My son, who is an Apple enthusiast, told me a surprising bit of news that was recently handed down in the MacOS universe.  Apparently the newest iteration of the Mac OS, Catalina, is switching to the venerable Zsh (Z Shell) as its default command line shell:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18651872/apple-macos-catalina-zsh-bash-shell-replacement-features

Apple unveiled macOS Catalina yesterday with support for iPad apps and lots of new features, but a big change for developers and power users was missing from the on stage presentation. Starting with macOS Catalina, Macs will now use zsh as the default login shell and interactive shell across the operating system. All newly created user accounts in macOS Catalina will use zsh by default. Bash will still be available, but Apple is signaling that developers should start moving to zsh on macOS Mojave or earlier in anticipation of bash eventually going away in macOS.

Most internet news sources have started asking "Why?", and come up with pretty much the same answer: That pesky GPLv3 license:
https://thenextweb.com/dd/2019/06/04/why-does-macos-catalina-use-zsh-instead-of-bash-licensing/

So, why the sudden change?
In a word: licensing.
For well over a decade, Apple has shipped macOS with a horrendously outdated version of GNU Bash. The default version on the last version of macOS, codenamed Mojave, is Bash 3.2. That dates back to 2007. For context, that’s the same year Apple unveiled the first iPhone.
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Newer versions of Bash are licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 – or GPLv3 for short. This comes with several restrictions which could potentially have caused a few headaches for Apple further down the line.

While that may be a *correct* answer, a few people have seen another answer that fleshes out a possibility beyond 'Muh License': the mighty 'Oh My ZSH' community.
https://sunlightmedia.org/bash-vs-zsh/

For one, zsh has the leverage of a powerful online community called Oh My ZSH. Oh My ZSH is one of the oldest and most popular options for managing zsh configurations. Offering over 250 plugins and 140 different themes supplied by the community, Oh My ZSH is a great place to start in customizing the z shell that even comes with an auto-update function that keeps your shell updated. This allows users to work in a shell with a more personalized interface, amp up their workspace with a diverse array of tools, and have access to a convenient out-of-the-box support system. For instance, a highly favorable option for the interface is a right-handed side prompt or a side prompt that auto-hides when typing in long file paths or commands. Even this minute level of flexibility turns developers’ heads towards zsh.

You might say "Ok, so it has a few themes and whatnot, but Bash also supports colorizing and you can write scripts, change configs and set aliases without needing 'plugins', so what gives?", and you'd be right.  Take a look at Bash-It, a self-confessed OMZ "rip-off" and you'll see it offers a similar experience, with nothing more than the afore-mentioned scripts, configs, and aliases.
But then I noticed something peculiar:  Most of the theme screenshots at the Themes page showed Zsh being used inside a Git session.  As in, instead of the prompt simply showing you what directory you're currently in, these custom prompts will show you what Git branch/node you're working in, and some of them do some downright snazzy things. 



There are plugins and themes that go beyond Git, adding autocompletion, aliases and functions for working with Mercurial, Docker sessions, and many others. So it seems Zsh (coupled with the OMZ framework) allows you to go beyond simple colorization, and into useful visual feedback while doing work in the clean environment of a shell.
That's some downright Star Trek bizniss right there.  Nice.  :Thmbsup:

So, will I be installing Zsh and OMZ on my Linux box?  I just might at that, and I'll report back my experience.

(You'll get the joke if you read about Tuxman's "UnClouder" plugin here -> https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=44611.0)

High-Performance Gaming, Accessible to Everyone
Forget about hardware: Shadow is a full Windows computer you can access through a simple app. Anything you can do on a high-end computer, you can do on Shadow.

So basically, Shadows is a remote computer that runs all the high-end graphics (currently an Intel Xeon with 12GB RAM, 256GB secure storage, and nVidia GTX 1080 graphics), and delivers it to you as a simple stream.  That makes it possible to run high-end games at max settings on a second-hand laptop with nothing more than a decent Internet connection. 
My first thought was that lag would render the games barely playable, but many reviews I've read say that the latency between you pushing a button and it showing on your screen is around 10ms or so, which is noticeable, but barely.  It's a pretty hefty subscription though (~$35/month USD), so I won't be trying it any time soon, but thought some folks here might find it interesting.

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from a random post I saw somewhere

So, who's going to be the first programmer to adopt a poop emoji as their default file extension?

Unicode
Most computer systems today (e.g. Windows, OSX, Android, iOS) use a thing called Unicode to represent text. Since computers work in binary, there needs to be a way to take a string of binary and convert it to letters and numbers to display on the screen. Unicode is one way to do that, and any system that uses Unicode knows that 01000001 is the capital letter A.
...
Since all of these emoji are part of the Unicode standard it means that emoji is essentially text, and it can be typed into anywhere normal text can be typed into, which means we can now put them in lots of funny places.

On Mac/iOS: https://zachholman.com/posts/abusing-emoji/
On Windows: https://davidzych.com/abusing-emoji-in-windows/

It also works on Linux.  I know because I created a file named new_file.🐮
(that's "dot-cow" just in case ya didn't know)

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from it's way too late and I can't even