If you're a big business, you'll save money going with a M365 subscription over a perpetual license.

Why? Because M365 is licensed per user, while Office is licensed per-computer. M365 allows up to 5 PCs to use the same license (which may include a personal install on the user's home PC), while office perpetual is licensed just on that PC.

If you've got an employee with a desktop and a laptop, they're going to have to have 2 perpetual office licenses, or one subscription. Given the costs are roughly the same (if you buy a new version every 3 years or so) not having to have two licenses is cheaper.

In additional Microsoft is part of the gang of companies that can demand accounting of all the licenses in use. So you start having to produce receipts of purchasing as many licenses as computers. M365 being licensed per user makes this much easier to manage since you only need one per employee.

Who will buy all that sweet, sweet private info without the ability to sell it?/blockquote

Lots. Companies that deal with LEOs will love to get at this data - they can offer searches of all that genetic data to help find potential suspects in crimes.

Those companies don't need to sell the data, they just sell a service to scan the data for potential partial matches for a subscription fee.

How much longer will there even be an FTC? Not holding my breath for enforcement in the current environment.

Not long, wasn't Elon Musk being investigated by the FTC? He's been going through the agencies that have been investigating him or his companies, so I'm surprised there is an FTC to speak of right now.

but in the 1980's it stood for the villain of the Tron series, Master Control Program.

Of course, the Master Control Program is really just another term for Operating System these days. So tying the two together we end up with Windows and CoPilot....

Finally, some sanity in the whole discussion of AI coding.

No, our software development jobs aren't going away any time soon. The typing part is just going to get a little easier.

There always was sanity. If you watch vibe coders at work, you can tell the tools are nowhere near where they're hyped at. Sure the early days they seemed cool enough where ChatGPT would get you a lot of code that seemed to work, but ask it more sophisticated problems and things break down really quickly. There are plenty of videos of people doing it.

Also, check out the App Store or the Google Play Store and you can see some categories of apps have exploded, because that's what the AI coding would generate. Things like "meditation" or "mindfulness" type apps have exploded in number.

Of course, the hype will still be there because we're in the AI hype cycle, but if you've seen the jobs asking for vibe coders, you'll be less than impressed. Most of those jobs are paying not much more than minimum wage.

And I think at best we'll see the destruction of a new job - the prompt engineer.

AI slop is still junk, regardless of if it's a photo, a picture, music, books, papers, or code. Basically the only thing AI does is provide the initial bulk, it still requires a lot of human input, modification, revision, and other things to turn it into something useful. And chances are if you tried it, it would take you longer than if you did it yourself. At best, it might provide inspiration.

That's not to say AI didn't benefit me - but its contributions had to be carefully monitored and in the end I didn't use the vast majority of what it provided. It did provide help with some troublesome phrasing, but that's it. The rest of it was just crap, slop and hallucinations and was unusable.

AMD is doing very nicely with their GPUs nowadays, because nVidia basically exited the gaming market. Sure, they have the top dog GPUs, but that's it - they aren't concentrating on selling those cards very much hence all the shortages. That's because gaming GPUs make up a tiny amount of nVidia's revenue so they're concentrating less on gaming, and more on AI and other things.

It's why they just price their top end GPU at $2000 and call it a day - they don't care if people buy it or not. If gamers want to pay for that extra FPS, nVidia will sell it to them.

Meanwhile AMD is seeing good sales of their high end card, which can't compete with nVidia's top end, but is very competitive at the price point for midrange cards of $500 and under. They are selling through every card they make because you just can't get any nVidia cards.

Meanwhile, Intel's Arc cards are good for the lower end are surprisingly good on the latest handhelds using them

I don't see Intel chomping at the midrange level, but the low to mid range will probably work for them in the budget gaming arena

Also some astonishingly bad cell phone modems.

Except that Intel sold that to Apple, who managed to turn them around into a surprisingly decent modem in the C1 chip on the iPhone 16E.

It's apparently quite competitive with the Qualcomm modem, except lacking the mmWave support to achieve the ultra-high-speed transfers.

Except for the experience of going with a group, I don't see a reason to go to a theater.

Says the person who lives in a house, likely in the suburbs.

Because a large TV, nice sound system, etc, are much less possible if you live in the city, so you're likely watching movies on a 50" TV with TV speakers or a soundbar turned on low.

Megaplexes might be hard to get to since they're almost always located out of the area, but smaller theatres are located in many urban centers offering people who prefer to walk or transit to get around the ability to get big screen and big sound.

So maybe it's dying in the US, but if your apartment's the size of a shoebox, they aren't going anywhere yet. And yes, there's always the option of moving, but then you often need to then acquire a car, with maintenance, insurance, etc, and then sit through long commutes often in bad traffic. So there are tradeoffs.

yeah imagine having all that money and still caring so much what randos think of you.

What a petty, petulant child. I bet he and the orange idiot get along well.

You forgot about Elon Musk, the world's richest man-baby. He bought a social network just so he could control what people were saying about him on it. Then he started buying elections because people stopped using his social network.

Yeah, having PV panels is just a gimmick. Because we've had solar powered EVs for years - just that the solar panels were located in more static locations, their power used to charge the battery of the EV.

Of course, that being a given, they could just get rid of the PV cells on the vehicle and eliminate the weight and cost of all the support equipment as well, which should improve the efficiency numbers even more.

But I guess the only way to make news is to have a gimmick, so here we are.

Nitrogen gas doesn't like to participate in reactions. That nasty triple bond in molecular nitrogen makes it really stable because it takes so much energy to break it. That said, it isn't impossible to break, and there are bacteria that do it in the soil, usually as part of symbiosis with a plant's roots. The plant provides the energy, the bacteria uses that energy to help break the triple bond and provides it to the plant.

But I wouldn't call it the start of life. I'd say it happened through evolution - a bacteria found it had the ability to split molecular nitrogen and produce something useful with it, and then latched onto plants who discovered an easy way to get nitrogen.

It's just really hard to use nitrogen otherwise. It took the discovery of the Haber process to turn nitrogen gas into more useful ammonia before we really had a use for all that nitrogen gas.

Those kei trucks are great for urban areas though, where the density is pretty high. If you do deliveries in a downtown area, having a smaller truck is great for zipping around packed streets and fitting into small parking spaces.

That's why people love them. Also, they're very efficient on gas.

If you need the ability to carry a lot of stuff, but a pickup like the F-150 is too big to go around downtown, a Kei is really good because they can haul a lot more than a car, without taking much more footprint.

Of course, the main reason they're illegal is not safety, it's because they're small, lightweight, great on gas, and that is not the general messaging the Big 3 want to make. Because big trucks and SUVs are way more profitable per vehicle than a smaller truck.

The reason they're illegal is heavy lobbying by the car companies to make them illegal because they don't want to compete with people finding smaller trucks much more useful for going around town, especially for work trucks and such. Pickup trucks are used for work, and if you're forced to buy a $70,000 F-150 that gets 8mpg even if it's way more truck than you need, that's better for Ford than if you discover you can get a Kei car for $15,000 all in, that gets 30mpg and you can actually park it and go about your day.

The Big 3 have been giving a narrative that only big vehicles will do since the late 80s, which is why there's the rise of the SUV as the family hauler over say, the station wagon. Or why SUVs over minivans.

Part of the auto tariffs is because the Big 3 refuse to make smaller more efficient vehicles and that's a niche that Japanese and other foreign makes did to invade the US in the 70s.

Sodium ions have many advantages, but portability isn't one of them, because the sodium atom is about 3 times heavier (atomic weight 23) versus lithium (7). This is because lithium is atomic number 3, while sodium is 11.

It is, however, a much cleaner chemistry - using water based electrolytes, and sustainable iron based electrodes. It's also much cheaper to use because everything in a sodium ion battery is cheap - the raw materials are common (sodium, iron are easy and cheap materials) and plentiful.

The current power density is around that of LiFePO4.

But you have to remember, lithium ion batteries have had over 50 years of development, and have been commercially available for 30 years. Sodium ion batteries are only been around for 30 years, with commercial availability for 15 or so, with it becoming more common the past 5 or so.

But not needing stuff like nickel and cobalt makes sodium ion a much bettery technology in the end. I expect them to start showing up first in grid storage, house storage batteries and then electric vehicles where their weight will be less of an issue, and their economic cost to be a major advantage since they need massive amounts of batteries.

Of course they are. The whole "250 year olds are getting social security!" thing was showing how ignorant of the whole thing they are.

Everyone is celebrating the "waste" and "fraud" they find, but a lot of these things have delayed effects that we won't see for months.

Things like USAID being disbanded is going to hurt a LOT of farmers because they were a big customer buying lots of surplus food to give away. That stuff won't happen until the fall harvest and suddenly farmers will go bankrupt.

They're panicking right now because the stopping of IRA (inflation reduction act) payments meant many of the improvements they paid for are no longer being paid for, so now they're stuck having paid for something they wouldn't have bought otherwise.

And now they're wanting to force SS recipients to visit in person an SSA office, many of which were closed during the mass firing.

This stuff is like a timebomb - it doesn't go off now, it'll go off way in the future.

Even more funny is that farmers, verterans, etc., the people most affected by all this, generally are hardcore Republican voters.

The "FO" part of "FAFO" is coming.

How is a company that made $100 million in revenue last year through corporate nepotism -- and lost $1B worth $80B? Does Musk get to just completely make up the value of his companies like Trump does his properties? Are there any auditors in this process?

Basically a valuation is just a random number pulled out of thin air.

Say you're going for investment funding, and your VC says they'll pick up 10% at $100M. That means your valuation is $1B - because the VC firm is buying 10% of it for $100M, so 100% of the company is worth $1B.

Given the AI hype, it's likely there's a lot of overblown valuations out there - all Musk needs to do is find someone to say they'll buy 1% of xAI for $100M and you have $10B valuation.

Musk can easily say he'll put in $1B for 1% of the company, and hey, $100B valuation.