Prodigy is an excellent story ... with a caveat. Just like Star Trek: Discovery, the first few episodes are difficult to watch and have turned a lot of people away from the series before it gets great.

It answers the question "what if you put a Star Wars character into a Star Trek universe?" So it opens with a hotshot kid who bends all the rules so he can escape the mining colony where he's held prisoner. And he thinks he can do everything himself, and that he's cool and awesome. He's insufferable and all the other characters basically can't stand him.

By episode 5, he's gotten his tail handed to him a few times too many, so that's the point where he bucks up and accepts that he's part of a team ... and from there, the series beautifully goes into the principles of Star Trek, strength through diversity, boldly going, &c.

S1 is on Netflix right now, with S2 coming to it later this year. For anyone who's curious about it, I recommend watching it up through episode 6 "Kobayashi", which is a love letter from the writers to the fans. That should be enough to know whether it's to your liking.

I'm a veteran of the browser wars. I remember when Microsoft tried to snuff out its competition by including a fully-featured Internet Explorer with Windows, and justified this by saying that users wanted all the features of a best-in-class app.

I always wondered (sarcastically) why this didn't extend to their word processor, too. Why not include a fully-featured Microsoft Word with Windows?

Maybe now's the time to do that.

In 1998, Apple had recently purchased NeXT announced that Mac OS X would be built atop BSD Unix. There was talk about the potential benefits of Microsoft doing something similar with Windows, making the GUI a component on top of Linux.

I still think that would have been a good move. Microsoft would have benefited from getting a stable and proven multitasking OS (something which was only realized around the time of Windows 7, I'd say) with a broad set of drivers, and Linux would have gotten improvements it needed to provide better support to desktop GUIs.

Yep! Also the same Apple which refused to give the iOS source code to the Chinese government.

I don't mind Apple abiding by Chinese laws to make its hardware and software available in China. I am glad it hasn't bowed to pressure to make its hardware and software modifiable by China.

And not just Star Wars, but also Star Trek! Haven't any of them watched Picard season 3? Remember "Fleet Formation"?!

The fact that China is a surveillance state, whereas Apple has frequently and publicly resisted pressure to add back doors to its devices and software.

What are the other possible interpretations?

Came here to say this. "Enhance cybersecurity" means that China can't bug iPhones to monitor its government employees, so it'll require them to use phones that it has already bugged.

If anything, this is a sign that Apple is doing things right.

I liked Cortana, but I never actually found anything it could do. Sure it could tell jokes and make Halo references, but if I asked it to launch an application, change the volume, shut down the computer, &c., it would give me a generic "I can't do that" message. What was the point?

Buy a used Xbox 360 Kinect ($20-$30 on eBay), and use the free K2VR (https://k2vr.tech/). Boom, done. Leg tracking. You don't need a fancy headset that keeps track of your legs, and you don't need to buy additional hardware trackers for your hips and your ankles.

Seriously, I don't know why more VR solutions aren't going with depth camera tracking instead of trying to guess where your limbs are.

I just want a new 15" Mac laptop for less than $1500 USD.

MacBook Air 15" would be fine. They can call it whatever they want. I don't need all the bells and whistles, I'm not going to be editing video on it.

You're leaving out a few details and getting the order wrong. First there was this:

"Microsoft proposed a division of the browser market between our companies: if Netscape would agree not to produce a Windows 95 browser that would compete with Internet Explorer, Microsoft would allow Netscape to continue to produce cross-platform versions of its browser for the relatively small market of non-Windows 95 platforms: namely, Windows 3.1, Macintosh, and UNIX. Moreover, Microsoft made clear that if Netscape did not agree to its plan to divide the browser market, Microsoft would crush Netscape, using its operating system monopoly, by freely incorporating all the functionality of Netscape’s products into Windows." - James Barksdale's testimony, as quoted in the antitrust trial's Findings of Fact

Netscape declined, Microsoft licensed NCSA code, and then Microsoft did exactly what they had threatened to do.

It was a few years later that Netscape, in an attempt to survive, attempted to push a web-based OS strategy (similar to Google Docs today). Note, though, that they used open standards for this (HTTP, HTML, LDAP, and so forth). Unfortunately this was too little too late.

Netscape died *because* Microsoft played dirty: using Windows revenues to develop IE and give it away for free, doing the same with lots of server products that copied ones Netscape was selling, threatening to stop selling Windows licenses to PC vendors if they preinstalled Netscape.

If the major sources of revenue for your company have been cut off by a competitor who can then afford to litigate you until you run out of money, how can you compete?

Want to fix the Start menu? A start would be to get rid of folders.

I have Geforce Experience installed, but it's not listed under 'G'. It's under 'N' because it's the only thing in a folder named 'NVIDIA Corporation'.

Lots of other apps are in the Start menu inside folders which also contain their help applications, links to their corporate web sites, and their uninstallers. Because yeah, whenever I install an app I'm glad the developers gave me quick access to a way to get rid of it ...

All this stuff may have been appropriate for the Start menu up through Windows 7, but Windows 10 has been around for five years now. I'd hope that apps would get with the program instead of continuing to clutter up the Start menu.

I want to see rats driving tiny cars! I am disappointed the article has no video of it! All it has is a commercial for Excedrin.

Sounds like fun, but is it really true that it can only be tried via Telegram - a Russian service with questionable security policies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)