I am unconcerned about default search settings - that can be changed to DDG.

I am far more concerned about things where there is no option at all to disable. Windows 11 doesn't allow turning off telemetry, for example, only turning it down. Actually, Microsoft in general is far more of a threat than Google/Alphabet is to privacy. All of Windows 11 is spyware. They bought Github and trained their LLMs on GPLed code and use it to produce derivative works without having the resultant code be GPLed. They bundle their products together, taking advantage of their monopoly status in the OS area to push dominance in other areas. Why does Windows 11 need a key shortcut to launch LinkedIn? Oh, Microsoft does. Why is it near impossible to remove OneDrive? Why does Office increasingly push all of your documents into the cloud, where they can violate your privacy? We know the answers to these questions, but I guess the DoJ is happier now with 2024 Microsoft than they were with 90s Microsoft, even though what they are doing is much worse, now that Microsoft is doing what they were supposed to do all along - bribe politicians with campaign donations.

It's 1% in aggregate for the software covered by that license, not for all the software or other parts a producer uses.

The other philosophically odd thing about this percent-of-revenue model is that it means the price of the software is different for every single customer of that product. It would be like if you go to a grocery store and instead of a gallon of milk costing $3.50, it costs 0.1% of your monthly income. Some people are going to be paying $1.60 for the gallon, others are going to pay $8.00, for the exact same product, in the exact same store.

That's really interesting, thanks. Probably explains some of the weirdass trace routing I've observed on older boards, sometimes going the long way around.

Let's say I make an expensive product, say, an aircraft or giant factory. I use one instance of a piece of software covered by this license - why would that software warrant 1% (or any other percentage?) of revenue of the product?

We need laws to make all licenses be fixed price, not percent-revenue based. This would also fix all the FRAND nonsense, it would quiet the app store arguments, etc.

I know why sellers want the percent-revenue model, but it's heinous; it would actually make it impossible to create certain products, if the sum of claims on revenue is too high a fraction (and in the limit, it could exceed 100%... if you use more than 100 components each demanding 1% or more of revenue.

Also what if some other part goes up in price, making my total product cost more, why should this organization get more income (based on higher overall revenue), just because other things cost more?

Back a few years I was wondering why Mint, being glorified Ubuntu, ran so much better than Ubuntu. Turns out Mint was running (by actual count) 1/4th as many processes. Gee, I wonder how that could impact performance...

I didn't much like Devuan until they borrowed the PCLOS desktop and general way of doing things... now it's a lot slicker.

348 square feet per person.

To power all of India, 20,000 square miles (if I didn't slip a digit).

If any of we peons proposed such mass environmental destruction, even of the middle of nothing and nowhere, we'd be jailed.

Yeah, same here, first crawled into a PC's innards in 1993, and nowadays I have a houseful built from salvage and scrap, but none of it started life low-class. Absolutely right, Windows problems are rarely Windows, but rather shit hardware or shit drivers. Absent that, I'm accustomed to Windows uptimes measured in years. (Linux, well, I find it also depends on the distro.)

Even so... we who build our own desktops are a small minority. The real market isn't even home PCs, it's business contracts where they buy 'em literally by the pallet, or the truckload. Or why there are a zillion Dells on the salvage market.

The more-space argument doesn't wash. They reclaimed a whole lot of space going from HDD to SSD to NVMe to eMMC. I have a 14" thin laptop whose working innards entirely fit on what amounts to a Pi board (it's about 4" by 6", and not cramped). Even counting it as a minimal unit, that's a lot of space left to work with.

Tho I can see the no-one-upgrades argument; that's almost all PCs everywhere. We DIY types who promptly max out RAM are an anomaly, a tiny sliver of the market.

Of course, they use that to say, "Base unit, $AttractivePrice. Unit with enough RAM to function as you need, add 3x the aftermarket price for that RAM."

Even the summary said it was because Spotify is refusing to pay the core tech fee.

It's not because they are advertising prices, it's because they aren't fulfilling the other side of the contract - which they should be doing until the courts say if that is illegal.

Apple has no reason (legal or otherwise) to provide a service (approving an app) without compensation. At least as far as I know - even in the EU, you can't be compelled to such a thing, can you?

This, so much this. It's a shame that reporting is allowed to create (mis)leading headlines.

The articles on this don't even mention that this is standard practice related to amortization schedules of R&D and other capital costs - it absolutely does not mean that the marginal cost of every vehicle is $100k greater than the sale price of each vehicle, and the article writers know it.

Funny thing, Montana is a big grain-producing state, and we have possibly the most unpredictable, and definitely the most absurdly-variable climate in North America.

https://montanakids.com/facts_...

Oh, and we also grow potatoes, but only in very limited areas (potatoes need more predictable conditions), whereas grain is grown here pretty much anywhere the ground is near enough to level.

Another lesson that is related to the above: cheapest in terms of currency (e.g., sticker price) is not necessarily (and is almost never in reality) the cheapest overall.

There are so many "hidden" costs that aren't reflected in the low currency price of many goods.

I mean consider all the "free" internet services... which cost us privacy and advertising bombardment...

I don't know about real Macs, but I have a Hackintosh that's ... um, OSX 10.8, on a midrange i7 with 8GB RAM and a fast SSD, and even doing nothing much (file manager, system settings and the like, no browser) it was sluggish to occasionally painful. Gave the system 32GB and suddenly it was much better.

If a version of OSX however-many-years-old is that bad with 8GB, I can't imagine current-OSX being pleasant.

What I've noticed more than that... over the past year or so, a vast uptick in the number of auto-generated videos. These drag together a lot of readily-available text and images on the nominal topic, so pass for "real" -- but the giveaway is that the narrator is text-to-speech, not a human. (It'll make mistakes like saying "one, six hundred" for "1,600".)

All such channels I've encountered have MILLIONS of subscribers, MILLIONS of rapidly-acquired views, but very few comments. (Like, 12M views in a week, but only 30 comments.)

I've concluded that these videos exist so that the channel owner can use another bot to generate millions of views and a whole lot of the shared ad revenue.

Which is probably starting to bleed Youtube beyond what they're used to.

And yes, probably because of the high view counts, those channels occasionally dominate my recommends (which are otherwise pretty good).

This isn't something new to the US military, I can tell you that we've been thinking about drone attacks and drone defense for many years now. The drone swarm is an obvious next step past the UAVs we've been piloting for decades now.