Backward-compatible Xbox 360 games will still be available for purchase on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S stores, Microsoft says.
So no, presumably Microsoft just doesn’t want to deal with the tangle of close to 20-year-old code that holds up the Xbox 360’s store interfaces.
Great value for him, maybe.
The biggest problem people have with systemd is that it’s constantly growing, taking on more functions and becoming a dependency of more software. People joke that some day you won’t be using Linux anymore, but GNU/systemd, (or as they’ve taken to calling it, GNU plus systemd) because it’s ever-growing from a simple init daemon into a significant percentage of an entire operating system.
People worry that some day, you won’t be able to run a Linux system that’s compatible with much of the software developed for Linux without using systemd. Whether that’s a realistic worry or not I don’t know, and I don’t really have a horse in the systemd VS not-systemd race, but I can appreciate being worried that systemd might end up becoming a hard requirement for a Linux system in a way that nothing else really is - you can substitute GNOME for KDE, X11 for Wayland (or Mir, I guess), PulseAudio for PipeWire and most stuff will still work, so the idea that systemd could become as non-negotiable an element of a Linux system as the Linux kernel itself rubs people the wrong way, as it functionally makes Linux with systemd a different target platform entirely to Linux with another init daemon.
They already have alt-tech, which had kind of a headstart on the Fediverse.
The Fediverse is home to a lot of young, tech-minded people distrustful of major corporations. The younger generations are more likely to come out as transgender due to greater awareness and acceptance of gender identity and dysphoria, and a decentralised, open platform is naturally going to appeal to communists, syndicalists and other left-wingers who don’t want some billionaire buying the next website they get comfortable on. And funnily enough, there are a surprising number of trans people in the tech sector, to the point where trans-flag socks have become a meme among programmers.
This is the first I’ve heard of the JPEG XL format, but it sounds pretty good!
Hopefully it doesn’t get misused by websites to mangle lossless compressed images with so much compression they’re barely visible to save a few kilobytes, though.
Yeah, federated network things.
Did you read the article? Excerpts include:
Generally, in business, it is sensible to provide your customers with what they want. With Twitter, the meme-makers’ favourite billionaire is doing the opposite. The cyber-trucker is trying his best to cull his customer base.
Threads is what would happen if Twitter and Instagram made out in a bowling alley. It’s all their worst parts combined - but it may well succeed. Rocket-man Musk’s changes to Twitter have not exactly made it ‘brand friendly’. Threads, meanwhile, is shaping up to be a paradise for in-your-face brands - and the AdTech industry would love for you to join them
and
Threads’ naffness won’t stop its success. It’s data-scraping fluffily dressed up as substandard corporate twaddle. It’s a cringe-inducing privacy invasion. It’s not meant for users, but that doesn’t really matter: you’re not a user, you’re a product.
It’s describing Threads as a product not for users, but advertisers. The perfect brand-friendly non-place for companies to stick their marketing crap. That doesn’t really come across as a ringing endorsement to me.
Honestly, the biggest problem with the Quest headsets is that they’re made by Facebook. Sorry, “Meta”. The Quest 2 stand-alone headset would be an obvious recommendation to anyone curious about virtual reality if it weren’t a Mark Zuckerberg product.
In the case of the Surface Go family, there isn’t really anything comparable from other companies. It’s unironically the best compact tablet I’m aware of that you can put Linux on, and it runs Pop!_OS without issue once you disable Secure Boot. The only better Linux tablet for me would be an iPad Mini, but you can’t put Linux on one of those and even if you could it’s ARM-based so most proprietary apps won’t work on it.
In general, your tablet options for something smaller and handier than full-size 2-in-1s are pretty limited if you don’t want to be running iPadOS, so excluding Microsoft’s devices from the running if you want to put Linux on your tablet is pointless. Yeah, buying a Surface Laptop to put Linux on there is a bit weird, but I can see the Surface Pro family yielding a good ARM Linux tablet some day.
On the flip side, it’s a rolling-release distro, so you don’t have to play a game of “what broke?” whenever you do a major version upgrade or do a clean install to avoid it, because there are no major version updates. And the AUR is pretty much the reason to use Arch outside of being at the cutting edge (which is mainly useful for using brand new hardware that hasn’t got the best support in the more conventional distros yet, like a new laptop).
Arch is good for a machine that gets used a lot, but for something where you need stability or to be able to run it for a long time between restarts and updates, something Debian-based is preferable. Just not modern Ubuntu because Snaps are performance-sapping nightmares.
USB-C hubs all seem to be dodgy crap made by anonymous Chinese companies and resold through various companies, including the likes of Apple. There’s an absolute dearth of hubs made by actual reputable firms.
I can definitely believe that. America’s wartime production was incredibly well-standardised and every part was optimised to take as few man-hours as was feasible to produce. German production of everything from rifles to tanks to aircraft still involved a good amount of hand-fitting late into the war by contrast.
They really weren’t, though.
Yeah, the Panzer III was better than a lot of the early-war British and French tanks, but that isn’t really saying a whole lot and it didn’t have any room left to grow after the long 50mm upgrade. It was arguably the best all-rounder tank in the world in 1939 with its torsion bar suspension and great ergonomics, and its chassis endured right to the end of the war in the form of derivatives like the StuG, but it wasn’t exceptional in any way.
The Panzer IV became a pretty good medium tank around 1942-3, but by then the T-34 had overcome the worst of its early teething problems and received a less awful turret, and the M4 Sherman, which totally outmoded the Panzer IV was entering production. Plus it was still ultimately a 1930s design (if a rather forward-looking one) with crappy suspension.
The Tiger I was a pretty good heavy tank for 1942 but still, ultimately, just a heavy tank. It was never intended to be a mass-production vehicle making up the bulk of a fighting force. It was a specialised tool that did its job pretty well, not a battle-winning wunderwaffe.
The Panther was a 45-ton tank made out of parts designed for a 30-ton tank. Reasonably quick in a straight line, handled nicely when it worked, solid medium-calibre gun but it broke down frequently and was quite maintenance-intensive - this was less of a problem on the specialised Tiger I than on the Panther, a tank intended to replace the Panzer IV as the standard tank of the German army.
The Tiger II was frankly insanity. All the Tiger II really needed to be was a streamlined Tiger I with sloped armour, a longer gun and a redesigned turret. Instead, it became an immobile 70-ton brick that was never available where it was needed and was generally a total waste of resources. Let’s not even talk about the Jagdtiger.
Sure, the Germans had some very effective guns - the L/70 and the 88s - but it’s not like nobody else did. The British ended up with the very effective OQF 17-pounder, the Americans actually had the 76mm M1 and its derivatives pretty early on but didn’t much use it because the 75mm was more than “good enough” until Panthers started appearing in large numbers, and the Soviets had their own very effective 85mm and 100mm guns.
The 128mm on the Jagdtiger was frankly absurd overkill considering the long 88 was already eminently capable of putting down the bulk of Allied armour at long ranges; the Jagdtiger really doesn’t offer much advantage over a Jagdpanther in practical terms outside of hypothetically fighting Allied counters to the Jagdtiger like the Tortoise, IS-4 and the various American super-heavies (T28/T95, T29,30,34). At least the IS-2’s 122mm cannon had the excuses of being an expedient use of surplus equipment and the larger shells being a better fit for infantry support since they could fit more HE filler.
Uncompressed textures and uncompressed audio for all languages at once (this started with the 8th gen consoles because their shitty CPUs couldn’t handle real-time decompression), so a lot of space is being taken up by audio that’s never used in languages you don’t understand because at some point in the last 20 years the gaming industry forgot how to create checkbox installers.