ares35

the only one within an hour of here has very high prices. they basically feed off of walmart hate, and charge those customers a premium for the convenience of not having to drive an hour (each way) to get to the next nearest store that isn’t them or walmart.

ya. basically they hit that ‘tipping point’ where the increased profit margins from the higher prices is no longer keeping up with the decrease in sales volume resulting from those ever-increasing prices.

they ain’t gonna shut it down… not before some shenanigans involving new corporate entities, loads of debt, and a bankruptcy that ends up with the feds (taxpayers) with the clean-up bill.

also 13 original colonies… 13 stripes on the flag.

some magahead: so that means 1.2…3…4…7 republicans… and 1…2…6 confederates?

it’ll be covered on screen 73 of the ‘agreement’ required to use the device.

correct; acquired in 2013.

i’ve seen two of these things around here. they’ve both been on the flatbed of a local towing service.

ad-skip to present day. encryption and drm is being introduced into the new atsc 3.0 broadcast standard, and some stations are already using it.

i bought a few smr drives, knowing they were smr. they were cheaper, a lot cheaper than the same amount of space in cmr. used only for static media storage, so that’s not a big deal, really., but holy hell was it slow getting stuff on them initially.

i have a few self-powered externals that are also smr (quite common with those as they use 2.5in notebook hdd). when those things have to start shuffling bits around and rewriting tracks, sustained write speeds fall well under what even usb2 can send.

i bought a big external hdd recently on impulse… a clearance sale. it was really, really cheap. with the thinking that i could ‘shuck’ it because i’m short on space in a couple storage systems. i checked. i can, but i haven’t. hell, i haven’t even used it yet other than to run a full smart diag on it, followed by a full format and a read/write verify. took days. then i put it back in the box and have basically forgotten about it until now.

you have to be careful on what models you buy. some have usb built onto the controller board (no internal sata) or other things (e.g. encryption chip, weird power) that make it more difficult or even impossible to use the internal drive in an environment other than the enclosure it ships in.

tmobile (and sprint when it existed) and att suck around here. they are only built-up along the interstate. verizon (through acquisitions) and uscc were the legacy cellular providers. towers everywhere, in every small town and every other farm field in between. it’ll make tmobile better here, but at the expense of higher prices across-the-board with one less player in a game with far too few left.

on my arch-based systems, i use repos first, aur second. appimages third. i do also have a couple minor things (that are self-contained with no dependencies) that were just ‘unzipped’ into their own directories and links added to menus where appropriate. note that i don’t game on these systems. i don’t have a lot of aur packages installed, so updates and subsequent recompile time isn’t an issue.

i have yet to run into anything i want or need that isn’t available in those. so no flatpaks or snaps.

i remember getting my first one. it was an amazing time. played a lot of games back then. not so much now. i just can’t keep up with the upgrades, so i just play older ones every now and then.

a modern equivalent would be moving from an old pc with hdd to a new one with nvme ssd.

hard drives are going to be slow af copying data to itself, or moving data to a different partition on it.

then you’re also adding partition size manipulation to the mix, which will also be slow af when data has to be moved off the ‘end’ of partitions to ‘make room’ to enlarge or create another with a different fs.

your best option is to get another drive, even if it’s also a hard drive instead of ssd. use that to move (copy, really, to preserve the original as a backup for the time being) all the data to that you want to preserve.

upgrades have been working fine here, both linux and windows, for well over a decade.

only if a system is also being repurposed at the time of the ‘upgrade’, or if i’m changing the connection type of the boot drive (such as from sata to nvme, or switching an older system to ahci mode) do i install ‘from scratch’.

definitely keep windows on it to begin with. once you’re fully settled-in on linux and haven’t even looked at windows for at least a couple weeks, make one last backup… then nuke it or repurpose it.

fire the computer. go back to the pigeons

i remember talk as far back as the 1980s about high-speed rail between the cities and chicago.

still waiting.

patents is what you’re thinking of. and all (afaik) of them relating to mp3 format have expired.

most transit buses are also larger and/or heavier, with larger engines that burn more fuel.