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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sold on his very own special X boxes.

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..."

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.

It's a command that pulls a whole bunch of useful system information and sticks it on one page.

Really, the biggest use of it is for showing other people your system- especially showing off. It's a staple of "look at my system" brag posts.

But to be generous, there are (small) legit use cases for it. If you manage a lot of machines, and you plausibly don't know the basic system information for whatever you happen to be working on in this instant, it's a program that will give you most of what you could want to know in a single command. Yes, 100% of the information could be retrieved just as easily using other standard commands, but having it in a single short command, outputting to a single overview page, formatted to be easily readable at a glance, is no bad thing.

but there’s nothing in the law that states they have to let you sideload whatever you choose

That's pretty much exactly what the law does say.

The gatekeeper shall allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software applications or software application stores using, or interoperating with, its operating system and allow those software applications or software application stores to be accessed by means other than the relevant core platform services of that gatekeeper.

There's a provision for not letting the user actively break the device, but that's it. And it's couched in terms like "if strictly necessary and proportionate" and "provided they are justified", so it's not something Apple can apply on a whim.

AI image processing could do the job in two minutes with no skill, whereas manual image editing (even crappily) takes skill and time.

Why assume someone handcrafted it when there's no evidence?

The Firefox snap is published directly by Mozilla too; it's not a third party snap.

What I really want to know is why and how it went away.

The move was in place because of the fear that IE was becoming a monopoly. Now Edge is very very far from the most popular browser, and Google Chrome is looking like the overwhelmingly dominant player, there's no reason to make MS prompt people to download rival products anymore.

It's not a "shitty title", because Ubuntu Linux is the thing they actually tested.

Whether Debian or Fedora or Alpine or Void or whatever would do better or worse is not a given, and isn't something the OP can comment on because they didn't test it.

We can probably infer that gains of a similar amount would be seen on most mainstream distros (as they're all pretty similar under the covers), but that's not on the OP.

In particular, Ubuntu ships with various non-free drivers and kernel patches that will be present in some, but not all other distros.

I mean... yeah?

A major GPL software stack used by major Linux distributions getting more money to invest in accessibility tooling seems like a "good thing".

Zip has a worse compression ratio than 7z, and that's a disadvantage for the average user (for example, a user with an email attachment size limit that they need to stay under).

If Windows natively supports one of the better alternatives, there's no reason to keep using zip. It's a 30 year old format, and it's something that regular users will happily just go with whatever's default.

New version of GNOME, new tiling window tool, replacement for Ubuntu Software app, new firmware management app. A fair amount, really. Nothing groundbreaking, but then what were you expecting?

Oh yeah, I'll just tell my wife that we're never having sex again because we've now got enough kids. I'm sure this will be a healthy and emotionally viable way of strengthening our relationship over the next 30 years or so until the menopause.

In the context of the people who did it, I think it's just a "bit of fun"; a hobbyist hacking project to see how far you can take something.

But that said, it is absolutely insane how much disk space Windows needs. Windows Server 2022, with its most minimal "core" installation option, still has a minimum requirement of a baffling 32GB of hard disk space. By comparison, Ubuntu Server's published minimum requirement is for only 2.5GB (with more specialist minimalist distros like Alpine coming in at well under 1GB).

Yeah, I mean if you want to get picky, the actual i386 processor family hasn't been supported by the Linux kernel since 2012, and was dropped by Debian in 2007.

Most people were generally not particularly affected by that, seeing as the last i386 chip was released in (I think) 1989!

Debian's choice to refer to the whole x86-32 line as i386 has always been a weird historical quirk.

"Oh, and 2/3 of our content is only available via 'channels' which require an additional monthly subscription almost as much as the subscription you're already paying for."

Amazon, you literally own MGM. No I am not paying you even more money to watch MGM content, you greedy fucks.

It doesn’t say anything about specific software. They have to allow you to use third party stores, they don’t have to allow you to download torrent apps so that you can pirate.

Literally in the quote I posted...

The gatekeeper shall allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software applications or software application stores

Birdtray sounds like what you're looking for. It allows you to close Thunderbird to the system tray so that it runs in the background. Thunderbird already throws notifications to GNOME, and should continue to do so while running in the background in the way.

Projects which choose BSD/Apache type licences do so fully in the knowledge that their code may be incorporated into projects with different licences. That's literally the point: it's considered a feature of the licence. These projects are explicitly OK with their code going proprietary, for example. If they weren't OK with it, they'd use a GPL-type copyleft licence instead, as that's conversely the literal point of those licences.

Being mad about your Apache code being incorporated into a GPL project would make no sense, and certainly wouldn't garner any sympathy from most people in the FOSS community.

That seems to be a rather unfair assertion to make. Boeing seems to be unique amongst the big airlines in having these problems; and they're relatively new problems for them too, in the grand scheme of things.

I've never once heard of systemic issues of this sort at Airbus, and it seems lazy to do a "they're all the same!" when this really does seem to be a Boeing problem first and foremost.

At some point we're just getting bogged down in semantics. Someone invented the internal combustion engine, and the earliest versions ran on gaseous fuels. Somebody else "invented" versions that than on liquid fuels. Engines that ran on petrol (gas) and diesel were "invented" by separate people. Engines based on turbine, reciprocating pistons, and rotary mechanisms were all "invented" by separate people.

The degree to which you consider any of those independent "inventions" versus simply modifying and improving existing inventions is essentially arbitrary.

I remember another one proposing using eye tracking on a phone's selfie camera to make sure you were watching ads, with the ads pausing every time you looked away.

This feels like something you should go tell Google about rather than the rest of us. They're the ones who have embedded LLM-generated answers to random search queries.

It's a typo. It should be "comprised".

From an end user point of view, there's not much difference other than the UI (and because of differing APIs, different third party apps too). It's fully interoperable with Lemmy (and Mastodon).

Behind the scenes on the server, though, it's a completely different piece of software.

The headline is kinda burying the lede. You're absolutely right that "kamikaze drones" already exist. Others have rather glibly pointed out that cruise missiles that have existed for decades are essentially this, and more recently there have been a great many "loitering munitions" drones which are what this startup is talking about.

The thing that seems to be novel here is that they are intending to make them fully automated, with AI-driven target acquisition, and capable of operating in a zero-comms environment. Currently drones generally still need a human at the controls.

The idea of what amounts to the equivalent of Tesla's "Full Self Driving" tech being in charge of deciding who lives and dies and what should be reduced to a smouldering crater is, it has to be said, faintly unnerving.

"Rock star developer" was originally coined to mean literally the anti-pattern of what you want from a Dev team.

It's someone who undeniably has plenty of skill, but who also:

• Has an unbearable ego.
• Doesn't work well with others.
• Doesn't document or comment their work properly.
• Refuses to work to other people's designs.
• Becomes an enormous key man dependency.

(Or some combination of similar traits).

The fact that recruiters heard the term and thought "hey, rock stars are cool, let's get as many of those as possible" is hilariously tragic.

No, this is just about the kernel and the installer/images.

You won't be able to install Debian on an x86-32 computer anymore, but everything you can currently do on an x86-64 install still continue to work.

1. "The steam loom is going to put weavers out of work, industrialization is a double edged sword and needs to be carefully considered".

2. This is the same complaint made about literally every single AI programme. It's not necessarily invalid, but if Mozilla doesn't move into this space plenty of other competitors still will.

3. Mozilla is allowed to do more than one thing.

You don't really need the majority of the market to have moved before things start to get tricky for Intel. They're a very much non-diversified company; the entire house is bet on x86. They've only just started dabbling in discrete GPUs, despite having made integrated GPU SOCs for years. Other than a bit of contract fabbing, almost every penny they make is from x86.

If ARM starts to make inroads into the laptop/desktop space and RISC-V starts to take a chunk of the server market, the bottom could fall out of Intel's business model fast.