Apple typically provides mainstream support for a macOS release for a year, and then security patches for the two years following.

For example, macOS 13 (Ventura) was launched in the fall of 2022. It is receiving security patches until (at least) the fall of 2025.

quietly request the READ_GSERVICES permission. This lets them grab your Google Services Framework ID, a persistent device ID that survives app reinstalls and SIM swaps. Translation: perfect for long-term tracking.

Given how critical that permission is, how are they even able to request it quietly? I would think Android would be screaming at the top of its lungs if that permission were requested.

> it's been neither "stable" nor "reliable."

I was going to say the same thing. CenturyLink/Quantum's fiber service has been spotty pretty much since the beginning. Which tracks, since their DSL service wasn't much better.

AT&T may find new and interesting ways to screw things up. But Quantum residential customers have already been getting the short end of the stick for reliability.

This whole exchange has me thinking of a filler bit from a DS9 episode.

JACK: The fact is that the universe is going to stop expanding and it is going to collapse in on itself. We've got to do something before it's too late.
PATRICK: How much time do we have left?
JACK: Sixty trillion years, seventy at the most.
JACK: There's too much matter. The universe is too heavy for its own good.
LAUREN: You need to lighten the load.
JACK: Yes, yes, yes, exactly. We have to find some way to decrease the mass.
SARINA: Of the entire universe?
JACK: That's the whole point.

Apparently, we're just going to have to change the cosmological constant...

Polygon had seen better days, that's for sure. But in their early days the site was very, very good.

More than anything else, I feel like the site lost its focus somewhere in the last half-decade. The original focus of the site is all in the name: polygons - as in video games. But Vox slowly morphed it into a general pop culture website. These days it's a mix of video games, movies, TV shows, board games, books, etc.

Those are all fine things in and of themselves. But at best they dilute the brand. And at worst they're taking the place of video game content, to the point where if you're after actual gaming news you're going to want to go elsewhere, because Polygon didn't have the editorial bandwidth to cover it.

So it has been a long time coming, in some respects. Unfortunately, the people who really pay the price are the writers, who are now out of a job.

CodeWeavers is one of the few companies that I believe really do intend to keep their word - and have the means to do it.

The company has been shipping CrossOver Mac for almost 20 years now - basically since Macs transitioned from PPC to x86. They've rejiggered their software lineup a couple of times, essentially consolidating a few different products (Games, Office, Standard) into a single SKU, but they've always provided a continuity of features and an upgrade path. Put another way, they've been offering the same continually-updated CrossOver product for over two decades now.

Which, since it's essentially the commercial release of Wine, that makes sense. Their whole business model is constantly developing improvements to Wine, and then bundling that up into a commercial-grade software package that comes with official support. So their business model is stable (so long as Windows remains important), as well as the need to continue updating the software.

Given how intertwined CodeWeavers is with Wine, it would be a disaster if they did renege on lifetime updates for anyone who has paid for them. The corollary to that being that if it were to happen, then something very bad must have already happened to the broader Wine ecosystem, as this is how they primarilly fund the whole project.

Good high schools have offered stats courses for ages. And for college-bound students, AP Statistics has been offered for almost 30 years now.

Not even jokingly, no. Denuevo is self-contained at the executable level: it runs entirely in ring 3. It's not like, say, StarForce, which needed a ring 0 driver installed.

Similar but reversed. My credit unions aren't part of Zelle, but some people don't use or won't use Venmo or Paypal FF. This removes one of the few free ways to transfer funds.

Ditto. This change means I won't be able to pay Zelle users. There are other services, so it's not the end of the world, but it makes Zelle all but impossible for me to use.

I remember when the Beeb was still experimenting with various forms of radio streaming. They were one of the first groups to try out OGG Vorbis, and even though they didn't stick with it, their R&D efforts contributed a lot to the development and success of Vorbis overall.

More importantly, I didn't think there would be a day where you wouldn't be able to stream BBC Radio online. Even 25 years later, I still enjoy poking the Radio 1 stream now and then just to see what weird and hip stuff they're running overnight. It's still an insightful look into what's going on nearly half-way around the world.

So that sucks.

Isn't most of the cost the probe, followed by the energy and machinery needed to get out of Earth's immediate gravity well?

Being that close to us is more convenient. But if it reduces the cost of a mission from $500m to $450m, that's not the kind of significant improvement needed to make more missions viable.

Did slashdot suddenly stop working with certain scripts disabled? Site load normally, then changes into a massive notice that JavaScript needs to be enabled.

For the last few months, Slashdot's owners have been toying with an anti-adblocking service called Ad-Shield.

Ad-Shield is a very thorough and very heavy-handed service that has multiple layers of checks to ensure that ads are loading. And a lot of those checks require JavaScript to run. So Ad-Shield makes the site unusable without JS in order to make it harder to block its checks.

But if Nvidia is removing PhysX entirely, then ANY game using Physx, be it 32bit or 64bit, is dead. The game will not work.

To clarify, the PhysX middleware is bundled with the game. It's usually statically compiled in, but there are also some instances where it's shipped as part of a DLL.

The issue is that the API PhysX uses to access the GPU to execute GPU-accelerated effects is CUDA. And NVIDIA is dropping 32-bit CUDA support. That means there's no way for the PhysX middleware to talk to the GPU. As you correctly note, PhysX itself doesn't stop working - the CPU effects still work just fine - but all of the optional GPU effects will stop working.

And 64-bit CUDA support isn't going away. So 64-bit binaries that use PhysX GPU effects will continue to work just fine.

Indeed. Alongside RAM, NAND is the other classic cyclical (boom & bust) technology market.

The long-term trend is always down, but inside of a two year period it's going to behave like a sine wave, with prices cresting and busting out as production reacts to market prices and the onlining of new facilities.

There are a surprising number of businesses that (still) don't accept anything above a $20. They'd really rather you pay with a card - and if you aren't going to do that, they want you using bills that are too small to be worth counterfeiting.