Hey me too, birthday buddy.

They made it the default option for businesses that routinely buy computers with less local storage than their users need. Pretty much every company I have worked for.

They then pushed it out hard into the consumer market when SSD came out and the average storage space on lower end models dropped by 75%.

I see why they did it, how they did it was in usual Microsoft fashion, idiotic.

It’s sort of their pattern.

1. Introduce new changes.

2. Screw it up royalty.

3. Fix the features that are salvageable and revert most of the remaining except: Double down on the shitty ones that they think will make them more money.

4. Rinse and Repeat

Forums were awesome until the ads took over. Then apps like Tapatalk made reading them easier. Then Tapatalk went to shit and power users migrated to reddit (mainly for the easy to use wepage and awesome independent apps.).

Then reddit shit the bed so now Lemmy is filling the gaps.

Windows 11 adoption to business customers is really bad. Most of the adoption to 11 has been from people purchasing new home computers and being stuck with 11 (I have two win 11 computers now).

Since the bulk of Microsoft’s revenue comes from business customers, they have a huge impact on decisions.

At this point the only decision Microsoft can make is to write off win 11 as a failue. Resuming feature upgrades to win 10 makes business sense.

How about you try reading what I wrote again. Apparently my simple analysis was too complex for you to understand.

A few basics for the logically and statistically impaired. This is a simple analysis of the probability of pairing up.

Having desirable traits for pairing up: I didn’t mentioned what these were to for a very good reason. It doesn’t matter to the analysis. What matters is the resulting rate of pairing up. Those that have traits desirable to pairing up are removed from the dating pool more quickly than those that don’t.

This creates a constant strong selection pressure of removal on the pool.

I also used to terms to describe the potential relationship not the people. Because who or what these people are is immaterial.

Dud = no chance of pairing up.

Mediocre = moderate chance of paring up.

Winner = pairing up.

Seriously…

It’s an age thing.

People with desirable traits for pairing up do so more frequently than those who lack these traits. As individuals pair up, the average quality of the remaining unpaired pool declines.

So the dating pool for early 20 year olds might be 1 dud: 20 mediocre: 1 winner. By the time people hit 40 the dating pool is 500 duds: 5 mediocre: 1 winner.

“boy do I have thrips” triggered a funny memory.

When I worked in Ag. Research we had a big international field day. People from 50+ countries visiting in. I got the wonderful job of doing presentations in the field all day long. This was in late summer on a bad thrip year.

Well, one of the office goons decided that they would order all the staff polo shirts for the three day event. We were all supposed to wear the same color on the specified day.

They ordered in a light blue, yellow, and green polos. The first day was to be light blue. I “accidentally” wore the green one instead and had a few very irate office goons on my back first off that morning. Strangely enough all of the experienced outdoor staff “accidently” wore the green shirt as well.

For those that don’t know, thrips are highly attracted to light blue and they bite. I laughed my ass off most of the day.

The following two days everyone wore green. Except for the one determined office goon who wore the yellow shirt. In a field full of honeybee hives…

Swirski mites are my favorite in the greenhouse or nethouse. They work better than any pesticide I have ever seen.

Yes but can they dislodge the glue from their mouth parts? Very unlikely if it’s strong enough to hold the smaller insects.

This is a really, really, bad idea.

The issue is that sticky traps are non-specific. Any insect the size of a trip can be trapped. Then when predators are attracted to all the free food, they are potentially stuck or damaged as well.

Thrips are also one of the easiest species to control using predatory species.

It’s all about profits. Seedless watermelons usually sell better with American consumers.

In order to produce fruit on triploid watermelons there has to be regular seeded (diploid) varieties in the field. Traditionally they would use a large oblong traditional seeded (allsweet types). Mainly because there was a market for them and they looked different than the seedless varieties.

The growers had to dedicate 1/5th of their acres to growing a seeded melons which they could sell at 50% or less than seedless varieties.

That’s when seed companies introduced dedicated pollinators (non-harvested). These untilized several different dwarf genes and could be interplanted with seedless varities with no loss of space.

With the exception of the big party markets like the 4th of July, most fields utilize the dedicated pollinators in the U.S. now. For production in Latin America, they export the seedless ones to the U.S. and sell the seeded ones l ones domestically.

Bottom line, today you only occasionally seeded watermelons in grocery stores in the U.S. and Canada.

They are not all bad. In the early 2000’s a breeder created a logistical method create tetraploids in 6 years (5 generations every 2 years). He used 3 countries to do it in if I recall correctly.

He integrated some of the small seeded deep red fleshed Chinese germplasm combined with the old flavorful allsweet types to make dramatically improved tetraploids.

Other companies have followed suit and the average quality of the fruit has improved. Some of the newer ones have really excellent flavor.

Also a bit of trivia I had to double check.

The seedless watermelon against Catholics image.

The original picture is one I took.

A. They have no significant difference in nutrition than non-GMO. In fact many GMO’s have been created to improve nutrition but sadly not used because of dumbfucks like Greenpeace who would rather have people go blind or die than accept GMO food. For example, rice that produces vitamin A and folic acid have been created but never used.

B. The “Terminator” GMO gene was created by the USDA-ARS and was NEVER released. No seed on the market has ever had a GMO sterility gene. Contrary to public opinion, it was designed to be integrated with other GMO genes to prevent the outcrossing and spread into the environment, not as an IP control mechanism.

Now why seedless watermelons suck is an interesting story.

The first intentional creation of a seedless watermelon was done in 1939 in Japan. University breeding programs in the southern U.S. after WWII began using the technology to create the first hybrids. In the early '50’s and '60’s multiple tetraploids were created by the university programs and released to private companies to produce seed with.

These tetraploid lines were “greys”. “Greys” were selected to have a thick hard rind for long distance shipping. They were barely red on the inside and tasted slightly bitter. They all sucked for flavor.

A seedless watermelon hybrid is made by crossing a tetraploid female by a diploid male. The resulting hybrid (triploid) has 3 copies of every chromosome and is sterile.

Fertile stable tetraploids take a long time to create - around 15 generations of you are lucky. Seedless watermelons also took a long time to gain popularity in the market. So nobody put significant money or time into creating more tetraploid inbreds for over 40 years.

From the 1980’s when seedless watermelons were introduced until around 2010, everyone used those shitty old tetraploids as 2/3rds of the hybrid. Since 2010 companies have created new tetraploid to use, but a significant portion still use 70 year old shitty ones.

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That’s it’s very much normal.

When I was teaching my older son to drive, I took him through it. My recommendation: “Never turn left at it. Turn right and find a safer way to go the other way.”

When he got to the interchange the guy in front of him tried to turn left and got hit immediately.

He should have had his “soft” targets better protected. Russia has a long tradition punishing the families of those that oppose them.

I have gotten flamed a few times for telling the Linux fanboys the hard truth.

If I have to hit Terminal even once with an average setup the OS is not ready for mainstream use. No exceptions. It has to work out of the box on the newest systems.

I use Linux the same way that you have: for a few applications that need a rock solid stable system. Once you get the damn thing setup, it truly is wonderful. Stable, reliable, easy to use. But getting there… Fuck that.

I think I had one clean distro install where everything worked. The PC was 7 years old when I installed it.

Mac did have a better OS than Win 95 -Win98 It was smoother and crashed less.

The difference was that Windows still ran DOS programs, 5.25" floppy disks etc… They made the decision to maintain backwards compatibility.

Mac decided to drop support regularly for what they considered “outdated software and technology.” For example: when USB drives came out they canceled support for 3.5" floppies in their OS. Machines that had a 3.5" drive installed could no longer use it. Put a floppy drive in and nothing happened.

Although Mac was a smoother more stable OS, windows had more functionality and greater compatability. Windows was a far superior product because of it. Even with the regular apearance of the blue screen of death.

Linux at the time also suffered from being a terminal based OS. Too much like DOS for way too long. I used it for specific tasks where it excelled at.

Had two ponies growing up and 15-18 horses on the ranch.

The two ponies were absolute assholes. Vicious aggressive beast who hated people. The farrier charged double for them.

The 17 hand paint was a big puppy. He’d follow us around looking for loves and your sandwich. He would beg for a PB&J.