It’s not that big, the cases are much smaller than DVD cases. Each case is 12-13mm wide, so on a typical shelf, you could fit >60. You can easily make them two or three deep, depending on your shelf.

I just stick them in a box after ripping them to my HDDs.

The article specifies a JD Power study, which is an American institution. Seems obvious enough…

And it’s especially unnecessary for a big use case for EVs: commuters and grocery getters. It’s only needed for cars intended to do road trips.

And yeah, a phone app is more than sufficient. I do trips infrequently enough that it’s totally unnecessary to be built-in.

They have 38,000 kiosks. So that’s ~$10k/kiosk.

Honestly, that may be a fair price, assuming these machines are profitable. Vending machines make $4-10k revenue/year. Assuming that holds for RedBox, that should make >$2k profit per year, which would make aquisition reasonable. The question is, is that what they’re getting?

If I were in their shoes, I’d expand the options at the kiosks to include console games, and maybe a limited selection of snacks (e.g. popcorn), if it can be retrofitted.

Prices are largely in line with historical prices, after inflation. $70 today is worth about the same as $50 in 2011. IIRC, new releases were often $60 back then, so new games may actually be cheaper today than ever.

That doesn’t make it any better though. I’m patient because games don’t release in a solid state these days, and by the time they’re properly patched, they’re on a solid discount. I’m not paying $70 to be a beta tester, I’d rather pay <$50 for a solid, patched game, even better if it’s less.

Copyright is not a capitalist idea, it’s collectivist. See copyright in the Soviet Union, the initial bill of which was passed in 1925, right near the start of the USSR.

A pure capitalist system would have no copyright, and works would instead be protected through exclusivity (I.e. paywalls) and DRM. Copyright is intended to promote sharing by providing a period of exclusivity (temporary monopoly on a work). Whether it achieves those goals is certainly up for debate.

Long terms go against any benefit to society that copyright might have. I think it does have a benefit, but that benefit is pretty limited and should probably only last 10-15 years. I think eliminating copyright entirely would leave most people worse off and probably mostly benefit large orgs that can afford expensive DRM schemes in much the same way that our current copyright duration disproportionately benefits large orgs.

Do you really need a custom kernel for the surface devices?

I’ve kept Windows installed on a spare drive for years now. I don’t remember when I last booted into it on purpose, it was certainly more than a year ago, and was just to install Minecraft Bedrock to play with his friends (his friends bailed). My kids have only ever used Linux. :)

I could probably install Linux on my work MBP, but my boss would make me test on macOS, so it would kind of defeat the point.

At home, everything is Linux except my SO’s desktop, and that’s a job I’m unwilling to be fired from.

People think I’m nuts when I say Win2k was my favorite Windows. I switched to Linux before Vista came out. People say WinXP was good, but really, it was just tolerable.

Yeah, the only solution there is to buy better hardware.

Exactly.

Fortunately, my company doesn’t put ads in our product because it’s essentially a B2B product and customers pay a lot to use it, and our product being unusable could cost individual customers potentially millions if it blocks their day-to-day activities (we deal with regulations). We do use spyware though (e.g. fullstory), which makes sense given that lens, since being able to solve problems before they report them has a lot of value for our customers. If we did anything unethical, I would push back and potentially quit, since I’m not interested at all in manipulating customers (ads, dark patterns, etc).

I don’t think the tools we use to catch issues in the field make ethical sense in other contexts though. So yeah, I block a lot of the stuff we use in our product, and we don’t do anything to actively counter blocking in our app either (if you block it, you don’t get the pre-emptive bug-fixing).

Yup. If you use Windows, you need to accept what Microsoft does, because they control the OS. If you use Linux, you only need to accept what the software you install does, and there are a lot of options to select from.

Feel free to complain when Microsoft does something stupid, but don’t expect Microsoft to do anything about it. If you want control, use something that preserves that control.

So are you volunteering to install Linux on everyone’s machines when they get a new computer? And answer their tech support questions when they inevitably need that one program?

Exactly. Look at Reddit/Lemmy where people ask questions instead of searching, when they could’ve gotten their answer faster by searching using their question as a query instead of posting it (i.e. LMGTFY). People are lazy in very weird ways, some are happier to call tech support than read an article, even if that call takes more than 2x as long as the search.

JXL is new (like 2 years old), webp is older (> 10 years). Adding support for a thing takes time and resources, which is lower priority when there are good-enough formats already supported.

At least that’s my perspective as someone who interacts with product owners (i.e. the type of people deciding what features get prioritized).

What’s there to control? It’s a completely open format. No royalties, no control, nothing.

I’m sure he understands them, but at the end of the day, his job is to get views. So he’s going to complain when the UX is bad, regardless of the technical motivations, because that’s what customers will notice.

Nah, just a workaholic IMO.

Exactly. Apple only cares about the bigger fish, like big YouTube reviewers and their own presentation. They let their fanbase take care of the rest.