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Comment Re:The real killer for Visio (Score 0) 64

You didn't read the whole post: "Set up your TV to simply be a monitor and use a cheap little computer as an HTPC".

Seriously who bothers with the crapware built into a tv anyway? Just use it as a dumb screen and attach other devices to it. The devices are cheap and much easier to replace than a tv. I have a tv from more than 10 years ago which i still use in one room, with a newer box connected to it. The built in crapware on the tv is now totally useless as it stopped being supported years ago.

Comment Re:Why stop there? (Score 1) 98

Agreed - I'm also a light user of KDE and exactly the same as I said about the Mac applies to KDE. The Mac improved a lot, although it's still more flexible to use 3rd party stuff. I'm not aware of any extra window management available in KDE although as stated I'm only a light user of it really (my gaming box is a Bazzite install with KDE).

Comment Remember AltaVista (Score 4, Interesting) 78

People switched to Google because it had a nice clean white page with a single search box, while AltaVista was going the 90s fad portal route. Clean interface and simplicity was thee key,

There's lots of talk about how Google's search algos were better than AltaVista but honestly, at first, they weren't. They were close and they improved, but the loading speed and simplicity advantage that Google had over AltaVista is what bought them time to improve. Remember too that one reason AltaVista was better was that people optimised to be found by it, and not for Google. As time went on, more people learned what Page Rank was (long since gone) and started to optimise for that instead, thus speeding up the switch.

Lesson: Don't go complex. Don't go shoving extra stuff at people that they haven't asked for. Give them the simplest thing possible, and they will use it.

Comment Re:Strange crossovers (Score 1) 118

AIX has always run on Power/PPC, running it on an Apple branded PPC machine is not strange at all. Legacy macOS 10 was never meant as a server OS so it made sense to use something that was.

IBM Z has run Linux for a long time, it's not surprising that people would port other open source systems to it like opensolaris, there's probably BSD ports too.

Comment Re:Discover new applications? Hell no (Score 1) 98

How do you know they exist in the first place? Start menu is a copy of the Apple menu as enhanced by an ancient shareware utility called "Hierarchical Menus". That add-on does exactly what the start menu does, allowing shortcuts to be grouped in folders etc. and for nesting of folders. It predates the Start menu by a few years.

One of the points was to be able to organise by category. I might not know what the thing-to-set-up-a-disk-partition is called, but it's probably in a menu hierarchy called "Utilities" and I can go look. It's discoverable, and it should be there.

Pinned things? Probably a set of defaults that are easily removable would be my preferred answer (which is what they do), but I could also settle for none until you put it there. But I very much disagree that nothing at all should be in the Start menu except your own choices.

Comment Re:Why stop there? (Score 1) 98

I mean - the Apple's "Microsoft - Start Your Photocopiers!" definitely applied to the start of the Win 7 era. It was pretty much a straight lift of Aqua, ironically (given this post's subject) with more flexibility on positioningthe task bar vs the Dock. Certainly Windows didn't introduce pinning apps.

By the end of it though, I thought that Win7 had better actually window management than the Mac did, and even with the split view stuff etc. that's been introduced since I still feel that in order to get the same flexibility of window management that I get in Windows I need to install 3rd party stuff on the Mac.

Admittedly I haven't sat down and done a feature-to-feature comparison for a while there, but yep: will definitely give MS the edge of the ability to re-arrange your windows on the screen.

Comment Re:Most requested feature...that you removed (Score 1) 98

Yeah, but I heard exactly the same thing about Windows 7 (although admittedly never about 8). If you're using Windows, you will eventually move for something. Whether it's hardware, or some new app you want...can't predict it. Just that looking at the pattern over many years, you will.

I have an install of it. I don't use it, I'm Mac for my main platform and Linux for my gaming. But I still have a Windows partition, and it's Windows 11 too, mostly to handle odd manufacturer firmware update programs for external hardware. Even I moved to 11, and eventually people will do need to do so if they want to stay on the Windows platform. In my case, even if they don't want to stay on that platform in fact.

Comment Re:Do these modules get loaded unnecessarily? (Score 2) 29

but obviously you can't do that if you have a huge farm of devices to support.

It depends what those devices are. In a lot of cases this "huge farm" is actually "hundreds of virtual machines running on the same hypervisor" so you absolutely can compile a custom kernel and roll it out. The memory usage vs a generic kernel will also be somewhat lower, multiplied by the number of virtual machines and you have quite decent savings.

Comment Re:In five years time... (Score 1) 146

This actually has been a problem for utilities for a long while.

https://freemannews.tulane.edu...

"As more and more homeowners install solar panels, they generate their own electricity and buy less from utility companies. While consumer solar adoption is good for the environment, it reduces the revenue that utilities generate from consumers. To make up for the shortfall, utilities raise electricity prices, which in turn pushes more people to switch to solar, further decreasing demand for utility-provided power. This âoeutility death spiralâ can lead to skyrocketing prices for consumers and financial instability for utility companies."

EVs were supposed to be a lifeline, but that whole push has been sidelined.

Comment Re:Greed and infrastructure do not mix (Score 5, Informative) 146

The energy company deciding to end service is not the utility directly serving customers:

"NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoeâ(TM)s electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities â" the small California company that services the region â" that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason: NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers being built by Google, Apple, and Microsoft around the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center east of Reno, according to Fortune."

Liberty Utilities is the electric company. NV Energy is their main supplier. NV Energy found a customer willing to pay more, and is giving Liberty Utilities notice to figure out a different method to make up the shortfall. Is Liberty negligent? Not at all:

https://california.libertyutil...

https://california.libertyutil...

"Liberty is preparing for a planned transition in our supplemental energy supply beginning in 2028, while continuing to provide safe, reliable electric service to our customers. Liberty began this process in 2019 when Liberty filed for the transmission capacity reservations to enable this transition to the market. Liberty cannot access the greater energy market without these transmission rights, and weâ(TM)re excited to receive those rights when NV Energyâ(TM)s Greenlink-West project goes into service, expected December 31, 2027.
Today, we serve customers through a combination of Liberty-owned solar generation and supplemental wholesale power purchased from NV Energy. Our 60 megawatts of locally owned solar generation will continue to play an important role in our long-term energy mix.
Beginning in 2028, NV Energy will no longer serve as our wholesale energy supplier. To prepare for this transition, we are pursuing a competitive process to secure new supplemental energy supply arrangements focused on sustainability, affordability, and reliability. NV Energy will remain our transmission provider and neighbor, and we will continue using the existing transmission system to deliver electricity to our service territory."

The problem is that apparently NV Energy is moving up the deadline from beginning 2028 to May of 2027... effectively giving 1 year notice to Liberty Utilities basically from now.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/12...

"Data centers used 22% of Nevadaâ(TM)s electricity in 2024, and that share could rise to 35% by 2030. In NV Energyâ(TM)s own 2024 resource plan, about 75% of major-project load growth is attributed to data centers, according to Sierra Club expert testimony filed with Nevada regulators and reviewed by Fortune, and most of it is concentrated in Northern Nevadaâ"using the same system that feeds power to Lake Tahoe.

NV Energy is building Greenlink West, a 525-kV, $4.2 billion transmission line from Las Vegas to Yerington, expected online in May 2027. Schwarzrock said Liberty would be âoefirst in the waiting lineâ when Greenlink opens, giving it access to a wider pool of energy providers. But that timeline matches the contract deadline exactly, leaving almost no margin for error. About 70% of the projectâ(TM)s costs will be borne by Southern Nevada customers. "

So basically Liberty was expecting until December 2027 to make the transition, understandably allowing for delays and other transition activities. NV Energy is basically saying - there will be no delays, be prepared for the cutover to happen in May.

I'm not going to call the parent article complete flamebait, because it does highlight the very specific problem that the Tahoe grid has (it doesn't connect to California, but it is regulated by California regulators.) However, it is a far cry from saying that datacenters are going to cause Tahoe to go dark. That's a potential possibility if there are delays but NV Energy decides to cut them off anyway, but it is not a definite likelyhood.

This is just more datacenter FUD.

Comment RTFA: Not Office per se, Cloud licensing of Office (Score 2) 57

This isn't about Office. This is about Office 365 and Azure, and how a license is bundled when you use Azure but unbundled if you wanted to use 365 and, for example, AWS.

It's a shame because I wish they would, but the gov.uk link explicitly talks about "CMA’s cloud market investigation – Microsoft’s use of software licensing reducing competition in cloud".

This won't be what people are hoping for here - actual Office. This is purely about licensing costs with regards to cloud deployments.

Comment Re:nope. not again. (Score 1) 30

It's the original founder at least, Kevin Rose. I had a look at the relaunched I-can't-believe-it's-not-Reddit version and it was...ok'ish. But yes, they were unprepared for the bots in the main forums and unfortunately the place never got big enough to have any traffic in the smaller ones.

It's ironic - I looked at Reddit before The Great Migration following Dig...err...3? whatever the fiasco revision was. Like many others, I moved when that version of Digg appeared. I was interested when Digg said they were coming back, because Reddit has become a bit tiresome other than the smaller, subject-specialised subs. Alas though, never took off.

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