Per TFA:

These adjustments stem from Sonyâ(TM)s ongoing efforts to manage backend services and data feeds that support enhanced guide features on its Google TV-powered BRAVIA lineup.

It sounds like Sony is losing (or is not renewing) the contracts with their data brokers who providing the listing services for their TVs? In which case this is not necessarily expected, but it is par for the course.

There is no truly free source of OTA TV listings and other metadata in the US. The stations themselves do not provide this data over the air as an adjacent data stream (which is what a rational person would expect), so the only way to get listings is from third party providers such as Gracenote. Which as a technical solution works, but it means someone is always on the hook for paying for that service. And no one wants to pay for OTA metadata services, since the hallmark attribute of OTA TV is that it's free.

This is a problem that goes back to the earliest days of TiVo. Someone needs to pay for TV listings, but TVs and other STBs last too long; hardware manufacturers eventually tire of paying for an ever-increasing bill - it costs them money they don't get to make back if they give away the listings for free. And thus you eventually end up with required a monthly subscription just to have an OTA DVR.

The eventual death of linear TV should finally put an end to this nonsense. But until then we're all going to keep experiencing the same non-free listings issues we've had since the late 90s.

Huh. I am surprised to hear that Microsoft SQL Management Studio doesn't run. The usual problem children are either programs that are using specific x86 instructions (e.g. games with AVX2), or programs that need kernel mode drivers. MSMS doesn't fall into either of those categories.

This is an especially bad example.

The SN850X has been rebranded multiple times as SanDisk has slowly split from Western Digital (taking all the SSDs with them). They still sell it as the SN850X, but the full model and SKU numbers have changed over the years. As a result, prices for the old models have been volatile, as some vendors treat the newer iterations as the same product while others don't. Which means that for the latter, they see the old models as an item they aren't getting more stock of, and raise prices on the remaining stock accordingly.

Oldest Model: WDBB9H0020BNC-WRSN (The original Western Digital WD_BLACK product)
Mid Model: WDS200T2XHE-00BCA0 (The WD_BLACK By SanDisk product)
Newest Model: SDSP81200TAH-000E0 (The current SanDisk product)

The SN850X has been a very long-lived product from a manufacturer who supplies their own NAND and controller, so I can see why The Verge would want to use that as a tracking point for SSD prices. But the brand/SKU changes make it a poor choice. Samsung's drives are probably a better point of comparison here.

It's a bit of a moot point. Systems that aren't receiving general OS updates wouldn't receive updated bootloaders anyhow. So they wouldn't need the updated certificates that allow for bootloaders signed after June 2026.

It gets a bit tautological, but only systems that are getting updates need updates.

It lacks an appropriate number of ports and doesn't support DisplayPort.

USB DisplayPort alt mode says hello. Every rear USB-C port on the Mac Mini is also a DisplayPort. Just as it is on all of Apple's laptops.

Thunderbolt is a garbage, proprietary Apple standard.

Thunderbolt is an Intel standard. And in the case of Thunderbolt 4, it's just an additional set of feature requirements over base USB4, where those features are optional. In other words, TB4 is a superset of USB4.

Thank you for calling this out.

The fact that these one-liner installers are becoming an increasingly common method of installing software is utterly insane - and even more dangerous.

The solution (probably) isn't to lock down OSes to prevent this. But at a minimum, developers need to be tapped with a pitchfork for trying to officially distribute their software in this fashion. Doing so is normalizing bad habits.

One of many examples: the official installation instructions for the Deno JS runtime are one-liners for all three OSes: Linux, Windows, and macOS. It's equally stupid on all of them.

Does this mean the Martian Council of Elders has finally figured out how to disable our satellites in orbit?

Will our gelsacs be safe?!

If I were going to buy one so that I can play this game, which is the better choice? Which one is newer?

Out of the box, the Xbox Series X is slightly better hardware than the regular PS5. it's not really enough to matter, especially on a mutliplatform game, but since you asked...

That said, Sony offers the PS5 Pro, a higher spec version of the console that Microsoft does not offer an equivalent of. So if price is no object, the PS5 Pro is expected to be the best platform to play it on.

Upcoming? The iPhone 16e was released last year. These are schematics for a phone that has been out for a year.

The problem with this document's release is that it's technical information that was supposed to be kept confidential forever.

I'm assuming this is just an error on the FCC's part, and that they automatically released it after a year. Though with the current administration, Hanlon's razor is getting harder and harder to apply.

It's subjective.

My wife and I went to see a couple of movies last year because they were big deals to us (Terrifier 3 and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice). We enjoyed the recliners, the limited edition popcorn bucket merch, the time out together, the reclining seats and the big screen.

What we didn't enjoy was the other people in the theatre talking through the movies, using their cell phones, coughing, breathing loudly, chewing food loudly, opening wrappers etc.

I'm with the parent, personally. If other people still enjoy the theatre experience then there's nothing wrong with that and theatres certainly don't "deserve to die." But there are those of us who don't consider watching a movie to be a social activity, and get extremely resentful and triggered when the presence of other people in the space pulls our heads out of the film we're trying to feel immersed in.

More people die in the aggregate when censorship is status quo. You start by censoring things you feel are absolutely justified because, allegedly, those ideas "cost lives." But then someone comes along with different ideas as to what is justified. Maybe they are threatened by ideas that challenge their power status. Soon enough science, research, innovation, investigative journalism .. .things that objectively improve people's lives and save many more lives than a virus has ever taken are silenced out of fear of repercussions for saying the wrong thing.

Freedom of speech is not a "laudable ideal". It is a fundamental human right that exists because reason is our primary tool of survival as human beings. But like with everything, there is good and bad to be found. There are bad actors out there who will lie and cheat and steal. The solution is not to prevent people from being able to share information, no matter how justified you feel in doing so. The solution is to counter bad ideas and lies with better ideas and truths. Individuals will make their own individual choices and face the consequences accordingly. Reality always wins.

My wife recently bought a new laptop and, to both of our surprise, it was configured out of the box to save data to OneDrive instead of C:. She's not particularly tech savvy and one day Chrome complained that storage was full. She did a web search of the error and it recommended deleting data from OneDrive, which she did, assuming that her family pictures were only backed up there - not primarily stored there - and ended up losing important data as a result of this.

Thankfully it must have been that particular OEM that chose to do this. I had installed "vanilla" Windows 11 on a custom PC build and that didn't happen - and we just bought a new laptop for our new business, different brand, and that was the first setting I checked (not an issue).

Still... companies pushing this type of crap on users is just batshit. Offer as an option, sure. But fundamentally re-configuring core functionality that people who have been using the OS for decades take for granted is just madness.

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.