Perhaps, but how is the price or popularity of MacBook pros particularly related to that?

To be honest I’m surprisingly happy* about Windows 11, after minimal amount of tweaking (less than I need on any Linux distro I tried to make it usable) I turned off most of the annoying stuff and I don’t really have much to complain about it + WSL

*the only thing I really want from an OS these days is to stay out of my way and require the minimal amount of pointless busywork from me (all the package management nonsense on Linux + permanent issues with Nvidia’s drivers).

I could only hope that the EU would ban it ASAP if such a product existed making it unviable anywhere else. Except maybe China and such, should be pretty useful for the CCP enforcement agencies.

Yeah but IMO the scam part is mostly tangential. It hardly matters what did the CEO do with the stolen money, he could have gambled it away at a casino or bought a yacht with it, at the end of the day he still stole it and that’s the crime we’re discussing here.

> You can go after the regulators but I don’t think that’s going to be an effective strategy to solve the problem.

Yes, but going after the bankers would have exposed the extreme incompetence by the regulators and if you started unwinding the whole thing it would have affected a lot of high level people in government. So it’s rather obvious that that they had very little desire to prosecute anyone.

And it hardly matters who deserves what since you can’t send anyone who was just exploiting loopholes and didn’t clearly brake any laws regardless how immoral or unethical their actions were.

It’s a bit like blaming low level construction workers for a bridge that collapsed (assuming they didn’t sabotage anything on purpose).

This is 10-15 years out of date. And even then it was hardly ever as straightforward as that. And only ever applied to junior and maybe mid level developers or those who couldn’t effectively communicate in English. High skilled one were significantly more mobile and were basically competing with a much more global pool of developers. They could relatively easily move (if not to the US then at least Western Europe so your potential savings were usually limited to the difference in CoL + some premium).

This led to pretty high inequality based on skill/experience e.g. to top CS graduates could expect their income to increase by 3x if not more over the next 5 years after graduation.

To me it just seems a more or less natural outcome of the major structural flaws in the whole business model. I’m not sure you need an explicit conspiracy for credit agencies to begin behaving in such a way that maximizes their revenue, it was mostly just a natural outcome of competition and extremely useless and inefficient regulation. If anyone deserves to go to prison it’s the people who were supposed to be regulating the banking industry.

Obviously the Federal government had zero interest in doing that but if they only went after the bankers it would have quickly become obvious that they are not the only ones to blame.

And if we look the most popular/largest games the proportion that use Unreal/Unity gets much lower.

Backwards compatibility is also a thing. If you ship a binary for Windows you can be pretty sure that it will work for 10-20+ years, that’s hardly the case for Linux (because its developers hate proprietary binary software due to irrational “reasons”).

I was always very puzzled by people who do that instead of just saying “Hi, [short description of the project/question]”.

Especially by junior developers who usually struggle with estimating the importance/complexity of the problems they are trying to solve.

If it’s really a “quick question” just write it down and in the off chance that it develops into something else you can have that meeting.

Of course it’s also a cultural/etc. thing. Some people are just horrible at expressing themselves in text or communicating asynchronously (the “Hello [I won’t tell you what I need until you reply”] ones or those that think that they are being helpful by making their messages as terse, short and consequentially vague and unspecific as possible)

I’m not sure how can that be beneficial for the team/company if it significantly affects productivity.

Longterm for Linux isn’t it better for games to be built against stable and backwards compatible APIs?

> It would have been 1 billion times cheaper, and saner, to write audit tools for ELF64 binaries

Regardless if it wouldn’t have been cheaper for game developers to spend time doing that to get a handful of additional users. What incentives would they have to use these tools? Now they can release games on Linux almost for free.

The arrogance and smugness of some Linux users is probably the main reason for me. I just don’t want to be associated with that kind of people..

Generally unpolished UX and poor UI design (even by Windows standards…) is the second reason. Overall IMHO usually for consumer/desktop use cases all the tinkering you need to do on Linux to do many of the things that just work on Windows/macOS it’s just more trouble that it’s worth.. (unless you’re into masochism and there is nothing wrong with that).

> didn't build their platform "almost from scratch".

Well, no, it’s of course relative I meant that compared to Valve/Steam they did. And it’s not like iOS/macOS is just a collection of open source components slapped together with some small proprietary layer on top. At this point it’s mostly proprietary stuff they had to build effectively from scratch over the years with some open source components here and there.

Probably not relative to total revenue. But it doesn’t really change much. To be fair I don’t have a problem at all with 15% or even 30% but with the fact that Apple is running a lite extortion racket by not allowing any competition.

> how a company pays for its RnD internally, one cannot conclusively say that the consumers are the ones who pay for the HW/OS

I don’t think the exact nuances of internal accounting (even if they do it this way instead of just putting all revenue into a single “pot”) really changes anything.

It’s pretty clear (based on all evidence from the last 30+ years) that platforms can generate significantly higher revenue by maximizing the amount of third party software and by giving away development tools/etc. for free or significantly below cost than by trying to extract as much money as feasible possible from 3rd part developers (and it wasn’t a huge concern anyway since all major desktop platforms have always been mostly open)

> why are we okay with the others that are arguably more? And why do people defend the other marketplaces ?

IMHO mainly because Apple has a very large market share and is effectively a monopoly in certain ways.

If you want to develop a mobile app/game you can’t not make it available on iOS. It’s just not an option. This gives Apple a huge amount of pricing power and effectively allows them to exploit developers and consumers by generating a surplus they don’t have to work for.

It a scale of course but no other company is quite in the same position. Steam can lose most of their customers if they stop providing value. Even Google is in a much weaker position (consequently they don’t have such strict controls on iAPs) since phone makers can (and have) make their own app stores, side loading etc. I think consoles are closers but they are purely an entertainment product with a lot of alternatives and substitutes.

Overall I personally believe consumer surplus should most dwarf everything else to an extent. Therefore I don’t see any reason why can’t we apply “arbitrary” rules/standards to corporations based on their size and influence on the market.

I’m highly certain about that. Regardless also I don’t think most companies work like that. More or less all revenue at least from the in specific divisions like Windows or Azure is going to the same pot.

> Nobody has enough facts outside the companies

Well.. same argument applies to > 90% of all stuff people say on online forums like HN and makes most online discussions entirely meaningless.

Regardless we can still reason about a lot of things with a fairly high degree of confidence without complete certainty.

> we say that they could make it all free and still afford it, it would still affect priorities of what gets developed.

Yet it’s the direction MS has been taking over the last 10-15+ years. They have invested massive amounts of money into products which are either effectively free for most users or don’t really generate enough direct revenue to fund them like GitHub.

But from what I understand Pi 5 still doesn’t have any HW encoder? So if your task relies on that you it basically loses its main advantage against the N100, lower power usage since you get it for free with Intel.