> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?

In some countries it's not just "unethical", but outright illegal. Laws and rules vary, but all is equal to the spam button and the whims of those wielding it.

30 people managing the hardware? Sure, if you get good deals on the hardware itself, the employees stay healthy, and you have everything so centralised you don't need multiple people on call.

Centralising things to that level and supporting the users of the entire government structure of a country the size of France -- one of the countries the sun _never_ sets on -- while it's transitioning from decades of Microsoft dependency to an open source ecosystem? Heh, no.

Hetzner exists.

The claim above of 30 is not particularly important, the point is to lean on the community. Millions a year would get you incredibly far. Many are already helping for free.

24/7 linux webservers existed already by the late nineties.

"Helping for free" doesn't cut it when dealing with governments. Even if everyone had gone the Linux route 20 years ago we'd still have an entire ecosystem of commercial businesses selling and operating it; imagine what Red Hat would look like with Microsoft actually out of the picture.

We'd have just as many consultancy firms and layers of beuraucracy without Microsoft, and France wouldn't be operating their entire government IT stack, all the way down to individual workstations, that much cheaper than it is now.

The difference is that because of open-source there would be competition in those services. And they could take any of it in house at a discount with reasonably priced govt workers. IOW, they'd have choices instead of handcuffs.

They'd be in better situation on all counts. It pays to think ahead to the future and remove dependencies. Where do you want to be in five years? Still in an abusive relationship?

That's how you ensure the birth rate stays low.

I think you are missing the sarcasm.

Finland's fertility rate drove off a cliff in the 60's like in so many other countries. If sauna has an overall effect we wouldn't know as we've nothing to compare with -- going to sauna is rather universal and the tradition is ancient.

> Power users aren't just annoying edge cases, they're signal.

Not all power users. Some re-invent the wheel and/or do things inefficiently, and in most cases there's no business incentive to adapt the service to fit the usage patterns of those users, or of other users that deviate from the norm in regards to resource usage.

There is a point to be made about short-sightedness on the manufacturers' part; if the infrastructure needs to be improved then short-term profits should be reduced in order to ensure long-term sustainability.

But yes, at least where I live, there's a major infrastructure problem that nobody -- consumers included -- want to pay for, and for a lot of us EV's aren't an option until said infrastructure has been upgraded.

Give it a week and it will be. By far.

Batteries fail completely too, on occasion especially with cheaper brands or 5+ year-old headphones.

Were there actually Pentium M chipsets that could decode anything but MPEG2?

The CPU will be struggling with most modern video formats including h.264.

we were decoding 480x320 MP4 on PalmOS 5 devices in early 2000. Those were single-core in-order 200mhz ARM devices with no accelerators at all. Pentium M outperforms those easily and thus can do it too.

Mp4 is the container. H264 is the video codec.

got me, it was DivX and XviD which are indeed newer and fancier than MPEG2

And still much easier to play than h264. A Pentium II with NetBSD was more than enough.

Nowadays on an n270 CPU based netbook I use mpv and yt-dlp capped to 420p, even if I can play 720p@30FPS.

Amiga was big in Europe. No doubt they were slow though; most computers of the time were.