It would be trivial for you to also put a PayPal address, which seems safer for one-off donations.

You might also be tempted to put BTC/ETH addresses but I doubt there's many donors that way.

I assumed it would be possible to do a lifestyle business out of catering to a subset of the over 1M NetBeans users. Turns out it is not so easy.

I spend some money for a Windows machine to digitally sign builds, the macOS dev certificate and hosting. But the bulk of the cost was the time it all took.

PS: The .xyz domain in combination with the Windows antivirus solutions (looking at you ESET) was a major annoyance. Switched to .ORG just in time for the whole debacle there.

:-)

Your whole post was a pleasure to read.

The whole idea of introducing IP law for seeds to improve yields then show a 17% increase, just like the baseline, seems a monumental mistake.

The fertilizer situation is questionable too. If they put so many conditions then they should also guarantee some outputs. Otherwise there's no risk for them, only the farmers. But I grant you that whole section seems a bit shallow.

You set a pretty high bar to criticise such huge initiatives. They can fail based on the externalities they create, not only as a model that guarantees an output given some assumptions.

If the outcome was a net 0 compared to the baseline those investments and surrounding legal changes didn't improve things.

The program is supposed to improve agricultural yields and they claim it did not. Is the program just about helping Western investments? So the investments result in unchanged yields?

I had no clue about this situation but it doesn't look very well. Introducing continent-wide IP-law for seeds, getting farmers into debt by having them used only approved fertilisers and then showing virtually no productivity increase against the baseline shows no redeeming quality to the program.

But hey, Gates will be declared a saint in the next 10 years so who is this little mag site to comment?

Or is the end goal to have hardware in stores that people can buy?

Wasn't SPARC a RISC architecture? (Wikipedia says so, but I'm no expert).

> What do you mean by "We barely have a decent ARM ecosystem". Are you talking about the tools to build for those processors? Or the tools to build new ones of those processors? Or the actual chips that are available?

I remember the early OpenWRT / RPi days when many packages weren't even compiling for ARM. Now I think we are in a much better shape. The chips were available, but the software ecosystem was way behind.

> At worst, RISC-V could be equivalent to ARM, without many of the parts that suck about it.

What I do know about ARM sucking is that the whole board design makes each product need a customer kernel more or less. Which is why we still don't have a "Linux for your phones". What I've read about RISC is that it's going to be roughly the same: encourage a lot of co-processors which mean custom boards to me and probably custom kernels.

Why should developers care? We barely have a decent ARM ecosystem after years of ARM routers and Raspberry Pi. Now we are supposed to be enthusiastic we will do that yet again for RISC-V?

Is it because it's somehow more open? But ARM wasn't that closed afaik - lost of folks produced it.

And Sun Microsystems open sourced a 64 thread CPU, the OpenSparc and nothing happened.

So, in a nutshell, why?

Now that we are producing and injecting industrial quantities of Ψ, any chance this will get incorporated in actual viruses or maybe teach the immune system not to ignore it (or maybe even go crazy about it)?

Apple gear is nice, but you can't compare the price of a Lenovo having a fast Ryzen with the latest MBP. I bought the Lenovo at 1/3rd the price. Considering the difference I think the bumps I encountered are worth the $$$$ saved.

Still, they have $300,000 worth of shares and "the buyer has agreed to pay US$10-million to key employees and consultants including Mr. Gagne and Dr. Bengio as part of a retention plan".

Business doesn't always work out. Getting a cool $1M after trying and failing is not the worst thing that could happen.

So, everybody knows a little laptop CPU and a desktop Ryzen are not the same class but it's still useful to compare.

I have a new laptop with the Ryzen 4800H, I would surely like a direct comparison with the M1.