If Microsoft had added an Android app runtime (even if it were slow), they would’ve had a much better argument for buying Windows phones. As it was, their sales pitch was “buy a phone with this new OS that doesn’t run any of your apps, from the guys who made WinCE” (Windows Phone) and “buy a phone with this new OS that looks exactly like the last OS but won’t run apps from that one or Android” (Windows 10 Phone).

By the time Win10P dropped, nobody expected Microsoft to actually commit to it (so the enthusiast crowd stayed away) and its app ecosystem was literally a decade behind the competition (so casual users wouldn’t touch it). And then Microsoft didn’t see sales and promptly canceled the whole thing.

Well, that heavily depends upon factors like what kind of lifestyle you’re living. For example, I save a shitload of money by not needing a car.

In general I’d say that someone who lives in my town and makes roughly what I do could save 1k to 2k per month depending on how much discretionary spending they want to be able to do. Possibly more if they’re very frugal.

In case we’re comparing to the USA here, Germany has lower wages and higher taxes but a lot of stuff is way cheaper, especially education and healthcare. My health insurance premium can’t exceed 14.6% of my income, deductibles don’t exist, and most procedures are fully covered – for instance, when I went to a hospital for surgery and stayed for four days, my total bill was 40 €.

No, I misread (“do” instead of “make”).

I went from something like 25k to something like 50k, which still wasn’t impressive but okay for a junior-level dev. And vastly better than what I made before.

These days I’m somewhere north of 80k but monthly bonuses tied to company performance make it hard to give an accurate number off the top of my head. Depending on who you ask that’s either above or below average for someone of my experience level.

Germany.

The minimum notice time scales with employment duration (if the company terminates the contact) or is four weeks (if the employee quits). However, the contact can state a longer period; this is often done to make the notice time symmetrical. The notice period for the employee can never exceed that for the company. Usually, contacts can only be terminated effective at the end of a month so that can extend things a bit further.

At-will employment is not a thing in Germany except for informal arrangement like paying the neighbor’s kid to mow the lawn. Even during the trial period (a period of typically six months at the start of an employment where firing the employee is much easier) two weeks are the absolute minimum.

I’ve changed jobs since then; these days I still do software but in the financial sector (which is a highly annoying sector since the problem domain is complex and unintuitive).

Back then I did almost triple my salary (more like x 2.5 but it routine taken triple pay to get me to stay) but that’s more reflective of how terribly the old job paid.

I used to work as a cheapo part-time-on-paper software developer to pay for university. All devs in the company were student workers and the quality of the work reflected that. That clown show of a job actually took so much of my energy and attention that it delayed my thesis by two years. Yikes.

My boss was straight up delusional. Among his many bizarre ideas was the assumption that I’d stay on for about nine months after my graduation, obviously for the absurdly low pay I was making as a student. That arrangement would’ve worked out very well for him so he assumed I’d be all for it.

Unfortunately for him, I was already working out the terms of my employment with another company. On the other side of the country. Who actually employed real full-time devs for real market-rate pay. There was no chance I’d stay on for longer than necessary.

So I hand-delivered my written resignation, effective in two months – that being the legal minimum notice period based on my employment duration at the time. Boy, was he upset. He thought we had an agreement (that I never agreed to) and that I’d take as much time as needed to finish up that major project we’d recently started (because clearly that’s a reason to work for pennies).

Hell no. I did tell him I’d reconsider… if he beat the other company’s offer. That would’ve meant a 200% pay rise. Suddenly he was much more amenable to my leaving.

Remember, tomato is a fruit, it’s just not sweet.

Shitty supermarket tomatoes aren’t sweet. Homegrown tomatoes can be very sweet and very delicious.

How about some weird ancient ones?

They’re as much not to everyone’s taste as the shows themselves but I love all of the HaréGuu openings. The original’s a bop, Deluxe continues this while adding a spoken-word section the singer can barely keep up with, and Final is the best of the bunch. HaréGuu Deluxe also has a neat showtune-y ending.

I also think that Nerima Daikon Brothers has a great opening; it very much fits with the main characters being dollar store Blues Brothers.

If you want something that oozes cool, I can recommend the original Hellsing. A World Without Logos is an extremely stylish song as long as you don’t mind completely incomprehensible lyrics. (The song sounds as if it’s in English but is really just onomatopoeia. Basically Prisencolinensinainciusol in menacing.)

GUI disk space analyzers are absolutely amazing.

For those who prefer KDE and/or donut graphs, Filelight has you covered.

I just love how you just assert that your information is properly sourced while providing no sources at all. Beautiful.

I have screens on my 3rd floor windows. Mine are attached to the window frame with long thin velcro strips but I think there’s other systems as well.

If you’re in Europe and aren’t quite comfortable with the “main” FSF, the European offshoot FSFe is generally considered to be fairly sensible. The FSFe has completely divorced itself from the FSF when Stallman returned to the FSF.

The star of some old comics, characterized by being a violent choleric who deals with annoying people. Check out !truecomics@midwest.social.

So wouldn’t this mean that past SCOTUS decisions are irrelevant to new cases? So people could legitimately keep bringing near-identical cases to the SCOTUS level and have a legitimate expectation for them to be decided? That sounds obviously unwise even by current SCOTUS standards.

Mind you, Thomas probably wants to go by a rule of “precedent matters when I say it does”, so consistency is irrelevant.

More specifically, “absolute” refers to being above the law or other oversight. An absolute ruler is not bound by the laws that govern everyone else; being able to rule by decree is a consequence of that as there can be no laws that prevent this.

That fridge competes with a dumb fridge from a budget brand that costs 200 to 300 bucks. You can even get self-defrosting ones at that price point.

Unlike TVs, which need to display content, fridges can work just fine when they’re just a heat pump, a thermostat, a light bulb, and an insulated box (and optionally also a fan and a heating element). The biggest technical difference between a cheap fridge today and one from the 50s is in materials and using an LED bulb.

Mind you, the anime part came from some guys on the Internet combining a sped-up version of the original song with some dancing from the opening of a hentai show. (Or game? I don’t remember.)

Then it went viral and the label marketed the hell out of it.

The original song is just another piece of generic dance music: Four on the floor beat; lyrics that vaguely describe dance steps; catchy because Swedish producers can’t produce non-catchy songs.

I think major factors in people bitching about the Windows 10 EOL is that a) Windows 10 was explicitly marketed as the final version of Windows and b) Windows 11 is so unappealing that even companies are reluctant to upgrade.

Normally, that wouldn’t be a big problem. We had dud releases before. Windows Vista had few friends due to compatibility issues but was workable. Besides, 7 was launched shortly after Vista’s EOL. Likewise, Windows 8’s absurd UI choices made it deeply unpopular but it was quickly followed by 8.1, which fixed that. And Windows 10 again followed shortly after 8’s EOL (and well before 8.1’s).

Windows 11, however, combines a hard to justify spec hike with a complete absence of appealing new features. The notable new features that are there are raising concerns about data safety. In certain industries (e.g. medical, legal, and finance), Recall/Copilot Vision is seen as dangerous as it might access protected information and is not under the same control that the company has over its document stores. That increases the vector for a data breach that could lead to severe legal and reputational penalties.

Microsoft failed to satisfyingly address these concerns. And there’s not even hope of a new version of Windows releasing a few months after 10’s EOL; Windows 12 hasn’t even been announced yet.

It’s no wonder that companies are now complaining about Windows 10’s support window being too short.

In stereotypical winter you can’t add enough layers since if you do add layers so your face doesn’t hurt you get accosted by the police because going to public places in a balaclava hasn’t been legal since the late 50s.

In winter as it actually happens you need fewer layers but they need to be waterproof because winter means rain at +2 °C.

Yeah, and in the 70s they estimated they’d need about twice that to make significant progress in a reasonable timeframe. Fusion research is underfunded – especially when you look at how the USA dump money into places like the NIF, which research inertial confinement fusion.

Inertial confinement fusion is great for developing better thermonuclear weapons but an unlikely candidate for practical power generation. So from that one billion bucks a year, a significant amount is pissed away on weapons research instead of power generation candidates like tokamaks and stellarators.

I’m glad that China is funding fusion research, especially since they’re in a consortium with many Western nations. When they make progress, so do we (and vice versa).