Long ago, the UK courts ordered all the major consumer ISPs to block The Pirate Bay along with various other popular services. Ever since, we've had to keep up to date on what the latest proxy address might be.

Of course, thanks to the new censorship laws introduced more recently, we're all on VPNs now, so as to avoid having to hand our ID to the wallet inspector for every last website we ever use. And once that was set up, it was nice to discover that the original is still in play!

Apple's got many faults, but their hardware has a very premium feel. I presume this is where Dell's additional hundred bucks went, because Apple's used to doing that and Dell isn't. They think they are, but they aren't normally as good at it. But they're going to deliver this PC with Windows, and there might be Linux issues — there's no way to know until it's in reviewers' hands exactly what hardware is actually used around the parts we know about. And unless you specifically need Windows, it's very hard to imagine getting excited about spending more money to run that.

I have to admit that I find the lack of a headphone jack offensive, but I wouldn't even consider buying a Dell that's trying to be a Macintosh over an actual Macintosh, and I say that as someone with very little respect for Apple. I don't hate Dell, but I've never been impressed by them either. I would describe them as "less terrible than HP".

The fact that it's a garbage off-brand speaker makes it more likely that it's possible, because people with valuable brands are the ones who are most likely to want to prevent you from changing it, and also the most likely to actually design their own product internals or have them designed to spec. The cheap brands are most likely to grab a complete PCB off the "shelf", or even more likely than that, just have their crappy brand put on someone else's complete product.

But, and it's a big one, they won't be offering the user the tools to do it with. They'd have to figure out who actually made it and/or what chip is on it in order to identify the tool, then they'd have to track it down, then they'd have to maybe short something on the PCB because it's not necessarily as easy as holding down a button, they'd have to do it on a windows PC or at least by attaching a USB hub to a windows VM so that when the device inevitably changes IDs during the reflashing procedure it remains connected, or with some kind of reflashing tool which is cheap but which they definitely don't own.

For their hardware. When you want to move to someone else's hardware, will it still be solved?

There's probably too much metal between the cargo hold and the passenger compartment for Bluetooth to work anyway. I think all actual bombs on aircraft (other than the failed shoe bomber) have been triggered by pressure switches at altitude or timers.

So it's not just that they wouldn't be stupid enough, but also that it probably wouldn't be successful even if they were.

People who are using headphones jacks are people who probably do not care the DAC sucks or have high end headphones to use on a $699 laptop. For example for a video conference meeting, a headphone jack is fine for that fidelity.

He was clearly only trying to differentiate to determine the scope. Save your professional offense for an offensive situation.

I would say most people who are buying a $699 laptop do not know what a DAC is nor care about buying one. What they will see is this budget laptop requires an adapter to use wired headphones. Will it completely stop someone from buying this laptop over another model? Probably not, but it is a negative.

Compared to AMD's drivers, and ATI's before that, they have always been far and away superior. AFAICT, AMD still can't do drivers, but at least we have the option of FOSS drivers which work on Linux. There are no Nvidia drivers worth a shit on any platform today, except for CUDA.

Yeah, I'm sure IBM didn't intend for business customers to buy the PC.

Wait, what?

[sarcasm]But it will have Windows 11, the most beloved version of Windows right now.[/sarcasm]

WiFi 7 is more robust. The problem is if your network isn’t WiFi 7, then the benefits are negligible over WiFi6. But consumers can buy any new WiFi router right now so that shouldn’t be a problem . . .oh wait. Yeah . . .

Dell says the processor will be an Intel Core Series 3 for the budget $699 model and has up to 17 hours of streaming battery life. We will have to see if it lives up to battery life and performance tests. Noticeably absent from the advertisement was how well this laptop would do in benchmarks.

I saw the movie. It was fine. It was not the best, but it was not the worst. From my perspective the movie did not have a main singular plot but multiple ones; it seems to been designed to break broken into pieces for serialized content like TV episodes. My guess is that this was intentional so that Disney+ could have another season of The Mandalorian and a movie. Basically the movie is really to generate some box office revenue that it could not generate as a TV season.