No, no, it can't be, because everyone knows this is Hunter Biden's laptop sending emails through Hillary's server. C'mon it's always the evil Dems.

I can't say they didn't, but at least they have a track record of doing Rust rewrites from pre-LLM days. As a fan of Rust, I wish it weren't a company like Discord getting the headlines for doing this type of thing.

https://discord.com/blog/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to-rust

Flipping seats that have never been flupped

Exactly. There's a difference between creating new rules to tax them more, and collecting the tax they're already supposed to be paying but aren't.

I truly hope this pays off. Some folk say things like "but they'll leave if we tax them". Good! If they're making money off us and not paying what they're due, they're damaging our economy and we're better off without them. If they truly were performing a worthwhile service, then someone else will fill the void. Same goes for the corporations, who I hope are next.

Because if you try to use a teapot made of chocolate to make tea, the deliciousness and the tea will be distributed over a wider area than ideal for the tea making process.

Dumold Trump

This is a calculation that anyone should do before starting a business: is it profitable?

If you're genuinely serious about doing this, work out exactly what you're offering and how long it will take you to do this for each system. Then work out what you need per hour to live, and work it through. You should now have a ballpark figure for a single customer/system. You might need to tweak it a bit to allow for bits and bobs. Practice it a couple of times on any different systems you can get your hands on. Be ready for hardware challenges like different GPUs or other hardware.

You may need to figure out ways of making things quicker/cheaper, by doing some jobs in parallel and automating some stuff with scripts. You may end up with, say, multiple flash drives with Ventoy containing a few images and some scripts.

Be absolutely clear about what you're offering. It's important for potential customers to know that Linux isn't a Windows clone and it's not trying to be, and it may take a little time to adjust, but also not too strong on that as to put them off.

Like you already identified, you don't want to be a 24hr support line afterwards. You may need to invest in some reference material to get them started, in the form of a quick reference booklet or some Peertube videos, or even just a collection of links to a hand-selected group of videos or sites that others have done.

You may want to add extras, like data migration, but be careful not to have so many options as to confuse, and don't offer it so cheap as to screw yourself. The data migration side is a minefield because of things like save games, settings and all sorts of obscure applications that can hide their stuff in nooks and crannies. Again, be clear that it's only their docs and not all the other stuff. Also be clear that if they don't opt for data migration their stuff will be gone: it seems obvious but not everyone understands that. Factor these things into your prices: when you're advising people about the service you're not getting systems done.

Support could be an extra, but again be careful of pricing: this is an area you could bankrupt yourself if you get your pricing wrong.

I don't mean any of this to put you off at all. Running a business can be very rewarding and fulfilling, and could turn out to be the most awesome thing you've ever done. Depending on your commitments, you could try doing it as a side hustle to test out the market and refine your processes before diving in.

And, most of all, good luck!

*config?

Dumold Trump doesn't know what half of those words mean anyway.

Nice to see one of these where the 3rd and 4th panels have the same text again. Been a while.

And, just like that, Astrocoin was born.

Or start holding the decision-making executives criminally liable.

I wonder what the security is like. I'd love to know how difficult it would be to set up a mock-service to just tell it you have everything.

You'd expect there to be encryption and some kind of certificate validation to check the response is trustworthy, but given what we now know about the CAN bus that many cars use, and how vulnerable it is to attack, it suggests the motor industry is way behind the times in terms of security.

Baba is win

It's also weird that those three countries, Russia, China and USA, are becoming so frequently talked about in the same light. The speed that the US has joined the other two in being referred to as both unreliable and unfriendly is incredible, and kinda scary really. I know it will take time to repair the damage but I hope they turn it around soon.

It is, it's absolutely horrendous. I can hardly imagine how it's impacted them and their families for so many years. It's good the memorial is there to respect those affected and remind others about the terrible injustice.

Am I the only one that read the headline and wondered how a memorial can be contaminated with HIV and hepatitis?

If by discrete ICs you mean custom logic baked into silicon, yes that's always been expensive. I was referring to off-the-shelf ICs that cost pennies, which used to be orders of magnitude cheaper even than PICs (in the days before Internet connected fridges).

Before the term software engineer was commonplace, electronic engineers used design circuits around off-the-shelf components, like the venerable TI 555 timer or op-amps, and design a circuit around them. To do it they'd need the datasheets (https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm555.pdf). Hobbyists and aspiring young engineers would buy books like this: (https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/14021/IC-555-Projects/), which were like O'Reilly cookbooks for electronics circuits. The equipment to program a PIC used to be way beyond the reach of hobbyists, and wasn't necessary for manufacturers producing simple control circuits. If you look at circuitboards from that time you'll see some ICs with pins that aren't connected to anything because those just weren't needed for the circuit, much like you describe the empty sockets in modern boards.

It absolutely was possible in the pre-Internet days to design a fully functional fridge, and more, without writing code of any kind, and it was cheap too.

There's plenty of middle ground. We had integrated circuits embedded in circuit boards for a long time before re-programmable chips started appearing, and those ones certainly didn't connect to the Internet and brick themselves.

Indeed, I expect they won't reinstate them fully, and I also suspect most of the world will expect the same. This is why it will be so difficult to repair the US reputation on the world stage.