I disagree - Outlook is a walled garden of closed standards, and it makes users vulnerable to the whims of Microsoft or dependent entirely on their office ecosystem.

The recent outlook hack with senior accounts hacked and only being informed by Microsoft of the hack 1 year later is a good example.

Outlook is superficially good but essentially big businesses and organisations are locked in to a proprietary system for email and calendars and entirely reliant on Microsoft to keep their data secure.

I’m actually surprised Antitrust laws aren’t used to break up the Office 365 monopoly. Only the teams integration is being challenged but the tight integration between Outlook, Office and OneDrive is monopolistic. Other services could integrate in the same way if Microsoft was forced to open up its APIs, which would be good for competition and customers.

At the moment you pretty much have to go all in with Office or forgo major integration benefits if you want to use different cloud or mail services. Why do you need 1 single provider for office software, mail and cloud storage?

Well they said themselves why there is not a focus on desktop apps: web apps work well. I use proton calendar for my personal calendar. For work I use outlook. For both I access via phone apps or web browser on my desktop.

The big problem with calendar desktop apps is not the apps, it’s how they sync and share. You have either ICS or caldav.

The biggest problem is Microsoft Office. It partially supports ICS and is a nightmare to work with Exchange calendars. Most Microsoft clients (84% apparently) are hosted in Microsoft cloud services, and Microsoft is removing EWS support in 2026 (which Thunderbird is working to support). Microsoft’s own Graph api for cloud access is limited preventing some basic desktop features.

So existing calendar software is fine if you use good services that support standards. Its bad if you’re locked into the proprietary Microsoft ecosystem. Mac calendar tools will hit the same problems in 2026 when EWS support is dropped.

There is basically no incentive to work on these tools with Exchange because its a deliberately walled garden. But Thunderbird and other desktop calendar apps are decent, they just don’t support Outlook/Exchange.

Its on businesses to challenge why Microsoft keeps their data walled within a proprietary system. Security may be an argument but that’s a little flimsy when you see how very senior outlook accounts have been accessed by hackers and Microsoft has been keeping it quiet. Theyve only started contacting people now to tell them their emails maybhave been accessed after a major hack last year. And were talking CEO level account access.

And there is the problem laid bare - there are too many people associated with the campaign who have a vested interest in it continuing, and are unable or unwilling to step back and listen.

Its been blindingly obvious for the last 18 months that Biden is a very bad choice for the democratic nomination. But the entire discourse has been dominated by an attitude that if you don’t support biden, you’re basically support trump.

It is the Biden supporters who are going to hand the presidency on a silver platter to Trump.

They need to step back and look at the bigger picture. This is not just some Republican talking point to reflexively ignore and fight against. Biden IS too old, and he DOES come across as confused. And he is making trump look better by comparison - he is lowering the bar of expectation and scrutiny of trump because the focus is on Bidens age and mental capacity.

The democrats have to ditch biden right now and begin the urgebt search for a better, younger candidate to unite behind. Its already very late in the day but every day they continue with Biden is another wasted.

That is then not a technology ready for mass use. That would be McDonalds paying IBM to let it beta test (or alpha test it seems) its software for them.

And the only way to check the order would be to listen to each order and confirm the order is correct - so totally duplicating the AI’s job. It then becomes “what’s the point” for McDonalds?

AI tools at present are broken and not fit for purpose.

AI is and always has been a bullshit technology. Its no where near as capable as its proponents in tech industry have been claiming. Its all driven by greed to feed into a stock price frenzy but its the emperor’s new clothes. In the future it may be something useful but at present even the tools that exist are unreliable and broken.

Self Drive Cars is different, very much a Tesla issue rather than generalised. Tesla has a first move advantage but then Elon Musk blew it by forcing his engineers to cut back on sensors and tech to save money because he knows best. Other self drive manufacturers are doing well and even have licenses to test their fully featured systems in multiple locations.

AI is a generally crap technology (maybe in the future it will be something useful). Self Drive is a generally myself up technology, except at Tesla where they went for the crap unworkable version.

Regardless of the supposed motivations, this is mass surveillance on a scale never seen before. The EU wants to become China 2.0.

Non profit doesn’t mean free. A non profit costs money to run. In this case I guess arguably selling textbooks and material is how the money to preserve the language comes in. The only alternativesnwould presumably be charitable donations.

Money that comes in to a non profit is not used for profit or shares but reinvested in the non profit to further its goal such as preserving a dying language.

Well all we have in the article are claims from the perpetrators family and vague innuendo about what was on the victims phone.

The only facts outlined in the article were that the victim was shot 7 times in his own home, and managed to call from help from the street before dying. The purpetrator was on the run for 2 weeks, and allegedly on drugs during that time.

Its trash journalism and a shit article. The allegations may be substantiated or they may not, but at the moment the story as written is the family’s opinion spliced into a few details about the crime.

Ceres is the name of the roman goddess of agriculture including grain crops. The dwarf moon is named after her, as is this brand of beer it seems.

Batteries can be replaced. An EV that could run 1 million miles would still need maintenance - I think the point is that they could be designed to last.

Planned obsolescence is so wide spread we don’t even notice it, but lots of products are designed to fail either through cheaper components or deliberately flawed design. That means we have to go and buy a replacement. It is also generally cheaper.

So we either have cheap products that will break or seemingly expensive products but they last for a very long time. But in the long run the cheap products generally cost you more to buy than one expensive product.

I’ve always used Virtualbox with various linux distros without issue. My go to is usually Linux Mint using XFCE - xfce is a lightweight desktop environment including whrj it comes to graphics requirements compared to Gnome and KDE. I use the Virtualbox Guest Additions to get good integration with my host system.

It is also important to set up the guest machine properly so it runs well. I give it the max 128mb of video ram possible, 16gb syaten ram, 2 CPU cores to use (I have 6 on my PC), and a 50gb virtual hard drive at least. When setting up the distro I always install it to the virtual drive, and the first thing I do is install guest additions. I then run the machine at full screen on one of my two monitors.

My advice would be use a popular distro with a low overhead Desktop Environment, as graphics will be the main bottleneck. Also try to avoid using Snap and Flatpak in the system as they are more resource - so no to Ubuntu and Kubuntu. I’d go for Xfce, LXde spins of various distros - Mint is honestly fine if you want an Ubuntu related system that’s easy to use and relatively stable. Otherwise Puppy linux is very lightweight and you can add just what you need. Debian would probably also be good to use forna truly stable environment.

Doesn’t really matter if you see the survey or not - valve can validate their data other ways. They easily know how many clients connect from each OS and what proportions as that’s fundamental to the client itself. The survey fills in the rest of the data like which kernel, distros, and hardware.

All this would do is maybe weight some of the answers on which flavour of Linux and which hardware is being used in the favour of proactive users. But really good survey data relies on being representative and that is bes achieved by large random samples rather than people saying “count me!”

Skyrim was fun which is why its endured. Starfield is unfortunately fundamentally a bit boring and feels dated - they didn’t learn from the RPGs that came after Skyrim and moved things forward (Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 spring to mind).

I doubt it’ll be fixed. Its not like No Man’s Sky -the developers only game and their number one priority. I think well get the usual small DLCs and Bethesda moves on to its next big project.

I hope they learn from Starfield and make the next elder scrolls something special.

Manifest V2 phase out is a big deal, as Google is pushing towards Manifest 3 only. Google’s version of Manifest 3 is hobbled by removing WebRequest blocking which breaks privacy and ad blocking tools - an obvious benefit to Google as an Ad and data harvesting company.

Firefox is implementing Manifest 3 with WebRequest blocking, as well as supporting Google’s hobbled version declarativeNetRequest to allow compatibility with chrome extensions.

True but ultimately this is about ownership - we don’t own our games. We license them - that is what is lost with Steam and DRM, and moving away from physical media.

GOG is an alternative in that you can download and back up the installers for your games (mostly) but even then do you own your ganes?

You need to decide what you want from your life. It is not your responsibility to “fix” Israel. If you feel truly passionate about it then go for it.

But if you’re worried about this out of a vague sense of guilt or responsibility then park it. You get one life to live - don’t waste it doing something your don’t want to do or are not passionate about. Live a good life and strive for happiness, and try to be kind and good to those you meet on the journey - that is all that can be asked of anyone.

Rare because cooking rare bear is rare.

As a software developer you should have a bit of a head start - you can read the code - one of the big pluses of open source projects is it’s all there in the open. Even if not familiar with the specific language used you can see the source and get a rough idea of scope and complexity.

And look at the Github details like the age, the frequency between releases, commits, forks. Malicious projects don’t stick around for long on a host site like that, and they don’t get 1000s of stars or lots of engagement from legitimate users. It’s very difficult to fake that.

Look at the project website. Real projects have active forums, detailed wikis, and evidence of user engagement. You’ll see people recommending the project elsewhere on the net if you search, or writing independent tutorials on how to deploy or use it, or reviews on YouTube etc. Look for testimonials and user experiences.

Also look at where the software is deployed and recommended. If it’s included in big name Linux distros repos thats a good sign.

Look at all the things you’d be looking at for paid software to see it’s actually in use and not a scam.

And try it out - it’s easy to set up a VM and deploy something in a sandbox safe environment and get a feeling if it does what it claims to do. Whether that be a cut down system with docker or an entire OS in the sandbox to stress test the software and out it through its paces.

There are so many possible elements to doing “due diligence” to ensure it’s legitimate but also the right solution for your needs.

So is this adjusted for inflation? The word is not mentioned once in the article.

Using inflation calculators I get the following (used https://www.calculator.net/inflation-calculator.html and https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/; getting similar results)

• 1990s - $124,800 ($298,200 today)
• 2000s - $165,300 ($299,800 today)
• 2010s - $219,000 ($313,600 today)
• 2020s - $327,100 ($394,700 today)
• Now - $420,800

Looking at FRED economic data (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS), it looks like thats where they got their figures. As far as I can tell is it not inflation adjusted. They have picked the Q4 results for each year as base for the 1 Jan.

When adjusted for inflation, the increase in value since the 1990s is much less AND the increase was biggest between 2010-2020.

Also on their own figures in the article; between 2020 and now the median price is up 28% without inflation adjustment, and 7% with. Compared to 1990 the median price corrected for inflation is up 40%, but the biggest jump is 2010-2020; it began 2020 32% above the 1990 price.

The point? House prices are up, but inflation has been uneven over that period, with a big spike recently - the dramatic figures in the article may not reflect the real story. According to the calculators from 2020 to 2024 the total inflation rate is 21.54%; equivalent to 4.7% a year. Inflation accounts for much more of the perceived price rise than the actual real value rise.

The problem with inflation is people only think about today’s inflation rate. Current US inflation is 3.5% but that is on top of last years inflation, and the year before that etc. So dramatic articles like this are really of dubious value.

EDIT: The article links to “analysis” by another website ResiClib. They do not seem to have looked at inflation at all either.

Yes and no.

Apple used to be something of a design innovator which the rest of the market would follow. It has this reputation for creating product categories that didn’t exist. That’s not quite true and is rewriting history, what it was good at was design.

What it did was take a product and design a high quality cutting edge of that and make bank. It started with Mp3 players - there were many of them before the iPod but the iPod did very well because it was a good design with some nice features. Then it made the iPod Touch - which again wasn’t the first but was by far the best and really a mini ipad.

The iPhone wasn’t the first touch screen phone, but it was a huge leap in usability and power and they did extremely well out of that. The ipad wasn’t the first tablet but again it was a huge leap in usability and design and they did very well. The imac and later mac books were attractive designs rather than innovative.

Now there isn’t really any areas left for them to work that strategy on. The Mp3 player, the phone, the ipad - they were obvious product categories that existed but were far away from what they could be.

VR is the remaining obvious tech frontier - but the difference is the technology isn’t quite there yet. It’s obvious what the ultimate VR device should be - a light weight, high fidelity unit that immersed you. Other manufacturers are either making PC tethered devices with high fidelity or mobile devices with low fidelity,as the tech isn’t quite economical or right for the sweet spot.

Apple Vision Pro is a gamble on trying to secure that sweet spot. It’s not intended to do well currently, it’s intended to build up the manufacturing supply chain which should bring down the cost over time. Vision 2 or 3 will what they’re hoping takes off. It’s a new spin on their old strategy.

Most of what Apple does now though is just release fresh spins of its current products. They don’t innovate but it’s hard to when there isn’t much left to improve on those product categories. All they can do is make the devices more powerful and lighter, and compete with companies who have now learned all the tricks and offer similar products for cheaper.

Vision may or may not win the VR wars. Otherwise there isn’t really much else for Apple to go in consumer electronics. Now it is focused on “services” - selling apps, selling media - and organically growing it’s user base. Big leaps in consumer electronics probably won’t come until there is a big innovation in battery technology - that’s the holy grail of tech at the moment.