The annoying thing with Windows is that Microsoft doesn't improve the OS for the benefit of its users, it "improves" it for the benefit of itself. Users (its "customers" really) are just pawns to be monetized. This is a fundamental cultural thing. I don't forsee them changing it, not unless their self-centered philosophy hits their bottom line too much (as happened with Win8). Even then the course correction was minor - they still managed to push people off Win7 onto the telemetry heavy Win10, while also pushing unrequested BS like Onedrive and Office subscriptions.

With the Win11 push I am exploring a different route. I decided to virtualize my Win10 PC and run it on top of a Linux host (Manjaro). I managed to image the Win10 PC into a qcow2 file, setup a VM, and surprisingly got the Win10 key to accept this as a "hardware change". To keep some performance I installed a 2nd GPU for looking-glass and maxxed the ram (128GB DDR4 - not too expensive - I imagine people will be dumping used DDR4 soon). This virtual setup runs quite well - when the VM is full screen it is indistinguishable from a Win10-only PC.

But the real purpose of this experiment is software - how much Win software do I really run. Interestingly, games are the least trouble to run on Linux (I don't play MMOs, yes I am aware of anti-cheat topics). Literally every single thing I've run off Steam works perfectly fine. Web browser, Youtube, all run fine. At least mostly - I have found Firefox after being up for a few days and having multiple Youtube tabs open will start to lag and act strange - not exactly a memory leak (nothing obvious on btop), and after restarting it runs fine again.

The actual hangups I have found are 1) Fusion360 - I don't think this runs on Wine or has native linux and 2) Portable apps. I make heavy use of USB Portableapps setup - while many Portableapps have native linux versions, they are - not portable. I did try using Wine in combination with the Portableapps exe files, but that was a failure. I don't know if there is a native-linux equivalent of Portableapps, but if so that would reduce my Windows usage to basically only Fusion. And I am OK running Fusion in a Win10 setup indefinitely if needed. Although being tax-season I can forsee other things like tax software being a problem. The experiment remains on-going.

Unfortunately while I can do all these modifications on a desktop PC, I expect the laptops in our house will simply end up on Win11 (or abandoned due to old hardware).

I bought Starfield, so my sale counted. But at the same time I thought it was very disappointing. It is a mix of good and bad. First person action is good, ship editor is fun, but everything else is dumbed down and kind of bland.

Ship combat is really bad despite the interesting builder. It is dumbed down arcade garbage. Seriously they need a dev to pick up a 20yr old copy of Freespace and figure out what decent space combat sim looks like

But as the OPs are saying Bethesda burned a bridge here. I have no intention of ever purchasing their DLC or mod content (a whole separate topic is how they try to monetize the mod space like greedy assholes).

I waited years to get Halo on PC. I like Halo, but not enough to buy an Xbox for it. I can see the necessity of what they are doing, but i expect they will greed themselves out of sales anyway, just like what they did on Starfield.

It is not just reading. Writing skills have degraded also. I don't think this is necessarily due to the individual though. The environment of today promotes this.

As an example, look at handwriting skills. Everything today is typed - keyboards on computers, touchscreens on phones. People learn how to type efficiently but if you hand them a pencil and paper and ask them to handwrite something you get Homer Simpson chicken scratch out.

Another seemingly benign one is spell and grammar checkers. When the computer corrects what you type as you type it, what happens is you associate incorrect muscle movement with the correct result. This applies to many of the "helpful" features that default-on in word processors.

"AI" is the same thing on the next level. Now you don't even need to formulate sentence structure, you just need to dump a semi-coherent jumble of ideas into a prompt to get a coherent paragraph out. So of course one would expect the ability to directly create a similar paragraph is going to degrade.

I think this is a fundamental flaw in a lot of these assistants. One can easily extend it to other things also. Someone who drives an automatic cannot drive a stick-shift. A person who gets chauffeured around in a self-driving car will drive like crap if they ever need to take the wheel. A pilot who lets AI handle a self-flying plane will not be able to fly as well. It goes on and on.

This no longer works for old keys: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/290832/you-can-no-longer-use-windows-7-8-keys-to-activate-windows-11

However I recently found that I could move my Win10 physical machine into a VM by imaging the whole disk into a qcow2 file, and then setting up a VM for it. As expected this invalidated the key due to the change, but surprisingly I was able to reactivate it when it asked "was there a hardware change?" Answered yes, and then it was OK. Technically it is on the same machine, just as a VM on a Linux host, so perhaps that was a factor.

Clearly the solution here is to put little rubber feet on the top, and then flip the whole machine upside down... Has the bonus of getting the fan more air, and putting their dumb logo on the bottom. Triple win!

Really? So now you can put tabs under the bookmark bar? What, no? Well then I guess it's not better today than it ever was. Wake me up when you can fix that simple thing.

Maybe this new Firefox can also learn how to not drive away all the extension devs.

Chris Titus had an interesting video where he was looking into the dependency ties of Recall. In a couple videos preceding the one below he found that removing Recall would break File Explorer. This was found to be due to bad dependency setup, but the strange thing is the feature is not fully present, but is being shipped as enabled. This has the look of shipping it opt-out even though it was previously said it would be opt-in only.

I fully expect this will just pop into existance at some point the same way onedrive or copilot appeared, even though they were never explicitly asked for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBqIUkmVel8

A big problem in central and eastern Austin, and northern areas like Georgetown is that the ground has a big thick layer of clay. Our old house in NE Austin was on 16ft of clay, and I've heard stories of areas that are 60ft+ thick. All that clay expands and contracts with water and heat cycles. So lots and lots of houses in those areas have foundation problems and need repairs at some point. I'd say within probably less than 20yrs of age.

Traditional wood framing and sheetrock walls can hide foundation problems, at least for a while. Tile floors will show it though. But here in these houses there are giant concrete walls. So when the foundation cracks in half and the front of the house drops an inch, I can only imagine these walls will split. I'm not sure how that would be repaired. I suspect in 15-20years there will be some very upset homeowners in this neighborhood.

I think if AT&T wants to cancel this service they should call the gov't support line and talk to a representative - who will then put them on hold for 30 min and then transfer them to someone else - who will then put them on hold for another 30 min before hanging up...

I'm not sure why people bother getting straight Tmobile. A better option that has been around for quite a while now is Google Fi, which as I understand for the most part uses the Tmobile network, but it can also jump to other networks, and can also run calls over local WiFi. And they are much cheaper and more consistent than Tmobile (Fi is good for international also).

In fact right now, you can get a free Pixel 8A. A $500 phone with a $500 rebate (over 2yrs): https://fi.google.com/about/phones/pixel-8a

I've had both Tmobile and ATT in the past, and since going to Fi years ago I would never go back.

When I was working in smaller analog ASICs we occasionally added pictures like these on the die. It sort of depends on the team and personality. In projects where the whole die was controlled by a small group (generally less than 10 people), you could do something like this. But recently working in teams where there are hundreds of people there are too many eyes scrutinizing every bit of space.

In addition, long ago, back on lower-end process nodes (eg. 0.25um+) there was not as hard requirements on density and fill. So it was easier to find open space on the die. But newer deep-submicron processes (anything below 40nm) has very strict requirements on density and fill. Usually any open space is back-filled with fill shapes to prevent problems in fabrication (shapes that are adjacent to large open spaces do not process equally to ones that are surrounded). So unless a section of the die is explicitly sectioned off, open areas are rare now.

Another thing that is very common is an area where you will see numbers/letters, usually a grid of them. What happens is each layer in the stack will get a letter or number such that they don't overlap each other. Later on if the die gets a mask update (this can happen if metal-changes are done to fix bugs/errors) then the layer identifier will get updated. So looking at the die you can identify which masks were used to make it. This is useful if you have multiple revisions of an otherwise identical product.

In college I also fabricated my own die through MOSIS for a research project (0.5um process IIRC). Of course when you control the whole die you can do anything you want, so I had to personalize it a bit.

An interesting one I saw once was a Pentium4 (I think). I had a bare die embedded in a clear keychain. Under the microscope they had a whole block sectioned off with what appeared to be the initials of everyone who worked on it. I sort of doubt Intel does that sort of thing anymore.

You are out of date on this. Bluray can be ripped, generally without much trouble. Check MakeMKV.

I've transferred many of our Bluray discs over to a Plex server. Which is useful because our Bluray player is starting to have problems.

The bigger issue with doing this is that the rips can take quite a lot of space. A 1080p movie takes about 6-8GB usually, which isn't too bad. But a 4K Bluray can take around 50-80GB each. You need a big storage array if you want a good size library.

This exactly. I had not upgraded our home systems to Win11, so I didn't have much experience on it.

Then our office pushed new Win11 laptops to everyone last year, and it has been incredibly infuriating. The damn forced updates are so in-your-face now it has driven me to strongly consider going Linux at home. I even had it happen that I was in the middle of a conference call, speaking at the moment, when Win11 pushed some update that kicked me off the call, and then spent 15 minutes rebooting and installing crap. I've lost more mid-edit document changes to forced reboots in the last 6 months then I have in the last 20 years. So a big FU Microsoft.

The main holdout I have going to Linux is not games, it is the large 3D CAD applications. None of these programs - Fusion, Solid Edge, or Solidworks - have Linux installs. I find this surprising in itself - at my workplace (not 3D CAD) -all- workstations are Linux. But regardless the recommended workaround is to use a VM, which if you are using a VM to run a desktop for apps, what is the point in having a different base OS for the desktop.

Agree completely. These are foolish parents, letting this kid trade some of the best years of his life for an early entry into the industry grind (especially of all places, at one of Musk's companies). Even if the kid was super smart, it is unlikely his maturity level is at the same place as his coworkers, so he will be socially ostracized regardless.

It would have been better if the kid used his skills to start his own company as an entrepreneur, and work at his own pace. I would also suggest maintaining social connections with other kids his age, but I'm guessing since he went through an accelerated school program, that is probably non-existant already.

Some parents seem to be oblivious to the social aspects of this type of accelerated placement. Even pushing your kid one grade up causes them to be the youngest kid in the class, so they will consistently be the smallest kid there (not just size, but maturity). And at some point when growth spurt hits all the other kids, it will become really obvious. Agree that the best thing is to divert their energy into other activites.

Not only is it obvious, assets that do exactly what they are talking about have been on the Unity asset store for a long time. It takes all of 5 seconds to find ready-to-go ad systems for in-game ads, this is just the first three I saw:

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/bidstack-in-game-advertising-serving-player-experiences-on-mobil-233179

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/frameplay-sdk-152964

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/add-ons/anzu-programmatic-in-game-pc-console-ad-monetization-that-respec-211181

In fact the last one claims "The only licensed XBOX in-game advertising provider", so there is no way Microsoft is unaware of these systems. From a patent perspective this should be rejected just on the basis of all the prior art.