setup rather than pay Spotify $10/month. Spotify gives the illusion of supporting artists but the artists you listen to will never see a significant amount of money from your subscription fee.

I've downloaded thousands of albums over the years and have my own music library. Why should I pay Spotify for doing the same thing? This is literally how they seeded their library when they started out.

I have since mainly moved from torrenting to buying vinyl and using Bandcamp like others here have mentioned. I still see artists tour on occasion, but I'm not convinced that touring is sustainable for musicians, so I'd rather buy the album.

It's sad to me that so many have bought the lie that Spotify et al have pushed. They are no different from the music labels.

DIY 'til I die.

I've been thinking about replacing the hard drive and battery in mine for the past few years. The wheel-based iPods really did have the best UI for music in any device I've ever owned. If you're familiar with it, you can navigate with extraordinary ease.

TimesOpen is an engineer-driven blog. Its previous incarnation was self-hosted on a WordPress stack (separate from our main CMS), but for various reasons it was decided to re-platform.

There were many discussions before settling on Medium and alternatives were considered (such as dogfooding our own CMS). We have a lot of work in-flight to modernize and simplify our publishing stack, and the timing wasn't right to rely on internal tools to publish a new blog.

I understand and agree with your stance on the sense of entitlement that some people have regarding software purchases, but I feel like you might have missed one of the finer points being made here. My response somewhat assumes that you either do not own recent Nintendo consoles, or at a minimum, are a very casual user of their platforms and are not aware of some of the shenanigans they've been up to due to negligence or incompetence in the digital space.

Purchases of their Virtual Console games for one console do not transfer across platforms. If you bought Mario 3 for Wii, you'll have to buy it again if you want to play it on the go for your 3DS. Furthermore, licenses for digital purchases on the 3DS (and maybe other consoles?) were tied to hardware IDs, resulting in a super-tedious license transfer process for anyone unlucky enough to need a repair or for those who had the nerve to voluntarily upgrade their system to one of Nintendo's hardware revisions.

So in some sense, they _do_ or, at least, reasonably _should_ have the infrastructure to manage digital purchases in a customer-friendly way, but instead settled for a system which forces people to re-purchase the same title for different platforms. Compare this to Sony and Microsoft, whose digital shops allow cross-platform purchases for many titles.

To add to all of this, Nintendo has a very confusing maze of different account systems for their different services and it is very tough to navigate which accounts serve which purpose. I have at least 3 accounts for Nintendo services at this point and it's still not clear to me what the deal is.

All of these factors combined make re-purchasing Zelda several times over a harder pill to swallow.

Total shot in the dark, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit if they licensed usage of the API to "Authorized Board Partners" for an extra fee.

This is really cool. Thanks for writing it up. I have also felt for while that the tools are terribly designed/clunky.

Maybe one day, hardware manufacturers will drop the cliche 'gamer aesthetic'... maybe...

As I understand it, the plugin system is poorly documented, and it seemed like most of the popular ones were being maintained by one guy:

https://github.com/josh4trunks/freenas-plugins

Before rushing to upgrade, take note that they are abandoning the plugin system for, what I believe is, a docker-based approach for services. Don't quote me on that second part, but I'm fairly certain you will need to reconfigure any services which are presently running as a plugin.

If you have custom jails, then you really don't need my advice :)

FWIW, I replaced my WiFi/Bluetooth adapter immediately upon receiving my 9343. I had been following the XPS13 developer edition forums for a while, and the adapter that shipped with most XPS13 had a Broadcom chipset with bad Linux support. An Intel card was recommended instead. I actually had my card on-hand hand ready to go the day I received the laptop shipment.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RCZ4I6S/ref=od_aui_deta...

Here's the caves.jpg fixed:

http://imgur.com/a/WBqiL

One perfect layer

That's the problem.

My only regret about getting into his channel is that now I have seen all of his videos and I have to wait 7 days for each new one.

His channel is great for more than just its content; it's also inspirational. My father has been a hobbyist woodworker and he has a small basement shop. Growing up I would frequently be down there with him 'helping' here and there, but never really built much of anything on my own besides a few small projects.

Watching Matthias' videos rekindled my interest in the hobby and I even picked up some new tricks along the way. It has also been great to get back into the shop with my dad and spend real quality time with him.

Matthias, if you ever read this: thanks!!!

I was running a 2500K until this past July. Upgraded to Broadwell-E for the same reasons you mentioned (even though it was also regarded a flop). I'm using the "Samsung 950 PRO Series - 512GB PCIe NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD" and it is a beast.

My old desktop was passed down to my wife, who was previously using my 3rd most recent desktop, a Core2 Duo (E6600 I think). The 2500K/2600K still has much life left in it for many tasks.

Here's some examples of dithering being used in order to do effects like gradients and pseudo-transparency:

http://retro-sanctuary.com/comparisons%20-%20differing.html

I'm deep into this hobby and I can tell you that the AVS is one of the better solutions for the average person looking to play NES games. There are various mods you can do to original hardware for use on modern displays, but they can be pretty pricey, especially if you need someone else to do the [non-trivial] installation.

Furthermore, original hardware can be finicky; the NES has a notoriously unreliable connector for reading carts and requires a bulky AC adapter. Meanwhile, the AVS has an improved design, new/clean cart connector and runs off 5V from a USB port on the back; most people can plug it into their TV, receiver, or any other device in their entertainment system with a spare USB port (like an Xbox or PlayStation).

It's a superb value for someone with the cash to burn. I own both the NES and the AVS and think both are fantastic, but would recommend the AVS to friends and the NES to purists.

Surely you aren't suggesting that New Yorkers should forage in Central Park...it's a public space, not your privately-owned backyard.

How did it get on the authorities' radar?

Same way you know about it, I guess. An open secret really isn't a secret.

It's true; the members of sites like what and waffles were dedicated to quality. People would go to great lengths to ensure quality was upheld: from keeping detailed logs of the ripping and transcoding processes, to generate spectrograms to weed out sub-par webrips and fake encodes.

It's really a shame...

Fruit Ninja is a blast. Even my father (non-gamer) had a blast with it and picked it up right away.

I guess you aren't familiar with KeePass. If your KeePass database is pwnd, that means your box has been pwnd since the database is stored locally and not any cloud provider (unless YOU put it there). This means you have much bigger problems and is not a shortcoming of KeePass, itself.

As a full disclaimer, there are some issues with KeePass [1], but known issues are detailed in full by the project and are available for review.

1. http://keepass.info/help/kb/sec_issues.html

You'll get over that little hurdle once you realize that you can dump the anxiety of remembering a hundred password variants for different sites. And realistically speaking, you're probably not even using a hundred variants...or possibly even 10. If you're memorizing passwords, chances are your re-use frequency is nonzero.

What's important is to keep a backup of your password database in a few places. I use KeePass because I have no desire to keep passwords, encrypted or not, in a cloud service. I also don't find value in browser integration (possible attack vector?). I'm generally very DIY-inclined anyway. Your preferences may vary.

If you're using a password manager, that's a non-issue. And until we have something better than passwords, you really should be using one.

I own DK1, DK2, Vive and tried Rift CV1 at a Best Buy. Was not impressed by the tracking on the Rift CV1. Perhaps it was the demo or demo environment, but it didn't feel as smooth. It definitely 'cut out' a few times, albeit very briefly. Have you experienced that at home?

You didn't need to do a WHOIS to figure that out. The information you 'found' is right there on the page. Just scroll...