We count gaming PCs but most gamers don't really use their PCs as a desktop beyond "some movies [porn] and lite web browsing."

In all seriousness, though, I think it does help Linux desktop adoption because it normalizes Linux for these users. It's very common on ./ to see posts where people say, "I only use Windows for games." Gamers tend to build their own PCs (or buy weird custom rigs), so unlike most computer users the OS isn't just baked into the cost. Also, judging by their hardware, ricing Linux should be right up their alley.

Steam legitimizes Linux gaming and you get extra nerd cred for doing it. That's not to say the "year of the Linux desktop" is upon up, but the market is won one niche at a time. Personally, I don't care if Linux comes to dominate the desktop like it does the server world. I just want it to gain enough market share so the big developers have to support it and I don't have to use macOS for certain things at work at Linux for everything else.

The payment processors have all the power here. I doubt Steam particularly wanted to do this - otherwise that content would have been blocked before payment was an issue. And since the threat really is existential, Steam will bend. No shade to them. They aren't in the business of protecting freedoms. They just want to sell games.

My guess is that it's the mixed situation that is problematic. After all, porn companies use providers that take credit cards. Gambling sites, too. But those companies aren't selling the equivalent of Barbie dolls and bubblegum as well.

Pretty much on every topic for that matter.

You linked to a post you made that has nothing to do with the UI. Your gripes are oddly specific and probably only apply to you. But your original post blasts LibreOffice for having a "terrible interface."

It's kind of a dick move to discourage people from using FOSS that provides a viable alternative to the proprietary nightmare that is MS Office because it lacks a KEYBOARD SHORTCUT you like and you have some weird complaint about its autocorrect (I won't pretend to understand that one, as I find autocorrect on any program to be an annoyance that I immediately turn off). If those are the things that keep you on MS Office, fine. But from UI best practices LibreOffice is the clear winner, and that was your original criticism. For most functions, it takes less clicks and less searching on LibreOffice than MS Office (also, LibreOffice provides the option to switch to that terrible ribbon interface to make the MS Office users feel comfortable).

So this is a crypto scheme to buy on margin? Oh boy...

Technologies like OAUTH 2.0 have been around for a long, long time, and their purpose is to provide a verifiable audit-trail for users.

And it works! Although there have been (and will always be) security issues, the reality is that technologies like SAML and OAUTH do provide a very useful level of trust.

Except that, although these technologies do allow for a useful transfer of identity, the agents widely used to provide this identity (the IDP) is never an entity that provides a uniformly useful level of identity.

Here I am: Bill Jones (not my real name) citizen of the UK (not my real country, either) and I have no way to properly assert that to, say, Bank of the West (not my real bank, either) or Northern Airlines. (not my real airline)

If I have to assert my true identity, I have a state-issued driver's license or passport. Why do I have no way to assert either of these identification documents electronically?

Why can't I use my passport ID to assert myself to the bank, or the airline?

Seems to me that it would be HIGHLY USEFUL if I could. And it seems to be self-evident and proper that the agencies that issue drivers licenses or passports could offer electronic identification, even if it's sourced out to a tech company with a good reputation.

In the US, it's now become increasingly common to have a unified electronic ID to interact with agencies: see id.me. This is a start, and I know government agencies work GLACIALLY SLOWLY so maybe by the time my grandkids are having babies this could be a thing.

Eh?

> At some point you have to ask why you're using RAID at all. If it's for always-on, avoiding data loss due to hardware failures, and speed, then RAID 6 isn't really am great solution for avoiding data loss when disks get to these kinds of sizes, the chances of getting more than one disk fail simultaneously is approaching one, and obviously it was never great for speed.

If you're at this point, then using drives at all is probably already off the table. But I think this position is probably ridiculous.

I have many years of experience managing file clusters in scopes ranging from SOHO to serving up to 15,000 people at a time in a single cluster. In a cluster of 24 drives under these constant, enterprise-level loads, I saw maybe 1 drive fail in a year.

I've heard this trope about "failure rate approaching 1" since 500GB drives were new. From my own experience, it wasn't really true then, any more than it's true now.

Yes, HDDs have failure rates to keep in mind, but outside the occasional "bad batch", they are still shockingly reliable. Failure rates per unit haven't changed much, even though with rising capacities, that makes the failure rate per GB rise. It still doesn't matter as much as you think.

You can have a great time if you follow a few rules, in my experience:

1) Engineer your system so that any drive cluster going truly offline is survivable. AKA "DR" or "Disaster Recovery". What happens if your data center gets flooded or burns to the ground? And once you have solid DR plans, TRUMPET THE HECK OUT OF IT and tell all your customers. Let them know that they really are safe! It can be a HUGE selling point.

2) Engineer your system so that likely failures are casually survivable. For me, this was ZFS/RAIDZ2, with 6 or 8 drive vdevs, on "white box" 24 bay SuperMicro servers with redundant power.

3) If 24x7x36* uptime is really critical, have 3 levels of redundancy, so even in a failure condition, you fail to a redundant state. For me engineering at "enterprise" level, we used application-layer logic so there were always at least 2 independent drive clusters containing full copies of all data. We had 3 drive clusters using different filesystem technologies (ZFS, XFS/LVM) and sometimes we chose to take one offline to do filesystem level processing or analysis.

4) Backups: You *do* have backups, and you do adhere to the 3-2-1 rule, right? In our case, we used ZFS replication and merged backups and DR. This combined with automated monitoring ensured that we were ready for emergencies, which did happen and were always managed in a satisfactory way.

From that article, it's unclear whether birds are actually doing this, and if so whether they actually locate themselves with any degree of precision using a map, vs. basically just telling north from south and largely relying on seeing geographic features like rivers and mountains.

What are the supposed benefits over buying the stock itself?

And none of this pansy-ass h264 stuff either. That's a large number of uncompressed dual-layer blu-ray images! Should somebody have that much bandwidth.

Maybe I'm liking an imagination, but as an individual consumer I can't even think of anything to use up this much space? Whereas if I were implementing Google drive, sure.

What do you consider a good interface? The stupid ribbon thing where you have to futz around with tabs to find the oversided icon (that may have a dropdown) to the thing you need, that may or may not switch you to a completely different window?

The LibreOffice UI is much more efficient and intuitive for users. It looks better, too.

This, we're seeing the rise of ultra-nationalism in western countries and it will be the destruction of us if it's not stopped.

Also the GP is wrong. Globalism didn't start in the 1940s or 50s after the fall of fascism, it started in the 80s after the rise of Reagan/Thatcherism. The rise of ever more right wing policies has enabled and encouraged more and more jobs and industries to be sent overseas in the name of increased shareholder value. The 50's, economically at least were a good time for the US (Socially it was a total mess but beyond the scope of the argument I feel).

It's the same thing with Mexico, companies went to India because places like Mexico got too expensive.

India is becoming expensive and Indian oligarchs know it, so they are now demanding Indians work 80 hours a week for the same pay.

I doubt they're moving off to Nepal though as Nepal doesn't have the infrastructure.

I've long stopped considering electronic music to be music because a computer is not an instrument.

The music industry has loved this kind of thing because musical instruments require talent to play, especially to play well which gives the artist a large mesure of power over their own destiny, rights, a voice... things that music execs hate because they can use that to get more of their precious, sweet, sweet profit.

A "DJ" or rapper can be replaced easily as they don't have any actual talent. Doubly so for pop stars these days as it's all autotuned to within an inch of their lives (so much so that the "artist" can't recreate the sound using their own voice, so they all mime at their shows these days, and to think there was a time where we derided Kylie because she was the only one doing it). The person doing the performance has become the least important part of it considering most of the time someone else writes their own song. Execs really dug their own grave by making music so drab, boring, repetitive and especially by removing all requirement for any kind of musical talent, AI is set to eat their lunch and their biggest problem is not that AI can replicate their process... but the fact anyone can use it, their problem is that they don't control the AI.

You're right that AI is no different than when a label assembles a band (or runs a non-talent show to find someone).. but you couldn't be more wrong about AI being an instrument.