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Submission + - Bill Gates: Sex Machine (battleswarmblog.com)

Nova Express writes: "Bill Gates was accused of having more than 20 extramarital affairs in the fallout from his divorce from ex-wife Melinda, the billionaire told Gates Foundation staffers during a sullen town meeting earlier this year, according to a new report." I don't think anyone had Bill Gates, sex machine on their 2026 bingo card. Or any other year's bingo card.

Comment Synths too (Score 4, Interesting) 112

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?

Comment Re:Dang They dont get it do they (Score 2) 110

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.

Comment Re:A 67 year old woman living in hiding (Score 1, Interesting) 86

Also funny that the alpha males always go straight to the police and government when they feel harmed or at risk. And they fall over themselves to give government and police limitless power at the slightest provocation. Curious!

I'm not sure if that's true, but it would make sense if it was. Alpha males (ignoring there is no such thing) are the most restricted by laws, because they are the most likely to get their way if there was no enforcement of laws (through the natural law of might makes right). So it shouldn't be surprising that they'd be the least likely to let something slide without getting the police involved to get the same outcome they could have done themselves if the laws allowed them to use their own physical force. "Less alpha" individuals may be more used to not getting their way regardless of the laws, are therefore feel less entitled to get the police involved as quickly.

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) 79

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: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:wow (Score 1) 37

Indeed. I pay $20 per month for Cursor, and it works great. Why should I pay 15 times that much to be Elon's beta tester?

My guess is you don't use Cursor very much if a $20 monthly subscription is enough for your needs. I still run into limits with Anthropic's $200 per month (I have 13% of my weekly allotment left with 13 hours left in the week), and I just use it as a hobbyist. Even though I am a very active hobbyist, I still can't imagine someone using these tools even 10 hours a week on just a $20 per month plan.

Comment RTFA: Not Office per se, Cloud licensing of Office (Score 2) 58

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.

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