I think Jerry Lewis was a no-talent hack, and an awful person.

But I can kind of see what he maybe was trying to do with this movie. I think he was going for "The Holocaust was even more awful than you can imagine". A clown that distracts Jewish kids as they are herded into the ovens? Yeah, that definitely would get that point across.

I think maybe Lewis thought "This is going to be incredibly offensive, but that is the point". But there is a line you can't cross, and he crossed it.

I would say it's the opposite.

Ford has a lot of clout with dealerships, especially their own. They can simply *force* their dealerships to do what they want. You're a Ford dealership? Or a dealership that has contracts with Ford for repair services and stuff? Toe the line or Ford no longer will sell you any product.

Anyway, screw car dealers. Scum of the earth.

I had an Amiga 500 back in the day. I *loved* that thing. Used it all the way up until 1997, when I got my first PC.

But, the sad fact is, very VERY few Amiga games hold up. And the really good ones are available on other platforms, with better graphics.

The only Amiga-exclusive game that is worth playing is Wizkid. Because there is nothing else like it.

It doesn't matter.

For the *vast* majority of people, smartphones are a way to send SMS/MMS messages and photos, and play music, and watch videos. They'll probably install SnapChat or something if they are into that. That's IT. That "ecosystem" of apps you talk about? Not that many people care very much. There are only about 10 apps that most people ever use, and 5 of them are part of the OS on both Android an iOS.

I can't deny the appeal of playing games at home, and playing online. But arcades were just...great.

Young gamers that don't live in Japan have never got to experience the full "arcade culture", and that's too bad. You made friends, you had fun, and you "got good".

The "got good" part is something I really miss about arcades, honestly. Not having a game at home, and having to spend money on it, and having limited lives, adds a LOT to most games. You were motivated to get your money's worth, every time you played.

I have fond memories of "beating" arcade games at my neighborhood convenience store. All of the kids my age played the games, and we'd play them constantly until all of us could beat them, and then they'd replace them. It was good times.

I remember all of us playing "Vs. Super Mario Bros." before the NES was available in the US. We all could beat it without dying, and without warping. Eventually we started going for max points, which meant killing as many enemies and destroying as many bricks as possible, and ALSO meant landing on the "hammer" at the end of each World (after defeating Bowser) with exactly "000" seconds left. Do that, and the timer resets to "999", and you get all those points for "time remaining".

We did that with all the games they had. Hell we did that with *Gauntlet*, which took forever and cost a collective fortune. But it was great.

/ when the NES came out, we were all excited to play Super Mario Bros. at *home* for *free*. But it wasn't the "Vs." version, and it was *pathetically* easy compared to the "Vs." version. I remember how pissed off we all were about that.

Oh, come on.

Don't pretend that installing drivers in Windows isn't *a billion times simpler* than installing them in Linux. In the *rare* instances when Windows doesn't have a built-in driver (and contrary to what you wrote, nearly every network interface chipset is supported out-of-the-box these days. Network cards are almost "generic" anymore. Gigabit ethernet chipsets haven't changed much in the past 8 years or so), all you have to do is hit the manufacturer's site and download an installer.

Linux...if there isn't a driver available, you're screwed, period.

Firstly, it's "Canonical", not Conical.

Secondly, why would Microsoft buy them? It's open-source. They can do whatever they want with it without paying for it. It's not like the Canonical or Ubuntu "brand" are worth anything.

Plus, Microsoft has gone pretty nuts with the WSL stuff. You can run Linux in a window on Windows. You can even run full-on GUI Linux apps as if they are native Widnows apps.

So...why would Microsoft switch to Linux? They don't need to. Linux apps run just fine in Windows. And, the NT kernel is better than the Linux kernel in most ways.

I *really* don't expect Microsoft to move to Linux. They don't gain anything. At all.

You're pretty-much correct.

That's why unions are so hard to get started. You can't be fired for trying to unionize, but *until you are unionized*, you can be fired for any (non-illegal) reason.

Basically that means that as soon as word gets out that you are forming a union, you are likely to be fired. Did you take a 61 minute lunch break instead of 60 minutes? You're fired.

Obviously, you can fight this stuff in court. But that costs money, and then end result is, you now work for a company that you sued, and they lost. They are going to be looking for a *legitimate* reason to fire you the rest of the time you are there. Unless you can get the union formed and protect yourself.

So like I said, yeah, it's *incredibly* hard to form a union in the United States, because it's incredibly risky. You're nearly guaranteed to get fired before it gets anywhere.

I imagine it does kind of suck to work at Apple as a developer.

Mostly because Apple has this weird philosophy of not giving users what they want, ever. Can you imagine how frustrating that would be as a developer?

People rag on Microsoft, and they make some stupid decisions, but they generally respond to user complaints. Bad ideas don't last too long in Microsoft software, for the most part. Apple just...doesn't care.

I agree. iPads are pretty limited in what they can do.

But...that's their strength, in many ways. There isn't much you can screw up. The downside, of course, is God help you if you *do* need to do something unusual, or need to try and troubleshoot some kind of weird issue. Because you mostly can't. With all iOS devices, if things get weird, your only option is usually just to do a factory reset and hope for the best.

There is only one tablet that matters, and that's the iPad. Android tablets never quite got there, and Windows tablets barely ever got off the ground, thanks to the Windows RT debacle.. The full-on Windows "convertibles" are semi-useful, but even those seem to have bombed. I have yet to see anyone I know with "2-in-1" Windows laptop that uses it in tablet mode. Though having a hinge that won't break is actually a nice feature.

iPads are just...nice. They do what they do, and they do it well. Most people don't even bother with a tablet at all, since phone screens got so large. But if you need a really big screen, get an iPad.

What it amounts to is, the use cases for tablets vs. smartphones is VERY SMALL, and there isn't a lot of room in the market. And Apple is already there.

They've lost the entire 18-34 crowd. Yeah, a chunk of them moved to Instagram, which Facebook owns, but even Instagram is fading fast. WhatsApp is sort-of popular, but it is *also* fading out.

This is the natural evolution of "social media", I think. The various apps/sites are essentially "fads". Facebook held on longer than its predecessors, but the writing was on the wall once smartphones became ubiquitous. There just isn't much need for social media when you can send SMS messages to anyone at any time.

That said...I think they should be regulated into near-oblivion. But current US law doesn't really allow for that, unfortunately. Thankfully the EU is probably going to smack them hard in the near future.

I don't blame Sony for the lack of product. Hell, I haven't purchased a new console (for myself) since the original Xbox. But I still follow the industry.

It looks like the shortage is going to last another YEAR. That's 2 years of this generation where the consoles simply aren't readily available. Pretty strange times.

I do wonder if maybe it's a blessing in disguise, though. These extra couple of years mean that the game devs can spend some extra time on the games, since they don't really have to worry about getting them out NOW. Why push the release of a game when you can wait a couple years and sell more copies of it? Games have a really short half-life.

Now that it's a situation that is getting some press, I *fully expect* this thing to be cracked in the next couple of weeks.

I mean, hell. Apple can't stop the iPhone from being cracked. A company that makes motorcycle vests has NO HOPE of locking this thing down.

I expect that next month we'll see a story about how it was cracked, and the vests' "black box" all have a default, hardwired, unchangeable password of KLIM123.

I'm all for charging for the service. I'd pay...$10/year for Telegram. At most.

The problem is that they will end up charging $6.95/month for it, and it's not worth that much to anybody. Not really.

It's almost certainly dead. Nobody will use it if it has ads, and nobody will pay for it if it's not really cheap. But they can't make it cheap, because the investors want HUGE returns.