We don't have a monopoly on one class of device, we have monopolies on five different classes of device. That's definitely different and better!

It's a concept car; none of those things are actually known or knowable yet.

Fortnite uses Easy Anti Cheat, which is made by Epic (that is, Fortnite's own developer). EAC works fine on Linux; it just needs the developer to enable it.

It's also loud.

I don't need or want everyone sat in the same room as me to know every little thing I do on my phone. Leaving aside things that are actually private, that's just a level of inane garbage that we all don't need to know about each other.

Sometimes I just want to glance at the football scores without announcing to everyone: "OK Google, what is the current score for the football match between Swindon Town and Harrogate?".

Edit: It's currently nil-nil, if you're wondering.

I know this thread is likely to quickly descend into 50 variants of "ew, snap", but it's a good write up of what is really a pretty interesting novel approach to the immutable desktop world.

As the article says, it could well be the thing that actually justifies Canonical's dogged perseverance with snaps in the first place.

If only the biggest problem was messages starting "I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said:"

A far bigger problem is people using AI to draft text and then posting it as their own. On social media like this, I can't count the number of comments I've encountered midway through an otherwise normal discussion thread, and only clocked 2 paragraphs in that I'm reading a chat bot's response. I feel like I've had time and braincells stolen from me in the deception for the moments spent reading and attempting to derive meaning from it.

And just this week I received an application from someone wanting work in my office which was very clearly AI generated. Obviously that person will not be offered any work. If you can't be bothered to write your own "why I want to work here" cover letter, then I can't be bothered to work with you.

I've been a Linux user for a decade and a half now, but still use Windows on my corporate laptops. Honestly, it's baffling how Microsoft seem to consistently manage to miss the mark with the UI design. There's lots to be said about the underlying internals of Windows vs Linux, performance, kernel design etc., but even at the shallow, end user, "is this thing pleasant to use" stakes, they just never manage to get it right.

Windows 7 was...fine. It was largely inoffensive from a shell point of view, although things about how config and settings were handled were still pretty screwy. But Windows 8 was an absolutely insane approach to UI design, Windows 10 spent an awful lot of energy just trying to de-awful it without throwing the whole thing out, and Windows 11 is missing basic UI features that even Windows 7 had.

When you look at their main commercial competition (Mac and Chromebook) or the big names in Linux (GNOME, KDE, plenty of others besides), they stand out as a company that simply can't get it right, despite having more resources to throw at it than the rest of them put together.

That's His Majesty King Charles III, tyvm.

It probably isn't legal most places. EULAs are already considered fairly flimsy in terms of enforcement, but changing an EULA after you've already bought a device, in such a way as to reduce your statutory rights, is almost certainly a complete non-starter.

All translation services use AI, and have done for decades. There's pretty much no other way to do it.

Use an alternative, or

Use Wine/Proton, or

Use a web app if it exists, or

Run Windows in a VM.

For me, the first 3 options covers 99.9% of my usage. It's been a long time since I had to worry about installing Windows in a VM.

But to be fair, my requirements to use Windows software are very limited and non-critical. If:

A lot of programs I work with very often are Windows-exclusive

...then I would certainly consider keeping a Windows laptop around. Right tool for the job and all that.

Sold on his very own special X boxes.

There's so much to dislike, but I think the thing that irrationally bugs me the most is the fact that they chose a 6 panel door and just chopped the top off it right through the panels. Instead of, you know, just buying a different kind of door.

Not all mainframes are ancient; new models are still designed and sold to this day. And the brand spanking new mainframes may still be running COBOL code and other such antiquities, as many new mainframes are installed as upgrades for older mainframes and inherit a lot of legacy software that way.

And to answer your question: a mainframe is just a server. A specific design-type of server with a particular specialism for a particular set of usecases, but the basics of the underlying technology are no different from any other server. Old machines (mainframes or otherwise) will always consume far more power per instruction than a newer machine, so any old mainframes still chugging along out there are likely to be consuming a lot of power comparable to the work they're doing.

The value of mainframes is that they tend to have enormous redundancy and very high performance characteristics, particularly in terms of data access and storage. They're the machine of choice for things like financial transactions, where every transaction must be processed almost instantly, data loss is unacceptable, downtime nonexistent, and spikes in load are extremely unpredictable. For a usecase like that, the over-engineering of a mainframe is exactly what you need, and well worth the money over the alternative of a bodged together cluster of standard rack servers.

See also machines like the HP Nonstop line of fault-tolerant servers, which aren't usually called mainframes but which share a kinship with them in terms of being enormously over-engineered and very expensive servers which serve a particular niche.

How much effort that they've put into battling hate speech is irrelevant; all that matters is how successful those efforts are. It feels like there is far more hate speech on the platform than there was a couple of years ago, ergo they're failing.

If I were an advertiser concerned that my brand will appear alongside rampant neo-Naziism, it would be scarce comfort to be told "yeah, but we tried..."

Seems like a bit of a waste to launch an intercontinental missile at a country next door, on the same continent. Isn't Russia supposed to have plenty of short and mid range ballistic missiles? I guess they must be running low.

I was under the impression that ICBMs weren't all that great for conventional warheads. Their payload capacity isn't enormous and their accuracy tends to be relatively low- which matters not a jot if you're firing nukes (which do a lot of bang per kilo, and where a few hundred metres either way isn't likely to be critical), but not so great for dropping normal munitions.

Celebrities and influencers, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, endorsed Reece Lewis as a strong leader for the HyperVerse. ... Wozniak said in a video that he supported "Steven," proclaiming, "I can’t wait for the HyperVerse.”

In 2022, a writer for the British tabloid called The Mirror, Andrew Penman, attempted to raise a red flag, noting that all three of the celebrities (Wozniak, Chuck Norris, and Lance Bass) who endorsed Reece Lewis declined to confirm ever knowing him.

Oh Woz. How the mighty have fallen. Whatever they paid you, it wasn't enough. Also you're filthy rich already FFS.

More to the point, who in their right mind thinks that BMW would be selling a car with a 45mph top speed? Like, at all?

The fact that a person who works for a BMW dealership of all people would genuinely think this is simply not credible.

It's a big tech company. Unless you're an actual coal-face developer or sysadmin, most of the actual challenges will be the same regardless of what the machines with the blinky lights are actually doing.

It's not like the CEO is expected to be cutting code.

I'm a big 6'1" man, and generally a lover of dogs, but I'm exactly the same. I once had a massive German shepherd barrel up to me at full tilt, no owner in sight, and launch itself into my belly. It was being friendly, as it happens, but that's hardly much comfort when a 30kg bundle of muscle and claws hurls itself at you at a full sprint.

The owner, when they materialised a few moments later, was a middle aged woman who chuckled about how "he's a big softy, he just wants attention". Like, sure, but it would have been small comfort if I'd been a 10 year old child or something. Keep that "lovable scamp" on a fucking lead if you can't keep them to heel...