the actual production cost of $30 million as indicated by the tax writeoff stated value

The tax write-off can only be for part of the production cost, isn't it? You don't get to deduct the entire cost of the movie.

It's well-reported that WB sold the film below costs to Ketchup, and they paid $50 million for it.

There is a reason I qualified that with "open source projects for AI."

Toasters will fly (again) before Nvidia's graphics tech gets open sourced.

Nvidia has been a pretty big supporter of open source projects for AI over the last half-decade or so. Many of the company's technologies are open source, most notably their open-weights model, Nemotron, and Dynamo, their inference serving and distribution framework. So it would be surprising to see them do anything to close off the Hugging Face collection. If nothing else, keeping it open is in Nvidia's own self-interest. The frontier AI companies themselves are all designing their own AI chips (e.g. OpenAI Jalapeno, Meta MTIA), which reduces the amount of Nvidia hardware they need to buy. Whereas smaller operations using open source models will inevitably pair those with commodity COTS hardware, which is where Nvidia reigns supreme.

Epic added a Linux build target to Unreal Engine 4.1 in 2014. And since UE5 in 2020 the entire development toolchain has been feature complete in Linux. Meaning you could make your Unreal game on Linux and then release it natively for Linux (and Windows/consoles/mobile devices/etc).

So while Epic has not been the best supporter of Linux, they have not been ignoring it, either. The core engine is ready. What's left is that the anti-cheat software (Easy Anti-Cheat) and the store need to catch up.

Epic looks to be hiring to improve the anti-cheat situation as it currently lacks kernel-level support, and this latest announcement indicates that they're working on getting EGS running as well.

The article makes no mention of the source. But everything about this sounds like it's just the CAM release from LuCY. Which has been available for around a week and a half now.

In which case, yeah, the only thing novel about it was that it was posted to a more publicly-visible website.

Xbox 1 emulation is in a so-so place right now. Xemu has pretty good compatibility (80% or so), but it is very, very slow.

To date no one has been able to develop an Xbox emulator using high-level emulation, so Xemu takes a low-level approach based around QEMU. Which makes the computational requirements much, much higher*. To the point where there are plenty of games that run at half-speed (or worse) even on the latest CPUs. The current emulators are heavily CPU limited (and to just a couple of threads at that), and CPUs aren't getting faster very quickly these days.

So if Microsoft has an emulation environment with much lower overhead, then that is a significant development. Because even with third-party emulators available, most games aren't currently fully playable on them.

* LLE extends to the GPU as well. So a lot of cycles are burnt emulating parts of the NV2A GPU and its 25 year old peculiarities

Amazon took nine years to reach profitability.

I'm not sure Amazon is a good example here. The company famously opted to reinvest its free cash flow into growing the business, rather than saving them and booking them as net income. They likely could have been profitable sooner otherwise.

Also, I am not aware of Amazon receiving billions in government support in the 1994-2001 timeframe.

Score one for K'Breel and the Council of Elders, I guess. We'll get you next time, you crafty Martians!

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are still included with every Apple device. The current versions are fully up to date and are free for any device owner.

What Apple has done is put the AI features and licensed stock images behind a paywall. Which isn't great, but those weren't core features to begin with; the iWork apps existed long before they were added.

To quote Apple: "Yes. You can continue using Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform for free. And while these apps remain free for everyone, an Apple Creator Studio subscription offers premium templates, a library of high-quality, royalty-free photos and graphics, and powerful intelligence features."

Why would an otherwise routine software update even come with new EULA terms?

Off the top of my head, I can't recall an Office for Mac update ever coming with a new EULA.

While Office 2021 is affected by the expiring license, it's still under support until Oct 2026 and users just need to update. It only reverts to read-only if you don't update.

Thank you. I had been wondering about this precisely because Office 2021 is still receiving updates.

So this is really only an Office 2019 issue. Which still isn't great, but it is at least older.

And from the sounds of things, this only impacts the retail-licensed version of Office 2019. The volume licensed LTSC version doesn't rely on an activation server or certificates.

It's modded funny because OpenCL is all but dead for new projects. It got weighed down by industry infighting to the point that the big feature of OpenCL 3.0 in 2020 was undoing everything added to the spec after 2011.

So the idea of using OpenCL as a CUDA replacement, rather than something like ROCm or OneAPI, is funny. It's like rewriting C++ programs to use Pascal.

Per TFA:

These adjustments stem from Sonyâ(TM)s ongoing efforts to manage backend services and data feeds that support enhanced guide features on its Google TV-powered BRAVIA lineup.

It sounds like Sony is losing (or is not renewing) the contracts with their data brokers who providing the listing services for their TVs? In which case this is not necessarily expected, but it is par for the course.

There is no truly free source of OTA TV listings and other metadata in the US. The stations themselves do not provide this data over the air as an adjacent data stream (which is what a rational person would expect), so the only way to get listings is from third party providers such as Gracenote. Which as a technical solution works, but it means someone is always on the hook for paying for that service. And no one wants to pay for OTA metadata services, since the hallmark attribute of OTA TV is that it's free.

This is a problem that goes back to the earliest days of TiVo. Someone needs to pay for TV listings, but TVs and other STBs last too long; hardware manufacturers eventually tire of paying for an ever-increasing bill - it costs them money they don't get to make back if they give away the listings for free. And thus you eventually end up with required a monthly subscription just to have an OTA DVR.

The eventual death of linear TV should finally put an end to this nonsense. But until then we're all going to keep experiencing the same non-free listings issues we've had since the late 90s.

Huh. I am surprised to hear that Microsoft SQL Management Studio doesn't run. The usual problem children are either programs that are using specific x86 instructions (e.g. games with AVX2), or programs that need kernel mode drivers. MSMS doesn't fall into either of those categories.

This is an especially bad example.

The SN850X has been rebranded multiple times as SanDisk has slowly split from Western Digital (taking all the SSDs with them). They still sell it as the SN850X, but the full model and SKU numbers have changed over the years. As a result, prices for the old models have been volatile, as some vendors treat the newer iterations as the same product while others don't. Which means that for the latter, they see the old models as an item they aren't getting more stock of, and raise prices on the remaining stock accordingly.

Oldest Model: WDBB9H0020BNC-WRSN (The original Western Digital WD_BLACK product)
Mid Model: WDS200T2XHE-00BCA0 (The WD_BLACK By SanDisk product)
Newest Model: SDSP81200TAH-000E0 (The current SanDisk product)

The SN850X has been a very long-lived product from a manufacturer who supplies their own NAND and controller, so I can see why The Verge would want to use that as a tracking point for SSD prices. But the brand/SKU changes make it a poor choice. Samsung's drives are probably a better point of comparison here.