Xymist

SS (and the equivalent in other countries) was, in hindsight, an incredibly stupid system to set up that way - people should be exclusively contributing to cover _themselves_ so that it's a saving/investment scheme rather than a pyramid scheme. If you're in poverty in retirement that shouldn't be because the current generation of workers is shrinking. It should be because you failed (or were unable - doesn't matter which) to carry forward enough from your own career.

The shaping isn't necessarily productive, though. My company has a policy wherein a the dev team are on a rota to assist the support team (and by extension clients) with technical queries. The net effect has been to make me hate customers with a passion usually reserved for opposing political regimes and childhood bullies.

There's really only one acceptable price for an OS, and it's the same as the only acceptable price for a browser or DB - $0.00. The precedent has been pretty solidly set (Linux, FreeBSD, MySQL, Postgres, Chrome, Firefox...) at this point, hence all the pivots to charging for service and support and suchlike.

Which companies are those? My last batch of Levi's moved them into "never again" status - noticeably cheaper fabric than the previous batch, flawed stitching, cheaper logos and tags. I paid more per pair than five years ago (unacceptable for a commodity) and got a worse product (doubly unacceptable for anything). I need tough black jeans I can trust to last a decade; I don't mind spending £250 on them but I do mind getting soft cheap cotton which will go to holes just from daily wear.

Others have covered why that isn't what's being done, but also if it was that would be a _fabulous_ joke.

If the price of privacy is children, damn the children. We're having fewer (nowhere near few enough, but fewer) of them anyway, they should not be used as a reason to restrict everyone else. Especially as they become that everyone else after a few short years.

The phrasing they chose is particularly amusing, since it's always false regardless of the day. They could have said "usual service", and left in the plausible acknowledgement of the fact that it's hot, cramped, miserable, grubby, loud, plague-ridden, mouse-ridden, and generally unpleasant.

Yes, ish. Shopping is delivered, cooking is a hobby (or takeaway), cleaning services for a couple of hours a week is often practical even if actually having a full time housekeeper isn't. Convert money from the unenjoyable part into time in the enjoyable part.

It's a pretty sensible policy, really. Corollary to Hyrum's Law - do not permit your API to have any behaviours, useful or otherwise, which someone might depend on but which aren't part of your design goals. For programmers in particular, who are sodding munchkins and cannot be trusted not to do something clever but unintended just because it solves a problem for them, that means aggressively hamstringing everything.

A flathead screwdriver should bend like rubber if someone tries to use it as a prybar.

16GB is _not_ sufficient if you have Jellyfin or Immich or similar and a lot of media you want to scroll through quickly; I've found I need a lot of ZFS cache for that to be as responsive as I want, even with SSD storage.

Straightforwardly, nobody with the resources to build and maintain a browser could ever be trusted to do so, as they get those resources from somewhere, and it's going to be somewhere unacceptable (ads, trackers, Google, taxes, selling the browser or addons/features as a product, hostile nation states).

These things are far too complex and expensive to be produced as they should and as most FOSS is: for free, by a group of individuals who could fit around a breakfast table and don't answer to anyone but each other.

I feel like you're trying to be sarky with the "#winWin", but genuinely yes. If the tradeoff is that someone gets to feel important and have a plaque put up with their name on it, and something good but expensive happens which otherwise could not, everyone absolutely does win. Even better than taxes because it's a specific goal and consensual on all sides.

ESP32-C6, and associated dev boards.

This factor (95% of "your audience" not being interested at the time) is the core of why all marketing is unavoidably scummy.

I don't want to hear about your product _ever_, except on the day I am looking for a product which provides the function your product does. On that day, I don't want to hear about it from you or anyone you have anything to do with; I want a list of products in that space, curated by an independent third party you have never spoken to and cannot influence in any way, with a clear featureset and upfront costs comparison table that does not have any variant on "talk to their sales team" anywhere near it.

Seagate have an Exos M in 36TB for about £450, so 24 of those could do it. Three vdevs with one parity drive each? Call the project £13k?

Not exactly a production grade setup, but it'd do the job and you'll see fewer failures each year than in 544 10k SAS drives.