I bought a Roland S-1 Tweak Synth this week. Absolutely lovely bit of kit, one of the best things Roland have done for a while. It's relevance to this conversation though is that it has a built-in, non-user replaceable battery and is charged by USB C.

I've kept my Roland synth from 1989, and there are people with synths much older than that. While never massively user-serviceable as a genre, this is the first time I can think of that there's a definite life span on these things. Just like a phone, eventually this battery is going to wear out and have severely reduced capacity. I have to imagine that, as with vintage synths or older phones, someone will probably start a service for replacing the battery but wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to and the design had been thought of in advance?

Yep, was more thinking of the "people using wired don't care about the DAC" part than the actual machines we're talking about.

Quite the opposite. A strong use-case for a jack is low-latency audio, and tht's the kind of thing used by people who use their machines for audio and music production. I'm a heavy user of Logic, and would absolutely not let wireless headphones anywhere near it.

For "people who don't care the DAC sucks", there's wireless. For people who do care about the DAC but only for listening to music or conversation etc., then wireless also exists. For those who care about both quality and latency, and that's really only for specific use cases these days, then wired is the way.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"The other zero-days leaked include .... BlueHammer, a separate Microsoft vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-32201 that was patched in April."

By definition, if a patch is available it is not a zero day.

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.

"sponsored work visa entirely depended on people primarily coming over to mooch off of benefits". I'm not American, but that sentence doesn't make much sense to me. If they're working, they're earning and contributing tax, right?

UK. I installed solar on my roof and put a home battery in last month, and am very happy with the results. It took up-front investment of course and payback times vary between 4-7 years depending on the rates for selling energy back to the grid, but I'm fine with that. My first bill has my electricity cost down about 40% - I installed part way through the month so can't really give consistent figures as yet.

With the solar+home battery, all my domestic electricity usage is easily taken care of. I also took the opportunity to put in a whole home backup, meaning that if there's a power cut the house carries on. Power cuts aren't really a big problem in the UK but little micro ones do happen, and I got fed up of resetting the digital clocks and rebooting everything.

The solar+battery doesnt take care of 100% of my usage though, not by a long way. I've been driving an EV since 2018. I do around 22,000 miles per year, My solar peaks at around 5kWh and is best used to power the house and add to the house's battery capacity. I use about 22kWhs on a round-trip commute, and the home battery is 12.5kWh. The typical max I might need then is 34.5kWh a day, and I also need it overnight - solar isn't going to help me there. My actual pattern is load-shifting: charge both car and home batteries cheaply overnight, use solar+battery through the day on the house and sell the daytime excess to the grid.

On the car alone I have saved around £8-10,000 vs petrol, add in the car maintenance and the savings are even higher. For solar+home battery I don't yet know, not owned it long enough to be able to give good figures but the usage pattern is looking good. If I'm asked about EVs I rarely make an environmental argument - if you can charge at home, the cost argument is so massively in favour of them that's it's barely worth a debate. If you can't - nuance time and more questions to be asked.

I'm not off fossil just yet - still have gas heating. The heat pump equations are a lot trickier to work out - without load shifting it's much more expensive, plus how will it average out over winter when I presumably get less solar to recharge the home battery during the day. So heat pump is the next bit of research rather than my automatic next move. For the rest though - just no argument, the renewable/EV route is just better.

"....except for closing the deal and signing the paperwork". In other words, the one step where it matters to the company that it got everything right. Previous steps where it only matters to you if it got things right? Pah.

My understanding from the various blogs is that they have indeed 'developed their own', in that they worked jointly to get a design together. The panel isn't going to be the same as in previous folding phones, and that's actually one reason for the later launch vs other manufacturers.

Source is just the various rumour blogs on my RSS feeds, I'm no expert here.