Not that novel. The first ergonomics studies on touchscreens were done in the seventies. In 2010, touchscreens were already sophisticated technology and well established in many settings.
I got my first laptop with a digital pen and touchscreen in 2008 or so. They were rare back then, but nothing groundbreaking new. The touchscreen did suck though.
I don't know why you got downvoted, it's true. A lot of screens were touch screen even in the 90s, but they were typically single-touch rather than multi-touch capacitive interfaces. They were used a lot (and still are) in Point of Sale terminals, for example, where an employee needs to stand and ring up sales.
I'm not saying that big tech isn't hijacking open source software, but that does not mean that free or OSS was always "meant to devalue" devs or small companies.
Until very recently, big tech pumped untold millions of dollars into obliterating FLOSS altogether, calling it a cancer that will destroy any enterprise it touches.
You mean just Microsoft. Microsoft was an outlier. Even in the 90s, Linux and GCC were being funded by big tech. Obviously they were developed with the best of intentions, but I think it's accurate to say that OSS is "meant" to devalue developers because the purpose of a system is what it does, and that is what it does in practice.
"The purpose of a system is what it does" is the weirdest cliché I encountered here, and that's not just because it is horoscope nonsense dressed up as a fact, but because it brilliantly illustrates how many people here think they just know what a system does on a glance.
But if it was true: In the 90s, millions of small businesses around the world used FLOSS to host websites and offer services over the internet. That was decidedly not the route big enterprises wanted to go. They wanted to push through big standards through ITU et al, build giant, patented moats, and host it all on big mainframes with huge Oracle databases.
Even today, there exist small to medium businesses in the hosting and shopware space, and they can only do that because big tech could not push them out of that space because FLOSS protected them.
Of course it doesn’t matter in in the grand scheme of things. We are talking about saving seconds in the most egregious example. But it’s nice to know one’s tools.
It's very very very very hard to forge money convincingly enough to fool central banks. It's basically impossible for anyone but nation-state actors, and the only known cases date back decades. Today, it's even harder, because even if central banks were unable to identify forgeries, duplicate serial numbers or ones that have never been issued would be detected very quickly.
Even making forgeries that can fool normal automated tests, like those done in an ATM, is incredibly hard. It's certainly possible, just way too expensive.
It's wrong to suggest that vacancy rates are are necessarily sign of housing dysfunction.
Areas that are attractive to live always have low vacancy rates, because there's a reason that people want to live there.
The assumption that 'as many people ought to be able to live in a neighbourhood as should want to live there' - implied by the 'vacancy rate' issue just means 'every attractive area turns into Hong Kong'.
While there can be very good reason for more building as well - socialized housing is almost never the answer to that. It has a role in some situations, but generally not on the aggregate like that.
Usually this will have to do with permits, regulation - and frankly workers. Nobody wants to do the kind of labour necessary to build homes, and it's extremely hard to find workers to do that kind of work, which to anyone paying the least bit of attention should be a pretty big paradox.
'City overflowing with people who want homes to live don't want to make homes in which to live'
Probably there's a lot of bureaucracy to clean out and that's a good place to start.
I have FDE with keys in the TPM. It's pretty smooth bit required a one time additional step in Fedora. It's also probably not very secure, but my threat model is simple theft.
> Expensive boutique manufacturer that basically catered to a niche audience of media professionals.
As much true back then, as it is in 2026, with the added category of some GNU/Linux users buying shiny hardware and then complaining macOS UNIX implementation doesn't overlap with GNU/Linux, beyond regular POSIX.
Seriously? They were tiny, media production niche, crazily priced machines 30 years ago. Almost zero marketshare or mindshare, and most people (in e.g. EU) didn't even know anyone who owned a Mac.
Yes, it was pretty much Atari, Commodore, Acorn and PC over here, plus some lesser known brands, like MSX on Netherlands.
However even today, if you go to the European countries less fortunate with their economies, having anything Apple is usually obtained via credit, or some contract bundling, for example with the cable or Internet operator, naturally bound to a minimal duration of 24 to 36 months contract.
Not something like in US and countries with similar economies where most people don't think twice to get Apple gear, and quickly pre-order new gear after each couple of new product announcements.
> However even today, if you go to the European countries less fortunate with their economies, having anything Apple is usually obtained via credit, or some contract bundling
Given how many iPhones I've noticed suddenly showed up in hands of regular people, including teenagers, in the last couple years in Poland, I imagine there's healthy second-hand/used devices market going too. iPhones have reputation of being long lasting devices (battery shenanigans notwithstanding), maybe the reputation is true.
Not exclusively so. They were 'big' in some schools with their original Apple 2 lines. Even looked good, considering the later models. By school I mean anything between grade 5 and 13.
I got my first laptop with a digital pen and touchscreen in 2008 or so. They were rare back then, but nothing groundbreaking new. The touchscreen did suck though.
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