BananaTrifleViolin

Windows is in no way free. Every new Windows Laptop and PC comes with a license; when you pay for the PC part of that money goes directly to Microsoft.

Microsoft made upgrading to Windows 10 and 11 “free” for those on older hardware who already had paid for a license because they wanted to move people onto the latest versions and stop supporting the old versions. At the same time they’ve been harvesting and selling users data to make even more money.

They are not trying to “kill” Windows, they are trying to change it into a cloud based system too so that you do have to pay a subscription to use it. They want new PCs and Laptops to be essentially nothing more than thin terminals, using your hardware to support their cloud based system but not actually owning any of the software at all.

But they are less bothered about the absolute revenue Windows makes now, and more bothered about making it a walled garden they control and which up-sells you to all their other subscription services under Office, and Xbox.

Leads in the polls at 35%, so he is far off a majority. People like simple narratives about someone “winning” an election as it’s easier to follow, but realistically even if he “wins” with 35% he will also struggle to form a stable government or exercise power.

We’re seeing this pattern across Europe at the moment - electorates are fragmented and split, as politicians seem incapable of offering what people actually want. In the UK for example, current opinion polls have us on a 5-way split between Labour, Conservatives, Reform, Green and Lib Dems. This is despite Labour winning a big majority in the election only 2 years ago.

There are two elements to this - the system and dollars. The systems are CHIPS (used for clearing, which is in US Dollars) and SWIFT used for interbank communication. Russia was severely cut off from both. Countries can trade in any currency they want, but the international system is standardised around the dollar and CHIPs and SWIFT make it fast and efficient.

Lets say Russia wanted to buy $50m of oil from UAE. It would involve a Russian bank and a UAE bank handling the money and both would have CHIPS accounts. A Russian bank would place an order via SWIFT for $50m to the UAE bank via its CHIPS account. The money would be transferred to the UAE banks account and out to the UAE. This seems pointless for 1 transaction, but actually there are many 1000s of different transactions happening every day in different directions, and the way clearing happens instead of moving $50m from one bank to another, it will look at all the other transactions both banks are making with everyone else across the day and just move the correct overall amount out.

So $50m does move from one bank to the other, but it’s part of all the other transactions going on making it simpler for both banks. For example maybe at the same time the UAE bank is transferring $30m to another bank in another country; so at the end of the day it’ll get $20m from CHIPs.

When Russia was cut off, there weren’t really other good routes to make that trade. Also people don’t want Roubles. So normally Russia and Russian banks buy and hold Dollars, and use that when they need to trade. Russia was locked out of this, so it now had to buy $50m of oil but using Roubles which the UAE bank didn’t want or need. This means either Russia had to find other ways to get the $50m or it paid way more in Roubles than the $ amount to buy enough Dirhem so that the UAE would accept the money.

However, as you rightly point out - why would countries be so reliant on the $ and the US like this? Up until now, people trusted the Dollar and the US to keep the system open and functioning. But first the Ukraine war sanctions and now certainly the Iran war have shown to the world that the Dollar and current systems are entirely under US control. Even though the EU was against Russia in the Ukraine war, they have also been moving to put in new systems so they’re not over reliant on the US systems after seeing what happened with the CHIPS/SWIFT sanctions. Those sanctions were really seen as the “nuclear” option when it happened, and people never thought anyone would actually do that.

Now the Trump is again emphasising how reliant the world was on US stability, and US stability is seemingly gone. Tarrifs, threats to invade Greenland, disparaging allies, and Iran - all have shown that the US is unreliable and unstable. So now the EU and many other countries (including China) are accelerating the process to move away from being so reliant on the US Dollar and the USA. It will have huge consequences for the USA and the world, and even if the Iran war ends tomorrow and a decent president is elected in 2028, the damage is done. No one trusts the US political system any more - it has been shown to be unstable and capricious, and entirely dependent on the whims of the US president. The supposed “checks and balances” are non-existent: the courts and congress have done nothing to stop this mess. So everyone is reducing their “exposure” to the risk of being too reliant on the USA and it’s financial systems.

It really doesn’t matter any more if the Democrats win congress and the white house. It will just be seen as a period of calm before the next Trump comes along. We’ve already had that once with Biden coming in after Trumps first term, and Trumps second is even worse. And it’s not about Trump specifically - he’ll be gone in a few years, but the world has been shown that any nutter in the white house can do what they want, plus the Republicans are clearly bat-shit crazy. And whats to say the Democrats don’t also put someone bat shit crazy into the white house in the future? All trust in the US is gone and it can’t be rebuilt.

Yeah, at the turn of the century we had a CD-RW in our family PC. Mac was always expensive; while internal CD-R for a PC would have been probably half that price? Certainly I remember CD-R and CD-RW became pretty ubiquitous pretty fast, and while the drives were pricey at first, the discs were cheap mb for mb. You could buy the discs in supermarkets pretty quickly, they took off so fast.

Even if pricy at the beginning, you also knew if you burnt a CD it’d go in any PC. And if you burnt music tracks onto it, it’d play in any Hifi or Walkman. They just hands down made way more sense than an expensive Zip Drive as they were so much more useful.

I was growing up in the 90s. Zip drives definitely did not dominate; they were a failure. My dad actually did use zip drive personally at home so I’m familiar with them, but I never saw them in school, and they were not used commonly by most people. Most people never seem to have ever heard of them.

When I grew up 3.5inch floppy disks were the standard from the late 80s into the 90s. In the mid 90s files were getting bigger so yes there was a need for more storage than 1.44mb on an 3.5inch floppy disk for some people. But most Word documents would still fit on a floppy disk, and of course email was a thing (albeit the internet was slow and transfers could take ages). You could also Zip a file (not Zip Drive but the Zip file format) and split it into 1.44mb chunks to use multiple floppies.

So I remember when Iomega’s Zip Drives came out. They did look good but the problem was they were just too expensive - both the disks and the readers - any they just weren’t in the vast majority of computers so weren’t useful, so they never took off. Whats the point of putting a file on a Zip Disk if the computer at the other end doesn’t have a drive to take it? I’m sure some business switched to them but they never really became truly mainstream.

Instead CD was definitely the dominant format. Almost all new computers in the 90s (certainly mid to late 90s anyway) had a built in CD drive. And then CD-R (CD write once) drives came along. You either made do with floppys & the internet, or you had a CD-R drive if you wanted to transfer big files. CD could be slow to write but was always quick to read; and Zip Drives were just always slow. And of course music was the big thing for young people - so you’d rip your favourite songs and burn them onto a CD and could play it anywhere - your walkman, your Hifi, your mates car (if they were lucky enough to have a CD player). So CD-R drives just became essential, and especially anyone with any tech interest. If you were into games you might also rip your favourite games and burn those onto a CD too. Video just wasn’t really a thing until 1998 when DivX came along and that took a little while to take off, but again CD was the star.

I remember actually my 6th Form College in the early 2000s DID buy computers with in-built Zip Drives, but by then it was too late - the internet was already fast enough & USB sticks had appeared. Even my dad wasn’t using them any-more and he’d been an early adopter.

AI: a bit shit and now over priced too.

I wonder if the world will ever standardise to one or the other?

The . for decimal separator is used in English, as well as China and India but apparently that is only 35-40% of the global population. The , is used for 60-65%. Although the figures may not be accurate as a lot of countries seem to use both, with . used for international business, and internationally published science tends to be published in English?

Probably never be standardised as it’s probably too difficult to switch now? 1,000,000.00 and 1.000.000,00 are clear because of the use of three 0s for thousands etc, and two 0s for decimals. But 1.001 and 1,001 are much more ambiguous and would definitely need context as to which system is being used - is it 1 thousand and 1 or 1 and one thousandth?

A few reasons. One is there isn’t much flat land; most of it is hilly and even mountainous and covered in thick forests. The flat areas are occupied with farms and towns but the space is small and not enough for big cities to grow. The hills and mountains are heavily forested and there has never been a big enough population to need to encroach on them. It’s also not great for building and farming, unless grazing animals.

The other big reason is there are no natural deep sea ports in that region. It’s either marshy or the estuary of the river Colombia. Small fishing towns would be fine, but not big industrial ports that drive city growth (or did in the past). Meanwhile, Portland sits further back up the river with plenty of flat land and access to the water, so makes a natural port. And Seattle sits on the bay further north and is coastal, and a good port.

The dynamic got set up of big cities further back, and those areas never really grew. Once the land became part of state forests, then that restricts growth even more.

EDIT: Here is a topographical map showing in blue the flat land: https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/world/?center=38.54817%2C-119.79492&zoom=6

Tortoises are Turtles, but not all Turtles are Tortoises.

This isn’t an English thing, this is a taxonomy thing. It should be the same in any language, just with different words used.

“I can’t open the strait of hormuz, so I’ll pretend I’m the one who wanted it closed”. Moron.

And we were right.

In all honesty at this stage it’s not that exciting. They’re hyping up people going further from the earth than ever before, which is technically true, but astronauts have orbited the moon before just not quite as far in absolute distance.

So this is mostly doing something done before in the 70s. Rocket launches, grainy images of the moon from close up, photos of earth from near the moon and astronauts floating in zero G isn’t new.

I don’t blame you for not getting excited to watch long videos where not a lot happens very slowly, or reading press coverage which is brutally honest largely fluff.

The ultimate goal is exciting, but that doesn’t mean every step on the way is exciting. I suspect the first moon landing will be of more interest, then the next one will not be, even though the landings are a stepping stone to Mars.

This laptop is more than capable of running SNES emulation; its 1GHz quadcore, and 4gb ram.

SNES is an old system which had 3.58Mhz CPU and 128kb ram; you’ll be able to emulate it without much issue on that laptop. BSNES has low requirements (like an Athlon or Pentium 4, and 512mb ram, and Open GL2), although if you have problems then Snes9x and ZSnes are less accurate but lighter weight. RetroArch is pretty convenient way to deploy emulators and has BSNES, Snes9x and Snex9x_Next cores to use.

A lightweight Desktop Environement may help make the laptop feel snappier; Xfce or Lxqt. If it feels slow then you want a minimal desktop which doesn’t have overhead like compositing. Also don’t use flatpaks especially if you multitask; use native apps as flatpaks have some overhead.

Mint as a distro is fine for installing lightweight desktop environments, and if you wanted you could install Linux Mint Xfce edition from scratch.

For comparison, prices near me in the UK are £1.55 a litre which is about $7.45 a gallon.

He’s so incredibly stupid; honestly the biggest moron I’ve ever seen in any government.

He started this war, he didn’t think it through - it was well known attacking Iran would lead to them closing the strait of hormuz, and it would be extremely difficult to open it without a ground invasion. Israel has wanted to go after Iran for decades but every US president had common sense and said no. Trump has done what no President has ever done. The US allies are not stupid enough to be drawn into the this pointless war as it’s unwinnable.

Now this so-called “business man” doesn’t even know how global markets work. You remove 20% of the oil supply, then prices go up because demand goes up - you still have 100% of demand. The US isn’t protected from that as a net shale oil/gas exporter.

First: everyone in the world is bidding for oil and gas supplies so it goes to the highest bidder; thats how a market works - everyone ends up paying more including americans. Second: the US is a net exporter but it also imports a lot of gas and oil. It’s exports are driven by Liquid Natural Gas. But it imports Crude Oil, because it can’t produce enough of that for domestic demand. Third: As energy prices go up, you get “demand destruction”. In other words, some activities are no longer economical as the price of oil and gas is too high and obliterates profits. That means the global economy goes into decline - a recession. And the US is in no way insulated from that - it is totally integrated into the global economy.

Trump has fucked over the US, allies like the UK, Canada and EU and the rest of the world. This isn’t his allies’ war, and they’re not getting involved - it’s politically toxic and it’d just escalate this mess. Trump can get frustrated at the mess he’s made and lash out as much as he wants, but he can’t get away from this mess. He has two choices and both are shit: Invade Iran with troops or admit defeat and cave into the Iran’s demands. I suspect he will cave in and try and spin this as a “victory”.

Sim City 4 is the best version of the Sim City games, and is 75% off on GOG right now, $5 / £4.

Cities Skylines 1 is the best modern city builder, 3D and a lot of fun plus well designed. But only really worth it when it’s on sale; lots of DLC and overpriced as a package when not on sale. Avoid Cities Skylines 2 - it’s just not fun and hasn’t been fixed - maybe they will one day fix but I doubt it 2.5 years in…

Libre Office is maintained by The Document Foundation which is based in Germany. So from a governance point of view it’s already a European hosted open source project.

Also for online collaboration platforms, Libre Office isn’t really a good option. It is an old, sprawling codebase which doesn’t lend itself to being ported to being a server based collaborative platform. It has actually been done but hasn’t flourished, hence alternatives like OnlyOffice.

Also this is more about OnlyOffice’s issues - the lack of transparancy and true collaboration with contributors, the proprietary code used for mobile apps, and it being based in Russia which is geopolitically problematic especially if part of the idea is “Euro sovereignty”

It’d be time consuming and expensive to turn this round with regular animation. Ironic that AI is being used by the Iran’s supporters in this way.

True but at the same time bees help spread pollinating plants - it’s a two way relationship. They may be commercialised for crops, but they will go to any plants in range and contribute to their spread.

So a method of increasing bee populations may also be helpful in spreading wildflowers and speeding up rewilding efforts.

In addition dramatically increasing bee populations may help resolve issues with pollination such as in some regions of China where damage is so bad that hand pollination is needed for crops. Restoring bee pollinators in those areas may increase crop yields, which in turn reduces the general pressure globally on expanding the use of fertile land for farming.

So while crop/pollen diversity is certainly very important, this kind of research still has potentially big benefits for the environment both in the fight to rewild and slow the spread of land use being moved to farming.

Few options off the top of my head:

• Open a terminal (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+T) and type “firefox -p &”. The & operator runs the process in the background so it will continue to run even when the terminal is closed

OR

• Use your desktops equivalent to windows “run”. So for example, on KDE use Krunner (Alt+F2 or Alt+Space usually launches it) and type in “firefox -p”; it usually defaults to running a command. There is also a dedicated “Run Command” plasmoid that can be added to your desktop. On Gnome, I think the “run a command” dialogue will do the same (also Alt+F2 I believe).

OR

• Add an app entry to your desktops menu for Firefox Profile Manager. On KDE if you type Profile, “Profile Manager - Firefox” already exists as a Krunner action; so you can easily get it from your menu or krunner just typing Profile. If it doesn’t exist then you can use your desktop’s menu editor to copy the firefox entry and add the -p as the command line argument. On KDE that done most easily by right clicking on the menu icon and selecting “edit applications…” or search for menu editor. Other desktops will be very similar.