I've only tried the original Half-Life trilogy so far, but Steam on Linux seems to work well for at least some games.

Steam has Proton, which because of the Steam Deck, it has significantly improved gaming on Linux. About the only things it doesn't work on are games that require kernel anti-cheat.

And while Proton only works with Steam (though its changes are pushed back into WINE), you can still run other stores using it since you can add any app you want and run it under Proton.

I've long held that the use of biometrics to replace passwords is a mistake. The classic "username" and "password" combo provides two pieces of information in order to verify identify: who you are, and something you know. A thumbprint, or an iris scan, more accurately represents who you are than something you know; so using those to replace your username would make sense... but using them to replace your password seems like a bad idea.

Except that the truth is far worse. The reason phones use biometrics is because without it, people were not using anything.

Remember "slide to unlock"? Have you remembered seeing anyone with that on their phone? Circa 2012 or so, studies conducted showed only about 20% of phone users had a PIN on their phone - the rest of them used the default password less slide to unlock.

The reason for this was simple - people were checking phones, and the added annoyance of having to unlock your phone was a deterrent - people check their phones hundreds to thousands of times a day, and unlocking every time turned out to be not worth the effort.

That's why they added biometrics - because now people would be forced to put a password on their phone, but it wouldn't be annoying since they would put their finger on the sensor and it would unlock for them by the time they got it into view.

So yes, password is best. however, it was interfering with the need for people to quickly glance at their phones. Biometrics solved that because now users would generally not be bothered with a password entry dialog most of the time so they could continue to use their phones with a password because it's not getting in the way, most of the time.

Phones still allow you to disable biometrics so you can have password only authentication. However you'll probably find people disabling it after a few hours of inconvenience.

And that's why all phones nowadays have SOS modes, so you can disable biometrics until the password is entered. Just lear the key combination (it's usually a mix of power button and volume button) and the biometrics will be disabled until the next successful login.

how does an six- to nine-month school cost 30K?
now an full collage can cost more and the loans are harder to get out of.

Private schools often cost that much or more. It's why Catholic private schools are an extremely popular option because their costs are usually 1/10th of what a normal private school costs.

No. The "ruling" was that there is no human creativity in AI-generated material, thus nothing subject to copyright.

You also appear to need reference to the sweat of the brow doctrine and its inapplicability in modern copyright law.

It's the phone book or recipe book copyright. The contents of the book (the phone numbers, the recipes, etc) are not copyrightable. However, how those phone numbers and recipes are laid out, that can have copyright.

But you're just as free to take those recipes and put it on your website as long as you don't reproduce the layout or other copyrighted content (e.g., photos).

So if the book gets published, you're free to re-type the text of the book out and give it away for free because it's in the public domain. However, if there is artwork and how you format the pages is copyrighted, So make sure you use a different font.

You're also free to make adaptations of the content - an audiobook, for example. You can't copyright the content, but the recording of it is copyrightable

Honor among thieves is a myth. It would be funny if they did release it, not only as an outing, but a way of making a lot of personal enemies, that have no ethics in solving a particular problem.

The quote is "There is no honor among thieves". It never existed in the first place. Because if crooks can't be trusted (they're a crook, they already did the crime), why would a crook trust a crook?

I mean, they're willing to break rules to get what t hey want, so why would they suddenly be willing to obey a rule in a slightly different context?

That said, you do occasionally see it where one criminal doesn't give up the name of their co-conspirators for some reason or another. Which is generally unusual since while they get to rot in jail for the crime, it's likely their partners don't even care about that - they're living it up. So you really aren't getting anything by not squealing either - other than the honor of being forgotten about.

Basically a big miscalculation of what people would do. I guess they expected a good chunk of people to have been stuck and continue to pay, and they made such changes so quickly everyone decided to ditch rather than stay.

It's the problem - they went from acquiring to making changes way too quickly and people generally get very scared at that. The speed of which basically started everyone into looking at alternatives.

And alternatives exist - ProxMox even gained the ability to import ESXi machines.

The problem was they started making changes so quickly people got scared. Chances are if they sat around on the licensing front and let things settle they'd probably get less churn,

But nope, they decided to rip the carpet from under their users - one day licensing is this, the next day, it's that, and that's done. No time to sunset old agreements, just switch over with no announcement and no transition or migration plan.

Even Google, known for killing their stuff, generally gives at least a month's heads up that stuff will end, sometimes way more to allow users to migrate.

Particularly with firmware, you get chunks to cover bits and pieces but you have to provide certain bits and pieces. I'm frankly shocked how bad the 'ready to go' firmware even from someone like Insyde or AMI is, who you would *think* would have it pretty well down by now. You can have the most milquetoast combination of predictable components and *still* need to do work to behave as well as a Dell or Lenovo even if the components are largely the same, as they have some on staff firmware developers that build on top of the vendors and they don't share their assets with the world. Hell, it's obvious that they don't even share with themselves, some product families are worlds apart from the exact same company with the same chipsets.

A PC has a lot of custom components on it and that's where a lot of the BIOS work comes from.

For example, most PCs need a programmable clock generator to generate the various clock frequencies needed by the CPU, chipset, memory, slots, etc. Did you know there are hundreds of chips out there that can do this? Well, the motherboard manufacturer gets to pick one (and likely a bunch of alternates because supply chain) and put them o the board. But now your BIOS needs to support that chip, so someone needs to write code to support that chip.

But also, there are infinite number of ways to hook that chip up to the various components - many have multiple channels so channel A may go to the CPU, channel B to the RAM, etc., or someone else might do it another way, with Channel A going to RAM, channel B to the chipset, etc.

Likewise, PCIe has two methods of signalling interrupts - an interrupt pin or an interrupt message. Interrupt pins need routing to the interrupt controller, and how that's done is different on every board. Likewise, the interrupt messages are used to have the root complex signal an interrupt on usually another interrupt line.

Then you have the dozens of other controllers - most motherboards have RGB support, which can come in at least 3 different flavors.

There's probably dozens of GPIO lines as well, used to do various things - like vritually set jumpers, write protect the flash chips, and other features.

All those things are something BIOS vendors need to support.

Then there are the fun ones like the ACPI tables (or programs, since it's really a VM like thing). Like when you suspend a PC, you need to start suspending memory, then suspend devices, the CPU, etc. And often toggle various IO lines as you shut down components

Oh, and the BIOS is modular - because someone may want features that someone else doesn't want to pay for.

You don't need to run the entire model - Google's model is apparently very RAM hungry as it would need 8GB of RAM.

If you design your device with that in mind, 8GB of RAM to run a model isn't all that much - given it's IOS, Apple will probably only need 4 or 8 GB of RAM for the OS and applications, so your device will only need 12 or 16GB of RAM total. Not really unheard of (12GB was what "flagship" Android phones had years ago).

This is why a signature should still be a requirement for anything to be legally binding. An accidental click won't result in her signature being written on a final approval document.

Except that's what lawyers do. Lawyers are called "your representation" - if you go to court, you can be absent and have your lawyers represent your case to the court. You give them that power when you hire them. You can hire a lawyer to answer questions on law, but usually you hire them to represent you in a lawsuit.

When you do that, the lawyer's actions represent you. If the lawyer misrepresents you by taking a deal you don't like, your recourse is to sue your lawyer for misrepresentation.

It was way more up to the mid 90s or so to have these doodles - basically right when we started going from LSI to VLSI in designs. In LSI and early VLSI and before, chips were generally laid out by hand - hand drawn in mask (you might remember people saying Rubylith, which is a masking film so when it came time to do the photoreduction the rubylith would block light, but under normal light it was a transparent red so you could see what you're masking).

As such, doing such doodles was relatively easy since you had the time and space to do it.

But once going into the VLSI era, on digital chips it started to be whittled down to initials and such. But it was also strongly discouraged because those doodles had been known to interact with signals causing issues.

Because analog IC design generally doesn't use VLSI techniques, they often still have doodles because a lot of it is still manually laid out by hand. (Analog IC design isn't using cutting edge processes).

These days, you're really likely to just get initials as it's relatively easy to get those imported into the design and there's generally an area of the chip for such text anyways (you usually will have die ID codes visible).

Nope. Apple still requires ALL apps to be reviewed and notarized.

I'm not sure why people keep having this misconception that Apple has opened anything up. Apple still has final say on approving an app, which means that this is nothing like how it works on Android.

No, Apple is NOT reviewing any apps not using the App Store. Apple is notarizing apps, but that just means Apple is signing them.

Basically you send your IPA through Apple's page, and it comes back to you signed.

Apple will sign anything, without reviewing it. If something turns out to be malware then Apple could potentially figure out whose app it is and ask the developer to fix it.

Does it support SponsorBlock? Many videos are just as bad for ads these days. Especially sponsor whore channels like LTT.

8.3 came from Gary Kildall (who never worked for Microsoft) in 1974. Microsoft wasn't even founded until a year later and in 1980 chose to make the DOS file system compatible with Kildall's existing CP/M. None of this seems unwise or shows a lack of foresight on Microsoft's part.

Gary Kildall was the CEO of Digital Research. They created CP/M, a very popular operating system for (at the time) 8 bit microcomputers running the Z80 CPU.

Microsoft at best made a BASIC for these microcomputers - things like the FAT filesystem can trace their origins to microcomputer BASIC from Micro-Soft (as it was known then).

Now, IBM famously tried to arrange a hush-hush meeting with Digital Research to get CP/M ported to 16-bit processors (i.e., the 8086) for their new Personal Computer. Unfortunately, Gary was out flying, while his wife refused to sign the NDA IBM wanted. Now, depending on the version of the story, the widely publicized one was that Gary was flying for fun and not to be disturbed which irritated IBM as they mutually arranged for this meeting. In reality, Gary's wife was the one who did the business matters (Gary was the technical guy/programmer/etc) so Gary wasn't actually needed since it was thought that they would hammer out the legal agreements. But it was not only the failure of Gary's wife to sign the NDA, but that they could not hammer out a licensing arrangement. IBM wanted "free and clear" licensing - they'd pay Digital Research a sum of money for unlimited copies, and that was something Digital Research refused to do. So IBM left.

IBM then asked Micro-Soft (who was providing the BASIC and languages support) if they would supply the OS as well, which is where they bought QDOS from Seattle Computer Products, which was a clean room implementation of a CP/M like OS for the 8086. (It was by definition clean room - as CP/M for 16-bit processors didn't yet exist). Of course, Digital Research sued IBM and Microsoft, and IBM settled by offering CP/M, when it was available, with the IBM PC. Incidentally, this was one of the first "look and feel" lawsuits - it was felt that MS-DOS felt a little "too close" to CP/M

Of course, by then it was too late - MS-DOS and PC-DOS was well established for years, and were cheaper at $99 vs. DR's 16-bit CP/M at $250.

And yes, 8.3 was ridiculous in the 80s, when even contemporary PCs supported longer file names - I think the Commodore 64 supported 16 characters for the filename, while the Apple II supported 30 characters (!) in DOS and 15 characters (aww...) in ProDOS. And the Macintosh supported 32 characters initially.

And that we put up with this silliness until the mid 90s. When every other computer and OS on the market supported much longer filenames. Or *gasp*, spaces.

It should be noted that FAT12 and FAT16 are hardcoded to only support 8.3 filenames - the directory contains 8 characters for name, and 3 characters for extension (all filenames are padded to 8 with spaces). FAT32 was the first to support long filenames natively (support was added in Windows 98, so Windows 95 only did FAT12 and FAT16). So long filename support was a hack for FAT12 and FAT16 (and added to Linux as "vfat" but you could mount it as "msdos" to get back to 8.3. (and there was the umsdos extension to add UNIX permissions and ownership information).

Incidentally, long filename support was one of the patents Microsoft sued over initially, leading to vfat being slightly incompatible (I believe it stopped making the 8.3 compatible filename), but it was OK as Windows would auto-create them on mounting.

I diagree. Music often can be played in places where other forms of entertainment is inappropriate.

For example, background music is often present everywhere because it only uses your sense of hearing, while you're doing other things. It's extremely difficult to read a book and drive, for example (though many people try), or to watch TV and read a book at the same time. But listening to music and driving, or reading a book, or doing other things like shopping, happens all the time.

It's one of those things that can make taking exams difficult - if you study while listening to music (and most people do), going into an exam room where it's quiet can be extremely disconcerting to the point of distraction.

Of course, the problem with music is the radio - ClearChannel (now IHeartRadio) has basically destroyed music by turning it into something that's overplayed and bland and heard in every market. Back when there were limits on ownership (first it was you couldn't own more than 6 stations, then something like you couldn't own 3 in a market) you had more variety. Now every market has a KISS-FM, or MOVE radio, or everything else iHeartRadio has.

You missed a very important task - getting a job requires the Internet as well.

Any retail job - all the job applications are online. There are minimum wage entry level jobs. You can ask, but most people will say to apply at the website.

Still, most jobs require application over the Internet - I'm sure the next job you're considering is being done online - either through some online job portal or you're emailing your resume around to people you know.

And then those interviews are often done remotely and not in person, again, over the internet.

There are very few jobs you can apply for in person these days.