This is what happens in a mature market...

Nothing groundbreaking or earth shattering. I skipped the 7. May get an 8. Dunno.

I can say that given my experience with Samsung's Tab S3, they don't have much to offer either.

If the market is mature then I am looking forward to the part where we can buy cheap clones at rockbottom prices.

"Wake up, sheeple! Ditch the Apple and go Android!"

My Samsung 425G was a fantastic "dumb phone". Had all the smarts I needed.

2017-09-13 15:45 from IGnatius T Foobar @uncnsrd
If the market is mature then I am looking forward to the part where we

can buy cheap clones at rockbottom prices.

Enjoy the spyware ridden Chinese knockoffs!

There was a great tweet in my timeline today, saying that IBM's new Z14 mainframe is now shipping, and, "it still plays Flappy Bird!", taking a much needed dig at Apple's culling of software for the new iPhone platform. Hahahah.
:)

Got the iPhone 8+ today. Nothing too exciting. Pretty similar to the 6s+ I was running. The camera is excellent (for a tiny little sensor).

I guess now I'm forced to upgrade (arigato, Obama-san) - my 5c is unsupported, so I'll buy the SE because I just want it to be as small as possible.

There was a great tweet in my timeline today, saying that IBM's new Z14

mainframe is now shipping, and, "it still plays Flappy Bird!", taking a

much needed dig at Apple's culling of software for the new iPhone
platform. Hahahah.

Flappy Bird could stay if the author updated it to 64bit.

That's the thing though; IBM Z can still run apps from 1964's 32-bit System/360.
No need to update anything! Just let the license fees roll in!

True, no one does backward compatibility quite like an IBM mainframe. For a long time it seemed like WinTel was holding its own in that area, but on 64-bit Windows they've dropped support for MS-DOS and Win16 software. Linux and Mac OS have of course always been terrible in this area (for different reasons). Maybe I should buy a mainframe so I won't have to keep upgrading software.

Mac just doesn't care about compatibility. With Linux, the goal has always been "source compatibility," although I'm still shocked I can run Linux binaries I've compiled back in 1.3 days. Just don't use anything more exotic than raw kernel API, and you're golden.

Considering the mainframe's relative resurgence in the industry, I feel like I've missed an opportunity to get into that community. Oh well. Maybe once stable, I can build an "open hardware mainframe" around the Kestrel somehow.
;)

Linux gave the venerable mainframe a new lease on life. Apparently it's a big deal and very successful, because IBM has even been selling "Linux-only" mainframes (aptly named "Emperor" systems) for two years now. For orgs that already have mainframes running MVS (sorry ... "Z/OS") it was a good deal for them to begin with. Sometimes you just need to scale up instead of scaling out.

Any gamer-PC owning gamer will tell you the value of scaling up instead of scaling out. :) z/OS is actually doing quite well too (and I've learned enough of that "horrid JCL" to see why it still has some advantages over normal Bash shell scripting, and am left wondering why symbolic parameters fell out of favor).

Question for the Apple faithful:

What's the oldest (read: cheapest to buy used) Mac Mini that will run Linux natively? I may have a use for one in a "throw it in the corner and forget about it" role.

Why even bother with a Mac Mini wheen there are so many small cheap Wintel boxes out there?

Well, there's the whole thing about making heads explode among the Apple Faithful when they see a Mac not running Mac OS. But mainly I'm looking for something with a small footprint and low power consumption.

How powerful do you need it? Check out something like the Lenovo Q180.

Hmm, that Lenovo is a neat little machine. I wonder if it could be set up as a Hackintosh. :)

I dug through my old stuff and found a netbook that hasn't been touched in about five years. I think I'll try putting a barebones Linux image on that and see how it runs.