The size increase in hard drives around that time was insane. Compared to the mid-90’s which was just a decade ago, hard drives capacities increased around 100 times. On average, drive capacities were doubling every year.

Then things slowed down. In the past 20 years, we’ve maybe increased the capacities 30-40 times for hard drives.

Flash memory, on the other hand, is a different story. Sometime around 2002-3 or so I paid something like $45 for my first USB flash drive - a whole 128MB of storage. Today I can buy one that’s literally 1000 times larger, for around a third of that price. (I still have that drive, and it still works too!)

That chart doesn’t really show the recent price hike. Late last year, I bought an 8TB Samsung SATA SSD for $350. If I wanted to buy that same drive today, it would be $630.

The Samsung monitors we get at the office still appear to be just dumb screens. No remote or anything like that. But that’s from their business lineup of monitors. Wouldn’t surprise me too much if their consumer/gamer lineup would be different.

I have to say, they really should come up with a different name. Searching and finding the website for a company named “Why!” is pretty much impossible with today’s search engines.

Most of those apps could be replaced by a website that will work anywhere. But a website can’t spy on you as easily… so they push apps instead.

I got all but one achievement in Subnautica, and all of the achievements in Below Zero (the sequel) in my first playthrough of both games, just from taking my time and thoroughly exploring both of the worlds and completing the story without even consciously trying to go for the achievements.

With that said, they are open world games and at times don’t really give you a whole of guidance as to what you need to do next. So you are kind of left to explore and figure it out on your own. If you don’t like that sort of game you might end up hating them by the end too.

Personally, I didn’t really mind Wesley in the later seasons and a few of the Wesley-centric episodes were pretty good. It’s really the first season, and even more so the first few episodes of the first season where he was annoying as all hell. Oh look, boy wonder saves the ship, yet again. Unfortunately that kind of seems to have stuck with the character, despite the show toning down his antics significantly after that.

If you think that’s fun, just wait until you get to the verbs of motion.

Maybe the bumpers on some of the Ram trucks?

Any of the decorative chrome bits have been cheap plasti-chrome for something like 30 years now.

Junk also tend to accumulate in rivers and lakes. Once it’s in there it’s out of sight, out of mind - and even if you know it’s there it is often difficult to remove.

When it finally gets cleaned up by bringing in the magnet or a barge to dredge it up or whatever, you’re seeing years if not decades of stuff that’s getting pulled out all at once.

With David Brin’s Uplift books, I’d just start with Startide Rising. It’s not so much a sequel to Sundiver, but another standalone book set in the same universe. There’s a couple of very minor references to Sundiver, but you’re not really missing anything if you haven’t read it going into Startide Rising.

While Startide Rising is fantastic and is probably one of my favorite sci-fi books, I found Sundiver just wasn’t that good. It’s not really bad per se, but it was David Brin’s first novel and that really shows and has some issues with pacing, an unreliable narrator, and things like that (IMHO). It’s also more of a mystery/detective novel set in space whereas Startide Rising is space opera, so the whole feel of the two books is very different and can just boil down to what sort of books you like.

I actually had read Startide Rising twice without even knowing Sundiver existed before looking it up online and realizing it was the second book in a series. I’ll probably pick up Startide Rising for another re-read sometime in the future, but for Sundiver once is probably enough.

The third book The Uplift War, is also quite good, and similar to the other two it’s more of another standalone book that’s set in the same universe, with some minor references to the previous two. I wasn’t as much of a fan of the last three books - they are a trilogy more than a standalone books, and you’d probably want to have read the previous three books before tackling them (or at the very least, Startide Rising) because things aren’t going to make a lot of sense if you just jump right in. I found them a long read and they got really weird at the end. Like Sundiver I’d say once is enough for books 4-6 too.

That’s my experience with Asus going back over 25 years now. To me, Asus has always been substandard products sold at premium prices. If I wanted a substandard motherboard, I’d buy ECS and save a bunch of money. And to be fair to ECS, I’ve had some of their boards that have worked just fine, which is more than I can say about the Asus stuff.

The old Podcast app was simple, it did one thing, and it did it well. YouTube Music seems to be trying to do a dozen different things, and it does a shit job of all of them.

It certainly could. That’s the gamble you’re taking.

I usually replace drives after 5 years if they are doing anything I consider important. So those drives to me would have 1-2 years left in them. Of course, I have seen a good number of drives I have repurposed to things less important still manage to rack up impressive numbers of hours.

I have an old film scanner (was pricy back in its day) that doesn’t have drivers for 64 bit Windows, and anything newer than Vista. So I have an old XP box that can talk to it.

That’s all I use that computer for, so it’s otherwise fine with its circa 2009 configuration. Haven’t had to do any fixes or workarounds.

I’d say not really, Tolkien was a writer, not an artist.

What you are doing is violating the trademark Middle-Earth Enterprises has on the Gandalf character.

How do they compare to TVs? At least the last time I looked into it, pretty much every TV was terrible compared to even a halfway decent computer monitor.

For me, it wasn’t just the story, but also just randomly going out and exploring, checking things out, and finding cool (and sometimes scary) things.

It’s one of those games that I’m hoping in like 10 years or something I’ll have forgotten enough of it that if I go play it again it’ll be mostly all new again.

We actually moved from JIRA to Azure DevOps. Part of it was that Atlassian dropped the server version of JIRA and we weren’t too keen on moving to the crappier cloud version.

I’d say it’s different. Some things JIRA does better, some things Azure DevOps does better. You eliminate some pain points, and end up with some new ones.

DuckDuckGo is not Bing, though they get most of their results from Bing so they end up pretty similar.

And yes, I would say it’s better. Not that Bing is particularly good and their search results have also taken a nosedive. But they are still way better than the garbage results I get out of Google.