Interesting but the absolute figures are not helpful due to the way the survey is conducted. But the macro trend over a long period is clearly up; we just don't know where is actually lies as a true %.
Valve will have far more accurate idea of actual numbers as they will be able to correct the raw survey data using other information and data they hold and collect. But they'll never release that as it's a commercial advantage to them to know so much about the PC games market.
Yeah, his videos are interesting but I must admit I do find the somewhat fake "lecture" style off putting. It made as if he's lecturing to a class of people and there are even fake western "students" asking questions at the end. But the guy is in China, and these are clearly produced for a new audience but dressed up as if it is educational. I can see why he does it - it lends an air of authority to the videos, and it is engaging, but the conceit of it being a real lecture undermines it.
Windows is in no way free. Every new Windows Laptop and PC comes with a license; when you pay for the PC part of that money goes directly to Microsoft.
Microsoft made upgrading to Windows 10 and 11 "free" for those on older hardware who already had paid for a license because they wanted to move people onto the latest versions and stop supporting the old versions. At the same time they've been harvesting and selling users data to make even more money.
They are not trying to "kill" Windows, they are trying to change it into a cloud based system too so that you do have to pay a subscription to use it. They want new PCs and Laptops to be essentially nothing more than thin terminals, using your hardware to support their cloud based system but not actually owning any of the software at all.
But they are less bothered about the absolute revenue Windows makes now, and more bothered about making it a walled garden they control and which up-sells you to all their other subscription services under Office, and Xbox.
Leads in the polls at 35%, so he is far off a majority. People like simple narratives about someone "winning" an election as it's easier to follow, but realistically even if he "wins" with 35% he will also struggle to form a stable government or exercise power.
We're seeing this pattern across Europe at the moment - electorates are fragmented and split, as politicians seem incapable of offering what people actually want. In the UK for example, current opinion polls have us on a 5-way split between Labour, Conservatives, Reform, Green and Lib Dems. This is despite Labour winning a big majority in the election only 2 years ago.
There are two elements to this - the system and dollars. The systems are CHIPS (used for clearing, which is in US Dollars) and SWIFT used for interbank communication. Russia was severely cut off from both. Countries can trade in any currency they want, but the international system is standardised around the dollar and CHIPs and SWIFT make it fast and efficient.
Lets say Russia wanted to buy $50m of oil from UAE. It would involve a Russian bank and a UAE bank handling the money and both would have CHIPS accounts. A Russian bank would place an order via SWIFT for $50m to the UAE bank via its CHIPS account. The money would be transferred to the UAE banks account and out to the UAE. This seems pointless for 1 transaction, but actually there are many 1000s of different transactions happening every day in different directions, and the way clearing happens instead of moving $50m from one bank to another, it will look at all the other transactions both banks are making with everyone else across the day and just move the correct overall amount out.
So $50m does move from one bank to the other, but it's part of all the other transactions going on making it simpler for both banks. For example maybe at the same time the UAE bank is transferring $30m to another bank in another country; so at the end of the day it'll get $20m from CHIPs.
When Russia was cut off, there weren't really other good routes to make that trade. Also people don't want Roubles. So normally Russia and Russian banks buy and hold Dollars, and use that when they need to trade. Russia was locked out of this, so it now had to buy $50m of oil but using Roubles which the UAE bank didn't want or need. This means either Russia had to find other ways to get the $50m or it paid way more in Roubles than the $ amount to buy enough Dirhem so that the UAE would accept the money.
However, as you rightly point out - why would countries be so reliant on the $ and the US like this? Up until now, people trusted the Dollar and the US to keep the system open and functioning. But first the Ukraine war sanctions and now certainly the Iran war have shown to the world that the Dollar and current systems are entirely under US control. Even though the EU was against Russia in the Ukraine war, they have also been moving to put in new systems so they're not over reliant on the US systems after seeing what happened with the CHIPS/SWIFT sanctions. Those sanctions were really seen as the "nuclear" option when it happened, and people never thought anyone would actually do that.
Now the Trump is again emphasising how reliant the world was on US stability, and US stability is seemingly gone. Tarrifs, threats to invade Greenland, disparaging allies, and Iran - all have shown that the US is unreliable and unstable. So now the EU and many other countries (including China) are accelerating the process to move away from being so reliant on the US Dollar and the USA. It will have huge consequences for the USA and the world, and even if the Iran war ends tomorrow and a decent president is elected in 2028, the damage is done. No one trusts the US political system any more - it has been shown to be unstable and capricious, and entirely dependent on the whims of the US president. The supposed "checks and balances" are non-existent: the courts and congress have done nothing to stop this mess. So everyone is reducing their "exposure" to the risk of being too reliant on the USA and it's financial systems.
It really doesn't matter any more if the Democrats win congress and the white house. It will just be seen as a period of calm before the next Trump comes along. We've already had that once with Biden coming in after Trumps first term, and Trumps second is even worse. And it's not about Trump specifically - he'll be gone in a few years, but the world has been shown that any nutter in the white house can do what they want, plus the Republicans are clearly bat-shit crazy. And whats to say the Democrats don't also put someone bat shit crazy into the white house in the future? All trust in the US is gone and it can't be rebuilt.
Yeah, at the turn of the century we had a CD-RW in our family PC. Mac was always expensive; while internal CD-R for a PC would have been probably half that price? Certainly I remember CD-R and CD-RW became pretty ubiquitous pretty fast, and while the drives were pricey at first, the discs were cheap mb for mb. You could buy the discs in supermarkets pretty quickly, they took off so fast.
Even if pricy at the beginning, you also knew if you burnt a CD it'd go in any PC. And if you burnt music tracks onto it, it'd play in any Hifi or Walkman. They just hands down made way more sense than an expensive Zip Drive as they were so much more useful.
I was growing up in the 90s. Zip drives definitely did not dominate; they were a failure. My dad actually did use zip drive personally at home so I'm familiar with them, but I never saw them in school, and they were not used commonly by most people. Most people never seem to have ever heard of them.
When I grew up 3.5inch floppy disks were the standard from the late 80s into the 90s. In the mid 90s files were getting bigger so yes there was a need for more storage than 1.44mb on an 3.5inch floppy disk for some people. But most Word documents would still fit on a floppy disk, and of course email was a thing (albeit the internet was slow and transfers could take ages). You could also Zip a file (not Zip Drive but the Zip file format) and split it into 1.44mb chunks to use multiple floppies.
So I remember when Iomega's Zip Drives came out. They did look good but the problem was they were just too expensive - both the disks and the readers - any they just weren't in the vast majority of computers so weren't useful, so they never took off. Whats the point of putting a file on a Zip Disk if the computer at the other end doesn't have a drive to take it? I'm sure some business switched to them but they never really became truly mainstream.
Instead CD was definitely the dominant format. Almost all new computers in the 90s (certainly mid to late 90s anyway) had a built in CD drive. And then CD-R (CD write once) drives came along. You either made do with floppys & the internet, or you had a CD-R drive if you wanted to transfer big files. CD could be slow to write but was always quick to read; and Zip Drives were just always slow. And of course music was the big thing for young people - so you'd rip your favourite songs and burn them onto a CD and could play it anywhere - your walkman, your Hifi, your mates car (if they were lucky enough to have a CD player). So CD-R drives just became essential, and especially anyone with any tech interest. If you were into games you might also rip your favourite games and burn those onto a CD too. Video just wasn't really a thing until 1998 when DivX came along and that took a little while to take off, but again CD was the star.
I remember actually my 6th Form College in the early 2000s DID buy computers with in-built Zip Drives, but by then it was too late - the internet was already fast enough & USB sticks had appeared. Even my dad wasn't using them any-more and he'd been an early adopter.
Honestly I'm so impressed with how many new features and QOL improvements KDE adds with each update. Keep up the great work!
I donate monthly to the KDE project and strongly recommend others do too; it's a great open source project.
News isn't a zero sum game. Like, I don't think the White House correspondent or the middle east desk was working on this particular story.
A few reasons. One is there isn't much flat land; most of it is hilly and even mountainous and covered in thick forests. The flat areas are occupied with farms and towns but the space is small and not enough for big cities to grow. The hills and mountains are heavily forested and there has never been a big enough population to need to encroach on them. It's also not great for building and farming, unless grazing animals.
The other big reason is there are no natural deep sea ports in that region. It's either marshy or the estuary of the river Colombia. Small fishing towns would be fine, but not big industrial ports that drive city growth (or did in the past). Meanwhile, Portland sits further back up the river with plenty of flat land and access to the water, so makes a natural port. And Seattle sits on the bay further north and is coastal, and a good port.
The dynamic got set up of big cities further back, and those areas never really grew. Once the land became part of state forests, then that restricts growth even more.
EDIT: Here is a topographical map showing in blue the flat land: https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/world/?center=38.54817%2C-119.79492&zoom=6
Wow this is terrible news. Basically Paradox owns the IP to Cities Skylines and Colossal Order seemingly want out.
I'd say a large reason CS2 has been such a mess is because it was rushed out, the paradox mod system is just not fit for purpose and there remains a ridiculous focus on getting the console version released + move on to DLCs rather than fixing the main game. I'd put most of the blame on Paradox's shoulders to be honest.
It'll be interesting to see what CO does next. CS1 was a great game, CS2 could have been a great game. Will they do another city sim or more onto something else? Seems a shame if they move on as they have grown so much expertise in the genre. I'm hoping they're cutting free to do a game with their own vision, which was how CS1 came to be.
No not "too woke", don't apologise for calling this bullsh*t out. People make lots of excuses for him but he settled one case; he was aquitted in one case but further people have made accusations - supposedly 10-15 (including a family with 5 children).
The Michael Jackson biopic is definitely a whitewash; it's produced by the estate that has a vested interest in protecting his financial legacy. It was going to try to cast doubt on the Chandler case but settlement from that case actually agreed no movie representing the family could be made by Jackson or his estate.
It's not woke to find this disgusting.