I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.

I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.

At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.

I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.

I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.

You're right. Meet Excelcia, the Slashdot monitoring and control AI.

That's a funny way of explaining that they neglected to implement proper security measures and backup measures for decades.

The security measures I can forgive. Or, rather, I can extend them the benefit of the doubt. There are so many vectors and ins, I'm willing to issue a mulligan on that.

But the backup... what is the difference between a ransomware attack and a hard drive failure? Only the predicate intent. The result is identical.

So while I have room for tolerance for a security failure, I have no tolerance for the aftermath. Anyone can get hit by it, but being harmed by it for more than a day, that's on them. Anything more than a day's down time to re-image every hard drive and firmware back to known good, is just simply incompetence.

I would say that any kind of substantial level of investment in a jurisdiction is a reasonable indicator of an expectation of a return on investment, and thus confidence in the economic growth of at least some industries in that jurisdiction. I'm not sure why people are trying to hand wave away that kind of an indicator, unless the fact of it creates some problem for some narrative they have bought into, creating a level of cognitive dissonance necessitating peculiar denials.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Still trying to extort money from IBM after all this time. Nothing like a business model made up entirely of rent seeking.

Tero said: How did this article even get published?

It's a great article. There are a lot of apps, use cases, and workflows that can be duplicated in Linux, but which aren't obvious or well advertised. An article like this encourages people to share those workflows they have had problems duplicating and then others who have duplicated them or found other solutions can share them. Great idea. The lowest quality (or one of) part of this article was your comment.

couchslug said: Maintaining the low quality of Slashdot is a mysterious choice by its owners whose replacement by AI would be an upgrade.

...and here we have a tie for the other lowest quality part of this article. Great name, by the way. Matches your attitude. If you want to make a complaint, then offer a solution with it. If you hate Slashdot in general so much, why are you here? We have all watched the site slowly suffer from not having any energy input into the system, but maybe dragging it down further isn't the answer. Can you even see the irony of bitterly complaining about the lack of effort the owners are putting in?

Both of you, add some energy to the system, or vote with your feet. Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Depends what you mean by video editor.

For transcoding, de and re-muxing, filtering, cropping, resizing, de-interlace, and some splicing with the equivalent audio capabilities (basically for format bashing with enough splicing ability to piece together pieces of movies, for example, spread over multiple discs) you have avidemux.

You have other tools like MKVToolNix, Mediainfo and MakeMKV for direct Matroska editing, meta-data vewing, and DVD/Blu-Ray ripping respectively too.

For video authoring with splices, fades, effects, animations, titles, with good timeline support, you have openshot.

Bah,

Made a typo in the quoting but I'm sure you can figure it out.

Would you actually be cheering if he was using Linux and had gotten away with his ransomware spree?

I would be cheering regardless of the end-use of the computer if the method used to apprehend the suspect was not frighteningly draconian. Yes.

It's not a win for anybody.

Indeed, invasion of privacy is not a remedy for crime.

These are the same arguments that legislators and law enforcement are using the world over to erode privacy. To institute "age verification" (which is really just tracking by another name) and to brand everything you do. This is the pre-internet equivalent to tattooing a serial number on everyone and then recording that number at every checkpoint and building access in order to track people. Good thing no one ever did that.

Oh.... wait....

There are many American vs "Rest of the English Speaking World" spellings that don't matter. This one does, as they are two very different things with completely different etymologies and histories.

A check is an action you perform to investigate, and perhaps a mark you make to indicate an investigation or task is completed.
A cheque is a financial instrument used to transfer funds.

If the British can set aside their hatred of all things French long enough to use the correct loan word, then even Americans can get it right.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

Frankly, the quality of build, the stability of the operating system, and just the plain reliability and features even in the supporting tools exceed Windows. Take the Preview App. The work I can do on PDFs; signatures, annotations, OCR, right out of the box, and built so that the versions on my iPhone and iPad fully integrate, cannot be easily replicated on Windows. Apple just really has an eye for workflow, and making sure the base system and tools fit well into that.

It's not perfect, to be sure, I wouldn't want to use Pages as my full time word processor, and Apple, like Microsoft and Google, suffer designed interoperation friction, which does suck. But all in all, I'm just more efficient on a Mac, and in subtle ways I never knew were even problems until I picked a MacBook up the first time. Honestly going to Windows right now is just horrible for me, particular Windows 11, which just feels like constant chaos and out of control busy-ness.