As requested: https://old.lemmy.world (MLMYM)
You're talking about an entire architecture change, though. If you're going to compare like-for-like, try installing Windows 11 on an ARMv7 machine, never mind that Microsoft frequently drops support for older processors anyway.
omg, I have a 13 year old tabby goddess called Hera 😻
The same way you know how many times a show was watched legitimately, you take a sample of known data and extrapolate it from there. It's basically guesswork but it's educated guesswork.
BitTorrent, even though it's decentralised, is still operating on the public internet using public, known protocols. You can join a swarm and get an idea of how big that swarm is with a small amount of data inspection. I mean, your torrent client knows how many seeders and leechers there are, right? Just watch the swarms and extrapolate from there.
Any time you read these articles, they're always caveated with something similar to "The number could be much higher than that" too because it's not just torrents, you've got newsgroups, file shares, streaming sites, even old school IRC, people putting titles on a USB stick and so on. Hence there's a lot of guessing, but it's not entirely plucked from thin air.
Where it does get more bullshitty is when they try to translate those numbers into lost sales. That is just made up numbers as far as I'm concerned.
I still think you're making unfair comparisons here. It's more effort to get MacOS installed on unsupported hardware than Windows, but just because it installs doesn't mean it's supported. Just because a few registry hacks can get Windows 11 on an old machine doesn't mean a future windows update won't suddenly break it (I mean they break even supported configurations from time to time). I get what you're saying, Apple do sure go out of their way to prevent it, but even if Windows let you install it, an unsupported configuration is still by definition out of support and it can just stop working at any time without much recourse.
I've got an old Surface Go I still use when travelling. I only ever really use it for watching videos, streaming from emby and the like. Occasionally I plug in a USB-C hub to plug it into a TV. Would this work well for that? I can see the surface go is listed as supported and it looks pretty feature complete, if it can make it run a bit faster and not give me any grief, I might give it a go.
Absolutely and I think something a lot of people don't realise is that something can absolutely work fine and still be unsupported. I dare say if we took at look at an average home-built PC, the vast majority would have some component to it that was out of support in some fashion.
I don't think you're making a fair comparison there really. You should be comparing Apple to someone like Dell, HP, Asus, etc.
What you're really comparing Apple's support to is your own, because you're the one building and maintaining that PC's hardware. Plus take a look at your 10 year old PC, does every component of it - motherboard, GPU, etc. still get security updates? Motherboards are one of the worst offenders in this area for just arbitrarily dropping support.
The fact that the PC ecosystem is so open is why it can last so long, but I don't think it's as imbalanced as you're suggesting.
Disclosure: I don't own any apple products
That's not really a fair analogy, Windows isn't that locked down. It's more like the hood is open and for general maintenance you're fine, but all the parts are proprietary so if something breaks, you can only go to one manufacturer who controls the entire supply chain for that part. However, the parts are generally okay quality so for most people who just drive A to B, they're unlikely to encounter too many issues.
Linux is a kit car. You can pretty much build it yourself or have one preassembled but either way you can rip any part of it out and replace any component with anything you like, entirely within your control. Most people wouldn't have the competency to build one themselves because most people don't really know how cars work but for those that do, it's the dream.
I genuinely don't believe that one approach is better than another, but I do believe that the majority of folks out there want something that "just works" and Linux is usually not that option. Not on the desktop.
It's worth pointing out that the wiki article lists several examples of Microsoft using this approach but I wouldn't class many of them as successful.
It's nice, but keep in mind that it's largely unsustainable without some form of revenue. Reddit didn't turn evil just because of a bunch of shareholders, it went that way because the money was drying up and they weren't making any money. They're still not making money.
As lemmy grows and server costs increase, especially for the larger instances, more will be asked of the community to help foot the bill. This current server has a good breakdown in costs for those curious and while it doesn't seem like a lot today, it'll start to jump quite considerably as you hit certain thresholds on database sizes and whatnot. If you like this server, please by the admin a coffee to say thank you :)
(I'm not affiliated in any way with aussie.zone, it's not even my home instance).
At this point, it should be open sourced officially. Look at all the good that came from ID open sourcing the doom and quake source code.
It's not like Far Cry is a particularly advanced engine with tonnes of secret sauce by today's standards.
I love this, but I don't seem to be able to post comments with this view. The page refreshes but the comment doesn't appear, chrome shows the POST request returned a 301.