Pre-installing a game store with every copy of your shipped PC OS surely automatically makes that game store a monopoly on that PC OS since *everyone* has it? To date, I only know of 2 instances of this - Windows Store on Windows (many 100s of millions of PCs) and Steam on SteamOS (5-6 million on Steam Decks/Lenovo Legion Go S). If anything, I'd argue Windows Store is an order of magnitude bigger monopoly game store than Steam is.

What's been confused here is market dominance (being so much better than the competition that users gravitate towards it despite having several game store choices on PC) vs monopolistic practices (where the barrier to market entry is made higher by behaviour of the market leader e.g. by bundling the game store with the OS). Steam provides such a better quality of life for gamers and its sales (and policy to allow often even cheaper third party sellers of Steam keys) are so good that it's almost a no-brainer to consider the Steam version of game first unless the non-Steam version is significantly cheaper.

Heck, I've picked up close to 1,000 freebies (paid games that go free for a short period) from Epic, GOG and Amazon, but I still don't play that many of them - despite Heroic Games Launcher making it easy to do so - because I prefer the Steam ecosystem and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

The only major stumbling block for Linux gaming is kernel level anti-cheat, which some people equate to behaving like malware anyway. Several anti-cheat systems (e.g. BattlEye, Easy Anti Cheat, XIGNCODE3) have Linux support, but some game developers refuse to enable them on Linux for...reasons. Some feel that it forces them to fully support Linux when they don't see an economic reason to or other claims it's ineffective because it's not kernel level on Linux.

As far non-Steam gaming stores go, I use Heroic Games Launcher, which has Linux, macOS and Windows versions and supports easily playing all your GOG, Epic and Amazon titles in one launcher. You can also use Lutris to cover even more game stores in one client, but I found it less friendly than Heroic. I don't play multi-player games and I do a quick check on protondb.com if Steam says a game is "Unsupported" (which doesn't mean it doesn't run on Linux - quite often the reverse is true). I reckon at least 95% of my 3,000+ Steam Library (plus almost 1000 games in other stores - almost all freebies from GOG, Epic and Amazon) works on both my Steam Deck and my Fedora Linux desktop fine.

When it comes to IMAP - a well-documented and widely implemented e-mail protocol - Microsoft takes a "not invented here" attitude to it and has a disgracefully half-baked IMAP implementation of it in Outlook. Pretty well every popular non-Outlook mail client out there implements IMAP correctly, but a trillion dollar company called Microsoft apparently can't.

My biggest grievances are that it often won't pick up changes to your IMAP inbox automatically and it doesn't implement the IMAP delete properly either (leading to mail not being deleted on the server while Outlook only deletes its local copy - not good if you have a mail server quota [another thing that Outlook doesn't query by IMAP either]).

I can guarantee you that the vast majority of wINDOWS/Mac users have never installed an OS from scratch on their machiNe. Sure, they'll go through a major upgrade of the same OS if they're prompted for one, but they absolutely will not download an ISO image and install that OS from scratch. Heck, if their OS install got borked, they'd either ask a tech friend/family member to fix it, take it to a computer shop for repair or simply bin it and buy a new machine. Sadly, most Slashdot users can't fathom this and think that the average user will move to Linux, when most of them have even barely heard about the OS in the first place.

The things that will happen at the EOL of Windows 10 are:
* Users keep running Windows 10 with no more patches, oblivious of the fact that the security risk of doing so ramps up over time.
* Users get the 1 year of extra patches (either pay $30 or backup stuff to OneDrive apparently), but still have the EOL of patches to deal with one year later (it's a one-time set of 1 year of patches).
* Users buy a new machine and will probably bin the old one (not realising it could be reused with a Linux distro).
* A tiny fraction of Windows users (1%) know about Linux and switch to it cold turkey (they would have to wipe Windows 10 because it would have EOLed).

So yes, I think we'll see a tiny movement (maybe +0.5% at best) in Linux market share, but the EOL of Windows 10, even with 200m+ machines not being able to run Windows 11, will more likely see a surge in landfill if you ask me.

BBC BASIC shipped with the BBC Micro in 1981 was by far the best BASIC ever written for the 6502 CPU. It was extremely fast (it tokenised BASIC keywords for speed and memory saving), had various graphics instructions and had the brilliant feature of a 6502 assembler built in, so you could write either 100% machine code programs or mix BASIC and machine code. It made Microsoft's 6502 BASIC look like amateur hour, IMHO.

I'm surprised Space:1999 wasn't the very first comment about this! For those not in the know, it was a 1970's UK sci-fi TV show (great first season, not so hot second season) where a nuclear pile on Moonbase Alpha explodes on the moon and hurtles it away from the earth (spoiler: no, they never return to earth). Have we not learned our lesson from Professor Gerry Anderson after all these years? :-)

You should always encrypt uploads to services like WeTransfer - always assume they'll keep the data even if they claim they'll delete it after a few days and don't be surprised if they try to sell it on or train AI on it. It's what I've done for years, even well before AI bots/training was an established thing.

One big issue I have with the UK's Online Safety Act is that the UK government isn't providing a centralised age verification service (or commissioning a non-profit UK organisation to do it, which maybe the government then subsidises?). So what we're going to get is a disparate set of companies providing probably slightly different methods of age verification and a much bigger chance of the verification data being leaked. BTW, I'm a UK adult and have no form of UK photo ID, so I've no idea how they're going to verify my age (maybe my birth certificate?).

In Reddit's case, we've got the issue of a US company (Persona, who the BBC article mentioned but failed to state it's based in San Francisco in the US) verifying the ages of UK users. This brings up the issue of jurisdiction and possible GPDR violations to my mind.

LibreOffice seem to want Windows users to go via the most difficult route first - install Linux in a dual boot scenario to test LibreOffice in Linux. Surely, a Windows user should downlooad and install LibreOffice for Windows first and see if their existing MS Office documents work fine with it (writing in one suite and reading it back in the other and vice versa). Only if Windows LibreOffice is compatible and usable enough for them, should they then consider Linux and its LibreOffice version surely?

I'm in the UK with an "alt-net" ISP (small ISP only covering small towns that were neglected by BT Openreach or Virgin Media) and they offer 500 Mbit/sec unlimited download and upload for £27 ($37 including taxes) a month, 900 Mbit/sec for £30 ($41) and 2300 Mbit/sec for £50 ($68) for either a 12 or 18 month fixed price contract. These T-Mobile prices seem very high to me!

BTW, I just switched to their 900 Mbit/sec plan and they offered it to me for the price of the 500 Mbit/sec plan (no idea why - that offer certainly isn't on their Web site or in the contract renewal reminder e-mail they sent me), plus they just posted me what looks like a better router too.

The recent TV series "Upload" already did this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - I quite enjoyed the show and it's been renewed for a 4th and final season. Minds were uploaded to a virtual reality scenario and could later then be downloaded (it happened to a clone of the main character's body) with, yes, both versions active at the same time.

I'm surprised no-one's mentioned the Black Mirror season 3 episode "Hated In The Nation", which featured none other than a swarm of robobees. Predictably for Black Mirror, things didn't turn out too well. A little easter egg for season 7's episode 1 ("Common People") is that Rashida Jones' teacher character talks about robobees in her class as a nod to the earlier episode.

I would argue that storing absolute URLs thousands of times in the WordPress site database is incredibly annoying when you can pick up the top-level URL via a $_SERVER[] variable (or just have it hard-coded once in the DB and append relative URLs to it for sub-pages). Anyone doing serious WP development has dev/staging/live environments and will often want to copy a full site between any combination of those environments - cue painful search-replace of all the URLs (sadly WP-CLI's "wp search-replace" only does a half-assed job of this, leaving many old URL strings unchanged).

One thing I would like to see added to WordPress is a read-only Administrator role - the number of times a client who has full admin access does something they shouldn't is ridiculous (e.g. create dozens of other Administrator users [no non-admin users at all in their WP site!] or install random-ass plugins that cause problems for their site). A read-only admin would be a read-write Editor, plus view only access to the same Dashboard view that a normal Administrator would see. That way, they can see all the settings/plugins/theme/etc, but can't change them and have to ask a normal Administrator to make a change.

I'm not terrified of knives - it's guns that I'm truly scared about. The fact that a US citizen can own multiple firearms and carry them concealed is truly nightmarish and really doesn't belong in a civilised country. The vast majority of UK police don't carry a firearm - only special squads used for extreme situations (e.g. hostage-taking, terrorism) carry them and they definitely should be the only people who do.

The UK does have a massive amount of CCTV surveillance (particularly in cities) and you know what - I'm fine with that. You need some disincentive for rowdy/illegal behaviour and CCTV is one of the best tools for that.

Steam's Proton can already use esync and fsync to improve the performance of Windows games. What ntsync gives you is a more accurate implementation that works in corner cases where esync and fsync don't (for some games, you actually have to disable esync/fsync to get them to work) - the perf difference between ntsync and esync/fsync is minimal. What the misleading headline is basing the "perf leap" on is a game using ntsync vs. a game using nothing, which isn't the norm for the vast majority of games run via Proton.