eBay? That's your go-to for new product research?

I can walk over to Microcenter with $600 and walk out with a spiffy laptop with an 8 core snapdragon CPU, 16 gig of RAM and 1TB of storage - running Win 11, the same OS most companies & schools run. (Acer Aspire 14 and 16 laptops in specific)

The people excited about a $600 iPad are looking for a laptop to take the place of an iPad, and they have to be casual users that don't have specific software requirements/needs - nothing beyond a browser or office suite.

There are a lot of them, but not enough to scare or "terrify" a company like Acer in any meaningful way.

5-6 million pieces is a far cry from 'limited edition' in my opinion...

No PC vendor is seriously worried about a $600 Mac iPad w/ keyboard attached - they mostly all offer a lower price model Windows laptop.

It's an interesting product, it's targeted at the lower-end of the market, but it's not going put a serious crimp in any Win laptop Mfg sales.

He gave cash to name the building, if they strip off the name, it is conceivable he is entitled to consideration - otherwise, the school could continually resell naming rights anytime it wanted, tanking the value of naming the building and eliminating an easy source of income/donations.

What's wrong with that? He wanted Detroit to have a zoo and golf course, and structured his donation to enable/enforce that.

If you accepted cash to name the building after Gates, will you give back the cash if you rename the building?

Things named after Chavez were named as an honor to him.

Things named after Gates, et al, were bought and paid for with (presumably) very, very large cash donations from Gates.

Would schools give back the money 'evil' Bill Gates gave to name facilities after him? I doubt it.

What has *actually* been proven about Bill Gates and Epstein? AFAIK the issue is they were buddies, and his wife left him because of his association with Epstein - I'm not aware of anyone claiming Gates personally took advantage of anyone, etc.

Lots of politicians took donations from Epstein, are they "tarred with the same brush" as Epstein?

4K BASIC was in ROM, not RAM.

As I recall most Disc-based OSes of the ROM Basic era required 16K of RAM to support the disc operating system...

Please, explain why that advertising campaign isn't winning over more converts? Have Linux usage numbers gone up dramatically since Win 10 went off-support?

Real people that care about security updates (a small minority of the computer using population) don't complain that their 7-10 year-old computer is no longer supported and needs to be upgraded, and people that don't care about security updates won't update their 7-10 year-old computer and happily run Win 10 a few more years.

Apple introduced a $600 iPad with a keyboard.

It's (Mac) Netbook 2.0, nothing more than that.

Kernel support for an architecture does not translate to distribution support for that architecture. Just because a Linux kernel supports a 486 CPU, but that doesn't mean the latest distribution of a given flavor of Linux will run on a 486.

For example, can Ubuntu 2024 LTS run on a 486 machine?

Hasn't this already happened? From 2025 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/...

For instance, the article mentions that the median price of a home is about $500k. This likely isn't enough to buy a studio apartment in lower Manhattan.

Manhattan isn't considered "typical" by most measures. 'Middle class' Americans don't buy apartments in Manhattan, wealthy American buy in Manhattan, middle class Americans rent.

But, but - what about the wage gap?!?! I hear it's worse than ever...

So, to be clear, that means Senators & Congressmen are "upper middle class" by virtue of earning about $175K/yr, right?

"Punative taxes" on EVs? Explain.

When the federal gov't stopped SUBSIDIZING EVs folks called that punative, it's not, it's prudent.

When states talk about assessing road usage fees on EVs to make up for lost road taxes that would normally have been collected on gasoline purchases, some call it punative, it's just prudent.

People aren't 'owed' $7,500 for an EV purchase, nor are EVs entitled to use our public roads for free - so please, don't try and claim treating EVs like ICE vehicles as "punative."

An employer trying to figure out how little they can offer an individual seems like a lot of work, which will blow-up in their face if/when the employees compare compensation packages.

I can't imagine an employer doing this on any sort of large group of employees. Unless you have a mono-sexual, mono-racial workforce, different individual compensation for the same job is just a shit-storm waiting to happen. What if Women are, generally, paid less then men in the same position? Or if minorities are paid less than Caucasian workers?

I've worked in places where one worker ;an older woman) learned she was paid about $5K less than her colleagues, but that was because she came to the job with no experience, the others had 5-10 years industry experience when they were hired. She felt she was 'cheated', it affected her work and her relationships with coworkers. Ultimately they quietly bumped up her pay, but she still complained - it turned out bad for her (impacted her review, cost her a performance raise at year-end).

Bottom line, the worker is owed what the employer offers and the employee accepts. If the offer is too low, don't accept it. It isn't anyone's fault but your own if you accept a too-low offer.

I don't understand the outrage of using publicly-available information to make a business decision - in realpage scandal a company used computers to determine the maximal rent a landlord/owner could charge a tenant, and in this case an employer is using a service to create a profile of a worker from public information to figure out how low an offer the candidate is likely to accept. These are things that have been manually done for decades, but somehow automating it makes it bad?

Employers look at candidates, review their job history, and arrive at a number they think the candidate will accept. That a candidate has gone and used payday loans is (apparently) publicly-available info - the issue is to maybe make the info private?

Employers do background checks, criminal record checks, and, I would assume, some sort of financial background check before hiring certain workers - it's labor-intensive, so probably not very common, but for certain occupations, I'm sure it's standard.