- No, but now that you mention it, I'm curious about the five posts to the official US Federal Bureau of Prisons Instagram[1], which, unlike their Facebook and Twitter accounts, is private.
(No relation, just the first thing that came to mind when I tried to think of an organization that I wouldn't expect to have much of a social media presence.)
- Just because the Steam Machine isn't powerful enough to support high framerates in modern AAA games doesn't mean it can't do so with older or less graphically-intensive games.
VRR and HDR are presumably the biggest issues, because HDMI 2.0 should already have enough bandwith to support 8-bit 2160p120 with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, which should work fine for most SDR games, and 144 Hz vs 120 Hz is, in my experience at least, not noticeably different enough to be worth fussing over.
Some people will want to use their Steam Machine as a general-purpose desktop, of course, where RGB or 4:2:2 is nonnegotiable. Though in this case 120 Hz — or 120,000/1001 Hz, thanks NTSC — is, again in my experience, superior to 144 Hz as it avoids frame pacing issues with 30/60 Hz video.
- Here's a stupid question: per the site, "any entity wishing to make an active and material contribution to the development of future HDMI Specifications" can join the HDMI Forum for $15,000 p.a., and the Board of Directors is elected by majority vote by members.
Is there anything other than the money and desire to do so stopping 100 well-heeled Linux users from joining up and packing the board with open source-friendly directors who would as their first official act grant AMD permission to release its driver?
- Short answer: Probably not outright forbidden — but discouraged or constrained — because “I asked AI…” posts usually add noise, not insight.
(source: ChatGPT)
- While Cook isn't a product visionary, and never pretended to be, he's also not a mere caretaker: before he was CEO, he was responsible for the design and implementation of Apple's global supply chain and manufacturing operations as they exist today.
To torture your analogy, he designed and built the tracks and related infrastructure that kept Jobs' trains running on time.
Delivering products to customers, as you may recall, was always as important to Jobs as the design of the products themselves.
- I assume it has as much to do with the fact that Disney and Comcast didn't settle on terms of sale for Comcast's minority stake in Hulu until June of this year.
- I imagine major HBO resellers / direct Netflix competitors Amazon and Hulu (Disney) will insist on HBO remaining an extra-cost option, assuming these relationships survive the merger at all.
- Hulu "no ads" is even worse.
Live TV? Ads. Shows available as part of streaming packages for channels included in live TV? Ads. Random other stuff "due to streaming rights"? Ads.
At this point I pretty much assume any non-Disney programming that isn't a Hulu original will have ads, and access it by other means, partly as a minor act of civil disobedience, but mostly because I'm impatient (i.e., never in my life have I actually watched television advertising, even when forced to sit through it).
- Integration is the biggest thing. While some desktop VM hosts provide various integration bits like file sharing and rootless window support, the experience is rarely seemless.
Drawing a few examples from an old Raymond Chen blog post[1], integrations required for seemless operation include
• Host files must be accessible in guest applications using host paths and vice versa. Obviously this can't apply to all files, but users will at least expect their document files to be accessible, including documents located on (possibly drive-letter-mapped) network shares.
• Cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop need to work between host and guest applications.
• Taskbar notification icons created by guest applications must appear on the host's taskbar.
• Keyboard layout changes must be synchronized between host and guest.
These are, at least to a useful degree, possible. Integrations that are effectively impossible in the general case:
• Using local IPC mechanisms between host and guest applications. Chen's examples are OLE, DDE, and SendMessage, but this extends to other mechanisms like named pipes, TCP/IP via the loopback adapter, and shared memory.
• Using plug-ins running in the guest OS in host applications and vice versa. At best, these could be implemented through some sort of shim mechanism on a case-by-case basis, assuming the plug-in mechanism isn't too heavily sandboxed, and that the shim mechanism doesn't introduce unacceptable overhead (e.g., latency in real-time A/V applications).
Finally, implementing these integrations without complicated (to implement and configure) safeguards would effectively eliminate most of the security benefits of virtualization.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20051223213509/http://blogs.msdn...
- True, but plenty chase specs like sample rate (beyond 96 kHz) and bit depth (beyond 24) that have no practical benefit beyond the DAC circuit.
- This. I’d complain more about Face ID if Apple Pay wasn’t the first payment mechanism I’ve used that reliably fulfills the promise of being faster/easier than cash, and Face ID + mechanical button is a big part of that.
- For gaming, this doesn't bother me much, given that, even at today's prices, the cost of maintaining a midrange gaming PC with ample storage and "recommended" specs for new releases is probably no more than $200-$300/year.
The ever-increasing system requirements of productivity software, however, never ceases to amaze me:
Acrobat Exchange 1.0 for Windows (1993) required 4 MB RAM and 6 MB free disk space.
Rough feature parity with the most-used features of modern Acrobat also required Acrobat Distiller, which required 8 MB RAM and another 10 MB or so of disk space.
Acrobat for Windows (2025) requires 2,000 MB RAM and 4,500 MB free disk space.
- Reminds me of a silly thing that happened when I was a freshman in high school, ca. 1992.
We had a dumb "computer literacy" class taught in an computer lab full of PS/2 Model 25s with no hard drives, and were each issued a bootable floppy disk containing both Microsoft Works and our assignment files (word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc.), which we turned in at the end of class for grading.
We started Works in the usual way, by typing "works" at the MS-DOS prompt.
One day, out of boredom, I added "PROMPT Password:" to AUTOEXEC.BAT on my disk, changing the DOS prompt from "A:\>" to "Password:" when booted from my disk.
Two days later, I got called into the dean's office, where the instructor demanded to know how I used my disk to "hack the network" — a network that, up until this point, I didn't even know existed, as the lab computers weren't connected to anything but power — and "lock me out of my computer", and threatened suspension unless and until I revealed the password.
After a few minutes trying to explain that no password existed to a "computer literacy" instructor who clearly had no idea what either AUTOEXEC.BAT or the DOS prompt was, nor why booting a networked computer from a potentially untrustworthy floppy disk was a terrible idea, I finally gave in.
"Fine. The password is works. Can I go now?"
- I don't know what it scans in the background by default, but it can custom scan mounted volumes with no visible mount points assigned at all, e.g., my EFI partition containing a copy of the EICAR test file[1]:
[1] https://www.eicar.org/download-anti-malware-testfile/PS C:\Users\jtm> & 'C:\Program Files\Windows Defender\MpCmdRun.exe' -Scan -ScanType 3 -File '\\?\Volume{91ada2dc-bb55-4d7d-aee5-df40f3cfa155}\' Scan starting... Scan finished. Scanning \\?\Volume{91ada2dc-bb55-4d7d-aee5-df40f3cfa155}\ found 1 threats. Cleaning started... Cleaning finished. - Symlinks also work on NTFS, though mount points have the advantage of not having a canonical path that might be unintentionally resolved and persisted.
- As long as the rotations aren't for more than a month or two, sign me up as well!
- Tastes differ. I personally find the 36U IBM rack in the corner of my apartment more visually appealing than some of my other furniture, and consolidating equipment in a rack with built-in PDUs makes it easier to run everything through a single UPS in an apartment where rewiring is not an option.
- Office 365 is a subscription, not a perpetual license, but the only time I can recall Microsoft ever deliberately removing access to downloadable software I was entitled to was in the late 90's, when they removed Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 from MSDN as part of a settlement with Sun where they agreed to stop distributing their Java runtime.
Oh, and just for the record, one time in the early 90s, I was getting read errors trying to reinstall Excel from the original floppies, had no backups, and Microsoft support sent a complete replacement disk set, at no charge, no questions asked (seriously; for all they knew, I could have been lying to get a free unlicensed copy of Excel).
- Amusingly, download.info.apple.com still appears to serve all the files that used to be on the old FTP site, including a small and somewhat random subset of old system software versions for Mac and Apple II, Newton firmware updates, etc., but directory browsing isn't enabled, so you need direct links, which you can get from the Wayback machine[1].
But once you have the links, you can download the actual files directly from Apple, e.g., if you're ready to upgrade your Mac Plus to the latest and greatest version of System 6, download
https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof...
https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof...
https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof...
https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141025043714/http://www.info.a...
For instance, the source code to Epic's Unreal Engine[1] is hosted in a private GitHub repo, accessible by anyone who agrees to a clickthrough license, and free for personal, educational, and commercial use up to $1 million gross revenue, at which point royalty payments are required.
[1] https://www.unrealengine.com/