keyringlight

I think BTX serves as the example for why a major change is unlikely, it's death is a warning to anyone thinking of doing the same. That said, even though it was led by intel back when they were in a much better position than they are now, I wonder if it wasn't against the background of Pentium4/"Preshott" and Athlon/Opteron would it have gone down better.

It's a shame as the only real personal computer desktop/tower maker that's exercised their freedom to make a significantly different design Apple with Mac Pros, and that's a different animal entirely.

MY likely-underinformed opinion is that the ATX form factor for building PCs is creaking at the seams for the generic '1x dGPU' specification, but there's a number of factors that work against a change to something substantially better. It'd need a number of companies to offer new product lines at the same time, probably incompatible with ATX and all the challenges that would bring.

It's not just the huge heatsinks to get rid of the heat output, the power input is another. Also while dGPUs are growing at the high end, low-end dGPUs seem under-served, while AMD have APUs that I think could make a lot of people very content they don't seem too eager to make them easy to get hold of, and intel have the building blocks for a similar product but are hesitant to providing something beyond the minimum

FWIW I updated my phone to a relatively budget samsung recently, and had a similar noticeable delay to bring up the keyboard, installing 'simple keyboard' from F-droid seems to have helped. I wouldn't be surprised if it is missing features compared to the samsung/google ones where their absence will annoy a power user, but for whatever subset I use it works fine and doesn't appear as though my phone hangs.

How much of that is down to browser bare-bones defaults before the page defines its own styles, IIRC bare HTML doesn't define what the client must do because at that level it's not defining a presentation.

I could see a browser making a change to have their defaults for an undefined style to something else, other colors and fonts or closer to reader mode, with an options toggle or flag to restore old behavior. I doubt many browsers would bother as unstyled pages are so rare for most of the web.

I wonder if there will be a similar situation at nvidia, which apparently has a challenge with so many of their employees being rich as their stock has rocketed up in value, and then could cause concerns about motivation or if skilled and knowledgeable employees will leave.

Yes, as I understand it ABS catches the occasion where your braking overwhelms the wheel-road friction the wheel locks and starts to skid. If you're before that threshold then it doesn't activate and doesn't negatively affect anything, if you do lock then ABS activating is better than not having it and the remedy is the same as without ABS where you release the brake enough for the wheel to turn again. A skid is the least desirable in terms of control and stopping distance, having ABS lets a driver hit the brakes hard in an emergency with more confidence.

Assuming you're talking about winget, that seems to operate either as an alternative CLI interface to the MS store with a separate database developers would need to add their manifests to, or to download and run normal installers in silent mode. For example if you do winget show "adobe acrobat reader (64-bit) you can see what it will grab. It's a far cry from how most linux package managers operate

One of the things that strikes me about 24 is that it started running about 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a debate about running it or edits, but in retrospect it does seem like the timing worked and fit with the public mood of the time. What would be interesting is how 9/11 and following real life events influenced the show's writing in later series.

One of the things I wonder about recently is whether there's too many distros, which is dividing effort and there's less drive to find consensus on certain issues when everyone has the freedom to do things their own way and experiment to explore their niche. That freedom is the point of free software to a large extent, but there's costs to it. It also divides the userbase so when something doesn't work you may need to dive deeper into the details than you'd like to see if there's anything particular about your species of the linux animal kingdom.

It'd be interesting if there was a "Ubuntu v2" type effort, over 20 years later. Before ubuntu it's not as though desktop linux was an impossible dream or there was a lack of distros, but Canonical cleaned up a lot of rough edges to the extent it became a lingua franca. It's to the extent you can rely on ubuntu being in instructions for linux software, for example if there's any differences to required package names it'll be the ubuntu names over debian's.

The ongoing saga with the migration from control panel to the settings app is as good an example as any. They've been working on that since win8 which released in 2012. Given the time it took to make a new release, it's been 15 years and is still ongoing, it very much seems like MS don't care about that area of the OS.

I can understand that there's a lot of old/legacy third party stuff that would rely on the .cpl capabilities so you can't rip it out in one go, but "it's a lot of work" seems like a poor excuse for a company with resources like MS to not at least get all their own moved across with equivalents. They could even leave the old deprecated ones available in the background for anything legacy that needs to interact with them.

The trouble is that if some weirdness happens because of the edit, you've got to handle it even if you say it would be reasonable to assume that it's outside of being supported. Maybe you spend a bit more time defensive coding around what inputs it reads from the file, maybe a certain proportion of users doing the save edit see bugs in an apparently unrelated part of the game and seek support (and their bug report might not be complete with all the details), developers spend time to chase down what went wrong, maybe they bad-mouth it on forums which affects sales - there's going to be some cost to handling all of that.

One of the anecdotes from Titan Quest developed by Iron Lore is that their copy protection had multiple checks, crackers removed the early checks to get the game running but later 'tripwires' as you progress through the game remained and the game appeared to crash. So the game earned a reputation for being buggy for something no normal user would hit running the game as intended.

I'm interested to see how this affects Microsoft's messaging to some win10 users for "you need to buy a new PC to continue to be updated" while there's still a significant [0] amount of people to switch in 5-6 months.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...

I think that speaks to another aspect, individual apps taking full control over how they're presented instead of inheriting whatever framework the DE is providing or the cohabitation of various KDE/QT/GTK/X/other, or electron framework defaults. Over on windows even when uxtheme skinning was in full swing it was the start of applications doing it themselves (winamp and quicktime come to mind), but I have the impression developers doing so made sure the extra effort had a payoff.

Another one [0] SpyCast - DOGE Layoffs and the Counterintelligence Threats They Pose Also on their podcast RSS, but it seems they haven't added a webpage to link to for that individual show

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foLsTVQwBIg

The thing that turned me off reddit is that for many years how much of it seemed to be following a script for any given topic, and that's a long time to when /r/subredditsimulator or GPT variants would be novel. Personally I'm long past the point where I found myself caring whether it's a human or bot if the value in reading the post isn't there as it's not presenting anything new. I found myself despairing a bit that if it was humans typing out responses, what's the cumulative amount of time spent doing so and not moving things forwards, just playing out the same scene over and over, and likely being angry about it so it's hard to see it as a leisure activity

I remember using the BootVis tool (IIRC was an early part of what would be the performance toolkit) to profile the startup process, and then you could it to optimize the location of data loaded from HDDs to reduce the seeking required. Also back when PATA was still in use depending on your motherboard I seem to remember making sure windows wouldn't try to autodetect link speed on unused attachments as that could take ages trying to find something that wasn't there.

The way I see it (and similarly with browsers now) is that the OS is a venue providing a stage for others to perform on, they provide the facilities so every act doesn't need to build their own venue. Most of the time people don't visit/use a venue for the sake of it.

The 'cheap' angle is something I wonder about, especially for the coming year with tariffs, and especially when Microsoft is trying to tell a lot of people that they need to buy new PCs to get off win10 and I doubt a huge proportion will be able/willing to do the remaining bypasses or learn another OS. It seems like a perfect storm if you're trying to be frugal, so I assume 'frugal' is going to translate into a lot of people on unsupported systems.

My feeling is that deck v2 will only happen around the time of next generation consoles (PS6, etc) so they can piggy-back off the AMD APU made for it again. Getting a chip as a slight variation on a mass-market product is going to be a lot easier

As far as quality goes, the main things steam looks for [0] to release is that it launches on the platforms you say it's available for, and that it matches the store page you've made for it. Presumably it'd have to be absolutely malicious for them to get involved past that

[0] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/review_process

Besides Fortnite (which is a big hit on mobile/consoles) all those examples hit their stride before steam opened to third parties or early in that period. Others like COD or Minecraft may have started on PC but migrated their main focus to other platforms too.

What stands out to me is that while most studios accept that they've got to pay their tithe to valve in order to succeed on PC, for many it seems to begrudgingly so and where they have the capability they investigate using their own or alternative channels to get a better rate. It's an interesting parallel to Valve's moan around 15 years or so that Microsoft could E.E.E. PC gaming and the linux direction was hedging against that.

Something I found myself paying attention to as I was getting tired of cars and looking towards training for a motorcycle is what colors stand out, not just high-visibility clothes but the vehicle too because you want to be seen. Once you've tuned your eyes into looking it's shocking how many riders are pure black when they're more vulnerable on the roads. It's an interesting exercise when you're walking around a city onto a new street with cars parked up to see how quickly you can count how many there are, I found it can be difficult to separate out cars with how common black is now, and the less common brighter colors really stand out.

It's not just Apple integrating AI into the hardware, Microsoft has been part of a big push to "AI PCs" with a certain minimum capabilities (and I'm sure their partners don't mind selling new gear) and the copilot button on keyboards, and certain android models have the processors and memory capacities specifically for running AI

One of the big changes with ME was cutting out DOS mode as much as they could, and if you're doing a system for retro computing then it's hard to see why you'd constrain what it's capable of. If you don't need that and you've blacklisted 95/98 then I don't see why you wouldn't go for win2k onwards as it'll be a lot easier to work with, but it's a different animal.

This is definitely an interesting part of it. Copying a few hundred megs from CD to HDD doesn't take long even for old hardware, but when I was setting up a win98 rig last autumn to test some 3dfx cards it took the common ~45 minutes to get through the main install, and that's before you get into the post-install cycle of installing any software/drivers/updates that need reboots. The "unofficial service pack3" is one I'd love to integrate as it includes support for USB mass storage which made the machine a lot easier to work with

On a side-note, walking the line between annoying and entertaining was the noise of the HD during install, which sounded like techno music and I should have recorded it. Weirdly it was only during the win98 install that it made that type of sound.

I see it as one of the consequences of freedom, but perhaps also a gap in packaging where they can't bundle up their changes in a form to be applied onto another base.

That 'base' is one issue I've been thinking about with linux, I have similar concerns about the cost of everyone being able to make their own distro for their own slight variation on something else. It's not that I think it's a bad thing to pathfind in new areas, but the replication in building/supporting it all, getting users to pick between 4 similar variants of the same thing, and accounting for "you're using KustomLinux, which is 2 steps removed from CommonLinux" and all the little differences between them. It's an interesting contrast against standardization, but I can't help wondering how it would change the approachability of linux if the starting point was limited to one of the big distros and then variants are layered on top of that.

>and there's something to it that makes it easier to just know which window is open over which window that's lacking in modern UIs (I think it's the over-reliance on soft shadows and the borderless windows).

I think this started with Vista, I remember watching a video criticizing the new love of glass effects on UI chrome as it got rid of or minimized the color/shading difference between focused/unfocused windows. The example the video used was 6 notepad windows and pick which one was focused, and the main cue you'd need to look for is that the window with focus had a close button colored red.

Thin borders and minimalist/hiding scrollbars is another one that annoys me, give me something graphical for my gaze to grasp.

Like a lot of things in any OS it depends how far off the beaten track you go. I think there's a lot of gaming newcomers to linux where their main exposure for wine is via steam, which generally wraps things up for them and hides the details behind their launcher. If you need to go diving into the details for compatibility or you'd like to separate things out with prefixes then it's definitely much less polished and elegant, but I'd argue you could say the same thing about windows for compatibility with some old games or sites like PCGamingWiki.com would be a lot smaller as the combinations of windows (or DOS)+drivers+hardware over the years hasn't resulted in perfect consistent compatibility.

The way I see it is like fashion or fashion-adjacent, at least on the consumer side. One of the big accomplishments of Jobs direction is that they made computing cool, something you'd want to display instead of a functional beige box you hide away. It's not in the background, you have these colors, elegance or attention to detail on computing you want to be seen, and new major models need to be different to keep customers engaged along with being the status symbol.

With further progression on integration/miniaturization and lower power consumption/heat output for general computing, the devices have shrunk to their bare minimum as slabs, there's very little physical to display so the fashion needed to move to software (and what online services it can be a client for). Stasis is death when you rely on selling, and maintenance is a constant cost which no one really wants to pay for.

As a side note, it's interesting to compare attitudes to the physical side to PC, where for years there was almost a pride that PC was a minimalist functional box (besides the occasional fun/weird exception), but that contrasts against now where it's hard not to get components with windows or embellished with LEDs and logos on display (and there's another weird contrast, where on one hand you have internals on display, on the other trying to minimize or hiding away the cables as though the inner workings were ugly)

I've thought along similar lines for art, what ecological niches are there where AI can't participate, are harder to pull training data from or not economical, where humans can flourish.