What do you do with that information though?

Freebies and discounts helps get people in the door. Having an experience that people don't hate might keep them there.

I don't buy a lot of games, but when I do, I don't usually look at Epic. I'd rather buy on GOG or Steam. Steam is probably from inertia, but if Epic provided a better than Steam experience on the games I've gotten for free, than I might consider it. I don't really know what would qualify as better than steam though... maybe faster startup, less dumb prompts?

I don't even consider buying games on the Microsoft store though, so Epic has a leg up --- if it's sale season, I will look to see if Epic has a bigger sale than Steam.

FreeBSD isn't too bad, you can build/install compat packages back to FreeBSD 4.x, and I'd expect things to largely work. At previous jobs we would mostly build our software for the oldest FreeBSD version we ran and distribute it to hosts running newer FreeBSD releases and outside some exceptional cases, it would work. But you'd have to either only use base libraries, or be careful about distribution of the libraries you depend on. You can't really use anything from ports, unless you do the same build on oldest and distribute plan.

At Yahoo, we'd build on 4.3-4.8, and run on 4.x - 8.x. At WhatsApp, I think I remember mostly building on 8.x and 9.x, for 8.x - 11.x. The only thing that I remember causing major problems was extending the bitmask for CPU pinning; there were a couple updates where old software + old kernel CPU pinning would work, and old software + new kernel CPU pinning failed; eventually upstream made that better as long as you don't run old software on a system with more cores than fit in the bitmask. I'm sure there were a few other issues, but I don't remember them ...

> I think consumers largely have stopped taking out their wallet for Microsoft, at least enough of them to cause Microsoft to start walking back a little bit.

Microsoft has largely stopped asking consumers for money. The last paid upgrade was Windows 8, IIRC. Since then, Microsoft wants consumers to upgrade, so it's free, with full screen prompts at login, and sometimes the 'no thanks' button just does it anyway.

Microsoft sells consumer OSes to OEMs. I haven't been looking, but I assume they don't allow OEMs to install Windows 10 Home anymore; and maybe not even Windows 10 Pro. So when consumers buy a new PC, they're getting Windows 11. The only Linux option at most stores is Chrome OS, which Google is shutting down, and is just a browser for most users (it's a useful product! a lot of users just need a browser; but it's not a platform of empowerment)

Early Rokus had rca out (sometimes through a 1/8" jack)

All vehicles can override/ignore warning devices. Doesn't make it right. Emergency vehicles should not override/ignore train or plane crossings. Trains and Planes don't care about flashing lights. Crossing an active runway requires clearance for safety.

In this case, from the available information, the drivers of the fire truck thought they were cleared, and proceeded to cross while a plane was cleared to land. I'm not familiar with ATC ground radio to know if they were actually cleared or not, but it seems clear that that the drivers thought they were cleared.

Investigation reports will give us more details.

Nine nines is too hard; my target is eight eights.

You only get a broken pipe when you write, which is often after you've already done most of the work.

The soldiers in my home only have bill acceptors, not coin slots, so it's legal.

I don't know much about postgres, but as I understand it, it's a pretty standard server application. Read a request from the client, work on the request, send the result, read the next request.

Changing that to poll for a cancellation while working is a big change. Also, the server would need to buffer any pipelined requests while looking for a cancellation request. A second connection is not without wrinkles, but it avoids a lot of network complexity.