The technical barriers to entry are so high and the capital outlay to spin up bleeding-edge fabs is so ludicrously expensive - not to mention the proprietary technologies you would have to hire industry-leading experts to basically reinvent as the established players have no incentive to share the details of their advanced manufacturing processes - that there's effectively no way for anyone else to enter the market. It's just too hard, too costly and a very long runway to any kind of profitability. The virtually unlimited budget that AI seems to have now means they can charge, effectively, whatever they want for datacentre RAM. Consumers cannot or will not pay the prices that the AI behemoths will, so their needs will simply go unaddressed. This is the free market at work; not every need gets served, only the most profitable needs.

The very best we can hope for is that the AI bubble pops soon and the manufacturers begrudgingly crawl back to their previous market segments, which looks extremely unlikely in the short term.

In the UK at least, if there's a sports broadcast playing in a bar or restaurant there will be a watermark on the screen to show that it's licensed - the form of the watermark depends on which broadcaster it is and which licence type they're using, but usually for Sky Sports it's a pint glass watermark on the bottom left of the screen. Inspectors can easily see at a glance if a pub is showing a valid commercial stream or not.

In the example above I would say that both entities may be liable; the streamer for sharing a stream in contravention of the license and the bar for allowing an unlicensed stream to be displayed on their TVs.

You're talking about the social media companies, right?

The UK has not tried to ban VPNs, yet. A couple of MPs are pushing for it but the government has said they currently have no plans.

That's not the issue; it's not about running local models or AI generally. It's about MS about jamming Co-pilot into every nook and cranny of the OS.

Imagine if Clippy broke out of Office 97 and started rampaging around your computer telling you to lick 9V batteries to boost your vitamin B12 and that $false = $true is a really elegant bugfix.

FTFY

You're thinking only of rounding to 0. In this case the rounded increment can be 0 or 5. The system batkiwi suggests is the sensible way to do that.

A quick search seems to suggest that the cash equivalent of 1300 points is around $0.80, so they're not exactly breaking the bank with their offer.

There are things you can redeem for 1300 but it's mostly charitable donations and entries into sweepstakes until you hit ~1800 points.

In the UK it costs 1,860 points to get a £1.25 gift card for the Microsoft Store. That is not a typo; you can redeem a £1.25 gift card. Perfect Christmas gift for the the people in your life that don't matter to you.

Why should Google complain? They are free to do the same thing with Chrome if they want to; e.g. Play Store points for using Chrome.

To "de-license the Edge clone" they would have to change the license of Chromium from the BSD 3-Clause License, and I would bet all my money that they are not going to do that. There are - I'm guessing - hundreds of downstream projects that would be affected by a license change.

Given that Edge is Chromium-based, I don't see what the benefit is in disallowing Edge on the Internet but allowing Chrome. Technically, it seems like a distinction without a difference. Functionally, you are just replacing one data siphon company with another. From a security perspective, if a vulnerability affects Chrome it will almost certainly affect Edge too since they share most of their code.

We only allow Edge here, which was largely my decision. Not because I love Edge - I certainly don't use it at home - but because it's functionally 100% compatible with Chrome, it's already installed in Windows so we don't have a second browser to keep updated, it integrates nicely with M365 services, and we don't need to install (and keep updating) Chrome's 3rd-party templates to apply policies.

When we ditched Chrome we got a small amount of pushback from a handful of users for completely arbitrary reasons that they couldn't articulate, and then everything just carried on as normal. No tickets saying "this worked in Chrome but not in Edge" because... that just doesn't happen.

If we used Google Workspace then Chrome would make more sense, but we don't. We're already sending all our data to Microsoft - why would we want to add Google into the mix when, again, there is no benefit to us?

You might want to look into how it works before trashing it.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fninite.com%2Fhelp%2Fhow-ninite-works%2F

Ninite doesn't supply the installers, it downloads them from the publisher's site every time. It just uses whatever switches or parameters allow the software to silently install and disables any optional cruft or bundled nonsense from the installation.

Further, all you need to do to get it to update all the apps you selected is run the exact same Ninite executable you already downloaded. It'll go off and get all the latest versions and update them. The Ninite installer you downloaded a year ago will download the latest versions of the same apps you originally selected. They do not become obsolete - the only exception is if a package is removed from Ninite.

Ninite is the first thing I download on any new personal Windows machine I set up. In minutes I have 95% of the applications I need.

Yep, they've been gaslighting me for years with this. Come back in the morning to see the machine is still on and think "Hmm, I guess I must have clicked Restart by accident". Nope! Just MS doing their usual bang-up job with testing.

Which one? You have Windows Update, which updates separately from WinGet, which updates separately from Microsoft Store, which updates separately from Edge, which updates separately from Office, etc.

There is literally no way to coordinate updates for everything in Windows. I battle with this every day trying desperately to keep our client estate updated and as vulnerability-free as possible. It's a goddamn nightmare.

I think those days are gone. They're never going to roll back from the always-online, Microsoft account required, upsell everywhere, telemetry everywhere, shoving ads onto your menus, AI-infused garbage. We've seen the least user-hostile Windows; it's been and gone and it's all downhill from here.

You should remember. 95 was a bona-fide phenomenon. People queued up to buy it. It was hotly anticipated and it absolutely took the world by storm. It certainly wasn't perfect, but it was a huge leap forward from Windows 3.11.