BananaTrifleViolin

Yeah, I had Office 2010 and used that for years - probably up to 2022. It allowed installs on 3 devices at a time, and included Word, Excel and Powerpoint. I only switched to Office 365 when my work made it freely available, and I have it set up inside a windows VM on my Linux desktop for the very rare times I need to use office at home. Work are paying for all the redundant tools no one at work uses - like copilot. Don’t see it as my problem.

But I can’t recommend Office 2024 when it costs £120 for a license with online activation and install restrictions to one PC. Not when the alternative Libre Office is free, unlimited installs on all devices, and does everything a home user would ever need. Joplin is also a superb alternative to One Note.

I personally would never buy another version of Office; I have libre office installed and use that for my personal documents (like my budget spreadsheet and occasional word processing) and Joplin for my notes. And while Libre office doesn’t have integrated cloud storage, all you need to do is add your preferred cloud storage system to your file manager in Linux or Windows.

Office 2024 doesn’t really offer a good value proposition. And if you’re really in the market for Office, then ebay to get valid licenses for Office Professional Plus 2019 or 2021is better value; £40 for the full suite (inc Access, Outlook, Publisher) is far better value than a direct license from MS for 2024. But it’s just a product key card, so there is always the risk a license and access to downloads gets revoked eventually.

It’s a gold rush which will have consequences a few years down the line. The data centre market will get saturated, and with a probable collapse in the AI market thats driving this (particularly given the “winner takes all” approach all the players are following) and associated massive duplication of data centres running different AI models for different companies, it’s likely to be a collapse, not a soft landing.

Hardware companies investing in expanding their output to service the data centres demand will be over producing once the market swings the other way. Expect prices to collapse and some of these memory producing companies to go bankrupt. This is another classic sign of a bubble: everyone thinks this will keep going and going, so they invest hard in having a chunk of it. But it will inevitably hit a wall - some AI companies will fail and their data centres become redundant, and the market overall will eventually swing away from endless expansion to consolidation. And thats best case scenario; more likely it a catastrophic collapse in which case the market is getting flooded with unneeded 2nd had product from data centres sold off during bankruptcy proceedings.

It’s not a question of if the party will end, it’s just a question of when. Even if people don’t think the AI market will pop, the economics of building more and more data centres by unprofitable competitors in this market is unsustainable and has to end at some point. And the evidence is we’re already well beyond the point of diminishing returns with current AI models in terms of scaling up.

So while times are hard right now for home PC users, I’d expect there to be period in the near future of oversupply and cheap components. This year? Next year? Hard to say exactly when but the writing is on the wall for the AI bubble imo.

Yeah and in reality people are lazy and go for the easiest route (not a criticism; it’s just human nature). The AUR is popular because it’s easy to download from; the problem is that it was based on the assumption that “someone” is keeping it secure. As it was so popular people assumed that it must be secure because everyone else is using it, and particularly with reassuring voices on tech forums who make a it a badge of honour to use the AUR with Arch. So the AUR has been normalised for lots of users.

It’s a bit like how Wikipedia is trusted by lots of people but in reality there are huge issues with bias and factual errors. People seem to forget/?ignore the warnings that Wikipedia should never be treated as a primary source - because it’s quick and convenient to just look at what’s on Wikipedia and believe it.

I saw someone saying they use Arch because Arch + AUR is the closest you can get to a Windows-like experience on Linux; the AUR provides a huge range of software. The problem is that the Windows-like experience is the ultimate open trust based network. You can download software from anyone anywhere and launch it on your computer. Windows is also a hotbed of malware and viruses as a result, even with the restrictions that Microsoft has put on users over the years.

Securing the AUR is nigh on impossible I think; it’s hard enough for distros and OSS projects to find enough people to maintain close trust-based systems in popular projects let alone the people needed to do the code audits and package checks for 100k+ user submitted packages. Maybe they can change their model a bit though - have a curated section of popular packages that do undergo some kind of audit and “certification”. I think it’ll survive this as it’s a popular resource for all it’s issues, but trust has rightly been dented. And in fairness that was a false trust as the AUR has never pretended to be anything other than what it is: people have chosen to accept the warnings that they use it at their own risk.

The headline is a little misleading: the feature has disappeared from consumer chips but AMD is not responding when asked why. As the article itself says: it’s not clear if this is a deliberate decision, or a bug that has caused this issue.

The headline implies it was a deliberate action. Maybe it was, but at the moment we don’t really know. But it is good that Toms Hardware is writing about this and drawing attention to this issue. It’s concerning regardless of the reason, and it’s also concerning how cagey AMD is being about addressing this issue.

This is a fluff article but about a well signposted issue in education: tech in schools may be pushing education backwards.

Many countries have embraced tech in schools - such as laptops for students - and big tech companies in the US have been enthusiastic about getting their tech in front of young people as they will be the consumers of the future. But despite the billions spent it seems to actually be damaging education.

There are educationalists pushing for tech to be taken out of schools and go back to methods that actually do produce consistently good results.