...Seems like a solution looking for a problem.

Prices are likely to trend higher than right now, for one very simple reason: No discs means no secondary market for (cheap) used discs. Digital would no longer have to competing against used copies, so much less incentive to lower prices, at least not nearly as early.

The reason steam can often be cheap is because there are 124,000+ games on there, from more than 100,000 different publishers competing with one another. Many of which are also available on other stores, physical disc, or direct download from the developers. Many games are sold dirt cheap because they are literally decades old and making pennies is still better than making nothing.

Meanwhile, the Playstation store has much less competition (just 4,000 games), and is heavily curated by Sony. Barrier to entry is far higher than with Steam. without discs, There would be ZERO alternative places to obtain those games for PS users other than the Playstation store.

...Sony ought to be forced to change the "buy" or "purchase" buttons in their marketplace to say "rent a temporary time-limited license" instead, going forward.

Any "purchase" that can be unilaterally revoked at any time (days or even years after the fact) at the sole discretion of the seller isn't a purchase at all, so labeling it as such is blatantly false advertising.

Another vote for voidtools' "everything".

Near instantaneous searching across all your drives, including regex support.

Of course if you only have a local account and no a Microsoft one, every few months after updates MS now brings up a window strongly suggesting you probably want to switch all your settings to the Microsoft recommended defaults, enable backup, and then directing you to log in with a Microsoft account (or create one if you don't already have one). No listed option to skip, bypass, or ignore at that point.

Only way to skip the MS account at that point is to first hit "back" twice, where it then offers the "skip for now" option which wasn't listed the first time that windows was shown.

Very deceptive and coercive.

Because this is the kind of data collection that strengthens the case that climate change is very much real and ongoing, which endangers the profit margins of their largest corporate donors who don't want to risk being inconvenienced by having to spend money to mitigate that.

Leaving the equipment in place risks a future administration simply turning it all back on again instead of having to spend years and millions of dollars rebuilding it all from scratch first.

All the AI garbage that's shoehorned in and can't be turned off wants system resources too.

With the ever-increasing shift towards online game purchases (be it through steam, the playstation store, xbox store, whatever) having a brick-and-mortar game store is a dying business model.
Gamestop bought thinkgeek in 2014 for 140M and basically let it all wither away. They'd certainly be looking for something else to diversify and try to survive, because if they don't there's no way but down. Can't blame them for wanting to acquire something with an actual viable business model.

Of course whether any money lenders or investors would be dumb enough to throw tens of billions of dollars towards putting Gamestop owners at the helm of anything is a different question altogether

As the saying goes: Jack of all trades, master of none.

FWIW, there have been native windows compiled versions for pretty much all the major linux commandline tools since forever; grep, awk, sed, cat, tac, wget, wc, uniq, etc.
No need to install any emulation or translation layers or dependencies like cygwin, just straight up individual native windows binaries that work from any command prompt or batch file. As long as it's at least a 32-bit executable it will work on modern 64-bit windows.

Only caveat is that windows command prompt uses ^ as the escape character, so syntax might be slightly different like having to use ^^ instead of ^ when using regex with grep.

When Apple Maps launched, it didn't have turn-by-turn navigation support at all, while the google maps that it replaced did.
Apple absolutely launched it before it was ready, taking existing functionality away when doing so.

...If the converter machine is powered by solar, wind or other renewable source, this would make a gasoline car carbon neutral.

Unfortunately, fewer and fewer hosting companies provide their own email services; over the past years most of them have migrated to 3rd party services like Microsoft's Exchange Online or Google's business email, both of which charge significantly more per mailbox.

When Godaddy did that a few years ago I looked at a lot of places, and the best option I came across was OpenSRS/Tucows, who has been around since 1999. they still only charged $0.50/month per mailbox or so. Only caveat is that they don't sell directly to end users, but provide services to 3rd party resellers. However, anyone can sign up for a reseller account.

Part of signing up as a reseller is paying $100, but that then gives you $100 credit for services in your account. At just $0.50/month per mailbox, that will last a long time. You do have the option to turn off your public reseller/online ordering portal and just use it for personal/friend/family.

Before it was widely known what he was like:

If you are applying for an office job and and see Dilbert strips posted everywhere, you should be concerned.

...But if you walk through their office and you don't see any at all, you should worry more.

Google pretty much had to support JPEG-XL, because the PDF association declared it to be the preferred format for embedded images in the latest PDF standard.
https://www.theregister.com/20...

If they want chrome to be able to show PDF files going forward, then JPEG-XL support is required as well.