nucleative

"Ever" is a long time. Human progress seems to come and go based on need and economics. At the moment we seem pretty distracted by local problems and I don't think any of us will still be around by the time humans kill the Earth, so it doesn't seem all that pressing.

But someday the technical issues will be solved and a sustainable habitat will be able to coast through space for however long it takes to travel beyond Mars to somewhere else interesting. When it's possible, I think some people will do it, perhaps a lot of people.

It's a worthy goal. As a human I feel some motivation to ensure the continuation of our species so I would lean towards any efforts that involve sending some backup copies of our DNA to some off-site storage.

I remember that IBM was famously missing the trend in the late 80s/90s and couldn't understand why regular consumers would ever want to buy a PC. It's why they gave the PC clone market away, never seriously approached their OS/2 thing, and never really marketed directly to anybody except businesses.

Microsoft really pushed the idea that regular people needed a home PC which laid the foundation for so many people already having the hardware in place to jump on the internet as soon as it became accessible.

For a brief moment it looked like a toss up between Microsoft IIS webservers serving up .asp files (or coldfusion .cf - RIP) vs Apache pushing CGI but in the end the Linux solution was more baked and flexible when it was time to launch and scale an internet startup in that era.

Somebody else would have done what Microsoft did for sure, had they not been there, and I suppose we could be paying AT&T for Unix licenses these days too. But yeah, ultimately both Gates and Torvalds were right in terms of operating systems and well timed.

Both Torvalds and Gates are nerds... Gates decided to monetize it and Torvalds decided to give it away.

But without Microsoft's "PC on every desktop" vision for the '90s, we may not have seen such an increased demand for server infrastructure which is all running the Linux kernel now.

Arguably Torvalds' strategy had a greater impact than Gates because now many of us carry his kernel in our pocket. But I think both needed each other to get where we are today.

Pretty sure I know what the top Halloween costume will be this year!

So apex that most of us outsource our hunting and farming, which makes us fat and slow unless we purposefully burn energy for no other purpose than to burn it.

Interesting, that's got to be intentional. Microsoft was so slow to webbify their Office suite (and probably thought why should we?it's printing money!) that they lost out on a generation of startup companies.

The thought of switching back to Microsoft hasn't even crossed my mind since I moved everything to Google around a decade ago. But now I'm actively de-googling because they're starting to mess with the core solutions.

There was a time when gsuite was a scrappy little service that gave you a serious option that wasn't Micro$oft (which at the time was deep into shady monopolistic practices) at a fraction of the price with replacements that were good enough for most small businesses.

If memory serves, the initial price was around $20 or perhaps $50 a YEAR per user. It was a steal if you were used to paying 10 times that for an annual subscription to Microsoft Office Pro plus needing to support a local NT server running Microsoft Exchange and probably a file server that needed backups and antivirus and on and on.

As more and more businesses have gone SaaS and put the whole thing in the cloud, Google has capitalized on this by cranking up the prices while probably scanning and using our data for their benefits somehow (mostly without adding additional features... Google Sheets is nowhere close to feature parity with Excel).

Thankfully we now have way more FOSS and private cloud solutions such as Nextcloud.

I still can't help but notice, however that feature-wise we really haven't gone anywhere in 25 plus years.

Injecting AI buttons into Google Workspace or whatever they call it now is probably not a feature that too many of their customers are asking for. But in the never ending push to increase revenue, it seems like now we're going to get it and that's the justification for the latest price jump.

Websockets are often used for quality of life features like notifications and websites that are dynamic without needing to be refreshed. Almost went website with any kind of chat will use WS for example. Turning it off will make web browsing a little more annoying.

However websockets are also sometimes used for anti-fraud related software that can also leak information you may deem private. Disabling websockets might prevent that data from getting out but of course all this depends on your threat model.

I'll be heli-skiing this weekend, is it a good time for you to install my new theater audio system?

Somebody must have had a rad cable label machine

Yes. Nobody wants to be first because they and the next xx% will be the sacrifice.

Yes