To my knowledge, they peered with other registrars and hosts to manage the vending. At least, in 2008 ish they partnered almost exclusively with Apple (for their MobileMe cloud and email services issuing everyone dotME addresses) and GoDaddy. I think others had to resell somehow through them? But I could be mistaken on that detail.

Domain squatting was a very profitable scourge on the internet back before all the obvious names were brought up , but it was one of the few popular TLD’s to gain any real traction with consumers until dotAI.

I very briefly held, and did nothing with, “pants.me” which I regret to this day.

Seconded. I moved to Win10 LTSC IoT on some, Bazzite on others, and haven’t looked back.

I’m never loading naked spyware Win11 again.

When forced to move off win10iot I’ll go to win11iot for anything mission critical for windows.

But by then I’d better be 90% MacOS/Linux.

Citations needed for the first paragraph. Hard agree, for the second.

Oh, I didn’t say that they wouldn’t all board a vessel to Mars.

None of them are stepping foot on it, though, for sure.

It would be nice if we could deposit all of them there, for sure.

If it’s any comfort, none of them are getting to Mars.

Enjoying my EU hosted services, and looking forward to my next-gen cloud office software from the EU, and I’m already bypassing US retail brands for most of my electronics.

There was a time that saying “buy American” wasn’t a curse or a threat.

My friend, I’m sorry to tell you… That’s not how this is going to go.

After the crash, no matter how you shake it, three truths will be standing between you and affordable ram at home.

1. None of the backlog of product that had been fabricated will be useful and adaptable for Consumer equipment. They can’t just repackage any of the HBM products to fit in our computers.

2. Every ram manufacturer will suddenly be facing a cash flow problem as their principal (and in some cases, ONLY) accounts receivable will be dodging them and checks won’t clear.

3. All of the equipment thst manufacterers the memory chips will need to be retooled and all of the supply chain paths to packagers and Distributors will need to be spun up and rebuilt.

All of this hurts the memory pricing we pay at the end of the line.

My friend, have you seen the markets? You’re seeing how capitalism works because it fails.

The benefits are privatized. The losses are socialized. Lather, rinse repeat.

Family trip from Asia? That’s 128gb right there.

I bet I could quadruple it with sodimms. That’s probably why AMD is requiring solder on memory for Strix Halo.

I remember diligently installing cash clearing apps and religiously matching that button to make it go back to zero, believing I was speeding up my old Barton core xp-2500+

Thinking about that is most of the packagers for RAM are in china. Even if that silicon wasn’t pressed in china, the company that actually buys up the modules slaps them on dims or sodiums, and ships them with custom Packaging are in China.

There is a whole middle step that most of us are completely missing, between the actual memory manufacturers and the distributors.

Imagine if all of us cared about the regulatory capture rampant in the baby formula industry they gave us that US baby formula crisis at the start of the decade, as much as we care about our computer memory.

Realistically, a whole lot of the high bandwidth memory products that they are producing will never find their way into consumer products.

When the dotcom bubble popped there were a lot of Assets in by products which could be adopted by other companies or distributed to a wide array of potential users, but the E-Waste and byproducts of this era are going to be niche and esoteric.

I think a lost decade is much more likely than a Renaissance of repurposing.

I’m just hoping the big three memory manufacturers that have essentially contracted all of their volumes across the next several Cycles will be able to survive whatever collapse hits their account receivable when they’ve done exactly what they said they would but the people with the purchase orders leave them holding the bag.