I'm in the UK with an "alt-net" ISP (small ISP only covering small towns that were neglected by BT Openreach or Virgin Media) and they offer 500 Mbit/sec unlimited download and upload for £27 ($37 including taxes) a month, 900 Mbit/sec for £30 ($41) and 2300 Mbit/sec for £50 ($68) for either a 12 or 18 month fixed price contract. These T-Mobile prices seem very high to me!

BTW, I just switched to their 900 Mbit/sec plan and they offered it to me for the price of the 500 Mbit/sec plan (no idea why - that offer certainly isn't on their Web site or in the contract renewal reminder e-mail they sent me), plus they just posted me what looks like a better router too.

The recent TV series "Upload" already did this: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... - I quite enjoyed the show and it's been renewed for a 4th and final season. Minds were uploaded to a virtual reality scenario and could later then be downloaded (it happened to a clone of the main character's body) with, yes, both versions active at the same time.

I'm surprised no-one's mentioned the Black Mirror season 3 episode "Hated In The Nation", which featured none other than a swarm of robobees. Predictably for Black Mirror, things didn't turn out too well. A little easter egg for season 7's episode 1 ("Common People") is that Rashida Jones' teacher character talks about robobees in her class as a nod to the earlier episode.

I would argue that storing absolute URLs thousands of times in the WordPress site database is incredibly annoying when you can pick up the top-level URL via a $_SERVER[] variable (or just have it hard-coded once in the DB and append relative URLs to it for sub-pages). Anyone doing serious WP development has dev/staging/live environments and will often want to copy a full site between any combination of those environments - cue painful search-replace of all the URLs (sadly WP-CLI's "wp search-replace" only does a half-assed job of this, leaving many old URL strings unchanged).

One thing I would like to see added to WordPress is a read-only Administrator role - the number of times a client who has full admin access does something they shouldn't is ridiculous (e.g. create dozens of other Administrator users [no non-admin users at all in their WP site!] or install random-ass plugins that cause problems for their site). A read-only admin would be a read-write Editor, plus view only access to the same Dashboard view that a normal Administrator would see. That way, they can see all the settings/plugins/theme/etc, but can't change them and have to ask a normal Administrator to make a change.

I'm not terrified of knives - it's guns that I'm truly scared about. The fact that a US citizen can own multiple firearms and carry them concealed is truly nightmarish and really doesn't belong in a civilised country. The vast majority of UK police don't carry a firearm - only special squads used for extreme situations (e.g. hostage-taking, terrorism) carry them and they definitely should be the only people who do.

The UK does have a massive amount of CCTV surveillance (particularly in cities) and you know what - I'm fine with that. You need some disincentive for rowdy/illegal behaviour and CCTV is one of the best tools for that.

Steam's Proton can already use esync and fsync to improve the performance of Windows games. What ntsync gives you is a more accurate implementation that works in corner cases where esync and fsync don't (for some games, you actually have to disable esync/fsync to get them to work) - the perf difference between ntsync and esync/fsync is minimal. What the misleading headline is basing the "perf leap" on is a game using ntsync vs. a game using nothing, which isn't the norm for the vast majority of games run via Proton.

Despite all this DRM, it seems like pirates find it incredibly easy to capture an entire video stream and save it as an unencrypted video file, which then ends up on file download sites, torrent sites and, yep, pirate streaming sites that stream it without DRM.

Once it's available as a normal video file, it's then trivial for the end user to run a video player, pause it and screenshot any frame they like on any device they can play video on. With the splintering of content across many expensive streaming services, piracy has seen a resurgence because of its convenience (all the content you want spread across very few [or even just one] sites)...and no DRM gives you bonuses like unencumbered screenshotting.

A bit surprised there wasn't actually any live video footage during the module descent on NASA's livestream. Instead, we got a fairly basic CGI representation of the module and simulated flames from coming its thrusters. Cue the usual nutcase "fake moon landing" conspiracy theorists to come out of the woodwork...

This is "olds" - the alpha 6 announcement was 8 days ago on 21st February and Phoronix had an article up the same day as the release: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoronix.com%2Fnews%2F...

I've got to question why the 6th alpha of a desktop UI is even worth a news article in the first place. The move to beta definitely is and then, if there is one or more, the start of release candidates, but only the first alpha was truly newsworthy (since it was the first public release).

The OP got it completely wrong in the very first sentence by claiming the Amazon Appstore is closing down - clearly they didn't fully read the FAQ that they linked to, because the FAQ says nothing of the sort. What's already happened is that the https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Famazon.com%2Fgetappstore download URL for the app has been replaced by the FAQ (so you can now no longer download and sideload the Amazon Appstore Android app). I'm assuming that on 20th Aug 2025, any installed Amazon Appstore Android app on a non-Fire device will "self-destruct" (i.e. stop working). Any Fire-branded device will still be able to use the Amazon Appstore app and get updates for it, even after 20th Aug 2025.

I bought a dirt cheap (£171) 2-in-1 Lenovo Chromebook last year that's got support until June 2033 - I suspect either the battery or screen will probably die well before that expiry date.

It's only got a bargain basement Intel N100 CPU in it, but I just wanted a laptop to mess around with that was a) stupidly cheap and b) didn't come with Windows - Chromebooks fit that role perfectly for me. The fact it can run Android and Linux apps seamlessly is just icing on the cake - it makes it actually usable when completely offline (which will be when you're moving it out of the house - the main reason to buy a laptop instead of a desktop after all). When it gives up the ghost, hopefully a typical low-end Chromebook will have a faster CPU, which is perhaps the only criticism I can level at this otherwise rather nitfy sub-£200 laptop.

Things I want:
- Unlockable bootloader to allow custom ROMs to extend the support life of the device (only a few manufacturers offer more than 2-3 years of support).
- Full Linux support by all the phone's component manufacturers so that Linux phones - via custom ROMs installed onto Android phones (and eventually pre-installed) - could become a reality rather than ultra-niche (and often underpowered/overpriced).
- Easy-to-replace batteries (don't have to be user-removable, but that would be a bonus).
- No camera hole/punch/teardrop/cutout: full display please with minimal bezels. Heck, I'd even like no selfie camera - I never take selfies.
- Easy way to converge as a desktop - e.g. go into a DeX/ChromeOS-like desktop mode when an external display is attached.

Although Nintendo cracked down on various Nintendo Switch emulators last year, you can still find them if you look hard enough. They're not too difficult to set up and once they're going, they seem to be able to match the 30 FPS performance of a Switch (which shows how embarrassingly bad the Switch hardware was if ARM -> Intel translation on a Steam Deck still results in playable performance).

I'm not excited about the Switch 2 at all - it'll be another locked down system where you have to pay to play online, the hardware will probably be average at best at launch (and downright bad 3-4 years down the line), the games will be stupidly highly price/rarely on discount/not discounted by much for years on end and the first-party game catalogue will be, as ever, heavily family-skewed (with third-party titles performing nowhere near the level of PC/PS5/Xbox equivalents).

Let's hope VLC does a better job than the live captions option that Microsoft Teams has. I switch on that option to see how hilariously it mangles the English language :-) It's rare for it to get one complete sentence right and this is from a trillion dollar company. It's frankly embarrassing and completely useless as a text record of your Teams meeting.

10 years ago, you did have to spend a decent amount of money to get a good phone, but a sub-$200 phone nowadays is usually performs "good enough" (especially if you buy a mid-range phone second-hand at that price) that there's no point in spending more than $200 really

What I'm more concerned about is that "full screen" phones (i.e. no notch/cutout/teardrop in the screen and no large bezel) have been very scarce since 2020 - they seem to be limited to high-end gaming phones (e.g. the Red Magic 10 Pro - too expensive for my tastes and somewhat overspec'ed for me because I'm not a gamer, but has a full screen...something no Samsung or Apple phone has had for, well, ever). I wish underscreen cameras came to budget phones (or ye olde motorised camera that got ditched after 2019) so I could get a $200 full screen phone.

In the meantime, I'm clinging onto a second-hand OnePlus 7T Pro with a crDroid Android 15 custom ROM - that OnePlus was the last one in their line (yep, in 2019) to have a full screen thanks to a motorised camera...