Back in those (pre-UEFI) days it was quite easy to add GRUB to the Windows boot manager instead.
You’d wind up with a menu entry that Windows would usually leave alone, unlike its aggressive reinstallation overwriting GRUB.
Once UEFI came along, it became easier to give each OS an entire disk with no connections between them, and use the BIOS as the boot menu.
Or, y’know, just give Windows the flick and only run Linux 😉
The interesting thing is the people who will care the most about this are professional users, who actually did require a machine with real expandability, to stuff full of the likes of SDI video IO cards (eg https://www.aja.com/products/kona-5).
If you ask those people, they’ll undoubtedly gladly tell you how much it sucked dealing with Thunderbolt-to-PCIe expansion cages during the “Trashcan” era in order to use their machine for their work.
While Thunderbolt’s throughput has certainly improved a bunch since then (80Gbps symmetrical or 120/40Gbps asymmetrical for TB5, vs 20Gbps for TB2 back in that era), latency and stability still frankly leave a lot to be desired versus a real PCIe slot.
For people who already perceive Apple devices as overpriced toy computers, their further alienating what was at one point their primary target audience - high-end professional users - will certainly seem like an odd choice.
DVDs didn’t have that issue, fortunately.
In CDs, the recorded layer is directly under the label, in DVDs it’s mid-way through the thickness of the disc so there’s a layer of plastic between it and the label. A function of different wavelengths of light used to read them.
Bit rot due to degradation of the organic chemicals in the recording layer is still very much a concern though.
It was the 3TB ST3000DM001 that was the really terrible one.
(so bad it has its own Wikipedia page)
Fair point. Games clearly need to start decoupling the UI scale/resolution from the general screen resolution.
In a somewhat parallel issue, I’ve found that playing games on the couch (usually with Steam in-home streaming, from a PC elsewhere in the house) I have to reduce the resolution because the game’s UI is far too small at TV-watching differences.
There are two kinds of people who would like a refreshed Steam Deck, in my experience:
People who seem to think it needs to be faster. Since it appears to be crafted to provide suitable performance for the 720p display it has (which I don’t personally think needs to be changed, considering the whole “portable” use case), this seems to just be a “bigger number better” argument and those people should probably go out and buy a Lenovo Legion / ROG Ally / whatever.
People who are otherwise happy, but think it should have a newer, more efficient processor to get longer battery life, and make less heat/noise in the process. There’s a measurable gulf between the current Zen2/RDNA2 CPU and a theoretical modern Zen5/RDNA3.5 (or even RDNA4) model in that regard; it could be tuned to deliver roughly the same performance as the original (or a little more, for the handful of games that tend to miss their performance target slightly) but deliver longer battery life.
We got a hint at 2) with the OLED model’s CPU using a newer manufacturing process improving thermals and battery life (of course it did also have a bigger battery). I think the number of people willing to pay a bit extra for what could be an even larger improvement in that area is probably more than some would like to admit.
(I personally fit in that latter category. Considering a full work day including a public transport commute and lunch break, not a whole lot of extra battery could well be the difference between having to carry a charger and not)
Using the phone as a touchpad has come in handy on a few occasions for me. Also just niceties like having your music on the PC pause automatically if you receive a call.
It should further be pointed out that it’s not even required that one end is a phone. You can connect your laptop to your desktop and share content between them just as easily.
It always seemed like an amazing way to speed-run repetitive strain injury to me.
Anything that requires that level of precision but offers basically zero range of motion just seems to force unnatural levels of tension in every muscle in your hand and wrist.
The things cause me agonising wrist pain within minutes of use, not something I’ve experienced with any modern (ie, larger than the postage stamp sizes of old) touchpad.
Good riddance.
Indeed, you will note that they carefully chose the moniker “Daily Active Uniques” and not “Daily Active Users”.
I think that speaks volumes, as humans are definitely harder to retain.
I was downloading episodes of Jackass back in about 2001, using I think it would have been eMule.
You’d get a 240p MPEG-1 file, and you were happy with that.
Hilariously, for people who didn’t own computers that could handle playing videos from CD-Rs, as my PC’s video card had composite output I used to make VHS tapes from those files. And then put the adhesive label sheet for the tape cassette through the printer.
Y’know, normal stuff.