Anything short of providing what you’re advertising 100% of the time is fraud. It’s not even theoretically possible to sell more than you’re capable of providing while acting in good faith.

Every customer should be entitled to receive exactly what they’re advertised. Stop advertising shit you can’t offer. There is no possible excuse that makes you not a scumbag.

A perfectly acceptable alternative seizing the assets of every company scamming their customers and making them the publicly owned utility that they’re supposed to be.

No one is expecting ISPs to have the bandwidth to handle every network at once maxing out their bandwidth.

We’re expecting enough bandwidth to have enough overhead that they literally never once fail to meet peak demand. Because every single minute they fail to do so should be a mandatory felony count of fraud against every single member of the board.

But the bottom line is that tech like this, that gives them the minimum they need without extra, is a hard prerequisite to any such laws even being genuinely considered. It’s easy to disable, and doesn’t give any extra information on default use case users because of all the other tracking. Advanced users who block that can block this easily. There’s no real downside.

There’s no legitimately plausible path to just banning their data collection without allowing for attribution of transactions. It won’t happen.

Banning them in the US or the EU would have a huge impact, because it would preclude businesses that operate in those countries legitimately from participating in the market for those countries. But it isn’t something that’s going to happen.

lol I honestly needed to open the article to parse the title. That’s why I posted.

But I’m definitely of the belief that you need a hell of a lot more architecture than they have to go meaningfully further. Humans are a hell of a lot more complicated than a bit like of neurons.

It could make it easier to get privacy preserving legislation through if there’s a technical solution to the part they actually need.

I hate ads, and hate tracking, and do my best to prevent exposure to either. But internet ads need to know what sites are driving clicks to function. Unless you want to ban ads (which I’m all for, but isn’t realistic), technology like this, then banning additional tracking is your best bet.

A hit to a vest definitely has a real chance to kill him. Vests distribute the impact, but they’re still massive chest trauma for a 70-something dude.

TLDR: he thinks the techniques are fine and you can just brute force them for the foreseeable future.

"Hardware,” to my surprise, has been a relatively small part of the company, with just 41 employees paid a gross of more than $17 million in 2021

That’s the only one I saw that meant anything that useful. They have ~10x that for game development but no indication of number of people there, and 79 people working on Steam.

Edited.

I just read their one example as one example, not as relative to the 70/30 split of CPUs used.

the team dives into game telemetry data (from Oodle) that shows Intel CPUs represent 70% of the error logs compared to AMD with just 30%.

Uh, what’s the market share? You can’t really provide the one number without the other.

lol IDK how to link to a user on this app, but look at mox right below me. It’s just presented in a confusing way.

For all the reality of “streaming rights are a shitshow”, what percentage of the population do you think is willing to buy physical movies?

Because I don’t think it’s all that high.

Yes, it absolutely is.

I’m genuinely curious how they did that math. Where did that number supposedly come from?

The more relevant question IMO is what proportion of software (or by revenue) is installed through the Windows store.

Because compared to android (even counting Amazon fire and whatever other third party devices), I’m guessing that’s pretty low.

But Windows is the product. Hardware is a small part of their revenue, and most of their install base is hardware that isn’t theirs.

MacOS is also part of Apple’s product, but they pretty much only sell higher margin premium hardware that both pays for and streamlines the OS development process.

The story I always heard was that there were some weird accounting rules that were, if not codified legally, common practice at the time, that made the book keeping on free updates sketchier. But I don’t know about the validity of that.

I definitely don’t think “free” justifies any of Windows bullshit. I did pay for 10 (pro) for gaming several years back, but with the real emergence of proton the steam deck accelerated, I wouldn’t install windows on any of my systems for free now. They’re super hostile to users and are just assuming that inertia is good enough that they can get away with it.

It’s effectively bundled with Apple hardware (which also dramatically lowers their development costs; they don’t support anything they don’t ship and are perfectly willing to abandon hardware once it no longer supports the level of hardware features they feel the new OS version needs). I’m not sure it’s that different.

Android is free (maybe? Do phone manufacturers pay for Google play branding?), but they make their money by having the lions share of software going through their storefront. Microsoft is never going to do that with Windows.

The hardware the company provides unconditionally needs to be able to handle the full advertised bandwidth.

I know bandwidth is oversold. It’s overt fraud. “Up to” is horseshit. “Most of the time” is fraud. Excluding documented weather outages, any scenario where a user is not able to reach the speed listed on the ad (that’s not a limitation on the other side) for 5 minutes in a month should be fines so high that it will take years of that customer’s subscription to earn it back. It’s not possible for selling service you can’t provide to not be fraudulent.

The hardware the ISP provides is always an ISP problem. Provide hardware that actually works.

Also, unless you’re fiber, you don’t provide the bandwidth you actually sell people, which is also an ISP problem. Every single customer who can’t get their advertised speed at peak load should be a mandatory criminal case of fraud.

The fact that Windows hasn’t solved the “fake extension” scam is wild. You can’t make people not click stuff, obviously. But you absolutely could identify double extensions clearly intended to confuse people and give some kind of “this isn’t a PDF” warning.