Not too long. It's defense in depth; it's not meant to be outright impenetrable, just very (very) hard to get through.

Someone with enough drive, enough time, and enough resources will eventually put together an exploit chain that doesn't require an invalid tagged memory access. But if that raises the manpower requirement by 10-fold (to pull a number out of my ass), then it makes it that much more expensive to attack a phone. At some point, the Apple juice won't be worth the squeeze.

Given these changes, how does developer identification work? Is there even dev identification at this point?

My understanding is that Microsoft followed Apple for the same reason: a financial trail allows the stores to better authenticate that a developer is who they say they are, and conversely, it makes it harder for bad actors to get into the store. If Microsoft is no longer charging, do they still have an effective means to ID devs and to screen out fakes?

No it's not "obvious." My wife and I own 3 properties. One is commercial, the other two are residential. That might paint us as extremely wealthy but neither property is huge. We're fairly middle class. We use both residential properties interchangeably because they're not huge houses and we like our space. We could sell both and move into a single dwelling but we like things the way they are. Especially now that our daughters are adults in their twenties, who still live at home for the time being, but have their friends & significant others stay over quite a bit. I'm too much of an autistic introvert to live with that many other people in the same house 24/7 even if the house were a mansion.

The only reason I pay for the highest tier Netflix account is because of the number of devices allowed. Basically for my wife and daughters. I almost never watch it myself. Every time I open it up I feel like I spend more time scrolling to try and find something to watch than actually watching content. So if Netflix comes after us for "account sharing" I'm cancelling our subscription immediately without thinking twice about it. We're a single family, we just occupy multiple locations most of the time.

And our case is a bit more complicated than people who are talking about paying for a family account that includes kids who are away at school or camp or what-have-you. Or families who travel a lot. My wife and I are magicians (our commercial property is a small theatre and magic shop). This gets me thinking about families that travel for work. Army families or entertainers. Imagine being a Cirque Du Soleil performer - many of whom have kids ... they live on the road most days of the year.

The point is that there is no one-sized-fits-all "family" and it's more common for a nuclear family to occupy multiple locations than many would think.

A lot of us are old enough to have worked through the dot-com bubble and crash. The AI boom over the last year or two feels a lot like the late 90s leading up.

That said, if the market hadn't gone so all-in on the Internet and world wide web, investing stupid amounts of money into so many idiotic crackpot ideas that were doomed to fail, we arguably wouldn't have the Internet that we enjoy today.

In other words, you have to throw a lot of shit at the wall to see what will stick. 90% of just about everything we humans create is unremarkable. It's the 10% that we end up with that matters.

And we will get the 10% out of AI. Which is another way of framing what you are saying.

I've been a pretty big skeptic when it comes to the hype vs actual productivity gains, but that doesn't mean I haven't found a few areas where it has been useful in my workflow. LLMs are a cool magic trick. They can create some breathtaking illusions and are exceptionally useful at a few narrow applications such as searching and pattern matching.

While I don't want to see the ugly side of the crash (layoffs and unemployment), I am looking forward to when the hype train is over so everyone shuts up about their overstated fantasy and we can get on with doing actual work. The blockchain hype was annoying too, but since it wasn't obvious how blockchain could be applied to all types of work we didn't hear every single CEO at every single company talk about how AI is going to fundamentally change the way we work.

I've always loathed the term "Nintendo Tax" because it implies some kind of penalty, like a wealth tax or a vice tax. Though I can't argue that it's not a real thing - Nintendo's best games hold their market value far better than rival games, even from other top-tier Japanese developers.

Still, I would approach this phenomena from the other direction. Nintendo is not able to maintain high prices because they're somehow fleecing people (as a tax would imply), but because they work to make games that stand the test of time. And then back it up with a sales strategy to match.

So much of the industry treats video games as ephemeral entertainment - something to consume, and then throw away as you move on to the next game. It's the traditional media model for TV and movies extended to interactive media. And for most of the industry it's an accurate observation: game sales are ridiculously front-loaded, and few games (especially single-player games) have a long tail. After the initial hype subsides, you need to lower your price quickly in order to keep unit sales (and thus revenue) from cratering. All the while you're already hard at work on next year's game.

But Nintendo has been able to channel the lifecycle of board games and card games. In their eyes they aren't creating media, they're creating a digital plaything. They're creating something that you'll play now, but you'll also want to play next month, next year, next decade. Case in point: Mario Kart 8 is 11 years old and the only thing that has really diminished its value (and sales) after all of this time is that it finally has a successor in Mario Kart World.

When is the last time you saw a permanent price cut on Monopoly? Uno? Settlers of Catan. The occasional sale, sure. But a copy of Catan is still going to sell for $40+, even today. That's the business strategy Nintendo is tapping into. If a game is good - like really, really good - and it's repeatedly replayable, then why does the price need to be cut soon after launch? Why can't people come along and discover it years later? Why does it need to be priced like it's a quickly depreciating asset - like a movie instead of a board game?

And that is the ultimately where the Nintendo Tax as we know it comes from. Make a game good enough, make a game gamey-enough, and don't devalue it by replacing it 3 years down the line - and it's something people will want to buy even years later.

Though this is a relatively recent phenomena. It's only after we hit the PS360U generation of hardware that systems had enough processing power and memory for games to not be constrained and do whatever they want. And that games stopped being obviously dated in terms of visual when compared to the previous generation. It's no coincidence that this was the last generation where Nintendo offered their Nintendo Selects line of discounted games.

Still wondering about those upload speeds, though.

It's kind of a complex question. It depends on where you are and what plan you currently have.

If you're in a mid-split area (where Comcast is using a larger range of frequencies for upload traffic) and had a plan to take advantage of it - which it sounds like you are - then the new plans actually regress on upload speeds. The old ~1Gbps and ~2Gbps plans had 300Mbps nominal uploads (closer to 360Mbps due to overprovisioning), while all other plans were 150Mbps nominal. The new plans drop this down to 100Mbps nominal for everything except the new ~2Gbps plan, which gets 250Mbps nominal.

Unfortunately, you're facing an either/or proposition. Comcast won't remove the data cap for existing plans, you have to transition to a new plan. But if you do that, then you'll get the new, lower upload speeds. With that said, Comcast isn't forcing anyone to upgrade, so current customers can stay on their legacy plans indefinitely.

I use LibreOffice writer all the time, have for years (I'm old enough to say that I've used Star Office), and wish it all the success in the world ... but it has issues.

The thing that drives me crazy the most is when I select [highlight] some text in order to change the formatting (make it bold, italic, underline etc.) and it changes the formatting of surrounding text. Lists have similar issues when you're trying to add some preexisting text to a list but not other text.

The only reasons I have for reaching for a word processor over a text editor is a) rich text formatting b) print features c) embedded images, tables etc. and d) import/export of other document formats.

If a word processor can't make text styling/formatting painless then it is not ready for prime time IMO. That's one of it's most primary basic features that people just take for granted in any WYSIWYG editor.

Apple typically provides mainstream support for a macOS release for a year, and then security patches for the two years following.

For example, macOS 13 (Ventura) was launched in the fall of 2022. It is receiving security patches until (at least) the fall of 2025.

quietly request the READ_GSERVICES permission. This lets them grab your Google Services Framework ID, a persistent device ID that survives app reinstalls and SIM swaps. Translation: perfect for long-term tracking.

Given how critical that permission is, how are they even able to request it quietly? I would think Android would be screaming at the top of its lungs if that permission were requested.

> it's been neither "stable" nor "reliable."

I was going to say the same thing. CenturyLink/Quantum's fiber service has been spotty pretty much since the beginning. Which tracks, since their DSL service wasn't much better.

AT&T may find new and interesting ways to screw things up. But Quantum residential customers have already been getting the short end of the stick for reliability.

Right, just like it's impossible for an English speaking Canadian to communicate with people from Japan or Germany. I mean ... no one has ever solved that problem *rolls eyes*.

To me the fundamental issue at hand is the role of the government and individual freedom and liberty. My operating definition of liberty is an environment in which all interpersonal relations are consensual.

In order for two parties to communicate with each other, there must first be an intent to communicate. When that intent exists, the mechanisms will be negotiated between those parties.

For a 3rd party to enter the picture and dictate the mechanisms under threat of force is morally wrong in my opinion. There is no justification for that.

The only narrow area that I can think of is when government adopts a policy that says "For the purposes of communicating with the government, specifically, these are the languages that we promise to support."

That is no different than private individuals saying "If you want to communicate with me, these are the languages and tools that you can use to reach me."

I don't know what makes business so "special" or different that you would hold them to a standard above that of the government. Food labels? You might as well say that a company is required by law to print food labels in every single language that exists on the planet... as their may be some customer that walks into the store that doesn't speak English or French (to keep this within Canada). That would be absurd.

Government's job is not to "protect" a language. Government's job is to protect the rights of each and every individual that exists within it's operating jurisdiction. Those rights include the right to express yourself freely and to associate freely. Compelling that communication between private individuals take a specific form is to infringe upon the rights of those individuals.

There is no "middle ground" here. Either two parties are able to communicate using whatever means THEY chose, or some other 3rd party is interfering forcibly under threat of punishment. That latter scenario is not "middle ground", it's the illegitimate initiation of force against individuals who are just living their lives and going about their business. The fact that they are choosing to do so using a language or tool set that you don't like or approve of is none of your business and doesn't hurt you in any way. Go read a book or something and stop worrying so much about the private lives of others, you authoritarian nutter.

This whole exchange has me thinking of a filler bit from a DS9 episode.

JACK: The fact is that the universe is going to stop expanding and it is going to collapse in on itself. We've got to do something before it's too late.
PATRICK: How much time do we have left?
JACK: Sixty trillion years, seventy at the most.
JACK: There's too much matter. The universe is too heavy for its own good.
LAUREN: You need to lighten the load.
JACK: Yes, yes, yes, exactly. We have to find some way to decrease the mass.
SARINA: Of the entire universe?
JACK: That's the whole point.

Apparently, we're just going to have to change the cosmological constant...

Polygon had seen better days, that's for sure. But in their early days the site was very, very good.

More than anything else, I feel like the site lost its focus somewhere in the last half-decade. The original focus of the site is all in the name: polygons - as in video games. But Vox slowly morphed it into a general pop culture website. These days it's a mix of video games, movies, TV shows, board games, books, etc.

Those are all fine things in and of themselves. But at best they dilute the brand. And at worst they're taking the place of video game content, to the point where if you're after actual gaming news you're going to want to go elsewhere, because Polygon didn't have the editorial bandwidth to cover it.

So it has been a long time coming, in some respects. Unfortunately, the people who really pay the price are the writers, who are now out of a job.

CodeWeavers is one of the few companies that I believe really do intend to keep their word - and have the means to do it.

The company has been shipping CrossOver Mac for almost 20 years now - basically since Macs transitioned from PPC to x86. They've rejiggered their software lineup a couple of times, essentially consolidating a few different products (Games, Office, Standard) into a single SKU, but they've always provided a continuity of features and an upgrade path. Put another way, they've been offering the same continually-updated CrossOver product for over two decades now.

Which, since it's essentially the commercial release of Wine, that makes sense. Their whole business model is constantly developing improvements to Wine, and then bundling that up into a commercial-grade software package that comes with official support. So their business model is stable (so long as Windows remains important), as well as the need to continue updating the software.

Given how intertwined CodeWeavers is with Wine, it would be a disaster if they did renege on lifetime updates for anyone who has paid for them. The corollary to that being that if it were to happen, then something very bad must have already happened to the broader Wine ecosystem, as this is how they primarilly fund the whole project.

Good high schools have offered stats courses for ages. And for college-bound students, AP Statistics has been offered for almost 30 years now.