No, that's not it. Let's pretend that we're a person who attempts to move their computer to Linux...

For starters, we'll assume that this person has a friend to get them over the hurdles of creating install media, dealing with Secure Boot, and backing up whatever documents they had stored locally, and then moved it over to their fresh install of Mint or Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS, the three most common 'starter distros' in my experience. For added niceness, we'll assume that any and all documents made in Word or Excel are drop-in compliant with LibreOffice being a 100% drop-in replacement with no learning curve or formatting woes whatsoever. We'll just make that the starting point.

Now, our friend gets to a desktop and wants to make a photo of their family their wallpaper. On Windows, one right-clicks a JPEG and chooses 'set as desktop background'. Well, the instructions are different if you have KDE vs. GNOME vs. Cinnamon. Cinnamon is probably the easiest, because it respects the 'file->set wallpaper' from xviewer, but that assumes that xviewer is, in fact, the default photo viewer. The others have multi-step processes.

So, the wallpaper is set, now let's talk about adding some desktop icons. In Windows, one can just drag an icon from the Start Menu and the shortcut exists. In Cinnamon, one can do the same by holding Ctrl+Shift (there are no cues to do so), or one can use the Menu Editor, or one can create a Launcher...and while these methods *do* have some advantages, their discoverability rivals that of Snapchat.

Okay, desktop icons are made, let's listen to some music! Whelp, I hope they stopped using iTunes and can listen to their music in Apple Music or Spotify through a web browser; I'm sure that it's even more liberating to have music on remote servers and pay a subscription than to dare use some sort of closed source software like iTunes on Linux. I mean, I guess one can ensure the correct version of Python is installed, to then run a Github script to convert the data to Clementine...

Or, let's watch some videos! Well, Disney+ is out, since they require a Widevine level so deep that it is broken on Linux as commonly as it's fixed, so fortunately, Netflix is still L2 Widevine...but the included browser doesn't allow playback since its Free Software status is contingent upon not including the Widevine components, so one must download and install Google Chrome to make it possible...now, fortunately, Linux Mint makes it *relatively* simple to get from their App Store interface, but a browser install must be performed to make that possible.

It's a good thing our friend installed Chrome, because they're going to need it for their Cricut machine! I mean, there's a desktop app for Windows and OSX, but for Linux, one is stuck using the browser-based interface, along with the USB connectivity that is not officially supported through other browsers (except Mozilla Firefox; forks and derivatives are iffy on that front).

It's also a good thing our friend's Etsy store, for which the Cricut machine was purchased, has put all their financial data into Xero! It'd have been a massive headache if they were still using Quickbooks for their bookkeeping, because there is neither a means of using Quickbooks on Linux (unless one is going to use WINE, which is going to be a complete headache for Quickbooks), nor is it fun to spend all day using Quickbooks on another computer to export CSVs to then import into GNUCash, and then shift everything to double-entry accounting...and God help our Etsy creator when it comes tax time and the accountant asks for the Quickbooks file...

Chrome is becoming super-useful, because our Etsy designer uses Canva for everything! Good thing it wasn't Affinity Photo, because even though it's made some pretty solid inroads against Photoshop, GIMP still doesn't open the Affinity Photo format, so it would have been another day of converting templates and verifying utility.

Our user will also need Chrome to access data sent via OneDrive and Google Drive, because while Mint's Online Accounts functionality *does* support syncing these services, there are multiple forum posts about these services deciding to not-work after MS and Google make a backend change. Certainly, this is the fault of MS and Google rather than Linux or Mint or its developers...but our user needs their data, and since today is an 'off' day, browser-based downloads, it is.

Of course, one last source of annoyance is that, while our user's multifunction printer *can* scan as PDFs or JPEGs with SimpleScan, the Windows software allowed our user to create multiple scan areas, so a plate of six photos could be scanned in as different image files, whereas SimpleScan requires a full plate scan, only to be cropped afterward.

And all of this - ALL of this - is for what advantage, exactly? "Freedom" is relative since most of the useful data is on Someone Else's Server. None of these applications, except Chrome, were actually transferable, so our user would have had to re-learn lots of different software, had they not put all of that data on Someone Else's Server.

The reason Desktop Linux hasn't had its year yet is because it is inherently, fundamentally, and inextricably caught between two worlds. World One is the FSF group that believes - correctly - that users should have control of their computers and the data created with it. World Two is the userbase that believes - correctly - that a computer is a means to an end and that it is no crime to pursue the path of least resistance to that end, which frequently means accepting concessions in exchange for streamlining the path to that end.

Development and Sysops tasks are done much better on Linux than Windows; that IIS/SQL Server/ASP.Net is an extreme minority in comparison to LAMP is a testament to this reality. For regular users who want to do nontechnical tasks with a computer, there's a huge incentive to pursue commercial software...and until Linux makes it tenable to use that commercial software, out of the box, consistently and reliably, Windows and MacOS will continue to rule the roost. ChromeOS, and its "dumb terminal" philosophy and design, may be the ultimate outcome - a Linux-based OS that is Linux-based in the most pointless way possible.

Are any of the profits going to Gila Monster conservation?

So every international traveler could be searched to see if their meds contain any patent violations and seized at the border?

This is entirely unworkable.

Didn't they say some rogue VP set up his laptop to torrent all 72TB of Z-Library to feel o-llama?

I wish my laptop had that many drive bays!

If ChatGPT (or at least, GPT-4o) can ingest and execute code, why wouldn't it just go online, search for a FOSS chess engine in a language it "understands" (like Python), download it, recognize it as being more adept at solving problems in this specific domain, and execute that chess engine *directly* & present the output as its own?

The only thing I can think of offhand is that gpt-4o's "firewall" might limit its ability to execute code.

Some people so want to believe that a useful information retrieval system is a superintelligence.

The rest of us aren't surprised that an interesting search engine isn't good at chess.

...what Google should really do is incentivize apps that are only 15MB in size. The entire app ecosystem was built on phones that had 200KByte/sec download speeds, at best; apps had to be optimized in order to be chosen.

Now, we've got ultra fast LTE/5G speeds...and 100MByte apps for restaurant menus and gas station points, that get updated weekly with full-size downloads, with patch notes that amount to "fixed typo in the Pig Latin translation". Instant Apps were only needed *because* apps have become so massive and bloated, with frameworks layered on redundant frameworks.

If Google offered preferential placement to smaller apps, there wouldn't be a need for Instant Apps. Now sure, this begets 'stub installers', where an 'app' is basically a frontend who's first job is to download the rest of the app, a problem in its own right. While I certainly wouldn't begrudge a game for downloading assets for one level at a time to minimize storage usage for the player, it would take roughly three seconds for apps to become tiny installer stubs that make users wait five minutes before the app is in a usable state...so, that's its own issue...but even so, rewarding optimization is a benefit for *everyone*.

I'm familiar with some organizations that have been feeding their Slack data into a RAG for employee queries.

They're going to be quite pissed if this has been shut down by Slack.

I implemented portsentry feeding fail2ban on edge servers to deal with the unrelenting scans.

It helps, somewhat.

https://github.com/portsentry/...

And where should those documents *go*? Are we conceding that everything should just be stored in OneDrive, with no folder structure? So then, what's to stop Microsoft from preventing LibreOffice from accessing OneDrive, thus making the utility of Office "you can't access your data any other way anymore"? If we're cool with local file storage, then one would need a way to specify the logical volume the data is supposed to be written to...perhaps with a list of the different volumes that are available...and perhaps a means of using folders and subfolders to help categorize the data...

Yup, but now the AI lobby is stronger than the oil lobby.

I guess whichever the military needs more.

There are some videos online with sound.

Do we hear the engines?

Hopefully an airplane enthusiast who is familiar with the expected sound profile can comment.

That is the question.

I can see if they outsourced something and delegated a subdomain and the contract expired and then somehow the spammers got the IP's (hosting farm?) which had been abandoned and set up DNS.

But I've never been able to request a specific IP when setting up a VPS or colo, so it's kinda a mystery to me.

404 should have included the most basic of details.

So, I know a few non-technical people, who have had someone set up one of those pirated-TV-stream appliances for them. These services tend to include basically every stream of basically every broadcast channel, combined with a library of on-demand TV shows and still-in-theater movies. No searching, no downloading...just one interface to rule them all, and they pay in bitcoin once or twice a year for the privilege.

So, if these things are gaining some popularity...is it possible that the numbers have dipped because there's less of a need to go to whatever websites were being measured here? In other words, is it possible that copyright infringement is still as frequent as ever (possibly even more so), but with less accurate measurements?