Like, yes and no.
For people who are somewhat familiar with Linux, Ubuntu is certainty recognised as being about as mainstream as any distro is able to be, and a safe haven for Linux noobs for decades.
In recent years however it’s Mint which has for whatever reason been constantly recommended as a go-to distro for people fleeing the evils of Windows, ramping up especially with the discontinuation of Windows 10.
So right now, Mint might be more of a beginner distro than even Ubuntu.
I don’t think there’s any pride in it, they are just going after what is the most profitable at any given time.
That’s exactly why I suspect they will choose to resurrect the Crucial name later, because given a choice between launching a new name nobody knows, or a name people recognise (even if it’s been tarred a bit) then recognised will be the winning and more profitable option.
That is, if they haven’t sold the Crucial name to someone else first.
Probably just the same brand, honestly?
News two years from now: “Crucial back in business”
It doesn’t make as much sense, to me.
Like sure - they could design a Linux phone with their own polished UI, and Proton so it can run Steam games natively, and that would be super cool! But what about the apps?
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that for most people out there a phone is all about apps - in fact, completely synonymous with apps - and the sad truth is that Android and iOS have an absolute stranglehold on the app market.
There have been (and still are) efforts to develop Linux phones, but they are generally seen as rough experiments which for most people require far too much compromise - with one of the most significant compromises being that you give up all your apps.
Valve’s recent hardware successes haven’t come from making experiments for dedicated nerds, but from making polished hardware devices that you can put in the hands of a consumer and just work, and do everything they expect. That’s the strategy.
Now don’t get me wrong - I’d love to see a big-hitter like Valve with some financial clout try to make a phone. But this is an arena where even Microsoft failed, and heavens knows how much money they poured into phones before pulling the plug.
I’d love it, but I don’t think it aligns at all with Valve’s strategy, and I don’t expect to see it.
“Sweetie, isn’t he a little scary? Don’t you want a soft owl instead?”
“He’d not scawy! He’d nice! 🤗”
Similarly, youtube channels about disaster events that are just reading the Wikipedia page with some spooky music.
Tape and Dial have a similar etymology, but in modern usage tape has fallen out of use in favour of the more generic ‘record’, while dial is still current.
Dial is used a lot less than it was, admittedly; if you want to make a voice call it’s usually from a stored contact or a number on a website so we just ‘phone’ or ‘call’ people most of the time.
But the physical act of interacting with a sequence of individal numbers to initiate a call? We don’t have a better word for that than ‘dial’
Tape though, there’s a very real chance that a young person can hear ‘tape’ and not have the slightest clue what that means.
To dig into the term further, ‘meta’ in a gaming context is short for “metagame” and shares an etymology with other terms like “metadata” in that ‘meta’ means self, or about the self.
In image metadata, for example, the ‘metadata’ isn’t the image pixels themselves; rather it is data /about/ the image; the author, the camera model, or the GPS coordinates where it was taken.
If “metadata” is “data about data” then the “metagame” is “the game about the game”
What this means is looking at the game holistically as a collection of systems or mechanics, and even looking entirely outside the game to optimise how it can be played.
You might choose your character based on the strongest stats on the wiki, or make choices based on completely external factors - for example, choosing the time of day you play online to optimise for more favourable match-ups, or deciding what items you either sell now or hoarde now on the basis of predicting what changes the game developer might make in the future.
To use something like chess as a concrete example, the ‘game’ is moving your pieces on the board according to the rules, and reacting logically to where your opponent moves thieirs. Whereas the ‘metagame’ might be to get into your opponent’s head and to use prior knowledge of their personal playstyle against them, amongst other off-board factors.
All games have their unique metas, depending on the specifics of the game, and the meta always changes over time because it’s fundamentally a human factor that has as much to do with other players and the game’s community as it does the game itself.
That’s right. There’s an insightful blog article if you want to learn the full story.
You could get your PC upgraded for $99 if you also bought 24 months of dial-up Internet service through them. But you also had to pay shipping both ways, and be out the use of your computer while you did it! That seems so inconvenient I imagine almost nobody bothered. eMachines certainly expected people wouldn’t, making the whole thing little more than a carefully calculated marketing tactic. And it worked.
That said, their machines were very competitively priced even without the upgrade deal, and it really disrupted the incumbents, making them good value machines even if you didn’t take them up on the dubious “never obsolete” offer.
LatteGo, LatteGo, Can’t hold it back anymore~
As someone who loves food, I agree with you.
Food is my #1 carnal pleasure, and I like to have meals that are varied in taste and in texture. When I visit a foreign country, the biggest joy of the trip is sampling their food, and experiencing all the local flavours.
But, I understand that isn’t the same for everyone. For some people food is just fuel, and they’d rather spend their energy on other things which matter more to them. I can’t agree with that, but I do respect it.
They made 3D TVs with passive glasses too, I had one. Still have actually, working fine 10 years later.
Has some neat tricks like coming with two pairs of “game” glasses that are effectly two left lenses for one person and two right lenses for the other, giving the ability to play a two-player split screen game with each player having a full-screen view (albeit stretched) and not being able to see the other! Trippy.
IMO the reason they didn’t catch on wasn’t the technology, just that it genuinely didn’t add much to the movie watching experience. What makes a movie worth watching continues to be the movie itself, and in some ways 3D - which was meant to be “immersive”- was actually just a distraction from the movie which frequently reminds you you’re actually just sat in a room watching a screen, rather than letting you get into the story.
My first-ever USB pendrive was 256 megabytes, in 2003.
It was a godsend, because to that point I’d been using floppy disks. It was brushed metal and came in a little faux-leather carry pouch. I guess they figured it was so damn expensive, they should at least make it feel premium.
I’ve still got it, and it still works. Quite useful actually for random jobs like flashing the BIOS on old machines that refuse to read from anything too large, or too new.
I’m primarily using eBay, but I didn’t name names because the best option where other people are may vary.
The seller I bought from wasn’t actually an auction (though auctions can be great too) - it was a “buy it now” item from a business seller who does electrical “waste” recycling for office businesses.
Regardless of the platform, those kind of sellers are ideal because they have a lot of inventory and are more concerned with getting rid of it than they are with getting the highest price on any single item.
Daily trauma event
I do this and then proceed to dismiss it every single night.
The place to get decent budget laptops is auction sites, second-hand marketplace listings, charities, and office clearance companies (many of whom are also listing on the auction sites).
For under £100 I got a i7 ThinkPad with 16GB RAM and the ‘Yoga’ fold capability, fully tricked out with touch screen, wacom pen, fingerprint reader and the rest - and even better it all works under Linux, even the fingerprint reader.
There’s a genuine reason the stereotype of weebs with programming socks and a used thinkpad exists.
New devices built to be cheap right from new can never compete for value against pre-owned business machines.
And the response of staff at the temple was to take a video and post it on Facebook? That’s kinda upsetting.
On your other Arch laptop, obviously. You need multiple pre-owned ThinkPads loaded with Arch at any given time to maintain workable redundancy, just like you need several clean pairs of programming socks.