6877 stories
·
166 followers

Opera Accuses Microsoft of Anti-Competitive Edge Tactics

1 Comment
Opera will file a complaint against Microsoft to Brazilian antitrust authority CADE on Tuesday, alleging the tech giant gives its Edge browser an unfair advantage over competitors. Opera claims Microsoft pre-installs Edge as the default browser across Windows devices and prevents rivals from competing on product merits.

The company's general counsel Aaron McParlan said Microsoft locks browsers like Opera out of preinstallation opportunities and frustrates users' ability to download alternative browsers. Opera, which says it is Brazil's third-most popular PC browser, wants CADE to investigate Microsoft and demand concessions to ensure fair competition.
Read the whole story
jepler
15 hours ago
reply
I think courts can agree, competitive edging is much better than uncompetitive edging.
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
Share this story
Delete

Kite Incident

2 Comments and 4 Shares
Detectives say the key to tracking down the source of the kites was a large wall map covered in thumbtacks and string. 'It's the first time that method has ever actually worked,' said a spokesperson.
Read the whole story
jepler
1 day ago
reply
What If....
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
Share this story
Delete
1 public comment
alt_text_bot
1 day ago
reply
Detectives say the key to tracking down the source of the kites was a large wall map covered in thumbtacks and string. 'It's the first time that method has ever actually worked,' said a spokesperson.

Crib Sheet: A Conventional Boy

1 Comment

A Conventional Boy is the most recent published novel in the Laundry Files as of 2025, but somewhere between the fourth and sixth in internal chronological order—it takes place at least a year after the events of The Fuller Memorandum and at least a year before the events of The Nightmare Stacks.

I began writing it in 2009, and it was originally going to be a long short story (a novelette—8000-16,000 words. But one thing after another got in the way, until I finally picked it up to try and finish it in 2022—at which point it ran away to 40,000 words! Which put it at the upper end of the novella length range. And then I sent it to my editor at Tor.com, who asked for some more scenes covering Derek's life in Camp Sunshine, which shoved it right over the threshold into "short novel" territory at 53,000 words. That's inconveniently short for a stand-alone novel this century (it'd have been fine in the 1950s; Asimov's original Foundation novels were fix-ups of two novellas that bulked up to roughly that length), so we made a decision to go back to the format of The Atrocity Archives—a short novel bundled with another story (or stories) and an explanatory essay. In this case, we chose two novelettes previously published on Tor.com, and an essay exploring the origins of the D&D Satanic Panic of the 1980s (which features heavily in this novel, and which seems eerily topical in the current—2020s—political climate).

(Why is it short, and not a full-sized novel? Well, I wrote it in 2022-23, the year I had COVID19 twice and badly—not hospital-grade badly, but it left me with brain fog for more than a year and I'm pretty sure it did some permanent damage. As it happens, a novella is structurally simpler than a novel (it typically needs only one or two plot strands, rather than three or more or some elaborate extras). and I need to be able to hold the structure of a story together in my head while I write it. A Conventional Boy was the most complicated thing I could have written in that condition without it being visibly defective. There are only two plot strands and some historical flashbacks, they're easily interleaved, and the main plot itself is fairly simple. When your brain is a mass of congealed porridge? Keeping it simple is good. It was accepted by Tor.com for print and ebook publication in 2023, and would normally have come out in 2024, but for business reasons was delayed until January 2025. So take this as my 2024 book, slightly delayed, and suffice to say that my next book—The Regicide Report, due out in January 2026—is back to full length again.)

So, what's it about?

I introduced a new but then-minor Laundry character called Derek the DM in The Nightmare Stacks: Derek is portly, short-sighted, middle-aged, and works in Forecasting Ops, the department of precognition (predicting the future, or trying to), a unit I introduced as a throwaway gag in the novelette Overtime (which is also part of the book). If you think about the implications for any length of time it becomes apparent that precognition is a winning tool for any kind of intelligence agency, so I had to hedge around it a bit: it turns out that Forecasting Ops are not infallible. They can be "jammed" by precognitives working for rival organizations. Focussing too closely on a precise future can actually make it less likely to come to pass. And different precognitives are less or more accurate. Derek is one of the Laundry's best forecasters, and also an invaluable operation planner—or scenario designer, as he'd call it, because he was, and is, a Dungeon Master at heart.

I figured out that Derek's back-story had to be fascinating before I even finished writing The Nightmare Stacks, and I actually planned to write A Conventional Boy next. But somehow it got away from me, and kept getting shoved back down my to-do list until Derek appeared again in The Labyrinth Index and I realized I had to get him nailed down before The Regicide Report (for reasons that will become clear when that novel comes out). So here we are.

Derek began DM'ing for his group of friends in the early 1980s, using the original AD&D rules (the last edition I played). The campaign he's been running in Camp Sunshine is based on the core AD&D rules, with his own mutant extensions: he's rewritten almost everything, because TTRPG rule books are expensive when you're either a 14 year old with a 14-yo's pocket money allowance or a trusty in a prison that pays wages of 30p an hour. So he doesn't recognize the Omphalos Corporation's LARP scenario as a cut-rate knock-off of The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, and he didn't have the money to keep up with subsequent editions of AD&D.

Yes, there are some self-referential bits in here. As with the TTRPGs in the New Management books, they eerily prefigure events in the outside world in the Laundryverse. Derek has no idea that naming his homebrew ruleset and campaign Cult of the Black Pharaoh might be problematic until he met Iris Carpenter, Bob's treacherous manager from The Fuller Memorandum (and now Derek's boss in the camp, where she's serving out her sentence running the recreational services). Yes, the game scenario he runs at DiceCon is a garbled version of Eve's adventure in Quantum of Nightmares. (There's a reason he gets pulled into Forecasting Ops!)

DiceCon is set in Scarfolk—for further information, please re-read. Richard Littler's excellent satire of late 1970s north-west England exactly nails the ambiance I wanted for the setting, and Camp Sunshine was already set not far from there: so yes, this is a deliberate homage to Scarfolk (in parts).

And finally, Piranha Solution is real.

You can buy A Conventional Boy here (North America) or here (UK/EU).

Read the whole story
jepler
1 day ago
reply
I .. bought it, but haven't read it yet. So I won't be reading this blog entry now. I just want the conclusion of the story of Bob & Mo. and the the long promised Space Opera novels.
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
WorldMaker
13 hours ago
A Conventional Bot feels like one of Bob’s early books in a lot of great ways, including it is short for a novel. I thought it a quick, fun read.
Share this story
Delete

Microsoft CEO Addresses 'Enigma' of Layoffs

1 Comment
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addressed growing internal unease at the company Thursday morning in a company-wide memo that acknowledged the "uncertainty and seeming incongruence" of conducting layoffs while achieving record profits and AI investments. The tech giant has eliminated more than 15,000 positions in 2025, including 9,000 cuts in early July alone, marking one of the most aggressive periods of job reductions in Microsoft's history.

Nadella described this as the "enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value," noting that Microsoft is thriving by "every objective measure" with strong market performance and record capital investments. "Progress isn't linear. It's dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding. But it's also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before," he added. Microsoft President Brad Smith said that an estimated $80 billion in capital expenditures over the past year created pressure to reduce operating costs.
Read the whole story
jepler
5 days ago
reply
huh? chatbot write that for ya?
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
tpbrisco
4 days ago
Buzzword spew helps to soften the blow that you are now commodity goods.
Share this story
Delete

Vintage Macintosh Programming Book Library (vintageapple.org)

1 Comment
Comments
Read the whole story
jepler
5 days ago
reply
I've been leaning heavily on the Inside Macintosh set I downloaded from them.
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
davenelson
5 days ago
I have quite a few vintage Apple books laying around, I should see if they already have them and if not, donate them.
Share this story
Delete

Debian supports End of 10 Campaign. Find out the '10 reasons to choose Linux' starting with https://floss.social/@Endof10/114833402470026707 #debian #linux #EndOf10

1 Comment

Debian supports End of 10 Campaign. Find out the '10 reasons to choose Linux' starting with https://floss.social/@Endof10/114833402470026707 #debian #linux #EndOf10

Read the whole story
jepler
16 days ago
reply
but Debian 10 "Buster" gets ETLS until 2029-06-30! no need to worry.
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
Share this story
Delete
Next Page of Stories