yeah i work in tech (at a bank rn) and the mainframes are hilarious. a constant source of downtime, and insanely overpriced hardware to boot.

literally i can’t think of any downtime our services have had in the last six months that wasn’t caused by the mainframe’s downtime. this is dozens of cases.

but they will basically never be replaced. maybe in 100 years? ha

so have i. this is the technology community, after all. for a couple years i worked for a major cruise line and each ship had an AS400 on board. so I’m familiar with mainframes, and sure they are un-removable for a number of reasons. but that statement was stupid

what ads?

ok this article was a hilarious shit show. full of gems like

The former Treasury official told us that mainframes—and COBOL, the ancient programming language they often run—are really good for what they do,

ffs

just a couple of regular old politicians

there’s so many! but which ones!?!

same on Voyager (in post view)

106%

also, the disrespect for software that powers the fucking touchscreen is insane (as a non-biased software developer)

the part that worries me is that planes with touchscreens are coming

it aint just tesla. i was at a wedding this week and one of my pals rented an electric Ford. no regular door handles, no climate or radio control buttons. we ended up roasting it the whole time. the future is now! he paid $40 to get 200 miles of charge and it only took 90 minutes. all the buttons were screens and the levers were buttons or knobs! seriously stupid

i was trying to find a link to Apache’s chat server that we used to power cruise ship chat applications w/out internet. i didn’t find it but this list i found has some neat projects listed, so i thought i would share that at least: https://medevel.com/26-os-chat-servers/ (no affiliation)

Larry Ellison just gave a big talk on this tech coming to America soon. fuckin billionaires

a monopoly patent was literally a government invention. an actual monopoly does require the government. what you are talking about is called a “natural monopoly” in the literature. that would be a situation where there’s only one seller for something like say water in a desert town. in that case you can have price gouging and such.

now, the important bit is the LEGAL ability to prevent competition. if there is a natural monopoly on water, and the seller decided to start charging obscene amounts for water, those extreme profits would normally induce other sellers to enter the market. except when they are legally prohibited, we can expect that a natural monopoly will not last if what we call “monopoly rents” are extracted.

so you see, a true monopoly requires legal force, eg the state.

but almost no two libertarians will agree about those things. if you think there is only one “blessed” or accepted viewpoint on those topics, you’ve been duped.

for example on the rights of kids. there will be somebody who will argue they fully own themselves and parents are never allowed to hit children or otherwise harm them. then there will be some idiot who argues that because babies are helpless and the parents made it, that the parents “own” the child until some point and can do what they want with it. other libertarians will have even more differing viewpoints.

yep, my most heavily-trafficked site is https://bongo.to which Cloudflare doesn’t support for registration. so i have the domain registered with Namecheap but hosted still via Cloudflare. Nowadays I’d check out Porkbun also, I’ve heard good things.

in case you were wondering, you can attach a bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. or you can use it to act as a monitor for your macbook, so you could type on that. theres a virtual keyboard too, but if course it would suck to work on (based on second hand reports, i’ve never used one)

i think “really big screen” for movies or laptop display is about it for useful work features. also, some people like to put windows everywhere and work like that ig.

Cloudflare is by far the cheapest registrar & host I’ve used. I’m on their free plan, which can handle almost any load (thousands of requests a week for me personally). The domains are sold at cost, so around $10 for my dot-coms. So $10/yr covers it.