Specifically, VHS had both longer recording times and cheaper VCRs (due to Matsushita’s liberal licensing) than Betamax did. Beta only had slightly better picture quality if you were willing to sacrifice recording length per tape. Most Betamax users adopted the βII format which lowered picture quality to VHS levels in order to squeeze more recording time onto the tape. At that point Betamax’s only advantage was a slightly more compact cassette.
Also to correct another common myth, porn was widely available on both formats and was not the cause of VHS’s success over Betamax.
Yes, weight alone is not that important for fuel economy at highway speeds. Aerodynamic efficiency of a vehicle is determined by the cross section area + drag coefficient. A 90s Honda Civic has a worse drag coefficient but a vastly smaller cross section than the Rivian, so it needs to move less air out of the way to drive forward. Smaller EVs can go farther with smaller batteries, but the American consumer has decided for one reason or another that cars must be tall, and therefore less aerodynamically efficient.
Considering the amount of personal data on people’s phones, plus how commonly people lose them in public, I would say that encryption by default is unambiguously a good thing, and it’s incredible that it took Google until Android 10.
Google can be an excellent place to work, but most of the people working there are not contributing to the company’s profits. Whether or not you think that still has value, leadership is trying to “optimize” by squeezing everyone harder and demanding they show productivity gains using AI. Some teams will adapt and keep being a nice team to work on, but many employees are getting “optimized” out of the company and replaced with vendorization and consultants.
A lot of those individual googlers are longtimers who are now leaving after 15, 20 years. Google has been offering voluntary exit packages this year and I suspect the kind of people who would value Google.com working in Lynx are also the type who have made plenty of money and are disillusioned by what the company has become.
My concern is the politicians are suddenly flip flopping because they realize in the short term Israel is close to exterminating the entire population of Gaza. Perhaps they will let a pittance of food aid through to prolong the genocide so Netanyahu can stay in power. I have little confidence in US leadership actually having a change of heart now.
It’s fine to accept your mom or your neighbor changing their mind, but I think we should be skeptical of politicians changing their mind and consider what hidden, calculated motives they may have for changing it now, when they had plenty of information to reach the same conclusion over a year ago.
Similar with google docs, if you share a link to a doc, even if the doc is restricted access, anyone can see the thumbnail icon with the contents of page 1.
Because any choice in a two party system is stupid to some degree, for most people. Most people’s beliefs don’t all line up exactly with one political party or the other. So every election is a compromise: which of your values must you prioritize? A whole lot of Americans aren’t doing well economically, they haven’t been doing well for decades, and under Biden they saw everything get more expensive. So they don’t like either side, and if you can convince them to vote, it’s only going to be for change. Kamala didn’t portray any change from Biden, so she lost.
So if you went to prison for 7 years, and your conviction wasn’t overturned but you served your time, it’s somehow ok for the government to send you a bill for $50 * 365 * 7 = $127750? When convicted felons usually struggle to find better than minimum wage jobs due to their records? What a perversion of “justice”. And if you get out early for good behavior or due to prison overcrowding (again, your sentence was valid) you still get charged for the full 7 years? How is that morally reasonable?
The Framework touchpad is unfortunately a lot worse than the haptic touchpads on MacBooks. The click is just a little too mushy, and requires too much force as you click higher up the trackpad. I think there are finally some PC laptops with haptic touchpads, so if Framework starts offering one I’d definitely upgrade my FW13.
OCLP is great, but not parent-proof. I had to walk my mom over the phone through manually updating OCLP after she installed a macOS update without running the patcher first, which resulted in a machine with no working wifi. (OCLP did pop up a dialog letting her know she should update it, but she closed it without reading it as users typically do when given an unexpected random dialog)
Genuine question: is there any technological/scaling problem with Mastodon that actually needs solving, and that the AT protocol would fix? What reason is there to split different parts of their backend tech stack between different “operators” with different policies? Does this separation of concerns improve the performance (or other desirable attribute) of the decentralized network versus Mastodon’s approach?
Yes, I had that issue too (years ago, when they first allowed deleting the Music app). I think it might not be a problem in newer cars, but my car radio only had iPod support, not iPhone, and it seemingly needed at least one song in the music library for the connectivity to work at all.
Perhaps the lack of availability in certain countries due to their data laws is a sign that this app really shouldn’t require an account. If the ultimate goal of this free app is monetizing my data, no thanks.
Also to correct another common myth, porn was widely available on both formats and was not the cause of VHS’s success over Betamax.