I'm almost impressed. I've made my own share of 'mess-ups', but I've never screwed something up so badly it made international news.

Hey, thanks for that! It's the first time I've ever seen it outright stated what the issue was (though now that I know what to search for I found plenty of places - figures). Makes sense now. And knowing what the emulation performance hit would be I definitely would choose not to upgrade even if given the choice... though I still think I'd like to be GIVEN the (informed) choice. Good to finally have a concrete answer though, so thanks again!

...then it would probably have larger take-up.

But no, MS decided my Dell XPS 9560 with 32Gb RAM can't run it. No, not because I don't have a TPM - I do - but because the CPU, for some reason that has never been adequately explained, isn't supported. It's more than adequate to run Win11 well, but for some reason they decided that no, they wouldn't support it.
  And sure, I can force-install anyway, but then I gotta worry about not getting updates? Not an option.

Nobody is complaining about RAM requirements, those have always been in place. No one WOULD be complaining about CPU requirements if you supported more than you do AND articulated why others aren't supported, because again, CPU requirements have always been a thing. SSD/free space? Obviously okay. TPM? Well, you should absolutely provide a software emulation version, so a hardware TPM isn't a hard requirement (totally okay to flash a big, red "this is gonna suck" message if it has to go that route though).

In fact, that's really what SHOULD have happened right from the start: allow an update on any machine that CAN technically run it, but throw up warnings about why it might not be a good idea to do so, and let users decide. If someone knows they are going to get a slow, crippled experience and still chooses to upgrade, then go ahead, let 'em, and continue to support them. You know, like MS has pretty much always done?

But no, instead, MS artificially limited the pool of users. I don't know what the adoption rate would be if they had done this from the word go, but it would for sure be higher than it is now. And yes, some people argue that sometimes you have to leave legacy behind to move the state-of-the-art forward, and that's true, but let's be honest: what Win11 offers is NOT sufficiently ahead of Win10 to warrant leaving so many behind.

They shot themselves in the foot, and now all they can do is wait for peoples' machines to age out and they get them on the next purchase. I won't even get into the obvious sustainability arguments there because even if we have a whole other planet to dump our waste on, that would still be a shitty thing to do to cusotmers.

It has file MANAGEMENT, yes, but it does NOT have a file MANAGER, because it does not expose a proper file system to user land, which is what people want. This is a purposeful design choice by Apple, and we can debate whether it's a good one or not, but it is what it is, and you'll never have a PROPER file manager as a result, you'll always have some kneecapped app.

And when you say it can run Office, photo edit software and sound/movie production, that's true in a general sense, but again, it's not what people mean. They mean it can't run the FULL desktop versions of this stuff, and that's true. You're not running a FULL version of Office, for example, you're still running a trimmed-down "mobile" version. You're not running a FULL version of Photoshop, or Cubase, or Final Cut, you're running trimmed-down versions. And, again, we can debate whether this is good or bad, whether they have 99% of what most people need 99% of the time and therefore could effectively be considered "full", but it again is what it is by design.

I'm an actual Starlink user at my farm. It's head-and-shoulders better than any competing service.

I previously has used a cellular uplink... and even with a yagi mounted 30' up on a mast, I barely had 1-2Mb/s of bandwidth. It was truly miserable.

Starlink is a game-changer... give 'em the freakin' money. They've done something truly miraculous for rural internet users, who had previously only terrible/expensive options. As a taxpayer, I'm actually glad to see the money I contribute going to something useful.

The difference in this case is that the blockchain is a public list of every transaction. If any other kind of currency was used, investigators would have to piece all that information together from different sources. With bitcoin, it's all right in front of them.
I guess it's not really a new investigative technique, it's more that they don't have to use any investigative techniques to get a lot of information.

The AMD FX-8350 was a socket AM3+ chip, and practically all of those motherboards have UEFI

If you moved to the UK then you could use UTC as local time (GMT) for half the year.

If you care that much about calc, Microsoft open sourced it a few years ago, so you can just download the code from github and compile your own version: https://github.com/microsoft/c...

You say that like it's not true.

It always amazes me when I see people who aren't technical people that have to look at our old COBOL-based system to understand some business logic and they can follow the code just fine. Try that with C++ or Python or Java or any of the modern "good" languages and you'd have a very different experience (well, I'm throwing Python under the bus a little there because the rewrite of the system is largely Python-based and they seem to handle that pretty well for the most part too, so maybe that one is unfair... but the basic point still stands).

Hey now, don't forget about Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Fuck-face Johnson claiming (lying) that the NHS would get £350M extra.

I'd never heard of KiwiFarms before today, but judging solely from the people who've turned up to defend it, that's no great loss.

Glad to see I wasn't the only person who thought of this as well.

(Ninjam was written by Justin Frankel, the original author of Winamp).

What they don't mention in that article is that Dyson's ventilators don't have regulatory approval yet, and probably won't for quite a while. Hence the UK government has cancelled the order and is concentrating on buying ventilators made to previously existing designs that have already been tested.

So it's not that the UK doesn't need more ventilators (although the requirement is less than first thought), it's that the UK doesn't need Dyson's untested, unapproved, ventilators. (src).