deadbeef

Had a similar experience in what I think must have been my second year of primary school.

I was asked to go through a math problem that was written out, something like "4 + 7 = ?".

I said "Four plus seven equals eleven".

The teacher said that was wrong and said "Four add seven is eleven".

I'm like, what is the difference? She says, we aren't onto "plus" and "equals" yet

Six year old me spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out how their was some difference between plus and add. She just could have said "they are the same, but please use these words to describe them in our lessons".

It's an engineering sample that was produced before the final product was available. They use the really early ones to figure out if what they got back from the fab actually runs and how fast it will go safely. Later ones end up at motherboard partners so they can test their new board designs.

It is pretty common for them to leak out onto the second hand market after the final release. I've never heard of one that had any real problems, but in theory you might be buying something that has some issue that they hadn't discovered at that point.

I've changed distro's a bunch of times personally and for business I have influence in a bunch of times in the last 30 odd years.

Slackware -> Redhat -> Suse -> Ubuntu -> Debian.

The reasons for each were ( as best I can recall ).

Slackware to Redhat was just because a proper package manager made sense at the time. I think the Redhat releases were a bit more up to date too.

Redhat to Suse was because Redhat stopped doing the free long term releases, the short term ones were too short to be workable.

Suse to Ubuntu was a similar thing to Redhat with Suse trying to push you into the enterprise version.

Ubuntu to Debian most recently was due to the Ubuntu releases coming with more and more unwanted crap, we had been running mint on desktops to avoid whatever their mutant gnome reskin was called and then their regular gnome releases, but we were still running regular Ubuntu on servers. Eventually when they started putting pretty core stuff in snaps we decided to move to Debian.

Hopefully that is the last migration we have to do for a while.

I'm not sure. They could have been describing that to me, but because the local body funding mechanism we have here is called rates rather than property taxes I could have easily got that confused in with the state tax discussion.

I was kind of astounded that a spreadsheet of tax rates would play a significant part in a decision of where you were going to live.

I have heard folks distantly related to me talk like the state tax rate was pretty damn important when selecting which part of the United States to move to.

They were the sort of people that would sit ( in their living room in New Zealand ) and watch fox news and go on the engineered logical and emotional weirdcoaster that sort of media offers up. This is some pretty niche viewing for folks in my country.

Dune 2. It was the gateway drug that turned me playing computer games into a full blown addiction for a bunch of my family.

Relations camped out waiting for a slot to satisfy the urge for months until they could scrape together the cash to fund an appropriate PC to run it themselves at home.

The three 5.25 inch drives bother me. Most PCs with that sort of aesthetic from the 80s or 90s with a real floppy connector can only run two floppy drives without needing some pretty weird bios and OS config.

AI models produced from copyrighted training data should need a license from the copyright holder to train using their data. This means most of the wild west land grab that is going on will not be legal. In general I'm not a huge fan of the current state of copyright at all, but that would put it on an even business footing with everything else.

I've got no idea how to fix the screeds of slop that is polluting search of all kinds now. These sorts of problems ( along the lines of email spam ) seem to be absurdly hard to fix outside of walled gardens.

In New Zealand it is pretty common for members of parliament to get thrown out of the chamber for a whole bunch of reasons. In general you have to do whatever the speaker says, sort of like you would a judge in a court proceeding. There's a whole lot ( perhaps dated ) rules around treating other members of the house with respect, letting them speak when their part of the process is up etc.

I think most of this is covered by this list of rules: https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/parliamentary-rules/standing-orders-2017-by-chapter/chapter-3-general-procedures/

Another trick big box retail can pull is when you make a big enough order with some well known brands you can have them sell it with a custom part number, so you when folks try and price match it you can say 'nope, not the same'.

Who are these mad men who are dumping stuff to SSDs and then sitting them on a shelf? Can't get my mind around it.

I also like old school single player games often to zone out playing.

Titanfall 2 was good mindless fun, it is like $6NZD on steam, no idea what your currency is.

I bought the Castle wolfenstein reboot games on steam recently in a bundle and that was great fun for the $17NZD.

Also the Halo master chief collection was approximately $25NZD at one point and that was great fun on a dollar per hour basis.

The mass effect games were like $10 at one point too, and the first couple of those are great.

Again, I don't know much about the xbox pricing on these, they might be still gouging on that platform.